The Facts of Fiction (22 page)

And almost on the last page Reade committed the howling blunder of making Alfred's wicked persecutor himself not merely bad but mad. The only evidence Reade adduces of the old man's monomania is a perfectly justifiable outbreak of anger, and the fact that “Alfred saw the truth and wondered at his past obtuseness.”

There is no more striking example of the dangers of teaching a moral lesson by sensational methods. After reading such a passage one feels almost like advising the author to read
Hard Cash,
as a terrible example of the effects of miscertification of madness.

But to accuse Reade of inconsistency (though he would never have admitted his inconsistency himself) is rather like accusing a Hyde Park orator of a sore throat. In such media there is no time to think about such things. Reade did successfully what he set out to do. He raised a storm with himself in the centre of it. He wrote a vast, historic, historical novel in which the view and the thought, and not merely the language, as is usually the case, were really archaic. He improved the position of the author—if he had stuck by his early trade of violin-trading he would doubtless have secured legislation for the protection of violin-traders. He linked arms with Justice, and for half
a century paraded up and down, showing her off to a world that knew nothing nobler than equity.

And he coined one wonderful phrase which all novelists-with-a-purpose should know and carry on their shields as well as on their sleeves alongside their hearts: “Justice is the daughter of Publicity.”

“Like all civilised societies we give due weight to rank and wealth ”—thus Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer, first Lord Lytton, to the assembled youth of a great public school. If Lytton had been elected out of all England to be the oracle of the upper classes, and the mouthpiece of every headmaster in the country, he could not have made a more orthodox and inspiring remark. Earlier ages might have found something vulgarly displeasing in this casual levelling of prosperous tradesman and impoverished peer. And since his day, the peer has definitely failed in his attempt to preserve even a precarious equality with the tradesman. But in the middle years of the nineteenth century, those words must have carried across the School Hall as irresistible and irrefutable as a muezzin's.

Unfortunately they are foolish, inflated words: they do not explain how large the due weight that we give to rank and wealth is. They merely leave a feeling in the mind that it is not the sort of due that you give the Devil, and that the speaker sees God as a Plantagenet Rothschild.

So far as Bulwer Lytton himself was concerned, the words are justified. A needy member of the untitled aristocracy of England, by his industry and intellect he got the matter both of need and title set right before he died.

He preserved an attitude of contemptuous, golden indifference towards the rest of the world. His energy, like his pride and ability, was colossal. The first led him to
write some of the most patiently and laboriously detailed and romantic historical novels in the language: the second and third caused him to produce some of the brightest gilding in fiction.

Lytton saw the whole of life as a perpetual Ascot Week: all tall hats and quick smiles. And in
Pelham
he said that that was how he saw it.
Pelham,
in consequence, is a great sweep of aristocratic cynicism; a sneer out of the ermine. It is remorselessly witty; even though the wit seems to have turned a little rancid in places. The hero is more Byronic than Byron, and more agreeable than Alcibiades. He is so ravishingly himself that he blows about the book like a piece of social blight, scattering the germs of inward rot.

The book is founded on the assumption that with Youth at the prow and Pleasure at the helm, Youth will pretty soon be on the rocks. It is a moral lesson smuggled to the reader under the guise of amusement.

As a novel,
Pelham
is constantly amusing, at least in its early portions, by the ceaseless vivacity of malicious incident.

Mr. Conway had just caused two divorces; and of course all the women in London were dying for him—judge then of the pride which Lady Frances felt at his addresses. The end of the season was unusually dull, and my mother, after having looked over her list of engagements, and ascertaining that she had none remaining worth staying for, agreed to elope with her new lover.

The carriage was at the end of the square. My mother, for the first time in her life, got up at six o'clock. Her foot was on the step, and her hand next to Mr. Conway's heart, when she remembered that her
favourite china monster, and her French dog, were left behind. She insisted on returning—re-entered the house, and was coming downstairs with one under each arm, when she was met by my father and two servants. My father's valet had discovered the flight (I forget how), and awakened his master.

When my father was convinced of his loss, he called for his dressing-gown—searched the garret and the kitchen—looked in the maids' drawers and the cellaret—and finally declared he was distracted. I have heard that the servants were quite melted by his grief, and I do not doubt it in the least, for he was always celebrated for his skill in private theatricals.

Or:

I think at this moment I see my mother before me, reclining on the sofa, repeating to me some story about Queen Elizabeth and Lord Essex; then telling me, in a languid voice, as she sank back with the exertion, of the blessings of a literary taste, and admonishing me never to read above half an hour at a time for fear of losing my health.

The charm of this method of writing lies in the lively heartlessness that infects it. Unfortunately, it infected Lytton, too, in places. And his spiteful pleasantries sometimes lose their pleasantness in a sweating attack of comic disillusion:

I was in her boudoir one evening, when her
femme de chambre
came to tell us that the duc was in the passage. Notwithstanding the innocence of our attachment, the duchesse was in a violent fright; a small door was
at the left of the ottoman on which we were sitting. “Oh, no, no, not there,” cried the lady; but I saw no other refuge, entered it forthwith, and before she could ferret me out, the duc was in the room.

In the meanwhile, I amused myself by examining the wonders of the new world into which I had so abruptly immerged: on a small table before me, was deposited a remarkably constructed night-cap; I examined it as a curiosity; on each side was placed
une petite côtelette de veau cru
, sewed on with green-coloured silk (I remember even the smallest minutiæ); a beautiful golden wig (the duchesse never liked me to play with her hair) was on a block close by, and on another table was a set of teeth
d'une blancheur éblouissante.

A passage like that explains why it was that Lytton was never able to draw the romantic portraits of heroines that his historical novels,
The Last Days of Pompeii; Harold, Last of the Saxon Kings; Rienzi,
and the rest of the yearning and magnificent tributes to vanished greatness, demanded. He became
the
historical novelist of his age, wonderfully well-read, pompously perfect in every line and paragraph, when he should have become rather a kind of dignified and disinfected Oscar Wilde; a poseur ridiculing all poses but his own.

He took himself, naturally, as seriously as a judge. He moved in the best circles of Paris and London with a supreme sense of his own talents and importance. He lived in an age when it was fashionable to be clever; and Lytton was a leader of fashion. He wrote fiction in much the manner in which an Elizabethan youth of the same distinction of intellect would have written poetry; because his mind was both alive with thoughts and respectful of the prevailing conventions.

A few years earlier, and he would have written elegant and expert Don Juanish verses. As it was, he came into a world that was growing tired of Don Juans. So he dressed his Pelhams and Clintons in the complete uniform of Byronism, and then just carted them about in his books like Guys ready for the burning. There is an opulent tawdriness about Lytton's world in which the mad, bad characters of an earlier age move in a new serious world of virtue.

Lytton, indeed, stands midway between the age of the libertine and the era of the evangelical Liberal; between the Byronic open shirt and the Gladstone collar.

There was, however, another reason than convention for Lytton's writing novels; and that was marriage. Lytton, with the remarkable misguidance of heart which has distinguished most of the English novelists, married the wrong woman. He broke with his mother—who was also his banker—to marry a tragic wife, who after the birth of two children separated from him and with insane perseverance tried to ruin his life. His mother disapproved of the match from the start, and stopped his allowance. Thus, in the early years, it was necessary for him to write to support a home. And in the later years he wrote, just as he flung himself into politics, because, with no home life to provide the normal comforts of a man's life, he needed some distraction for his mind.

He was a man isolated by his own cleverness; and further removed from the ordinary conduct of life by his unexceptionable breeding. He was a man of too good manners; and, too many of them. And after middle-age he became rather like an expensive, polished lectern; golden, standing alone, and magnificently glittering.

Bulwer Lytton was just a little too clever to surrender
his mind to the common business of life long enough to write a novel of ordinary human sincerity and, therefore, of ordinary human appeal and endurance.

Benjamin Disraeli, throughout his life was another who was the victim of a morbidly enlarged intelligence. But he was a Jew; and a Jew is naturally more comfortable in his own cleverness.

His intelligence would never have been an embarrassment to him if he had not chosen to ally himself to the one political party that distrusts cleverness. He was, it should be remembered, born in an age when the qualifications for a successful political career were strikingly unlike those of to-day. It would be a parody of a perfectly serious and sincere politician to suggest that Disraeli was simply a Lyttonesque exquisite from some unmentioned, unmentionable ghetto, gloriously declaiming with more than Christian cleverness and less than English reserve. Indeed, in
Sybil
Disraeli flings facts, of the unpleasant kind that have to be faced, at us as though he were a novelist-with-a-purpose who cared less for literary form than for the formula of his convictions.

But to say that Disraeli invented the political novel is to mean something very different from what the same words would imply to-day. In
Coningsby
Disraeli approached the political world in the spirit of carnival. Balls, breakfasts, steeplechases, hunt-suppers, salons—such was the political laboratory in which he and Coningsby worked. There is always a smattering of the ambassador—braid, white gloves, wit, and an expression of Chinese wisdom—about the writer of Disraeli's novels. The mind of the reader moves perpetually on thick carpets and smooth floors. The clarets and champagnes make poets of politicians. The natural eloquence, the fatal, fulsome eloquence, of the author adds excess to the luxury
of the scene. Even breakfast tables look as though furnished by Drage.

The breakfast room at Brentham was very bright. It opened on a garden of its own, which at this season was so glowing, and cultured into patterns so fanciful and finished, that it had the resemblance of a vast mosaic. The walls of the chamber were covered with bright drawings and sketches of our modern masters and frames of interesting miniatures ….

It is a pity, indeed, that so much of Disraeli's fiction should support the Gladstonian view of the inspired flunkey. But, undeniably, it does so. Half the descriptions of characters are like those of a man who knows people intimately by appearance but has never met them on terms of even casual acquaintance. All the pageantry of the social scene is there and it is soon obvious that the author has not even begun to be interested in his characters as they exist off the stage. Thus:

The guests reassembled in the great saloon before they repaired to the theatre. A lady on the arm of a Russian prince bestowed on Coningsby a haughty, but not ungracious, bow; which he returned, unconscious of the person to whom he bent. She was, however, a very striking person: not beautiful; her face indeed at the first glance was almost repulsive, yet it ever attracted a second gaze. A remarkable pallor distinguished her; her features had neither regularity nor expression; neither were her eyes fine; but her brow impressed you with an idea of power of no ordinary character or capacity. Her figure was as fine and commanding as her face was void of charm. Juno, in the full bloom of her
immortality could have presented nothing more majestic. Coningsby watched her as she swept along like a resistless fate.

All that character and pallor (and padding) and not a hint of the implications until we arrive at the last sentence ! And that is not all. Such a sentence as that about Juno gives a hint of the worst of Disraeli's weaknesses; his fatal tendency to gush.

There is a kind of facile fatuity about Disraeli's method of opening a chapter that is fatal to anything that follows on it. “What wonderful things are events! The least are of greater importance than the most sublime and comprehensive speculations! ” —a remark that should be decorated in acknowledgment of its mature idiocy—or, “There are few things more full of delight and splendour, than to travel during the heat of a refulgent summer in the green district of some ancient forest,” such are the too lavishly lubricated Disraelian openings.

There probably never was a generation that has found it harder to take Disraeli's fashion of prose seriously than our own. As we see him in his novels he is like a small thinking fly ever getting caught in a tangled web of extravagant description. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch has compared this glamour with the magic of the
Arabian Nights
; a legacy of the world that lies east of England. But I am not sure that it is the luxury of sensation in the picturesque metaphors that affect us unfavourably, so much as their incredible ineptness. For example: