Adventures in Criticism Part 22

And with the word, G.o.d's mother shone; The wanderer whispered 'Mary, hail!'

The vision helped her to put on Bracelet and fillet, ring and veil.

'You are sister to the mountains now, And sister to the day and night; Sister to G.o.d.' And on her brow She kissed her thrice and left her sight."

The voice in each case is that of a prophet rather than that of a reed shaken by the wind, or an aeolian harp played upon by the same.

March, 1895. Second Thoughts.

I have to add that, apart from the beautiful language in which they are presented, Mr. Davidson's doctrines do not appeal to me. I cannot accept his picture of the poet's as "a soulless life ... wherein the foulest things may loll at ease beside the loveliest." It seems to me at least as obligatory on a poet as on other men to keep his garden weeded and his conscience active. Indeed, I believe some asceticism of soul to be a condition of all really great poetry. Also Mr. Davidson appears to be confusing charity with an approbation of things in the strict sense d.a.m.nable when he makes the Mother of Christ abet a Nun whose wanderings have no n.o.bler excuse than a carnal desire--_savoir enfin ce que c'est un homme_. Between forgiving a lapsed man or woman and abetting the lapse I now, in a cooler hour, see an immense, an essential, moral difference. But I confess that the foregoing paper was written while my sense of this difference was temporarily blinded under the spell of Mr. Davidson's beautiful verse.

It may still be that his Nun had some n.o.bler motive than I am able, after two or three readings of the ballad, to discover. In that case I can only ask pardon for my obtuseness.

BJoRNSTERNE BJoRNSON

June 1, 1895. Bjornson's First Manner.

I see that the stories promised in Mr. Heinemann's new series of translations of Bjornson are _Synnove Solbakken_, _Arne_, _A Happy Boy_, _The Fisher Maiden_, _The Bridal March_, _Magnhild_, and _Captain Mansana_. The first, _Synnove Solbakken_, appeared in 1857.

The others are dated thus:--_Arne_ in 1858, _A Happy Boy_ in 1860, _The Fisher Maiden_ in 1868, _The Bridal March_ in 1873, _Magnhild_ in 1877, and _Captain Mansana_ in 1879. There are some very significant gaps here, the most important being the eight years' gap between _A Happy Boy_ and _The Fisher Maiden_. Again, after 1879 Bjornson ceased to write novels for a while, returning to the charge in 1884 with _Flags are Flying in Town and Haven_, and following up with _In G.o.d's Way_, 1889. Translations of these two novels have also been published by Mr. Heinemann (the former under an altered t.i.tle, _The Heritage of the Kurts_) and, to use Mr. Gosse's words, are the works, by which Bjornson is best known to the present generation of Englishmen. "They possess elements which have proved excessively attractive to certain sections of our public; indeed, in the case of _In G.o.d's Way_, a novel which was by no means successful in its own country at its original publication, has enjoyed an aftermath of popularity in Scandinavia, founded on reflected warmth from its English admirers."

Taking, then, Bjornson's fiction apart from his other writings (with which I confess myself unacquainted), we find that it falls into three periods, pretty sharply divided. The earliest is the idyllic period, pure and simple, and includes _Synnove_, _Arne_, and _A Happy Boy_.

Then with _The Fisher Maiden_ we enter on a stage of transition. It is still the idyll; but it grows self-conscious, elaborate, confused by the realism that was coming into fashion all over Europe; and the trouble and confusion grow until we reach _Magnhild_. With _Flags are Flying_ and _In G.o.d's Way_ we reach a third stage--the stage of realism, some readers would say. I should not agree. But these tales certainly differ remarkably from their predecessors. They are much longer, to begin with; in them, too, realism at length preponderates; and they are probably as near to pure realism as Bjornson will ever get.

If asked to label these three periods, I should call them the periods of (1) Simplicity, (2) Confusion, (3) Dire Confusion.

I speak, of course, as a foreigner, obliged to read Bjornson in translations. But perhaps the disability is not so important as it seems at first sight. Translations cannot hide Bjornson's genius; nor obscure the truth that his genius is essentially idyllic. Now if one form of literary expression suffers more than another by translation it is the idyll. Its bloom is peculiarly delicate; its freshness peculiarly quick to disappear under much handling of any kind. But all the translations leave _Arne_ a masterpiece, and _Synnove_ and _The Happy Boy_.

How many artists have been twisted from their natural bent by the long vogue of "naturalism" we shall never know. We must make the best of the great works which have been produced under its influence, and be content with that. But we may say with some confidence that Bjornson's genius was unfortunate in the date of its maturity. He was born on the 8th of December, 1832, in a lonely farmhouse among the mountains, at the head of the long valley called Osterdalen; his father being priest of Kvikne parish, one of the most savage in all Norway. After six years the family removed to Naesset, in the Romsdal, "a spot as enchanting and as genial as Kvikne is the reverse." Mr. Gosse, who prefaces Mr. Heinemann's new series with a study of Bjornson's writings, quotes a curious pa.s.sage in which Bjornson records the impression of physical beauty made upon his childish mind by the physical beauty of Naesset:--

"Here in the parsonage of Naesset--one of the loveliest places in Norway, where the land lies broadly spreading where two fjords meet, with the green braeside above it, with waterfalls and farmhouses on the opposite sh.o.r.e, with billowy meadows and cattle away towards the foot of the valley, and, far overhead, along the line of the fjord, mountains shooting promontory after promontory out into the lake, a big farmhouse at the extremity of each--here in the parsonage of Naesset, where I would stand at the close of the day and gaze at the sunlight playing over mountain and fjord, until I wept, as though I had done something wrong; and where I, descending on my snow-shoes into some valley, would pause as though bewitched by a loveliness, by a longing, which I had not the power to explain, but which was so great that above the highest ecstasy of joy I would feel the deepest apprehension and distress--here in the parsonage of Naesset were awakened my earliest sensations."

The pa.s.sage is obviously important. And Bjornson shows how much importance he attaches to the experience by introducing it, or something like it, time after time into his stories. Readers of _In G.o.d's Way_--the latest of the novels under discussion--will remember its opening chapter well.

It was good fortune indeed that a boy of such gifts should pa.s.s his early boyhood in such surroundings. Nor did the luck end here. While the young Bjornson acc.u.mulated these impressions, the peasant-romance, or idyll of country life, was taking its place and growing into favor as one of the most beautiful forms of modern prose-fiction. Immermann wrote _Der Oberhof_ in 1839. Weill and Auerbach took up the running in 1841 and 1843. George Sand followed, and Fritz Reuter. Bjornson began to write in 1856. _Synnove Solbakken_ and _Arne_ came in on the high flood of this movement. "These two stories," writes Mr. Gosse, "seem to me to be almost perfect; they have an enchanting lyrical quality, without bitterness or pa.s.sion, which I look for elsewhere in vain in the prose literature of the second half of the century." To my mind, without any doubt, they and _A Happy Boy_ are the best work Bjornson has ever done in fiction, or is ever likely to do. For they are simple, direct, congruous; all of one piece as a flower is of a piece with its root. And never since has Bjornson written a tale altogether of one piece.

His later Manner.

For here the luck ended. All over Europe there began to spread influences that may have been good for some artists, but were (we may say) peculiarly injurious to so _naf_ and, at the same time, so personal a writer as Bjornson. I think another age will find much the same cause to mourn over Daudet when it compares his later novels with the promise of _Lettres de Mon Moulin_ and _Le Pet.i.t Chose_.

Naturalism demands nothing more severely than an impersonal treatment of its themes. Of three very personal and romantic writers, our own Stevenson escaped the pit into which both Bjornson and Daudet stumbled. You may say the temptation came later to him. But the temptation to follow an European fashion does, as a rule, befall a Briton last of all men, for reasons of which we need not feel proud: and the date of Mr. Hardy's stumbling is fairly recent, after all.

Bjornson, at any rate, began very soon to be troubled. Between 1864 and 1874, from his thirty-second to his forty-second year, his invention seemed, to some extent, paralyzed. _The Fisher Maiden_, the one story written during that time, starts as beautifully as _Arne_; but it grows complicated and introspective: the psychological experiences of the stage-struck heroine are not in the same key as the opening chapters. Pa.s.sing over nine years, we find _Magnhild_ much more vague and involved--

"Here he is visibly affected by French models, and by the methods of the naturalists, but he is trying to combine them with his own simpler traditions of rustic realism.... The author felt himself greatly moved by fermenting ideas and ambitions which he had not completely mastered.... There is a kind of uncomfortable discrepancy between the scene and the style, a breath of Paris and the boulevards blowing through the pine-trees of a puritanical Norwegian village.... But the book is a most interesting link between the early peasant-stories and the great novels of his latest period."

Well, of these same "great novels"--of _Flags are Flying_ and _In G.o.d's Way_--people must speak as they think. They seem to me the laborious productions of a man forcing himself still further and further from his right and natural bent. In them, says Mr. Gosse, "Bjornson returns, in measure, to the poetical elements of his youth.

He is now capable again, as for instance in the episode of Ragni's symbolical walk in the woodlands, _In G.o.d's Way_, of pa.s.sages of pure idealism." Yes, he returns--"in measure." He is "capable of idyllic pa.s.sages." In other words, his nature rea.s.serts itself, and he remains an imperfect convert. "He has striven hard to be a realist, and at times he has seemed to acquiesce altogether in the naturalistic formula, but in truth he has never had anything essential in common with M. Zola." In other words, he has fallen between two stools. He has tried to expel nature with a pitchfork and still she runs back upon him. He has put his hand to the plough and has looked back: or (if you take my view of "the naturalistic formula") he has sinned, but has not sinned with his whole heart. For to produce a h.o.m.ogeneous story, either the acquired Zola or the native Bjornson must have been cast out utterly.

Value of Early Impressions to a Novelist.

I have quoted an example of the impressions of Bjornson's childhood. I do not think critics have ever quite realized the extent to which writers of fiction--especially those who use a personal style--depend upon the remembered impressions of childhood. Such impressions--no matter how fantastic--are an author's firsthand stock: and in using them he comes much closer to nature than when he collects any number of scientifically approved data to maintain some view of life which he has derived from books. Compare _Flags are Flying_ with _Arne_, and you will see my point. The longer book is ten times as realistic in treatment, and about one-tenth as true to life.

MR. GEORGE MOORE

March 31, 1894. "Esther Waters."

It is good, after all, to come across a novel written by a man who can write a novel. We have been much in the company of the Amateur of late, and I for one am very weary of him--weary of his preposterous goings-out and comings-in, of his smart inept.i.tudes, of his solemn zeal in reforming the decayed art of fiction, of his repeated failures to discover beneficence in all those inst.i.tutions, from the Common Law of England to the Scheme of the Universe, which have managed to leave him and his aspirations out of count. I am weary of him and of his deceased wife's sister, and of their fell determination to discover each other's soul in a bottle of hay. Above all, I am weary of his writings, because he cannot write, neither has he the humility to sit down and learn.

Mr. George Moore, on the other hand, has steadily labored to make himself a fine artist, and his training has led him through many strange places. I should guess that among living novelists few have started with so scant an equipment. As far as one can tell he had, to begin with, neither a fertile invention nor a subtle dramatic instinct, nor an accurate ear for language. A week ago I should have said this very confidently: after reading _Esther Waters_ I say it less confidently, but believe it to be true, nevertheless. Mr. Moore has written novels that are full of faults. These faults have been exposed mercilessly, for Mr. Moore has made many enemies. But he has always possessed an artistic conscience and an immense courage. He answered his critics briskly enough at the time, but an onlooker of common sagacity could perceive that the really convincing answer was held in reserve--that, as they say in America, Mr. Moore "allowed" he was going to write a big novel one of these days, and meanwhile we had better hold our judgment upon Mr. Moore's capacity open to revision.

What, then, is to be said of _Esther Waters_, this volume of a modest 377 pages, upon which Mr. Moore has been at work for at least two years?

"Esther" and Mr. Hardy's "Tess."

Well, in the first place, I say, without hesitation, that _Esther Waters_ is the most important novel published in England during these two years. We have been suffering from the Amateur during that period, and no doubt (though it seems hard) every nation has the Amateur it deserves. To find a book to compare with _Esther Waters_ we must go back to December, 1891, and to Mr. Hardy's _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_. It happens that a certain similarity in the motives of these two stories makes comparison easy. Each starts with the seduction of a young girl; and each is mainly concerned with her subsequent adventures. From the beginning the advantage of probability is with the younger novelist. Mr. Moore's "William Latch" is a thoroughly natural figure, and remains a natural figure to the end of the book: an uneducated man and full of failings, but a man always, and therefore to be forgiven by the reader only a little less readily than Esther herself forgives him. Mr. Hardy's "Alec D'Urberville" is a grotesque and violent lay figure, a wholly incredible cad. Mr. Hardy, by killing Tess's child, takes away the one means by which his heroine could have been led to return to D'Urberville without any loss of the reader's sympathy. Mr. Moore allows Esther's child to live, and thus has at hand the material for one of the most beautiful stories of maternal love ever imagined by a writer. I dislike extravagance of speech, and would run my pen through these words could I remember, in any novel I have read, a more heroic story than this of Esther Waters, a poor maid-of-all-work, without money, friends, or character, fighting for her child against the world, and in the end dragging victory out of the struggle. In spite of the aeschylean gloom in which Mr. Hardy wraps the story of Tess, I contend that Esther's fight is, from end to end, the more heroic.

Also Esther's story seems to me informed with a saner philosophy of life. There is gloom in her story; and many of the circ.u.mstances are sordid enough; but throughout I see the recognition that man and woman can at least improve and dignify their lot in this world. Many people believe _Tess_ to be the finest of its author's achievements. A devoted admirer of Mr. Hardy's genius, I decline altogether to consent. To my mind, among recent developments of the English novel nothing is more lamentable than the manner in which this distinguished writer has allowed himself of late to fancy that the riddles of life are solved by pulling mouths at Providence (or whatever men choose to call the Supreme Power) and depicting it as a savage and omnipotent bully, directing human affairs after the fashion of a practical joker fresh from a village ale-house. For to this teaching his more recent writings plainly tend; and alike in _Tess_ and _Life's Little Ironies_ the part played by the "President of the Immortals" is no sublimer--save in the amount of force exerted--than that of a lout who pulls a chair suddenly from under an old woman.

Now, by wedding Necessity with uncouth Jocularity, Mr. Hardy may have found an hypothesis that solves for him all the difficulties of life.

I am not concerned in this place to deny that it may be the true explanation. I have merely to point out that art and criticism must take some time in getting accustomed to it, and that meanwhile the traditions of both are so far agreed in allowing a certain amount of free will to direct the actions of men and women that a tale which should be all necessity and no free will would, in effect, be necessity's own contrary--a merely wanton freak.

For, in effect, it comes to this:--The story of Tess, in which attention is so urgently directed to the hand of Destiny, is not felt to be inevitable, but freakish. The story of Esther Waters, in which a poor servant-girl is allowed to grapple with her destiny and, after a fashion, to defeat it, is felt (or has been felt by one reader, at any rate) to be absolutely inevitable. To reconcile us to the black flag above Wintoncester prison as to the appointed end of Tess's career, a curse at least as deep as that of Pelops should have been laid on the D'Urberville family. Tess's curse does not lie by nature on all women; nor on all Dorset women; nor on all Dorset women who have illegitimate children; for a very few even of these are hanged. We feel that we are not concerned with a type, but with an individual case deliberately chosen by the author; and no amount of talk about the "President of the Immortals" and his "Sport" can persuade us to the contrary. With Esther Waters, on the other hand, we feel we are a.s.sisting in the combat of a human life against its natural destiny; we perceive that the woman has a chance of winning; we are happy when she wins; and we are the better for helping her with our sympathy in the struggle.

That is why, using the word in the Aristotelian sense, I maintain that _Esther Waters_ is a more "philosophical" work than _Tess_.

The atmosphere of the low-cla.s.s gambling in which Mr. Moore's characters breathe and live is no doubt a result of his careful study of Zola. It is, as everyone knows, M. Zola's habit to take one of the many pursuits of men--from War and Religion down to Haberdashery and Veterinary Surgery--and expand it into an atmosphere for a novel. But in Mr. Moore's case it may safely be urged that gambling on racehorses actually is the atmosphere in which a million or two of Londoners pa.s.s their lives. Their hopes, their very chances of a satisfying meal, hang from day to day on the performances of horses they have never seen. I cannot profess to judge with what accuracy Mr. Moore has reproduced the niceties of handicapping, bookmaking, place-betting, and the rest, the fluctuations of the gambling market, and their causes. I gather that extraordinary care has been bestowed upon these details; but criticism here must be left to experts, I only know that, not once or twice only in the course of his narrative, Mr. Moore makes us study the odds against a horse almost as eagerly as if it carried our own money: because it does indeed carry for a while the destiny of Esther Waters--and yet for a while only. We feel that, whichever horse wins the ultimate issues are inevitable.

It will be gathered from what I have said that Mr. Moore has vastly outstripped his own public form, even as shown in _A Mummer's Wife_.

But it may be as well to set down, beyond possibility of misapprehension, my belief that in _Esther Waters_ we have the most artistic, the most complete, and the most inevitable work of fiction that has been written in England for at least two years. Its plainness of speech may offend many. It may not be a favorite in the circulating libraries or on the bookstalls. But I shall be surprised if it fails of the place I predict for it in the esteem of those who know the true aims of fiction and respect the conscientious practice of that great art.

MRS. MARGARET L. WOODS

Nov. 28, 1891. "Esther Vanhomrigh."

Among considerable novelists who have handled historical subjects--that is to say, who have brought into their story men and women who really lived and events which have really taken place--you will find one rule strictly observed, and no single infringement of it that has been followed by success. This rule is that the historical characters and events should be mingled with poetical characters and events, and _made subservient to them_. And it holds of books as widely dissimilar as _La Vicomte de Bragelonne_ and _La Guerre et la Paix_; _The Abbot_ and _John Inglesant_. In history Louis XIV. and Napoleon are the most salient men of their time: in fiction they fall back and give prominence to D'Artagnan and the Prince Andre. They may be admirably painted, but unless they take a subordinate place in the composition, the artist scores a failure.