Part 10

Two points, then, are noticeable in this work. In the first place, it depends for its interest not on astonishing adventures, high-flown diction, or extravagant play of fancy, but simply on the sterling humanity of the narrative. The unfortunate hero and his wife are, of course, drawn upon the heroic scale, but they still possess the solid traits of real manhood and womanhood, and, applying the supreme test in all such cases, we find that we can believe in them. The chasm which separates such an achievement as this from the windy sentimentalities of the Anglo-French romance is a very wide one, and Mrs. Behn’s boldness of innovation was, therefore, the more remarkable. In the second place, “Oroonoko” is written with a well-defined didactic aim. It is a novel with a purpose—the remote forerunner of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and the whole modern school of ethical fiction. Thus, together with a marked tendency towards realism, Mrs. Behn’s book exhibits a no less marked bias in the direction of practical teaching. Its historic significance is therefore twofold.[17]

Footnote 17:

Another matter of curious interest in connection with “Oroonoko” calls for passing mention, though too far removed from our special subject to detain us here. This is the remarkable way in which, in its presentation of the “noble savage,” and the innocence, purity, and high moral character of the “natural man,” the story anticipates Rousseau and the later romanticists. Jusserand, who points this out, goes so far as to say that Mrs. Behn “carries us at once beyond the times of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, and takes us among the precursors of the French Revolution.” It may be added that, in the hands of “Honest Tom Southerne,” the story of Oroonoko became a successful play.

Mrs. Behn’s other tales show less originality, and are neither so attractive nor so valuable. They are short love-stories which, though not so radically and aggressively impure as her plays, are still tainted through and through by the prevailing grossness of the time. Like Mrs. Manley, Mrs. Behn makes mere physical appetite—the passion which “rages beyond the inspirations of _a god all soft and gentle_, and reigns more like _a fury from hell_”[18]—the turning-point of all her plots; like Mrs. Manley, she centres the entire interest of her narratives in the gratification, not in the influences, of this passion. Like Mrs. Manley, too,—and here the severest judgment might well pass unprotested,—she is as harsh and free-spoken as the most profligate of male cynics regarding the foibles of her own sex. Vain, selfish, salacious, intriguing, spiteful, her female figures, as a whole, are simply repulsive in their unqualified animality; and as we read of their lives and their doings, we no longer wonder at the open savagery of a Wycherley, or the undisguised contempt of a Congreve, in an age when a woman could thus write of women, without fear, almost without reproach. Finally, like Mrs. Manley, Mrs. Behn is ready at times to indulge not only in scenes of the utmost coarseness, but also in pictures of the most revolting brutality. An instance of this might be given from “The Fair Jilt”, where the unskilful execution of Tarquin is detailed with horrible minuteness. The best of these shorter stories is “The Lucky Mistake,” a tale written throughout with comparatively good taste. They are nearly all based on fact—many on direct observation; and this renders them, from a student’s point of view, interesting. But there is a great sameness in the incidents described, and on the side of characterization they are very weak indeed. The plots are all made up out of the same classes of material; and the men and women of any one story are hardly to be distinguished otherwise than by name from those of any other.

Footnote 18:

“The Fair Jilt.”

* * * * *

And now, in returning to the question of the historic significance of the two writers into whose books—habitually allowed to stand undisturbed upon the library shelf—we have here rather rashly ventured to pry, we shall find, if I mistake not, that little remains to be said. Brief as our analysis of the heroic romances and the tales of Mrs. Behn and Mrs. Manley has necessarily been, it will, if it does not fail entirely of its purpose, suffice to mark the points of fundamental contrast between them. The nature and importance of the changes exemplified in these story-tellers of the Restoration will thus be made clear.

Hitherto, as we have seen, fiction had made little or no attempt to deal frankly with life. In other words, it had not as yet found its proper sphere. Purely a thing of the imagination, it had sought its subjects afar, proudly ignoring the common matters of the world—the joys and sorrows, the hopes and struggles of every-day humanity. The words which the author of a life of Sidney, prefixed to one of the early editions of the “Arcadia,” applies to that work, we might with equal fairness apply to almost the entire mass of fiction thus far written. “The invention is wholly spun out of the fancy,” he says. The scene was laid in some far-away dreamland, not the less remote and visionary because occasionally called by a familiar earthly name; the characters were swollen out to superhuman proportions, and were endowed with qualities that no mortal being has ever been known to possess; their adventures were on the face of them impossible; they thought, acted, talked as no man or woman had thought, acted, talked since the world began. Life and fiction stood entirely apart. The real world of tangible flesh and blood found for the time its only expression in the drama. In fiction there was as yet no human interest whatever.

With Mrs. Behn commenced the tendency to deal with life—to make the novel in some sense a reproduction of actual experience. We may regret that the special phases of the human comedy that she deliberately chose to write about, were only too often phases the least worthy of attention; that her interests were narrowed down, and her work crippled, by considerations of the most cramping and disastrous kinds; that she knew nothing of proportion and perspective, and little of the higher and finer developments of motive and character; that she could not see life steadily, and did not see it whole. But all this must not stand in the way of our insisting that she was one of the first writers of prose fiction—perhaps the first in England—to substitute the solid stuff of reality for the flimsy material of the imagination. Crude and partial as her observations were, she at least observed; sorry as are most of the results of her study of the world, she did study it at first hand—did hold the mirror up to nature. What she accomplished in thus opening up the field of the modern novel, what Mrs. Manley accomplished in following her lead, are matters, therefore, of sufficient importance to call for distinct recognition. We do not claim for the books of these two women any individual merit or interest. But when we lay aside one of their stories, bearing in mind the conditions of the time at which it was written, we realize that, artistically, if not always morally, they represent a step in advance; that it was by such work as this—poor and hopelessly dull as it may seem to us to-day—that the folios of La Calprenède and De Scudéri were overthrown, the way made clear for Defoe and Richardson, and the foundations of modern fiction firmly laid.

But now let us notice the suggestive circumstance that, like nearly all innovators, these first realists seriously overstepped the mark. In their early attempts to exchange Fairy Land for the actual world, we find too large a place given to fact, in the most hard and circumscribed sense of the word. In place of pure fancy, they sought to give absolute and undiluted reality; in place of a picture without existing counterpart, they strove to secure the detailed verisimilitude of a photograph. Indeed, for a time the aims and methods of fiction were almost entirely lost sight of. And it is easy to see how this unfortunate result was brought about. Weary of the conventionalities of the old romances, and of the shadowy heroes and heroines with whose tedious adventures and even more tedious disquisitions their pages were filled, the novelists of the Restoration made a bold endeavor to get back to the life with which they were familiar, and to deal with the world as they knew it to exist. But for the moment, there seemed only one way of doing this. Instead of fancy, they must have fact; instead of wandering off into the impossible, they must limit themselves to the things which had actually happened—which had really, in Charles Reade’s witty phrase, gone through the formality of taking place. Hence, for the present, the constructive work of the imagination—which some of us, in these days of so-called Naturalism, are still old-fashioned enough to hold essentially important—was almost entirely neglected. Nearly every story was statedly “founded on fact”; and the business of the novelist was practically reduced to the task of presenting, with but slight embellishment or rearrangement, specific occurrences in life. Thus we have an early example of the tendency, just now so conspicuous, towards what M. Brunetière has happily called “reportage” in literature. In the reaction against the school of heroic romance, the new story-writers, therefore, went to the other extreme. To take the materials of familiar existence and to reorganize them, thus producing a work of art which is at once all compact of truth and imagination, was for the time being beyond their ken. To their limited view, realism meant slavish reality.

It was only after this mistake had been made that the possibility of avoiding the airy unrealities of old romance, without being bound down to the skeleton facts of life, gradually became apparent. The discovery that a writer could be true to experience and human nature without necessarily reproducing actual events or photographing individual men and women, was the outcome of many experiments and much failure, and was at length hit upon in a half-blind and fortuitous way. It was only little by little that the element of acknowledged fiction was allowed to encroach upon the domain of truth; only little by little that people began to understand that the art of fiction and the art of lying are not one and the same, and that the boldest play of imagination in the treatment of life is not always to be associated with the distortion of reality. In the works of Mrs. Manley and Mrs. Behn we see the English novel stumbling painfully towards the comprehension of its own objects. We have reached firm ground, and that is a great achievement; for only when we move on firm ground is the novel possible. But the dead weight of the actual is too heavy for us; we cannot synthesize the results of experience; we gather observations, but we are unable to make artistic productions out of them. Thus, we have a “New Atalantis” (and the book is historically significant just for this reason) which is little more than a jumble of personal scandal, filled in with occasional false incidents and mendacious details; an “Oroonoko,” which is rather a fanciful biography than a tale; we have a “Wife’s Resentment,” a “Fair Jilt,” a “Lucky Mistake,”—stories all of which are based more or less exclusively on historic occurrences or on events that had come under the direct observation of the relaters.[19] Even where there is a lack of truth, the appearance of truth is still carefully preserved. Things which have not actually happened are nevertheless related as facts; real characters are put through unreal incidents; the novel is supposed to give history; fiction and falsehood are as yet confused.

Footnote 19:

Mrs. Manley, in her Dedication to Lady Lansdowne, says that her stories have truth for their foundation—_i.e._, are based on fact. Mrs. Behn calls her “Nun” a “true novel.”

* * * * *

With this brief summary of the qualities and shortcomings of our two women-novelists, this little paper might properly close. But it may be interesting if, having carried our inquiry thus far, we add a paragraph about the way in which the rigid reality of the works at which we have been glancing grew gradually out into the genuine realism of the later novel.

Properly to understand this tendency towards an equilibrium between fact and imagination, we should turn aside to examine the profound influence exerted over the fiction of the time of the “Tatler” and the “Spectator.” But for our present purposes we shall find the movement forward clearly enough exemplified in the work of one man—the author of “Robinson Crusoe,” whose writings, therefore, we will take as our clue.

Beginning with the production of history, or semi-history, in which real characters, slightly exaggerated, move through real scenes, or through scenes to but small extent imaginary, Defoe proceeded little by little to import more of fiction into his narrative, to the detriment of the small substratum of truth still retained. By and by, he did no more than preserve the mere frame-work of history—as in “The Journal of the Plague Year” and the “Memoirs of a Cavalier,” in which most of the characters and many of the incidents are purely fictitious. After this, the remaining element of truth was gradually eliminated, and he reached the production of narratives of fictitious characters in fictitious settings and among fictitious scenes. “From writing biographies with real names attached to them,” says Professor Minto, in his Life of Defoe, “it was but a short step to writing biographies with fictitious names.” Even when that short step was taken, the artifices resorted to by him to preserve the apparent truthfulness of his narrations show us that he was by no means satisfied that it would be desirable to let matters of fact slip out of his work entirely. Though what he wrote was false, he still tried to palm it off upon the world as true. This makes the writing of Defoe more like lying than fiction, and goes far to explain the extraordinary minuteness of the circumstantial method adopted by him. But it marks, also, the transitional quality of his work. As Mr. Leslie Stephen has neatly put it, “Defoe’s novels are simply history _minus_ the facts.” Only in his latest works do we find this pseudo-history making way for fiction proper; and then we recognize in Defoe the distinct forerunner of the great novelists of the eighteenth century.

But to follow this matter farther would take us beyond the due bounds, already somewhat transgressed, of our present study. As we may now see, the story of English fiction from the period of the Anglo-French romance to the time of Fielding and Smollett, is a long one, and we have undertaken to deal with only one chapter here—the chapter which tells of Mrs. Behn and Mrs. Manley, of what they did, and of what they failed to do. That finished, our task is at an end.

A Glimpse of Bohemia

A Glimpse of Bohemia

The Bohemia with which the following pages are concerned is not that inland country of Europe which Greene and Shakspere, to the indignation of all right-minded commentators, so generously endowed with a sea-coast. We must at once dismiss from our minds all thought of Prague and the Czechs; for the country into which we are about to offer a personally conducted excursion finds no place on our maps and no mention in our geographies. Our Bohemia is, in a word, none other than the Bohemia of Paris.

The confines and landmarks of this strange country have, fortunately for us, been authoritatively established. Bohemia, according to the painter Marcel, of whom we shall hear more anon, and who certainly knew well what he was talking about, is “bounded on the north by hope, work, and gayety; on the south by necessity and courage; on the west and east by calumny and the hospital.”[20] Yet it is just possible that these cryptic phrases may fail to convey to some readers any very definite geographical information; since even Rodolphe, to whom they were first addressed, is reported to have shrugged his shoulders and responded with a simple “Je ne comprends pas.” Hence, it may be well at the outset to attempt to describe, as succinctly as possible, the limits of that seductive land through which our road is now to lie.

Footnote 20:

“La Vie de Bohème,” act i., scene 8.

This is far from being an easy task, however. Often as the word _Bohemia_ is used, in the broad sense here attached to it, so many writers have colored it with so many different shades of meaning, that, though we may understand vaguely its general significance, it seems well-nigh impossible to bring it satisfactorily within the terms of a strict definition. “Vive la Bohème!” cries George Sand, at the end of her novel, “La Dernière Aldini”; and “Vive la Bohème!” has found many an echo and re-echo in the pages of French literature, down to the present day, when it would seem that, as a free and independent country, Bohemia is practically disappearing from the face of the earth. But each one of the many explorers of this dark and mysterious corner of our modern world, has brought back with him his own report of the territory and its inhabitants; and these travellers’ stories by no means tally one with another. To some it has seemed to be peopled by the lowest classes of those who, as the phrase goes, live upon their wits; by beggars, petty swindlers of all descriptions, and men and women who, through idleness or misfortune, are unable to obtain a livelihood, we will not say in honest ways, but in any way that society chooses to recognize as honest. To others the population has appeared to be composed of those who follow undignified and precarious careers, as cheap-jacks, circus-riders, street-conjurers, acrobats, bear-trainers, sword-swallowers, and itinerant mountebanks of kindred descriptions. A third class of writers has made Bohemia a regular sink of society, the receptacle of all such outcasts and human abominations as Eugène Sue and his followers loved to depict; villains of the deepest dye—vitriol-throwers, house-breakers, assassins. While to a fourth group this same domain has been the land of literature and the arts, where philosophy and beer, music and debt, painting and hunger, criticism and tobacco-smoke, combine to make life picturesque and inspiring; a land the denizens of which either die of penury in the streets or the hospital, uncared for, unknown, or, living, at last take their rightful places in the front rank, among the painters, composers, and writers of their time.

Wherein these various critics agree, is in describing Bohemia as a country lying on the outskirts of ordinary society, and inhabited by those who cannot, or will not, yield to that society’s conventions—the failures or the incompatibles of decent modern civilization. It is hardly worth while to try to decide as to what particular portion of this vast and complex community has the best right to a name which has thus been used with great elasticity of meaning. It will be sufficient if we say at once that the phase of Bohemian life with which we here purpose to deal is not that reflected in the romances of Xavier de Montépin, Féval, or Sue. Our Bohemia is the Bohemia of art and letters; and, as our guide through this romantic region, we will take the man who has drawn its life for us with such marvellous power and vividness—Henri Murger, himself the representative Bohemian, alike in the struggles and lurid contradictions of his career, and alas! in his early and tragic death.

“To-day, as of old, every man who devotes himself to art, with no other means of subsistence than art itself, will be forced to tread the pathways of Bohemia. The majority of our contemporaries who display the most beautiful heraldry of art have been Bohemians; and, in their calm and prosperous glory, they often recall, sometimes perhaps with regret, the time when, climbing the green slopes of youth, they had no other fortune, in the sunshine of their twenty years, than courage, which is the virtue of the young, and hope, which is the fortune of the poor. For the uneasy reader, for the timorous bourgeois, for all those who can never have too many dots on the _i_’s of a definition, we will repeat in the form of an axiom: Bohemia is the probation of artistic life; it is the preface to the academy, the hospital, or the morgue.”

Thus writes Murger, in the preface to his immortal “Scènes de la Vie de Bohème,” and the words will be found to furnish a startling commentary about the kind of life with which his volume deals—a life made up of extraordinary contrasts; of dazzling dreams and the most sordid of realities; of hope alternating with despair; of high talents ruined by reckless excesses; of splendid promises defeated by the Fates; of brilliant careers cut short by premature death. “The true Bohemians,” continues this writer, who, more than any other, speaks as their accredited mouthpiece and historian, “are really the called of art, and stand a chance of being also the chosen.” But the country of their adoption literally “bristles with dangers. Chasms yawn on either side—misery and doubt. Yet between these two chasms, there is at least a road, leading to a goal, which the Bohemians can already reach with their eyes, while awaiting the time when they shall touch it with their hands.” But till such time shall come, even if it ever comes at all, the young enthusiast must turn a brave face upon all the troubles, the anxieties, the privations, the fears, the petty worries and distractions, by which his self-chosen career will be everywhere begirt. For those who have once set their feet in the alluring but perilous pathway, which will lead to fame or misery, to immortality or death, there must be no trembling, no hesitation, no looking backward with regretful eyes to the safe, though humble, beaten tracks which they have left below. They have dared to devote themselves, brain and soul, to art, in a world which cannot understand their aims, which sneers at their aspirations, which is very likely to leave them to starve, and will at best yield them only a grudging and tardy welcome. Hence, every day’s existence becomes for them “a work of genius, an ever-recurring problem.”[21] Nor is it surprising that, in the haphazard life which they are thus forced to lead, they should inevitably acquire those habits of carelessness, that easy-going morality, and often enough that want of settled purpose, which make them the black sheep of respectable society.

“If a little good fortune falls into their hands, they forthwith begin to pursue the most ruinous fancies ... not finding windows enough to throw their money out of; and then, when the last écu is dead and buried, they begin again to dine at the table d’hôte of chance, where their cover is always laid; and to chase, from morning till night, that ferocious beast, the hundred-sous-piece.”[22]

Footnote 21:

“La Vie de Bohème,” act i., scene 8.

Footnote 22:

_Ibid._

Such is the tenor of their way; certainly not a noiseless one, nor one running through the cool, sequestered vale of life. Little wonder, then, that with all the frivolities and uncertainties of their journey, with all its physical hardships and moral perils, so few should survive their pilgrimage through Bohemia, or, when they finally reach a quieter resting-place, should have the heart to recount, with frankness and simplicity, their varied experiences in the probationary land.