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Limitation of Hypnotic Fiction.

Let us distinguish. Hypnotism is a proved fact: people are hypnotized. Hypnotism is not a delimited fact: nobody yet knows precisely its conditions or its effects; or, if the discovery has been made, it has certainly not yet found its way to the novelists. For them it is as yet chiefly a field of fancy. They invent vagaries for it as they invent ghosts. And as for the “humananum nihil a me alienum” defence, my strongest objection to hypnotic fiction is its inhumanity. An experience is not human in the proper artistic sense (with which alone we are concerned) merely because it has befallen a man or a woman. There was an Irishman, the other day, who through mere inadvertence cut off his own head with a scythe. But the story is rather inhuman than not. Still less right have we to call everything human which can be supposed by the most liberal stretch of the imagination to have happened to a man or a woman. A story is only human in so far as it is governed by the laws which are recognized as determining human action. Now according as we regard human action, its two great determinants will be free will or necessity. But hypnotism entirely does away with free will: and for necessity, fatal or circumstantial, it substitutes the lawless and irresponsible imperative of a casual individual man, who (in fiction) usually happens to be a scoundrel.

A story may be human even though it discard one or more of the recognized conditions of human life. Thus in the confessedly supernatural story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the conflict between the two Jekylls is human enough and morally significant, because it answers to a conflict which is waged day by day–though as a rule less tremendously–in the soul of every human being. But the double Trilby signifies nothing. She is naturally in love with Little Billee: she is also in love with Svengali, but quite unnaturally and irresponsibly. There is no real conflict. As Gecko says of Svengali–

“He had but to say ‘Dors!‘ and she suddenly became an unconscious Trilby of marble, who could produce wonderful sounds–just the sounds he wanted and nothing else–and think his thoughts and wish his wishes–and love him at his bidding with a strange, unreal, factitious love … just his own love for himself turned inside out–à l’envers–and reflected back on him as from a mirror … un écho, un simulacre, quoi? pas autre chose!… It was not worth having! I was not even jealous!”

This last passage, I think, suggests that Mr. du Maurier would have produced a much less charming story, indeed, but a vastly more artistic one, had he directed his readers’ attention rather upon the tragedy of Svengali than upon the tragedy of Trilby. For Svengali’s position as complete master of a woman’s will and yet unable to call forth more than a factitious love–“just his own love for himself turned inside out and reflected back on him as from a mirror”–is a really tragic one, and a fine variation on the old Frankenstein motif. The tragedy of Frankenstein resides in Frankenstein himself, not in his creature.

An Incongruous Story.

In short, Trilby seems–as Peter Ibbetson seemed–to fall into two parts, the natural and supernatural, which will not join. They might possibly join if Mr. du Maurier had not made the natural so exceedingly domestic, had he been less successful with the Trilby, and Little Billee, and Taffy, and the Laird, for all of whom he has taught us so extravagant a liking. But his very success with these domestic (if oddly domestic) figures, and with the very domestic tale of Little Billee’s affair of the heart, proves our greatest stumbling-block when we are invited to follow the machinations of the superlative Svengali. That the story of Svengali and of Trilby’s voice is a good story only a duffer would deny. So is Gautier’s La Morte Amoureuse; perhaps the best story of its kind ever written. But suppose Thackeray had taken La Morte Amoureuse and tried to write it into Pendennis!