Part 23 (1/2)

A Disability of ”Historical Fiction”

The reason of this is, of course, very simple If an artist is to have full power over his characters, to know their hearts, to govern their emotions and sway them at his will, they must be his own creatures and the life in them derived from him He es of history have an independent life of their own, and with them his hand is tied

Thackeray has a freehold on the soul of Beatrix Esh furnished, on a short lease, and has to render an account to the Muse of History He is lord of one and mere occupier of the other Nor will it do to say that an artist by syent study can roup of historical characters sufficiently for his purpose For, since they have anticipated him and lived their lives without his help, they leave him but a choice between two poor courses If he narrate their lives and adventures as they really befel, he is writing history If, on the other hand, he disregard historical accuracy, he ht just as well have used another set of characters or have given his characters other names Indeed, it would be much better For if Alcibiades went as a matter of fact to Sparta and as a matter of fiction you make him stay at ho in Alcibiades you don't understand And if you are writing about an Alcibiades whom you don't quite understand, you will save your readers so him Charicles

Now Jonathan Swift and Esther Johnson and Esther Vanho, became historical But Mrs Woods sets forth to translate them back into fiction, not as subordinate characters, but as protagonists She has chosen to ithin the difficult liht easily have cramped her hand even more closely

A Tale of Passion to be told in Terh is a story of passion, and runs on the confines of e of Reason

Doubtless e: doubtless, too, they spoke of madness and passion, but not in their literature And now that the lips are dust and the fiery conversations lost, Mrs Woods has only their written prose to turn to for help To satisfy the pedant she must tell her story of passion in terms of reason In one respect Thackeray had a more difficult task in _Esmond_; for he aie and line, of the days of Queen Anne Not only had he, like Mrs Woods, to e; but every word of the story is supposed to be told by a gentlee, whereas Mrs Woods in her narrative prose e of her own century On the other hand, the story of _Esmond_ deals with co in Thackeray's e of Reason It is pitched in the key of those times, and the prose of those times is sufficient and exactly sufficient for it That it should be so is all the more to Thackeray's honor, for the artist is to be praised in the conception as duly as in the execution of his work But, the conception being granted, I think _Esther Vanhoh_ must have been a harder book than _Esmond_ to write

For even the prose of Swift hi anoe while he lived, and can hardly be pulled into perspective noith the drawing enius are rarely e used by their contemporaries; and this is perhaps the reason why they disquiet their contemporaries so confoundedly Where in the books written by tye-bewigged gentlemen, or in the letters written by Swift himself, can you find words to explain that turbulent and potent man? He bursts the capacity of Addison's phrase and Pope's couplet He was too big for a bishop's chair, and now, if a novelist attearments of his ti this difficulty that Mrs Woods seeence of a true artist She is bound to be praised by many for her erudition; but perhaps she will lettrodden upon her erudition In the first volume it threatened to overload and sink her But no sooner does she begin to catch the wind of her subject than she tosses all this superfluous cargo overboard From the point where passion creeps into the story this learning is carried lightly and see the age, she comprehends it

To hteenth-century conversation, without

For this alone the book would be notable; and it can be proved to co exists froh nota scene vivid for us by describing it, not as it is, but as it excites her own intelligence or feelings Let me explainand suggestive as _Esther Vanhoh_ to divert the critic from praise of the writer to consider a dozen problems which the writer raises

Women and ”le don pittoresque”

Well, then, M Jules Lemaitre has said somewhere--and with considerable truth--that women when they write have not _le don pittoresque_ By this he means that they do not strive to depict a scene exactly as it strikes upon their senses, but as they perceive it after testing its effect upon their emotions and experience

Suppose noe have to describe a in, thus--

”The few and twinkling lights disappeared froh in the cloudless deep of heaven, and the sounds of the warht were all about their path; the splash of leaping fish, the sleepy chirrup of birds disturbed by so of the reed-warbler, the persistent churring of the night jar, and the occasional hoot of the owl, far off on some ancestral tree”

Now all this, except, perhaps, the ”ancestral” tree, is a direct picture, and with it soht stop But no wooes on--

”It was such an exquisite May night, full of the ht and the scent of hawthorn, as makes the earth an Eden in which none but lovers should walk--happy lovers or young poets, whose large eyes, so blind in the daylight world ofin the Garden”

You see it is sensation no longer, but reflection and e that wo it On the contrary, it is beautiful in Mrs Woods's hand, and sometimes luminously true Take this, for instance, of the interior of a city church:--

”It had none of the dim impressiveness of a mediaeval church, that seems reared with a view to Heaven rather than Earth, and whose arches, ain nor lose by the accidental presence of ephe seeation, and the mind's eye involuntarily peopled it with its Sunday complement of substantial citizens and their families”

This is not a picturesque but a reflective description Yet how it illuht of it before we kno, once and for all, the essential difference between a Gothic church and one of Wren's building And further, since Mrs Woods is writing of an age that slighted Gothic for the architecture of Wren and his followers, we get a brilliant side-flash to help our comprehension It is a hint only, but it assures us as we read that we are in the eighteenth century, whenaspirations

And the conclusion is that if Mrs Woods could not conquer the difficulties which beset any atteonists of two historical characters, if she was obliged to follow the facts to the detrie in a fashi+on to reat feat, and its authoress is one of the feho abonds”

In her latest book,[A] Mrs Woods returns to that class of life--so far as life may be classified--which she handled so h As the titles indicate, the life in the earlier story was stationary: in the latter it is no show This at once suggests coanno_; or rather a contrast: for the two stories, conceived in very sis, differ in at least two vital respects

Coanno”

For what, in short, is the story of _Les Freres Zeanno_? Two brothers, Gianni and Nello, tue fairs and small country towns of France, are seized with an aland, where they spend so in various circuses Then they return to th a trick act, a feat that willit for the first tiainst Nello, causes his