PART II

ROMANTICISM

CHATEAUBRIAND AND ROMANTICISM

CHATEAUBRIAND AND ROMANTICISM

[Chateaubriand and the French Revolution.]

THERE are some men who seem epitomes of their periods, of all the weaknesses, strengths, ideals and follies and wisdoms of their times. All the tangled skeins of different movements seem embroidered into the pattern of a face; and that face is theirs. We seek in them the years in which they lived, and are never disappointed. Sir Philip Sidney means the age of Elizabeth, Dr. Johnson the common-sense English eighteenth century, Rousseau the stirring of revolutionary France, Goethe the awakening of Germany. Of these men was Chateaubriand. He was born before the storm and died after it. He gathered up the best of the things that were before the revolution, and handed them on to the men who, when the revolution had left a new France, were to make that new country the centre of European literature. Rousseau and the Romantics meet in him. He wrote when France, her eyes still bright and wide after the sight of blood, was seeking in religion for one thing, at least, that might be covered by the tossing waves of revolution and yet survive. Christianity in his finest story is the rock on which his lovers break themselves. And Christianity was the first earthwork attacked before the revolution, and the first reoccupied afterwards.

Chateaubriand stands curiously in the midst of the opposing elements. Like Byron he was a patrician and a fighter. He too would have died for freedom. But whereas Byron fought, contemptuously sometimes, for revolutionaries, Chateaubriand fought against them.

When some of the ragged ones marched joyously down his street carrying the heads of two of their enemies bleeding on the ends of pikes, he cried at them, 'Brigands! Is this what you mean by Liberty?' and declared that if he had had a gun he would have shot them down like wolves. And if Chateaubriand had not been an aristocrat, he could never so well have represented his times. He would have fought and written as a revolutionist, instead of caring passionately for one party, and pinning to it the ideals of the other, so claiming both for his own. Everything that could make him one with his period and country was his. After a childhood of severe repression, he had seen the fall of the Bastille, and then sought liberty and the North-West Passage, coming back from America to find the revolution successful against himself. Could any man's life be so perfect an analogy of the meteor-like progress of France? France also sought liberty and a North-West Passage, quicker than all others; France also was to return and find the ground aquiver beneath her feet.

[Jean-Jacques Rousseau.]

After that she was to be mistress of Europe. The three stages of Romanticism correspond with these three stages of France; the last that of Hugo and Gautier and Dumas, the Romanticism of 1830, promised by that of Chateaubriand, itself made possible by the unrestful writing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is impossible to understand any one of the three without referring to the others. Rousseau was the son of a watchmaker, in a day when superiority of intellect in a man of low birth won him either neglect or the most insufferable patronage. His mother died in bearing him, and his father, although he made a second marriage, never mentioned her without tears. He seems to have been a very simple-hearted man, and found such pleasure in romances that he would sit up all night reading them to his little son, going ashamedly to bed in the morning when the swallows began to call in the eaves. These two traits in his father are characteristic of the work of Rousseau himself. His life was spent in emphasising the compatibility of low birth with lofty animation, and so in preparing that democratisation of literature that generously attributes humanity to men who are not gentlemen. Richardson gave him a suitable narrative form for what he had to say, and _La Nouvelle Héloïse_ is a novel in letters whose hero is a poor tutor in love with his pupil. The book is full of an emotional oratory so fresh and sincere that it seems as if the ice of fifty years of passionless reasoning has suddenly broken over the springs of the human heart. There is in it too an Ossianic sharing of feelings with Nature, as if man had realised with the tears in his eyes that he had not always lived in towns.

[The world of the Revolution.]

Chateaubriand had not Rousseau's birthright of handicap. He could not feel the righteous energy of the watchmaker's son against a people who did not know their own language and were yet in a position to employ him as a footman. He was outside that quarrel. He left Rousseau's social reform behind him on the threshold of his world, but had learnt from him to carry his heart upon his sleeve, and to cry, like _Ossian_, 'The murmur of thy streams, O Lara! brings back the memory of the past. The sound of thy woods, Garmallar, is lovely in mine ear.' He took with him Rousseau's twin worships of passion and nature into the melancholy turmoil that was waiting for him, sad with an unrest not of classes but of a nation. He knew, like France, what it was to question everything while standing firm upon nothing. In that maelstrom nothing seemed fixed; there was nothing a man might grasp for a moment to keep his head above the waters of infinite doubt. Everything seemed possible, and much of the Romantic melancholy is a despairing cry for a little impossibility from which at least there could be no escape. It is one thing to question religion by the light of atheism, or atheism by the light of religion; it is another thing, and far more terrible, to question both while sure of neither, and to see not one word in all the universe, not God, nor Man, nor State, nor Church, without a question mark at its side, a ghastly reminder of uncertainty, like, in some old engravings, the waiting figure of Death muffled in each man's shadow.

[_Atala._]

That was the world of the Revolution, a world whose permanent instability had been suddenly made manifest by a violent removal of the apparently stable crust. With the overturning of one mountain every other shuddered in its bed, and seemed ready at any moment to shake with crash and groan into the valleys. This was the world for whose expression the face of Chateaubriand, nervous, passionate, the fire of vision in his eye, the wind of chaos in his tempestuous hair, seems so marvellously made. This was the world in which, like the spirit of his age, he wrote the books the times expected because they were their own. _Atala_ and _René_, but particularly _Atala_, seemed to be the old, vague promises of Rousseau and _Ossian_, reaffirmed with the clarity of a silver trumpet. Chactas and Atala, those savage lovers, who 'took their way towards the star that never moves, guiding their steps by the moss on the tree stems,' walked like young deities of light before these people who had known the half-mummied courtesies of an eighteenth century civilisation. 'She made him a cloak of the inner bark of the ash, and mocassins of the musk rat's skin, and he set on her head a wreath of blue mallows, and on her neck red berries of the azalea, smiling as he did so to see how fair she was.' The world is young again, and man has won his way back into Eden, conscious of sorrow, conscious of evil, but alive and unafraid to be himself.

[Nature and emotion.]

Chateaubriand carried further than Rousseau the transfiguration of nature by emotion, although in _Atala_ nature is still a stage effect, subjected to its uses as illustration of the feelings of the humans in the tale. Chateaubriand tunes up the elements with crash of thunder, bright forked lightning, and fall of mighty tree, to the moment when, in the supreme crisis the hand of Atala's God intervenes between the lovers, and the bell of the forest hermitage sounds in the appropriate silence. But in those vivid, fiery descriptions there is already something besides the theatrical, a new generosity of sentiment that was to let Barye make lions and tigers instead of what would once have been rather impersonal decorations, and to allow Corot to give landscapes their own personality without always seeking to impose on them the irrelevant interest of human figures. Nature is never excluded from the story, and when the action is less urgent the setting is given a greater freedom. The lovers never meet on a studio background, but are always seen with trees and rivers, and forest dawn and forest night, more real than any that had been painted before. Chateaubriand is never content to call a tree a tree or a bird a bird, but gives them the dignity of their own names. Aurora no longer rises from her rosy bed in the approved convention for the dawn, but a bar of gold shapes itself in the east, the sparrow-hawks call from the rocks, and the martens retire to the hollows of the elms.

[Particularity in setting.]

It was through caring for his setting in this way that Chateaubriand came as if by accident to the discovery of local colour. He wanted his savages to love in the wilderness, and happening to have seen a wilderness, reproduced it, and made his savages not merely savages but Muskogees, fashioned their talk to fit their race, and made it quite clear that this tale, at any rate, could not be imagined as passing on the Mountains of the Moon. When the older story-tellers named a locality they did little more than the Elizabethan stage managers, who placed a label on the stage and expected it to be sufficient to conjure up a forest or a battlefield. Chateaubriand, in making his writing more completely pictorial, visualised his scenes in detail, and so showed the Romantics the way to that close distinction between country and country, age and age, race and race, that made the artists of the nineteenth century richer than any who were before them in variety of subject, and in the material of self-expression.

[Christianity.]

The Christianity of _Atala_ was the religion that Chateaubriand offered to his country in _Le Génie du Christianisme_. I can never be quite sure that it was his own, but in that amazing book, divided and subdivided like an ancient treatise on some occult science, he showed with passionate use of reasoning and erudition that Christianity was not the ugly thing that it had been pictured by the eighteenth century philosophers, and, more, that it at least was older than France, and permanent in a world where kings, emperors, and republics swung hither and thither like dead leaves in the wind. The teaching came to Paris like a gospel. These people, anchorless as they were, were not difficult converts, because they were eager to be converted, and to be able, if only for a moment in their lives, to whisper, 'I believe' in something other than uncertainty. All society became Christian for a time, and when that time passed, the effects of the book did not all pass with it. The artists of a younger generation had learned that Christianity was the belief that had brought most loveliness into the world, and that the Gods of Antiquity were not the only deities who were favourable to beautiful things. The false taste of the end of the eighteenth century had been pierced by Gothic spires, and through the dull cloud of correct and half-hearted imitation showed again the pinnacles and gargoyles and flying buttresses of the naïve and trustful mediæval art. Atala joins hands with Nicolete, and links Victor Hugo with the builders of Notre Dame.

[The art of Chateaubriand survives the battle in which it was used.]

There is little wonder that a writer who answered so fully the needs of his own generation, and did so much to cut a way for the generation to come, became instantly famous, immediately execrated. Chateaubriand wrote: 'La polémique est mon allure naturelle.... Il me faut toujours un adversaire, n'importe où.' In 1800 he had no difficulty in finding them. But it takes two to make a quarrel. It would not have been surprising if books that belonged so absolutely to the battles of their times should have struck their blows, and been then forgotten for want of opposition. Manifestations of the time spirit, and particularly fighting manifestations, not infrequently manifest it only to the time, and are worthless to future generations. _Atala_, after setting in an uproar the Paris of 1802 is for us but a beautiful piece of colour whose pattern has faded away. Unless we can feel with the men of the dawn that we are tossing on mad waves, clutching at religion as at a rock beneath the shifting waters, and breathlessly thankful for any proof of its steadfastness and power: unless we can remember with them the old love of drawing-rooms and bent knees and kisses on gloved hands, and feel with them a passionate novelty in the love of wild things in the open air; unless we can remember the tamed, docile nature of the pastorals, and open our eyes upon a first view of any sort of real country; unless, in a word, we can dream back a hundred years, the beauty of _Atala_ is like that of an old battle-cry:--

'So he cried, as the fight grew thick at the noon, _Two red roses across the moon_!'

The cry no longer calls to battle. The combatants are dead. The bugle sounds to armies of white bones, and we who overhear it think only of the skill of the trumpeter. And Chateaubriand had something in him that was independent of his doctrines, independent of his enemies. Flaubert, looking back to him over the years, saw in his books, when the dust of their battles settled about them, early examples of a most scrupulous technique. Chateaubriand the fighter, the man of his time, was forgotten in the old master of a new prose. These books shaped in the din of battle were models for men writing in a fat, quiet day of peace. Then it was possible, the clangour no longer sounding in the ears, to notice the mastery of form, the elaboration, carried so far and no further, of the main idea into the significant detail that was to make the idea alive; then became clear the economy that makes of every fact a vivid illustration of some trait in the people of the story, a heightening of the lights or a deepening of the shadows of the tale.

SCOTT AND ROMANTICISM

SCOTT AND ROMANTICISM

[Scott's place in the romantic movement.]

THE genius of a man like Scott does not leap into the world a complete and novel creation, like Minerva from the skull of Jupiter, ready for battle, and accoutred in the armour that it never afterwards forsakes. Nor does it with the strength of its own hand turn one world into another, or the audience of Fielding and Smollett into that of the Waverley Novels. The world is prepared for it; it finds its weapons lying round its cradle, and works its miracle with the world's co-operation.

Romanticism, although, in our indolence, we like to think of it as the work of a single man, as a stream gushing from the hard rock at the stroke of a Moses, was no conjuring trick, nor sudden invention, but a force as old as story-telling. The rock had been built gradually over it, and was as gradually taken away. It suits our convenience and the pictorial inclination of our minds to imagine it as the work of one man or two; but there is hardly need to remind ourselves of facts we have so wilfully forgotten, and that, if we choose, we can trace without difficulty a more diffuse as well as a more ancient origin of the spring.

Romanticism was a movement too large and too various to be defined in a paragraph, or to allow an essay on any single man to describe, even in the art of story-telling, its several sources, and the innumerable streams that flowed from them to fertilise the nineteenth century. It carried with it liberty and toleration, liberty of expression and toleration of all kinds of spiritual and physical vitality. It was comparable with and related to the French Revolution. It allowed men to see each other in their relations with the universe as well as with each other, and made existence a thing about which it was possible to be infinitely curious. Old desires for terror and fantasy and magnificence arose in the most civilised of minds. Glamour was thrown over the forest and the palace, and the modern and ancient worlds came suddenly together, so that all the ages seemed to be contemporary and all conditions of human life simultaneous and full of promise.

Scott was a part of this revivified world, and his importance in it is not that of its inventor, but of the man who brought so many of its qualities into the art of story-telling that his novels became a secondary inspiration, and moved men as different as Hugo, Balzac, and Dumas, to express themselves in narrative.

[Romanticism before the Waverley Novels.]

Before the writing of the Waverley Novels, Romanticism in English narrative had shown itself but a stuttering and one-legged abortion, remarkable only for its extravagances. It had not, except in poetry, been humane enough to be literature. It had made only violent gesticulations like a man shut up in a sack.

Horace Walpole, protesting, I suppose, against Fielding and Smollett, had said that the 'great resources of fancy had been dammed up by a strict adherence to common life,' while the older romances were 'all imagination and improbability.' He had tried to combine the two in _The Castle of Otranto_, a book in which portraits sigh and step down from their canvases, dead hermits reappear as skeletons in sackcloth, and gigantic ghosts in armour rise to heaven in a clap of thunder. These eccentricities were efforts after the strangeness of all true romance, and their instant popularity showed how ready people were for mystery and ancient tale. Before Scott succeeded in doing what Walpole had attempted, in writing a tale that should be strange but sane, ancient but real, a crowd of novels, whose most attractive quality was their 'horridness,' had turned the heads of the young women who read them. Miss Thorpe, in _Northanger Abbey_, says:

'My dearest Catherine, what have you been doing with yourself all this morning? Have you gone on with _Udolpho_?'

'Yes, I have been reading it ever since I woke; and I am got to the black veil.'

'Are you indeed? How delightful! Oh! I would not tell you what is behind the black veil for the world! Are not you wild to know?'

'Oh! yes, quite; what can it be? But do not tell me: I would not be told upon any account. I know it must be a skeleton; I am sure it is Laurentina's skeleton. Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it, I assure you; if it had not been to meet you, I would not have come away from it for all the world.'

'Dear creature, how much I am obliged to you; and when you have finished _Udolpho_, we will read the Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you.'

'Have you indeed! How glad I am! What are they all?'

'I will read you their names directly; here they are in my pocket-book. _Castle of Wolfenbach_, _Clermont_, _Mysterious Warnings_, _Necromancer of the Black Forest_, _Midnight Bell_, _Orphan of the Rhine_, and _Horrid Mysteries_. These will last us some time.'

'Yes; pretty well; but are they all horrid? Are you sure they are all horrid?'

'Yes, quite sure, for a particular friend of mine, a Miss Andrews, a sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the world, has read every one of them. I wish you knew Miss Andrews, you would be delighted with her. She is netting herself the sweetest cloak you can imagine.'

[Percy, _Ossian_, and Chatterton.]

These things were but the clothes of romantic story-telling, walking bodiless about the world, while a poetry old enough to be astonishingly new was nurturing the body that was to stretch them for itself. Chatterton's ballads, imitations as they were, showed a sudden and novel feeling for mediæval colouring. _Ossian_, that book of majestic moments, carried imagination out again to stand between the wind and the hill. Scott disliked its vagueness, but it helped in preparing his world. Percy's _Reliques_, excused by their compiler on the frivolous ground of antiquarian interest, brought the rough voice and rude style of Sir Philip Sidney's blind beggar ringing across the centuries, and in those old tales, whose rhymes clash like sword on targe, Scott found the inspiration that Macpherson's disorderly, splendid flood swept down on other men.

[Scott's life.]

Scott's life was no patchwork but woven on a single loom. He did not turn suddenly in manhood to discover the colour of his life. It had been his in babyhood. An old clergyman, a friend of his aunt, protested that 'one may as well speak in the mouth of a cannon as where that child is,' while Walter Scott, aged three or four, shouted the ballad of Hardyknute:--

'And he has ridden o'er muir and moss, O'er hills and mony a glen, When he came to a wounded knight Making a heavy mane. Here maun I lye, here maun I dye, By treacherie's false guiles; Witless I was that e'er gave faith To wicked woman's smiles.'

As he grew older, he was able, like Froissart, to 'inquire of the truth of the deeds of war and adventures' that were to be the background of much of his work. He knew old Lowland gentlemen who had paid blackmail to Rob Roy, was told of the '15 and the '45 by veterans who had used their swords on those occasions, and heard of the executions after Culloden from one who had seen at Carlisle the rebels' heads above the Scottish Gate. The warlike knowledge of his childhood was ripened and mellowed for story-telling by the enthusiasms of his youth. Riding through the Lowland valleys collecting the border minstrelsy, his good nature and pleasant way let him learn in a broad acquaintanceship fashion the character of his countrymen. He had not Balzac's deep-cutting analytic knowledge of men, but knew them as a warm-hearted fellow of themselves. He knew them as one man knows another, and not with the passionately speculative knowledge belonging to a mind that contemplates them from another world. He did not analyse them, but wrote of their doings with an unconscious externality that very much simplified their motives and made them fit participators in the sportsman-like life of his books.

[Scott and reality.]

Ballads and sagas and the historical reading to which they had given their savour; a free open air life, and a broad, humorous understanding of men; these were the things that Scott had behind him when Cervantes moved him to write narrative, and when the gold that shines through the dress of education in the stories of Maria Edgeworth made him fall in love with local as well as historical colour, anxious to draw his nation as she had drawn hers, and to paint Scottish character in prose as Burns had painted it in verse. The historical character of his work should not disguise from us its more vital qualities. Hazlitt, whose keen eye was not to be put out by the gold and pomp of trappings and armour, notices that Scott represents a return to the real. He is noticing the most invigorating quality of Romanticism. Scott's importance is not his because he wrote historical novels, but because his historical novels were humane. He had found out, as Hazlitt says, that 'there is no romance like the romance of real life.'

[His technique.]

'As for his technique, there is no need to praise him, who had so many other virtues, for that of delicate craftsmanship, which he had not. He was not a clever performer, but an honest one whose methods were no more elaborate than himself. Dumas describes them in that chapter of the _Histoire de mes Bêtes_ in which he discusses his own:--

'His plan was to be tedious, mortally tedious, often for half a volume, sometimes for a volume.

'But during this volume he posed his characters; during this volume he made so minute a description of their physiques, characters, and habits; you learnt so well how they dressed, how they walked, how they talked, that when, at the beginning of the second volume, one of these characters found himself in some danger, you exclaimed to yourself:

'"What, that poor gentleman in an applegreen coat, who limped as he walked, and lisped as he talked, how is he going to get out of that?"

'And you were very much astonished, after being bored for half a volume, a volume, sometimes indeed for a volume and a half; you were astonished to find that you were enormously concerned for the gentleman who lisped in talking, limped in walking, and had an applegreen coat.'

The sensation of reading a Waverley Novel is that of leaning on the parapet of a bridge on a summer day, watching the sunlight on a twig that lies motionless in a backwater. The day is so calm and the sunlight so pleasant that we continue watching the twig for a time quite disproportionate to the interest we feel in it, until, when it is at last carried into the main current, we follow its swirling progress down the stream, and are no more able to take our eyes from it than if we were watching the drowning of ourselves.

[Improvisation.]

Scott knew very well the disadvantages of improvisation, of piling up his interest and our own together. But he could work in no other manner. He said: 'There is one way to give novelty, to depend for success on the interest of a well contrived story. But, wo's me! that requires thought, consideration--the writing out of a regular plan or plot--above all, the adhering to one, which I can never do, for the ideas rise as I write, and bear such a disproportioned extent to that which each occupied at the first concoction, that (cocksnowns!) I shall never be able to take the trouble.' His was a mind entirely different from Poe's, or Mérimée's, or Flaubert's, those scrupulous technicians with whom was the future of Romanticism, and it was an artistic virtue in him to realise the fact, to proceed on his own course, leaving as he went large, rough, incomparable things, as impressive as the boulder stones of which the country people say that a giant threw them as he passed.

[His character and work.]

His swift, confused writing gets its effect because he never asked too much from it. He never tried to do anything with it beyond the description of his characters and the telling of their story. He had no need to catch an atmosphere by subtleties of language. His conception of the beings and life of another age did not make them different except in externals, from our own. He did not, like Gautier or Flaubert, regard the past as a miraculous time in which it was possible to be oneself, or in which true feeling was not veiled in inexactitudes. Very simple himself, he did not feel in the present those laxities of sensation or inexactitudes of expression that made the past a place of refuge. He was not dissatisfied with life as he found it, and was not disposed to alter it when he dressed it for a masquerade. Nor was that difficult for him. His mind was full of the stage properties of the past, and, as he walked about, he lived in any time he chose and was the same in all of them. He lived with humanity rather than in any particular half-century, and did not feel, like Peacock, the need of dainty, careful movement in order not to break the fabric he was building. _Maid Marian_ is the same story as _Ivanhoe_. Scott seems to have stepped straight out of his story to write it, Peacock to be looking a long way back, and building very skilfully the replica of something he had never seen but in a peculiarly happy vision. Scott is quite at home in his tale, and can treat it as rudely as he likes. Peacock seems to be playing very warily on the fragile keys of a spinet.

Sir Walter's fingers would have broken a spinet. His was no elaborately patterned music threaded with the light delicacies of melody. He struck big chords and used the loud pedal. His was the art of a Wagner rather than that of a Scarlatti. 'The Big Bow-wow strain,' he wrote, comparing himself with Jane Austen, 'I can do like any now going; but the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me.' 'One man can do but one thing. Universal pretensions end in nothing.' Scott knew that jewellery-work was not for him, and never tried his eyes by peering through the watchmaker's glass. He saw life, as a short-sighted man sees a landscape, in its essentials. He could spread over it what dress of detail he preferred, and chose that which came readiest to his hand, flinging over humanity the cloak of his boyish dreams. Humanity was not hampered by it, but moves through his pages like a stout wind over a northern moor.

THE ROMANTICISM OF 1830

THE ROMANTICISM OF 1830

[The mingling of the arts.]

DUMAS in _La Femme au Collier de Velours_ thus describes Hoffmann's room: 'It was the room of a genius at once capricious and picturesque, for it had the air of a studio, a music-shop, and a study, all together. There was a palette, brushes, and an easel, and on the easel the beginnings of a sketch. There was a guitar, a violin, and a piano, and on the piano an open sonata. There was pen, ink, and paper, and on the paper the first scrawled lines of a ballad. Along the walls were bows, arrows, and arbalests of the fifteenth century, sixteenth-century drawings, seventeenth-century musical instruments, chests of all times, tankards of all shapes, jugs of all kinds, and, lastly, glass necklaces, feather fans, stuffed lizards, dried flowers, a whole world of things, but a whole world not worth twenty-five silver thalers.'

That account, whether from hearsay, conjecture, or knowledge, I do not know, is not only an admirable portrait of the room and brain of an arch-romantic, but might serve as a parable of the Romanticism of 1830. In that year Hugo's _Hernani_ was produced at the Comédie Française, and the young men who battled with the Philistines for its success were drawn from the studios as well as from the libraries, and had their David in Théophile Gautier. Never before had the arts been so inextricably entangled, had antiquarianism been so lively and humane, had gems and worthless baubles been so confounded together. Chateaubriand had reaffirmed the pictorial rights of literature. Delacroix was painting pictures from Byron and from Dante, in bold, predominant colours, very different from the lassitudinous livery of the schools. There was a new generosity of sentiment responsible for Corot's landscapes and Barye's beasts. The sudden widening of knowledge and sympathy was expressed in the new broadness and courage of technique, and the same forces that covered the palette with vivid reds and blues, and compelled the sculptor to a virile handling of his chisel, found outlet in words also. Writers, like painters, seized the human, coloured, passionate elements in foreign literatures, looking everywhere for the liberty and brilliance they desired. The open-throated, sinewy, gladiatorial muse of Byron found here devoted worshippers, and the spacious movements of Shakespeare, his people alive and free, independent of the dramas in which for a few hours in the Globe Theatre they had had a part to play, delighted men with an outlook very different from, and hostile to, that of Voltaire, although he had done his share in making their outlook possible.

The studio and the study were very close together. Gautier, Hugo, and Mérimée were all painters in their own right, and there is a difference between the writers who have only seen life from a library, and those who have seen it from behind an easel. The writer who has once felt them can never forget the eye-delighting pleasures of the palette, but composes in colour-schemes, and feels for the tints of words as well as for their melody. The work of the Romantics was visualised and coloured in a manner then new. It was almost shocking to men who had been accustomed, as it were, to write in the severest monotone, and to refuse, if indeed they had ever thought of it, such luxury of realisation.

[Local colour.]

There is no need, except for the sake of the argument, to state the fact that pictures are called up in a reader's mind by a careful selection of details presented in a proper order. It is well known that a few details correctly chosen have a more compelling power on the imagination than a complete and catalogued description. These men, writing pictorially, gave a new responsibility to single touches. It became clear that visualisation was impossible unless observation preceded it, and details accordingly took upon themselves the exigent dignity of local colour. Local colour, from distinguishing between places, was brought to mark the difference between times. Archæology became suddenly of absorbing interest; its materials were more than its materials; they were made the symbols of lives as real and as red in the veins as those of the archæologists themselves. Notre Dame was no longer to be expressed in a learned antiquarian paper, but in a passionate book. And Victor Hugo visualising with the accuracy of a poet, found that just as archæology meant little without life, so the life was vapid without the archæology. Quasimodo shoves his hideous face through a hole in order to be elected king of fools, but Hugo does not allow that marvellous grimace to fill the picture. The hole must be there as well, and so 'une vitre brisée à la jolie rosace audessus de la porte laissa libre un cercle de pierre par lequel il fut convenu que les concurrents passeraient la tête.' The setting is as important as the head; humanity and its trappings are worthless by themselves, and valuable only together. Here is the source of Realism, within Romanticism itself. Indeed almost the whole development of the art in the nineteenth century is due to this new care for the frame, and to this new honesty in dealing with the man within it.

[The youth of the Romantics.]

An energetic simplicity of nature was needed for the fullest enjoyment of these new conditions, and the greatest of the French Romantics were almost like big interested children in their attitude towards life and themselves. As soon as we find a Romantic like Mérimée, reserved, subtle, a tender-hearted Machiavellian, we find a man who is to dissociate himself from them sooner or later, and to produce something different a little from the purely Romantic ideals. There is something beautiful and inspiriting in the youth of the Romantics. I like to think of Gautier, the olive-skinned boy from the studio in the rue St. Louis, overcome with nervousness at the idea of touching the hand of Hugo, himself only twenty-seven, sitting down and trembling like a girl on the stairs before the master's door. And then the splendid prank of Dumas, who, on the eve of revolution, went down into the country like one of his own heroes, held up a town, and with a very few friends obtained the submission of the governor, and captured an arsenal for his party. They were boys, and some hostility was needed for their uttermost delight. In England the battles of art are more like squabbles, but in the Paris of 1830 it seemed as if the town were divided into camps for the defence of classicism and the support of the new ideas. It was as if each point of vantage had to be taken by storm, and the great night of _Hernani_, when Hugo's supporters had red tickets and a password--the Spanish word _hierro_, which means 'steel'--was the noblest memory in the life of at least one of Hugo's enthusiastic lieutenants.

Such a joyous and vigorous thing was the Romanticism of 1830. It touched story-telling through Balzac, Hugo, Dumas, Gautier, and Mérimée, of whom the first three, in turning from the theatre to the art of narrative, found inspiration in Sir Walter Scott. Scott's influence has been one of bulk rather than of quality on English story-telling. But in France, instead of tracing his progeny in insipid copies, we follow it through the bold variations of these three powerful and original minds. Through them it returned to England again. Balzac, as the most important of the three, in view of the later developments of the novel, I have discussed in a separate chapter. Gautier's Oriental and Antique inspiration, and Mérimée's combination of ascetic narrative with vivid subject, are also themes for separate and particular consideration. But Hugo and Dumas are so generally representative of the Romantic movement in story-telling, that in writing of them in this chapter I feel I am but filling in the background already sketched for the others.

[The Preface to _Cromwell_.]

The theatre was, in 1830, the scene of the most decisive battle between Romanticism and Classicism. The fight of the painters, of the poets, of the story-tellers, seemed concentrated in the more obvious combat of the dramatists, whose armies could see their enemies, and even come to blows with them. And in Hugo's preface to _Cromwell_, that preface which is now so much more interesting than the play that follows it, he claims several things for the dramatist that by act if not by argument he was later to claim for the artist in narrative. He demands that the sublime and ridiculous should be together in literature and, as in life, win their force from each other. The drama, and so the novel, which also attempts in some sort a reproduction of human existence, is not to be written on a single note. It is not to be wholly sublime or wholly ridiculous, but both at once. The general in his triumphal car is to be genuinely afraid of toppling over. And so, in _Les Misérables_, the student's frolic is whole-heartedly described, without in any way binding the author to make light of the sorrow of Fantine when she finds that her own desertion is the merry surprise at the end of it. The sublime will not be the less sublime for being mingled with the grotesque, and so, in _Notre Dame de Paris_, the deepest passion in the book is felt by a hideous and deformed dwarf, and by this same dwarf rather than by any more obvious impersonation of justice, the lascivious priest is flung from the tower. Looking up in his agony, as he clings to the bending cornice his desperate hands have clutched, he does not meet the eyes of some person of a grandeur matching the moment, but sees the grotesque face of Quasimodo, utterly indifferent to him, looking, like one of the gargoyles, over Paris, with tears on his distorted cheeks.

In this same preface, too, Hugo justifies innovations in language, very necessary for an art whose new won freedom was to let it explore so much that was unknown. When the body changes, he asks, would you keep the coat the same? Triumphantly appealing to history, he points out that 'the language of Montaigne is no longer that of Rabelais, the language of Pascal is no longer that of Montaigne, and the language of Montesquieu is no longer that of Pascal.' He is justifying there the coloured prose of Chateaubriand, the opulent vocabulary of Gautier, and his own infinitely various effects in prose and verse.

[Victor Hugo on Scott.]

He was, until Sainte-Beuve took the work from his hands, at once the leader and the defender of Romanticism. And, critic and artist, severally and in the combination that we have grown accustomed to expect in fulfilment of both these functions, his was too sovereign a mind to adopt or borrow anything from another writer without knowing very clearly what he intended to do with it. Writing of _Quentin Durward_, he said: 'Après le roman pittoresque mais prosaïque de Walter Scott il restera un autre roman à créer, plus beau et plus complet encore selon nous. C'est le roman, à la fois drame et épopée, pittoresque mais poètique, réel mais idéal, vrai mais grand, qui enchâssera Walter Scott dans Homère.' That romance is Victor Hugo's own. His tremendous books are conceived in the manner of an epic poet rather than of a novelist or a romancer. The relations of his characters are not solely concerned with themselves but with some large principle that animates the book in which they live. If he is without Norns or Fates, if he sets his characters against a background other than that of Destiny, he substitutes the power of the law or the power of the sea, and illumines with a story not only the actors who take part in it, but also the spirit of the Gothic or the spirit of revolution.

[The Waverley Novels and Hugo's romances.]

To turn from the Waverley Novels to the romances of Hugo, is like stepping from the open air into a vast amphitheatre whose enclosed immensity is more overwhelming than the clear sky. Scott writes, on a plain human level, tales that we can readily believe, chronicles that are like private documents, or memoirs such as might have been written by the ancestors of our own families. Hugo does not tell his tale from the point of view of its actors, but puts them before us in a setting far larger than the one they saw. Their petty adventures are but threads chosen arbitrarily from a far more intricate design, and they themselves but illustrations of some greater motion than any to which in their own right they could aspire. There are hundreds of them, and with our narrow powers of interest and attention we fasten on one or two, like children choosing colours on a race-course, and follow them to the end, while Hugo, with his godlike eye, sees them all as threads in his pattern, poor, small lives, twisted in accordance with a design beyond their comprehension. In Scott's open air we can live and breathe and be content, and stand firmly with our feet upon the ground. In Hugo's amphitheatre we see an ordered spectacle of life and death, and are, as it were, present at the shapings of the ends of man.

[Dumas on Scott.]

There is a much less terrible pleasure to be had from the works of Dumas. Behind all Hugo's books is the solemnity, behind Dumas' the joy of living, the _joie de vivre_--the French phrase, although identical, seems better to express it. To compare Hugo's with Dumas' criticism of the Scott novel is to see very clearly the difference in weight and depth between the two men. Hugo sees in Scott the promise of another and a greater kind of romance. Dumas sees only that it is possible to improve on Scott's technique. He notices that Scott spends half a volume or so in describing his characters before setting them in action, and in his gay way justifies him by saying: 'Il n'y a pas de feu sans fumée, il n'y a pas de soleil sans ombre. L'ennui, c'est l'ombre; l'ennui c'est la fumée.' Sacrifice fifty pages of _ennui_ to the gods, and then away with your story. Dumas decides to improve on this, to set his characters moving, and to pour his libations of _ennui_ on the way. 'Commencer par l'intérêt, au lieu de commencer par l'ennui; commencer par l'action, au lieu de commencer par la préparation; parler des personnages après les avoir fait paraître, au lieu de les faire paraître après avoir parlé d'eux.' This is not very sublime, after the suggestion that Hugo won from the same subject; but it produced '_Les Trois Mousquetaires_.' D'Artagnan is in a hubbub on the first page, and the _ennui_ of description is given us so sparsely that, watching for it chapter by chapter, we almost consider ourselves swindled when we reach the last and are still without it. 'The purpose of this tale is not to describe interiors,' Dumas petulantly ejaculates when tired of talking about Cornelius' room in _La Tulipe Noire_. No; certainly not; neither of rooms nor of men. Damn psychology, and hey for full-blooded adventure. Dumas took a free stage for his duels and headlong rides and gallant adventures and ingenious stratagems. His men moved too fast not to feel themselves encumbered in a furnished room; there was little point in describing a landscape for them, since, before it was done, they were several leagues off in another; too intricate furniture in their own heads would have cost them hesitancies, unguarded stabs, and possible falls from a galloping horse.

[_Les Trois Mousquetaires._]

Dumas' novels are novels of the theatre. His first piece of work was an attempt to make a melodrama out of _Ivanhoe_, and his best books exhibit the art of Walter Scott modified by the rules of the stage. The curtain rises on people moving about. It falls on a climax. The action of all its scenes is in crescendo. Alter Scott to fit these rules, and you have something like the form that Dumas for more than half a century has imposed on non-psychological fiction. How admirably he filled it himself. Those splendid fellows of his, whose cavalier way fairly takes us off our feet, are not dead puppets made to wield toy swords at the pulling of a string. There is something exuberant and infectious even in the restraint of Athos. They are all alive, not with an independent, almost hostile existence like that of the characters of Balzac, but with a vitality they owe to their creator and to us, the free coursing blood of boyish dreams. They are the things that at one time or another we have set our hearts on being, the things that Dumas actually was. Where they ride a jolly spirit goes with them, and we know that Dumas had only to settle in a quiet village to turn it into a place of gay and prosperous festivity. 'Madeleine,' says D'Artagnan at the end of _Vingt Ans Après_, 'give me the room on the first floor. I must keep up my dignity now that I am captain of the musketeers. But always keep my room on the fifth floor; one never knows what may happen.' Is not that just the attitude of Dumas, who remarked upon his deathbed, 'I took twenty francs with me to Paris. Well, I have kept them. There they are,' and pointed to his last louis on the mantelpiece. In the flamboyant youthfulness of Dumas, who died a boy at sixty-seven, and called Mazarin 'still young, for he was only fifty-six,' is perhaps that characteristic that made Romanticism in France so complete and satisfactory a Renaissance. When such men as he were writing books the world had won its youth again.

BALZAC

BALZAC

[His vitality.]

BALZAC used to tell a story of his father, who, when asked to carve a partridge, not knowing how to set about it, rolled up his sleeves, gripped his knife and fork, and cut it in four with such energy as to cleave the plate at the same time and embed the knife in the table. That was the manner of setting about things natural to Balzac himself. He was a 'joyous wild boar' of a man, with the build and strength of a navvy. He was never ill. Gautier tells us that the habitual expression of that powerful face was a kind of Rabelaisian glee. Now a man who could write the _Comédie Humaine_ and look aside from it with a Rabelaisian glee was perhaps the only kind of man who could have attempted such a task without being turned, willy nilly, into a pedant.

[The conception of the _Comédie Humaine_.]

There was a logic, a completeness, in the groundwork of the scheme, that would have sterilised the imagination of a man with less exuberant vitality. Compare for a moment the _Comédie Humaine_ with the novels of Sir Walter Scott. Scott meant to Balzac what Maria Edgeworth had meant to himself. He had seen in her an attempt to paint Irish country and character, and had decided to do the same for Scotland. Balzac after those ten years of bad mediæval stories, those ten years of labour for the Rachel of his own soul, saw in him an attempt to paint Scottish country and character, and decided to do the same for France. But, whereas Scott had been brought up on the _Reliques of English Poetry_, and in the country of purple heather, grey rock, and leaping stream, Balzac was nourished on philosophy and science, and spent his youth in a Paris lodging. Scott saw men rather than kinds of man. Bailie Nicol Jarvie is more Nicol Jarvie than Bailie. Balzac comes at life in a much more scientific spirit. 'Does not Society make of man,' he asks, as Chaucer has unconsciously asked before him, 'as many different men as there are varieties in zoology? The differences between a soldier, a labourer, an administrator, an idler, a savant, a statesman, a merchant, a sailor, a poet, a pauper, a priest, are, though more difficult to seize, as considerable as those that distinguish the wolf, the lion, the ass, the crow, the shark, the sea-calf, the goat, etc.' Balzac made up his mind to collect specimens of the social species, not pressed and dried, like the old 'Characters' of the seventeenth century, but exhibited alive and in their natural surroundings. He was to make a world with the colour of contemporary France, an 'august lie, true in its details,' a world complete in itself, a world in which all the characters were to show the impress of that state of life to which it should please Balzac to call them. That was the idea that turned the Waverley Novels into the _Comédie Humaine_, that the idea whose exposition by a less full-blooded professor would have been so readily precise, so readily dull in its precision.

[Physical energy and the task of writing.]

Now there are few harder tasks for a man of overflowing physical energy than this, of covering innumerable sheets of paper with wriggling unnatural lines traced with the end of a pen. It is likely to become a torment; the feet cross and uncross, the fingers itch, the inkpot flies across the room, and the energy defeats itself. There is the legend of Scott's hand, covering sheet after sheet so swiftly and with such regularity that it was painful to watch it; but Scott's was not the bomb-like brute energy of Balzac. Balzac, to give life to his scientific ideas, needed a more fiery vitality than Scott's, who began and ended with merely human notions. The actual writing of his books was proportionately more difficult for him. There was no mere eccentricity in his habit of getting the sketches for his books set up in type, and enlarging them from proofs in the middle of large sheets of paper, covering the vast margins with the additions that were to make the books themselves. It was a wise attempt to give himself the same physical outlet as that enjoyed by the painter or sculptor, to give himself something to pull about, something actual, something that could be attacked, anything rather than the terrible silkworm spinning of a single endless fibre. His energy would have been wasted in a hundred ways unless, so far as was possible, he had fitted his work to himself and himself to his work. Giant of concentration as he was, he added cubits to his stature by taking thought. He made his writing hours different from every one else's, wore a white frock something like a monk's habit, and found in the drinking of enormous quantities of coffee a stimulant as much theatrical as medicinal. These things meant much to him, and his use of them was an action similar to that of Poe's schoolboy, who, when guessing odd or even the marbles in his playmate's hand, would imitate the expression of his adversary's face and see what thoughts arose in his mind. The paraphernalia of work were likely to induce the proper spirit. When all his fellow Parisians were in bed, Balzac, gathering the voluminous white folds about his sturdy person, and glancing at the coffee stewing on the fire, sat down to his writing-table with the conviction of an alderman sitting down to a city dinner. There could never be a doubt in his mind as to the purpose for which he was there.

[Balzac's prose.]

This navvy-work of production had its influence on the character of his writing. But it was never in Balzac's nature to have understood Gautier's craftsman's delight in the polishing and chasing of diminutive things. Balzac, the working machine, was simply enormous energy so coaxed and trained as to produce an enormous output. The raw material of his rich humanity passed through violent processes. It had but small chance of any very delicate finish. Balzac thought in books and in cycles of books, never in pages, paragraphs, or sentences. Although he was much preoccupied with 'style,' envying the men whose writing would be charming to the ear even if it meant nothing to the mind, the best of his own prose is unbeautiful, rugged, fiercely energetic, peculiarly his own, and therefore not to be grumbled at. He would have liked to write finely, just as he would have liked _la vie splendide_. But his mind, delivering pickaxe blows, or furiously wrestling with great masses of material, could not clothe itself in stately periods. Always, out of any splendour that he made for it, shows a brown, brawny arm, and the splendour becomes an impertinence. He had ideas on art, as he had ideas on science, but his was too large a humanity to allow itself to be subordinate to either. He was too full-blooded a man to be withered by a theory. He was too eager to say what he had in his mouth to be patient in the modulation of his voice. He was almost too much of a man to be an artist. To think of that man fashioning small, perfect poems, who avowed that he wrote his _Contes Drôlatiques_ because he happened to notice the fall in the French birth rate, is to think of a Colossus tinkering at the mechanism of a watch.

[His proximity to life.]

Then, too, he had been too close to life to think of art for art's sake. During the years that followed his setting up author in a garret, he had watched the existence of those who are so near starvation that they seem to make a living by sweeping the doorstep of Death. And, at the same time that, walking out in the evenings, and following a workman and his wife on their way home, he had been able to feel their rags upon his back, and to walk with their broken shoes upon his feet, he had also had his glimpses of _la vie splendide_, the more vivid, no doubt, for their contrast with the sober realities he knew. To this man, however great a writer he might become, life would always mean more than books. It always did. He could cut short other people's lamentations by saying, 'Well, but let us talk of real things; let us talk of Eugénie Grandet,' but Eugénie Grandet, the miser's daughter, interested him much more than the mere novel of that name. His people never existed for the sake of his books, but always his books for the sake of his people. He makes a story one-legged or humpbacked without scruple, so long as by doing so he can make his reader see a man and his circumstances exactly as they appeared to himself. He was not like a pure artist, an instrument on which life played, producing beautiful things. His concern with life was always positive. His world was not a world of dream and patterned imagery, but, according to his mood, was an elaborate piece of mechanism and he an impassioned mechanician, or a zoological garden and he an impassioned zoologist. It is almost matter for wonder that such a man should choose to express himself in narrative.

[His conception of the novel.]

And yet the novel, as he conceived it, gave him the best of opportunities for putting his results before the world. If we allow ourselves to set all our attention on politics and finance and social theory, we lose in life all but the smell of blue-books, and the grey colour of Stock Exchange returns. If Balzac had written science, and not stories, we should have only had the ideas of his novels without that passionate presentment of concrete things that gives those ideas their vitality. Indeed, the novels are far greater than the ideas, just as the poetic, seeing man in Balzac was greater than the scientist. Weariless in distinguishing man from man, type from type, specimen from specimen, by the slightest indication of the clay, he was able in novels, as he could never have done in works of science, to give the colour of each man's life expressed in his actions, in his talk, in his choice of clothes, in the furniture of his room. The action of all novels, like that of all plays, is performed in the brain of the reader or spectator. The novelist's and dramatist's characters are like pieces on a chessboard, symbols of possibilities not obviously expressed. In older fiction these possibilities were left so vague that the reader could adopt any part he chose, without in the least interfering with the story, independent as that was of personal character. Never before Balzac made them had the chessmen assumed so much of human detail. In his books they are no longer pegs of wood, depending for their meanings on the reader's generosity, for their adventures on the ingenuity of the author. They make their moves in their own rights. The hero of a Balzac novel is not the reader, in borrowed clothes, undergoing a series of quite arbitrary experiences. He cannot be made to do what the author requires, but fills his own suits, and has a private life. Balzac knows and makes his reader feel that his characters have not leapt ready-made into the world to eat and drink through a couple of hundred pages and vanish whence they came. They have left their mark on things, and things have left their mark on them. They have lived in pages where he has not seen them, and Balzac never drags them to take a part in existences to which they do not belong. I can remember no case where Balzac uses a stock scene, a room, or a garden, or a valley that would do for anything. There was only one room, one valley, one garden, where the characters could have said those words, lost that money, or kissed those kisses, and Balzac's stupendous energy is equal not only to pouring life into his people, but also to forcing the particular scene upon his canvas with such vivid strokes that every cobble seems to have a heart, and every flower in a pot to sway its blossoms with the sun. Even in the short stories, where he often follows gods that are not his own, writing of madness like a Hoffmann, and of intrigue like a Boccaccio, his peculiar genius is apparent in the environments. How carefully, in _La Messe de l'Athée_, he works out the conditions of life that made the story possible for its actors. And, in the longer novels, there is scarcely a sentence unweighted with evidence that is of real import to him who would truly understand the characters and happenings of the book. How much does not the story of _Eugénie Grandet_ owe to that description of the little money-getting, vine-growing town of Saumur, with its cobbled streets, its old houses, its greedy faces watching the weather from the house doors, the only proper setting for the narrow power of Goodman Grandet, and the leaden monotony of his daughter's life?

[Balzac's world and that of Realism.]

Balzac's fierce determination that his lies should be true in their details has often been remarked in claiming him as the first of the French realists. And, indeed, others of his characteristics, his interest in life as it is, the scientific bias that found its parody in Zola, his fearlessness in choice of subject, his entire freedom from classical ideals, are certainly attributes of realism. Realism is ready, like Balzac, to deal with stock exchanges and bakeries and all the side shops of civilisation; realism finds Greek Greek and not an Elixir of Life; realism tries to see life as it is. But realism (an impossible ideal) needs for its approximate attainment a man of ordinary energy; and this Balzac was not. Balzac used Thor's hammer, not one from the carpenter's shop. He lived like ten men and so do his characters. A crossing-sweeper in a story by Balzac would wear out his broom in half an hour, but the broom of a crossing-sweeper of de Maupassant or Flaubert would be certain of an average life. Balzac's world is not the world of realism, because it goes too fast, like a clock without a pendulum, running at full speed. His world is more alive than ours, and so are his men. They are demons, men carried to the _n_th power. Fire runs in their veins instead of blood, and we watch them with something like terror, as if we were peeping into hell. They are superhuman like Balzac himself, and have become a kind of lesser divinities. None but he would have dared 'to frame their fearful symmetry.' None but they could so well have illustrated existence as Balzac saw it.

[A new motive in fiction.]

And life, as this Rabelaisian Frenchman saw it, in the chaotic years of the nineteenth century, was a terrible thing except to the blind and the numbed, and to those who, like himself, possessed 'unconquerable souls.' He found two primary motives in existence. Passion and the production of children was one. He said that this was the only one. But his life and his work made it clear that there was another, and that this other was money. Money, the need of it, the spending of it, fantastic but always acute plans for getting hold of it, like that suggested in _Facino Cane_, filled his own life, and were not banished even from his love-letters. His own obsession by debts and business forced on him as a novelist a new way of looking at life, and, through him, gave another outlook to story-telling. In the older novels, Fielding's for example, rich were rich, and poor were poor, and only to be changed from one to the other by some calamity or fairy godmother of a coincidence. People were static; unless they turned out to be Somebody's illegitimate son or rightful heir, their clothes were not of a finer cut as they grew older, and if they ate off wooden platters in the first chapter, they supped no more daintily in the last. In romantic tales and fairy stories, a hero might cut his way to fortune through dragons or piratical Turks; in the rogue novels he might swindle a dinner, and after long switchbacking between twopence and nothing, happen by accident upon a competence; he never, before Balzac took him in hand, went grimly at life, closing his heart, concentrating his energies, compelling even love to help him in his steady climb from poverty to opulence. He left that to the villain, and the story-teller took care that the villain eventually got his deserts. The older novelists were vastly interested in the progress of a love-affair; Balzac looks kindly at that, but his real interest is in the progress of a financial superman. The wealth and poverty of Balzac's characters is the quality that makes or breaks them. The mainspring of their actions is the desire of getting on in life. What is the tragedy of Eugénie Grandet, but money? What is the tragedy of Père Goriot, but money? Eliminate wealth and poverty from either of them and they cease to exist. If old Goriot had been rich and indulgent to his daughters he would have been an estimable father; but he is poor; his daughters must be luxurious, and so he is Père Goriot. The story is that of Lear and his kingdom, translated into hundred franc notes and lacking the Cordelia. Love, Wisdom, Gentleness are inconsequent dreamers in a house of Mammon. They talk in window corners and behind curtains, ashamed of their disinterestedness. They are like the old gods banished from the temples, whispering in secret places in the woods, and going abroad quietly in the twilight, while in the glare of noon the clanking brazen giant strides heavily across the world.

'And underneath his feet, all scattered lay Dead skulls and bones of men, whose life had gone astray.'

GAUTIER AND THE EAST

GAUTIER AND THE EAST

[The East as a means of expression.]

THE East is an invention of the nineteenth century. We have only to look at the works of Voltaire or of Goldsmith to see that the Orient did not exist before the time of the Romantic movement. To early writers it meant nothing but polygamy, moguls, elephants, and 'bonzes,' and the eighteenth-century translation of the _Arabian Nights_ did little more than supply an entertaining form to an ironical philosopher. Even when it became the fashion to make imaginary Orientals expose the follies of the West, the East had not yet become alive for us. We find scarcely a hint in the hundred and twenty letters of _The Citizen of the World_ that it meant more than a dialectical expression for topsy-turvydom, a place to which you could refer as to Lilliput or to Brobdingnag, useful like the _x_ of algebra in illustrating the properties of other things. The first glimmerings of discovery are in Beckford's _Vathek_, an extravagant book, belittled by a schoolboyish humour--as when the Caliph plays football with the rotund figure of the Indian Magician--but written by a man to whom the East did really mean some sort of gorgeous dream.

For the East is not an expression of philosophy, or of geography, but of temperament; it is a dream that has led many to leave their people for its people, their homes for desert tents, in the effort to turn its conventions into realities of life. Men have fallen in love with it, as they have fallen in love with statues or with the beautiful women of pictures. It means more than itself, like a man whom time has lifted into Godhead. It has been given the compelling power of a religion. I believe it was an invention made possible by the discovery of local colour. With the emphasis of local colour came an emphasised difference in places. Minds only mildly preferring one place to another when both were vague, most vigorously preferred one or other place when both were realised in vivid detail, and could be readily compared. Fastidious minds seeking the stage-properties of expression could choose them in the booths of all the world. Men who did not care for the settings of their own lives were able to fill out their dim Arcadias with detail, and vein their phantom goddesses with blood.

The East, when Gautier was growing up in the rich tastes of the Romantic movement, was ready to supply the most delicious conventions. Goethe had shown its possibilities. It was there like a many-coloured curtain behind which he could build a world less entangled, less unmanageable than his own. Its newness must not be forgotten in considering his use of it, and in thinking of his use of Antiquity we must remember that it was as novel as the East.

[The Antique.]

Now the Antique was one of the cudgels with which the Classicists tried to beat the heads of the Romanticists in the battles of that time. It did not mean to Gautier what it meant to them. Its metamorphosis was simultaneous with the birth of the East, and had almost the same cause. Insisting on local colour in places, the Romanticists insisted also on local colour in humanity. Cromwell was to be allowed to say that he had the parliament in his bag and the king in his pocket. Cæsar was to be allowed to talk like a man and even to be one. So that for Gautier Antiquity meant not a cold inhumanity that had been beautiful, but a warm, full-blooded life that worshipped simple, energetic gods, and found expression in a thousand ways other than the speech of blank verse and heroic actions that had been so often represented in pictures of an annoying timidity of colouring. The East and the Antique together had been touched as if by magic, and turned from the abstract into the concrete, from the heroic into the human, and so into the very material for personal expression.

[The East and Arcadia.]

Gautier's attitude towards the East is not unlike that of the Elizabethans towards Arcadia. Sir Philip Sidney, courtier, soldier, and busy statesman, wrote in terms of shepherds, shepherdesses, and shipwrecked princes, and worked in an ideal atmosphere where no cares were greater than love, or a thorn in a lamb's foot. He, with

'A sweet attractive kinde of grace A full assurance given by lookes, Continual comfort in a face, The lineaments of gospel bookes,'

seemed to belong to that Golden Age which has never been now, but always long ago. And Gautier, busy writer of articles and travel-books, massive and vividly alive, could not persuade himself to be Parisian and contemporary. Nor would it be extravagant to compare him with the pastoral writers of to-day, Celtic and Gaelic, who like him lift their emotions into a simpler, more congenial atmosphere, and like him insist continually on the local colour of their dreams. These writers, sitting in London or in Edinburgh, hear, without moving from their comfortable chairs, the cry of the curlew on the moor, and are transported to a quiet bay, half enclosed by cliffs, 'in two white curves, like the wings of the solander when she hollows them as she breasts the north wind,' and under the spells of an intenser imagined life find their own emotions more vivid and more easily expressed. Gautier, sitting in Paris, sees the swallows fluttering about the roofs and flying south in autumn.

'Je comprends tout ce qu'elles disent, Car le poète est un oiseau; Mais captif ses élans se brisent Contre un invisible réseau!

Des ailes! des ailes! des ailes! Comme dans le chant de Ruckert, Pour voler, là-bas avec elles Au soleil d'or, au printemps vert!'

That cry for wings is the keynote of his most passionately beautiful work. When he is at his best; when he is not projecting young men with a mathematical freedom of morals into a Western society; in those moments when he is most himself, we hear clipped feathers beat against the bars. He sought to escape from Paris to the Enchanted Islands, and from the nineteenth century to the Golden Age. The Enchanted Islands he had identified with the East, and the Golden Age was the time of the Pharaohs or of the making of the Venus. As the Christian fingers his crucifix and is able to kneel upon the footsteps of the throne, so Gautier found talismans to help his dreams to their desires. A mummy's foot, a marble hand took him to the times he loved, or half revealed the perfections that reality refused. A curiosity shop was a postern-gate to heaven, and a merchant of antiquities held St. Peter's keys.

[The story-telling of dreams.]

His art is that of making his dreams come true. He is not an observer of life, like Richardson, Fielding, or De Maupassant. He does not copy the surface of contemporary existence; but cuts away all but passion, and clothes that in symbols whose strangeness disentangled it and helped him to make it real. Beautiful women step down to him from their tapestries, and, living on drops of his blood, come back to him out of their graves. The Princess Hermonthis claims her little foot that he has bought as a paper-weight, and takes him to the tomb of the Pharaohs and the pre-adamite kings sitting with their thousand peoples waiting for the final day. The Pompeian harlot is brought alive by the love of a youth for the imprint her perfect breasts have left in molten lava. He is ill at ease in his most famous _Roman de la Momie_ until he has finished with the Englishman and the doctor, and is translating the scroll of papyrus buried three thousand years ago with Tahoser in the sarcophagus.

[Gautier the man.]

But it is too easy to construct a man out of his work. It is more interesting to compare the man of this world with the man he would have liked to be, and the man he chose to express. Gautier was not pure dreamer. Though the world of his art was as far from the world of Paris, as the world of Mr. Yeats from the world of London or Dublin, he was not a seer, or a poet between whom and reality hung a veil of dreams. He was a solid man, one of whose proudest memories was a blow that registered five hundred and thirty-two pounds on an automatic instrument, the result of daily washing down five pounds of gory mutton with three bottles of red Bordeaux. He was a Porthos, and the Gautier of his stories, that gorgeous barbaric figure, was his boast, cherished as Porthos cherished his dignity. The traits he loved in himself were those that gave colour to his fiction. His olive skin, his strength, his vitality, his scorn of the religion of sacrifice--these were the details he caressed. He was never tired of insisting on everything that helped in this Oriental and Antique projection of himself. His hero in _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ exclaims: 'I am a man of the Homeric times; the world where I live does not belong to me, and I do not understand the society about me. Christ has not yet come for me; I am as pagan as Alcibiades and Phidias.... I find the earth as beautiful as heaven, and I think that perfection of form is virtue. I love a statue better than a phantom, and full noon better than twilight. Three things please me: gold, marble and purple, splendour, solidity, colour.' When a reviewer described him as a being, 'fat, jovial, and sanguinary,' he quotes the description with gratitude, and explains gleefully that it refers to his taste for bull-fights. He begins a book: 'People have often caricatured us, dressed like a Turk, cross-legged on cushions.... The caricature is only an exaggeration of the truth.' That was how he liked to think of himself, and how he would like to be imagined. It is interesting to know that he was a kindly bear of a man, who was always called by his Christian name, and delighted in astonishing his friends with outbursts of genius served up in a joyous obscenity.

He was not a man of wealth as his work suggests; but an extremely industrious journalist. Like Balzac, he was proud of his prodigious activity. He confesses that he wrote about three hundred volumes: but that is the estimate of Porthos; his biographer puts the number at sixty. From his twenty-fifth year he was an artist on a treadmill, and only at every hundredth, or two hundredth, or three hundredth turn of the wheel could he escape for a little and try to satisfy himself. That is why his poems and shorter stories are the most perfect specimens of his later work. He needed things that could be roughed out in a sitting and carried about without risk until the time when he could work on them again. He was able to hurry out of sight his dozen sheets for the _Presse_ or the _Figaro_, sit down on his cushions, let his fingers run through the long hair of a Persian cat, and turn over again and again one of the minute Enamels or Cameos of his poetry. In so small a space he could afford to be fastidious. He could take up the little thing a week later, and a month after that, and file and polish it to his content. It was the same with the stories. The story-telling Gautier was a Gautier on holiday.

He was a complete man, and could, in active life, have twisted the present if he had chosen. But he did not choose. As for politics, 'what does it matter whether one is ruled by a sabre, a sprinkler of holy-water, or an umbrella?' He has been censured for this, but the censure means no more than to say he was a perfect artist unfortunately not interested in local government. One does not ask a shoemaker if his soles and uppers are Socialist or only gentle Liberal. As for his own life, he worked hard, brought up his children, but found his emotions too intricate to please him. He had to separate them, and translate them into terms of another time and place. Modernity rattled past him, like the chariots of the king past the potter, who would not look up from his wheel lest an ugly curve should throw awry the vessel he was shaping. Gautier did his duty by this world and left it, discovering for others what Baudelaire called 'the consolation of the arts,' and finding peace himself in the less encumbered simplicity of his Ancient and Oriental Arcadia.

[The flowers of the white narcissus.]

His work was the construction of a paradise for himself in which other people are allowed to walk. His stories are a substitute for opium and haschisch, and take us into a world like that of old romance and myth, where we meet our own souls walking in strange clothes. 'Art,' says Santayana, 'so long as it needs to be a dream, will never cease to be a disappointment.' We leave a volume of Gautier as we leave the _Mabinogion_, or the _Morte Darthur_, or the _Volsunga Saga_, or a book of fairy-tales. We have to readjust ourselves before meeting the difficulties of life. But opposite Santayana's sentence we may set one from Mahomet. 'If any man have two loaves, let him sell one, and buy flowers of the white narcissus; for the one is food for the body and the other is food for the soul.' And perhaps this art, where the world is simplified into the conventions of a tapestry, by its intense appeal to primitive emotions, may help us like a touchstone to distinguish between the things to which more than lip-service is slavery, and the things to which less than life-service is death.

POE AND THE NEW TECHNIQUE

POE AND THE NEW TECHNIQUE

[Self-conscious method.]

'IT is the curse,' says Poe, 'of a certain order of mind that it can never rest satisfied with the consciousness of its ability to do a thing. Not even is it content with doing it. It must both know and show how it was done.' It is all very well to call it a curse; it is the curse that gave us Leonardo's notebooks, Reynolds' Discourses, and Stevenson's few essays on the art of writing; the curse that is among the reasons of Leonardo's excellence, Reynolds' excellence, Stevenson's excellence, and the excellence of Poe himself. It is the curse that is the secret of all real knowledge of technique. The man who is as interested in the way of doing a thing as in the thing when done, is the man who is likely to put a new tool in the hands of his fellow-craftsmen.

Poe's methods were such a delight to him that his works have an uncanny atmosphere about them, as if he had not written them but had been present, passionately observant and critical, while they were being written by somebody else. More than once he used his pen to make a new thing out of a discussion of an old one, and on these occasions he dissects his own motives in so impersonal a manner that it is difficult for the reader to remember that the author examining is in any way connected with the author undergoing examination. _The Raven_, for example, a profound piece of technique, is scarcely as profound, and certainly not as surprising, as _The Philosophy of Composition_, in which its construction is minutely analysed, and Poe callously explains, as a matter of scientific rather than personal interest, that the whole poem was built on the refrain 'Nevermore,' and that this particular refrain was chosen on account of the sonority and ease of _o_ and _r_ sounded together. It was inevitable that such a man busying himself with story-telling should bring something new into the art.

[William Godwin and _Caleb Williams_.]

Another story-teller, who, like Poe, was a philosopher and deeply interested in technique, had existed before, and from him Poe had that strengthening of his ideas that is given by outside confirmation. He refers often to William Godwin, the author of _An Enquiry concerning Political Justice_ and of several novels, among them one now most undeservedly half forgotten, called _Caleb Williams_. It is seldom possible to point to any one book as the sign-post of a literary cross-roads, but there can be no doubt that in _Caleb Williams_ we see the beginnings of self-conscious construction in story-telling. Of that book Hazlitt wrote: 'No one ever began _Caleb Williams_ that did not read it through: no one that ever read it could possibly forget it, or speak of it after any length of time but with an impression as if the events and feelings had been personal to himself.' And the author not only had done this, but had known how it was done. It is usual to say that Poe himself was the first to choose an effect and then plan a story to produce it. But _Caleb Williams_ was published in 1794, and in a preface to one of the later editions Godwin gave his methods away. On him also lay that fruitful curse. He wrote: 'I formed a conception of a book of fictitious adventure that should in some way be distinguished by a very powerful interest. Pursuing this idea, I invented first the third volume of my tale, then the second, and last of all the first.'

Godwin perhaps did not realise how revolutionary was his attitude, and even Hazlitt, delighted as he was by their results, does not seem to have noticed the novelty of his methods. But Poe, finding Godwin's ideas of the very temper of his own, developed them logically as far as they would go, and in two paragraphs that I am going to quote, expressed in a final manner the principles of self-conscious construction.

[The architecture of narrative.]

The first is taken from an essay on Hawthorne:

'A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but, having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be worked out, he then invents such incidents--he then contrives such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of the effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented unblemished, because undisturbed.' ...

The second is more personal, and from _The Philosophy of Composition_:

'I prefer commencing with the consideration of an _effect_.... Keeping originality always in view, I say to myself, in the first place, "Of the innumerable effects or impressions of which the heart, the intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion, select?" Having chosen a novel first, and secondly a vivid effect, I consider whether it can be best wrought out by incident or tone--whether by ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or the converse, or by peculiarity both of incident and tone--afterwards looking about me (or rather within) for such combination of event and tone as shall best aid me in the construction of the effect.'

[_The Masque of the Red Death._]

Here, of course, he is exaggerating actual fact to make his meaning more clear; but I am sure that even the exaggeration is deliberate. If he did not literally work in that way he certainly worked in that spirit. A writer of Poe's fertility of imagination would be at least biassed in choosing his effect by consideration of material already in his head. But, the effect once chosen, he left nothing to chance. He would never, like the older story-tellers, allow himself to be carried away by a wave of his own emotion. He stands beside de Maupassant and the conscious artists of the latter half of the nineteenth century. His emotional material is never emptied carelessly in front of the reader. Chosen scraps of it are laid before him, one by one, in a chosen order, producing a more powerful effect than the unrestrained discharge of the whole. The first sentences of one of his stories prepare its readers for the atmosphere demanded by its conclusion. In _The Masque of the Red Death_, for example, revolting horror is the emotion on which he built. So, from the terrible opening lines, 'The Red Death had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal and so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and seal--the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution ...' to the end, 'And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed hall of their revel, and died, each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all,' we are led on through consciously created disquietude and terror. How menacing is the sentence that immediately follows the prelude: 'But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious.' We feel at once that the shadow of death is at his elbow.

[The detective stories.]

Perhaps Poe's technique is more easily examined in those of his tales in which the same faculties that planned the construction supplied also the motive. The three great detective stories, _The Purloined Letter_, _The Murders in the Rue Morgue_, and _The Mystery of Marie Roget_, are made of reasoning and built on curiosity, the very mainspring of analysis. It is a profitable delight to take any one of these stories, and, working backwards from the end to the beginning, to follow the mind of the architect. Each of the tales states a difficulty and secretes an explanation that is gradually to be reached by the reader, who identifies the processes of his own mind with those of the analytical Dupin. Starting always with the solution, we can watch Poe refusing the slightest irrelevance, and at the same time artfully piling up detail upon detail in exactly that order best calculated to keep the secret, to heighten the curiosity, to disturb the peace of the reader's mind, and to hold him in conjectural suspense until the end.

[Poe's mind.]

But it is easy, in considering the technique of Poe's stories, his smiling refusal of 'inspiration,' his confident mastery over his material, to let the brilliance of his analytical powers hide from us his intimacy with the beautiful, the richness and vividness of his imagination, and, particularly, the passionate character of his mind. Like Leonardo da Vinci, he was a man whose works were the result of the energetic fusing of an emotional personality into moulds designed by reason. Not all Leonardo's theories and calculations would have sufficed to make a _Mona Lisa_. And if Poe had been merely a skilled technician, like so many of his imitators, we should have had from him only unbeautiful toys no less valueless than theirs. All Poe's work depends, like all Leonardo's, on his power of retaining the poetry, the energy of his material, after submitting it to his constructive science, and then, when the moulds have been made, of pouring it into them red-hot and fluid, as if in the primal vitality of its conception. In those very detective stories, that seem built by and of the coldest-blooded reason, what is it that makes them great but Poe's absorbing passion for the manner of mind of their leading character. Dupin is not a mere detective. He is not an analyst, but analysis. He is the embodiment of the logical spirit in mankind, just as Nicolete, in the old French tale, is the embodiment of the loving spirit in womankind. It is for this reason that some have accused Dupin and Nicolete of a lack of individuality. They are not individual, but universal.

If we would understand the matter as well as the manner of his stories, we must think of him as two men, and remember that the same sensibility that served the man of anagrams, and ciphers, and detective puzzles, served also the worshipper of beauty, and made him tremble like a lover at the faintest whisper of her name. Delicately balanced, alike as analyst and æsthete, he was moved profoundly by the smallest circumstance. Just as a glass of wine was sufficient to overturn his reason, so the least wind of suggestion stirred his brain in a deep and surprising manner. Nothing that happened to him touched him only on the surface. Everything dropped to the depths of him, and sometimes returned enriched and recreated. Ideas that others would have passed over became for him and for his readers powerful, haunting and inevitable. Ideas of mesmerism, of hypnotism, and of madness, that have been for so many lesser artists only the materials for foolishness, were pregnant for him with wonderful effects and stories that, once read, can never be forgotten. In _William Wilson_ he is using less flippantly than Stevenson the idea of dual personality. In _The Oval Portrait_, where a painter transfers the very soul of his lady to his canvas, and, as the portrait seems to breathe alive, turns round to find her dead, he is using the subtle, half-thought things that an earlier writer would scarcely have felt, or, if he had, would have brushed, like cobwebs, secretly aside.

[His failures.]

With a mind so sensitive, a coinage so rare, and a technique so thorough, it is curious that he should so frequently have failed. And yet, when we examine his failures they are not difficult to explain. They are due in every case, saving only his attempts to be funny, which are like hangman's jokes, to sudden rents in the veils of his illusions, made by single impossible phrases whose impossibility he seems to have been unable to recognise. I could give a hundred examples, but perhaps none better than the excruciating line in an otherwise beautiful poem, where he tells us that

'The sweet Lenore hath "gone before," with Hope, that flew beside.'

Lapses like that destroy like lightning flashes the mysterious atmosphere he has been at pains to create. They are the penalty he had to pay for being a citizen in a youthful democracy. Americans are never safe from the pitfalls of a language that is older than their nation.

[His isolation.]

In the America of that time, Poe was like the little boy in the grocer's shop, who, while the shopmen are busy with paper and string, dreams of green meadows and scribbles verses on the sugar bags. Even in Europe he would have been one of those men 'who live on islands in the sea of souls.' There are some like Scott and Gautier who are always called by their Christian names, and can talk unreservedly with a thousand. There are others more aloof in mind of whom it is difficult even to think with familiarity. It seems fitting enough to hear of Scott as Walter or Wattie, and of Gautier as Théo, even in old age; but who would have dared to call that man Tommy who heard in tavern song some echo of the music of the spheres? There are men who cannot be habitually good companions, and, when the talk is at its loudest, turn from the crowd, pull aside the curtain, and look up to see the pale moon far above the housetops. Such a man was Poe. He would have been lonely even in the city of Europe where he could perhaps have found three men of his own aloofness from the inessential, his own hatred of the commonplace, his own intense belief in individualism. He was extraordinarily lonely in America. His love of beauty, his elevation of his work above its results in gold, were next to incomprehensible by that people in that chaotic state of their development. Energetic and wholly practical, fiercely busied with material advancement, they could not understand his passionate, impractical, intellectual existence. His biographer, a literary man, remembered not that he was a great artist, but that he died through drink, not that he had made beautiful things but that he had gained little money by doing so. In the Poe who 'reeled across Broadway on the day of the publication of _The Raven_,' in the Poe who died in an hospital, they forgot the reality, and, in their hurry, found it easy to make a melodrama out of a gentle and inoffensive life. Their traditional idea of Poe allows his extravagances to represent him. It is as if we were to describe some hills by saying there was a lightning flash between the peaks. I prefer to think of the little cottage at Fordham, where he lived with his wife and her mother, and their pets, parrots and bobolinks, a peaceful, small citadel held by those three friends against the world. Throughout Poe's harassed existence this note of gentleness and quiet is always sounding somewhere below the discords of penury and suffering.

[His work.]

The result of his isolation, his poverty, his sensibility, and his intellectual energy was a great deal of work of no value whatever, some melancholy and beautiful verse, critical articles of a kind then new in America, a philosophical poem, some tales of the same flavour as the most delightful of Euclid's propositions, and some other stories that can only be fully enjoyed by those who come to them with the reverence and careful taste it is proper to bring to a glass of priceless wine. It is by them chiefly that he will be remembered. They are a delicacy, not a staple of food. They are not stories from which we can learn life; but they are the key to strange knowledge of ourselves. They leave us richer, not in facts but in emotions. We find our way with their help into novel corners of sensation. They are like rare coloured goblets or fantastic metal-work, and we find, often with surprise, that we have waited for them. That is their vindication, that the test between the valueless and the invaluable of the fantastic. There are tales of twisted extravagance that stir us with no more emotion than is given by an accidental or capricious decoration never felt or formed in the depths of a man. But these stories, like those patterns, however grotesque, that have once meant the world to a mind sensible to beauty, have a more than momentary import. Like old melody, like elaborate and beautiful dancing, like artificial light, like the sight of poison or any other concentrated power, they are among the significant experiences that are open to humanity.

HAWTHORNE AND MORAL ROMANCE

HAWTHORNE AND MORAL ROMANCE

[The essayist in story-telling.]

HAWTHORNE is one of the earliest story-tellers whom we remember as much for himself as for his books. He is loved or hated, as an essayist is loved or hated, without reference to the subjects on which he happened to write. He wrote in a community for whom a writer was still so novel as to possess some rags of the old splendours of the sage; an author was something wonderful, and no mere business man. He had not to expect any hostility in his reader, but rather a readiness to admire (of which he seldom took advantage), and an eagerness to enjoy him for his own sake. He could assume, as an essayist assumes when he dances naked before his readers, that they were not there to scoff. He brought a sweet ingenuous spirit into modern story-telling that would perhaps have been impossible had he been writing for a more sophisticated audience. We love him for it. He made books, he said, 'for his known and unknown friends.' As he says it, he brings us all into the circle. When we think of Fielding, Bunyan, or Cervantes, we think of _Tom Jones_, _Pilgrim's Progress_, and _Don Quixote_; when we think of _Elia_, _Table Talk_, and _The Scarlet Letter_, we think of Lamb, Hazlitt, and Hawthorne.

[Hawthorne and Poe.]

This engaging, unsuspicious, essayistical attitude of his would have been quite impossible to Poe; but we must remember that Hawthorne and Poe, although contemporary, knew very different Americas. Poe's birth was a kind of accident, and he approached America penniless, so that she was a hostile place to him, a country of skinflint editors and large terrible towns, from which to escape in books, and, as far as possible, in life. He hated the New America, but he belonged to her. Hawthorne belonged to the old. His family connected him with her history; he was never at her mercy; as we learn from his rambling prefaces, that would be intolerable in a less lovable writer, she was endeared to him by a delightful boyhood, and did not refuse him a peaceful youth of devotion to his art. She never treated him otherwise than tenderly, and he did not leave her until as a representative of her people, nor sought escape from her in books, except for those of his shadowy creatures who could move with greater freedom in a less bread-and-buttery fairyland.

[Hawthorne's life.]

His life, as we learn it from those prefaces and from his biographers, was as gentle as the man himself. We read of quiet days of work in a study from whose windows he could watch the sunlight through the willow boughs; of days on the river with Thoreau in a canoe which that angular reformer had built with his own hands; of meetings with Emerson walking in the woods, 'with that pure intellectual gleam diffused about his person like the garment of a shining one'; of evenings before the red fire in a little room with white moonlight bringing out the patterns on the carpet, weaving the tapestries of dream that were next day to come alive upon the paper. These people, who were to make the intellectual life of America, were not American in the peace of their existence. Hawthorne, in the newest of all countries, wrote 'in a clear, brown, twilight atmosphere.' He was a lover of secondhand things, and so clothed things with his imagination that all he touched was green with ivy. No contemporary or even historical romances have about them such ancient tenderness and legendary dusk as his. It is extraordinary to think that he was born within two years of Poe. He thought 'the world was very weary, and should recline its vast head on the first convenient pillow and take an age-long nap.' America, at least, had a thousand other things to do, but it was not until he had seen Europe that Hawthorne recognised the fact.

[His notebooks.]

His notebooks reflect at the same time this quiet life and its excitements, the stirring adventures of an artist in search of perfection. He 'had settled down by the wayside of life like a man under an enchantment.' None but the artist can know how happy such enchantment is. He notices the flashing soles of a boy's bare feet running past him in the wood, and 'a whirlwind, whirling the dried leaves round in a circle, not very violently.' He writes one day, 'The tops of the chestnut trees have a whitish appearance, they being, I suppose, in bloom'; two days later, unsatisfied, he makes another attempt to fit his words to his impression:--'The tops of the chestnut trees are peculiarly rich, as if a more luscious sunshine were falling on them than anywhere else, "Whitish," as above, don't express it.' One of his biographers, himself no mean artist, suggests that Hawthorne's must have been a dull existence, if in it such trifles were worthy of note. But the frequency of such notes, interspersed by innumerable sketches for stories, is not a sign of the poverty of Hawthorne's life but of its opulence. For Hawthorne, busied always with dim things not easily expressed, every walk was a treasure hunt that might supply some phrase, some simile, that would give blood and sinew to the ghost of an idea.

[The material of his work.]

His friends were as far removed from the ordinary as himself. He was never 'bustled in the world of workaday.' Even his spell of life as surveyor in the Customs was such that his description of it reads not unlike Charles Lamb's recollections of the old clerks in the South-Sea House. The Customs House was a place of sleep and cobwebs, and the people in it, mostly retired sea-captains, 'partook of the genius of the place.' 'Pour connaître l'homme,' says Stendhal, 'il suffit de l'étudier soi-même; pour connaître les hommes, il faut les pratiquer.' Hawthorne had never kept company with men; his nature and his circumstances made him learn man from his own heart. He was never hampered as a romancer by the kind of knowledge that would have made him a novelist. He deals not with manners, for he had little opportunity of studying them, nor with passions, for they had not greatly troubled him, but with conscience. He plays upon the strings of conscience, and, dusty as the instrument may be, his playing wakes an echo.

Perhaps if he had been less personal, less lovable, we could not have tolerated his tampering with those secret strings whose music is so novel and so poignant. Certainly we would have found him intolerable if he had been less serious. If he had jangled those fibres with a laugh they would have given no response. If he had waked them with a careless discord they would have broken. We can bear it because he is Hawthorne; we listen to him because he is in earnest. All, in such matters, depends upon the attitude of the artist. War, for example, is a terrible thing in Tolstoy, a joyous thing in Dumas, and an ordinary thing, neither terrible nor joyous, in Smollett. We take to ourselves something of an artist's outlook, and sin is nothing to us unless we hear of it from a man to whom it is momentous.

[Goya's 'Monk and Witch'.]

I remember a little picture by Goya representing a monk and a witch. The woman, with white staring eyeballs, wide nostrils, fallen jaw, shrinks back against the monk in puling terror; and he, crazed utterly, his eyes fixed on nothingness, shrieks with gaping mouth some horrid incantation that drowns the gasping breathing of the witch. Theirs is no physical fear of fire or sword or scourge: they have sinned, and seen the face of God. Before me are a set of reproductions of Holbein's 'Dance of Death.' Death lies before the feet of the burgess in the road, plucks unconcernedly at the robe of the abbot, viciously sticks a spear through the middle of the knight, and snuffs the altar candles in the nun's cell, where her young lover is playing on a guitar. But the picture of Judgment at the end is no more than a careless grace after meat. It is there with propriety but without conviction. Death is a full stop, not a comma. What is it to me that the burgess may have cheated, the abbot be a hypocrite, the knight a roysterer, and the nun a wanton? Death is close at hand to put a stop to the doings of them all. I do not know what was the sin of the monk or the witch, and yet the mere memory of their spiritual terror moves me more than the pictures before my eyes. Their peril is not of this world.

[The background of Hawthorne's tales.]

Hawthorne's finest stories are a Dance of Death, in which Death is no mere end of a blind alley, but a dividing of the ways. Those dim people he found in his own soul are important to us by their chances of salvation or damnation. Their feet

'Are in the world as on a tight-rope slung Over the gape and hunger of Hell.'[8]

The background to their actions is not happiness and misery, questions of this world only, but righteousness and mortal sin. The fortunes of Hawthorne's characters are shaping for Eternity. When Ethan Brand flings himself into the furnace, what one of Hawthorne's readers ever thought he died there?

Even this dignity of grave belief, combined with the charm of the writer, would not excuse unskilful playing. But Hawthorne is as dexterous on his chosen instrument as Poe on his, and as consciously an artist as Stevenson, who indeed, in _Markheim_, plays, no more skilfully than he, Hawthorne's peculiar tune. In the preface to _The House of the Seven Gables_ there is a paragraph that, though long, it is not impertinent to quote. It shows how carefully he had thought out the possibilities, and how scrupulously he had defined the limits, of his chosen art.

[Romance and Novel.]

'When a writer calls his work a Romance it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience. The former--while, as a work of art, it must subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart--has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own choosing or creation. If he thinks fit, also, he may so manage his atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights, and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture. He will be wise, no doubt, to make a very moderate use of the privileges here stated, and especially to mingle the Marvellous rather as a slight, delicate, and evanescent flavour, than as any portion of the actual substance of the dish offered to the public. He can hardly be said, however, to commit a literary crime, even if he disregard this caution.'

There is a hint here of the provincial pedant; 'dishes offered to the public' are a little out of date; but the principles are sound. Hawthorne could not give clear outlines to the results of his 'burrowings in our common nature' unless he set them in an atmospherical medium that made such outlines possible for things so vague and so mysterious. Romance left him free to do so. He could make a world to fit them, a patterned world, coloured to suggest New England, Italy, or Nowhere. He was never forced to shock us by introducing them into quite ordinary life. He never loses command over his 'atmospherical medium,' and never weakens the importance of his characters by letting them escape from the dominion of morals. And yet his stories are not 'impaled on texts.' Moral feeling makes them alive, but it is treated like the Marvellous--'mingled as a slight, delicate, and evanescent flavour.' No artist had ever such tricky balances to keep. No artist keeps his balance more successfully.

[Devices of craftsmanship.]

His artistry is as subtle in the details as in the design. It is hard to examine his stories unmoved. But, if we quiet our consciences, and still the throbbing of our hearts, and force ourselves to read them paragraph by paragraph with scientific calm, we find there are few tales from which we can learn more delicate devices of craftsmanship in making afraid, and in giving reality to intangible and mysterious things. Before such skill the most prosaic reader surrenders his reason and shudders with the rest.

Notice, for example, in _Rappacini's Daughter_, Hawthorne's way of making credible the marvellous. He states the miracle quite simply, and by asking 'Was it really so?' lays, without making his intention obvious, a double emphasis on every point. On every point he throws a doubt, and stamps belief into the mind. When Giovanni wonders if Beatrice is like the flowers in that rich garden of death, in breath and body poisonous, 'to be touched only with a glove, nor to be approached without a mask,' Hawthorne suggests that he had grown morbid. We know at once that he had not. A beautiful insect flutters about her and dies at her feet. 'Now here it could not be but that Giovanni Guasconti's eyes deceived him.' We know that they did not. As Beatrice goes into the house, Giovanni fancies that the flowers he had given her were already withering in her grasp. 'It was an idle thought,' says Hawthorne, 'there could be no possibility of distinguishing a faded flower from a fresh one at so great a distance.' We see the dead petals fall like leaves in autumn as she steps across the threshold.

And then notice, in _The Scarlet Letter_, his use of simple actions made significant by their contexts. When Hester Prynne has thrown aside, as if for ever, the searing symbol of her outlawry, her child refuses to recognise her, until she picks it miserably up, and pains her bosom once again with the embroidered scarlet character. 'Now thou art my mother, indeed!' cries the child, 'and I am thy little Pearl!' And when Hester tells her that one day the minister will share a fireside with them, and hold her on his knees, and teach her many things, and love her dearly--'And will he always keep his hand over his heart?' the child inquires. It is quite natural in her to notice a peculiar habit, and to cling to a familiar piece of ornament; but her words and actions assume the dignity of portents when we know what they meant to that poor woman and that conscience-stricken man.

[The power of details.]

The imagination needs straws to make its bricks, and Hawthorne is careful never to set it the impossible task. He knows how to squeeze all the emotion in his material into one small fragment of pictorial suggestion that can be confidently left to produce its effect in concert with the reader's mind. Remember how Goodman Brown, at setting out, looked back and saw 'the head of Faith still peeping after him with a melancholy air in spite of her pink ribbons.' A trifle, apparently, but one that is not to be wasted. After his talk with the devil, he thought he heard his wife's voice above him in the air, as an unseen multitude of saints and sinners were encouraging her to that awful meeting in the forest. '"Faith!" he shouted in a voice of agony and desperation, and the echoes of the forest mocked him, crying "Faith! Faith!" as if bewildered wretches were seeking her all through the wilderness. The cry of grief, rage, and terror was yet piercing the night when the unhappy wretch held his breath for a response. There was a scream, drowned immediately in a louder murmur of voices, fading into far-off laughter, as the dark cloud swept away, leaving the dear and silent sky above Goodman Brown. But something fluttered lightly down through the air and caught on the branch of a tree. The young man seized it, and beheld a pink ribbon.'--A pink ribbon, a merry little thing that we can see and touch, is made a sudden, awful summary of horror and despair.

He makes nature throb with his own mood, and by imperceptible art weights the simplest words with the emotion of his tale. How are the very tones of madness caught as the young man flourishes the devil's stick and strides along the forest path. '"Ha! ha! ha!" roared Goodman Brown when the wind laughed at him. "Let us hear which will laugh loudest. Think not to frighten me with your deviltry. Come witch, come wizard, come Indian powpow, come devil himself and here comes Goodman Brown. You may as well fear him as he fear you."' That paragraph is the work of a master.

[The character of his work.]

And yet, artist as he was, Hawthorne lived too near provincialism to show no signs of its influence in his outlook and his work. He could not enjoy statues without clothes. He was able to commit the enormity of typifying a search for the absolute beautiful by the making of a tiny toy butterfly that flapped its wings just like a real one. Nor did he ever reach that conception of his art, of all art, that sets prettiness in niches round rather than upon the altar of the temple. He valued perhaps too highly the simple flowerlike embroidery that is characteristic of his work. When, while he was in the Custom House, this power of facile prettiness deserted him for a season, he produced nothing, and feared that all his power was gone, for it was not in him to conjure without a wand. He thought afterwards that he might have written something with the pedestrian fidelity of the novel; but that was the one thing he could never do. A man who is accustomed to see his pages glimmer with opalescent colour, and to feel the touch of elfin fingers on his brow, is oddly disconcerted in those moments when the little people must be brushed aside like midges, and the glimmering veil be torn by the elbows of a ruder reality. Such men are not so common that we can complain of the _défauts de leurs qualités_. And indeed, in his more solemn stories, instinct with the spiritual terror of Goya's miniature, the grace that never leaves him adds to the effect. A rapier seems never more cruel than in a hand elaborately gloved. What kind of man is that, we ask, who, balancing souls between Heaven and Hell, can never quite forget his friendship with the fairies?

MÉRIMÉE AND CONVERSATIONAL STORY-TELLING

MÉRIMÉE AND CONVERSATIONAL STORY-TELLING

[Mérimée's attitude towards writing.]

THERE is a lean athletic air about the tales of Prosper Mérimée. Their author is like a man who throws balls at the cocoa-nuts in the fair--to bring them down, and not for the pleasure of throwing. His writing was something quite outside himself, undertaken for the satisfaction of feeling himself able to do it. He was in the habit of setting himself tasks. 'I will blacken some paper,' he writes, 'in 1829,' and he keeps his word. He was not an author, in the modern professional sense, but a man, one of whose activities was authorship. There is a real difference between writers of these classes, the amateurs existing outside their work, the professionals breathing only through it. Gautier, full-blooded, brutal, splendid creature, is almost invisible but in his books. Mérimée, irreproachably dressed, stands beside his, looking in another direction. I am reminded of the sporting gentlemen of Hazlitt's day who now and again would step into the ring and show that they too had a pretty way with the gloves. Late in his life, when one of his juvenile theatrical pieces was to be played for the first time, Mérimée went to the performance, and heard a hostile noise in the house. 'Is it me they are hissing?' he asked, 'I am going to hiss with the rest.' I think of Congreve asking Voltaire to consider him as a plain gentleman, not as an author.

Writing was only one of the interests of Mérimée's life; only one of the innumerable tasks he set himself. He learnt half a dozen languages without being a mere linguist. He travelled in half a dozen countries without being a traveller. He was extremely erudite, but never a bookish scholar. He fulfilled with enthusiasm his duties as Inspector of Ancient Monuments without lapsing into a dusty-handed antiquary. He saw much of the fashionable life of Paris without being a man of the world. He was a courtier without being nothing but a courtier, and could accomplish a state mission without turning into a diplomatist. He studied 'la théologie, la tactique, la poliorcétique, l'architecture, l'épigraphie, la numismatique, la magie et la cuisine,' without being solely a theologian, a tactician, a specialist in sieges, an architect, a decipherer of inscriptions, a coin collector, a wizard, or an undiluted cook. No more was he a writer, as Dumas, Hazlitt, Hawthorne, and Keats were writers. On no shore did he burn his boats. His character was as various as his activities. He was sensualist and sentimentalist, dandy and Bohemian. Evenings begun in the salon of Mme. de Boigne or at the Hôtel Castellane were, his biographer tells us, finished behind the scenes at the Opera. He wrote delightful love-letters, but whole series of his letters to his friends are unfitted for print by consistent indecency. He read his tales to his Empress, and told them in the gipsy tongue by the camp-fires of Andalusian muleteers. His experiments in literature were analogous to his experiments in cooking. Both were expressions of an intense curiosity about life and the methods of life, and a thirst for personal practical efficiency in them all. Never had man more facets in which to see the world. It is important in this essay, that considers only one of them, not to forget that there were others.

[The imaginary author of his tales.]

It is indeed not easy to see more than one facet of a man's personality at once, and difficult not to assume that this one facet is the whole. The _curés_ of the old churches in France who saw Mérimée busied in protecting the ancient buildings from ruin and restoration would have been amazed by the witty dandy of the dinners in the Café de la Rotonde, or by the author of _Colomba_. Each one of such a man's expressions suggests a complete portrait, but only the composite picture tells the truth. It is difficult not to reason from his work and build up an imaginary author--a discreet, slightly ironical person, who smiles only with the corners of his mouth, never laughs, never weeps, modestly disclaims any very personal connection with his tales, and is careful to seem as little moved as may be by the terrible or mysterious things he sets before us. This imaginary polite person, who represented Mérimée in conversation as well as in books, is not Mérimée, but, just now, as I see him quietly smiling in the air before me, I know who he is. He is the conventional raconteur, whose manner every Englishman assumes in the telling of anecdote or ghost story.

[Printed and spoken stories.]

Perhaps each nation has its own. Perhaps each nation adopts an attitude for anecdote peculiar to its own genius. The French at any rate is very different from the English. The Frenchman will gesticulate in his tale, suit the expression of his face to its emotions, and try, ingratiatingly, to win our indulgence for his story, that becomes, as he tells it, part of himself. The Englishman, more tenacious of his dignity, less willing to hazard it for an effect, throws all responsibility upon the thing itself. In England, the distinction between printed story-telling and story-telling by word of mouth is more marked than elsewhere. The object of both is to interest and move us, but, while the literary artist makes no bones about it, and takes every advantage possible, giving the setting of his tale, its colour scheme, its scent, its atmosphere, the plain Englishman shrinks from all assumption of craftsmanship, sets out his facts bare, rough like uncut stones, and repudiates by a purposely disordered language, perhaps by a few words of slang, any desire of competition with the professional.[9] And we, the audience, allow ourselves to be moved more readily by an amateur than by a man who avows his intention of moving us. The avowed intention provokes a kind of hostility; it is a declaration of war, an open announcement of a plan to usurp the throne of our own mind, and to order the sensations we like to think we can control. We are more lenient with the amateur; we wish to save his face; politeness and good-fellowship are traitors in our citadel, and we conspire with the enemy to compass our own yielding.

[Mérimée's adoption of the conventions of anecdote.]

Mérimée gives his tales no more background than an Englishman could put without immodesty into an after-dinner conversation. He does not decorate them with words, nor try to suggest atmosphere by rhythm or any other of the subtler uses of language. He does not laugh at his jokes, nor, in moments of pathos, show any mist in his eyes. The only openly personal touches in his stories are those sentences of irony as poignant as those of another great conversationalist, whose _Modest Proposal_ for the eating of little children is scarcely more cruel than _Mateo Falcone_. His style is without felicities. It has none of the Oriental pomp of Gautier's prose, none of the torrential eloquence of Hugo's; but its limitations are its virtues. Pomp is the ruin of a plain fact as of a plain man, and rhetoric rolls facts along too fast to do anything but smooth them. This style, that seems to disclaim any pretension to be a style at all, leaves facts unencumbered, with their corners unpolished. It emphasises Mérimée's continual suggestion that he is not a story-teller, and so helps to betray us into his power. But I cannot understand those critics who find it a style of clear glass that shows us facts through no personality whatever. Always, in reading a Mérimée, I have an impression of listening to a man who has seen the world, and was young once upon a time, who loves Brantôme, and who in another century would have been a friend of Anthony Hamilton, and perhaps have written or had a minor part in memoirs like those of the Count Grammont. And this man is the imaginary mouthpiece of English anecdote, the mask handed from speaker to speaker at an English dinner-table.

[Mérimée's _anglomanie_.]

Mérimée himself had something of the appearance of an Englishman; everything except the smile, according to Taine. No Frenchman can write of him without referring to his _anglomanie_. His mother had English relatives, and Hazlitt, Holcroft, and Hazlitt's worshipped Northcote were among his father's friends. He was not baptized in the Catholic religion. He seems to have grown up in an atmosphere not unlike that of many English intellectual families, and very early made friends across the Channel for himself. This Englishness perhaps partly accounts for the peculiar attitude he took as a story-teller, and also made possible that curious reconciliation between the virtues of rival schools that the attitude demanded; made possible, that is to say, the apparent paradox of a man whose subjects were Romantic, whose style was almost Classical, and whose stories were yet a prophecy of the Realists. It is not a French characteristic to recognise virtues in more than one type at once, and to combine them. 'Le Roi est mort; vive le Roi.' The French invented that saying. They do not recognise compromises, but are exclusive in their judgments, and regulate their opinions by general rules. A Romantic hates all Classicists, a Realist finds his worst term of opprobrium in the word Romantic. An Englishman, on the other hand, does not think of regulating his affections or actions by a theory. If he has principles, he locks them up with his black clothes for use on special occasions. He keeps a sturdy affection for Oliver Cromwell, without letting his love for the Commonwealth abate in the least his loyalty to the King. Mérimée seems extraordinarily English in being able to own Romantic ideals, without using Romantic method.

[The contrast between his manner and his material.]

The conversational story-telling depends for its success, not on the wit or charm of the talker, but on the plots of his stories. No more exigent test of the intrinsic power of a tale can be applied than this, of telling it badly in conversation. A good story will sometimes gain by the naked recital of its facts; a bad one is immediately betrayed. Bad stories, in this sense, are those that resemble the women of whom Lyly wrote:--'Take from them their periwigges, their paintings, their Jewells, their rowles, their boulstrings, and thou shalt soone perceive that a woman is the least part of hir selfe.' How many times, in repeating to a friend the story of a book, you have become suddenly aware it was an empty, worthless thing that, in clothes more gorgeous than it had a right to wear, had made you its dupe for a moment. Mérimée was compelled by his method to tell good stories or none. His material, to be sufficiently strong to stand without support, to be built with rigid economy, and to make its effects out of its construction, to be told as if with a desire of making no impression, and to make an impression all the stronger for such telling, could not be of a light or delicate nature. His events had to be striking, visible, conclusive. He had to choose stories in which something happened. There is death in almost every one of his tales. Hence comes the amazing contrast between his work and that of the Romantics. The large gesture, the simple violent passions are his as well as theirs, because he needed them, but, while they matched their subjects in their temperaments, and wrote of hot blood with pulsing veins, everything in Mérimée's stories is vivid and passionate except the author. The atmosphere of his tales is not warm or moist, but extraordinarily rarified. In that clear air his colours seem almost white. If they were not so brilliant we should not perceive them at all. Even his women are chosen for the attitude. The women a man loves are usually reflected in his work. But Mérimée's women are the women of Romance, dying for love or for hate, ready at any moment to throw their emotions into dramatic action, while the women he loved were capricious, whimsical, tender seldom, _outrées_ never. The writer needed picturesque women as clear as facts. The man loved women who never betrayed themselves, but were sufficiently elusive to give him an Epicurean pleasure in pursuing them.

[An art of construction.]

The art of Mérimée's tales is one of expository construction. He was compelled by his self-denials to be as conscious an artist as Poe. He is like a good chess-player who surrenders many pieces, and is forced to make most wonderful play with the few that remain. His effects are got from the material of his tales, not superimposed on the vital stuff like the front of a Venetian palace on the plain wall. He takes his dramatic material, and sets it before us in his undecorated style, so that no morsel of its vitality is wasted, smothering no wild gesture in elaborate drapery, but cutting it out so nakedly that every quivering sinew can be seen. His art has been compared to drawing, but it is more like sculpture. His stories are so cleanly carved out of existence that they are 'without deception.' We can examine them from above and from below, in a dozen different lights. There is no point of view from which the artist begs us to refrain. Behind a drawing there is a bare sheet. Behind a story of Mérimée's there is the other side.

[Pointillism in facts.]

His art is more like painting in those few tales of the marvellous that are his ghost stories, as the others are his anecdotes. Mérimée had the archæologist's hatred of the mysterious, and the artist's delight in creating it. He reconciled the two by producing mysterious effects by statements of the utmost clarity, the very clarity of the statements throwing the reader off his guard so that he does not perceive the purposeful skill with which they are chosen and put together. There is a school of painting in France, whose followers call themselves Pointillists; they get their effects by laying spots of simple colours side by side, each one separate, each one though in the right position with regard to other spots of other colours placed in its neighbourhood. At a sufficient distance they merge luminously into the less simple colours of the picture. Mérimée's treatment of the marvellous was not unlike this. The vague mystery of _La Vénus d'Ille_ is not reflected by any vagueness or mystery in the telling of the tale. It is impossible to point to the single sentence, the single paragraph that makes the mystery mysterious. You cannot find them because they do not exist. Instead, there are a hundred morsels of fact. Not one of them is incredible; not one is without a reasonable explanation if an explanation is necessary. And yet all these concrete, simple facts combine imperceptibly in producing the extraordinary supernatural feeling of the tale. Compare this negative manner of treating a miracle with the frank, positive fairy-tale of Gautier's _Arria Marcella_. The effects of both tales are perfectly achieved, but Arria Marcella belongs to written story-telling. We believe in her because Gautier wishes us to believe, and uses every means of colour and rhythm and sensual suggestion to compel his readers to subject their imaginations to his own. The Venus belongs to story-telling by word of mouth. Hers is a ghost story whose shudder we covet, and experience, in spite of ourselves, in spite of the half-incredulous story-teller, by virtue of those simple facts so cunningly put together.

[Strength or charm.]

But to write analytically of such stories is to write with compass and rule, dully, awkwardly, technically, badly. It is impossible to express the excellence of a bridge except by showing how perfectly its curves represent the principles of its design, and to talk like an architect of the method of its building. And that is so very inadequate. It is easy to write of warmth, of delicacy, of sweetness; there is nothing harder in the world than to write of the icy strength that is shown not in action but in construction. And although there is a real charm about the shy, active, intellectual man who made them, a charm that is shown in his love-letters, yet there is no charm at all about Mérimée's stories. The difference between them and such tales as Nathaniel Hawthorne's is that between the little Grecian lady in baked clay, who stands upon my mantelpiece, still removing with what grace of curved body and neck and delicate arm the thorn that pricked her tiny foot some thousand years ago, and the copy of an Egyptian god, standing upright, one straight leg advanced, his jackal head set square upon his shoulders, his arms stiff at his sides, his legs like pillars, so strong in the restraint of every line that to look at him is a bracing of the muscles. There is no charm in him, no grace, no delicacy, and he needs neither delicacy, grace, nor charm. Erect in his own economy of strength he has an implacable, strenuous power that any added tenderness would weaken and perhaps destroy.

FLAUBERT

FLAUBERT

'I AM the last of the fathers of the church,' said Flaubert, and on this text his niece remarks that 'with his long chestnut coat, and little black silk skull-cap, he had something the air of one of the Port-Royal solitaries.' The metaphor is accurately chosen. Flaubert lived in an atmosphere of monastic devotion to his art, and the solitaries of Port-Royal were not more constant than he to their intellectual preoccupations. A man of excessive openness to sensation, he fled it and was fascinated by it. He would take ever so little of the world and torture himself with its examination because it hurt him to look at it. Life, and especially that life whose sensitiveness was so slight as, in comparison with his own, to have no existence, brought him continual pain. 'La bêtise entre mes pores.' Stupidity touching him anywhere made him shrink like a snail touched with a feather. He had _recoquillements_, shrinkings up, when with his dearest friends, and it was pain to him to be recalled to ordinary existence. He escaped from modernity in dreams of the Orient, but was continually drawn back by memory of the unhappiness that was waiting for him, to the contemplation of those ordinary people whose slightest act, as he imagined it, struck such a grating discord with himself. An exuberant life like Gautier's was impossible to such a man. He could not be so gregarious a recluse as Balzac. He had to fashion a peculiar retreat, a room with two windows, from one of which he could see the stars, and from the other watch and listen to the people whom he hated and found so efficient as the instruments of his self torture. He found the seclusion he desired in a most absolute devotion to the art of literature, which was in his hands the art of making beauty out of pain. Pain, self-inflicted, was at the starting-point of all his works, and in most of them went with him step by step throughout.

[Flaubert and the bourgeois.]

An analysis of the pain that Flaubert suffered in examining Philistines, that white light of suffering which throws up so clearly the bourgeois figures on which he let it play, supplies the key not only to the matter of much of his work, but to its manner, and particularly to that wonderful prose of his, whose scrupulosity has been and is so frequently misunderstood. Flaubert was not pained by a bourgeois because he felt differently from himself. He was pained by a bourgeois because a bourgeois did not know that he felt differently from himself, because a bourgeois never knew how he felt at all. Whole wolves hate a lame one. It has never been stated with what inveterate hatred a lame one regards whole wolves. And Flaubert was less fitted for life than an ordinary man. He was given to know when he was honest or dishonest to himself. In so far was he, on their own ground, weaker than those others, who never know whether they tell the truth or a lie. He was born as it were with no skin over his heart. He had no need to make guesses at his feelings. What more terrible nightmare could be imagined for such a man than to hear men and women, educated, as the bourgeois are, into a horrible facility of speech, using the language of knowledge and emotion, unchecked by any doubts as to their possible inaccuracy. In all bourgeois life, where language and action have larger scales than are necessary, there is a discrepancy between expression and the thing for which expression is sought. For Flaubert, sensitive to this discrepancy as the ordinary man is not, it was a perpetual pain. And just as a man who has a nerve exposed in one of his teeth, touches it again and again, in spite of himself, for the exquisite twinge that reminds him it is there, so Flaubert in more than one half of his books is occupied in hurting himself by the delicate and infinitely varied search for this particular discord.

[Flaubert's prose.]

Flaubert's prose is due, like his unhappiness, to his inhuman trueness of feeling. He realised that flexible as language is, there are almost insuperable difficulties in the way of any one who wishes to put an idea accurately into words. He went to the bottom of all writing and announced that literature is founded on the word; and that unless you have the right word you have the wrong literature. He was a little puzzled at the survival of the mighty improvisations of older times, although he loved them; but there was no doubt in his mind that his own way was not 'a primrose path to the everlasting bonfire' of bad books. Whatever he wrote, he would have it in words chosen one by one, scrupulously matched in scent, colour, and atmosphere to the ideas or emotions he wished to express. His whole creed was to tell the truth. What exactly did he feel? These were the letters that were always flaming before him. It is vivid discomfort to a labourer to be cross-questioned, and forced to find words for his unrealised meanings. With increased facility of speech we grow callous, and, compromising with our words, write approximations to the thoughts that, not having accurately described, we can scarcely be said to possess. Flaubert, in disgust at such inexactitudes, forced on his own highly educated brain the discomfort of the cross-questioned labourer. Knowing the truth, he would say it or nothing, and rejected phrase after phrase in his search for precision. It was gain and loss to him; gain in texture, loss in scope. 'What a scope Balzac had,' he cried, and then: 'What a writer he would have been if only he had been able to write.' The work of such men is loosely knit in comparison with his, because built in a less resisting material. 'Oui,' says Gautier--

'Oui, l'œuvre sort plus belle D'une forme au travail Rebelle, Vers, marbre, onyx, émail.'

Flaubert's attitude made prose a medium as hard, as challenging as these.

It is difficult to believe that the older writers bought their excellence so dearly. Their thoughts cannot have been so biassed, for it is the expression of every bias, of the background, of the smell, of the feel of an idea that makes circumspicuity of writing so difficult. Montaigne, for example, sitting peaceably in his tower, asking himself with lively interest what were his opinions, was not at all like the almost terrible figure of Flaubert, striding to and fro in his chamber, wringing phrases from his nerves, asking passionately, ferociously, what he meant, and almost throttling himself for an accurate answer. Is it harder than it was to produce a masterpiece?

[Romanticism and realism.]

Flaubert, who held Chateaubriand a master, was the friend of Gautier, and the director in his art of Guy de Maupassant, who wrote with one hand _Madame Bovary_ and with the other _Salammbo_, who put in the same book _St. Julien l'Hospitalier_ and _Un Cœur Simple_, is, on a far grander scale than Mérimée, an illustration as well as a reason of the development of romanticism into realism. Flaubert's passionate care for the truth, would, if he had lived before the Romantic movement, have confined itself to the elaboration of a very scrupulous prose. But after the discovery of local colour, after the surprising discovery of the variety that exists in things, as great as the variety that exists in words and in their combinations, it was sure to apply itself not only to the writing but also to those external things that had suggested the ideas the writing was to embody. It would try to make the sentences true to their author; it would also try to make them true to the life they were to represent. It was Flaubert who said to De Maupassant as they passed a cabstand, 'Young man, describe that horse in one sentence so as to distinguish him from every other horse in the world, and I shall begin to believe that you have possibilities as a writer.' This demand for accurate portraiture turned the romantic realism of Balzac's _Comédie Humaine_ into the other realism of _Madame Bovary_. [_Madame Bovary._] Balzac had his models, yes, as hints in the back of his head, but he made his characters alive with his own energy and his own brain. As I have already pointed out, they are all too alive to be true. But Flaubert, true to himself in his manner, wished to be true to life in his matter. Madame Bovary, that second-rate, ordinary, foolish, weak, little provincial wife, has no atmosphere about her but her own. She has not been inoculated with the blood of Flaubert, as all the veins of all the characters of Balzac have been scorched with fire from those of that 'joyful wild boar.' When Flaubert wrote that everything in the book was outside himself, he was saying no more than the truth. He was as honest towards her and her life as he was towards his own ideas. She talks like herself. Now the older writers, like Fielding and Smollett, are content to let their people talk as men and women should talk to be fit for good literature. Even the characters of men like Balzac or Hugo say what they think, as nearly as their creators are themselves able to express it. Flaubert is infinitely more scrupulous. The Bovary never says what she thinks. Flaubert knew well enough what she was thinking, but sought out exactly those phrases and sentences beneath which she would have hidden her thought, those horrible bourgeois inaccuracies that it was torture for him to hear.

A life so wholly concerned with intangible things seems too intellectual for humanity. I am glad to turn aside from it for a moment to remember the Flaubert who was loved by those who spent their days with him; the uncle who taught her letters to his little niece, and who would, as she says, have done anything imaginable to enliven her when sad or ill. 'One of his greatest pleasures was the amusement of those about him,' although he never saw a woman without thinking of her skeleton, a child without remembering that it would one day be old, or a cradle without finding in it the promise of a grave. He was one of the men who love their friends the dearer for their dislike of mankind in general. He never shaved without laughing at 'the intrinsic absurdity of human life,' and yet he lived out his own share in it with steadfast purpose, 'yoking himself to his work like an ox to the plough.'

The result of his incessant labour divides itself into four kinds; novels of the bourgeoisie, a novel of the East, three short stories, and two other books that are, as it were, twin keys to the whole.

[_Salammbo._]

_Madame Bovary_ and _L'Éducation Sentimentale_ are the novels of the bourgeoisie, novels with an entirely new quality of vision, due to the sustained contrast between his own articulate habit of mind and the unconsciously inarticulate minds of his characters; these are the books commonly described as his contributions to Realism by men too ready to set him on their own level. Opposed to these two books there is _Salammbo_, an Oriental and ancient romance, a reposeful dream for him, in which move characters whose feelings and expressions are no more blurred than his own. All these books offer more delight at each re-reading, although the last, considered as an example of narrative, is almost a failure. The Romantics too often miss the trees for the wood. Flaubert's method makes it rather easy to miss the wood for the trees. But his trees are of such interest and beauty that we are ready to examine them singly. In writing _Madame Bovary_, his subject was close within his reach. Madame was too near to allow him to cover her up with a library of knowledge about his own times. But in _Salammbo_ he was so anxious to be true to the life that he did not know, that he read until he knew too much. The book is made of perfect sentences, perfect descriptions, while the story itself is buried beneath a dust-heap of antiquity. Cartloads after cartloads of gorgeous things are emptied on the top of each other, until the whole is a glittering mass with here and there some splendid detail shining so brilliantly among the rest that we would like to remove it for a museum. The mass stirs: there are movements within it; but they are too heavily laden to shake themselves free and become visible and intelligible.

[_Trois Contes._]

No such criticism can be urged against the three short stories, the _Trois Contes_, in which Flaubert proves himself not only one of the greatest writers of all time, but also one of the greatest story-tellers. This little book is a fit pendant to the novels, since it represents both the Flaubert of _Madame Bovary_ and the Flaubert of _Salammbo_. _Un Cœur Simple_, the first of the three, is the story of a servant woman and her parrot, a subject that de Maupassant might have chosen. So completely is it weaned from himself, that no one would suspect that Flaubert wrote it after his mother's death, for the pleasure, in describing the provincial household, of remembering his own childhood. It and the two stories, _St. Julien l'Hospitalier_ and _Hérodias_, which are purely romantic in subject and treatment, and more scrupulous in technique than the finest of Gautier, are among the most beautiful tales that the nineteenth century produced. All three answer the supreme test of a dozen readings as admirably as those old improvisations from whose spirit they are so utterly alien.

[_La Tentation de Saint Antoine_ and _Bouvard et Pécuchet_.]

That is the sum of Flaubert's work in pure narrative. There are beside it two books, one a _Tentation de Saint Antoine_, that he spent his whole life in bringing to perfection, and the other, _Bouvard et Pécuchet_, that he left unfinished at his death. They are among the most wonderful philosophic books of the world. In an Oriental dream, a dialogue form with stage directions so explicit and descriptive as to do the work of narrative, and in a story whose form might have been dictated by Voltaire, whose material was the same as that used in the novels, he expressed man in the presence of Religion, and man in the presence of Knowledge. The legend of St. Anthony is treated by the Flaubert who loved the East, the story of Bouvard and Pécuchet by the Flaubert who tortured himself with observation of the bourgeois. St. Anthony is tempted of love and of all the religions; at last, not triumphing, but shaken and very weary, he kneels again, and Flaubert leaves him. Bouvard and Pécuchet, the two clerks given by the accident of a legacy the aloofness and the opportunity for development that was Anthony's, are tempted of love and of all the knowledges; at last made very miserable they return to their desks; that is where Flaubert would have left them if he had lived. To discuss the settings of these two great expositions is to ask the question that was asked by a disciple at the end of Voltaire's _Dream of Plato_. 'And then, I suppose, you awoke?' It is only permissible after recognising the grandeur of the underlying idea.

[The statue of _Le Penseur_.]

There have been two men with such a conception of thought. Rodin carved what Flaubert had written. The statue of _Le Penseur_, that stands in front of the Panthéon in Paris, is the statue of a man tormented like St. Anthony, baffled like Bouvard and Pécuchet. This statue does not represent man's dream of the power of thought, of the dominion of thought. That head is no clear mechanism, faultless and frictionless; that attitude is not one of placid contemplation. The head is in torture, the whole body grips itself in the agony of articulation. The statue is not that of _a_ thinker, but of _the_ thinker; man before the Universe, man unable to wrest the words out of himself. Flaubert had such a vision as that when he wrote the _Tentation_ and _Bouvard et Pécuchet_. He hated mankind because they could not share it with him. They did not know as he knew, or see as he saw, but knelt or worked, and were happy. This one stupendous conception of the true relation between man and thought is that on which all Flaubert's work is founded. Expressed in these two books, it is implied in all the others (even in _Salammbo_, which is almost an attempt to escape from it). It is not a message; it does not say anything; it is as dumb as Rodin's statue; it simply _is_--like _Paradise Lost_ or the _Mona Lisa_ or a religion. 'I am the last of the Fathers of the Church.'

A NOTE ON DE MAUPASSANT

DE MAUPASSANT for seven years submitted all he wrote to Flaubert's criticism. If we add to the preceding essay some sentences from Flaubert's correspondence, it will be easy to imagine the lines that criticism must have taken, and interesting to compare them with the resulting craftsman.

'I love above all the nervous phrase, substantial, clear, with strong muscles and browned skin. I love masculine phrases not feminine.

'What dull stupidity it is always to praise the lie, and to say that poetry lives on illusion: as if disillusion were not a hundred times more poetic.

'Find out what is really your nature, and be in harmony with it. _Sibi constat_ said Horace. All is there.

'Work, above all think, condense your thought; you know that beautiful fragments are worthless; unity, unity is everything.

'The author in his work ought to be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

'Fine subjects make mediocre works.'

These sentences might well be taken as de Maupassant's inspiration. De Maupassant, a man of powerful mind, with Flaubert's example before him, makes each of his tales a rounded unity, and a thing outside himself, and yet a thing that no one else could have written. He shunned fine subjects. His stories are like sections of life prepared for examination, and in looking at them we are flattered into thinking that we have clearer eyes than usual. He chooses some quite ordinary incident, and by working up selected details of it, turns it into a story as exciting to the curiosity as a detective puzzle. He allows no abstract feminine-phrased discourses on the psychology of his characters: he does not take advantage of their confessions. Their psychology is manifested in things said and in things done. The works, as in life, are hidden in the fourth dimension, where we cannot see them.

_La Rendezvous_, a tiny story of seven pages, will illustrate his methods. The chosen incident is that of a woman going to see her lover, meeting some one else on the way, and going off with him instead. That is all. Let us see how de Maupassant works it out. Here is his first paragraph:

'Her hat on her head, her cloak on her back, a black veil across her face, another in her pocket, which she would put on over the first as soon as she was in the guilty cab, she was tapping the point of her boot with the end of her umbrella, and stayed sitting in her room, unable to make up her mind to go out to keep the appointment.'

The whole of her indecision is expressed before it is explained. Then there is a paragraph that lets us know that she had been keeping the appointment regularly for two years, and we sympathise with her a little. A description of her room follows, made by mention of a clock ticking the seconds, a half-read book on a rosewood desk, and a perfume. The clock strikes and she goes out, lying to the servant. We watch her, loitering on the way, telling herself that the Vicomte awaiting her would be opening the window, listening at the door, sitting down, getting up, and, since she had forbidden him to smoke on the days of her visits, throwing desperate glances at the cigarette-box. De Maupassant's characters think in pictures of physical action. People do so in real life.

The heroine sits in a square watching children, and reflects, always in the concrete, how much the Vicomte is going to bore her, and on the terrible danger of rendezvous, and so on, making pictures all the time. At last, when she is three-quarters of an hour late, she gets up and sets out for his rooms. She has not gone ten steps before she meets a diplomatic baron, of whose character in her eyes de Maupassant has been careful to let us have a hint beforehand. He asks her, after the usual politenesses, to come and see his Japanese collections. He is an adroit person this baron. He does not make love to her. He laughs at her. He ends, after a delightful little dialogue, in half hurrying, half frightening her into a cab. They have scarcely started when she cries out that she has forgotten that she had promised her husband to invite the Vicomte to dinner. They stop at a post office. The baron goes in and gets her a telegram card. She writes on it in pencil--it would be vandalism to spoil the message by translating it from the French--she writes:

'Mon cher ami, je suis très souffrante; j'ai une névralgie atroce qui me tient au lit. Impossible sortir. Venez diner demain soir pour que je me fasse pardonner.

JEANNE.'

She licks the edge, closes it carefully, writes the Vicomte's address, and then, handing it to the baron, 'Now, will you be so good as to drop this in the box for telegrams.'

There de Maupassant ends, without comment of any kind. His stories have always 'the look of a gentleman,' and know how to move, when to stop, what to put in and what to leave out. They are impersonal, but not more impersonal than Mérimée's. There is a man behind them, and in contradistinction to the school of writers with whom he has been confounded, he does not blink the fact, but obeys Flaubert's maxim, allowing his presence to be felt but keeping himself invisible. De Maupassant, the pupil of Flaubert, makes even clearer than his master the intimate connection between those apparently hostile things, Romanticism and Realism. Lesser and coarser minds may have needed the stimulus of a revolt when none was; but the great men on the heights knew that the suns of dawn and sunset were the same.

De Maupassant's position in this book is commensurate neither with his genius nor with what I should like to say of him, and hope to write in another place. I had wished my book to end with the Romantic Movement, and so with Flaubert, who seems to me to mark its ultimate development without a change of name. De Maupassant is here only to show how direct is the descent of the least exuberant of modern story-telling from the Romanticism that made possible the work of Chateaubriand, Hugo, or Balzac. His true position is in a book that should begin with Flaubert and end with some great writer of to-morrow, whose work should show by what alchemy the story-telling of to-day will be changed into that of the future.

CONCLUSION

CONCLUSION

MY table is covered with a green cloth, and on it, under the lamplight, are two bowls of roses. One is full of the rich garden flowers, whose hundred folded petals hold in their depths the shadows of their colourings--cream, crimson, and the rose and orange of an autumn sunset. In the other are three or four wild roses from the hedge on the far side of the lane. I scarcely know which give me greater pleasure. In comparing them I seem to be setting _Aucassin and Nicolete_ by the side of _La Morte Amoureuse_. How many flowers must represent the gradual growth of one into the other. How large a collection would be necessary to illustrate every stage of the transformation of the simple beauty of the wild blossoms into the luxuriant loveliness, majesty, and variety of the roses in the opposite bowl. I have attempted such a task in this book; not the impossible one of collecting every flower in any way different from those that had opened before it, but of bringing together a score or so to make the difference between first and last a little less tantalising and obscure.

[Genius a stationary quality.]

I had thought I was tracing a progress of the art itself; but I no longer think so. Century after century has laid its gift before the story-teller, its gift of a form, an unworked vein, a point of view. He has learnt to hold us with an episode, and also, evening after evening, to keep us interested in the lives of a dozen different people whose adventures in the pages of a book he makes no less actual than our own. In this last century of the art we have seen men looking back to all the ages before them, and bringing into modern story-telling the finest qualities of the most ancient, recreating it, and winning for it the universal acknowledgment that is given to painting, poetry, or music. Much seems to have been done, and yet, who would dare assign to a modern story-teller, however excellent a craftsman, a place above Boccaccio? Who says that his digressions make old Dan Chaucer out of date? Art does not progress but in consciousness of its technique and in breadth of power. Genius is a stationary quality. Techniques and the conditions of production, qualified the one by the other, and modified by genius, move past it side by side, like an endless procession before a seated king. The works they carry between them are not to be judged by their place in the cavalcade, but by the spirit before whom they pass, who wakes from time to time to give them life and meaning.

None the less, there is a kind of imperfect contemporariness in the art that lets the finest works of all times remain side by side to be imitated or compared. And this power of survival that belongs to works of genius accounts for two phenomena, which give genius itself a spurious air of progress. The one is an ever clearer consciousness of technique, the other an ever wider range of possibilities, both due to the increasing number of works of art that are ready for comparison or imitation.

[The dissociation of forms.]

In the latter half of my book, and particularly in the chapters on Poe, Mérimée, Hawthorne, and Flaubert, we have been partly busied in remarking the later stages of self-conscious craftsmanship. There remains to be discussed the dissociation of one form from another that naturally accompanied this more observant technique. I want to distinguish here between the short story, the _nouvelle_, and the novel, which are not short, middle-sized, and lengthy specimens of the same thing, but forms whose beauties are individual and distinct. They demand quite different skills, and few men have excelled in more than one of them. Before proceeding to closer definition, let me name an example of each, to keep in our minds for purposes of reference while considering their several moulds. Balzac's _Père Goriot_ is a novel; Gautier's _La Morte Amoureuse_ is a _nouvelle_; de Maupassant's _La Petite Ficelle_ is a short story.

[The novel.]

The novel was the first form to be used by men with a clear knowledge of what it allowed them to do, and what it expected of them in return. Smollett's is its simplest definition. 'A novel,' he says, 'is a large diffused picture, comprehending the characters of life, disposed in different groups and exhibited in various attitudes, for the purpose of a uniform plan and general occurrence, to which every individual figure is subservient.' It is, as near as may be, a piece of life, and one of its similarities to ordinary existence is perhaps the characteristic that best marks its difference from the _nouvelle_. The novel contains at least one counterplot, the _nouvelle_ none. Life has as many counterplots as it has actors, as many heroes and heroines as play any part in it at all. No man is a hero to his valet, because in that particular plot the valet happens to be a hero to himself. The novelist does not attempt so equable a characterisation, but by telling the adventures of more than one group of people, and by threading their tales in and out through each other, he contrives to give a conventional semblance of the intricate story-telling of life.[10]

[The _nouvelle_.]

The _nouvelle_ is a novel without a counterplot, and on a smaller scale.[11] The latter quality is dependent on the former, since it combats the difficulty of sustained attention, that the novel avoids by continual change from one to another of its parallel stories. The _nouvelle_ was with Boccaccio little more than a plot made actual by the more important sentences of dialogue, and by concise sketching of its principal scenes. It has now grown to be a most delicate and delightful form, without breathlessness and without compression, its aim of pure story being implicit in the manner of its telling. It is differentiated from the short story, the advantage of whose brevity it shares in a lesser degree, by the separate importance of its scenes, which are not bound to be subjected so absolutely to its conclusion. For example, the splendid cathedral scene in _La Morte Amoureuse_, where, at the moment of ordination, a young priest is stricken with passion for a courtesan, would be unjustifiable in a short story unless it ended in the climax of the tale. The priest would have to die on the steps of the altar, or the woman to kill herself at his feet as he passed, a vowed celebate, down the cathedral aisle. The short story must be a single melody ending with itself; the _nouvelle_ a piece of music, the motive of whose opening bars, recurring again and again throughout, is finally repeated with the increase in meaning that is given it by the whole performance.

[The short story.]

The short story proper is in narrative prose what the short lyric is in poetry. It is an episode, an event, a scene, a sentence, whose importance is such that it allows nothing in the story that is not directly concerned with its realisation. This is true of many specimens of the _nouvelle_, but it is the essential rule of the short story. Look at the end of _La Petite Ficelle_, or of any other of the _Contes_ of de Maupassant. 'Une 'tite ficelle ... une 'tite ficelle ... t'nez la, voila, m'sieu le Maire.' 'A little bit of string ... a little bit of string ... look, there it is, M. le Maire.' That sentence, repeated by the dying man in his delirium, needs for the full pathos of its effect every word of the story. From the first paragraph about an ordinary market day, the accident of the old man picking up a piece of string in a place where a purse had been lost, the false accusation, and his guilt-seeming protestation of innocence, every detail in the story is worked just so far as to make the reader's mind as ready and sensitive as possible for the final infliction of those few words. Keats once coated the inside of his mouth with cayenne pepper to feel as keenly as he could 'the delicious coolness of claret.' The art of the short story is just such a making ready for such a momentary sensation.

[The possibilities of narrative.]

Just as Time, with the clearer consciousness of technique, has made the moulds of the art more markedly distinct, so it has given the artist an infinite choice of amalgams with which to fill them. Although some of the most delightful examples of narrative are still produced with the old and worthy object of telling a tale to pass the time, although there are still men who lay their mats upon the ground, squat down on them, and keep their audiences happy by stories that demand no more intellectual attention than the buzz of bees in the magnolia flowers; yet, if we consider only those artists who have been discussed in the preceding chapters, we perceive at once how many are the other possibilities of narrative, and, if we examine the story-telling of our own day, we shall find that most of them are illustrated in contemporary practice.

Story-telling has grown into a means of expression with a gamut as wide as that of poetry, which is as wide as that of humanity. 'It is literature,' says Wilde, 'that shows us the body in its swiftness and the soul in its unrest'; and the same art that helps us to laze away a summer afternoon is a key that lets us into the hearts of men we have never seen, and not infrequently opens our own to us, when, in the bustle of existence, we have gone out and found ourselves unable to return. It is a Gyges' ring with which, upon our finger, we can go about the world and mingle in the business of men to whom we would not bow, or who would not bow to us. It breaks the gold or iron collars of our classes and sets each man free as a man to understand all other men soever. It opens our eyes like Shelley's to see that life--

'like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of eternity.'

We become conscious of that radiance when, by this art made free of time, we can dream the dreams of the Pharaohs, pray with the hermits in the Thebaid, and send our hazardous guesses like seeking dogs into the dim forests of futurity. Our eyes may fitly shine, and we become as little children in brief resting-hours out of the grown-up world, when this art makes those tints ours that we never knew, and sends us, divested of our monotones, to choose among all the glittering colours of mankind.

And if we are not listeners only, but have ourselves something to fit with wings and to send out to find those men who will know the whispering sound of its flight and take it to themselves, how much do we not owe to this most manifold art of story-telling?

There is nothing that its pinions will not bear.

INDEX

ABERCROMBIE, Lascelles, 263.

Addison, Joseph, 110, 113 _et seq._

_Ali Baba_, 89.

_Amadis of Gaul_, 52, 97.

_Anatomy of Melancholy, The_, 125.

Apuleius, 125.

_Arabian Nights, The_, 46, 100, 101, 231.

_Arcadia_, The Duchess of Pembroke's, 78, 83 _et seq._, 196.

_Arria Marcella_, 283.

_Astrée, l'_, 85.

_Atala_, 179 _et seq._

_Aucassin and Nicolete_, 11, 14, 15, 249, 305.

BACON, Sir Francis, 112.

Balzac, Honoré de, 188, 192, 206, 212, 217 _et seq._, 238, 288, 290, 292, 293, 301, 307.

Barye, Antoine Louis, 180, 202.

Baudelaire, Charles, 239.

Beardsley Aubrey, 88.

Behn, Mrs. Aphra, 70, 139.

Beowulf, 9.

_Bergers d'Arcadie, Les_, 87.

Bible, The, 128.

_Bickerstaff, Mr._, 19, 113 _et seq._

Boccaccio, Giovanni, 19, 20 _et seq._, 56, 82, 85, 125, 155, 225, 306, 309.

Boigne, Mme. de, 275.

Boileau, Nicolas B.-Despreaux, 62.

Borrow, George, 59.

Botticelli, 25.

_Bouvard et Pécuchet_, 296, 297, 298.

Brantôme, 278.

Browne, Sir Thomas, 252.

Bunyan, John, 126 _et seq._, 140, 155, 257.

Burleigh, Lord, 74.

Burney, Fanny, 107, 112, 115, 119, 147 _et seq._

Burns, Robert, 193.

Burton, Robert, 125, 132, 134.

Byron, Lord, 176, 202.

_Caleb Williams_, 244, 245.

_Canterbury Tales, The_, 37 _et seq._

_Captain Singleton_, 58.

_Caractères_, La Bruyère's, 110.

_Castle of Otranto, The_, 189.

Cellini, Benvenuto, 157.

_Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, Les_, 46.

Cervantes, Miguel de C. Saavedra, 32, 60, 61, 78, 82, 85, 86, 93 _et seq._, 126, 158, 162, 192, 257.

_Characters_, Sir Thomas Overbury's, 107 _et seq._

Charlemagne, 8, 9, 32, 52.

Chateaubriand, François René de, 175 _et seq._, 202, 208, 291, 301.

Chatterton, Thomas, 190.

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 19, 20, 21, 31 _et seq._, 107, 155, 156, 218, 306.

_Cinderella_, 89.

_Citizen of the World, The_, 148, 231.

_Clarissa Harlowe_, 140 _et seq._

Clopinel, Jean, 21 _et seq._

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 42.

_Colomba_, 275.

_Comédie Humaine, La_, 217 _et seq._, 292.

Congreve, William, 274.

_Contes Drôlatiques, Les_, 222.

Corelli, Miss, 25.

_Cranford_, 118, 168.

Cromwell, Oliver, 126.

_Cromwell_, 206.

_Dance of Death, The_, 262.

Dante, 155, 202.

_Decameron, The_, 19, 37 _et seq._, 156.

Defoe, Daniel, 114, 132 _et seq._, 140, 155.

Delacroix, Eugène, 202.

De Quincey, Thomas, 120.

Desvergnes, 26.

_Diana_, 85.

Dickens, Charles, 58.

_Don Quixote_, 10, 60, 82, 96 _et seq._, 158, 161, 257.

_Dream Children_, 120.

Dumas, Alexandre, 177, 188, 193, 201, 205, 206, 210 _et seq._, 261, 274.

EARLE, John, 109, 110, 111.

Edgeworth, Maria, 192, 217.

_Éducation Sentimentale, l'_, 294.

Edward III., 39.

_Elia_, 258.

Ellis, F. S., 22.

_Émaux et Camées_, 238.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 259.

_Emma_, 151.

_Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, An_, 244.

_Ethan Brand_, 263.

Euclid, 144, 146, 253.

_Eugénie Grandet_, 222, 225, 228.

_Euphues_, 67, 70 _et seq._, 139.

_Evelina_, 147 _et seq._, 168.

_Exemplary Novels, The_, 46, 94, 99, 101, 102, 126.

_Facino Cane_, 227.

_Faërie Queene, The_, 126, 128, 132.

_Femme au Collier de Velours, La_, 201.

_Ferdinand Count, Fathom_, 165.

Fiametta, 85.

Fielding, Henry, 71, 96, 107, 119, 147, 150, 152, 156 _et seq._, 187, 227, 235, 257, 293.

_Figaro, Le_, 238.

Flaubert, Gustave, 46, 133, 184, 195, 226, 287 _et seq._, 307.

Froissart, 191.

_Galatea_, 62, 78, 85, 94, 95, 98, 103.

Gautier, Théophile, 88, 177, 195, 202, 203, 205, 206, 208, 217, 221, 231 _et seq._, 251, 273, 277, 283, 288, 291, 307.

Gavin, Miss J., 102.

Gay, John, 42.

_Génie du Christianisme, Le_, 182.

_Gesta Romanorum, The_, 20, 34 _et seq._, 45, 128.

_Gil Blas_, 61, 62, 63, 161.

Godwin, William, 244 _et seq._

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 175, 232.

Goldsmith, Oliver, 42, 118 _et seq._, 148, 231.

Goya, Francisco Jose de G. y Lucientes, 262, 269.

_Grace Abounding_, 130.

Graham, R. B. Cunninghame, 121.

_Grammont Memoirs, The_, 278.

Greene, Robert, 67, 74, 126, 140.

_Griselda_, 46.

_Guardian, The_, 112.

Guest, Lady Charlotte, 13.

HAMILTON, Anthony, 278.

_Hardyknute, The Ballad of_, 191.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 134, 245, 257 _et seq._, 274, 283, 307, 308.

Hazlitt, William, 84, 111, 128, 193, 244, 245, 258, 273, 274, 278.

_Heptameron, The_, 51.

_Hernani_, 201, 205.

_Hérodias_, 296.

_Histoire mes de Bêtes, l'_, 193.

Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Wilhelm, 201, 225.

Hogarth, William, 156, 168.

Holbein, Hans, 262.

Holcroft, Thomas, 278.

Homer, 208.

Hosea, 128.

_House of the Seven Gables, The_, 263.

Hugo, Victor, 177, 183, 201, 203 _et seq._, 277, 295, 301.

_Humphry Clinker_, 51, 117, 147, 166 _et seq._

Hunt, Leigh, 119.

_Ivanhoe_, 196, 211.

_Jack Wilton_, or _The Unfortunate Traveller_, 60, 76.

_John Arnolfini and his Wife_, 41.

Johnson, Samuel, 118, 144, 175.

_Jonathan Wild_, 163 _et seq._

Jonson, Ben, 109.

_Joseph Andrews_, 156 _et seq._

_Journal of the Plague Year, A_, 134.

_Julie_, or _La Nouvelle Héloïse_, 147, 177.

KEATS, John, 42, 274, 310.

_King Lear_, 228.

Kit Kats, The, 115.

LA BRUYÈRE, Jean de, 63, 110, 111.

Lafontaine, Jean de, 42.

Lamb, Charles, 120, 133, 258, 260.

Lancret, Nicolas, 86.

_Lavengro_, 58, 59.

_Lazarillo de Tormes_, 51 _et seq._

_Lenore_, 251.

Leonardo da Vinci, 243, 248.

Le Sage, Alain René, 61 _et seq._, 160.

Lewis, Matthew Gregory, 166.

Lockhart, John Gibson, 101.

Lodge, Thomas, 73 _et seq._, 126.

Lorris, Guillaume de, 23.

_Love for Love_, 149.

Luna, H. de, 56.

Lyly, John, 70 _et seq._, 90, 139, 280.

MABBE, James, 126.

_Mabinogion, The_, 9, 11 _et seq._, 51, 73, 240.

Macpherson, James, 191.

_Madame Bovary_, 291 _et seq._

_Mademoiselle de Maupin_, 237.

Mahomet, 240.

Malory, Sir Thomas, 11, 61, 88.

_Manon Lescaut_, 147.

Margaret, Queen of Navarre, 51.

_Markheim_, 263.

Marot, Clément, 21, 156.

Masefield, John, 61.

_Masque of the Red Death, The_, 247.

_Mateo Falcone_, 277.

Maupassant, Guy de, 226, 235, 247, 291, 292, 298 _et seq._, 307.

Mérimée, Prosper, 46, 195, 203, 205, 206, 273 _et seq._, 292, 301, 307.

_Messe de l'Athée, La_, 225.

Meung, Jean de, 21 _et seq._, 31.

_Microcosmography, A_, 111.

Milton, John, 42.

_Misérables, Les_, 207.

_Modest Proposal, A_, 277.

Molière, Jean Baptiste Poquelin de, 61.

_Monk and Witch_, 262.

_Mona Lisa_, 249, 298.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem Sieur de, 73, 112, 120, 208.

Montemôr, Jorge de, 85.

Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de, 208.

_Morte Amoureuse, La_, 305, 307, 309.

_Morte Darthur, The_, 8, 11, 32, 37, 51, 61, 240.

_Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist_, 120.

_Murders in the Rue Morgue, The_, 248.

_Mystery of Marie Roget, The_, 248.

NAPLES, Queen Joan of, 47.

Nash, Thomas, 60, 76.

Nevinson, H. W., 88.

_Newgate Calendar, The_, 132.

_New Testament, The_, 144.

_Northanger Abbey_, 189.

Northcote, James, 278.

_Notre Dame de Paris_, 204, 207.

_Nouvelle Héloïse, La_, or _Julie_, 147, 177.

ODIN, 8.

_Old Gentleman, The_, 119.

_Old Lady, The_, 120.

_Oliver Twist_, 58.

_Ossian_, 178, 179, 191.

_Oval Portrait, The_, 250.

Overbury, Sir Thomas, 108, 109, 110, 111.

_Pamela_, 140 _et seq._, 157.

_Pandosto_, 75, 76.

_Paradise Lost_, 298.

Pascal, 208.

Pater, Walter, 121.

_Paynter's Pallace_, 68.

Peacock, Thomas Love, 196.

_Penseur, Le_, 297.

Pepys, Samuel, 129.

_Percy and Duglas_, 84.

Percy, Bishop, 191.

_Père Goriot_, 228, 307.

_Petite Ficelle, La_, 307, 310.

_Petite Pallace of Petite his Pleasure, A_, 68 _et seq._

Petrarch, 38.

Pettie, George, 68, 69, 126.

_Philosophy of Composition, The_, 244, 246.

_Pilgrim's Progress_, 126 _et seq._, 257.

Pindar, 84.

Pippin, 8.

Pisan, Christine de, 25.

_Plea of Pan, The_, 88.

Poe, Edgar Allan, 46, 165, 195, 220, 243 _et seq._, 258, 259, 263, 281, 307.

Poussin, Nicolas, 86, 87.

_Presse, La_, 238.

Prévost, l'Abbé, 147.

_Punch and Judy_, 96.

_Purloined Letter, The_, 248.

_Quentin Durward_, 208.

RABELAIS, François, 25, 96, 170, 208.

Radcliffe, Mrs., 166.

_Rappacini's Daughter_, 265.

_Raven, The_, 244, 253.

_Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, The_, 191, 218.

_Rendezvous, Le_, 299.

_René_, 179.

_Reynard the Fox_, 9, 54.

Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 243.

Richardson, Samuel, 71; 139 _et seq._, 155, 156, 157, 158, 167, 235.

_Robert the Devil, The Life of_, 19.

_Robinson Crusoe_, 114, 132.

_Rob Roy_, 192.

_Roderick Random_, 58, 160 _et seq._

Rodin, Auguste, 297.

_Romance of the Rose, The_, 19 _et seq._, 132.

_Roman Comique, Le_, 158.

_Roman de la Momie, Le_, 236.

_Romany Rye, The_, 59.

Ronsard, Pierre de, 21, 155, 158.

_Rosalynde_, 73, 75, 77, 78.

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 42, 44.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 147, 175, 177, 178, 179, 180.

SAINTE-BEUVE, Charles Augustin de, 208.

_St. Julien l'Hospitalier_, 291, 296.

_Salammbo_, 291, 294, 295, 298.

Santayana, George, 239.

Scarlatti, Alessandro, 196.

_Scarlet Letter, The_, 258, 266.

Scarron, Paul, 86, 170.

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 25.

Scott, Sir Walter, 42, 101, 187 _et seq._, 206, 208, 210, 211, 212, 217, 218, 219, 251.

Selkirk, Alexander, 134.

_Sense and Sensibility_, 150.

Shakespeare, William, 78, 96, 126, 155, 202.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 311.

Sidney, Sir Philip, 78, 83 _et seq._, 95, 140, 175, 191, 233.

_Sir Charles Grandison_, 140.

_Sir Roger de Coverley_, 117 _et seq._

Smollett, Tobias, 58, 71, 107, 119, 147, 150, 152, 156 _et seq._, 187, 261, 293, 308.

Somerset, The Countess of, 108.

Somerset, The Earl of, 108.

_Song of Roland, The_, 37.

_Spectator, The_, 112, 116, 117, 142, 148, 168.

Spenser, Edmund, 42, 126, 128.

Steele, Sir Richard, 113 _et seq._, 142, 148.

Stendhal, Henri Beyle who wrote as, 131, 261.

Sterne, Laurence, 169, 170.

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 243, 250.

_Summer is icumen in_, 15.

Swift, Dean, 113.

Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 71.

_Table Talk_, 258.

Taine, Hippolyte, 23, 278.

_Tatler, The_, 112, 113, 142, 148, 168.

Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 42.

_Tentation de Saint Antoine, La_, 296, 297, 298.

Theocritus, 81.

Theophrastus, 63, 107, 110, 111.

Thomson, Hugh, 118.

Thoreau, Henry David, 258.

Tolstoy, Leo, Count, 261.

_Tom Jones_, 51, 58, 89, 144, 166, 257.

_Tristram Shandy_, 169, 170.

_Troilus and Criseyd_, 38, 47.

_Trois Contes_, 295.

_Trois Mousquetaires, Les_, 211, 212.

_Tulipe Noire, La_, 211.

_Un Cœur Simple_, 291, 295.

Urfé, Honoré d', 85.

VAN EYCK, Jan and Hubert, 41, 42.

_Vathek_, 231.

_Venus d'Ille, La_, 283.

_Vicar of Wakefield, The_, 86, 118, 119.

_Vingt Ans Après_, 212.

Virgil, 81, 86.

_Volsunga Saga, The_, 11, 240.

Voltaire, 202, 231, 274, 296, 297.

WAGNER, Wilhelm Richard, 196.

Walpole, Horace, 189.

Watteau Antoine, 61, 86.

_Waverley Novels, The_, 42, 187 _et seq._, 209.

Wilde, Oscar, 311.

_William Wilson_, 250.

Wordsworth, William, 42.

YEATS, William Butler, 236.

_Young Goodman Brown_, 267, 268.

ZOLA, Emile, 226.

Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty at the Edinburgh University Press

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Translation by Lady Charlotte Guest, 1838.

[2] The quotations in this chapter are from the translation by Mr. F. S. Ellis.

[3] It would be possible to trace an interesting history of narrative in verse from Chaucer to our own day. But although the names of Spenser, Milton, Lafontaine, Gay, Goldsmith, Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Rossetti, which with many others come instantly to mind, show how various and suggestive such an essay might be, yet the purpose of this book would hardly be served by its inclusion. It would be more nearly concerned with the history of poetry than with that of story-telling.

[4] By H. de Luna, 1620. The earliest known edition of _Lazarillo_ was published in 1553.

[5] From a poem by John Masefield.

[6] There is another picture of the same name and subject in the Duke of Devonshire's collection.

[7] It is worth noticing as an additional proof of the close connection between the story in letters and the feminine novel that _Sense and Sensibility_ was built out of an older tale that she actually wrote in epistolary form.

[8] From a poem by Lascelles Abercrombie.

[9] This is repeated with a new purpose from the chapter on Origins.

[10] The distinction between novel and romance made in the chapter on Hawthorne is one of material rather than of form. It is possible to use the material of romance in the form of either novel, _nouvelle_, or short story.

[11] The novelette is not the same as the _nouvelle_, but simply a short novel as its name implies.

End of Project Gutenberg's A History of Story-telling, by Arthur Ransome