The Ghost Ship

by Richard Middleton

  Produced by Tom Harris

  THE GHOST-SHIP

  by Richard Middleton

  Thanks are due to the Editors of _The Century_, _English Review_, _Vanity Fair_, and _The Academy_, for permission to reproduce most of the stories in this volume.

  Preface

  The other day I said to a friend, "I have just been reading in proofa volume of short stories by an author named Richard Middleton. He isdead. It is an extraordinary book, and all the work in it is full ofa quite curious and distinctive quality. In my opinion it is veryfine work indeed."

  It would be so simple if the business of the introducer orpreface-writer were limited to such a straightforward, honest, anddirect expression of opinion; unfortunately that is not so. For mostof us, the happier ones of the world, it is enough to say "I likeit," or "I don't like it," and there is an end: the critic has toanswer the everlasting "Why?" And so, I suppose, it is my office,in this present instance, to say why I like the collection of talesthat follows.

  I think that I have found a hint as to the right answer in two ofthese stories. One is called "The Story of a Book," the other "TheBiography of a Superman." Each is rather an essay than a tale, thoughthe form of each is narrative. The first relates the sad bewildermentof a successful novelist who feels that, after all, his great workwas something less than nothing.

  He could not help noticing that London had discovered the secret which made his intellectual life a torment. The streets were more than a mere assemblage of houses, London herself was more than a tangled skein of streets, and overhead heaven was more than a meeting-place of individual stars. What was this secret that made words into a book, houses into cities, and restless and measurable stars into an unchanging and immeasurable universe?

  Then from "The Biography of a Superman" I select this very strikingpassage:--

  Possessed of an intellect of great analytic and destructive force, he was almost entirely lacking in imagination, and he was therefore unable to raise his work to a plane in which the mutually combative elements of his nature might have been reconciled. His light moments of envy, anger, and vanity passed into the crucible to come forth unchanged. He lacked the magic wand, and his work never took wings above his conception.

  Now compare the two places; "the streets were more than a mereassemblage of houses;" . . . "his light moments . . . passed into thecrucible to come forth unchanged. He lacked the magic wand." I thinkthese two passages indicate the answer to the "why" that I am forcedto resolve; show something of the secret of the strange charm which"The Ghost-Ship" possesses.

  It delights because it is significant, because it is no mereassemblage of words and facts and observations and incidents, itdelights because its matter has not passed through the crucibleunchanged. On the contrary, the jumble of experiences and impressionswhich fell to the lot of the author as to us all had assuredly beenplaced in the athanor of art, in that furnace of the sages which issaid to be governed with wisdom. Lead entered the burning of thefire, gold came forth from it.

  This analogy of the process of alchemy which Richard Middleton hashimself suggested is one of the finest and the fittest for ourpurpose; but there are many others. The "magic wand" analogy comes tomuch the same thing; there is the like notion of something ugly andinsignificant changed to something beautiful and significant.Something ugly; shall we not say rather something formless transmutedinto form! After all, the Latin Dictionary declares solemnly that"beauty" is one of the meanings of "forma" And here we are away fromalchemy and the magic wand ideas, and pass to the thought of thefirst place that I have quoted: "the streets were more than a mereassemblage of houses," The puzzle is solved; the jig-saw--I thinkthey call it--has been successfully fitted together, There in a boxlay all the jagged, irregular pieces, each in itself crazy andmeaningless and irritating by its very lack of meaning: now we seeeach part adapted to the other and the whole is one picture and onepurpose.

  But the first thing necessary to this achievement is the recognitionof the fact that there is a puzzle. There are many people who gothrough life persuaded that there isn't a puzzle at all; that it wasonly the infancy and rude childhood of the world which dreamed a vaindream of a picture to be made out of the jagged bits of wood, Therenever has been a picture, these persons say, and there never will bea picture, all we have to do is to take the bits out of the box, lookat them, and put them back again. Or, returning to RichardMiddleton's excellent example: there is no such thing as London,there are only houses. No man has seen London at any time; the veryword (meaning "the fort on the lake") is nonsensical; no human eyehas ever beheld aught else but a number of houses; it is clear thatthis "London" is as mythical and monstrous and irrational a conceptas many others of the same class. Well, people who talk like that aredoubtless sent into the world for some useful but mysterious process;but they can't write real books. Richard Middleton knew that therewas a puzzle; in other words, that the universe is a great mystery;and this consciousness of his is the source of the charm of "TheGhost Ship."

  I have compared this orthodox view of life and theuniverse and the fine art that results from this view to the solvingof a puzzle; but the analogy is not an absolutely perfect one. For ifyou buy a jig-saw in a box in the Haymarket, you take it home withyou and begin to put the pieces together, and sooner or later thetoil is over and the difficulties are overcome: the picture is clearbefore you. Yes, the toil is over, but so is the fun; it is but poorsport to do the trick all over again. And here is the vastinferiority of the things they sell in the shops to the universe: ourgreat puzzle is never perfectly solved. We come across marvelloushints, we join line to line and our hearts beat with the rapture of agreat surmise; we follow a certain track and know by sure signs andsignals that we are not mistaken, that we are on the right road; weare furnished with certain charts which tell us "here there bewater-pools," "here is a waste place," "here a high hill riseth," andwe find as we journey that so it is. But, happily, by the very natureof the case, we can never put the whole of the picture together, wecan never recover the perfect utterance of the Lost Word, we cannever say "here is the end of all the journey." Man is so made thatall his true delight arises from the contemplation of mystery, andsave by his own frantic and invincible folly, mystery is never takenfrom him; it rises within his soul, a well of joy unending.

  Hence it is that the consciousness of this mystery, resolved into theform of art, expresses itself usually (or always) by symbols, by thepart put for the whole. Now and then, as in the case of Dante, as itwas with the great romance-cycle of the Holy Graal, we have a senseof completeness. With the vision of the Angelic Rose and the sentenceconcerning that Love which moves the sun and the other stars there isthe shadow of a catholic survey of all things; and so in a lessdegree it is as we read of the translation of Galahad. Still, theRose and the Graal are but symbols of the eternal verities, not thoseverities themselves in their essences; and in these later days whenwe have become clever--with the cleverness of the Performing Pig--itis a great thing to find the most obscure and broken indications ofthe things which really are. There is the true enchantment of trueromance in the Don Quixote--for those who can understand--but it isdelivered in the mode of parody and burlesque; and so it is with theextraordinary fantasy, "The Ghost-Ship," which gives its name to thiscollection of tales. Take this story to bits, as it were; analyse it;you will be astonished at its frantic absurdity: the ghostly galleonblown in by a great tempest to a turnip-patch in Fairfield, a littlevillage lying near the Portsmouth Road about half-way between Londonand the sea; the farmer grumbling at the loss of so many turnips; thecaptain of the weird vessel acknowledging the justice of the claimand tossing a great gold brooch to the landlord by way of s
atisfyingthe debt; the deplorable fact that all the decent village ghostslearned to riot with Captain Bartholomew Roberts; the visit of theparson and his godly admonitions to the Captain on the evil work hewas doing; mere craziness, you will say?

  Yes; but the strange thing is that as, in spite of all jocose tricksand low-comedy misadventures, Don Quixote departs from us with agreat light shining upon him; so this ghost-ship of RichardMiddleton's, somehow or other, sails and anchors and re-sails in anunearthly glow; and Captain Bartholomew's rum that was like hot oiland honey and fire in the veins of the mortals who drank of it, hasbecome for me one of the _nobilium poculorum_ of story. And thus didthe ship put forth from the village and sail away in a great tempestof wind--to what unimaginable seas of the spirit!

  The wind that had been howling outside like an outrageous dog had all of a sudden turned as melodious as the carol-boys of a Christmas Eve.

  We went to the door, and the wind burst it open so that the handle was driven clean into the plaster of the wall. But we didn't think much of that at the time; for over our heads, sailing very comfortably through the windy stars, was the ship that had passed the summer in landlord's field. Her portholes and her bay-window were blazing with lights, and there was a noise of singing and fiddling on her decks. "He's gone," shouted landlord above the storm, "and he's taken half the village with him!" I could only nod in answer, not having lungs like bellows of leather.

  I declare I would not exchange this short, crazy, enchanting fantasyfor a whole wilderness of seemly novels, proclaiming in decorousaccents the undoubted truth that there are milestones on thePortsmouth Road.

  Arthur Machen.