The Crown of Wild Olive
and winter in which no man can work, compel the impatiences and coveting
of his heart into labour too submissive to be anxious, and rest too
sweet to be wanton. What thought can enough comprehend the contrast
between such life, and that in streets where summer and winter are only
alternations of heat and cold; where snow never fell white, nor sunshine
clear; where the ground is only a pavement, and the sky no more than the
glass roof of an arcade; where the utmost power of a storm is to choke
the gutters, and the finest magic of spring, to change mud into dust:
where--chief and most fatal difference in state, there is no interest of
occupation for any of the inhabitants but the routine of counter or desk
within doors, and the effort to pass each other without collision
outside; so that from morning to evening the only possible variation of
the monotony of the hours, and lightening of the penalty of existence,
must be some kind of mischief, limited, unless by more than ordinary
godsend of fatality, to the fall of a horse, or the slitting of a
pocket.
I said that under these laws of inanition, the craving of the human
heart for some kind of excitement could be supplied from _one_ source
only. It might have been thought by any other than a sternly tentative
philosopher, that the denial of their natural food to human feelings
would have provoked a reactionary desire for it; and that the dreariness
of the street would have been gilded by dreams of pastoral felicity.
Experience has shown the fact to be otherwise; the thoroughly trained
Londoner can enjoy no other excitement than that to which he has been
accustomed, but asks for _that_ in continually more ardent or more
virulent concentration; and the ultimate power of fiction to entertain
him is by varying to his fancy the modes, and defining for his dulness
the horrors, of Death. In the single novel of _Bleak House_ there are
nine deaths (or left for death's, in the drop scene) carefully wrought
out or led up to, either by way of pleasing surprise, as the baby's at
the brickmaker's, or finished in their threatenings and sufferings, with
as much enjoyment as can be contrived in the anticipation, and as much
pathology as can be concentrated in the description. Under the following
varieties of method:--
One by assassination Mr. Tulkinghorn.
One by starvation, with phthisis Joe.
One by chagrin Richard.
One by spontaneous combustion Mr. Krook.
One by sorrow Lady Dedlock's lover.
One by remorse Lady Dedlock.
One by insanity Miss Flite.
One by paralysis Sir Leicester.
Besides the baby, by fever, and a lively young Frenchwoman left to be
hanged.
And all this, observe, not in a tragic, adventurous, or military story,
but merely as the further enlivenment of a narrative intended to be
amusing; and as a properly representative average of the statistics of
civilian mortality in the centre of London.
Observe further, and chiefly. It is not the mere number of deaths
(which, if we count the odd troopers in the last scene, is exceeded in
_Old Mortality_, and reached, within one or two, both in _Waverley_ and
_Guy Mannering_) that marks the peculiar tone of the modern novel. It is
the fact that all these deaths, but one, are of inoffensive, or at least
in the world's estimate respectable persons; and that they are all
grotesquely either violent or miserable, purporting thus to illustrate
the modern theology that the appointed destiny of a large average of our
population is to die like rats in a drain, either by trap or poison.
Not, indeed, that a lawyer in full practice can be usually supposed as
faultless in the eye of heaven as a dove or a woodcock; but it is not,
in former divinities, thought the will of Providence that he should be
dropped by a shot from a client behind his fire-screen, and retrieved in
the morning by his housemaid under the chandelier. Neither is Lady
Dedlock less reprehensible in her conduct than many women of fashion
have been and will be: but it would not therefore have been thought
poetically just, in old-fashioned morality, that she should be found by
her daughter lying dead, with her face in the mud of a St. Giles's
churchyard.
In the work of the great masters death is always either heroic,
deserved, or quiet and natural (unless their purpose be totally and
deeply tragic, when collateral meaner death is permitted, like that of
Polonius or Roderigo). In _Old Mortality_, four of the deaths,
Bothwell's, Ensign Grahame's, Macbriar's, and Evandale's, are
magnificently heroic; Burley's and Oliphant's long deserved, and swift;
the troopers', met in the discharge of their military duty, and the old
miser's, as gentle as the passing of a cloud, and almost beautiful in
its last words of--now unselfish--care.
'Ailie' (he aye ca'd me Ailie, we were auld acquaintance,)
'Ailie, take ye care and haud the gear weel thegither; for
the name of Morton of Milnwood's gane out like the last
sough of an auld sang.' And sae he fell out o' ae dwam into
another, and ne'er spak a word mair, unless it were
something we cou'dna mak out, about a dipped candle being
gude eneugh to see to dee wi'. He cou'd ne'er bide to see a
moulded ane, and there was ane, by ill luck, on the table.
In _Guy Mannering_, the murder, though unpremeditated, of a single
person, (himself not entirely innocent, but at least by heartlessness in
a cruel function earning his fate,) is avenged to the uttermost on all
the men conscious of the crime; Mr. Bertram's death, like that of his
wife, brief in pain, and each told in the space of half-a-dozen lines;
and that of the heroine of the tale, self-devoted, heroic in the
highest, and happy.
Nor is it ever to be forgotten, in the comparison of Scott's with
inferior work, that his own splendid powers were, even in early life,
tainted, and in his latter years destroyed, by modern conditions of
commercial excitement, then first, but rapidly, developing themselves.
There are parts even in his best novels coloured to meet tastes which he
despised; and many pages written in his later ones to lengthen his
article for the indiscriminate market.
But there was one weakness of which his healthy mind remained incapable
to the last. In modern stories prepared for more refined or fastidious
audiences than those of Dickens, the funereal excitement is obtained,
for the most part, not by the infliction of violent or disgusting death;
but in the suspense, the pathos, and the more or less by all felt, and
recognised, mortal phenomena of the sick-room. The temptation, to weak
writers, of this order of subject is especially great, because the study
of it from the living--or dying--model is so easy, and to many has been
the most impressive part of their own personal experience; while, if the
description be given even with mediocre accuracy, a very large section
of readers will admire its truth, and cherish its melancholy: Few
authors of second or third rate genius can either record or invent a
probable conversation in ordinary life; but few, on the other hand, are
so destitute of observant faculty as to be unable to chronicle the
broken syllables and languid movements of an invalid. The easily
rendered, and too surely recognised, image of familiar suffering is felt
at once to be real where all else had been false; and the historian of
the gestures of fever and words of delirium can count on the applause of
a gratified audience as surely as the dramatist who introduces on the
stage of his flagging action a carriage that can be driven or a fountain
that will flow. But the masters of strong imagination disdain such work,
and those of deep sensibility shrink from it.[154] Only under conditions
of personal weakness, presently to be noted, would Scott comply with the
cravings of his lower audience in scenes of terror like the death of
Front-de-Boeuf. But he never once withdrew the sacred curtain of the
sick-chamber, nor permitted the disgrace of wanton tears round the
humiliation of strength, or the wreck of beauty.
IV. No exception to this law of reverence will be found in the scenes in
Coeur de Lion's illness introductory to the principal incident in the
_Talisman_. An inferior writer would have made the king charge in
imagination at the head of his chivalry, or wander in dreams by the
brooks of Aquitaine; but Scott allows us to learn no more startling
symptoms of the king's malady than that he was restless and impatient,
and could not wear his armour. Nor is any bodily weakness, or crisis of
danger, permitted to disturb for an instant the royalty of intelligence
and heart in which he examines, trusts and obeys the physician whom his
attendants fear.
Yet the choice of the main subject in this story and its companion--the
trial, to a point of utter torture, of knightly faith, and several
passages in the conduct of both, more especially the exaggerated scenes
in the House of Baldringham, and hermitage of Engedi, are signs of the
gradual decline in force of intellect and soul which those who love
Scott best have done him the worst injustice in their endeavours to
disguise or deny. The mean anxieties, moral humiliations, and
mercilessly demanded brain-toil, which killed him, show their sepulchral
grasp for many and many a year before their final victory; and the
states of more or less dulled, distorted, and polluted imagination which
culminate in _Castle Dangerous_, cast a Stygian hue over _St. Ronan's
Well, The Fair Maid of Perth_, and _Anne of Geierstein_, which lowers
them, the first altogether, the other two at frequent intervals, into
fellowship with the normal disease which festers throughout the whole
body of our lower fictitious literature.
Fictitious! I use the ambiguous word deliberately; for it is impossible
to distinguish in these tales of the prison-house how far their vice and
gloom are thrown into their manufacture only to meet a vile demand, and
how far they are an integral condition of thought in the minds of men
trained from their youth up in the knowledge of Londinian and Parisian
misery. The speciality of the plague is a delight in the exposition of
the relations between guilt and decrepitude; and I call the results of
it literature 'of the prison-house,' because the thwarted habits of body
and mind, which are the punishment of reckless crowding in cities,
become, in the issue of that punishment, frightful subjects of exclusive
interest to themselves; and the art of fiction in which they finally
delight is only the more studied arrangement and illustration, by
coloured firelights, of the daily bulletins of their own wretchedness,
in the prison calendar, the police news, and the hospital report.
The reader will perhaps be surprised at my separating the greatest work
of Dickens, _Oliver Twist_, with honour, from the loathsome mass to
which it typically belongs. That book is an earnest and uncaricatured
record of states of criminal life, written with didactic purpose, full
of the gravest instruction, nor destitute of pathetic studies of noble
passion. Even the _Mysteries of Paris_ and Gaboriau's _Crime d'Augival_
are raised, by their definiteness of historical intention and
forewarning anxiety, far above the level of their order, and may be
accepted as photographic evidence of an otherwise incredible
civilisation, corrupted in the infernal fact of it, down to the genesis
of such figures as the Vicomte d'Augival, the Stabber,[155] the
Skeleton, and the She-wolf. But the effectual head of the whole
cretinous school is the renowned novel in which the hunchbacked lover