Shelburne Essays, Third Series

by Paul Elmer More

What to the reader is merely a pleasant and momentary illusion, or a salutary excitation from without, is in the creative poet a partial dissolution of his own personality. Shakespeare was not dealing in empty words when he likened the poet to the lover and the lunatic as being of imagination all compact; nor was Plato speaking mere metaphor when he said that "the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses and the mind is no longer in him." In the hour of inspiration some darkened window is opened on the horizon to eyes that are ordinarily confined within the four walls of his meagre self, a door is thrown open to the heaven-sweeping gales, he hears for a brief while the voice of the Over-soul speaking a language that with all his toil he can barely render into human speech;—and when at last the door is closed, the vision gone, and the voice hushed, he sits in the darkened chamber of his own person, silent and forlorn.

I would not presume to describe absolutely the inner state of the poet when life appears to him in its ideal form, but the means by which he conveys his illusion to the reader is quite clear. The rhythm of his verse produces on the mind something of the stimulating effect of music and this effect is enhanced by the use of language and metaphor lifted out of the common mould. Prose, however, has no such resources to impose on the fancy a creation of its own, in which the individual will is raised above itself. On the contrary, the office of the novel—and this we see more clearly as fiction grows regularly more realistic—is to represent life as controlled by environment and to portray human beings as the servants of the flesh. This, I take it, was the meaning of Goethe in his definition of the genres: "In the novel sentiments and events chiefly are exhibited, in the drama characters and deeds." The procedure of the novel must be, so to speak, a passive one. It depicts man as a creature of circumstance, and its only method of escape is so to encompass the individual in circumstance as to lend to his separate life something of the pomp of universality. It effects its purpose by breadth rather than by exaltation. Its truest aim is not to represent the actions of a single man as noteworthy in themselves, but to represent the life of a people or a phase of society; in the great sweep of human activity something of the same largeness and freedom is produced as in the poetic idealisation of the individual will in the drama. Thus it happens that the artistic validity of a novel depends first of all on the power of the author to portray broadly and veraciously some aspect of this wider existence.

Balzac, in some respects the master novelist, was clearly conscious of this aim of his art; and his Comédie Humaine is a supreme effort to grasp the whole range of French society. Nor would it be difficult in the case of the greater English novelists to show that unwittingly—an Englishman rarely if ever has the same knowledge of his art as a Frenchman—they obeyed the same law. We admire Fielding and Smollett not so much for their individual characterisations as for the joy we feel in escaping our conventional timidity in the old-time tumultuous country life of England, with all its rude strength and even its vulgarity. By a natural contrast we read Jane Austen for her picture of rural security and stability, and are glad to forget the vexations and uncertainties of life's warfare in that gentle round of society, where greed and passion are reduced to petty foibles, and where the errors of mankind only furnish material for malicious but innocent satire. With Thackeray we put on the veneer of artificial society which was the true idealism inherited by him from the eighteenth century; and we move more freely amidst that gai monde because there runs through the story of it such a biting satire of worldliness and snobbishness as flatters us with the feeling of our own superiority. In Dickens we are carried into the very opposite field of life, and for a while we move with those who are the creatures of grotesque whims and emotions: caricatures we call his people, but deep in our hearts we know that each of us longs at times to be as humanity is in Dickens's world, the perfect and unreflecting creature of his dearest whim—for this too is liberty. Thus it is that the interest of the novel depends as much, or almost as much, on the intrinsic value of the national life or phase of society reproduced as on the skill of the writer. The prose author is in this respect far less a free agent than the poet and far more the subject of his environment; for he deals less with the unchanging laws of character and more with what he perceives outwardly about him. It is this fact which leads many readers to prefer the English novelists to the French, although the latter are unquestionably the greater masters of their craft.

Now the peculiar good fortune of Scott in this matter was most strongly brought home to me in reading the narrative work of Mr. Lang. Fine and entertaining as are Scott's more professedly historical novels, such as Ivanhoe and Quentin Durward, I do not believe they could ever have resisted the invasion of time were they not bolstered up by the stories that deal more directly with the realities of Scotch life. There is, to be sure, in the foreign tales a wonderfully pure vein of romance; but romantic writing in prose cannot endure unless firmly grounded in realism, or unless, like Hawthorne's work, it is surcharged with spiritual meanings. Not having the power possessed by verse to convey illusion, it lacks also the vitality of verse. Younger readers may take naturally to Ivanhoe or The Talisman, because very little is required to evoke illusion with them. More mature readers turn oftenest to Guy Mannering and those tales in which the romance is the realism of Scotch life, finding here a fulness of interest that is more than a compensation for the frequent slovenliness of Scott's language and for the haphazard construction of his plots.

These negligences of the indifferent craftsman might, perhaps, need no such compensation, for we have grown hardened at last to slovenliness in fiction. But there are other limitations to Scott's powers that show more clearly how much of his fame rests on the substratum of national life on which he builds. An infinite variety of characters, from kings in the council hall down to strolling half-witted gaberlunzies, move through the pages of his novels; but, and the fact is notorious, the great Scotchman was little better at painting the purple light of young desire than was our own Cooper. There is something like love-making in Rob Roy, and Di Vernon has been signalised by Mr. Saintsbury as one of his five chosen heroines; but in general the scenes that form the ecstasy of most romance are dead and perfunctory in Scott. And this is the more remarkable since we know that he himself was a lover—and a disappointed lover, which is vastly more to the point in art, as all the world knows. But in fact this inability to portray the softer emotions is not an isolated phenomenon in Scott; he skims very lightly over most of the deeper passions of the heart, seeming to avoid them except in so far as they express themselves in action. His novels contain no adequate picture of remorse or hatred, love or jealousy; neither do they contain any such psychological analysis of the emotions as has made the fame of subsequent writers. But there is an infinite variety of characters in action, and a perfect understanding of that form of the imagination which displays itself in whimsicalities corresponding to the "originals" or "humourists" of the Elizabethan comedy.

The numberless quotations from "old plays" at the head of Scott's chapters are not without significance. At times he approaches closer to Shakespeare than any other writer, whether of prose or verse. In one scene at least in The Bride of Lammermoor, where he describes the "singular and gloomy delight" of the three old cummers about the body of their contemporary, he lets us know that he has in mind the meeting of the witches in Macbeth, and I think on the whole he excels the dramatist in his own field. After all is said, the Shakespearian witch-scene is an arbitrary exercise of the fancy, which fails to carry with it a complete sense of reality: the illusion is not fully maintained. The dialogue in the novelist, on the contrary, is instinct with thrilling suggestiveness, for the very reason that it is based on the groundwork of national character. The superstitious awe is here simple realism, from the beginning of the scene down to the warning cry of the paralytic hag from the cottage:

"He's a frank man, and a free-handed man, the Master," said Annie Winnie, "and a comely personage—broad in the shouthers, and narrow around the lunyies. He wad mak a bonny corpse; I wad like to hae the streiking and winding o' him."

"It is written on his brow, Annie Winnie," returned the octogenarian, her companion, "that hand of woman, or of man either, will never straught him; dead-deal will never be laid on his back, make you your market of that, for I hae it frae a sure hand."

"Will it be his lot to die on the battle-ground then, Ailsie Gourlay? Will he die by the sword or the ball, as his forbears hae dune before him, mony ane o'them?"

"Ask nae mair questions about it—he'll no be graced sae far," replied the sage.