Atlantic Classics Volume I Part 13

abeyance, finds the countess quite ready to marry him. She does not marry him in the end, to be sure, but we are permitted to feel that there was something lacking in her because Paragot's manners at tea did not please her.

The hero of old had what used to be called 'a sense of fitness,' and a saving sense of humor, which combined to prevent his entering a ballroom as John the Baptist. The same lucky combination would have prevented him--in literature, at least--from wooing the millionaire's child with dusty commonplaces of the Higher Criticism or jeremiads against the daughters of Heth. But perhaps millionaires' children to-day take that sort of thing for manners. To the argument that a performance of the kind takes courage, one can only reply that, judging from the enthusiasm with which the preaching hero is received by the heroine, it apparently does not. And in any case, the hero is too sublimely ignorant of what socially const.i.tutes courage to deserve any credit for it.

Sometimes, of course, like Mr. Galsworthy's men, he perceives, with some inherited sense, that his kind of thing is not likely to be welcomed; and then he goes sadly and sternly away, leaving the girl to accept a wooer with more technique. But usually he cuts out everybody. For the chief hall-mark of a gentleman, now, is the desire to reform his own cla.s.s out of all recognition.

Women, as we know, have long wanted to be talked to as if they were men; and the result is that heroines now let themselves be lectured at in a way that very few men would endure. Alison Parr marries the Rev. John Hodder, and Carlisle Heth would have married V. V. if he had lived.

Well: Clara Middleton married Vernon Whitford, and Carinthia Jane married Owain Wythan, and Aminta married Matey Weyburn.

I may have seemed to be speaking cynically. That, I can give my word of honor, I am not. It is well that we have come to realize that there are some adventures which, in themselves, add no l.u.s.tre to a man's name. It is well that we take thought for the lower strata of humanity--though our actual reforms, I fancy, show their authors as taking thought not for to-morrow but for to-day. Certainly brutality, or the indifference which is negative brutality, is not a beautiful or a moral thing; and certainly we do not particularly sympathize with Thackeray shedding tears as he went away from his publishers because they had obliged him to save Pendennis's chast.i.ty. That dreadful person, Arthur Pendennis, would surely not have been made any less dreadful by being permitted to seduce f.a.n.n.y Bolton.

It is right to think of the poor; it is right to bend our energies, as citizens, to the economic bettering of their lot. No one could sanely regret our doing so. But there is always danger in saying the thing which is not, and in pretending that because some virtues have hitherto not been recognized, the virtues that have been recognized are no good.

One sympathizes with Towneley (in that incomparable novel _The Way of All Flesh_) when Ernest asks him,--

'"Don't you like poor people very much yourself?"

'Towneley gave his face a comical but good-natured screw and said quietly, but slowly and decidedly, "No, no, no," and escaped.

'Of course, some poor people were very nice, and always would be so, but as though scales had fallen suddenly from his eyes he saw that no one was nicer for being poor, and that between the upper and lower cla.s.ses there was a gulf which amounted practically to an impa.s.sable barrier.'

It is a great pity that Samuel Butler did not live longer and write more novels. But in regretting him, we shall do well to remember that though publication was delayed until some time after the author's death, the bulk of _The Way of All Flesh_ was written in the '70's. _The Way of All Flesh_ is not sympathetic to the contemporary mood; it is one of those books so much ahead of its time (except perhaps in ecclesiastical matters) that the time has not yet caught up with it. It was doomed inevitably to an interval of oblivion. The case reminds one of _Richard Feverel_.

Only in one way is _The Way of All Flesh_ quite contemporary. The hero thinks so well of the prost.i.tute that he marries her. On the other hand, to be sure, he bitterly regrets it, which is not contemporary. I do not mean that the hero's marrying her is especially in the literary fas.h.i.+on, but his thinking well of her is. You will notice that in our moral fever we do not leave the prost.i.tute out of our novels--no, indeed: she must be there to give spice, as of old. Only now, instead of being entangled with her, the young gentleman preaches to her; and she loves him for it. Perhaps this is what happens nowadays in real life. I do not pretend to know; but I suspect it is true, for I fancy the only kind of person who could invent the contemporary plot is the kind who would live it. The wildest imaginings of the people who are made differently would hardly stretch to it. And not only does the hero find himself immensely touched by the tragedy of the disreputable woman,--which is, after all, in certain cases plausible enough,--he burns to introduce his fiancee to her. Now that, again, may be life,--Mr. Winston Churchill, for example, should know better than I,--but it is certainly a world with the sense of values gone wrong. And when we have lost our sense of values, we shall presently lose the values as well. The girl herself is often to blame: did not the fiancee of Simon de Gex go of her own initiative to see the animal-tamer, and come away to renounce him, convinced that the animal-tamer was the n.o.bler woman? Which, emphatically, she was not. But then, as we know from long experience of Mr. Locke, he cannot keep his head with circus-people about; and sawdust is incense to him. Let Mr. Locke have his little foibles by all means; but even Mr. Locke should not have made the spoiled darling of society marry the animal-tamer (one side of her face having been nearly clawed off) and _then_ go with her into city missionary work. Yet I do not believe it is really Mr. Locke's fault.

The public at present loves as a sister the woman with a past; and loves city missionary work, if possible, more.

The fact is that with all our imitation of Meredith--and every one who is not imitating Tolsto is imitating Meredith--he has failed to save us. We have taken all his prescriptions blindly--except one. We have emanc.i.p.ated our women and emasculated our men; we have cast down the mighty from their seats and exalted them of low degree; we have learned all the Radical s.h.i.+bboleths and say them for our morning prayers; and we have faced the fact of s.e.x so squarely that we can hardly see anything else. But we have not learned his saving hatred of the sentimentalist.

Miss May Sinclair has admirably pointed out in her study of the _Three Brontes_ that Charlotte Bronte was exceedingly modern in her detestation of sentimentality. Modern she may have been--with Meredith; but not modern with the present novelists, for they are almost too sentimental to be endured. And there is the whole trouble. We think Thackeray an old fool for being sentimental over Amelia Sedley; but how does it better the case to be sentimental, instead, over the heroine of _The Promised Land_? Amelia Sedley was all in all a much nicer person, if not half so clever. She may have sniveled a good deal, but she was capable of loving some one else better than herself.

Of course, I have cited only a few instances--those that happened to come most easily to mind. But let any reader of fiction run over mentally a group of contemporary heroes, and see if the subst.i.tutions I have named have not pretty generally taken place. Has not pride given way to humility, reticence to glibness, cla.s.s-consciousness to a wild democracy, the code of manners to an uncouth unworldliness, and honor in the old sense to a burning pa.s.sion for reform--'any old' reform? Do not these men lead us into the heterogeneous company of the uncla.s.sed of both s.e.xes--and ask us to look upon them as saints in motley? Has not the world of fiction changed in the last twenty years? The hero in old days sometimes fell foul of the law by getting into debt. But we were not supposed, therefore, to be on his side against the law. Now, the hero does not, perhaps, get into legal difficulties himself, but he is always pa.s.sionately on the side of the people whom laws were devised to protect the respectable from. The scientific tendency to consider that aristocracy consists merely in freedom from certain physical taints has permeated fiction. 'Is not one man as good as another?' asked the demagogue. 'Of course he is, and a great deal better!' replied the excited Irishman in the crowd. We are in the thick of a popular mania for thinking all the undesirables 'a good deal better.' The modern hero is, to my mind, in intention, if not in execution, an admirable figure; and though one rather expects him any day to give his whole fortune for a gross of green spectacles, one will not, for that, find him any less likable. Some day he will rediscover the Dantesque hierarchy of souls implicit in humanity. And then, perhaps, he will get back his charm.

Some one is probably bursting to observe that we have a school of realists at hand; and that no one can accuse Mr. Wells and Mr. Bennett of sentimentality--also that we have Mr. Shaw and Mr. Granville Barker and Mr. Masefield as mounted auxiliaries in the field. I grant Mr.

Bennett; I am not so sure about Mr. Wells. But certainly Mr. Wells is not sentimental as Mr. William de Morgan, Mr. Winston Churchill, Mr.

Meredith Nicholson, Mr. Theodore Dreiser, Mr. H. S. Harrison, and Miss Ellen Glasgow are sentimental. If he is sentimental at all, it is rather over ideas than people. (Mr. Masefield, I am inclined to think, is simply catering to the special audience that Thomas Hardy, by his silence, has left gaping and empty.) Let us look into the matter a little. 'Sentimental' is one of the most difficult catchwords in the world to define; and you can get a roomful of intelligent people quarreling over it any time. Perhaps, for our purposes, it will serve merely to say that the sentimentalist is always, in one way or another, disloyal to facts. He cannot be trusted to give a straight account, because his own sense of things is more valuable to him than the truth.

He has come in on the top of the pragmatic wave, and the sands of Anglo-Saxondom are strewn thick with him. He serves, in Kipling's phrase, the G.o.d of Things as They Ought to Be (according to his private feeling). His own perversion may be aesthetic, or intellectual, or moral, or sociological, but he is always recognizable by his tampering with truth.

Now, Mr. Wells does tamper with truth. He did it, for example, in the case of Ann Veronica. He wanted Ann Veronica to be a nice girl under twenty, and he wanted her, even more, to be unduly awakened to certain physical aspects of s.e.x. It was sentimentality that made him draw her as he did: determination to prove that the girl who loved as he wanted her to love was just as conventional as any one else. You cannot have your cake and eat it too; but the sentimentalist blindly refuses to accept that. Accordingly, we get the unconvincing creature that Mr. Wells wanted to believe existed. Mr. Wells's heroes may not seem to bear out my argument so well as Mr. Galsworthy's. To be sure, Mr. Wells is not so sentimental as Mr. Galsworthy, and he has not, like the author of _The Man of Property_, and _Fraternity_, and _Justice_, one--just one--fixed idea. Mr. Galsworthy always deals with a man who is in love with some other man's wife; and his world is thereby narrowed. Mr. Wells is interested in a good many things, and his politics are not purely philanthropic as most of our novelists' politics are. But Mr. Wells's heroes, even when they are fairly fortunate, are preoccupied with their own notions of sociological duty, even more than they are preoccupied with pa.s.sion, though their pa.s.sion is 'special' enough when it comes.

Would any one except a Wells hero take a trip to India and come away having seen nothing but the sweat-shops of Bombay? Always the author's sympathy is with the under dog; whether it is Kipps or Mr. Polly living out his long foredoomed existence, or George Ponderevo a.n.a.lyzing Bladesover with diabolic keenness and aching contempt. 'I'm a spiritual guttersnipe in love with unimaginable G.o.ddesses,' says Ponderevo in a burst of frankness. There you have the Wells hero to the life. And Mr.

Bennett's people are only spiritual guttersnipes who are _not_ in love with unimaginable G.o.ddesses.

The point is that the guttersnipe is having his turn in fiction: if our American heroes are not guttersnipes themselves, it is their sign of grace to be supremely interested in guttersnipes. In one way or the other, the guttersnipe must have his proper prominence. Of course, there are differences and degrees: a few heroes get no nearer the lower cla.s.ses than a pa.s.sionate desire for reform tickets and munic.i.p.al sanitation. But ordinarily they must go through Ernest Pontifex's state of believing that poor people are not only more important, but in every way nicer than rich people; and few of them go back utterly on that belief, as Ernest did. Perhaps that, more than anything else, marks the change of fas.h.i.+on in men. For gentlemen were always, in their way, benevolent; but formerly they had not achieved the paradox that the object of benevolence is _ex officio_ more interesting than the bestower.

Books have been written before now in the interest of reform. They tell us that _Justice_ set the Home Secretary to thinking. Well: Marcus Clarke actually caused the reform of the Australian penal settlements by his now forgotten novel, _For the Term of His Natural Life_. The hero of Marcus Clarke's book was innocent and unjustly condemned; the hero of _Justice_ is guilty. Wanton cruelty is wicked whether the victim be a bad man or a good one; but the difference between these two heroes is not so purely accidental as, at first blush, it may seem. The author of _His Natural Life_ starting out to capture sympathy, showed the brutal system wreaking itself on an innocent man, of good family, condemned for another's guilt. Mr. Galsworthy, equally eager to capture sympathy, makes his protagonist guilty of the theft, having tried in vain to incriminate an innocent person. Each writer depended, doubtless, on public sentiment for his effect. In Marcus Clarke's time, public sentiment--however unfortunate the fact may be--simply could not have been aroused to such a pitch by the sufferings of a liar and a thief as by the sufferings of an innocent man who is consciously paying another person's penalty. The Humanitarian Hero had not come into fas.h.i.+on--nor yet the guttersnipe. But Marcus Clarke's book did its work--proof that even in the '50's we were not so callous as we seemed.

I said earlier that in life, as well as in literature, men had changed.

One's instances, obviously, must be from books, and not from one's acquaintance; but I spoke truth. Philanthropy is the latest social ladder, but it would not be so if the people on the top rung were not interested in philanthropy. There has been, for whatever reason, a tremendous spurt of interest in sociological questions. Our hard-headed young men, of high ideals, find themselves fighting, of necessity, on a different battlefield from any that strategists would have chosen thirty years ago. Moreover, philanthropy being woman's way into politics, women have been giving their calm, or hysterical, attention to problems which, thirty years since, did not, as problems, exist for them. I said that the change of taste in women would probably account for much of the change of fas.h.i.+on in men. A schoolmate of mine, writing me some years since of her engagement, said (in nearly these words), 'He is tremendously interested in city missionary work; it wouldn't have been quite perfect if we hadn't had that in common.' Both were spoiled darlings of fortune, but the statement was quite sincere. Undoubtedly, without that, it would not have been 'quite perfect' in the eyes of either.

The mere conversation of the marriageable young has changed past belief.

'Social service' has usurped so many subjects! Have many people stopped to realize, I wonder, how completely the psychological novel and the 'problem' play (in the old sense) have gone out of date? The psychology of hero and heroine, their emotional att.i.tudes to each other, are largely worked out now in terms of their att.i.tudes to impersonal questions, their religious or their sociological 'principles.' The individual personal reaction counts less and less. If they agree on the same panacea for the social evils, the author can usually patch up a pa.s.sion sufficient for them to marry on. Gone, for the most part, are the pages of intimate a.n.a.lysis. No intimate a.n.a.lysis is needed any longer. As for the 'problem play,' we have it still with us, but in another form. _The Doll's House_ and _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_ are both antiquated: we do not call a drama a problem play now unless it preaches a new kind of legislation. And as for s.e.x,--in its finer aspects it no longer interests us.

There was a great deal more s.e.x, in its subtler manifestations, in the old novels and plays, than in the new ones. Not so long ago, a novel was a love story; and it was of supreme importance to a hero whether or not he could make the heroine care for him. It was also of supreme importance to the heroine. The romance was all founded on s.e.x; and yet s.e.x was hardly mentioned. Our heroes and heroines still marry; but when they consider s.e.x at all, they are apt to consider it biologically, not romantically. We, as a public, are more frankly interested in s.e.x than ever; but we think of it objectively, and a little brutally, in terms of demand and supply. And so we get often the pathetic spectacle of the hero and heroine having no time to make love to each other in the good old-fas.h.i.+oned way, because they are so busy suppressing the red-light district and compiling statistics of disease. Much of the frankness, doubtless, is a good thing; but beyond a doubt, it has cheapened pa.s.sion. For pa.s.sion among civilized people is a subtle thing: it is wrapped about with dreams and imaginings; and can bring human beings to salvation as well as to perdition. But when it is shown to us as the mere province of courtesans, small wonder that we turn from it to the hero who will have difficulty in feeling or inspiring it. Especially since we are told, at the same time, that even the courtesan plies her trade only from direst necessity.

After all, the only safe person to fall in love with nowadays _is_ a reformer: socially, financially, and sentimentally. And most women, at least, could (if they would) say with the Princesse Mathilde, 'Je n'aime que les romans dont je voudrais etre l'herone.' Certainly, unless for some special reason, no novel of which one would not like to be the heroine--in love with the hero--will reach the hundred thousand mark. If there are any of us left who regret the gentlemen of old--who still prefer our Darcy or even our Plantagenet Palliser--we must write our own novels, and divine our own heroes under the protective coloring of their conventional breeding. For they are not being 'featured,' at present, either in life or in literature.

A Confession in Prose

By Walter Prichard Eaton

Unlike M. Jourdain, who had been speaking prose all his life without knowing it, I have been writing it nearly all of mine, quite consciously, and earning my living thereby since I was twenty-one years old. I am now thirty-four. I have been a professional writer of prose, then, for thirteen years--or shall I say a writer of professional prose?

Much of this writing has been done for various American magazines; still more has been done to fill the ravenous columns of American newspapers; some, even, has been immured between covers. I have tried never to write sloppily, though I have of necessity often written hastily. I can honestly say, too, that I have tried at times to write beautifully, by which I mean rhythmically, with a conscious adjustment of sound and melody to the sense, with the charm of word-chiming further to heighten heightened thought. But I can also as honestly say that in this latter effort I have never been encouraged by a newspaper editor, and I have been not infrequently discouraged by magazine editors. Not all magazines compel you to chop up your prose into a maximum paragraph length of ten lines, as does a certain one of large circulation. Not all newspapers compel you to be 'smart,' as did one for which I worked compel us all. But the impression among editors is prevalent, none the less, that a conversational downrightness and sentence and paragraph brevity are the be-all and end-all of prose style, or at least of so much of prose style as can be grasped by the populace who read their publications; and that beautiful writing must be 'fine writing,' and therefore never too much to be avoided. So I started out from the cla.s.sroom of Professor Lewis E. Gates, one of the keenest and most inspiring a.n.a.lysts of prose beauties this country has produced, to be a professional writer of prose, and dreamed, as youth will, of wrapping my singing robes about me and ravis.h.i.+ng the world. I was soon enough told to doff my singing robes for the overalls of journalism, and I have become a writer of professional prose instead.

These remarks have been inspired by a long and wistful evening just spent in perusing Professor Saintsbury's new book, called _The History of English Prose Rhythm_. I shall hold no brief for the good professor's method of scansion. It matters little to me, indeed, how he chooses to scan prose. What does matter to me is that he has chosen to scan it at all, that he has brought forward the finest examples in the stately procession of English literature, and demonstrated with all the weight of his learning, his authority, his fine enthusiasm, that this prose is no less consciously wrought to pleasing numbers than is verse. We who studied under Professor Gates knew much of this before, if not in so detailed and would-be methodical a fas.h.i.+on. Charles Lamb knew it when he wrote, 'Even ourself, in these our humbler lucubrations, tune our best measured cadences (prose has her cadences) not unfrequently to the charm of the drowsier watchman, "blessing the doors"; or the wild sweep of winds at midnight.' Sir Thomas Browne was not exactly unaware of it as he prepared his _Urn Burial_ for the printer; nor the authors of the King James Version of the Bible when they translated--or if you prefer, paraphrased--the rhapsodic chapters of Isaiah. But it is pleasant, and not unimportant, to be once more reminded, in a generation when written speech has sunk to the conversational level of the man in the street, that 'prose has her cadences'; and to me, at least, it is melancholy, also. For I would strive to write such prose, in my stumbling fas.h.i.+on, were I permitted.

Writing about a fine art, as I am so often called upon to do, I would endeavor with what might lay in me to write about it finely. Suppose that art chances to be the drama. Why, when some compact, weighty, and worthily performed example comes to our stage, should I be expected to toss off a description of it in a style less compact and weighty and worthily conducted? On the rare occasions when a new play chances to be poetic, am I not justified in writing of it in poetic prose? How else, indeed, can I truly render back to my readers the subtler aspects of its charm? But for such writing there is little room in our hurrying and 'conversational' press, though now and then a despised dramatic editor is found who understands. Even the drama itself strives to be 'conversational' at all costs, under the banner of 'realism,' and profanity flourishes on our stage in what we must infer to be a most life-like manner, while we have almost forgotten that the spoken word can be melodious or imaginative. Criticism cries at its heels, and helps with flippant jest and broken syntax and cacophonous combinations of our poorest vernacular, in the general debas.e.m.e.nt. Do not tell me that men do not exist who could write differently of the stage, as men exist who can, and do, write differently for it. Every worthy dramatist can be paralleled by at least one worthy critic, and more probably by three or four, since the true creative instinct in drama is perhaps the rarest of human attributes, save only charity. But the editors appear to have determined that the public does not want such critics--and perhaps the editors are right. At least, the public does not often get them.

We are speaking now of prose, not of opinions, and we may safely introduce the name of a living critic, William Winter. For nearly half a century Mr. Winter has written prose about the theatre, and although that prose was produced for a morning newspaper it was carefully and consistently balanced and welded, and, when the subject demanded it, rose, according to its creator's ideas of beauty, into the heightened eloquence of sentence rhythm and syllabic harmony. Leisure may improve, but haste cannot prevent the rhythm of prose, provided the instinct for it resides in the writer, and the opportunity exists for practice and expression. Two examples of Mr. Winter's use of rhythm come to my memory, and I quote only phrases, not whole sentences, merely because I am sure of no more. Writing one morning of a new and very 'modern' play, presented the previous evening by a well-known actress, he said: 'Sarah Bernhardt at least made her s.e.xual monsters interesting, wielding the lethal hatpin or the deadly hatchet with Gallic grace and sweet celerity.' Again, in reviewing Pinero's _Iris_, he took up two of Henry Arthur Jones's phrases, recently made current in a lecture, and played with them, ending with mellifluous scorn, 'Such are "the great realities of modern life," flowers of disease and blight that fringe the charnel house of the "serious drama."'

These are certainly examples of rhythmic, or cadenced prose, and they are examples taken from journalistic reviews. They admirably express the writer's point of view toward his subject matter, but they also reveal his care for the manner of expression, they satisfy the ear; and therefore to one at all sensitive to literature they are doubly satisfying. The arrow of irony is ever more delightful when it sings on its flight. The trick, then, can be done. Mr. Winter, too often perhaps for modern ears, performed it by recourse to the Johnsonian balance of period and almost uniform, swelling roll. But that is neither here nor there. The point is that he performed it--and that it is no longer performed by the new generation, either in newspaper columns, or, we will add at once, anywhere else. Rhythmic prose, prose cadenced to charm the ear and by its melodies and harmonies properly adjusted to heighten, as with an under-song, the emotional appeal of the ideas expressed, is no longer written. It appears to be no longer wanted. We are fallen upon harsh and colloquial times.

No one with any ear at all would deny Emerson a style, even if his rhythms are often broken into the cross-chop of Carlyle. No one would deny Irving a style, or Poe,--certainly Poe at his best,--or, indeed, to hark far back, Cotton Mather in many pa.s.sages of the _Magnalia_, where to a quaint iambic simplicity he added a Biblical fervor which redeems and melodizes the monotony. Mather suggests Milton, Irving suggests Addison, Emerson suggests Carlyle, Poe, shall we say, is often the too conscious workman typified by De Quincey. But thereafter, in this country, we descend rapidly into second-hand imitations, into rhythm become, in truth, mere 'fine writing,' until its death within recent memory. Yet we do not find even to-day the true cadenced prose either uninteresting or out of date. Emerson is as modern as the morning paper.

Newman's description of the ideal site for a university, in the clear air of Attica beside the blue aegean, charms us still with its perfect blend of sound and sense, its clear intellectual idea borne on a cadenced undersong, as of distant surf upon the sh.o.r.e; and the exquisite epilogue to the _Apologia_, with its chime of proper names, still brings a moisture to our eyes. The triumphant tramp of Gibbon, the headlong imagery and Biblical fervor of Ruskin, the languid music of Walter Pater, each holds its separate charm, and the charm is not archaic.

Is such prose impossible any more? Certainly it is not. The heritage of the language is still ours, the birthright of our n.o.ble English tongue.

Simply, we do not dare to let ourselves go. We seem tortured with the modern blight of self-consciousness; and while the cheaper magazines are almost blatant in their unblus.h.i.+ng self-puffery, they are none the less cravenly submissive to what they deem popular demand, and turn their backs on literature, on style, as something abhorrent to a race which has been fed on the English Bible for three hundred years. Their ideal of a prose style now seems to consist of a series of staccato yips. It really cannot be described in any other way. The 'triumphantly intricate' sentence celebrated by Walter Pater would give many a modern editor a s.h.i.+ver of terror. He would visualize it as mowing down the circulation of the magazine like a machine gun. Rhythm and beauty of style can hardly be achieved by staccato yips. The modern magazine writer, trying to be rhetorically effective, trying to rise to the demands of heightened thought or emotional appeal, reminds one of that enthusiastic German tympanist who wrote an entire symphonic poem for kettle-drums.

I read one of the autumn crop of new novels the other day. Curiously enough, it was written by a music critic who, in his reviews of music, is constantly insisting on the primal importance of melody and harmony, who is an arch foe of the modern programme school and the whole-tone scale of Debussy. But the prose of his novel was utterly devoid of these prized elements, melody and harmony. A heavy, or sometimes turgid, journalistic commonplaceness sat upon it. I will not be unfair and tear an ill.u.s.tration from some pa.s.sage of rightly simple narration. I will take the closing sentences from one of the climactic chapters, when the mood had supposedly risen to intensity, and, if ever, the prose would have been justified in rising to reinforce the emotion.

The house was aroused to extravagant demonstrations. Across the footlights it looked like a brilliantly realistic piece of acting, and the audience was astonished at the vigor of the hitherto cold Americano.

'But Nagy was not deceived. Crushed, dishevelled, breathless, she knew that her dominion over him was gone forever. She had tried to show him his soul and he had begun to see the light.'

Now, an ear attuned to the melodies of English prose must surely find this commonplace, and the closing sentence of all actually as harsh as the tonalities of Strauss or Debussy seem to the writer. Let us, even if a little unfairly, set it beside a pa.s.sage from _Henry Esmond_, again a climactic pa.s.sage, but one where the style is climactic, also, rising to the mood.

'"You will please, sir, to remember," he continued, "that our family hath ruined itself by fidelity to yours: that my grandfather spent his estate, and gave his blood and his son to die for your service; that my dear lord's grandfather (for lord you are now, Frank, by right and t.i.tle too) died for the same cause; that my poor kinswoman, my father's second wife, after giving away her honor to your wicked perjured race, sent all her wealth to the King; and got in return that precious t.i.tle that lies in ashes, and this inestimable yard of blue ribbon. I lay this at your feet and stamp upon it; I draw this sword, and break it and deny you; and had you completed the wrong you designed us, by Heaven I would have driven it through your heart, and no more pardoned you than your father pardoned Monmouth. Frank will do the same, won't you, cousin?"'

This justly famous pa.s.sage, be it noted, is dialogue. To-day we especially do not dare to rise above a conversational level in dialogue.

We should be accused of being 'unnatural.' Does no one speak beautifully any more, then, even in real life? Are the nerve-centres so shattered in the modern anatomy that no connection is established between emotions and the musical sense? Does an exquisite mood no longer reflect itself in our voice, in our vocabulary? Does no lover rise to eloquence in the presence of his Adored? If that is the case, surely we now speak unnaturally, and it should be the duty of literature to restore our health! Nor need such speech in fiction float clear away from solid ground. Notice how Thackeray in his closing sentence--'Frank will do the same, won't you, cousin?'--anchors his rhetoric to the earth.

We are, let it be said again, in the grasp of realism, and realism but imperfectly understood. Just as our drama aims to reproduce exactly a 'solid' room upon the stage, and to set actors to talking therein the exact speech of every day, so our oratory, so-called, is the reproduction of a one-sided conversation, and our novels (when they are worthy of consideration) are reproductions of patiently acc.u.mulated details, set forth in impatiently a.s.sembled sentences. But all this does not of necessity const.i.tute realism, because its effect is not of necessity the creation of illusion, however truthful the artist's purpose. Of what avail, in the drama, for example, are solid rooms and conversational vernacular if the characters do not come to life in our imaginations, so that we share their joys and sorrows? Of what effect are the realistic details of a novel, whether of incident or language, if we do not re-live its story as we read? Surely, the answer is plain, and therefore any literary devices which heighten the mood for us are perfectly justifiable weapons of the realist, even as they are of the romanticist. One of these devices is consciously wrought prose. For the present we plead for its employment on no higher ground than this of practical expediency.

But how, you may ask,--no, not you, dear reader, who understand, but some other chap, a poor dog of an author, perhaps,--can consciously wrought prose aid in the creation of illusion? How can it be more than pretty?

Let us turn for answer to Sir Thomas Browne, to 'The Garden of Cyrus,'

to the closing numbers:--

'Besides, Hippocrates hath spoke so little, and the oneirocritical masters have left such frigid interpretations from plants, that there is little encouragement to dream of paradise itself. Nor will the sweetest delight of gardens afford much comfort in sleep, wherein the dulness of that sense shakes hands with delectable odours; and though in the bed of Cleopatra, can hardly with any delight raise up the ghost of a rose.'