When he released her she moved at once impetuously to the open doorway. On the threshold she hesitated, paused a moment irresolutely, and then turned back.
“Shall I——Does your pipe want filling, John?”she asked softly.
“No, thank you, my dear.”
“Would you like me to stay, read to you, or anything?”
He looked up at her wistfully.“N-no, thank you, I'm not much of a reader, you know, my dear—somehow.”
She hated herself for knowing that there would be a“my dear,”probably a“somehow”in his reply, and despised herself for the sense of irritated impatience she felt by anticipation, even before the words were uttered.
There was a moment's hesitating silence, broken by the sound of quick firm footsteps without. Broomhurst paused at the entrance, and looked into the tent.
“Aren't you coming, Drayton?”he asked, looking first atDrayton's wife and then swiftly putting in his name with a scarcely perceptible pause.“Too lazy? But you, Mrs. Drayton?”
“Yes, I'm coming,”she said.
They left the tent together, and walked some few steps in silence.
Broomhurst shot a quick glance at his companion's face.
“Anything wrong?”he asked presently.
Though the words were ordinary enough, the voice in which they were spoken was in some subtle fashion a different voice from that in which he had talked to her nearly two months ago, though it would have required a keen sense of nice shades in sound to have detected the change.
Mrs. Drayton's sense of niceties in sound was particularly keen, but she answered quietly,“Nothing, thank you.”
They did not speak again till the trees round the stone-well were reached.
Broomhurst arranged their seats comfortably beside it.
“Are we going to read or talk?”he asked, looking up at her from his lower place.
“Well, we generally talk most when we arrange to read, so shall we agree to talk to-day for a change, by way of getting some reading done?”she rejoined, smiling.“Youbegin.”
Broomhurst seemed in no hurry to avail himself of the permission, he was apparently engrossed in watching the flecks of sunshine on Mrs. Drayton's white dress. The whirring of insects, and the creaking of a Persian wheel somewhere in the neighbourhood, filtered through the hot silence.
Mrs. Drayton laughed after a few minutes; there was a touch of embarrassment in the sound.
“The new plan doesn't answer. Suppose you read as usual, and let me interrupt, also as usual, after the first two lines.”
He opened the book obediently, but turned the pages at random.
She watched him for a moment, and then bent a little forward towards him.
“It is my turn now,”she said suddenly.“Is anything wrong?”
He raised his head, and their eyes met. There was a pause.“I will be more honest than you,”he returned.“Yes, there is.”
“What?”
“I've had orders to move on.”
She drew back, and her lips whitened, though she kept them steady.
“When do you go?”
“On Wednesday.”
There was silence again; the man still kept his eyes on her face.
The whirring of the insects and the creaking of the wheel had suddenly grown so strangely loud and insistent, that it was in a half-dazed fashion she at length heard her name—“Kathleen!”
“Kathleen!”he whispered again hoarsely.
She looked him full in the face, and once more their eyes met in a long grave gaze.
The man's face flushed, and he half rose from his seat with an impetuous movement, but Kathleen stopped him with a glance.
“Will you go and fetch my work? I left it in the tent,”she said, speaking very clearly and distinctly;“and then will you go on reading? I will find the place while you are gone.”
She took the book from his hand, and he rose and stood before her.
There was a mute appeal in his silence, and she raised her head slowly.
Her face was white to the lips, but she looked at him unflinchingly; and without a word he turned and left her.
Mrs. Drayton was resting in the tent on Tuesday afternoon. With the help of cushions and some low chairs she had improvised a couch, on which she lay quietly with her eyes closed. There was a tenseness, however, in her attitude which indicated that sleep was far from her.
Her features seemed to have sharpened during the last few days, and there were hollows in her cheeks. She had been very still for a long time, but all at once with a sudden movement she turned her head and buried her face in the cushions with a groan. Slipping from her place she fell on her knees beside the couch, and put both hands before her mouth to force back the cry that she felt struggling to her lips.
For some moments the wild effort she was making for outward calm, which even when she was alone was her first instinct, strained every nerve and blotted out sight and hearing, and it was not till the sound was very near that she was conscious of the ring of horse's hoofs on the plain.
She raised her head sharply with a thrill of fear, still kneeling, and listened.
There was no mistake. The horseman was riding in hot haste, for the thud of the hoofs followed one another swiftly.
As Mrs. Drayton listened her white face grew whiter, and she began to tremble. Putting out shaking hands, she raised herself by the arms of the folding-chair and stood upright.
Nearer and nearer came the thunder of the approaching sound, mingled with startled exclamations and the noise of trampling feet from the direction of the kitchen tent.
Slowly, mechanically almost, she dragged herself to the entrance, and stood clinging to the canvas there. By the time she had reached it, Broomhurst had flung himself from the saddle, and had thrown the reins to one of the men.
Mrs. Drayton stared at him with wide bright eyes as he hastened towards her.
“I thought you—you are not——”she began, and then her teeth began to chatter.“I am so cold!”she said, in a little weak voice.
Broomhurst took her hand, and led her over the threshold back into the tent.
“Don't be so frightened,”he implored;“I came to tell you first. I thought it wouldn't frighten you so much as——Your—Drayton is—very ill. They are bringing him. I——”
He paused. She gazed at him a moment with parted lips, then she broke into a horrible discordant laugh, and stood clinging to the back of a chair.
Broomhurst started back.
“Do you understand what I mean?”he whispered.“Kathleen, for God's sake—don't—he isdead.”
He looked over his shoulder as he spoke, her shrill laughter ringing in his ears. The white glare and dazzle of the plain stretched before him, framed by the entrance to the tent; far off, against the horizon, there were moving black specks, which he knew to be the returning servants with their still burden.
They were bringing John Drayton home.
One afternoon, some months later, Broomhurst climbed the steep lane leading to the cliffs of a little English village by the sea. He had already been to the inn, and had been shown by the proprietress the house where Mrs. Drayton lodged.
“The lady was out, but the gentleman would likely find her if he went to the cliffs—down by the bay, or thereabouts,”her landlady explained, and, obeying her directions, Broomhurst presently emerged from the shady woodland path on to the hillside overhanging the sea.
He glanced eagerly round him, and then with a sudden quickening of the heart, walked on over the springy heather to where she sat. She turned when the rustling his footsteps made through the bracken was near enough to arrest her attention, and looked up at him as he came. Then she rose slowly and stood waiting for him. He came up to her without a word and seized both her hands, devouring her face with his eyes. Something he saw there repelled him. Slowly he let her hands fall, still looking at her silently.“You are not glad to see me, and I have counted the hours,”he said at last in a dull toneless voice.
Her lips quivered.“Don't be angry with me—I can't help it—I'm not glad or sorry for anything now,”she answered, and her voice matched his for greyness.
They sat down together on a long flat stone half embedded in a wiry clump of whortleberries. Behind them the lonely hillsides rose, brilliant with yellow bracken and the purple of heather. Before them stretched the wide sea. It was a soft grey day. Streaks of pale sunlight trembled at moments far out on the water.The tide was rising in the little bay above which they sat, and Broomhurst watched the lazy foam-edged waves slipping over the uncovered rocks towards the shore, then sliding back as though for very weariness they despaired of reaching it. The muffled pulsing sound of the sea filled the silence. Broomhurst thought suddenly of hot Eastern sunshine, of the whirr of insect wings on the still air, and the creaking of a wheel in the distance. He turned and looked at his companion.
“I have come thousands of miles to see you,”he said;“aren't you going to speak to me now I am here?”
“Why did you come? I told you not to come,”she answered, falteringly.“I——”she paused.
“And I replied that I should follow you—if you remember,”he answered, still quietly.“I came because I would not listen to what you said then, at that awful time. You didn't knowyourselfwhat you said. No wonder! I have given you some months, and now I have come.”
There was silence between them. Broomhurst saw that she was crying; her tears fell fast on to her hands, that were clasped in her lap. Her face, he noticed, was thin and drawn.
Very gently he put his arm round her shoulder and drew her nearer to him. She made no resistance—it seemed that she did not notice the movement; and his arm dropped at his side.
“You asked me why I had come? You think it possible that three months can change one, very thoroughly, then?”he said in a cold voice.
“I not only think it possible, I have proved it,”she replied wearily.
He turned round and faced her.
“Youdidlove me, Kathleen!”he asserted;“you never said so in words, but I know it,”he added fiercely.
“Yes, I did.”
“And——You mean that you don't now?”
Her voice was very tired.“Yes—I can't help it,”she answered,“it has gone—utterly.”
The grey sea slowly lapped the rocks. Overhead the sharp scream of a gull cut through the stillness. It was broken again, a moment afterwards, by a short hard laugh from the man.
“Don't!”she whispered, and laid a hand swiftly on his arm.“Do you think it isn't worse for me? I wish to God Ididlove you,”she cried passionately.“Perhaps it would make me forget that to all intents and purposes I am a murderess.”
Broomhurst met her wide despairing eyes with an amazement which yielded to sudden pitying comprehension.
“So that is it, my darling? You are worrying aboutthat? You who were as loyal, as——”
She stopped him with a frantic gesture.
“Don't!don't!”she wailed.“If you only knew; let me try to tell you—will you?”she urged pitifully.“It may be better if I tell someone—if I don't keep it all to myself, and think, andthink.”
She clasped her hands tight, with the old gesture he remembered when she was struggling for self-control, and waited a moment.
Presently she began to speak in a low hurried tone:“It began before you came. I know now what the feeling was that I was afraid to acknowledge to myself. I used to try and smother it, I used to repeat things to myself all day—poems, stupid rhymes—anythingto keep my thoughts quite underneath—but I—hatedJohn before you came! We had been married nearly a year then. I never loved him. Of course you are going to say: 'Why did you marry him?'”She looked drearily over the placid sea.“WhydidI marry him? I don't know; for the reason that hundreds of ignorant inexperienced girls marry, I suppose. My home wasn't a happy one. I was miserable, and oh,—restless. I wonder if men know what it feels like to be restless? Sometimes I think they can't even guess. John wanted me very badly—nobody wanted me at home particularly. There didn't seem to be any point in my life. Do you understand?... Of course being alone with him in that little camp in that silent plain”—she shuddered—“made things worse. My nerves went all to pieces. Everything he said—his voice—his accent—his walk—the way he ate—irritated me so that I longed to rush out sometimes and shriek—and gomad. Does it sound ridiculous to you to be driven mad by such trifles? I only know I used to get up from the table sometimes and walk up and down outside, with both hands over my mouth to keep myself quiet. And all the time Ihatedmyself—how I hated myself! I never had a word from him that wasn't gentle and tender. I believe he loved the ground I walked on. Oh, it isawfulto be loved like that, when you——”She drew in her breath with a sob.“I—I—it made me sick for him to come near me—to touch me.”She stopped a moment.
Broomhurst gently laid his hand on her quivering one.“Poor little girl!”he murmured.
“Thenyoucame,”she said,“and before long I had another feeling to fight against. At first I thought it couldn't be true that I loved you—it would die down. I think I wasfrightenedat the feeling; I didn't know it hurt so to love anyone.”
Broomhurst stirred a little.“Go on,”he said tersely.
“But it didn't die,”she continued in a trembling whisper,“and the otherawfulfeeling grew stronger and stronger—hatred; no, that is not the word—loathingfor—for—John. I fought againstit. Yes,”she cried feverishly, clasping and unclasping her hands,“Heaven knows I fought it with all my strength, and reasoned with myself, and—oh, I dideverything, but——”Her quick-falling tears made speech difficult.
“Kathleen!”Broomhurst urged desperately,“you couldn't help it, you poor child. You say yourself you struggled against your feelings—you were always gentle. Perhaps he didn't know.”
“But he did—hedid,”she wailed,“it is just that. I hurt him a hundred times a day; he never said so, but I knew it; and yet Icouldn'tbe kind to him—except in words—and he understood. And after you came it was worse in one way, for he knew. Ifelthe knew that I loved you. His eyes used to follow me like a dog's, and I was stabbed with remorse, and I tried to be good to him, but I couldn't.”
“But—he didn't suspect—he trusted you,”began Broomhurst.“He had every reason. No woman was ever so loyal, so——”
“Hush,”she almost screamed.“Loyal! it was the least I could do—to stop you, I mean—when you——After all, I knew it without your telling me. I had deliberately married him without loving him. It was my own fault. I felt it. Even if I couldn't prevent his knowing that I hated him, I could preventthat. It was my punishment. I deserved it fordaringto marry without love. But I didn't spare John one pang, after all,”she added bitterly.“He knew what I felt towards him—I don't think he cared about anything else. You say I mustn't reproach myself? When I went back to the tent that morning—when you—when I stopped you from saying you loved me, he was sitting at the table with his head buried in his hands; he was crying—bitterly: I saw him—it is terrible to see a man cry—and I stole away gently, but he saw me. I was torn to pieces, but Icouldn'tgoto him. I knew he would kiss me, and I shuddered to think of it. It seemed more than ever not to be borne that he should do that—when I knewyouloved me.”
“Kathleen,”cried her lover again,“don't dwell on it all so terribly——don't——”
“How can I forget?”she answered despairingly,“and then”—she lowered her voice—“oh, I can't tell you—all the time, at the back of my mind somewhere, there was a burning wish that he mightdie. I used to lie awake at night, and do what I would to stifle it, that thought used toscorchme, I wished it so intensely. Do you believe that by willing one can bring such things to pass?”she asked, looking at Broomhurst with feverishly bright eyes.“No?—well, I don't know—I tried to smother it. Ireallytried, but it was there, whatever other thoughts I heaped on the top. Then, when I heard the horse galloping across the plain that morning, I had a sick fear that it was you. I knew something had happened, and my first thought when I saw you alive and well, and knew that it wasJohn, was,that it was too good to be true. I believe I laughed like a maniac, didn't I?... Not to blame? Why, if it hadn't been for me he wouldn't have died. The men say they saw him sitting with his head uncovered in the burning sun, his face buried in his hands—just as I had seen him the day before. He didn't trouble to be careful—he was too wretched.”
She paused, and Broomhurst rose and began to pace the little hillside path at the edge of which they were seated.
Presently he came back to her.
“Kathleen, let me take care of you,”he implored, stooping towards her.“We have only ourselves to consider in this matter. Will you come to me at once?”
She shook her head sadly.
Broomhurst set his teeth, and the lines round his mouth deepened. He threw himself down beside her on the heather.
“Dear,”he urged still gently, though his voice showed he was controlling himself with an effort.“You are morbid about this. You have been alone too much—you are ill. Let me take care of you: Ican, Kathleen—and I love you. Nothing but morbid fancy makes you imagine you are in any way responsible for—Drayton's death. You can't bring him back to life, and——”
“No,”she sighed drearily,“and if I could, nothing would be altered. Though I am mad with self-reproach, I feelthat—it was all so inevitable. If he were alive and well before me this instant my feeling towards him wouldn't have changed. If he spoke to me, he would say 'My dear'—and I shouldloathehim. Oh, I know! It isthatthat makes it so awful.”
“But if you acknowledge it,”Broomhurst struck in eagerly,“will you wreck both of our lives for the sake of vain regrets? Kathleen, you never will.”
He waited breathlessly for her answer.
“I won't wreck both our lives by marrying again without love on my side,”she replied firmly.
“I will take the risk,”he said.“Youhaveloved me—you will love me again. You are crushed and dazed now with brooding over this—this trouble, but——”
“But I will not allow you to take the risk,”Kathleen answered.“What sort of woman should I be to be willing again to live with a man I don't love? I have come to know that there are things one owes tooneself. Self-respect is one of them. I don't know how it has come to be so, but all my old feeling for you hasgone. It is as though it had burnt itself out. I will not offer grey ashes to any man.”
Broomhurst looking up at her pale, set face, knew that her words were final, and turned his own aside with a groan.
“Ah!”cried Kathleen with a little break in her voice,“don't.Go away and be happy and strong, and all that I loved in you. I am so sorry—so sorry to hurt you. I——”her voice faltered miserably.“I—I only bring trouble to people.”
There was a long pause.
“Did you never think that there is a terrible vein of irony running through the ordering of this world?”she said presently.“It is a mistake to think our prayers are not answered—they are. In due time we get our heart's desire—when we have ceased to care for it.”
“I haven't yet got mine,”Broomhurst answered doggedly,“and I shall never cease to care for it.”
She smiled a little with infinite sadness.
“Listen, Kathleen,”he said. They had both risen and he stood before her, looking down at her.“I will go now, but in a year's time I shall come back. I will not give you up. You shall love me yet.”
“Perhaps—I don't think so,”she answered wearily.
Broomhurst looked at her trembling lips a moment in silence, then he stooped and kissed both her hands instead.
“I will wait till you tell me you love me,”he said.
She stood watching him out of sight. He did not look back, and she turned with swimming eyes to the grey sea and the transient gleams of sunlight that swept like tender smiles across its face.
An Idyll
By W. Brown MacDougal
Illustration: An Idyll
By Hubert Crackanthorpe
During the past fifty years, as everyone knows, the art of fiction has been expanding in a manner exceedingly remarkable, till it has grown to be the predominant branch of imaginative literature. But the other day we were assured that poetry only thrives in limited and exquisite editions; that the drama, here in England at least, has practically ceased to be literature at all. Each epoch instinctively chooses that literary vehicle which is best adapted for the expression of its particular temper: just as the drama flourished in the robust age of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson; just as that outburst of lyrical poetry, at the beginning of the century in France, coincided with a period of extreme emotional exaltation; so the novel, facile and flexible in its conventions, with its endless opportunities for accurate delineation of reality, becomes supreme in a time of democracy and of science—to note but these two salient characteristics.
And, if we pursue this light of thought, we find that, on all sides, the novel is being approached in one especial spirit, that it would seem to be striving, for the moment at any rate, to perfect itself within certain definite limitations. To employ ahackneyed,and often quite unintelligent, catchword—the novel is becoming realistic.
Throughout the history of literature, the jealous worship of beauty—which we term idealism—and the jealous worship of truth—which we term realism—have alternately prevailed. Indeed, it is within the compass of these alternations that lies the whole fundamental diversity of literary temper.
Still, the classification is a clumsy one, for no hard and fast line can be drawn between the one spirit and the other. The so-called idealist must take as his point of departure the facts of Nature; the so-called realist must be sensitive to some one or other of the forms of beauty, if each would achieve the fineness of great art. And the pendulum of production is continually swinging, from degenerate idealism to degenerate realism, from effete vapidity to slavish sordidity.
Either term, then, can only be employed in a purely limited and relative sense. Completely idealistic art—art that has no point of contact with the facts of the universe, as we know them—is, of course, an impossible absurdity; similarly, a complete reproduction of Nature by means of words is an absurd impossibility. Neither emphasization nor abstraction can be dispensed with: the one, eliminating the details of no import; the other, exaggerating those which the artist has selected. And, even were such a thing possible, it would not be Art. The invention of a highly perfected system of coloured photography, for instance, or a skilful recording by means of the phonograph of scenes in real life, would not subtract one whit from the value of the painter's or the playwright's interpretation. Art is not invested with the futile function of perpetually striving after imitation or reproduction of Nature; she endeavours to produce, through the adaptation of a restricted number of natural facts, an harmonious and satisfactory whole. Indeed, inthis very process of adaptation and blending together, lies the main and greater task of the artist. And the novel, the short story, even the impression of a mere incident, convey each of them, the imprint of the temper in which their creator has achieved this process of adaptation and blending together of his material. They are inevitably stamped with the hall-mark of his personality. A work of art can never be more than a corner of Nature, seen through the temperament of a single man. Thus, all literature is, must be, essentially subjective; for style is but the power of individual expression. The disparity which separates literature from the reporter's transcript is ineradicable. There is a quality of ultimate suggestiveness to be achieved; for the business of art is, not to explain or to describe, but to suggest. That attitude of objectivity, or of impersonality towards his subject, consciously or unconsciously, assumed by the artist, and which nowadays provokes so considerable an admiration, can be attained only in a limited degree. Every piece of imaginative work must be a kind of autobiography of its creator—significant, if not of the actual facts of his existence, at least of the inner working of his soul. We are each of us conscious, not of the whole world, but of our own world; not of naked reality, but of that aspect of reality which our peculiar temperament enables us to appropriate. Thus, every narrative of an external circumstance is never anything else than the transcript of the impression produced upon ourselves by that circumstance, and, invariably, a degree of individual interpretation is insinuated into every picture, real or imaginary, however objective it may be. So then, the disparity between the so-called idealist and the so-called realist is a matter, not of æsthetic philosophy, but of individual temperament. Each is at work, according to the especial bent of his genius, within precisely the same limits. Realism, as a creed, is as ridiculous as any other literary creed.
Now, it would have been exceedingly curious if this recent specialisation of the art of fiction, this passion for draining from the life, as it were, born, in due season, of the general spirit of the latter half of the nineteenth century, had not provoked a considerable amount of opposition—opposition of just that kind which every new evolution in art inevitably encounters. Between the vanguard and the main body there is perpetual friction.
But time flits quickly in this hurried age of ours, and the opposition to the renascence of fiction as a conscientious interpretation of life is not what it was; its opponents are not the men they were. It is not so long since a publisher was sent to prison for issuing English translations of celebrated specimens of French realism; yet, only the other day, we vied with each other in doing honour to the chief figure-head of that tendency across the Channel, and there was heard but the belated protest of a few worthy individuals, inadequately equipped with the jaunty courage of ignorance, or the insufferable confidence of second-hand knowledge.
And during the past year things have been moving very rapidly. The position of the literary artist towards Nature, his great inspirer, has become more definite, more secure. A sound, organised opinion of men of letters is being acquired; and in the little bouts with thebourgeois—if I may be pardoned the use of that wearisome word—no one has to fight single-handed. Heroism is at a discount; Mrs. Grundy is becoming mythological; a crowd of unsuspected supporters collect from all sides, and the deadly conflict of which we had been warned becomes but an interesting skirmish. Books are published, stories are printed, in old-established reviews, which would never have been tolerated a few years ago. On all sides, deference to the tendency of the time is spreading. The truth must be admitted: the roar of unthinking prejudice is dying away.
All this is exceedingly comforting: and yet, perhaps, it is not a matter for absolute congratulation. For, if the enemy are not dying as gamely as we had expected, if they are, as I am afraid, losing heart, and in danger of sinking into a condition of passive indifference, it should be to us a matter of not inconsiderable apprehension. If this new evolution in the art of fiction—this general return of the literary artist towards Nature, on the brink of which we are to-day hesitating—is to achieve any definite, ultimate fineness of expression, it will benefit enormously by the continued presence of a healthy, vigorous, if not wholly intelligent, body of opponents. Directly or indirectly, they will knock a lot of nonsense out of us, will these opponents;—why should we be ashamed to admit it? They will enable us to find our level, they will spur us on to bring out the best—and only the best—that is within us.
Take, for instance, the gentleman who objects to realistic fiction on moral grounds. If he does not stand the most conspicuous to-day, at least he was pre-eminent the day before yesterday. He is a hard case, and it is on his especial behalf that I would appeal. For he has been dislodged from the hill top, he has become a target for all manner of unkind chaff, from the ribald youth of Fleet Street and Chelsea. He has been labelled a Philistine: he has been twitted with his middle-age; he has been reported to have compromised himself with that indecent old person, Mrs. Grundy. It is confidently asserted that he comes from Putney, or from Sheffield, and that, when he is not busy abolishing the art of English literature, he is employed in safeguarding the interests of the grocery or tallow-chandler's trade. Strange and cruel tales of him have been printed in the monthly reviews; how, but for him, certain well-known popular writers would have written masterpieces; how, like the ogre in the fairy tale, he consumes every morning at breakfasta hundred pot-boiled young geniuses. For the most part they have been excellently well told, these tales of this moral ogre of ours; but why start to shatter brutally their dainty charm by a soulless process of investigation? No, let us be shamed rather into a more charitable spirit, into making generous amends, into rehabilitating the greatness of our moral ogre.
He is the backbone of our nation; the guardian of our mediocrity; the very foil of our intelligence. Once, you fancied that you could argue with him, that you could dispute his dictum. Ah! how we cherished that day-dream of our extreme youth. But it was not to be. He is still immense; for he is unassailable; he is flawless, for he is complete within himself; his lucidity is yet unimpaired; his impartiality is yet supreme. Who amongst us could judge with a like impartiality the productions of Scandinavia and Charpentier, Walt Whitman, and the Independent Theatre? Let us remember that he has never professed to understand Art, and the deep debt of gratitude that every artist in the land should consequently owe to him; let us remember that he is above us, for he belongs to the great middle classes; let us remember that he commands votes, that he is candidate for the County Council; let us remember that he is delightful, because he is intelligible.
Yes, he is intelligible; and of how many of us can that be said? His is no complex programme, no subtly exacting demand. A plain moral lesson is all that he asks, and his voice is as of one crying in the ever fertile wilderness of Smith and of Mudie.
And he is right, after all—if he only knew it. The business of art is to create for us fine interests, to make of our human nature a more complete thing: and thus, all great art is moral in the wider and the truer sense of the word. It is precisely on this point of the meaning of the word“moral”that we and our ogrepart company. To him, morality is concerned only with the established relations between the sexes and with fair dealing between man and man: to him the subtle, indirect morality of Art is incomprehensible.
Theoretically, Art is non-moral. She is not interested in any ethical code of any age or any nation, except in so far as the breach or observance of that code may furnish her with material on which to work. But, unfortunately, in this complex world of ours, we cannot satisfactorily pursue one interest—no, not even the interest of Art, at the expense of all others—let us look that fact in the face, doggedly, whatever pangs it may cost us—pleading magnanimously for the survival of our moral ogre, for there will be danger to our cause when his voice is no more heard.
If imitation be the sincerest form of flattery, then our moral ogre must indeed have experienced a proud moment, when a follower came to him from the camp of the lovers of Art, and the artistic objector to realistic fiction started on his timid career. I use the word timid in no disparaging sense, but because our artistic objector, had he ventured a little farther from the vicinity of the coat-tails of his powerful protector, might have secured a more adequate recognition of his performances. For he is by no means devoid of adroitness. He can patter to us glibly of the“gospel of ugliness”; of the“cheerlessness of modern literature”; he can even juggle with that honourable property-piece, the maxim of Art for Art's sake. But there have been moments when even this feat has proved ineffective, and some one has started scoffing at his pretended“delight in pure rhythm or music of the phrase,”and flippantly assured him that he is talking nonsense, and that style is a mere matter of psychological suggestion. You fancy our performer nonplussed, or at least boldly bracing himself to brazen the matter out. No, he passes dexterously to his curtaineffect—a fervid denunciation of express trains, evening newspapers, Parisian novels, or the first number ofThe Yellow Book. Verily, he is a versatile person.
Sometimes, to listen to him you would imagine that pessimism and regular meals were incompatible; that the world is only ameliorated by those whom it completely satisfies, that good predominates over evil, that the problem of our destiny had been solved long ago. You begin to doubt whether any good thing can come out of this miserable, inadequate age of ours, unless it be a doctored survival of the vocabulary of a past century. The language of the coster and cadger resound in our midst, and, though Velasquez tried to paint like Whistler, Rudyard Kipling cannot write like Pope. And a weird word has been invented to explain the whole business. Decadence, decadence: you are all decadent nowadays. Ibsen, Degas, and the New English Art Club; Zola, Oscar Wilde, and the Second Mrs. Tanqueray. Mr. Richard Le Gallienne is hoist with his own petard; even the British playwright has not escaped the taint. Ah, what a hideous spectacle. All whirling along towards one common end. And the elegant voice of the artistic objector floating behind:“Après vous le déluge.”A wholesale abusing of the tendencies of the age has ever proved, for the superior mind, an inexhaustible source of relief. Few things breed such inward comfort as the contemplation of one's own pessimism—few things produce such discomfort as the remembrance of our neighbour's optimism.
And yet, pessimists though we may be dubbed, some of us, on this point at least, how can we compete with the hopelessness enjoyed by our artistic objector, when the spectacle of his despondency makes us insufferably replete with hope and confidence, so that while he is loftily bewailing or prettily denouncing the completeness of our degradation, we continue to delight in the evil ofour ways? Oh, if we could only be sure that he would persevere in reprimanding this persistent study of the pitiable aspects of life, how our hearts would go out towards him? For the man who said that joy is essentially, regrettably inartistic, admitted in the same breath that misery lends itself to artistic treatment twice as easily as joy, and resumed the whole question in a single phrase. Let our artistic objector but weary the world sufficiently with his despair concerning the permanence of the cheerlessness of modern realism, and some day a man will arise who will give us a study of human happiness, as fine, as vital as anything we owe to Guy de Maupassant or to Ibsen. That man will have accomplished the infinitely difficult, and in admiration and in awe shall we bow down our heads before him.
In one radical respect the art of fiction is not in the same position as the other arts. They—music, poetry, painting, sculpture, and the drama—possess a magnificent fabric of accumulated tradition. The great traditions of the art of fiction have yet to be made. Ours is a young art, struggling desperately to reach expression, with no great past to guide it. Thus, it should be a matter for wonder, not that we stumble into certain pitfalls, but that we do not fall headlong into a hundred more.
But, if we have no great past, we have the present and the future—the one abundant in facilities, the other abundant in possibilities. Young men of to-day have enormous chances: we are working under exceedingly favourable conditions. Possibly we stand on the threshold of a very great period. I know, of course, that the literary artist is shamefully ill-paid, and that the man who merely caters for the public taste, amasses a rapid and respectable fortune. But how is it that such an arrangement seems other than entirely equitable? The essential conditions of the two cases are entirely distinct. The one man is free to give untrammelledexpression to his own soul, free to fan to the full the flame that burns in his heart: the other is a seller of wares, a unit in national commerce. To the one is allotted liberty and a living wage; to the other, captivity and a consolation in Consols. Let us whine, then, no more concerning the prejudice and the persecution of the Philistine, when even that misanthrope, Mr. Robert Buchanan, admits that there is no power in England to prevent a man writing exactly as he pleases. Before long the battle for literary freedom will be won. A new public has been created—appreciative, eager and determined; a public which, as Mr. Gosse puts it, in one of those admirable essays of his,“has eaten of the apple of knowledge, and will not be satisfied with mere marionnettes. Whatever comes next,”Mr. Gosse continues,“we cannot return, in serious novels, to the inanities and impossibilities of the old well-made plot, to the children changed at nurse, to the madonna-heroine and the god-like hero, to the impossible virtues and melodramatic vices. In future, even those who sneer at realism and misrepresent it most wilfully, will be obliged to put their productions more in accordance with veritable experience. There will still be novel-writers who address the gallery, and who will keep up the gaudy old convention, and the clumsyFamily Heraldevolution, but they will no longer be distinguished men of genius. They will no longer sign themselves George Sand or Charles Dickens.”
Fiction has taken her place amongst the arts. The theory that writing resembles the blacking of boots, the more boots you black, the better you do it, is busy evaporating. The excessive admiration for the mere idea of a book or a story is dwindling; so is the comparative indifference to slovenly treatment. True is it that the society lady, dazzled by the brilliancy of her own conversation, and the serious-minded spinster, bitten by some sociological theory, still decide in the old jaunty spirit, that fiction is the obviousmedium through which to astonish or improve the world. Let us beware of the despotism of the intelligent amateur, and cease our toying with that quaint and winsome bogey of ours, the British Philistine, whilst the intelligent amateur, the deadliest of Art's enemies, is creeping up in our midst.
For the familiarity of the man in the street with the material employed by the artist in fiction, will ever militate against the acquisition of a sound, fine, and genuine standard of workmanship. Unlike the musician, the painter, the sculptor, the architect, the artist in fiction enjoys no monopoly in his medium. The word and the phrase are, of necessity, the common property of everybody; the ordinary use of them demands no special training. Hence the popular mind, while willingly acknowledging that there are technical difficulties to be surmounted in the creation of the sonata, the landscape, the statue, the building, in the case of the short story, or of the longer novel, declines to believe even in their existence, persuaded that in order to produce good fiction, an ingenious idea, or“plot,”as it is termed, is the one thing needed. The rest is a mere matter of handwriting.
The truth is, and, despite Mr. Waugh, we are near recognition of it, that nowadays there is but scanty merit in the mere selection of any particular subject, however ingenious or daring it may appear at first sight; that a man is not an artist, simply because he writes about heredity or thedemi-monde, that to call a spade a spade requires no extraordinary literary gift, and that the essential is contained in the frank, fearless acceptance by every man of his entire artistic temperament, with its qualities and its flaws.
Two Drawings
By E. J. Sullivan
I. The Old Man's Garden
II. The Quick and the Dead