Adventures among Books

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Of her later life in Lacedaemon, nothing is known on really ancient
authority, and later traditions vary. The Spartans showed her sepulchre
and her shrine at Therapnae, where she was worshipped. Herodotus tells
us how Helen, as a Goddess, appeared in her temple and healed a deformed
child, making her the fairest woman in Sparta, in the reign of Ariston.
It may, perhaps, be conjectured that in Sparta, Helen occupied the place
of a local Aphrodite. In another late story she dwells in the isle of
Leuke, a shadowy bride of the shadowy Achilles. The mocking Lucian, in
his _Vera Historia_, meets Helen in the Fortunate Islands, whence she
elopes with one of his companions. Again, the sons of Menelaus, by a
concubine, were said to have driven Helen from Sparta on the death of her
lord, and she was murdered in Rhodes, by the vengeance of Polyxo, whose
husband fell at Troy. But, among all these inventions, that of Homer
stands out pre-eminent. Helen and Menelaus do not die, they are too near
akin to Zeus; they dwell immortal, not among the shadows of heroes and of
famous ladies dead and gone, but in Elysium, the paradise at the world's
end, unvisited by storms.

"Beyond these voices there is peace."

It is plain that, as a love-story, the tale of Paris and Helen must to
modern readers seem meagre. To Greece, in every age, the main interest
lay not in the passion of the beautiful pair, but in its world-wide
consequences: the clash of Europe and Asia, the deaths of kings, the ruin
wrought in their homes, the consequent fall of the great and ancient
Achaean civilisation. To the Greeks, the Trojan war was what the
Crusades are in later history. As in the Crusades, the West assailed the
East for an ideal, not to recover the Holy Sepulchre of our religion, but
to win back the living type of beauty and of charm. Perhaps, ere the sun
grows cold, men will no more believe in the Crusades, as an historical
fact, than we do in the siege of Troy. In a sense, a very obvious sense,
the myth of Helen is a parable of Hellenic history. They sought beauty,
and they found it; they bore it home, and, with beauty, their bane.
Wherever Helen went "she brought calamity," in this a type of all the
famous and peerless ladies of old days, of Cleopatra and of Mary Stuart.
Romance and poetry have nothing less plausible than the part which
Cleopatra actually played in the history of the world, a world well lost
by Mark Antony for her sake. The flight from Actium might seem as much a
mere poet's dream as the gathering of the Achaeans at Aulis, if we were
not certain that it is truly chronicled.

From the earliest times, even from times before Homer (whose audience is
supposed to know all about Helen), the imagination of Greece, and later,
the imagination of the civilised world, has played around Helen, devising
about her all that possibly could be devised. She was the daughter of
Zeus by Nemesis, or by Leda; or the daughter of the swan, or a child of
the changeful moon, brooding on "the formless and multi-form waters." She
could speak in the voices of all women, hence she was named "Echo," and
we might fancy that, like the witch of the Brocken, she could appear to
every man in the likeness of his own first love. The ancient Egyptians
either knew her, or invented legends of her to amuse the inquiring
Greeks. She had touched at Sidon, and perhaps Astaroth is only her
Sidonian name. Whatever could be told of beauty, in its charm, its
perils, the dangers with which it surrounds its lovers, the purity which
it retains, unsmirched by all the sins that are done for beauty's sake,
could be told of Helen.

Like a golden cup, as M. Paul de St. Victor says, she was carried from
lips to lips of heroes, but the gold remains unsullied and unalloyed. To
heaven she returns again, to heaven which is her own, and looks down
serenely on men slain, and women widowed, and sinking ships, and burning
towns. Yet with death she gives immortality by her kiss, and Paris and
Menelaus live, because they have touched the lips of Helen. Through the
grace of Helen, for whom he fell, Sarpedon's memory endures, and Achilles
and Memnon, the son of the Morning, and Troy is more imperishable than
Carthage, or Rome, or Corinth, though Helen

"Burnt the topless towers of Ilium."

In one brief passage, Marlowe did more than all poets since Stesichorus,
or, at least since the epithalamium of Theocritus, for the glory of
Helen. Roman poets knew her best as an enemy of their fabulous
ancestors, and in the "AEneid," Virgil's hero draws his sword to slay
her. Through the Middle Ages, in the romances of Troy, she wanders as a
shining shadow of the ideally fair, like Guinevere, who so often recalls
her in the Arthurian romances. The chivalrous mediaeval poets and the
Celts could understand better than the Romans the philosophy of "the
world well lost" for love. Modern poetry, even in Goethe's "Second part
of Faust," has not been very fortunately inspired by Helen, except in the
few lines which she speaks in "The Dream of Fair Women."

"I had great beauty; ask thou not my name."

Mr. William Morris's Helen, in the "Earthly Paradise," charms at the time
of reading, but, perhaps, leaves little abiding memory. The Helen of
"Troilus and Cressida" is not one of Shakespeare's immortal women, and
Mr. Rossetti's ballad is fantastic and somewhat false in tone--a romantic
_pastiche_. Where Euripides twice failed, in the "Troades" and the
"Helena," it can be given to few to succeed. Helen is best left to her
earliest known minstrel, for who can recapture the grace, the tenderness,
the melancholy, and the charm of the daughter of Zeus in the "Odyssey"
and "Iliad"? The sightless eyes of Homer saw her clearest, and Helen was
best understood by the wisdom of his unquestioning simplicity.

As if to prove how entirely, though so many hands paltered with her
legend, Helen is Homer's alone, there remains no great or typical work of
Greek art which represents her beauty, and the breasts from which were
modelled cups of gold for the service of the gods. We have only
paintings on vases, or work on gems, which, though graceful, is
conventional and might represent any other heroine, Polyxena, or
Eriphyle. No Helen from the hands of Phidias or Scopas has survived to
our time, and the grass may be growing in Therapnae over the shattered
remains of her only statue.

As Stesichorus fabled that only an _eidolon_ of Helen went to Troy, so,
except in the "Iliad" and "Odyssey," we meet but shadows of her
loveliness, phantasms woven out of clouds, and the light of setting suns.




CHAPTER XIII: ENCHANTED CIGARETTES


To dream over literary projects, Balzac says, is like "smoking enchanted
cigarettes," but when we try to tackle our projects, to make them real,
the enchantment disappears. We have to till the soil, to sow the seed,
to gather the leaves, and then the cigarettes must be manufactured, while
there may be no market for them after all. Probably most people have
enjoyed the fragrance of these enchanted cigarettes, and have brooded
over much which they will never put on paper. Here are some of "the
ashes of the weeds of my delight"--memories of romances whereof no single
line is written, or is likely to be written.

Of my earliest novel I remember but little. I know there had been a
wreck, and that the villain, who was believed to be drowned, came home
and made himself disagreeable. I know that the heroine's mouth was _not_
"too large for regular beauty." In that respect she was original. All
heroines are "muckle-mou'd," I know not why. It is expected of them. I
know she was melancholy and merry; it would not surprise me to learn that
she drowned herself from a canoe. But the villain never descended to
crime, the first lover would not fall in love, the heroine's own
affections were provokingly disengaged, and the whole affair came to a
dead stop for want of a plot. Perhaps, considering modern canons of
fiction, this might have been a very successful novel. It was entirely
devoid of incident or interest, and, consequently, was a good deal like
real life, as real life appears to many cultivated authors. On the other
hand, all the characters were flippant. This would never have done, and
I do not regret novel No. I., which had not even a name.

The second story had a plot, quantities of plot, nothing but plot. It
was to have been written in collaboration with a very great novelist,
who, as far as we went, confined himself to making objections. This
novel was stopped (not that my friend would ever have gone on) by "Called
Back," which anticipated part of the idea. The story was entitled "Where
is Rose?" and the motto was--

"_Rosa quo locorum_
_Sera moratur_."

The characters were--(1) Rose, a young lady of quality. (2) The Russian
Princess, her friend (need I add that, to meet a public demand, _her_
name was Vera?). (3) Young man engaged to Rose. (4) Charles, his
friend. (5) An enterprising person named "The Whiteley of Crime," the
universal Provider of Iniquity. In fact, he anticipated Sir Arthur
Doyle's Professor Moriarty. The rest were detectives, old ladies, mob,
and a wealthy young Colonial larrikin. Neither my friend nor I was fond
of describing love scenes, so we made the heroine disappear in the second
chapter, and she never turned up again till chapter the last. After
playing in a comedy at the house of an earl, Rosa and Vera entered her
brougham. Soon afterwards the brougham drew up, _empty_, at Rose's own
door. Where _was_ Rose? Traces of her were found, of all places, in the
Haunted House in Berkeley Square, which is not haunted any longer. After
that Rose was long sought in vain.

This, briefly, is what had occurred. A Russian detective "wanted" Vera,
who, to be sure, was a Nihilist. To catch Vera he made an alliance with
"The Whiteley of Crime." He was a man who would destroy a parish
register, or forge a will, or crack a crib, or break up a Pro-Boer
meeting, or burn a house, or kidnap a rightful heir, or manage a
personation, or issue amateur bank-notes, or what you please. Thinking
to kill two birds with one stone, he carried off Rose for her diamonds
and Vera for his friend, the Muscovite police official, lodging them both
in the Haunted House. But there he and the Russian came to blows, and,
in the confusion, Vera made her escape, while Rose was conveyed, _as
Vera_, to Siberia. Not knowing how to dispose of her, the Russian police
consigned her to a nunnery at the mouth of the Obi. Her lover, in a
yacht, found her hiding-place, and got a friendly nun to give her some
narcotic known to the Samoyeds. It was the old _truc_ of the Friar in
"Romeo and Juliet." At the mouth of the Obi they do not bury the dead,
but lay them down on platforms in the open air. Rose was picked up there
by her lover (accompanied by a chaperon, of course), was got on board the
steam yacht, and all went well. I forget what happened to "The Whiteley
of Crime." After him I still rather hanker--he was a humorous ruffian.
Something could be made of "The Whiteley of Crime." Something _has_ been
made, by the author of "Sherlock Holmes."

In yet another romance, a gentleman takes his friend, in a country place,
to see his betrothed. The friend, who had only come into the
neighbourhood that day, is found dead, next morning, hanging to a tree.
Gipsies and others are suspected. But the lover was the murderer. He
had been a priest, in South America, and the lady was a Catholic (who
knew not of his Orders). Now the friend fell in love with the lady at
first sight, on being introduced to her by the lover. As the two men
walked home, the friend threatened to reveal the lover's secret--his
tonsure--which would be fatal to his hopes. They quarrelled, parted, and
the ex-priest lassoed his friend. The motive, I think, is an original
one, and not likely to occur to the first comer. The inventor is open to
offers.

The next novel, based on a dream, was called "In Search of Qrart."

What is _Qrart_? I decline to divulge this secret beyond saying that
_Qrart_ was a product of the civilisation which now sleeps under the
snows of the pole. It was an article of the utmost value to humanity.
Farther I do not intend to commit myself. The Bride of a God was one of
the characters.

The next novel is, at present, my favourite cigarette. The scene is
partly in Greece, partly at the Parthian Court, about 80-60 B.C. Crassus
is the villain. The heroine was an actress in one of the wandering Greek
companies, splendid strollers, who played at the Indian and Asiatic
Courts. The story ends with the representation of the "Bacchae," in
Parthia. The head of Pentheus is carried by one of the Bacchae in that
drama. Behold, it is not a mask, but _the head of Crassus_, and thus
conveys the first news of the Roman defeat. Obviously, this is a novel
that needs a great deal of preliminary study, as much, indeed, as
"Salammbo."

Another story will deal with the Icelandic discoverers of America. Mr.
Kipling, however, has taken the wind out of its sails with his sketch,
"The Finest Story in the World." There are all the marvels and portents
of the _Eyrbyggja Saga_ to draw upon, there are Skraelings to fight, and
why should not Karlsefni's son kill the last mastodon, and, as
Quetzalcoatl, be the white-bearded god of the Aztecs? After that a
romance on the intrigues to make Charles Edward King of Poland sounds
commonplace. But much might be made of that, too, if the right man took
it in hand. Believe me, there are plenty of stories left, waiting for
the man who can tell them. I have said it before, but I say it again, if
I were king I would keep court officials, Mr. Stanley Weyman, Mr. Mason,
Mr. Kipling, and others, to tell me my own stories. I know the kind of
thing which I like, from the discovery of _Qrart_ to that of the French
gold in the burn at Loch Arkaig, or in "the wood by the lochside" that
Murray of Broughton mentions.

Another cigarette I have, the adventures of a Poet, a Poet born in a
Puritan village of Massachusetts about 1670. Hawthorne could have told
me my story, and how my friend was driven into the wilderness and lived
among the Red Men. I think he was killed in an attempt to warn his
countrymen of an Indian raid; I think his MS. poems have a bullet-hole
through them, and blood on the leaves. They were in Carew's best manner,
these poems.

Another tale Hawthorne might have told me, the tale of an excellent man,
whose very virtues, by some baneful moral chemistry, corrupt and ruin the
people with whom he comes in contact. I do not mean by goading them into
the opposite extremes, but rather something like a moral _jettatura_.
This needs a great deal of subtlety, and what is to become of the hero?
Is he to plunge into vice till everybody is virtuous again? It wants
working out. I have omitted, after all, a schoolboy historical romance,
explaining _why Queen Elizabeth was never married_. A Scottish paper
offered a prize for a story of Queen Mary Stuart's reign. I did not get
the prize--perhaps did not deserve it, but my story ran thus: You must
know that Queen Elizabeth was singularly like Darnley in personal
appearance. What so natural as that, disguised as a page, her Majesty
should come spying about the Court of Holyrood? Darnley sees her walking
out of Queen Mary's room, he thinks her an hallucination, discovers that
she is real, challenges her, and they fight at Faldonside, by the Tweed,
Shakespeare holding Elizabeth's horse. Elizabeth is wounded, and is
carried to the Kirk of Field, and laid in Darnley's chamber, while
Darnley goes out and makes love to my rural heroine, the lady of
Fernilee, a Kerr. That night Bothwell blows up the Kirk of Field,
Elizabeth and all. Darnley has only one resource. Borrowing the riding
habit of the rural heroine, the lady of Fernilee, he flees across the
Border, and, for the rest of his life, personates Queen Elizabeth. That
is why Elizabeth, who was Darnley, hated Mary so bitterly (on account of
the Kirk of Field affair), and _that is why Queen Elizabeth was never
married_. Side-lights on Shakespeare's Sonnets were obviously cast. The
young man whom Shakespeare admired so, and urged to marry, was--Darnley.
This romance did not get the prize (the anachronism about Shakespeare is
worthy of Scott), but I am conceited enough to think it deserved an
honourable mention.

Enough of my own cigarettes. But there are others of a more fragrant
weed. Who will end for me the novel of which Byron only wrote a chapter;
who, as Bulwer Lytton is dead? A finer opening, one more mysteriously
stirring, you can nowhere read. And the novel in letters, which Scott
began in 1819, who shall finish it, or tell us what he did with his fair
Venetian courtezan, a character so much out of Sir Walter's way? He
tossed it aside--it was but an enchanted cigarette--and gave us "The
Fortunes of Nigel" in its place. I want both. We cannot call up those
who "left half told" these stories. In a happier world we shall listen
to their endings, and all our dreams shall be coherent and concluded.
Meanwhile, without trouble, and expense, and disappointment, and reviews,
we can all smoke our cigarettes of fairyland. Would that many people
were content to smoke them peacefully, and did not rush on pen, paper,
and ink!




CHAPTER XIV: STORIES AND STORY-TELLING
(From STRATH NAVER)


We have had a drought for three weeks. During a whole week this northern
strath has been as sunny as the Riviera is expected to be. The streams
can be crossed dry-shod, kelts are plunging in the pools, but even kelts
will not look at a fly. Now, by way of a pleasant change, an icy north
wind is blowing, with gusts of snow, not snow enough to swell the loch
that feeds the river, but just enough snow (as the tourist said of the
water in the River Styx) "to swear by," or at! _The Field_ announces
that a duke, who rents three rods on a neighbouring river, has not yet
caught one salmon. The acrimoniously democratic mind may take comfort in
that intelligence, but, if the weather will not improve for a duke, it is
not likely to change for a mere person of letters. Thus the devotee of
the Muses is driven back, by stress of climate, upon literature, and as
there is nothing in the lodge to read he is compelled to write.

Now certainly one would not lack material, if only one were capable of
the art of fiction. The genesis of novels and stories is a topic little
studied, but I am inclined to believe that, like the pearls in the
mussels of the river, fiction is a beautiful disease of the brain.
Something, an incident or an experience, or a reflection, gets imbedded,
incrusted, in the properly constituted mind, and becomes the nucleus of a
pearl of romance. Mr. Marion Crawford, in a recent work, describes his
hero, who is a novelist, at work. This young gentleman, by a series of
faults or misfortunes, has himself become a centre of harrowing emotion.
Two young ladies, to each of whom he has been betrothed, are weeping out
their eyes for him, or are kneeling to heaven with despairing cries, or
are hardening their hearts to marry men for whom they "do not care a
bawbee." The hero's aunt has committed a crime; everybody, in fact, is
in despair, when an idea occurs to the hero. Indifferent to the sorrows
of his nearest and dearest, he sits down with his notion and writes a
novel--writes like a person possessed.

He has the proper kind of brain, the nucleus has been dropped into it,
the pearl begins to grow, and to assume prismatic hues. So he is happy,
and even the frozen-out angler might be happy if he could write a novel
in the absence of salmon. Unluckily, my brain is not capable of this
aesthetic malady, and to save my life, or to "milk a fine warm cow rain,"
as the Zulus say, I could not write a novel, or even a short story. About
The Short Story, as they call it, with capital letters, our critical
American cousins have much to say. Its germ, one fancies, is usually an
incident, or a mere anecdote, according to the nature of the author's
brain; this germ becomes either the pearl of a brief _conte_, or the seed
of a stately tree, in three volumes. An author of experience soon finds
out how he should treat his material. One writer informs me that, given
the idea, the germinal idea, it is as easy for him to make a novel out of
it as a tale--as easy, and much more satisfactory and remunerative.
Others, like M. Guy de Maupassant, for example, seem to find their
strength in brevity, in cutting down, not in amplifying; in selecting and
reducing, not in allowing other ideas to group themselves round the
first, other characters to assemble about those who are essential. That
seems to be really the whole philosophy of this matter, concerning which
so many words are expended. The growth of the germinal idea depends on
the nature of an author's talent--he may excel in expansion, or in
reduction; he may be economical, and out of an anecdote may spin the
whole cocoon of a romance; or he may be extravagant, and give a capable
idea away in the briefest form possible.

These ideas may come to a man in many ways, as we said, from a dream,
from a fragmentary experience (as most experiences in life are
fragmentary), from a hint in a newspaper, from a tale told in
conversation. Not long ago, for example, I heard an anecdote out of
which M. Guy de Maupassant could have made the most ghastly, the most
squalid, and the most supernaturally moving of all his _contes_. Indeed,
that is not saying much, as he did not excel in the supernatural. Were
it written in French, it might lie in my lady's chamber, and, as times
go, nobody would be shocked. But, by our curious British conventions,
this tale cannot be told in an English book or magazine. It was not, in
its tendency, immoral; those terrible tales never are. The events were
rather calculated to frighten the hearer into the paths of virtue. When
Mr. Richard Cameron, the founder of the Cameronians, and the godfather of
the Cameronian Regiment, was sent to his parish, he was bidden by Mr.
Peden to "put hell-fire to the tails" of his congregation. This vigorous
expression was well fitted to describe the _conte_ which I have in my
mind (I rather wish I had it not), and which is not to be narrated here,
nor in English.

For a combination of pity and terror, it seemed to me unmatched in the
works of the modern fancy, or in the horrors of modern experience;
whether in experience or in imagination it had its original source. But
even the English authors, who plume themselves on their audacity, or
their realism, or their contempt for "the young person," would not
venture this little romance, much less, then, is a timidly uncorrect pen-
man likely to tempt Mr. Mudie with the _conte_. It is one of two tales,
both told as true, which one would like to be able to narrate in the
language of Moliere. The other is also very good, and has a wonderful
scene with a corpse and a _chapelle ardente_, and a young lady; it is
historical, and of the last generation but one.

Even our frozen strath here has its modern legend, which may be told in
English, and out of which, I am sure, a novelist could make a good short
story, or a pleasant opening chapter of a romance. What is the
mysterious art by which these things are done? What makes the well-told
story seem real, rich with life, actual, engrossing? It is the secret of
genius, of the novelist's art, and the writer who cannot practise the art
might as well try to discover the Philosopher's Stone, or to "harp fish
out of the water." However, let me tell the legend as simply as may be,
and as it was told to me.

The strath runs due north, the river flowing from a great loch to the
Northern sea. All around are low, undulating hills, brown with heather,
and as lonely almost as the Sahara. On the horizon to the south rise the
mountains, Ben this and Ben that, real mountains of beautiful outline,
though no higher than some three thousand feet. Before the country was
divided into moors and forests, tenanted by makers of patent corkscrews,
and boilers of patent soap, before the rivers were distributed into
beats, marked off by white and red posts, there lived over to the south,
under the mountains, a sportsman of athletic frame and adventurous
disposition. His name I have forgotten, but we may call him Dick
Lindsay. It is told of him that he once found a poacher in the forest,
and, being unable to catch the intruder, fired his rifle, not at him, but
in his neighbourhood, whereon the poacher, deliberately kneeling down,
took a long shot at Dick. How the duel ended, and whether either party
flew a flag of truce, history does not record.

At all events, one stormy day in late September, Dick had stalked and
wounded a stag on the hills to the south-east of the strath. Here, if
only one were a novelist, one could weave several pages of valuable copy
out of the stalk. The stag made for the strath here, and Dick, who had
no gillie, but was an independent sportsman of the old school, pursued on
foot. Plunging down the low, birch-clad hills, the stag found the
flooded river before him, black and swollen with rain. He took the
water, crossing by the big pool, which looked almost like a little loch,
tempestuous under a north wind blowing up stream, and covered with small
white, vicious crests. The stag crossed and staggered up the bank, where
he stood panting. It is not a humane thing to leave a deer to die slowly
of a rifle bullet, and Dick, reaching the pool, hesitated not, but threw
off his clothes, took his skene between his teeth, plunged in, and swam
the river.