PLEASING AND PRATTLING
(Pall Mall Gazette, August 4, 1880.)
Sixty years ago, when Sir Walter Scott was inaugurating an era of historical romance, The Wolfe of Badenoch was a very popular book. To us its interest is more archaeological than artistic, and its characters seem merely puppets parading in fourteenth-century costume. It is true our grandfathers thought differently. They liked novels in which the heroine exclaims, "Peace with thine impudence, sir knave. Dost thou dare to speak thus in presence of the Lady Eleanore de Selby? . . . A greybeard"s ire shall never--," while the hero remarks that "the welkin reddenes i" the west." In fact, they considered that language like this is exceedingly picturesque and gives the necessary historical perspective. Nowadays, however, few people have the time to read a novel that requires a glossary to explain it, and we fear that without a glossary the general reader will hardly appreciate the value of such expressions as "gnoffe," "bowke," "herborow," "papelarde," "couepe,"
"rethes," "pankers," "agroted lorrel," and "horrow tallow-catch," all of which occur in the first few pages of The Wolfe of Badenoch. In a novel we want life, not learning; and, unfortunately, Sir Thomas Lauder lays himself open to the criticism Jonson made on Spenser, that "in affecting the ancients he writ no language." Still, there is a healthy spirit of adventure in the book, and no doubt many people will be interested to see the kind of novel the public liked in 1825.
Keep My Secret, by Miss G. M. Robins, is very different. It is quite modern both in manner and in matter. The heroine, Miss Olga Damien, when she is a little girl tries to murder Mr. Victor Burnside. Mr. Burnside, who is tall, blue-eyed and amber-haired, makes her promise never to mention the subject to any one; this, in fact, is the secret that gives the t.i.tle to the book. The result is that Miss Damien is blackmailed by a fascinating and unscrupulous uncle and is nearly burnt to death in the secret chamber of an old castle. The novel at the end gets too melodramatic in character and the plot becomes a chaos of incoherent incidents, but the writing is clever and bright. It is just the book, in fact, for a summer holiday, as it is never dull and yet makes no demands at all upon the intellect.
Mrs. Chetwynd gives us a new type of widow. As a rule, in fiction widows are delightful, designing and deceitful; but Mrs. Dorriman is not by any means a Cleopatra in c.r.a.pe. She is a weak, retiring woman, very feeble and very feminine, and with the simplicity that is characteristic of such sweet and shallow natures she allows her brother to defraud her of all her property. The widow is rather a bore and the brother is quite a bear, but Margaret Rivers who, to save her sister from poverty, marries a man she does not love, is a cleverly conceived character, and Lady Lyons is an admirable old dowager. The book can be read without any trouble and was probably written without any trouble also. The style is prattling and pleasing.
The plot of Delamere is not very new. On the death of her husband, Mrs.
De Ruthven discovers that the estates belong by right not to her son Raymond but to her niece Fleurette. As she keeps her knowledge to herself, a series of complications follows, but the cousins are ultimately united in marriage and the story ends happily. Mr. Curzon writes in a clever style, and though its construction is rather clumsy the novel is a thoroughly interesting one.
A Daughter of Fife tells us of the love of a young artist for a Scotch fisher-girl. The character sketches are exceptionally good, especially that of David Promoter, a fisherman who leaves his nets to preach the gospel, and the heroine is quite charming till she becomes civilised. The book is a most artistic combination of romantic feeling with realistic form, and it is pleasant to read descriptions of Scotch scenery that do not represent the land of mist and mountain as a sort of chromolithograph from the Brompton Road.
In Mr. Speight"s novel, A Barren t.i.tle, we have an impoverished earl who receives an allowance from his relations on condition of his remaining single, being all the time secretly married and the father of a grown-up son. The story is improbable and amusing.
On the whole, there is a great deal to be said for our ordinary English novelists. They have all some story to tell, and most of them tell it in an interesting manner. Where they fail is in concentration of style.
Their characters are far too eloquent and talk themselves to tatters.
What we want is a little more reality and a little less rhetoric. We are most grateful to them that they have not as yet accepted any frigid formula, nor stereotyped themselves into a school, but we wish that they would talk less and think more. They lead us through a barren desert of verbiage to a mirage that they call life; we wander aimlessly through a very wilderness of words in search of one touch of nature. However, one should not be too severe on English novels: they are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed.
(1) The Wolfe of Badenoch: A Historical Romance of the Fourteenth Century. By Sir Thomas Lauder. (Hamilton, Adams and Co.)
(2) Keep My Secret. By G. M. Robins. (Bentley and Son.)
(3) Mrs. Dorriman. By the Hon. Mrs. Henry Chetwynd. (Chapman and Hall.)
(4) Delamere. By G. Curzon. (Sampson Low, Marston and Co.)
(5) A Daughter of Fife. By Amelia Barr. (James Clarke and Co.)
(6) A Barren t.i.tle. By T. W. Speight. (Chatto and Windus.)
BALZAC IN ENGLISH
(Pall Mall Gazette, September 13, 1886.)
Many years ago, in a number of All the Year Round, Charles d.i.c.kens complained that Balzac was very little read in England, and although since then the public has become more familiar with the great masterpieces of French fiction, still it may be doubted whether the Comedie Humaine is at all appreciated or understood by the general run of novel readers. It is really the greatest monument that literature has produced in our century, and M. Taine hardly exaggerates when he says that, after Shakespeare, Balzac is our most important magazine of doc.u.ments on human nature. Balzac"s aim, in fact, was to do for humanity what Buffon had done for the animal creation. As the naturalist studied lions and tigers, so the novelist studied men and women. Yet he was no mere reporter. Photography and proces-verbal were not the essentials of his method. Observation gave him the facts of life, but his genius converted facts into truths, and truths into truth. He was, in a word, a marvellous combination of the artistic temperament with the scientific spirit. The latter he bequeathed to his disciples; the former was entirely his own. The distinction between such a book as M. Zola"s L"a.s.sommoir and such a book as Balzac"s Illusions Perdues is the distinction between unimaginative realism and imaginative reality. "All Balzac"s characters," said Baudelaire, "are gifted with the same ardour of life that animated himself. All his fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams. Every mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle with will. The very scullions have genius." He was, of course, accused of being immoral. Few writers who deal directly with life escape that charge. His answer to the accusation was characteristic and conclusive. "Whoever contributes his stone to the edifice of ideas," he wrote, "whoever proclaims an abuse, whoever sets his mark upon an evil to be abolished, always pa.s.ses for immoral. If you are true in your portraits, if, by dint of daily and nightly toil, you succeed in writing the most difficult language in the world, the word immoral is thrown in your face." The morals of the personages of the Comedie Humaine are simply the morals of the world around us. They are part of the artist"s subject-matter; they are not part of his method. If there be any need of censure it is to life, not to literature, that it should be given. Balzac, besides, is essentially universal. He sees life from every point of view. He has no preferences and no prejudices. He does not try to prove anything. He feels that the spectacle of life contains its own secret. "II cree un monde et se tait."
And what a world it is! What a panorama of pa.s.sions! What a pell-mell of men and women! It was said of Trollope that he increased the number of our acquaintances without adding to our visiting list; but after the Comedie Humaine one begins to believe that the only real people are the people who have never existed. Lucien de Rubempre, le Pere Goriot, Ursule Mirouet, Marguerite Claes, the Baron Hulot, Madame Marneffe, le Cousin Pons, De Marsay--all bring with them a kind of contagious illusion of life. They have a fierce vitality about them: their existence is fervent and fiery-coloured; we not merely feel for them but we see them--they dominate our fancy and defy scepticism. A steady course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our acquaintances to the shadows of shades. Who would care to go out to an evening party to meet Tomkins, the friend of one"s boyhood, when one can sit at home with Lucien de Rubempre? It is pleasanter to have the entree to Balzac"s society than to receive cards from all the d.u.c.h.esses in May fair.
In spite of this, there are many people who have declared the Comedie Humaine to be indigestible. Perhaps it is: but then what about truffles?
Balzac"s publisher refused to be disturbed by any such criticism as that.
"Indigestible, is it?" he exclaimed with what, for a publisher, was rare good sense. "Well, I should hope so; who ever thinks of a dinner that isn"t?" And our English publisher, Mr. Routledge, clearly agrees with M.
Poulet-Mala.s.sis, as he is occupied in producing a complete translation of the Comedie Humaine. The two volumes that at present lie before us contain Cesar Birotteau, that terrible tragedy of finance, and L"lll.u.s.tre Gaudissart, the apotheosis of the commercial traveller, the d.u.c.h.esse de Langeais, most marvellous of modern love stories, Le Chef d"OEuvre Inconnu, from which Mr. Henry James took his Madonna of the Future, and that extraordinary romance Une Pa.s.sion dans le Desert. The choice of stories is quite excellent, but the translations are very unequal, and some of them are positively bad. L"lll.u.s.tre Gaudissart, for instance, is full of the most grotesque mistakes, mistakes that would disgrace a schoolboy. "Bon conseil vaut un oeil dans la main" is translated "Good advice is an egg in the hand"! "Ecus rebelles" is rendered "rebellious lucre," and such common expressions as "faire la barbe," "attendre la vente," "n"entendre rien," palir sur une affaire," are all mistranslated.
"Des bois de quoi se faire un cure-dent" is not "a few trees to slice into toothpicks," but "as much timber as would make a toothpick"; "son horloge enfermee dans une grande armoire oblongue" is not "a clock which he kept shut up in a large oblong closet" but simply a clock in a tall clock-case; "journal viager" is not "an annuity," "garce" is not the same as "farce," and "dessins des Indes" are not "drawings of the Indies." On the whole, nothing can be worse than this translation, and if Mr.
Routledge wishes the public to read his version of the Comedie Humaine, he should engage translators who have some slight knowledge of French.
Cesar Birotteau is better, though it is not by any means free from mistakes. "To suffer under the Maximum" is an absurd rendering of "subir le maximum"; "perse" is "chintz," not "Persian chintz"; "rendre le pain benit" is not "to take the wafer"; "riviere" is hardly a "fillet of diamonds"; and to translate "son coeur avait un calus a l"endroit du loyer" by "his heart was a callus in the direction of a lease" is an insult to two languages. On the whole, the best version is that of the d.u.c.h.esse de Langeais, though even this leaves much to be desired. Such a sentence as "to imitate the rough logician who marched before the Pyrrhonians while denying his own movement" entirely misses the point of Balzac"s "imiter le rude logicien qui marchait devant les pyrrhoniens, qui niaient le mouvement."
We fear Mr. Routledge"s edition will not do. It is well printed and nicely bound; but his translators do not understand French. It is a great pity, for La Comedie Humaine is one of the masterpieces of the age.
Balzac"s Novels in English. The d.u.c.h.esse de Langeais and Other Stories; Cesar Birotteau. (Routledge and Sons.)
TWO NEW NOVELS
(Pall Mall Gazette, September 16, 1880.)
Most modern novels are more remarkable for their crime than for their culture, and Mr. G. Manville Fenn"s last venture is no exception to the general rule. The Master of the Ceremonies is turbid, terrifying and thrilling. It contains, besides many "moving accidents by flood and field," an elopement, an abduction, a bigamous marriage, an attempted a.s.sa.s.sination, a duel, a suicide, and a murder. The murder, we must acknowledge, is a masterpiece. It would do credit to Gaboriau, and should make Miss Braddon jealous. The Newgate Calendar itself contains nothing more fascinating, and what higher praise than this can be given to a sensational novel? Not that Lady Teigne, the hapless victim, is killed in any very new or subtle manner. She is merely strangled in bed, like Desdemona; but the circ.u.mstances of the murder are so peculiar that Claire Denville, in common with the reader, suspects her own father of being guilty, while the father is convinced that the real criminal is his eldest son. Stuart Denville himself, the Master of the Ceremonies, is most powerfully drawn. He is a penniless, padded dandy who, by a careful study of the "grand style" in deportment, has succeeded in making himself the Brummel of the promenade and the autocrat of the a.s.sembly Rooms. A light comedian by profession, he is suddenly compelled to play the princ.i.p.al part in a tragedy. His shallow, trivial nature is forced into the loftiest heroism, the n.o.blest self-sacrifice. He becomes a hero against his will. The b.u.t.terfly goes to martyrdom, the fop has to become fine. Round this character centres, or rather should centre, the psychological interest of the book, but unfortunately Mr. Fenn has insisted on crowding his story with unnecessary incident. He might have made of his novel "A Soul"s Tragedy," but he has produced merely a melodrama in three volumes. The Master of the Ceremonies is a melancholy example of the fatal influence of Drury Lane on literature. Still, it should be read, for though Mr. Fenn has offered up his genius as a holocaust to Mr. Harris, he is never dull, and his style is on the whole very good. We wish, however, that he would not try to give articulate form to inarticulate exclamations. Such a pa.s.sage as this is quite dreadful and fails, besides, in producing the effect it aims at:
"He--he--he, hi--hi--hi, hec--hec--hec, ha--ha--ha! ho--ho! Bless my--hey--ha! hey--ha! hugh--hugh--hugh! Oh dear me! Oh--why don"t you--heck--heck--heck--heck--heck! shut the--ho--ho--ho--ho--hugh--hugh--window before I--ho--ho--ho--ho!"
This horrible jargon is supposed to convey the impression of a lady coughing. It is, of course, a mere meaningless monstrosity on a par with spelling a sneeze. We hope that Mr. Fenn will not again try these theatrical tricks with language, for he possesses a rare art--the art of telling a story well.
A Statesman"s Love, the author tells us in a rather mystical preface, was written "to show that the alchemist-like transfiguration supposed to be wrought in our whole nature by that pa.s.sion has no existence in fact,"
but it cannot be said to prove this remarkable doctrine.
It is an exaggerated psychological study of a modern woman, a sort of picture by limelight, full of coa.r.s.e colours and violent contrasts, not by any means devoid of cleverness but essentially false and over-emphasised. The heroine, Helen Rohan by name, tells her own story and, as she takes three volumes to do it in, we weary of the one point of view. Life to be intelligible should be approached from many sides, and valuable though the permanent ego may be in philosophy, the permanent ego in fiction soon becomes a bore. There are, however, some interesting scenes in the novel, and a good portrait of the Young Pretender, for though the heroine is absolutely a creation of the nineteenth century, the background of the story is historical and deals with the Rebellion of "45. As for the style, it is often original and picturesque; here and there are strong individual touches and brilliant pa.s.sages; but there is also a good deal of pretence and a good deal of carelessness.
What can be said, for instance, about such expressions as these, taken at random from the second volume,--"evanishing," "solitary loneness," "in my _then_ mood," "the bees _might advantage_ by to-day," "I would not listen reverently as _did the other some_ who went," "entangling myself in the net of this retiari," and why should Ba.s.sanio"s beautiful speech in the trial scene be deliberately attributed to Shylock? On the whole, A Statesman"s Love cannot be said to be an artistic success; but still it shows promise and, some day, the author who, to judge by the style, is probably a woman, may do good work. This, however, will require pruning, prudence and patience. We shall see.
(1) The Master of the Ceremonies. By G. Manville Fenn. (Ward and Downey.)
(2) A Statesman"s Love. By Emile Bauche. (Blackwood and Co.)
BEN JONSON
(Pall Mall Gazette, September 20, 1886.)
In selecting Mr. John Addington Symonds to write the life of Ben Jonson for his series of "English Worthies," Mr. Lang, no doubt, exercised a wise judgment. Mr. Symonds, like the author of Volpone, is a scholar and a man of letters; his book on Shakspeare"s Predecessors showed a marvellous knowledge of the Elizabethan period, and he is a recognised authority on the Italian Renaissance. The last is not the least of his qualifications. Without a full appreciation of the meaning of the Humanistic movement it is impossible to understand the great struggle between the Cla.s.sical form and the Romantic spirit which is the chief critical characteristic of the golden age of the English drama, an age when Shakespeare found his chief adversary, not among his contemporaries, but in Seneca, and when Jonson armed himself with Aristotle to win the suffrages of a London audience. Mr. Symonds" book, consequently, will be opened with interest. It does not, of course, contain much that is new about Jonson"s life. But the facts of Jonson"s life are already well known, and in books of this kind what is true is of more importance than what is new, appreciation more valuable than discovery. Scotchmen, however, will, no doubt, be interested to find that Mr. Symonds has succeeded in identifying Jonson"s crest with that of the Johnstones of Annandale, and the story of the way the literary t.i.tan escaped from hanging, by proving that he could read, is graphically told.
On the whole, we have a vivid picture of the man as he lived. Where picturesqueness is required, Mr. Symonds is always good. The usual comparison with Dr. Johnson is, of course, brought out. Few of "Rare Ben"s" biographers spare us that, and the point is possibly a natural one to make. But when Mr. Symonds calls upon us to notice that both men made a journey to Scotland, and that "each found in a Scotchman his biographer," the parallel loses all value. There is an M in Monmouth and an M in Macedon, and Drummond of Hawthornden and Boswell of Auchinleck were both born the other side of the Tweed; but from such a.n.a.logies nothing is to be learned. There is no surer way of destroying a similarity than to strain it.
As for Mr. Symonds" estimate of Jonson"s genius, it is in many points quite excellent. He ranks him with the giants rather than with the G.o.ds, with those who compel our admiration by their untiring energy and huge strength of intellectual muscle, not with those "who share the divine gifts of creative imagination and inevitable instinct." Here he is right. Pelion more than Parna.s.sus was Jonson"s home. His art has too much effort about it, too much definite intention. His style lacks the charm of chance. Mr. Symonds is right also in the stress he lays on the extraordinary combination in Jonson"s work of the most concentrated realism with encyclopaedic erudition. In Jonson"s comedies London slang and learned scholarship go hand in hand. Literature was as living a thing to him as life itself. He used his cla.s.sical lore not merely to give form to his verse, but to give flesh and blood to the persons of his plays. He could build up a breathing creature out of quotations. He made the poets of Greece and Rome terribly modern, and introduced them to the oddest company. His very culture is an element in his coa.r.s.eness.
There are moments when one is tempted to liken him to a beast that has fed off books.