THE HIGHBROW HERO OF CURRENT FICTION

And a Certain Exasperating Peculiarity of Novelists

Frank Moore Colby

Author of "Imaginary Obligations," etc.

I HAVE no wish to embark on the grim task of exposing all the harmless frauds of current fiction.

For example, it has often been observed that the humorous remarks which convulse the characters in a novel usually leave the reader feeling rather solemn; yet nobody feels cheated on that account. From the incredible laughter of one of Sir Walter Scott's characters over the pleasantries elaborated by another, down to the groundless merriment that enlivens the pages of Mr. Henry James, the undeservedly successful joke has been a fixed tradition. It is a convention, quite generally accepted, that the author of a novel need not invent an actual joke, but merely invent people who will behave as if there were one. Sentences ending with "Said he with a laugh," are not amusing in a novel, and naturally enough; for if they were amusing the author would not need to say so. His anxious explicitness in the matter arises from the fact that there really is no joke. It is a romantic habit caught even by writers who do not think themselves romantic at all. The sternest realist will idealize his jokes. For literary laughter is as a rule merely decorative in design and seldom bears any relation to an actual diaphragm.

It is too often laughter with a purpose, and without a cause.

Nor is there any use in quarreling with what may be called the physiological technique of fiction, although as the years go by it may seem to some of us rather monotonous. We accept the heaving bosom and the curling lip, and demand no change in them, though, I believe, Henry James made a face heave once instead of a bosom, in a pardonable endeavor to shift things about a bit. We shall probably find no fault with the deep blush, the slight flush, and the gnawing of the nether lip, for many years to come; and we are still ready to admit that eyes gleam savagely, veins stand out like whipcord, words are hissed through clenched teeth, brows are knit, and fingers pull nervously the petals from a flower, just as they have always done. Nobody complains of the frequency and persistency of these phenomena or scrutinizes too closely the adequacy of the cause, even though it may be urged that, outside the world of book-covers, any such constant cooperation between the emotions and this limited range of muscular activity is not only unknown but would be regarded, in the interest of a pleasant variety in human life, as very undesirable.

I AM not objecting to these simplicities of literary routine, or blaming any minor novelist for not being a major one. I am merely pleading either for a little more moderation in the choice of the hero's intellect in the first place or for greater caution in displaying its activities later on. If one must take for one's chief character the most penetrating mind in the British Isles, it is safer not to let the reader see it penetrate. If a character is strikingly original, and, as generally happens, his creator is not, it is better not to reproduce very much of his conversation. I do not urge so sweeping a measure of reform as that writers like Mrs. Humphry Ward, for example, should never be allowed to take any very gifted beings for their characters. I merely say that if they feel that they must take them, they ought on their own account to keep them just as quiet as they can. I contend that the common practice of presenting the reader with a swan's egg and then letting it hatch out into an ordinary chicken before his very eyes is bad for everyone concerned. Any intellect described by the usual author as amazing ought from that moment to be very cunningly concealed. No novelist who is not himself of extraordinary dimensions ought ever to let the cat out of the bag.

Thus, Fenor, the hero of Mr. W. L. George's " The Second Blooming," was, according to the author, a "lyrical person," with a "sumptuous" mind, who "might have bound himself down to any view if he could embody it in a happy but beautiful phrase." Mr. George gives us many samples of Fenor's phrases and reports their effect on the heroine, Grace. Fenor frequently makes remarks like this: "There are only two kinds of people, you see: the weak ones who make faces and the strong ones who bite," and every time he does so Grace is electrified. Once when he said she had a beautiful hand and that "everything that we have seen already, when we see it again, becomes a new adventure, because we are, each one of us, become a new adventurer," she nearly swooned from the force and beauty of the language! She thought it was "like walking over the lava under which you can hear rumblings and crashes, which lets out here and there little spirals of steam." She was equally responsive to his lighter moods.

" ' Respectability is like fire wood, made to be cut down. That's pleasant of course; virtue's a very necessary thing in the world; without virtue there'd be no vice and we'd lose all the fun.'

"Grace laughed; this cynicism amused her."

THERE is probably no use in protesting against this practice of first exalting a hero's intellect and then showing us what it accomplishes, for it is too firmly intrenched in current fiction. Yet one might think that any novelist, not of the first magnitude, would, in his own interest, be more prudent. Even Mr. H. G. Wells after gaily taking one of these elephants on his hands must be somewhat uncomfortable before he is done with it. No man can promise to show a giant mind in motion without realizing that he will disappoint a great many people before he is through, and I picture Mr. Wells as secretly feeling a good deal embarrassed as he tries to heave the hero through the latter portion of several of his books. To him, as to that woman writer some years ago, who, after insisting that her poet-hero was a genius, proceeded, under some strange compulsion, to give us specimens of his poetry, there must have come some private misgivings. It is good enough sport in the earlier chapters, before the great intellect really opens up. I suppose everyone rather likes those big, splendid Wells headpieces so long as Mr. Wells merely hints at what is inside them and does not let anything out—tells us how they dart and dazzle and bounce about and run from the earliest slime down to the Minimum Wage Act, and grip all the underlying laws of human life that are worth the gripping— but I doubt if anyone, even Mr. Wells himself, is ever wholly satisfied with their actual product.

"Mankind is in a mess," a Wells character will exclaim (I may not have the words exactly), "and the Empire and patriotism and Parliament and social reform, and all the rest of it is silly, silly. What is humanity, as a whole, doing?" And, being one of those "strange men who take sweeping views—as larks soar," off he will go to Labrador "to think it out." There, perhaps, his views will go sweeping back to slippery carboniferous creeping things and forward to the time when man, half-angel, towers laughing among the stars. And then he will say to himself that Europe, after all, is rather piffling and that even when you throw in Asia and the Western Hemisphere it does not amount to very much, for, by the Lord, what is civilization anyhow, when you come to think of it? "Civilization is the merest flourish out of barbarism. What then is the Great Solution?" Unfortunately the hero almost always lets us know: and it will turn out to be, perhaps, some plan for an international book company, or for a system of maternity endowment or for the foundation of a weekly magazine to teach human society that what it needs is hard, sound, sweet thinking. Or it may be that the hero will quote some passages from a recent address of Mr. H. G. Wells before the Royal Geographical Society and let it go at that. Had Mr. Wells killed him at the height of his promise just before the "Great Solution" got out, nobody would know that Mr. Wells had lied about him.

As it is, the primrose pathway of Mr. Wells' unhappy hero from that time on is strewn with many of these broken pledges of astonishment.

AND, with Mr. George, the fall is heavier, for though an excellent Wells disciple he lacks something of his master's gift. Fenor's remarks are never extraordinary. They occur frequently in inexpensive magazines, and Grace was a well-to-do young woman who could easily have secured an abundance of fiction even in book form. Moreover, as she was as a matter of fact addicted to contemporary reading, she could not by any chance have failed to encounter many times already all the things that Fenor had to say.

I could easily believe I Ir. George's Fenor a singular person, if Mr. George had not exposed his entire lack of singularity. I might, with Grace, have even thought him volcanic, but Mr. George by showing him in actual eruption, put an end to all illusion as to the nature of his insides. Had J 'r. George said that Fenor was magnetic and had a way with women, but that his conversation was rather so-so, the following remarks would have certainly passed muster:

"'Stealing,' said Fenor, reflectively, 'it's only wrong if property is right, and if property has a value ... If human life is as sacred as the suicide law makes out, then surely a man ought not to be sent to gaol for stealing to maintain life; he ought to be given a medal by the Royal Humane Society.'"

BUT put out as the product of a mind that draws women from their homes and husbands, it will strike almost anyone as rather ordinary. I would not imply that Mr. George's intelligence is mediocre, but only that it has needlessly laid on itself too heavy obligations.

This obviously irredeemable promise should never have been made. The instance is typical, I have good reason to believe, of a very respectable body of current fiction.