FICTION
WHERE IS FANCY BRED ?
A FANTASY must set a hard problem for a critic who believes stalwartly in Realism. Where everything is impossible, what faculty of judgment can he bring to bear ? The problem is
important, too. Say you are introducing a dragon into a story : you have never kept dragons under observation, and you wish to find out how to make this one appear thoroughly convincing. Now, if you were rigorously of the French school of realists, you would observe a crocodile and an eagle ;
or pick up a second-hand piece of information about them :— ‘• Most things movo the under-jaw ; the crocodile not."
The mouth of your dragon, then, must gape upwards ; and a man would be moderately safe from the flame it blows out if he could manage to keep below the level of its jaws. It shall have eyesight that the sun cannot dazzle, and it shall drop tortoises on stones to break their shells. If it has anything in it of human nature, if it can talk or weep or grow malicious, then you can hang on it a few more observations.
It stammers, let us suppose. The last man who stammered at you was unhappily married, and took up boxing for exercise (a psycho-analyst could have told you why) ; your dragon shall assume the character of that unfortunate stammerer. I confess that none of these observations arc notably original ; you would need -to expend a great deal of labour and fill a shelf of notebooks before you plumped out your dragon into a plausible inhabitant of this world. But you see how simple it is to build a synthetic dragon after the fashion of the masters of French fiction ?
And really it would be a pity to waste all that time. Your dragon would be impressive, I have no doubt, but it would not convince the reader any more thoroughly than the dragon of some idle writer who only troubled to convince himself. Yet if by mere congruence of invention a writer can take his readers with him, the case of the Realists falls to the ground. What can be done with a dragon can be done with a man. Indeed, it seems probable that no good work of fiction can be in any way a transcript from life. Invention depends to some extent on experience ; but on digested experience. If we conscientiously unravel our dreams, we find that every scene and every incident is a mirroring and distorting of scenes or incidents in our waking life : and even this dis- tortion is not done casually or freely : our experience of life has made knots in our mental processes and we cannot escape from our past selves. And so with the creation of literature ; if you let your invention loose you have already a sufficient grounding of fact to support it. All you need to do, then, is to keep your invention steady, not let it fly hither and thither at the dictates of your own conceit (as' it does in dreams) ; and to satisfy yourself that your own characters are behaving in the way in which they should behave—not at all the way in which your neighbours behave. Please don't press your autobiography into the story ; it is quite unfair to do that. You may give an appearance of truth to fact by relating anecdotes of your childhood, and you may shelve for a time the exposure of the quality of your invention. But you cannot give internal life to a story by shovelling into it a heap of external life. And, by the way, if anyone catches you out in some anachronism, don't hang your head and confess a sin. Anachronism is no sin unless it wrecks the coherence of the story. Shakespeare was not careless ; he knew that it wasn't worth while to swot up history for seven years in order to reproduce the bare circumstances of life. It is an artist's duty only to reproduce life itself. Fancy, in brief, is conceived in the heart and issues from the head. It has no breeding, for it is born full-grown.
If all this were true (as in part it is), then fantasy would fall under the general rules of critical judgment. We should inquire, that is, into the quality of invention and the congruity of parts. Mr. Laurence Housman gives his fantasy a good congruity of parts ; he is more admirable than Miss Rose Nlacaulay in this particular. But Miss Macaulay's invention is so much livelier and happier and fuller than Mr. Housman's that there can be no doubt as to the better book of the two.
In 1855, Miss Macaulay tells us, Miss Charlotte Smith was escorting forty orphans from England to San Francisco. The ship was driven out of its course and wrecked : the villainous crew made off in the ship's boats, and Miss Charlotte Smith, the forty orphans, a Calvinistic Scottish maid, and a drunken and jovial ship's-doctor were marooned upon a coral island. There was very little hope of rescue, and Miss Smith and the doctor set themselves to work to make the life of the community as orderly and comfortable as possible. After some time the doctor proposes marriage ; he very much wants the companionship of a wife, he explains, and he doesn't want to wait till the orphans grow up. Miss Smith succumbs to his proposal, and they are married, Scottish fashion, by the Calvinistic maid. We leave them for seventy- five years.
In 1922 a Cambridge don comes across a confessien by his grandfather, one of the sailors who saved their own skins at the expense of the Smith party. There is a chart,too, marking the site of the island. He and his three children sail off to discover if there is any sign of the marooned party. They find a community of nearly two thousand under the tyrannical rule of Miss Smith. She is now ninety-seven but as forceful and strict and Victorian as ever. An aristocracy of the Smith family has been erected to govern the community
and live on the labours of the unhappy descendants of tilt orphans. To be " Smith " is a mark almost of divinity ; to be " Orphan " a mark of vulgarity. As Miss smith had retained a prodigious amount of general learning—history, geography, Bible texts, and the British Constitution—and as the doctor, before he was carried off by a shark, had taught the community much handicraft and some few mechanical tricks, the civilization of the island was highly developed by the best Victorian models. But the seeds of dissension were growing ; already atheism, labour troubles, republican- ism, and looseness of morals had shown themselves among the Orphans. And Miss Macaulay has a threefold opportunity —she satirizes Victorianism, modernity, and general human nature with an equal vigour. It is true that there are missed chances, and after all, the invention is more rc markable for quantity than for quality ; but it is a charming, acute, laughable, gentle book, with no airs or artificialities to it.
But in Trimblerigg Mr. Housman has set himself too small a task. He presents to us in three hundred pages a portrait of a hypocritical Nonconformist minister, who persuades himself that he is a saint at heart and overlooks all his own publicity-hunting and manoeuvring for power and selfishness of purpose. Or not quite overlooks ; he is quick- minded enough and knows quite well what he is doing; but he sees -his dishonesties humorously and dissociates himself from them. In detail the story is very goed ; but the accumu- lation of detail is too many for the theme. There is a stiffness and artfulness in Mr. Housman's style, too, that might well put a reader off ; and the self-conscious airs of the preface are intolerable. It is a pity that so much excellent ridietee and absurdity are confined in so narrow a scene.
The preface isn't a patch on M. Octave Mirbeau's preface to Goha the Fool for downright provokingness. " Frankness is not a principle with me," he writes. " It is an inner neces- sity dominating every other obligation. I have been told that I am harsh. . . . Why will people never understand that I am simply sincere ? Why expect my admiration when I can give only my sympathy?" While he informs us in this fashion of the nobility of his soul, he is supposed to be intro- ducing to us the two Egyptians, M. Ades and M. Josipovici, who wrote Goha ; they are unfortunate in having an intro- ducer at all. The novel is a story of Egyptian life in the eighteenth century of our era ; and it is well carried through and most informative. A realistic work, you will understand.
ANDREW CAREY.
Previous page
