The Facts of Fiction

by Norman Collins

  She began her best novel, Pride and Prejudice, before she was twenty-one, and finished it within ten months. Sense and Sensibility was started as soon as Pride and Prejudice was finished; and it contained the frame of a tale, Elinor and Marianne, that had been written before Jane’s maturity, at twenty. The earlier work had been in the form of letters—a trouble that doubtless derived from Samuel Richardson, whom Jane Austen read and liked; and whom, in making one of her characters say, “It is my duty and also my wish,” she imitated. Northanger Abbey was begun at twenty-three.

  The fate of the three books shows how ill-prepared the public was for fiction that had its roots in the uneventful Monday-to-Saturday life of mankind. Pride and Prejudice was refused by return of post; Sense and Sensibility was kept back; and Northanger Abbey was bought in 1803 by a publisher in Bath, who paid £10 for the privilege of denying it to the world and condemning his own powers of judgment and decision by letting it lie by him for years, finally to sell it back for the sum which he had paid for it.

  At the age of thirty-four Jane found a publisher who gave her £150—nearly a quarter of the entire sum at which the contemporary world valued her—for Sense and Sensibility. And it was not till sixteen years later that she offered Pride and Prejudice to a publisher for the second time and saw it accepted.

  It has been found convenient to divide Jane Austen’s life into two periods of activity. The first produced Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Northanger Abbey at Steventon Parsonage; the second, Emma, Mansfield Park and Persuasion at Southampton. A period of something like ten years lies between; and so far as we can tell, without being wise after the event, they did not leave any trace on her mind.

  Knowing the sad, quiet life of Jane Austen, we can almost forgive the excessive praise that she has received; it is a post-dated cheque that has been duly honoured. Throughout her life she chose to remain anonymous, and so could smile at Fate for not recognising her. Then at that moment when, with the Prince Regent assuring her of his regard, it looked as though Jane were at last to be seen at her real size, she went into one of those mysterious declines that decimated the century. Her hopes almost exactly balanced her rewards.

  On her deathbed, when she was asked if she wanted anything, she replied, “Nothing but death ”; the last, sensible, modest, unreligious expression of a woman to whom Life had been a joke that she had seen once too often.

  The Reign Of Terror And The Noble Savage

  Walpole’s Castle of Otranto established the Gothic architecture in fiction. It also established the Gothic archness in romance. Human qualities were magnified out of proportion, until they were distorted out of recognition, like noses in a shadowgraph. Villains remembered I ago and grew viler. Heroes wore the tethered-eagle look in their eyes, and grew more Byronic. Or, as perhaps we should say, Byron wore the tormented Gothic expression on his face, and grew more heroic. The supernatural was caught, hobbled and flogged without mercy.

  For half a century in fiction the whole domestic furniture of civilisation was in the hands of necromancy. Doors opened at unseen pressures or unnaturally withheld themselves. Shrieks and reverberations were for ever coming from below stairs like the sounds of some fatal and unsuccessful plumbing operation.

  Everything happened in the next room or on another floor. Portraits on the wall frowned, winked and grimaced unceasingly and unnervingly. A cupboard that contained no more than one skeleton would have been accounted empty. Ghosts waited in queues to appear. Those residents who were not ghosts were mostly certifiable.

  It is no more necessary to catalogue the novels of this period, in order to depict them, than it would be necessary to enumerate every novel of the kind that followed Sherlock Holmes in order to describe detective fiction.

  The Renaissance began moderately and grew immoderately. One of the first to attach herself to the movement that was to establish a Reign of Terror in Literature was Clara Reeve, a respectable spinster who wrote her first novel at the mature and unlikely age of fifty-one.

  The novel was entitled The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story, but it was by no means the unfettered child of fever and romance that Otranto was. Clara Reeve, indeed, set out to write a kind of sceptic’s ghost-story; a tale of the supernatural for the plain man. In a modest and disarming Preface she wrote: “We can conceive, and allow of the appearance of a ghost, but it must keep within certain limits of credibility.” And she went on to put her finger on the exact weakness in the fiction of the supernatural:

  A sword so large as to require one hundred men to lift it; a helmet that by its own weight forces a passage through a courtyard, into an arched vault, big enough for a man to go through; a picture that walks out of its frame; a skeleton ghost in a monk’s cowl—when your expectation is wound up to the highest pitch, those circumstances take it down with a witness, destroy the work of imagination, and, instead of attention, excite laughter.

  Perhaps it was her age, her unexcitable middle-age, that made Clara Reeve preserve such admirable calm before a ghost. Walpole, who probably disliked more than most men the idea that anyone had been laughing at him, declared that “The Old English Baron is so probable that any trial for murder at the Old Bailey would make a more interesting story ”—a remark that sounds as rather less than a condemnation to modern ears.

  Clara Reeve herself had misgivings that by straining to appear probable, she might have allowed the spirit of the piece to evaporate. And her story shows her to have been right. With the best will in the world it is impossible to create a ghost that is neither natural nor supernatural. But it is desperately and deceptively easy to create one that is merely unnatural. To appreciate any story which contains a ghost as an intrinsic part of it demands a suspension of disbelief, that is so willing as to constitute an original offer of credulity. And Clara Reeve chose the natural possibilities of terror rather than the far more exciting possibilities of the supernatural.

  A chest containing a skeleton bound neck and heels together was as far as her macabre fancy took her. Indeed, the only naturally inexplicable event in the whole story is the sound of clashing arms and of a heavy fall somewhere—one of the subterranean plumbing episodes—on a lower floor.

  The truth is that Clara Reeve was quite unsuited to her task. In a letter to a friend she wrote: “I have been all my life straitened in my circumstances, and used my pen to support a scanty establishment; yet, to the best of my knowledge, I have drawn it on the side of truth, virtue and morality.” Obviously such a woman had not been designed by Providence to scare the scalps off the simple.

  Clara Reeve at fifty-one quite obviously was hardly the Child of her Age. But Ann Radcliffe, who was only thirty when she published her Mysteries of Udolpho, was so. If Providence had been ungenerous in Clara Reeve it was prodigal to prodigality in Mrs. Radcliffe. Her pen kept up a perpetual whimper of terror. Her characters move in a world not unlike that of a sick child’s nightmare.

  All the old familiar alarms of something-up-the-chimney and someone-underneath-the-bed are set out here in elaborate and competent narrative, admirably sustained by the machinery of suspense.

  Emily, somewhat ashamed of her terrors, stepped back to the bed, willing to be convinced that the mind only had occasioned her alarm; when, as she gazed within the curtains, the pall moved again, and in the next moment the apparition of a human countenance rose above it.

  One wonders how any woman could bring herself to go to bed in such a house; the more so because every bedroom seems to have been set square on the footpath between here and Hell. But apparently the characters got used enough to such incidents. They certainly learned to live through them.

  Mrs. Radcliffe’s pages are loaded with scenery—wild, rocky and romantic, like the blue landscape viewed through a Pre-Raphaelite doorway. It was the sort of scenery that is believed to lie around the Mediterranean; a strange countryside of papal palaces, ruined monasteries and eremitical retreats. In a word, it was a native Roman Catholic landscape; and it wa
s a Roman Catholic landscape viewed through an English Protestant telescope.

  This whole Romantic Revival or Renaissance of Wonder, indeed, was the child of Protestant reason. The English mind, tired of imaginative restraint, suddenly celebrated a giddy festival of liberty. It turned to those things that had the powerful attraction of mystery. And the weirdest thing that the English mind, moving in the channels of establishment, could imagine was the dark rite of the Roman Church. George Borrow even smelt Roman Catholicism in Walter Scott because the odour of romance was strongly there. And so it is that from Mrs. Radcliffe to that misguided artist, Charles Maturin, the chief actor in the Romance of Terror is the Church of Rome behaving strenuously as those outside it have always believed, do now believe, and always will believe, that it has behaved.

  The Inquisition provided Mrs. Radcliffe with the material for her best story, The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents. For there the Church, abstract, awful and historical, was all the reason that could be needed to account for any groans that reached the upper air. And the next great alarmist in literature, Charles Maturin, in his mysterious masterpiece, Melmoth the Wanderer, drained the Roman Church of all the mystery that it had accumulated through centuries of maturity in the Protestant mind.

  Charles Maturin contrived to live almost as romantically as he wrote. When he was a poor curate in Ireland, an episcopal messenger waited on him with an offer of preferment. The messenger continued to wait. Then unusual noises were heard, such as should come from no vicar’s clerk. At last in swam Maturin, mazily declaiming passages from his own plays, his hair all stuck over with quills like the straws in the March Hare’s head. The scene fades as rapidly as the preferment. We seem to see a vague, retreating ecclesiastical figure merging into obscurity. But Maturin, crazy and declamatory, steps right out of the picture-frame of history and remains before our eyes.

  Yet Maturin was not so cracked that he could not write with at least the easy competence of those novelists who are remembered to-day because they extracted interest from the more nearly commonplace. Melmoth the Wanderer begins as well and truly as any novel of the period. Maturin’s picture of a miser almost became one of the memorable portraits of fiction. But from the moment when his hero discovers one of those mouldering manuscripts that are so common in this, the most illegible period of English literature, and then has to listen for hours to an ex-Jesuit’s revelations about the Society of Jesus, we are aware that we are watching a novelist who has taken the wrong road and is walking fast in an effort to find himself again. Scott, in a review of Melmoth, declared that he had never seen “a more remarkable instance of genius degraded by the labour in which it is employed.”

  The refrain of the opening chapter in which a penniless and unsuspecting youth visits a solitary and eccentric relative, whose house is rather like a Chamber of Horrors on a Gala Night, is one which with variations has been played until our day. In the opening chapters of story after story we meet a handsome, natural being, hesitant upon the doorstep of one of the lonely Gothic madhouses of romance. The door is opened, and the visitor shining his torch of sanity around him, inspects the interior, until overcome by what he sees, he drops the torch and behaves as wildly as the rest of the Bedlamites. Finally he is shot out of the back door and sits on the top step, a madder and a wilder man. So assiduously was this formula applied in the century of its origin that the romance of terror became so highly developed a thing as to make it doubtful whether Edgar Allan Poe yesterday, or Mr. Julian Green to-day, has added anything to it.

  Highly developed; and highly profitable. Perhaps the most truly typical exponent of it was Matthew Gregory Lewis who soared into celebrity at twenty. Lewis is one of those freakish and fantastic little insects of which the enfolding amber of the eighteenth century is full. The son of wealthy parents, he travelled in Germany and caught there a chronic attack of Goethe while still in his teens.

  His gross, ghastly, Germanic mediaeval romance The Monk won him enough fame to last him through his busy, fussy lifetime, during which he wrote poems and set them to music, and struggled along on an allowance of £1,000 a year. He died in 1818 in his forty-third year, of yellow fever contracted while on a visit to Jamaica where he had been investigating the lot of the negroes and recommending in the manner of his century amelioration, but not emancipation. Such a life is truly the strange product of his age.

  He had individual characteristics besides. “How few friends,” Scott obliquely remarked of him, “has one whose faults are only ridiculous. … Lewis was fonder of great men than he ought to have been, either as a man of talent or as a man of fashion. He had always dukes and duchesses in his mouth, and was pathetically fond of anyone who had a title.” Such was the “good-natured fopling,” as Lockhart called him, who exploited the popular terror and love of cowled faces in impenetrable shadow that Mr. Edgar Wallace has successfully revived in the present day.

  Lewis, indeed, made a fortune out of hiding round the corners of a much frequented by-way of literature and saying “Boo! ” to the public in a hollow, convincing voice.

  The Reign of Terror is usually reckoned to have come to an end somewhere about the time of the publication of Northanger Abbey. There the arch, Gothic heroine received a humorous, rationalistic jab:

  You will proceed into this small vaulted room, and through this into several others, without perceiving anything very remarkable in either. In one perhaps there may be a dagger, in another a few drops of blood, and in a third the remains of some instrument of torture; but there being nothing in all this out of the common way, and your lamp being nearly exhausted, you will return towards your own apartment. In repassing through the small vaulted room, however, your eyes will be attracted towards a large, old-fashioned cabinet of ebony and gold, which, though narrowly examining the furniture before, you had passed unnoticed. Impelled by an irresistible presentiment, you will eagerly advance to it, unlock its folding doors, and search into every drawer;—but for some time without discovering anything of importance—perhaps nothing but a considerable hoard of diamonds. At last, however, by touching a secret spring, an inner compartment will open—a roll of paper appears;—you seize it—it contains many sheets of manuscript—you hasten with the precious treasure into your own chamber, but scarcely have you been able to decipher “Oh thou whomsoever thou mayest be, into whose hands these memoirs of the wretched Matilda may fall …”

  Certainly the legions of demons that had conquered romance were routed, not so much by an attack of a more rigid rationalism or of a more religious religion, as by an attack of the giggles. For it is a part of the convention of the supernatural that no ghost shall appear ridiculous. And here Jane Austen had defied convention and raised a laugh at the expense of Hell.

  But the truth is, of course, that people did not cease reading tales of terror from the moment that Northanger Abbey appeared. Everyone, naturally, did not read Northanger Abbey; and there are always some people who find shuddering easier than laughing. Thus, though romantic parody became a fashion and almost a trade, romance itself continued as the staple of fiction. Maria Edgeworth’s Angelina, or L’ Amie Inconnue, and Eaton Stannard Barrett’s The Heroine could not destroy the public taste for terror any more than jokes about greediness could seriously undermine the appetite of schoolboys. And so late as the first third of the nineteenth century, the gush of ghosts from the Minerva Press was continuing without abatement.

  Mr. Lane, the publisher at the Press, founded the biggest circulating library of his day for the better dissemination of his frights and fictions. It was the sort of literature, like the detective literature of to-day, which is better read on loan than on purchase. Usually such fiction has been written without pains and can be read at least as fast as it was set down. It is rarely necessary to read such books twice. For no one with the best will in the world can be so terrified as he ought to be when he holds a complete dossier of the ghost’s movements, before the case. The library alone satisfies the appetite a
nd sharpens it.

  And so it was that Hazlitt and Lamb and Macaulay, to say nothing of the unnamed rest of polite society, fattened their imaginations and their fears on the Fashionable Forgotten. Writers from Mrs. Mary Meeke to Mr. Barrett enjoyed a popularity then that might seem enviable even to-day. Theirs was easy and artless stuff to write, as Scott pointed out when he read a batch of such novels, and wrote:

  We strolled through a variety of castles, each of which was regularly called II Castello; met with as many captains of condottieri; heard various ejaculations of Santa Maria or Diavolo; read by a decaying lamp in a tapestried chamber dozens of legends as stupid as the main history; examined such suites of deserted apartments as might fit up a reasonable barrack; and saw as many glimmering lights as would make a respectable illumination.

  Now into the midst of so much that was supernatural there came once more the Natural Man, the Noble Savage, an import from France bearing the trade-mark of Rousseau.

  Rousseau wore a softer and a larger velvet glove than any revolutionary since his time. The Nouvelle Héloïse is a work of excruciating sentiment; a Bolshevist bomb very cunningly concealed. Had such a bombshell attempted to enter England without the words “Honey: This Side Up” stamped on it, it would have been stopped at the Customs. John Morley remarked that the danger lay in “the mischievous intellectual direction which Rousseau imparted to the effusion ”—which is rather obviously true.

  The Noble Savage, who was thus introduced, immediately became one of the ruling class in fiction. At first he was merely a foil to throw up the vices of the civilised. By our time he has become a foil to throw up their virtues. The Noble Savage has given place to the Strong Silent Man; both of them beings with the innocent moral ruthlessness of purpose of a steam-roller. Indeed, it has by now become a convention that the Strong Silent Man shall have either no morals or bad ones.