The altar of the dead
forms part of a volume bearing the title of
Terminations,
which appeared in 1895. Figuring last in that collection of short pieces,
it here stands at the head of my list, not as prevailing over its companions
by length, but as being ample enough and of an earlier date than several. I
have to add that with this fact of its temporal order, and the fact that, as
I remember, it had vainly been ‘hawked about’, knocking, in the
world of magazines, at half a dozen editorial doors impenetrably closed to
it, I shall have exhausted my fund of allusion to the influences attending
its birth. I consult memory further to no effect; so that if I should seem
to have lost every trace of ‘how I came to think’ of such a
motive, did n’t I, by a longer reach of reflexion, help myself
back to the state of not having had to think of it? The idea
embodied in this composition must in other words never have been so absent
from my view as to call for an organised search. It was ‘there’
– it had always, or from ever so far back, been there, not interfering
with other conceits, yet at the same time not interfered with; and it
naturally found expression at the first hour something more urgently
undertaken happened not to stop the way. The way here, I recognise, would
ever have been easy to stop, for the general patience, the inherent waiting
faculty, of the principle of interest involved, was conscious of no strain,
and above all of no loss, in amusedly biding its time. Other conceits might
indeed come and go, born of light impressions and passing hours, for what
sort of free intelligence would it be that, addressed to the human scene,
should propose to itself, all vulgarly, never to be waylaid or arrested,
never effectively inspired, by some imaged appeal of the lost Dead? The
subject of my story is obviously, and quite as usual, the exhibition of a
case; the case being that of an accepted,
a cultivated habit (the cultivation is really the point) of regularly taking
thought for them. Frankly, I can but gather, the desire, at last of the
acutest, to give an example and represent an instance of some such practised
communion, was a foredoomed consequence of life, year after year, amid the
densest and most materialised aggregation of men upon earth, the society
most wedded by all its conditions to the immediate and the finite. More
exactly speaking, it was impossible for any critic or ‘creator’ at
all worth his wage not, as a matter of course, again and again to ask
himself what may not become of individual sensibility, of the faculty and
the fibre itself, when everything makes against the indulgence of it save as
a conscious, and indeed highly emphasised, dead loss.
The impression went back for its full intensity, no
doubt, neither to a definite moment nor to a particular shock; but the
author of the tale before us was long to cherish the memory of a pair of
illuminating incidents that, happily for him – by which I mean happily
for the generalisation he here makes – placed themselves, at no great
distance apart, so late in a sustained experience of London as to find him
profitably prepared for them, and yet early enough to let confirmatory
matter gather in abundance round. Not to this day, in fine, has he forgotten
the hard, handsome, gentlemanly face, as it was expressionally affected in a
particular conjunction, of a personage occasionally met in other years at
one of the friendliest, the most liberal of ‘entertaining’ houses
and then lost to sight till after a long interval. The end of all mortal
things had, during this period, and in the fulness of time, overtaken our
delightful hosts and the scene of their long hospitality, a scene of
constant welcome to my personage, as I have called him (a police-magistrate
then seated, by reason of his office, well in the eye of London, but as
conspicious for his private urbanity as for his high magisterial and penal
mask). He too has now passed away, but what could exactly better attest the
power of prized survival in personal signs than my even yet felt chill as I
saw the old penal glare rekindled in him by the form of my aid
to his memory. “We used sometimes to meet, in the old days, at the dear
So-and-So’s, you may recall.” “The So-and-So’s?”
said the awful gentleman, who appeared to recognise the name, across the
table, only to be shocked at the allusion. “Why, they’re Dead, sir
– dead these many years.” “Indeed they are, sir, alas,”
I could but reply with spirit; “and it’s precisely why I like so
to speak of them! –
Il ne manquerait plus que cela,
that because they’re dead I should n’t!” is what I came
within an ace of adding; or rather might have come had n’t
I felt my indecency too utterly put in its place. I was left with it in fact
on my hands – where however I was quite everlastingly, as you see, to
cherish it. My anecdote is mild and its companion perhaps milder; but
impressions come as they can and stay as they will.
A distinguished old friend, a very eminent lady and
highly marked character, though technically, as it were, a private person,
unencompassed by literary luggage or other monumental matter, had dropped
from the rank at a great age and, as I was to note after a sufficient
interval, to my surprise, with a singularly uncommemorated and unchronicled
effect: given, I mean, her social and historical value. One blushed, as the
days passed, for the want of manners in it – there being twenty reasons
in the case why manners should have been remembered. A friend of the
interesting woman, there upon, seeing his opportunity, asked leave of an
acquaintance of his own, the conductor of a ‘high class’
periodical, to intervene on behalf of her memory in the pages under the
latter’s control. The amiable editor so far yielded to a first good
impulse as to welcome the proposal; but the proposer was disconcerted to
receive on the morrow a colder retractation. “I really don’t see
why I should publish an article about Mrs X because – and
because only, so far as I can make out – she’s
dead.” Again I felt the inhibition, as the psychologists say, that I
had felt in the other case; the vanity, in the conditions, of any
yearning plea that this was the most beautiful of reasons. Clearly the
conditions were against its being for an effective moment felt as such; and
the article
in question never appeared – nor, to the best of my knowledge, anything
else of the sort: which fact was to take its place among other grim values.
These pointed, as they all too largely accumulated, to the general black
truth that London was a terrible place to die in; doubtless not so much more
over by conscious cruelty or perversity as under the awful doom of general
dishumanisation. It takes space to feel, it takes time to know, and great
organisms as well as small have to pause, more or less, to possess
themselves and to be aware. Monstrous masses are, by this truth, so
impervious to vibration that the sharpest forces of feeling, locally
applied, no more penetrate than a pin or a paper-cutter penetrates an
elephant’s hide. Thus the very tradition of sensibility would perish if
left only to their care. It has here and there to be rescued, to be saved by
independent, intelligent zeal; which type of effort however, to avail, has
to fly in the face of the conditions.
These are easily, one is obliged to add, too many for
it; nothing being more visible for instance than that the life of
inordinately numerous companies is hostile to friendship and intimacy –
unless indeed it be the impropriety of such names applied to the actual
terms of intercourse. The sense of the state of the dead is but part of the
sense of the state of the living; and, congruously with that, life is
cheated to almost the same degree of the finest homage (precisely this our
possible friendships and intimacies) that we fain would render it. We clutch
indeed at some shadow of these things, we stay our yearning with snatches
and stop-gaps; but our struggle yields to the other arrayed things that
defeat the cultivation, in such an air, of the finer flowers –
creatures of cultivation as the finer flowers essentially are. We perforce
fall back, for the application of that process, on the coarser – which
form together the rank and showy bloom of ‘success’, of multiplied
contact and multiplied motion; the bloom of a myriad many-coloured
‘relations’ – amid which the precious plant that is rare at
the best becomes rare indeed.
The altar of the dead
then commemorates a case of what I have called the individual independent
effort to keep it none the
less tended and watered, to cultivate it, as I say, with an exasperated
piety. I am not however here reconstituting my more or less vivid fable, but
simply glancing at the natural growth of its prime idea, that of an invoked,
a restorative reaction against certain general brutalities. Brutal, more and
more, to wondering eyes, the great fact that the poor dead, all about one,
were nowhere so dead as there; where to be caught in any rueful glance at
them was to be branded at once as ‘morbid’.
“Mourir,
à Londres, c’est être bien mort!”
– I have not forgotten the ironic emphasis of a distinguished
foreign friend,
for some years officially resident in England, as we happened once to watch
together a funeral-train, on its way to
Kensal Green or wherever,
bound merrily by. That truth, to any man of memories, was too repeatedly and
intolerably driven home, and the situation of my depicted George Stransom is
that of the poor gentleman who simply at last could n’t
‘stand’ it.
To desire, amid these collocations, to place, so far as
possible, like with like, was to invite
The beast in the jungle
to stand here next in order. As to the accidental determinant of which
composition, once more – of comparatively recent date and destined,
like its predecessor, first to see the light in a volume of miscellanies
(
The better sort,
1903) – I remount the stream of time, all enquiringly, but to come back
empty-handed. The subject of this elaborated fantasy – which, I must
add, I hold a successful thing only as its motive may seem to the reader to
stand out sharp – can’t quite have belonged to the immemorial
company of such solicitations; though in spite of this I meet it, in
ten lines of an old note-book,
but as a recorded conceit and an accomplished fact. Another poor sensitive
gentleman, fit indeed to mate with Stransom of
The altar
– my attested predilection for poor sensitive gentlemen almost
embarrasses me as I march! – was to have been, after a strange fashion
and from the threshold of his career, condemned to keep counting with the
unreasoned prevision of some extraordinary fate; the conviction, lodged in
his brain, part and parcel of his imagination from far back, that experience
would be marked for him,
and whether for good or for ill, by some rare distinction, some incalculable
violence or unprecedented stroke. So I seemed to see him start in life
– under the so mixed star of the extreme of apprehension and the
extreme of confidence; all to the logical, the quite inevitable effect of
the complication aforesaid: his having to wait and wait for the right
recognition; none of the mere usual and normal human adventures, whether
delights or disconcertments, appearing to conform to the great type of his
fortune. So it is that he ’s depicted. No gathering appearance, no
descried or interpreted promise or portent, affects his superstitious soul
either as a damnation deep enough (if damnation be in question) for his
appointed quality of consciousness, or as a translation into bliss
sublime enough (on that hypothesis) to fill, in vulgar parlance,
the bill. Therefore as each item of experience comes, with its
possibilities, into view, he can but dismiss it under this sterilising habit
of the failure to find it good enough and thence to appropriate it.
His one desire remains of course to meet his fate, or at
least to divine it, to see it as intelligible, to learn it, in a word; but
none of its harbingers, pretended or supposed, speak his ear in the true
voice; they wait their moment at his door only to pass on unheeded, and the
years ebb while he holds his breath and stays his hand and – from the
dread not less of imputed pride than of imputed pusillanimity – stifles
his distinguished secret. He perforce lets everything go – leaving all
the while his general presumption disguised and his general abstention
unexplained; since he ’s ridden by the idea of what things may lead to,
since they mostly always lead to human communities, wider or intenser, of
experience, and since, above all, in his uncertainty, he must n’t
compromise others. Like the blinded seeker in the
old-fashioned game
he ‘burns’, on occasion, as with the sense of the hidden thing near
– only to deviate again however into the chill; the chill that indeed
settles on him as the striking of his hour is deferred. His career thus
resolves itself into a great negative adventure, my report of which
presents, for its centre, the fine case that has caused him
most tormentedly to ‘burn’, and then most unprofitably to stray.
He is afraid to recognise what he incidentally misses, since what his high
belief amounts to is not that he shall have felt and vibrated less than any
one else, but that he shall have felt and vibrated more; which no
acknowledgement of the minor loss must conflict with. Such a course of
existence naturally involves a climax – the final flash of the light
under which he reads his lifelong riddle and sees his conviction proved. He
has indeed been marked and indeed suffered his fortune – which is
precisely to have been the man in the world to whom nothing whatever was to
happen. My picture leaves him overwhelmed – at last he has understood;
though in thus disengaging my treated theme for the reader’s benefit I
seem to acknowledge that this more detached witness may not successfully
have done so. I certainly grant that any felt merit in the thing must all
depend on the clearness and charm with which the subject just noted
expresses itself.
If
The birthplace
deals with another poor gentleman – of interest as being yet again too
fine for his rough fate – here at least I can claim to have gone by
book, here once more I lay my hand, for my warrant, on the clue of
actuality. It was one of the cases in which I was to say at the first brush
of the hint: “How can there possibly not be innumerable things
in it?” ‘It’ was the mentioned adventure of a
good intelligent man
rather recently appointed to the care of a great place of
pilgrimage, a shrine sacred to the piety and curiosity of the whole
English-speaking race, and haunted by other persons as well; who, coming to
his office with infinite zest, had after a while desperately thrown it up
– as a climax to his struggle, some time prolonged, with “the
awful nonsense he found himself expected and paid, and thence quite obliged,
to talk.” It was in these simple terms his predicament was named to me
– not that I would have had a word more, not indeed that I
had n’t at once to turn my back for very joy of the suppressed
details: so unmistakeably, on the spot, was a splendid case all there, so
complete, in fine, as it stood, was the appeal to fond
fancy; an appeal the more direct, I may add, by reason, as happened, of an
acquaintance, lately much confirmed, on my own part, with the
particular temple
of our poor gentleman’s priesthood. It struck me, at any rate, that
here, if ever, was the perfect theme of a
nouvelle
– and to some such composition I addressed myself with a confidence
unchilled by the certainty that it would nowhere, at the best (a prevision
not falsified) find ‘acceptance’. For the rest I must but leave
The birthplace
to plead its own cause; only adding that here afresh and in the highest
degree were the conditions reproduced for that mystic, that
‘chemical’ change wrought in the impression of life by its
dedication to an æsthetic use, that I
lately spoke of
in connexion with
The Coxon fund.
Beautiful on all this ground exactly, to the projector’s mind, the
process by which the small cluster of actualities latent in the fact
reported to him was to be reconstituted and, so far as they might need,
altered; the felt fermentation, ever interesting, but flagrantly so in the
example before us, that enables the sense originally communicated to make
fresh and possibly quite different terms for the new employment there
awaiting it. It has been liberated (to repeat, I believe, my figure) after
the fashion of some sound young draught-horse who may, in the great meadow,
have to be re-captured and re-broken for the saddle.
I proceed almost eagerly, in any case, to
The private life
– and at the cost of reaching for a moment over
The jolly corner:
I find myself so fondly return to ground on which the history even of
small experiments may be more or less written. This mild documentation
fairly thickens for me, I confess, the air of the first-mentioned of these
tales; the scraps of records flit through that medium, to memory, as with
the incalculable brush of wings of the imprisoned bat at eventide. This
piece of ingenuity rests for me on such a handful of acute impressions as I
may not here tell over at once; so that, to be brief, I select two of the
sharpest. Neither of these was, in old London days, I make out, to be
resisted even under its single pressure; so that the hour struck with a
vengeance for “Dramatise it,
dramatise it!” (dramatise, that is, the combination) from the first
glimpse of a good way to work together two cases that happened to have been
given me. They were those – as distinct as possible save for belonging
alike to the ‘world’, the London world of a time when
Discrimination still a little lifted its head – of a
highly distinguished man,
constantly to be encountered, whose fortune and whose
peculiarity it was to bear out personally as little as possible (at least to
my wondering sense) the high denotements, the rich implications and
rare associations, of the genius to which he owed his position and his
renown. One may go, naturally, in such a connexion, but by one’s own
applied measure; and I have never ceased to ask myself, in this particular
loud, sound, normal, hearty presence, all so assertive and so whole, all
bristling with prompt responses and expected opinions and usual views,
radiating all a broad daylight equality of emphasis and impartiality of
address (for most relations) – I never ceased, I say, to ask myself
what lodgement, on such premises, the rich proud genius one adored could
ever have contrived, what domestic commerce the subtlety that was its prime
ornament and the world’s wonder have enjoyed, under what shelter the
obscurity that was its luckless drawback and the world’s despair have
flourished. The whole aspect and allure of the fresh sane man,
illustrious and undistinguished – no ‘sensitive poor
gentleman’ he! – was mystifying; they made the question of who
then had written the immortal things such a puzzle.
So at least one could but take the case – though
one’s need for relief depended, no doubt, on what one (so to speak)
suffered. The writer of these lines, at any rate, suffered so much – I
mean of course but by the unanswered question – that light had
at last to break under pressure of the whimsical theory of two distinct and
alternate presences, the assertion of either of which on any occasion
directly involved the entire extinction of the other. This explained to the
imagination the mystery: our delightful inconceivable celebrity was
double, constructed in two quite distinct and
‘water-tight’ compartments – one of these figured by the
gentleman
who sat at a table all alone, silent and unseen, and wrote admirably deep
and brave and intricate things; while the gentleman who regularly came forth
to sit at a quite different table and substantially and promiscuously and
multitudinously dine stood for its companion. They had nothing to do, the so
dissimilar twins, with each other; the diner could exist but by the
cessation of the writer, whose emergence, on his side, depended on his
– and our! – ignoring the diner. Thus it was amusing to think of
the real great man as a presence known, in the late London days, all and
only to himself – unseen of other human eye and converted into his
perfectly positive, but quite secondary,
alter ego
by any approach
to a social contact. To the same tune was the social personage known all and
only to society, was he conceivable but as ‘cut dead’, on the
return home and the threshold of the closed study, by the waiting spirit who
would flash at that signal into form and possession. Once I had so seen the
case I could n’t see it otherwise; and so to see it moreover was
inevitably to feel in it a situation and a motive. The ever-importunate
murmur, “Dramatise it, dramatise it!” haunted, as I say,
one’s perception; yet without giving the idea much support till, by the
happiest turn, the whole possibility was made to glow.
For did n’t there immensely flourish in those
very days and exactly in that society the apparition the most qualified to
balance with the odd character I have referred to and to supply to
‘drama’, if ‘drama’ there was to be, the precious
element of contrast and antithesis? – that most accomplished of
artists
and most dazzling of men of the world whose effect on the mind repeatedly
invited to appraise him was to beget in it an image of representation and
figuration so exclusive of any possible inner self that, so far from there
being here a question of an
alter ego,
a double personality, there
seemed scarce a question of a real and single one, scarce foothold or margin
for any private and domestic ego at all. Immense in this case too,
for any analytic witness, the solicitation of wonder – which struggled
all the while, not less amusingly than in the other example, toward the
explanatory secret; a clear view of the perpetual, essential performer,
consummate, infallible, impeccable, and with his high shining elegance, his
intensity of presence, on these lines, involving to the imagination an
absolutely blank reverse or starved residuum, no other power of
presence whatever. One said it under one’s breath, one really yearned
to know: was he, such an embodiment of skill and taste and tone and
composition, of every public gloss and grace, thinkable even as occasionally
single? – since to be truly single is to be able, under stress, to be
separate, to be
solus,
to know at need the interlunar swoon of
some independent consciousness. Yes, had our dazzling
friend any such alternative, could he so unattestedly exist, and was the
withdrawn, the sequestered, the unobserved and unhonoured condition so much
as imputable to him? Was n’t his potentiality of existence public,
in fine, to the last squeeze of the golden orange, and when he passed from
our admiring sight into the chamber of mystery what, the next minute, was on
the other side of the door? It was irresistible to believe at last that
there was at such junctures inveterately nothing; and the more so, once I
had begun to dramatise, as this supplied the most natural opposition in the
world to my fond companion-view – the other side of the door
only cognisant of the true Robert Browning. One’s harmless
formula for the poetic employment of this pair of conceits
could n’t go much further than ‘Play them against each
other’ – the ingenuity of which small game
The private life
reflects as it can.
I fear I can defend such doings but under the plea of my
amusement in them – an amusement I of course hoped others might succeed
in sharing. But so comes in exactly the principle under the wide strong wing
of which several such matters are here harvested; things of a type that
might move me, had I space, to a pleading eloquence. Such compositions as
The jolly corner,
printed here not for the first time, but printed
elsewhere
only as I write and after my quite ceasing to expect it;
The friends of the friends,
to which I here change the colourless title of
The way it came
(1896),
Owen Wingrave
(1893),
Sir Edmund
Orme
(1891),
The real right thing
(1900), would obviously never have existed but for that love of ‘a
story as a story’ which had from far back beset and beguiled their
author. To this passion, the vital flame at the heart of any sincere attempt
to lay a scene and launch a drama, he flatters himself he has never been
false; and he will indeed have done his duty but little by it if he has
failed to let it, whether robustly or quite insidiously, fire his fancy and
rule his scheme. He has consistently felt it (the appeal to wonder and
terror and curiosity and pity and to the delight of fine recognitions, as
well as to the joy, perhaps sharper still, of the mystified state) the very
source of wise counsel and the very law of charming effect. He has revelled
in the creation of alarm and suspense and surprise and relief, in all the
arts that practise, with a scruple for nothing but any lapse of application,
on the credulous soul of the candid or, immeasurably better, on the seasoned
spirit of the cunning, reader. He has built, rejoicingly, on that blest
faculty of wonder just named, in the latent eagerness of which the novelist
so finds, throughout, his best warrant that he can but pin his faith and
attach his car to it, rest in fine his monstrous weight and his queer case
on it, as on a strange passion planted in the heart of man for his benefit,
a mysterious provision made for him in the scheme of nature. He has seen
this particular sensibility, the need and the love of wondering and the
quick response to any pretext for it, as the beginning and the end of his
affair – thanks to the innumerable ways in which that chord may
vibrate. His prime care has been to master those most congruous with his own
faculty, to make it vibrate as finely as possible – or in other words
to the production of the interest appealing most (by its kind) to himself.
This last is of course the particular clear light by which the genius of
representation ever best proceeds – with its beauty of adjustment to
any strain of attention whatever. Essentially, meanwhile, excited wonder
must have a subject, must face in a direction, must be, increasingly,
about something. Here comes in then the artist’s bias and his
range – determined, these things, by his own
fond inclination. About what, good man, does he himself most wonder? –
for upon that, whatever it may be, he will naturally most abound. Under that
star will he gather in what he shall most seek to represent; so that if you
follow thus his range of representation you will know how, you will see
where, again, good man, he for himself most aptly vibrates.
All of which makes a desired point for the little group
of compositions here placed together; the point that, since the question has
ever been for me but of wondering and, with all achievable adroitness, of
causing to wonder, so the whole fairy-tale side of life has used, for its
tug at my sensibility, a cord all its own. When we want to wonder
there ’s no such good ground for it as the wonderful – premising
indeed always, by an induction as prompt, that this element can but be at
best, to fit its different cases, a thing of appreciation. What is wonderful
in one set of conditions may quite fail of its spell in another set; and,
for that matter, the peril of the unmeasured strange, in fiction, being the
silly, just as its strength, when it saves itself, is the charming, the wind
of interest blows where it lists, the surrender of attention persists where
it can. The ideal, obviously, on these lines, is the straight fairy-tale,
the case that has purged in the crucible all its
bêtises
while keeping all its grace. It may seem odd, in a search for the amusing, to
try to steer wide of the silly by hugging close the ‘supernatural’;
but one man’s amusement is at the best (we have surely long had to
recognise) another’s desolation; and I am prepared with the confession
that the ‘ghost-story’, as we for convenience call it, has ever
been for me the most possible form of the fairy-tale. It enjoys, to my eyes,
this honour by being so much the neatest – neat with that neatness
without which representation, and therewith beauty, drops.
One’s working of the spell is of course – decently and effectively
– but by the represented thing, and the grace of the more or less
closely represented state is the measure of any success; a truth by the
general smug neglect of which it ’s difficult not to be struck. To begin
to wonder, over a case, I
must begin to believe – to begin to give out (that is to attend) I must
begin to take in, and to enjoy that profit I must begin to see and
hear and feel. This would n’t seem, I allow, the general
requirement – as appears from the fact that so many persons profess
delight in the picture of marvels and prodigies which by any, even the
easiest, critical measure is no picture; in the recital of
wonderful horrific or beatific things that are neither represented nor, so
far as one makes out, seen as representable: a weakness not invalidating,
round about us, the most resounding appeals to curiosity. The main condition
of interest – that of some appreciable rendering of sought effects
– is absent from them; so that when, as often happens, one is asked how
one ‘likes’ such and such a ‘story’ one can but point
responsively to the lack of material for a judgement.
The apprehension at work, we thus see, would be of
certain projected conditions, and its first need therefore is that these
appearances be constituted in some other and more colourable fashion than by
the author’s answering for them on his more or less gentlemanly honour.
This is n’t enough; give me your elements, treat
me your subject, one has to say – I must wait till then to tell you how
I like them. I might ‘rave’ about them all were they given and
treated; but there is no basis of opinion in such matters without a basis of
vision, and no ground for that, in turn, without some communicated closeness
of truth. There are portentous situations, there are prodigies and marvels
and miracles as to which this communication, whether by necessity or by
chance, works comparatively straight – works, by our measure, to some
convincing consequence; there are others as to which the report, the
picture, the plea, answers no tithe of the questions we would put. Those
questions may perhaps then, by the very nature of the case, be
unanswerable – though often again, no doubt, the felt vice is but in
the quality of the provision made for them: on any showing, my own instinct,
even in the service of great adventures, is all for the best terms
of things; all for ground on which touches and tricks may be multiplied, the
greatest number of questions
answered, the greatest appearance of truth conveyed. With the preference I
have noted for the ‘neat’ evocation – the image, of any sort,
with fewest attendant vaguenesses and cheapnesses, fewest loose ends
dangling and fewest features missing, the image kept in fine the most
susceptible of intensity – with this predilection, I say, the safest
arena for the play of moving accidents and mighty mutations and strange
encounters, or whatever odd matters, is the field, as I may call it, rather
of their second than of their first exhibition. By which, to avoid
obscurity, I mean nothing more cryptic than I feel myself show them best by
showing almost exclusively the way they are felt, by recognising as their
main interest some impression strongly made by them and intensely received.
We but too probably break down, I have ever reasoned, when we attempt the
prodigy, the appeal to mystification, in itself ; with its
‘objective’ side too emphasised the report (it is ten to one) will
practically run thin. We want it clear, goodness knows, but we also want it
thick, and we get the thickness in the human consciousness that entertains
and records, that amplifies and interprets it. That indeed, when the
question is (to repeat) of the ‘supernatural’, constitutes the
only thickness we do get; here prodigies, when they come straight, come with
an effect imperilled; they keep all their character, on the other hand, by
looming through some other history – the indispensable history of
somebody’s normal relation to something. It ’s in such
connexions as these that they most interest, for what we are then mainly
concerned with is their imputed and borrowed dignity. Intrinsic values they
have none – as we feel for instance in such a matter as the would-be
portentous climax of Edgar Poe’s
Arthur Gordon Pym,
where the indispensable history is absent, where the phenomena evoked, the
moving accidents, coming straight, as I say, are immediate and flat, and the
attempt is all at the horrific in itself. The result is that, to my sense,
the climax fails – fails because it stops short, and stops short for
want of connexions. There are no connexions; not only, I mean, in
the sense of further statement, but of our own further
relation to the elements, which hang in the void: whereby we see the effect
lost, the imaginative effort wasted.
I dare say, to conclude, that whenever, in quest, as I
have noted, of the amusing, I have invoked the horrific, I have invoked it,
in such air as that of
The turn of the screw,
that of
The jolly corner,
that of
The friends of the friends,
that of
Sir Edmund Orme,
that of
The real right thing,
in earnest aversion to waste and from the sense that in art economy is
always beauty. The apparitions of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, in the first
of the tales just named, the elusive presence nightly ‘stalked’
through the New York house by the poor gentleman in the second, are matters
as to which in themselves, really, the critical challenge (essentially
nothing ever but the spirit of fine attention) may take a hundred forms
– and a hundred felt or possibly proved infirmities is too great a
number. Our friends’ respective minds about them, on the other hand,
are a different matter – challengeable, and repeatedly, if you like,
but never challengeable without some consequent further stiffening of the
whole texture. Which proposition involves, I think, a moral. The moving
accident, the rare conjunction, whatever it be, does n’t make the
story – in the sense that the story is our excitement, our amusement,
our thrill and our suspense; the human emotion and the human attestation,
the clustering human conditions we expect presented, only make it. The
extraordinary is most extraordinary in that it happens to you and me, and
it ’s of value (of value for others) but so far as visibly brought home
to us. At any rate, odd though it may sound to pretend that one feels on
safer ground in tracing such an adventure as that of the hero of
The Jolly Corner
than in pursuing a bright career among pirates or detectives, I allow that
composition to pass as the measure or limit, on my own part, of any
achievable comfort in the ‘adventure-story’; and this not because
I may ‘render’ – well, what my poor gentleman attempted and
suffered in the New York house – better than I may render detectives or
pirates or other splendid desperadoes, though even here too there would be
something to say; but because
the spirit engaged with the forces of violence interests me most when I can
think of it as engaged most deeply, most finely and most ‘subtly’
(precious term!). For then it is that, as with the longest and firmest
prongs of consciousness, I grasp and hold the throbbing subject;
there it is above all that I find the steady light of the picture.
After which attempted demonstration I drop with scant
grace perhaps to the admission here of a general vagueness on the article of
my different little origins. I have spoken of these in three or four
connexions, but ask myself to no purpose, I fear, what put such a matter as
Owen Wingrave
or as
The friends of the friends,
such a fantasy as
Sir Edmund Orme,
into my head. The habitual teller of tales finds these things in old
note-books – which however but shifts the burden a step; since how,
and under what inspiration, did they first wake up in these rude cradles?
One’s notes, as all writers remember, sometimes explicitly mention,
sometimes indirectly reveal, and sometimes wholly dissimulate, such clues
and such obligations. The search for these last indeed, through faded or
pencilled pages, is perhaps one of the sweetest of our more pensive
pleasures. Then we chance on some idea we have afterwards treated;
then, greeting it with tenderness, we wonder at the first form of a motive
that was to lead us so far and to show, no doubt, to eyes not our own, for
so other; then we heave the deep sigh of relief over all that is never,
thank goodness, to be done again. Would we have embarked on that
stream had we known? – and what might n’t we have made of
this one had n’t we known! How, in a proportion of cases,
could we have dreamed ‘there might be something’? – and why,
in another proportion, did n’t we try what there might
be, since there are sorts of trials (ah indeed more than one sort!) for
which the day will soon have passed? Most of all, of a certainty, is brought
back, before these promiscuities, the old burden of the much life and the
little art, and of the portentous dose of the one it takes to make any show
of the other. It is n’t however that one ‘minds’ not
recovering lost hints; the special pride of any tinted flower of fable,
however
small, is to be able to opine with the celebrated
Topsy
that it can only have ‘growed’. Does n’t the fabulist
himself indeed recall even as one of his best joys the particular pang (both
quickening and, in a manner, profaning possession) of parting with some conceit
of which he can give no account but that his sense – of beauty or truth or
whatever – has been for ever so long saturated with it? Not, I hasten
to add, that measurements of time may n’t here be agreeably
fallacious, and that the ‘ever so long’ of saturation shan’t
often have consisted but of ten minutes of perception. It comes back to me of
Owen Wingrave,
for example, simply that one summer afternoon many years ago, on a penny
chair and under a great tree in
Kensington Gardens,
I must at the end of a few such visionary moments have been able to
equip him even with details not involved or not mentioned in the story.
Would that adequate intensity all have sprung from the fact
that while I sat there in the immense
mild summer rustle and the ever so softened London hum a young man should
have taken his place on another chair within my limit of contemplation, a
tall quiet slim studious young man, of admirable type, and have settled to a
book with immediate gravity? Did the young man then, on the spot, just
become Owen Wingrave, establishing by the mere magic of type the
situation, creating at a stroke all the implications and filling out all the
picture? That he would have been capable of it is all I can say –
unless it be, otherwise put, that I should have been capable of letting him;
though there hovers the happy alternative that Owen Wingrave, nebulous and
fluid, may only, at the touch, have found himself in this
gentleman; found, that is, a figure and a habit, a form, a face, a fate, the
interesting aspect presented and the dreadful doom recorded; together with
the required and multiplied connexions, not least that presence of some
self-conscious dangerous girl of lockets and amulets offered by the
full-blown idea to my very first glance. These questions are as answerless
as they are, luckily, the reverse of pressing – since my poor point is
only that at the beginning of my session in the penny chair the seedless
fable had n’t a claim to make or an excuse to give, and that, the
very next thing, the pennyworth still partly unconsumed, it was fairly
bristling with pretexts. “Dramatise it, dramatise it!” would seem
to have rung with sudden intensity in my ears. But dramatise what? The young
man in the chair? Him perhaps indeed – however disproportionately to
his mere inoffensive stillness; though no imaginative response can
be disproportionate, after all, I think, to any right, any really
penetrating, appeal. Only, where and whence and why and how sneaked in,
during so few seconds, so much penetration, so very much rightness? However,
these mysteries are really irrecoverable; besides being doubtless of
interest, in general, at the best, but to the infatuated author.
Moved to say that of
Sir Edmund Orme
I remember absolutely nothing, I yet pull myself up ruefully to retrace the
presumption that this morsel must first have appeared, with a large picture,
in a
weekly newspaper
and, as then struck me, in the very smallest of all
possible print – at sight of which I felt sure that, in spite of the
picture (a thing, in its way, to be thankful for) no one would ever read it.
I was never to hear in fact that any one had done so – and I therefore
surround it here with every advantage and give it without compunction a new
chance. For as I meditate I do a little live it over, do a little remember
in connexion with it the felt challenge of some experiment or two in one of
the finer shades, the finest (that was the point) of the gruesome.
The gruesome gross and obvious might be charmless enough; but why
should n’t one, with ingenuity, almost infinitely refine upon it?
– as one was prone at any time to refine almost on anything? The study
of certain of the situations that keep, as we say, the heart in the mouth
might renew itself under this star; and in the recital in question, as in
The friends of the friends,
The jolly corner
and
The real right thing,
the pursuit of such verily leads us into rarefied air. Two sources of
effect must have seemed to me happy for
Sir Edmund Orme;
one of these the bright thought of a state of unconscious
obsession or, in
romantic parlance, hauntedness, on the part of a given person; the
consciousness of it on the part of some other, in anguish lest a wrong turn
or forced betrayal shall determine a break in the blest ignorance, becoming
thus the subject of portrayal, with plenty of suspense for the occurrence or
non-occurrence of the feared mischance. Not to be liable herself to a dark
visitation, but to see such a danger play about her child as incessantly as
forked lightning may play unheeded about the blind, this is the penalty
suffered by the mother, in
Sir Edmund Orme,
for some hardness or baseness of her own youth. There I must doubtless have
found my escape from the obvious; there I avoided a low directness and
achieved one of those redoubled twists or sportive – by which I
don’t at all mean wanton – gambols dear to the fastidious, the
creative fancy and that make for the higher interest. The higher interest
– and this is the second of the two flowers of evidence that I pluck
from the faded cluster – must further have dwelt, to my appraisement,
in my placing my scene at Brighton, the old, the mid-Victorian, the
Thackerayan Brighton; where the twinkling sea and the breezy air, the great
friendly, fluttered, animated, many-coloured ‘front’, would
emphasise the note I wanted; that of the strange and sinister embroidered on
the very type of the normal and easy.
This was to be again, after years, the idea entertained
for
The jolly corner,
about the composition of which there would be more to say than my space
allows; almost more in fact than categorical clearness might see its way to.
A very limited thing being on this occasion in question, I was moved to
adopt as my motive an analysis of some one of the conceivably rarest and
intensest grounds for an ‘unnatural’ anxiety, a
malaise
so incongruous and discordant, in the given prosaic prosperous conditions, as
almost to be compromising. Spencer Brydon’s adventure however is one of
those finished fantasies that, achieving success or not, speak best even to
the critical sense for themselves – which I leave it to do, while I
apply the remark as well to
The friends of the friends
(and all the more
that this last piece allows probably for no other comment).
I have placed
Julia Bride,
for
material reasons,
at the end of this volume, quite out of her
congruous company, though not very much out of her temporal order; and
mainly with this drawback alone that any play of criticism she may seem
formed to provoke rather misses its link with the reflexions I have here
been making. That link is with others
Sir Edmund Orme
to come
end of the preface to volume 17
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