Advertising the Climax

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

THE devices to which the writer of today resorts for securing a proper emotional attitude toward a crisis remind one rather strongly of the artifices of the melodramas of cheap theatres. In these there is a general tendency of the minor characters to explain at considerable length what a truly heroic hero their particular hero is ; and when he perforins any deed of valor or self-sacrifice or magnanimity, the whole company is quite obtrusively overcome with admiration. The current novelist approaches a climax in the same fashion, carefully providing some kind of explanatory chorus whose business it is to make sure that the public shall not fail to realize the impressiveness or the strangeness or the pathos.

The methods of doing this differ widely. In the old days the characters themselves frankly called our attention to what they wished us to notice. “ Lucy says,” observes Miss Byron, describing an agitating scene in which she took part, " that she never saw me appear more to my advantage ; ” but few modern writers are so ingenuous as Richardson, and generally we receive such information less directly, though no less surely. When anything approaching a climax is in prospect, Mr. Henry James becomes unusually microscopic, and Mr. Howells provides relatives and friends to talk the situation over and impress it upon the reader. When the Lady of the Aroostook finds herself the only woman on board the vessel, we are informed through the mouths of the captain, two fellow passengers, an aunt, a great-uncle, a village minister, and still another aunt that the situation is peculiar. It is perhaps not surprising to find Mr. Richard Harding Davis checking the course of a whole revolution, — to be sure it was only a South American revolution, but still it had some momentum, — that we may realize the impressiveness of his young soldier lying dead in the stately dining hall; and Mrs. Deland, having made her hero explain to his unsuspecting and astonished wife that their marriage is a failure, and that on the very highest moral grounds they must instantly seek a divorce, pauses at the climax of the situation to remark that “it was a strange scene.” Surely even in Oklahoma such marital experiences cannot be so common that any reader would be in danger of mistaking this for an every-day occurrence.

And what makes this habit of our authors peculiarly irritating is its entire ineffectiveness ; for, with the natural perversity of human nature, we persist in not being impressed with what is so carefully pointed out to us. Any reader will admit that the scenes which live longest in his memory are not those which have been pointed out with guideboard and finger-post. Fancy one of the Drumtochty villagers dying with no more in the way of a chorus about his bed than Dame Quickly ; yet who will ever forget that Falstaff “ babbled o’ green fields ” as the shadows closed in around him? Would Beatrix Esmond coming down the dark old staircase, with the candle gleaming on her bravery of scarlet ribbon and tiny high-heeled shoes, haunt us as she does, had Thackeray devoted several pages to assuring us of the picturesqueness of the scene ? Or would even the adventures of the muchenduring Ulysses have lived, had they been set forth in modern style, with conscious and conscientious attention to dramatic effect ?

In this tendency, I am inclined to think, both author and reader are the victims of our Zeitgeist. This is an age of introspection and self-consciousness, and writers cannot escape the common mood. Inspiration is apt to disappear when examined under the microscope; ami then what is left but to elaborate details, and make sure that the reader knows at least what was intended ? Most of us find it difficult to lose ourselves in the genuine emotions of actual life. How, then, can we expect the writer to forget himself in the phantom woes of an imagined world ? It is too much to ask. And yet — this is an age of experiment, too. If only some enterprising author would at least assume unconsciousness, and, merely telling his story, leave us to discover what he has attempted and how he has succeeded, with what astonished relief we should welcome him !