Phantom of the Opera (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (41 page)

—February 19, 1911

 

Gaston Leroux, the canary journalist of literature, has just hurled his most dequincyesque product, “The Phantom of the Opera,” into the ranks of his devoted followers....

Leroux is no Edgar Allan Poe, and in this case it is well that he is not, for, had he been—starting with such a premise as that of his story-he would have wound up in such an awful literary ossuary that no reader, apart from a degenerate or a lunatic, would have been able to stand the verbal stench.

The best part of the book is the first half. Here you are presented with a series of culminating problems which are simply terrific; and then the author, in a manner which is somewhat labored compared with his previous effort, carefully unravels his skein of improbability, and you see that, after all, it is nothing so very awful.

I am not saying that it is not an unusual and highly interesting story. In fact, it is one of the all-night kind, where you don’t stop reading until the morning milkman rattles the cans at the front stoop.

Leroux was evidently first inspired by the architectural marvels of the world’s greatest opera house, which is the Paris temple of music-drama. This structure, of colossal size and luxurious splendor, has four or five stories underneath the ground, has also a subterranean lake which had to be mastered before the foundations could be secured, and in its time has served not only as an academy of music, but as a fortress, an arsenal, and a refuge for military fugitives.

Placing his plot back a number of years, Leroux introduces the reader and a new management simultaneously, and lets both reader and management face an uncanny problem—the “opera ghost.” This creature, though seldom seen, occupies a box, demands a tremendous indemnity for his personal expenses, exercises a supernatural charlatanism over the mechanical and physical end of the institution, and, when his ogreish demands are refused, destroys property and actually kills innocent people.

A beautiful and young Swedish singer of celestial voice, Christine Daaé, is beloved by the ghost, whose affection, in its ardor and cruelty, seems to transcend any earthly admiration.

The horrible and generally grotesque pranks of the opera ghost, his marvellous musical ability, his abduction of the exquisite Christine, his imprisonment of her in his golden house on the subterranean lake, the adventures of her noble lover in his dauntless pursuit, the mystery of the solemn Persian who is allied with the lover but who yet has been the friend and confidante of the opera ghost, the ghost’s own hideous personality, the bizarre adventure of the Persian and the lover in the death-dealing “tropical forest,” the devotion of the beautiful Christine, her sorrow for and equal abhorrence of the tragic ghost, who is practically dead in life, the majestic yet terrible score of the ghost’s opera, “Don Juan Triumphant,” the sorrowful renunciation by the ghost—well, these are just chapter-titles. Interesting? I should say! They give you the creeps. They make your hair stand, and gooseflesh your skin.

—March 26, 1911

1. What is the relation between art and artifice in this novel? Are they opposites or essentially the same, or is one a stimulus to the other?

2. The complaint has been made that
The Phantom of the Opera
is excessively plot-driven, that there is no subtlety or richness in the characterization, and that in fact the characters have no psychology. On the other hand, authors can represent a character’s inner state by what surrounds him as well as by what he does. What do you think? Are the opera house and the things in it, especially the five cellars, essentially psychological, even moral?

3. Would you rather that the supernatural happenings had not been explained away, that they had remained supernatural, or at least ambiguous?

4. Does the novel have a moral—such as that love is redemptive, that evil men are made, not born, or that creativity emerges out of a substratum of dark energies?

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