The Facts of Fiction (15 page)

Godwin called Shelley “licentious,” while he meant merely “consistent,” stowed Mary away, told her disagreeable stepmother to sit on her, and drove Shelley from the house. It is a little scene that has greatly comforted the orthodox at heart, this episode of the anarchist turning into the Christian father.

In the few years round the turn of the century, the novel began to throw out its arms, octopuswise, in some of the directions which are now familiar.

Thomas Holcroft, who was always the second-best man in whatever company he was in, played second-best to Godwin. Holcroft, whose novels
Anna St. Ives
and
Hugh Trevor
were simply the old didactic stories of the nursery, the good-boy-and-the-bad-boy sort of thing promoted into terms of political economy, has since been swallowed by his pupil.

Booby critics have always loved taking a shy at Sir Walter Scott. Because he is by so much the biggest figure that had appeared in the whole field of fiction up to his time, he presents so huge a butt that all except the very wildest arrows of criticism are sure to hit.

Thus Carlyle fired a load of bolts at him in the famous review of the first six volumes of Lockhart's biography. Carlyle tried Scott on the serious charge of not having wanted to write like Carlyle. And he convicted him. It was Carlyle who said: “Your Shakespeare fashions his characters from the heart outward. Your Scott fashions them from the skin inwards, never getting near the heart of them.” And we have to admit that at least as regards the principal characters it is something like the truth.

Scott is not even exciting to modern minds. To the historian he is a source of annoyance because he is disdainful of dates, and a thousand ages in his sight are like a moment gone. Judged by the standards of current psychological fiction he is so superficial as to appear silly. He is often too Scottish for the English reader. He was too romantic for Borrow; and many readers used to the browns and greys of this century unhesitatingly reject the purples and scarlets of his.

Scott's heroines also are poverty-stricken creations: they are the mannequins of fiction, magnificent creatures that never come near to being the female of Man. Amy Robsart stands out among her sisters, a mournful mannequin.

Perhaps, however, we are suffering from one of the
temporary tyrannies of prejudice in imagining that because Scott's women are too uniformly handsome and virtuous they must therefore be a race of glowing cretins. In the romantic conception beauty did not come unprotected by brains.

Scott's heroes again, are often too much like handsome scout-masters to be entirely agreeable. All his characters, indeed, are conceived in the simple terms in which a child understands men and women. Scott knew passion only in its respectable form romantic love, and that so respectably that he has often been accused of not knowing it all. In
St. Ronan's Well
he wrote of incest but drained the passion of all its poison by making it simply a mistake of ignorance. Altogether his mind was a solid unemotional mind: it never soared and it never delved. To expect him to speak rapturously and convincingly of love would be like asking a delicate catlike modern novelist to describe a Border battle.

Scott's faults and short-comings are revealed every time an iconoclastic critic gets busy on him. Even Scott's prose, the mainstay of the narrative novelist, can be shown to be awkward, stubborn stuff judged by Southern standards. And a great deal that he wrote seems rather less than adult in its appeal:

To snatch a mace from the pavement, on which it lay beside one whose dying grasp had just relinquished it—to rush on the Templar's band, and to strike in quick succession to the right and left, levelling a warrior at each blow, was for Athelstane's great strength, now animated with unusual fury, but the work of a single moment; he was soon within two yards of Bois-Guilbert, whom he defied in his loudest tone.

“Turn false-hearted Templar! let go her whom
thou art unworthy to touch—turn, limb of a band of murdering and hypocritical robbers! “

“Dog! ” said the Templar grinding his teeth, “I will teach thee to blaspheme the holy Order of the Temple of Zion ”; and with these words, half-wheeling his steed, he made a demi-courbette towards the Saxon, and rising in the stirrups, so as to take full advantage of the descent of the horse, he discharged a fearful blow upon the head of Athelstane.

This then in short was the Titanic incompetent who in 1814 made the first successful invasion of England from the North. This victorious crusade was the more remarkable since 1814 and 1815 saw the purple close of one of the most alarming cataclysms of European history. For anything to attempt to compete in the mind of an ordinarily intelligent man with the downfall of Napoleon must have seemed as patently absurd as presenting a debtor's letter at the Derby.

Book-selling, indeed, had a poor time in those years when Fact was leading Fiction by a length. But what were the books?
Mansfield Park
, Wordsworth's poems, Southey's
Don Roderick
; obviously none of them books to snatch up in the spirit of victory. The only author whose pulse was habitually above the normal was Byron; and his
Lara
and
The Corsair
beat level with the public's heart.

Then in this exhilarating and military world along came an author who had wanted to be a soldier. And the public heart found itself keeping time to a fresh and more pounding rhythm.

It is wrong to think of Scott as one of nature's novelists turning up to fill one of nature's vacuums. He was not a novelist in an age of poets, but a poet in an age of novelists.
He had refused the Laureateship before
Waverley
had appeared.

In fiction, true, unlike poetry, it was the Golden Age of the Great Forgotten. Figures like “Monk ” Lewis, Mrs. Radcliffe and Mrs. A. M. Bennett (who sold ten thousand copies of her six-volume novel
Vicissitudes Abroad; or The Ghost of My Father
, at 36
s
., on the day of publication) appear, and fade away again immediately like figures in a fog. The novel had spread with the popularity of the cross-word and the variety of human conversation. A critic in the
Edinburgh Review
remarked:

This is truly a novel-writing age! … Persons of all ranks and professions, who feel that they can wield a pen successfully, now strive to embody the fruits of their observations in a work of fiction. … It has been discovered that the novel is a very flexible and comprehensive form of composition, applicable to many purposes. There is scarcely any subject, not either repulsive or of a very abstruse nature, which must be of necessity excluded from it.

It was an age in which moralists were already growing alarmed at the amount of time that the fashion of novel reading consumed. And remembering the novels we may unhesitatingly place ourselves on the side of the moralists.

The commonest character in early nineteenth century fiction was the ghost, just as the commonest character in early twentieth century fiction is the corpse. But whereas detective fiction has never become quite the whole of fiction, the supernatural romance was the whole of fiction then. Scott rescued it. Among the orchestra of squeaks and shrieks and whistles and groans that comprised the contemporary novel Scott sounds like an entire
organ in full blast with everything from the sixty-four-foot stop to the
vox humana
.

Scott himself was educated in the horrific ecstasy of German phantasy. It affected his heart, and all but affected his head. There is a record of young Scott, a child of his age, intoxicated with the vapours of hobgoblinry, staring into the fire and suddenly exclaiming, “I wish to Heaven I could get a skull and two cross-bones.”

But Scott had a measure and a half of ordinary common sense. And though his romances were bright with the afterglow of the supernatural, he was never at the mercy of his own apparitions as most of his contemporaries were.

Scott indeed was at the mercy of nothing save his inexhaustible and consuming energy. He went through life as if he had hitched his wagon to a shooting-star. His strength even in his idle moments was always fully concentrated. When he walked out across the countryside for pleasure his appetite for fatigue was not satisfied until he had covered thirty miles. As a young man when he needed money he made it by copying legal documents at the rate of 3
d
. a folio, and could write one hundred and twenty folios without a break for food or rest.

The same driving restlessness within him drove him from bed by 5 o'clock, and Lockhart, on whose nerves the habit must have told, writes that:

He rose by five o'clock, lit his own fire when the season required one, and shaved and dressed with great deliberation, for he was a very martinet as to all but the mere coxcombries of the toilet, not abhorring effiminate dandyism itself so cordially as the slightest approach to personal slovenliness, or even those “bedgown and slipper tricks,” as he called them, in which literary men are so apt to indulge. Arrayed in his
shooting jacket or whatever dress he meant to use till dinner time, he was seated at his desk by six o'clock, all his papers arranged before him in the most accurate order, and his books of reference marshalled around him on the floor, while at least one favourite dog lay watching his eye, just beyond the line of circumvallation. Thus by the time the family assembled for breakfast between nine and ten, he had done enough (in his own language) “to break the neck of the day's work.”

So it was that in those mornings, with night unregretfully forgotten, and day a revel of exercise eagerly anticipated, the novels were written, profuse with disorders that a lesser mind would have remembered and corrected. Scott's capacity for work is less described by saying that it was superhuman than by saying that it was inhuman. There is a glimpse of its inhumanity in the episode of a neighbour who looked into Scott's rooms and complained:

There is a confounded hand in sight of me here, which has often bothered me before, and now it won't let me fill my glass with a good will. … Since we sat down … I have been watching it—it fascinates my eyes—it never stops—page after page is finished and thrown on that heap of MS. and still it goes on unwearied—and so it will be till candles are brought in, and God knows how long after that.

That hand was writing
Waverley
. It needed to be strong: it was also to write half the fiction of the next fifty years. This ferocious midday to midnight energy gained for Scott the reputation of being a machine: which in an idle world that respects industry is by no means a bad thing.
But it also gained for Scott's works the reputation of being machine-made: which, unfortunately, is simply and invariably the solvent of all art.

There is a picture of Scott as the Celestial Coiner, assiduously minting money to pay off his partner's business debts, that has been thickly painted over the Portrait of the Author of a Young Man. And the later painting obscures exactly half the truth.

That Scott planned his life with the regularity of a tradesman has led many people to disregard all those qualities of mind that would not be appreciated behind a counter. And even when the other illusion of Scott as a Talking Tradesman has been dissolved, and he has been promoted in the imagination to the dignity of a study, there appears a rather suffocating set-piece showing Scott, prosperous and porcine, in a room littered with collie dogs and antiquarian armour, and bristling with bric-à-brac like Balzac's. Byron's vase is on the table, Montrose's sword on the bookcase; an old Border bugle; James VII's travelling-flask; Rob Roy's sporran and long gun; Claverhouse's pistol; a brace of Bonaparte's; and over all a beatific and inscrutable bust of Shakespeare presiding like an immutable Oriental Buddha.

It would be difficult to imagine anything lively taking place in such a room. One sees the ghosts of those qualities whose absence people deplore—the abstract, the passionate, the realistic—in retreat from an environment so overpowering. Yet the quality which was to be found in that museum of curios was that rare and obscure quality of common sense. Perhaps it was that Scott was thus constantly reminded that even the relics of the great had their price.

German romantic fiction had been a parody of just those qualities in man—courage, love, faithfulness and so
forth—that have given life its nobility. And the early years of the nineteenth century saw the return of a life of true nobility into fiction by the circuitous route of a parody of parody. Just as
Northanger Abbey
opened in the manner of a schoolboy's going to Maskelyne's with the memory of his own conjuring-set at home in his mind, so
Waverley
begins with a sneer at the conventions of romance, even though the sneer soon gives place to a full-throated cheer.

Except for the humorous sanity of the interjections, the retrospective chapters of
Waverley
, that were written earlier than the rest, might be the opening chapters of any black-letter romance. There is the same Gothic Library; the Great Park with its mouldered Gothic monuments; the solitary island tower; an upper atmosphere crowded with griffins, moldwarps and wyverns; the grim uncle moping about the palace, like a family basilisk; and Youth, aloof, supercilious and not unlike a valetudinarian Byron, already distinguished by his habits of abstraction and love of solitude.

Readers of Mrs. Radcliffe probably felt themselves perfectly at home in such surroundings; as they did later in
The Bride of Lammermoor
and
Redgauntlet
. That may even have been why so many of them went on with it.

Yet it cannot have been that the capacity for doubt was entirely suspended in the public mind during the years of the black-letter. It has become customary to regard this period not as one of fancy, as it was, but as one of a kind of literary insanity. Probably nine-tenths of the novel readers of the day were only too thankful to the author who gave them the midnight delights of romance without calling upon them to surrender their daytime incredulity. For, with Scott, always through the mists of romantic material marched the facts of history—
and usually of recent history—hard, indisputable, and in continuous connection with the real business of human life; like solid, tangible telegraph poles stretching across a mountain mist.