A Novelist on Novels Part 6

In such scenes as these contests with bears, wolves, lions, crocodiles, the Baron is the chief actor, plays the part of comedian, but he is big enough to shed round himself a zone of comic light. The giant makes comedy as he walks; notably in St Petersburg, he runs from a mad dog, discarding his fur coat in his hurry, and that, so far as he is concerned, is the end of the adventure. But a comic fate pursues Munchausen, for his fur coat, bitten by the mad dog, develops hydrophobia, leaps at and destroys companion clothing, until its master arrives in time to see it 'falling upon a fine full-dress suit which _he_ shook and tossed in an unmerciful manner.' That is an example of the comic zone in which Munchausen revolves; round him the inanimate breathes, is animated by his own life-l.u.s.t until the 'it' of things vanishes into the magic 'he.'

It is a pity, from the purely comic point of view, that the Baron should so uniformly dominate circ.u.mstances. A victorious hero is seldom so mirth-making as is the ridiculous and ridiculed Tartarin; we find relief when Munchausen fails to throw a piece of ordnance across the Dardanelles, and when he shatters his chariot against the rock he thus decapitates and makes into Table Mountain. His failure, injurious to his gigantic quality, is essential to his comic quality, for the reader often cries out, in presence of his flaming victories: Accursed sun!

Will you never set? But the sun of Munchausen will never set. For a moment it may be obscured by a pa.s.sing cloud, while its powerful rays rebelliously glow through the clot of mist and maintain the outline of the Baron's wicked little eye, but set it cannot: is it not in its master's power to juggle with moons and arrest the steeds of Apollo?

DemiG.o.dly, the giant must see but not judge, for one cannot judge when one is so far away. Thus Munchausen has but few sneers for little mankind; he observes that the people of an island choose as governors a man and his wife who were 'plucking cuc.u.mbers on a tree' because they fell from the tree on the tyrant of the isle and destroyed him, but he does not seem to see anything singular in this method of government. Nor has he an express scoff for the College of Physicians because no deaths happened on earth while it was suspended in the air. The scoff is there, but it is not expressed by Munchausen; he takes the earth in his hand, remarks 'Odd machine, this,' and lays it down again. And it may be too much to say 'odd'; though Munchausen expresses astonishment from time to time it is not vacuous astonishment; it is reasonable, measured astonishment, that of a modern tourist in Baedekerland. Thus, in his view, politicians, rulers, pedagogues, apothecaries, explorers are not subjects for his sling: they are curiosities.

He stares at these curiosities with simple wonder. He does not see the world as a joke, but as an earnest and extraordinary thing. He is always ready to be mildly surprised and he is never sceptical; that is, he never doubts the possibility of the impossible when it happens to him: he gravely doubts it when it happens to anybody else. Thus it is clear that he does not think much of Mr Lemuel Gulliver, that his chief enemy is his old rival Baron de Tott. If he were not so polite Munchausen would call de Tott a plain liar; he refrains and merely outstrips the upstart, as a gentleman should do. Munchausen sees the world in terms of himself; he would have no faith in the marvellous escapes of von Trenck, Jack Sheppard, and Monte Cristo. 'I,' says Munchausen, and the rivals may withdraw. He does not even fear imitation, and if he were confronted with d.i.c.kens's story of the lunars in _Household Words_, or with his French imitator, M. de Crac, he would chivalrously say: 'Most creditable, but I....' Nothing in Munchausen is so colossal as his 'I.'

Like the Gauls he fears naught, save that the sky will fall upon his head, and I am not sure that he fears even that: the accident might enable him to make interesting notes on heaven.

There is, perhaps, unjustified levity in this surmise of mine, for Munchausen is a pious man. When, in Russia, he covers an old man with his cloak, a voice from heaven calls to him: 'You will be rewarded, my son, for this in time.' It must have been the voice of St Hubert, the patron to whom Munchausen readily paid his homage, for Munchausen simply believed in him, liked to think that 'some pa.s.sionate holy sportsman, or sporting abbot or bishop, may have shot, planted, and fixed the cross between the antlers of St Hubert's stag.' But his piety is personal; he believes that the voice is for him alone, that St Hubert is his own saint. Gigantic Munchausen shuts out his own view of the world. His shadow falls upon and obscures it. That is why he so continuously brags.

The most resolute horseman shrinks from a wild young horse, but Munchausen tames him in half an hour and makes him dance on the tea-table without breaking a single cup; the Grand Seignior discards his own envoy and employs him on State business at Cairo; he makes a cannon off a cannon-ball, 'having long studied the art of gunnery'; he does away (in his third edition) with the French persecutors of Marie Antoinette. He, always he, is the actor; he is not the chief actor, he is the sole actor, and the rest of the world is the audience.

So simply and singly does he believe in himself that his gigantic quality is a.s.sured. He disdains to imitate; when confined in the belly of the great fish he does not wait like Sindbad, or wait and pray like Jonah: Baron Munchausen dances a hornpipe. He is quite sure that he will escape from the fish: the fish is large, but not large enough to contain the spirit of a Munchausen; and he is sure that the story is true. There is nothing in any adventure to show that the Baron doubted its accuracy, and we must not conclude from his threat in Chapter VIII.: 'If any gentleman will say he doubts the truth of this story, I will fine him a gallon of brandy and make him drink it at one draught,' that he knew himself for a liar. As a man of the world he recognised that his were wonderful stories, and he expected to encounter unbelief, but he did not encounter it within himself. No, Munchausen accepted his own enormity, gravely believed that he 'made it a rule always to speak within compa.s.s.' If he winked at the world as he told his tales it was not because he did not believe in them; he winked because he was gay and, mischievously enough, liked to keep the world on the tenterhooks of scepticism and gullibility. He did not even truckle to his audience, try to be in any way consistent; thus, when entangled with the eagle he rides in the branches of a tree, he dares not jump for fear of being killed ... while he has previously fallen with impunity some five miles, on his descent from the moon, with such violence as to dig a hole nine fathoms deep.

No, this precursor of Bill Adams, who saved Gibraltar for General Elliott, simply believed. Like Falstaff, like Tartarin, he suffered from mirage; though some of his adventures are dreams, monstrous pictures of facts so small that we cannot imagine them, others are but the distortions of absolutely historic affairs. No doubt Munchausen saw a lion fight a crocodile: it needed no gigantic flight for him to believe that he cut off the lion's head while it was still alive, if he actually cut it off 'to make sure' when it was dead; and though he did not tie his horse to a snow-surrounded steeple, he may have tied him to a post and found, in the morning, that the snow had so thawed as to leave the horse on a taut bridle; a.s.suredly he did not kill seventy-three brace of wildfowl with one shot, but the killing of two brace was a feat n.o.ble enough to be magnified into the slaughter of a flight.

Munchausen lied, but he lied honestly, that is to himself before all men. For he was a gentleman, a gentleman of high lineage the like of whom rode and drove in numbers along the eighteenth century roads. His own career, or rather that of his historian, Raspe,[8] harmonises with his personal characteristics, reveals his Teutonic origin, and it matters little whether he was the German 'Munchausen' or the Dutch Westphalian 'Munnikhouson.' The first sentence of his first chapter tells of his beard; his family pride stares us everywhere in the face; Munchausen claims descent from the wife of Uriah (and he might have been innocent enough to accept Ananias as a forbear), and knows that _n.o.blesse oblige_, for, says he to the Lady Fragantia when receiving from her a plume: 'I swear ... that no savage, tyrant, or enemy upon the face of the earth shall despoil me of this favour, while one drop of the blood of the Munchausens doth circulate in my veins!' Quixotic Munchausen, it is well that you should, in later adventures, meet and somewhat humiliate the Spanish Don. For you are a gentleman of no English and cold-blooded pattern, even though you buy your field-gla.s.ses at Dollonds's and doubtless your clothes at the top of St James's Street. Too free, too unrestrained to be English you maintain an air of fashion, you worship at the shrine of any Dulcinea.

[Footnote 8: See Mr Thomas Seccombe's brilliant introduction to the Lawrence and Bullen edition, 1895.]

Munchausen has no use for women, save as objects for worship; they must not serve, or co-operate; for him they are inspiration, beautiful things before whom he bows, whom he compliments in fulsome wise; he is preoccupied by woman whenever he is not in the field; he has chivalrous oaths for others than the Lady Fragantia; he makes the horse mount the tea-table for the ladies' pleasure; he receives gracefully the proposals of Catherine of Russia; he is the favourite of the Grand Seignior's favourite; he is haunted by the Lady Fragantia, who was 'like a summer's morning, all blushing and full of dew.'

Polite and gallant as any cavalier, Munchausen carries in him the soul of a professor; he is minute, he kills no two score beasts, but exactly forty-one; every little thing counts for him, as if he were a student: Montgolfier and his balloon, architecture, and the amazing etymology for which 'Vide Otrckocsus de Orig-Hung.' A swordsman and a scholar he recalls those reiters who fled from kings into monasteries, there to labour as Benedictines. And he has Teutonic appet.i.tes. Indeed nothing is so Germanic as the Baron's perpetual concern with food: he remembers how good was the cherry-sauce made from the cherries that grew out of the stag's forehead; he gloats over a continent of cheese and a sea of wine; even on eagleback he finds bladders of gin and good roast-beef-fruit; bread-fruit, plum-pudding-fruit (hot), Cape wine, Candian sugar, frica.s.see of pistols, pistol-bullets, gunpowder sauce, all these figure in his memoirs. And if, sometimes, he is a little gross, as when he stops a leak in a ship by sitting upon it, which he can do because he is of Dutch extraction, he confirms completely the impression we have of him: a gallant gentleman, brave in the field, l.u.s.ty at the trencher, gay in the boudoir.

Good Munchausen, you strut large about the Kingdom of Loggerheads, debonair, tolerant, confident; you believe in yourself, because so large that you cannot overlook yourself; you believe in yourself because you tower and thus amaze humanity; and you believe in yourself because you are as enormously credulous as you would have us be. Thus, because you believe in yourself, you are: you need no Berkeley to demonstrate you.

The Esperanto of Art

It is established and accepted to-day that a painter may not like music, that a writer may yawn in a picture-gallery: though we proclaim that art is universal, it certainly is not universal for the universe. This should not surprise us who know that van Gogh wrote: 'To paint and to love women is incompatible'; van Gogh was right for himself, which does not mean that he was right for everybody, and I will not draw from his dictum the probably incorrect conclusion that 'To paint and to love literature is incompatible.' But van Gogh, who had not read Bergson, was indicating clearly enough that he knew he must ca.n.a.lise his powers, therefore exclude from his emotional purview all things which did not appertain directly to his own form of art.

Form of art! Those three words hold the difficulty of mutual understanding among artists. While sympathising with van Gogh in his xenophobia, I cannot accept that because certain artists did not appreciate certain forms of art, no artist can understand another whose form is alien to him. There is, there must be a link between the painter, the sculptor, the writer, the musician, the actor, between the poet in words and the one, to-day most common, who wishes to express himself in the deeds of his own life. For art is, we are a.s.sured thereof, all of one stuff. A symphony and a poem may be allotropic forms of the same matter: to use a common simile, there is red phosphorus and there is yellow, but both are phosphorus. Likewise there are different forms of art, but there is only one art.

It is important that artists should understand one another so that conflict may arise from their impressions, so that they may form a critical brotherhood. Some, to-day, are able to grasp one another's meaning and yet find it difficult, because every form of art has its own jargon, to express what they mean; they can grasp that the painter equally with the writer is striving to express himself, but they fail to phrase their appreciation and their criticism because writers cannot talk of ma.s.ses or painters of style. There stands between them a hedge of technique; so thick is it that often they cannot see the spirit of the works; their difficulty is one of terms. Now I do not suggest that the musician should study Praxiteles and himself carve marble; he is better employed expressing his own pa.s.sion in the Key of C. But I do feel that if technical terms are the preserve of each form of art, general terms are not; that _continuity_, _rhythm_, _harmony_, to quote but a few, have a precise meaning, that they are inherent in no form of art because they are inherent in art itself.

The following, then, is a forlorn attempt to find the common language, the esperanto of art. It is made up of general terms (in italics); it represents no more than a personal point of view, and is for this reason laid down in a tentative spirit: it is not a solution but a finger-post.

Order being a necessary antidote for the abstruse, I have divided the terms into groups, according to their nature, to the dimension they affect or the matter to which they refer. Following this line of thought we find that works of art affect us in virtue of four properties: their power, their logic, their movement, and their att.i.tude; this leads us to four groups of properties:--

Group A. (Volumetric): _Concentration_, _Relief_, _Density_, _Depth_.

Group B. (Linear): _Linking Continuity_.

Group C. (Kinetic): _Rhythm_, _Intensity_, _Reaction_, _Key_, _Culmination_.

Group D. (Static): _Grace_, _Balance_, _Harmony_.

This is a rough cla.s.sification, for an opera does not necessarily compare with a square rood of paint or a novel of Tolstoyan length; indeed, on the volumetric basis, an opera may have less bulk than a sonnet.

Group A. (Volumetric). By _concentration_ we mean the quality of conveying a great deal within a small s.p.a.ce. It follows that _concentration_ is in inverse ratio to area, though it does not follow that area is in inverse ratio to _concentration_. While _Anna Karenin_ is an enormous novel it is as concentrated as the sonnet of d'Arvers; on the other hand, Francis Thompson's _Arab Love Song_ is more concentrated than the complete works of Mrs Barclay; while any Rubens is more concentrated than a modern miniature, an intaglio may be more concentrated than twenty square yards of Delacroix. We nullify areas, therefore, and must lay down that the test of concentration is the effect: if the painter realises that the author has felt all he wrote, if the writer sees that every line was necessary, then both can be sure that they are respectively in presence of concentrated works.

Likewise with _relief_. A bas-relief may have none. A fresco may.

_Relief_ then is a matter of contrast, as is shown especially in the mosaics of Taj Mahal; but its nature is easily seen if we compare prose with paint:--

'He stood at the edge of the sea while the waves crept towards him, nearer and nearer, sinuously flowing and ebbing, but ever nearer.

Ever.'

I give this as an instance, not as a fragment of literature. The lonely 'ever' gives _relief_ to the sentence of twenty-four words if we a.s.sume that another long sentence follows. (If no sentence follows, 'ever' is no longer _relief_ but _culmination_, see Group C.) The painter renders the same effect by a more vivid line of foam in the middle distance, the musician by interposing a treble motif between ba.s.ses. Thus, if we find variety of sentence, variety of tone, we have _relief_.

_Density_ and _Depth_ need not detain us long. Flaubert, the Psalms, Jacob Epstein's _Oscar Wilde_, the Eroica and Velasquez all give the sensation we call by those names; we mean by them that the work contains a suggestion of something behind. Atmospheric quality, then, together with thought withdrawn, echo unheard and s.p.a.ce unlimned, are the bases on which the two terms rest. The suggestion that this 'behind' exists is of course essential, for we must not conclude that where there is nothing to be seen there is something to be guessed: there must be no guessing, but if a feeling of reserve is created then _density_ and _depth_ exist.

Group B. (Linear). The quality of _linking_ is opposed to the quality of discord, though a discord may prove to be a link. The most perfect instances of _linking_ and _continuity_, for I almost identify the terms, are the solar spectrum and the song of the lark, but in the field of art we must be content with the gamut, the sequence of shades and the concatenation of phrases. In prose:--

'The bird rose up into the air, and its wings beat slowly. The air was laden with mist. The bird rose towards the clouds ...' is an instance where there is a solution of continuity, which could be remedied if the second sentence were related to the flight of the bird. And the same lack of continuity would exist if the painter of a harlequin were to make his skull-cap brown, if in a pause of some work of Locatelli the musician interposed (however skilfully and gradually) some characteristic Grieg chords.

It does not, of course, follow that a discord is discontinuous.

Providing it recurs within the scheme of the work, as the clashes in _Elektra_, the sequence of discords becomes a sequence of links, and we arrive at this paradox, that it is the solutions of continuity provide the continuity, while the apparently continuous portions of the work are carried by the discordant sections. Thus there is continuity in the Louvre Ghirlandajo because equivalent, if minor, discords repeat the motif of the red mantle in two other portions of the picture. The relation of the discords is sometimes vital to more than continuity, namely to _rhythm_ (Group C.).

With Group C. (Kinetic) we touch the most vital portion of the subject, for the kinetic quality in art amounts to the quality of life in man.

And its chief component is _rhythm_. If _rhythm_ be taken as a condition of internal movement within the inanimate, as a suggestion of expanding and retracting life, of phrases (musical, pictorial, or literary) that come to an inevitable resolution, it is seen that its presence in a work of art must baffle until it is realised under what guise it appears. A simple instance of prose rhythm is:--

'The wayfarer stopped by the well. He looked within its depths and the water was far below. Idly he dropped a pebble between the walls; and it seemed minutes while he waited until the water sped its thanks.'

This is not metrical but rhythmic prose, and it would be wearisome if the rhythm were not altered from paragraph to paragraph; short sentences alternate with long at fixed intervals, or pa.s.sive verbs are inset between actives, while Gothic words, juxtaposed to Latin, or adjectival combinations produce the same effect of rise and fall. The rhythm may be regular as the movement of a woman's breast or spasmodic within the regular as the flight of a gull.

Pictorially _rhythm_ is best gauged by certain tapestries based on the flower backgrounds of Fergusson and Anne Estelle Rice. a.s.sume a black square of cloth; if the flowers are grouped thus from left to right: dark red, pink, white, there is no rhythm, for the mental line is a mere downgrade; if they are grouped: dark red, light blue, dark green, there is no rhythm, for the mental line is a mere curve, a circular or perhaps parabolic basin; but if the grouping amounts to: dark red, pink, light blue, black, light green, cream, dark brown, there is a succession of ebb and flow, rise and fall, _rhythm_. And this applies to drawing also, if we accept that colour is indicated by line, that lines are colours and that colours are tenses. That line can indicate colour is beyond denial, for we accept that colour is not material while tone is material. Colour being the _relation_ between an impression and the impression of colourlessness, and tone being the resultant translation of the intensity of the colour, then it is feasible to reproduce a red and blue combination by a green and yellow combination of equal contrast.[9] Therefore a combination of blacks may be made to balance a combination of even seven colours, provided the relative intensity (amount) of the blacks is in a true relation, in tone, with the relative intensity of the colours. C. R. W. Nevinson achieves this with grays and blacks, while Wyndham Lewis forgoes it.

[Footnote 9: Hence, _if the colour relations are maintained_, it is correct to represent a blue-eyed rubicund man by red eyes and a violet face.]

The quality of _rhythm_ being obvious in music needs no discussion; it is the only form of rhythm the popular can recognise, but if we accept the principles of grouping in phrase and colour, no musician will fail to recognise a sarabande in a dance of Matisse or in the posturings of Kellermann's clown.

As for _intensity_, with which goes _reaction_, for the first cannot exist without the second, it is naturally brought about by the rhythmic focusing of the subject's attention upon words, colours or notes.

Intensity is marked, for instance, by the triplets of the Venusberg music, their continual slow billowing; it can be found, less easily, in phrases and colours, but it must exist if the work is art. In prose it is marked by a general nervousness of form and word:--

'Upon the crag the tower pointed to the sky like a finger of stone, and about its base were thick bushes, which had burst forth into flower patches of purple and scarlet. The air was heavy with their scent.'

Here the _intensity_ is confined within the simile and the colour scheme; the intervening s.p.a.ce corresponds to the background of a picture, while the final short sentence, purposely dulled, is the _reaction_. Evidently (and all the more so as I have chosen a pictorial effect) an a.n.a.logous intensity could be obtained in a painting; the flower patches could be exaggerated in colour to the uttermost limit of the palette, while the reagent final sentence was figured by a filmy treatment of the atmosphere. The limit to _intensity_ is the _key_ in which the work is conceived. But the word _key_ must not be taken in its purely musical sense; obviously, within the same piece the governing motif must not be andante at the beginning and presto at the end, but in artistic generalisations it must be taken as the spirit that informs rather than as the technical rule which controls. Thus, in literature, the _key_ is the att.i.tude of the writer: if in one part of the book his thought recalls Thackeray and in another Paul de k.o.c.k the _key_ has been changed; and again if the left side of the picture is pointillist, the right side cubist, the _key_ has been changed. I choose exaggerated, almost absurd instances to make the point clear; in practice, when the writer, the musician, or the painter appears to have seen consistently, the key he has worked in is steadfast.

It should be said that uniformity of _key_ does not imply absence of _reaction_; there is room, while the _key_ remains uniform, for the juxtaposition of burlesque and romance, just as there is room in Holbein's 'Amba.s.sadors' for the incomprehensible object in the foreground, said to embody a pun (Hohl Bein). But the _key_ needs to be kept in mind as its maximum expression is the _culmination_ of the effect. The _culmination_ of a speech is in its peroration; of a poem in its incorporated envoi. Thus in the _Arab Love Song_, the culmination is:--

'And thou what needest with thy tribe's black tents Who hast the red pavilion of my heart?'

There is no difficulty there. But in painting the _culmination_ is more subtle. It consists in the isolation of the chief object. Say that we have from left to right: Black, yellow, dark brown, light blue, dark red; then add on the extreme right, crimson, then gold. The picture _culminates_ on the extreme right, with the result that attention is directed there and that any object in that section of the picture benefits by an influence about equivalent to that of footlights.

_Culmination_, involves the painter in great difficulties, for there must be _culmination_, while an effect in the wrong place may destroy the _balance_ of his work. This appertains to

Group D. (Static). Its chief quality, _balance_, is easily defined in painting. Where there is correspondence between every section of the picture, where no value is exaggerated, _balance_ exists. Hence the failure of Futurism. While the Futurists understand very well _intensity_, _reaction_, and _relief_, they refuse to give _balance_ any attention at all; leaving aside the absurdity of rendering the mental into terms of the pictorial, and taking as an instance one who was once less Futurist than the Futurists, Severini, we see in his 'Pan-pan Dance' how he detached himself from his school: he attained _balance_ by giving every object an equal _intensity_. Such is also the tendency of Wadsworth. Evidently if there are no clashes of tone-values, there must be _balance_, and the instance serves to show that where there are clashes of tone-values _balance_ must be ensured by the artist's hand.

There is always _balance_ in the purely decorative; in the realistic there is _balance_ if the attention of the beholder is directed simultaneously to the several points of _culmination_ indicated by the _rhythm_ of the picture. Thus there is _balance_ in Rothenstein's 'Chloe' because the rocks on the right repeat the significance of the rocks on the left.