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At this his good lady takes umbrage, and something very like a quarrel ensues, on which Trimalchio bids the musicians strike up a dead march. The tumult with which this is greeted is too much for many of the guests. Encolpius, the narrator, leaves the room, and the party breaks up. Encolpius on leaving Trimalchio's meets a poet, Eumolpus, who complains bitterly of poverty and neglect.
You know me better than any one else; you'll understand the thing as far as it can ever be understood, and perhaps I may be relieved of some of the oppression it has caused me. For it is rather a ghastly memory to grapple with alone, I can tell you." Hereupon, without further preface, Ken related the following tale. He was, I may observe in passing, a naturally fine narrator.
When you come to observe it, Bat's recital contained nothing that might not have been posted in eminent respectability on a church warden's door. Like fresh fruit passed through a mouldy cellar, the facts came from the medium of the narrator with the unclean contagion of cellar mould. The next narrator would not pass on the facts. He would pass on the cellar rot.
Before his boat reached his ship the commanding officer heard the steamer beginning to pick up her anchor. Then, shadowy in the fog, she steamed out on the given course. "'Yes, he said to his officers, 'I let him go." The narrator bent forward towards the couch, where no movement betrayed the presence of a living person. "Listen," he said, forcibly.
Fielding had shown more than any predecessor the possibilities of fiction in the study of character and the illustration of manners, and to the art of the narrator, he had added that of the dramatist. The falling of the rug in Molly Seagrim's bedroom is one of the happiest incidents ever devised, and no doubt suggested to Sheridan the falling of the screen in the "School for Scandal."
But my nostrils snuffed up a scent of cigar-smoke, clouds of which the narrator had emitted by way of visible emblem, I suppose, of the nebulous obscurity of his tale. Moreover, my gorgeous fantasies were woefully disturbed by the rattling of the spoon in a tumbler of whiskey-punch which Mr. Thomas Waite was mingling for a customer.
The unfriendly narrator declares that Napoleon, when told that his soldiers were only boys, flung his hat into a corner, and hissed, "You do not know what passes in a soldier's mind; I grew up in the field, and a man like me troubles himself little about a million men."
In 1548, a violent outbreak took place at Bordeaux on account of the gabel or salt-tax; and the king's lieutenant was massacred in it. Anne de Montmorency, whom the king had made constable in 1538, the fifth of his family invested with that dignity, repaired thither at once. The narrator, it will be seen, was not more merciful than the constable.
We learn about Crusoe's island, for instance, gradually just as Crusoe learns of it himself, though the author is careful by taking his narrator up to a high point of vantage the day after his arrival, that we shall learn the essentials of it, as long as verisimilitude is not sacrificed, as soon as possible.
The narrator believes in it, as all superstitious minds in Flanders likewise believe; and is not a whit wiser nor more credulous than his audience.
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