Magna Pars Fui

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

I WONDER if other readers find the autobiographic novel as unsatisfactory as I do. Probably but few, if any, to judge by the enormous currency which many books written in that form attain. When I have finished reading one such, however entertaining and engrossing, I lay it by with a certain sense of having been disappointed and half defrauded of the interest and excitement which I felt I had a right to expect from the subject, the epoch, and the circumstances concomitant with the action.

There is no veil of secrecy that can conceal from the reader the conclusion of the autobiographic novel. The spectator in the theatre, witnessing even a standard sensational melodrama, may always have in reserve his doubts whether the conventional scheme of rehabilitations and retributions may not be changed ultimately into an unexpected tragic plan, and the virtuous hero sink at last a victim into the evil snares which are spread for him according to regulation. But when the hero lives to tell the tale of his own exploits, the reader can have no misgivings as to the outcome of any peril or conflict; the narrator, although disheartened or damaged for the time, must have pulled safely through, or he could not now be recounting his triumphant steps.

True, we still press on from chapter to chapter with a natural interest to learn how many more dangers and difficulties are to present themselves, of just what nature they are to be, and by what hairbreadth escapes safety from them is to be won; but of their actual outcome there can be no question, while also the general tone and temper of the narrative enlighten us as to whether the conclusion of the whole matter was bright, peaceful, and happy, or darkened by permanent regrets and sufferings or irreparable losses and bereavements. For given retrospects would appear different to cheerful and to melancholic souls. And, further, however terrific and exhausting a bout may threaten to be, one loses interest in the most dreadful details when the end is foregone. When one knows that there has been “hippodroming ” in a race, a ball game, or a glove fight, what can he really care for the separate heats, innings, or rounds?

To enjoy a story thoroughly, one should be always uncertain not only as to what he will find on the next page, but also as to what the last chapter will contain for him. The true playwright understands this, and resorts to every device he can contrive to elude both reason and suspicion, and to increase as much as possible the element of unexpectedness in his dénouement. Consider for an instant the splendid illustration given in Much Ado about Nothing. Follow the action as closely as we may, estimate every probability at its full value, and give all weight to Beatrice’s virtual betrothal of herself to Benedick in the chapel scene, — yet we shall have come to within about thirty lines of the last curtain ere Shakespeare consents to settle the question finally and to show us the lady actually accepting her suitor in the presence of the assembled company ; so that the satisfaction of the long perplexed spectator may well range with the joy of the much tantalized wooer.

Suspense and surprise are among the great factors in the construction of a story as well as of a play, and the query may therefore fairly be raised as to whether that novelist does not diminish his power and his command over his readers who adopts the autobiographic manner for a tale meant to thrill and perplex, to enchain and to lead captive and captivated. Undoubtedly, the captiously interrogative will always “want to know ” how the impersonal narrator can have become acquainted with the incidents and words that he records; but as relation in the anonymous third person is as old as tradition, ballad, and history, it may continue to be accepted as the standard and most authentic form, and still be excused from explaining how it comes into possession of its facts. And, at any rate, it cannot be accused of drawing the long bow in self-glorification and concentrating attention upon an Ego and his experiences, with disturbing the fit proportions of a whole story, or discounting the aggregate values by “too previous” statement or suggestion. This is in itself an additional advantage, for one does not like to have his admiration for a hero’s prowess, or his delight at an unexpected and hardly hoped - for victory or escape, qualified by the apparent boastfulness or bumptiousness of that hero’s reiterated “Thus did I,” with its savor of Falstaff rather than of Coriolanus.