The Return to Horridness in Literature
BY ROSE MACAULAY. "RE you sure they are all horrid ? " Catherine A Morland earnestly inquired of the list of novels re- commended by her friend Isabella. Isabella was quite sure, for " a particular friend of mine, a Miss Andrews, a sweet girl, has read every one of them." Horrid enough, anyhow, to gratify and thrill the Regency, young ladies. That romantic horridness, complete with spectres, myste- rious warnings, haunted chambers, rattling chains, which has gratified young ladies down the ages, though now grown a trifle out of mode. The Regency young ladies (though probably not the Regency young gentlemen, who were tolerably tough) were already grown too squeamish for the horridness of their parents, still more of their grandparents, their great-grandparents, and that long line of robust literary ancestors which climbs back through the centuries to the Norman, the Dane, the Saxon, the Celt, the Roman, the Hebrew, and the Greek. A long and lusty line, who faced horridness with nerves of steel and stomachs of cast-iron, using it to adorn their literature as they used flowers, birds, the moon, the green walks of paradise, the deeds of heroes, the miracles of saints, the sorrows and joys of love. In among all these they flung rotting carcases, the tortures of life and death, and of that horrid plight which awaited the wicked beyond death, flayings, burnings, and all manner of filth, de- scribed with the utmost relish and sang-froid. They enjoyed such spectacles in life, looked forward to front seats in heaven from whence they might see them per- formed on the unrighteous in hell and flinched not from them in literature.
The English have perhaps never . been quite so horrid as some races, such as Latins, Gauls and Orientals, but they did well enough. Scandinavian and Teutonic literary ancestry on the one hand, Gallic on the other, produced, in the English genius a sturdy heir. The nerves of a people who flocked to see traitors executed and witches and heretics burned, were not frail. In the Middle Ages puritan piety wa3 interwoven with cheerful coarseness and barbarous ferocity. Renaissance humanism routed (temporarily) the puritanism, carried on the coarseness, and only slightly bated the ferocity. Its litterateurs were fine bloody men, who would gut you a man and rape you a woman with the most zestful pen in the world. And as to their printed controversy, I will not stain these pages or pain these printers with samples of it. There was, too, the unfortunate fashion in dirty epigrams, after Martial, or after any other cheerful and obscene Roman. Our Ben Jonson and Herrick acknowledged the Latins their masters here, and faithfully trotted after them. It was, on the other hand, the pleasure of Dr. Donne to dwell on the wormy tomb, with the close fidelity with which, before his change of heart, he had described the satisfactions of love. And in most homes lay Foxe's Book of Martyrs for pleasant family reading. The translators of the Bible heard no call to modify or soften the highly coloured Oriental effects of their original, and of the sufferings of the sons of the Maccabees they bated no jot. There is little enough sign through the seventeenth or the earlier eighteenth century of squeamishness, either on the part of moralists or of those they censured. Dean Swift is fouler in parts than any Restoration vulgarian. Jeremy Collier protested against profligate literature, but not he nor any one else against mere repulsiveness. When were the nerves and the senses of readers in general first jarred by this ? Possibly Addison's were ; anyhow, he wrote in that rough Augus- tan age with pretty propriety, and was nearly always quite the gentleman. Richardson, carrying it a little further, was quite the lady. Fielding was neither ; but, though often vulgar, he was only sometimes horrid (unless you hold as horrid that foeda et brevis voluptas, the intercourse of the sexes ; this view, though it has age- long sanction, I do not share). Apart from this, there is plenty of nastiness in the eighteenth century. But, by the time we arrive at the Romantics and the fin de Bieck novelists, the English had become definitely and unaccountably squeamish in their litera- ture ; possibly partly owing to the increase among the reading public of elegant females, with their more easily frayed susceptibilities and nerves. Anyhow, the nineteenth century was, in English literature, a squeamish century. So was the twentieth, until four years horrid beyond imagination's bounds smashed the barriers of elegant reticence and unsheathed the horrid pen. Since then the pen has flowed on ever more and more horridly.
There have broken on us a thousand war books ; and, since war is a horrid business, war books must be horrid or else liars. Our war novelists and diarists have not flinched ; brave warriors trained in a tough school, how seldom do they write as I should feel inclined to write did I feel it my duty to recall such intolerable memories, " I then saw some corpses," or " Near me a man was blown to bits " ; they describe the corpses and the dis- membered man with merciless detail, till the reader, • trained in no such bitter school, falls sick. More, this soldierly frankness, worthy of our old saga-writers, has spread to those who write of bull-fights, of tortures, of sea-sickness, of prison brutalities, of filth, so that any book may now be a trap for the unwary squeamish.
One must try to be fair in this matter, and not approach it a biassed invalid shuddering at each lurch of the ship.
Art must not be tested by the revulsions of stomach or nerves. That I, or any other, dislike horrid detail is beside the question. The question is, is it a legitimate or a desirable element in art ? Does it intensify beauty, stir imagination, reveal more vividly the dreadful warp on which our life's woof is woven ? Or does it merely' shock the nerves of the neurotic, pass unheeded of the robust, and titillate the sadistic to a morbid pleasure ? Should a writer say " They put out his eyes," and leave it at that, or amplify ? And if he amplifies, is the dra- matic value of the scene intensified, or swallowed up in physical nausea that obscures all else ? In brief, is it bad art or good ? I believe it bad ; but it is admittedly a debatable question.
What does seem certain is that, for good or ill, our literature is swinging back to an old-world robust- ness, and it will, one presumes, train up a reading public to suit it. At the end of a not-so-long road one sees the figure of the Noble Savage, tomahawk in hand, fierce in deed as in word, waiting to conduct to its ulti- mate doom a civilization grown too effeminate and nice.
Or is it, perhaps, all part of the scope of art to weave the horrid pattern of this horrid life of ours down to the last most horrid stitch ; and is the Noble Savage a Savage Messiah, a guide to a greater civilization than is yet ours, in which nothing that is will seem horrid, in which we shall look on blood and dirt both in life and art with a calm, deodorizing gaze ?
Possibly. But meanwhile you will admit that it is a problem a little baffling, a transition a little painful to weak humanity, for whom life and imagination hold already about as much of horror as it can cope with and yet remain approximately sane.
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