The Beth Book
trait or habit which she herself had already developed or contracted,
such as she found in the early part of George Sand's _Histoire de ma
Vie_, and in the lives of the Brontes. Under the influence of
nourishing books, her mind, sustained and stimulated, became nervously
active. It had a trick of flashing off from the subject she was
studying to something wholly irrelevant. She would begin Emerson's
essay on _Fate_ or _Beauty_ with enthusiasm, and presently, with her
eyes still following the lines, her thoughts would be busy forming a
code of literary principles for herself. In those days her mind was
continually under the influence of any author she cared about,
particularly if his style were mannered. Involuntarily, while she was
reading Macaulay, for instance, her own thoughts took a dogmatic turn,
and jerked along in short, sharp sentences. She caught the
peculiarities of De Quincey too, of Carlyle, and also some of the
simple dignity of Ruskin, which was not so easy; and she had written
things after the manner of each of these authors before she perceived
the effect they were having upon her. But it was unfortunate for her
that her attention had been turned from the matter which she had to
express to the manner in which she should express it. From the time
she began to think of the style and diction of prose as something to
be separately acquired, the spontaneous flow of her thoughts was
checked and hampered, and she expended herself in fashioning her
tools, as it were, instead of using her tools to fashion her work.
When, in her reading, she came under the influence of academic minds,
she lost all natural freshness, and succeeded in being artificial. Her
English became turgid with Latinities. She took phrases which had
flowed from her pen, and were telling in their simple eloquence, and
toiled at them, turning and twisting them until she had laboured all
the life out of them; and then, mistaking effort for power, and having
wearied herself, she was satisfied. Being too diffident to suspect
that she had any natural faculty, she conceived that the more trouble
she gave herself the better must be the result; and consequently she
did nothing worth the doing except as an exercise of ingenuity. She
was serving her apprenticeship, however--making her mistakes.
It was late in the autumn before she saw her good friend Sir George
Galbraith again. He came on a bright, clear, frosty morning, and found
her out in the garden, pacing up and down briskly, and looking greatly
exhilarated by the freshness. When she saw him coming towards her, she
uttered a little joyful exclamation, and hurried forward to meet him.
"I have been longing to see you," she said in her unaffected way; "but
I know what the distance is, and how fully your time is occupied. It
is very good of you to come at all."
"Only the time and distance have prevented me coming sooner," he
rejoined. "But, tell me, how have you been getting on? And have you
thought any more of making a career for yourself?"
"I have thought of nothing else," Beth answered brightly; "and I
wonder I ever thought of anything else, for the idea has been in me, I
believe, all my life. I must have discussed it, too, at a very early
age, for I have remembered lately that I was once advised by an old
aunt of mine, the best and dearest friend I ever had, to write only
that which is--or aims at being--soul-sustaining."
He nodded his head approvingly. "From such seed a good crop should
come," he said. "But what line shall you take?"
"I don't know."
"Not novels then, for certain?"
"Nothing for certain--whatever comes and calls for expression."
They were pacing up and down together, and there was a pause.
"Did you expect I should try to write novels, and do you think I
ought?" Beth asked at last.
"I think I did expect it," he answered; "but as to whether you ought
or ought not, that is for you to decide. There is much to be said
against novel reading and writing. I think it was De Quincey who said
that novels are the opium of the West; and I have myself observed that
novel-reading is one of those bad habits that grow upon people until
they are enslaved by it, demoralised by it; and if that is the case
with the reader, what must the writer suffer?"
Beth bent her brows upon this. "But that is only one side of it, is it
not?" she asked after a moment's reflection. "I notice in all things a
curious duality, a right side and a wrong side. Confusion is the wrong
side of order, misery of happiness, falsehood of truth, evil of good;
and it seems to me that novel-reading, which can be a vice, I know,
may also be made a virtue. It depends on the writer."
"And on the taste of the reader," he suggested. "But I believe the
taste of the intelligent 'general reader' is much better than one
supposes. The mind craves for nourishment; and the extraordinary
success of books in which any attempt, however imperfect, is made to
provide food for thought, as distinguished from those which merely
offer matter to distract the attention, bears witness, it seems to me,
to the involuntary effort which is always in progress to procure it. I
believe myself that good fiction may do more to improve the mind,
enlarge the sympathies, and develop the judgment than any other form
of literature--partly because it looks into the hidden springs of
action, and makes all that is obscure in the way of impulse and motive
clear to us. Biography, for instance, merely skims the surface of
life, as a rule; and in history, where man is a puppet moved by
events, there can be very little human nature."
"I wonder if you read many novels," said Beth. "I have to read them
aloud to my husband until I am satiated. And I am determined, if I
ever do try to write one, to avoid all that is conventional. I never
will have a faultlessly beautiful heroine, for instance. I am sick of
that creature. When I come to her, especially if she has golden hair
yards long, a faultless complexion, and eyes of extraordinary
dimensions, I feel inclined to groan and shut the book. I have met her
so often in the weary ways of fiction! I know every variety of her so
well! She consists of nothing but superlatives, and is as conventional
as the torso of an Egyptian statue, with her everlasting physical
perfection. I think her as repulsive as a barber's block. I confess
that a woman who has golden hair and manages to look like a lady, or
to be like one even in a book, is a wonder, considering all that is
associated with golden hair in our day; but I should avoid the
abnormal as much as the conventional. I would not write plotty-plotty
books either, nor make a pivot of the everlasting love-story, which
seems to me to show such a want of balance in an author, such an
absence of any true sense of proportion, as if there was nothing else
of interest in life but our sexual relations. But, oh!" she broke off,
"how I do appreciate what the difficulty of selection must be! In
writing a life, if one could present all sides of it, and not merely
one phase--the good and the bad of it, the joys and the sorrows, the
moments of strength and of weakness, of wisdom and of folly, of misery
and of pure delight--what a picture!"
"Yes; and how utterly beyond the average reader, who never understands
complexity," he answered. "But I think it a good sign for your chances
of success that you should have complained of the difficulty of
selection in the matter of material rather than bemoan your want of
experience of life. Most young aspirants to literary fame grumble that
they are handicapped for want of experience. They are seldom content
with the material they have at hand--the life they know. They want to
go and live in London, where they seem to think that every one worth
knowing is to be found."
"That isn't my feeling at all," said Beth. "The best people may be met
in London, but I don't believe that they are at their best. The
friction of the crowd rubs out their individuality. In a crowd I feel
mentally as if I were in a maze of telegraph wires. The thoughts of so
many people streaming out in all directions about me entangle and
bewilder me."
"You do not seem to like anything exceptional."
"No, I do not," said Beth. "I like the normal--the everyday. Great
events are not the most significant, nor are great people the most
typical. It is the little things that make life livable. The person
who comes and talks clever is not the person we love, nor the person
who interests us most. Those we love sympathise with us in the
ordinary everyday incidents of our lives, and discuss them with us,
merely touching, if at all, on the thoughts they engender. I don't
want to know what people think as a rule; I want to know what they
have experienced. People who talk facts, I like; people who talk
theories, I fly from. And I think upon the whole that I shall always
like the kind people better than the clever ones. I believe we owe
more to them, too, and learn more from them--more human nature, which
after all is what we want to know."
"But the clever people are kind also sometimes," said Sir George.
"When they are, of course it is perfect," Beth answered. "But judging
the clever ones of to-day by what they write, I cannot often think
them so. The works of our smartest modern writers, particularly the
French, satiate me with their cleverness; but they are vain, hollow,
cynical, dyspeptic; they appeal to the head, but the heart goes empty
away. Few of them know or show the one thing needful--that happiness
is the end of life; and that by trying to live rightly we help each
other to happiness. That is the one thing well worth understanding in
this world; but that, with all their ingenuity, they are not
intelligent enough to see."
"You are an optimist, I perceive," Sir George said, smiling, "and I
entirely agree with you. So long as we understand that happiness is
the end of life, and that the best way to secure it for ourselves is
by helping others to attain to it, we are travelling in the right
direction. By happiness I do not mean excitement, of course, nor the
pleasure we owe to others altogether; but that quiet content in
ourselves, that large toleration and love which should overflow from
us continually, and make the fact of our existence a source of joy and
strength to all who know us."
They walked up and down a little in silence, then Sir George asked her
what she thought of some of the specimens of style and art in
literature he had lent her to study.
"I don't know yet," Beth said. "My mind is in a state of chaos on the
subject. I seem to reject 'style' and 'art.' I ask for something more
or something else, and am never satisfied. But tell me what you think
of the stylists."
"I think them brilliant," he rejoined, "but their work is as the
photograph is to the painting, the lifeless accuracy of the machine to
the nervous fascinating faultiness of the human hand. No, I don't care
for the writers who are specially praised for their style. I find
their productions cold and bald as a rule. I want something
warmer--more full-blooded. Most of the stylists write as if they began
by acquiring a style and then had to sit and wait for a subject. I
believe style is the enemy of matter. You compress all the blood out
of your subject when you make it conform to a studied style, instead
of letting your style form itself out of the necessity for expression.
This is rank heresy, I know, and I should not have ventured on it a
few years ago; but now, I say, give me a style that is the natural
outcome of your subject, your mind, your character, not an artificial
but a natural product; and even though it be as full of faults as
human nature is, faults of every kind, so long as there is no fault of
the heart in it, that being the one unpardonable fault in an