Wan Adam dalf and Eve span
Wo was thanne a gentilman?
is made to listen to the poet-dreamer’s prophecy of the days of bourgeois rule and the jerry builder.
If we take into account the perfect truth and beauty of the literary form in which the story is presented, we do not believe that anything to surpass it could be found in historic fiction; indeed, we do not know that anything could be found to equal it. The difficulty of the imaginative writer who attempts, whether in prose or verse, to vivify the past seems to be increasing, as we have before said, every day with the growth of the scientific temper and the reverence of the sacredness of mere documents. The old-fashioned theory—the theory which obtained from Shakespeare’s time down to Scott’s and even down to Kingsley’s—that the facts of history could be manipulated for artistic purposes with the same freedom that the artist’s own inventions can be handled, gave the artist power to produce vital and flexible work at the expense of the historic conscience—a power which is being curtailed day by day. The instinct for vivifying by imaginative treatment the records of the past is too universal and too deeply inwoven in the very texture of the human mind to be other than a true and healthy instinct. But so oppressive has become the tyranny of documents, so fettered by what a humourist has called “factology” have become the wings of the romancer’s imagination, that
one wonders at his courage in dealing with historic subjects at all.
A bold writer would he be who in the present day should make Shakespeare figure among the Kenilworth festivities as a famous player (after the manner of Scott), or who should (after the manner of Kingsley) give Elizabeth credit for Winter’s device of using the fire-ships before Calais. Even the poet—he who, dealing as he does with essential and elemental qualities only, is not so hampered as the proseman in these matters—is beginning also to feel the tyranny of documents, as we see notably in Swinburne’s ‘Bothwell,’ which consists very largely of documents transfigured into splendid verse. But more than even this: the mere literary form has now to be as true to the time depicted as circumstances will allow. If Scott’s romances have a fault it is that, as he had no command over, and perhaps but little sympathy with, the beautiful old English of which Morris is such a master, his stories lack one important element of dramatic illusion. But it is in the literary form of his story that Morris is especially successful. Where time has dealt most cruelly with our beloved language is in robbing it of that beautiful cadence which fell from our forefathers’ lips as sweetly and as unconsciously as melody falls from the throat of the mavis. One of the many advantages that Morris has reaped from his peculiar line of study is that he can
write like this—he, and he alone among living men:—
“‘Surely thou goest to thy death.’ He smiled very sweetly, yet proudly, as he said: ‘Yea, the road is long, but the end cometh at last. Friend, many a day have I been dying; for my sister, with whom I have played and been merry in the autumntide about the edges of the stubble-fields; and we gathered the nuts and bramble-berries there, and started thence the missel-thrush, and wondered at his voice and thought him big; and the sparrow-hawk wheeled and turned over the hedges, and the weasel ran across the path, and the sound of the sheep-bells came to us from the downs as we sat happy on the grass; and she is dead and gone from the earth, for she pined from famine after the years of the great sickness; and my brother was slain in the French wars, and none thanked him for dying save he that stripped him of his gear; and my unwedded wife with whom I dwelt in love after I had taken the tonsure, and all men said she was good and fair, and true she was and lovely; she also is dead and gone from the earth; and why should I abide save for the deeds of the flesh which must be done? Truly, friend, this is but an old tale that men must die; and I will tell thee another, to wit, that they live: and I live now and shall live. Tell me then what shall befall.”
Note the music of the cadence here—a music that plays about the heart more sweetly than any verse, save the very highest. And here we touch upon an extremely interesting subject.
Always in reading a prose story by a writer whose energies have been exercised in other departments of letters there is for the critic a special interest. If this exercise has been in fields outside imaginative literature—in those fields of philosophical speculation where a logical method and a scientific modulation of sentences are required—the novelist, instead of presenting us with those concrete pictures of human life demanded in all imaginative art, is apt to give us disquisitions “about and about” human life. Forgetting that it is not the function of any art to prove, he is apt to concern himself deeply in showing why his actors did and said this or that—apt to busy himself about proving his story either by subtle analyses or else by purely scientific generalizations, instead of attending to the true method of convincement that belongs to his art—the convincement that is effected by actual pictorial and dramatic illustration of how his actors really did the things and said the things vouched for by his own imagination. That the quest of a scientific, or supposed scientific, basis for a novelist’s imaginative structure is fatal to true art is seen not only in George Eliot and the accomplished author of ‘Elsie Venner,’ but also in writers of another kind—writers whose hands cannot possibly have been stiffened by their knowledge of science.
Among the many instances that occur to us