we need point to only one, that of a story recently published by one of our most successful living novelists, in which the writer endeavours to prove that animal magnetism is the acting cause of spiritualistic manifestations so called. Setting out to show that a medium is nothing more than a powerful mesmerist, to whose manipulations all but two in a certain household are unconsciously succumbing, he soon ignores for plot purposes the nature of the dramatic situation by making those very two sceptics at a séance hear the same music, see the same spiritually conveyed newspaper, as the others hear and see. That the writer should mistake, as he seems to do, the merely directive force of magnetism for a motive force does not concern the literary critic. But when two sceptics, who are to expose a charlatan’s tricks by watching how the believers are succumbing to mesmeric hallucinations, are found succumbing to the same hallucinations themselves—succumbing because the story-teller needs them as witnesses of the phenomena—then the literary critic grows pensive, for he sees what havoc the scientific method will work in the flower-garden of art.
On the other hand, should the story-teller be a poet—one who, like the writer of ‘John Ball,’ has been accustomed to write under the conditions of a form of literary art where the diction is always and necessarily concrete,
figurative, and quintessential, and where the movement is metrical—his danger lies in a very different direction. The critic’s interest then lies in watching how the poet will comport himself in another field of imaginative literature—a field where no such conditions as these exist—a field where quintessential and concrete diction, though meritorious, may yet be carried too far, and where those regular and expected bars of the metricist which are the first requisites of verse are not only without function, but are in the way—are fatal, indeed, to that kind of convincement which, and which alone, is the proper quest of prose art. No doubt it is true, as we have before said, that literature being nothing but the reflex of the life of man, or else of the life of nature, the final quest of every form of literature is that special kind of convincement which is inherently suitable to the special form. For the analogy between nature and true art is not a fanciful one, and the relation of function to organism is the same in both. But what is the difference between the convincement achieved by poetic and the convincement achieved by prose art? Is it that the convincement of him who works in poetic forms is, though not necessarily, yet most perfectly achieved by a faithful record of the emotion aroused in his own soul by the impact upon his senses of the external world, while the convincement of the proseman is, though not
necessarily, yet most perfectly achieved by a faithful record and picture of the external world itself?
All such generalizations as this are, no doubt, to be taken with many and great qualifications; but, roughly speaking, would not this seem to be the fundamental difference between that kind of imaginative literature which expresses itself in metrical forms and that kind of imaginative literature in which metrical form is replaced by other qualities and other functions? Not but that these two methods may meet in the same work, not but that they may meet and strengthen each other, as we have before said when glancing at the interesting question, How much, or how little, of realism can poetry capture from the world of prose and weave into her magic woof, and how much of music can prose steal from poetry? But in order to do all that can be done in the way of enriching poetry with prose material without missing the convincement of poetic art, the poet must be Homer himself; in order to do all that can be done in the way of vivifying prose fiction with poetic fire without missing the convincement of prose art, the story-teller must be Charlotte Brontë or Emily, her sister, in whose work we find for once the quintessential strength and the concrete and figurative diction of the poet—indeed, all the poetical requisites save metre alone. Had ‘Jane Eyre,’ ‘Villette,’ and ‘Wuthering
Heights’ existed in Coleridge’s time he would, we may be sure, have taken these three prose poems as illustrations of the truth of his axiom that the true antithesis of poetry is not prose, but science.
What the prose poet has to avoid is metrical movement on the one side and scientific modulation of sentences on the other. And perhaps in no case can it be achieved save in the autobiographic form of fiction, where and where alone the work is so subjective that it may bear even the poetic glow of ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Villette.’ What makes us think this to be so is the fact that in ‘Shirley’—a story written in the epic method—the only passages of the poetic kind which really convince are those uttered by the characters in their own persons. And as to ‘Wuthering Heights,’ a story which could not, of course, be told in one autobiography, the method of telling it by means of a group of autobiographies, though clumsy enough from the constructor’s point, was yet just as effective as a more artistic method. And it was true instinct of genius that led Emily Brontë to adopt the autobiographic method even under these heavy conditions.
Still the general truth remains that the primary function of the poet is to tell his story steeped in his own emotion, while the primary function of the prose fictionist is to tell his story in an objective way. Hence it
is that in a general way the difficulty of the poet who turns to prose fiction lies, like that of philosophical or scientific writers, in suppressing certain intellectual functions which he has been in the habit of exercising. And the case of Scott, which at first sight might seem to show against this theory, may be adduced in support of it. For Scott’s versified diction, though concrete, is never more quintessential than that of prose; and his method being always objective rather than subjective, when he turned to prose fiction he seemed at once to be writing with his right hand where formerly he had been writing with his left.