The Facts of Fiction (14 page)

Lewis, indeed, made a fortune out of hiding round the corners of a much frequented by-way of literature and saying “Boo! ” to the public in a hollow, convincing voice.

The Reign of Terror is usually reckoned to have come to an end somewhere about the time of the publication of
Northanger Abbey
. There the arch, Gothic heroine received a humorous, rationalistic jab:

You will proceed into this small vaulted room, and through this into several others, without perceiving anything very remarkable in either. In one perhaps there may be a dagger, in another a few drops of blood, and in a third the remains of some instrument of torture; but there being nothing in all this out of the common way, and your lamp being nearly exhausted, you will return towards your own apartment. In repassing
through the small vaulted room, however, your eyes will be attracted towards a large, old-fashioned cabinet of ebony and gold, which, though narrowly examining the furniture before, you had passed unnoticed. Impelled by an irresistible presentiment, you will eagerly advance to it, unlock its folding doors, and search into every drawer;—but for some time without discovering anything of importance—perhaps nothing but a considerable hoard of diamonds. At last, however, by touching a secret spring, an inner compartment will open—a roll of paper appears;—you seize it—it contains many sheets of manuscript—you hasten with the precious treasure into your own chamber, but scarcely have you been able to decipher “Oh thou whomsoever thou mayest be, into whose hands these memoirs of the wretched Matilda may fall …”

Certainly the legions of demons that had conquered romance were routed, not so much by an attack of a more rigid rationalism or of a more religious religion, as by an attack of the giggles. For it is a part of the convention of the supernatural that no ghost shall appear ridiculous. And here Jane Austen had defied convention and raised a laugh at the expense of Hell.

But the truth is, of course, that people did not cease reading tales of terror from the moment that
Northanger Abbey
appeared. Everyone, naturally, did not read
Northanger Abbey
; and there are always some people who find shuddering easier than laughing. Thus, though romantic parody became a fashion and almost a trade, romance itself continued as the staple of fiction. Maria Edgeworth's
Angelina
, or
L' Amie Inconnue
, and Eaton Stannard Barrett's
The Heroine
could not destroy the public taste for terror any more than jokes about
greediness could seriously undermine the appetite of schoolboys. And so late as the first third of the nineteenth century, the gush of ghosts from the Minerva Press was continuing without abatement.

Mr. Lane, the publisher at the Press, founded the biggest circulating library of his day for the better dissemination of his frights and fictions. It was the sort of literature, like the detective literature of to-day, which is better read on loan than on purchase. Usually such fiction has been written without pains and can be read at least as fast as it was set down. It is rarely necessary to read such books twice. For no one with the best will in the world can be so terrified as he ought to be when he holds a complete dossier of the ghost's movements, before the case. The library alone satisfies the appetite and sharpens it.

And so it was that Hazlitt and Lamb and Macaulay, to say nothing of the unnamed rest of polite society, fattened their imaginations and their fears on the Fashionable Forgotten. Writers from Mrs. Mary Meeke to Mr. Barrett enjoyed a popularity then that might seem enviable even to-day. Theirs was easy and artless stuff to write, as Scott pointed out when he read a batch of such novels, and wrote:

We strolled through a variety of castles, each of which was regularly called II Castello; met with as many captains of condottieri; heard various ejaculations of Santa Maria or Diavolo; read by a decaying lamp in a tapestried chamber dozens of legends as stupid as the main history; examined such suites of deserted apartments as might fit up a reasonable barrack; and saw as many glimmering lights as would make a respectable illumination.

Now into the midst of so much that was supernatural there came once more the Natural Man, the Noble Savage, an import from France bearing the trade-mark of Rousseau.

Rousseau wore a softer and a larger velvet glove than any revolutionary since his time. The
Nouvelle Héloïse
is a work of excruciating sentiment; a Bolshevist bomb very cunningly concealed. Had such a bombshell attempted to enter England without the words “Honey: This Side Up” stamped on it, it would have been stopped at the Customs. John Morley remarked that the danger lay in “the mischievous intellectual direction which Rousseau imparted to the effusion ”—which is rather obviously true.

The Noble Savage, who was thus introduced, immediately became one of the ruling class in fiction. At first he was merely a foil to throw up the vices of the civilised. By our time he has become a foil to throw up their virtues. The Noble Savage has given place to the Strong Silent Man; both of them beings with the innocent moral ruthlessness of purpose of a steam-roller. Indeed, it has by now become a convention that the Strong Silent Man shall have either no morals or bad ones.

But though his actions may have changed from those of Adam in his simplicity to those of Casanova in his guile, outwardly he has remained immediately recognisable: “He was pretty tall. … His eyes were the most awful that could be seen, and very piercing. … His nose was rising and Roman.” So might a modern novelist sketch the elemental man. So, in point of fact, did Mrs. Aphra Behn sketch him in 1689 in
Oroonoko
. And with the exception of the point of morals, the only outstanding difference between Mrs. Behn's hero and one of Miss Dell's
was that Mrs. Behn's was suffering from the disability of the colour bar. The essential virility is the same.

In such a typically modern piece of fiction as Miss Ethel Mannin's
Ragged Banners
we see the return of the noble savage in his crudest form. The particular scene is so set that the reader's laughter all but destroys its significance. A woman novelist is shown mooning over her boudoir balcony, while below her the jobbing gardener sweats primitively at his labour.

When she made her breakfast tea she took a cup out to the man. He straightened himself as she approached, and when she stood beside him the pungent smell of his sweating body came to her, sharply, acrid, and she was aware of the dark mat of hair on his chest. That and something she could not define, but it was as though life burned in him like a slow fire and the warmth and glow of it communicating itself to her, so that she was not Mary Thane, the novelist, handing a cup of tea to a jobbing gardener she had hired, but primordial woman in the presence of primordial man listening with her blood to the surge of life in him. She had this sudden blood consciousness of him, and because of it a shyness swept her. …

Disgusting and ridiculous ? But it is not intended disgustingly, of that I am sure. The scene is intended rather to show how shocking it is that women who could glow like ingots in the furnace of passion (or some such phrase) should be left as cold and shapeless as the original ore.

It is the old story: The Savage showing the Civilised their defects. And the only difference is that our idea of the defects has changed.

With those novels in which the seeds and flowers of
revolution entered the country in disguise came a string of novels which even the most short-sighted policeman should have recognised for what they were. Yet somehow what slipped past the policeman contrived to enter the nursery.

We find such a handbook of gentle Bolshevism as
Sandford and Merton
becoming the infants' Bible. Thomas Day, in the ingratiating form of the parable, preached the exact spirit, if not the text, of Mr. Lloyd George's Lime-house Speech. A reader of the flowing passage who could not see that Mr. Barlow must have been in the pay of Moscow has been misled by the gossiping charm of the style.

The next morning Tommy was up almost as soon as it was light, and went to work in a corner of the garden, where he dug with great perseverance till breakfast: when he came in, he could not help telling Mr. Barlow what he had done, and asking him, whether he was not a very good boy, for working so hard to raise corn? “That,” said Mr. Barlow, “depends upon the use you intend to make of it when you have raised it. What is it that you intend doing with it? ““Why,” said Tommy, “I intend to send it to the mill that we saw, and have it ground into flour; and then I will get you to show me how to make bread of it; and then I will eat it, that I may tell my father that I have eaten bread out of corn of my own growing.” “That will be very well done,” said Mr. Barlow; “but where will be the great goodness, that you sow corn for your own eating? That is no more than all the people round continually do; and if they did not do it, they would be obliged to fast! ” “But then,” said Tommy, “they are not gentlemen, as I am.” “What then,” answered
Mr. Barlow, “must not gentlemen eat as well as others, and therefore is it not for their interest to know how to procure food as well as other people?” “Yes, sir,” answered Tommy, “but they can have other people to raise it for them, so that they are not obliged to work themselves.” “How does that happen? “said Mr. Barlow. T. “Why, sir, they pay other people to work for them, or buy bread when it is made, as much as they want.” Mr. B. “Then they pay for it with money.” T. “Yes, sir.” Mr. B. “Then they must have money before they can buy corn.” T. “Certainly, sir.” Mr. B. “But have all gentlemen money? “Tommy hesitated some time at this question; at last he said, “I believe, not always, sir.” Mr. B. “Why then, if they have not money, they will find it rather difficult to procure corn, unless they raise it for themselves.” “Indeed,” said Tommy, “I believe they will; for perhaps they may not find anybody good-natured enough to give it them. …”

All very much like a child's manual of Communism, complete with leading questions and misleading answers.

At the same time, works not only of revolutionary purpose but of open propaganda were appearing. There was, for instance, William Godwin's
Things as They Are; or the Adventures of Caleb Williams
, a positively Tolstoyan tract on the “corrupt wilderness of human society.” Like Fielding's
Amelia
, it was directed against the grosser injustices of this world. There is an over-emphasised human-itarianism about certain of the passages that set the reader, with his heavy ballast of modern authors in his head, in mind of Mr. John Galsworthy weeping for the sins of society. In short, it comprehends most of the modern sympathies because it is parent of them.

There is, for example, the character of the felon committed for highway robbery.

The character of the prisoner (“a common soldier ”) was such as has seldom been equalled. He had been ardent in the search of intellectual cultivation, and was accustomed to draw his favourite amusement from the works of Virgil and Horace. The humbleness of his situation, combined with his ardour for literature, only served to give an inexpensive heightening to the interestingness of his character. He was capable, when occasion demanded, of firmness, but, in his ordinary deportment, he seemed unarmed and unresisting, unsuspicious of guile in others, as he was totally free from guile himself. … His habits of thinking were strictly his own, full of justice, simplicity and wisdom. He from time to time earned money of his officers, by his peculiar excellence in furbishing arms; but he declined offers that had been made him to become a sergeant or corporal, saying that he did not want money, and that in a new situation he should have less leisure for study. He was equally constant in refusing presents that were offered him by persons who had been struck with his merit; not that he was under the influence of false delicacy and pride, but that he had no inclination to accept that, the want of which he did not feel to be an evil. This man died while I was in prison. I received his last breath.

All this piling up of perfection is intended to move the reader into a rage against the blind cruelty of the law, just as in the masterly ironic sentence in
Joseph Andrews
, which describes how “a lad who hath since been transported for robbing a Hen-roost” was the only person to

play the Good Samaritan to poor, naked, half-dead Joseph; and how while he stripped off his only garment he swore “a good Oath (for which he was rebuked by the Passengers) that he would rather ride in his Shirt all his Life, than suffer a Fellow-Creature to lie in so miserable a condition.”

The Preface to the first edition of
Caleb Williams
contained the statement that the object of the work was to make “a general review of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism by which man became the all destroyer of man.” Sheer anarchy: in other words, an attack on arbitrary government.

But it would have been easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle than so open a political libel through the bookshops. And the Preface was withdrawn from the original edition. When it was published, the author adds this sweet, brief note of explanation to it:

“Caleb Williams ” made his first appearance in the world in the same month in which the sanguinary plot broke out against the liberties of Englishmen, which was happily terminated by the acquittal of its first intended victims in the close of that year. Terror was the order of the day: and it was feared that even a humble novelist might be shown to be constructively a traitor.

Godwin, the indignant anarchist, existing towards the end of his life on eleemosynary titbits from a tainted table, the man of genius, whose work drew the word “masterpiece” from Hazlitt, extracts what life he still has in our minds not so much from his fame, won by this and his later novels, which has declined, as from the part he played in one of the by-comedies of literature.

It was Godwin, after a lifetime spent in preaching
against the institution of marriage, who flew into a passion when he heard that Shelley, applying Godwin's principles, wanted to take Mary Godwin for his wife, while poor Harriet was still living.