The Facts of Fiction (10 page)

Thus Walpole suspended the laws of nature, establishing romantic lore in their place, and gave to the characters an eighth sense, a sense of their momentous responsibilities in behaving exactly like a party of tourists—observant but scarcely surprised—on a conducted tour through the suburbs of Hades. So we get such a typical passage as this:

“I tell you,” said Manfred imperiously, “Hippolita is no longer my wife; I divorce her from this hour. Too long has she cursed me by her unfruitfulness. My fate depends upon having sons, and this night I trust will give a new date to my hopes.”

At those words he seized the cold hand of Isabella who was half dead with fright and horror. She shrieked and started from him. Manfred rose to pursue her, when the moon, which was now up and gleamed in at the opposite casement, presented to his sight the fatal helmet, which rose to the height of the windows, waving backwards and forwards in a tempestuous manner, and accompanied with a hollow and rustling sound. Isabella, who gathered courage from her situation, and who dreaded nothing so much as Manfred's pursuit of his declaration, cried:

“Look, my lord, ‘ see, Heaven itself declares against your impious intentions.' ”

“Heaven nor Hell shall impede my designs,” said Manfred, advancing again to seize the princess. At that instant the portrait of his grandfather, which hung over the bench where they had been sitting, uttered a deep sigh, and heaved its breast. Isabella, whose back was turned to the picture, saw not the motion nor whence the sound came, but started and said:

“Hark, my lord, what sound was that? ” and at the same time made towards the door. Manfred, distracted between the flight of Isabella, who had now reached the stairs, and yet unable to keep his eyes from the picture, which began to move, had, however, advanced some steps after her, still looking backwards on the portrait, when he saw it quit its panel, and descend on the floor with a grave and melancholy air.

“Do I dream? ” cried Manfred, returning, “or are the devils themselves in league against me? Speak, infernal spectre! or, if thou art my grandsire, why dost thou, too, conspire against thy wretched descendant, who too dearly pays for”—ere he could finish the sentence, the vision sighed again, and made a sign to Manfred to follow him.

“Lead on! ” cried Manfred; “I will follow thee to the gulf of perdition.” The spectre marched sedately, but dejected, to the end of the gallery, and turned into a chamber on the right hand.

Manfred, it might be objected, speaks a little too much in the grand manner, at least to modern ears. But it should be pointed out that he was a foreigner and a Catholic, and so naturally excitable and not altogether responsible for his actions. And few of us know exactly
how we should behave if we had just arranged to rape a girl, and our dead grandfather, sedate and dejected, were to get down from a canvas on the wall and go and shut himself up in another room. Considering the enormity of the old gentleman's behaviour, Manfred kept his nerve, to say nothing of his temper, remarkably well. He was apparently less anxious than most men are who are called on merely to assist a conjurer on a concert hall stage.

Scott spoke of the “wild interest ” of the story of
The Castle of Otranto
; and I believe that if we had not all of us been brought up with the criticism that it is “creaky ” already in our minds, we should find it infinitely more exciting than most of our modern “thrillers.” At least we should until within a page or two of the story's close.

For it is one of the incidental enslavements of the rational mind that only those miracles which are no more than ingenious illusions shall be admitted; and even then the last chapter must contain a full confession by the Almighty as how he contrived to appear miraculous.

Thus it is that the modern mind is apt finally to feel more than a trifle cheated when God (or the Devil) remains obstinately silent about his means, and ostentatiously showy about his manifestations. But at the actual moment of reading, the mind is feverishly fascinated.

It is not an accident that a whole saga of the supernatural came to be written towards the end of the eighteenth century. The supernatural trespasses into the rational world in two distinct states in the evolution of the human mind. The first is when unaccountable and unearthly beings are found everywhere among men, as unnecessary as poppies in a cornfield. That is the superstitious period. The second is when unpredictable messengers appear with calamitous warnings, or tremendous tidings, or helpful and sometimes purely temporary
advice. That is the religious period. For the first and last test of a Christian miracle is not whether it is wonderful but whether it is useful.

Obviously then, there is no riot of bizarre amusement to be had from the religious miracle. Once miracles are accepted and put into literary form the phantasy becomes merely that grosser thing—religious propaganda. The miraculous events in
The Castle of Otranto
are all palpably miracles of superstition, and not of religion. And they are not the products of the uneasy belief that is to be found in the childhood of the race, before superstition has had time to crystallise itself into religion, but the uneasiness that flourishes again in the decay of religion.

In the eighteenth century everyone had a sense of the religious tradition, but few the spirit of religious faith. So God floated out of the Churches and ghosts floated into the home. And from Walpole onwards came a stream of terrifying writers: Clara Reeve, Mrs. Radcliffe, “Monk ” Lewis and the rest, who created a superstition of singular density, and no little literary effectiveness—to those left with sufficient religious instinct to enjoy it.

But Walpole was not a pumpkin-spectre out to frighten yokels. He foresaw his successors as little as he foresaw his success. And there is no reason to believe that he saw the real significance of what he had done for fiction.

He seemed to think that because he had taught his characters to behave with that admirable detachment and suspicion that Gideon displayed before the miraculous fleece, he had instituted a new kind of romance. It is necessary only to remember Gulliver's behaviour before the Houyhnhnms to see that Manfred had been rather seriously anticipated.

But what Walpole did do was the infinitely more important thing of changing the story from a mere string of
events into a cat's cradle of ingenious complexity; to lay out a plot like a pattern and not merely uncoil it like a rope. And he did this, not because of any superior intelligence in his mind but because the nature of his plot compelled him.

If you write a story with a skeleton in the cupboard in the first chapter you must, sooner or later, explain how it came to be there, and the story will move forward with this as its purpose. And so when Walpole begins with a miraculous helmet, crushing a bridegroom to death on the first page, we know that we shall have to hear more about the helmet, and that we shall be given some reason, no matter how unreasonable, for its behaviour. Each chapter, thereupon, assumes a new responsibility, earning its keep, not merely by adding to the length, but to the purpose, of the novel.

Tom Jones
, for example, could have stretched to twice its length, with no damage or improvement to itself, only providing that Tom's endurance could support the strain of forgetting his Sophia in the simplest way he knew, and that the reader's patience could endure him for so long.

* * *

The third major piece of minor fiction of the period is
The Vicar of Wakefield
. It is the typically repentant product of a man who has crowded the greatest wildnesses of his life into the early years. There is a kind of innocence that is so closely akin to idiocy that we may be forgiven if we call it by its harder name. And the idiotic incumbent of Wakefield reveals just those deficiencies of intelligence that made his author one of Fortune's gifts to the trickster and the cheat.

The Vicar of Wakefield
is usually exhibited as the most successful of Johnson's god-children. But Johnson found
it in circumstances that were likely to commend it. The description that he has left of the incident is this:

I received one morning a message from poor Goldsmith that he was in great distress, and as it was not in his power to come to me, begging that I would come to him as soon as possible. I sent him a guinea, and promised to come to him directly. I accordingly went as soon as I was drest, and found that his landlady had arrested him for his rent, at which he was in a violent passion. I perceived that he had already changed my guinea, and had got a bottle of Madeira and a glass before him. I put the cork into the bottle, desired he would be calm, and began to talk to him of the means by which he might be extricated. He then told me that he had a novel ready for the press, which he produced to me. I looked into it and saw its merit; told the landlady I should soon return, and having gone to a bookseller, sold it for sixty pounds. I brought Goldsmith the money, and he discharged his rent, not however without rating his landlady in a high tone for having used him so ill.

In a room with the shadow of the bailiff on the blind a man would find merit in sixpence. That is not for one moment to pretend that
The Vicar of Wakefield
was devoid of merit. The simple sentiment of the story is obviously sincere; it goes straight to the heart of the public like the picture on a sublime tradesman's calendar.

No one, I suppose, could fail to see the charm of the nincompoop old vicar; no one, that is, who can put his common sense in his pocket for a space. But the trouble is that Goldsmith's picture of an honest man was no more than that of a fat, affectionate pig, politely handing the fatal knife to a pig-sticking destiny.

That was at the back of Goldsmith's mind because it had been at the back of his life. Goldsmith was a pawn of Fate who began the game with a gambit. When his family did contrive to send him to college in Dublin he played the fool so strenuously that his tutor, poor desperate man, broke into his rooms and boxed his ears in the middle of an uproarious party. The disgrace was too great; Goldsmith sold his books and, with his ears still singing with shame, left Erin never to return.

At least, it is what he intended. But being the weak, asinine creature that he was, he dawdled on in Dublin, plying his sacred trade of idler, until he had only a shilling left. Then the family appeared and Goldsmith had to be reconciled with his tutor. It was all a part of the shifting design in his patternless life.

The next years show us Goldsmith wandering about the world from Edinburgh to Padua, being arrested and robbed and cheated and tricked, playing his flute for pence, spending the money that his family with saintly patience continued to send him, now in Leyden, now in Italy, and behaving in general as though Life had really created him to see if for one character at least she could not behave as generously and variously as fiction. But patternless as the life was it was all of a piece; like needing a patron and ridiculously mistaking his manservant for him, and then spurning the patron on the entirely false assertion that “book-sellers are the best patrons ”; behaving like a Duke in the intervals of living like a pauper; earning a prosperous living, yet dying in debt to the tune of £2,000.

Goldsmith is one of the few inspired loafers in history; a man who learned more from idleness than most men do from industry. Since loafing was his apprenticeship to life, and he was so diligent, we may forgive him that for its
sake he was also a liar, a cheat and a thief. He was the pickpocket in leading strings. His mother had always had great faith in her son's ingenuity as a writer. And her proof was not long lacking. For young Oliver was fertile in reasons for her giving him money.

For example, there was his old story of how he embarked upon a ship for America, paid his fare, sent his kit, his valuable kit, on board and then missed the vessel. The only thing that makes the story even worth repeating, now that its original purpose of getting money is pointless, is that there certainly is something that rings true about Goldsmith's not knowing the name of the ship.

For there is another story of how he first arrived in Edinburgh, took his luggage to his rooms and left to explore the town, only to find he had failed to note the number or street of his lodgings. By chance, it is said, he met the porter who had carried his luggage: which saved him. And the little vignette of An Irishman in Scotland was complete.

But in matters of money Goldsmith is hard to blame. His was a nature of lavish habits, for which money was essential. When he came to have it later in life he spent it. And probably he quite sincerely could not imagine that there were people in this world who liked to have money by them, at rest as well as in motion.

Goldsmith's generosity, indeed, has become one of the great historical attributes, like Smollett's temper and Sterne's wit and Sidney's grace.

To have been a friend of either Goldsmith or Johnson would have been to be as immune from the fear of actual hunger as any man possibly could be. The only difference between Goldsmith's generosity and Johnson's was that Johnson knew the value of money and deliberately made himself forget it upon occasion, and Goldsmith never knew.

One of the unfading scenes of sentimental history is that of the crowd of indigent mourners, pauper dependents on a debtor, who thronged Goldsmith's staircase in Brick Court when he died. And the scene is still affecting even though the grief of a beggar when his benefactor dies is necessarily not above suspicion.

It would be easy criticism to say that the simplicity of
The Vicar of Wakefield
was the same simplicity which led Goldsmith to give away his money and his coat and his breakfast, and behave always as though St. Anthony were holding out a hand from every doorway. But that would be misleading, because it would overlook such a piece of work as
She Stoops to Conquer
. Goldsmith was perpetually puzzling his contemporaries by suddenly shining through the mists of his own mind like a sun, and then as suddenly taking cover again. And he puzzles us still more.
She Stoops to Conquer
, for example, is the product of a man who has seen through all the follies of mankind. And seeing through a folly is usually halfway to overlooking it.