Adventures in Criticism Part 25

Hypnotism is not a delimited fact: n.o.body yet knows precisely its conditions or its effects; or, if the discovery has been made, it has certainly not yet found its way to the novelists. For them it is as yet chiefly a field of fancy. They invent vagaries for it as they invent ghosts. And as for the "_humananum nihil a me alienum_"

defence, my strongest objection to hypnotic fiction is its inhumanity.

An experience is not human in the proper artistic sense (with which alone we are concerned) merely because it has befallen a man or a woman. There was an Irishman, the other day, who through mere inadvertence cut off his own head with a scythe. But the story is rather inhuman than not. Still less right have we to call everything human which can be supposed by the most liberal stretch of the imagination to have happened to a man or a woman. A story is only human in so far as it is governed by the laws which are recognized as determining human action. Now according as we regard human action, its two great determinants will be free will or necessity. But hypnotism entirely does away with free will: and for necessity, fatal or circ.u.mstantial, it subst.i.tutes the lawless and irresponsible imperative of a casual individual man, who (in fiction) usually happens to be a scoundrel.

A story may be human even though it discard one or more of the recognized conditions of human life. Thus in the confessedly supernatural story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the conflict between the two Jekylls is human enough and morally significant, because it answers to a conflict which is waged day by day--though as a rule less tremendously--in the soul of every human being. But the double Trilby signifies nothing. She is naturally in love with Little Billee: she is also in love with Svengali, but quite unnaturally and irresponsibly.

There is no real conflict. As Gecko says of Svengali--

"He had but to say '_Dors!_' and she suddenly became an unconscious Trilby of marble, who could produce wonderful sounds--just the sounds he wanted and nothing else--and think his thoughts and wish his wishes--and love him at his bidding with a strange, unreal, fact.i.tious love ... just his own love for himself turned inside out--a l'envers--and reflected back on him as from a mirror ... un echo, un simulacre, quoi? pas autre chose!... It was not worth having! I was not even jealous!"

This last pa.s.sage, I think, suggests that Mr. du Maurier would have produced a much less charming story, indeed, but a vastly more artistic one, had he directed his readers' attention rather upon the tragedy of Svengali than upon the tragedy of Trilby. For Svengali's position as complete master of a woman's will and yet unable to call forth more than a fact.i.tious love--"just his own love for himself turned inside out and reflected back on him as from a mirror"--is a really tragic one, and a fine variation on the old Frankenstein _motif_. The tragedy of Frankenstein resides in Frankenstein himself, not in his creature.

An Incongruous Story.

In short, _Trilby_ seems--as _Peter Ibbetson_ seemed--to fall into two parts, the natural and supernatural, which will not join. They might possibly join if Mr. du Maurier had not made the natural so exceedingly domestic, had he been less successful with the Trilby, and Little Billee, and Taffy, and the Laird, for all of whom he has taught us so extravagant a liking. But his very success with these domestic (if oddly domestic) figures, and with the very domestic tale of Little Billee's affair of the heart, proves our greatest stumbling-block when we are invited to follow the machinations of the superlative Svengali.

That the story of Svengali and of Trilby's voice is a good story only a duffer would deny. So is Gautier's _La Morte Amoureuse_; perhaps the best story of its kind ever written. But suppose Thackeray had taken _La Morte Amoureuse_ and tried to write it into _Pendennis!_

MR. STOCKTON

Sept. 21, 1895. Stevenson's Testimony.

In his chapter of "Personal Memories," printed in the _Century Magazine_ of July last, Mr. Gosse speaks of the peculiar esteem in which Mr. Frank R. Stockton's stories were held by Robert Louis Stevenson. "When I was going to America to lecture, he was particularly anxious that I should lay at the feet of Mr. Frank R.

Stockton his homage, couched in the following lines:--

My Stockton if I failed to like, It were a sheer depravity; For I went down with the 'Thomas Hyke,'

And up with the 'Negative Gravity.'

He adored these tales of Mr. Stockton's, a taste which must be shared by all good men."

It is shared at any rate by some thousands of people on this side of the Atlantic. Only, one is not quite sure how far their admiration extends. As far as can be guessed--for I have never come across any British attempt at a serious appreciation of Mr. Stockton--the general disposition is to regard him as an amusing kind of "cuss" with a queer kink in his fancy, who writes puzzling little stories that make you smile. As for taking him seriously, "why he doesn't even profess to write seriously"--an absurd objection, of course; but good enough for the present-day reviewer, who sits up all night in order that the public may have his earliest possible opinion on the Reminiscences of Bishop A, or the Personal Recollections of Field-Marshal B, or a Tour taken in Ireland by the Honorable Mrs. C.

For criticism just now, as a mere matter of business convenience, provides a relative importance for books before they appear; and in this cla.s.sification the s.p.a.ce allotted to fiction and labelled "important" is crowded for the moment with works dealing with religious or s.e.xual difficulties. Everyone has read _Rudder Grange_, _The Lady or the Tiger?_ and _A Borrowed Month_; but somehow few people seem to think of them as subjects for serious criticism.

"Cla.s.sical" qualities.

And yet these stories are almost cla.s.sics. That is to say, they have the cla.s.sical qualities, and only need time to ripen them into cla.s.sics: for nothing but age divides a story of the quality of _The Lady or the Tiger?_ (for instance) from a story of the quality of _Rip Van Winkle_. They are full of wit; but the wit never chokes the style, which is simple and pellucid. Their fanciful postulates being granted, they are absolutely rational. And they are in a high degree original.

Originality, good temper, good sense, moderation, wit--these are cla.s.sical qualities: and he is a rare benefactor who employs them all for the amus.e.m.e.nt of the world.

A Comparison.

At first sight it may seem absurd to compare Mr. Stockton with Defoe.

You can scarcely imagine two men with more dissimilar notions of the value of gracefulness and humor, or with more divergent aims in writing. Mr. Stockton is nothing if not fanciful, and Defoe is hardly fanciful at all. Nevertheless in reading one I am constantly reminded of the other. You must remember Mr. Stockton's habit is to confine his eccentricities of fancy to the postulates of a tale. He starts with some wildly unusual--but, as a rule, not impossible--conjuncture of circ.u.mstances. This being granted, however, he deduces his story logically and precisely, appealing never to our pa.s.sions and almost constantly to our common sense. His people are as full of common-sense as Defoe's. They may have more pluck than the average man or woman, and they usually have more adaptability; but they apply to extraordinary circ.u.mstances the good unsentimental reasoning of ordinary life, and usually with the happiest results. The shipwreck of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine was extraordinary enough, but their subsequent conduct was rational almost to precision: and in story-telling rationality does for fancy what economy of emotional utterances does for emotion. We may apply to Mr. Stockton's tales a remark which Mr. Saintsbury let fall some years ago upon dream-literature. He was speaking particularly of Flaubert's _Tentation de Saint Antoine_:--

"The capacities of dreams and hallucinations for literary treatment are undoubted. But most writers, including even De Quincey, who have tried this style, have erred, inasmuch as they have endeavoured to throw a portion of the mystery with which the waking mind invests dreams over the dream itself. Anyone's experience is sufficient to show that this is wrong. The events of dreams as they happen are quite plain and matter-of-fact, and it is only in the intervals, and, so to speak, the scene-shifting of dreaming, that any suspicion of strangeness occurs to the dreamer."

A dream, however wild, is quite plain and matter-of-fact to the dreamer; therefore, for verisimilitude, the narrative of a dream should be quite plain and matter-of-fact. In the same way the narrator of an extremely fanciful tale should--since verisimilitude is the first aim of story-telling--attempt to exclude all suspicion of the unnatural from his reader's mind. And this is only done by persuading him that no suspicion of the unnatural occurred to the actors in the story. And this again is best managed by making his characters persons of sound every-day common sense. "If _these_ are not upset by what befalls them, why"--is the unconscious inference--"why in the world should _I_ be upset?"

So, in spite of the enormous difference between the two writers, there has been no one since Defoe who so carefully as Mr. Stockton regulates the actions of his characters by strict common sense. Nor do I at the moment remember any writer who comes closer to Defoe in mathematical care for detail. In the case of the True-born Englishman this carefulness was sometimes overdone--as when he makes Colonel Jack remember with exactness the lists of articles he stole as a boy, and their value. In the _Adventures of Captain Horn_ the machinery which conceals and guards the Peruvian treasure is so elaborately described that one is tempted to believe Mr. Stockton must have constructed a working model of it with his own hands before he sat down to write the book. In a way, this accuracy of detail is part of the common-sense character of the narrative, and undoubtedly helps the verisimilitude enormously.

A Genuine American.

But to my mind Mr. Stockton's characters are even more original than the machinery of his stories. And in their originality they reflect not only Mr. Stockton himself, but the race from which they and their author spring. In fact, they seem to me about the most genuinely American things in American fiction. After all, when one comes to think of it, Mrs. Lecks and Captain Horn merely ill.u.s.trate that ready adaptation of Anglo-Saxon pluck and businesslike common sense to savage and unusual circ.u.mstances which has been the real secret of the colonization of the North American Continent. Captain Horn's discovery and winning of the treasure may differ accidentally, but do not differ in essence, from a thousand true tales of commercial triumph in the great Central Plain or on the Pacific Slope. And in the heroine of the book we recognize those very qualities and apt.i.tudes for which we have all learnt to admire and esteem the American girl.

They are hero and heroine, and so of course we are presented with the better side of a national character; but then it has been the better side which has done the business. The bitterest critic of things American will not deny that Mr. Stockton's characters are typical Americans, and could not belong to any other nation in the world. Nor can he deny that they combine sobriety with pluck, and businesslike behavior with good feeling; that they are as full of honor as of resource, and as sportsmanlike as sagacious. That people with such characteristics should be recognizable by us as typical Americans is a sufficient answer to half the nonsense which is being talked just now _a propos_ of a recent silly contest for the America Cup.

Nationality apart, if anyone wants a good stirring story, _Captain Horn_ is the story for his money. It has loose ends, and the concluding chapter ties up an end that might well have been left loose; but if a better story of adventure has been written of late I wish somebody would tell me its name.

BOW-WOW

August 26, 1893. Dauntless Anthology.

It is really very difficult to know what to say to Mr. Maynard Leonard, editor of _The Dog in British Poetry_ (London: David Nutt).

His case is something the same as Archdeacon Farrar's. The critic who desires amendment in the Archdeacon's prose, and suggests that something might be done by a study of Butler or Hume or Cobbett or Newman, is met with the cheerful retort, "But I have studied these writers, and admire them even more than you do." The position is impregnable; and the Archdeacon is only a.s.serting that two and two make four when he goes on to confess that, "with the best will in the world to profit by the criticisms of his books, he has never profited in the least by any of them."

Now, Mr. Leonard has at least this much in common with Archdeacon Farrar, that before him criticism must sit down with folded hands. In the lightness of his heart he accepts every fresh argument against such and such a course as an added reason for following it:--

"While this collection of poems was being made," he tells us, "a well-known author and critic took occasion to gently ridicule (_sic_) anthologies and anthologists. He suggested, as if the force of foolishness could no further go, that the next anthology would deal with dogs."

"Undismayed by this," to use his own words, Mr. Leonard proceeded to prove it. Now it is obvious that no man can set a term to literary activity if it depend on the Briton's notorious unwillingness to recognize that he is beaten. I might dare, for instance, a Scotsman to compile an anthology on "The Eel in British Poetry"; but of what avail is it to challenge an indomitable race?

I am sorry Mr. Leonard has not given the name of this critic; but have a notion it must be Mr. Andrew Lang, though I am sure he is innocent of the split infinitive quoted above. It really ought to be Mr. Lang, if only for the humor of the means by which Mr. Leonard proposes to silence him. "I am confident," says he, "that the voice of the great dog-loving public in this country would drown that of the critic in question." Mr. Leonard's metaphors, you see, like the dyer's hand, are subdued to what they work in. But is not the picture delightful? Mr.

Lang, the gentle of speech; who, with his master Walton, "studies to be quiet"; who tells us in his very latest verse

"I've maistly had my fill O' this world's din"--

--Mr. Lang set down in the midst of a really representative dog show, say at Birmingham or the Crystal Palace, and there howled down! His _blandi susurri_ drowned in the combined clamor of mongrel, puppy, whelp, and hound, and "the great dog-loving public in this country"!

"_Solvitur ululando_," hopes Mr. Leonard; and we will wait for the voice of the great dog-loving public to uplift itself and settle the question. Here, at any rate, is the book, beautiful in shape, and printed by the Constables upon sumptuous paper. And the t.i.tle-page bears a rubric and a reference to Tobias' dog. "It is no need," says Wyclif in one of his sermons, "to busy us what hight Tobies' hound"; but Wyclif had never to reckon with a great dog-loving public. And Mr.

Leonard, having considered his work and dedicated it "To the Cynics"--which, I suppose, is Greek for "dog-loving public"--observes, "It is rather remarkable that no one has yet published such a book as this." Perhaps it is.

But if we take it for granted (1) that it was worth doing, and (2) that whatever be worth doing is worth doing well, then Mr. Leonard has reason for his complacency. "It was never my intention," he says, "to gather together a complete collection of even British poems about dogs."--When will _that_ come, I wonder?--"I have sought to secure a representative rather than an exhaustive anthology." His selections from a ma.s.s of poetry ranging from Homer to Mr. Mallock are judicious.

He is not concerned (he a.s.sures us) to defend the poetical merits of all this verse:--

"--O, the wise contentment Th' anthologist doth find!"

--but he has provided it with notes--and capital notes they are--with a magnificent Table of Contents, an Index of Authors, an Index of First Lines, an Index of Dogs Mentioned by Name in the Poems, and an Index of the Species of Dogs Mentioned. So that, even if he miss transportation to an equal sky, the dog has better treatment on earth than most authors. And Mr. Nutt and the Messrs. Constable have done their best; and everyone knows how good is that best. And the wonder is, as Dr. Johnson remarked (concerning a dog, by the way), not that the thing is done so well, but that it should be done at all.

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