Three English Novels

THE ingenuous lover of pictures for their interesting qualities is often disconcerted by being told that he admires them for inferior virtues ; that they are to be praised only for the excellence of their technique ; indeed, that deficiency in this particular cannot be offset by any skill in mere story-telling, and a high degree of technical expertness may dispense with merits which any one can perceive. And inasmuch as painting supposes an art that has arcana, the humble spectator accepts this dictum; he may even give a hesitating assent to the same criterion of poetry, but he is bold to deny it when a similar assertion is made respecting prose fiction. What! may a story fail to be very interesting, and yet be praiseworthy on the ground of its artistic quality ? It is conceivable that a reader, untrained in analysis of pleasure, may miss an adequate recognition of the art which has constructed the tale : but can there be any supreme artistic value to a story which compensates for its failure to arrest and hold the attention of the reader ?

The answer would have to wait on one’s definition of a story. In truth, the literature of fiction has become so comprehensive, and holds so undeniable a position as outranking all other forms, that all sorts of creative minds are drawn into the production of it, and each contributes of his own highest gift. He may, for example, not be a born storyteller, but have a natural gift for buffoonery, and so he plays his pranks in the guise of fiction. He may be a reformer; but unadulterated reform is not greatly in demand, so he charges a story with this particular form of gas. In the Elizabethan era he would have been a dramatist ; in the Victorian he writes novels which are praised for their dramatic qualities. Perhaps the time may come when the highest literary achievement will be held to be an exquisitely worded monologue, sweeping into its capacious circle such a criticism of life as shall convince by its intuitive truthfulness, and charm by its fit expression. Should that time come, we can fancy an historian of literature pointing out how much George Meredith was hampered by the conditions of nineteenth-century taste which prescribed the novel as the almost universal form of literary art. He was not a novelist of necessity, such an historian might say ; internal impulse did not force him into this mould; he was a novelist by choice and by the pressure of circumstance, and consequently belongs among the men of genius who require something little short of genius on the part of others to recognize the special qualities which really distinguish them. If he had been a painter, painters would have discussed his merits with enthusiasm in their studios, but they would have found it hard to translate their praises into the dialect of the uninitiated.

No one can be truly great in his art when the verdict constantly is, How splendidly he does it! And that is the verdict one may pronounce on Lord Ormont and his Aminta.¹ There are passages in it which stir one by their appeal to intellectual admiration, but these are not, for the most part, the passages which mark critical points in the development of the drama ; they are pungent reflections on the natural history of man. Now and then the brilliant writing coincides with some momentous turn in the fortunes of the characters, as in the famous swimming scene, which will next century be in all the prose anthologies, and be of just as much worth there as in the story itself; but the reader is not inspired by Meredith’s nervous language so as to realize to himself more perfectly the figures and scenes ; he is quite as likely to forget Lord Ormont, Aminta, Matthew Weyburn, or even Lady Charlotte Eglett, the best modeled figure of the lot, and fix his attention on the wit and eloquence of George Meredith.

The most enduring impression left upon the mind, after reading this book, is the somewhat elusive one of Meredith’s own attitude toward the story he has undertaken to tell. In but one case does he appear to take any pains to give speech to the speaker after his kind. At the end of the story, when Giulio Calliani is introduced, he makes an effort to convey some notion of the Italian’s jerky, unEnglish style of conversation ; yet even here he seems not wholly to avoid the air of its all being in the third person. That is the characteristic of the entire book. The people come and go ; now and then they speak to one another, but after all it is in the third person. Mr. Meredith had a story to tell; he was interested in the persons who were to carry on the action of the story, but his interest was a literary, philosophical sort of interest, and the result is that the reader seems always to be overhearing Mr. Meredith talking to himself ; the story gets out in an allusive, inferential sort of fashion, and inasmuch as he quickly comes to be more interested in Mr. Meredith than in Mr. Meredith’s creations, he does not greatly complain if the confidential talk which Mr. Meredith is carrying on with himself drowns the voices of the people on the stage.

Yet when one has thus amused himself with the author of this brilliant book, and has admired his epigrammatic criticism of life, he comes back to a world which cannot be shut up in an epigram, and asks whether after all Mr. Meredith has, in the story itself, passed a sound, wholesome, calm, and enduring judgment upon human nature. For the story has to do with some tolerably fundamental conditions. Matthew Weyburn, when a schoolboy, with a capacity for admiration, at once makes a hero of Lord Ormont, a sort of sulking Achilles of an Englishman, and fixes his young love upon Aminta Farrell, a handsome schoolgirl in the neighborhood. These two meet again a few years later, when Weyburn, revolving plans for an international school which is to produce men on the English pattern, is secretary to his lordship, and Aminta is Lady Ormont; really so, but, through a whim of Lord Ormont’s, not publicly given her place. Aminta, rebelling against her false position, makes an effort to force her husband to give her her rights, but instead is thrust back into her anomalous relation. Meanwhile, constant association with her quondam schoolboy lover has done for her what might have been done freely had not this marital bond existed. Her starved soul is fed, and at last the two leave England behind them ; not like a guilty pair, — quite the contrary : they are setting out for, not from paradise. They set up the school where honor is to be taught! and in the end Lord Ormont commits to their keeping his grandnephew.

Such, stripped of all sophistry, is the story upon which Mr. Meredith has expended his wit and eloquence. There is a refinement of lust in literature which sets forth unholy situations so delicately that the reader at first hardly knows that he has been poisoned, but the poison works nevertheless. Mr. Meredith has scarcely quickened the pulse of the most sensitive reader by this narrative ; he effectually arrests inflammation by a constant use of cooling draughts of philosophy. But he relies for his power on his penetration of conduct, his analysis of human nature, his art of translating good and evil into the terms of the epigrammatist’s art; and we do not hesitate to say that the triumph of Weyburn and Aminta is an offense against laws to which the mightiest artists are most humbly obedient. Fancy Shakespeare, or Dante, or Walter Scott making this dance of death lead up to a virtuous schoolhouse in Switzerland !

It is another sort of problem in art which presents itself to us in Mr. Hall Caine’s latest novel.² We are accustomed to the minute use which he makes of the little territory of the Isle of Man, and are quite ready to admit that there are advantages in circumscribing one’s figures. An island is a good geographical foundation for a novel which intends a cosmic bit of art. Shakespeare knew the use of an island when he wrote The Tempest, and so did Defoe when he wrote Robinson Crusoe. The very name, moreover, the Isle of Man, is full of suggestion ; it has a Bunyan-like significance, and Mr. Caine thus may be pardoned if he clings to his isolated scrap of earth when he would tell of ambition which aspires to the deemster’s place, passion which sacrifices friendship, and retribution which follows hard upon the short joys of forbidden love. If Mr. Meredith is primarily an artist so enamored of his fine phrases that he neglects the substantial truth of human nature which can make them endure, Mr. Caine is primarily a moralist so possessed by the intricate errancies of the human conscience that he turns life into a pathological clinic, and practices vivisection on men and women for whom in his heart he has a most earnest affection.

In this story of The Manxman he is at his best and at his worst. The plot is not a very involved one. The leading characters are put on their feet early in the story, and though the reader does not foresee every one of the complications in their relations, he perceives clearly enough what their separate natures will work out. The strength of Mr. Caine’s hold on the great laws of human life is well shown. There is something Hebraic in his conception of the generations of men, the sins of the fathers visited upon the children, and there is an inevitableness about conclusions which is like the inevitableness of a Greek drama; but the waverings, the ebb and flow of minor currents, the torture of doubt, the alternation of resolute purpose and drifting,— all this is illustrative of a temper neither Hebraic nor Greek, but essentially modern and analytic. The terrible fascinates Mr. Caine, but still more does he delight in forecasting the terrible, and watching every deflection from the straight road which leads from the simple beginning to the complex but sure end. If the subtle pursuit of the human soul through all its windings and turnings were not controlled by an awful sense of judgment to come, if it were accompanied, for example, by a delight in evil, we should have what is not uncommon in this age of morbid fiction, an inflammatory, pestilential book. The Manxman is free from this blot, but is it, for all that, a work of art to be admired ?

No, for it lacks a prime quality in its treatment of sin and its consequences; it is unreserved and it is tedious. Mr. Caine’s conception of his subject, as we have said, is strong ; it is comprehensive, too, and faithful to the movements of human life ; but he seems to forget that great art in such subjects is swift, not ruminative. He accumulates details ; he builds up his story bit by bit, and elaborates each successive scene with such a multitude of touches that he exhausts himself and his reader. Though none of the details is foreign from the story, and each contributes its mite, the strong effect of the central theme is frittered away. It is as if a man having to build a stone wall should select with infinite pains all the pebbles he could find and lay his wall with them, —a wall which, when completed, should be true in line and properly proportioned, but wearisome to the eye from the demand it made in its individual parts. We think few books afford so melancholy an example of the tendency of current fiction to pathological excess for here is a writer of normally healthy mind who cannot resist the temptation to follow his characters step by step through the inner chambers of their being, and to drag his readers along with him.

It is like issuing from a gloomy forest with a great deal of underbrush into a sunny pasture, to pass from The Manxman to Trilby.³ The lightness, joyousness, of this book, its pleasure in itself, are heightened by contrast with the introspection, the heavy sense of the pressure upon life, even the forced gayety, which mark so much of current fiction. It is no wonder that people have been captivated by it. On the title-page of the book the author has drawn a messenger on horseback stopping suddenly in a dashing ride, with hands extended and head thrown up, and underneath is written, —

and as a sort of motto to the book he has written on a flyleaf, —

It is this April-day character of the book which unquestionably sets the reader’s pulse quickening, and hurries him headlong over the dancing pages. The spontaneity, which does not always take heed even of good English, sweeps away judgment as one reads ; one simply abandons one’s self to the book, and only fears he may not keep up with the author’s pace. The quick transition from tears to laughter, and from laughter back to tears, gives no time for reflection. Out comes the sun, and we close our umbrellas; a sudden cloud, a downpour, and up go our umbrellas again.

And what is the story ? What is the bottom fact on which the whole rests ? Ah, that is what one asks when he sees the juggler pulling yards and yards of bright ribbon out of a hat, setting birds flying from an empty birdcage, and performing other feats which one looks at with a vain attempt to escape his delusive action and penetrate the mystery of the sleight of hand. Mr. DU Maurier has practiced the black art of this polite end of the nineteenth century. He has juggled with hypnotism. While psychologists are experimenting with this occult force, and coming out of their laboratories from time to time with partial results, thinking perhaps to give it a therapeutic turn, or to account by means of it for mob action and other half-understood vagaries of human nature, our trifling novelist and artist gayly possesses himself of the secret of the whole matter, and applies it to the life of that loveliest object in nature, a maiden stepping over the threshold of womanhood. If one were in a mocking mood, he might point to Trilby and say to the professional psychologists : This is what your discoveries in hypnotism are demonstrating : the effacement of nice, old-fashioned distinctions of human responsibility ; the eradication of those roots of evil which we used to think, and which Mr. Hall Caine still believes, strike terribly deep into the life of generations.

Is then Trilby an offense against morals ? Rather, we are inclined to say, it is, so far as it can be made, an unmoral book, a nineteenth-century fairy tale for grown men and women. In the fairy tales which have sucked up the elemental truths of the race, there is, properly speaking, no right and no wrong; there is the play of all those animal propensities which find individual expression in the cunning of the fox, the strength of the lion, the fidelity of the dog, and, translated into human terms, embrace, so to speak, those qualities of character which we sometimes style instinctive, natural emotions and passions, ungoverned as yet by the Conscience. But Mr. Du Maurier cannot wholly unseat this judge. What he does is to divert the magistrate’s attention from the subjects which usually occupy him when such a character as Trilby is presented to notice, and direct him to the apparent irresponsibility of a beautiful, lovable nature, brought finally to an end which forces tears to the eyes of Conscience.

It is of slight consequence that one should try to predict the length of life of a popular favorite like Trilby, and yet prophecy has its twofold attribute of fore-telling and forth-telling. That the grace, the bonhomie, of the book will appeal to another generation depends, we think, on how far another generation will be as tired as ours is of the fiction which wrestles with all the problems of life, or which plays the part of devil’s advocate. That the story of Trilby will continue to fascinate will depend on two facts : how far hypnotism becomes a commonplace of human experience; and how far writers of fiction come again to a sense of the sweetness, the strength, and the enduring power which reside in the pictures of life and character that are obedient to a finely sensitive perception of the everlasting beauty of purity in man and woman.