Article published in Munsey's Magazine, January 1898
BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE
In April 1897 Munsey's Magazine began publishing a series
of articles in which leading writers of the day discussed their favourite
authors and what they considered to be their best books. The following authors
contributed to the series:
William Dean Howells, April 1897
Brander Matthews, May 1897
Frank R. Stockton, June 1897
Mrs. Burton Harrison, July 1897
S.R. Crockett, August 1897
Paul Bourget, September 1897
Bret Harte, October 1897
W. Clark Russell, November 1897
Anthony Hope, December 1897
Arthur Conan Doyle, January 1898
Sir Walter Besant, February 1898
Ian Maclaren, March 1898
Jerome K. Jerome, April 1898
Munsey's Magazine introduces ACD's contribution to the
series with the words: "Dr. Conan Doyle finds something admirable in almost
every school of fiction, but names as his special favorites the romances of Sir
Walter Scott, and Charles Reade's great historical novel, The Cloister and
The Hearth."
Copies of the other articles in the series are available at Unz.org,
where they can be located by typing "My Favorite Novelist" in the "Title"
search-box. —RG.
IF some fairy godmother were to lead me into the reading room of
the British Museum, and to say to me, "Upon these walls you will find the works
of all the great story tellers of the world. Look at them well, weigh one
against the other, and when you have quite made up your mind which is the
greatest, you will yourself be endowed with that writer's virtues and failings,"
I should then, I think, approach the question with a keener sense of criticism
and a more resolute effort to be clear in my own literary aims. But I know that
the task would be a hard one, for I am catholic in my tastes, and every form of
fiction—be it good of its kind—appeals to my admiration as freely as every
flower in a garden. I have no sympathy for the petty critics who cannot enjoy
Flaubert without belittling Scott, or relish a romance without sneering at the
modern problem novel. They are all good—if they be but good of their kind—and
there is room and to spare for all of them, if they serve to interest some section of the public.
The idea that the writing of a novel is a sort of exact science, only to be
approached in certain ways and along certain lines, by realism or by romance, is
the utmost pedantry and cant. Here is the writer and there is the audience. Let
him seek his subject where he will. Let him treat it how he will. But let him
hold that audience—and if he continue to hold it long enough to show that his
power does not spring from any passing fashion, he has then a real vocation,
whether he deal with the court of a medieval king or that of an East End slum.
But to recur to the stupendous offer of my fairy godmother, I can imagine
myself seated in the midst of that enormous room, and gazing round at the books
which line it, while I carefully consider which are those which I shall
henceforth claim as my own. I review in my mind all those great writers whom I
have admired and revered. I try to see their faults as well as their beauties. I
turn to Tolstoy, and I am attracted by his earnestness and by his power of
detail, but I am repelled by his looseness of construction and by his
unreasonable and impracticable mysticism. I covet the literary but not the moral
conscience of Zola. I long for the human humor of Dickens and the polished
worldliness of Thackeray, but in each case deplore their want of form, their
lack of that sense of construction which has been the weakest point of our
English novelists. There are many great names left, but of them all there are
three over which I should linger, if such a choice were mine—Scott, Dumas, Maupassant.
Maupassant, with all his faults of taste, was such a natural, instinctive
story teller, so concise, so admirably balanced, with such a range of
sympathies. Of the great masters of fiction none, perhaps, combined high
imagination with actual knowledge of life so fully as he. Some of his tales are,
I grant, indefensible, but a French writer is to be judged by the standard of
his own country, and it may at least be said of him that he is never coarse for
the sake of coarseness, and that the humor or the drama of the situation is its
excuse, if not its justification. And yet, as my good godmother waits
impatiently for my choice, I pass my favorite of all short story writers
regretfully by, and I turn to the full blooded, fiery Creole, the man of a
hundred books and plays innumerable, the father of the Musketeers, and the
grandfather of much of the fiction of today. Who can judge him impartially, for
who is there who does not owe him a debt of gratitude? His colossal imagination,
his great sweep, the masterful way in which he molds history to his own uses,
these give him a place apart. Boy or man, simpleton or philosopher, all can find
what they want in his pages.
But if I am to choose between him and Scott, I must become advocatus
diaboli, and seek for the flaws as well as the beauties of my Dumas. And it
must be confessed that they abound. Amidst all this rattle of incident I catch
but dim and uncertain glimpses of the world in which these people lived. I learn
little—and that little I mistrust. These St. Vitus' dance conversations, too,
which jerk and jump in little spasmodic sentences with unnecessary questions and
gratuitous answers, do they not bear some relation to the daily column of some
journal which had to be filled with its feuilleton? And then again, when
a character becomes superhuman—like Porthos, who dies pulling down a
mountain and slaying a regiment—he becomes not impressive, but grotesque. No, I
will pass the Norman Frenchman, and I will pass the shock headed Creole, and I
will fix my aspirations upon the canny Scotch lawyer, the man with the lame leg
and the peaked head, who, with the heartiest contempt for his own profession,
hardly deigning to acknowledge his work after he had done it, found time between
his dogs, his plantations, and his sheriff's court to write the series of novels
which has made the name of Scott immortal.
For apart from the fact of his being the first—which, ceteris paribus,
must give him an overwhelming share of the credit —how many points there are in
which Scott was the master of Dumas, and how few in which he was his inferior.
Let us grant that the Frenchman treated his women characters with more freedom,
if with less reverence. Granted, also, that there is a certain touch and go
quality about his story-telling which is racial rather than individual. But
beyond this everything is in Scott's favor—his sanity, his restraint, his
accuracy to history, his dignity, his power of realizing and reproducing a
historical character as he reproduced Louis XI from the "Croniques" of Philippe
de Comines, his exact knowledge, his humor. In the latter quality there can be
no comparison between the two. Take the four comic servants of the musketeers,
and compare them with Friar Tuck, with Dandie Dinmont, or, best of
all, with Dugald Dalgetty, and you see the difference between a
marionette and a human creature.
But the most odious of all comparisons are those between two people whom you
admire, and I should never have ventured upon so ungracious a task had I not
been forced to justify myself for choosing the one, rather than the other, as my
ideal. Let me speak rather of Scott's own virtues, without reference to any rival.
First, as to his beautiful reverence for woman: is there in the whole list of
his books one single scene which verges upon coarseness, or is there one precept
to be gathered from them which is not gallant and manly? I acknowledge that it
is not the primary duty of a novel to teach ethics; but granting that it fulfils
all other conditions of a good novel, then it would be absurd to say that this
is not an added merit.
And then there is the fullness and accuracy of his knowledge. He knows the
peculiarities of every class and of every trade. His fowlers speak like fowlers,
his soldiers like soldiers, his physicians like the leeches of the period. He
had a unique power of concentrating all his wide reading so as to build up a
single definite picture. Take the work of his old age, "Count Robert of Paris."
Who has ever realized the old Greek empire, grotesque, bloodstained, and yet
venerable, as he has done in this book, which is usually quoted as the least
successful of his writings? A student who had spent his whole life in studying
the subject confessed that he had never realized it until this tired old giant
came along and made the whole thing clear by a single flash of his imagination.
It is worthy of note that Scott never wrote a line of fiction until after he
was forty—in which he resembled many of the greatest novelists, for this art is
the latest of all to mature. To describe life one must know it. Having once
begun, he wrote with great rapidity, in spite of many distractions. The wise
critics who are so ready to accuse modern writers of over production should
remember that Scott turned out as many as three novels a year, each of them
exceeding in length the average book of today. If the modern cannot justify his
books by their merit, he can at least quote the aphorism of Dr. Johnson, who
said that if a tree only produced crab apples, the tree which produced many of
them was better than the one which produced few. On the whole, then, whether I
take his quantity or his quality, his literary merit or his clean and noble
moral influence, I should from all ages and all races place the author of
"Ivanhoe" and of "Quentin Durward" at the highest pinnacle of his profession.
But before choosing my favorite novelist I should have, as I have shown, to
hesitate and to weigh one against the other. This would not be so in the case of
my favorite novel. There my mind is entirely made up. It is a book by none of
the great men whom I have mentioned, but it is one which, if the author could
always have kept to that high level, would have placed him higher than them all.
It is Charles Reade's "Cloister and the Hearth." Some books are great on account
of the intellect which is shown in them, and some on account of the heart, but I
do not know where I can find a book in which the highest qualities of head and
of heart go together as they do in this one. From that noble and sonorous opening paragraph:
There is a musty Chronicle written in tolerable Latin, and in it
a chapter where every sentence holds a fact. Here is told with harsh brevity the
strange history of a pair who lived untrumpeted and died unsung four hundred
years ago, and lie now as unpitied on that stern page as fossils in a rock.
Thus, living or dead. Fate is still unjust to them. For if I can but show you
what lies below that dry Chronicler's words, methinks you will correct the
indifference of centuries, and give those two sore tried souls a place in your heart for a day—
down to the last ringing sentence:
The words of a genius so high as his are not born to die; their
immediate work upon mankind fulfilled, they may seem to lie torpid; but at each
fresh shower of intelligence Time pours upon their students they prove their
immortal race; they revive, they spring from the dust of great libraries, they
bud, they flower, they fruit, they seed, from generation to generation and from age to age—
I have never found so much accurate knowledge and ripe wisdom and passionate
human emotion within the covers of any single book.
The story is to be told in a few sentences, and sounds bald enough, as all
stories do when reduced to pure statement.
A young Dutchman, Gerard, the son of Eli, somewhere about the
year 1450 marries a girl, Margaret—sweetest of all heroines of
fiction—and has a child, known in after years as the great Erasmus. Persecuted
at home, he journeys across Europe to Rome, to earn some money by his ornamental
manuscripts, which are rapidly being ousted by the printing press. While at Rome
a false report of the death of Margaret reaches his ears, and, in his
agony, he joins the priesthood and becomes a preaching friar. As such he visits
Holland and finds the poor, faithful Margaret still waiting for him. His
vows stand between her and him, so they live as friends and die as the novelist
tells us. There lies the whole of the story, and it is from the struggle between
the church and human love, the life of the home and that of the cloister, that
the book takes its title. Such an indictment against celibacy of the clergy has never yet been penned.
But the wonder of the book is the extraordinary clearness and power with
which the middle ages, in many countries and from many points of view, are laid
before us. As Mr. Hornung has picturesquely remarked, it is a searchlight thrown
across medieval Europe. And it is a human medievalism, neither stiff nor
conventional nor unnatural, but palpitating with rude life and with primitive
emotions. We are convinced, as we read, that even such the people must have
been, and so they must have thought and Erasmus, Froissart, Deschamps, lived.
The atmosphere is so perfect and so consistent that we drift back into that
dreadful life, and wake at the end of a chapter with a start and a sigh of
relief to feel that we are living in a cleaner, fresher world, where force has
been tempered by law and bigotry by reason.
We see the castle of the brutal and ignorant noble which dominates the road.
We see also the monastery, where a little spark of learning and humanity still
glimmers amid that widespread darkness. We realize the inns, their discomforts
and their dangers, the great woods swarming with robbers, the incessant wars,
the grossness and superstition of the people, and yet the picture is lightened,
as life is lightened, by the traits of kindliness and nobility which in all
ages, and under every condition, will break out in human nature; the self
sacrifice which springs from love, the loyalty of friends, the kindliness of
women, and the devotion of the poorer clergy.
Wonderfully reproduced, also, is that atmosphere of wonder and of adventure
which pervaded the world in a time when there always hung a mirage over the
horizon. A man knew the city in which he was born—perhaps also a little of the
country around it; but over the river, or beyond the mountains, it was all a
land of mystery, a place where anything might befall him. If he traveled, it was
along villainous, deeply rutted roads, with danger like a hedge upon either side
of them, and the chances of an ambuscade at every defile. Printing was coming,
the Reformation was coming, the revival of learning was just at hand, but the
greater part of Europe still lay in that blackest night which precedes the dawn.
I do not know that Charles Reade has anywhere left it upon record how many
books went to the making of this one, but it is evident that only very wide
reading could give him the store of knowledge from which he draws so freely. And
it is necessary not only to collect such knowledge, but to digest and to
assimilate it, before it can be used in a natural fashion, without any savor of
pedantry. Sir Walter Besant, who is himself an authority upon this epoch,
mentions Erasmus, Froissart, Deschamps, Esquillart, Gringoire, Villon, and
Luther among the roots from which this great book has sprung.
Consider the many sides of life which are treated here—all of them with the
greatest minuteness of detail. We begin with the well ordered routine of
provincial Holland, the thrifty, spotless, tile lined house of the burgher, with
a passing glance into the palace of the Duke of Burgundy. We learn many things,
incidentally and allusively, as such things should be learned in a novel, of the
house-keeping of these people, of their dress, of their lives, of the Dutch
school of painters, of the mystery plays, of their hunting, their archery, their
views of existence. Then you start upon that wonderfully vivid journey from
Holland to Rome. You pass into medieval Germany, you visit the slovenly inns,
the dirty, drunken, good hearted people, the sluggish but honest traders. You
are introduced to the old world soldier, and to that more deadly man, the old
world physician. At Dьsseldorf you strike the Rhine, the broad green highway
which binds southern and northern Europe. You visit good abbeys and bad ones,
consort with saints and sinners, take your chances with amorous hostesses and
murderous hosts, learn incidentally the methods of scientific warfare in the
middle ages, and the more complex methods of scientific begging, and so pass on
through Burgundy and down to the sea.
And then there is the Roman section, with its sketch of the renaissance, its
dilettante cardinals who stand for the new dispensation, and its fanatical
preaching friars who represent the old; its artists, its collectors, its
debauched society, its hired assassins, and its very human and tolerant pope.
Finally there is the somber and elaborate finale, which draws the life of the
cloister and the life of the cell, and the moving study of that poor saint whose
troubles arose from never having heard that pithy Western maxim, "One world at a
time." When you look back on all this wide field of information you feel that it
is not a mere book, but the distillation of a whole library, which you have been reading.
So much for the head, but it is the qualities of heart which seem to me to be
the greater of the two. With what tenderness the piteous story is told! How warm
and true is Reade's sympathy with all that is human and good! The great heart of
the man sets the whole book throbbing. From the first meeting of Gerard
and Margaret, when he plucks the straws to suck the soup, until he is
laid in his coffin and stern old Brother Jerome lays the auburn tress
upon his body, no such love story, so natural, so beautiful, and so tender, has
been told in our time. You feel that the author has fulfilled that first
essential for deeply moving others—he has been deeply moved himself Sad as it
is, it is not maudlin or forced, but the solemn and tender sadness of life which
has something sweet forever mixed with its bitterness. I know no scene in
fiction which affects me so powerfully as the death of Margaret. The man
who can read that chapter with dry eyes is a man whom I do not wish to know.
There is no work of man which is not open to adverse criticism. Perfection
never has and never will be attained. In Reade's case the imperfections, the
irritating and superficial tricks of manner, are so obtrusive that they catch
the eye to the exclusion, sometimes, of the rare qualities which lie beneath
them. That a man of his judgment and discernment should try to emphasize a point
by using large type, like a sensational daily paper, is a psychological
curiosity. His style can be sonorous and beautiful, as in the opening and
closing passages which I have quoted, but it can also be abrupt, jerky, and
incoherent to an exasperating extent. But at least it was his own—"his skin and
not his shirt," as Carlyle expressed it—and that is something in these days,
when "style" is usually a short word for affectation.
Bad also are Charles Reade's familiarities with his reader and with his
characters, his trick of nicknaming them, his occasionally clumsy playfulness,
his eternal asides, his habit of destroying the illusion by alluding to modern
matters in what purports to be an ancient chronicle. But when all this has been
most freely discounted, there still remains enough virtue in this novel to make
it, in my eyes, the wisest and the most beautiful I have ever read.
