Delphi complete works of.., p.806
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 806
This is excellent. You can almost see someone shovelling it all up. But in using metaphors you must stick to the same one, if you call a thing bedrock don’t shift it to a grain of mustard seed. If you say that science sheds its rays of light, don’t say that presently the fowls of the air will rest on it. They won’t. If you decide to be a wave, remain one; don’t say that a wave of sympathy from America will dry the tears of Europe. It can’t.
The pulpit seems for some reason or other to lend itself especially to the creation of mixed metaphors. It may be that the minds of the clergy are filled with the vivid imagery of the scriptures — the green pastures, the fountains, the shadows of great rocks in weary lands, the seeds that grow to great trees — so filled with them that extempore oratory has not time to sort them out. Hence we hear them express the hope that the work begun to-day may kindle a spark which will only need watering to make it a great fire that will spread and multiply till all the fowls of the air can sit on it.
But even without actually mixing metaphor to the point of literary criminality many writers dull the point of their style with combinations that slur and confuse sense and sound and touch and shift incontinently from one to another.
‘The chairman said that they must make a great effort, put their shoulder to the wheel and strike out with both hands, with their heads high, and so on. (Chairmen often talk this way.)
Yet everybody who writes will find that comparison is a powerful instrument and everybody who reads may judge how vital is its use. You have only to open a page of Charles Dickens to realize the extraordinary use made by him of metaphor and simile. All description became comparison. For ‘He was forever comparing everything with everything else,’ writes one of his many biographers, ‘and, above all, in this way endowing inanimate objects with life and movement. For him, windows grin, doors yawn, clocks wink solemnly and trees talk in the night breeze. The fancies of Barnaby Budge watching the clothes dance upon the clothes-line are those of his creator.’
At times such comparisons touch a note of such deep pathos that the sound lingers, as part of Dickens’s permanent legacy:
‘What are the wild waves saying,
Sister, the whole day long?’
Often the sheer ingenuity of comparison becomes a vehicle of humour, as when Dickens describes one of the cricket players of All-Muggleton as looking like half a roll of flannel, and another player as looking like the other half. Compare here Bill Nye’s description of a man who had legs ‘like twenty-five minutes after six.’
But there are other and more comprehensive aspects of the art, and especially of the method, of narration, still to be discussed. Consider, for example, the question of the narrator, this is, of who tells, or is supposed to tell, the story. The author can write history in a purely impersonal way without stating how he came to know it. He writes it in this case with a sort of omniscience. He knows the secret feelings and thoughts of everybody; what’s happening even when there are no witnesses, and, of course, knows what is going to happen and can’t pretend that he doesn’t. This is far and away the most usual method of story-writing at the present time. Only a child would wonder how the writer came to know it all — only a child or the mythical young lady who wondered how the astronomers came to know the names of the stars. The vast advantage of this method lies in its omniscience. Such disadvantage as it has comes from the fact that it is after all only a chronicle — the record of something all done and finished and not of something happening now.
A second method, which to-day is the only serious competitor of the third person omniscient, is the plan of telling the story through the mouth of a character; of making it what is sometimes called a story with an ‘I’ in it. This evidently makes for vividness and reality; it sounds as if someone was telling the story to you. But unfortunately ‘I’ can’t know everything; can only relate what I see and hear and what people tell me, and not what people say to one and another when I’m not there. But there is not only the value of directness, of living communication as it were, but also the fact that the character telling the story may be a creation through whose eyes we see things hidden from our own. Take the case of Huckleberry Finn. Here is a book which all admire and which many think the greatest work of fiction ever written in America. But the very essence of the book — and its chief merit — is that we look out on the world through Huck Finn’s eyes. Our vision is refracted to that of the little outcast on his raft and all the world is changed. The simple elementary values of fife, the natural estimates of good and bad, commonly lost in the shifting perplexed pattern of social existence, show clear again, as an X-ray. Huck can convey to us more about slavery and the old slave days in one sentence than a voluminous down-south novel in a whole chapter.
‘Anybody hurt?.
‘No, mum — killed a nigger.’
Sometimes, however, the T’ in the story is inserted merely as a background relator, a negative character, nobody particular in himself, who narrates the things that have happened to the people around him, of which he chanced to be a spectator. An elderly clergyman does nicely in this role: if not a clergyman then someone as neutral and insignificant as a presidential elector. Otherwise I may give offence by blowing ‘my’ horn too much and, especially in an adventure story, by ‘hogging the whole show.’ One recalls the well-worn quotation, Pierre was the bravest man in France: he said so, and he ought to know. So it was that the ‘I’ of the old-fashioned adventure story grew very tiresome; his excessive bravery was equalled only by his modesty; his way of almost giving himself up for lost (as when they tied him to the stake and ht the fire) — all this was wonderful in the first exuberance of popular story-telling in the nineteenth century, but has long since worn thin.
An obvious variation of the method of first person narration (the story with an ‘I’ in it) is the method of a diary, or of a story written up in instalments. A diary, except in a limited capacity, is singularly hard to sustain: it has in it that peculiar artificiality already mentioned in an earlier chapter. People don’t really chronicle things in diaries. Even the usual pretence that the writer writes his diary as a sort of solace to his loneliness or to divert his mind from his misfortune doesn’t quite wash. It was a favourite device, however, of earlier authors. But as a matter of fact this hug-the-diary to the heart is only suited for a prisoner in the Bastille writing ‘Another day. A. second rat appeared but refused all my efforts to coax him towards me. My other fly died last night.’
That’s first-rate and most suitable. So, too, is the diary the proper form for anything really and truly happening day by day — the kind of scope that an actual diary might fill. When Gentlemen Prefer Blondes they naturally prefer them from day to day. Another method, a novelty till it was overworked, is to cast a story in the form of letters. The advantage is that we can thus have two — or more — points of view instead of that of one narrator. The disadvantage is the movement is apt to be slow, and the form itself, when it runs down to ‘From the same to the same... gets tiresome.’ Yet Ring Lardner showed how genius can use it to reveal people’s character by the way they write letters. (Some like them cold.)
In the old-fashioned novel-writing the writer was seldom content to stand entirely outside of his picture. quite apart from any narration by a character in the first person, he had a way of stepping in and out of the story himself, and inviting his reader to observe this and to notice that, and adjuring him not to think so and so or to conclude something else; or, if the story seemed to be getting dull, to cheer the reader up with the assurance of lots more things coming. The author of the period especially loved to address the person whom he called ‘my fair reader.’ This was a sort of come-along compliment to the dumpy sentimental ladies of forty-five who were more apt to be reading a three-decker novel than would a fly-away girl of fifteen. The ‘fair reader’ in that case was at least flattering: but not so applicable to a grimy old miner reading a paper novel in a log-cabin. But to the Victorians it was all one. These superficial tricks of writing, in reality matters that lie upon the surface and are no deeper than passing fashion, nowadays put us off the older books. Unless appreciated when young an effort is required to ‘get into them.’
Much deeper than fashion and below the surface in the very life of fiction is the varying method of relation that corresponds to what we may call tone — for want of a better word. If tone may be used, as we have used it above, for the run of the words and sentences, then tone may serve to indicate the difference of the author’s voice in the relation: whether he throws into it the sentiment of what he relates or relates it only as it happens — the difference between romance and realism, between sentiment and statement, fantasy or photograph. French writers and French critics have analysed and discussed this aspect of fiction far more than we have in English, and have been far more self- conscious in regard to it. Students of writing should get a clear idea of what is meant here by romantic, a thing very different from the wider and more usual meaning of romantic. The two are cognate but not the same. When we talk of romantic scenery we mean scenery which suggests and suits strange stories, scenery where lovers might have walked and wooed — a glade in a green wood, a forsaken garden, a broken mill, a ruined castle — as distinct from a city street beside a stock exchange. Wherever love may sigh (in suitable sighing places), or danger lurk, or gallantry defy it, wherever golden fortune breaks the closed circuit of daily life — there is romance. To its portrayal the world has devoted the softest of its music, the most appealing of its poetry, most stirring of its dreams and the thousand and one tales of its imagination.
When we speak of romantic writing, we recall the heroes and the heroines of Walter Scott or the figures (wax and otherwise) of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. To what extent such people as Tennyson’s ‘Blameless King Arthur’ are possible, what difference there is (if any) between King Arthur and a stuffed shirt, is another matter. To the proper kind of reader of their day, if they were not true to life they were at least much better than life. Ordinary life, as compared with them, was as a ham sandwich to a banquet.
But it is also possible to write stories about people who live not in castles, but on Main Street and fall in love with people as commonplace as themselves. Stories in fact can be told all the way from cowboys and cabbages up to kings. Everybody understands in a general way the difference between romantic and realistic stories, tales of fife as it might be and narratives of life as it is.
But a further difference comes up when we refer not to the subject and characters of a story, but the way of writing it. It would be possible, in this sense, to write romantically of very poor and simple people, as Dickens often did, or to write realistically of kings and castles as many writers try to do now. In this sense romantic writing means a way of telling a story in which the author’s own feeling and sentiments blend with and colour the narrative. The realistic way of telling a story is to state the facts and not to weep or laugh over them, not to express approval or disapproval, but to leave that to the reader. Take a simple example:
‘The poor old man thus found himself out in the bitter cold with no home to go to etc etc.
Observe the word poor, that’s the author’s opinion about the old man, expressing his sympathy for him. A realist wouldn’t call him that, unless he meant the word in the other sense as penniless, to express a fact. But observe also the word bitter-, that is all right here even for a realist, because it refers presumably to the thermometer. But if we wrote ‘the cruel cold,’ that would be romantic writing. In other words the ideal of the realist writer is to make a purely impersonal picture (a photograph) a purely impersonal narrative (a record).
The difference between the two methods and the conscious cultivation of either has been much more emphasized in France than in England. Indeed this field of art became for a time a sort of battleground of rival schools. The writer whose name is chiefly connected with realistic style is Guy de Maupassant who practised it with a perfection of technique seldom attained. Students of the art of writing may turn to the story La Parure (The Necklace) as a perfect specimen of his work.
In Britain and in America the fiction of the nineteenth century was overwhelmingly romantic in method, though rather by instinct than by art. But in the twentieth century the tendency has been more the other way, though the two methods of treatment have always blended and intermingled. Dickens, for example, was overwhelmingly romantic; the very life of his stories is the colour of sentiment, of approval or disapproval that run through them. He joins his readers in roars of laughter or sobs of tears at his characters. He would put in such epithets as the ‘noble Mrs Gamp,’
‘the magnanimous Mr. Pecksniff’ — which have nothing to do with the story but just comment on the character, and that a satirical one. Yet Dickens at times wrote pages of realism — clear, direct and wonderful in its appeal. Turn to the account of Mr. Dorrit’s sudden mental seizure at his own grand banquet when his mind carries him again to the Marshalsea prison and his horrified guests see him rise and call to his daughter in perplexity, ‘Amy, is Joe on the lock?’ There is no ‘poor Dorrit’ in this, no Dickens so to speak, no comment and none needed, just a picture, a record, tragic and overwhelming in the plain truth of its narration.
Now, as a matter of fact, it is not possible to separate realistic writing completely from romantic. The very facts that the writer selects imply a preference over other facts. The writer thinks them more interesting. If Guy de Maupassant hadn’t thought the idea of La Parure pathetic he wouldn’t have written it. After all heroism will out, tears will flow, and have done so ever since the Roman poet said ‘the world is full of weeping’ (sunt lachrymae rerum) — and even before. The stock-in-trade of the romanticists is part of human nature itself. We come to it by instinct. Our ‘boys’ stories,’ as Mr. Chesterton once said in a wonderful phrase, ‘still drive their dark trade in heroes.’
But the valid basis of realism is its protest against the exaggerated sentiment, the ‘sob-stuff,’ the mock heroisn and the stock heroinism into which treatment can so easily degenerate. The Victorian age loved tears, even when it did not propose to wipe them away. Bare-footed street boys, emaciated chimney sweeps, girls stitching a shirt as a prelude to throwing themselves into the Thames, fathers who refuse to come home from a saloon even when sung to — all this drew ready tears. Tears are indeed of the very fountain of life. But there is danger in them. We may be led to substitute weeping for action and sympathy for relief. One is apt to suspect that the Victorians felt as if their flood of generous tears had washed them free from obligations.
In our more realistic age we are impatient of impotent weeping. We are apt to say, Stop crying about it and see what can be done. Hence we change the Song of the Shirt to the plain talk of a minimum wage statute, and try, at least, to drag father out of the saloon with a prohibition law. ‘Tears, idle tears, and yet I know not why,’ said the Victorian. He seemed to sit and gulp, and like himself for it. We want to know why, and if we fail to-day we mean to succeed to-morrow, even if it is a to-morrow long in coming. Yet it is hard to judge. There are dangers both ways. It may be that tears, water the flowers of life and feed the roots of action. Some of the Victorian sobs and songs, like the Song of the Shirt itself, helped to make the world’s history. The new use now beginning to be made of this very term realistic shows where the new danger may lie. A realistic point of view, to our newspapers at any rate, now means one that depends on fact and force, and not upon agreement or obligation by honour. A realist is becoming the new name for the man who used to be called an ‘unprincipled scoundrel.’
As with the sobs of grief so with the ecstasies of love. The romanticist and the realist try to capture them, each in his own way. The Victorian age loved love as it loved tears. Hence its impossible heroines who became a stock- in-trade of nineteenth-century fiction. The heroine had to combine an ideal beauty, an impeccable virtue, a modesty and an innocence that ran idiocy hard.
There was no attempt to make the heroines true to life. They were supposed to be better than life. As the reader liked them that way then no harm was done and everybody was pleased. To all her other graces the heroine added a power of language rarely found outside of a legislative assembly. This was her weapon with which she could compel even the blackest villain to ‘unhand her.’ Here, as an example, is one of Charles Dickens’s earlier heroines (Kate Nickleby) telling her wicked uncle ‘where he gets off’:
‘“In the meantime,” interrupted Kate, with becoming pride and indignation, “I am to be the scorn of my own sex, and the toy of the other; justly condemned by all women of right feeling, and despisea by all honest and honourable men; sunken in my own esteem, and degraded in every eye that looks upon me. No, not if I work my fingers to the bone, not if I am driven to the roughest and hardest labour. Do not mistake me, I will not disgrace your recommendation. I will remain in the house in which it placed me, until I am entitled to leave it by the terms of my engagement; though, mind, I see these men no morel When I quit it, I will hide myself from them and you, and, striving to support my mother by hard service, I will live, at least, in peace, and trust in God to help me”’
But if the romantic heroine is unsatisfactory what about the realist one? If we are to portray the heroine just as she is, what is left of her? You cannot depict love inside a frame of fact. It needs a mist to dissolve in. You cannot tell a love story just as if is — because it isn’t. There is something else there, something higher than our common selves and perhaps truer. When a young man sees in his girl an angel, and a young girl sees in her lover a hero, perhaps they are seeing what is really there — the self we each might have but which we grasp only in our higher moments and too late. Hence you cannot in the art of narration bind love within the fetters of fact. It slips through as easily as radio through a prison wall. A ‘realistic’ love story is either grubby, or false, or both. It is probable that the distorted image of a Kate Nickleby is nearer to what a young man sees when in love, than any picture that can be drawn by loveless observation.
