III
Now, just accepting this as a historical fact, without question for the moment of its Tightness or wrongness, you will easily see how impatient it made that generation with many things to which their fathers had been prone. Let me mention two or three.
(1) To begin with, it made them abhor those detailed descriptions of hero, heroine and others—those page-long introductions to which the great Sir Walter was prone: the philosophical reason for this being that no art should attempt that which can be far better done by another. “Her hair, of a raven gloss, concealed its luxuriance within the confines of a simple ribbon. Loosened, it fell below her waist. The upper part of her face, with its purely-arched eyebrows, suggested a Cleopatra. A lover of the antique might have cavilled, perchance, at the slight uptilt of the nose, which indeed, etc.: or again at the pout of the pretty, provocative mouth reminiscent”—well, of some picture of Greuze rather than of some statue or other with which the reader was presumably acquainted. “But as she burst upon Harold’s vision in a gown of some simple soft white clinging material—” and so on. It seemed that a drawing could do that sort of thing better and, for the reader, in one-twentieth part of the time.
(2) Secondly, our theory cut out long descriptions of “natural scenery.” Hardy’s preliminary Chapter of Egdon Heath would, of course, be judged for what it was—a deliberate and magnificent setting of slow, perdurable nature as background to the transitory life of man, the stern breast that has suckled so many fretful children and seen them pass. And again, as in The Woodlanders all the sap of English woodland—all its spirits of Dryad and Hamadryad—all its aeolian murmurs in the upper boughs—might be evoked to dignify a most simple country story. But the sort of romanticism that used to enjoy itself in the Alps, amid thunderstorms, the solitary communings of the tortured breast with the grander aspects of peak and ravine, of the atrabilious or merely bilious, with the avalanche—all this [shall I call it the Obermann nonsense?] was wiped out even as the terrors of that gentleman who making an early ascent of the tall but inconsiderable slope of Glaramara, sat down and demanded to be “let blood.” In short, lengthy descriptions of scenery passed out of vogue along with lengthy descriptions of feminine charms.
(3) Thirdly—and to be very brief about this—the names of invented characters came to be real, or at least plausible names. Such names as those with which Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, spoilt the verisimilitude of their novels—“Lord Frederick Verisopht,” “Mr. Quiverful” or the list of Becky’s guests in Vanity Fair—“the Duchess Dowager of Stilton, Duc de la Gruyère, Marchioness of Cheshire, Marchese Allessandro Strachino, Comte de Brie, Baron Schapsugar and Chevalier Tosti”—all in the slang of that day “quite the cheese.” You may say what you like against the old realistic novel, but anyhow it earned a living in its day if only by cutting out this detestable boil inherited from Ben Jonson, with his type names of Brain-worm, Well-bred, La Foule, Sir Epicure Mammon, and so on....
(4) But above all this passion of one’s youth for purely objective treatment of narrative fell as a denunciatory curse upon Thackeray’s incurable habit of preaching. And here, if we were right (which I shall not here contend), we blithely damned ourselves to the permanent unpopularity we are beginning to enjoy. Take warning: for if there be one vice this nation has in its bones it is a fondness for preaching. An inscrutable addiction, an unholy habit! I observe even in railway trains that nine of our nation will swallow a column of propaganda, unashamed in its cookery, for one that will relish a clean news-report. And yet, Gentlemen, the mind that can separate clean news from propaganda and suggestion is the only mind we should seek to send forth from this city of ours, as the only mind that shall save our state.
This awful propensity to preaching!—and but yesterday an attempt to force upon all Professors no less than forty preachments a year—a gluttony of misemployment in a land of unemployed!
Let me illustrate. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a story, Treasure Island, over which a number of those young men of whom I have been talking waxed enthusiastic, just because it told a plain tale neatly as (they held) a tale should be told. But Treasure Island cut (as they say) very little ice with the General Public. What fetched the General Public and made Stevenson popular was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and that because the General Public read into it a religious lesson which the author had never intended. Thereafter he, having ever in him a strain, as W. E. Henley noted, a
something of the Shorter Catechist,
gave way to preachment—to the composition of collects and Christmas sermons and (as apparently any of us can do—it is a career open to all the talents) thereby attracted audiences. But where had gone the economy of description, the directness of narrative, the sudden incisiveness of a speaking voice? Take this, for example, of the Hispaniola’s working her way in to anchorage:
All the way in, Long John stood by the steersman and conned the ship. He knew the passage like the palm of his hand; and though the man in the chains got everywhere more water than was down in the chart, John never hesitated once.
“There’s a strong scour with the ebb,” he said, “and this here passage has been dug out, in a manner of speaking, with a spade.”
We brought up just where the anchor was in the chart, about a third of a mile from either shore, the mainland on one side, and Skeleton Island on the other. The bottom was clean sand. The plunge of our anchor sent up clouds of birds wheeling and crying over the woods; but in less than a minute they were down again, and all was once more silent.
The place was entirely land-locked, buried in woods, the trees coming right down to a high-water mark, the shores mostly flat, and the hill-tops standing round at a distance in a sort of amphitheatre, one here, one there. Two little rivers, or rather, two swamps, emptied out into this pond, as you might call it; and the foliage round that part of the shore had a kind of poisonous brightness. From the ship we could see nothing of the house or stockade, for they were quite buried among trees; and if it had not been for the chart on the companion, we might have been the first that had ever anchored there since the island arose out of the seas.
There was not a breath of air moving, nor a sound but that of the surf booming half a mile away along the beaches and against the rocks outside. A peculiar stagnant smell hung over the anchorage—a smell of sodden leaves and rotting tree-trunks. I observed the doctor sniffing and sniffing like some one tasting a bad egg.
“I don’t know about treasure,” he said, “but I’ll stake my wig there’s fever here.”
You will remark, first, how the mere description moves with the story, following the crew in and just noting the landscape as they saw it after the long sea-passage: quite in the fashion of Homer who (as Lessing observed) does not in the Iliad weary with any long description of the finished shield of Achilles but coaxes us up to the forge of Hephaestus, so that like the children at the open door of Longfellow’s village smithy we see the work shaping under the workman’s hammer, and—forgive the trite old verse—
love to see the flaming forge
And hear the bellows roar,
And catch the burning sparks that fly
Like chaff from a threshing-floor:
quite in the fashion of the Odyssey, too, where the Wanderers, and we with them, make landfall
on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn
and beach the black ship and disembark and wonder at cliff, glade and waterfall, we wondering (that is) through their eyes.
You will remark, secondly, in the casual passage I quoted, how the very few words spoken—those by John Silver, the villain, those by the Doctor who is the true punctum indifferens, the normal sane man of the story as truly as is Horatio in Hamlet—bite in, as by sharp acid, the impression of the story—the meaning of it, at that moment, to the mutineer and to the simply honest man.
Am I comparing small things with great? Why, Gentlemen, of course I am, and purposely; to convince you, if I can, that in small as in great—the same laws rule true narrative art.