Part 2

But, indeed, of the long story, as well as of the short, may it not be agreed that on the whole the dialogue is apt to be the least successful thing? The ordinary reader, of course, will not be dramatic enough to notice its deficiencies. In humorous dialogue, these are seen least. Humorous dialogue has a legitimate licence. You do not ask from it exactitude; you do not nail it down to its statement. But in the dialogue of the critical moment, when the fire of a little word will kindle how great a matter, how needful then, and how rare, that the word be the true one! We do not want laxity, inappropriateness, on the one hand; nor, on the other, the tortured phraseology of a too resolute cleverness. And those of us who have a preference--derived, it may be, from the simpler generation of Dickens--for an unbending when it is a question of _little_ matters, and, when it is a question of great ones, for ‘a sincere large accent, nobly plain’--well! there is much of modern finessing we are hardly privileged to understand. Yet if one wants an instance, in a long novel, in which the sentence now said at a white heat is the result, inevitable, burningly true to life, of the sentence that was said just before, one condones the obscurity that has had its imitators, and pays one’s tribute of admiration to the insight of _Diana of the Crossways_.

One of the difficulties of the short story, the short story shares with the acted drama, and that is the indispensableness of compression--the need that every sentence shall tell--the difference being, that in the acted drama it must tell for the moment, it must tell till it is found out, and in the short story it must tell for at least a _modest_ eternity, and something more, if that be possible--for if a ‘Fortnight is eternity’ upon the Stock Exchange, a literary eternity is, perhaps, forty years.

Of course the short story, like all other fiction to be read, does not share the other difficulties of the acted drama--above all, the disadvantage which drags the acted drama down--the disadvantage of appealing to, at all events of having to give sops to, at one and the same moment, gallery and stalls: an audience so incongruous that it lies outside the power of Literature to weld it really together. In the contemporary theatre, in some of the very cleverest of our acted dramas, the characters are frequently doing, not what the man of intuition, and the man who remembers life, _knows_ that they would do, but that which they must do to conciliate the dress circle, to entertain the pit, to defer not too long the gentle chuckle with which the ‘average sensual man’ receives the assurance that it is a delusion to suppose our world contains any soul, even a woman’s soul, that is higher and purer than his. To such temptations the writer of the short story is not even exposed, if he be willing to conceive of his art upon exalted lines, to offer carefully the best of his reflection, in a form of durable and chosen grace, or, by a less conscious, perhaps, but not less fruitful, husbanding of his resources, to give us, sooner or later some first-hand study of human emotion, ‘gotten,’ as William Watson says, ‘of the immediate soul.’ But again, contrasting his fortunes with those of his brother, the dramatist, the writer of short stories must, even at the best, know himself denied the dramatist’s crowning advantage--which is the thrill of actual human presence.

I have not presumed, except incidentally and by way of illustration, to sit in rapid judgment, and award impertinently blame or praise to the most or the least prominent of those who are writing short stories to-day. Even an occasional grappler with the difficulties of a task is not generally its best critic. He will criticise from the inside, now and then, and so, although you ought to have from him, now and again, at least--what I know, nevertheless, that _I_ may not have given--illuminating commentary--you cannot have final judgment. Of the art of Painting, where skill of hand and sense of colour count for much more than intellect, this is especially true. It is true, more or less, of Music--in spite of exceptions as notable as Schumann and Berlioz: almost perfect critics of the very art that they produced. It is true--though in a less degree--of creative Literature. We leave this point, to write down, before stopping, one word about _tendencies_.

Among the better writers, one tendency of the day is to devote a greater care to the art of expression--to an unbroken continuity of excellent style. The short story, much more than the long one, makes this thing possible to men who may not claim to be geniuses, but who, if we are to respect them at all, must claim to be artists. And yet, in face of the indifference of so much of our public here to anything we can call Style--in face, actually, of a strange insensibility to it--the attempt, wherever made, is a courageous one. This insensibility--how does it come about?

It comes about, in honest truth, partly because that instrument of Art, our English tongue, in which the verse of Gray was written, and the prose of Landor and Sterne, is likewise the necessary vehicle in which, every morning of our lives, we ask for something at breakfast. If we all of us had to demand breakfast by making a rude drawing of a coffee-pot, we should understand, before long--the quickness of the French intelligence on that matter being unfortunately denied us--the man in the street would understand that Writing, as much as Painting, is an art to be acquired, and an art in whose technical processes one is bound to take pleasure. And, perhaps, another reason is the immense diffusion nowadays of superficial education; so that the election of a book to the honours of quick popularity is decided by those, precisely, whose minds are least trained for the exercise of that suffrage. What _is_ elected is too often the work which presents at a first reading everything that it presents at all. I remember Mr. Browning once saying, _àpropos_ of such a matter, ‘What has a cow to do with nutmegs?’ He explained, it was a German proverb. Is it? Or is it German only in the way of ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’? Anyhow, things being as they are, all the more honour to those younger people who, in the face of indifference, remember that their instrument of English language is a quite unequalled instrument of Art.

Against this happy tendency, one has to set--in regard at least to some of them--tendencies less admirable. For, whilst the only kind of work that has a chance of engaging the attention of Sainte-Beuve’s ‘severe To-morrow’ is work that is original, individual, sincere, is it not a pity, because of another’s sudden success, to be unremittingly occupied with the exploitation of one particular world--to paint for ever, say, in violent and garish hue, or in deep shades through which no light can struggle, the life of the gutter? to paint it, too, with that distorted ‘realism’ which witnesses upon the part of its practitioners to _one thing only_, a profound conviction of the ugly! I talk, of course, not of the short stories of the penetrating observer, but of those of the dyspeptic pessimist, whose pessimism, where it is not the _pose_ of the contortionist--adopted with an eye to a sensational success of journalism, to a commercial effect--is hysteria, an imitative malady, a malady of the mind. The profession of the literary pessimist is already overcrowded; and if I name two writers who, though in different degrees, have avoided the temptation to join it--if I name one who knows familiarly the cheery as well as the more sombre side of Cockney character and life, Mr. Henry Nevinson, the author of the remarkable short-stories, _Neighbours of Ours_, and then again a more accepted student of a sordid existence--Mr. George Gissing, in _Human Odds and Ends_ especially--I name them but as such instances as I am privileged to know, of observant and unbiassed treatment of the subjects with which they have elected to deal.

In France, in the short story, we may easily notice, the uglier forms of ‘Realism’ are wearing themselves out. ‘Le soleil de France,’ said Gluck to Marie Antoinette, ‘le soleil de France donne du génie.’ And the genius that it gives cannot long be hopeless and sombre. It leaves the obscure wood and tangled bypath; it makes for the open road: ‘la route claire et droite’--the phrase belongs to M. Leygues--‘la route claire et droite où marche le génie français.’ Straight and clear was the road followed--nay, sometimes actually cut--by the unresting talent of Guy de Maupassant, the writer of a hundred short stories, which, for the world of his day at least, went far beyond Charles Nodier’s earlier delicacy and Champfleury’s wit. But, somehow, upon De Maupassant’s nature and temperament the curse of pessimism lay. To deviate into cheeriness he must deal with the virtues of the _déclassées_--undoubtedly an interesting theme--he must deal with them as in the famous _Maison Tellier_, an ebullition of scarcely cynical comedy, fuller much of real humanity than De Goncourt’s sordid document, _La Fille Elisa_. But that was an exception. De Maupassant was pessimist generally, because, master of an amazing talent, he refreshed himself never in any rarefied air. The vista of the Spirit was denied him. His reputation he may keep; but his school--the school in which a few even of our own imitative writers prattle the accents of a hopeless materialism--his school, I fancy, will be crowded no more. For, with an observation keen and judicial, M. René Bazin treats to-day themes, we need not say more ‘legitimate’--since much may be legitimate--but at least more acceptable. And then again, with a style of which De Maupassant, direct as was his own, must have envied even the clarity and the subtler charm, a master draughtsman of ecclesiastic and bookworm, of the neglected genius of the provincial town (some poor devil of a small professor), and of the soldier, and the shopkeeper, and the Sous-Préfet’s wife--I hope I am describing M. Anatole France--looks out on the contemporary world with a vision humane and genial, sane and wide. Pessimism, it seems to me, can only be excusable in those who are still bowed down by the immense responsibility of youth. It was a great poet, who, writing of one of his peers--a man of mature life--declared of him, _not_ ‘he mopes picturesquely,’ but ‘he knows the world, firm, quiet, and gay.’ To such a writer--only to such a writer--is possible a happy comedy; and possible, besides, a true and an august vision of profounder things! And _that_ is the spirit to which the Short Story, at its best, will certainly return.

(_Nineteenth Century_, March 1898.)

MY RARE BOOK

I wish I could say it was my diligence that discovered it, and that I hunted it out of some fifth-rate bookstall of Goswell Street or of the New Road--‘all this lot at 6d. apiece.’ But no, it has no romantic story as far as I am concerned. Given perhaps, eighty years ago, by friend to friend, or lover to sweetheart, in days when our great-grandmothers were beautiful and our great-grandfathers devoted, it got to be neglected, it got to be sold--somebody ceased to care for it, or somebody wanted the few shillings it then would bring--somehow it tossed about the world, till a keen bookseller or keen bookbuyer rescued it, and took it to a binder of note, and then it was arrayed in seemly dress, and safer for the future. Afterwards--but not for very long, I think--it was a rich man’s possession: one thing, and quite a little thing, in a great library of English classics, from Defoe and Sterne to Dickens and Tennyson. Then it came to be sold, along with most or all of its important companions, and so I got it, in prosaic fashion. I bought it under the hammer at Sotheby’s--or rather, Mr. F. S. Ellis bought it there on my behalf--on the 3rd of March, in this present year of grace. And now it takes up its position on insignificant shelves, by the side of the Rogers with the Turner illustrations; by the side of a few things--but the collector knows them not.

This is how it figures in the auctioneer’s catalogue: ‘Wordsworth (W.) Lyrical Ballads, with a few other Poems (including Rime of the Ancyent Marinere by Coleridge), FIRST EDITION, _green morocco extra g. e. by Riviere_, 1798.’ The ‘g. e.’ means nothing more mysterious than ‘gilt edges.’ The morocco is of a rich and sunny green--the ‘good’ green of modern artistic speech, which rightly enough, I suppose, endows colour and line with moral qualities. I am thankful to the rich man for having saved me both money and trouble, in binding, completely to my taste, it happens, my rare book.

And few things, perhaps, deserve more careful guardianship. The _Lyrical Ballads_, as the world now knows, were a starting-point in the new English Literature, which addressed itself to study in the field of Nature more than in academies, and which taught us the beauty and interest of common life and of everyday incident; and it is a delight to me to see the pages of these simple lyrics and pastorals as Wordsworth’s own eye was content with them when Cottle, the Bristol bookseller, passed them through the press, and printed them, as well as might be, on pleasantly toned paper, bearing here and there on its water-mark the date of its making, ‘1795.’ On the whole, it is a well-printed book; two hundred and ten pages, tastefully arranged, and of _errata_ there are but five. Those were days when centralisation had not brought the best work all to London, and even concentrated it in certain quarters of London; and of what is sometimes called provincial, but of what there is better reason to define as suburban, clumsiness--for nothing is done so ill in the world as what is done in London suburbs--there is only a trace in the gross inequality of the size of the figures in the table of contents: they are taken, it appears, from different founts. But generally the book is printed with smoothness and precision, and, even apart from the high literature which it enshrines, is worthy of its good green coat, joyful of hue, pleasant of smell, and grateful of touch to the fingers that pass over it. And nothing that comes now, even from the Chiswick Press, or from Jouaust or whoever may be the fashionable printing man to-day in Paris, can be much neater than its title-page; the mention of which brings me to a point of interest to the bibliophile.

The book has two title-pages; or, rather, like many of the books of its day, there belong two title-pages to the same edition of it--the custom having been for a second bookseller, who bought what the first bookseller was minded to get rid of, to print his own title-page. This is the course that the thing followed in the matter of _Lyrical Ballads_. The book was printed, as we shall see in detail presently, by Cottle, in Bristol, in the year 1798. Five hundred copies were printed, but they did not sell. ‘As a curious literary fact,’ says Cottle, in his ‘Recollections,’ ‘I might mention that the sale of the First Edition of the _Lyrical Ballads_ was so slow, and the severity of most of the reviews so great, that its progress to oblivion seemed ordained to be as rapid as it was certain.’ ‘I had given,’ he adds, ‘thirty guineas for the copyright; but the heavy sale induced me to part with the largest proportion of the impression of 500, at a loss, to Mr. Arch, a London bookseller.’ Mr. Arch printed his own title-page. My copy has his title-page, ‘_London, printed for J. & A. Arch, Gracechurch Street_’; and so, I think, had the copy sold at Mr. Dew Smith’s sale, about four years ago. The date, of course, remains the same, 1798, and all else remains the same. The British Museum copy--it was Southey’s copy--has the Bristol title-page, and the Museum may possibly acquire a copy with Mr. Arch’s when opportunity occurs. In the only copy of the First Edition which they have at present, the words are, ‘_Bristol, printed by Biggs and Cottle, for T. N. Longman, Paternoster Row, London_.’ Thus the First Edition of five hundred was divided--say two hundred for Mr. Cottle, say three hundred for Mr. Arch when the Bristolian found the sale was ‘slow’ and ‘heavy.’ Where have they all gone to? It was only eighty-four years ago. But where have all the copies of the big edition of the _Christmas Carol_ gone to? That was hardly forty years ago.

To recall a little the origin of the book--the circumstances under which Wordsworth and Coleridge planned and produced it. It was in the Nether Stowey and Alfoxden time, when the men were neighbours, three miles of green Somerset country dividing the home of Coleridge from the home of Wordsworth. I saw the place--that is, the neighbourhood, and Coleridge’s home--a few years since, much in that summer weather which tempted their own more prolonged wanderings, which followed them in that excursion to ‘Linton and the Valley of Stones,’ which was the first cause, Wordsworth says, of the issue of _Lyrical Ballads_. Plain living and high thinking they practised then, and from necessity as much as from choice. A yeoman of Somerset would hardly have lived at that time--and certainly he would not live to-day--in the cottage which was Coleridge’s. Straight from the country road you step to its door: in an instant you are in the small square parlour, with large kitchen-like fireplace, with one, or, I think, two small windows, and a window-seat from which, on days of evil weather, the stay-at-home commanded the prospect of the passing rustic as he walked abroad--perhaps of the occasional traveller on his way to the village inn. But generally, fair weather or foul, the spectacle was scanty--time was marked by shifting light and changes in the colour of the sky, or by the movements of beasts at milking-time, or at hours of rest and of labour. Never, I should say, was one hour merely frittered away by either the poet who lived or the poet who visited in that humble cottage. Never a call of ceremony: an interview that bears no fruit--a social necessity, the continual plague of cities. Never an hour that did not tell in some way, by active work, or by ‘wise passiveness,’ upon the mind that was to be cultivated and the character that was to be developed. Such a life, led not in actual isolation, but in narrowed and selected companionship, was perhaps about the best preparation men could make for work of the concentrated and the self-possessed power of the ‘Ancient Mariner,’ and of the serene profundity of the lines connected with Tintern Abbey. This was the place, and these were the conditions, for the quietude of life and thought felt as the greatest necessity of existence by Wordsworth, ‘a worshipper of Nature,’ ‘unwearied in that service.’

In 1797 came the first thought of the book. Wordsworth’s account of it may already be familiar. Prefixed in later editions to the poem of ‘We are Seven,’ which was printed for the first time in _Lyrical Ballads_, is a note which says: ‘In reference to this poem I will here mention one of the most noticeable facts in my own poetic history, and that of Mr. Coleridge.’ And then he tells the story: ‘In the autumn of 1797, he, my sister, and myself started from Alfoxden pretty late in the afternoon, with a view to visit Linton and the Valley of Stones near to it; and, as our united funds were very small, we agreed to defray the expense of the tour by writing a poem, to be sent to the _New Monthly Magazine_, set up by Phillips, the bookseller, and edited by Dr. Aikin. Accordingly, we set off, and proceeded along the Quantock Hills towards Watchet; and in the course of this walk was planned the poem of the “Ancient Mariner,” founded on a dream, as Coleridge said, of his friend Mr. Cruikshank.’ And then Wordsworth adds some details which are characteristic. ‘Much the greatest part of the story was Mr. Coleridge’s invention,’ he says; ‘but certain parts I suggested.’

Now, what were those parts? They were parts which yield to no other in importance, and which do very much to throw over the work the glamour of noble imagination, the sudden magical charm which was Wordsworth’s own, and with which he was accustomed to illumine the commoner themes of his habitual choice. It was Wordsworth’s suggestion that the Ancient Mariner should be represented as having killed the Albatross, and that ‘the tutelary spirits of these regions’--the regions of the South Sea--‘should take upon them to avenge the crime.’ ‘I also suggested the navigation of the ship by the dead men, but do not recollect that I had anything more to do with the scheme of the poem.’ A detail, however, he had to do with. ‘I furnished two or three lines at the beginning of the poem, in particular--

“And listened like a three years’ child: The Mariner had his will.”

These trifling contributions, all but one, which Mr. C. has with unnecessary scrupulosity recorded, slipped out of his mind, as they well might.’

If the contributions themselves were characteristic, so certainly is the manner of speaking of them. These men, and the men who were more or less their associates, believed much in each other. In no different spirit from Wordsworth’s did Coleridge himself write, in his introduction to _Poems on Various Subjects_, these words about Charles Lamb: ‘The effusions signed C. L. were written by Mr. Charles Lamb, of the India House; independently of the signature, their superior merit would have sufficiently distinguished them.’ And in no different spirit did Coleridge write of Wordsworth, years afterwards, in the _Biographia Literaria_, when their ways had parted. He could explain generously then ‘what Mr. Wordsworth really intended’ by the theories put forward in that famous preface which was too much for Coleridge.

But to return to the book--or rather, for the moment, to Wordsworth’s account of it. As the friends endeavoured to proceed conjointly in the construction of the ‘Ancient Mariner’--it was still that same evening in which the poem was conceived--their respective manners proved so widely different that it would have been, to Wordsworth’s mind, ‘quite presumptuous in me to do anything but separate from an undertaking upon which I could only have been a clog.’ ‘The “Ancient Mariner” grew and grew,’ he adds, ‘till it became too important for our first object, which was limited to our expectation of five pounds; and we began to think of a volume, which was to consist, as Mr. Coleridge has told the world, of poems chiefly on supernatural subjects taken from common life, but looked at, as much as might be, through an imaginative medium.’ That ‘imaginative medium’ was to distinguish these poems, we have been told elsewhere, from the rhymed stories of Crabbe. Poetic realism and prosaic realism, and what a world between them!