My Contemporaries In Fiction Part 1

My Contemporaries In Fiction.

by David Christie Murray.

INTRODUCTORY

When these essays were originally printed (they appeared simultaneously in many newspapers), I expected to make some enemies. So far, I have been most agreeably disappointed in that regard; but I can affirm that they have made me many friends, and that I have had encouragement enough from fellow craftsmen, from professional critics, and from casual readers at home, in the colonies, and the United States to bolster up the courage of the most timorous man that ever held a pen. As a set-off against all this, I have received one very n.o.ble and dignified rebuke from a Contemporary in Fiction, whom the world holds in high honour, who regrets that I am not engaged in creative work--in lieu of this--and pleads that 'authorship should be allowed the distinction of an exemption from rank and t.i.tle.' With genuine respect I venture to urge that this is an impossible aspiration, and in spite of the lofty sanction which the writer's name must lend to his opinion, I have been unable to surrender the belief that the work done in these pages is alike honourable and useful. It is, as will be seen, in the nature of a crusade against puffery and hysteria. It is not meant to instruct the instructed, and it makes no pretence to be infallible, but it is issued in its present form in the belief that it will (in some degree) aid the average reader in the formation of just opinions on contemporary art, and in the hope that it may (in some degree) impose a check on certain interested or over-enthusiastic people.

MY CONTEMPORARIES IN FICTION

I.--FIRST, THE CRITICS, AND THEN A WORD ON d.i.c.kENS

The critics of to-day are suffering from a sort of epidemic of kindness.

They have accustomed themselves to the administration of praise in unmeasured doses. They are not, taking them in the ma.s.s, critics any longer, but merely professional admirers. They have ceased to be useful to the public, and are becoming dangerous to the interests of letters.

In their over-friendly eyes every painstaking apprentice in the art of fiction is a master, and hysterical schoolgirls, who have spent their brief day in the acquisition of ignorance, are reviewed as if they were so many Elizabeth Barrett Brownings or George Eliots. One of the most curious and instructive things in this regard is the use which the modern critic makes of Sir Walter Scott. Sir Walter is set up as a sort of first standard for the aspirant in the art of fiction to excel. Let the question be asked, with as much gravity as is possible: What _is_ the use of a critic who gravely a.s.sures us that Mr. S. R. Crockett 'has rivalled, if not surpa.s.sed, Sir Walter'? The statement is, of course, most lamentably and ludicrously absurd, but it is made more than once, or twice, or thrice, and it is quoted and advertised. It is not Mr.

Crockett's fault that he is set on this ridiculous eminence, and his name is not cited here with any grain of malice. He has his fellow-sufferers. Other gentlemen who have 'rivalled, if not surpa.s.sed, Sir Walter,' are Dr. Conan Doyle, Mr. J. M. Barrie, Mr. Ian Maclaren, and Mr. Stanley Weyman. No person whose judgment is worth a straw can read the writings of these accomplished workmen without respect and pleasure. But it is no more true that they rival Sir Walter than it is true that they are twelve feet high, or that any one of them believes in his own private mind the egregious announcement of the reviewer. The one great sufferer by this craze for setting men of middling stature side by side with Scott is our beautiful and beloved Stevenson, who, unless rescued by some judicious hand, is likely to be buried under foolish and unmeasured praises.

It would be easy to fill pages with verifications of the charge here made. Books of the last half-dozen years or so, which have already proved the ephemeral nature of their own claim, have been received with plaudits which would have been exaggerated if applied to some of our acknowledged cla.s.sics. The critical declaration that 'Eric Bright-eyes'

could have been written by no other Englishman of the last six hundred years than Mr. Rider Haggard may be allowed its own monumental place in the desert of silly and hysteric judgments.

It is time, for the sake of mere common-sense, to get back to something like a real standard of excellence. It is time to say plainly that our literature is in danger of degradation, and that the ma.s.s of readers is systematically misled.

Before I go further, I will offer one word in self-excuse. I have taken this work upon my own shoulders, because I cannot see that anybody else will take it, and because it seems to me to be calling loudly to be done. My one unwillingness to undertake it lies in the fact that I have devoted my own life to the pursuit of that art the exercise of which by my contemporaries I am now about to criticise. That has an evil and ungenerous look. But, whatever the declaration may seem to be worth, I make it with sincerity and truth. I have never tasted the gall of envy in my life. I have had my share, and my full share, of the critical sugarplums. I have never, in the critics, apprehension, 'rivalled or surpa.s.sed Sir Walter,' but on many thousands of printed pages (of advertis.e.m.e.nt) it is recorded that I have 'more genius for the delineation of rustic character than any half-dozen surviving novelists put together.' I laugh when I read this, for I remember Thomas Hardy, who is my master far and far away. I am quite persuaded that my critic was genuinely pleased with the book over which he thus 'pyrotechnicated'

(as poor Artemus used to say), but I think my judgment the more sane and sober of the two. I have not the faintest desire to pull down other men's flags and leave my own flag flying. And there is the first and last intrusion of myself. I felt it necessary, and I will neither erase it nor apologise for its presence.

Side by side with the exaggerated admiration with which our professional censors greet the crowd of new-comers, it is instructive to note the contempt into which some of our old G.o.ds have fallen. The Superior Person we have always with us. He is, in his essence, a Prig; but when, as occasionally happens, his heart and intelligence ripen, he loses the characteristics which once made him a superior person. Whilst he holds his native status his special art is not to admire anything which common people find admirable. A year or two ago it became the shibboleth of his cla.s.s that they couldn't read d.i.c.kens. We met suddenly a host of people who really couldn't stand d.i.c.kens. Most of them (of course) were 'the people of whom crowds are made,' owning no sort of mental furniture worth exchange or purchase. They killed the fashion of despising d.i.c.kens _as_ a fashion, and the Superior Person, finding that his sorrowful inability was no longer an exclusive thing, ceased to brag about it.

When a fashion in dress is popular on Hampstead Heath on Bank Holiday festivals, the people who originally set the fashion discard it, and set another. In half a generation some of our superiors, for the mere sake of originality in judgment, will be going back to the pages of that immortal master-immortal as men count literary immortality--and will begin to tell us that after all there was really something in him.

It was Mr. W. D. Howells, an American writer of distinguished ability, as times go, who set afloat the phrase that since the death of Thackeray and d.i.c.kens fiction has become a finer art. If Mr. Howells had meant what many people supposed him to mean, the saying would have been merely impudent He used the word 'finer' in its literal sense, and meant only that a fashion of minuteness in investigation and in style had come upon us. There is a sense in which the dissector who makes a reticulation of the muscular and nervous systems of a little finger is a 'finer' surgeon than the giant of the hospitals whose diagnosis is an inspiration, and whose knife carves unerringly to the root of disease. There is a sense in which a sculptor, carving on cherrystones likenesses of commonplace people, would be a 'finer' artist than Michael Angelo, whose custom it was to handle forms of splendour on an heroic scale of size. In that sense, and in the hands of some of its pract.i.tioners, fiction for a year or two became a finer art than it had ever been before. But the microscopist was never popular, and could never hope to be. He is dead now, and the younger men are giving us vigorous copies of Dumas, and Scott, and Edgar Allan Poe, and some of them are fusing the methods of d.i.c.kens with those of later and earlier writers. We are in for an era of broad effect again.

But a great many people, and, amongst them, some who ought to have known better, adopted the saying of Mr. Howells in a wider sense than he ever intended it to carry, and, partly as a result of this, we have arrived at a certain tacit depreciation of the greatest emotional master of fiction. There are other and more cogent reasons for the temporary obscuration of that brilliant light. It may aid our present purpose to discover what they are.

Every age has its fashions in literature as it has in dress. All the beautiful fashions in literature, at least, have been thought worthy of revival and imitation, but there has come to each in turn a moment when it has begun to pall upon the fancy. Every school before its death is fated to inspire satiety and weariness. The more overwhelming its success has been, the more complete and sweeping is the welcomed change.

We know how the world thrilled and wept over Pamela and Clarissa, and we know how their particular form of pathos sated the world and died.

We know what a turn enchanted castles had, and how their spell withered into nothing. We know what a triumphal progress the Sentimental Sufferer made through the world, and what a bore he came to be. It is success which kills. Success breeds imitation, and the imitators are a weariness. And it is not the genius who dies. It is only the school which arose to mimic him. Richardson is alive for everybody but the dull and stupid. Now that the world of fiction is no longer crowded with enchanted castles, we can go to live in one occasionally for a change, and enjoy ourselves. Werther is our friend again, though the school he founded was probably the most tiresome the world has seen.

Now, with the solitary exception of Sir Walter Scott, it is probable that no man ever inspired such a host of imitators as Charles d.i.c.kens.

There is not a writer of fiction at this hour, in any land where fiction is a recognised trade or art, who is not, whether he knows it and owns it, or no, largely influenced by d.i.c.kens. His method has got into the atmosphere of fiction, as that of all really great writers must do, and we might as well swear to unmix our oxygen and hydrogen as to stand clear of his influences. To stand clear of those influences you must stand apart from all modern thought and sentiment. You must have read nothing that has been written in the last sixty years, and you must have been bred on a desert island. d.i.c.kens has a living part in the life of the whole wide world. He is on a hundred thousand magisterial benches every day. There is not a hospital patient in any country who has not at this minute a right to thank G.o.d that d.i.c.kens lived. What his blessed and bountiful hand has done for the poor and oppressed, and them that had no helper, no man knows. He made charity and good feeling a religion. Millions and millions of money have flowed from the coffers of the rich for the benefit of the poor because of his books. A great part of our daily life, and a good deal of the best of it, is of his making.

No single man ever made such opportunities for himself. No single man was ever so widely and permanently useful. No single man ever sowed gentleness and mercy with so broad a sweep.

This is all true, and very far from new, but it has not been the fashion to say it lately. It is not the whole of the truth. n.o.ble rivers have their own natural defects of swamp and mudbank. Sometimes his tides ran sluggishly, as in 'The Battle of Life,' for example, which has always seemed to me, at least, a most mawkish and unreal book. The pure stream of 'The Carol,' which washes the heart of a man, runs thin in 'The Chimes,' runs thinner in 'The Haunted Man,' and in 'The Battle of Life'

is lees and mud. 'Nickleby,' again, is a young man's book, and as full of blemishes as of genius. But when all is said and done, it killed the Yorkshire schools.

The chief fault the superficial modern critic has to find with d.i.c.kens is a sort of rumbustious boisterousness in the expression of emotion.

But let one thing be pointed out, and let me point it out in my own fashion. Tom Hood, who was a true poet, and the best of our English wits, and probably as good a judge of good work as any person now alive, went home after meeting with d.i.c.kens, and in a playful enthusiasm told his wife to cut off his hand and bottle it, because it had shaken hands with Boz. Lord Jeffrey, who was cold as a critic, cried over little Nell. So did Sydney Smith, who was very far from being a blubbering sentimentalist. To judge rightly of any kind of dish you must bring an appet.i.te to it. Here is the famous d.i.c.kens pie, when first served, p.r.o.nounced inimitable, not by a cla.s.s or a clique, but by all men in all lands. But you get it served hot, and you get it served cold, it is rehashed in every literary restaurant, you detect its flavour in your morning leader and your weekly review. The pie gravy finds its way into the prose and the verse of a whole young generation. It has a striking flavour, an individual flavour, It gets into everything. We are weary of the ceaseless resurrections of that once so toothsome dish. Take it away.

The original pie is no worse and no better, but thousands of cooks have had the recipe for it, and have tried to make it. Appet.i.te may have vanished, but the pie was a good pie.

No simile runs on all fours, and this parable in a pie-dish is a poor traveller.

But this principle of judgment applies of necessity to all great work in art. It does not apply to merely good work, for that is nearly always imitative, and therefore not much provocative of imitation. It happens sometimes that an imitator, to the undiscerning reader, may even seem better than the man he mimics, because he has a modern touch. But remember, in his time the master also was a modern.

The new man says of d.i.c.kens that his sentiment rings false. This is a mistake. It rings old-fashioned. No false note ever moved a world, and the world combined to love his very name. There were tears in thousands of households when he died, and they were as sincere and as real as if they had arisen at the loss of a personal friend.

We, who in spite of fashion remain true to our allegiance to the magician of our youth, who can never worship or love another as we loved and worshipped him, are quite contented in the slight inevitable dimming of his fame. He is still in the hearts of the people, and there he has only one rival.

No attempt at a review of modern fiction can be made without a mention of the men who were greatest when the art was great When we have done with the giants we will come down to the big fellows, and by that time we shall have an eye for the proportions of the rest. But before we part for the time being, let me offer the uncritical reader one valuable touchstone. Let him recall the stories he has read, say, five years ago.

If he can find a live man or woman anywhere amongst his memories, who is still as a friend or an enemy to him, he has, fifty to one, read a sterling book. d.i.c.kens' people stand this test with all readers, whether they admire him or no. Even when they are grotesque they are alive. They live in the memory even of the careless like real people. And this is the one unfailing trial by which great fiction may be known.

II.--CHARLES READE

Reade's position in literature is distinctly strange. The professional critics never came within miles of a just appreciation of his greatness, and the average 'cultured reader' receives his name with a droll air of allowance and patronage. But there are some, and these are not the least qualified as judges, who regard him as ranking with the great masters.

You will find, I think, that the men holding this opinion are, in the main, fellow-workers in the craft he practised. His warmest and most constant admirers are his brother novelists. Trollope, to be sure, spoke of him as 'almost a man of genius,' but Trollope's mind was a quintessential distillation of the commonplace, and the man who was on fire with the romance and pa.s.sion of his own age was outside the limit of his understanding. But amongst the writers of English fiction whom it has been my privilege to know personally, I have not met with one who has not reckoned Charles Reade a giant.

The critics have never acknowledged him, and, in a measure, he has been neglected by the public. There is a reason for everything, if we could only find it, and sometimes I seem to have a glimmering of light on this perplexing problem. Sir Walter Besant (Mr. Besant then) wrote in the 'Gentleman's Magazine' years ago a daring panegyric on Reade's work, giving him frankly a place among the very greatest. My heart glowed as I read, but I know now that it took courage of the rarer sort to express a judgment so unreserved in favour of a writer who never for an hour occupied in the face of the public such a position as is held by three or four men in our day, whom this dead master could have rolled in the hollow of his hand.

Let me try for a minute or two to show why and how he is so very great a man; and then let me try to point out one or two of the reasons for which the true reward of greatness has been denied him.

The very first essential to greatness in any pursuit is that a man should be in earnest in respect to it. You may as well try to kindle your household fire with pump water as to excite laughter by the invention of a story which does not seem laughable to yourself, or to draw real tears by a story conceived whilst your own heart is dry, 'The wounded is the wounding heart.' In Charles Reade's case this essential sympathy amounted to a pa.s.sion. He derided difficulties, but he derided them after the fashion of the thorough-going enthusiast, and not after that of the sluggard. He made up his mind to write fiction, and he practised for years before he printed a line. He a.s.sured himself of methods of selection and of forms of expression. Better equipped by nature than one in a hundred of those who follow the profession he had chosen he laboured with a fiery, unresting patience to complete his armoury, and to perfect himself in the handling of its every weapon. He read omnivorously, and, throughout his literary lifetime, he made it his business to collect and to collate, to cla.s.sify and to catalogue, innumerable fragments of character, of history, of current news, of evanescent yet vital stuffs of all sorts. In the last year but one of his life he went with me over some of the stupendous volumes he had built in this way. The vast books remain as an ill.u.s.tration of his industry, but only one who has seen him in consultation with their pages can guess the accuracy and intimacy of his knowledge of their contents.

They seem to deal with everything, and with whatever they enclosed he was familiar.

This encyclopaedic industry would have left a commonplace man commonplace, and in the estimate of a great man's genius it takes rank merely as a characteristic. His sympathy for his chosen craft was backed by a sympathy for humanity just as intense and impa.s.sioned. He was a glorious lover and hater of lovable and hateful things.

In one respect he was almost unique amongst men, for he united a savage detestation of wrong with a most minute accuracy in his judgment of its extent and quality. He laboured in the investigation of the problems of his own age with the cold diligence of an antiquary. He came to a conclusion with the calm of a great judge. And when his cause was sure he threw himself upon it with an extraordinary and sustained energy. The rage of his advocacy is in surprising contrast with the patience exerted in building up his case.

Reade had a poet's recognition for the greatness of his own time. He saw the epic nature of the events of his own hour, the epic character of the men who moulded those events. Hundreds of years hence, when federated Australia is thickly sown with great cities, and the island-continent has grown to its fulness of accomplished nationhood, and is grey in honour, Reade's nervous English, which may by that time have grown quaint, and only legible to learned eves, will preserve; the history of its beginnings. That part of His work, indeed, is purely and wholly epic in sentiment and discernment, however colloquial in form, and it is the sole example of its kind, since it was written by one who was contemporary with the events described.

Reade was pretty constantly at war with his critics, but he fairly justified himself of the reviewer in his own day, and at this time the people who a.s.sailed him have something like a right to sleep in peace.

In private life one of the most amiable of men, and distinguished for courtesy and kindness, he was a swash-buckler in controversy. He had a trick of being in the right which his opponents found displeasing, and he was sometimes cruel in his impatience of stupidity and wrong-headedness. Scarcely any continuance in folly could have inspired most men to the retorts he occasionally made. He wrote to one unfortunate: 'Sir,--You have ventured to contradict me on a question with regard to which I am profoundly learned, where you are ignorant as dirt.' It was quite true, but another kind of man would have found another way of saying it.

That trick of being right came out with marked effect in the discussion which accompanied the issue of 'Hard Cash' in 'All the Year Round,' A pract.i.tioner in lunacy condemned one of the author's statements as a bald impossibility. Reade answered that the impossibility in question disguised itself as fact, and went through the hollow form of taking place on such and such a date in such and such a public court, and was recorded in such and such contemporary journals. Whenever he made a crusade against a public evil, as when he a.s.sailed the prison system, or the madhouse system, or the system of rattening in trades unions, his case was supported by huge collections of indexed fact, and in the fight which commonly followed he could appeal to unimpeachable records; but again and again the angry fervour of the advocate led people to forget or to distrust the judicial accuracy on which his case invariably rested.

When all is said and done, his claim to immortality lies less in the books which deal with the splendours and the scandals of his own age than in that monument of learning, of humour, of pathos, and of narrative skill, 'The Cloister and the Hearth.'* It is not too much to say of this book that, on its own lines, it is without a rival. To the reader it seems to be not less than the revival of a dead age. To a.s.sert dogmatically that the bygone people with whom it deals could not have been other than it paints them would be to pretend to a knowledge greater than the writer's own. But they are not the men and women with whom we are familiar in real life, and they are not the men and women with whom other writers of fiction have made us acquainted. Yet they are indubitably human and alive, and we doubt them no more than the people with whom we rub shoulders in the street. Dr. Conan Doyle once said to me what I thought a memorable thing about this book; To read it, he said, was 'like going through the Dark Ages with a dark lantern,' It is so, indeed. You pa.s.s along the devious route from old Sevenbergen to mediaeval Rome, and wherever the narrative leads you, the searchlight flashes on everything, and out of the darkness and the dust and death of centuries life leaps at you. And I know nothing in English prose which for a n.o.ble and simple eloquence surpa.s.ses the opening and the closing paragraphs of this great work, nor--with some nave and almost childish pa.s.sages of humour omitted--a richer, terser, purer, or more perfect style than that of the whole narrative. Nowadays, the fashion in criticism has changed, and the feeblest duffer amongst us receives welcome ten times more enthusiastic and praise less measured than was bestowed upon 'The Cloister and the Hearth' when it first saw the light.

Think only for a moment--think what would happen if such a book should suddenly be launched upon us. Honestly, there _could_ be no reviewing it. Our superlatives have been used so often to describe, at the best, good, plain, sound work, and, at the worst, frank rubbish, that we have no vocabulary for excellence of such a cast.

* It is worth while to record here a phrase used by Charles Reade to me in reference to this work. He was reb.u.t.ting the charge of plagiarism which had been brought against him, and he said laughingly, 'It is true that I milked three hundred cows into my bucket, but the b.u.t.ter I churned was my own.'

And now, how comes it that with genius, scholarship, and style, with laughter and terror and tears at his order, this great writer halts in his stride towards the place which should be his by right? It seems to me at times as if I had a partial answer to that question. I believe that a judicious editor, without a solitary act of impiety, could give Charles Reade undisputed and indisputable rank. One-half the whole business is a question of printing. This great and admirable writer had one constant fault, which is so vulgar and trivial that it remains as much of a wonder as it is of an offence. He seeks emphasis by the expedient of big type and small type, of capitals and small capitals, of italics and black letter, and of tawdry little ill.u.s.trations. Long before the reader arrives at the point at which it is intended that his emotions shall be stirred, his eye warns him that the shock is coming.

He knows beforehand that the rhetorical bolt is to fall just there, and when it comes it is ten to one that he finds the effect disappointing.

Or the change from the uniformity of the page draws his eye to the 'displayed' pa.s.sages, and he is tantalised into reading them out of their proper place and order. Take, for instance, an example which just occurs to me. In 'It is Never Too Late to Mend,' Fielding and Robinson are lost in an Australian forest--'bushed,' as the local phrase goes. At that hour they are being hunted for their lives. They fall into a sort of devil's circle, and, as lost men have often done, they come in the course of their wanderings upon their own trail. For awhile they follow it in the hope that it will lead them to some camp or settlement.

Suddenly Fielding becomes aware that they are following the track of their own earlier footprints, and almost in the same breath he discovers that these are joined by the traces of other feet. He reads a fatal and true meaning into this sign, looks to his weapons, and starts off at a mended pace. 'What are you doing?' asks Robinson, and Fielding answers (in capital letters): 'I am hunting the hunters!' The situation is admirably dramatic. Chance has so ordered it that the pursued are actually behind the pursuers, and the presence of the intended murderers is proclaimed by a device which is at once simple, natural, novel, and surprising. All the elements for success in thrilling narrative are here, and the style never lulls for a second, or for a second allows the strain of the position to relax. But those capital letters have long since called the eye of the reader to themselves, and the point the writer tries to emphasise is doubly lost. It has been forestalled, and has become an irritation. You come on it twice; you have been robbed of antic.i.p.ation and suspense, which, just here, are the life and soul of art. You know before you ought to be allowed to guess; and, worst of all, perhaps, you feel that your own intelligence has been affronted.