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Title: A History of Story-telling: Studies in the development of
narrative

Author: Arthur Ransome

Illustrator: J. Gavin

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HISTORY OF
STORY-TELLING: STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF
NARRATIVE ***

Transcriber's note.
Minor punctuation inconsistencies have been silently repaired. Variable
spelling has been retained.

A HISTORY OF STORY-
TELLING

EDITED BY ARTHUR RANSOME
THE WORLD'S STORY-TELLERS
Each volume contains a selection of complete stories, an Introductory
Essay by Arthur Ransome, and a Frontispiece Portrait by J. Gavin.
List of volumes already published:—

GAUTIER
HOFFMANN
POE
HAWTHORNE
MÉRIMÉE
BALZAC
CHATEAUBRIAND
THE ESSAYISTS
CERVANTES
Others in preparation

In cloth, 1s. net; cloth gilt, gilt top, 1s. 6d. net per vol.

LONDON AND EDINBURGH
T. C. AND E. C. JACK

JEAN DE MEUNG

A HISTORY OF
STORY-TELLING
STUDIES IN THE
DEVELOPMENT OF NARRATIVE
BY
ARTHUR RANSOME
Editor of 'The World's Story-Tellers'

WITH 27 PORTRAITS BY J. GAVIN

LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK
16 HENRIETTA STREET, W.C.
1909

TO MY WIFE

PREFACE
This is a spring day, and I am writing in a flood of sunlight in front of a
brown French inn. Above my head there is the dusty branch of a tree stuck
out of a window, the ancient sign that gave point to the proverb, 'Good wine
needs no bush.' Good books, I suppose, need no prefaces. But honest
authors realise that their books are never as good as they had planned them.
A preface, put on last and worn in front, to show what they would have
liked their books to be, is the pleasantest of their privileges. And I am not
inclined to do without it.
A book that calls itself a history of a subject with as many byeways and
blind alleys as exist in the history of story-telling, is precisely the kind of
book that one would wish one's enemy to have written. Everybody who
reads it grumbles because something or other is left out that, if they had had
the writing of it, would have been put in. And yet in the case of this
particular book (how many authors have thought the same!) criticism of
omissions is like quarrelling with a guinea-pig because it has not got a tail.
It is not the guinea-pig's business to have a tail, and it is not the business of
this book to be a chronicle, full of facts, and admirable for reference. That
place is already filled by Dunlop's History of Fiction, and, in a very
delightful manner, by Professor Raleigh's English Novel. The word history
can be used in a different sense. The French say that such an one makes a
history of a thing when he makes a great deal of talk about it. That is what I
set out to do. My business was not to be noting down dates and facts—this
book was published in such a year and this in the year preceding. I was to
write with a livelier imp astride my pen. The schoolmaster was to be sent to
steal apples in the orchard. I was to write of story-telling as a man might
write of painting or jewellery or any other art he loved. I was to take here a
book and there a book, and notice the development of technique, the
conquests of new material, the gradual perfecting of form. I would talk of
old masters and modern ones, and string my chapters like beads, a space
between each, along the history of the art.

Well, I have fait une histoire, suggested mainly by the masterpieces that I
love, and without too much regard for those that happen to be loved by
other people. And now that it is done, I think of it sadly enough. It should
have been so beautiful. When I see an old church, like the priory church at
Cartmel, standing grey and solemn in the mist above the houses, or hear an
old song, like 'Summer is icumen in,' or see a browned old picture, like
Poussin's 'Bergers d'Arcadie,' I feel that these things have meant more to
man than battles. These are his dreams and his ideals, resting from age to
age, long after the din of fighting has died and been forgotten, recorded
each in its own way, in stone, in melody, in colour, and in the tales also that,
changing continually, have 'held children from play and old men from the
chimney-corner,' the dreams lie hid. What a tapestry they should have
made. For the story of this art, or indeed of any art, is the story of man.
Looking back through the years, as I sit here and close my eyes against the
sunlight, I see the hard men and fierce women of the Sagas living out their
lives in the cold and vigorous north—Pippin, the grandfather of
Charlemagne, sticking his sword indifferently through the devil, Beaumains
and his scornful lady riding through the green wood. In the dungeon of the
tower sits Aucassin sorrowing for Nicolete his so sweet friend. Among the
orange-trees on the Italian slope the gold-haired Fiammetta watches for her
lover. With battered armour and ascetic face Don Quixote, upright in his
saddle, rides on the bare roads of Spain, dreaming of Dulcinea del Toboso.
Gil Blas swindles his way through life and comes out top as an honest
rascal will. Clarissa sits in her chamber blotting with tears her interminable
correspondence. Tom Jones draws blood from many meaner noses. My
Uncle Toby looks, not in the white, for the mote in the Widow Wadman's
eye. Mrs. Bennet begs her husband, to 'come and make Lizzy marry Mr.
Collins.' Old Goriot pawns his plate and moves to cheaper and yet cheaper
rooms to keep his daughters in their luxury. Raphael, nearing death,
watches the relentless shrinking of the morsel of shagreen. There falls the
House of Usher. There floats the white face of Marie Roget down the waters
of the Seine. Quasimodo leers through the rosace; Mateo Falcone feels the
earth with the butt of his gun and finds it not too hard for the digging of a
child's grave; Clarimonde throws her passionate regard across the cathedral
to the young novice about to take his vows; and, with a clatter of hoofs, the
musketeers ride off for the reputation of the Queen of France.
A tapestry indeed.

I turn over my chapters, torn rags of colour loosely patched together, and
then look back to my dream, that gorgeous thing that for these five years
past has glittered and swung before me. I look from one to the other and
back again, and am almost ready to tear up the book in order to regain the
delightful possession of the dream. It was a task to be taken up reverently
and with love; and indeed these are the only qualifications I can honestly
claim. But it needed far more. Now that I have done my best, I look at the
result and am afraid. I hate, like I hate the tourists in Notre Dame,
impertinent little books on splendid subjects. With my heart in my mouth I
ask myself if I have made one.

Impertinent or no, my book is very vulnerable, and since it is my own I
must defend it, so far as that is possible, by defining my intentions. The
chapters are, as I meant them be, threaded like beads along the history of
the art, and it is very easy to quarrel not only with the beads, but also with
the spaces between them. There is no one who reads the book who will not
find somewhere a space where he would have had a gleaming bead, a bead,
where he would have had a contemptuous space. I could not put everything
in; but have left material for many complementary volumes. It would
perhaps be possible, writing only of authors I have not considered, to
produce a history of story-telling no more incomplete than this. But it will
be found, and the fact is perhaps my justification, that few of my omissions
have been made by accident. In order to have the satisfaction of coming to
an end at all, I had to seek the closest limits, and those limits, once chosen,
barred, to my own surprise, more than one great story-teller from any
detailed discussion.
My object not being an expanded bibliography of story-telling, but rather a
series of chapters that would trace the development of the art, many
admirable writers, who were content with the moulds that were ready made
to their hands, fell outside my range, however noble, however human was
the material they poured into the ancient matrices. Dickens and Thackeray,
for example, pouring their energy and feeling and wit and humour into the
moulds designed by the eighteenth century, had, economically, to be passed
over, since across the channel and in America men were writing stories, not

necessarily greater, nor of wider appeal to mankind, but of more vital
interest to their fellow artists. Throughout the book we hunt, my readers and
I, with the hare. Always we discuss the art in those examples that seem the
most advanced of their time. Just as with the Romantic movement I pass
over from England to France, though the book contains no survey of French
fiction, so when Cervantes is the leading story-teller, the artist nearest our
own time, I shall be in Spain, though Spanish literature does not make a
continuous thread in the history. I shall think more of the art than of my
own country, or indeed of any country, and shall neglect all literatures in
turn when they are producing nothing that is memorable in the progress of
the technique of story-telling, however freely they may be contributing
great or brilliant tales to the world's resources of amusement.
Then too, it will be noticed that I neglect my opportunities. What a
semblance of erudition I might have made by discussing, among the origins
of story-telling, the Greek and Latin specimens of narrative. But it seemed
desirable, since it was possible, to trace the development of the art entirely
in the literatures of our own civilisation. French and English, the two
greatest European literatures, contain, grafted on their national stocks, every
flower of the art that was cultivated by Greece or Rome. I have used for
discussion only the books known and made by our own ancestors, and
when, at the Renaissance, they lifted forms out of Antiquity and filled them
with imitations of classical matter, I have considered the imitations rather
than the originals, if only because any further influence they may have had
on the development of the art was exerted not by the classical writers but by
the Englishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards, and Italians who made their
manners and materials their own.
The book represents many years of reading, and two of writing where it
should have taken ten. It has travelled about with me piecemeal, and, if I
dated my chapters from the places where I wrote them, they would trace a
very various itinerary. In France, in England, and in Scotland it has shared
my adventures, and indeed it is a wilful, rambling thing, more than a little
reminiscent of its infancy. Do not expect it to be too consistent. There is, I
fear, no need for me to ask you not to read it all at once.
ARTHUR RANSOME.

CONTENTS
PAGE
Preface vii
PART I
Origins 5
'The Romance of the Rose' 19
Chaucer and Boccaccio 31
The Rogue Novel 51
The Elizabethans 67
The Pastoral 81
Cervantes 93
The Essayists' Contribution to Story-telling 107
Transition: Bunyan and Defoe 125
Richardson and the Feminine Novel 139
Fielding, Smollett, and the Masculine Novel 155
A Note on Sterne 169
PART II
Chateaubriand and Romanticism 175
Scott and Romanticism 187
The Romanticism of 1830 201
Balzac 217
Gautier and the East 231
Poe and the New Technique 243
Hawthorne and Moral Romance 257
Mérimée and Conversational Story-telling 273
Flaubert 287
A Note on De Maupassant 298
Conclusion 305

Index 313

ILLUSTRATIONS
TO FACE PAGE
Jean de Meung 22
Geoffrey Chaucer 38
Giovanni Boccaccio 44
Alain René le Sage 60
Sir Philip Sidney 84
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra 96
Richard Steele and Joseph Addison 114
John Bunyan 126
Daniel Defoe 132
Samuel Richardson 140
Fanny Burney 146
Jane Austen 150
Henry Fielding 156
Tobias Smollett 166
Jean Jacques Rousseau 176
François René de Chateaubriand 180
Sir Walter Scott 188
Victor Hugo 202
Alexandre Dumas 210
Honoré de Balzac 218
Théophile Gautier 236
William Godwin 244
Edgar Allan Poe 250
Nathaniel Hawthorne 258
Prosper Mérimée 274
Gustave Flaubert 288

Guy de Maupassant 300

PART I

ORIGINS

ORIGINS

Story-telling has nowadays only a shamefaced existence
Story-telling
outside books.
outside books. We leave the art to the artist, perhaps
because he has brought it to such perfection that we do
not care to expose our amateur bunglings. If a man has a story to tell after
dinner he carefully puts it into slang, or tells it with jerk and gesture in as
few words as possible; it is as if he were to hold up a little placard
deprecating the idea that he is telling a story at all. The only tales in which
we allow ourselves much detail of colouring and background are those in
which public opinion has prohibited professional competition. We tell
improper stories as competently as ever. But, for the other tales, we set
them out concisely, almost curtly, refusing any attempt to imitate the fuller,
richer treatment of literature. Our tales are mere plots. We allow ourselves
scarcely two sentences of dialogue to clinch them at the finish. We give
them no framework. We are shy, except perhaps before a single intimate
friend, of trying in a spoken story to reproduce the effect of moonlight in
the trees, the flickering firelight on the faces in a tavern, or whatever else of
delicacy and embroidery we should be glad to use in writing.
But in the beginning story-telling was not an affair of pen and ink. It began
with the Warning Examples naturally told by a mother to her children, and
with the Embroidered Exploits told by a boaster to his wife or friends. The
early woman would persuade her child from the fire with a tale of how just
such another as he had touched the yellow dancer, and had had his hair
burned and his eyelashes singed so that he could not look in the face of the
sun. Enjoying the narrative, she would give it realistic and credible touches,
and so make something more of it than the dull lie of utility. The early man,
fresh from an encounter with some beast of the woods, would not be so
little of an artist as to tell the actual facts; how he heard a noise, the
creaking of boughs and crackling in the undergrowth, and ran. No; he
would describe the monster, sketch his panic moments, the short, fierce
struggle, his stratagem, and his escape. In these two primitive tales, and
their combination in varying proportions, are the germs of all the others.

There is no story written to-day which cannot trace its pedigree to those two
primitive types of narrative, generated by the vanity of man and the
exigencies of his life.
At first there would be no professional story-tellers. But
The professional
story-teller.
it would not be long before, by the camp fire, in the
desert tents, and in the huts at night, wherever simple
men were together relating the experiences of vigorous days, there would
be found some one whose adventures were always the pleasantest to hear,
whose deeds were the most marvellous, whose realistic details the most
varied. Probably it would also be found that this same man could also give
the neatest point to the tales of wisdom that were the children of the
Warning Example. Men would begin to quote his stories, and gradually the
discrepancy between his life and the life that he lived as he recounted it to
his nightly audiences would grow too great to be ignored. His adventures
would become too tremendous for himself, and, to save his modesty and
preserve his credit, he would father them upon some dead chief, a strong
man who had done things that others had not, and, being dead, was unable
to contradict with his stone axe his too enthusiastic biographer. Such a man,
like many a modern story-teller, would likely use his hold over the
imagination of his fellows to become the medicine man of his tribe, the
depositary of their traditions, their sage as well as their entertainer. He
would create gods besides rebuilding men, and while his people were
sheltering in the huts and listening atremble to the dying rolls of the
thunder, would describe how his hero, the dead chief of long ago, was even
now wrestling with the Thunder God and getting his knee upon that mighty
throat. In the beginning man was a very little thing in the face of a
stupendous Universe. Story-telling raised him higher and higher until at last
heaven and earth were hidden by the gigantic figure of a man. In the Arthur
legend, in the legend of Charlemagne, in the Sagas, we can watch men
becoming heroes, and heroes supernatural. Then story-telling, having done
so much, was to set to work in the opposite direction, and we shall see the
figures of men gradually shrinking into their true proportions through each
successive phase of the art, until, now that we have examples of all stages
permanently before us, we manufacture gods, heroes, men, and creatures
less than men, with almost equal profusion.

But in the beginning of written story-telling, when life
In early story- was a huge battle in which it was the proper thing to die,
telling heroes are
when the heroes of stories were not finished off with
more than life size.
marriage but by the more definite means of a battle-axe,
when life was a thing of such swiftness, fierceness, and force, it was clear to
his biographer that the creature who conquered it was surely more than
man. His were the attributes of the gods, with whom he was not frightened
to struggle or to be allied. Sigurd's pedigree is carried back to Odin. Pippin
struck a sword through the devil who met him as he went to bath, and found
that 'the shape was so far material that it defiled all those waters with blood
and gore and horrid slime. Even this did not upset the unconquerable
Pippin. He said to his chamberlain: "Do not mind this little affair. Let the
defiled water run for a while; and then, when it flows clear again, I will take
my bath without delay."' Beowulf fought with dragons and died boasting
gloriously. Theirs are the figures of men a thousand times man's height,
very man-like, but gigantic, like the watchers shadowed on the mountain
mist.
Each nation showed its peculiar spirit in huge cycles of
Silk and homespun
stories.
narrative. The solid force of the Vikings and their sword-
bright imagery survives in the Sagas; the French chivalry
in the legends of Charlemagne and Arthur; the Celtic feeling for the veiled
things in the spells and dreams of the Mabinogion. These were the great
stories of their peoples. But side by side with them were others. The thralls
of the Vikings heard of Brunhild and Gudrun, the serfs of France heard of
Roland and Bertha with the Large Feet; but they had also tales of their own.
The tales of silk have been preserved for us in writing, but what of the tales
of homespun yarn that no old clerk thought worthy of a manuscript with
gold leaves, and sweet faces, and blue and scarlet flowers entwined around
its borders?
Very few of these homespun stories were written down. Reynard the Fox
had few brethren except in spoken story-telling. Perhaps just because they
never were written down, we can guess from the folk-lore that has survived
among us to our own day, and from the tales we hear from savages, what
were those tales of Jean and Jaques, that were perhaps nearer modern story-
telling than the great books that were known by their masters. In folk-tale,
as in Reynard the Fox, we find very different virtues from those of the

knights, heroes, kings, and gods. In the silken tales the virtues are those of
Don Quixote; in the homespun stories they are those of Sancho Panza.
Chivalry would seem an old conceit; bravery, foolhardiness. Sagacity,
cunning, and mischief are their motives. In the silken tales there is no scorn
shown save of cowards, in the folk-tales none save of fools. Perhaps the
proverbs illustrate them best. 'Do not close the stable door after the horse
has gone.' 'A stitch in time saves nine.' 'A bird in the hand is worth two in
the bush.' These are all short stories summed in a sentence, and any one of
them might serve as the motive of a modern novel.
From the time that stories began to be written down, we
The swineherd and
can watch them coming nearer and nearer to this level,
the king's daughter.
nearer and nearer the ordinary man. The history of story-
telling henceforth is that of the abasement of the grand and the uplifting of
the lowly, and of the mingling of the two. The folk-tale of the swineherd
who married the king's daughter is the history alike of the progress of
humanity and of the materials of story-telling.
But before the heroes of written story-telling could
Reduction in the begin to be humble, they had to leave off being gods. It is
size of the heroes.
possible to observe the transformation by comparing a set
of early stories composed at practically the same time, but in different
countries, in different stages of civilisation, and so, for the purpose of our
argument, in sequence. The Volsunga Saga, the Mabinogion and Aucassin
and Nicolete were all composed about the same time, but there are centuries
of development between them. The heroes of the sagas are 'too largely
thewed for life'; Aucassin is a boy. Love in the sagas is a fierce passion, the
mainspring of terrific deeds; Aucassin's love is a tender obsession that keeps
him from his arms, and lets him ride, careless and dreaming, into the midst
of his enemies. In the Morte Darthur, as we have it in Malory's version of
the much older tales, we can see the two spirits pulling at cross purposes in
the same book. Beneath there is the rugged brutality of the old fighting
tales, overlaid now with the softer texture of chivalry and gentleness. The
one shows through the other like the grey rock through the green turf of our
north country fields.
The technique of the old tales varies most precisely with
Technique of the
Sagas.
the humanity and loss of super-humanity of their heroes.
In the sagas it is very simple. The effect is got by sheer

weight and mass of magnificent human material. The details are those of
personal appearance and armour; there are no settings. The men ride out
gorgeous and bright in battle array, with gold about their helms, and painted
shields, on great white horses against a sombre sky. There is no other
background to the tales than heaven and the watchful gods. It was not until
a later stage in their development that story-tellers painted their full canvas,
and put in woodland and castle and all those other accessories that force
their human figures to a human height. At first, like the early painters, they
were content with the outlines of men doing things; their audiences, with
unspoilt imaginations, filled in the rest themselves. Then, too, they told
their tales in a short sing-song form of verse that served well to keep them
in mind, but prevented any great variation in emphasis. A lament for the
dead warrior, a pæan for his victory, and an account of his wife's beauty, a
genealogical tree, were all forced to jog to the same tune, and the
atmosphere and scent of their telling could only be altered by the
intonations of the singer. They still depended for their effect on the men
who recited them, and had not achieved the completeness of expression that
would give them independence.
The Mabinogion, that took literary form at about the
Of the Mabinogion.
same time, were made by a Celtic nation, far further
advanced as artists than the Scandinavians. The men are
not so great in their biographers' eyes as to hide all else. Picture after picture
is made and left as the tale goes on. For example:—

'And at the mouth of the river he beheld a castle, the fairest that man
ever saw, and the gate of the castle was open, and he went into the
castle. And in the castle he saw a fair hall, of which the roof seemed to
be all gold; the walls of the hall seemed to be entirely of glittering
precious gems; the doors all seemed to be of gold. Golden seats he saw
in the hall, and silver tables. And on a seat opposite to him he beheld
two auburn-haired youths playing at chess. He saw a silver board for
the chess, and golden pieces thereon. The garments of the youths were
of jet black satin, and chaplets of ruddy gold bound their hair, whereon
were sparkling jewels of great price, rubies, and gems, alternately with
imperial stones. Buskins of new Cordovan leather on their feet,
fastened by slides of red gold.

'And beside a pillar in the hall he saw a hoary-headed man, in a chair
of ivory, with the figures of two eagles of ruddy gold thereon.
Bracelets of gold were upon his arms, and many rings were on his
hands, and a golden torque about his neck; and his hair was bound
with a golden diadem. He was of powerful aspect. A chessboard of
gold was before him and a rod of gold, and a steel file in his hand. And
he was carving out chessmen.'[1]

These two paragraphs are almost perfect in their kind. See only how the
details are presented in a perfectly natural order, each one as it would strike
a man advancing into the hall, who would see everything before
discovering exactly what the old man was about with his chessboard, his
gold, and his steel file. The Welsh bards were trained more rigorously than
the skalds, and were more delicate in their craftsmanship. And yet it is
interesting to see how these two paragraphs are the work of a man writing
for people in whose eyes gold and ivory and precious stones have still the
glory of the new. The feeling of that little piece of story is the same we
know ourselves when we have a little child before us, and are telling it
wonderful things to make it open its eyes. The opening of eyes was one of
the effects at which the early artists aimed.
And then when we come to Aucassin and Nicolete, also
Of Aucassin and
Nicolete.
written at the same time, but in a country still less
barbaric, we find an even more delicate artistry, and a
material far nearer that of later story-telling. Not only have the heroes
become men, but the wondrous background has become that of real life.
There are no castles in Aucassin and Nicolete whose walls are built 'of
precious gems, whose doors are all of gold.' Nicolete 'went through the
streets of Beaucaire keeping to the shadow, for the moon shone very bright;
and she went on till she came to the tower where her friend was. The tower
had cracks in it here and there, and she crouched against one of the piers,
and wrapped herself in her mantle, and thrust her head into a chink in the
tower, which was old and ancient, and heard Aucassin within weeping, and
making very great sorrow, and lamenting for his sweet friend whom he
loved so much.' Now that is a real tower, as we see again when presently
Nicolete has to go along its wall, and let herself down into the ditch, hurting
her feet sorely before climbing out on the other side. And is not that an
admirable sense for reality that suggested the keeping to the shadow as she

crept through the town? As for the humanity of the tale; we have been
smitten to awe and worship by the heroes of the sagas, interested in the
heroes of the magic-laden Mabinogion, and now we are made to be sorry
for Aucassin. Like the swing of a pendulum, the character of heroes has
swung from that of God-like ruffians, through that of men, almost to
womanhood. We have had terrible tales, and wondrous tales, and now

'There is none in such ill case,
Sad with sorrow, waste with care,
Sick with sadness, if he hear,
But shall in the hearing be
Whole again and glad with glee,
So sweet the story.'

Loveliness and delicacy are here for their own sakes. We have already
passed the early stages of narrative. We are in the time of sweetly patterned
art; in the monastery over in England a monk is writing the air of 'Summer
is icumen in,' the first known piece of finished, ordered music; everywhere
clerks and holy men, aloof a little from the turmoil of life, are making
gardens in the margins of missals, and on the roads throughout the world
the vagabond students, as separate from the turmoil as the monks, are
singing the Latin songs that promised the Renaissance.

'THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE'

'THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE'

Thinking of the Renaissance now, we are apt to see only
The thirteenth
century.
the flowers of its spring, the work of men like Boccaccio
and Chaucer, who were strong enough and aloof enough
to lift their heads above the flood of classical learning that refreshed them,
and to write as blithely as if there had been never a book in the world before
them. It is easy to forget those dull years after Chaucer that showed how
exceptional he had been in being at once a student and an artist. It is still
easier to forget the winter years of ploughing and sowing and premature
birth that were before him, the years when no one thought that poetry could
be more esteemed than knowledge, those greedy years of rough and ready
erudition between the making of the students' songs and the building of the
Decameron. Many versions of old legends come to us from that time like
the Life of Robert the Devil, whose son fought with Charlemagne. Many of
the legends of the kind that the son of Mr. Bickerstaff's friend was such a
proficient in, and many collections of miracles and small romances of
chivalry less beautiful than that of Aucassin, were at least written down in
these years. The monasteries held most of the learned men, and became
more important than the minstrels in the history of story-telling. They
produced the books of miracles, and also several armouries of warning
examples, many of them taken from the classics, for the vanquishing of
scrupulous sinners and the edification of all. Books like the Gesta
Romanorum, volumes of tales more or less irrelevantly tagged with morals,
were the forerunners of collections of less instructive stories, like those of
Boccaccio's country-house party, or those of Chaucer's pilgrims riding to
Canterbury. These books, with their frequent reference to antiquity, showed
signs of the new spirit that was spreading over Europe; the miracle-tales
and the exaggerated wondering biographies held the essence of the old.
Rome in the former was the city built by Romulus and Remus; Rome in the
latter was the place that had been rescued by Charlemagne, the place that
was ruled by the Pope.

But in that thirteenth century, when so many new things were struggling to
birth, one book stands out above all others as the most perfect illustration of
its spirit. The very fact that it is so much less of a story than the anecdotes
of the Gesta Romanorum had almost made me pass it over in a more
detailed criticism of them, but this same fact perfects it as an example of an
artist's attitude in the time of the revival of classical learning. It was almost
an accident that let me see these years of novel study and eager wisdom so
clearly expressed in the long rhyming narrative of the Romance of the Rose,
that was known above all other books for a hundred years, that was read by
Ronsard, modernised by Marot, and partly translated by Chaucer. The
accident was such that I think there is no irrelevance in describing it.
Walking through France with the manuscript of my
Meung-sur-Loire.
history on my back, I came at evening of an April day
into the little grey French town of Meung, set on the side
of a hill above the Loire. Small cobbled streets twisted this way and that, up
and down, between the old houses, and walking under the gateway, the
Porte d'Amont, with its low arch and narrow windows overhead, I felt I was
stepping suddenly from the broad, practical France, whose roadside
crucifixes are made of iron a hundred at a time, into a forgotten corner of
that older France whose spirit clings about the new, like the breath of
lavender in a room where it has once been kept. In the inn where I left my
knapsack there was a miller who drank a bottle of wine with me, and talked
of old Jean Clopinel, who was born here in Meung those centuries ago.
'And it was a big book he had the writing of too, and a wise book, so they
tell me, and good poetry; but it's written in the old French that's not our
language any longer; I could not read it if I tried, and why should I? They
know all about it in the town.'
Indeed the town seemed a piece of the old French itself, with its partly
ruined church, and the little château crowned with conical cap-like towers,
the broad Loire flowing below. I thought of The Romance of the Rose, Jean
Clopinel's book, the book that meant so much to the Middle Ages, the book
that, unwieldy as it is, is still deliciously alive. I thought of Jean Clopinel
and his description of himself, put as a prophecy into the mouth of the God
of Love:—

'Then shall appear Jean Clopinel,
Joyous of heart, of body well
And fairly built: at Meun shall he
Be born where Loire flows peacefully.'[2]

I made up my mind to look at the old book again when I should have left
the road, and be within reach of a larger library than my own manuscript
and a single volume of Defoe.
Jean de Meung, joyous of heart, belongs absolutely to
Jean de Meung.
the mediæval revival of learning. He was less of a poet
than a scholar, more pleased with a display of knowledge
than of beauty, and yet so far undamped by his learning as to be always
ready to put plainly out such observations upon life as keep a reader smiling
to-day at their shrewdness and applicability. His share of The Romance of
the Rose is a strange and suggestive contrast with the beginning that was
written by Guillaume de Lorris. The first part, earlier by forty years than the
second, and about a fifth of the length, is a delicious allegory on love, with
the sweetness and purity of Aucassin and Nicolete; the second opens solidly
with a good round speech by Reason, filling something like two thousand
lines, and ransacking antiquity to fit her wise saws with ancient instances
according to the new fashion of the time.
Taine finds this garrulous Jean 'the most tedious of doctors'; but it is
difficult not to throw yourself into his own delight in his new-won
knowledge, hard not to enjoy his continual little revelations of character, as
when you read:—

'Let one demand of some wise clerk
Well versed in that most noble work
"Of Consolation" foretime writ
By great Boethius, for in it
Are stored and hidden most profound
And learned lessons: 'twould redound
Greatly to that man's praise who should
Translate that book with masterhood,'

and know that he made the translation himself.
The very popularity of the book proves that the whole
The world at
school.
world was at school then, and eager to be taught. Lorris,
poet though he is, reminds his readers that his
embroidered tale hides something really valuable, that it is 'fair wit with
wisdom closely wed,' knowing well that he could find no better bait to keep
them with him to the end. And Jean, when it comes to his turn, admirably
expresses the contemporary point of view. He has no doubts at all between
the comparative worths of manner and matter. He justifies the classics by
saying:—

'For oft their quip and crank and fable
Is wondrous good and profitable.'

One of the The permanent value of knowledge is always before him,
schoolmasters. and having learnt a great deal himself, what wonder that
he should empty it all out, only now and again giving the
tale a perfunctory prod forward before continuing his discourse?
Knowledge comes always before culture, and knowledge taken with such
abandon is almost inspiriting. I cannot be bored by a scholar who in the
thirteenth century is so independent and so frank. Eager quarry work such
as his had to precede the refined statuary of the Renaissance, and in The
Romance of the Rose the pedagogue is far too human to be dismissed as a
dealer in books alone. Wisdom and observation were not disunited in him,
and there are in that rambling, various repository of learning promises

enough of realistic story-telling and of the criticism of life, sufficiently
valuable to excuse its atrocious narrative, even were that not justified by the
classical allusion with which it is so abundantly loaded. It gives me pleasure
to hear Jean Clopinel defend plain speaking, and, protesting against calling
spades anything but spades, prepare the way for Rabelais. What matter if
the romance suffer a little, and the Rose lie pressed beneath a weight of
scholarship? Jean himself moves on unhampered. He talked of women's
table-manners so well that Chaucer himself could do no better than borrow
from him. He attacked womenkind in general so mercilessly (with the
authority of the classics behind him) that he won a stern rebuke from
Christine de Pisan, that popular authoress of a century later, just as
Schopenhauer might be censured by Miss Corelli. He looks at kings, and,
turning away, remarks that it is best, if a man wishes to feel respectful
towards them, that he should not see them too close. Nor does he forget to
let us know his views on astronomy, on immortality, or his preference of
nature over art in sculpture and painting. This last opinion of his is an
illustration of that good and honest Philistinism that he needed for his work.
All these things and a thousand others he puts, without a shudder, into the
continuation of a story on the art of loving, that begins with a spring
morning account of a dreamer's vision of a rose and a garden, and Mirth and
Idleness, Youth and Courtesy, dancing together as if in a picture by
Botticelli.
I went down that night just after sunset and crossed the
In Meung six river in the dusk. Resting in the middle of the bridge and
hundred years ago.
looking over the dim reflections to the far-distant bank,
with its grove of huge trees, and the tower of the church with the outline of
the gateway on the hill behind just showing against the sky, I dreamed that I
was back in the old days, when the minstrel was giving place to the scholar,
and that up there on the hill, in the little town of Meung, was Jean, Doctor
of Divinity, poring at his books. I remembered the bust by Desvergnes, that
beautiful scholar's face, and thought how strong a personality his must have
been, to leave after six hundred years and more the memory of himself and
the feeling of his time so vividly impressed upon the town. For even now,
though they do not read his book in Meung, they know all about it, and talk
of him with that reverence in speaking that children use when they talk of a
master whom they do not often see. I could not help feeling that their
attitude was traditional. It has been the same for all these years, and perhaps

long ago the townsfolk, passing in the narrow streets, hushed themselves
before one door, and whispered, 'Yes; he is in there writing a book; there are
not many who can do that,' while old Jean Clopinel inside nursed his lame
leg and dipped from folio to folio, as he took gem and pebble from the dead
tongue and put his vivid thought and gleeful knowledge in black letter on
the parchment, in black-lettered French, the speech of his own people, that
all might see how fine a thing it was to look into antiquity and to be wise.

CHAUCER AND BOCCACCIO

CHAUCER AND BOCCACCIO

The Franklin of Chaucer's pilgrims introduces his own
The Romancers
before Chaucer.
story by remarking that,

'Thise olde gentil Britons in hir dayes
Of diverse aventures maden layes,
Rymeyed in hir firste Briton tonge;
Which layes with hir instruments they songe,
Or elles redden hem for hir pleasaunce;
And oon of hem have I in remembraunce
Which I shal seyn with good wil as I can.'

Chaucer had many of them 'in remembraunce,' and though he shared the
knowledge of Jean de Meung, and was not, like the Franklin, a man who

'sleep never on the mount of Parnaso,
Ne lerned Marcus Tullius Cithero,'

these tales, whether made by the 'olde gentil Britons' or the French, must
not be forgotten in considering him.
The romancers who preceded him, and, clad in bright colours, chanted
their stories before the ladies and knights in the rush-carpeted halls, turning
somersaults between their chapters, as many a modern novelist might for
the enlivenment of his narrative, were not scholars, but had great store of
legendary matter from which they made their tales. Their material
continued to be used, more and more elaborately, until the time of
Cervantes, and in such books as the Morte Darthur we can see what manner
of material it was. They were not in the least afraid of the supernatural, and
they knew the undying attraction of hard blows. Their tales were compiled
without reference to the classics, and contain all the characteristics of

primitive story-telling noted in the chapter on Origins. They represented,
fairly accurately, the Embroidered Exploit. They were tales of heroes,
knights, and kings, half elfin stuff, half history, elaborate genealogical
narratives in which the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children, and
the grandsons' misfortunes are connected with their parents' revenge on the
previous generation. There were great dragon-slayers before the Lord, and
many who, like Charlemagne, were mighty killers of Saracens in the cause
of Christendom. And then there were such tales as that of Melusine, whose
father, King Helymas, married a fairy, and out of love for her broke his
promise not to inquire how she was when she lay in childbed. Melusine
suffers accordingly, spending every Saturday bathing herself, with her
delicate white limbs hidden beneath a serpent's scaly skin. There comes to
her a young knight called Raymondin whom she saves by her wisdom,
enriches by her magic, weds with great pomp, and presents in successive
years with ten sons, each curiously deformed by reason of the fairy blood.
Raymondin, in espousing her, promises to make no inquiries about her
doings on Saturdays. He breaks his promise, like his father-in-law before
him, and when, in anger at the ill-deeds of one of his sons, he reproaches
her with what she is, she sadly takes leave of him, and flies off through the
window, 'transfigured lyke a serpent grete and long in fifteen foote of
lengthe.' There were tales too of more charming fancy, like that of the queen
who bore seven children at a birth, six boys and a girl, with silver chains
about their necks. The midwife, in her devilish way, showed her seven
puppies with silver collars instead of her litter of babes, privately sending
the children to be killed. The children, however, left in the forest, were
nurtured by a nanny-goat and cared for by a hermit, until the midwife
discovered that they were not dead, when she sent men to see that they were
properly scotched. But the men were so softened by the accident of meeting
a crowd busied with the burning of a woman who had killed her child, that
they had only heart to take the chains from off the babies' necks, whereupon
they flew away as white swans. That is the beginning of the tale.
There were tales like these representing the
The Gesta
Romanorum.
Embroidered Exploit, and there were others illustrating in
a curious manner the growth of the Warning Example.
These latter were the forerunners of the tales of Boccaccio, who, like
Chaucer, stands as it were with a Janus-head, looking both ways, modern
and primitive at once. The Gesta Romanorum is a perfectly delightful book,

whose purpose was, however, not pleasure but edification. It is a collection
of stories containing amusement and religion, diversion and instruction—a
primrose path from the everlasting bonfire. The anecdotes are from a
thousand sources. Many of them are taken from the classics, but the
references are so inaccurate as to make it pretty certain that the monkish
writer had not read them, but had gleaned them from the conversation of
other monks he knew. And some of them cannot have come to him within
the monastery. I can imagine the old man, with his hood well thrown back,
lolling on a bench, behind a tankard of good wine and a dish of fruit,
laughing gleefully at the tale of the rich patroness or pious knight who
wished to entertain themselves and him. For almost the only things monkish
about the stories are the applications or morals, some of which are so far
fetched as to make it clear that the monk compiler has included a tale for
the pleasure he has himself won from it, and, after writing it down, been
hard put to it to find a moral that should justify its place in a book intended
as an armoury for preachers. Here is an example:—

'OF THE AVARICIOUS PURSUIT OF RICHES, WHICH LEADS
TO HELL.'

'A certain carpenter, residing in a city near the sea, very covetous and
very wicked, collected a large sum of money, and placed it in the trunk
of a tree, which he stationed by his fireside, and which he never lost
sight of. A place like this, he thought, no one could suspect; but it
happened, that while all his household slept, the sea overflowed its
boundaries, broke down that side of the building where the log was
situated, and carried it away. It floated many miles from its original
destination, and reached at length a city in which there lived a person
who kept open house. Arising early in the morning, he perceived the
trunk of a tree in the water, and thinking it would be of service to him,
he brought it to his own home. He was a liberal, kind-hearted man, and
a great benefactor to the poor. It one day chanced that he entertained
some pilgrims in his house; and the weather being extremely cold, he
cut up the log for firewood. When he had struck two or three blows
with the axe, he heard a rattling sound; and cleaving it in twain, the
gold pieces rolled out in every direction. Greatly rejoiced at the

discovery, he reposited them in a secure place, until he should
ascertain who was the owner.
'Now the carpenter, bitterly lamenting the loss of his money, travelled
from place to place in pursuit of it. He came, by accident, to the house
of the hospitable man who had found the trunk. He failed not to
mention the object of his search; and the host, understanding that the
money was his, reflected whether his title to it were good. "I will
prove," said he to himself, "if God will that the money should be
returned to him." Accordingly he made three cakes, the first of which
he filled with earth, the second with the bones of dead men, and in the
third he put a quantity of the gold which he had discovered in the
trunk. "Friend," said he, addressing the carpenter, "we will eat three
cakes, composed of the best meat in my house. Chuse which you will
have." The carpenter did as he was directed, he took the cakes and
weighed them in his hand, one after another, and finding that the earth
weighed heaviest, he chose it. "And if I want more, my worthy host,"
added he, "I will have that"—laying his hand upon the cake containing
the bones. "You may keep the third cake yourself." "I see clearly,"
murmured the host, "I see very clearly that God does not will the
money to be returned to this wretched man." Calling, therefore, the
poor and infirm, the blind and the lame, and opening the cake of gold
in the presence of the carpenter, to whom he spoke, "Thou miserable
varlet, this is thine own gold. But thou preferredst the cake of earth and
dead men's bones. I am persuaded, therefore, that God wills not that I
return thee thy money." Without delay, he distributed the whole among
the paupers, and drove the carpenter away in great tribulation.'

So much for the story, which is indeed rather long to be quoted in so small
a book. But listen now to the application:—

'My beloved, the carpenter is any worldly-minded man; the trunk of
the tree denotes the human heart, filled with the riches of this life. The
host is a wise confessor. The cake of earth is the world; that of the
bones of dead men is the flesh; and that of gold is the kingdom of
heaven.'

The modern novel could have no beginning in a
Chaucer and literature so far removed from ordinary life as the
Boccaccio.
romances, so brief in narration, so pious in ideal as the
Gesta. Something more of flesh and blood, something of coarser grain than
dreams, on the one hand, and on the other something fuller fleshed than the
skeletonic anecdote (however marrowy its bones) was needed to produce it.
It needed men and women, and it needed a more delicate narrative form,
portraiture, and the fine art of story-telling, Chaucer, and Boccaccio.
Chaucer, for all that he wrote in verse, was not a trouveur when he was at
his best. Boccaccio was not a collector of anecdotes. The new classical
learning had given them humaner outlooks. The attitude of the Canterbury
Tales is not that of the Song of Roland, or the Morte Darthur; the attitude of
the Decameron is not that of the Gesta. Chaucer and Boccaccio, sometimes
at least, were plain men, pleasantly conscious of their humanity, telling
stories to amuse their friends.
Chaucer was a middle-class Englishman, Boccaccio a middle-class Italian.
They both wrote in languages that were scarcely older than themselves, in
languages that were rather popular than learned. They were both in a sense
mediators between the classical culture and their own people. There the
resemblance ends, and their personal characters begin to seal the
impressions they made on their respective literatures. They represent two
quite distinct advances in the art of story-telling, the one in material, the
other in technique. In both of them there is a personal honesty of
workmanship that makes their work their own. The names of the trouveurs
are lost, or, at least, not connected with what they did. They were workers
on a general theme, and counted no more in the production of the whole
than the thousand men who chiselled out each his piece of carving round
the arches of Notre Dame. They were the tools of their nations. Chaucer and
Boccaccio were men whose workmanship had its special marks, its private
personality. They were artists in their own right and not artisans.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

Chaucer's was a fairly simple nature. He seems to have
Chaucer. taken to Renaissance fashions just as he took to
Renaissance learning, without in the least disturbing the
solid Englishness of his foundation. He married a Damsell Philippa without
letting his marriage interfere with an ideal and unrequited passion like that

of Petrarch for Laura. He had Jean de Meung's own reverence for the
classics. 'Go litel book, go litel my tragedie,' he says in 'Troilus and Criseyd,

'And kiss the steppes, wher-as thou seest pace
Virgil, Ovyde, Omer, Lucan, and Stace.'

And yet few men have about them less of a classical savour. He may well
have liked 'at his beddes heed

'Twenty bokes clad in blak or reed,
Of Aristotle and his philosophye,'

but he was a man of the true 'Merry England,' when oxen were roasted
whole on feast-days, and pigs ran in the London streets. He followed the
Court, but he knew the populace. His father was a vintner in Thames Street,
and in the Cheapside taverns Chaucer found some of the material that his
travels and learning taught him how to use. On St. George's day 1374 he
was granted a pitcher of wine daily for life by his Majesty Edward the
Third. It is probable that he met Petrarch at Padua. These two facts seem to
me to present no very hollow portrait of the man.
He brought into the art of story-telling a new clearness
Portraiture.
of sight in looking at other people and at the manners of
the time. The romances had not represented
contemporary life, but rather contemporary ideals. No one can pretend to
find in Lancelot, in Roland, in Isoud of the White Hands, character-sketch
or portrait. Lancelot is the perfect knight, Roland the perfect warrior, Isoud
the beautiful woman. They were not a knight, a warrior, a woman. Those
who heard the tales used the names as servant-girls use names in modern
novels of plot, as pegs on which to hang their own emotions and their own
ambitions. The lady who listened with her chin upon her hands as the
trouveurs chanted before her, took herself the part of Isoud, and gave her
lover or the lover for whom she hoped the attributes of Tristram. The jack-
squire listening near the foot of the table himself felt Roland's steed
between his legs. These names of romance were qualities not people. The
Wife of Bath is a very different matter.

'In al the parisshe wyf ne was ther noon
That to th' offering bifore hir sholde goon;
And if ther dide, certeyn, so wrooth was she,
That she was out of alle charitee.
Hir coverchiefs ful fyne were of ground;
I dorste swere they weyeden ten pound
That on a Sonday were upon hir heed.
Hir hosen weren of fyn scarlet reed,
Ful streite y-teyd, and shoos ful moiste and newe.
Bold was hir face, and fair, and reed of hewe.
She was a worthy womman al hir lyve,
Housbondes at chirche-dore she hadde fyve,
Withouten other companye in youthe;
But therof nedeth nat to speke as nouthe.
And thryes hadde she been at Jerusalem;
She hadde passed many a straunge streem;
At Rome she hadde been, and at Boloigne,
In Galice at seint Jame, and at Coloigne.
She coude much of wandring by the weye;
Gat-tothed was she, soothly for to seye.
Upon an amblere esily she sat,
Y-wimpled wel, and on hir heed an hat
As brood as is a bokeler or a targe;
A foot-mantel aboute hir hipes large,
And on hir feet a paire of spores sharpe.
In felawschip wel coude she laughe and carpe.
Of remedyes of love she knew perchaunce,
For she coude of that art the olde daunce.'

She is there, solid, garrulous, herself. She does not get husbands because
she is a worshipped goddess, but because she is a practical woman. Bold
indeed would be the lady who in imagination played her part. The Wife is
no empty fancy dress in which we move and live; she is well filled out with
her own flesh, and we watch her from outside as we would watch a
neighbour. Hers is no veil of dreams, but a good and costly one, bought at

Bristol Fair by one or other of her five husbands whom she has badgered
into getting it.
Story-tellers before Chaucer seemed scarcely to have realised that men
were more than good or bad, brave or coward. You hated a man, or you
loved him, laughed at, or admired him; it never occurred to you to observe
him. Every man was man, every woman woman. It was not until the
Renaissance that modern story-telling found one of its motives, which is,
that there are as many kinds of man and woman as there are men and
women in the world. Then, at last, character and individuality became
suddenly important. Passion, reverence, charm had existed before in story-
telling. To these was now added another possibility of the art in portrait
painting. So was the modern world differentiated from the dark ages;
blinking in the unaccustomed light, men began to look at one another. In
painting, almost simultaneously with literature, the new power found
expression. The Van Eycks were alive before Chaucer was dead, and in the
careful, serene painting of 'John Arnolfini and his Wife,' is the observant
spirit of the Canterbury Tales. That woman standing there in her
miraculously real green robe, her linen neat upon her head, her hand laid in
her husband's, and her eyes regarding his pious, solemn gesture as if she
had consented in her own mind to see him painted as he wished, and not
betray her sense of humour, the man, the pattens on the floor, the little dog,
and the detailed chandelier, are all painted as if in Chaucer's verse. The
identity of them is the amazing thing; their difference from all the other
men and women of the town, the difference of their room from all other
rooms, and their little dog from all other little dogs. To compare that
married couple with any knight and lady carved in stone, hands folded over
breasts, on a tomb in an old church, is to compare the modern with the
mediæval, and the Wife of Bath with Guenevere or the Wife of Sir
Segwarides.
After Chaucer, narrative scarcely developed except in
Prose and verse.
prose. Scott, indeed, nearly five centuries later, wrote his
first tales in verse, but the rhyming story-teller
disappeared in the greater author of the Waverley Novels.[3] Chaucer
himself is interesting for marking the transition. He had many attributes of
later narrative, in his round English humour, in his concern with actual life,
although in this essay I have only needed him to illustrate the beginnings of

the portrait-making that has since become so important a byway of the art.
But while his verse in the Canterbury Tales has the effect of good prose, his
prose, excellent elsewhere, is here unwieldy and beyond his governance. He
expressed the new attitude in the old way; but when he was only nine years
old, there had been written in Italy prose tales that have hardly been
excelled as examples of the two forms of the short story. Chaucer was born
in 1340. In 1349 Boccaccio finished the Decameron.
Boccaccio had a more intricate mind than Chaucer's,
Boccaccio.
and a more elaborate life. He is said to have been an
illegitimate son of a Florentine merchant and a
Frenchwoman, and the two nations certainly seem to have contributed to his
character. He spent six years of his youth apprenticed to a merchant in
Paris, forsook business, and was sent to learn law, and only in the end
persuaded his father to let him devote himself to books. He had a
knowledge of the world uncommon even in his day, and a knowledge of
letters that was rare. He was something of a scholar, something of a
courtier, and, particularly, something of a poet. Sentence after sentence in
the Decameron glides by like a splash of sunlight on a stream with floating
blossoms. I must quote one of his poems in Rossetti's most beautiful
translation:—

'By a clear well, within a little field
Full of green grass and flowers of every hue,
Sat three young girls, relating (as I knew)
Their loves. And each had twined a bough to shield
Her lovely face; and the green leaves did yield
The golden hair their shadow; while the two
Sweet colours mingled, both blown lightly through
With a soft wind for ever stirred and still'd.
After a little while one of them said
(I heard her), 'Think! If, ere the next hour struck,
Each of our lovers should come here to-day,
Think you that we should fly or feel afraid?'
To whom the others answered, 'From such luck
A girl would be a fool to run away.'

He could write a poem like that; he could write the Decameron; he could
write books of greater impropriety; and at the end of his life could beg his
friends to leave such books alone, devoting himself to the compilation of
ponderous works of classical learning. There is a legend of a deathbed
vision of Judgment where Boccaccio figured, which, being reported to him,
nearly gave the wit, the scholar, and the gallant the additional mask of the
Carthusian religious.

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO

But the Boccaccio of the Decameron was the mature young man, of
personal beauty, and nimble tongue, a Dioneo, who had his own way with
the company in which he found himself, and was licensed, like a
professional jester, to say the most scandalous things. He knew the rich
colour, classical learning, and jollity of morals of the Court of Naples. Here
he heard the travelling story-tellers, and perhaps learnt from them a little of
the art of narrative. He knew the Gesta Romanorum, and began to collect

tales himself with the idea of making some similar collection. Noting story
after story that he heard told (for it would be ridiculous to reason from the
widespread origin of his tales that he had a stupendous knowledge of the
world's books), he wrote them with a perfect feeling for value and
proportion. In him the story-teller ceased to be an improviser. In his tales
the longwindedness of the trouveurs was gone, gone also the nakedness of
the anecdote. He refused to excuse them with the moral tags of the Gesta.
These new forms were not things of utility that needed justification; they
were things of independent beauty.
Boccaccio was intent simply on the art of telling tales.
His story-telling.
He knew enough of classical literature to feel the possible
dignity and permanence of prose, and he told his stories
as they were told to him in a supple, pleasant vernacular that obeyed him
absolutely and never led him off by its own strangeness into byways foreign
to the tales and to himself. He found his material in anecdotes of current
gossip, like Cecco Angiolieri's misadventure with his money, his palfrey,
and his clothes, and in popular tales like that of the overpatient Griselda. He
took it in the rough and shaped it marvellously, creating two forms, the
short story proper, the skilful development of a single episode, and the little
novel, the French nouvelle, a tale whose incidents are many and whose plot
may be elaborate. From his day to our own these two forms have scarcely
altered, and in the use of both of them he showed that invaluable art, so
strenuously attained by later story-tellers, of compelling us to read with him
to the end, even if we know it, for the mere joy of narrative, the delight of
his narrating presence. We are so well content with Chaucer's gorgeous
improvisations that we never ask whether this piece or that is relevant to the
general theme. But in Boccaccio there are no irrelevancies, praise that can
be given to few story-tellers before the time of the self-conscious
construction of men like Poe, and the austere selection of men like Mérimée
and Flaubert.
Even without their setting his tales would have been
Importance of
framework in
something memorable, something that lifted the art to a
books of short new level and made less loving workmanship an obvious
tales. backsliding. But stories put together do not make good
books. The Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles are very short and
make a collection of anecdotes. The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes are

very long and stand and fall each one alone. But the Canterbury Tales are
the better for that merry company on pilgrimage. And when Queen Joan of
Naples, profligate, murderess, and bluestocking, asked Boccaccio to put his
stories in a book, it was well that he should have the plague of 1348 to set
as purple velvet underneath his gems—the morality inseparable from the
tales was so simple and so careless. Boccaccio's attitude was that of his age.
Man has wants: if he can satisfy them, good: if not, why then it may ease
his sorrow to hear it professionally expressed:—'Help me,' as Chaucer says:
—

'Help me that am the sorwful instrument
That helpeth lovers, as I can, to pleyne!'

As for good fortune, it is taken as naïvely as by the topers in the song:—

'Maults gone down, maults gone down
From an old angel to a French crown.
And every drunkard in this town
Is very glad that maults gone down.'

When Troilus is happy with Cressida, Chaucer smiles aside:—'With worse
hap God let us never mete.' And Boccaccio, after describing a scene that in
England at the present day would be the prelude to a case at law, and
columns of loathsomely prurient newspaper reports, ejaculates with simple
piety:—'God grant us the like.' The Decameron owes much of its dignity
and permanence to its double frame, to the Court of Story-telling in the
garden on the hill, and to the deeper irony that places it, sweet, peaceful,
and insouciant, in the black year of pestilence and death.

THE ROGUE NOVEL

THE ROGUE NOVEL

Few characters in literature have had so large or so
Democracy in
literature.
honourable a progeny as the gutter-snipe. If the Kings'
daughters of High Romance, charming, delicate
creatures, had only wedded with Kings' sons, as delicately fashioned as
themselves, we should never have known the sterling dynasty of the Tom
Joneses and the Humphry Clinkers, with their honest hearts and coarse
hides warranted to wear. All those Kings of men, whose thrones were beer-
barrels, whose sceptres, oaken cudgels, whose perennial counsellor was
Jollity, whose enemy, Introspection, would never have come to their own,
and indeed would never have been born, if it had not been for the sixteenth
century entry of the rascal into the Palace gardens, for the escapades of such
shaggy-headed, smutfaced, barefooted urchins as Lazarillo de Tormes.
To such rogues as he must be attributed much of our present humanity; for
until we could laugh at those of low estate, we held them of little account.
There is small mention made of serving-men in the Morte Darthur or the
Mabinogion, and when, in the Heptameron of Margaret of Navarre, we hear
of the drowning of a number of them in trying to render easy the passage of
their masters through the floods, the comment is extremely short: 'One must
not despair for the loss of servants, for they are easy to replace.' On a
similar occasion 'all the company were filled with a joy inestimable,
praising the Creator, who, contenting himself with serving-men, had saved
the masters and mistresses,' an index alike to the ferocity they still attributed
to God and the rather exclusive humanity of themselves. Do you not think
with sudden awe of the revolution to come? Do you not hear a long way off
the trampling of a million serving-men, prepared to satisfy God with other
lives? It is a fine contrast to turn from these queenly sentences to this little
book, the autobiography of a beggar, who thinks himself sufficiently
important to set down the whole truth about his birth, lest people should
make any mistake. 'My father, God be kind to him, had for fifteen years a
mill on the river of Tormes.... I was scarcely eight when he was accused of
having, with evil intent, made leakage in his check sacks.... Letting himself

be surprised, he confessed all, and suffered patiently the chastisement of
justice, which makes me hope that he is, according to the Gospel, of the
number of those happy in the Glory of God.' No very reputable parentage
this, in a day when it was the fashion to derive heroes from Charlemagne or
Amadis.
It is a short step from the ironic to the sincere. The
Lazarillo de author of the book is laughing at his hero, and makes a
Tormes.
huge joke of his pretensions. But to recognise, even in
jest, that a vagabond rogue could have pretensions, or indeed any personal
character at all beyond that of a tool in the hand of whoever was kind
enough to use him, was to look upon him with a humaner eye and,
presently, to recognise him in earnest as a fellow creature. It seems to me
significant that the first rogues in our literature should come from Spain, a
country that has never quite forgotten its Moorish occupation. In the
Spanish student, who, so tradition says, wrote Lazarillo while in the
University of Salamanca, there must have been something of the spirit of
the race that lets the hunchback tell his story to the Caliph, and is glad when
the son of the barber marries the daughter of the Grand Vizier. For, joke as
it is, the book is the story of a beggar, told as a peculiarly fearless and
brazen beggar would tell it, without suggesting or demanding either
condescension or pity.
There is genius in the little book. Its author perhaps did
The morality of the
underworld.
better than he meant, for he brings on every page the
moral atmosphere of the underworld, the old folk-
morality, the same in sixteenth-century Spain as in the oldest tales of
sagacity and cunning. Lazarillo's shameless mother apprentices him to a
blind beggar who promises to treat him like a son and begins his education
at once. He takes the boy to a big stone on the outskirts of the town, and
bids him listen to the noise within it. The boy puts his head close to the
stone to hear the better, and the old rascal gives him a thundering blow,
which, the stone being an admirable anvil, nearly cracks his skull. That is
his first lesson ... never to be unsuspicious ... and it is as characteristic of the
others as of Reynard the Fox.
There never was so excellent a beggar as Lazarillo's master; no trick of the
trade was unknown to him. As a fortune-teller, he could prophesy what his
victims wished to hear. As a doctor he had his remedies for toothache, and

for fainting-fits; not an illness could be mentioned but he had a physic ready
to his hands. Then too, 'he knew by heart more prayers than all the blind
men of Spain. He recited them very distinctly, in a low tone, grave and
clear, calling the attention of the whole church; he accompanied them with a
posture humble and devout, without gesticulations or grimaces of mouth,
after the manner of those blind men who have not been properly brought
up.' Indeed his only fault was avarice. 'He was not content with making me
die of hunger,' says his pupil; 'he was doing the same himself.'
Under such a master Lazarillo's wits sharpen quickly. 'A fool would have
been dead a hundred times; but by my subtlety and my good tricks, I
always, or mostly (in spite of all his care), succeeded in getting hold of the
biggest and best portion.' Lazarillo becomes as astute a rascal as his teacher,
and, living fairly and squarely in the conditions of the underworld, his
villainy does not damp his spirits, or disturb his peace of nights. I was
reminded of him by a young tramp with whom I walked in the north
country, a rogue with as merry a heart as he, and a similar well-fitting
morality. With me, from whom he knew there was nothing to gain but good
fellowship, he was a good fellow, walked with a merry stride, whistled as
he went, sang me songs in the Gaelic of his childhood, and told me of the
jolly tricks he had played with a monkey he had brought from over sea. We
walked like men in the sunshine. But when, beyond a turn in the road, he
saw some person coming a little better dressed, why then his face flashed
into a winking melancholy, his stride degenerated as if by magic into a
slouch, and it was odd if his mean figure and despairing hand did not attract
a copper, for which he would call down a blessing. Then, as soon as we
were out of sight of his benefactor, he would resume his natural walk and
burst again into whistling and merriment. Lazarillo is as frank as he. He
recognises his needs (Hunger is not an easy fellow to ignore), and would be
much surprised if you denied his right to satisfy them. Nor is he
disappointed in you. Every honest man must love a rogue, and you are as
consciencelessly glad as himself when Lazarillo, by kneeling before him
and sucking the liquor through a straw, diddles the blind man who greedily
guards the wine bowl between his ragged knees. You feel that he has but his
due when he happens upon a wife and a living and (if you read the
continuation of his history[4]) find nothing blameworthy in the fact that he
spends his last years in the clothes and reputation of a dead hermit,
subsisting on the charity of the religious.

I have talked at some length about the contents of this
The form of the little book in order to illustrate the new material then
rogue novel.
brought into story-telling. Let me now consider the new
form that came with it. Lazarillo de Tormes was a very simple development
from the plain anecdote or merry quip of folklore or gossip, which was, as
we have seen in the last chapter, one of the popular early forms of narrative.
Boccaccio raised the anecdote to a higher level of art by giving it a fuller
technique and expanding it into the short story. The inventors of the rogue
novels achieved a similar result by stringing a number of anecdotes together
about a particular hero, making as it were cycles of anecdotes comparable
in their humbler way with the grand cycles of romance. Lazarillo himself is
not an elaborate conception, but simply a fit rogue to play the main part in a
score or so of roguish exploits, idly following one another as they occurred
to the mind of the narrator. His life is a jest-book turned into a biography, a
collection of anecdotes metamorphosed into a novel.
The new form gave story-telling a wider scope. In
Its satirical
material.
writing a collection of anecdotes it was difficult to realise
the hero who was no more than a name that happened to
be common to them all. It was impossible to make much of the minor
characters who walk on or off the tiny stage of each adventure. But in
stringing them along a biography, in producing instead of a number of
embroidered exploits a single embroidered life, there need be no limit to the
choice and elaboration of the embroidery. Though the hero was no more
than a quality, a puppet guaranteed to jump on the pull of a string, the
setting of his life turned easily into a satirical picture of contemporary
existence, and satire became eventually one of the principal aims with
which such novels were written.
The low estate of the rogue novel's hero made satire from his lips not only
easy but palatable. In writing the opinions of a rogue you can politely
assume that his standpoint is not that of his readers. For that reason they can
applaud the rascal's wit playing over other people, or, if it touches them too
closely, regard it with compassion as lions might listen to the criticism of
jackals. Lazarillo contains plenty of good-humoured, bantering portraits:
the seller of forged indulgences, the miserly priest, and particularly the out-
at-elbows gentleman who walks abroad each day to lunch with a rich friend,
and is unable on his return from his hungry promenade to keep from eyeing,

and at last from sharing, the rough bread that his servant has begged or
stolen for himself. Lazarillo's merit is that he writes of himself à propos of
other people, and never barrenly of himself for his own sake. Smollett in
writing Roderick Random is true to his traditions in getting his own back
from schoolmasters and the Navy Office. And the arms of Dickens, who
reformed the workhouses in telling the story of Oliver Twist, must have had
quartered upon them the rampant begging bowl of the little Spanish rogue.
Now the characteristic language of satire is as pointed as the blade of a
rapier, and for this we owe some gratitude to these rascally autobiographies
whose plainness of style was nearer talk than that of any earlier form of
narrative. The prose of the picaresque novel has been in every age
remarkably free from the literary tricks most fashionable at the time. When
your hero dresses in rags you cannot do better than clothe his opinions in
simplicity. The writing of Lazarillo, of Tom Jones, of Captain Singleton, of
Lavengro, is clear, virile, not at all ornate, the exact opposite to that of the
Pastorals. Such heroes deliver their sentences, like Long Melford, straight
from the shoulder, and would consider fine writing as so much aimless
trifling in the air.
Mention of Lavengro suggests a paragraph on one of the
Picaresque
autobiographies.
most curious developments to be noticed in the history of
the art. All that we have examined so far have been from
truth to fiction; this is a movement from fiction to truth. Stories of the deeds
of a man have become romances of the deeds of a hero. A biography has
changed as we watched it into a tale of miracle. Here is a quite different
phenomenon. An imaginary autobiography that pretends to be real, of a
rascally hero, makes it possible for rogues to write real autobiographies that
pretend to be imaginary. Lavengro and the Romany Rye are two parts of a
rogue novel constructed like the oldest of the kind. They contain a hero
somehow put on a different plane from that of respectable society, and the
books are made up of the people he meets and the things they say and do to
him, or make him do and say. 'Why,' says Borrow, whose attitude towards
life is as confident as Lazarillo's, 'there is not a chapter in the present book
which is not full of adventures, with the exception of the present one, and
this is not yet terminated.'
But Borrow and other makers of confessions are not of the direct line, in
spite of the roguish and adventurous air that clings about them as they rest

upon our shelves. Lazarillo had many sincerer and more
The development immediate flatterers—Thomas Nash, for example, whose
of the rogue novel.
Jacke Wilton, or the Unfortunate Traveller, holds in
itself, as one of the earliest pieces of realism in English literature, more than
enough of interest for an essay. He had also many younger brothers at
home, and an enormous progeny, and it has so happened that the influence
of the rogue novel on our own fiction was exerted through them, and not
through his early imitations in France and England. Cervantes used its form
for the adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and, combining the
picaresque spirit with that of the tales of chivalry, produced the first realistic
romance. Many lesser writers were content to follow Lazarillo's lead
without such independent ingenuity. They brought up their literary children
to be heroes after Lazarillo's fashion and were proud to have him as a
godfather. In their hands the rogue novel retained its form and gained only a
multiplicity of incident, a hundred writers earnestly devising new swindles
and more exciting adventures for the hero, whose personality under all their
buffetings remained constant to its original characteristics. No nation has
shown more fertility in fancy than the Spanish. We owe to Spain half the
trap-door excitements, half the eavesdropping discoveries, half the
ingenious plots and counter-plots of the theatre. And when we remember
that for a hundred and fifty years the rogue novel had been one of the most
popular forms of Spanish literature, we need not wonder that Le Sage, in
turning over volume after volume of the lives of Spanish rascals, should
find that the Spanish language was an Open Sesame to an Ali Baba's cave
of opulent invention. Just as a hundred forgotten trouveurs chanted the tales
of the Morte Darthur, before Malory made from their songs the epic that
we know, so the rogue novel had seeded and repeated itself again and again,
before it met its great man who seized the vitality of a hundred bantlings to
make a breeched book.

ALAIN RENÉ LE SAGE

Just as Malory was not a Frenchman but an Englishman,
Its culmination in
so Le Sage was not a Spaniard but a Frenchman, and a
Le Sage.
Frenchman in a very different age from that which
produced his models. The

'Stately Spanish galleons
Sailing from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the tropics by the palm green shores,
With cargoes of diamonds,
Emeralds, amethysts,
Topazes and cinnamon and gold moidores,'[5]

no longer brought the wealth of the Incas to Cadiz and Barcelona, but had
been burnt as firewood in the cabins on the Irish coast. The Elizabethan age
had come and gone. Cervantes had been dead a hundred years. Molière had
brought comedy to the French stage. Watteau was painting, and Boileau was
formulating the eighteenth-century code of letters, when in a little garden
summer-house behind a Paris street, Le Sage sat at his desk, dipped through
Spanish books, and wrote with a light heart of the people that he knew,
disguised in foreign clothes, and moving in places he had never seen. He
made his travels by his own fireside, and the contrast between Cervantes'
active life and his peaceable Galatea is no greater than that between the
adventurous Gil Blas and Le Sage's sedentary industry. His lack of personal
experience left him very free in the handling of his material, and made him
just the man to recast the old adventures of a century before, to translate
them, spilling none of their vitality, to a later time, to fill them out with a
more delicate fancy, to finish them with a more fastidious pen, and to build
from them a new and delicious French book, Spanish in colouring, but
wholly Parisian in appeal.
Gil Blas is a Frenchman in a Spanish cloak, Le Sage, as he imagined
himself under the tattered mantle of Lazarillo. His disguise left him doubly
licensed for the criticism of contemporary France. He was of low estate, so
that he could see things from below, upside down, and comment upon them.
His circumstances were Spanish, so that he could observe French things,
call them by Spanish names, and laugh at them without being inexcusably
impertinent. He had also a very excellent technique. Le Sage had read La
Bruyère and La Bruyère's translation of Theophrastus, and was the better
able to allow his hero to take the hint from Lazarillo, and use his
autobiography as an outlet for his social satire. Everything that Lazarillo
had done, Gil Blas did in a larger and more skilful fashion. The book

summed up the rogue novels in itself, and in its own right brought their
influence to bear on English narrative. Smollett translated it, and it shares
with Don Quixote the parentage of the masculine novel.

THE ELIZABETHANS

THE ELIZABETHANS

Professional story-tellers before the sixteenth century
The new conditions
of professional
seem very far removed from the novelists of our
story-telling. circulating libraries. Theirs was a simpler patronage; they
had but to please one rich man, and they could live. The
invention of printing made them leap suddenly into the conditions of
modernity. It changed the audience of the castle hall into the audience of the
world, and patrons into the public. A man told his stories in his own room.
He was not sure of a single listener; he might have ten thousand without
raising his voice or pressing harder with his pen. Poets might write for their
friends or the Court; but Elizabethan story-tellers were already able to exist
by writing for the booksellers. Middlemen were between their audience and
themselves. They had no chance of excusing the defects of their wares by
charm of voice or charm of personality, unless they could get that charm on
paper. The characteristics of modern story-telling were rapidly appearing;
already, as in the case of Euphues, a single book might set the fashion for a
thousand; already the novelist felt his audience through his sales. Men like
Greene, swift 'yarkers up' of pamphlets, had to write what the Elizabethan
public wanted—with the result that there is very little purely English story-
telling of the period. The Elizabethans wanted silks and gold from overseas.
They fell in love with what was new and strange. They were hungry for all
countries but their own, and for all times but those in which they lived.
There never were such thieves. They stole from Spain, from France, from
Italy, from Portugal, and, curiously mixing impudence and awe, copied
crudely and continually from a newly discovered antiquity.
There was Paynter's Pallace, peopled with characters
Elizabethan
borrowings.
from the love-tales of France and Italy, in whose
adventures Elizabethan playwrights found a score of
plots. And then there was Pettie's Pallace, with its delightful title, A petite
Pallace of Pettie his pleasure, that shows how late our language lost its
French. Pettie steals his tales from the classics, with a most engaging air of
right of way. Wherever the Elizabethans went they carried their heads high

and were not abashed. They were ready to nod to Cæsar, call Endymion a
Johnny-head-in-air, and clink a glass in honour of Ulysses. All the world
was so new that Antiquity seemed only yesterday. Classical allusion was
used with the most lavish hand. Progne, inveighing against her husband,
explains his iniquity as follows:—

'He sheweth his cursed cruel kind, he plainly proves himself to
proceed of the progeny of that traitor Aeneas, who wrought the
confusion of Queen Dido, who succoured him in his distress. It is
evident he is engendered of Jason's race, who disloyally forsook
Medea that made him win the golden fleece! He is descended of the
stock of Demophoon, who through his faithless dealing forced Phyllis
to hang herself! He seems of the seed of Theseus, who left Ariadne in
the deserts to be devoured, through whose help he subdued the
monster Minotaur, and escaped out of the intricate labyrinth! He
cometh of Nero his cruel kind, who carnally abused his own mother
Agrippina, and then caused her to be slain and ripped open, that he
might see the place wherein he lay being an infant in her belly! So that
what but filthiness is to be gathered of such grafts? What boughs but
beastliness grow out of such stems?'

And yet, quite undismayed by such family connections, so intimate was he
with antiquity, the story-teller sums up the deeds of his characters as though
he were a prosecuting counsel, and they even now cowering in the dock
before him.

'It were hard here, Gentlewoman, for you to give sentence, who more
offended of the husband or the wife, seeing the doings of both the one
and the other near in the highest degree of devilishness—such
unbridled lust and beastly cruelty in him, such monstrous mischief and
murder in her; in him such treason, in her such treachery; in him such
falseness, in her such furiousness; in him such devilish desire, in her
such revengeful ire; in him such devilish heat, in her such haggish
hate, that I think them both worthy to be condemned to the most
bottomless pit in hell.'

There is something in the style of this, as well as in the address to a female
reader, that suggests the Euphues of John Lyly, published two years later.

Lyly, alchemist of Spanish magniloquence into English
Lyly writes for euphuism, who settled the style of the Elizabethan
women.
romance, and brought into it many elements still
characteristic of English story-telling, wrote as well as his letter to
'Gentlemen Readers,' and to his 'verrie good friends, the Gentlemen
Schollers of Oxford,' Epistles dedicatory to women—'To the Ladies and
Gentlewoemen of England, John Lyly wisheth what they would.' They were
grateful to him, and since he said that he would rather 'lye shut in a Ladye's
Casket, then open in a Scholler's studie,' there was scarce a gentlewoman in
London but knew much of him by heart, addressed her husband or lover in
terms his Lucia might have used, and woke nearly as eager to read in him as
in her looking-glass. His was a very modern success. Then, too, the end of
all his tales was high morality. He winds up each with a reflection, and like
most English story-telling, they contain more of the Warning Example than
of the Embroidered Exploit. He reminds the 'Gentlewoemen of England'
that he has 'diligently observed that there shall be nothing found that may
offend the chaste mind with unseemly tearmes or uncleanly talke.' And yet
he wrote of love a hundred years before the eighteenth century, and
throughout those hundred years, and for some fifty afterwards, the chaste
mind was to be almost disregarded. Mrs. Aphra Behn was to pour forth
what Swinburne called her 'weltering sewerage,' and Fielding and Smollett
were to write, before the chaste mind was to exert any very lasting
influence on literature. Fielding and Smollett wrote for men, while, like an
earlier Richardson, 'could Euphues take the measure of a woman's minde,
as the Tailour doth of hir bodie, he would go as neere to fit them for a fancie
as the other doth for a fashion.' Elizabethan women must have been less
squeamish than their descendants on the subject of themselves. For in this
book planned to fit them, Lyly writes like an Elizabethan Schopenhauer:
—'Take from them their periwigges, their paintings, their Jewells, their
rowles, their boulstrings, and thou shalt soone perceive that a woman is the
least part of hir selfe.' That is the gentle art of being rude, in which so much
of early wit consisted. But, as it was designed as a 'Cooling Carde for
Philautus and all fond lovers,' whose affections were misplaced or
unrequited, the women, accepting not without pride responsibility for the
disease, must have found it easy to forgive him and to smile at so impotent
a cure.

The style of Euphues had a much wider influence than
Euphuism. his matter. Like Pettie's, it is precious, but with a
preciousness at the same time so elaborate and infectious
that I am finding it difficult even now, in thinking about it, to keep from
imitating it. Its principle is a battledore-and-shuttlecock motion, in which
the sense, sometimes a little bruised, is kept up between similar sounds or
words that are not quite puns but nearly so. An idea that could be expressed
in a single very short sentence is expanded as long as the breath lasts, or
longer, by the insertion of separate contrasts, like those used in the
intermediate lines of one of the forms of Japanese poetry. There was
something of this in Pettie's peroration that was quoted three paragraphs
ago; and here is an example from Lyly:—'Alas, Euphues, by how much the
more I love the high clymbing of thy capacitie, by so much the more I feare
thy fall.' (There is the idea; all that follows is its embroidery.) 'The fine
Christall is sooner erased then the hard Marble; the greenest Beech burneth
faster then the dryest Oke; the fairest silke is soonest soyled; and the
sweetest wine tourneth to the sharpest Vinegar. The Pestilence doth most
infect the clearest complection, and the Caterpiller cleaveth into the ripest
fruite: the most delycate witte is allured with small enticement unto vice,
and most subject to yeelde unto vanitie.'
Such a style could not but attract a newly educated
'Cruditie and
indigestion.'
people, still able to marvel at knowledge. Its lavishness of
information is comparable to that generosity of gold and
precious gems that has been noticed as characteristic of the writers of the
Mabinogion. The Briton wondered at wealth, the Elizabethan at learning. It
is not surprising that in this state of civilisation a fact-laden style should be
brought to perfection. 'It is a sign of cruditie and indigestion,' says
Montaigne, 'for a man to yeelde up his meat even as he swallowed the
same: the stomach hath not wrought his full operation unlesse it have
changed forme and altered fashion of that which was given him to boyle
and concoct.' In Elizabethan England, when knowledge was so new and so
delightful that men did not scruple to invent it, it is easy to imagine John
Lyly writing with a huge Bestiary open to the left of him, and a classical
dictionary open to the right, from which he might dig out metaphors learned
and ingenious, and present them immediately to his readers without putting
any undue strain on his own intellectual digestion.

His imitators were no less numerous than his readers. If
Lyly's followers. they could not write they talked his peculiar language. If
they were novelists they wrote in something like his
manner, and with cheerful consciences used his name as a trade-mark to
attract his popularity to themselves. Lodge's Rosalynde is introduced as
Euphues' Golden Legacie, and many other stories were connected by some
ingenious silken thread to Lyly's garlanded triumphal car. It is too easy to
laugh at euphuism. It was the first prophecy of the ordered poetic prose in
which such delicate work has been done in our own time. In the hands of
Lodge and Greene, who tempered it with homelier periods, it showed at
once its possibilities of beauty. Nor with Lyly was it continued pedantry. A
golden smile appears sometimes beneath the mask. Euphues, crossing to
England, tells the story of Callimachus to Philautus and the sailors, and
when he says, 'You must imagine (because it were too long to tell all his
journey) that he was Sea-sick (as thou beginnest to be, Philautus),' we
perceive that Lyly is not always to be hidden behind his sentences. The
stories he introduces, the tale of Callimachus and Cassander, or the pretty
history of old Fidus and his Issida, are as pleasant as the tales of Lodge and
Greene.
How near he was to being a story-teller may be seen from the work of
these two men. They tried to imitate him in everything; but Greene wrote in
a hurry for the press, and you could not expect Lodge, writing on the high
seas, to be as consistently euphuistical as an Oxford gentleman, holding an
appointment from Lord Burleigh, and having nothing else to do. Euphuism
fell away from both journalist and sailor, leaving a pleasant glow over their
style. They were more intent than Lyly on the plain forwarding of the
narrative. For the long rhetorical harangues they substituted shorter, simpler
speeches to express the feelings of their characters. The harangue was a step
from the bald statement that so-and-so 'made great dole,' and these shorter
speeches were a further step from the by no means bald declamations on the
subject of the dole, towards the working up of emotion by a closer copy of
the action and dialogue in which emotion expresses itself. Dialogue was yet
to be introduced from the theatre. In Lyly it meant argument, but in the best
of his imitators it had become already a tool imperfectly understood but
sometimes used for the actual progress of the tale.

Greene and Lodge illustrate very well the characteristics of Elizabethan
story-telling. Pandosto, Rosalynde, and some of Greene's confessions let us
know pretty clearly what it was that the public of the day found interesting.
Greene was a Bohemian, 'with a jolley red peaked beard' who could 'yark
up a pamphlet in a single night,' and do it so well that the booksellers were
glad to pay 'for the very dregs of his wit.' Lodge was an undergraduate at
Oxford, a pirate, and later a very successful physician. Both were, like their
audiences, exceedingly alive.
In Greene's Pandosto we find reminiscences of old
Romance and
confession.
romance, classical nomenclature, the influence of the
Italian novelle, and plenty of the wild improbability that
still had power over his audience. Pandosto is a love pamphlet, and after a
euphuistic dedication and a little preface on jealousy, 'from which oft
ensueth bloody revenge as this ensuing history manifestly proveth,' Greene
leads off with, 'In the country of Bohemia there reigned a king called
Pandosto.' Bohemia is an island—no matter. Pandosto, in a most obliging
manner, 'to close up the comedy with a tragical stratagem,' slays himself at
the finish—no matter again. We must remember that for the Elizabethans,
fortunate people who believed in the Lamia and the Boas, probability and
improbability had no existence as relative terms. Everything was credible,
and one of the joys of romance reading was the exercise of an athletic faith.
Another was the gathering of knowledge, and Greene met this demand with
books whose breathings of realism illustrate, like Nash's Jacke Wilton, the
rogue novel in England, and give his name a double importance. These
other books were more personal to their writer, and depend more closely on
his own life and character. Greene was a wild liver with a conscience. He
enjoyed debauch and the company of rogues better than virtue and the
society of sober citizens. But his conscience oscillated between hibernation
and wakefulness with a periodicity that corresponded to the fulness and
emptiness of his purse, and in times of poverty and righteousness he wrote
confessions of his own misdoing, and books on the methods of rapscallions
with whom he consorted, that brought him the money to continue on his
riotous career, and satisfied the curiosity of his public as well as his
romances had delighted their imaginations.
Lodge, although his work was also various, appealed mainly to the latter.

'Roome for a souldier and a sailer that gives you the fruits of his
labors that he wrote, in the ocean, when everie line was wet with a
surge, and every humorous passion countercheckt with a storme. If you
like it, so; and yet I will be yours in duetie, if you be mine in favour.
But if Momus, or any squinteied asse, that hath mighty eares to
conceive with Midas, and yet little reason to judge, if he come abord
our barke to find fault with the tackling, when hee knowes not the
shrowds, Ile down into the hold, and fetch out a rustie pollax, that
sawe no sunne this seaven yeare, and either well bebast him, or heave
the cockescombe over boord to feed cods. But curteous gentlemen,
that favour most, backbite none, and pardon what is overslipt, let such
come and welcome; Ile into the stewards roome, and fetch them a
kanne of our best bevradge.'

That is the way in which Thomas Lodge, newly returned
As You Like It. to England from piracies on the western seas, introduces
his Rosalynde. With such a preface, you would expect a
ruffianly tale, full of hard knocks and coarse words, certainly not the dainty
little pastoral, romantic fairy story, found in Euphues' cell, and holding
lessons of much profit for the guidance of his friend's children. The very
contrast between its buccaneering author and its own fragility is the same as
that between the pastoral writers and their books, between, for example,
Cervantes of Lepanto and the author of the Galatea, between the Sidney
who died at Zutphen and the author of Arcadia. It is the tale of As You Like
It, and Shakespeare, in turning it into a play, chose the right title for it, since
it contains every one of the surest baits with which to hook an Elizabethan
audience. It was brought from overseas, and in that time when ships were
sailing up to London Bridge with all the new-found riches of the world, the
hint of travel was a sufficient promise of delight. It begins with a dying
knight who leaves a legacy between his sons, and its audience had not yet
tired of Sir Bevis and Sir Isumbras. It has the fairy-tale notion of the
youngest born, and was not England youngest son of all the world? There
are beautiful women in it, and one of them dresses like a man—a delicious,
romantic thing to dream upon. And finally, is it not left by Euphues himself,
and therefore full of profit as of pleasure, of wit as of wisdom, and written
in something not too far from that embroidered manner, as dear to the
Elizabethans as their new won luxuries, their newly imported frivolities.

THE PASTORAL

THE PASTORAL

The Pastoral, whose influence touches even the
The discovery and
exploitation of
Elizabethan novels not professedly Arcadian, had been
Arcadia. fished up from sunken antiquity by the early scholars of
the Renaissance. They were fascinated by the serene
country pieces of Virgil, and the leafy embroideries of Theocritus, and
were, of course, too newly learned, too eager for the name of learning, to be
able to apply the old form to their own material. Instead, they did their best
to write not only in a classical manner, but also of a classical country. They
used Greek names, Latin names, any but homespun names of their own
times. It was not on purpose that Arcadia was set by them in the Golden
Age; they had aimed at a century more prosaic. The best time of all the
world had a date for them, and they did their best to live up to its particular
antiquity. But in using conventions so different from real life, in a time of
hurry and stress, it was natural that they should be led into daydreams of a
greater simplicity than their own elaborate existence. It was natural, too,
that by refining character, tempering the wind, and keeping the year at its
sweetest season, they should end in the making of books that were beyond
all measure artificial. From the time of Boccaccio to the time of Cervantes
these books had multiplied, and become more and more like arrangements
of marionettes in landscapes dotted with Noah's Ark trees, until, when the
curate in Don Quixote's library defends them to the niece and calls them
'ingenious books that can do nobody any prejudice,' the niece hurriedly
replies, 'Oh! good sir, burn them with the rest I beseech you; for should my
uncle get cured of his knight-errant frenzy, and betake himself to the
reading of these books, we should have him turn shepherd, and so wander
through the woods and fields; nay, and what would be worse yet, turn poet,
which they say is a catching and incurable disease.'
The niece was right, for when shepherds love sweet
Shepherds' plaints.
shepherdesses, it seems that for the benefit of a
Renaissance public they must pour their sorrows out in
verse, as elegant and classical as may be. No sooner does one shepherd

begin his song than another joins him and another, until there is a chorus of
complaining lovers; the infection is so virulent that it leaps from man to
man, and if a shepherd-boy breathe a poem to his lass, it is great odds that
she will cap it with another, and then they will keep it up between them like
a shuttlecock. The disease is so strong indeed that if poor Corydon has no
one to cross Muses with, it forces Echo herself to answer him in rhyme:—

'In what state was I then, when I took this deadly disease?
Ease.
And what manner of mind which had to that humour a vain?
Vain.
Hath not reason enough vehemence to desire to reprove?
Prove.
Oft prove I but what salve when reason seeks to begone?
One.
Oh! what is it? what is it that may be a salve to my love?
Love.
What do lovers seek for long seeking for to enjoy?
Joy.
What be the joys for which to enjoy they went to the pains?
Pains.
Then to an earnest love what doth best victory end?
End.'

These lines are from Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, which, of course, was not
in the Knight's library. We are told in advance that they are hexameters.
How delightfully they scan:—

'Wh¯at d˘o l˘ov | er¯s se¯ek | f¯or l¯ong | se¯ekin¯g | f¯or t˘o e˘n | j¯oy?
¯
J oy.'

On the next page a shepherdess 'threw down the burden of her mind in
Anacreon's kind of verses.' And 'Basilius, when she had fully ended her
song, fell prostrate upon the ground and thanked the gods they had
preserved his life so long as to hear the very music they themselves had
used in an earthly body.' Presently follows a copy of 'Phaleuciaks,' and then
Dorus 'had long he thought kept silence from saying something which
might tend to the glory of her, in whom all glory to his seeming was
included, but now he broke it, singing those verses called Asclepiadiks.'
And they thought the night had passed quickly.

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY

This is no insult to Sir Philip Sidney, but only to the
An apology to rather exorbitant demands of the form he had chosen. His
Sidney.
own sonnets vindicate him as a poet, and some of them,
even Hazlitt owned, who did not like him, 'are sweet even to a sense of
faintness, luscious as the woodbine, and graceful and luxurious like it.'
Sidney lets us see his own attitude in that splendid sentence which begins,
'Certainly I must confesse my own barbarousnes, I neuer heard the olde

song of Percy and Duglas that I found not my heart mooued more then with
a Trumpet; and yet is it sung but by some blinde Crouder, with no rougher
voyce then rude stile'; I should be almost sorry that he finished it by saying
'which, being so euill apparrelled in the dust and cobwebbes of that vnciuill
age, what would it worke trymmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar?'
but that it rings with the sincerity of his classicism. Taste has changed, and
now we find his 'barbarousnes' in the question rather than in the confession.
But the sentence illustrating at once his sensitiveness to simplicity and his
predilection for the classics, shows how genuine was the expression that the
busy, chivalric diplomatist found for himself in the confines of Arcadia. The
classic metres brought as near as might be our Tudor English to 'the
language of the Gods.'
The continual downpour of poetry, the Arcadian
The slow progress
of Arcadian
substitute for rain, was not the only drag on the narrative
narrative. of the pastoral story-tellers. Serenity was considered
essential, and so, while the story was being everlastingly
shunted, so that the lovesick shepherds might plain, it had also for every
step it took forward to take another back in order to catch again the chosen
atmosphere of lovesick repose. The result was 'a note of linked sweetness
long drawn out,' a series of agitated standstills, and a narrative impossible to
end. Cervantes' Galatea was never finished; the last books of Arcadia were
written by another hand; d'Urfé died before putting an end to l'Astrée; and
Montemor abandoned his Diana.
In the history of story-telling it is not the form of the pastoral that is
important, but the motive that gave it its popularity. We begin to understand
the motive when we notice that it became the fashion to hide real people
under the names of Corydon and Phyllis, and to put ribboned crooks and
silver horns into the hands of enemies and friends. At first it was the
genuine feeling that made Boccaccio enshrine his Fiammetta; at the end it
degenerated into mere privy gossip and books uninteresting without their
keys; but in general it was simply a desire of flattering elaborate people into
thinking themselves of simple heart. The pastorals were
The motive of the like the paintings of Watteau and Lancret, where we find
Pastoral.
the ladies of a lively court playing innocent games under
the trees, while, if we searched in the brushwood, we should find in the soft
earth under the brambles the hoofmarks of the sporting satyrs. The feelings

of author and subjects were those of the Vicar of Wakefield's family when
they sat before the portrait painter:—'Olivia would be drawn as an Amazon,
sitting upon a bank of flowers, dressed in a green Joseph richly laced with
gold, and a whip in her hand. Sophia was to be a shepherdess, with as many
sheep as the painter could put in for nothing.' Elizabethan ladies liked to
think of themselves sitting on banks garlanding flowers, troubled only by
the sweet difficulties of love, and with innumerable sheep, since the writer
was able to put them in so very inexpensively.
There is another artist who, living before Cervantes and
Poussin's Les
Bergers d'Arcadie.
Sidney were dead, gives in his pictures, cleaner and
sweeter than Watteau, an idea of the pastoral spirit. You
can imagine one of Watteau's shepherdesses using paint. It would be
impossible to suspect the same of one of Sidney's, or of one of Nicolas
Poussin's, that solemn, sweet-minded man who was shocked as if by
sacrilege at Scarron's irreverent treatment of Virgil. There is in the Louvre
(how many times have I been to see it) a picture called 'Les Bergers
d'Arcadie.' Hazlitt mentions it, most inaccurately as to facts, but most
precisely as to feeling, in his essay on the painter:[6]—'But above all, who
shall celebrate in terms of fit praise, his picture of the shepherds in the Vale
of Tempe going out on a fine morning in the spring, and coming to a tomb
with this inscription: Et Ego in Arcadia vixi! The eager curiosity of some,
the expression of others who start back with fear and surprise, the clear
breeze playing with the branches of the shadowing trees, "the valleys low
where the mild zephyrs use," the distant, uninterrupted, sunny prospects
speak (and for ever will speak on) of ages past to ages yet to come!'
In those sentences Hazlitt, who found the written pastoral dull, shows us
the very secret of its life. In trying to copy the classic country writing, it
came to be an attempt to reconstruct the time that has always been past
since the beginning of the world. Real shepherds never do and never did
show fear and surprise and eager curiosity on their weather-beaten faces;
but then in Arcadia is no rain. Sweet, sunny days, soft, peaceful nights,
green grass, white sheep, and smooth-cheeked shepherds Grecian limbed;
the whole is the convention of a dream. It was the dream of busy men in
close touch with a life whose end was apt to come short and sharp between
the lifting of a flagon and putting the lips to it. And in Sidney's dream
especially, there is something of the true Renaissance worship of the ancient

gods. Sidney's dream was of a pastoral life; yes, but to him other things in it
were more important than its rusticity. For him, at least, it must be a life
where the goatfoot god still moved in the green undergrowth, where Diana
hunted the white fawns, while Silenus tippled in the valley, and Apollo
looked serenely from the wooded hill.
This was the same art as that of Malory, though not that
Conventional and
realistic art.
of the chansons or the sagas. It is the art in which life is
simplified into a convention, and human figures worked
into a tapestry. The pastoral romances are duller than those of chivalry,
partly, no doubt, because their conventions are not home-made but taken as
strictly as possible from another civilisation, and partly because they are too
long for their motives—the pattern is repeated too often. But they do not
represent a dead or a dying art, but rather a stage in the infancy of an art
that has blossomed in our own day, in some of the work of Théophile
Gautier, for example; in Mr. Nevinson's Plea of Pan, in some of the
drawings of Aubrey Beardsley. Sidney's Arcadia is terribly unwieldy, but
passage after passage in it breathes a fragrance different from anything in
the literature of realism.
Indeed it is well to mark thus early the distinction between these two arts,
the one that seeks to show us our own souls, the other that shows us life,
that one that, using symbols disentangled from ordinary existence, can
legitimately fill books with things beautiful in themselves, and the other
that reconciles us to ugliness by showing us some vital interest, some
hidden loveliness, some makeshift beauty in things as they generally are.
The spirit of the one set statues of lovely forms in the bedchambers of the
Grecian women, the spirit of the other praises ugly babies to their mothers.
Both spirits have shown their right to be by the works of art whose
inspiration they have been. We must only be careful not to criticise the art
of the one by the canons that rule the art of the other. There are two worlds,
the actual and the ideal. If Tom Jones were to open a door by saying 'Open
Sesame' to it, we should have a right to laugh, just as we should be
legitimately disappointed if Ali Baba were to turn a key and enter the
robber's treasury in the ordinary way. We cannot blame the Arcadian
shepherds because they are not like the shepherds we meet about the hills,
any more than we can blame that little kitchen slut called Cinderella for
riding to a king's ball in a gold chariot made of a pumpkin. Truth to an ideal

is all we may ask of dreams. And the pastorals, in spite of their borrowed
conventions, do hold an ideal, suffocated though it sometimes is under an
impossible technique, and the weight of ornament which is so tempting to
those who have but newly learned the secrets of its manufacture.
Our later Arcadians have not so hampered themselves.
Poetic prose.
They have made short stories instead of labyrinthine
narratives, and they have been able, as Sidney tried to do,
to disclaim any competition with utilitarian homespun literature by the use
of a poetic prose. In the prose of Sidney's Arcadia, imitated from that of
Lyly, but a little less noisily eccentric, falling perhaps too often between
poetry and prose, we can see the promise of that new prose of ornament
perfected by the artists of the nineteenth century, a prose firm, unshaken by
the recurrent rhythms of verse, but richer in colour and melody than the
prose of use.

CERVANTES

CERVANTES

It is curious how many odds and ends may be heaped
Prologue.
together and woven into a patchwork of thought, by a
mind concentrating itself upon one idea, and, as if in spite
of itself, making excursions after each chance butterfly and puff of wind,
each half promise of real or phantom value it perceives. The mind returns
continually to where it stood, bringing with it always something new, like a
starling adding to its nest, until at last the original idea is so covered over
with half visualised images, half clarified obscurities, dimly comprehended
notions, that it is itself no longer to be seen but by a reverse process of
picking away and throwing aside, one by one, the accretions that have been
brought to it by the adventuring mind. For the last hour I have been sitting
in my easy-chair, a cup of tea at my elbow, a pipe in my mouth, a good fire
at my feet, trying not to let myself stray too far from the consideration of
Cervantes and his place in the history of story-telling. All that hour, without
effort, almost against my will, my mind has been playing about the subject,
and bringing straw and scraps of coloured cloth, until now the plain notion
of Cervantes is dotted over and burdened with a dozen other things—a
comparison between an active life and a bookish one, the relation between
parody and progress, the mingling of rogue novel and romance, Sir Walter
Scott, and the remembrance of a band of Spanish village musicians. Perhaps
if I disentangle this superstructure piece by piece Cervantes himself will
become as visible as he intends to allow me to present him.

Cervantes was one of the men who write books in two
An active life and a
languages; in literature and in life. Indeed, his
bookish one.
contribution to his country's history is scarcely less vivid
than his share in the history of story-telling. Cervantes the soldier, losing
the use of his hand in the naval battle of Lepanto, in which he took so
glorious a part that the grandiloquent Spanish tradition attributed to him, a
mere private soldier, more than half the merit of the victory, is quite as
attractive as Cervantes the impecunious author, writing plays for the theatre
and poems for the nobility, collecting taxes for the king, pleasing himself
with his Galatea, and laying literature under an international debt to him for
his Exemplary Novels and his Don Quixote. Like Sir Philip Sidney, he won
admiration from his contemporaries as much for his personal worth as for
his intellect. The maimed hand meant to them and him as much as any
printed books. His own life was as romantic as his romance. Wherever he
had found himself, boarding a Turkish galley, plotting for freedom in the
prisons of Algiers, he had played the game as stirringly as d'Artagnan. Don
Quixote's patriotism was no more obstinate and glamorous than his, and
Sancho Panza's wisdom was gained in no school of harder knocks.
It is not without significance that his first book should be a specimen of
pastoral romance. The Galatea bears no closer relation to workaday life
than Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia. This old soldier began his career as a man
of letters by trying to settle upon an estate in Arcady, the very country
whose cardboard foliage he was afterwards to ridicule, and the last book he
wrote, in spite of the humaner work that had preceded it, was a romance not
dissimilar from his first. Partly this must have been due to the fashion of the
time; but it is not extravagant to find in it an illustration of the wistful
manner in which men write about their opposites. Men like Stevenson,
caged in sick rooms, may love to be buccaneers on paper. The real
adventurers set the balance even by imagining themselves tending sheep on
a smooth grassy slope.
Cervantes' Galatea is not a great work. Its shepherds
Don Quixote no
parody.
weep more than Sir Philip Sidney's, and sing
considerably worse. But it had its success, and Cervantes
was never anything but proud of it, a fact that should not be forgotten in
remembering his Don Quixote. Don Quixote has often been described as a
parody of the heroic and pastoral romances, which indeed had become a

little foolish. But Cervantes was not the man to jeer at what he loved.
Instead, he fills the old skins that had held the wine of dreams with the new
wine of experience. He did not parody the old romances, but re-wrote them
in a different way. Parody laughs and writes a full stop; the art of Cervantes,
Fielding, and Rabelais ends always in a hyphen, a sign that allows all
manner of developments.

MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA

Cervantes, like Shakespeare, used all the resources of
The picaresque his time, and did not disdain to profit by other men's
form.
experiments. Don Quixote owed a triple debt to the
common-sensible humorous rogue novel invented seventy years before, as
well as to the more serious tales of knights and pastoral life that made his
existence possible. Thieves and shepherds and paragons of chivalry assisted
at his birth. The thieves in particular were responsible for the design, or lack
of design, in the construction of the book. The rogue novels were made by
stringing a series of disconnected 'merry quips' along the autobiography or
biography of a disreputable hero. They were like Punch and Judy shows.
The character of Punch is as stable as his red nose or his hump back. His
deeds do not change him, and, so long as he is always well in the front of
his stage we ask for no other connecting thread in the entertainment than his
habit of punctuating his conversation with a well-directed log of wood. Let
him continue his villainous career, let his squeaking inhuman voice
continue to exult, and we are perfectly contented. It was so with the rogues,
and it is so with Don Quixote. As the Bachelor says, 'many of those that
love mirth better than melancholy, cry out, give us more Quixoteries: let but
Don Quixote lay on, and Sancho talk, be it what it will, we are satisfied.'
Three hundred years after the Bachelor, we too are
Rogue novel and
romance.
satisfied with Sancho's chatter, and his master's
Quixoteries, because they are both pretty closely
connected with humanity. If Don Quixote is among the clouds, Sancho
Panza sits firm upon his donkey, and between the two of them the book
itself moves spaciously upon a mellowed earth. There is a perpetual
interplay between dignity and impudence, the ridiculous and the sublime,
and the partners, as if at tennis, lend vigour and give opportunity to each
other. Sancho is not a mere village bellyful of common sense, whose
business is to make the Knight of the Doleful Countenance appear
ridiculous. He, too, has his delusions; he, too, prefers sometimes those two
birds twittering distantly in the bush; Romance, smilingly enough, has
touched his puzzled forehead also. And Don Quixote, with ideals no less
noble than those of Amadis of Gaul or Don Belianis of Greece, with notions
of life no less exaggerated than those in the interminable pastorals, is yet a
man of blood and bone. His ideals and notions are properly fleshed, and are
in the book as a soul in a body. Don Quixote is a book of dreams set upon

earth, and earthly shrewdness reaching vainly after dreams. The rogue
novels and the romances were, either of them, the one without the other.
We see Don Quixote's adventures with the realist's eye
The ideal not spoilt
by the reality.
of disillusion, and find that external perfection does not
matter to our dreams. ''Tis not the deed but the intent.'
The gorgeous charger of the knight of chivalry is become a poor old
starveling hack that should have been horsemeat these dozen years.
Mambrino's helmet is but a barber's bason after all. Lancelot's Guinevere is
Dulcinea of the Mill. Her feet are large and her shoulders one higher than
the other. The castle is a wayside inn, the routed army a flock of luckless
sheep. The goatherds do not talk after the fashion of the Court, like those in
Galatea; but, 'with some coarse compliment, after the country way, they
desired Don Quixote to sit down upon a trough with the bottom upwards.'
Gone are the rose-flecked cloudy pinnacles of dawn; we know them now
for drenching rain. And yet—the play's the thing, and is not judged by its
trappings, but by its beating heart. Not one scene in the Romances, not one
glimpse of the Happy Valley in the Pastorals, has ever moved us like this
book, which is so near life that when we close it we seem not to have flown
on an enchanted carpet from a thousand leagues away, but to have stepped
merely from one room to another of our own existence.
The Exemplary Novels were begun before Don Quixote,
The Exemplary
Novels.
and published afterwards. They are examples rather of a
form in story-telling than of any particular piety.
Cervantes was, he tells us, 'the first to essay novels in the Castilian tongue,
for the many novels which go about in print in Spanish are all translated
from foreign languages, while these are my own, neither imitated nor
stolen.' He took the form of the Italian short story, not the episode but the
nouvelle, the little novel that had inspired the Elizabethans. He took this
form and filled it with his own material, told in his own manner. In thinking
of that manner I am reminded of the band of Spanish village musicians who
seemed at first to have no obvious connection with my subject. There were
perhaps a dozen of them grouped on the stage of a London music hall, and
they played small windy tunes, occasionally blaring out with trumpets,
using a musical scale entirely different from our own. I remembered a
Japanese I had heard playing on a bamboo flute, and then the semitones of a
little henna-stained flageolet from Kairouan. For theirs was Eastern music,

and I wondered if these Spaniards still owed their scale to the old rulers of
Granada. They set me thinking whether the peculiar movement of
Cervantes' narrative had not also an Eastern origin. The facts favour the
supposition. Up to the battle of Lepanto the Turks were so far a ruling
nation as to be the supreme sea-power; until even later the most likely of
incidents for the use of the story-teller was that which happened to
Cervantes himself—capture by a Moslem pirate and imprisonment in
Algiers. Only a hundred years had passed since the Moors had been driven
from Granada. It would indeed be surprising if in Cervantes' work we found
no sign of Eastern influence. 'I tell it you,' quoth Sancho of his tale, 'as all
stories are told in my country, and I cannot for the blood of me tell it in any
other way, nor is it fit I should alter the custom.' Many characteristics of
Cervantes' narrative remind us that he was writing in a country only
recently freed from the Moors, and in a time when it took the united forces
of Venice, Spain, and the Papacy to beat the Turks at sea.
Cervantes is not ignorant, for example, of the literary
Oriental story-
telling.
trick of letting his heroes quote from the poets, after the
engaging, erudite manner of the heroes of the Arabian
Nights. Sancho Panza's conversation is an anthology of those short wisdom-
laden maxims that had been the staple of Hebrew and Arabic literature. 'Set
a hen upon an egg'; 'While a man gets he never can lose'; 'Where there is no
hook, to be sure there can hang no bacon'; shrewd Ali and careful Hakim
exchange such sentences to-day in the market-places of the East. But these
are small things and beside the main point. I want to suggest that Cervantes
had caught, whether in his Algerine prison, or in his Morocco-Spanish
Spain, the yarning, leisurely, humanity-laden, unflinching atmosphere of
Oriental story-telling. The form of the nouvelle, Eastern in origin, had been
passed on from Naples to Paris and to London, without noticeable
improvement, but it seems to me that now in Spain it met the East again,
and was accordingly recreated. It is just the element of Eastern narrative,
accidental in the genius of Cervantes, that makes his examples of that form
so infinitely more important than those of the English Elizabethans. Scott
told Lockhart that the reading of the Exemplary Novels first turned his mind
to the writing of fiction, and in Scott there is precisely the mood of
uninterruptible story-telling that Cervantes shares with the Princess
Scherazada.

The novels are delightful specimens of ambling, elaborate narrative, full of
the easiest, most confident knowledge of humanity, illustrating with serene
clarity a point of view that is to-day as refreshing as it is surprising. The
happy endings, when the seducer falls in love at sight on meeting the
seduced of years before, and satisfies all her scruples, and turns her sorrow
to unblemished joy by marrying her, show an ethic of respectability no less
assured than Richardson's. They are enriched by passages whose
observation is as minute as Fielding's. They are never tales about nothing.
There is always meat on their bones. They are among the few stories that
can be read on a summer afternoon under an apple-tree, for they will bear
contact with nature, and are never in a hurry. Even if Cervantes had not
written Don Quixote, the Exemplary Novels would have assured him a place
in the history of his art. There is no cleverness in them, any more than in the
greater book. The whole body of Cervantes' work is an illustration of the
impregnable advantage that plain humanity possesses over intellect.
And now, after these various questions for the
The portrait of
Cervantes.
schoolmen, questions to more than one of which the
cautious man must answer with Sir Roger, that 'much
might be said on both sides,' let us return to the old story-teller himself, who
will survive by innumerable generations our little praises and discussions as
he has lived benevolent and secure through the centuries that have already
passed over his grave. The only authentic portrait of Cervantes is in his own
words. A hundred artists have tried to supplement these words with paint,
and their pictures have at least a family likeness. The portrait made by Miss
Gavin after a careful comparison parison of many others represents very
fairly the traditional Cervantes type, and does not materially belie the
lineaments that he describes:—'He whom you here behold, with aquiline
visage, with chestnut hair, smooth and unruffled brow, with sparkling eyes,
and a nose arched though well proportioned, a silver beard, although not
twenty years ago it was golden, large moustache, small mouth, teeth not
important, for he has but six of them, and those in ill condition and worse
placed because they do not correspond the one with the other, the body
between two extremes, neither large nor small, the complexion bright,
rather white than brown, somewhat heavy-shouldered, and not very nimble
on his feet; this, I say, is the portrait of the author of the Galatea and of Don
Quixote de la Mancha.' That is the sort of statement of himself that an
honest humorous man might make to a friend. Part of the satisfaction given

by his books is due to the comfortable knowledge that there is a man behind
them, a man who knew the world and had not frozen in it. Cervantes, for all
his intimacy with life, never became worldly enough to believe in hatred.
He assumed that all his readers were his friends, and made them so by the
assumption.

No: Cervantes is too simple a man to do anything but
Epilogue. suffer in discussion. There are men whom you know well,
who seem to elude you like the final mystery of
metaphysics when you try to talk about them. My history and not Cervantes
is the clearer for the rags and tatters of observation I have picked off him
one by one. I had put them there myself. It was necessary, for the purposes
of my book, to notice the Eastern character of his story-telling and his
position between rogue novel and romance, but, now that it is done, I am
glad to go back to him without pre-occupations. There is yet hot water in
the kettle, and tea in the pot, and four hours to spend with Don Quixote
before I go to bed. Cervantes, at least, will bear me no malice, but tell me
his story as simply as before I had tried to bring it into argument.

THE ESSAYISTS' CONTRIBUTION TO
STORY-TELLING

THE ESSAYISTS' CONTRIBUTION TO STORY-TELLING

The detailed, silver-point portrait studies of Fanny
The Character.
Burney, the miniatures of Jane Austen, and the stronger
etchings of Fielding and Smollett, owed their existence to
something outside the art of story-telling, something other than the grave,
humorous pictures of Chaucer, or the hiding of real people under the
homespun of lovesick shepherds, or the gay autobiographies of swindling
rogues. They owed it to an art which in its beginnings seemed far enough
away from any sort of narrative. In those happy, thievish times when
plagiary was a virtue to be cried upon the housetops, this art, or rather this
artistic form, had been, like much else, stolen from antiquity.
When literature was for the first time become a fashionable toy, and when,
even at Court, a gallant or a soldier was far outmatched by a wit, the little
book of Theophrastus his Characters suggested a pastime that offered no
less opportunity than poetry for the display of nimbleness and sparkling
fancy. Life had become very diverse and elaborate, and how delightful to
take one of its flowerings, one man, one woman, of a particular species, and
exhibit it in a small space, in a select number of points and quips, each one
barbed and sticking in the chosen target. Sir Thomas Overbury, trying to
define the art he used so skilfully, said, in his clear way:—'To square out a
character by our English levell, it is a picture (reall or personall) quaintly
drawne, in various colours, all of them heightned by one shadowing. It is a
quicke and soft touch of many strings, all shutting up in one musicall close:
it is wit's descant on any plaine song.' The thing had to be witty; it had to be
short. A busy courtier could compose one in a morning while his barber was
arranging his coiffure, and show it round in the afternoon for the delectation
of his friends and the increase of his vanity. He could take a subject like 'A
Woman,' and with quick sentences pin her to the paper like a butterfly on
cork. Then he could take another title, like 'A Very Woman,' and repeat his
triumph with another variety of the species. Sir Thomas
Sir Thomas
Overbury.
Overbury, that charming, insolent, honest man, the friend
of Somerset, venomously done to death by his Countess

for having given too good advice to her husband, is perhaps the most
notable of the early practitioners. He is not to be despised for his sage poem
on the choice of a wife, but he is at his best in the making of these little
portraits, like that of the 'Faire and happy Milk-mayd,' wherein, in
accordance with his definition, he could polish each detail without jarring
his musical close, and without nullifying the single shadowing designed to
heighten the whole. The form was fitted to the times like their fashions in
clothes. The Character belonged to that age, like the novel to the nineteenth
century. Sir Thomas, as his title-page tells us, was assisted by 'other much
learned gentlemen'; he was presently followed by a man as different from
himself as gentle John Earle, Doctor of Divinity, and just such a student as
an Inns of Court man like Sir Thomas would naturally despise. So general
was the inclination of the age to portraiture.
With Earle we are nearer the drawing of individuals, and
John Earle.
so to a tenderer touch on idiosyncrasies. He relies less on
quaint conceits (though he has plenty of them and
charming ones at command; witness the child whose 'father hath writ him
as his owne little story, wherein hee reads those dayes of his life that hee
cannot remember') and trusts more often to fragments of real observation.
His Characters are not so consistently wit's descant on a plain song. He is
often content to give us a plain descant on a plain song—less concerned
with his cleverness than with his subjects. With Earle we are already some
way from the age of Elizabeth, and indeed Overbury, though he was able to
quarrel with Ben Jonson, and in spite of his Renaissance death, seems to
have a part in a less youthful century. In his wisdom, in his wise advice
unwisely given to his friend, there is something already of the flavour of
Addison; an essence ever so slight of the sound morality of the periodical
essayists whose work owed more than a little to his own.
The same impulse that suggested the pleasure and profit
La Bruyère.
of collecting Londoners as Theophrastus had collected his
Athenians, suggested also the noting of contemporary
manners. Manners and Characters, especially since Characters meant
peculiarities, belonged to each other. Overbury's 'Pyrate' is a picture of the
times quite as much as of that sterling fellow they produced, to whom if you
gave 'sea roome in never so small a vessell, like a witch in a sieve, you
would think he were going to make merry with the devill.' And the portrait

of 'The Faire and happy Milk-mayd' betrays in its painting more than a little
of the artist and of the age in which she sat for him. This is true of the plain
Character, unexpanded and unframed; it is still more true of the Character in
the form it very speedily took. The Character became a paragraph in a
discursive essay, and La Bruyère, who copied directly from Theophrastus,
does not make series of separate portraits, but notices in his original less his
picturing of types than his suggestion of their circumstances, dividing his
own work into large sections, 'de la ville,' 'de la Cour,' 'des Biens de
Fortune,' 'de la Société et de la Conversation,' where he seems to stroll
slowly through a garden-walk of philosophy, pointing his remarks with his
stick, and using such portraits as he cares to make to illustrate his general
observations. His Characters are almost anecdotes. He is like the more
advanced naturalist who, no longer content with his butterflies on cork and
his stuffed birds stiff on perches, attempts to place them in the setting of
their ordinary existence, where they may illustrate at once that existence
and their own natures by some characteristic pose. How near is this to the
desire of seeing them alive and in continuous action, which, if he had had it,
would perhaps have made him combine his notes and sketches in a novel.
The periodical essayists had La Bruyère, and Earle's
The periodical
essayists.
Microcosmography: A Piece of the World discovered in
Essays and Characters, and Sir Thomas Overbury with
his much learned gentlemen, and Theophrastus, the father of them all, well
in their memory. They too were collectors of Characters and observers of
public morals and censurers of private follies. La Bruyère's aims with
something more were theirs. Hazlitt's is so excellent a description of their
work that I shall quote it instead of writing a stupid one. 'Quicquid agunt
homines nostri farrago libelli, is the general motto of this department of
literature.... It makes familiar with the world of men and women, assigns
their motives, exhibits their whims, characterises their pursuits in all their
singular and endless variety, ridicules their absurdities, exposes their
inconsistencies, "holds the mirror up to nature, and shows the very age and
body of the time its form and pressure"; takes minutes of our dress, air,
looks, words, thoughts, and actions; shows us what we are, and what we are
not; plays the whole game of human life over before us, and by making us
enlightened spectators of its many coloured scenes, enables us (if possible)
to become tolerably reasonable agents in the one in which we have to
perform a part.' We might be listening to a description of the eighteenth

century novel of manners. Fanny Burney would have recognised these
pretensions for her secret own, though she might have blushed to see them
so emblazoned.
The Tatler, The Spectator, The Guardian, and the rest of
Minuteness of
observation.
them, are like a long series of skirmishes in a determined
campaign on the part of the essayists to cross the
borderland of narrative. Their traditions, the Character, Montaigne, and
Bacon, were very different from those of the story-tellers. The canvases
prescribed for them were not huge things almost shutting out the sky, but a
very small stock size, two or three pages only, to lie two days on coffee-
house tables, and be used for wrapping butter on the third. The essayists
were like men compelled to examine an elephant with a pocket microscope.
Each subject, small as it was, hid all others for the moment, so that their
observation made mountain peaks and ranges out of pimples and creases.
These very limitations sharpened the weapons of their struggle, the
weapons that were at last to be taken over by the novelists. The small
canvas made carelessness impossible, and this compulsory attention to
detail gave a new dignity to the trivialities that the novelists had so far
overlooked.
The very conception of these papers contained an
Mr. Bickerstaff.
accidental discovery of a possibility in fiction. The Tatler
was not written by Steele, or Swift, or Addison, or indeed
by any one of its contributors, but by a Mr. Isaac Bickerstaff, an oldish
gentleman, a bachelor, a lover of children and discreet good fellowship, of
an austere but kindly life, possessed by a pleasant, old-gentlemanly desire
to better the manners of the town. This is personal, yes, but ... and the but
has the dignity of the sentence ... the personality is imaginary. It is a
Character so far alive as to be able to conduct a magazine. It was a
utilitarian conception. Steele was, or pretended to be, vastly annoyed when
the authorship was found out and his own jolly person discovered under the
sober clothes of Mr. Bickerstaff. 'The work,' he says, 'has indeed for some
time been disagreeable to me, and the purpose of it wholly lost by my being
so long understood as its author.... The general purpose of the whole has
been to recommend truth, innocence, honour, and virtue as the chief
ornaments of life; but I considered that severity of manners was absolutely
necessary to him who would censure others, and for that reason, and that

only, chose to talk in a mask. I shall not carry my humility so far as to call
myself a vicious man, but at the same time must confess, my life is at best
but pardonable. And, with no greater character than this, a man would make
but an indifferent progress in attacking prevailing and fashionable vices,
which Mr. Bickerstaff has done with a freedom of spirit, that would have
lost both its beauty and efficacy, had it been pretended to by Mr. Steele.' It
is as if we were to hear Defoe apologising for dressing up as Robinson
Crusoe, assuring us that his book is but an allegory, and telling us with due
solemnity that he has lived with his wife these many years, and hardly
above once set foot on shipboard, and then only between London Bridge
and Greenwich. Steele was quite unaware that The Tatler was an embryo
novel. And yet, what is it, but an imaginary character, sometimes meeting
other imaginary characters, and experiencing subjects instead of undergoing
adventures?

RICHARD STEELE AND JOSEPH ADDISON

Mr. Bickerstaff was in himself a contribution to
The Character and character-study in fiction; the daily talks that were put
the short story.
into his mouth by Steele and his friends, supplied others
no less valuable. The Character, the neat driven team of short sentences,
became in his hands something like a story. It became an anecdote with no
other point than to bring alive the person described. And the portraits

became less general. Types turned into individuals. Ned Softly, for example,
is not called 'a very Poet,' and hit off with, 'He will ever into Company with
a Copy of Verses in his Pocket; and these will be read to all that suffer him.
Every Opinion he taketh for Praise, and Ridicule in his Ears soundeth like
Flattery.' He is given the name by which he is known in private life. We see
him walk into the room, hear his preliminaries, watch his battery unmasked
as he opens his pocket, listen to his verses, hear them again, line by
ridiculous line, observe him batten on the opinions he extracts, and see him
hide his darlings at the approach of sterner-featured critics. The Character is
become a little scene. The moth has no pin through his middle, but flaps his
way where we may see him best. Here is the very art that Fanny Burney,
that charming show-woman, was to use for the exhibition of Madame
Duval; here the alchemy that was to turn puppets into people. It is the same
that gave Pygmalion his mistress. The essayists owed much to their own
hearts, or to the heart they set in 'our' Mr. Bickerstaff, for if you love a man
as well as you laugh at him, it is great odds that he will come alive.
Steele probably got a few letters from unknown
Mr. Bickerstaff's
letter-box.
correspondents, dull and stupid as such things are.
Perhaps in laughingly parodying them at the coffee-house
tables he caught the idea of inventing better ones for Mr. Bickerstaff's
assistance. Perhaps, when hard pressed for time, thrown to the last minute
for his work by some merry expedition with the Kit Kats to talk and drink
wine under the mulberry-tree on Hampstead Heath, he found he could get
quicker into a subject through the letter of a servant girl than through Mr.
Bickerstaff's first-personal lucubrations. However that may be, much of the
best reading in both Tatler and Spectator is held in the letters supposed to
be written to the man who was supposed to write the whole. These letters
are not mere statements of fact, to serve instead of Latin quotations as texts
for essays. They are imitations, 'liker than life itself,' of the letters of reality.
Each one of them is written by some individual person whose impress on its
writing is so clear that the letter makes a portrait of himself. Even the cock
in Clare Market has a personality quite his own when he sends Mr.
Bickerstaff a petition. And as for the Quaker; remember how he would have
been described in the old manner, and read this:—

'To the man called the Spectator

'Friend,—Forasmuch as at the Birth of thy Labour, thou didst
promise upon thy Word, that letting alone the Vanities that do abound,
thou wouldest only endeavour to strengthen the crooked Morals of this
our Babylon, I gave Credit to thy fair Speeches, and admitted one of
thy Papers every Day, save Sunday, into my House; for the Edification
of my Daughter Tabitha, and to the End that Susanna, the Wife of my
Bosom, might profit thereby. But alas! my Friend, I find that thou art a
Liar, and that the Truth is not in thee; else why didst thou in a Paper
which thou didst lately put forth, make Mention of those vain
Coverings for the Heads of our Females, which thou lovest to liken
unto Tulips, and which are lately sprung up among us? Nay, why didst
thou make Mention of them in such a Seeming, as if thou didst
approve the Invention, insomuch that my Daughter Tabitha beginneth
to wax wanton, and to lust after these foolish Vanities? Surely thou
dost see with the Eyes of the Flesh. Verily, therefore, unless thou dost
speedily amend and leave off following thine own Imagination, I will
leave off thee.—Thy Friend as hereafter thou dost demean Thyself,
'Hezekiah Broadbrim.'

Could anything of the kind be better? It needed only a series of such
letters, consistent to a few characters, and dealing with a succession of
events, to produce a 'Humphry Clinker.' The letters of Matthew Bramble
and his sister, and Lyddy, 'who had a languishing eye and read romances,'
are built no more cunningly than this of Hezekiah.
If I were asked which was the first English novel of
Sir Roger de
Coverley—a novel.
character-study, as I am asking myself now, I should
reply, as I reply now, those essays in the Spectator that
are concerned with Sir Roger de Coverley. Set that little series of pictures in
a book by themselves, as has been done with appropriate and delightful
illustrations by Mr. Hugh Thomson, and in reading them you will find it
hard to remember that you are not enjoying a more than usually leisurely
kind of narrative. The knight is shown to us in different scenes; we watch
him at the assizes, leaning over to the judge to congratulate him on the good
weather his lordship enjoys; we see him smile in greeting of Will Wimble;
we watch him fidget in his seat with impatience of the misdeeds of the
villain in the play; we hear of his death with a tear in our eye that is a

testimony to the completeness and humanity of the portraiture. If only his
love-story were thinly spread throughout the book and not begun and ended
in a chapter, Sir Roger de Coverley would be a novel indeed. As it is, in that
delicate picture of a country gentleman and country life—for Sir Roger
does not stand against a black curtain for his portraiture, but before his
tenants and his friends—we have the promise of The Vicar of Wakefield and
of Cranford, and of all that chaste and tender kind of story-telling that is
almost peculiar to our literature.
Johnson and Goldsmith followed the tradition. Even the
Johnson and
Goldsmith.
ponderous Doctor could step lightly at times, and never
so lightly as when he obeyed the instinct that turns
discussion into fiction and essays into sketches. He too can write his letters,
and that from Mrs. Deborah Ginger, the unfortunate wife of a city wit, is a
story in itself. And as for Goldsmith, he can hardly hold his pen for half a
paragraph before it breaks away from the hard road of ideas and goes
merrily along the bridle-path of mere humanity. His letters from Lien Chi
Altangi, that serious Chinese busied in exposing the follies of the Occident,
turn continually to story-telling. A wise remark will usher in an Eastern tale,
and, not even in the papers of Steele or Addison are the subjects of
characters, like the little beau, who would have been a 'mere indigent
gallant,' magicked so deliciously to life. Finally, he did with 'The Man in
Black' what Addison and Steele could so well have done with Sir Roger.
Fielding and Smollett had written before him, and he saw that he could
follow their art without resigning any of the graces of the essayist.
The eighteenth century saw the absorption of the
The later essayists.
periodical essayists into avowed story-telling. Miss
Burney left them nothing to do but to write sketches for
chapters that might have appeared in her books. The essayists who came
later could only make beautiful examples of a form that was already a little
old-fashioned, though, following other suggestions, they experimented in a
new direction and found another art to teach to story-tellers. Leigh Hunt's
pair of early nineteenth-century portraits, 'The Old Gentleman,' and 'The
Old Lady,' betray the family likeness of the character as it was known to
Overbury. Lamb's portrait of Mrs. Battle is nearer modern story-telling. He
does not let us into more than one of Sarah Battle's secrets, but in telling us
of her attitude towards the game of whist he shows us how she looked upon

the game of life. We would know her if we met her, even if she were not
seated at the card-table, the candles unsnuffed, the fire merry on the hearth,
and in the faces of her and her partner and foes the frosty joy of 'the rigour
of the game.' Hazlitt, though he stuck close to his Montaigne, and cared less
to illustrate himself by other people than by his own opinions, gives us
characters too—that noble one of his father!—and his account of Jack
Cavanagh the fives player, and his description of his going down to see the
fight, are splendid passages of biography and narrative. But the gift of the
later essayists to story-telling was the new art of reverie, and of the
description of an event so soaked in the describer's personality as to be at
once an essay and a story. Few forms are richer in
The art of reverie. opportunity either for essayist or story-teller, than that
which made possible Lamb's 'Dream Children,' and in
which the child De Quincey, who had been in Hell, could show us the
calamity of three generations of beautiful children, and ask at last whether
death or life were the more terrible, the more to be feared. It is sufficient to
mention the names of Walter Pater and Mr. Cunninghame Graham to show
that some of the finest work of modern times has been done in this kind of
story-telling, and is being so done to-day. And this art, this most delicate art
of suggested narrative, is it not also—to return, perhaps a little fancifully, to
the tragic old knight's definition—is it not also 'a picture in various colours,
all of them heightned by one shadowing'? Is it not also 'a quicke and soft
touch of many strings, all shutting up in one musicall close'?

TRANSITION: BUNYAN AND DEFOE

TRANSITION: BUNYAN AND DEFOE

The hundred years between the Elizabethan romancers
The old world of
fairy tale.
and the English novelists was not a period of great story-
telling like the fifty that were to follow it, or the first half
of the nineteenth century. It is of interest here mainly because it witnessed a
complete change of audience, the gradual transition of all the arts from a
light-hearted and credulous old world to a careful and common-sense new
one. The change is made very clear by a comparison of the stories popular
before and after.
Robert Burton gives us a fairly accurate notion of the story-telling of the
first quarter of the century, in a paragraph of The Anatomy of Melancholy.
He is referring to spoken tales, but his description applies quite as well to
tales in print. 'The ordinary recreations which we have in winter, and in the
most solitarie times busie our minds with, are cards, tables and dice ...
merry tales of errant knights, queens, lovers, lords, ladies, giants, dwarfs,
theeves, cheaters, witches, fayries, goblins, friers, etc., such as the old
woman told Psyche in Apuleius, Bocace novels, and the rest, quarum
auditione pueri delectantur, senes narratione, which some delight to hear,
some to tell, all are well pleased with.' In short, the material of
Shakespeare's plays, of Spenser's Faërie Queene, of the early rogue books,
and of the tales imitated from Italy and antiquity by Greene and Lodge and
Pettie.
By 1640 things had already changed a little. James
A more sober spirit.
Mabbe, the quaint flavour of whose Tudor style,
endearing as the moss on an old house, reminds us that he
published his translation of six of the Exemplary Novels before Cervantes
had been dead for a quarter of a century, felt that he had to apologise for
them to the more sober spirit of the time. 'Your wisest and learnedst Men,'
he writes, 'both in Church and Common-weale, will sometimes leave off
their more serious discourses, and entertain themselves with matters of
harmelesse Merriment and Disports. Such are these stories I present unto

your view. I will not promise any great profit you shall reape by reading
them, but I promise they will be pleasing and delightful, the Sceane is so
often varied, the Passages are so pretty, the Accidents so strange, and in the
end wrought to so happy a Conclusion.' That marks very neatly the mid-
seventeenth-century attitude towards the art. It was not impossible that the
simple unascetic humanity of Cervantes would be taken amiss by these
people who were stirred by the forces that were producing a Cromwell and
a Bunyan, a Commonwealth and a Pilgrim's Progress. Only, in
contradiction to this, the translator could make a confident appeal to a
Pepysian delight in pretty passages, strange accidents, and happy
conclusions—a delight only different from that of the Elizabethans in its
anxiety to be able to write 'harmelesse' when it had enjoyed them.

JOHN BUNYAN

Before the Pilgrim's Progress was written there had
Bunyan's world. come to be two parties in the audience: one with an
epicurean delight in loose living, and one whose care was
for a stern decency that postponed all flamboyance to a future life. The men
of the first party flung their roses the more joyously for their antagonism to
the sober black of the others, and were all the merrier for the thought that
most of the community held them damned, although, when Bunyan wrote,

theirs was the outward victory. Consciences were violently stirred, and so
were either hardened absolutely, or else unmistakably alive. If you were
good you were very very good, and if you were bad you were horrid, like
the little girl in the rhyme. There had been revolutions and counter-
revolutions; and likes and dislikes were pretty strongly marked, because
men had had to fight for them.
Bunyan's business was the description of a pilgrim's progress through a
world thus vividly good and bad. His choice of allegory as a method
allowed him to illustrate at the same time the earnestness of his times and
their extraordinary clarity of sensation. It was a form ready to his hand. The
authorised version of the Bible, published in 1611, its English retaining the
savour of a style then out of date, formed at once his writing and his
method, as it constituted his education. 'My Bible and Concordance are my
only library in my writings.' And, himself a minor prophet, he could quote
from Hosea: 'I have used similitudes.'
Bunyan's use of them was very different from Spenser's.
The justification of
allegory.
Hazlitt said of The Faërie Queene that, if you left the
allegory alone, it would leave you; and his advice may be
safely followed. It is not so with Bunyan, and his allegory must be defended
in another manner. It needs defence, for although it is one of the oldest and
pleasantest ways of producing wisdom-laden stories, it is so easy to use
badly that people have become a little out of patience with it. We remember
the far-fetched explanations tagged on to the Gesta Romanorum, and refuse
any longer to be fobbed off with puzzles that are easy to make and hard to
solve. We demand that a book shall have cost its author at least as much as
it costs us. Allegory is like fantasy, either worthless, or not to be bought
with rubies and precious stones; with anything, in fact, but blood. When
Bunyan writes:

'It came from my own heart, so to my head,
And thence into my fingers trickled;
Then to my pen, from whence immediately
On paper I did dribble it daintily,'

he sets up the one plea that is an absolute justification of his method; that it
is 'dribbled daintily,' and came from the depths of him. The old monks
wrote their stories, and searched their heads for a meaning. But Bunyan
thought for himself, and could not think without seeing. His heart's talk was
in passionate imagery.
He was the son of a tinker, and a tinker himself, and saw
Bunyan and the
early painters.
his visions as clearly as he saw his tin pans. His book is
never opalescent with the shifting colours of a vague
mysticism. It is painted in tints as sharp and bright and simple as Anglo-
Saxon words. Bunyan had to throw himself into no trance in order to watch
the pilgrim's arrival at the New Jerusalem. The Celestial City was as real to
him as London, and there seemed to him no need to describe it in a whisper.
His eyes were as childlike as those of the early painters, who clothed the
builders of the Tower of Babel in fifteenth-century Italian costume, put a
little bonnet on the head and a flying cloak about the shoulders of Tobias,
and set soft leather boots on the feet of the angel. The whole of the
Pilgrim's Progress is contemporary with Mr. Pepys. 'Now Christiana, if
need was, could play upon the viol, and her daughter Mercy upon the lute;
so, since they were so merry disposed, she played them a lesson, and
Ready-to-halt would dance. So he took Despondency's daughter, named
Much-afraid, by the hand, and to dancing they went in the road. True, he
could not dance without one crutch in his hand; but, I promise you, he
footed it well. Also the girl was to be commended, for she answered the
music handsomely.' It might be Mr. Pepys himself describing the frolic of
some friends. And yet it was the most natural, righteous thing in the world,
since Great Heart had killed Giant Despair, and Despondency and Much-
afraid had just been freed from the dungeons of Doubting Castle.
It is characteristic of the English spirit that the greatest
The Fear of Life.
national classic of piety should be written by a man
whose relish for life was in no way blunted by his
thoughts of immortality. Bunyan had a fear of life no less real than his fear
of God, and loved both God and life the better for fearing them. Men set
capital letters to the Fear of God, and there is a Fear of Life no less different
from cowardice. Bunyan, a brave man, imprisoned again and again for his
beliefs, and more than once in imminent danger of hanging, shows in a
passage of his Grace Abounding this Fear of Life in a very glare of light.

Bunyan had loved bell-ringing, and, after he had come to consider it not the
occupation of a man whose profession was so perilous and serious as a
Christian's, he could not help going to the belfry to watch those whose
scruples still allowed them his favourite pastime.

'But quickly after, I began to think, "How if one of the bells should
fall?" Then I chose to stand under a main beam, that lay athwart the
steeple from side to side, thinking here I might stand sure; but then I
thought again, should the bell fall with a swing, it might first hit the
wall, and then rebounding upon me, might kill me for all this beam.
This made me stand in the steeple door; and now thought I, I am safe
enough, for if a bell should then fall, I can slip out behind these thick
walls, and so be preserved notwithstanding. So after this I would yet
go to see them ring, but would not go any further than the steeple door;
but then it came into my head, 'How if the steeple itself should fall?'
And the thought (it may, for aught I know, when I stood and looked
on) did continually so shake my mind, that I durst not stand at the
steeple-door any longer, but was forced to flee, for fear the steeple
should fall upon my head.'

A man who felt as vividly as that, and was as stout as Bunyan, taking
existence as he would take a nettle, took it with a grip as firm as that of
love, and loved and feared his life as he loved and feared his God. He knew
that brightness and clarity of sensation desired by Stendhal when he wrote,
'The perfection of civilisation would be to combine all the delicate pleasures
of the nineteenth century with the more frequent presence of danger.' Life
was very actual to him, and so, in this account of a pious dream, we find the
clearest prophecy of that sense for reality that distinguishes the novels of
the eighteenth century. The Pilgrim's Progress was the first great story of
that series of books that was to paint the English character in the eyes of the
world.
A fact is something very like an Englishman. It is a
Facts. thing complete in itself, and satisfactory on that account.
There is no vanity about a fact, and, as a people, we hate
showing off. I can think of no other nation as hungry for fact as ours, none
with a book that corresponds to the Newgate Calendar and has been so
popular, none with a book of spiritual adventure so actual as the Pilgrims

Progress, none with a book of bodily adventure comparable with Robinson
Crusoe. Defoe and Bunyan stand for the plain facts of religion and
existence, in both of which they found so English a delight.
Bunyan's book is an account of a dream. It is not a frank
The instinct for
verisimilitude.
fairy tale demanding a certain licence of nature to make
possible its supernatural events. Like the Romance of the
Rose, unlike the Faërie Queene, it takes its licence in its first sentence—'As
I slept, I dreamed'—and is able thenceforth to be as miraculous as it pleases
without much loss of credibility, since miracle, if not consistency and
continuity, is of the very element of a dream. It was an instinct for reality
that made Bunyan give his story such a setting. Giants and dwarfs could no
longer be jostled with thieves and cheaters as when Burton wrote. And
Defoe, writing another forty years later, shows this same instinct for reality
very much more conscientiously developed.

DANIEL DEFOE

With an imagination scarcely less opulent than Bunyan's, Defoe, if he had
described a dream, would have managed somehow to make it as short-
winded and inconsequent as a real one. He was in love with verisimilitude,
and delighted in facts for their own sakes. 'To read Defoe,' wrote Charles
Lamb, 'is like hearing evidence in a Court of Justice.' No compliment could
have pleased him better.
The letter in which Lamb paid it him was written at the
Lamb and Defoe.
East India House, immediately after the labour of

entering the accounts of a tea sale. Careless as it is, it contains a criticism of
Defoe's books that goes to the root of his method. Here is its kernel. 'The
author,' writes Lamb, 'never appears in these self-narratives (for so they
ought to be called, or rather, autobiographies), but the narrator chains us
down to an implicit belief in everything he says.' (It is interesting to notice
that Defoe, a very early realist, obeyed the spirit of Flaubert's maxim, that a
writer should be everywhere invisible in his work, and that his books
should, so to speak, tell themselves.) 'There is all the minute detail of a log-
book in it. Dates are painfully impressed upon the memory. Facts are
repeated over and over in varying phases, till you cannot choose but believe
them.' Then follows the sentence already quoted. Lamb goes on: 'So
anxious the story-teller seems that the truth should be clearly
comprehended, that when he has told us a matter of fact or a motive in a
line or two farther down he repeats it, with his favourite figure of speech, 'I
say,' so and so, though he had made it abundantly plain before. This is an
imitation of the common people's way of speaking, or rather of the way in
which they are addressed by a master or mistress, who wishes to impress
something on their memories, and has a wonderful effect upon matter-of-
fact readers.'
There is little to add to that, though Lamb 'had not
The new world of
matter-of-fact.
looked into them latterly,' or he would have noticed in
Defoe's books, with his quick eye for such things, Defoe's
wary way with anything that seems to him at all incredible. In The Journal
of the Plague Year, for example, none of the more dramatic anecdotes are
vouched for by the writer. He heard them from some one else, did not see
them with his own eyes, finds them hard to believe, and so rivets the belief
of his readers. We shall observe in discussing Hawthorne the more
advanced possibilities of this ingenious trick. The best books of Defoe's are
rogue novels, and in none of them was he content with a merely literary
reality. His heroes are as solid as ordinary men, or more so. The figure of
Selkirk shrinks away like a faint shadow behind that of Crusoe, whose
imaginary adventures his own had suggested, and there can be no doubt in
anybody's mind as to which of the two is the more credible. And then there
is that style of his, homelier even than Bunyan's, though less markedly so,
since he is describing homelier things. There is no Euphuism here; Defoe
was not the man to deal in gossamers. The essayist's delicacy of line had not
yet been given to the story-tellers, and Defoe was not the man to deal with

silver point. His style is as simple and effective as a bricklayer's hod. He
carries facts in it, and builds with them alone. The resulting books are like
solid Queen Anne houses. There is no affectation about them; they are not
decorated with carving; but they are very good for 'matter-of-fact readers' to
live in. Matter-of-fact readers made Defoe's audience, and the hundred
years since Burton wrote had made a matter-of-fact English nation out of
the credulous Elizabethans. The eighteenth century opens with this note.
The tales the old woman told Psyche have been blown away like dead
leaves into heaps for the children to play in, and grown-up people, serious
now, have done with fairy tale and are ready for the English novel.

RICHARDSON AND THE FEMININE NOVEL

RICHARDSON AND THE FEMININE NOVEL

Euphues had addressed a dedication to the 'Ladies and
For women by
women.
Gentlewomen of England,' and had said openly that he
would rather lie shut in a tiring closet than open in a
study; but, writing for women as he did, he never tried to write as if he were
himself a woman. On the contrary, Lyly's attitude was that of the gallant.
The Elizabethan romancers who followed him were read by women but
content to be men. Mrs. Behn, whose 'weltering sewerage' we have not had
space to discuss, wrote for women, but certainly not less coarsely than if
she had been writing for her own heroes. It was not until the eighteenth
century that there was fairly launched a new story-telling, characteristically
English in origin, without the fine careless heroism and improbability of
romance, that it held was 'calculated for amusement only,' and different also
from the mischievous realism of the picaresque. These ships, with their
gallant scarlet and gold pennons, and their merry skull and cross-bones, had
been long afloat before there came to join them a white barge with a lily at
the prow and on her decks girls in white dresses, with their heads close
together telling stories to each other. The author of a tale had hitherto been
either a man, a god, or a rascal; he had never been content to be a girl. And
the first of the new craftswomen was a fat and solid little printer and
alderman of the City of London, called Samuel Richardson.
Richardson was an author of a kind quite new to English
Samuel
Richardson.
letters—neither a great gentleman like Sidney, nor a
roisterer like Greene, nor a fanatic preacher like Bunyan,
nor a journalist like Defoe; just a quiet, conscientious, little business man,
who, after a duteous apprenticeship, had married his master's daughter like
a proper Whittington, and, when she died, had married again, with
admirable judgment in each case. It is not every one who can marry two
wives and be unhappy with neither. As a boy, he had written love-letters for
young women who were shy of their abilities. Girlish in his youth, he had
preferred the tea-table to the tavern. Surrounded by women in his manhood,
he was a grotesque little figure of a man, as inquisitive as an old maid, as

serious over detail as a village gossip; walking in the Park, and looking at
the feet of the women he met, and, as they passed him, quickly scanning
their faces, and saying to himself, 'that kind of person,' or 'this kind of
person,' and then going on to observe and summarise the next. He was
accustomed, like a Japanese draughtsman, or a woman in a theatre, to
complete and instantaneous observation. His was just the mind to show
women what they could do; and this, with their constant applause and help,
he did.

SAMUEL RICHARDSON

He had a lifetime of feminine society behind him when he was asked to
write a series of letters on 'the useful concerns in common life' for the
guidance of servant-girls, and, setting himself to the task, produced Pamela,
or Virtue Rewarded, and then, stepping on from his success, Clarissa
Harlowe, and finally the monstrous Grandison. The books were written in a
close atmosphere of femininity. 'My worthy-hearted wife and the young
lady who is with us, when I had read them some part of the story, which I
had begun without their knowing it, used to come into my little closet every
night, with—"Have you any more of Pamela, Mr. R.? We are come to hear a
little more of Pamela."' Every letter of Clarissa's was canvassed by the tea-
parties that wept and trembled for her fate, and worshipped her proud little
creator. And all his friends contributed their ideas of the perfect man to the
making of Sir Charles Grandison. No author had ever written so before.
I believe that the femininity of the resulting books was
The novel by post.
due to his choice of the epistolary method as well as to
his own temperament, and his enviable opportunities of
studying the character of the audience at which he aimed. If he had not
happened upon it, if he had tried to tell his stories in the manner fashionable
at the time, they would but have been exaggerations and amplifications of
tales that Steele would have put most comfortably into a single number of
The Tatler or Spectator. If he had used the autobiographical form he would
have been prohibited from much of his detail, and all the effect of lighting
his subject from several points of view. But letters were so new in story-
telling that they helped him to be new himself, just as a new and unusual
fashion of coat helps a man to be militantly original, within as well as
without. And then letters, always describing events that have scarcely
happened, excuse the most unlimited detail, the most elaborately
particularised gossip or confession. Letters were the perfect medium for the
expression of the feminine mind.
I do not deny that there are disadvantages in the novel by post, that
concerns many characters in elaborate play. Richardson has, for example, to
keep his corresponding couples, naughty Lovelace and uneasy Belford,
Clarissa and the giddy Miss Howe, dodging apart again and again for the
purpose of exchanging letters. We are tortured by Pamela's efforts for the
good of her story, her letters sandwiched between tiles and buried in earth,
the incredible agility of her postman John, and the forethought and luck that

enables her to provide herself with ink and paper in the most impossible
circumstances. And when Mr. Belford writes of Clarissa, 'there never was a
woman so young who wrote so much and with such celerity,' we look at the
huge volumes and find it easy to believe him. When we hear that 'Her
thoughts keeping pace with her pen she hardly ever stopped or hesitated,
and very seldom blotted out or altered,' we reflect that she certainly had not
the time. And when later we are told that 'Last night, for the first time since
Monday last, she got to her pen and ink; but she pursues her writing with
such eagerness and hurry as show her discomposure,' we cannot help
smiling to think how very advantageous such discomposure must be to Mr.
Richardson, who is to edit the correspondence. There is this difficulty of
credibility, and also occasional even more obvious awkwardnesses, as when
the characters, always very obliging to their creator, have to enclose copies
of letters that would not otherwise have got into print.
On the other hand, we cannot count these as serious
Richardson does
not attempt
blemishes on a form of art so far removed from any
illusion. attempt at illusion. There is in Richardson's novels no sort
of visualised presentment of life. We see his principal
characters through little panes of glass over their hearts, and in no other
way. I cannot for the life of me imagine what Clarissa really looked like,
but I know well enough what she thought. Spasmodic reminders of
Pamela's abstract prettiness produce little but an impatient desire to see a
portrait. I remember but one glimpse of her, and that is in the first volume,
when she has dressed herself up in her new homespun clothes, dangles a
straw hat by its two blue strings, and looks at herself in the looking-glass.
There comes an expression a little later, 'a pretty neat damsel,' and again, 'a
tight prim lass,' and I think that the ghost of a little girl shows in the
looking-glass, but only for a moment, like the reflection of a bird flying
over a pool of water. Richardson's characters are decreasingly real from
their hearts outwards. They have no feet. But their hearts are so beautifully
exhibited that we cannot ask for anything else. To quarrel over them with
Richardson is like quarrelling with the delightful Euclid because no one has
ever been able to draw a straight line that should really be length without
breadth. Such a line does not exist outside his books, yet Euclid is all in the
right when he talks of geometry. Pamela and Clarissa do not exist outside
their propositions, yet Johnson, talking fairly honestly, was able to say that

there was more knowledge of the human heart in a letter of Richardson's
than in all Tom Jones.
It is knowledge of the human heart from the girl's point
The passion for
respectability.
of view—the unromantic girl, for Richardson could never
bring himself to believe in great passions. He would
never have used as the text of a novel that sentence from the New
Testament that has inspired so many later story-tellers: 'Her sins are
forgiven her because she loved much.' Richardson's only passion is one not
usually so called, and that is a passion for respectability. The desire for
respectability, for her children's sake if not for her own, is part of every
woman's armour in the battle of this world. In Richardson's two best novels
it is something far more than this, an obsession that love cannot conquer nor
goodness override. In Clarissa it is so Quixotic, so forlorn a hope as to be
noble; but Pamela's respectability is a little disgusting. What, after all, is
Pamela's story but the tale of a servant-girl who declaims continually about
her honesty, writes foolish verse about it, lets her head fall on her master's
shoulder, and refuses to be his except as his wife? She is quite right, of
course, and most estimable. But her affronted virtue does not seem much
more than a practical commercial asset, when she successfully marries the
man who by every means in his power has sought to destroy it. Clarissa, on
the other hand, has nothing to gain, nothing even to retain, except her self-
respect. The respect of Howes, Belfords, and Harlowes could weigh but
little with a being lifted from ordinary Philistine life into a conflict as
unworldly as hers. She has the ivory dignity of some flowers, and the
curious power of the book that traces her misfortunes is due to the spectacle
of so flowerlike and fragile a being engaged in a struggle so terribly
unequal. The struggle itself could hardly have been imagined by a wholly
masculine writer. It is a kind of elaborate proposition, not a picture of life. It
is like a chess problem in which we know that white mates in two moves,
and are interested only in seeing how he does it. In Richardson, as in
Euclid, we know always what is coming. Our artistic pleasure is in the logic
and sequence of the intervening steps. If you expect a theorem to turn into a
problem or vice versâ, the inevitability of Richardson annoys you; but if
you read him in the right spirit that quality is your chief delight.
It is interesting to notice that Richardson, inventing girls' theorems, is
unable to draw a hero in whom a man can believe. Lovelace, for example, is

touched in in a way that makes women fall in love with him, but men feel
for cobwebs in the air. Pamela's master is frankly incredible. And it is no
bad illustration of Richardson's femininity that Charles Grandison, planned
as the perfect man, has been found unbearable in the smoking-room, insipid
at the tea-table, and has probably had no conquests but a few Georgian
ladies'-maids. But the women, abstractions, algebraical formulæ, as they
are, let us into secrets of the machinery of a woman's mind that no earlier
novelist had been able to examine.
Richardson's precise, intimate, feminine knowledge of
Richardson's women and feminine method of writing had a wider
influence.
influence than that we are tracing in this chapter. He
showed story-tellers a new world to conquer and quite unexplored
possibilities in the telling of a tale. It was for this that he was translated by
the Abbé Prévost, the Jesuit, soldier, priest and novelist, who wrote in
Manon Lescaut of a passion greater and more self-sacrificing than any that
had come in the way of the little printer of Salisbury Court. And when St.
Preux and Julie exchange those letters that brought a new freedom of
sentiment into literature, Rousseau, who taught them how to write, had
himself been taught by Richardson.

FANNY BURNEY

I do not intend any detailed portraiture of the later
Fanny Burney. writers of the feminine novel, but only in a brief mention
of two of them to suggest the course they took in the
development of their art, until in the nineteenth century it combined with
and became indistinguishable from the masculine novel that held it at first
in a not lightly to be reconciled hostility. Let us look along the bookshelf for
a volume called Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the
World. Thirty years had passed between the publication of Clarissa and that
of Fanny Burney's best book, and in those years Fielding and Smollett had
written, and Humphry Clinker had shown that it was possible to describe in
letters other things than a series of attacks on the armour of respectability.
Fanny Burney took more material with a lighter hand, stealing away the
business of The Tatler, The Spectator, The Citizen of the World, and trying

not only to 'draw characters from nature' but also to 'mark the manners of
the time.' She had learnt from a diligent perusal of Richardson, avoided a
too elaborate postal system, and made her butterfly task the easier by
writing of herself, whereas he had to invent the Clarissas and Pamelas of his
more bee-like labours.
Fanny Burney was the daughter of a popular music-
Young lady's
'manners.'
master, whose house was always full of all sorts of
people, so that she had the best of opportunities for
observing that surface of life which she was able so incomparably to
reproduce. She was able to see manners in contrast. Now 'manners'
described by a man in a coffee-house—by Steele, for example, or
Goldsmith, mean the habits and foibles of contemporary society. 'Manners'
'marked' at a young lady's rosewood desk mean vulgarity and its opposite,
and the various shades between the two. In the essayist's eyes, manners
were simply manners, to be described each one for its own sake. The
feminine novelist found manners either good or bad, and was concerned
with the tracing of a gossamer thread of distinction. The story of Evelina is
not so much that of her love-affair with Lord Orville, but of the suffering or
satisfaction of a sensitive person exposed alternately to atmospheres of bad
manners or good. Evelina threads her way shyly along the border-line, and
illustrates both sides by their effects upon her happiness. We are sorrier for
her when she hears Miss Branghton cry out joyfully, 'Miss is going to marry
a Lord,' than when she is in more serious trouble over her acknowledgment
by her father. All the minor characters for whom the story makes a frame
are set there as types less of character than of behaviour. There is Mrs.
Selwyn with her habit of 'setting down' young men, and her characteristic
praise of Lord Orville, 'there must have been some mistake about the birth
of that young man; he was, undoubtedly, designed for the last age; for he is
really polite.' There is Captain Mirvan, representing good birth and brutality
of manners; Madame Duval, low birth seeking to veil itself in lofty
affectation; the Branghtons, frank vulgarity; Mr. Smith, the tinsel gentility
of the Holborn beau. Each character is in the book in order to inflict its
peculiar type of manners on the heroine, so that we may watch the result.
Evelina herself, delicious as she is, is given to us as a touchstone between
good breeding and vulgarity.

Miss Burney marks very clearly the introduction of the
Feminine standards feminine standards of delicacy that were to rule the
of delicacy.
English novel of the nineteenth century. Evelina's
criticism of Love for Love, written less than a hundred years before she saw
it, distinguishes honestly between her own point of view and that of the best
of men. 'Though it (the play) was fraught with wit and entertainment, I hope
I shall never see it represented again; for it is so extremely indelicate—to
use the softest word I can—that Miss Mirvan and I were perpetually out of
countenance, and could neither make any observations ourselves, nor
venture to listen to those of others. This was the more provoking, as Lord
Orville was in excellent spirits, and exceedingly entertaining.'

JANE AUSTEN

Twenty years after Evelina, the novel of femininity took
Jane Austen. a further step in technique and breadth of design. Miss
Austen, who in the last decade of the eighteenth century
was writing the novels that were not to be published till after the first
decade of the nineteenth, learnt from both her precursors. She was a proper
follower of Richardson, but dispensed altogether with the artifice of letters,
although the whole of her work is so intimate and particular in expression
that it would almost seem to be written in a letter to the reader.[7] Like Miss

Burney she had read the masculine novels of an ordinary life, whose strings
were not so finely stretched as those of life in the books of the sentimental
little printer; she had read Fielding and Smollett and the Essayists, and Miss
Burney herself, but she carried the satire she had learnt from them deeper
than Miss Burney's criticism of well or ill-bred manners. She deals more
directly with existence. Miss Burney with lovable skill made her puppets
play her game. Miss Austen's puppets played a game of their own. She
remarked before writing Emma, 'I am going to take a heroine whom no one
but myself will much like,' exactly as if she were a little girl rather
capriciously choosing a new plaything. But Emma, once chosen, illustrates
no special theorem, and is compelled to tread no tight-rope over the abyss
of vulgarity. Miss Austen's world has the vitality of independent life, and is
yet close under observation, like society in a doll's house. Her people are
alive and real, and yet so small that she found it easy to see round them and
be amused. Indeed, she grew so accustomed to laughing at them that she
came to include the reader in her play. I am not sure if it would not be wise
for any one who found a page of hers a little dull or incomprehensible, to
consider very carefully and seriously if she is not being mischievous
enough and insolent enough to win her silvery laugh from his own self. To
read her is like being in the room with an unscrupulously witty woman; it is
delightful, but more than a trifle dangerous.
But Miss Austen's satire is not so important as the clear,
The analysis of the
heart.
keen sight that made it possible. The feminine novel finds
its justification and characteristic in the quick light
gossiping knowledge of Miss Burney, in Miss Austen's bric-à-brac of
observation, in Richardson's topographical accuracy among the hidden
alleys and byways of the heart. Its tenderness of detail is its most valuable
contribution to story-telling, associated though it is with feminine standards
of decency, and the sharp point of feminine raillery. The first of these
concomitants is a gift of doubtful, and certainly not universal, virtue. The
second is no more than a variation, a different-tinted, other-textured version
of the satire of men. But the gift to which they were attached has made
possible some of the finest work of later artists, in those stories whose
absorbing interest is the unravelling of tangled skeins of intricate
psychology. Theirs is a minuteness in the dissection of the heart quite
different from, and indeed hostile to, the free-and-easy way of men like
Fielding and Smollett, and wherever we meet with this fine and delicate

surgery practice we can trace its ancestry with some assurance to the
feminine novel of the eighteenth century.

FIELDING, SMOLLETT, AND THE
MASCULINE NOVEL

FIELDING, SMOLLETT, AND THE MASCULINE NOVEL

I have always felt that the English Renaissance was
The English
Renaissance.
considerably later than that of France or Italy, and
happened in the eighteenth century. When we speak of
the Italian or the French Renaissance we mean the times in the histories of
Italy or France when the peculiar genius of each of these countries showed
the most energetic and satisfying efflorescence. In Italy and in France this
time was that of the revival of classical learning, when Boccaccio lectured
on Dante at Florence and Ronsard gardened and rhymed. In England,
although from the time of Chaucer to the time of Shakespeare we were
picking continental flowers, and flowering ourselves individually and
gorgeously, yet we had no general efflorescence in our national right, no
sudden and complete self-portraiture in several arts at once. And this in the
eighteenth century was what we had. All our national characteristics were
unashamedly on view. Our solidity, our care for matter of fact, our love of
oversea adventure, were exhibited in Defoe. Our sturdy spirituality had only
recently found expression in Bunyan. Richardson discovered the young
person who, rustling her petticoats, sits with so demure an air of
permanence on Victorian literature, and represents indeed so real a part of
our national character that we shall never be able to forget her blushes
altogether. Our serious turn for morality showed itself at once in the aims
all our authors professed, and in the pictures of Hogarth who, with courage
unknown elsewhere, dared to paint ugliness as ugly. This is the century that
represents us in the eyes of the world. If we would think of the Italian spirit
we remember the Decameron; if of the French, we remember Ronsard's
'Mignonne, allons voir si la rose,' or Marot's 'Mignonne, je vous donne le
bon jour.' But if a Frenchman tries to describe an Englishman his model is
not a Chaucer but a Jean Bull, and the only adequate portraits of Jean Bull
are to be found in the novels of Fielding and Smollett.

HENRY FIELDING

Out of this general efflorescence were to spring two
Two points of view.
branches of story-telling different and hostile from the
start. The novel was given sex. Richardson had scarcely
invented the feminine novel before Fielding and Smollett were at work
producing books of a masculinity correspondingly pronounced. Fielding
was the first to mark the difference, and Richardson to the end of his life
hated him for writing Joseph Andrews. It often happens that one
philosopher hates another whose system though less elaborate is obviously

founded on a broader basis than his own. Fielding could afford to laugh at
Richardson, but Richardson could never laugh at Fielding. He could only
enjoy the lesser satisfaction of holding his rival accursed. Their upbringings
had been as different as the resulting books. Eton, law studies at Leyden
and the Middle Temple, were a different training for the art of story-telling
than the Dick Whittington youth of the little business man. Richardson saw
the game of life from the outside. Harry Fielding knew the rough and
tumble. Richardson was all for virtue; so was Fielding, but, as he would
have put it himself, for virtue that is virtue. Virtue at the expense of nature
he could no more understand than Benvenuto Cellini, who, if the facts in
the case of Pamela had been set before him, would have thought her a
devilish artful young woman, and, if he had met her, congratulated her upon
her capture. Fielding had a short, rough and ready creed, and that was that a
good heart goes farther than a capful of piety towards keeping the world a
habitable place.
Pamela made him laugh. He wanted to make money by
Pamela and Joseph
Andrews.
writing, so he sat down to put the laugh on paper, with the
ultimate notion of filling his pocket by publishing a
squib. He set out to parody Pamela in the person of her brother Mr. Joseph
Andrews. He had not gone very far in the performance before Parson
Adams came into the story, and became so prodigiously delightful that it
occurred to Fielding that he had here as admirable a couple for adventure as
Cervantes himself could have wished, with the result that Mr. Andrews'
correspondence does not compare at all favourably with his sister's, while
his biography is infinitely more entertaining. When the book was done, its
creator printed on the title-page: 'Written in imitation of the Manner of
Cervantes, Author of Don Quixote,' made no very particular reference to his
original purpose, and described his book as 'A Comic Epic in Prose.' The
masculine novel was on its way. Like Don Quixote or Le Roman Comique it
represented a smiling move towards reality, or the criticism of reality, in
Fielding's hands through the high and difficult art of ridicule, in the hands
of Smollett, whose first book was published six years later, through the
easier art of caricature.
These two men between them made the masculine novel of the eighteenth
century. Its scope and character are best mapped out by a study of their

respective lives, which were sufficiently unlike to make their books almost
as different from each other's as they were from Richardson's.
They both looked on man as man, a simple creature
Fielding and
Smollett.
seldom wholly bad. They were not the fellows to tolerate
humbug about platonic love, or the soul, or religion.
Religion meant the Established Church, and a parson was a man, good or
bad, a representative of the State perhaps, but not a representative of God.
Love was no opal passion between Endymion and the moon. It meant desire
between man and woman, as tender as you liked, but still desire. It was as
simple a thing as valour, which meant ability to use the fists and stand fire.
Fielding and Smollett knew a fairly brutal world. But their positions in it
had been different. Fielding had always had his head above water. He is
continually thinking of fair play, and feels, as we do, a thrill at the heart
when he sees Tom Jones and an innkeeper shake hands after bleeding each
other's noses. Smollett had had a harder time. He had known what it was to
be denied the privileges of a gentleman. He had been in a subordinate
position in the navy when that was an organisation of licensed brutality. He
was as accustomed to seeing men's bodies cross-questioned, as Fielding to
reading law-cases and examining men's minds. He writes always on a more
animal level than Fielding. After every fight he lines up his characters for
medical treatment:—

'"'n' well," says he, "'n' how
Are yer arms, 'n' legs, 'n' liver, 'n' lungs, 'n' bones a-feelin' now?"'

Fielding only inquires after their hearts. Put their portraits side by side, and
the difference is clear. Fielding's is the face of the fortunate man who has
had his bad times and come smiling through; Smollett's that of the man not
bruised but permanently scarred by the experiences he has suffered. An old
sailor once said to me that you can judge of the roughness of a man's
employment by the coarseness of his language; those whose work is
roughest, using the coarsest words. Fielding is seldom disgusting. His
heroes are constantly putting their feet into it; but not into unnecessary filth.
It is impossible to say the same of Smollett.

Their choice of models was characteristic; Joseph
Smollett and Le Andrews being written in imitation of the gentle banter of
Sage.
Cervantes, while Roderick Random copied the more acid
satire of Le Sage. Indeed, Le Sage was not serious enough. 'The disgraces
of Gil Blas,' says Smollett in his preface, 'are for the most part such as
rather excite mirth than compassion; he himself laughs at them; and his
transitions from distress to happiness, or at least ease, are so sudden, that
neither the reader has time to pity him, nor himself to be acquainted with
affliction. This conduct, in my opinion, not only deviates from probability,
but prevents that generous indignation, which ought to animate the reader
against the sordid and vicious disposition of the world.' That is a moving
and very remarkable paragraph. Between those lines is the memory of more
than enough 'acquaintance with affliction,' and there is something terrible in
the assumption, made with such absolute conviction, that good luck
'deviates from probability.' Smollett had not known much happiness, and
found so light-hearted an aim as Le Sage's impossible. His own was almost
vengeful. 'I have attempted to represent modest merit struggling with every
difficulty to which a friendless orphan is exposed, from his own want of
experience, as well as from the selfishness, envy, malice, and base
indifference of mankind.' Roderick Random is a rogue and a skunk, but we
cannot blame Tobias Smollett if he did not know it. Random's more
objectionable qualities are those that pull him through his difficulties. A
nicer man would have gone under. The difficulties are at fault for making
not Random but Smollett what he was.
The technique of the English novel was more elaborate
The technique of
the English novel.
than that of its models. Just as Joseph Andrews is more
orderly than Don Quixote, so Roderick Random is a step
between the pure rogue novel, the string of adventures only connected by
the person of the adventurer, and the modern novel of definite plot. Don
Quixote and Gil Blas could be cut off anywhere. Their creators had only to
kill them. But the curtain could not be rung down on the adventures of
Random or Andrew before quite a number of different threads had been
properly gathered and explained. There were a few pretty wild coincidences
to be discovered. Rory, Joseph, and Fanny all find their true parents;
perhaps but rough and ready means to give rotundity to a story, but still
pleasant mysteries, to be kept like sweetmeats and dessert as lures for
flagging appetites. The novel had assumed some of the elaborate interest of

the nouvelle, as practised by Cervantes and the Elizabethans, and the
influence of the stage perhaps partly accounts for the construction of the
English imitations, more consistent than that of their Spanish and Franco-
Spanish models. The art of play-writing had reached its period of most
scrupulous technique so recently that these two men who had failed in the
theatre were not likely to forget its methods when experimenting with the
more plastic art of narrative.
Of the two, Fielding is always the better artist. He is
Fielding the better
artist.
more interested in his art, more single-minded. He never
forgets his duties as a novelist, and continually turns to
the reader, just as if he were a sculptor executing a difficult piece of work in
the presence of an audience whose admiration he expects. He was ready to
laugh at himself for it too: 'We assure the reader we would rather have
suffered half mankind to be hanged than have saved one contrary to the
strictest laws of unity and probability.' He did not always keep up this
admirable conscientiousness; but he did so more consistently than Smollett.
The delicacy of their craftsmanship is best compared not in their greatest
books but in those two novels in which they essayed the same task, the
portraiture of a rogue, and a rogue not after the merry sympathetic fashion
of Lazarillo, but one whom the authors themselves accounted a villain and
expected their readers to detest.
The ironic biographer of Jonathan Wild realised the
Jonathan Wild.
difficulties of the undertaking. He saw that unless he
adopted an attitude which would make it proper for him
always to express approval of his hero, his readers would begin to cast this
way and that, not knowing whether to sympathise or hate, as the genius of
the author or the villainy of the hero were alternately prominent in their
eyes. Accordingly, choosing the name of a real and famous gallows-bird
who had been hung some twenty years before, Fielding took his tone from
those little penny biographies that used to be hawked among the crowd who
waited at Tyburn to see their hero swing. He ironically takes this tone; and
sustains it without a false note for a couple of hundred pages. How
admirably he uses it:—

'The hero, though he loved the chaste Laetitia with excessive
tenderness, was not of that low snivelling breed of mortals who, as is

generally expressed, tie themselves to a woman's apron-strings; in a
word, who are afflicted with that mean, base, low vice or virtue, as it is
called, of constancy.'

And again in the passage that sums up the book:—

'He laid down several maxims, as the certain means of attaining
greatness, to which, in his own pursuit of it, he constantly adhered.
As—
1. Never to do more mischief than was necessary to the effecting of
his purpose; for that mischief was too precious a thing to be thrown
away.
2. To know no distinction of men from affection; but to sacrifice all
with equal readiness to his interest.
3. Never to communicate more of an affair than was necessary to the
person who was to execute it.
4. Not to trust him who hath deceived you, nor who knows he has
been deceived by you.
5. To forgive no enemy; but to be cautious and often dilatory in
revenge.
6. To shun poverty and distress, and to ally himself as close as
possible to power and riches.
7. To maintain a constant gravity in his countenance and behaviour,
and to affect wisdom on all occasions.
8. To foment eternal jealousies in his gang, one of another.
9. Never to reward any one equal to his merit; but always to insinuate
that the reward was above it.
10. That all men were knaves or fools, and much the greater number a
composition of both.
11. That a good name, like money, must be parted with or at least
greatly risked, in order to bring the owner any advantage.

12. That virtues, like precious stones, were easily counterfeited; that
the counterfeits in both cases adorned the wearer equally; and that very
few had knowledge or discernment sufficient to distinguish the
counterfeit jewels from the real.
13. That many men were undone by not going deep enough in
roguery; as in gaming any man may be a loser who doth not play the
whole game.
14. That men proclaim their own virtues, as shopkeepers expose their
goods, in order to profit by them.
15. That the heart was the proper seat of hatred, and the countenance
of affection and friendship.'

The whole scheme is worked out with a scrupulous attention to the main
idea, and a consistency of mood that would not have been unworthy one of
the self-conscious artists of a hundred years later. Poe himself could have
built no more skilfully, and, lacking Fielding's knowledge of rascaldom, the
straw for his bricks would not have been so good.
Smollett had the knowledge; but, a less perspicuous
Ferdinand, Count
Fathom.
artist, did not realise the difficulties of using it. His villain
is never frank in his villainy. Smollett intended from the
beginning to disobey Fielding's principle, meant to save his rogue from the
gallows, meant to do it all along, and was consequently handicapped in
making him respectably wicked. Ferdinand, Count Fathom, does damnable
deeds, but his author's purpose is completely nullified by his promise of
eventual conversion. The book is not true to itself, but fails because
Smollett was not sufficient of an artist to be able to send his hero to hell.
It is interesting to notice in one of the dullest scenes of this unsatisfactory
book, that Smollett touched for the first time, in a fumbling, hesitant
manner, the note of quasi-supernatural horror that was soon to be sounded
with clarity and almost too facile skill. In the hero's device for the undoing
of Celinda there is the first warning of the Radcliffes and Lewises and their
kind, with their groans upon the battlements, their figures in white, and their
unearthly music in the wind. Smollett did not wait long enough to find out
what could be done with this new sensation. He jangled the note, and, in his

inartistic way, passed on to paint and to reform the wickedness of the
Count.

TOBIAS SMOLLETT

I am a little ungracious to Smollett in saying so loud that
Smollett the more
versatile.
he was an artist inferior to Fielding. Inferior he was, but
when I set their best books side by side, I remember that
there is little to choose between the pleasures they have given me, and am
compelled to admit that the less scrupulous Smollett had the wider range. I
read Tom Jones in one sitting of twenty-four hours, and should like to write

an essay on it, but can find no excuse for discussing here that epic of good-
heartedness, since its characteristics are not different from those already
noticed in Joseph Andrews. But Humphry Clinker would have held me for
as long if it had had as many pages, and in the history of the art, has, as an
example of the novel in letters, an interest wholly separate from that of
Roderick Random, which is a specimen of the picaresque. When Smollett
came to write that book he was fifty years old and just about to die. He
seems to have forgotten his old feud with life, and to look at things with a
kindlier eye as one just ready to depart. His late-won detachment helped
him to a scheme as clear as one of Fielding's, although even in this he is
sometimes submerged in human nature. His notion was to describe the same
scenes and events simultaneously from several points of view, in letters
from different persons, so as to keep a story moving gently forward, with
half a dozen personalities revolving round it, able to realise themselves or
be realised in their own letters or those of their friends. In none of his other
books are the characters so rounded and complete. There is Matthew
Bramble, the old knight, outwardly morose and secretly generous; his sister,
an old maid determined not to remain one, for ever grumbling at her
brother's generosities; Lyddy, their romantic niece, and Jerry, their young
blood of a nephew; and, as persons of the counterplot, Mistress Winifred
Jenkins and Mary Jones; not to speak of the ubiquitous Clinker. The letters
tell the whole story, and yet, written long after Richardson's, they have an
older manner. Richardson's letters, with all their passionate reiteration of
detail, do not concern themselves with foibles. They do not make you smile
at their writers, and if you had laughed, as Fielding did, he would have been
prodigiously annoyed. Smollett's letters have the same aim as the letters of
the Spectator or the Tatler. They are different only in less brilliant polish,
and in their grouping round a story. The Humphry Clinker correspondence
is as important as the letters of Clarissa in forming the most delicate and
humorous epistolary style employed by Miss Evelina Anville.
The extreme difficulty I have experienced throughout
The motives of the
masculine novel.
this chapter in thinking of the technique of these
novelists, instead of their material, is a tribute to their
power. It is the same with Hogarth. It is impossible to get at the artist for
thinking of the life upon his canvases. It is almost impossible to consider
Fielding or Smollett as technicians (I have had to do it in their least human
books), for thinking of the England that they represented. And now that I

am looking about for a concluding paragraph on the work of these two men,
when I should be summing up the general characteristics of their
craftsmanship, I look at the pile of their books on the table before me, and
feel a full and comfortable stomach, and cannot get out of my nose the
smell of beer and beef and cheese associated as closely with their pages as
lavender with the pages of Cranford. What an England it was in their day.
Mr. Staytape carried Rory 'into an alehouse, where he called for some beer
and bread and cheese, on which we breakfasted.' 'Our landlord and we sat
down at a board, and dined upon a shin of beef most deliciously; our
reckoning amounting to twopence halfpenny each, bread and small beer
included.' The bright glances of Mistress Waters 'hit only a vast piece of
beef which he was carrying into his plate, and harmless spent their force.'
Her sighs were drowned 'by the coarse bubbling of some bottled ale.'
Square meals are the best antidotes for sentiment, and in every scene of
these novelists there is always some one who has fed too recently to allow
any hairsplitting delicacy in the room with him. No confessional
disentangling of emotions, but beer, beef, cheese, a good heart, a sound
skin, and the lack of these things, are the motives of the masculine novel.

A NOTE ON STERNE

Sterne hardly comes within the scope of this book, since his was the
art, not of telling stories, but of withholding them, not of keeping
things on the move, but of keeping them on the point of moving. It is
not without much difficulty and two or three chapters that a character
of Sterne's crosses the room. The nine books of Tristram Shandy bring
him through the midwife's hands, and a little further. I believe we hear
breeches talked of for him. Another nine books would perhaps let him
put one leg into them. Tristram Shandy is a continuous denial of the
forms that Fielding and Smollett were doing their best to fix. But it is
read by many who find them superficial, because Sterne writes of
universal, whereas they write of a limited and particular humanity.
They write of a Mr. Jones or a Mr. Random, while the hero of Sterne's
book is man. He begins, as he puts it himself, ab ovo. He saw that the
whole of humanity is a constellation revolving round the birth of a
child, and contrived to introduce into his book every imaginable
incident connected with that event. If Tristram Shandy does not grow

up quick enough to take to himself a wife, My Uncle Toby is taken as a
husband by the Widow Wadman. If he does not die, Yorick does. If My
Uncle Toby's affairs do not go far enough to produce a baby, Tristram
is born. In this book, where nothing seems to happen, everything does.
It is the Life and Opinions, not of Tristram Shandy, but of Humanity,
illustrated, not in a single character over a long period, but in half a
dozen over a short one. For the story of the three generations of the
giants, Rabelais needed land and sea, Paris and Touraine. For the
adventures of his strolling players, Scarron needed a dozen little towns
along the Loire, with inns and châteaux and what not. But for the
adventures of Humanity, Sterne, who learnt from both of them, needed
only a bowling-green, a study, a bedroom, and a parlour. There is
really little else of background to the story. And it is all there; birth,
love, death, and all the sad comedy of man misunderstood, and
fortunate when, like Uncle Toby, he does not try to understand, the
beginning in triviality, and the end in 'Alas, poor Yorick!'

PART II
ROMANTICISM

CHATEAUBRIAND AND ROMANTICISM

CHATEAUBRIAND AND ROMANTICISM

There are some men who seem epitomes of their periods,
Chateaubriand and
the French
of all the weaknesses, strengths, ideals and follies and
Revolution. wisdoms of their times. All the tangled skeins of different
movements seem embroidered into the pattern of a face;
and that face is theirs. We seek in them the years in which they lived, and
are never disappointed. Sir Philip Sidney means the age of Elizabeth, Dr.
Johnson the common-sense English eighteenth century, Rousseau the
stirring of revolutionary France, Goethe the awakening of Germany. Of
these men was Chateaubriand. He was born before the storm and died after
it. He gathered up the best of the things that were before the revolution, and
handed them on to the men who, when the revolution had left a new France,
were to make that new country the centre of European literature. Rousseau
and the Romantics meet in him. He wrote when France, her eyes still bright
and wide after the sight of blood, was seeking in religion for one thing, at
least, that might be covered by the tossing waves of revolution and yet
survive. Christianity in his finest story is the rock on which his lovers break
themselves. And Christianity was the first earthwork attacked before the
revolution, and the first reoccupied afterwards.
Chateaubriand stands curiously in the midst of the opposing elements.
Like Byron he was a patrician and a fighter. He too would have died for
freedom. But whereas Byron fought, contemptuously sometimes, for
revolutionaries, Chateaubriand fought against them.
When some of the ragged ones marched joyously down his street carrying
the heads of two of their enemies bleeding on the ends of pikes, he cried at
them, 'Brigands! Is this what you mean by Liberty?' and declared that if he
had had a gun he would have shot them down like wolves. And if
Chateaubriand had not been an aristocrat, he could never so well have
represented his times. He would have fought and written as a revolutionist,
instead of caring passionately for one party, and pinning to it the ideals of
the other, so claiming both for his own. Everything that could make him

one with his period and country was his. After a childhood of severe
repression, he had seen the fall of the Bastille, and then sought liberty and
the North-West Passage, coming back from America to find the revolution
successful against himself. Could any man's life be so perfect an analogy of
the meteor-like progress of France? France also sought liberty and a North-
West Passage, quicker than all others; France also was to return and find the
ground aquiver beneath her feet.

JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU

After that she was to be mistress of Europe. The three
Jean-Jacques stages of Romanticism correspond with these three stages
Rousseau.
of France; the last that of Hugo and Gautier and Dumas,
the Romanticism of 1830, promised by that of Chateaubriand, itself made
possible by the unrestful writing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is impossible
to understand any one of the three without referring to the others. Rousseau
was the son of a watchmaker, in a day when superiority of intellect in a man
of low birth won him either neglect or the most insufferable patronage. His
mother died in bearing him, and his father, although he made a second
marriage, never mentioned her without tears. He seems to have been a very
simple-hearted man, and found such pleasure in romances that he would sit
up all night reading them to his little son, going ashamedly to bed in the
morning when the swallows began to call in the eaves. These two traits in
his father are characteristic of the work of Rousseau himself. His life was
spent in emphasising the compatibility of low birth with lofty animation,
and so in preparing that democratisation of literature that generously
attributes humanity to men who are not gentlemen. Richardson gave him a
suitable narrative form for what he had to say, and La Nouvelle Héloïse is a
novel in letters whose hero is a poor tutor in love with his pupil. The book
is full of an emotional oratory so fresh and sincere that it seems as if the ice
of fifty years of passionless reasoning has suddenly broken over the springs
of the human heart. There is in it too an Ossianic sharing of feelings with
Nature, as if man had realised with the tears in his eyes that he had not
always lived in towns.
Chateaubriand had not Rousseau's birthright of
The world of the
Revolution.
handicap. He could not feel the righteous energy of the
watchmaker's son against a people who did not know
their own language and were yet in a position to employ him as a footman.
He was outside that quarrel. He left Rousseau's social reform behind him on
the threshold of his world, but had learnt from him to carry his heart upon
his sleeve, and to cry, like Ossian, 'The murmur of thy streams, O Lara!
brings back the memory of the past. The sound of thy woods, Garmallar, is
lovely in mine ear.' He took with him Rousseau's twin worships of passion
and nature into the melancholy turmoil that was waiting for him, sad with

an unrest not of classes but of a nation. He knew, like France, what it was to
question everything while standing firm upon nothing. In that maelstrom
nothing seemed fixed; there was nothing a man might grasp for a moment
to keep his head above the waters of infinite doubt. Everything seemed
possible, and much of the Romantic melancholy is a despairing cry for a
little impossibility from which at least there could be no escape. It is one
thing to question religion by the light of atheism, or atheism by the light of
religion; it is another thing, and far more terrible, to question both while
sure of neither, and to see not one word in all the universe, not God, nor
Man, nor State, nor Church, without a question mark at its side, a ghastly
reminder of uncertainty, like, in some old engravings, the waiting figure of
Death muffled in each man's shadow.
That was the world of the Revolution, a world whose
Atala.
permanent instability had been suddenly made manifest
by a violent removal of the apparently stable crust. With
the overturning of one mountain every other shuddered in its bed, and
seemed ready at any moment to shake with crash and groan into the valleys.
This was the world for whose expression the face of Chateaubriand,
nervous, passionate, the fire of vision in his eye, the wind of chaos in his
tempestuous hair, seems so marvellously made. This was the world in
which, like the spirit of his age, he wrote the books the times expected
because they were their own. Atala and René, but particularly Atala,
seemed to be the old, vague promises of Rousseau and Ossian, reaffirmed
with the clarity of a silver trumpet. Chactas and Atala, those savage lovers,
who 'took their way towards the star that never moves, guiding their steps
by the moss on the tree stems,' walked like young deities of light before
these people who had known the half-mummied courtesies of an eighteenth
century civilisation. 'She made him a cloak of the inner bark of the ash, and
mocassins of the musk rat's skin, and he set on her head a wreath of blue
mallows, and on her neck red berries of the azalea, smiling as he did so to
see how fair she was.' The world is young again, and man has won his way
back into Eden, conscious of sorrow, conscious of evil, but alive and
unafraid to be himself.
Chateaubriand carried further than Rousseau the
Nature and
emotion.
transfiguration of nature by emotion, although in Atala
nature is still a stage effect, subjected to its uses as

illustration of the feelings of the humans in the tale. Chateaubriand tunes up
the elements with crash of thunder, bright forked lightning, and fall of
mighty tree, to the moment when, in the supreme crisis the hand of Atala's
God intervenes between the lovers, and the bell of the forest hermitage
sounds in the appropriate silence. But in those vivid, fiery descriptions there
is already something besides the theatrical, a new generosity of sentiment
that was to let Barye make lions and tigers instead of what would once have
been rather impersonal decorations, and to allow Corot to give landscapes
their own personality without always seeking to impose on them the
irrelevant interest of human figures. Nature is never excluded from the
story, and when the action is less urgent the setting is given a greater
freedom. The lovers never meet on a studio background, but are always
seen with trees and rivers, and forest dawn and forest night, more real than
any that had been painted before. Chateaubriand is never content to call a
tree a tree or a bird a bird, but gives them the dignity of their own names.
Aurora no longer rises from her rosy bed in the approved convention for the
dawn, but a bar of gold shapes itself in the east, the sparrow-hawks call
from the rocks, and the martens retire to the hollows of the elms.

FRANÇOIS RENÉ DE CHATEAUBRIAND

It was through caring for his setting in this way that
Particularity in Chateaubriand came as if by accident to the discovery of
setting.
local colour. He wanted his savages to love in the
wilderness, and happening to have seen a wilderness, reproduced it, and
made his savages not merely savages but Muskogees, fashioned their talk to
fit their race, and made it quite clear that this tale, at any rate, could not be
imagined as passing on the Mountains of the Moon. When the older story-

tellers named a locality they did little more than the Elizabethan stage
managers, who placed a label on the stage and expected it to be sufficient to
conjure up a forest or a battlefield. Chateaubriand, in making his writing
more completely pictorial, visualised his scenes in detail, and so showed the
Romantics the way to that close distinction between country and country,
age and age, race and race, that made the artists of the nineteenth century
richer than any who were before them in variety of subject, and in the
material of self-expression.
The Christianity of Atala was the religion that
Christianity.
Chateaubriand offered to his country in Le Génie du
Christianisme. I can never be quite sure that it was his
own, but in that amazing book, divided and subdivided like an ancient
treatise on some occult science, he showed with passionate use of reasoning
and erudition that Christianity was not the ugly thing that it had been
pictured by the eighteenth century philosophers, and, more, that it at least
was older than France, and permanent in a world where kings, emperors,
and republics swung hither and thither like dead leaves in the wind. The
teaching came to Paris like a gospel. These people, anchorless as they were,
were not difficult converts, because they were eager to be converted, and to
be able, if only for a moment in their lives, to whisper, 'I believe' in
something other than uncertainty. All society became Christian for a time,
and when that time passed, the effects of the book did not all pass with it.
The artists of a younger generation had learned that Christianity was the
belief that had brought most loveliness into the world, and that the Gods of
Antiquity were not the only deities who were favourable to beautiful things.
The false taste of the end of the eighteenth century had been pierced by
Gothic spires, and through the dull cloud of correct and half-hearted
imitation showed again the pinnacles and gargoyles and flying buttresses of
the naïve and trustful mediæval art. Atala joins hands with Nicolete, and
links Victor Hugo with the builders of Notre Dame.
There is little wonder that a writer who answered so
The art of
Chateaubriand
fully the needs of his own generation, and did so much to
survives the battle cut a way for the generation to come, became instantly
in which it was famous, immediately execrated. Chateaubriand wrote: 'La
used.
polémique est mon allure naturelle.... Il me faut toujours
un adversaire, n'importe où.' In 1800 he had no difficulty

in finding them. But it takes two to make a quarrel. It would not have been
surprising if books that belonged so absolutely to the battles of their times
should have struck their blows, and been then forgotten for want of
opposition. Manifestations of the time spirit, and particularly fighting
manifestations, not infrequently manifest it only to the time, and are
worthless to future generations. Atala, after setting in an uproar the Paris of
1802 is for us but a beautiful piece of colour whose pattern has faded away.
Unless we can feel with the men of the dawn that we are tossing on mad
waves, clutching at religion as at a rock beneath the shifting waters, and
breathlessly thankful for any proof of its steadfastness and power: unless we
can remember with them the old love of drawing-rooms and bent knees and
kisses on gloved hands, and feel with them a passionate novelty in the love
of wild things in the open air; unless we can remember the tamed, docile
nature of the pastorals, and open our eyes upon a first view of any sort of
real country; unless, in a word, we can dream back a hundred years, the
beauty of Atala is like that of an old battle-cry:—

'So he cried, as the fight grew thick at the noon,
Two red roses across the moon!'

The cry no longer calls to battle. The combatants are dead. The bugle
sounds to armies of white bones, and we who overhear it think only of the
skill of the trumpeter. And Chateaubriand had something in him that was
independent of his doctrines, independent of his enemies. Flaubert, looking
back to him over the years, saw in his books, when the dust of their battles
settled about them, early examples of a most scrupulous technique.
Chateaubriand the fighter, the man of his time, was forgotten in the old
master of a new prose. These books shaped in the din of battle were models
for men writing in a fat, quiet day of peace. Then it was possible, the
clangour no longer sounding in the ears, to notice the mastery of form, the
elaboration, carried so far and no further, of the main idea into the
significant detail that was to make the idea alive; then became clear the
economy that makes of every fact a vivid illustration of some trait in the
people of the story, a heightening of the lights or a deepening of the
shadows of the tale.

SCOTT AND ROMANTICISM

SCOTT AND ROMANTICISM

The genius of a man like Scott does not leap into the
Scott's place in the
romantic
world a complete and novel creation, like Minerva from
movement. the skull of Jupiter, ready for battle, and accoutred in the
armour that it never afterwards forsakes. Nor does it with
the strength of its own hand turn one world into another, or the audience of
Fielding and Smollett into that of the Waverley Novels. The world is
prepared for it; it finds its weapons lying round its cradle, and works its
miracle with the world's co-operation.
Romanticism, although, in our indolence, we like to think of it as the work
of a single man, as a stream gushing from the hard rock at the stroke of a
Moses, was no conjuring trick, nor sudden invention, but a force as old as
story-telling. The rock had been built gradually over it, and was as
gradually taken away. It suits our convenience and the pictorial inclination
of our minds to imagine it as the work of one man or two; but there is
hardly need to remind ourselves of facts we have so wilfully forgotten, and
that, if we choose, we can trace without difficulty a more diffuse as well as
a more ancient origin of the spring.
Romanticism was a movement too large and too various to be defined in a
paragraph, or to allow an essay on any single man to describe, even in the
art of story-telling, its several sources, and the innumerable streams that
flowed from them to fertilise the nineteenth century. It carried with it liberty
and toleration, liberty of expression and toleration of all kinds of spiritual
and physical vitality. It was comparable with and related to the French
Revolution. It allowed men to see each other in their relations with the
universe as well as with each other, and made existence a thing about which
it was possible to be infinitely curious. Old desires for terror and fantasy
and magnificence arose in the most civilised of minds. Glamour was thrown
over the forest and the palace, and the modern and ancient worlds came
suddenly together, so that all the ages seemed to be contemporary and all
conditions of human life simultaneous and full of promise.

Scott was a part of this revivified world, and his importance in it is not that
of its inventor, but of the man who brought so many of its qualities into the
art of story-telling that his novels became a secondary inspiration, and
moved men as different as Hugo, Balzac, and Dumas, to express themselves
in narrative.

SIR WALTER SCOTT

Before the writing of the Waverley Novels,
Romanticism Romanticism in English narrative had shown itself but a
before the
Waverley Novels. stuttering and one-legged abortion, remarkable only for
its extravagances. It had not, except in poetry, been
humane enough to be literature. It had made only violent gesticulations like
a man shut up in a sack.
Horace Walpole, protesting, I suppose, against Fielding and Smollett, had
said that the 'great resources of fancy had been dammed up by a strict
adherence to common life,' while the older romances were 'all imagination
and improbability.' He had tried to combine the two in The Castle of
Otranto, a book in which portraits sigh and step down from their canvases,
dead hermits reappear as skeletons in sackcloth, and gigantic ghosts in
armour rise to heaven in a clap of thunder. These eccentricities were efforts
after the strangeness of all true romance, and their instant popularity
showed how ready people were for mystery and ancient tale. Before Scott
succeeded in doing what Walpole had attempted, in writing a tale that
should be strange but sane, ancient but real, a crowd of novels, whose most
attractive quality was their 'horridness,' had turned the heads of the young
women who read them. Miss Thorpe, in Northanger Abbey, says:

'My dearest Catherine, what have you been doing with yourself all
this morning? Have you gone on with Udolpho?'
'Yes, I have been reading it ever since I woke; and I am got to the
black veil.'
'Are you indeed? How delightful! Oh! I would not tell you what is
behind the black veil for the world! Are not you wild to know?'
'Oh! yes, quite; what can it be? But do not tell me: I would not be told
upon any account. I know it must be a skeleton; I am sure it is
Laurentina's skeleton. Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like
to spend my whole life in reading it, I assure you; if it had not been to
meet you, I would not have come away from it for all the world.'

'Dear creature, how much I am obliged to you; and when you have
finished Udolpho, we will read the Italian together; and I have made
out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you.'
'Have you indeed! How glad I am! What are they all?'
'I will read you their names directly; here they are in my pocket-book.
Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer
of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid
Mysteries. These will last us some time.'
'Yes; pretty well; but are they all horrid? Are you sure they are all
horrid?'
'Yes, quite sure, for a particular friend of mine, a Miss Andrews, a
sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the world, has read every
one of them. I wish you knew Miss Andrews, you would be delighted
with her. She is netting herself the sweetest cloak you can imagine.'

These things were but the clothes of romantic story-
Percy, Ossian, and
Chatterton.
telling, walking bodiless about the world, while a poetry
old enough to be astonishingly new was nurturing the
body that was to stretch them for itself. Chatterton's ballads, imitations as
they were, showed a sudden and novel feeling for mediæval colouring.
Ossian, that book of majestic moments, carried imagination out again to
stand between the wind and the hill. Scott disliked its vagueness, but it
helped in preparing his world. Percy's Reliques, excused by their compiler
on the frivolous ground of antiquarian interest, brought the rough voice and
rude style of Sir Philip Sidney's blind beggar ringing across the centuries,
and in those old tales, whose rhymes clash like sword on targe, Scott found
the inspiration that Macpherson's disorderly, splendid flood swept down on
other men.
Scott's life was no patchwork but woven on a single
Scott's life.
loom. He did not turn suddenly in manhood to discover
the colour of his life. It had been his in babyhood. An old
clergyman, a friend of his aunt, protested that 'one may as well speak in the
mouth of a cannon as where that child is,' while Walter Scott, aged three or
four, shouted the ballad of Hardyknute:—

'And he has ridden o'er muir and moss,
O'er hills and mony a glen,
When he came to a wounded knight
Making a heavy mane.
Here maun I lye, here maun I dye,
By treacherie's false guiles;
Witless I was that e'er gave faith
To wicked woman's smiles.'

As he grew older, he was able, like Froissart, to 'inquire of the truth of the
deeds of war and adventures' that were to be the background of much of his
work. He knew old Lowland gentlemen who had paid blackmail to Rob
Roy, was told of the '15 and the '45 by veterans who had used their swords
on those occasions, and heard of the executions after Culloden from one
who had seen at Carlisle the rebels' heads above the Scottish Gate. The
warlike knowledge of his childhood was ripened and mellowed for story-
telling by the enthusiasms of his youth. Riding through the Lowland valleys
collecting the border minstrelsy, his good nature and pleasant way let him
learn in a broad acquaintanceship fashion the character of his countrymen.
He had not Balzac's deep-cutting analytic knowledge of men, but knew
them as a warm-hearted fellow of themselves. He knew them as one man
knows another, and not with the passionately speculative knowledge
belonging to a mind that contemplates them from another world. He did not
analyse them, but wrote of their doings with an unconscious externality that
very much simplified their motives and made them fit participators in the
sportsman-like life of his books.
Ballads and sagas and the historical reading to which
Scott and reality.
they had given their savour; a free open air life, and a
broad, humorous understanding of men; these were the
things that Scott had behind him when Cervantes moved him to write
narrative, and when the gold that shines through the dress of education in
the stories of Maria Edgeworth made him fall in love with local as well as
historical colour, anxious to draw his nation as she had drawn hers, and to
paint Scottish character in prose as Burns had painted it in verse. The
historical character of his work should not disguise from us its more vital

qualities. Hazlitt, whose keen eye was not to be put out by the gold and
pomp of trappings and armour, notices that Scott represents a return to the
real. He is noticing the most invigorating quality of Romanticism. Scott's
importance is not his because he wrote historical novels, but because his
historical novels were humane. He had found out, as Hazlitt says, that 'there
is no romance like the romance of real life.'
'As for his technique, there is no need to praise him,
His technique.
who had so many other virtues, for that of delicate
craftsmanship, which he had not. He was not a clever
performer, but an honest one whose methods were no more elaborate than
himself. Dumas describes them in that chapter of the Histoire de mes Bêtes
in which he discusses his own:—

'His plan was to be tedious, mortally tedious, often for half a volume,
sometimes for a volume.
'But during this volume he posed his characters; during this volume
he made so minute a description of their physiques, characters, and
habits; you learnt so well how they dressed, how they walked, how
they talked, that when, at the beginning of the second volume, one of
these characters found himself in some danger, you exclaimed to
yourself:
'"What, that poor gentleman in an applegreen coat, who limped as he
walked, and lisped as he talked, how is he going to get out of that?"
'And you were very much astonished, after being bored for half a
volume, a volume, sometimes indeed for a volume and a half; you
were astonished to find that you were enormously concerned for the
gentleman who lisped in talking, limped in walking, and had an
applegreen coat.'

The sensation of reading a Waverley Novel is that of leaning on the
parapet of a bridge on a summer day, watching the sunlight on a twig that
lies motionless in a backwater. The day is so calm and the sunlight so
pleasant that we continue watching the twig for a time quite
disproportionate to the interest we feel in it, until, when it is at last carried
into the main current, we follow its swirling progress down the stream, and

are no more able to take our eyes from it than if we were watching the
drowning of ourselves.
Scott knew very well the disadvantages of
Improvisation.
improvisation, of piling up his interest and our own
together. But he could work in no other manner. He said:
'There is one way to give novelty, to depend for success on the interest of a
well contrived story. But, wo's me! that requires thought, consideration—
the writing out of a regular plan or plot—above all, the adhering to one,
which I can never do, for the ideas rise as I write, and bear such a
disproportioned extent to that which each occupied at the first concoction,
that (cocksnowns!) I shall never be able to take the trouble.' His was a mind
entirely different from Poe's, or Mérimée's, or Flaubert's, those scrupulous
technicians with whom was the future of Romanticism, and it was an
artistic virtue in him to realise the fact, to proceed on his own course,
leaving as he went large, rough, incomparable things, as impressive as the
boulder stones of which the country people say that a giant threw them as
he passed.
His swift, confused writing gets its effect because he
His character and
work.
never asked too much from it. He never tried to do
anything with it beyond the description of his characters
and the telling of their story. He had no need to catch an atmosphere by
subtleties of language. His conception of the beings and life of another age
did not make them different except in externals, from our own. He did not,
like Gautier or Flaubert, regard the past as a miraculous time in which it
was possible to be oneself, or in which true feeling was not veiled in
inexactitudes. Very simple himself, he did not feel in the present those
laxities of sensation or inexactitudes of expression that made the past a
place of refuge. He was not dissatisfied with life as he found it, and was not
disposed to alter it when he dressed it for a masquerade. Nor was that
difficult for him. His mind was full of the stage properties of the past, and,
as he walked about, he lived in any time he chose and was the same in all of
them. He lived with humanity rather than in any particular half-century, and
did not feel, like Peacock, the need of dainty, careful movement in order not
to break the fabric he was building. Maid Marian is the same story as
Ivanhoe. Scott seems to have stepped straight out of his story to write it,
Peacock to be looking a long way back, and building very skilfully the

replica of something he had never seen but in a peculiarly happy vision.
Scott is quite at home in his tale, and can treat it as rudely as he likes.
Peacock seems to be playing very warily on the fragile keys of a spinet.
Sir Walter's fingers would have broken a spinet. His was no elaborately
patterned music threaded with the light delicacies of melody. He struck big
chords and used the loud pedal. His was the art of a Wagner rather than that
of a Scarlatti. 'The Big Bow-wow strain,' he wrote, comparing himself with
Jane Austen, 'I can do like any now going; but the exquisite touch, which
renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the
truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me.' 'One man can do
but one thing. Universal pretensions end in nothing.' Scott knew that
jewellery-work was not for him, and never tried his eyes by peering through
the watchmaker's glass. He saw life, as a short-sighted man sees a
landscape, in its essentials. He could spread over it what dress of detail he
preferred, and chose that which came readiest to his hand, flinging over
humanity the cloak of his boyish dreams. Humanity was not hampered by
it, but moves through his pages like a stout wind over a northern moor.

THE ROMANTICISM OF 1830

THE ROMANTICISM OF 1830

Dumas in La Femme au Collier de Velours thus describes
The mingling of the
arts.
Hoffmann's room: 'It was the room of a genius at once
capricious and picturesque, for it had the air of a studio, a
music-shop, and a study, all together. There was a palette, brushes, and an
easel, and on the easel the beginnings of a sketch. There was a guitar, a
violin, and a piano, and on the piano an open sonata. There was pen, ink,
and paper, and on the paper the first scrawled lines of a ballad. Along the
walls were bows, arrows, and arbalests of the fifteenth century, sixteenth-
century drawings, seventeenth-century musical instruments, chests of all
times, tankards of all shapes, jugs of all kinds, and, lastly, glass necklaces,
feather fans, stuffed lizards, dried flowers, a whole world of things, but a
whole world not worth twenty-five silver thalers.'
That account, whether from hearsay, conjecture, or knowledge, I do not
know, is not only an admirable portrait of the room and brain of an arch-
romantic, but might serve as a parable of the Romanticism of 1830. In that
year Hugo's Hernani was produced at the Comédie Française, and the
young men who battled with the Philistines for its success were drawn from
the studios as well as from the libraries, and had their David in Théophile
Gautier. Never before had the arts been so inextricably entangled, had
antiquarianism been so lively and humane, had gems and worthless baubles
been so confounded together. Chateaubriand had reaffirmed the pictorial
rights of literature. Delacroix was painting pictures from Byron and from
Dante, in bold, predominant colours, very different from the lassitudinous
livery of the schools. There was a new generosity of sentiment responsible
for Corot's landscapes and Barye's beasts. The sudden widening of
knowledge and sympathy was expressed in the new broadness and courage
of technique, and the same forces that covered the palette with vivid reds
and blues, and compelled the sculptor to a virile handling of his chisel,
found outlet in words also. Writers, like painters, seized the human,
coloured, passionate elements in foreign literatures, looking everywhere for
the liberty and brilliance they desired. The open-throated, sinewy,

gladiatorial muse of Byron found here devoted worshippers, and the
spacious movements of Shakespeare, his people alive and free, independent
of the dramas in which for a few hours in the Globe Theatre they had had a
part to play, delighted men with an outlook very different from, and hostile
to, that of Voltaire, although he had done his share in making their outlook
possible.

VICTOR HUGO

The studio and the study were very close together. Gautier, Hugo, and
Mérimée were all painters in their own right, and there is a difference
between the writers who have only seen life from a library, and those who
have seen it from behind an easel. The writer who has once felt them can
never forget the eye-delighting pleasures of the palette, but composes in
colour-schemes, and feels for the tints of words as well as for their melody.
The work of the Romantics was visualised and coloured in a manner then
new. It was almost shocking to men who had been accustomed, as it were,
to write in the severest monotone, and to refuse, if indeed they had ever
thought of it, such luxury of realisation.

There is no need, except for the sake of the argument, to
Local colour. state the fact that pictures are called up in a reader's mind
by a careful selection of details presented in a proper
order. It is well known that a few details correctly chosen have a more
compelling power on the imagination than a complete and catalogued
description. These men, writing pictorially, gave a new responsibility to
single touches. It became clear that visualisation was impossible unless
observation preceded it, and details accordingly took upon themselves the
exigent dignity of local colour. Local colour, from distinguishing between
places, was brought to mark the difference between times. Archæology
became suddenly of absorbing interest; its materials were more than its
materials; they were made the symbols of lives as real and as red in the
veins as those of the archæologists themselves. Notre Dame was no longer
to be expressed in a learned antiquarian paper, but in a passionate book.
And Victor Hugo visualising with the accuracy of a poet, found that just as
archæology meant little without life, so the life was vapid without the
archæology. Quasimodo shoves his hideous face through a hole in order to
be elected king of fools, but Hugo does not allow that marvellous grimace
to fill the picture. The hole must be there as well, and so 'une vitre brisée à
la jolie rosace audessus de la porte laissa libre un cercle de pierre par lequel
il fut convenu que les concurrents passeraient la tête.' The setting is as
important as the head; humanity and its trappings are worthless by
themselves, and valuable only together. Here is the source of Realism,
within Romanticism itself. Indeed almost the whole development of the art
in the nineteenth century is due to this new care for the frame, and to this
new honesty in dealing with the man within it.
An energetic simplicity of nature was needed for the
The youth of the
Romantics.
fullest enjoyment of these new conditions, and the
greatest of the French Romantics were almost like big
interested children in their attitude towards life and themselves. As soon as
we find a Romantic like Mérimée, reserved, subtle, a tender-hearted
Machiavellian, we find a man who is to dissociate himself from them
sooner or later, and to produce something different a little from the purely
Romantic ideals. There is something beautiful and inspiriting in the youth
of the Romantics. I like to think of Gautier, the olive-skinned boy from the
studio in the rue St. Louis, overcome with nervousness at the idea of

touching the hand of Hugo, himself only twenty-seven, sitting down and
trembling like a girl on the stairs before the master's door. And then the
splendid prank of Dumas, who, on the eve of revolution, went down into
the country like one of his own heroes, held up a town, and with a very few
friends obtained the submission of the governor, and captured an arsenal for
his party. They were boys, and some hostility was needed for their uttermost
delight. In England the battles of art are more like squabbles, but in the
Paris of 1830 it seemed as if the town were divided into camps for the
defence of classicism and the support of the new ideas. It was as if each
point of vantage had to be taken by storm, and the great night of Hernani,
when Hugo's supporters had red tickets and a password—the Spanish word
hierro, which means 'steel'—was the noblest memory in the life of at least
one of Hugo's enthusiastic lieutenants.
Such a joyous and vigorous thing was the Romanticism of 1830. It
touched story-telling through Balzac, Hugo, Dumas, Gautier, and Mérimée,
of whom the first three, in turning from the theatre to the art of narrative,
found inspiration in Sir Walter Scott. Scott's influence has been one of bulk
rather than of quality on English story-telling. But in France, instead of
tracing his progeny in insipid copies, we follow it through the bold
variations of these three powerful and original minds. Through them it
returned to England again. Balzac, as the most important of the three, in
view of the later developments of the novel, I have discussed in a separate
chapter. Gautier's Oriental and Antique inspiration, and Mérimée's
combination of ascetic narrative with vivid subject, are also themes for
separate and particular consideration. But Hugo and Dumas are so generally
representative of the Romantic movement in story-telling, that in writing of
them in this chapter I feel I am but filling in the background already
sketched for the others.
The theatre was, in 1830, the scene of the most decisive
The Preface to
Cromwell.
battle between Romanticism and Classicism. The fight of
the painters, of the poets, of the story-tellers, seemed
concentrated in the more obvious combat of the dramatists, whose armies
could see their enemies, and even come to blows with them. And in Hugo's
preface to Cromwell, that preface which is now so much more interesting
than the play that follows it, he claims several things for the dramatist that
by act if not by argument he was later to claim for the artist in narrative. He

demands that the sublime and ridiculous should be together in literature
and, as in life, win their force from each other. The drama, and so the novel,
which also attempts in some sort a reproduction of human existence, is not
to be written on a single note. It is not to be wholly sublime or wholly
ridiculous, but both at once. The general in his triumphal car is to be
genuinely afraid of toppling over. And so, in Les Misérables, the student's
frolic is whole-heartedly described, without in any way binding the author
to make light of the sorrow of Fantine when she finds that her own
desertion is the merry surprise at the end of it. The sublime will not be the
less sublime for being mingled with the grotesque, and so, in Notre Dame
de Paris, the deepest passion in the book is felt by a hideous and deformed
dwarf, and by this same dwarf rather than by any more obvious
impersonation of justice, the lascivious priest is flung from the tower.
Looking up in his agony, as he clings to the bending cornice his desperate
hands have clutched, he does not meet the eyes of some person of a
grandeur matching the moment, but sees the grotesque face of Quasimodo,
utterly indifferent to him, looking, like one of the gargoyles, over Paris,
with tears on his distorted cheeks.
In this same preface, too, Hugo justifies innovations in language, very
necessary for an art whose new won freedom was to let it explore so much
that was unknown. When the body changes, he asks, would you keep the
coat the same? Triumphantly appealing to history, he points out that 'the
language of Montaigne is no longer that of Rabelais, the language of Pascal
is no longer that of Montaigne, and the language of Montesquieu is no
longer that of Pascal.' He is justifying there the coloured prose of
Chateaubriand, the opulent vocabulary of Gautier, and his own infinitely
various effects in prose and verse.
He was, until Sainte-Beuve took the work from his
Victor Hugo on
Scott.
hands, at once the leader and the defender of
Romanticism. And, critic and artist, severally and in the
combination that we have grown accustomed to expect in fulfilment of both
these functions, his was too sovereign a mind to adopt or borrow anything
from another writer without knowing very clearly what he intended to do
with it. Writing of Quentin Durward, he said: 'Après le roman pittoresque
mais prosaïque de Walter Scott il restera un autre roman à créer, plus beau
et plus complet encore selon nous. C'est le roman, à la fois drame et épopée,

pittoresque mais poètique, réel mais idéal, vrai mais grand, qui enchâssera
Walter Scott dans Homère.' That romance is Victor Hugo's own. His
tremendous books are conceived in the manner of an epic poet rather than
of a novelist or a romancer. The relations of his characters are not solely
concerned with themselves but with some large principle that animates the
book in which they live. If he is without Norns or Fates, if he sets his
characters against a background other than that of Destiny, he substitutes
the power of the law or the power of the sea, and illumines with a story not
only the actors who take part in it, but also the spirit of the Gothic or the
spirit of revolution.
To turn from the Waverley Novels to the romances of
The Waverley
Novels and Hugo's
Hugo, is like stepping from the open air into a vast
romances. amphitheatre whose enclosed immensity is more
overwhelming than the clear sky. Scott writes, on a plain
human level, tales that we can readily believe, chronicles that are like
private documents, or memoirs such as might have been written by the
ancestors of our own families. Hugo does not tell his tale from the point of
view of its actors, but puts them before us in a setting far larger than the one
they saw. Their petty adventures are but threads chosen arbitrarily from a
far more intricate design, and they themselves but illustrations of some
greater motion than any to which in their own right they could aspire. There
are hundreds of them, and with our narrow powers of interest and attention
we fasten on one or two, like children choosing colours on a race-course,
and follow them to the end, while Hugo, with his godlike eye, sees them all
as threads in his pattern, poor, small lives, twisted in accordance with a
design beyond their comprehension. In Scott's open air we can live and
breathe and be content, and stand firmly with our feet upon the ground. In
Hugo's amphitheatre we see an ordered spectacle of life and death, and are,
as it were, present at the shapings of the ends of man.

ALEXANDRE DUMAS

There is a much less terrible pleasure to be had from the
Dumas on Scott. works of Dumas. Behind all Hugo's books is the
solemnity, behind Dumas' the joy of living, the joie de
vivre—the French phrase, although identical, seems better to express it. To
compare Hugo's with Dumas' criticism of the Scott novel is to see very
clearly the difference in weight and depth between the two men. Hugo sees
in Scott the promise of another and a greater kind of romance. Dumas sees
only that it is possible to improve on Scott's technique. He notices that Scott
spends half a volume or so in describing his characters before setting them
in action, and in his gay way justifies him by saying: 'Il n'y a pas de feu sans

fumée, il n'y a pas de soleil sans ombre. L'ennui, c'est l'ombre; l'ennui c'est
la fumée.' Sacrifice fifty pages of ennui to the gods, and then away with
your story. Dumas decides to improve on this, to set his characters moving,
and to pour his libations of ennui on the way. 'Commencer par l'intérêt, au
lieu de commencer par l'ennui; commencer par l'action, au lieu de
commencer par la préparation; parler des personnages après les avoir fait
paraître, au lieu de les faire paraître après avoir parlé d'eux.' This is not very
sublime, after the suggestion that Hugo won from the same subject; but it
produced 'Les Trois Mousquetaires.' D'Artagnan is in a hubbub on the first
page, and the ennui of description is given us so sparsely that, watching for
it chapter by chapter, we almost consider ourselves swindled when we reach
the last and are still without it. 'The purpose of this tale is not to describe
interiors,' Dumas petulantly ejaculates when tired of talking about
Cornelius' room in La Tulipe Noire. No; certainly not; neither of rooms nor
of men. Damn psychology, and hey for full-blooded adventure. Dumas took
a free stage for his duels and headlong rides and gallant adventures and
ingenious stratagems. His men moved too fast not to feel themselves
encumbered in a furnished room; there was little point in describing a
landscape for them, since, before it was done, they were several leagues off
in another; too intricate furniture in their own heads would have cost them
hesitancies, unguarded stabs, and possible falls from a galloping horse.
Dumas' novels are novels of the theatre. His first piece
Les Trois
Mousquetaires.
of work was an attempt to make a melodrama out of
Ivanhoe, and his best books exhibit the art of Walter Scott
modified by the rules of the stage. The curtain rises on people moving
about. It falls on a climax. The action of all its scenes is in crescendo. Alter
Scott to fit these rules, and you have something like the form that Dumas
for more than half a century has imposed on non-psychological fiction.
How admirably he filled it himself. Those splendid fellows of his, whose
cavalier way fairly takes us off our feet, are not dead puppets made to wield
toy swords at the pulling of a string. There is something exuberant and
infectious even in the restraint of Athos. They are all alive, not with an
independent, almost hostile existence like that of the characters of Balzac,
but with a vitality they owe to their creator and to us, the free coursing
blood of boyish dreams. They are the things that at one time or another we
have set our hearts on being, the things that Dumas actually was. Where
they ride a jolly spirit goes with them, and we know that Dumas had only to

settle in a quiet village to turn it into a place of gay and prosperous festivity.
'Madeleine,' says D'Artagnan at the end of Vingt Ans Après, 'give me the
room on the first floor. I must keep up my dignity now that I am captain of
the musketeers. But always keep my room on the fifth floor; one never
knows what may happen.' Is not that just the attitude of Dumas, who
remarked upon his deathbed, 'I took twenty francs with me to Paris. Well, I
have kept them. There they are,' and pointed to his last louis on the
mantelpiece. In the flamboyant youthfulness of Dumas, who died a boy at
sixty-seven, and called Mazarin 'still young, for he was only fifty-six,' is
perhaps that characteristic that made Romanticism in France so complete
and satisfactory a Renaissance. When such men as he were writing books
the world had won its youth again.

BALZAC

BALZAC

Balzac used to tell a story of his father, who, when asked
His vitality.
to carve a partridge, not knowing how to set about it,
rolled up his sleeves, gripped his knife and fork, and cut
it in four with such energy as to cleave the plate at the same time and embed
the knife in the table. That was the manner of setting about things natural to
Balzac himself. He was a 'joyous wild boar' of a man, with the build and
strength of a navvy. He was never ill. Gautier tells us that the habitual
expression of that powerful face was a kind of Rabelaisian glee. Now a man
who could write the Comédie Humaine and look aside from it with a
Rabelaisian glee was perhaps the only kind of man who could have
attempted such a task without being turned, willy nilly, into a pedant.
There was a logic, a completeness, in the groundwork of
The conception of
the Comédie
the scheme, that would have sterilised the imagination of
Humaine. a man with less exuberant vitality. Compare for a moment
the Comédie Humaine with the novels of Sir Walter Scott.
Scott meant to Balzac what Maria Edgeworth had meant to himself. He had
seen in her an attempt to paint Irish country and character, and had decided
to do the same for Scotland. Balzac after those ten years of bad mediæval
stories, those ten years of labour for the Rachel of his own soul, saw in him
an attempt to paint Scottish country and character, and decided to do the
same for France. But, whereas Scott had been brought up on the Reliques of
English Poetry, and in the country of purple heather, grey rock, and leaping
stream, Balzac was nourished on philosophy and science, and spent his
youth in a Paris lodging. Scott saw men rather than kinds of man. Bailie
Nicol Jarvie is more Nicol Jarvie than Bailie. Balzac comes at life in a
much more scientific spirit. 'Does not Society make of man,' he asks, as
Chaucer has unconsciously asked before him, 'as many different men as
there are varieties in zoology? The differences between a soldier, a labourer,
an administrator, an idler, a savant, a statesman, a merchant, a sailor, a poet,
a pauper, a priest, are, though more difficult to seize, as considerable as
those that distinguish the wolf, the lion, the ass, the crow, the shark, the sea-

calf, the goat, etc.' Balzac made up his mind to collect specimens of the
social species, not pressed and dried, like the old 'Characters' of the
seventeenth century, but exhibited alive and in their natural surroundings.
He was to make a world with the colour of contemporary France, an 'august
lie, true in its details,' a world complete in itself, a world in which all the
characters were to show the impress of that state of life to which it should
please Balzac to call them. That was the idea that turned the Waverley
Novels into the Comédie Humaine, that the idea whose exposition by a less
full-blooded professor would have been so readily precise, so readily dull in
its precision.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Now there are few harder tasks for a man of
Physical energy overflowing physical energy than this, of covering
and the task of
writing. innumerable sheets of paper with wriggling unnatural
lines traced with the end of a pen. It is likely to become a
torment; the feet cross and uncross, the fingers itch, the inkpot flies across
the room, and the energy defeats itself. There is the legend of Scott's hand,

covering sheet after sheet so swiftly and with such regularity that it was
painful to watch it; but Scott's was not the bomb-like brute energy of
Balzac. Balzac, to give life to his scientific ideas, needed a more fiery
vitality than Scott's, who began and ended with merely human notions. The
actual writing of his books was proportionately more difficult for him.
There was no mere eccentricity in his habit of getting the sketches for his
books set up in type, and enlarging them from proofs in the middle of large
sheets of paper, covering the vast margins with the additions that were to
make the books themselves. It was a wise attempt to give himself the same
physical outlet as that enjoyed by the painter or sculptor, to give himself
something to pull about, something actual, something that could be
attacked, anything rather than the terrible silkworm spinning of a single
endless fibre. His energy would have been wasted in a hundred ways unless,
so far as was possible, he had fitted his work to himself and himself to his
work. Giant of concentration as he was, he added cubits to his stature by
taking thought. He made his writing hours different from every one else's,
wore a white frock something like a monk's habit, and found in the drinking
of enormous quantities of coffee a stimulant as much theatrical as
medicinal. These things meant much to him, and his use of them was an
action similar to that of Poe's schoolboy, who, when guessing odd or even
the marbles in his playmate's hand, would imitate the expression of his
adversary's face and see what thoughts arose in his mind. The paraphernalia
of work were likely to induce the proper spirit. When all his fellow
Parisians were in bed, Balzac, gathering the voluminous white folds about
his sturdy person, and glancing at the coffee stewing on the fire, sat down to
his writing-table with the conviction of an alderman sitting down to a city
dinner. There could never be a doubt in his mind as to the purpose for which
he was there.
This navvy-work of production had its influence on the
Balzac's prose.
character of his writing. But it was never in Balzac's
nature to have understood Gautier's craftsman's delight in
the polishing and chasing of diminutive things. Balzac, the working
machine, was simply enormous energy so coaxed and trained as to produce
an enormous output. The raw material of his rich humanity passed through
violent processes. It had but small chance of any very delicate finish.
Balzac thought in books and in cycles of books, never in pages, paragraphs,
or sentences. Although he was much preoccupied with 'style,' envying the

men whose writing would be charming to the ear even if it meant nothing to
the mind, the best of his own prose is unbeautiful, rugged, fiercely
energetic, peculiarly his own, and therefore not to be grumbled at. He
would have liked to write finely, just as he would have liked la vie
splendide. But his mind, delivering pickaxe blows, or furiously wrestling
with great masses of material, could not clothe itself in stately periods.
Always, out of any splendour that he made for it, shows a brown, brawny
arm, and the splendour becomes an impertinence. He had ideas on art, as he
had ideas on science, but his was too large a humanity to allow itself to be
subordinate to either. He was too full-blooded a man to be withered by a
theory. He was too eager to say what he had in his mouth to be patient in
the modulation of his voice. He was almost too much of a man to be an
artist. To think of that man fashioning small, perfect poems, who avowed
that he wrote his Contes Drôlatiques because he happened to notice the fall
in the French birth rate, is to think of a Colossus tinkering at the mechanism
of a watch.
Then, too, he had been too close to life to think of art for
His proximity to
life.
art's sake. During the years that followed his setting up
author in a garret, he had watched the existence of those
who are so near starvation that they seem to make a living by sweeping the
doorstep of Death. And, at the same time that, walking out in the evenings,
and following a workman and his wife on their way home, he had been able
to feel their rags upon his back, and to walk with their broken shoes upon
his feet, he had also had his glimpses of la vie splendide, the more vivid, no
doubt, for their contrast with the sober realities he knew. To this man,
however great a writer he might become, life would always mean more than
books. It always did. He could cut short other people's lamentations by
saying, 'Well, but let us talk of real things; let us talk of Eugénie Grandet,'
but Eugénie Grandet, the miser's daughter, interested him much more than
the mere novel of that name. His people never existed for the sake of his
books, but always his books for the sake of his people. He makes a story
one-legged or humpbacked without scruple, so long as by doing so he can
make his reader see a man and his circumstances exactly as they appeared
to himself. He was not like a pure artist, an instrument on which life played,
producing beautiful things. His concern with life was always positive. His
world was not a world of dream and patterned imagery, but, according to
his mood, was an elaborate piece of mechanism and he an impassioned

mechanician, or a zoological garden and he an impassioned zoologist. It is
almost matter for wonder that such a man should choose to express himself
in narrative.
And yet the novel, as he conceived it, gave him the best
His conception of
the novel.
of opportunities for putting his results before the world. If
we allow ourselves to set all our attention on politics and
finance and social theory, we lose in life all but the smell of blue-books, and
the grey colour of Stock Exchange returns. If Balzac had written science,
and not stories, we should have only had the ideas of his novels without that
passionate presentment of concrete things that gives those ideas their
vitality. Indeed, the novels are far greater than the ideas, just as the poetic,
seeing man in Balzac was greater than the scientist. Weariless in
distinguishing man from man, type from type, specimen from specimen, by
the slightest indication of the clay, he was able in novels, as he could never
have done in works of science, to give the colour of each man's life
expressed in his actions, in his talk, in his choice of clothes, in the furniture
of his room. The action of all novels, like that of all plays, is performed in
the brain of the reader or spectator. The novelist's and dramatist's characters
are like pieces on a chessboard, symbols of possibilities not obviously
expressed. In older fiction these possibilities were left so vague that the
reader could adopt any part he chose, without in the least interfering with
the story, independent as that was of personal character. Never before
Balzac made them had the chessmen assumed so much of human detail. In
his books they are no longer pegs of wood, depending for their meanings on
the reader's generosity, for their adventures on the ingenuity of the author.
They make their moves in their own rights. The hero of a Balzac novel is
not the reader, in borrowed clothes, undergoing a series of quite arbitrary
experiences. He cannot be made to do what the author requires, but fills his
own suits, and has a private life. Balzac knows and makes his reader feel
that his characters have not leapt ready-made into the world to eat and drink
through a couple of hundred pages and vanish whence they came. They
have left their mark on things, and things have left their mark on them.
They have lived in pages where he has not seen them, and Balzac never
drags them to take a part in existences to which they do not belong. I can
remember no case where Balzac uses a stock scene, a room, or a garden, or
a valley that would do for anything. There was only one room, one valley,
one garden, where the characters could have said those words, lost that

money, or kissed those kisses, and Balzac's stupendous energy is equal not
only to pouring life into his people, but also to forcing the particular scene
upon his canvas with such vivid strokes that every cobble seems to have a
heart, and every flower in a pot to sway its blossoms with the sun. Even in
the short stories, where he often follows gods that are not his own, writing
of madness like a Hoffmann, and of intrigue like a Boccaccio, his peculiar
genius is apparent in the environments. How carefully, in La Messe de
l'Athée, he works out the conditions of life that made the story possible for
its actors. And, in the longer novels, there is scarcely a sentence unweighted
with evidence that is of real import to him who would truly understand the
characters and happenings of the book. How much does not the story of
Eugénie Grandet owe to that description of the little money-getting, vine-
growing town of Saumur, with its cobbled streets, its old houses, its greedy
faces watching the weather from the house doors, the only proper setting for
the narrow power of Goodman Grandet, and the leaden monotony of his
daughter's life?
Balzac's fierce determination that his lies should be true
Balzac's world and
that of Realism.
in their details has often been remarked in claiming him
as the first of the French realists. And, indeed, others of
his characteristics, his interest in life as it is, the scientific bias that found its
parody in Zola, his fearlessness in choice of subject, his entire freedom
from classical ideals, are certainly attributes of realism. Realism is ready,
like Balzac, to deal with stock exchanges and bakeries and all the side
shops of civilisation; realism finds Greek Greek and not an Elixir of Life;
realism tries to see life as it is. But realism (an impossible ideal) needs for
its approximate attainment a man of ordinary energy; and this Balzac was
not. Balzac used Thor's hammer, not one from the carpenter's shop. He
lived like ten men and so do his characters. A crossing-sweeper in a story by
Balzac would wear out his broom in half an hour, but the broom of a
crossing-sweeper of de Maupassant or Flaubert would be certain of an
average life. Balzac's world is not the world of realism, because it goes too
fast, like a clock without a pendulum, running at full speed. His world is
more alive than ours, and so are his men. They are demons, men carried to
the nth power. Fire runs in their veins instead of blood, and we watch them
with something like terror, as if we were peeping into hell. They are
superhuman like Balzac himself, and have become a kind of lesser

divinities. None but he would have dared 'to frame their fearful symmetry.'
None but they could so well have illustrated existence as Balzac saw it.
And life, as this Rabelaisian Frenchman saw it, in the
A new motive in
fiction.
chaotic years of the nineteenth century, was a terrible
thing except to the blind and the numbed, and to those
who, like himself, possessed 'unconquerable souls.' He found two primary
motives in existence. Passion and the production of children was one. He
said that this was the only one. But his life and his work made it clear that
there was another, and that this other was money. Money, the need of it, the
spending of it, fantastic but always acute plans for getting hold of it, like
that suggested in Facino Cane, filled his own life, and were not banished
even from his love-letters. His own obsession by debts and business forced
on him as a novelist a new way of looking at life, and, through him, gave
another outlook to story-telling. In the older novels, Fielding's for example,
rich were rich, and poor were poor, and only to be changed from one to the
other by some calamity or fairy godmother of a coincidence. People were
static; unless they turned out to be Somebody's illegitimate son or rightful
heir, their clothes were not of a finer cut as they grew older, and if they ate
off wooden platters in the first chapter, they supped no more daintily in the
last. In romantic tales and fairy stories, a hero might cut his way to fortune
through dragons or piratical Turks; in the rogue novels he might swindle a
dinner, and after long switchbacking between twopence and nothing,
happen by accident upon a competence; he never, before Balzac took him in
hand, went grimly at life, closing his heart, concentrating his energies,
compelling even love to help him in his steady climb from poverty to
opulence. He left that to the villain, and the story-teller took care that the
villain eventually got his deserts. The older novelists were vastly interested
in the progress of a love-affair; Balzac looks kindly at that, but his real
interest is in the progress of a financial superman. The wealth and poverty
of Balzac's characters is the quality that makes or breaks them. The
mainspring of their actions is the desire of getting on in life. What is the
tragedy of Eugénie Grandet, but money? What is the tragedy of Père Goriot,
but money? Eliminate wealth and poverty from either of them and they
cease to exist. If old Goriot had been rich and indulgent to his daughters he
would have been an estimable father; but he is poor; his daughters must be
luxurious, and so he is Père Goriot. The story is that of Lear and his
kingdom, translated into hundred franc notes and lacking the Cordelia.

Love, Wisdom, Gentleness are inconsequent dreamers in a house of
Mammon. They talk in window corners and behind curtains, ashamed of
their disinterestedness. They are like the old gods banished from the
temples, whispering in secret places in the woods, and going abroad quietly
in the twilight, while in the glare of noon the clanking brazen giant strides
heavily across the world.

'And underneath his feet, all scattered lay
Dead skulls and bones of men, whose life had gone astray.'

GAUTIER AND THE EAST

GAUTIER AND THE EAST

The East is an invention of the nineteenth century. We
The East as a
means of
have only to look at the works of Voltaire or of Goldsmith
expression. to see that the Orient did not exist before the time of the
Romantic movement. To early writers it meant nothing
but polygamy, moguls, elephants, and 'bonzes,' and the eighteenth-century
translation of the Arabian Nights did little more than supply an entertaining
form to an ironical philosopher. Even when it became the fashion to make
imaginary Orientals expose the follies of the West, the East had not yet
become alive for us. We find scarcely a hint in the hundred and twenty
letters of The Citizen of the World that it meant more than a dialectical
expression for topsy-turvydom, a place to which you could refer as to
Lilliput or to Brobdingnag, useful like the x of algebra in illustrating the
properties of other things. The first glimmerings of discovery are in
Beckford's Vathek, an extravagant book, belittled by a schoolboyish humour
—as when the Caliph plays football with the rotund figure of the Indian
Magician—but written by a man to whom the East did really mean some
sort of gorgeous dream.
For the East is not an expression of philosophy, or of geography, but of
temperament; it is a dream that has led many to leave their people for its
people, their homes for desert tents, in the effort to turn its conventions into
realities of life. Men have fallen in love with it, as they have fallen in love
with statues or with the beautiful women of pictures. It means more than
itself, like a man whom time has lifted into Godhead. It has been given the
compelling power of a religion. I believe it was an invention made possible
by the discovery of local colour. With the emphasis of local colour came an
emphasised difference in places. Minds only mildly preferring one place to
another when both were vague, most vigorously preferred one or other
place when both were realised in vivid detail, and could be readily
compared. Fastidious minds seeking the stage-properties of expression
could choose them in the booths of all the world. Men who did not care for

the settings of their own lives were able to fill out their dim Arcadias with
detail, and vein their phantom goddesses with blood.
The East, when Gautier was growing up in the rich tastes of the Romantic
movement, was ready to supply the most delicious conventions. Goethe had
shown its possibilities. It was there like a many-coloured curtain behind
which he could build a world less entangled, less unmanageable than his
own. Its newness must not be forgotten in considering his use of it, and in
thinking of his use of Antiquity we must remember that it was as novel as
the East.
Now the Antique was one of the cudgels with which the
The Antique.
Classicists tried to beat the heads of the Romanticists in
the battles of that time. It did not mean to Gautier what it
meant to them. Its metamorphosis was simultaneous with the birth of the
East, and had almost the same cause. Insisting on local colour in places, the
Romanticists insisted also on local colour in humanity. Cromwell was to be
allowed to say that he had the parliament in his bag and the king in his
pocket. Cæsar was to be allowed to talk like a man and even to be one. So
that for Gautier Antiquity meant not a cold inhumanity that had been
beautiful, but a warm, full-blooded life that worshipped simple, energetic
gods, and found expression in a thousand ways other than the speech of
blank verse and heroic actions that had been so often represented in pictures
of an annoying timidity of colouring. The East and the Antique together had
been touched as if by magic, and turned from the abstract into the concrete,
from the heroic into the human, and so into the very material for personal
expression.
Gautier's attitude towards the East is not unlike that of
The East and
Arcadia.
the Elizabethans towards Arcadia. Sir Philip Sidney,
courtier, soldier, and busy statesman, wrote in terms of
shepherds, shepherdesses, and shipwrecked princes, and worked in an ideal
atmosphere where no cares were greater than love, or a thorn in a lamb's
foot. He, with

'A sweet attractive kinde of grace
A full assurance given by lookes,
Continual comfort in a face,
The lineaments of gospel bookes,'

seemed to belong to that Golden Age which has never been now, but always
long ago. And Gautier, busy writer of articles and travel-books, massive and
vividly alive, could not persuade himself to be Parisian and contemporary.
Nor would it be extravagant to compare him with the pastoral writers of to-
day, Celtic and Gaelic, who like him lift their emotions into a simpler, more
congenial atmosphere, and like him insist continually on the local colour of
their dreams. These writers, sitting in London or in Edinburgh, hear,
without moving from their comfortable chairs, the cry of the curlew on the
moor, and are transported to a quiet bay, half enclosed by cliffs, 'in two
white curves, like the wings of the solander when she hollows them as she
breasts the north wind,' and under the spells of an intenser imagined life
find their own emotions more vivid and more easily expressed. Gautier,
sitting in Paris, sees the swallows fluttering about the roofs and flying south
in autumn.

'Je comprends tout ce qu'elles disent,
Car le poète est un oiseau;
Mais captif ses élans se brisent
Contre un invisible réseau!

Des ailes! des ailes! des ailes!
Comme dans le chant de Ruckert,
Pour voler, là-bas avec elles
Au soleil d'or, au printemps vert!'

That cry for wings is the keynote of his most passionately beautiful work.
When he is at his best; when he is not projecting young men with a
mathematical freedom of morals into a Western society; in those moments
when he is most himself, we hear clipped feathers beat against the bars. He
sought to escape from Paris to the Enchanted Islands, and from the

nineteenth century to the Golden Age. The Enchanted Islands he had
identified with the East, and the Golden Age was the time of the Pharaohs
or of the making of the Venus. As the Christian fingers his crucifix and is
able to kneel upon the footsteps of the throne, so Gautier found talismans to
help his dreams to their desires. A mummy's foot, a marble hand took him
to the times he loved, or half revealed the perfections that reality refused. A
curiosity shop was a postern-gate to heaven, and a merchant of antiquities
held St. Peter's keys.
His art is that of making his dreams come true. He is not
The story-telling of
dreams.
an observer of life, like Richardson, Fielding, or De
Maupassant. He does not copy the surface of
contemporary existence; but cuts away all but passion, and clothes that in
symbols whose strangeness disentangled it and helped him to make it real.
Beautiful women step down to him from their tapestries, and, living on
drops of his blood, come back to him out of their graves. The Princess
Hermonthis claims her little foot that he has bought as a paper-weight, and
takes him to the tomb of the Pharaohs and the pre-adamite kings sitting with
their thousand peoples waiting for the final day. The Pompeian harlot is
brought alive by the love of a youth for the imprint her perfect breasts have
left in molten lava. He is ill at ease in his most famous Roman de la Momie
until he has finished with the Englishman and the doctor, and is translating
the scroll of papyrus buried three thousand years ago with Tahoser in the
sarcophagus.

THÉOPHILE GAUTIER

But it is too easy to construct a man out of his work. It is
Gautier the man. more interesting to compare the man of this world with
the man he would have liked to be, and the man he chose
to express. Gautier was not pure dreamer. Though the world of his art was
as far from the world of Paris, as the world of Mr. Yeats from the world of
London or Dublin, he was not a seer, or a poet between whom and reality
hung a veil of dreams. He was a solid man, one of whose proudest

memories was a blow that registered five hundred and thirty-two pounds on
an automatic instrument, the result of daily washing down five pounds of
gory mutton with three bottles of red Bordeaux. He was a Porthos, and the
Gautier of his stories, that gorgeous barbaric figure, was his boast,
cherished as Porthos cherished his dignity. The traits he loved in himself
were those that gave colour to his fiction. His olive skin, his strength, his
vitality, his scorn of the religion of sacrifice—these were the details he
caressed. He was never tired of insisting on everything that helped in this
Oriental and Antique projection of himself. His hero in Mademoiselle de
Maupin exclaims: 'I am a man of the Homeric times; the world where I live
does not belong to me, and I do not understand the society about me. Christ
has not yet come for me; I am as pagan as Alcibiades and Phidias.... I find
the earth as beautiful as heaven, and I think that perfection of form is virtue.
I love a statue better than a phantom, and full noon better than twilight.
Three things please me: gold, marble and purple, splendour, solidity,
colour.' When a reviewer described him as a being, 'fat, jovial, and
sanguinary,' he quotes the description with gratitude, and explains gleefully
that it refers to his taste for bull-fights. He begins a book: 'People have often
caricatured us, dressed like a Turk, cross-legged on cushions.... The
caricature is only an exaggeration of the truth.' That was how he liked to
think of himself, and how he would like to be imagined. It is interesting to
know that he was a kindly bear of a man, who was always called by his
Christian name, and delighted in astonishing his friends with outbursts of
genius served up in a joyous obscenity.
He was not a man of wealth as his work suggests; but an extremely
industrious journalist. Like Balzac, he was proud of his prodigious activity.
He confesses that he wrote about three hundred volumes: but that is the
estimate of Porthos; his biographer puts the number at sixty. From his
twenty-fifth year he was an artist on a treadmill, and only at every
hundredth, or two hundredth, or three hundredth turn of the wheel could he
escape for a little and try to satisfy himself. That is why his poems and
shorter stories are the most perfect specimens of his later work. He needed
things that could be roughed out in a sitting and carried about without risk
until the time when he could work on them again. He was able to hurry out
of sight his dozen sheets for the Presse or the Figaro, sit down on his
cushions, let his fingers run through the long hair of a Persian cat, and turn
over again and again one of the minute Enamels or Cameos of his poetry. In

so small a space he could afford to be fastidious. He could take up the little
thing a week later, and a month after that, and file and polish it to his
content. It was the same with the stories. The story-telling Gautier was a
Gautier on holiday.
He was a complete man, and could, in active life, have twisted the present
if he had chosen. But he did not choose. As for politics, 'what does it matter
whether one is ruled by a sabre, a sprinkler of holy-water, or an umbrella?'
He has been censured for this, but the censure means no more than to say he
was a perfect artist unfortunately not interested in local government. One
does not ask a shoemaker if his soles and uppers are Socialist or only gentle
Liberal. As for his own life, he worked hard, brought up his children, but
found his emotions too intricate to please him. He had to separate them, and
translate them into terms of another time and place. Modernity rattled past
him, like the chariots of the king past the potter, who would not look up
from his wheel lest an ugly curve should throw awry the vessel he was
shaping. Gautier did his duty by this world and left it, discovering for others
what Baudelaire called 'the consolation of the arts,' and finding peace
himself in the less encumbered simplicity of his Ancient and Oriental
Arcadia.
His work was the construction of a paradise for himself
The flowers of the
white narcissus.
in which other people are allowed to walk. His stories are
a substitute for opium and haschisch, and take us into a
world like that of old romance and myth, where we meet our own souls
walking in strange clothes. 'Art,' says Santayana, 'so long as it needs to be a
dream, will never cease to be a disappointment.' We leave a volume of
Gautier as we leave the Mabinogion, or the Morte Darthur, or the Volsunga
Saga, or a book of fairy-tales. We have to readjust ourselves before meeting
the difficulties of life. But opposite Santayana's sentence we may set one
from Mahomet. 'If any man have two loaves, let him sell one, and buy
flowers of the white narcissus; for the one is food for the body and the other
is food for the soul.' And perhaps this art, where the world is simplified into
the conventions of a tapestry, by its intense appeal to primitive emotions,
may help us like a touchstone to distinguish between the things to which
more than lip-service is slavery, and the things to which less than life-
service is death.

POE AND THE NEW TECHNIQUE

POE AND THE NEW TECHNIQUE

'It is the curse,' says Poe, 'of a certain order of mind that
Self-conscious
method.
it can never rest satisfied with the consciousness of its
ability to do a thing. Not even is it content with doing it.
It must both know and show how it was done.' It is all very well to call it a
curse; it is the curse that gave us Leonardo's notebooks, Reynolds'
Discourses, and Stevenson's few essays on the art of writing; the curse that
is among the reasons of Leonardo's excellence, Reynolds' excellence,
Stevenson's excellence, and the excellence of Poe himself. It is the curse
that is the secret of all real knowledge of technique. The man who is as
interested in the way of doing a thing as in the thing when done, is the man
who is likely to put a new tool in the hands of his fellow-craftsmen.
Poe's methods were such a delight to him that his works have an uncanny
atmosphere about them, as if he had not written them but had been present,
passionately observant and critical, while they were being written by
somebody else. More than once he used his pen to make a new thing out of
a discussion of an old one, and on these occasions he dissects his own
motives in so impersonal a manner that it is difficult for the reader to
remember that the author examining is in any way connected with the
author undergoing examination. The Raven, for example, a profound piece
of technique, is scarcely as profound, and certainly not as surprising, as The
Philosophy of Composition, in which its construction is minutely analysed,
and Poe callously explains, as a matter of scientific rather than personal
interest, that the whole poem was built on the refrain 'Nevermore,' and that
this particular refrain was chosen on account of the sonority and ease of o
and r sounded together. It was inevitable that such a man busying himself
with story-telling should bring something new into the art.

WILLIAM GODWIN

Another story-teller, who, like Poe, was a philosopher
William Godwin and deeply interested in technique, had existed before,
and Caleb
Williams. and from him Poe had that strengthening of his ideas that
is given by outside confirmation. He refers often to
William Godwin, the author of An Enquiry concerning Political Justice and
of several novels, among them one now most undeservedly half forgotten,
called Caleb Williams. It is seldom possible to point to any one book as the
sign-post of a literary cross-roads, but there can be no doubt that in Caleb
Williams we see the beginnings of self-conscious construction in story-
telling. Of that book Hazlitt wrote: 'No one ever began Caleb Williams that

did not read it through: no one that ever read it could possibly forget it, or
speak of it after any length of time but with an impression as if the events
and feelings had been personal to himself.' And the author not only had
done this, but had known how it was done. It is usual to say that Poe
himself was the first to choose an effect and then plan a story to produce it.
But Caleb Williams was published in 1794, and in a preface to one of the
later editions Godwin gave his methods away. On him also lay that fruitful
curse. He wrote: 'I formed a conception of a book of fictitious adventure
that should in some way be distinguished by a very powerful interest.
Pursuing this idea, I invented first the third volume of my tale, then the
second, and last of all the first.'
Godwin perhaps did not realise how revolutionary was his attitude, and
even Hazlitt, delighted as he was by their results, does not seem to have
noticed the novelty of his methods. But Poe, finding Godwin's ideas of the
very temper of his own, developed them logically as far as they would go,
and in two paragraphs that I am going to quote, expressed in a final manner
the principles of self-conscious construction.
The first is taken from an essay on Hawthorne:
The architecture of
narrative.
'A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise,
he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but,
having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect
to be worked out, he then invents such incidents—he then contrives
such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived
effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of the
effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition
there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or
indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means,
with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in
the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art a sense of the
fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented
unblemished, because undisturbed.' ...

The second is more personal, and from The Philosophy of Composition:

'I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect.... Keeping
originality always in view, I say to myself, in the first place, "Of the

innumerable effects or impressions of which the heart, the intellect, or
(more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the
present occasion, select?" Having chosen a novel first, and secondly a
vivid effect, I consider whether it can be best wrought out by incident
or tone—whether by ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or the
converse, or by peculiarity both of incident and tone—afterwards
looking about me (or rather within) for such combination of event and
tone as shall best aid me in the construction of the effect.'

Here, of course, he is exaggerating actual fact to make
The Masque of the his meaning more clear; but I am sure that even the
Red Death.
exaggeration is deliberate. If he did not literally work in
that way he certainly worked in that spirit. A writer of Poe's fertility of
imagination would be at least biassed in choosing his effect by
consideration of material already in his head. But, the effect once chosen,
he left nothing to chance. He would never, like the older story-tellers, allow
himself to be carried away by a wave of his own emotion. He stands beside
de Maupassant and the conscious artists of the latter half of the nineteenth
century. His emotional material is never emptied carelessly in front of the
reader. Chosen scraps of it are laid before him, one by one, in a chosen
order, producing a more powerful effect than the unrestrained discharge of
the whole. The first sentences of one of his stories prepare its readers for the
atmosphere demanded by its conclusion. In The Masque of the Red Death,
for example, revolting horror is the emotion on which he built. So, from the
terrible opening lines, 'The Red Death had long devastated the country. No
pestilence had ever been so fatal and so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and
seal—the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains and
sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution
...' to the end, 'And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death.
He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers
in the blood-bedewed hall of their revel, and died, each in the despairing
posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the
last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and
Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all,' we are led on
through consciously created disquietude and terror. How menacing is the
sentence that immediately follows the prelude: 'But the Prince Prospero was

happy and dauntless and sagacious.' We feel at once that the shadow of
death is at his elbow.
Perhaps Poe's technique is more easily examined in
The detective
stories.
those of his tales in which the same faculties that planned
the construction supplied also the motive. The three great
detective stories, The Purloined Letter, The Murders in the Rue Morgue,
and The Mystery of Marie Roget, are made of reasoning and built on
curiosity, the very mainspring of analysis. It is a profitable delight to take
any one of these stories, and, working backwards from the end to the
beginning, to follow the mind of the architect. Each of the tales states a
difficulty and secretes an explanation that is gradually to be reached by the
reader, who identifies the processes of his own mind with those of the
analytical Dupin. Starting always with the solution, we can watch Poe
refusing the slightest irrelevance, and at the same time artfully piling up
detail upon detail in exactly that order best calculated to keep the secret, to
heighten the curiosity, to disturb the peace of the reader's mind, and to hold
him in conjectural suspense until the end.
But it is easy, in considering the technique of Poe's
Poe's mind.
stories, his smiling refusal of 'inspiration,' his confident
mastery over his material, to let the brilliance of his
analytical powers hide from us his intimacy with the beautiful, the richness
and vividness of his imagination, and, particularly, the passionate character
of his mind. Like Leonardo da Vinci, he was a man whose works were the
result of the energetic fusing of an emotional personality into moulds
designed by reason. Not all Leonardo's theories and calculations would
have sufficed to make a Mona Lisa. And if Poe had been merely a skilled
technician, like so many of his imitators, we should have had from him only
unbeautiful toys no less valueless than theirs. All Poe's work depends, like
all Leonardo's, on his power of retaining the poetry, the energy of his
material, after submitting it to his constructive science, and then, when the
moulds have been made, of pouring it into them red-hot and fluid, as if in
the primal vitality of its conception. In those very detective stories, that
seem built by and of the coldest-blooded reason, what is it that makes them
great but Poe's absorbing passion for the manner of mind of their leading
character. Dupin is not a mere detective. He is not an analyst, but analysis.
He is the embodiment of the logical spirit in mankind, just as Nicolete, in

the old French tale, is the embodiment of the loving spirit in womankind. It
is for this reason that some have accused Dupin and Nicolete of a lack of
individuality. They are not individual, but universal.
If we would understand the matter as well as the manner of his stories, we
must think of him as two men, and remember that the same sensibility that
served the man of anagrams, and ciphers, and detective puzzles, served also
the worshipper of beauty, and made him tremble like a lover at the faintest
whisper of her name. Delicately balanced, alike as analyst and æsthete, he
was moved profoundly by the smallest circumstance. Just as a glass of wine
was sufficient to overturn his reason, so the least wind of suggestion stirred
his brain in a deep and surprising manner. Nothing that happened to him
touched him only on the surface. Everything dropped to the depths of him,
and sometimes returned enriched and recreated. Ideas that others would
have passed over became for him and for his readers powerful, haunting
and inevitable. Ideas of mesmerism, of hypnotism, and of madness, that
have been for so many lesser artists only the materials for foolishness, were
pregnant for him with wonderful effects and stories that, once read, can
never be forgotten. In William Wilson he is using less flippantly than
Stevenson the idea of dual personality. In The Oval Portrait, where a
painter transfers the very soul of his lady to his canvas, and, as the portrait
seems to breathe alive, turns round to find her dead, he is using the subtle,
half-thought things that an earlier writer would scarcely have felt, or, if he
had, would have brushed, like cobwebs, secretly aside.

EDGAR ALLAN POE

With a mind so sensitive, a coinage so rare, and a
His failures. technique so thorough, it is curious that he should so
frequently have failed. And yet, when we examine his
failures they are not difficult to explain. They are due in every case, saving
only his attempts to be funny, which are like hangman's jokes, to sudden
rents in the veils of his illusions, made by single impossible phrases whose

impossibility he seems to have been unable to recognise. I could give a
hundred examples, but perhaps none better than the excruciating line in an
otherwise beautiful poem, where he tells us that

'The sweet Lenore hath "gone before," with Hope, that flew beside.'

Lapses like that destroy like lightning flashes the mysterious atmosphere he
has been at pains to create. They are the penalty he had to pay for being a
citizen in a youthful democracy. Americans are never safe from the pitfalls
of a language that is older than their nation.
In the America of that time, Poe was like the little boy in
His isolation.
the grocer's shop, who, while the shopmen are busy with
paper and string, dreams of green meadows and scribbles
verses on the sugar bags. Even in Europe he would have been one of those
men 'who live on islands in the sea of souls.' There are some like Scott and
Gautier who are always called by their Christian names, and can talk
unreservedly with a thousand. There are others more aloof in mind of whom
it is difficult even to think with familiarity. It seems fitting enough to hear
of Scott as Walter or Wattie, and of Gautier as Théo, even in old age; but
who would have dared to call that man Tommy who heard in tavern song
some echo of the music of the spheres? There are men who cannot be
habitually good companions, and, when the talk is at its loudest, turn from
the crowd, pull aside the curtain, and look up to see the pale moon far above
the housetops. Such a man was Poe. He would have been lonely even in the
city of Europe where he could perhaps have found three men of his own
aloofness from the inessential, his own hatred of the commonplace, his own
intense belief in individualism. He was extraordinarily lonely in America.
His love of beauty, his elevation of his work above its results in gold, were
next to incomprehensible by that people in that chaotic state of their
development. Energetic and wholly practical, fiercely busied with material
advancement, they could not understand his passionate, impractical,
intellectual existence. His biographer, a literary man, remembered not that
he was a great artist, but that he died through drink, not that he had made
beautiful things but that he had gained little money by doing so. In the Poe
who 'reeled across Broadway on the day of the publication of The Raven,' in
the Poe who died in an hospital, they forgot the reality, and, in their hurry,

found it easy to make a melodrama out of a gentle and inoffensive life.
Their traditional idea of Poe allows his extravagances to represent him. It is
as if we were to describe some hills by saying there was a lightning flash
between the peaks. I prefer to think of the little cottage at Fordham, where
he lived with his wife and her mother, and their pets, parrots and bobolinks,
a peaceful, small citadel held by those three friends against the world.
Throughout Poe's harassed existence this note of gentleness and quiet is
always sounding somewhere below the discords of penury and suffering.
The result of his isolation, his poverty, his sensibility,
His work.
and his intellectual energy was a great deal of work of no
value whatever, some melancholy and beautiful verse,
critical articles of a kind then new in America, a philosophical poem, some
tales of the same flavour as the most delightful of Euclid's propositions, and
some other stories that can only be fully enjoyed by those who come to
them with the reverence and careful taste it is proper to bring to a glass of
priceless wine. It is by them chiefly that he will be remembered. They are a
delicacy, not a staple of food. They are not stories from which we can learn
life; but they are the key to strange knowledge of ourselves. They leave us
richer, not in facts but in emotions. We find our way with their help into
novel corners of sensation. They are like rare coloured goblets or fantastic
metal-work, and we find, often with surprise, that we have waited for them.
That is their vindication, that the test between the valueless and the
invaluable of the fantastic. There are tales of twisted extravagance that stir
us with no more emotion than is given by an accidental or capricious
decoration never felt or formed in the depths of a man. But these stories,
like those patterns, however grotesque, that have once meant the world to a
mind sensible to beauty, have a more than momentary import. Like old
melody, like elaborate and beautiful dancing, like artificial light, like the
sight of poison or any other concentrated power, they are among the
significant experiences that are open to humanity.

HAWTHORNE AND MORAL ROMANCE

HAWTHORNE AND MORAL ROMANCE

Hawthorne is one of the earliest story-tellers whom we
The essayist in
story-telling.
remember as much for himself as for his books. He is
loved or hated, as an essayist is loved or hated, without
reference to the subjects on which he happened to write. He wrote in a
community for whom a writer was still so novel as to possess some rags of
the old splendours of the sage; an author was something wonderful, and no
mere business man. He had not to expect any hostility in his reader, but
rather a readiness to admire (of which he seldom took advantage), and an
eagerness to enjoy him for his own sake. He could assume, as an essayist
assumes when he dances naked before his readers, that they were not there
to scoff. He brought a sweet ingenuous spirit into modern story-telling that
would perhaps have been impossible had he been writing for a more
sophisticated audience. We love him for it. He made books, he said, 'for his
known and unknown friends.' As he says it, he brings us all into the circle.
When we think of Fielding, Bunyan, or Cervantes, we think of Tom Jones,
Pilgrim's Progress, and Don Quixote; when we think of Elia, Table Talk,
and The Scarlet Letter, we think of Lamb, Hazlitt, and Hawthorne.
This engaging, unsuspicious, essayistical attitude of his
Hawthorne and
Poe.
would have been quite impossible to Poe; but we must
remember that Hawthorne and Poe, although
contemporary, knew very different Americas. Poe's birth was a kind of
accident, and he approached America penniless, so that she was a hostile
place to him, a country of skinflint editors and large terrible towns, from
which to escape in books, and, as far as possible, in life. He hated the New
America, but he belonged to her. Hawthorne belonged to the old. His family
connected him with her history; he was never at her mercy; as we learn
from his rambling prefaces, that would be intolerable in a less lovable
writer, she was endeared to him by a delightful boyhood, and did not refuse
him a peaceful youth of devotion to his art. She never treated him otherwise
than tenderly, and he did not leave her until as a representative of her
people, nor sought escape from her in books, except for those of his

shadowy creatures who could move with greater freedom in a less bread-
and-buttery fairyland.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

His life, as we learn it from those prefaces and from his
Hawthorne's life.
biographers, was as gentle as the man himself. We read of
quiet days of work in a study from whose windows he

could watch the sunlight through the willow boughs; of days on the river
with Thoreau in a canoe which that angular reformer had built with his own
hands; of meetings with Emerson walking in the woods, 'with that pure
intellectual gleam diffused about his person like the garment of a shining
one'; of evenings before the red fire in a little room with white moonlight
bringing out the patterns on the carpet, weaving the tapestries of dream that
were next day to come alive upon the paper. These people, who were to
make the intellectual life of America, were not American in the peace of
their existence. Hawthorne, in the newest of all countries, wrote 'in a clear,
brown, twilight atmosphere.' He was a lover of secondhand things, and so
clothed things with his imagination that all he touched was green with ivy.
No contemporary or even historical romances have about them such ancient
tenderness and legendary dusk as his. It is extraordinary to think that he was
born within two years of Poe. He thought 'the world was very weary, and
should recline its vast head on the first convenient pillow and take an age-
long nap.' America, at least, had a thousand other things to do, but it was
not until he had seen Europe that Hawthorne recognised the fact.
His notebooks reflect at the same time this quiet life and
His notebooks.
its excitements, the stirring adventures of an artist in
search of perfection. He 'had settled down by the wayside
of life like a man under an enchantment.' None but the artist can know how
happy such enchantment is. He notices the flashing soles of a boy's bare
feet running past him in the wood, and 'a whirlwind, whirling the dried
leaves round in a circle, not very violently.' He writes one day, 'The tops of
the chestnut trees have a whitish appearance, they being, I suppose, in
bloom'; two days later, unsatisfied, he makes another attempt to fit his
words to his impression:—'The tops of the chestnut trees are peculiarly rich,
as if a more luscious sunshine were falling on them than anywhere else,
"Whitish," as above, don't express it.' One of his biographers, himself no
mean artist, suggests that Hawthorne's must have been a dull existence, if in
it such trifles were worthy of note. But the frequency of such notes,
interspersed by innumerable sketches for stories, is not a sign of the poverty
of Hawthorne's life but of its opulence. For Hawthorne, busied always with
dim things not easily expressed, every walk was a treasure hunt that might
supply some phrase, some simile, that would give blood and sinew to the
ghost of an idea.

His friends were as far removed from the ordinary as
The material of his himself. He was never 'bustled in the world of workaday.'
work.
Even his spell of life as surveyor in the Customs was
such that his description of it reads not unlike Charles Lamb's recollections
of the old clerks in the South-Sea House. The Customs House was a place
of sleep and cobwebs, and the people in it, mostly retired sea-captains,
'partook of the genius of the place.' 'Pour connaître l'homme,' says Stendhal,
'il suffit de l'étudier soi-même; pour connaître les hommes, il faut les
pratiquer.' Hawthorne had never kept company with men; his nature and his
circumstances made him learn man from his own heart. He was never
hampered as a romancer by the kind of knowledge that would have made
him a novelist. He deals not with manners, for he had little opportunity of
studying them, nor with passions, for they had not greatly troubled him, but
with conscience. He plays upon the strings of conscience, and, dusty as the
instrument may be, his playing wakes an echo.
Perhaps if he had been less personal, less lovable, we could not have
tolerated his tampering with those secret strings whose music is so novel
and so poignant. Certainly we would have found him intolerable if he had
been less serious. If he had jangled those fibres with a laugh they would
have given no response. If he had waked them with a careless discord they
would have broken. We can bear it because he is Hawthorne; we listen to
him because he is in earnest. All, in such matters, depends upon the attitude
of the artist. War, for example, is a terrible thing in Tolstoy, a joyous thing
in Dumas, and an ordinary thing, neither terrible nor joyous, in Smollett.
We take to ourselves something of an artist's outlook, and sin is nothing to
us unless we hear of it from a man to whom it is momentous.
I remember a little picture by Goya representing a monk
Goya's 'Monk and
Witch'.
and a witch. The woman, with white staring eyeballs,
wide nostrils, fallen jaw, shrinks back against the monk in
puling terror; and he, crazed utterly, his eyes fixed on nothingness, shrieks
with gaping mouth some horrid incantation that drowns the gasping
breathing of the witch. Theirs is no physical fear of fire or sword or
scourge: they have sinned, and seen the face of God. Before me are a set of
reproductions of Holbein's 'Dance of Death.' Death lies before the feet of
the burgess in the road, plucks unconcernedly at the robe of the abbot,
viciously sticks a spear through the middle of the knight, and snuffs the

altar candles in the nun's cell, where her young lover is playing on a guitar.
But the picture of Judgment at the end is no more than a careless grace after
meat. It is there with propriety but without conviction. Death is a full stop,
not a comma. What is it to me that the burgess may have cheated, the abbot
be a hypocrite, the knight a roysterer, and the nun a wanton? Death is close
at hand to put a stop to the doings of them all. I do not know what was the
sin of the monk or the witch, and yet the mere memory of their spiritual
terror moves me more than the pictures before my eyes. Their peril is not of
this world.
Hawthorne's finest stories are a Dance of Death, in
The background of
which Death is no mere end of a blind alley, but a
Hawthorne's tales.
dividing of the ways. Those dim people he found in his
own soul are important to us by their chances of salvation or damnation.
Their feet

'Are in the world as on a tight-rope slung
Over the gape and hunger of Hell.'[8]

The background to their actions is not happiness and misery, questions of
this world only, but righteousness and mortal sin. The fortunes of
Hawthorne's characters are shaping for Eternity. When Ethan Brand flings
himself into the furnace, what one of Hawthorne's readers ever thought he
died there?
Even this dignity of grave belief, combined with the charm of the writer,
would not excuse unskilful playing. But Hawthorne is as dexterous on his
chosen instrument as Poe on his, and as consciously an artist as Stevenson,
who indeed, in Markheim, plays, no more skilfully than he, Hawthorne's
peculiar tune. In the preface to The House of the Seven Gables there is a
paragraph that, though long, it is not impertinent to quote. It shows how
carefully he had thought out the possibilities, and how scrupulously he had
defined the limits, of his chosen art.

Romance and 'When a writer calls his work a Romance it need
Novel. hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain
latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he

would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be
writing a Novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at
a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable
and ordinary course of man's experience. The former—while, as a
work of art, it must subject itself to laws, and while it sins
unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the
human heart—has fairly a right to present that truth under
circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own choosing or
creation. If he thinks fit, also, he may so manage his atmospherical
medium as to bring out or mellow the lights, and deepen and enrich the
shadows of the picture. He will be wise, no doubt, to make a very
moderate use of the privileges here stated, and especially to mingle the
Marvellous rather as a slight, delicate, and evanescent flavour, than as
any portion of the actual substance of the dish offered to the public. He
can hardly be said, however, to commit a literary crime, even if he
disregard this caution.'

There is a hint here of the provincial pedant; 'dishes offered to the public'
are a little out of date; but the principles are sound. Hawthorne could not
give clear outlines to the results of his 'burrowings in our common nature'
unless he set them in an atmospherical medium that made such outlines
possible for things so vague and so mysterious. Romance left him free to do
so. He could make a world to fit them, a patterned world, coloured to
suggest New England, Italy, or Nowhere. He was never forced to shock us
by introducing them into quite ordinary life. He never loses command over
his 'atmospherical medium,' and never weakens the importance of his
characters by letting them escape from the dominion of morals. And yet his
stories are not 'impaled on texts.' Moral feeling makes them alive, but it is
treated like the Marvellous—'mingled as a slight, delicate, and evanescent
flavour.' No artist had ever such tricky balances to keep. No artist keeps his
balance more successfully.
His artistry is as subtle in the details as in the design. It
Devices of
craftsmanship.
is hard to examine his stories unmoved. But, if we quiet
our consciences, and still the throbbing of our hearts, and
force ourselves to read them paragraph by paragraph with scientific calm,
we find there are few tales from which we can learn more delicate devices
of craftsmanship in making afraid, and in giving reality to intangible and

mysterious things. Before such skill the most prosaic reader surrenders his
reason and shudders with the rest.
Notice, for example, in Rappacini's Daughter, Hawthorne's way of
making credible the marvellous. He states the miracle quite simply, and by
asking 'Was it really so?' lays, without making his intention obvious, a
double emphasis on every point. On every point he throws a doubt, and
stamps belief into the mind. When Giovanni wonders if Beatrice is like the
flowers in that rich garden of death, in breath and body poisonous, 'to be
touched only with a glove, nor to be approached without a mask,'
Hawthorne suggests that he had grown morbid. We know at once that he
had not. A beautiful insect flutters about her and dies at her feet. 'Now here
it could not be but that Giovanni Guasconti's eyes deceived him.' We know
that they did not. As Beatrice goes into the house, Giovanni fancies that the
flowers he had given her were already withering in her grasp. 'It was an idle
thought,' says Hawthorne, 'there could be no possibility of distinguishing a
faded flower from a fresh one at so great a distance.' We see the dead petals
fall like leaves in autumn as she steps across the threshold.
And then notice, in The Scarlet Letter, his use of simple actions made
significant by their contexts. When Hester Prynne has thrown aside, as if for
ever, the searing symbol of her outlawry, her child refuses to recognise her,
until she picks it miserably up, and pains her bosom once again with the
embroidered scarlet character. 'Now thou art my mother, indeed!' cries the
child, 'and I am thy little Pearl!' And when Hester tells her that one day the
minister will share a fireside with them, and hold her on his knees, and
teach her many things, and love her dearly—'And will he always keep his
hand over his heart?' the child inquires. It is quite natural in her to notice a
peculiar habit, and to cling to a familiar piece of ornament; but her words
and actions assume the dignity of portents when we know what they meant
to that poor woman and that conscience-stricken man.
The imagination needs straws to make its bricks, and
The power of
details.
Hawthorne is careful never to set it the impossible task.
He knows how to squeeze all the emotion in his material
into one small fragment of pictorial suggestion that can be confidently left
to produce its effect in concert with the reader's mind. Remember how
Goodman Brown, at setting out, looked back and saw 'the head of Faith still
peeping after him with a melancholy air in spite of her pink ribbons.' A

trifle, apparently, but one that is not to be wasted. After his talk with the
devil, he thought he heard his wife's voice above him in the air, as an
unseen multitude of saints and sinners were encouraging her to that awful
meeting in the forest. '"Faith!" he shouted in a voice of agony and
desperation, and the echoes of the forest mocked him, crying "Faith! Faith!"
as if bewildered wretches were seeking her all through the wilderness. The
cry of grief, rage, and terror was yet piercing the night when the unhappy
wretch held his breath for a response. There was a scream, drowned
immediately in a louder murmur of voices, fading into far-off laughter, as
the dark cloud swept away, leaving the dear and silent sky above Goodman
Brown. But something fluttered lightly down through the air and caught on
the branch of a tree. The young man seized it, and beheld a pink ribbon.'—
A pink ribbon, a merry little thing that we can see and touch, is made a
sudden, awful summary of horror and despair.
He makes nature throb with his own mood, and by imperceptible art
weights the simplest words with the emotion of his tale. How are the very
tones of madness caught as the young man flourishes the devil's stick and
strides along the forest path. '"Ha! ha! ha!" roared Goodman Brown when
the wind laughed at him. "Let us hear which will laugh loudest. Think not
to frighten me with your deviltry. Come witch, come wizard, come Indian
powpow, come devil himself and here comes Goodman Brown. You may as
well fear him as he fear you."' That paragraph is the work of a master.
And yet, artist as he was, Hawthorne lived too near
The character of his
work.
provincialism to show no signs of its influence in his
outlook and his work. He could not enjoy statues without
clothes. He was able to commit the enormity of typifying a search for the
absolute beautiful by the making of a tiny toy butterfly that flapped its
wings just like a real one. Nor did he ever reach that conception of his art,
of all art, that sets prettiness in niches round rather than upon the altar of the
temple. He valued perhaps too highly the simple flowerlike embroidery that
is characteristic of his work. When, while he was in the Custom House, this
power of facile prettiness deserted him for a season, he produced nothing,
and feared that all his power was gone, for it was not in him to conjure
without a wand. He thought afterwards that he might have written
something with the pedestrian fidelity of the novel; but that was the one
thing he could never do. A man who is accustomed to see his pages glimmer

with opalescent colour, and to feel the touch of elfin fingers on his brow, is
oddly disconcerted in those moments when the little people must be
brushed aside like midges, and the glimmering veil be torn by the elbows of
a ruder reality. Such men are not so common that we can complain of the
défauts de leurs qualités. And indeed, in his more solemn stories, instinct
with the spiritual terror of Goya's miniature, the grace that never leaves him
adds to the effect. A rapier seems never more cruel than in a hand
elaborately gloved. What kind of man is that, we ask, who, balancing souls
between Heaven and Hell, can never quite forget his friendship with the
fairies?

MÉRIMÉE AND CONVERSATIONAL STORY-
TELLING

MÉRIMÉE AND CONVERSATIONAL STORY-TELLING

There is a lean athletic air about the tales of Prosper
Mérimée's attitude
towards writing.
Mérimée. Their author is like a man who throws balls at
the cocoa-nuts in the fair—to bring them down, and not
for the pleasure of throwing. His writing was something quite outside
himself, undertaken for the satisfaction of feeling himself able to do it. He
was in the habit of setting himself tasks. 'I will blacken some paper,' he
writes, 'in 1829,' and he keeps his word. He was not an author, in the
modern professional sense, but a man, one of whose activities was
authorship. There is a real difference between writers of these classes, the
amateurs existing outside their work, the professionals breathing only
through it. Gautier, full-blooded, brutal, splendid creature, is almost
invisible but in his books. Mérimée, irreproachably dressed, stands beside
his, looking in another direction. I am reminded of the sporting gentlemen
of Hazlitt's day who now and again would step into the ring and show that
they too had a pretty way with the gloves. Late in his life, when one of his
juvenile theatrical pieces was to be played for the first time, Mérimée went
to the performance, and heard a hostile noise in the house. 'Is it me they are
hissing?' he asked, 'I am going to hiss with the rest.' I think of Congreve
asking Voltaire to consider him as a plain gentleman, not as an author.

PROSPER MÉRIMÉE

Writing was only one of the interests of Mérimée's life; only one of the
innumerable tasks he set himself. He learnt half a dozen languages without
being a mere linguist. He travelled in half a dozen countries without being a
traveller. He was extremely erudite, but never a bookish scholar. He
fulfilled with enthusiasm his duties as Inspector of Ancient Monuments
without lapsing into a dusty-handed antiquary. He saw much of the
fashionable life of Paris without being a man of the world. He was a

courtier without being nothing but a courtier, and could accomplish a state
mission without turning into a diplomatist. He studied 'la théologie, la
tactique, la poliorcétique, l'architecture, l'épigraphie, la numismatique, la
magie et la cuisine,' without being solely a theologian, a tactician, a
specialist in sieges, an architect, a decipherer of inscriptions, a coin
collector, a wizard, or an undiluted cook. No more was he a writer, as
Dumas, Hazlitt, Hawthorne, and Keats were writers. On no shore did he
burn his boats. His character was as various as his activities. He was
sensualist and sentimentalist, dandy and Bohemian. Evenings begun in the
salon of Mme. de Boigne or at the Hôtel Castellane were, his biographer
tells us, finished behind the scenes at the Opera. He wrote delightful love-
letters, but whole series of his letters to his friends are unfitted for print by
consistent indecency. He read his tales to his Empress, and told them in the
gipsy tongue by the camp-fires of Andalusian muleteers. His experiments in
literature were analogous to his experiments in cooking. Both were
expressions of an intense curiosity about life and the methods of life, and a
thirst for personal practical efficiency in them all. Never had man more
facets in which to see the world. It is important in this essay, that considers
only one of them, not to forget that there were others.
It is indeed not easy to see more than one facet of a
The imaginary
man's personality at once, and difficult not to assume that
author of his tales.
this one facet is the whole. The curés of the old churches
in France who saw Mérimée busied in protecting the ancient buildings from
ruin and restoration would have been amazed by the witty dandy of the
dinners in the Café de la Rotonde, or by the author of Colomba. Each one of
such a man's expressions suggests a complete portrait, but only the
composite picture tells the truth. It is difficult not to reason from his work
and build up an imaginary author—a discreet, slightly ironical person, who
smiles only with the corners of his mouth, never laughs, never weeps,
modestly disclaims any very personal connection with his tales, and is
careful to seem as little moved as may be by the terrible or mysterious
things he sets before us. This imaginary polite person, who represented
Mérimée in conversation as well as in books, is not Mérimée, but, just now,
as I see him quietly smiling in the air before me, I know who he is. He is
the conventional raconteur, whose manner every Englishman assumes in the
telling of anecdote or ghost story.

Perhaps each nation has its own. Perhaps each nation
Printed and spoken adopts an attitude for anecdote peculiar to its own genius.
stories.
The French at any rate is very different from the English.
The Frenchman will gesticulate in his tale, suit the expression of his face to
its emotions, and try, ingratiatingly, to win our indulgence for his story, that
becomes, as he tells it, part of himself. The Englishman, more tenacious of
his dignity, less willing to hazard it for an effect, throws all responsibility
upon the thing itself. In England, the distinction between printed story-
telling and story-telling by word of mouth is more marked than elsewhere.
The object of both is to interest and move us, but, while the literary artist
makes no bones about it, and takes every advantage possible, giving the
setting of his tale, its colour scheme, its scent, its atmosphere, the plain
Englishman shrinks from all assumption of craftsmanship, sets out his facts
bare, rough like uncut stones, and repudiates by a purposely disordered
language, perhaps by a few words of slang, any desire of competition with
the professional.[9] And we, the audience, allow ourselves to be moved
more readily by an amateur than by a man who avows his intention of
moving us. The avowed intention provokes a kind of hostility; it is a
declaration of war, an open announcement of a plan to usurp the throne of
our own mind, and to order the sensations we like to think we can control.
We are more lenient with the amateur; we wish to save his face; politeness
and good-fellowship are traitors in our citadel, and we conspire with the
enemy to compass our own yielding.
Mérimée gives his tales no more background than an
Mérimée's adoption
of the conventions
Englishman could put without immodesty into an after-
of anecdote. dinner conversation. He does not decorate them with
words, nor try to suggest atmosphere by rhythm or any
other of the subtler uses of language. He does not laugh at his jokes, nor, in
moments of pathos, show any mist in his eyes. The only openly personal
touches in his stories are those sentences of irony as poignant as those of
another great conversationalist, whose Modest Proposal for the eating of
little children is scarcely more cruel than Mateo Falcone. His style is
without felicities. It has none of the Oriental pomp of Gautier's prose, none
of the torrential eloquence of Hugo's; but its limitations are its virtues.
Pomp is the ruin of a plain fact as of a plain man, and rhetoric rolls facts
along too fast to do anything but smooth them. This style, that seems to
disclaim any pretension to be a style at all, leaves facts unencumbered, with

their corners unpolished. It emphasises Mérimée's continual suggestion that
he is not a story-teller, and so helps to betray us into his power. But I cannot
understand those critics who find it a style of clear glass that shows us facts
through no personality whatever. Always, in reading a Mérimée, I have an
impression of listening to a man who has seen the world, and was young
once upon a time, who loves Brantôme, and who in another century would
have been a friend of Anthony Hamilton, and perhaps have written or had a
minor part in memoirs like those of the Count Grammont. And this man is
the imaginary mouthpiece of English anecdote, the mask handed from
speaker to speaker at an English dinner-table.
Mérimée himself had something of the appearance of an
Mérimée's
anglomanie.
Englishman; everything except the smile, according to
Taine. No Frenchman can write of him without referring
to his anglomanie. His mother had English relatives, and Hazlitt, Holcroft,
and Hazlitt's worshipped Northcote were among his father's friends. He was
not baptized in the Catholic religion. He seems to have grown up in an
atmosphere not unlike that of many English intellectual families, and very
early made friends across the Channel for himself. This Englishness
perhaps partly accounts for the peculiar attitude he took as a story-teller,
and also made possible that curious reconciliation between the virtues of
rival schools that the attitude demanded; made possible, that is to say, the
apparent paradox of a man whose subjects were Romantic, whose style was
almost Classical, and whose stories were yet a prophecy of the Realists. It is
not a French characteristic to recognise virtues in more than one type at
once, and to combine them. 'Le Roi est mort; vive le Roi.' The French
invented that saying. They do not recognise compromises, but are exclusive
in their judgments, and regulate their opinions by general rules. A Romantic
hates all Classicists, a Realist finds his worst term of opprobrium in the
word Romantic. An Englishman, on the other hand, does not think of
regulating his affections or actions by a theory. If he has principles, he locks
them up with his black clothes for use on special occasions. He keeps a
sturdy affection for Oliver Cromwell, without letting his love for the
Commonwealth abate in the least his loyalty to the King. Mérimée seems
extraordinarily English in being able to own Romantic ideals, without using
Romantic method.

The conversational story-telling depends for its success,
The contrast not on the wit or charm of the talker, but on the plots of
between his manner
and his material. his stories. No more exigent test of the intrinsic power of
a tale can be applied than this, of telling it badly in
conversation. A good story will sometimes gain by the naked recital of its
facts; a bad one is immediately betrayed. Bad stories, in this sense, are
those that resemble the women of whom Lyly wrote:—'Take from them
their periwigges, their paintings, their Jewells, their rowles, their
boulstrings, and thou shalt soone perceive that a woman is the least part of
hir selfe.' How many times, in repeating to a friend the story of a book, you
have become suddenly aware it was an empty, worthless thing that, in
clothes more gorgeous than it had a right to wear, had made you its dupe for
a moment. Mérimée was compelled by his method to tell good stories or
none. His material, to be sufficiently strong to stand without support, to be
built with rigid economy, and to make its effects out of its construction, to
be told as if with a desire of making no impression, and to make an
impression all the stronger for such telling, could not be of a light or
delicate nature. His events had to be striking, visible, conclusive. He had to
choose stories in which something happened. There is death in almost every
one of his tales. Hence comes the amazing contrast between his work and
that of the Romantics. The large gesture, the simple violent passions are his
as well as theirs, because he needed them, but, while they matched their
subjects in their temperaments, and wrote of hot blood with pulsing veins,
everything in Mérimée's stories is vivid and passionate except the author.
The atmosphere of his tales is not warm or moist, but extraordinarily
rarified. In that clear air his colours seem almost white. If they were not so
brilliant we should not perceive them at all. Even his women are chosen for
the attitude. The women a man loves are usually reflected in his work. But
Mérimée's women are the women of Romance, dying for love or for hate,
ready at any moment to throw their emotions into dramatic action, while the
women he loved were capricious, whimsical, tender seldom, outrées never.
The writer needed picturesque women as clear as facts. The man loved
women who never betrayed themselves, but were sufficiently elusive to
give him an Epicurean pleasure in pursuing them.
The art of Mérimée's tales is one of expository
An art of
construction.
construction. He was compelled by his self-denials to be
as conscious an artist as Poe. He is like a good chess-

player who surrenders many pieces, and is forced to make most wonderful
play with the few that remain. His effects are got from the material of his
tales, not superimposed on the vital stuff like the front of a Venetian palace
on the plain wall. He takes his dramatic material, and sets it before us in his
undecorated style, so that no morsel of its vitality is wasted, smothering no
wild gesture in elaborate drapery, but cutting it out so nakedly that every
quivering sinew can be seen. His art has been compared to drawing, but it is
more like sculpture. His stories are so cleanly carved out of existence that
they are 'without deception.' We can examine them from above and from
below, in a dozen different lights. There is no point of view from which the
artist begs us to refrain. Behind a drawing there is a bare sheet. Behind a
story of Mérimée's there is the other side.
His art is more like painting in those few tales of the
Pointillism in facts.
marvellous that are his ghost stories, as the others are his
anecdotes. Mérimée had the archæologist's hatred of the
mysterious, and the artist's delight in creating it. He reconciled the two by
producing mysterious effects by statements of the utmost clarity, the very
clarity of the statements throwing the reader off his guard so that he does
not perceive the purposeful skill with which they are chosen and put
together. There is a school of painting in France, whose followers call
themselves Pointillists; they get their effects by laying spots of simple
colours side by side, each one separate, each one though in the right
position with regard to other spots of other colours placed in its
neighbourhood. At a sufficient distance they merge luminously into the less
simple colours of the picture. Mérimée's treatment of the marvellous was
not unlike this. The vague mystery of La Vénus d'Ille is not reflected by any
vagueness or mystery in the telling of the tale. It is impossible to point to
the single sentence, the single paragraph that makes the mystery
mysterious. You cannot find them because they do not exist. Instead, there
are a hundred morsels of fact. Not one of them is incredible; not one is
without a reasonable explanation if an explanation is necessary. And yet all
these concrete, simple facts combine imperceptibly in producing the
extraordinary supernatural feeling of the tale. Compare this negative
manner of treating a miracle with the frank, positive fairy-tale of Gautier's
Arria Marcella. The effects of both tales are perfectly achieved, but Arria
Marcella belongs to written story-telling. We believe in her because Gautier
wishes us to believe, and uses every means of colour and rhythm and

sensual suggestion to compel his readers to subject their imaginations to his
own. The Venus belongs to story-telling by word of mouth. Hers is a ghost
story whose shudder we covet, and experience, in spite of ourselves, in spite
of the half-incredulous story-teller, by virtue of those simple facts so
cunningly put together.
But to write analytically of such stories is to write with
Strength or charm.
compass and rule, dully, awkwardly, technically, badly. It
is impossible to express the excellence of a bridge except
by showing how perfectly its curves represent the principles of its design,
and to talk like an architect of the method of its building. And that is so very
inadequate. It is easy to write of warmth, of delicacy, of sweetness; there is
nothing harder in the world than to write of the icy strength that is shown
not in action but in construction. And although there is a real charm about
the shy, active, intellectual man who made them, a charm that is shown in
his love-letters, yet there is no charm at all about Mérimée's stories. The
difference between them and such tales as Nathaniel Hawthorne's is that
between the little Grecian lady in baked clay, who stands upon my
mantelpiece, still removing with what grace of curved body and neck and
delicate arm the thorn that pricked her tiny foot some thousand years ago,
and the copy of an Egyptian god, standing upright, one straight leg
advanced, his jackal head set square upon his shoulders, his arms stiff at his
sides, his legs like pillars, so strong in the restraint of every line that to look
at him is a bracing of the muscles. There is no charm in him, no grace, no
delicacy, and he needs neither delicacy, grace, nor charm. Erect in his own
economy of strength he has an implacable, strenuous power that any added
tenderness would weaken and perhaps destroy.

FLAUBERT

FLAUBERT

'I am the last of the fathers of the church,' said Flaubert, and on this text his
niece remarks that 'with his long chestnut coat, and little black silk skull-
cap, he had something the air of one of the Port-Royal solitaries.' The
metaphor is accurately chosen. Flaubert lived in an atmosphere of monastic
devotion to his art, and the solitaries of Port-Royal were not more constant
than he to their intellectual preoccupations. A man of excessive openness to
sensation, he fled it and was fascinated by it. He would take ever so little of
the world and torture himself with its examination because it hurt him to
look at it. Life, and especially that life whose sensitiveness was so slight as,
in comparison with his own, to have no existence, brought him continual
pain. 'La bêtise entre mes pores.' Stupidity touching him anywhere made
him shrink like a snail touched with a feather. He had recoquillements,
shrinkings up, when with his dearest friends, and it was pain to him to be
recalled to ordinary existence. He escaped from modernity in dreams of the
Orient, but was continually drawn back by memory of the unhappiness that
was waiting for him, to the contemplation of those ordinary people whose
slightest act, as he imagined it, struck such a grating discord with himself.
An exuberant life like Gautier's was impossible to such a man. He could not
be so gregarious a recluse as Balzac. He had to fashion a peculiar retreat, a
room with two windows, from one of which he could see the stars, and
from the other watch and listen to the people whom he hated and found so
efficient as the instruments of his self torture. He found the seclusion he
desired in a most absolute devotion to the art of literature, which was in his
hands the art of making beauty out of pain. Pain, self-inflicted, was at the
starting-point of all his works, and in most of them went with him step by
step throughout.

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

An analysis of the pain that Flaubert suffered in
Flaubert and the examining Philistines, that white light of suffering which
bourgeois.
throws up so clearly the bourgeois figures on which he let
it play, supplies the key not only to the matter of much of his work, but to
its manner, and particularly to that wonderful prose of his, whose
scrupulosity has been and is so frequently misunderstood. Flaubert was not
pained by a bourgeois because he felt differently from himself. He was
pained by a bourgeois because a bourgeois did not know that he felt
differently from himself, because a bourgeois never knew how he felt at all.
Whole wolves hate a lame one. It has never been stated with what

inveterate hatred a lame one regards whole wolves. And Flaubert was less
fitted for life than an ordinary man. He was given to know when he was
honest or dishonest to himself. In so far was he, on their own ground,
weaker than those others, who never know whether they tell the truth or a
lie. He was born as it were with no skin over his heart. He had no need to
make guesses at his feelings. What more terrible nightmare could be
imagined for such a man than to hear men and women, educated, as the
bourgeois are, into a horrible facility of speech, using the language of
knowledge and emotion, unchecked by any doubts as to their possible
inaccuracy. In all bourgeois life, where language and action have larger
scales than are necessary, there is a discrepancy between expression and the
thing for which expression is sought. For Flaubert, sensitive to this
discrepancy as the ordinary man is not, it was a perpetual pain. And just as a
man who has a nerve exposed in one of his teeth, touches it again and again,
in spite of himself, for the exquisite twinge that reminds him it is there, so
Flaubert in more than one half of his books is occupied in hurting himself
by the delicate and infinitely varied search for this particular discord.
Flaubert's prose is due, like his unhappiness, to his
Flaubert's prose.
inhuman trueness of feeling. He realised that flexible as
language is, there are almost insuperable difficulties in
the way of any one who wishes to put an idea accurately into words. He
went to the bottom of all writing and announced that literature is founded
on the word; and that unless you have the right word you have the wrong
literature. He was a little puzzled at the survival of the mighty
improvisations of older times, although he loved them; but there was no
doubt in his mind that his own way was not 'a primrose path to the
everlasting bonfire' of bad books. Whatever he wrote, he would have it in
words chosen one by one, scrupulously matched in scent, colour, and
atmosphere to the ideas or emotions he wished to express. His whole creed
was to tell the truth. What exactly did he feel? These were the letters that
were always flaming before him. It is vivid discomfort to a labourer to be
cross-questioned, and forced to find words for his unrealised meanings.
With increased facility of speech we grow callous, and, compromising with
our words, write approximations to the thoughts that, not having accurately
described, we can scarcely be said to possess. Flaubert, in disgust at such
inexactitudes, forced on his own highly educated brain the discomfort of the
cross-questioned labourer. Knowing the truth, he would say it or nothing,

and rejected phrase after phrase in his search for precision. It was gain and
loss to him; gain in texture, loss in scope. 'What a scope Balzac had,' he
cried, and then: 'What a writer he would have been if only he had been able
to write.' The work of such men is loosely knit in comparison with his,
because built in a less resisting material. 'Oui,' says Gautier—

'Oui, l'œuvre sort plus belle
D'une forme au travail
Rebelle,
Vers, marbre, onyx, émail.'

Flaubert's attitude made prose a medium as hard, as challenging as these.
It is difficult to believe that the older writers bought their excellence so
dearly. Their thoughts cannot have been so biassed, for it is the expression
of every bias, of the background, of the smell, of the feel of an idea that
makes circumspicuity of writing so difficult. Montaigne, for example,
sitting peaceably in his tower, asking himself with lively interest what were
his opinions, was not at all like the almost terrible figure of Flaubert,
striding to and fro in his chamber, wringing phrases from his nerves, asking
passionately, ferociously, what he meant, and almost throttling himself for
an accurate answer. Is it harder than it was to produce a masterpiece?
Flaubert, who held Chateaubriand a master, was the
Romanticism and
realism.
friend of Gautier, and the director in his art of Guy de
Maupassant, who wrote with one hand Madame Bovary
and with the other Salammbo, who put in the same book St. Julien
l'Hospitalier and Un Cœur Simple, is, on a far grander scale than Mérimée,
an illustration as well as a reason of the development of romanticism into
realism. Flaubert's passionate care for the truth, would, if he had lived
before the Romantic movement, have confined itself to the elaboration of a
very scrupulous prose. But after the discovery of local colour, after the
surprising discovery of the variety that exists in things, as great as the
variety that exists in words and in their combinations, it was sure to apply
itself not only to the writing but also to those external things that had
suggested the ideas the writing was to embody. It would try to make the
sentences true to their author; it would also try to make them true to the life

they were to represent. It was Flaubert who said to De Maupassant as they
passed a cabstand, 'Young man, describe that horse in one sentence so as to
distinguish him from every other horse in the world, and I shall begin to
believe that you have possibilities as a writer.' This demand for accurate
portraiture turned the romantic realism of Balzac's Comédie Humaine into
the other realism of Madame Bovary. Balzac had his
Madame Bovary. models, yes, as hints in the back of his head, but he made
his characters alive with his own energy and his own
brain. As I have already pointed out, they are all too alive to be true. But
Flaubert, true to himself in his manner, wished to be true to life in his
matter. Madame Bovary, that second-rate, ordinary, foolish, weak, little
provincial wife, has no atmosphere about her but her own. She has not been
inoculated with the blood of Flaubert, as all the veins of all the characters of
Balzac have been scorched with fire from those of that 'joyful wild boar.'
When Flaubert wrote that everything in the book was outside himself, he
was saying no more than the truth. He was as honest towards her and her
life as he was towards his own ideas. She talks like herself. Now the older
writers, like Fielding and Smollett, are content to let their people talk as
men and women should talk to be fit for good literature. Even the characters
of men like Balzac or Hugo say what they think, as nearly as their creators
are themselves able to express it. Flaubert is infinitely more scrupulous. The
Bovary never says what she thinks. Flaubert knew well enough what she
was thinking, but sought out exactly those phrases and sentences beneath
which she would have hidden her thought, those horrible bourgeois
inaccuracies that it was torture for him to hear.
A life so wholly concerned with intangible things seems too intellectual
for humanity. I am glad to turn aside from it for a moment to remember the
Flaubert who was loved by those who spent their days with him; the uncle
who taught her letters to his little niece, and who would, as she says, have
done anything imaginable to enliven her when sad or ill. 'One of his greatest
pleasures was the amusement of those about him,' although he never saw a
woman without thinking of her skeleton, a child without remembering that
it would one day be old, or a cradle without finding in it the promise of a
grave. He was one of the men who love their friends the dearer for their
dislike of mankind in general. He never shaved without laughing at 'the
intrinsic absurdity of human life,' and yet he lived out his own share in it

with steadfast purpose, 'yoking himself to his work like an ox to the
plough.'
The result of his incessant labour divides itself into four kinds; novels of
the bourgeoisie, a novel of the East, three short stories, and two other books
that are, as it were, twin keys to the whole.
Madame Bovary and L'Éducation Sentimentale are the
Salammbo.
novels of the bourgeoisie, novels with an entirely new
quality of vision, due to the sustained contrast between
his own articulate habit of mind and the unconsciously inarticulate minds of
his characters; these are the books commonly described as his contributions
to Realism by men too ready to set him on their own level. Opposed to
these two books there is Salammbo, an Oriental and ancient romance, a
reposeful dream for him, in which move characters whose feelings and
expressions are no more blurred than his own. All these books offer more
delight at each re-reading, although the last, considered as an example of
narrative, is almost a failure. The Romantics too often miss the trees for the
wood. Flaubert's method makes it rather easy to miss the wood for the trees.
But his trees are of such interest and beauty that we are ready to examine
them singly. In writing Madame Bovary, his subject was close within his
reach. Madame was too near to allow him to cover her up with a library of
knowledge about his own times. But in Salammbo he was so anxious to be
true to the life that he did not know, that he read until he knew too much.
The book is made of perfect sentences, perfect descriptions, while the story
itself is buried beneath a dust-heap of antiquity. Cartloads after cartloads of
gorgeous things are emptied on the top of each other, until the whole is a
glittering mass with here and there some splendid detail shining so
brilliantly among the rest that we would like to remove it for a museum.
The mass stirs: there are movements within it; but they are too heavily
laden to shake themselves free and become visible and intelligible.
No such criticism can be urged against the three short
Trois Contes.
stories, the Trois Contes, in which Flaubert proves
himself not only one of the greatest writers of all time,
but also one of the greatest story-tellers. This little book is a fit pendant to
the novels, since it represents both the Flaubert of Madame Bovary and the
Flaubert of Salammbo. Un Cœur Simple, the first of the three, is the story of
a servant woman and her parrot, a subject that de Maupassant might have

chosen. So completely is it weaned from himself, that no one would suspect
that Flaubert wrote it after his mother's death, for the pleasure, in describing
the provincial household, of remembering his own childhood. It and the two
stories, St. Julien l'Hospitalier and Hérodias, which are purely romantic in
subject and treatment, and more scrupulous in technique than the finest of
Gautier, are among the most beautiful tales that the nineteenth century
produced. All three answer the supreme test of a dozen readings as
admirably as those old improvisations from whose spirit they are so utterly
alien.
That is the sum of Flaubert's work in pure narrative.
La Tentation de
Saint Antoine and
There are beside it two books, one a Tentation de Saint
Bouvard et Antoine, that he spent his whole life in bringing to
Pécuchet. perfection, and the other, Bouvard et Pécuchet, that he
left unfinished at his death. They are among the most
wonderful philosophic books of the world. In an Oriental dream, a dialogue
form with stage directions so explicit and descriptive as to do the work of
narrative, and in a story whose form might have been dictated by Voltaire,
whose material was the same as that used in the novels, he expressed man
in the presence of Religion, and man in the presence of Knowledge. The
legend of St. Anthony is treated by the Flaubert who loved the East, the
story of Bouvard and Pécuchet by the Flaubert who tortured himself with
observation of the bourgeois. St. Anthony is tempted of love and of all the
religions; at last, not triumphing, but shaken and very weary, he kneels
again, and Flaubert leaves him. Bouvard and Pécuchet, the two clerks given
by the accident of a legacy the aloofness and the opportunity for
development that was Anthony's, are tempted of love and of all the
knowledges; at last made very miserable they return to their desks; that is
where Flaubert would have left them if he had lived. To discuss the settings
of these two great expositions is to ask the question that was asked by a
disciple at the end of Voltaire's Dream of Plato. 'And then, I suppose, you
awoke?' It is only permissible after recognising the grandeur of the
underlying idea.
There have been two men with such a conception of
The statue of Le
Penseur.
thought. Rodin carved what Flaubert had written. The
statue of Le Penseur, that stands in front of the Panthéon
in Paris, is the statue of a man tormented like St. Anthony, baffled like

Bouvard and Pécuchet. This statue does not represent man's dream of the
power of thought, of the dominion of thought. That head is no clear
mechanism, faultless and frictionless; that attitude is not one of placid
contemplation. The head is in torture, the whole body grips itself in the
agony of articulation. The statue is not that of a thinker, but of the thinker;
man before the Universe, man unable to wrest the words out of himself.
Flaubert had such a vision as that when he wrote the Tentation and Bouvard
et Pécuchet. He hated mankind because they could not share it with him.
They did not know as he knew, or see as he saw, but knelt or worked, and
were happy. This one stupendous conception of the true relation between
man and thought is that on which all Flaubert's work is founded. Expressed
in these two books, it is implied in all the others (even in Salammbo, which
is almost an attempt to escape from it). It is not a message; it does not say
anything; it is as dumb as Rodin's statue; it simply is—like Paradise Lost or
the Mona Lisa or a religion. 'I am the last of the Fathers of the Church.'

A NOTE ON DE MAUPASSANT

De Maupassant for seven years submitted all he wrote to Flaubert's
criticism. If we add to the preceding essay some sentences from
Flaubert's correspondence, it will be easy to imagine the lines that
criticism must have taken, and interesting to compare them with the
resulting craftsman.
'I love above all the nervous phrase, substantial, clear, with strong
muscles and browned skin. I love masculine phrases not feminine.
'What dull stupidity it is always to praise the lie, and to say that
poetry lives on illusion: as if disillusion were not a hundred times more
poetic.
'Find out what is really your nature, and be in harmony with it. Sibi
constat said Horace. All is there.
'Work, above all think, condense your thought; you know that
beautiful fragments are worthless; unity, unity is everything.
'The author in his work ought to be like God in the Universe, present
everywhere and visible nowhere.

'Fine subjects make mediocre works.'
These sentences might well be taken as de Maupassant's inspiration.
De Maupassant, a man of powerful mind, with Flaubert's example
before him, makes each of his tales a rounded unity, and a thing
outside himself, and yet a thing that no one else could have written. He
shunned fine subjects. His stories are like sections of life prepared for
examination, and in looking at them we are flattered into thinking that
we have clearer eyes than usual. He chooses some quite ordinary
incident, and by working up selected details of it, turns it into a story
as exciting to the curiosity as a detective puzzle. He allows no abstract
feminine-phrased discourses on the psychology of his characters: he
does not take advantage of their confessions. Their psychology is
manifested in things said and in things done. The works, as in life, are
hidden in the fourth dimension, where we cannot see them.
La Rendezvous, a tiny story of seven pages, will illustrate his
methods. The chosen incident is that of a woman going to see her
lover, meeting some one else on the way, and going off with him
instead. That is all. Let us see how de Maupassant works it out. Here is
his first paragraph:
'Her hat on her head, her cloak on her back, a black veil across her
face, another in her pocket, which she would put on over the first as
soon as she was in the guilty cab, she was tapping the point of her boot
with the end of her umbrella, and stayed sitting in her room, unable to
make up her mind to go out to keep the appointment.'
The whole of her indecision is expressed before it is explained. Then
there is a paragraph that lets us know that she had been keeping the
appointment regularly for two years, and we sympathise with her a
little. A description of her room follows, made by mention of a clock
ticking the seconds, a half-read book on a rosewood desk, and a
perfume. The clock strikes and she goes out, lying to the servant. We
watch her, loitering on the way, telling herself that the Vicomte
awaiting her would be opening the window, listening at the door,
sitting down, getting up, and, since she had forbidden him to smoke on
the days of her visits, throwing desperate glances at the cigarette-box.

De Maupassant's characters think in pictures of physical action. People
do so in real life.
The heroine sits in a square watching children, and reflects, always in
the concrete, how much the Vicomte is going to bore her, and on the
terrible danger of rendezvous, and so on, making pictures all the time.
At last, when she is three-quarters of an hour late, she gets up and sets
out for his rooms. She has not gone ten steps before she meets a
diplomatic baron, of whose character in her eyes de Maupassant has
been careful to let us have a hint beforehand. He asks her, after the
usual politenesses, to come and see his Japanese collections. He is an
adroit person this baron. He does not make love to her. He laughs at
her. He ends, after a delightful little dialogue, in half hurrying, half
frightening her into a cab. They have scarcely started when she cries
out that she has forgotten that she had promised her husband to invite
the Vicomte to dinner. They stop at a post office. The baron goes in
and gets her a telegram card. She writes on it in pencil—it would be
vandalism to spoil the message by translating it from the French—she
writes:
'Mon cher ami, je suis très souffrante; j'ai une névralgie atroce qui me
tient au lit. Impossible sortir. Venez diner demain soir pour que je me
fasse pardonner.
Jeanne.'
She licks the edge, closes it carefully, writes the Vicomte's address,
and then, handing it to the baron, 'Now, will you be so good as to drop
this in the box for telegrams.'
There de Maupassant ends, without comment of any kind. His stories
have always 'the look of a gentleman,' and know how to move, when
to stop, what to put in and what to leave out. They are impersonal, but
not more impersonal than Mérimée's. There is a man behind them, and
in contradistinction to the school of writers with whom he has been
confounded, he does not blink the fact, but obeys Flaubert's maxim,
allowing his presence to be felt but keeping himself invisible. De
Maupassant, the pupil of Flaubert, makes even clearer than his master
the intimate connection between those apparently hostile things,
Romanticism and Realism. Lesser and coarser minds may have needed

the stimulus of a revolt when none was; but the great men on the
heights knew that the suns of dawn and sunset were the same.
De Maupassant's position in this book is commensurate neither with
his genius nor with what I should like to say of him, and hope to write
in another place. I had wished my book to end with the Romantic
Movement, and so with Flaubert, who seems to me to mark its ultimate
development without a change of name. De Maupassant is here only to
show how direct is the descent of the least exuberant of modern story-
telling from the Romanticism that made possible the work of
Chateaubriand, Hugo, or Balzac. His true position is in a book that
should begin with Flaubert and end with some great writer of to-
morrow, whose work should show by what alchemy the story-telling of
to-day will be changed into that of the future.

GUY DE MAUPASSANT

CONCLUSION

CONCLUSION

My table is covered with a green cloth, and on it, under the lamplight, are
two bowls of roses. One is full of the rich garden flowers, whose hundred
folded petals hold in their depths the shadows of their colourings—cream,
crimson, and the rose and orange of an autumn sunset. In the other are three
or four wild roses from the hedge on the far side of the lane. I scarcely
know which give me greater pleasure. In comparing them I seem to be
setting Aucassin and Nicolete by the side of La Morte Amoureuse. How
many flowers must represent the gradual growth of one into the other. How
large a collection would be necessary to illustrate every stage of the
transformation of the simple beauty of the wild blossoms into the luxuriant
loveliness, majesty, and variety of the roses in the opposite bowl. I have
attempted such a task in this book; not the impossible one of collecting
every flower in any way different from those that had opened before it, but
of bringing together a score or so to make the difference between first and
last a little less tantalising and obscure.
I had thought I was tracing a progress of the art itself;
Genius a stationary
quality.
but I no longer think so. Century after century has laid its
gift before the story-teller, its gift of a form, an unworked
vein, a point of view. He has learnt to hold us with an episode, and also,
evening after evening, to keep us interested in the lives of a dozen different
people whose adventures in the pages of a book he makes no less actual
than our own. In this last century of the art we have seen men looking back
to all the ages before them, and bringing into modern story-telling the finest
qualities of the most ancient, recreating it, and winning for it the universal
acknowledgment that is given to painting, poetry, or music. Much seems to
have been done, and yet, who would dare assign to a modern story-teller,
however excellent a craftsman, a place above Boccaccio? Who says that his
digressions make old Dan Chaucer out of date? Art does not progress but in
consciousness of its technique and in breadth of power. Genius is a
stationary quality. Techniques and the conditions of production, qualified
the one by the other, and modified by genius, move past it side by side, like

an endless procession before a seated king. The works they carry between
them are not to be judged by their place in the cavalcade, but by the spirit
before whom they pass, who wakes from time to time to give them life and
meaning.
None the less, there is a kind of imperfect contemporariness in the art that
lets the finest works of all times remain side by side to be imitated or
compared. And this power of survival that belongs to works of genius
accounts for two phenomena, which give genius itself a spurious air of
progress. The one is an ever clearer consciousness of technique, the other an
ever wider range of possibilities, both due to the increasing number of
works of art that are ready for comparison or imitation.
In the latter half of my book, and particularly in the
The dissociation of
forms.
chapters on Poe, Mérimée, Hawthorne, and Flaubert, we
have been partly busied in remarking the later stages of
self-conscious craftsmanship. There remains to be discussed the
dissociation of one form from another that naturally accompanied this more
observant technique. I want to distinguish here between the short story, the
nouvelle, and the novel, which are not short, middle-sized, and lengthy
specimens of the same thing, but forms whose beauties are individual and
distinct. They demand quite different skills, and few men have excelled in
more than one of them. Before proceeding to closer definition, let me name
an example of each, to keep in our minds for purposes of reference while
considering their several moulds. Balzac's Père Goriot is a novel; Gautier's
La Morte Amoureuse is a nouvelle; de Maupassant's La Petite Ficelle is a
short story.
The novel was the first form to be used by men with a
The novel.
clear knowledge of what it allowed them to do, and what
it expected of them in return. Smollett's is its simplest
definition. 'A novel,' he says, 'is a large diffused picture, comprehending the
characters of life, disposed in different groups and exhibited in various
attitudes, for the purpose of a uniform plan and general occurrence, to
which every individual figure is subservient.' It is, as near as may be, a
piece of life, and one of its similarities to ordinary existence is perhaps the
characteristic that best marks its difference from the nouvelle. The novel
contains at least one counterplot, the nouvelle none. Life has as many
counterplots as it has actors, as many heroes and heroines as play any part

in it at all. No man is a hero to his valet, because in that particular plot the
valet happens to be a hero to himself. The novelist does not attempt so
equable a characterisation, but by telling the adventures of more than one
group of people, and by threading their tales in and out through each other,
he contrives to give a conventional semblance of the intricate story-telling
of life.[10]
The nouvelle is a novel without a counterplot, and on a
The nouvelle.
smaller scale.[11] The latter quality is dependent on the
former, since it combats the difficulty of sustained attention, that the novel
avoids by continual change from one to another of its parallel stories. The
nouvelle was with Boccaccio little more than a plot made actual by the
more important sentences of dialogue, and by concise sketching of its
principal scenes. It has now grown to be a most delicate and delightful
form, without breathlessness and without compression, its aim of pure story
being implicit in the manner of its telling. It is differentiated from the short
story, the advantage of whose brevity it shares in a lesser degree, by the
separate importance of its scenes, which are not bound to be subjected so
absolutely to its conclusion. For example, the splendid cathedral scene in La
Morte Amoureuse, where, at the moment of ordination, a young priest is
stricken with passion for a courtesan, would be unjustifiable in a short story
unless it ended in the climax of the tale. The priest would have to die on the
steps of the altar, or the woman to kill herself at his feet as he passed, a
vowed celebate, down the cathedral aisle. The short story must be a single
melody ending with itself; the nouvelle a piece of music, the motive of
whose opening bars, recurring again and again throughout, is finally
repeated with the increase in meaning that is given it by the whole
performance.
The short story proper is in narrative prose what the
The short story.
short lyric is in poetry. It is an episode, an event, a scene,
a sentence, whose importance is such that it allows
nothing in the story that is not directly concerned with its realisation. This is
true of many specimens of the nouvelle, but it is the essential rule of the
short story. Look at the end of La Petite Ficelle, or of any other of the
Contes of de Maupassant. 'Une 'tite ficelle ... une 'tite ficelle ... t'nez la,
voila, m'sieu le Maire.' 'A little bit of string ... a little bit of string ... look,
there it is, M. le Maire.' That sentence, repeated by the dying man in his

delirium, needs for the full pathos of its effect every word of the story. From
the first paragraph about an ordinary market day, the accident of the old
man picking up a piece of string in a place where a purse had been lost, the
false accusation, and his guilt-seeming protestation of innocence, every
detail in the story is worked just so far as to make the reader's mind as ready
and sensitive as possible for the final infliction of those few words. Keats
once coated the inside of his mouth with cayenne pepper to feel as keenly
as he could 'the delicious coolness of claret.' The art of the short story is just
such a making ready for such a momentary sensation.
Just as Time, with the clearer consciousness of
The possibilities of
narrative.
technique, has made the moulds of the art more markedly
distinct, so it has given the artist an infinite choice of
amalgams with which to fill them. Although some of the most delightful
examples of narrative are still produced with the old and worthy object of
telling a tale to pass the time, although there are still men who lay their
mats upon the ground, squat down on them, and keep their audiences happy
by stories that demand no more intellectual attention than the buzz of bees
in the magnolia flowers; yet, if we consider only those artists who have
been discussed in the preceding chapters, we perceive at once how many
are the other possibilities of narrative, and, if we examine the story-telling
of our own day, we shall find that most of them are illustrated in
contemporary practice.
Story-telling has grown into a means of expression with a gamut as wide
as that of poetry, which is as wide as that of humanity. 'It is literature,' says
Wilde, 'that shows us the body in its swiftness and the soul in its unrest';
and the same art that helps us to laze away a summer afternoon is a key that
lets us into the hearts of men we have never seen, and not infrequently
opens our own to us, when, in the bustle of existence, we have gone out and
found ourselves unable to return. It is a Gyges' ring with which, upon our
finger, we can go about the world and mingle in the business of men to
whom we would not bow, or who would not bow to us. It breaks the gold or
iron collars of our classes and sets each man free as a man to understand all
other men soever. It opens our eyes like Shelley's to see that life—

'like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity.'

We become conscious of that radiance when, by this art made free of time,
we can dream the dreams of the Pharaohs, pray with the hermits in the
Thebaid, and send our hazardous guesses like seeking dogs into the dim
forests of futurity. Our eyes may fitly shine, and we become as little
children in brief resting-hours out of the grown-up world, when this art
makes those tints ours that we never knew, and sends us, divested of our
monotones, to choose among all the glittering colours of mankind.
And if we are not listeners only, but have ourselves something to fit with
wings and to send out to find those men who will know the whispering
sound of its flight and take it to themselves, how much do we not owe to
this most manifold art of story-telling?
There is nothing that its pinions will not bear.

INDEX
Abercrombie, Lascelles, 263.
Addison, Joseph, 110, 113 et seq.
Ali Baba, 89.
Amadis of Gaul, 52, 97.
Anatomy of Melancholy, The, 125.
Apuleius, 125.
Arabian Nights, The, 46, 100, 101, 231.
Arcadia, The Duchess of Pembroke's, 78, 83 et seq., 196.
Arria Marcella, 283.
Astrée, l', 85.
Atala, 179 et seq.
Aucassin and Nicolete, 11, 14, 15, 249, 305.

Bacon, Sir Francis, 112.
Balzac, Honoré de, 188, 192, 206, 212, 217 et seq., 238, 288, 290, 292,
293, 301, 307.
Barye, Antoine Louis, 180, 202.
Baudelaire, Charles, 239.
Beardsley Aubrey, 88.
Behn, Mrs. Aphra, 70, 139.
Beowulf, 9.
Bergers d'Arcadie, Les, 87.
Bible, The, 128.
Bickerstaff, Mr., 19, 113 et seq.
Boccaccio, Giovanni, 19, 20 et seq., 56, 82, 85, 125, 155, 225, 306,
309.
Boigne, Mme. de, 275.
Boileau, Nicolas B.-Despreaux, 62.
Borrow, George, 59.
Botticelli, 25.
Bouvard et Pécuchet, 296, 297, 298.
Brantôme, 278.

Browne, Sir Thomas, 252.
Bunyan, John, 126 et seq., 140, 155, 257.
Burleigh, Lord, 74.
Burney, Fanny, 107, 112, 115, 119, 147 et seq.
Burns, Robert, 193.
Burton, Robert, 125, 132, 134.
Byron, Lord, 176, 202.

Caleb Williams, 244, 245.
Canterbury Tales, The, 37 et seq.
Captain Singleton, 58.
Caractères, La Bruyère's, 110.
Castle of Otranto, The, 189.
Cellini, Benvenuto, 157.
Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, Les, 46.
Cervantes, Miguel de C. Saavedra, 32, 60, 61, 78, 82, 85, 86, 93 et
seq., 126, 158, 162, 192, 257.
Characters, Sir Thomas Overbury's, 107 et seq.
Charlemagne, 8, 9, 32, 52.
Chateaubriand, François René de, 175 et seq., 202, 208, 291, 301.
Chatterton, Thomas, 190.
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 19, 20, 21, 31 et seq., 107, 155, 156, 218, 306.
Cinderella, 89.
Citizen of the World, The, 148, 231.
Clarissa Harlowe, 140 et seq.
Clopinel, Jean, 21 et seq.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 42.
Colomba, 275.
Comédie Humaine, La, 217 et seq., 292.
Congreve, William, 274.
Contes Drôlatiques, Les, 222.
Corelli, Miss, 25.
Cranford, 118, 168.
Cromwell, Oliver, 126.
Cromwell, 206.

Dance of Death, The, 262.
Dante, 155, 202.
Decameron, The, 19, 37 et seq., 156.
Defoe, Daniel, 114, 132 et seq., 140, 155.
Delacroix, Eugène, 202.
De Quincey, Thomas, 120.
Desvergnes, 26.
Diana, 85.
Dickens, Charles, 58.
Don Quixote, 10, 60, 82, 96 et seq., 158, 161, 257.
Dream Children, 120.
Dumas, Alexandre, 177, 188, 193, 201, 205, 206, 210 et seq., 261, 274.

Earle, John, 109, 110, 111.
Edgeworth, Maria, 192, 217.
Éducation Sentimentale, l', 294.
Edward III., 39.
Elia, 258.
Ellis, F. S., 22.
Émaux et Camées, 238.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 259.
Emma, 151.
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, An, 244.
Ethan Brand, 263.
Euclid, 144, 146, 253.
Eugénie Grandet, 222, 225, 228.
Euphues, 67, 70 et seq., 139.
Evelina, 147 et seq., 168.
Exemplary Novels, The, 46, 94, 99, 101, 102, 126.

Facino Cane, 227.
Faërie Queene, The, 126, 128, 132.
Femme au Collier de Velours, La, 201.
Ferdinand Count, Fathom, 165.
Fiametta, 85.

Fielding, Henry, 71, 96, 107, 119, 147, 150, 152, 156 et seq., 187, 227,
235, 257, 293.
Figaro, Le, 238.
Flaubert, Gustave, 46, 133, 184, 195, 226, 287 et seq., 307.
Froissart, 191.

Galatea, 62, 78, 85, 94, 95, 98, 103.
Gautier, Théophile, 88, 177, 195, 202, 203, 205, 206, 208, 217, 221,
231 et seq., 251, 273, 277, 283, 288, 291, 307.
Gavin, Miss J., 102.
Gay, John, 42.
Génie du Christianisme, Le, 182.
Gesta Romanorum, The, 20, 34 et seq., 45, 128.
Gil Blas, 61, 62, 63, 161.
Godwin, William, 244 et seq.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 175, 232.
Goldsmith, Oliver, 42, 118 et seq., 148, 231.
Goya, Francisco Jose de G. y Lucientes, 262, 269.
Grace Abounding, 130.
Graham, R. B. Cunninghame, 121.
Grammont Memoirs, The, 278.
Greene, Robert, 67, 74, 126, 140.
Griselda, 46.
Guardian, The, 112.
Guest, Lady Charlotte, 13.

Hamilton, Anthony, 278.
Hardyknute, The Ballad of, 191.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 134, 245, 257 et seq., 274, 283, 307, 308.
Hazlitt, William, 84, 111, 128, 193, 244, 245, 258, 273, 274, 278.
Heptameron, The, 51.
Hernani, 201, 205.
Hérodias, 296.
Histoire mes de Bêtes, l', 193.
Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Wilhelm, 201, 225.
Hogarth, William, 156, 168.

Holbein, Hans, 262.
Holcroft, Thomas, 278.
Homer, 208.
Hosea, 128.
House of the Seven Gables, The, 263.
Hugo, Victor, 177, 183, 201, 203 et seq., 277, 295, 301.
Humphry Clinker, 51, 117, 147, 166 et seq.
Hunt, Leigh, 119.

Ivanhoe, 196, 211.

Jack Wilton, or The Unfortunate Traveller, 60, 76.
John Arnolfini and his Wife, 41.
Johnson, Samuel, 118, 144, 175.
Jonathan Wild, 163 et seq.
Jonson, Ben, 109.
Joseph Andrews, 156 et seq.
Journal of the Plague Year, A, 134.
Julie, or La Nouvelle Héloïse, 147, 177.

Keats, John, 42, 274, 310.
King Lear, 228.
Kit Kats, The, 115.

La Bruyère, Jean de, 63, 110, 111.
Lafontaine, Jean de, 42.
Lamb, Charles, 120, 133, 258, 260.
Lancret, Nicolas, 86.
Lavengro, 58, 59.
Lazarillo de Tormes, 51 et seq.
Lenore, 251.
Leonardo da Vinci, 243, 248.
Le Sage, Alain René, 61 et seq., 160.
Lewis, Matthew Gregory, 166.

Lockhart, John Gibson, 101.
Lodge, Thomas, 73 et seq., 126.
Lorris, Guillaume de, 23.
Love for Love, 149.
Luna, H. de, 56.
Lyly, John, 70 et seq., 90, 139, 280.

Mabbe, James, 126.
Mabinogion, The, 9, 11 et seq., 51, 73, 240.
Macpherson, James, 191.
Madame Bovary, 291 et seq.
Mademoiselle de Maupin, 237.
Mahomet, 240.
Malory, Sir Thomas, 11, 61, 88.
Manon Lescaut, 147.
Margaret, Queen of Navarre, 51.
Markheim, 263.
Marot, Clément, 21, 156.
Masefield, John, 61.
Masque of the Red Death, The, 247.
Mateo Falcone, 277.
Maupassant, Guy de, 226, 235, 247, 291, 292, 298 et seq., 307.
Mérimée, Prosper, 46, 195, 203, 205, 206, 273 et seq., 292, 301, 307.
Messe de l'Athée, La, 225.
Meung, Jean de, 21 et seq., 31.
Microcosmography, A, 111.
Milton, John, 42.
Misérables, Les, 207.
Modest Proposal, A, 277.
Molière, Jean Baptiste Poquelin de, 61.
Monk and Witch, 262.
Mona Lisa, 249, 298.
Montaigne, Michel Eyquem Sieur de, 73, 112, 120, 208.
Montemôr, Jorge de, 85.
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de, 208.
Morte Amoureuse, La, 305, 307, 309.

Morte Darthur, The, 8, 11, 32, 37, 51, 61, 240.
Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist, 120.
Murders in the Rue Morgue, The, 248.
Mystery of Marie Roget, The, 248.

Naples, Queen Joan of, 47.
Nash, Thomas, 60, 76.
Nevinson, H. W., 88.
Newgate Calendar, The, 132.
New Testament, The, 144.
Northanger Abbey, 189.
Northcote, James, 278.
Notre Dame de Paris, 204, 207.
Nouvelle Héloïse, La, or Julie, 147, 177.

Odin, 8.
Old Gentleman, The, 119.
Old Lady, The, 120.
Oliver Twist, 58.
Ossian, 178, 179, 191.
Oval Portrait, The, 250.
Overbury, Sir Thomas, 108, 109, 110, 111.

Pamela, 140 et seq., 157.
Pandosto, 75, 76.
Paradise Lost, 298.
Pascal, 208.
Pater, Walter, 121.
Paynter's Pallace, 68.
Peacock, Thomas Love, 196.
Penseur, Le, 297.
Pepys, Samuel, 129.
Percy and Duglas, 84.
Percy, Bishop, 191.
Père Goriot, 228, 307.

Petite Ficelle, La, 307, 310.
Petite Pallace of Petite his Pleasure, A, 68 et seq.
Petrarch, 38.
Pettie, George, 68, 69, 126.
Philosophy of Composition, The, 244, 246.
Pilgrim's Progress, 126 et seq., 257.
Pindar, 84.
Pippin, 8.
Pisan, Christine de, 25.
Plea of Pan, The, 88.
Poe, Edgar Allan, 46, 165, 195, 220, 243 et seq., 258, 259, 263, 281,
307.
Poussin, Nicolas, 86, 87.
Presse, La, 238.
Prévost, l'Abbé, 147.
Punch and Judy, 96.
Purloined Letter, The, 248.

Quentin Durward, 208.

Rabelais, François, 25, 96, 170, 208.
Radcliffe, Mrs., 166.
Rappacini's Daughter, 265.
Raven, The, 244, 253.
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, The, 191, 218.
Rendezvous, Le, 299.
René, 179.
Reynard the Fox, 9, 54.
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 243.
Richardson, Samuel, 71; 139 et seq., 155, 156, 157, 158, 167, 235.
Robert the Devil, The Life of, 19.
Robinson Crusoe, 114, 132.
Rob Roy, 192.
Roderick Random, 58, 160 et seq.
Rodin, Auguste, 297.
Romance of the Rose, The, 19 et seq., 132.

Roman Comique, Le, 158.
Roman de la Momie, Le, 236.
Romany Rye, The, 59.
Ronsard, Pierre de, 21, 155, 158.
Rosalynde, 73, 75, 77, 78.
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 42, 44.
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 147, 175, 177, 178, 179, 180.

Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin de, 208.
St. Julien l'Hospitalier, 291, 296.
Salammbo, 291, 294, 295, 298.
Santayana, George, 239.
Scarlatti, Alessandro, 196.
Scarlet Letter, The, 258, 266.
Scarron, Paul, 86, 170.
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 25.
Scott, Sir Walter, 42, 101, 187 et seq., 206, 208, 210, 211, 212, 217,
218, 219, 251.
Selkirk, Alexander, 134.
Sense and Sensibility, 150.
Shakespeare, William, 78, 96, 126, 155, 202.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 311.
Sidney, Sir Philip, 78, 83 et seq., 95, 140, 175, 191, 233.
Sir Charles Grandison, 140.
Sir Roger de Coverley, 117 et seq.
Smollett, Tobias, 58, 71, 107, 119, 147, 150, 152, 156 et seq., 187,
261, 293, 308.
Somerset, The Countess of, 108.
Somerset, The Earl of, 108.
Song of Roland, The, 37.
Spectator, The, 112, 116, 117, 142, 148, 168.
Spenser, Edmund, 42, 126, 128.
Steele, Sir Richard, 113 et seq., 142, 148.
Stendhal, Henri Beyle who wrote as, 131, 261.
Sterne, Laurence, 169, 170.
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 243, 250.

Summer is icumen in, 15.
Swift, Dean, 113.
Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 71.

Table Talk, 258.
Taine, Hippolyte, 23, 278.
Tatler, The, 112, 113, 142, 148, 168.
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 42.
Tentation de Saint Antoine, La, 296, 297, 298.
Theocritus, 81.
Theophrastus, 63, 107, 110, 111.
Thomson, Hugh, 118.
Thoreau, Henry David, 258.
Tolstoy, Leo, Count, 261.
Tom Jones, 51, 58, 89, 144, 166, 257.
Tristram Shandy, 169, 170.
Troilus and Criseyd, 38, 47.
Trois Contes, 295.
Trois Mousquetaires, Les, 211, 212.
Tulipe Noire, La, 211.

Un Cœur Simple, 291, 295.
Urfé, Honoré d', 85.

Van Eyck, Jan and Hubert, 41, 42.
Vathek, 231.
Venus d'Ille, La, 283.
Vicar of Wakefield, The, 86, 118, 119.
Vingt Ans Après, 212.
Virgil, 81, 86.
Volsunga Saga, The, 11, 240.
Voltaire, 202, 231, 274, 296, 297.

Wagner, Wilhelm Richard, 196.

Walpole, Horace, 189.
Watteau Antoine, 61, 86.
Waverley Novels, The, 42, 187 et seq., 209.
Wilde, Oscar, 311.
William Wilson, 250.
Wordsworth, William, 42.

Yeats, William Butler, 236.
Young Goodman Brown, 267, 268.

Zola, Emile, 226.

Printed by T. and A. Constable,
Printers to His Majesty at the
Edinburgh University Press

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Translation by Lady Charlotte Guest, 1838.

[2] The quotations in this chapter are from the
translation by Mr. F. S. Ellis.

[3] It would be possible to trace an interesting history
of narrative in verse from Chaucer to our own day. But
although the names of Spenser, Milton, Lafontaine,
Gay, Goldsmith, Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth,
Tennyson, Rossetti, which with many others come
instantly to mind, show how various and suggestive
such an essay might be, yet the purpose of this book
would hardly be served by its inclusion. It would be
more nearly concerned with the history of poetry than
with that of story-telling.

[4] By H. de Luna, 1620. The earliest known edition of
Lazarillo was published in 1553.

[5] From a poem by John Masefield.

[6] There is another picture of the same name and
subject in the Duke of Devonshire's collection.

[7] It is worth noticing as an additional proof of the
close connection between the story in letters and the
feminine novel that Sense and Sensibility was built out
of an older tale that she actually wrote in epistolary
form.

[8] From a poem by Lascelles Abercrombie.

[9]This is repeated with a new purpose from the
chapter on Origins.

[10] The distinction between novel and romance made
in the chapter on Hawthorne is one of material rather
than of form. It is possible to use the material of
romance in the form of either novel, nouvelle, or short
story.

[11] The novelette is not the same as the nouvelle, but
simply a short novel as its name implies.

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