Essays on Modern Novelists

Essays on Modern Novelists By William Lyon Phelps ESSAYS ON MODERN NOVELISTS I WILLIAM DE MORGAN "How can you know whether you are successful or not at forty-one? How do you know you won't have a tremendous success, all of a sudden? Yes after another ten years, perhaps but some time! And then twenty years of real, happy work. It has all been before, this sort of thing. Why not you?" Thus spoke the hopeful Alice to the despairing Charley; and it makes an interesting comment on the very man who wrote the conversation, and created the speakers. It has indeed "all been before, this sort of thing"; only when an extremely clever person, whose friends have always been saying, with an exclamation rather than an interrogation point appended, "Why don't you write a novel!" ... waits until he has passed his grand climacteric, he displays more faith in Providence than in himself. All of which is as it should be. Keats died at the age of twenty-five, but, from where I am now writing, I can reach his Poetical Works almost without leaving my chair; he is among the English Poets. Had Mr. De Morgan died at the age of twenty-five? The answer is, he didn't. I am no great believer in mute, inglorious Miltons, nor do I think that I daily pass potential novelists in the street. Life is shorter than Art, as has frequently been observed; but it seems long enough for Genius. Genius resembles murder in that it will out; you can no more prevent its expression than you can prevent the thrush from singing his song twice over. Crabbed age and youth have their peculiar accent. Keats, with all his glory, could not have written Joseph Vance, and Mr. De Morgan, with all his skill in ceramics, could not have fashioned the Ode on a Grecian Urn. Sir Thomas Browne, who loved miracles, did not hesitate to classify the supposed importance of the grand climacteric as a vulgar error; he included a whole quaint chapter on the subject, in that old curiosity shop of literature, the Pseudodoxia Epidemica. "And so perhaps hath it happened unto the number . and . which multiplyed into themselves doe make up . commonly esteemed the great Climactericall of our lives; for the dayes of men are usually cast up by septenaries, and every seventh yeare conceived to carry some altering character with it, either in the temper of body, minde, or both; but among all other, three are most remarkable, that is, . times . or forty-nine, . times . or eighty-one, and . times . or the yeare of sixty-three; which is conceived to carry with it, the most considerable fatality, and consisting of both the other numbers was apprehended to comprise the vertue of either, is therefore expected and entertained with feare, and esteemed a favour of fate to pass it over; which notwithstanding many suspect but to be a Panick terrour, and men to feare they justly know not what; and for my owne part, to speak indifferently, I find no satisfaction, nor any sufficiency in the received grounds to establish a rationall feare." Among various strong reasons against this superstition, Dr. Browne presents the impressive argument shown by the Patriarchs: "the lives of our forefathers presently after the flood, and more especially before it, who, attaining unto . or . yeares, had not their Climacters computable by digits, or as we doe account them; for the great Climactericall was past unto them before they begat children, or gave any Testimony of their virilitie, for we read not that any begat children before the age of sixtie five." The strange case of William De Morgan would have deeply interested Sir Thomas, and he would have given it both full and minute consideration. For it was just after he had safely passed the climacterical year of sixty-three, that our now famous novelist began what is to us the most important chapter of his life, the first chapter of Joseph Vance; and, like the Patriarchs, it was only after he had reached the age of sixty-five that he became fruitful, producing those wonderful children of his brain that are to-day everywhere known and loved. Poets ripen early; if a man comes to his twenty-fifth birthday without having written some things supremely well, he may in most instances abandon all hope of immortality in song; but to every would-be novelist it is reasonable to whisper those encouraging words, "while there's life there's hope." Of the ten writers who may be classed as the greatest English novelists, only one Charles Dickens published a good novel before the age of thirty. Defoe's first fiction of any consequence was Robinson Crusoe, printed in ; he was then fifty-eight years old. Richardson had turned fifty before his earliest novel appeared. And although I can think at this moment of no case exactly comparable with that of the author of Joseph Vance, it is a book to which experience has contributed as well as inspiration, and would be something, if not inferior, at all events very different, had it been composed in early or in middle life. For it vibrates with the echoes of a long gallery, whose walls are crowded with interesting pictures. The recent Romantic Revival has produced many novels that have enjoyed a brief and noisy popularity; its worst effects are noticeable on the minds of readers, unduly stimulated by the constant perusal of rapid-fire fiction. Many will not read further than the fourth page, unless some casualties have already occurred. To every writer who starts with some deliberation, they shout, "Leave your damnable faces and begin." Authors who produce for immediate consumption are prepared for this; so are the more clever men who write the publishers' advertisements. An announcement of a new work by an exceedingly fashionable novelist was headed by the appetising line, "This book goes with a rush, and ends with a smash." That would hardly do as a description of Clarissa Harlowe, Wilhelm Meister, or some other classics. To a highly nervous and irritably impatient reading public, a man whose name had no commercial value in literature gravely offered in the year of grace an "ill-written autobiography" of two hundred and eighty thousand words! Well, the result is what might not have been expected. If ever a confirmed optimist had reason to feel justification of his faith, Mr. De Morgan must have seen it in the reception given to his first novel. Despite the great length of Mr. De Morgan's books, and the leisurely passages of comment and rather extraneous detail, he never begins slowly. No producer of ephemeral trash, no sensation-monger, has ever got under way with more speed, or taken a swifter initial plunge into the very heart of action. One memorable day in , Count Tolstoi picked up a little story by Pushkin, which his ten-year-old son had been reading aloud to a member of the family. The great Russian glanced at the first sentence, "The guests began to assemble the evening before the fête." He was mightily pleased. "That's the way to begin a story!" he cried. "The reader is taken by one stroke into the midst of the action. Another writer would have commenced by describing the guests, the rooms, while Pushkin he goes straight at his goal." Some of those in the room laughed, and suggested that Tolstoi himself appropriate such a beginning and write a novel. He immediately retired and wrote the first sentences of Anna Karenina; which is literally the manner in which that masterpiece came into being.[ ] Now if one will open any of Mr. De Morgan's works, he will find the procedure that Tolstoi praised. Something immediately happens happens before we have any idea of the real character of the agents, and before we hardly know where we are. Indeed, the first chapter of Somehow Good may serve as an artistic model for the commencement of a novel. It is written with extraordinary vivacity and spirit. But the author understands better how to begin his works than he does how to end them. The close of Joseph Vance is like the mouth of the Mississippi, running off into the open sea through a great variety of passages. The ending of Alice-for-Short is accomplished only by notes, comment, and citations. And Somehow Good is simply snipped off, when it might conceivably have proceeded on its way. His fourth novel is the only one that ends as well as it begins. You cannot judge books, any more than you can individuals, by the first words they say. If I could only discover somewhere some man, woman, or child who had not read Joseph Vance, I should like to tell him the substance of the first chapter, and ask him to guess what sort of a story had awakened my enthusiasm. Suppose some person who had never heard of Browning should stumble on Pauline, and read the first three lines: "Pauline, mine own, bend o'er me thy soft breast Shall pant to mine bend o'er me thy sweet eyes, And loosened hair and breathing lips, and arms" one sees the sharp look of expectation on the reader's face, and one almost laughs aloud to think what there is in store for him. He will very soon exhibit symptoms of bewilderment, and before he has finished the second page he will push the book aside with an air of pious disappointment. No slum story ever opened more promisingly than Joseph Vance.

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