VERNON LEE [ VIOLET PAGET]

Persuaded as I was . . . that the greatest differences in literary effect are due
mainly to different treatment of the verb, I set about an examination of the present
tense, as it has been employed in our language.

It seems an idiotically obvious remark, yet one is apt to feel a little shock of
surprise when its truth is brought home to one: the present tense makes things
present; it abolishes the narrative and the narrator. This can be verified, as the
relation of relief and colour is best verified in pictures, by a process of reversing, like
standing a picture on its head. The ballad gives us this. For in the ballad the bulk of
the telling is sometimes in the present tense. . . .

I have said that the present tense abolishes the fact of narration. This has a most
important result, that of doing away with the sense of cause and effect. For we cannot
feel any causal connection without projecting ourselves into the past or the future.
The present tense, constantly pushing us along, leaves no leisure for thinking about
why; it hustles us into a new how. The present, in this case, never becomes a past,
the thing which we can keep and look into; it simply drops off into limbo, vanishes
entirely, as it probably does in the case of many children and thoughtless, unedu-
cated persons.

Moreover--and this is obvious--the present tense can bring the event before
us, or us before the event, forcing us into a kind of sham belief. I say of sham belief,
because this special kind of condition, that of dramatic illusion, is often totally
different from the genuine kind of belief, what William James would probably call
the "warm, familiar acquiescence" which belongs to the sense of reality. We may
sit in a theatre and be hurried, bullied into interest and sympathy with something
which we do not seriously believe possible. And here I should like to distinguish
very clearly between this kind of realisation, due to presentation on the stage or to
presentation by the present tense and similar devices, and realisation by such fulness
and harmony, such organic synthesis of co-ordinated detail, as is produced by only
the very greatest novels or poems. After watching a Sarah Bernhardt play, or reading
a chapter of Dickens even with breathless interest, I am by no means haunted by a
certainty that something is going on, that certain people are contriving to live,
struggle and suffer, such as I have after reading Thackeray, or Stendhal, or Tolstoi;
on the contrary, there is often, as one lays down the book or rises from one's seat,

-65-