Stranger Things: The Dustin Experiment

Follow Stranger Things fan favorite Dustin Henderson on a journey that

takes him beyond [Link]'s fall 1985, and Dustin Henderson is
starting his freshman year at Hawkins High School. After the tragedy
at the S

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.
Villon shines out of a cloud of time, and we hear the sound of his
reckless laughter and the music of his tears.
But if the relation between these two moderns and this singing
renegade of the Middle Ages is that of mysterious paternity, between
Baudelaire and Verlaine there is a brotherhood which is as wonderful
as an oriental dream of metempsychosis.
Baudelaire’s verses, read in early youth, so saturated and
possessed the new-born soul of Paul Verlaine that he became more
a reincarnation of Baudelaire than a separate existence. The
passions and the madness of Baudelaire became his own—he heard
the same strange music—saw the same visions. Incarnate of the
mad poet, Verlaine, his second soul, fled a second slave in the
footsteps of the same strange goddess—beauty in decay.
And where one had madly followed, so the other fled, enamoured
of her fatal loveliness, wherever her fickle steps should lead.
Sometimes she would escape them, disappearing in mists and
mysterious darkness, and sometimes they would come upon her
suddenly in glimpses of green light, dancing strange frivolous steps,
and the color of her robes would be mingled rose and mystic blue,
and the halo of her head the phosphor of decay.
And she has led them through strange paths into the dwelling-
place of death, and where love and life live together, for these two
are never separated, and, through many places of terror and delight,
to that ultimate spot, occult, remote, where dwells the soul of
woman.
There the youngest of her slaves found himself one day
outstripping his brother, and saw with living eyes the mystery,—and
thenceforward he was no more Paul Verlaine; he was the prophet
and interpreter of woman.
To him alone has the secret been revealed; to him alone, the
mantle of deceit she wears, the slavish dress of the centuries, is no
concealment. He has seen, has known, and he understands. “The
very worst thing in the world,” says an unknown writer, “is the soul
of a woman.” Forced to inaction, and fed on lies, her principal power,
founded on man’s weakness, curiosity, and the imagination of the
intellect, lead her in many wandering ways. Tasting but few of the
actual joys, the triumphs, and the trials of life, from the harem of
her slavery her fancy has wandered with the winds. In her mind the
unique and fatal experimenter, she has known all crimes, all horrors,
as well as martyrdoms and joys. And this, while her gentle feminine
hands have ministered to suffering, her voice has cheered, her smile
has illumined, and her divine patience has endured.
Consider these lines—their spiritual intuition is the parallel of
Wordsworth in his limpid moods; their knowledge, like a single glow
of summer lightning, illumines all the darkened land as the
glimmering patient light of Bourget’s candle in cycles of
encyclopedics will never do.
Behold the woman!
“Beauté des femmes, leur faiblesse et ces mains pâles,
Qui font souvent le bien et peuvent tout le mal.”
The appealing weakness of women is the first note, invariably
stronger than command—and then the reference to their hands. This
is very characteristic of Verlaine—they haunt him.
“Les chères mains qui furent miennes,
Toutes petites, toutes belles.”
. . . . . .
“Mains en songes—main sur mon âme.”
The last is a very poignant line—and again in “Ariettes
Oubliées,”—
“Le piano que baise une main frêle.”
Then comes the reflection as to the eyes of women, profoundly
true and observant, contained in the last two verses of the first
stanza:—
 “Et ces yeux où plus rien ne reste d’animal
Que juste assez pour dire ‘assez’ aux fureurs mâles!”
Then the next stanza:—
“Et toujours, maternelle endormeuse des râles,
Même quand elle ment—.”
Here is the creature who could be both nurse and courtesan—
concise and convincing classification.
Then he continues relating how, as man as well as poet, he has
vibrated to the clear soprano of
“Cette voix! Matinal
Appel, ou chant bien doux à vêpres, ou frais signal,
Ou beau sanglot qui va mourir au pli des châles!...”
How he has dreamed over the tender sentiment of her twilight
song, and been melted and conquered by the still greater, more
beautiful appeal of the emotional soul for love and understanding,
—“beau sanglot” indeed!
Then comes the wonderful third stanza, and its denunciation of
man’s brutality and selfishness.
“Hommes durs! Vie atroce et laide d’ici-bas!
Ah! que du moins, loins des baisers et des combats,
Quelque chose demeure un peu sur la montagne.”
Here is the appeal for sentiment, for the love of the spirit, choked
in the throats of dumb and suffering women.
“Quelque chose du cœur,” he repeats and persuades, “enfantin et
subtil.”
“Bonté, respect! car qu’est-ce qui nous accompagne,
Et vraiment, quand la mort viendra, que reste-t-il?”
 From him, the convict poet, from this heart rotten with all the sins
of fancy and of deed, bursts this plea—as naive as it is earnest, for
the spiritual in love—for sentiment, the essence of the soul. Strange
anomaly—stranger still that it should be he who has understood.
Three lines more, from an early poem called “Vœu,” of such
condensed significance and biting truth as lacks a parallel.
“O la femme à l’amour câlin et rechauffant,
Douce, pensive et brune, et jamais étonnée,
Et qui parfois vous baise au front, comme un enfant.”
What a portrait, typical and individual—“jamais étonnée,” my
sisters, what an accusation!

. . . . .
Verlaine is dead. The last shred of that ruined soul which has for
years been rotting away in chance Parisian brasseries, has loosened
its hold upon life and slipped into the unknown; but the poetry he
has left behind him, with its sighs and bitter sobbings, and its few
gleams of beauty and of joy, contains the essence of his strange
nature.
Although repudiating the responsibility of the position, he was the
founder and leader of that school of poetic expression which has
most importantly distinguished the end of his century.
Half faun, half satyr, his nature was allied to baseness and brutal
animalism, but possessed a strange and childish naïveté which
remained with him to the last, and a spirit remotely intact in the
chaos of his wayward senses, whence issued songs of matchless
purity and inimitable music.
 Degeneration
By
Alice Morse Earle
 DEGENERATION

I WRITE this paper as a solemn, an earnest warning, an appeal to

the unsuspecting and serene general public not to read Dr. Max
Nordau’s book “Degeneration.” I give this word of admonition with
much the same spirit of despairing yet powerless misery as might
animate the warning of any slave to a despised habit, a hashish-
eater, an opium smoker, an alcoholic inebriate. I have read this book
of Dr. Nordau’s, and through it I am become the unwilling victim of a
most deplorable, most odious, most blighting habit,—that of
searching for degenerates. I do not want or like to do this, but I do
it instinctively, mechanically. The habit has poisoned all the social
relations of my life, has entered into my views of the general public;
it has sapped my delight in novelty, choked my admiration of genius,
deadened my enthusiasm, silenced my opinions; and it has brought
these wretched conditions not only into my regard of matters and
persons of the present times, but retrospectively it has tainted the
glories of history. All this is exceeded by the introspective blight of
the book through exacting a miserable and mortifying self-
examination, which leads to the despairing, the unyielding
conclusion that I am myself a degenerate.
The book is, unfortunately, so explicit in explanation as to lure
every reader to amateur investigation. Indeed, such a vast array of
mental and physical traits are enumerated as stigmata—the marks of
the beast—as to paralyze the thoughtless, and to make the judicious
grieve. Our mental traits we can ofttimes conceal from public view,
our moral traits we always conceal, but many of our physical
characteristics cannot, alas, be wholly hidden. Dr. Nordau
enumerates many physical stigmata, all interesting, but perhaps the
most prominent, most visible one, is the degenerate malformation of
the ear.
 I was present recently, at an interesting function whereat the
subject of the evening was discussion of this book “Degeneration.”
In the course of a brilliant and convincing address one of the
lecturers chanced to name that most hateful and evident stigma, the
ear-mark, so to speak, of the accursed. Though simple were his
words, as subtle as sewer-gas was his poison; as all-pervading and
penetrating as the sandstorm in the desert, it entered every brain in
the room. I speedily and furtively glanced from side to side at my
neighbors’ ears, only to find them regarding mine with expressions
varying from inquisitiveness through surprise and apprehension, to
something closely approaching disgust. After the discussion was
ended, friends advanced to speak with me; they shook hands, not
looking with pleasant greeting into my eyes, but openly staring at
my ears.
Now, that would be necessarily most abhorrent to every one,—to
quote Spenser:—
“For fear lest we like rogues should be reputed
And for eare-marked beastes abroad be bruited.”
And it is specially offensive to me—it would be anyway, for my ears
are not handsome; but worse still must be admitted, they are not
normal. They answer every purpose of hearing and of restraining my
hat from slipping down over my eyes and on my neck, which is all I
have demanded of them hitherto. But now I know that as emblems
of my mental and moral characteristics they are wholly remiss, even
degraded. They are .079 larger than normality; they stand out from
my head at an angle which exhibits 2° too much obtusity; the lobule
displays .17 too little pendulosity; and, worst of all, the fossa
scaphoida of my pinna is basely unconvoluted. I am sore ashamed
of all this. I think of having the twin base betrayers of my
degenerate nature shaved off in spots, and already I tie them close
to my head at night in a feeble attempt at improvement. But I am
not in my callow youth; I fear they have not been bent in the way
they should be inclined, that their degeneracy is irremediable.
 It is not through physical stigmata alone that I find myself
branded. I find that I am impulsive, I have a predilection for inane
reverie, and for search for the bases of phenomena—all sad traits.
Worst of all, I have “the irresistible desire of the degenerate to
accumulate useless trifles.” Nordau says, “It is a stigmata of
degeneration, and has had invented for it the name oniomania or
buying craze. The oniomaniac is simply unable to pass by any
lumber without feeling an impulse to acquire.” When I read that
sentence I glanced guiltily at my cabinets of old china—well, I could
use it on the table and thus make it unstigmatic; at my Dutch silver
—I might melt it up and sell it; my books, my autographs, my
photographs, all may find some excuse; but how can I palliate my
book-plates, or ever live down having gone for a year through every
village, city, and town where I chanced or sought to wander, asking
at every jeweller’s, silversmith’s, and watch-repairer’s, “Have you any
bridges of old verge watches?” I fear those watch-bridges stamp me
an oniomaniac. And am I wholly free from Lombroso’s graphomania?
Have I not an insane desire to write? I conceal my obsession, but it
ever influences me. I may confess also (since I confess at all) that I
have rupophobia (fear of dirt), iophobia (fear of poison), nosophobia
(fear of sickness), belenophobia (fear of needles—especially on the
floor), and one or two other wretched obsessions, particularly an
inordinate love for animals, upon which I had hitherto rather bridled
as the mark of a tender nature.
But let me dwell no more on my own peculiar stigmata, but show
how—to paraphrase Prior:
“All earth is by the ears together
Since first that horrid book come hither.”
I haunt photograph shops, look over the frontispieces of
illustrated magazines, and various collections of likenesses, until I
am wearied to the core of looking at the ears of prominent persons,
and it brings forth a sense of profound, of heartfelt gratitude that
Daguerre was not born till this century, almost till our own day, and
that thus the ears of centuries of countless geniuses are disguised in
their counterfeit presentments by the meaningless conventionalities
of the artist’s brush, which represent in peaceful and happy
monotony and perfection that unfortunate, that abhorred member. I
plainly see, too, what the result of all this will be. I picture to myself
the poet of the future, hooded, veiled, to conceal his features; robed
in flowing drapery to cover his feet; with his hands in a muff; living
alone to hide his personal habits; studiously avoiding the subject of
his health; painstaking in showing no decided preferences; void of
passion lest he be deemed erotic; void of epigram or humor lest his
wit be taken as earnest; until I sigh mournfully for the time spoken
of in Genesis, when “there was no more earing.”
I will not sign my name to this heartfelt communication, since it
would have no weight as the cognomen of either a genius or a
mattoid, and perhaps the cry of warning will be more heeded from a
suffering incognito. Besides, I do not wish to be shunned by my
fellow-creatures as one who is determined to know their innermost
worst, with as cruel a mental insistence, and with a method genetic
to that employed by the Inquisition in penetrating the brain of its
victims by pouring boiling oil in the ears. Nor am I willing to have
such an odious position in society that none of my friends will visit
me, or come in my presence unless fortified with ear-muffs against
my insinuating gaze.
The Pleasures of Historiography
By
Alice Morse Earle
 THE PLEASURES OF HISTORIOGRAPHY

THE PLEASURES OF THE CHASE

I AM an historiographer; and being desirous and assiduous of

accuracy in my statements, I am given to recourse to first sources
of authority, to the fountain springs of great events; I am a
scientifically historical Gradgrind; I build up my histories inductively
from facts by the most approved scientific processes. And I can say
with feeling and with emphasis, in the words of Sir Thomas Browne:
“Sure, a great deal of conscience goes into the making of a history.”
A few days ago the need of exact knowledge upon a certain point
in the criminal history of the colonies determined me to seek my
information in the most unerring and unimpeachable historical
records we have, those of the Criminal Court. Those I sought were
of a large city, I might say of Chicago, only she has no colonial
records; so I frankly reveal that I wished to search the records of the
criminal courts of New Amsterdam.
Now I had read a score of times, and heard a score of times more
in the glibly-rounded sentences of elegant historical lectures,
patriotic addresses, commemorative “papers” of patriotic-hereditary
societies, that to the municipal honor of that very large frog in a
puddle, viz.: New York, which grew out of the pollywog New
Amsterdam, all records of colonial times of that city were still
preserved, were cherished as sacred script in that fitting cabinet, the
venerable Hall of Records in the City Hall Park. Thus introduced, I
ventured to its gates.
It is an ancient, dingy building, whose opening portals thrust you
upon a cage-like partition strongly suggestive of a menagerie, and
also olfactorily suggestive of the menageries’ accompaniment, “an
ancient and a fish-like”—nay, more, a bird- and beast-like smell.
A doorway on either side of the cage lead to various desks and
rooms, and enclosures and closets, all labelled with well-worn signs;
and as I glanced bewildered from placard to placard, from sign to
sign, there approached that blessed and gallant metropolitan engine
for the succor of feminine ignorance, incapacity, and weakness—a
policeman. Gladly did I follow in his sturdy wake to the office of the
Clerk of Records, who would know all about it. Alas! he was out. A
callow, inky youth, his deputy, had never heard of any Dutch
records, and didn’t believe there were any in New York. My
policeman had vanished. The youth leaned out of his latticed
window, pointed round a corner to an enclosed office: “Go ask him,
he can tell you.” I went and asked him; for a third time I told my
tale, already rehearsed to policeman and youth. “I wish to see the
colonial records of the criminal courts in New York in the
seventeenth century. Part are in Dutch. I hear they have been
translated, and that the English translation is here, for the use of the
public. If this is not so, I wish to see the original Dutch and English
records from the year 1650 to 1700.”
It is impossible to overstate the expression of blank surprise and
incredulity with which this inquiry was greeted. The official
vouchsafed one curt answer: “I never heard of such a thing as a
Dutch trial in the criminal courts of New York, and I don’t believe
there ever was one. If so, he will know.”
“He” was a haven, for his office was labelled Satisfaction—and he
was satisfactory. After a fourth explanation of my desires, he
answered me with the elaborately patient and compassionate
politeness usually employed by men in business and public offices to
a woman’s apparently useless inquiries. He said gently: “Only deeds
and transfers are here in the Hall of Records; those records you wish
to see are all in the County Clerk’s office, over there.”
 Over there was the court-house of Tweed’s inglorious fame.
Within the said office four transfers, from book-keeper to messenger,
to civil clerk, to County Clerk, found me, after four more dogged
repetitions, encaged myself in a dingy wire prison, surrounded by
millions of compartments with papers and deeds, and flanked by
scores of spittoons. Errand boys, messengers, aged porters, young
attorneys, came and went, papers were given and received with
mechanical rapidity and precision by the monarch of the cage, an
elderly Irishman, smooth-shaven, massive-featured, inscrutable,
blank of expression, who finally turned to me with civil indifference.
But this was not the right place for me to come; those records were
at the court-house at Ninth Street, where the criminal courts were
held. I patiently prepared to assail the Ninth Street abode of Themis,
not without an unworthy suspicion that this Hibernian Sphinx sent
me there to get rid of me. But a gentleman-like and eavesdropping
bystander proffered his advice: “Those records you want are in the
office of the Clerk of the Court of Common Pleas, in the third story
of this building.” And he thrust me with speed in the ascending
elevator. The room pointed out to me as my goal proved to be the
Supreme Court, a scene of peaceful dignity, but, alas, there was no
such officer anywhere as the Clerk of the Court of Common Pleas.
Gloomily turning to the Surrogate’s office to examine the will of this
Dutch criminal whom I was running to earth, mine eyes encountered
this sign: Office of the Court of Common Pleas. Certainly this was
the office and the records were here, though the clerk was not.
Other clerks there were; to the most urbane for the tenth time I told
my tale, and finally was shown the records. “These are in Dutch,” I
said; “will you show me the English translation?” “Are they in
Dutch?” he answered with some animation. “I never knew that. I
have been here twenty years, and no one has ever asked to see
them before.”
Of course there was no English translation. I can read and
translate printed Dutch with ease; but seventeenth century Dutch
differs more from modern Dutch than does old French from the
French of to-day. Add to this the unique variations in spelling of the
Dutch clerks, the curious chirography, the faded ink, and no
antiquary will be surprised to learn that an hour had passed ere I
had read enough of those records to learn that they were wholly civil
cases, boundary disputes, adjustment cases, etc. I wearily rose to
leave, when a newly-arrived person of authority said airily: “I can tell
you all about those old Criminal Court records. They are all over in
the City Hall, in the office of the Superintendent of City Affairs.” I
trust I showed becoming credulity and gratitude.
I walked out into the beautiful little park, aglow with beds of
radiant scarlet and yellow tulips, that remembered and significantly
commemorated their Holland ancestors and the old Dutch-American
town, even if the city’s servants knew them not; and I strolled under
the trees and breathed with delight the fresh air of heaven; for
wherever men congregate in offices, there ventilation is as naught.
I sought the Superintendent’s office. To him, ignominiously but
cheerfully ensconced in the cellar-like basement, I descended, where
glimmered a light so dim, so humid, that I had a sense of being in
subaqueous rather than subterranean depths, and I was struck with
the civic humor that placed the Superintendent subter omnia.
He really knew nothing about these records, but there was a man
in the Library who would know. Through underground tunnels and
cemented passages and up a narrow staircase, I reached the noble
aboveground abode of our municipal corporation.
Here all was radiant with prosperity. No lean and hungry race
filled those corridors and chambers; jocund and ruddy were all, as
were our city fathers of yore who drank vast tuns of sack-posset and
ale. Well may we say when on those men and on these we gaze:
Nobly wert thou named Manhattan!—the place where all drank
together!
Mighty is Manhattan and great even the reflection of her power.
Neither poverty-stricken nor meagre of flesh am I, but I shrank into
humble insignificance before those well-fed aggrandizations of the
city’s glory and prosperity who bourgeoned through the corridors of
our modern Stadt Huys; and I fain would have saluted them with
respectful mien and words as of yore as “Most Worshipful, Most
Prudent, and Very Discreet, their High Mightinesses,”—not
Burgomasters and Schepens, but Aldermen and Councilmen,—but
the tame conventionalities of modern life kept me silent.
In the Library the sought-for man sent me to the Clerk of the
Common Council, who in turn bade me be seated while he lured
from an adjoining “closet,” as old Pepys called his office, one who
would be glad to tell me all about everything relating to those
ancient days.
Here was something tangible. Glad to tell me! In truth he was.
Never have I seen such a passion for talking. Forth poured a flood of
elaborate Milesian eloquence, in which intricate suggestions, noble
patriotic sentiments, ardent historical interest, warm sympathy in my
researches, and unbounded satisfaction and glowing pride over New
York’s honorable preservation of the records of her ancestors all
joined. Nevertheless and notwithstanding, when I ran my fat but sly
and agile political fox to earth, and made him answer me directly, I
simmered down merely this one solid fact: “If ye go to Mr. De
Lancy’s office in the Vanderbilt Building, he can tell ye where thim
ricords is, an’ no one ilse in this city can.”
I tendered as floriated and declamatory a farewell expression of
gratitude as my dull tongue could command to my city authority,
who was, I am led to believe from the tablet on the office from
which he emerged, a common councilman, but who might have
been a score of glorious aldermen distilled and expressed and
condensed into one, so rotund, so ruby-colored, so shining, so truly
grand was he, so elegant, albeit loose, of attire, so glittering with
gold and precious stones. As I thanked him in phrases sadly
etiolated in comparison with his own glowing pauses, “Madam,” said
he, “are you satisfied, and may I ask your name and residence?”
“You may,” said I, “I came to study history, and I was sent to the
Satisfaction Clerk, and I found satisfaction, though not in the wonted
legal form.” “But ye haven’t told me yer name,” said he. “I have not,”
said I; “good day.”
The Bureau of Literary Revision
By
Alice Morse Earle
 THE BUREAU OF LITERARY REVISION

O UR beloved friend Charles Lamb once wrote of his Essays of

Elia:—
“One of these professors, on my complaining that these little
sketches of mine were anything but methodical, and that I was
unable to make them otherwise, kindly offered to instruct me on the
method by which the young gentlemen in his seminary were taught
to compose English themes.”
When, with the solemn thoughts brought to each soul at the “turn
of the year,” we recount to ourselves our many mercies, let us never
fail to remember with gratitude that the magnanimous offer of that
seminary professor was never accepted.
We do not have to wait to-day for chance offers from solemn
professors of instruction and revision in literary composition; “the
method by which young gentlemen in the seminary are taught to
compose” is thrust upon us at every hand. “Bureaus of revision” and
“Offices of literary criticism” abound and thrive and become opulent
through examining, correcting, and revising the work of confiding
authors. We are told with pride that in one bureau alone three
thousand manuscripts a year were thus revised. Among those three
thousand young fledglings of authors there may not have been a
Charles Lamb, but the lamentable thought also will arise that there
may have been a Charles Lamb, and that his unmethodical little
“sketches” may have been pruned or amplified, or arranged and
revised till they proved true “English themes.”
There is a wearying monotony in the make-up of many of our
periodicals, some of those even of large circulation. There is a lack
of literary color, a precise and proper formation of each sentence,
and a regularity of ensemble which is certainly grammatical but is
fully as uninteresting as grammar. A surfeit of these exactly formal
“English themes” has made the gasping public turn to some of our
literary freaks and comets with a sensation as if seeking an
inspiration of fresh air after mental smothering.
I attribute this too frequent monotony, and even stultification of
composition, to the “literary reviser”—the trail of the serpent is over
all our press.
And what does this literary revision offer for the large fees paid?
One alleged benefit is the correction of punctuation. It certainly
performs this service; but the editor and proofreader in any
responsible publishing-house will, as a duty, correct with precision
the punctuation of any paper or book printed by the house. A benefit
alleged by one circular is “a pruning of too riotous imagination.” I
groaned aloud as I read this threat. Too riotous imagination to-day!
when we long for imagination and long in vain; when a wooden
realism thrusts its angular outlines in our faces from every printed
page. “To curb the use of adjectives” is another of the reviser’s
duties. The meagre style too often seen of late may arise from this
curbing.
The most astonishing aspect of this bureau of revision is shown in
the patience with which authors endure its devastations. They
confidingly send into this machine the tenderly nourished children of
their brains, dressed with natural affection in all the frills and ruffles
of rhetoric, and receive them home again with ornaments torn away,
laid in a strait-jacket which has been cut with rigid uniformity, and
made with mathematical precision—and yet they kiss the rod that
turned the natural children of their brains into wretched little
automatons.
I would not judge all revision bureaus by one; but I must give my
experience at the hands of a very reputable one. I had written four
books of more than average sale, and had been ever commended by
the press for my grammatical construction, when I sent to a bureau
for criticism a short magazine-paper. It was returned to me full of
very large and legible corrections—or rather alterations such as
these: Where I wrote of my heroine being dressed in, etc., my
reviser placed gowned in; where I wrote the little child, the reviser
altered to the young babe; where I said nothing happened after this,
to my horror, in heroic blue-pencilled letters, I read my pet aversion,
nothing transpired. Where a compound sentence contained several
clauses with verbs in the past tense, all dependent clauses were
made participial in form; not always to the advantage in elegance,
never of moment or indeed of real difference in grammatical
construction.
I must confess that I did not send to this bureau my real name,
as palpably too well known to men of literary ilk. My three dollars’
worth of advice was contained in a single sentence: “Your style is
fair, but commonplace; if you practise literary composition you may
succeed; but this article is, in our judgment, not salable.”
I had the pleasure of sending the paper immediately to a well-
known magazine and receiving therefrom in payment a check for
fifty dollars.
Mr. Meredith and his Aminta
By
Lewis E. Gates
 MR. MEREDITH AND HIS AMINTA

I N his latest book the choppiness of Mr. Meredith’s style and the
restless tacking of his method are as great as ever, and those
worthy people who delight in the smooth seas and the steady
zephyrs of ordinary English fiction will find their experience of “Lord
Ormont and his Aminta” very much of a stormy channel-passage.
But to people with sound nerves and adventurous spirits the
experience is sure to be bracing and exhilarating. Perhaps the most
surprising single effect that you get from “Lord Ormont” is that of
the tingling vitality of the author. You can hardly realize while
reading the book that you have to do with a writer who has been for
forty years a tireless worker in literature, and who published his first
venture in fiction two years before George Eliot’s first story. The style
in “Lord Ormont” has all the audacity of a first rebellion against
tradition and convention; the sentences rush forward in all possible
rhythms except the languorous ones of the dilettante or the “faultily
faultless” ones of the precisian or pedant; the imagination is
restlessly self-assertive in its embodiment of every abstract idea in
an image for eye or for ear; the tone is almost boisterous in its
hilarity or brusqueness; and finally the book sounds everywhere the
note of the future, and prophesies change and new social conditions
without a touch of misgiving or regret. Perhaps in no earlier work
has Mr. Meredith been so aggressive and, at the same time, so
confident and buoyant.
As for Mr. Meredith’s technique, it remains in the new book
substantially what it has always been, and many of the general
effects he produces are familiar to his admirers and delightful in their
recurrence. Where save in Mr. Meredith’s fiction can there be found
such brilliance of surface? such vividness of dramatic portrayal? Or at
any rate where is vividness so reconciled with suggestiveness of
interpretation? concrete beauty with abstract truth? In all his novels
he sends our imaginations flashing over the surface of some portion
of life; he calls up before us this portion of life in all its fine contrasts
of color and form, of storm and sunshine, of mid-day and moonlight;
and yet at the same time he constrains us to pierce below the
surface and to understand intuitively why the drama moves this way
or that, what forces are in conflict, what passions are flushing or
blanching the cheek, what fancies or ideals are making the eyes
dream on a distant goal.
More nearly than any other living novelist, Mr. Meredith succeeds
in overcoming the difficulties forced on the writer of fiction by the
double appeal of life. Life is a pageant and life is a problem; it smites
on the senses and allures the imagination, but it also challenges the
intellect; it has power and beauty, but it has also significance. Now
most writers of fiction who reveal to us the inner meaning of life
allow its beauty and power to fade into shadowy vagueness; and
those who give us the dramatic value of life too often lack
penetration and philosophic insight. One of Mr. Meredith’s greatest
claims to distinction lies in the fact that he, better than any other
English novelist, has reconciled this conflict between vividness of
portrayal and depth of interpretation. He has grasped English life in
all its enormous range and mass and complexity; he has flashed it
before us in all its splendid vividness for eye and ear and
imagination; and at the same time he has made it suggestive to
thought, has comprehended it through and through in its subtlest
relations, and in portraying it has breathed into it the breath of a
philosophical spirit.
If we analyze Mr. Meredith’s pages carefully, we find very few of
those long disquisitions on character with which the pages of a
psychological novelist are covered. He deals almost as constantly
with acts, with dialogue, with what meets the senses, the eye and
the ear, as the elder Dumas. It is a mimic world of images he gives,
not a globe of the earth with scientific terms and black marks on
yellow pasteboard. He is always primarily an artist, not a
psychologist or a descriptive sociologist. Too often when we finish
one of George Eliot’s stories we feel that she has explained her
characters so exhaustively that we should not know them if we met
them on the street. We have had so much to do with their ganglia
and their nervous systems, and with the ashes of their ancestors,
that we have little notion of the characters as actual living people. If
a psychological novelist were to write out a professional analysis of
one’s best friend, it may fairly be doubted whether one would
recognize the description. In fact, in real life it is only criminals
whom we are expected to recognize by anthropometric memoranda,
—by the length of the index finger, the breadth of the ear, the
distance between the eyes, and by the lines on the finger-tips.
Now Mr. Meredith avoids all anthropometric statistics and
chemical analysis, and gives us the very counterfeit presentment of
men and women as in actual life they go visibly and audibly past us;
and yet he so seizes his moments for portraiture that the soul, the
inner life, the character, photographs itself on the retina of a
sensitive on-looker like a composite picture. He makes all his
characters and scenes, and all the life he portrays, instinct with
truth; and yet this truth is implicit; the author very rarely indulges in
pretentious talk on these topics. For the most part, he is apparently
busy putting before us the picturesque aspects of life and its
dramatic moments.
This fondness of his for brilliance of surface, for vividness of
portrayal, accounts for many peculiarities of Mr. Meredith’s method,
—among them for the use of what may be termed Meredith mosaic.
His opening chapters are nearly always curious composites, made up
of dozens of little speeches, little acts, little scenes, collected from a
series of years, and fitted together into a more or less homogeneous
whole. He dislikes formal exposition; he instinctively shrinks from
discoursing through wearisome pages on the early lives of the actors
in his story, on the formative influences, for example, which had
moulded the characters of Aminta and Weyburn up to the moment
when the continuous action of “Lord Ormont” begins. Yet the “fuller
portraiture” requires that this knowledge be in some way ensured to
his readers. Hence he puts before us such skilfully chosen bits of
Aminta’s and Weyburn’s early lives, that while our imaginations are
always kept busy with words and tones and acts and looks, we are
at the same time inveigled into a knowledge of minds and hearts
and motives. Chapters constructed on this plan are curiously without
continuity of action, and often seem puzzling in their
fragmentariness. But they combine, in an unusual degree, vividness
of portrayal with suggestiveness of interpretation.
Another means by which Mr. Meredith secures his brilliance of
surface, his glowing color, is through his lavish use of figures. Mr.
Meredith is a poet subdued by the spirit of his age to work in its
most popular form, the novel; but even in prose his imagination will
not be gainsaid, and everywhere we find in his style the sensuous
concreteness and symbolism of poetry. “Absent or present, she was
round him like the hills of a valley. She was round his thoughts—
caged them; however high, however far they flew, they were
conscious of her.” ... “Aminta drove her questioning heart as a vessel
across blank circles of sea where there was nothing save the solitary
heart for answer.” In no other contemporary English fiction do we
come upon passages like these, and realize with a sudden pang of
delight that we are in the region of poetry where imaginative beauty
is an end in itself.
Very often, of old, it was Nature that enticed Mr. Meredith into
these ravishing escapades; in “Lord Ormont” he seems pretty nearly
to have broken with Nature. Yet, now and then, he puts before us a
bit of the outside world with a compression of phrase, a brilliance of
technique, and an imaginative atmosphere, not easily to be
matched.
“A wind was rising. The trees gave their swish of
leaves, the river darkened the patch of wrinkles, the
bordering flags amid the reed-blades dipped and
streamed....
 “The trees were bending, the water hissing, the
grasses all this way and that, like the hands of a
delirious people in surges of wreck....
“Thames played round them on his pastoral pipes.
Bee-note and woodside blackbird, and meadow cow,
and the leap of the fish of the silver rolling rings,
composed the music.”
But often as Mr. Meredith’s imagination seeks and realizes the
beautiful, it still more often works in the grotesque, and decks out
his subject with arabesque detail. His satirical comment on the life
he portrays finds its way to the reader through the constant
innuendoes of figurative language.
“She probably regarded the wedding by law as the
end a woman has to aim at, and is annihilated by
hitting; one flash of success and then extinction, like a
boy’s cracker on the pavement....
“Thither he walked, a few minutes after noon,
prepared for cattishness.... He would have to crush her
if she humped and spat, and he hoped to be allowed
to do it gently.... Lady Charlotte put on her hump of
the feline defensive; then his batteries opened fire and
hers barked back on him.”
That Mr. Meredith often overworks these grotesque figures even
his warmest admirers must admit. There is a passage in the opening
chapter of “Beauchamp’s Career,” where for two pages he describes
the creation of an artificial war-panic under the figure of “a
deliberate saddling of our ancient nightmare of Invasion.” Before Mr.
Meredith consents to have done with this figure, even his most
obsequious admirers must be desolated at his persistence. One is
tempted to borrow the figure, and to call this kind of writing Mr.
Meredith’s nightmare style, when a figure like a nightmare gets the
bit in its teeth and goes racing across country with the author madly
grimacing on its back.
In point of fact, the imaginative or figurative quality of his style is
probably what costs Mr. Meredith most readers. His perpetually
shifting brilliances prove very wearisome to certain eyes. He is too
much of a flash-light, or has too much of the flourish of a Roman
candle, for those who pride themselves on their devotion to the
steady effulgence of the petroleum evening-lamp. Hazlitt used to tell
people who objected to Spenser’s “Faery Queen” on the ground of
the allegory, that, after all, the poetry was good poetry and the
allegory would not bite them. But if you similarly urge upon the
objectors to Mr. Meredith’s style, that a story of his is too great to be
neglected because of mere questions of phrasing, they are very
likely to tell you that they cannot see the story for the glare of the
style; just there lies their point.
Undoubtedly, at times, Mr. Meredith seems glaringly wilful in his
rejection of ordinary rhetorical canons; there is something, too, of a
flourish in his eccentricity; and often, apparently out of sheer
bravado, he inserts in his stories rollickingly grotesque passages, or
throws at the critics long sentences full of the clash of metaphors.
One may fancy his exclaiming with Browning,—
“Well, British public, ye that like me not,
(God love you!) and will have your proper laugh
At the dark question, laugh it! I laugh first.”
But after all, isn’t he right in maintaining his individuality against all-
comers? Can any one who understands the true nature of an
individual style and its self-revealing power, wish Mr. Meredith’s style
less racy, less figurative, less original? Surely, words and phrases
that bear the impress of a nature like Mr. Meredith’s are better worth
while than those that have become smooth and shiny with
conventional use,—always providing that the metal be twenty-carats
fine. The intimacy of the relation that Mr. Meredith’s style makes
possible between ordinary folk and a great and original personality is
something that cannot be too highly prized in these days of
conventionality and democratic averages. The words of most writers
now-a-days give us no clew to their individualities. “Tête-à-tête with
Lady Duberly?” exclaims the man in the play. “Nay, sir, tête-à-tête
with ten-thousand people.” Private ownership in words and phrases
seems in danger of becoming, even more speedily than private
ownership in land, a thing of the past. The distinction of Mr.
Meredith’s style is something to be devoutly grateful for. One would
infinitely rather have a notion of the world as it gives an account of
itself in Mr. Meredith’s mind, than a conventional scheme of things
drawn out in the stereotyped phrases of the rhetorician.
Possibly, however, there is one sound reason for wishing that Mr.
Meredith would be just a little less insistent on differences, and
would now and then “mitigate the rancor of his tongue;” that reason
is based on the fear that in this stupid world of ours compromise and
conventionality are needed to secure any adequate hearing. It
seems a great pity that so many people should be frightened away
from Mr. Meredith’s work by its mannerism, and should be oblivious
to some of the most suggestive current criticism of modern life. To
Americans it seems specially to be regretted that English people
should be so little receptive of the ideas of the most comprehensive
and the least insular of their novelists. Mr. Meredith has grasped
English life in its whole range and in all its vast complexity. He has
dealt with the high and the low, with rustic and cockney, with
plebeian and aristocrat, with the world of letters and the world of art
and the world of fashion, with the modern “conquerors” of social
power and position, and with the hereditarily great. All this vast
range of life he has portrayed with equal vividness and with the
same unfailing sympathy and insight; and yet his point of view is
always curiously beyond the radius of the British Isles, and many of
his implications are by no means favorable to the present
organization of English social and political life. Of course, it may be
this very lack of insularity that prevents a better understanding
between him and his public. Detachment on his part may make
attachment on their part impossible. And yet this ought not to be so;
for despite his occasional severities and the all-pervading
independence and individuality of his tone, no one has loved English
life more heartily, studied it more painstakingly, or represented it
more patriotically. Indeed, certain of its important aspects can be
found adequately portrayed only in Mr. Meredith’s pages; for
example, the genuine irresponsibleness of the most brilliant English
life. No other novels offer us such pictures of the world of the
luxuriously idle and systematically frivolous, of the habits and homes
of the people who have never been wont to give an account of
themselves to others, who have made idling into a fine art, and feel
that the land exists for them to shoot over, and the sea for them to
sail on in yachts. The so-called society-novelist succeeds admirably
with the gowns and the etiquette of this region, but gives us for its
inhabitants a lamentable lot of insipidities. But Mr. Meredith’s
aristocrats have brains as well as deportment and decorations; they
have the mental and moral idiom, the wit and the culture and the
weight of men of birth and position, their prejudices, too, and
perversities. That some wildness and even rankness of style should
keep the British public from enjoying Mr. Meredith’s vigorous and
sympathetic studies of its idolized “upper classes” seems strange;
and even more regrettable than strange it seems to those who find
running all through Mr. Meredith’s patriotic portrayal subtle
insinuations of a criticism of English life most uninsular in its tenor
and most salutary in its drift.
As to the precise value of the lesson latent in “Lord Ormont,”
there is, of course, much dubious questioning possible. The points at
issue, however, are of a kind on which perhaps only the Ulysses of
the matrimonial ocean, “much-experienced men” in the storms and
sunshine of married life, are in a condition to pronounce.
Nevertheless ordinary people may at least admire the conscientious
care with which Mr. Meredith has safeguarded his dangerous advice
and his somewhat revolutionary plea for the freedom of woman. His
preceding novel, “One of our Conquerors,” was from first to last a
strenuously faithful study of the penalties that follow infringement of
social conventions in the matter of marriage. The book might have
been named “Mrs. Burman’s Revenge.” Mrs. Burman concentrated in
her unprepossessing person all the mighty forces of prejudice which
the society of the western world puts into play to protect one of its
sacred institutions, marriage. Poor Nataly, who had ventured after
happiness outside of conventional limits, lost happiness and finally
life itself solely through her agonizingly persistent consciousness of
her false adjustment to her social environment. She had built her
house below the level of the dikes, to use Weyburn’s metaphor, and
the ever-present danger wore upon her and sapped her life.
Having thus set forth with the elaborateness of a three-volume
novel, and with the utmost power of his imagination, the almost
resistless might of social conventions, their importance, and the
danger of defying them, Mr. Meredith in his last book ventures to
plead for the individual against society, and to assert the right of the
individual occasionally to rebel against a blindly tyrannizing
convention. “Laws are necessary instruments of the majority; but
when they grind the sane human being to dust for their
maintenance, their enthronement is the rule of the savage’s old
deity, sniffing blood-sacrifice.”
The case of immolation that Mr. Meredith studies is meant,
despite some very special features, to be typical. The veteran Lord
Ormont stands as the representative, the most polished and
prepossessing representative possible, of the class of men for whom
woman is still merely the daintiest, the most exquisite toy that a
benevolent Providence has created for the delectation of the sons of
Adam. Weyburn is the ideal modern man of “spiritual valiancy,” every
whit as vigorous and virile as Lord Ormont, but mentally and morally
of immeasurably greater flexibility, and keenly alive to the needs of
his time and the signs of social change. He, too, is doubtless meant
to be a type,—so far as Mr. Meredith allows himself in character-
drawing the somewhat dangerous luxury of types; he is to be taken
as the most efficient possible member of a modern social
organization, where the standards of individual excellence are fixed,
not primarily by the organism’s need of defence against external
foes, but by what is requisite for the inner expansion and peaceful
evolution of society. Aminta, “the most beautiful woman of her time,”
has been half-secretly married to Lord Ormont in the Spanish
legation at Madrid, after a few weeks of travelling courtship;
forthwith she has become in his eyes his Aminta, his lovely Xarifa,
his beautiful slave, whom his soul delighteth to honor,—with ever a
due sense of the make-believe character of her sovereignty and with
a changelessly cynical conviction of the essential inferiority of the
feminine nature. From his “knightly amatory” adulation, from the
caressing glances of his “old-world eye upon women,” from his
“massive selfishness and icy inaccessibility to emotion,” Aminta
finally revolts, and takes refuge with Weyburn because with him she
finds “comprehension,” “encouragement,” “life and air,” freedom to
“use her qualities.” “His need and her need rushed together
somewhere down the skies.”
Doubtless, all this seems dangerously near the old doctrine of
elective affinities, on which organized society has never looked
kindly. But once more we cannot but admire the care with which Mr.
Meredith has limited his acceptance and recommendation of the
principle. If it is to be operative only in a society in which a
schoolmaster of spiritual valiancy is the popular hero, the ideal of
manhood, and in which the most beautiful women of their time
desert famous military leaders to become part-owners in boarding-
schools, Mr. Meredith can hardly be accused of recommending very
serious or far-reaching changes in the present state of the marriage
contract.
Whatever one may think of the special moral of the book, the
nobly optimistic tone of the whole is inspiriting. Mr. Meredith’s
vigorous optimism and his suggestion of endless vistas of social
progress contrast curiously with Mr. Hardy’s harping on the age of
the earth, Druidical ruins, and the irony of a cruel Nature. Mr.
Meredith, like his own Weyburn, is “one of the lovers of life, beautiful
to behold, when we spy into them; generally their aspect is an
enlivenment, whatever may be the carving of their features,” or, we