As ‘Aylwin’ was begun in metre, it would be very interesting to know on what lines the metre was constructed. Readers of ‘Aylwin’ have been struck with the music of the opening sentences, which are given as an extract from Philip Aylwin’s book, ‘The Veiled Queen’:—
“Those who in childhood have had solitary communings with the sea know the sea’s prophecy. They know that there is a deeper sympathy between the sea and the soul of man than other people dream of. They know that the water seems nearer akin than the land to the spiritual world, inasmuch as it is one and indivisible, and has motion, and answers to the mysterious call of the winds, and is the writing tablet of the moon and stars. When a child who, born beside the sea, and beloved by the sea, feels suddenly, as he gazes upon it, a dim sense of pity and warning; when there comes, or seems to come, a shadow across the waves, with never a cloud in the sky to cast it; when there comes a shuddering as of wings that move in dread or ire, then such a child feels as if the bloodhounds of calamity are let loose upon him or upon those he loves; he feels that the sea has told him all it dares tell or can. And, in other moods of fate, when beneath a cloudy sky the myriad dimples of the sea begin to sparkle as though the sun were shining bright upon them, such a child feels, as he gazes at it, that the sea is telling him of some great joy near at hand, or, at least, not far off.”
Many a reader will echo the words of a writer in ‘Notes and Queries,’ who says that this passage has haunted him since first he read it: I know it haunted me after I read it. But I wonder how many critics have read this passage in connection with Mr. Watts-Dunton’s metrical studies which have been carried on in the ‘Athenæum’ during more than a quarter of a century. They are closely connected with what he has said upon Bible rhythm in his article upon the Psalms, which I have already quoted, and in many other essays. Mr. Watts-Dunton, acknowledged to be a great authority on metrical subjects, has for years been declaring that we are on the verge of a new kind of metrical art altogether—a metrical art in which the emotions govern the metrical undulations. And I take the above passage and the following to be examples of what the movement in ‘Aylwin’ would have been if he had not abandoned the project of writing the story in metre:—
“Then quoth the Ka’dee, laughing until his grinders appeared: ‘Rather, by Allah, would I take all the punishment thou dreadest, thou most false donkey-driver of the Ruby Hills, than believe this story of thine—this mad, mad story, that she with whom thou wast seen was not the living wife of Hasan here (as these four legal witnesses have sworn), but thine own dead spouse, Alawiyah, refashioned for thee by the Angel of Memory out of thine own sorrow and unquenchable fountain of tears.’
Quoth Ja’afar, bowing low his head: ‘Bold is the donkey-driver, O Ka’dee! and bold the Ka’dee who dares say what he will believe, what disbelieve—not knowing in any wise the mind of Allah—not knowing in any wise his own heart and what it shall some day suffer.’”
Break these passages up into irregular lines, and you get a new metre of a very emotional kind, governed as to length by the sense pause. Mr. Watts-Dunton has been arguing for many years that English verse is, as Coleridge long ago pointed out, properly governed by the number of accents and not by the number of syllables in a line, and that this accentual system is governed, or should be governed, by emotion. It is a singular thing, by the bye, that writer after writer of late has been arguing over and over again Mr. Watts-Dunton’s arguments, and seems to be saying a new thing by using the word ‘stress’ for ‘accent.’ ‘Stress’ may or may not be a better word than ‘accent,’ the word used by Coleridge, and after him by Mr. Watts-Dunton, but the idea conveyed is one and the same. I, for my part, believe that rare as new ideas may be in creative work, they are still rarer in criticism.
Chapter XXI
THE METHODS OF PROSE FICTION
And now a word upon the imaginative power of ‘Aylwin.’ Very much has been written both in England and on the Continent concerning the source of the peculiar kind of ‘imaginative vividness’ shown in the story. The rushing narrative, as has been said, ‘is so fused in its molten stream that it seems one sentence, and it carries the reader irresistibly along through pictures of beauty and mystery till he becomes breathless.’ The truth is, however, that the mere method of the evolution of the story has a great deal more to do with this than is at first apparent. Upon this artistic method very little has been written save what I myself said when it first appeared. If the unequalled grip of the story upon the reader had been secured by methods as primitive, as unconscious as those of ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Wuthering Heights,’ I should estimate the pure, unadulterated imaginative force at work even more highly than I now do. But, as a critic, I must always inquire whether or not a writer’s imaginative vision is strengthened by constructive power. I must take into account the aid that the imagination of the writer has received from his mere self-conscious artistic skill. Now it is not to praise ‘Aylwin,’ but, I fear, to disparage it in a certain sense to say that the power of the scenes owes much to the mere artistic method, amounting at times to subtlety. I have heard the greatest of living poets mention ‘Tom Jones,’ ‘Waverley,’ and ‘Aylwin’ as three great novels whose reception by the outside public has been endorsed by criticism. One of the signs of Scott’s unique genius was the way in which he invented and carried to perfection the method of moving towards the dénouement by dialogue as much as by narrative. This gave a source of new brilliance to prose fiction, and it was certainly one of the most effective causes of the enormous success of ‘Waverley.’ This masterpiece opens, it will be remembered, in distinct imitation of the method of Fielding, but soon broke into the new dramatic method with which Scott’s name is associated. But in ‘Waverley’ Scott had not yet begun to use the dramatic method so freely as to sacrifice the very different qualities imported into the novel by Fielding, whose method was epic rather than dramatic. I think Mr. Watts-Dunton has himself somewhere commented upon this, and said that Scott carried the dramatic method quite as far as it could go without making the story suffer from that kind of stageyness and artificial brightness which is fatal to the novel. Scott’s disciple, Dumas, a more brilliant writer of dialogue than Scott himself, but not so true a one, carried the dramatic method too far and opened the way to mimics, who carried it further still. In ‘Aylwin,’ the blending of the two methods, the epic and the dramatic, is so skilfully done as to draw all the advantages that can be drawn from both; and this skill must be an enormous aid to the imaginative vision—an aid which Charlotte and Emily Brontë had to dispense with: but it is in the arrangement of the material on self-conscious constructive principles that I am chiefly thinking when I compare the imaginative vision in ‘Aylwin’ with that in ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Wuthering Heights.’ On the whole, no one seems to have studied ‘Aylwin’ from all points of view with so much insight as Madame Galimberti, unless it be M. Jacottet in ‘La Semaine Littéraire.’ Mr. Watts-Dunton in one of his essays has himself remarked that nine-tenths of the interest of any dramatic situation are lost if before approaching it the reader has not been made to feel an interest in the characters, as Fielding makes us feel an interest in Tom and Sophia long before they utter a word—indeed, long before they are introduced at all. This is true, no doubt, and the contemporary method of beginning a story like the opening of a play with long dialogues between characters that are strangers to the reader, is one among the many signs that, so far as securing illusion goes, there is a real retrogression in fictive art. A play, of course, must open in this way, but in an acted play the characters come bodily before the audience as real flesh and blood. They come surrounded by real accessories. They win our sympathy or else our dislike as soon as we see them and hear them speak. The dramatic scenes between Jane Eyre and Rochester would miss half their effect were it not for the picture of Jane as a child. In ‘Aylwin,’ by the time that there is any introduction of dramatic dialogue the atmosphere of the story has enveloped us: we have become so deeply in love with the two children that the most commonplace words from their lips would have seemed charged with beauty. This kind of perfection of the novelist’s art, in these days when stories are written to pass through magazines and newspapers, seemed impossible till ‘Aylwin’ appeared. It is curious to speculate as to what would have been the success of the opening chapters of ‘Aylwin’ if an instalment of the story had first made its appearance in a magazine.
One of the most remarkable features of ‘Aylwin’ is that in spite of the strength and originality of the mere story and in spite of the fact that the book is fundamentally the expression of a creed, the character painting does not in the least suffer from these facts. Striking and new as the story is, there is nothing mechanical about the structure. The characters are not, to use a well known phrase of the author’s, ‘plot-ridden’ in the least degree, as are the characters of the great masters of the plot-novel, Lytton, Charles Reade, and Wilkie Collins, to mention only those who are no longer with us. Perhaps in order to show what I mean I ought to go a little into detail here. In ‘Man and Wife,’ for instance, Collins, with his eye only upon his plot, makes the heroine, a lady whose delicacy of mind and nobility of character are continually dwelt upon, not only by the author but by a sagacious man of the world like Sir Peter, who afterwards marries her, succumb to the animal advances of a brute like Geoffrey. Many instances of the same sacrifice of everything to plot occur in most of Collins’s other stories, and as to the ‘long arm of coincidence’ he not only avails himself of that arm whenever it is convenient to do so, but he positively revels in his slavery to it. In ‘Armadale,’ for instance, besides scores of monstrous improbabilities, such as the ship ‘La Grace de Dieu’ coming to Scotland expressly that Allan Armadale should board her and have a dream upon her, and such as Midwinter’s being by accident brought into touch with Allan in a remote village in Devonshire when he was upon the eve of death, we find coincidences which are not of the smallest use, introduced simply because the author loves coincidences—such as that of making a family connection of Armadale’s rescue Miss Gwilt from drowning and get drowned himself, and thus bring about the devolution of the property upon Allan Armadale—an entirely superfluous coincidence, for the working power of this incident could have been secured in countless other ways. ‘No Name’ bristles with coincidences, such as that most impudent one where the heroine is at the point of death by destitution, and the one man who loves her and who had just returned to England passes down the obscure and squalid street he had never seen before at the very moment when she is sinking. It is the same with Bulwer Lytton’s novels. In ‘Night and Morning,’ for instance, people are tossed against each other in London, the country, or Paris at every moment whensoever the story demands it. As to Gawtry, one of the few really original villains in modern fiction, as soon as the story opens we expect him to turn up every moment like a jack in-the-box; we expect him to meet the hero in the most unlikely places, and to meet every other character in the same way. Let his presence be required, and we know that he will certainly turn up to put things right. But in ‘Aylwin,’ which has been well called by a French critic, ‘a novel without a villain,’ where sinister circumstance takes the place of the villain, there is not a single improbable coincidence; everything flows from a few simple causes, such as the effect upon an English patrician of love baffled by all kinds of fantastic antagonisms, the influence of the doctrines of the dead father upon the minds of several individuals, and the influence of the impact of the characters upon each other. Another thing to note is that in spite of the strange, new scenes in which the characters move, they all display that ‘softness of touch’ upon which the author has himself written so eloquently in one of his articles in the ‘Athenæum.’ I must find room to quote his words on this interesting subject:—
“The secret of the character-drawing of the great masters seems to be this: while moulding the character from broad general elements, from universal types of humanity, they are able to delude the reader’s imagination into mistaking the picture for real portraiture, and this they achieve by making the portrait seem to be drawn from particular and peculiar traits instead of from generalities, and especially by hiding away all purposes—æsthetic, ethic, or political.
One great virtue of the great masters is their winsome softness of touch in character drawing. We are not fond of comparing literary work with pictorial art, but between the work of the novelist and the work of the portrait painter there does seem a true analogy as regards the hardness and softness of touch in the drawing of characters. In landscape painting that hardness which the general public love is a fault; but in portrait painting so important is it to avoid hardness that unless the picture seems to have been blown upon the canvas, as in the best work of Gainsborough, rather than to have been laid upon it by the brush, the painter has not achieved a perfect success. In the imaginative literature of England the two great masters of this softness of touch in portraiture are Addison and Sterne. Three or four hardly-drawn lines in Sir Roger or the two Shandys, or Corporal Trim, would have ruined the portraits so completely that they would never have come down to us. Close upon Addison comes Scott, in whose vast gallery almost every portrait is painted with a Gainsborough softness. Scarcely one is limned with those hard lines which are too often apt to mar the glorious work of Dickens. After Scott comes Thackeray or Fielding, unless it be Mrs. Gaskell. We are not in this article dealing with, or even alluding to, contemporary writers, or we might easily say what novelists follow Mrs. Gaskell.”