Aspects of the novel

By E. M. Forster

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Title: Aspects of the novel

Author: Edward Morgan Forster

Release Date: April 7, 2023 [eBook #70492]

Language: English

Produced by: Laura Natal Rodrigues (Images generously made available by
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL ***


                        _ASPECTS_
                      OF THE NOVEL




                      E. M. FORSTER




                        NEW YORK
               HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY




                  COPYRIGHT, 1927, BY
           HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.




_By the same author_

    A PASSAGE TO INDIA
    HOWARDS END
    A ROOM WITH A VIEW
    THE LONGEST JOURNEY
    WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD
    THE CELESTIAL OMNIBUS _and other stories_
    THE ETERNAL MOMENT _and other stories_
    ABINGER HARVEST
    GOLDSWORTHY LOWES DICKINSON
    VIRGINIA WOOLF (_The Rede Lecture_)




                         _To_
                     CHARLES MAURON




NOTE


THESE are some lectures (the Clark lectures) which were delivered under
the auspices of Trinity College, Cambridge, in the spring of 1927. They
were informal, indeed talkative, in their tone, and it seemed safer when
presenting them in book form not to mitigate the talk, in case nothing
should be left at all. Words such as "I," "you," "one," "we," "curiously
enough," "so to speak," "only imagine," and "of course" will
consequently occur on every page and will rightly distress the sensitive
reader; but he is asked to remember that if these words were removed
others, perhaps more distinguished, might escape through the orifices
they left, and that since the novel is itself often colloquial it may
possibly withhold some of its secrets from the graver and grander
streams of criticism, and may reveal them to backwaters and shallows.




CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I    INTRODUCTORY

II   THE STORY

III  PEOPLE

IV   PEOPLE (_continued_)

V    THE PLOT

VI   FANTASY

VII  PROPHECY

VIII PATTERN AND RHYTHM

IX   CONCLUSION

INDEX OF MAIN REFERENCES




ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL




I

INTRODUCTORY


THIS lectureship is connected with the name of William George Clark, a
fellow of Trinity. It is through him we meet today, and through him we
shall approach our subject.

Clark was, I believe, a Yorkshireman. He was born in 1821, was at school
at Sedbergh and Shrewsbury, entered Trinity as an undergraduate in 1840,
became fellow four years later, and made the college his home for nearly
thirty years, only leaving it when his health broke, shortly before his
death. He is best known as a Shakespearian scholar, but he published two
books on other subjects to which we must here refer. He went as a young
man to Spain and wrote a pleasant lively account of his holiday called
_Gazpacho_: Gazpacho being the name of a certain cold soup which he ate
and appears to have enjoyed among the peasants of Andalusia: indeed he
appears to have enjoyed everything. Eight years later, as a result of a
holiday in Greece, he published a second book, _Peloponnesus_.
_Peloponnesus_ is a graver work and a duller. Greece was a serious place
in those days, more serious than Spain, besides, Clark had by now not
only taken Orders but become Public Orator, and he was, above all,
travelling with Dr. Thompson, the then Master of the college, who was
not at all the sort of person to be involved in a cold soup. The jests
about mules and fleas are consequently few, and we are increasingly
confronted with the remains of Classical Antiquity and the sites of
battles. What survives in the book--apart from its learning--is its
feeling for Greek country-side. Clark also travelled in Italy and
Poland.

To turn to his academic career. He planned the great _Cambridge
Shakespeare_, first with Glover, then with Aldis Wright (both librarians
of Trinity), and, helped by Aldis Wright, he issued the _Globe
Shakespeare_, a popular text. He collected much material for an edition
of Aristophanes. He also published some Sermons, but in 1869 he gave up
Holy Orders--which, by the way, will exempt us from excessive orthodoxy.
Like his friend and biographer Leslie Stephen, like Henry Sidgwick and
others of that generation, he did not find it possible to remain in the
Church, and he has explained his reasons in a pamphlet entitled _The
Present Dangers of the Church of England_. He resigned his post of
Public Orator in consequence, while retaining his college tutorship. He
died at the age of fifty-seven, esteemed by all who knew him as a
lovable, scholarly and honest man. You will have realized that he is a
Cambridge figure. Not a figure in the great world or even at Oxford, but
a spirit peculiar to these courts, which perhaps only you who tread them
after him can justly appreciate: the spirit of integrity. Out of a
bequest in his will, his old college has provided for a series of
lectures, to be delivered annually "on some period or periods of English
Literature not earlier than Chaucer," and that is why we meet here now.

Invocations are out of fashion, yet I wanted to make this small one, for
two reasons. Firstly, may a little of Clark's integrity be with us
through this course; and secondly, may he accord us a little
inattention! For I am not keeping quite strictly to the terms laid
down--"Period or periods of English Literature." This condition, though
it sounds liberal and is liberal enough in spirit, happens verbally not
quite to suit our subject, and I shall occupy the introductory lecture
in explaining why this is. The points raised may seem trivial. But they
will lead us to a convenient vantage post from which we can begin our
main attack next week.

We need a vantage post, for the novel is a formidable mass, and it is so
amorphous--no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even
a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of
literature--irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating
into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they
sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at
the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among
them. Perhaps we ought to define what a novel is before starting. This
will not take a second. M. Abel Chevalley has, in his brilliant little
manual,[1] provided a definition, and if a French critic cannot define
the English novel, who can? It is, he says, "a fiction in prose of a
certain extent" (une fiction en prose d'une certaine étendue). That is
quite good enough for us, and we may perhaps go so far as to add that
the extent should not be less than 50,000 words. Any fictitious prose
work over 50,000 words will be a novel for the purposes of these
lectures, and if this seems to you unphilosophic will you think of an
alternative definition, which will include _The Pilgrim's Progress_,
_Marius the Epicurean_, _The Adventures of a Younger Son_, _The Magic
Flute_, _The Journal of the Plague_, _Zuleika Dobson_, _Rasselas_,
_Ulysses_, and _Green Mansions_, or else will give reasons for their
exclusion? Parts of our spongy tract seem more fictitious than other
parts, it is true: near the middle, on a tump of grass, stand Miss
Austen with the figure of Emma by her side, and Thackeray holding up
Esmond. But no intelligent remark known to me will define the tract as a
whole. All we can say of it is that it is bounded by two chains of
mountains neither of which rises very abruptly--the opposing ranges of
Poetry and of History--and bounded on the third side by a sea--a sea
that we shall encounter when we come to _Moby Dick_.

Let us begin by considering the proviso "English Literature." "English"
we shall of course interpret as written in English, not as published
south of the Tweed or east of the Atlantic, or north of the Equator: we
need not attend to geographical accidents, they can be left to the
politicians. Yet, even with this interpretation, are we as free as we
wish? Can we, while discussing English fiction, quite ignore fiction
written in other languages, particularly French and Russian? As far as
influence goes, we could ignore it, for our writers have never been much
influenced by the continentals. But--for reasons soon to be explained--I
want to talk as little as possible about influence during these
lectures. My subject is a particular kind of book and the aspects that
book has assumed in English. Can we ignore its collateral aspects on the
continent? Not entirely. An unpleasant and unpatriotic truth has here to
be faced. No English novelist is as great as Tolstoy--that is to say has
given so complete a picture of man's life, both on its domestic and
heroic side. No English novelist has explored man's soul as deeply as
Dostoevsky. And no novelist anywhere has analysed the modern
consciousness as successfully as Marcel Proust. Before these triumphs we
must pause. English poetry fears no one--excels in quality as well as
quantity. But English Action is less triumphant: it does not contain the
best stuff yet written, and if we deny this we become guilty of
provincialism.

Now, provincialism does not signify in a writer, and may indeed be the
chief source of his strength: only a prig or a fool would complain that
Defoe is cockneyfied or Thomas Hardy countrified. But provincialism in a
critic is a serious fault. A critic has no right to the narrowness which
is the frequent prerogative of the creative artist. He has to have a
wide outlook or he has not anything at all. Although the novel exercises
the rights of a created object, criticism has not those rights, and too
many little mansions in English fiction have been acclaimed to their own
detriment as important edifices. Take four at random: _Cranford_, _The
Heart of Midlothian_, _Jane Eyre_, _Richard Feverel_. For various
personal and local reasons we may be attached to these four books.
_Cranford_ radiates the humour of the urban midlands, _Midlothian_ is a
handful out of Edinburgh, _Jane Eyre_ is the passionate dream of a fine
but still undeveloped woman. _Richard Feverel_ exudes farmhouse lyricism
and flickers with modish wit, but all four are little mansions, not
mighty edifices, and we shall see and respect them for what they are if
we stand them for an instant in the colonnades of _War and Peace_, or
the vaults of _The Brothers Karamazov_.

I shall not often refer to foreign novels in these lectures, still less
would I pose as an expert on them who is debarred from discussing them
by his terms of reference. But I do want to emphasize their greatness
before we start; to cast, so to speak, this preliminary shadow over our
subject, so that when we look back on it at the end we may have the
better chance of seeing it in its true lights.

So much for the proviso "English." Now for a more important proviso,
that of "period or periods." This idea of a period of a development in
time, with its consequent emphasis on influences and schools, happens to
be exactly what I am hoping to avoid during our brief survey, and I
believe that the author of _Gazpacho_ will be lenient. Time, all the way
through, is to be our enemy. We are to visualize the English novelists
not as floating down that stream which bears all its sons away unless
they are careful, but as seated together in a room, a circular room, a
sort of British Museum reading-room--all writing their novels
simultaneously. They do not, as they sit there, think "I live under
Queen Victoria, I under Anne, I carry on the tradition of Trollope, I am
reacting against Aldous Huxley." The fact that their pens are in their
hands is far more vivid to them. They are half mesmerized, their sorrows
and joys are pouring out through the ink, they are approximated by the
act of creation, and when Professor Oliver Elton says, as he does, that
"after 1847 the novel of passion was never to be the same again," none
of them understand what he means. That is to be our vision of them--an
imperfect vision, but it is suited to our powers, it will preserve us
from a serious danger, the danger of pseudo-scholarship.

Genuine scholarship is one of the highest successes which our race can
achieve. No one is more triumphant than the man who chooses a worthy
subject and masters all its facts and the leading facts of the subjects
neighbouring. He can then do what he likes. He can, if his subject is
the novel, lecture on it chronologically if he wishes because he has
read all the important novels of the past four centuries, many of the
unimportant ones, and has adequate knowledge of any collateral facts
that bear upon English fiction. The late Sir Walter Raleigh (who once
held this lectureship) was such a scholar. Raleigh knew so many facts
that he was able to proceed to influences, and his monograph on the
English novel adopts the treatment by period which his unworthy
successor must avoid. The scholar, like the philosopher, can contemplate
the river of time. He contemplates it not as a whole, but he can see the
facts, the personalities, floating past him, and estimate the relations
between them, and if his conclusions could be as valuable to us as they
are to himself he would long ago have civilized the human race. As you
know, he has failed. True scholarship is incommunicable, true scholars
rare. There are a few scholars, actual or potential, in the audience
today, but only a few, and there is certainly none on the platform. Most
of us are pseudo-scholars, and I want to consider our characteristics
with sympathy and respect, for we are a very large and quite a powerful
class, eminent in Church and State, we control the education of the
Empire, we lend to the Press such distinction as it consents to receive,
and we are a welcome asset at dinner-parties.

Pseudo-scholarship is, on its good side, the homage paid by ignorance to
learning. It also has an economic side, on which we need not be hard.
Most of us must get a job before thirty, or sponge on our relatives, and
many jobs can only be got by passing an exam. The pseudo-scholar often
does well in examination (real scholars are not much good), and even
when he fails he appreciates their innate majesty. They are gateways to
employment, they have power to ban and bless. A paper on _King Lear_ may
lead somewhere, unlike the rather far-fetched play of the same name. It
may be a stepping-stone to the Local Government Board. He does not often
put it to himself openly and say "That's the use of knowing things, they
help you to get on." The economic pressure he feels is more often
subconscious, and he goes to his exam, merely feeling that a paper on
King Lear is a very tempestuous and terrible experience but an intensely
real one. And whether he be cynical or naïf, he is not to be blamed. As
long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can
only be reached through exams, so long must we take the examination
system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much
so-called education would disappear, and no one be a penny the stupider.

It is when he comes to criticism--to a job like the present--that he can
be so pernicious, because he follows the method of a true scholar
without having his equipment. He classes books before he has understood
or read them; that is his first crime. Classification by chronology.
Books written before 1847, books written after it, books written after
or before 1848. The novel in the reign of Queen Anne, the pre-novel, the
ur-novel, the novel of the future. Classification by subject
matter--sillier still. The literature of Inns, beginning with _Tom
Jones_; the literature of the Women's Movement, beginning with
_Shirley_; the literature of Desert Islands, from _Robinson Crusoe_ to
_The Blue Lagoon_; the literature of Rogues--dreariest of all, though
the Open Road runs it pretty close; the literature of Sussex (perhaps
the most devoted of the Home Counties); improper books--a serious though
dreadful branch of enquiry, only to be pursued by pseudo-scholars of
riper years, novels relating to industrialism, aviation, chiropody, the
weather. I include the weather on the authority of the most amazing work
on the novel that I have met for many years. It came over the Atlantic
to me, nor shall I ever forget it. It was a literary manual entitled
_Materials and Methods of Fiction_. The writer's name shall be
concealed. He was a pseudo-scholar and a good one. He classified novels
by their dates, their length, their locality, their sex, their point of
view, till no more seemed possible. But he still had the weather up his
sleeve, and when he brought it out, it had nine heads. He gave an
example under each head, for he was anything but slovenly, and we will
run through his list. In the first place the weather can be
"decorative," as in Pierre Loti; then "utilitarian," as in _The Mill on
the Floss_ (no Floss, no Mill; no Mill, no Tullivers); "illustrative,"
as in _The Egoist_; "planned in pre-established harmony," as by Fiona
MacLeod; "in emotional contrast," as in _The Master of Ballantrae_;
"determinative of action," as in a certain Kipling story, where a man
proposes to the wrong girl on account of a mud storm; "a controlling
influence," _Richard Feverel_; "itself a hero," like Vesuvius in _The
Days of Pompeii_; and ninethly, it can be "non-existent," as in a
nursery tale. I liked him flinging in non-existence. It made everything
so scientific and trim. But he himself remained a little dissatisfied,
and having finished his classification he said yes, of course there was
one more thing, and that was genius; it was useless for a novelist to
know that there are nine sorts of weather, unless he has genius also.
Cheered by this reflection, he classified novels by their tones. There
are only two tones, personal and impersonal, and having given examples
of each he grew pensive again and said, "Yes, but you must have genius
too, or neither tone will profit."

This constant reference to genius is another characteristic of the
pseudo-scholar. He loves mentioning genius, because the sound of the
word exempts him from trying to discover its meaning. Literature is
written by geniuses. Novelists are geniuses. There we are; now let us
classify them. Which he does. Everything he says may be accurate but all
is useless because he is moving round books instead of through them, he
either has not read them or cannot read them properly. Books have to be
read (worse luck, for it takes a long time); it is the only way of
discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading
is the only method of assimilation revealed to the west. The reader must
sit down alone and struggle with the writer, and this the pseudo-scholar
will not do. He would rather relate a book to the history of its time,
to events in the life of its author, to the events it describes, above
all to some tendency. As soon as he can use the word "tendency" his
spirits rise, and though those of his audience may sink, they often pull
out their pencils at this point and make a note, under the belief that a
tendency is portable.

That is why, in the rather ramshackly course that lies ahead of us, we
cannot consider fiction by periods, we must not contemplate the stream
of time. Another image better suits our powers: that of all the
novelists writing their novels at once. They come from different ages
and ranks, they have different temperaments and aims, but they all hold
pens in their hands, and are in the process of creation. Let us look
over their shoulders for a moment and see what they are writing. It may
exorcise that demon of chronology which is at present our enemy and
which (we shall discover next week) is sometimes their enemy too. "Oh,
what quenchless feud is this, that Time hath with the sons of men,"
cries Herman Melville, and the feud goes on not only in life and death
but in the by-ways of literary creation and criticism. Let us avoid it
by imagining that all the novelists are at work together in a circular
room. I shall not mention their names until we have heard their words,
because a name brings associations with it, dates, gossip, all the
furniture of the method we are discarding.

They have been instructed to group themselves in pairs. We approach the
first pair, and read as follows:--


i. I don't know what to do--not I. God forgive me, but I am very
impatient! I wish--but I don't know what to wish without a sin. Yet I
wish it would please God to take me to his mercy!--I can meet with none
here.--What a world is this!--What is there in it desirable? The good we
hope for so strangely mixed, that one knows not what to wish for! And
one half of mankind tormenting the other and being tormented themselves
in tormenting.

ii. What I hate is myself--when I think that one has to take so much, to
be happy, out of the lives of others, and that one isn't happy even
then. One does it to cheat one's self and to stop one's mouth--but that
is only, at the best, for a little. The wretched self is always there,
always making us somehow a fresh anxiety. What it comes to is that it's
not, that it's never, a happiness, any happiness at all, to _take_. The
only safe thing is to give. It's what plays you least false.


It is obvious that here sit two novelists who are looking at life from
much the same angle, yet the first of them is Samuel Richardson, and the
second you will have already identified as Henry James. Each is an
anxious rather than an ardent psychologist. Each is sensitive to
suffering and appreciates self-sacrifice; each falls short of the
tragic, though a close approach is made. A sort of tremulous
nobility--that is the spirit that dominates them--and oh how well they
write!--not a word out of place in their copious flows. A hundred and
fifty years of time divide them, but are not they dose together in other
ways, and may not their neighbourliness profit us? Of course as I say
this I hear Henry James beginning to express his regret--no, not his
regret but his surprise--no, not even his surprise but his awareness
that neighbourliness is being postulated of him, and postulated, must he
add, in relation to a shopkeeper. And I hear Richardson, equally
cautious, wondering whether any writer born outside England can be
chaste. But these are surface differences, are indeed no differences at
all, but additional points of contact. We leave them sitting in harmony,
and proceed to our next pair.


i. All the preparations for the funeral ran easily and happily under
Mrs. Johnson's skilful hands. On the eve of the sad occasion she
produced a reserve of black sateen, the kitchen steps, and a box of
tintacks, and decorated the house with festoons and bows of black in the
best possible taste. She tied up the knocker with black crêpe, and put
a large bow over the corner of the steel engraving of Garibaldi, and
swathed the bust of Mr. Gladstone that had belonged to the deceased with
inky swathings. She turned the two vases that had views of Tivoli and
the Bay of Naples round, so that these rather brilliant landscapes were
hidden and only the plain blue enamel showed, and she anticipated the
long contemplated purchase of a tablecloth for the front room, and
substituted a violet purple cover for the now very worn and faded
raptures and roses in plushette that had hitherto done duty there.
Everything that loving consideration could do to impart a dignified
solemnity to her little home was done.

ii. The air of the parlour being faint with the smell of sweet cake, I
looked about for the table of refreshments; it was scarcely visible
until one had got accustomed to the gloom, but there was a cut-up plum
cake upon it, and there were cut-up oranges, and sandwiches, and
biscuits, and two decanters that I knew very well as ornaments, but had
never seen used in all my life; one full of port, and one of sherry.
Standing at this table, I became conscious of the servile Pumblechook in
a black cloak and several yards of hat-band, who was alternately
stuffing himself, and making obsequious movements to catch my attention.
The moment he succeeded, he came over to me (breathing sherry and
crumbs) and said in a subdued voice, "May I, dear sir?" and did.


These two funerals did not by any means happen on the same day. One is
the funeral of Mr. Polly's father (1920), the other the funeral of Mrs.
Gargery in _Great Expectations_ (1860). Yet Wells and Dickens are
describing them from the same point of view and even using the same
tricks of style (cf. the two vases and the two decanters). They are,
both, humorists and visualizers who get an effect by cataloguing details
and whisking the page over irritably. They are generous-minded; they
hate shams and enjoy being indignant about them; they are valuable
social reformers; they have no notion of confining books to a library
shelf. Sometimes the lively surface of their prose scratches like a
cheap gramophone record, a certain poorness of quality appears, and the
face of the author draws rather too near to that of the reader. In other
words, neither of them has much taste: the world of beauty was largely
closed to Dickens, and is entirely closed to Wells. And there are other
parallels--for instance their method of drawing character, but that we
shall examine later on. And perhaps the great difference between them is
the difference of opportunity offered to an obscure boy of genius a
hundred years ago and to a similar boy forty years ago. The difference
is all in Wells' favour. He is far better educated than his predecessor;
in particular the addition of science has strengthened his mind out of
recognition and subdued his hysteria. He registers an improvement in
society: Dotheboys Hall has been superseded by the Polytechnic. But he
does not register any change in the novelist's art.

What about our next pair?


i. But as for that mark, I'm not sure about it; I don't believe it was
made by a nail after all; it's too big, too round, for that I might get
up, but if I got up and looked at it, ten to one I shouldn't be able to
say for certain; because once a thing's done, no one ever knows how it
happened. O dear me, the mystery of life! The inaccuracy of thought! The
ignorance of humanity! To show how very little control of our
possessions we have--what an accidental affair this living is after all
our civilization--let me just count over a few of the things lost on one
lifetime, beginning, for that always seems the most mysterious of
losses--what cat would gnaw, what rat would nibble--three pale blue
canisters of bookbinding tools? Then there were the birdcages, the iron
hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne coal-scuttle, the
bagatelle-board, the hand-organ--all gone, and jewels too. Opals and
emeralds, they lie about the roots of turnips. What a scraping paring
affair it is to be sure! The wonder is that I've any clothes on my back,
that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one
wants to compare life to anything one must liken it to being blown
through the Tube at fifty miles an hour....

ii. Every day for at least ten years together did my father resolve to
have it mended; 'tis not mended yet. No family but ours would have borne
with it an hour, and what is most astonishing, there was not a subject
in the world upon which my father was so eloquent as upon that of
door-hinges. And yet, at the same time, he was certainly one of the
greatest bubbles to them, I think, that history can produce; his
rhetoric and conduct were at perpetual handy-cuffs. Never did the
parlour door open but his philosophy or his principles fell a victim to
it; three drops of oil with a feather, and a smart stroke of a hammer,
had saved his honour for ever.

Inconsistent soul that man is; languishing under wounds which he has the
power to heal; his whole life a contradiction to his knowledge; his
reason, that precious gift of God to him (instead of pouring in oil),
serving but to sharpen his sensibilities, to multiply his pains, and
render him more melancholy and uneasy under them! Poor unhappy creature,
that he should do so! Are not the necessary causes of misery in this
life enough, but he must add voluntary ones to his stock of sorrow?
Struggle against evils which cannot be avoided, and submit to others
which a tenth part of the trouble they create him would remove from his
heart for ever.

By all that is good and virtuous, if there are three drops of oil to be
got and a hammer to be found within ten miles of Shandy Hall, the
parlour door hinge shall be mended this reign.


The passage last quoted is, of course, out of _Tristram Shandy_. The
other passage was from Virginia Woolf. She and Sterne are both
fantasists. They start with a little object, take a flutter from it, and
settle on it again. They combine a humorous appreciation of the muddle
of life with a keen sense of its beauty. There is even the same tone in
their voices--a rather deliberate bewilderment, an announcement to all
and sundry that they do not know where they are going. No doubt their
scales of value are not the same. Sterne is a sentimentalist, Virginia
Woolf (except perhaps in her latest work, _To the Lighthouse_) is
extremely aloof. Nor are their achievements on the same scale. But their
medium is similar, the same odd effects are obtained by it, the parlour
door is never mended, the mark on the wall turns out to be a snail, life
is such a muddle, oh, dear, the will is so weak, the sensations
fidgety--philosophy--God--oh, dear, look at the mark--listen to the
door--existence is really too ... what were we saying?

Does not chronology seem less important now that we have visualized six
novelists at their jobs? If the novel develops, is it not likely to
develop on different lines from the British Constitution, or even the
Women's Movement? I say "even the Women's Movement" because there
happened to be a close association between fiction in England and that
movement during the nineteenth century--a connection so close that it
has misled some critics into thinking it an organic connection. As women
bettered their position the novel, they asserted, became better too.
Quite wrong. A mirror does not develop because an historical pageant
passes in front of it. It only develops when it gets a fresh coat of
quicksilver--in other words, when it acquires new sensitiveness; and the
novel's success lies in its own sensitiveness, not in the success of its
subject matter. Empires fall, votes are accorded, but to those people
writing in the circular room it is the feel of the pen between their
fingers that matters most. They may decide to write a novel upon the
French or the Russian Revolution, but memories, associations, passions,
rise up and cloud their objectivity, so that at the close, when they
re-read, some one else seems to have been holding their pen and to have
relegated their theme to the background. That "some one else" is their
self no doubt, but not the self that is so active in time and lives
under George IV or V. All through history writers while writing have
felt more or less the same. They have entered a common state which it is
convenient to call inspiration,[2] and having regard to that state, we
may say that History develops, Art stands still.

History develops, Art stands still, is a crude motto, indeed it is
almost a slogan, and though forced to adopt it we must not do so without
admitting it vulgarily. It contains only a partial truth.

It debars us in the first place from considering whether the human mind
alters from generation to generation; whether, for instance, Thomas
Deloney, who wrote humorously about shops and pubs in the reign of Queen
Elizabeth, differs fundamentally from his modern representative--who
would be some one of the calibre of Neil Lyons or Pett Ridge. As a
matter of fact Deloney did not differ; differed as an individual, but
not fundamentally, not because he lived four hundred years ago. Four
thousand, fourteen thousand years might give us pause, but four hundred
years is nothing in the life of our race, and does not allow room for
any measurable change. So our slogan here is no practical hindrance. We
can chant it without shame.

It is more serious when we turn to the development of tradition and see
what we lose through being debarred from examining that. Apart from
schools and influences and fashions, there has been a technique in
English fiction, and this does alter from generation to generation. The
technique of laughing at characters for instance: to smoke and to rag
are not identical; the Elizabethan humorist picks up his victim in a
different way from the modern, raises his laugh by other tricks. Or the
technique of fantasy: Virginia Woolf, though her aim and general effect
both resemble Sterne's, differs from him in execution; she belongs to
the same tradition but to a later phase of it. Or the technique of
conversation: in my pairs of examples I could not include a couple of
dialogues, though I wanted to, for the reason that the use of the "he
said" and "she said" varies so much through the centuries that it
colours its surroundings, and though the speakers may be similarly
conceived they will not seem so in an extract. Well, we cannot examine
questions like these, and must admit we are the poorer, though we can
abandon the development of subject matter and the development of the
human race without regret. Literary tradition is the borderland lying
between literature and history, and the well-equipped critic will spend
much time there and enrich his judgment accordingly. We cannot go there
because we have not read enough. We must pretend it belongs to history
and cut it off accordingly. We must refuse to have anything to do with
chronology.

Let me quote here for our comfort from my immediate predecessor in this
lectureship, Mr. T. S. Eliot. Mr. Eliot enumerates, in the introduction
to _The Sacred Wood_, the duties of the critic. "It is part of his
business to preserve tradition--when a good tradition exists. It is part
of his business to see literature steadily and to see it whole; and this
is eminently to see it not as consecrated by time, but to see it beyond
time." The first duty we cannot perform, the second we must try to
perform. We can neither examine nor preserve tradition. But we can
visualize the novelists as sitting in one room, and force them, by our
very ignorance, from the limitations of date and place. I think that is
worth doing, or I should not have ventured to undertake this course.

How then are we to attack the novel--that spongy tract, those fictions
in prose of a certain extent which extend so indeterminately? Not with
any elaborate apparatus. Principles and systems may suit other forms of
art, but they cannot be applicable here--or if applied their results
must be subjected to re-examination. And who is the re-examiner? Well, I
am afraid it will be the human heart, it will be this man-to-man
business, justly suspect in its cruder forms. The final test of a novel
will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of
anything else which we cannot define. Sentimentality--to some a worse
demon than chronology--will lurk in the background saying, "Oh, but I
like that," "Oh, but that doesn't appeal to me," and all I can promise
is that sentimentality shall not speak too loudly or too soon. The
intensely, stiflingly human quality of the novel is not to be avoided;
the novel is sogged with humanity; there is no escaping the uplift or
the downpour, nor can they be kept out of criticism. We may hate
humanity, but if it is exorcised or even purified the novel wilts,
little is left but a bunch of words.

And I have chosen the title "Aspects" because it is unscientific and
vague, because it leaves us the maximum of freedom, because it means
both the different ways we can look at a novel and the different ways a
novelist can look at his work. And the aspects selected for discussion
are seven in number: The Story; People; The Plot; Fantasy; Prophecy;
Pattern and Rhythm.


[Footnote 1: _Le Roman Anglais de Notre Temps_. By Abel Chevalley,
(Oxford University Press, New York.)]

[Footnote 2: I have touched on this theory of inspiration in a short essay
called "Anonymity." (Hogarth Press, London.)]




II

THE STORY


WE shall all agree that the fundamental aspect of the novel is its
story-telling aspect, but we shall voice our assent in different tones,
and it is on the precise tone of voice we employ now that our subsequent
conclusions will depend.

Let us listen to three voices. If you ask one type of man, "What does a
novel do?" he will reply placidly: "Well--I don't know--it seems a funny
sort of question to ask--a novel's a novel--well, I don't know--I
suppose it kind of tells a story, so to speak." He is quite
good-tempered and vague, and probably driving a motor-bus at the same
time and paying no more attention to literature than it merits. Another
man, whom I visualize as on a golf-course, will be aggressive and brisk.
He will reply: "What does a novel do? Why, tell a story of course, and
I've no use for it if it didn't. I like a story. Very bad taste on my
part, no doubt, but I like a story. You can take your art, you can take
your literature, you can take your music, but give me a good story. And
I like a story to be a story, mind, and my wife's the same." And a third
man he says in a sort of drooping regretful voice, "Yes--oh, dear,
yes--the novel tells a story." I respect and admire the first speaker. I
detest and fear the second. And the third is myself. Yes--oh, dear,
yes—the novel tells a story. That is the fundamental aspect without
which it could not exist. That is the highest factor common to all
novels, and I wish that it was not so, that it could be something
different--melody, or perception of the truth, not this low atavistic
form.

For the more we look at the story (the story that is a story, mind), the
more we disentangle it from the finer growths that it supports, the less
shall we find to admire. It runs like a backbone--or may I say a
tape-worm, for its beginning and end are arbitrary. It is immensely
old--goes back to neolithic times, perhaps to palæolithic. Neanderthal
man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull. The
primitive audience was an audience of shock-heads, gaping round the
camp-fire, fatigued with contending against the mammoth or the woolly
rhinoceros, and only kept awake by suspense. What would happen next? The
novelist droned on, and as soon as the audience guessed what happened
next, they either fell asleep or killed him. We can estimate the dangers
incurred when we think of the career of Scheherazade in somewhat later
times. Scheherazade avoided her fate because she knew how to wield the
weapon of suspense--the only literary tool that has any effect upon
tyrants and savages. Great novelist though she was,--exquisite in her
descriptions, tolerant in her judgments, ingenious in her incidents,
advanced in her morality, vivid in her delineations of character, expert
in her knowledge of three Oriental capitals--it was yet on none of these
gifts that she relied when trying to save her life from her intolerable
husband. They were but incidental. She only survived because she managed
to keep the king wondering what would happen next. Each time she saw the
sun rising she stopped in the middle of a sentence, and left him gaping.
"At this moment Scheherazade saw the morning appearing and, discreet,
was silent." This uninteresting little phrase is the backbone of the
_One Thousand and One Nights_, the tape-worm by which they are tied
together and the life of a most accomplished princess was preserved.

We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what
happens next. That is universal and that is why the backbone of a novels
has to be a story. Some of us want to know nothing else--there is
nothing in us but primeval curiosity, and consequently our other
literary judgments are ludicrous. And now the story can be defined. It
is a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence--dinner coming
after breakfast, Tuesday after Monday, decay after death, and so on. Qua
story, it can only have one merit: that of making the audience want to
know what happens next. And conversely it can only have one fault: that
of making the audience not want to know what happens next. These are the
only two criticisms that can be made on the story that is a story. It is
the lowest and simplest of literary organisms. Yet it is the highest
factor common to all the very complicated organisms known as novels.

When we isolate the story like this from the nobler aspects through
which it moves, and hold it out on the forceps--wriggling and
interminable, the naked worm of time--it presents an appearance that is
both unlovely and dull. But we have much to learn from it. Let us begin
by considering it in connection with daily life.

Daily life is also full of the time-sense. We think one event occurs
after or before another, the thought is often in our minds, and much of
our talk and action proceeds on the assumption. Much of our talk and
action, but not all; there seems something else in life besides time,
something which may conveniently be called "value," something which is
measured not by minutes or hours, but by intensity, so that when we look
at our past it does not stretch back evenly but piles up into a few
notable pinnacles, and when we look at the future it seems sometimes a
wall, sometimes a cloud, sometimes a sun, but never a chronological
chart. Neither memory nor anticipation is much interested in Father
Time, and all dreamers, artists and lovers are partially delivered from
his tyranny; he can kill them, but he cannot secure their attention, and
at the very moment of doom, when the dock collected in the tower its
strength and struck, they may be looking the other way. So daily life,
whatever it may be really, is practically composed of two lives--the
life in time and the life by values--and our conduct reveals a double
allegiance. "I only saw her for five minutes, but it was worth it."
There you have both allegiances in a single sentence. And what the story
does is to narrate the life in time. And what the entire novel does--if
it is a good novel--is to include the life by values as well; using
devices hereafter to be examined. It, also, pays a double allegiance.
But in it, in the novel, the allegiance to time is imperative: no novel
could be written without it. Whereas in daily life the allegiance may
not be necessary: we do not know, and the experience of certain mystics
suggests, indeed, that it is not necessary, and that we are quite
mistaken in supposing that Monday is followed by Tuesday, or death by
decay. It is always possible for you or me in daily life to deny that
time exists and act accordingly even if we become unintelligible and are
sent by our fellow citizens to what they choose to call a lunatic
asylum. But it is never possible for a novelist to deny time inside the
fabric of his novel: he must cling however lightly to the thread of his
story, he must touch the interminable tapeworm, otherwise he becomes
unintelligible, which, in his case, is a blunder.

I am trying not to be philosophic about time, for it is (experts assure
us) a most dangerous hobby for an outsider, far more fatal than place;
and quite eminent metaphysicians have been dethroned through referring
to it improperly. I am only trying to explain that as I lecture now I
hear that clock ticking or do not hear it ticking, I retain or lose
the time sense; whereas in a novel there is always a clock. The author
may dislike his clock. Emily Brontë in _Wuthering Heights_ tried to
hide hers. Sterne, in _Tristram Shandy_, turned his upside down. Marcel
Proust, still more ingenious, kept altering the hands, so that his hero
was at the same period entertaining a mistress to supper and playing
ball with his nurse in the park. All these devices are legitimate, but
none of them contravene our thesis: the basis of a novel is a story, and
a story is a narrative of events arranged in time sequence. (A story, by
the way, is not the same as a plot. It may form the basis of one, but
the plot is an organism of a higher type, and will be defined and
discussed in a future lecture.)

Who shall tell us a story?

Sir Walter Scott of course.

Scott is a novelist over whom we shall violently divide. For my own part
I do not care for him, and find it difficult to understand his continued
reputation. His reputation in his day--that is easy to understand. There
are important historical reasons for it, which we should discuss if our
scheme was chronological. But when we fish him out of the river of time
and set him to write in that circular room with the other novelists, he
presents a less impressive figure. He is seen to have a trivial mind and
a heavy style. He cannot construct. He has neither artistic detachment
nor passion, and how can a writer who is devoid of both, create
characters who will move us deeply? Artistic detachment--perhaps it is
priggish to ask for that. But passion--surely passion is low brow
enough, and think how all Scott's laborious mountains and scooped-out
glens and carefully ruined abbeys call out for passion, passion and how
it is never there! If he had passion he would be a great writer--no
amount of clumsiness or artificiality would matter then. But he only has
a temperate heart and gentlemanly feelings, and an intelligent affection
for the country-side: and this is not basis enough for great novels. And
his integrity--that is worse than nothing, for it was a purely moral and
commercial integrity. It satisfied his highest needs and he never dreamt
that another sort of loyalty exists.

His fame is due to two causes. In the first place, many of the elder
generation had him read aloud to them when they were young; he is
entangled with happy sentimental memories, with holidays in or residence
in Scotland. They love him indeed for the same reason that I loved and
still love _The Swiss Family Robinson_. I could lecture to you now on
_The Swiss Family Robinson_ and it would be a glowing lecture, because
of the emotions felt in boyhood. When my brain decays entirely I shall
not bother any more over great literature. I shall go back to the
romantic shore where the "ship struck with a fearful shock," emitting
four demigods named Fritz, Ernest, Jack and little Franz, together with
their father, their mother, and a cushion, which contained all the
appliances necessary for a ten years' residence in the tropics. That is
my eternal summer, that is what _The Swiss Family Robinson_ means to me,
and is not it all that Sir Walter Scott means to some of you? Is he
really more than a reminder of early happiness? And until our brains do
decay, must not we put all this aside when we attempt to understand
books?

In the second place, Scott's fame rests upon one genuine basis. He could
tell a story. He had the primitive power of keeping the reader in
suspense and playing on his curiosity. Let us paraphrase _The
Antiquary_--not analyze it, analysis is the wrong method, but
paraphrase. Then we shall see the story unrolling itself, and be able to
study its simple devices.


THE ANTIQUARY

CHAPTER I

It was early in a fine summer's day, near the end of the eighteenth
century, when a young man of genteel appearance, having occasion to go
towards the north-east of Scotland, provided himself with a ticket in
one of those public carriages which travel between Edinburgh and the
Queensferry, at which place, as the name implies, and as is well known
to all my northern readers, there is a passage-boat for crossing the
Frith of Forth.


That is the first sentence in _The Antiquary_--not an exciting sentence,
but it gives us the time, the place, and a young man,--it sets the
story-teller's scene. We feel a moderate interest in what the young man
will do next. His name is Lovel, and there is a mystery about him. He is
the hero or Scott would not call him genteel, and he is sure to make the
heroine happy. He meets the Antiquary, Jonathan Oldbuck. They get into
the coach, not too quickly, become acquainted, Lovel visits Oldbuck at
his house. Near it they meet a new character, Edie Ochiltree. Scott is
good at introducing fresh characters. He slides them very naturally, and
with a promising air. Edie Ochiltree promises a good deal. He is a
beggar--no ordinary beggar, a romantic and reliable rogue, and will he
not help to solve the mystery of which we saw the tip in Lovel? More
introductions: to Sir Arthur Wardour (old family, bad manager); to his
daughter Isabella (haughty), whom the hero loves unrequited; and to
Oldbuck's sister Miss Grizzle. Miss Grizzle is introduced with the same
air of promise. As a matter of fact she is just a comic turn--she leads
nowhere, and your story-teller is full of these turns. He need not
hammer away all the time at cause and effect. He keeps just as well
within the simple boundaries of his art if he says things that have no
bearing on the development. The audience thinks they will develop, but
the audience is shock-headed and tired and easily forgets. Unlike the
weaver of plots, the story-teller profits by ragged ends. Miss Grizzle
is a small example of a ragged end; for a big one I would refer to a
novel that professes to be lean and tragic: _The Bride of Lammermoor_.
Scott presents the Lord High Keeper in this book with great emphasis and
with endless suggestions that the defects of his character will lead to
the tragedy, while as a matter of fact the tragedy would occur in almost
the same form if he did not exist--the only necessary ingredients in it
being Edgar, Lucy, Lady Ashton and Bucklaw. Well, to return to _The
Antiquary_, then there is a dinner, Oldbuck and Sir Arthur quarrel, Sir
Arthur is offended and leaves early with his daughter, and they try to
walk back to their own house across the sands. Tides rise over sands.
The tide rises. Sir Arthur and Isabel are cut off, and are confronted in
their peril by Edie Ochiltree. This is the first serious moment in the
story and this is how the story-teller who is a story-teller handles it:


While they exchanged these words, they paused upon the highest ledge of
rock to which they could attain; for it seemed that any farther attempt
to move forward could only serve to anticipate their fate. Here then
they were to await the sure, though slow progress of the raging element,
something in the situation of the martyrs of the Early Church, who,
exposed by heathen tyrants to be slain by wild beasts, were compelled
for a time to witness the impatience and rage by which the animals were
agitated, while awaiting the signal for undoing their grates and letting
them loose upon the victims.

Yet even this fearful pause gave Isabella time to collect the powers of
a mind naturally strong and courageous, and which rallied itself at this
terrible juncture. "Must we yield life," she said, "without a struggle?
Is there no path, however dreadful, by which we could climb the crag, or
at least attain some height above the tide, where we could remain till
morning, or till help comes? They must be aware of our situation, and
will raise the country to relieve us."


Thus speaks the heroine, in accents which certainly chill the reader.
Yet we want to know what happens next. The rocks are of cardboard, like
those in my dear Swiss Family; the tempest is turned on with one hand
while Scott scribbles away about Early Christians with the other; there
is no sincerity, no sense of danger in the whole affair; it is all
passionless, perfunctory, yet we do just want to know what happens next.

Why--Lovel rescues them. Yes; we ought to have thought of that; and what
then?

Another ragged end. Lovel is put by the Antiquary to sleep in a haunted
room, where he has a dream or vision of his host's ancestor, who says to
him, "Kunst macht Gunst," words which he does not understand at the
time, owing to his ignorance of German, and learns afterwards that they
mean "Skill wins Favour": he must pursue the siege of Isabella's heart.
That is to say the supernatural contributes nothing to the story. It is
introduced with tapestries and storms, but only a copy-book maxim
results. The reader does not know this though. When he hears "Kunst
macht Gunst," his attention reawakens ... then his attention is diverted
to something else, and the time-sequence goes on.

Picnic in the ruins of St. Ruth. Introduction of Dousterswivel, a wicked
foreigner, who has involved Sir Arthur in mining schemes and whose
superstitions are ridiculed because not of the genuine Border brand.
Arrival of Hector McIntyre, the Antiquary's nephew, who suspects Lovel
of being an impostor. The two fight a duel; Lovel, thinking he has
killed his opponent, flies with Edie Ochiltree, who has turned up as
usual. They hide in the ruins of St. Ruth, where they watch
Dousterswivel gulling Sir Arthur in a treasure-hunt. Lovel gets away on
a boat and--out of sight out of mind; we do not worry about him until he
turns up again. Second treasure-hunt at St. Ruth. Sir Arthur finds a
hoard of silver. Third treasure-hunt. Dousterswivel is soundly
cudgelled, and when he comes to himself sees the funeral rites of the
old Countess of Glenallan, who is being buried there at midnight and
with secrecy, that family being of the Romish persuasion.

Now the Glenallans are very important in the story, yet how casually
they are introduced! They are hooked on to Dousterswivel in the most
artless way. His pair of eyes happened to be handy, so Scott had a peep
through them. And the reader by now is getting so docile under the
succession of episodes that he just gapes, like a primitive cave mam.
Now the Glenallan interest gets to work, the ruins of St. Ruth are
switched off, and we enter what may be called the "pre-story," where two
new characters intervene, and talk wildly and darkly about a sinful
past. Their names are: Elspeth Mucklebackit, a Sibyl of a fisherwoman,
and Lord Glenallan, son of the dead countess. Their dialogue is
interrupted by other events--by the arrest, trial and release of Edie
Ochiltree, by the death by drowning of another new character, and by the
humours of Hector McIntyre's convalescence at his uncle's house. But the
gist is that Lord Glenallan many years ago had married a lady called
Evelina Nevile, against his mother's wish, and had then been given to
understand that she was his half-sister. Maddened with horror, he had
left her before she gave birth to a child. Elspeth, formerly his
mother's servant, now explains to him that Evelina was no relation to
him, that she died in childbirth--Elspeth and another woman
attending--and that the child disappeared. Lord Glenallan then goes to
consult the Antiquary, who, as a Justice of the Peace, knew something of
the events of the time, and who had also loved Evelina. And what happens
next? Sir Arthur Wardour's goods are sold up, for Dousterswivel has
ruined him. And then? The French are reported to be landing. And then?
Lovel rides into the district leading the British troops. He calls
himself "Major Nevile" now. But even "Major Nevile" is not his right
name, for he is who but the lost child of Lord Glenallan, he is none
other than the legitimate heir to an earldom. Partly through Elspeth
Mucklebackit, partly through her fellow servant whom he meets as a nun
abroad, partly through an uncle who has died, partly through Edie
Ochiltree, the truth has come out. There are indeed plenty of reasons
for the dénouement, but Scott is not interested in reasons; he dumps
them down without bothering to elucidate them; to make one thing happen
after another is his only serious aim. And then? Isabella Wardour
relents and marries the hero. And then? That is the end of the story. We
must not ask "And then?" too often. If the time-sequence is pursued one
second too far it leads us into quite another country.

_The Antiquary_ is a book in which the life in time is celebrated
instinctively by the novelist, and this must lead to slackening of
emotion and shallowness of judgment, and in particular to that idiotic
use of marriage as a finale. Time can be celebrated consciously also,
and we shall find an example of this in a very different sort of book, a
memorable book: Arnold Bennett's _The Old Wives' Tale_. Time is the real
hero of _The Old Wives' Tale_. He is installed as the lord of
creation--excepting indeed of Mr. Critchlow, whose bizarre exemption
only gives added force. Sophia and Constance are the children of Time
from the instant we see them romping with their mother's dresses; they
are doomed to decay with a completeness that is very rare in literature.
They are girls, Sophia runs away and marries, the mother dies, Constance
marries, her husband dies, Sophia's husband dies, Sophia dies, Constance
dies, their old rheumatic dog lumbers up to see whether anything remains
in the saucer. Our daily life in time is exactly this business of
getting old which clogs the arteries of Sophia and Constance, and the
story that is a story and sounded so healthy and stood no nonsense
cannot sincerely lead to any conclusion but the grave. It is an
unsatisfactory conclusion. Of course we grow old. But a great book must
rest on something more than an "of course," and _The Old Wives' Tale_ is
very strong, sincere and sad,--it misses greatness.

What about _War and Peace_? that is certainly great, that likewise
emphasizes the effects of time and the waxing and waning of a
generation. Tolstoy, like Bennett, has the courage to show us people
getting old--the partial decay of Nicolay and Natasha is really more
sinister than the complete decay of Constance and Sophia: more of our
own youth seems to have perished in it. Then why is _War and Peace_ not
depressing? Probably because it has extended over space as well as over
time, and the sense of space until it terrifies us is exhilarating, and
leaves behind it an effect like music. After one has read _War and
Peace_ for a bit, great chords begin to sound, and we cannot say exactly
what struck them. They do not arise from the story, though Tolstoy is
quite as interested in what comes next as Scott, and quite as sincere as
Bennett. They do not come from the episodes nor yet from the characters.
They come from the immense area of Russia, over which episodes and
characters have been scattered, from the sum-total of bridges and frozen
rivers, forests, roads, gardens, fields, which accumulate grandeur and
sonority after we have passed them. Many novelists have the feeling for
place--Five Towns, Auld Reekie, and so on. Very few have the sense of
space, and the possession of it ranks high in Tolstoy's divine
equipment. Space is the lord of _War and Peace_, not time.

A word in conclusion about the story as the repository of a voice. It is
the aspect of the novelist's work which asks to be read out loud, which
appeals not to the eye, like most prose, but to the ear; having indeed
this much in common with oratory. It does not offer melody or cadence.
For these, strange as it may seem, the eye is sufficient; the eye,
backed by a mind that transmutes, can easily gather up the sounds of a
paragraph or dialogue when they have æsthetic value, and refer them to
our enjoyment,--yes, can even telescope them up so that we get them
quicker than we should do if they were recited, just as some people can
look through a musical score quicker than it can be rapped out on the
piano. But the eye is not equally quick at catching a voice. That
opening sentence of _The Antiquary_ has no beauty of sound, yet we
should lose something if it was not read aloud. Our mind would commune
with Walter Scott's silently, and less profitably. The story, besides
saying one thing after another, adds something because of its connection
with a voice.

It does not add much. It does not give us anything as important as the
author's personality. His personality--when he has one--is conveyed
through nobler agencies, such as the characters or the plot or his
comments on life. What the story does do in this particular capacity,
all it can do, is to transform us from readers into listeners, to whom
"a" voice speaks, the voice of the tribal narrator, squatting in the
middle of the cave, and saying one thing after another until the
audience falls asleep among their offal and bones. The story is
primitive, it reaches back to the origins of literature, before reading
was discovered, and it appeals to what is primitive in us. That is why
we are so unreasonable over the stories we like, and so ready to bully
those who like something else. For instance, I am annoyed when people
laugh at me for loving _The Swiss Family Robinson_, and I hope that I
have annoyed some of you over Scott! You see what I mean. Intolerance is
the atmosphere stories generate. The story is neither moral nor is it
favourable to the understanding of the novel in its other aspects. If we
want to do that we must come out of the cave.

We shall not come out of it yet, but observe already how that other
life--the life by value--presses against the novel from all sides, how
it is ready to fill and indeed distort it, offering it people, plots,
fantasies, views of the universe, anything except this constant "and
then ... and then," which is the sole contribution of our present
inquiry. The life in time is so obviously base and inferior that the
question naturally occurs: cannot the novelist abolish it from his work,
even as the mystic asserts he has abolished it from his experience, and
install its radiant alternative alone?

Well, there is one novelist who has tried to abolish time, and her
failure is instructive: Gertrude Stein. Going much further than Emily
Brontë, Sterne or Proust, Gertrude Stein has smashed up and pulverized
her clock and scattered its fragments over the world like the limbs of
Osiris, and she has done this not from naughtiness but from a noble
motive: she has hoped to emancipate fiction from the tyranny of time and
to express in it the life by values only. She fails, because as soon as
fiction is completely delivered from time it cannot express anything at
all, and in her later writing we can see the slope down which she is
slipping. She wants to abolish this whole aspect of the story, this
sequence in chronology, and my heart goes out to her. She cannot do it
without abolishing the sequence between the sentences. But this is not
effective unless the order of the words in the sentences is also
abolished, which in its turn entails the abolition of the order of the
letters or sounds in the words. And now she is over the precipice. There
is nothing to ridicule in such an experiment as hers. It is much more
important to play about like this than to rewrite the Waverley Novels.
Yet the experiment is doomed to failure. The time-sequence cannot be
destroyed without carrying in its ruin all that should have taken its
place; the novel that would express values only becomes unintelligible
and therefore valueless.

That is why I must ask you to join me in repeating in exactly the right
tone of voice the words with which this lecture opened. Do not say them
vaguely and good-temperedly like a busman: you have not the right. Do
not say them briskly and aggressively like a golfer: you know better.
Say them a little sadly, and you will be correct. Yes--oh, dear,
yes--the novel tells a story.




III

PEOPLE


HAVING discussed the story--that simple and fundamental aspect of the
novel--we can turn to a more interesting topic: the actors. We need not
ask what happened next, but to whom did it happen; the novelist will be
appealing to our intelligence and imagination, not merely to our
curiosity. A new emphasis enters his voice: emphasis upon value.

Since the actors in a story are usually human, it seemed convenient to
entitle this aspect People. Other animals have been introduced, but with
limited success, for we know too little so far about their psychology.
There may be, probably will be, an alteration here in the future,
comparable to the alteration in the novelist's rendering of savages in
the past. The gulf that separates Man Friday from Batouala may be
paralleled by the gulf that will separate Kipling's wolves from their
literary descendants two hundred years hence, and we shall have animals
who are neither symbolic, nor little men disguised, nor as four-legged
tables moving, nor as painted scraps of paper that fly. It is one of the
ways where science may enlarge the novel, by giving it fresh subject
matter. But the help has not been given yet, and until it comes we may
say that the actors in a story are, or pretend to be, human beings.

Since the novelist is himself a human being, there is an affinity
between him and his subject matter which is absent in many other forms
of art. The historian is also linked, though, as we shall see, less
intimately. The painter and sculptor need not be linked: that is to say
they need not represent human beings unless they wish, no more need the
poet, while the musician cannot represent them even if he wishes,
without the help of a programme. The novelist, unlike many of his
colleagues, makes up a number of word-masses roughly describing himself
(roughly: niceties shall come later), gives them names and sex, assigns
them plausible gestures, and causes them to speak by the use of inverted
commas, and perhaps to behave consistently. These word-masses are his
characters. They do not come thus coldly to his mind, they may be
created in delirious excitement, still, their nature is conditioned by
what he guesses about other people, and about himself, and is further
modified by the other aspects of his work. This last point--the relation
of characters to the other aspects of the novel--will form the subject
of a future enquiry. At present we are occupied with their relation to
actual life. What is the difference between people in a novel and people
like the novelist or like you, or like me, or Queen Victoria?

There is bound to be a difference. If a character in a novel is exactly
like Queen Victoria--not rather like but exactly like--then it actually
is Queen Victoria, and the novel, or all of it that the character
touches, becomes a memoir. A memoir is history, it is based on evidence.
A novel is based on evidence + or — _x_, the unknown quantity being
the temperament of the novelist, and the unknown quantity always
modifies the effect of the evidence, and sometimes transforms it
entirely.

The historian deals with actions, and with the characters of men only so
far as he can deduce them from their actions. He is quite as much
concerned with character as the novelist, but he can only know of its
existence when it shows on the surface. If Queen Victoria had not said,
"We are not amused," her neighbours at table would not have known she
was not amused, and her ennui could never have been announced to the
public. She might have frowned, so that they would have deduced her
state from that--looks and gestures are also historical evidence. But if
she remained impassive--what would any one know? The hidden life is, by
definition, hidden. The hidden life that appears in external signs is
hidden no longer, has entered the realm of action. And it is the
function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to
tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to
produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.

The interesting and sensitive French critic, who writes under the name
of Alain, has some helpful if slightly fantastic remarks on this point.
He gets a little out of his depth, but not as much as I feel myself out
of mine, and perhaps together we may move toward the shore. Alain
examines in turn the various forms of æsthetic activity, and coming in
time to the novel (le roman) he asserts that each human being has two
sides, appropriate to history and fiction. All that is observable in a
man--that is to say his actions and such of his spiritual existence as
can be deduced from his actions--falls into the domain of history. But
his romanceful or romantic side (sa partie romanesque ou romantique)
includes "the pure passions, that is to say the dreams, joys, sorrows
and self-communings which politeness or shame prevent him from
mentioning"; and to express this side of human nature is one of the
chief functions of the novel. "What is fictitious in a novel is not so
much the story as the method by which thought develops into action, a
method which never occurs in daily life.... History, with its emphasis
on external causes, is dominated by the notion of fatality, whereas
there is no fatality in the novel; there, everything is founded on human
nature, and the dominating feeling is of an existence where everything
is intentional, even passions and crimes, even misery."[3]

This is perhaps a roundabout way of saying what every British schoolboy
knew, that the historian records whereas the novelist must create.
Still, it is a profitable roundabout, for it brings out the fundamental
difference between people in daily life and people in books. In daily
life we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor
complete confessional exists. We know each other approximately, by
external signs, and these serve well enough as a basis for society and
even for intimacy. But people in a novel can be understood completely by
the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer
life can be exposed. And this is why they often seem more definite than
characters in history, or even our own friends; we have been told all
about them that can be told; even if they are imperfect or unreal they
do not contain any secrets, whereas our friends do and must, mutual
secrecy being one of the conditions of life upon this globe.

Now let us restate the problem in a more schoolboyish way. You and I are
people. Had not we better glance through the main facts in our own
lives--not in our individual careers but in our make-up as human beings?
Then we shall have something definite to start from.

The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and
death. One could increase the number--add breathing for instance--but
these five are the most obvious. Let us briefly ask ourselves what part
they play in our lives, and what in novels. Does the novelist tend to
reproduce them accurately or does he tend to exaggerate, minimize,
ignore, and to exhibit his characters going through processes which are
not the same through which you and I go, though they bear the same
names?

To consider the two strangest first: birth and death; strange because
they are at the same time experiences and not experiences. We only know
of them by report. We were all born, but we cannot remember what it was
like. And death is coming even as birth has come, but, similarly, we do
not know what it is like. Our final experience, like our first, is
conjectural. We move between two darknesses. Certain people pretend to
tell us what birth and death are like: a mother, for instance, has her
point of view about birth, a doctor, a religious, have their points of
view about both. But it is all from the outside, and the two entities
who might enlighten us, the baby and the corpse, cannot do so, because
their apparatus for communicating their experiences is not attuned to
our apparatus for reception.

So let us think of people as starting life with an experience they
forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot
understand. These are the creatures whom the novelist proposes to
introduce as characters into books; these, or creatures plausibly like
them. The novelist is allowed to remember and understand everything, if
it suits him. He knows all the hidden life. How soon will he pick up his
characters after birth, how close to the grave will he follow them? And
what will he say, or cause to be felt, about these two queer
experiences?

Then food, the stoking up process, the keeping alive of an individual
flame, the process that begins before birth and is continued after it by
the mother, and finally taken over by the individual himself, who goes
on day after day putting an assortment of objects into a hole in his
face without becoming surprised or bored: food is a link between the
known and the forgotten; closely connected with birth, which none of us
remembers, and coming down to this morning's breakfast. Like
sleep--which in many ways it resembles--food does not merely restore our
strength, it has also an æsthetic side, it can taste good or bad. What
will happen to this double-faced commodity in books?

And fourthly, sleep. On the average, about a third of our time is not
spent in society or civilization or even in what is usually called
solitude. We enter a world of which little is known and which seems to
us after leaving it to have been partly oblivion, partly a caricature of
this world and partly a revelation. "I dreamt of nothing" or "I dreamt
of a ladder" or "I dreamt of heaven" we say when we wake. I do not want
to discuss the nature of sleep and dreams--only to point out that they
occupy much time and that what is called "History" only busies itself
with about two-thirds of the human cycle, and theorizes accordingly.
Does fiction take up a similar attitude?

And lastly, love. I am using this celebrated word in its widest and
dullest sense. Let me be very dry and brief about sex in the first
place. Some years after a human being is born, certain changes occur in
it, as in other animals, which changes often lead to union with another
human being, and to the production of more human beings. And our race
goes on. Sex begins before adolescence, and survives sterility; it is
indeed coeval with our lives, although at the mating age its effects are
more obvious to society. And besides sex, there are other emotions, also
strengthening towards maturity: the various upliftings of the spirit,
such as affection, friendship, patriotism, mysticism--and as soon as we
try to determine the relation between sex and these other emotions we
shall of course begin to quarrel as violently as we ever could about
Walter Scott, perhaps even more violently. Let me only tabulate the
various points of view. Some people say that sex is basic and underlies
all these other loves--love of friends, of God, of country. Others say
that it is connected with them, but laterally, it is not their root.
Others say that it is not connected at all. All I suggest is that we
call the whole bundle of emotions love, and regard them as the fifth
great experience through which human beings have to pass. When human
beings love they try to get something. They also try to give something,
and this double aim makes love more complicated than food or sleep. It
is selfish and altruistic at the same time, and no amount of
specialization in one direction quite atrophies the other. How much time
does love take? This question sounds gross but it must be asked because
it bears on our present enquiry. Sleep takes about eight hours out of
the twenty-four, food about two more. Shall we put down love for another
two? Surely that is a handsome allowance. Love may weave itself into our
other activities--so may drowsiness and hunger. Love may start various
secondary activities: for instance, a man's love for his family may
cause him to spend a good deal of time on the Stock Exchange, or his
love for God a good deal of time in church. But that he has emotional
communion with any beloved object for more than two hours a day may be
gravely doubted, and it is this emotional communion, this desire to give
and to get, this mixture of generosity and expectation, that
distinguishes love from the other experiences on our list.

That is the human make-up--or part of it. Made up like this himself, the
novelist takes his pen in his hand, gets into the abnormal state which
it is convenient to call "inspiration," and tries to create characters.
Perhaps the characters have to fall in with something else in his novel:
this often happens (the books of Henry James are an extreme case), and
then the characters have, of course, to modify the make-up accordingly.
However, we are considering now the more simple case of the novelist
whose main passion is human beings and who will sacrifice a great deal
to their convenience--story, plot, form, incidental beauty.

Well, in what senses do the nations of fiction differ from those of the
earth? One cannot generalize about them, because they have nothing in
common in the scientific sense; they need not have glands, for example,
whereas all human beings have glands. Nevertheless, though incapable of
strict definition, they tend to behave along the same lines.

In the first place, they come into the world more like parcels than
human beings. When a baby arrives in a novel it usually has the air of
having been posted. It is delivered "off"; one of the elder characters
goes and picks it up and shows it to the reader, after which it is
usually laid in cold storage until it can talk or otherwise assist in
the action. There is both a good and a bad reason for this and for all
other deviations from earthly practice; these we will note in a minute,
but do just observe in what a very perfunctory way the population of
noveldom is recruited. Between Sterne and James Joyce, scarcely any
writer has tried either to use the facts of birth or to invent a new set
of facts, and no one, except in a sort of auntish wistful way, has tried
to work back towards the psychology of the baby's mind and to utilize
the literary wealth that must lie there. Perhaps it cannot be done. We
shall decide in a moment.

Death. The treatment of death, on the other hand, is nourished much more
on observation, and has a variety about it which suggests that the
novelist finds it congenial. He does, for the reason that death ends a
book neatly, and for the less obvious reason that working as he does in
time he finds it easier to work from the known towards the darkness
rather than from the darkness of birth towards the known. By the time
his characters die, he understands them, he can be both appropriate and
imaginative about them--strongest of combinations. Take a little
death--the death of Mrs. Proudie in the _Last Chronicle of Barset_. All
is in keeping, yet the effect is terrifying, because Trollope has ambled
Mrs. Proudie down many a diocesan bypath, showing her paces, making her
snap, accustoming us, even to boredom, to her character and tricks, to
her "Bishop, consider the souls of the people," and then she has a heart
attack by the edge of her bed, she has ambled far enough,--end of Mrs.
Proudie. There is scarcely anything that the novelist cannot borrow from
"daily death"; scarcely anything he may not profitably invent. The doors
of that darkness lie open to him and he can even follow his characters
through it, provided he is shod with imagination and does not try to
bring us back scraps of séance information about the "life beyond."

What of food, the third fact upon our list? Food in fiction is mainly
social. It draws characters together, but they seldom require it
physiologically, seldom enjoy it, and never digest it unless specially
asked to do so. They hunger for each other, as we do in life, but our
equally constant longing for breakfast and lunch does not get reflected.
Even poetry has made more of it--at least of its æsthetic side. Milton
and Keats have both come nearer to the sensuousness of swallowing than
George Meredith.

Sleep. Also perfunctory. No attempt to indicate oblivion or the actual
dream world. Dreams are either logical or else mosaics made out of hard
little fragments of the past and future. They are introduced with a
purpose and that purpose is not the character's life as a whole, but
that part of it he lives while awake. He is never conceived as a
creature a third of whose time is spent in the darkness. It is the
limited daylight vision of the historian, which the novelist elsewhere
avoids. Why should he not understand or reconstruct sleep? For remember,
he has the right to invent, and we know when he is inventing truly,
because his passion floats us over improbabilities. Yet he has neither
copied sleep nor created it. It is just an amalgam.

Love. You all know how enormously love bulks in novels, and will
probably agree with me that it has done them harm and made them
monotonous. Why has this particular experience, especially in its sex
form, been transplanted in such generous quantities? If you think of a
novel in the vague you think of a love interest--of a man and woman who
want to be united and perhaps succeed. If you think of your own life in
the vague, or of a group of lives, you are left with a very different
and a more complex impression.

There would seem to be two reasons why love, even in good sincere
novels, is unduly prominent.

Firstly, when the novelist ceases to design his characters and begins to
create them--"love" in any or all of its aspects becomes important in
his mind, and without intending to do so he makes his characters unduly
sensitive to it--unduly in the sense that they would not trouble so much
in life. The constant sensitiveness of characters for each other--even
in writers called robust like Fielding--is remarkable, and has no
parallel in life, except among people who have plenty of leisure.
Passion, intensity at moments--yes, but not this constant awareness,
this endless readjusting, this ceaseless hunger. I believe that these
are the reflections of the novelist's own state of mind while he
composes, and that the predominance of love in novels is partly because
of this.

A second reason; which logically comes into another part of our enquiry,
but it shall be noted here. Love, like death, is congenial to a novelist
because it ends a book conveniently. He can make it a permanency, and
his readers easily acquiesce, because one of the illusions attached to
love is that it will be permanent. Not has been--will be. All history,
all our experience, teaches us that no human relationship is constant,
it is as unstable as the living beings who compose it, and they must
balance like jugglers if it is to remain; if it is constant it is no
longer a human relationship but a social habit, the emphasis in it has
passed from love to marriage. All this we know, yet we cannot bear to
apply our bitter knowledge to the future; the future is to be so
different; the perfect person is to come along, or the person we know
already is to become perfect. There are to be no changes, no necessity
for alertness. We are to be happy or even perhaps miserable for ever and
ever. Any strong emotion brings with it the illusion of permanence, and
the novelists have seized upon this. They usually end their books with
marriage, and we do not object because we lend them our dreams.

Here we must conclude our comparison of those two allied species, Homo
Sapiens and Homo Fictus. Homo Fictus is more elusive than his cousin. He
is created in the minds of hundreds of different novelists, who have
conflicting methods of gestation, so one must not generalize. Still, one
can say a little about him. He is generally born off, he is capable of
dying on, he wants little food or sleep, he is tirelessly occupied with
human relationships. And--most important--we can know more about him
than we can know about any of our fellow creatures, because his creator
and narrator are one. Were we equipped for hyperbole we might exclaim at
this point: "If God could tell the story of the Universe, the Universe
would become fictitious."

For this is the principle involved.


Let us, after these high speculations, take an easy character and study
it for a little. Moll Flanders will do. She fills the book that bears
her name, or rather stands alone in it, like a tree in a park, so that
we can see her from every aspect and are not bothered by rival growths.
Defoe is telling a story, like Scott, and we shall find stray threads
left about in much the same way, on the chance of the writer wanting to
pick them up afterwards: Moll's early batch of children for instance.
But the parallel between Scott and Defoe cannot be pressed. What
interested Defoe was the heroine, and the form of his book proceeds
naturally out of her character. Seduced by a younger brother and married
to an elder, she takes to husbands in the earlier and brighter part of
her career: not to prostitution, which she detests with all the force of
a decent and affectionate heart. She and most of the characters in
Defoe's underworld are kind to one another, they save each other's
feelings and run risks through personal loyalty. Their innate goodness
is always flourishing despite the author's better judgment, the reason
evidently being that the author had some great experience himself while
in Newgate. We do not know what it was, probably he himself did not know
afterwards, for he was a busy slipshod journalist and a keen politician.
But something occurred to him in prison, and out of its vague, powerful
emotion Moll and Roxana are born. Moll is a character physically, with
hard plump limbs that get into bed and pick pockets. She lays no stress
upon her appearance, yet she moves us as having height and weight, as
breathing and eating, and doing many of the things that are usually
missed out. Husbands were her earlier employ: she was trigamous if not
quadrigamous, and one of her husbands turned out to be a brother. She
was happy with all of them, they were nice to her, she nice to them.
Listen to the pleasant jaunt her draper husband took her--she never
cared for him much.


"Come, my dear," says he to me one day, "shall we go and take a turn
into the country for about a week?" "Ay, my dear," says I, "whither
would you go?" "I care not whither," says he, "but I have a mind to look
like quality for a week. We'll go to Oxford," says he. "How," says I,
"shall we go? I am no horse-woman, and 'tis too far for a coach." "Too
far!" says he; "no place is too far for a coach-and-six. If I carry you
out, you shall travel like a duchess." "Hum," says I, "my dear, 'tis a
frolic; but if you have a mind to it, I don't care." Well, the time was
appointed, we had a rich coach, very good horses, a coachman, postilion,
and two footmen in very good liveries; a gentleman on horseback, and a
page with a feather in his hat upon another horse. The servants all
called my lord, and the innkeepers, you may be sure, did the like, and I
was her honour the Countess, and thus we travelled to Oxford, and a very
pleasant journey we had; for, give him his due, not a beggar alive knew
better how to be a lord than my husband. We saw all the rarities at
Oxford, talked with two or three Fellows of Colleges about putting out a
young nephew, that was left to his lordship's care, to the University,
and of their being his tutors. We diverted ourselves with bantering
several other poor Scholars, with hopes of being at least his lordship's
chaplains, and putting on a scarf; and thus having lived like quality,
indeed, as to expense, we went away for Northampton, and, in a word, in
about twelve days' ramble came home again, to the tune of about £93
expense.


Contrast with this the scene with her Lancashire husband, whom she
deeply loved. He is a high-wayman, and each by pretending to wealth has
trapped the other into marriage. After the ceremony, they are mutually
unmasked, and if Defoe were writing mechanically he would set them to
upbraid one another, like Mr. and Mrs. Lammle in _Our Mutual Friend_.
But he has given himself over to the humour and good sense of his
heroine. She guides him through.


"Truly," said I to him, "I found you would soon have conquered me; and
it is my affliction now, that I am not in a condition to let you see how
easily I should have been reconciled to you, and have passed by all the
tricks you had put upon me, in recompense of so much good-humour. But,
my dear," said I, "what can we do now? We are both undone, and what
better are we for our being reconciled together, seeing we have nothing
to live on?"

We proposed a great many things, but nothing could offer where there was
nothing to begin with. He begged me at last to talk no more of it, for,
he said, I would break his heart; so we talked of other things a little,
till at last he took a husband's leave of me, and so we went to sleep.


Which is both truer to daily life and pleasanter to read than Dickens.
The couple are up against facts, not against the author's theory of
morality, and being sensible good-hearted rogues, they do not make a
fuss. In the later part of her career she turns from husbands to
thieving; she thinks this a change for the worse and a natural darkness
spreads over the scene. But she is as firm and amusing as ever. How just
are her reflections when she robs of her gold necklace the little girl
returning from the dancing-class. The deed is done in the little passage
leading to St. Bartholomew's, Smithfield (you can visit the place
today--Defoe haunts London) and her impulse is to kill the child as
well. She does not, the impulse is very feeble, but conscious of the
risk the child has run she becomes most indignant with the parents for
"leaving the poor little lamb to come home by itself, and it would teach
them to take more care of it another time." How heavily and
pretentiously a modern psychologist would labour to express this! It
just runs off Defoe's pen, and so in another passage, where Moll cheats
a man, and then tells him pleasantly afterwards that she has done so,
with the result that she slides still further into his good graces, and
cannot bear to cheat him any more. Whatever she does gives us a slight
shock--not the jolt of disillusionment, but the thrill that proceeds
from a living being. We laugh at her, but without bitterness or
superiority. She is neither hypocrite nor fool.

Towards the end of the book she is caught in a draper's shop by two
young ladies from behind the counter: "I would have given them good
words but there was no room for it: two fiery dragons could not have
been more furious than they were"--they call for the police, she is
arrested and sentenced to death and then transported to Virginia
instead. The clouds of misfortune lift with indecent rapidity. The
voyage is a very pleasant one, owing to the kindness of the old woman
who had originally taught her to steal. And (better still) her
Lancashire husband happens to be transported also. They land at Virginia
where, much to her distress, her brother-husband proves to be in
residence. She conceals this, he dies, and the Lancashire husband only
blames her for concealing it from him: he has no other grievance, for
the reason that he and she are still in love. So the book closes
prosperously, and firm as at the opening sentence the heroine's voice
rings out: "We resolve to spend the remainder of our years in sincere
penitence for the wicked lives we have led."

Her penitence is sincere, and only a superficial judge will condemn her
as a hypocrite. A nature such as hers cannot for long distinguish
between doing wrong and getting caught--for a sentence or two she
disentangles them but they insist on blending, and that is why her
outlook is so cockneyfied and natural, with "sich is life" for a
philosophy and Newgate in the place of Hell. If we were to press her or
her creator Defoe and say, "Come, be serious. Do you believe in
Infinity?" they would say (in the parlance of their modern descendants),
"Of course I believe in Infinity--what do you take me for?"--a
confession of faith that slams the door on Infinity more completely than
could any denial.

_Moll Flanders_ then shall stand as our example of a novel, in which a
character is everything and is given freest play. Defoe makes a slight
attempt at a plot with the brother-husband as a centre, but he is quite
perfunctory, and her legal husband (the one who took her on the jaunt to
Oxford) just disappears and is heard of no more. Nothing matters but the
heroine; she stands in an open space like a tree, and having said that
she seems absolutely real from every point of view, we must ask
ourselves whether we should recognize her if we met her in daily life.
For that is the point we are still considering: the difference between
people in life and people in books. And the odd thing is, that even
though we take a character as natural and untheoretical as Moll who
would coincide with daily life in every detail, we should not find her
there as a whole. Suppose I suddenly altered my voice from a lecturing
voice into an ordinary one and said to you, "Look out--I can see Moll in
the audience--look out, Mr."--naming one of you by name--"she as near as
could be got your watch"--well, you would know at once that I was wrong,
that I was sinning not only against probabilities, which does not
signify, but against daily life and books and the gulf that divides
them. If I said, "Look out, there's some one like Moll in the audience,"
you might not believe me but you would not be annoyed by my imbecile
lack of taste: I should only be sinning against probability. To suggest
that Moll is in Cambridge this afternoon or anywhere in England, or has
been anywhere in England is idiotic. Why?

This particular question will be easy to answer next week, when we shall
deal with more complicated novels, where the character has to fit in
with other aspects of fiction. We shall then be able to make the usual
reply, which we find in all manuals of literature, and which should
always be given in an examination paper, the æsthetic reply, to the
effect that a novel is a work of art, with its own laws, which are not
those of daily life, and that a character in a novel is real when it
lives in accordance with such laws. Amelia or Emma, we shall then say,
cannot be at this lecture because they exist only in the books called
after them, only in worlds of Fielding or Jane Austen. The barrier of
art divides them from us. They are real not because they are like
ourselves (though they may be like us) but because they are convincing.

It is a good answer, it will lead on to some sound conclusions. Yet it
is not satisfactory for a novel like _Moll Flanders_, where the
character is everything and can do what it likes. We want a reply that
is less aesthetic and more psychological. Why cannot she be here? What
separates her from us? Our answer has already been implied in that
quotation from Alain: she cannot be here because she belongs to a world
where the secret life is visible, to a world that is not and cannot be
ours, to a world where the narrator and the creator are one. And now we
can get a definition as to when a character in a book is real: it is
real when the novelist knows everything about it. He may not choose to
tell us all he knows--many of the facts, even of the kind we call
obvious, may be hidden. But he will give us the feeling that though the
character has not been explained, it is explicable, and we get from this
a reality of a kind we can never get in daily life.

For human intercourse, as soon as we look at it for its own sake and not
as a social adjunct, is seen to be haunted by a spectre. We cannot
understand each other, except in a rough and ready way; we cannot reveal
ourselves, even when we want to; what we call intimacy is only a
makeshift; perfect knowledge is an illusion. But in the novel we can
know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading,
we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life. In this
direction fiction is truer than history, because it goes beyond the
evidence, and each of us knows from his own experience that there is
something beyond the evidence, and even if the novelist has not got it
correctly, well--he has tried. He can post his people in as babies, he
can cause them to go on without sleep or food, he can make them be in
love, love and nothing but love, provided he seems to know everything
about them, provided they are his creations. That is why Moll Flanders
cannot be here, that is one of the reasons why Amelia and Emma cannot be
here. They are people whose secret lives are visible or might be
visible: we are people whose secret lives are invisible.

And that is why novels, even when they are about wicked people, can
solace us; they suggest a more comprehensible and thus a more manageable
human race, they give us the illusion of perspicacity and of power.


[Footnote 3: Paraphrased from _Système des Beaux Arts_, pp. 314-315.
I am indebted to M. André Maurois for introducing me to this
stimulating essay.]




IV

PEOPLE (_continued_)


WE now turn from transplantation to acclimatization. We have discussed
whether people could be taken out of life and put into a book, and
conversely whether they could come out of books and sit down in this
room. The answer suggested was in the negative and led to a more vital
question: can we, in daily life, understand each other? Today our
problems are more academic. We are concerned with the characters in
their relation to other aspects of the novel; to a plot, a moral, their
fellow characters, atmosphere, etc. They will have to adapt themselves
to other requirements of their creator.

It follows that we shall no longer expect them to coincide as a whole
with daily life, only to parallel it. When we say that a character in
Jane Austen, Miss Bates for instance, is "so like life" we mean that
each bit of her coincides with a bit of life, but that she as a whole
only parallels the chatty spinster we met at tea. Miss Bates is bound by
a hundred threads to Highbury. We cannot tear her away without bringing
her mother too, and Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill, and the whole of
Box Hill; whereas we could tear Moll Flanders away, at least for the
purposes of experiment. A Jane Austen novel is more complicated than a
Defoe, because the characters are inter-dependent, and there is the
additional complication of a plot. The plot in _Emma_ is not prominent
and Miss Bates contributes little. Still it is there, she is connected
with the principals, and the result is a closely woven fabric from which
nothing can be removed. Miss Bates and Emma herself are like bushes in a
shrubbery--not isolated trees like Moll--and any one who has tried to
thin out a shrubbery knows how wretched the bushes look if they are
transplanted elsewhere, and how wretched is the look of the bushes that
remain. In most books the characters cannot spread themselves. They must
exercise a mutual restraint.

The novelist, we are beginning to see, has a very mixed lot of
ingredients to handle. There is the story, with its time-sequence of
"and then ... and then ..."; there are ninepins about whom he might
tell the story, and tell a rattling good one, but no, he prefers to tell
his story about human beings; he takes over the life by values as well
as the life in time. The characters arrive when evoked, but full of the
spirit of mutiny. For they have these numerous parallels with people
like ourselves, they try to live their own lives and are consequently
often engaged in treason against the main scheme of the book. They "run
away," they "get out of hand": they are creations inside a creation, and
often inharmonious towards it; if they are given complete freedom they
kick the book to pieces, and if they are kept too sternly in check, they
revenge themselves by dying, and destroy it by intestinal decay.

These trials beset the dramatist also, and he has yet another set of
ingredients to cope with--the actors and actresses--and they appear to
side sometimes with the characters they represent, sometimes with the
play as a whole, and more often to be the mortal enemies of both. The
weight they throw is incalculable, and how any work of art survives
their arrival I do not understand. Concerned with a lower form of art,
we need not worry--but, in passing, is it not extraordinary that plays
on the stage are often better than they are in the study, and that the
introduction of a bunch of rather ambitious and nervous men and women
should add anything to our understanding of Shakespeare and Tchekov?

No, the novelist has difficulties enough, and today we shall examine two
of his devices for solving them--instinctive devices, for his methods
when working are seldom the same as the methods we use when examining
his work. The first device is the use of different kinds of characters.
The second is connected with the point of view.

i. We may divide characters into flat and round.

Flat characters were called "humours" in the seventeenth century, and
are sometimes called types, and sometimes caricatures. In their purest
form, they are constructed round a single idea or quality: when there is
more than one factor in them, we get the beginning of the curve towards
the round. The really flat character can be expressed in one sentence
such as "I never will desert Mr. Micawber." There is Mrs. Micawber--she
says she won't desert Mr. Micawber, she doesn't, and there she is. Or:
"I must conceal, even by subterfuges, the poverty of my master's house."
There is Caleb Balderstone in _The Bride of Lammermoor_. He does not use
the actual phrase, but it completely describes him; he has no existence
outside it, no pleasures, none of the private lusts and aches that must
complicate the most consistent of servitors. Whatever he does, wherever
he goes, whatever lies he tells or plates he breaks, it is to conceal
the poverty of his master's house. It is not his idée fixe, because
there is nothing in him into which the idea can be fixed. He is the
idea, and such life as he possesses radiates from its edges and from the
scintillations it strikes when other elements in the novel impinge. Or
take Proust. There are numerous flat characters in Proust, such as the
Princess of Parma, or Legrandin. Each can be expressed in a single
sentence, the Princess's sentence being, "I must be particularly careful
to be kind." She does nothing except to be particularly careful, and
those of the other characters who are more complex than herself easily
see through the kindness, since it is only a by-product of the
carefulness.

One great advantage of flat characters is that they are easily
recognized whenever they come in--recognized by the reader's emotional
eye, not by the visual eye, which merely notes the recurrence of a
proper name. In Russian novels, where they so seldom occur, they would
be a decided help. It is a convenience for an author when he can strike
with his full force at once, and flat characters are very useful to him,
since they never need reintroducing, never run away, have not to be
watched for development, and provide their own atmosphere--little
luminous disks of a pre-arranged size, pushed hither and thither like
counters across the void or between the stars; most satisfactory.

A second advantage is that they are easily remembered by the reader
afterwards. They remain in his mind as unalterable for the reason that
they were not changed by circumstances; they moved through
circumstances, which gives them in retrospect a comforting quality, and
preserves them when the book that produced them may decay. The Countess
in _Evan Harrington_ furnishes a good little example here. Let us
compare our memories of her with our memories of Becky Sharp. We do not
remember what the Countess did or what she passed through. What is clear
is her figure and the formula that surrounds it, namely, "Proud as we
are of dear papa, we must conceal his memory." All her rich humour
proceeds from this. She is a flat character. Becky is round. She, too,
is on the make, but she cannot be summed up in a single phrase, and we
remember her in connection with the great scenes through which she
passed and as modified by those scenes--that is to say, we do not
remember her so easily because she waxes and wanes and has facets like a
human being. All of us, even the sophisticated, yearn for permanence,
and to the unsophisticated permanence is the chief excuse for a work of
art. We all want books to endure, to be refuges, and their inhabitants
to be always the same, and flat characters tend to justify themselves on
this account.

All the same, critics who have their eyes fixed severely upon daily
life--as were our eyes last week--have very little patience with such
renderings of human nature. Queen Victoria, they argue, cannot be summed
up in a single sentence, so what excuse remains for Mrs. Micawber? One
of our foremost writers, Mr. Norman Douglas, is a critic of this type,
and the passage from him which I will quote puts the case against flat
characters in a forcible fashion. The passage occurs in an open letter
to D. H. Lawrence, with whom he is quarrelling: a doughty pair of
combatants, the hardness of whose hitting makes the rest of us feel like
a lot of ladies up in a pavilion. He complains that Lawrence, in a
biography, has falsified the picture by employing "the novelist's
touch," and he goes on to define what this is:


It consists, I should say, in a failure to realize the complexities of
the ordinary human mind; it selects for literary purposes two or three
facets of a man or woman, generally the most spectacular, and therefore
useful ingredients of their character and disregards all the others.
Whatever fails to fit in with these specially chosen traits is
eliminated--must be eliminated, for otherwise the description would not
hold water. Such and such are the data: everything incompatible with
those data has to go by the board. It follows that the novelist's touch
argues, often logically, from a wrong premise: it takes what it likes
and leaves the rest. The facts may be correct as far as they go but
there are too few of them: what the author says may be true and yet by
no means the truth. That is the novelist's touch. It falsifies life.


Well, the novelist's touch as thus defined is, of course, bad in
biography, for no human being is simple. But in a novel it has its
place: a novel that is at all complex often requires flat people as well
as round, and the outcome of their collisions parallels life more
accurately than Mr. Douglas implies. The case of Dickens is significant.
Dickens' people are nearly all flat (Pip and David Copperfield attempt
roundness, but so diffidently that they seem more like bubbles than
solids). Nearly every one can be summed up in a sentence, and yet there
is this wonderful feeling of human depth. Probably the immense vitality
of Dickens causes his characters to vibrate a little, so that they
borrow his life and appear to lead one of their own. It is a conjuring
trick; at any moment we may look at Mr. Pickwick edgeways and find him
no thicker than a gramophone record. But we never get the sideway view.
Mr. Pickwick is far too adroit and well trained. He always has the air
of weighing something, and when he is put into the cupboard of the young
ladies' school he seems as heavy as Falstaff in the buck-basket at
Windsor. Part of the genius of Dickens is that he does use types and
caricatures, people whom we recognize the instant they re-enter, and yet
achieves effects that are not mechanical and a vision of humanity that
is not shallow. Those who dislike Dickens have an excellent case. He
ought to be bad. He is actually one of our big writers, and his immense
success with types suggests that there may be more in flatness than the
severer critics admit.

Or take H. G. Wells. With the possible exceptions of Kipps and the
aunt in _Tono Bungay_, all Wells' characters are as flat as a photograph.
But the photographs are agitated with such vigour that we forget their
complexities lie on the surface and would disappear if it was scratched
or curled up. A Wells character cannot indeed be summed up in a single
phrase; he is tethered much more to observation, he does not create
types. Nevertheless his people seldom pulsate by their own strength. It
is the deft and powerful hands of their maker that shake them and trick
the reader into a sense of depth. Good but imperfect novelists, like
Wells and Dickens, are very clever at transmitting force. The part of
their novel that is alive galvanizes the part that is not, and causes
the characters to jump about and speak in a convincing way. They are
quite different from the perfect novelist who touches all his material
directly, who seems to pass the creative finger down every sentence and
into every word. Richardson, Defoe, Jane Austen, are perfect in this
particular way; their work may not be great but their hands are always
upon it; there is not the tiny interval between the touching of the
button and the sound of the bell which occurs in novels where the
characters are not under direct control.

For we must admit that flat people are not in themselves as big
achievements as round ones, and also that they are best when they are
comic. A serious or tragic flat character is apt to be a bore. Each time
he enters crying "Revenge!" or "My heart bleeds for humanity!" or
whatever his formula is, our hearts sink. One of the romances of a
popular contemporary writer is constructed round a Sussex farmer who
says, "I'll plough up that bit of gorse." There is the farmer, there is
the gorse; he says he'll plough it up, he does plough it up, but it is
not like saying "I'll never desert Mr. Micawber," because we are so
bored by his consistency that we do not care whether he succeeds with
the gorse or fails. If his formula was analysed and connected up with
the rest of the human outfit, we should not be bored any longer, the
formula would cease to be the man and become an obsession in the man;
that is to say he would have turned from a flat farmer into a round one.
It is only round people who are fit to perform tragically for any length
of time and can move us to any feelings except humour and
appropriateness.

So now let us desert these two-dimensional people, and by way of
transition to the round, let us go to _Mansfield Park_, and look at Lady
Bertram, sitting on her sofa with pug. Pug is flat, like most animals in
fiction. He is once represented as straying into a rose-bed in a
cardboard kind of way, but that is all, and during most of the book his
mistress seems to be cut out of the same simple material as her dog.
Lady Bertram's formula is, "I am kindly, but must not be fatigued," and
she functions out of it. But at the end there is a catastrophe. Her two
daughters come to grief--to the worst grief known to Miss Austen's
universe, far worse than the Napoleonic wars. Julia elopes Maria, who is
unhappily married, runs off with a lover. What is Lady Bertram's
reaction? The sentence describing it is significant: "Lady Bertram did
not think deeply, but, guided by Sir Thomas, she thought justly on all
important points, and she saw therefore in all its enormity, what had
happened, and neither endeavoured herself, nor required Fanny to advise
her, to think little of guilt and infamy." These are strong words, and
they used to worry me because I thought Jane Austen's moral sense was
getting out of hand. She may, and of course does, deprecate guilt and
infamy herself, and she duly causes all possible distress in the minds
of Edmund and Fanny, but has she any right to agitate calm, consistent
Lady Bertram? Is not it like giving pug three faces and setting him to
guard the gates of Hell? Ought not her ladyship to remain on the sofa
saying, "This is a dreadful and sadly exhausting business about Julia
and Maria, but where is Fanny gone? I have dropped another stitch"?

I used to think this, through misunderstanding Jane Austen's
method--exactly as Scott misunderstood it when he congratulated her for
painting on a square of ivory. She is a miniaturist, but never
two-dimensional. All her characters are round, or capable of rotundity.
Even Miss Bates has a mind, even Elizabeth Eliot a heart, and Lady
Bertram's moral fervour ceases to vex us when we realize this: the disk
has suddenly extended and become a little globe. When the novel is
closed, Lady Bertram goes back to the flat, it is true; the dominant
impression she leaves can be summed up in a formula. But that is not how
Jane Austen conceived her, and the freshness of her reappearances are
due to this. Why do the characters in Jane Austen give us a slightly new
pleasure each time they come in, as opposed to the merely repetitive
pleasure that is caused by a character in Dickens? Why do they combine
so well in a conversation, and draw one another out without seeming to
do so, and never perform? The answer to this question can be put in
several ways: that, unlike Dickens, she was a real artist, that she
never stooped to caricature, etc. But the best reply is that her
characters though smaller than his are more highly organized. They
function all round, and even if her plot made greater demands on them
than it does, they would still be adequate. Suppose that Louisa Musgrove
had broken her neck on the Cobb. The description of her death would have
been feeble and ladylike--physical violence is quite beyond Miss
Austen's powers--but the survivors would have reacted properly as soon
as the corpse was carried away, they would have brought into view new
sides of their character, and though _Persuasion_ would have been
spoiled as a book, we should know more than we do about Captain
Wentworth and Anne. All the Jane Austen characters are ready for an
extended life, for a life which the scheme of her books seldom requires
them to lead, and that is why they lead their actual lives so
satisfactorily. Let us return to Lady Bertram and the crucial sentence.
See how subtly it modulates from her formula into an area where the
formula does not work. "Lady Bertram did not think deeply." Exactly: as
per formula. "But guided by Sir Thomas she thought justly on all
important points." Sir Thomas' guidance, which is part of the formula,
remains, but it pushes her ladyship towards an independent and undesired
morality. "She saw therefore in all its enormity what had happened."
This is the moral fortissimo--very strong but carefully introduced. And
then follows a most artful decrescendo, by means of negatives. "She
neither endeavoured herself, nor required Fanny to advise her, to think
little of guilt or infamy." The formula is reappearing, because as a
rule she does try to minimize trouble, and does require Fanny to advise
her how to do this; indeed Fanny has done nothing else for the last ten
years. The words, though they are negatived, remind us of this, her
normal state is again in view, and she has in a single sentence been
inflated into a round character and collapsed back into a flat one. How
Jane Austen can write! In a few words she has extended Lady Bertram, and
by so doing she has increased the probability of the elopements of Maria
and Julia. I say probability because the elopements belong to the domain
of violent physical action, and here, as already indicated, Jane Austen
is feeble and ladylike. Except in her school-girl novels, she cannot
stage a crash. Everything violent has to take place "off"--Louisa's
accident and Marianne Dashwood's putrid throat are the nearest
exceptions--and consequently all the comments on the elopement must be
sincere and convincing, otherwise we should doubt whether it occurred.
Lady Bertram helps us to believe that her daughters have run away, and
they have to run away, or there would be no apotheosis for Fanny. It is
a little point, and a little sentence, yet it shows us how delicately a
great novelist can modulate into the round.

All through her works we find these characters, apparently so simple and
flat, never needing reintroduction and yet never out of their
depth--Henry Tilney, Mr. Woodhouse, Charlotte Lucas. She may label her
characters "Sense," "Pride," "Sensibility," "Prejudice," but they are
not tethered to those qualities.

As for the round characters proper, they have already been defined by
implication and no more need be said. All I need do is to give some
examples of people in books who seem to me round so that the definition
can be tested afterwards:

All the principal characters in _War and Peace_, all the Dostoevsky
characters, and some of the Proust--for example, the old family servant,
the Duchess of Guermantes, M. de Charlus, and Saint Loup; Madame
Bovary--who, like Moll Flanders, has her book to herself, and can expand
and secrete unchecked; some people in Thackeray--for instance, Becky and
Beatrix; some in Fielding--Parson Adams, Tom Jones; and some in
Charlotte Brontë, most particularly Lucy Snowe. (And many more--this is
not a catalogue.) The test of a round character is whether it is capable
of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises, it is flat. If
it does not convince, it is a flat pretending to be round. It has the
incalculability of life about it--life within the pages of a book. And
by using it sometimes alone, more often in combination with the other
kind, the novelist achieves his task of acclimatization and harmonizes
the human race with the other aspects of his work.

ii. Now for the second device: the point of view from which the story
may be told.

To some critics this is the fundamental device of novel-writing. "The
whole intricate question of method, in the craft of fiction," says Mr.
Percy Lubbock, "I take to be governed by the question of the _point of
view_--the question of the relation in which the narrator stands to the
story." And his book _The Craft of Fiction_ examines various points of
view with genius and insight. The novelist, he says, can either describe
the characters from outside, as an impartial or partial onlooker; or he
can assume omniscience and describe them from within; or he can place
himself in the position of one of them and affect to be in the dark as
to the motives of the rest; or there are certain intermediate attitudes.

Those who follow him will lay a sure foundation for the æsthetics of
fiction--a foundation which I cannot for a moment promise. This is a
ramshackly survey and for me the "whole intricate question of method"
resolves itself not into formulæ but into the power of the writer to
bounce the reader into accepting what he says--a power which Mr. Lubbock
admits and admires, but locates at the edge of the problem instead of at
the centre. I should put it plumb in the centre. Look how Dickens
bounces us in _Bleak House_. Chapter I of _Bleak House_ is omniscient.
Dickens takes us into the Court of Chancery and rapidly explains all the
people there. In Chapter II he is partially omniscient. We still use his
eyes, but for some unexplained reason they begin to grow weak: he can
explain Sir Leicester Dedlock to us, part of Lady Dedlock but not all,
and nothing of Mr. Tulkinghorn. In Chapter III he is even more
reprehensible: he goes straight across into the dramatic method and
inhabits a young lady, Esther Summerson. "I have a great deal of
difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages, for I know I
am not clever," pipes up Esther, and continues in this strain with
consistency and competence, so long as she is allowed to hold the pen.
At any moment the author of her being may snatch it from her, and run
about taking notes himself, leaving her seated goodness knows where, and
employed we do not care how. Logically, _Bleak House_ is all to pieces,
but Dickens bounces us, so that we do not mind the shiftings of the view
point.

Critics are more apt to object than readers. Zealous for the novel's
eminence, they are a little too apt to look out for problems that shall
be peculiar to it, and differentiate it from the drama; they feel it
ought to have its own technical troubles before it can be accepted as an
independent art; and since the problem of a point of view certainly is
peculiar to the novel they have rather overstressed it. I do not myself
think it is so important as a proper mixture of characters--a problem
which the dramatist is up against also. And the novelist must bounce us;
that is imperative.

Let us glance at two other examples of a shifting view point.

The eminent French writer, André Gide, has published a novel called
_Les Faux Monnayeurs_[4]--for all its modernity, this novel of Gide's
has one aspect in common with _Bleak House_: it is all to pieces
logically. Sometimes the author is omniscient: he explains everything,
he stands back, "il juge ses personnages"; at other times his
omniscience is partial; yet again he is dramatic, and causes the story
to be told through the diary of one of the characters. There is the same
absence of view point, but whereas in Dickens it was instinctive, in
Gide it is sophisticated; he expatiates too much about the jolts. The
novelist who betrays too much interest in his own method can never be
more than interesting; he has given up the creation of character and
summoned us to help analyse his own mind, and a heavy drop in the
emotional thermometer results. _Les Faux Monnayeurs_ is among the more
interesting of recent works: not among the vital: and greatly as we
shall have to admire it as a fabric we cannot praise it unrestrictedly
now.

For our second example we must again glance at _War and Peace_. Here the
result is vital: we are bounced up and down Russia--omniscient,
semi-omniscient, dramatized here or there as the moment dictates--and at
the end we have accepted it all. Mr. Lubbock does not, it is true: great
as he finds the book, he would find it greater if it had a view point;
he feels Tolstoy has not pulled his full weight. I feel that the rules
of the game of writing are not like this. A novelist can shift his view
point if it comes off, and it came off with Dickens and Tolstoy. Indeed
this power to expand and contract perception (of which the shifting view
point is a symptom), this right to intermittent knowledge:--I find it
one of the great advantages of the novel-form, and it has a parallel in
our perception of life. We are stupider at some times than others; we
can enter into people's minds occasionally but not always, because our
own minds get tired; and this intermittence lends in the long run
variety and colour to the experiences we receive. A quantity of
novelists, English novelists especially, have behaved like this to the
people in their books: played fast and loose with them, and I cannot see
why they should be censured.

They must be censured if we catch them at it at the time. That is quite
true, and out of it arises another question: may the writer take the
reader into his confidence about his characters? Answer has already been
indicated: better not. It is dangerous, it generally leads to a drop in
the temperature, to intellectual and emotional laxity, and worse still
to facetiousness, and to a friendly invitation to see how the figures
hook up behind. "Doesn't A look nice--she always was my favourite."
"Let's think of why B does that--perhaps there's more in him than meets
the eye--yes, see--he has a heart of gold--having given you this peep at
it I'll pop it back--I don't think he's noticed." "And C--he always was
the mystery man." Intimacy is gained but at the expense of illusion and
nobility. It is like standing a man a drink so that he may not criticize
your opinions. With all respect to Fielding and Thackeray it is
devastating, it is bar-parlour chattiness, and nothing has been more
harmful to the novels of the past. To take your reader into your
confidence about the universe is a different thing. It is not dangerous
for a novelist to draw back from his characters, as Hardy and Conrad do,
and to generalize about the conditions under which he thinks life is
carried on. It is confidences about the individual people that do harm,
and beckon the reader away from the people to an examination of the
novelist's mind. Not much is ever found in it at such a moment, for it
is never in the creative state: the mere process of saying, "Come along,
let's have a chat," has cooled it down.

Our comments on human beings must now come to an end. They may take
fuller shape when we come to discuss the plot.


[Footnote 4: Translated by Dorothy Bussy as _The Counterfeiters_
(Knopf).]




V

THE PLOT


"CHARACTER," says Aristotle, "gives us qualities, but it is in
actions--what we do--that we are happy or the reverse." We have already
decided that Aristotle is wrong and now we must face the consequences of
disagreeing with him. "All human happiness and misery," says Aristotle,
"take the form of action." We know better. We believe that happiness and
misery exist in the secret life, which each of us leads privately and to
which (in his characters) the novelist has access. And by the secret
life we mean the life for which there is no external evidence, not, as
is vulgarly supposed, that which is revealed by a chance word or a sigh.
A chance word or sigh are just as much evidence as a speech or a murder:
the life they reveal ceases to be secret and enters the realm of action.

There is, however, no occasion to be hard on Aristotle. He had read few
novels and no modern ones--the _Odyssey_ but not _Ulysses_--he was by
temperament apathetic to secrecy, and indeed regarded the human mind as
a sort of tub from which everything can finally be extracted; and when
he wrote the words quoted above he had in view the drama, where no doubt
they hold true. In the drama all human happiness and misery does and
must take the form of action. Otherwise its existence remains unknown,
and this is the great difference between the drama and the novel.

The speciality of the novel is that the writer can talk about his
characters as well as through them or can arrange for us to listen when
they talk to themselves. He has access to self-communings, and from that
level he can descend even deeper and peer into the subconscious. A man
does not talk to himself quite truly--not even to himself; the happiness
or misery that he secretly feels proceed from causes that he cannot
quite explain, because as soon as he raises them to the level of the
explicable they lose their native quality. The novelist has a real pull
here. He can show the subconscious short-circuiting straight into action
(the dramatist can do this too); he can also show it in its relation to
soliloquy. He commands all the secret life, and he must not be robbed of
this privilege. "How did the writer know that?" it is sometimes said.
"What's his standpoint? He is not being consistent, he's shifting his
point of view from the limited to the omniscient, and now he's edging
back again." Questions like these have too much the atmosphere of the
law courts about them. All that matters to the reader is whether the
shifting of attitude and the secret life are convincing, whether it is
_πιθανόν_ in fact, and with his favourite word ringing in his
ears Aristotle may retire.

However, he leaves us in some confusion, for what, with this enlargement
of human nature, is going to become of the plot? In most literary works
there are two elements: human individuals, whom we have recently
discussed, and the element vaguely called art. Art we have also dallied
with, but with a very low form of it: the story: the chopped-off length
of the tapeworm of time. Now we arrive at a much higher aspect: the
plot, and the plot, instead of finding human beings more or less cut to
its requirements, as they are in the drama, finds them enormous, shadowy
and intractable, and three-quarters hidden like an iceberg. In vain it
points out to these unwieldy creatures the advantages of the triple
process of complication, crisis, and solution so persuasively expounded
by Aristotle. A few of them rise and comply, and a novel which ought to
have been a play is the result. But there is no general response. They
want to sit apart and brood or something, and the plot (whom I here
visualize as a sort of higher government official) is concerned at their
lack of public spirit: "This will not do," it seems to say.
"Individualism is a most valuable quality; indeed my own position
depends upon individuals; I have always admitted as much freely.
Nevertheless there are certain limits, and those limits are being
overstepped. Characters must not brood too long, they must not waste
time running up and down ladders in their own insides, they must
contribute, or higher interests will be jeopardised." How well one knows
that phrase, "a contribution to the plot"! It is accorded, and of
necessity, by the people in a drama: how necessary is it in a novel?

Let us define a plot. We have defined a story as a narrative of events
arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events,
the emphasis falling on causality. "The king died and then the queen
died," is a story. "The king died, and then the queen died of grief" is
a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality
overshadows it. Or again: "The queen died, no one knew why, until it was
discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king." This is
a plot with a mystery in it, a form capable of high development. It
suspends the time-sequence, it moves as far away from the story as its
limitations will allow. Consider the death of the queen. If it is in a
story we say "and then?" If it is in a plot we ask "why?" That is the
fundamental difference between these two aspects of the novel. A plot
cannot be told to a gaping audience of cave men or to a tyrannical
sultan or to their modern descendant the movie-public. They can only be
kept awake by "and then--and then----" They can only supply curiosity.
But a plot demands intelligence and memory also.

Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties. You will have
noticed in daily life that when people are inquisitive they nearly
always have bad memories and are usually stupid at bottom. The man who
begins by asking you how many brothers and sisters you have, is never a
sympathetic character, and if you meet him in a year's time he will
probably ask you how many brothers and sisters you have, his mouth again
sagging open, his eyes still bulging from his head. It is difficult to
be friends with such a man, and for two inquisitive people to be friends
must be impossible. Curiosity by itself takes us a very little way, nor
does it take us far into the novel--only as far as the story. If we
would grasp the plot we must add intelligence and memory.

Intelligence first. The intelligent novel-reader, unlike the inquisitive
one who just runs his eye over a new fact, mentally picks it up. He sees
it from two points of view: isolated, and related to the other facts
that he has read on previous pages. Probably he does not understand it,
but he does not expect to do so yet awhile. The facts in a highly
organized novel (like _The Egoist_) are often of the nature of
cross-correspondences and the ideal spectator cannot expect to view them
properly until he is sitting up on a hill at the end. This element of
surprise or mystery--the detective element as it is sometimes rather
emptily called--is of great importance in a plot. It occurs through a
suspension of the time-sequence; a mystery is a pocket in time, and it
occurs crudely, as in "Why did the queen die?" and more subtly in
half-explained gestures and words, the true meaning of which only dawns
pages ahead. Mystery is essential to a plot, and cannot be appreciated
without intelligence. To the curious it is just another "and then----"
To appreciate a mystery, part of the mind must be left behind, brooding,
while the other part goes marching on.

That brings us to our second qualification: memory.

Memory and intelligence are closely connected, for unless we remember we
cannot understand. If by the time the queen dies we have forgotten the
existence of the king we shall never make out what killed her. The
plot-maker expects us to remember, we expect him to leave no loose ends.
Every action or word ought to count; it ought to be economical and
spare; even when complicated it should be organic and free from dead
matter. It may be difficult or easy, it may and should contain
mysteries, but it ought not to mislead. And over it, as it unfolds, will
hover the memory of the reader (that dull glow of the mind of which
intelligence is the bright advancing edge) and will constantly rearrange
and reconsider, seeing new clues, new chains of cause and effect, and
the final sense (if the plot has been a fine one) will not be of clues
or chains, but of something æsthetically compact, something which might
have been shown by the novelist straight away, only if he had shown it
straight away it would never have become beautiful. We come up against
beauty here--for the first time in our enquiry: beauty at which a
novelist should never aim, though he fails if he does not achieve it. I
will conduct beauty to her proper place later on. Meanwhile please
accept her as part of a completed plot. She looks a little surprised at
being there, but beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the
emotion that best suits her face, as Botticelli knew when he painted her
risen from the waves, between the winds and the flowers. The beauty who
does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due--she
reminds us too much of a prima donna.

But let us get back to the plot, and we will do so via George Meredith.

Meredith is not the great name he was twenty or thirty years ago, when
much of the universe and all Cambridge trembled. I remember how
depressed I used to be by a line in one of his poems: "We live but to be
sword or block." I did not want to be either and I knew that I was not a
sword. It seems though that there was no real cause for depression, for
Meredith is himself now rather in the trough of a wave, and though
fashion will turn and raise him a bit, he will never be the spiritual
power he was about the year 1900. His philosophy has not worn well. His
heavy attacks on sentimentality--they bore the present generation, which
pursues the same quarry but with neater instruments, and is apt to
suspect any one carrying a blunderbuss of being a sentimentalist
himself. And his visions of Nature--they do not endure like Hardy's,
there is too much Surrey about them, they are fluffy and lush. He could
no more write the opening chapter of _The Return of the Native_ than Box
Hill could visit Salisbury Plain. What is really tragic and enduring in
the scenery of England was hidden from him, and so is what is really
tragic in life. When he gets serious and noble-minded there is a
strident overtone, a bullying that becomes distressing. I feel indeed
that he was like Tennyson in one respect: through not taking himself
quietly enough he strained his inside. And his novels: most of the
social values are faked. The tailors are not tailors, the cricket
matches are not cricket, the railway, trains do not even seem to be
trains, the county families give the air of having been only just that
moment unpacked, scarcely in position before the action starts, the
straw still clinging to their beards. It is surely very odd, the social
scene in which his characters are set: it is partly due to his fantasy,
which is legitimate, but partly a chilly fake, and wrong. What with the
faking, what with the preaching, which was never agreeable and is now
said to be hollow, and what with the home counties posing as the
universe, it is no wonder Meredith now lies in the trough. And yet he is
in one way a great novelist. He is the finest contriver that English
fiction has ever produced, and any lecture on plot must do homage to
him.

Meredith's plots are not closely knit. We cannot describe the action of
_Harry Richmond_ in a phrase, as we can that of _Great Expectations_,
though both books turn on the mistake made by a young man as to the
sources of his fortune. A Meredithian plot is not a temple to the tragic
or even to the comic Muse, but rather resembles a series of kiosks most
artfully placed among wooded slopes, which his people reach by their own
impetus, and from which they emerge with altered aspect. Incident
springs out of character, and having occurred it alters that character.
People and events are closely connected, and he does it by means of
these contrivances. They are often delightful, sometimes touching,
always unexpected. This shock, followed by the feeling, "Oh, that's all
right," is a sign that all is well with the plot: characters, to be
real, ought to run smoothly, but a plot ought to cause surprise. The
horse-whipping of Dr. Shrapnel in _Beauchamp's Career_ is a surprise. We
know that Everard Romfrey must dislike Shrapnel, must hate and
misunderstand his radicalism, and be jealous of his influence over
Beauchamp: we watch too the growth of the misunderstanding over
Rosamund, we watch the intrigues of Cecil Baskelett. As far as
characters go, Meredith plays with his cards on the table, but when the
incident comes what a shock it gives us and the characters too! The
tragicomic business of one old man whipping another from the highest
motives--it reacts upon all their world, and transforms all the
personages of the book. It is not the centre of _Beauchamp's Career_,
which indeed has no centre. It is essentially a contrivance, a door
through which the book is made to pass, emerging in an altered form.
Towards the close, when Beauchamp is drowned and Shrapnel and Romfrey
are reconciled over his body, there is an attempt to elevate the plot to
Aristotelian symmetry, to turn the novel into a temple wherein dwells
interpretation and peace. Meredith fails here: _Beauchamp's Career_
remains a series of contrivances (the visit to France is another of
them), but contrivances that spring from the characters and react upon
them.

And now briefly to illustrate the mystery element in the plot: the
formula of "The queen died, it was afterwards discovered through grief."
I will take an example, not from Dickens (though _Great Expectations_
provides a fine one), nor from Conan Doyle (whom my priggishness
prevents me from enjoying), but again from Meredith: an example of a
concealed emotion from the admirable plot of _The Egoist_: it occurs in
the character of Laetitia Dale.

We are told, at first, all that passes in Laetitia's mind. Sir
Willoughby has twice jilted her, she is sad, resigned. Then, for
dramatic reasons, her mind is hidden from us, it develops naturally
enough, but does not re-emerge until the great midnight scene where he
asks her to marry him because he is not sure about Clara, and this time,
a changed woman, Laetitia says "No." Meredith has concealed the change.
It would have spoiled his high comedy if we had been kept in touch with
it throughout. Sir Willoughby has to have a series of crashes, to catch
at this and that, and find everything rickety. We should not enjoy the
fun, in fact it would be boorish, if we saw the author preparing the
booby traps beforehand, so Laetitia's apathy has been hidden from us.
This is one of the countless examples in which either plot or character
has to suffer, and Meredith with his unerring good sense here lets the
plot triumph.

As an example of mistaken triumph, I think of a slip--it is no more than
a slip--which Charlotte Brontë makes in _Villette_. She allows Lucy
Snowe to conceal from the reader her discovery that Dr. John is the same
as her old playmate Graham. When it comes out, we do get a good plot
thrill, but too much at the expense of Lucy's character. She has seemed,
up to then, the spirit of integrity, and has, as it were, laid herself
under a moral obligation to narrate all that she knows. That she stoops
to suppress is a little distressing, though the incident is too trivial
to do her any permanent harm.

Sometimes a plot triumphs too completely. The characters have to suspend
their natures at every turn, or else are so swept away by the course of
Fate that our sense of their reality is weakened. We shall find
instances of this in a writer who is far greater than Meredith, and yet
less successful as a novelist--Thomas Hardy. Hardy seems to me
essentially a poet, who conceives of his novels from an enormous height.
They are to be tragedies or tragi-comedies, they are to give out the
sound of hammer-strokes as they proceed; in other words Hardy arranges
events with emphasis on causality, the ground plan is a plot, and the
characters are ordered to acquiesce in its requirements. Except in the
person of Tess (who conveys the feeling that she is greater than
destiny) this aspect of his work is unsatisfactory. His characters are
involved in various snares, they are finally bound hand and foot, there
is ceaseless emphasis on fate, and yet, for all the sacrifices made to
it, we never see the action as a living thing as we see it in _Antigone_
or _Berenice_ or _The Cherry Orchard_. The fate above us, not the fate
working through us--that is what is eminent and memorable in the Wessex
novels. Egdon Heath before Eustada Vye has set foot upon it. The woods
without the Woodlanders. The downs above Budmouth Regis with the royal
princesses, still asleep, driving across them through the dawn. Hardy's
success in _The Dynasts_ (where he uses another medium) is complete,
there the hammer-strokes are heard, cause and effect enchain the
characters despite their struggles, complete contact between the actors
and the plot is established. But in the novels, though the same superb
and terrible machine works, it never catches humanity in its teeth;
there is some vital problem that has not been answered, or even posed,
in the misfortunes of Jude the Obscure. In other words the characters
have been required to contribute too much to the plot; except in their
rustic humours, their vitality has been impoverished, they have gone dry
and thin. This, as far as I can make out, is the flaw running through
Hardy's novels: he has emphasized causality more strongly than his
medium permits. As a poet and prophet and visualizer George Meredith is
nothing by his side--just a suburban roarer--but Meredith did know what
the novel could stand, where the plot could dun the characters for a
contribution, where it must let them function as they liked. And the
moral--well, I see no moral, because the work of Hardy is my home and
that of Meredith cannot be: still the moral from the point of these
lectures is again unfavourable to Aristotle. In the novel, all human
happiness and misery does not take the form of action, it seeks means of
expression other than through the plot, it must not be rigidly
canalized.

In the losing battle that the plot fights with the characters, it often
takes a cowardly revenge. Nearly all novels are feeble at the end. This
is because the plot requires to be wound up. Why is this necessary? Why
is there not a convention which allows a novelist to stop as soon as he
feels muddled or bored? Alas, he has to round things off, and usually
the characters go dead while he is at work, and our final impression of
them is through deadness. _The Vicar of Wakefield_ is in this way a
typical novel, so clever and fresh in the first half, up to the painting
of the family group with Mrs. Primrose as Venus, and then so wooden and
imbecile. Incidents and people that occurred at first for their own sake
now have to contribute to the dénouement. In the end even the author
feels he is being a little foolish. "Nor can I go on," he says, "without
a reflection on those accidental meetings which, though they happen
every day, seldom excite our surprise but upon some extraordinary
occasion." Goldsmith is of course a light-weight, but most novels do
fail here--there is this disastrous standstill while logic takes over
the command from flesh and blood. If it was not for death and marriage
I do not know how the average novelist would conclude. Death and
marriage are almost his only connection between his characters and his
plot, and the reader is more ready to meet him here, and take a bookish
view of them, provided they occur later on in the book: the writer, poor
fellow, must be allowed to finish up somehow, he has his living to get
like any one else, so no wonder that nothing is heard but hammering and
screwing.

This--as far as one can generalize--is the inherent defect of novels:
they go off at the end: and there are two explanations of it: firstly,
failure of pep, which threatens the novelist like all workers: and
secondly, the difficulty which we have been discussing. The characters
have been getting out of hand, laying foundations and declining to build
on them afterwards, and now the novelist has to labour personally, in
order that the job may be done to time. He pretends that the characters
are acting for him. He keeps mentioning their names and using inverted
commas. But the characters are gone or dead.

The plot, then, is the novel in its logical intellectual aspect: it
requires mystery, but the mysteries are solved later on: the reader may
be moving about in worlds unrealized, but the novelist has no
misgivings. He is competent, poised above his work, throwing a beam of
light here, popping on a cap of invisibility there, and (qua plot-maker)
continually negotiating with himself qua character-monger as to the best
effect to be produced. He plans his book beforehand: or anyhow he stands
above it, his interest in cause and effect give him an air of
predetermination.

And now we must ask ourselves whether the framework thus produced is the
best possible for a novel. After all, why has a novel to be planned?
Cannot it grow? Why need it close, as a play closes? Cannot it open out?
Instead of standing above his work and controlling it, cannot the
novelist throw himself into it and be carried along to some goal that he
does not foresee? The plot is exciting and may be beautiful, yet is it
not a fetich, borrowed from the drama, from the spatial limitations of
the stage? Cannot fiction devise a framework that is not so logical yet
more suitable to its genius?

Modern writers say that it can, and we will now examine a recent
example--a violent onslaught on the plot as we have defined it: a
constructive attempt to put something in the place of the plot.

I have already mentioned the novel in question: _Les Faux Monnayeurs_ by
André Gide. It contains within its covers both the methods. Gide has
also published the diary he kept while he was writing the novel, and
there is no reason why he should not publish in the future the
impressions he had when rereading both the diary and the novel, and in
the future-perfect a still more final synthesis in which the diary, the
novel, and his impressions of both will interact. He is indeed a little
more solemn than an author should be about the whole caboodle, but
regarded as a caboodle it is excessively interesting, and repays careful
study by critics.

We have, in the first place, a plot in _Les Faux Monnayeurs_ of the
logical objective type that we have been considering--a plot, or rather
fragments of plots. The main fragment concerns a young man called
Olivier--a charming, touching and lovable character, who misses
happiness, and then recovers it after an excellently contrived
dénouement; confers it also; this fragment has a wonderful radiance and
"lives," if I may use so coarse a word, it is a successful creation on
familiar lines. But it is by no means the centre of the book. No more
are the other logical fragments--that which concerns Georges, Olivier's
schoolboy brother, who passes false coin, and is instrumental in driving
a fellow-pupil to suicide. (Gide gives us his sources for all this in
his diary, he got the idea of Georges from a boy whom he caught trying
to steal a book off a stall, the gang of coiners were caught at Rouen,
and the suicide of children took place at Clermont-Ferrand, etc.)
Neither Olivier, nor Georges, nor Vincent a third brother, nor Bernard
their friend is the centre of the book. We come nearer to it in Edouard.
Edouard is a novelist. He bears the same relation to Gide as Clissold
does to Wells. I dare not be more precise. Like Gide, he keeps a diary,
like Gide he is writing a book called _Les Faux Monnayeurs_, and like
Clissold he is disavowed. Edouard's diary is printed in full. It begins
before the plot-fragments, continues during them, and forms the bulk of
Gide's book. Edouard is not just a chronicler. He is an actor too;
indeed it is he who rescues Olivier and is rescued by him; we leave
those two in happiness.

But that is still not the centre. The nearest to the centre lies in a
discussion about the art of the novel. Edouard is holding forth to
Bernard his secretary and some friends. He has said (what we all accept
as commonplace) that truth in life and truth in a novel are not
identical, and then he goes on to say that he wants to write a book
which shall include both sorts of truth.


"And what is its subject?" asked Sophroniska.

"There is none," said Edouard sharply. "My novel has no subject. No
doubt that sounds foolish. Let us say, if you prefer, that it will not
have 'a' subject.... 'A slice of life,' the naturalistic school used to
say. The mistake that school made was always to cut its slice in the
same direction, always lengthwise, in the direction of time. Why not cut
it up and down? Or across? As for me, I don't want to cut it at all. You
see what I mean. I want to put everything into my novel and not snip off
my material either here or there. I have been working for a year, and
there is nothing I haven't put in: all I see, all I know, all I can
learn from other people's lives and my own."

"My poor man, you will bore your readers to death," cried Layra, unable
to restrain her mirth.

"Not at all. To get my effect, I am inventing, as my central character,
a novelist, and the subject of my book will be the struggle between what
reality offers him and what he tries to make of the offer."

"Have you planned out this book?" asked Sophroniska, trying to keep
grave.

"Of course not."

"Why 'of course'?"

"For a book of this type any plan would be unsuitable. The whole of it
would go wrong if I decided any detail ahead. I am waiting for reality
to dictate to me."

"But I thought you wanted to get away from reality."

"My novelist wants to get away, but I keep pulling him back. To tell the
truth, this is my subject: the struggle between facts as proposed by
reality, and the ideal reality."

"Do tell us the name of this book," said Laura, in despair.

"Very well. Tell it them, Bernard."

"_Les Faux Monnayeurs_" said Bernard. "And now will you please tell us
who these faux monnayeurs are."

"I haven't the least idea."

Bernard and Laura looked at each other and then at Sophroniska. There
was the sound of a deep sigh.

The fact was that ideas about money, depreciation, inflation, forgery,
etc., had gradually invaded Edouard's book--just as theories of clothing
invade _Sartor Resartus_ and even assume the functions of characters.
"Has any of you ever had hold of a false coin?" he asked after a pause.
"Imagine a ten-franc piece, gold, false. It is actually worth a couple
of sous, but it will remain worth ten francs until it is found out.
Suppose I begin with the idea that----"

"But why begin with an idea?" burst out Bernard, who was by now in a
state of exasperation. "Why not begin with a fact? If you introduce the
fact properly, the idea will follow of itself. If I was writing your
_Faux Monnayeurs_ I should begin with a piece of false money, with the
ten-franc piece you were speaking of, and here it is!"

So saying, Bernard pulled a ten-franc piece out of his pocket and flung
it on the table.

"There," he remarked. "It rings all right. I got it this morning from
the grocer. It's worth more than a couple of sous, as it's coated in
gold, but it's actually made of glass. It will become quite transparent
in time. No--don't rub it--you're going to spoil my false coin."

Edouard had taken it and was examining it with the utmost attention.

"How did the grocer get it?"

"He doesn't know. He passed it on me for a joke, and then enlightened
me, being a decent fellow. He let me have it for five francs. I thought
that, since you were writing _Les Faux Monnayeurs_, you ought to see
what false money is like, so I got it to show you. Now that you have
looked at it, give it me back. I am sorry to see that reality has no
interest for you."

"Yes," said Edouard: "it interests me, but it puts me out."

"That's a pity," remarked Bernard.[5]


This passage is the centre of the book. It contains the old thesis of
truth in life versus truth in art, and illustrates it very neatly by the
arrival of an actual false coin. What is new in it is the attempt to
combine the two truths, the proposal that writers should mix themselves
up in their material and be rolled over and over by it; they should not
try to subdue any longer, they should hope to be subdued, to be carried
away. As for a plot--to pot with the plot, break it up, boil it down.
Let there be those "formidable erosions of contour" of which Nietzsche
speaks. All that is prearranged is false.

Another distinguished critic has agreed with Gide--that old lady in the
anecdote who was accused by her nieces of being illogical. For some time
she could not be brought to understand what logic was, and when she
grasped its true nature she was not so much angry as contemptuous.
"Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!" she exclaimed. "How can I tell
what I think till I see what I say?" Her nieces, educated young women,
thought that she was passée; she was really more up to date than they
were.

Those who are in touch with contemporary France, say that the present
generation follows the advice of Gide and the old lady and resolutely
hurls itself into confusion, and indeed admires English novelists on the
ground that they so seldom succeed in what they attempt. Compliments are
always delightful, but this particular one is a bit of a backhander. It
is like trying to lay an egg and being told you have produced a
paraboloid--more curious than gratifying. And what results when you try
to lay a paraboloid, I cannot conceive--perhaps the death of the hen.
That seems the danger in Gide's position--he sets out to lay a
paraboloid; he is not well advised, if he wants to write subconscious
novels, to reason so lucidly and patiently about the subconscious; he is
introducing mysticism at the wrong stage of the process. However that is
his affair. As a critic he is most stimulating, and the various bundles
of words he has called _Les Faux Monnayeurs_ will be enjoyed by all who
cannot tell what they think till they see what they say, or who weary of
the tyranny by the plot and of its alternative, tyranny by characters.

There is clearly something else in view, some other aspect or aspects
which we have yet to examine. We may suspect the claim to be consciously
subconscious, nevertheless there is a vague and vast residue into which
the subconscious enters. Poetry, religion, passion--we have not placed
them yet, and since we are critics—only critics--we must try to place
them, to catalogue the rainbow. We have already peeped and botanized
upon our mothers' graves.

The numbering of the warp and woof of the rainbow must accordingly be
attempted and we must now bring our minds to bear on the subject of
fantasy.


[Footnote 5: Paraphrased from _Les Faux Monnayeurs_, pp. 238-246.
My version, needless to say, conveys neither the subtlety nor the
balance of the original.]




VI

FANTASY


A course of lectures, if it is to be more than a collection of remarks,
must have an idea running through it. It must also have a subject, and
the idea ought to run through the subject too. This is so obvious as to
sound foolish, but any one who has tried to lecture will realize that
here is a genuine difficulty. A course, like any other collection of
words, generates an atmosphere. It has its own apparatus--a lecturer, an
audience or provision for one, it occurs at regular intervals, it is
announced by printed notices, and it has a financial side, though this
last is tactfully concealed. Thus it tends in its parasitic way to lead
a life of its own, and it and the idea running through it are apt to
move in one direction while the subject steals off in the other.

The idea running through these lectures is by now plain enough: that
there are in the novel two forces: human beings and a bundle of various
things not human beings, and that it is the novelist's business to
adjust these two forces and conciliate their claims. That is plain
enough, but does it run through the novel too? Perhaps our subject,
namely the books we have read, has stolen away from us while we
theorize, like a shadow from an ascending bird. The bird is all
right--it climbs, it is consistent and eminent. The shadow is all
right--it has flickered across roads and gardens. But the two things
resemble one another less and less, they do not touch as they did when
the bird rested its toes on the ground. Criticism, especially a critical
course, is so misleading. However lofty its intentions and sound its
method, its subject slides away from beneath it, imperceptibly away, and
lecturer and audience may awake with a start to find that they are
carrying on in a distinguished and intelligent manner, but in regions
which have nothing to do with anything they have read.

It was this that was worrying Gide, or rather one of the things that was
worrying him, for he has an anxious mind. When we try to translate truth
out of one sphere into another, whether from life into books or from
books into lectures, something happens to truth, it goes wrong, not
suddenly when it might be detected, but slowly. That long passage from
_Les Faux Monnayeurs_ already quoted, may recall the bird to its shadow.
It is not possible, after it, to apply the old apparatus any more. There
is more in the novel than time or people or logic or any of their
derivatives, more even than Fate. And by "more" I do not mean something
that excludes these aspects nor something that includes them, embraces
them. I mean something that cuts across them like a bar of light, that
is intimately connected with them at one place and patiently illumines
all their problems, and at another place shoots over or through them as
if they did not exist. We shall give that bar of light two names,
fantasy and prophecy.

The novels we have now to consider all tell a story, contain characters,
and have plots or bits of plots, so we could apply to them the apparatus
suited for Fielding or Arnold Bennett. But when I say two of their
names--_Tristram Shandy_ and _Moby Dick_--it is clear that we must stop
and think a moment. The bird and the shadow are too far apart. A new
formula must be found: the mere fact that one can mention Tristram and
Moby in a single sentence shows it. What an impossible pair! As far
apart as the poles. Yes. And like the poles they have one thing in
common, which the lands round the equator do not share: an axis. What is
essential in Sterne and Melville belongs to this new aspect of fiction:
the fantastic-prophetical axis. George Meredith touched it: he was
somewhat fantastic. So did Charlotte Brontë: she was a prophetess
occasionally. But in neither of these was it essential. Deprive them of
it, and a book remains which still resembles _Harry Richmond_ or
_Shirley_. Deprive Sterne or Melville of it, deprive Peacock or Max
Beerbohm or Virginia Woolf or Walter de la Mare or William Beckford or
James Joyce or D. H. Lawrence or Swift, and nothing is left at all.

Our easiest approach to a definition of any aspect of fiction is always
by considering the sort of demand it makes on the reader. Curiosity for
the story, human feelings and a sense of value for the characters,
intelligence and memory for the plot. What does fantasy ask of us? It
asks us to pay something, extra. It compels us to an adjustment that is
different to an adjustment required by a work of art, to an additional
adjustment. The other novelists say "Here is something that might occur
in your lives," the fantasist says "Here's something that could not
occur. I must ask you first to accept my book as a whole, and secondly
to accept certain things in my book." Many readers can grant the first
request, but refuse the second. "One knows a book isn't real," they say,
"still one does expect it to be natural, and this angel or midget or
ghost or silly delay about the child's birth--no, it is too much." They
either retract their original concession and stop reading, or if they do
go on it is with complete coldness, and they watch the gambols of the
author without realizing how much they may mean to him.

No doubt the above approach is not critically sound. We all know that a
work of art is an entity, etc., etc.; it has its own laws which are not
those of daily life, anything that suits it is true, so why should any
question arise about the angel, etc., except whether it is suitable to
its book? Why place an angel on a different basis from a stockbroker?
Once in the realm of the fictitious, what difference is there between an
apparition and a mortgage? I see the soundness of this argument, but my
heart refuses to assent. The general tone of novels is so literal that
when the fantastic is introduced it produces a special effect: some
readers are thrilled, others choked off: it demands an additional
adjustment because of the oddness of its method or subject matter--like
a sideshow in an exhibition where you have to pay sixpence as well as
the original entrance fee. Some readers pay with delight, it is only for
the sideshows that they entered the exhibition, and it is only to them I
can now speak. Others refuse with indignation, and these have our
sincere regards, for to dislike the fantastic in literature is not to
dislike literature. It does not even imply poverty of imagination, only
a disinclination to meet certain demands that are made on it. Mr.
Asquith (if gossip is correct) could not meet the demands made on him by
_Lady into Fox_. He should not have objected, he said, if the fox had
become a lady again, but as it was he was left with an uncomfortable
dissatisfied feeling. This feeling reflects no discredit either upon an
eminent politician or a charming book. It merely means that Mr. Asquith,
though a genuine lover of literature, could not pay the additional
sixpence--or rather he was willing to pay it but hoped to get it back
again at the end.

So fantasy asks us to pay something extra.

Let us now distinguish between fantasy and prophecy.

They are alike in having gods, and unlike in the gods they have. There
is in both the sense of mythology which differentiates them from other
aspects of our subject. An invocation is again possible, therefore on
behalf of fantasy let us now invoke all beings who inhabit the lower
air, the shallow water, and the smaller hills, all Fauns and Dryads and
slips of the memory, all verbal coincidences, Pans and puns, all that is
mediæval this side of the grave. When we come to prophecy, we shall
utter no invocation, but it will have been to whatever transcends our
abilities, even when it is human passion that transcends them, to the
deities of India, Greece, Scandinavia and Judæa, to all that is
mediæval beyond the grave and to Lucifer son of the morning. By their
mythologies we shall distinguish these two sorts of novels.

A number of rather small gods then should haunt us today--I would call
them fairies if the word were not consecrated to imbecility. (Do you
believe in fairies? No, not under any circumstances.) The stuff of daily
life will be tugged and strained in various directions, the earth will
be given little tilts mischievous or pensive, spot lights will fall on
objects that have no reason to anticipate or welcome them, and tragedy
herself, though not excluded, will have a fortuitous air as if a word
would disarm her. The power of fantasy penetrates into every corner of
the universe, but not into the forces that govern it--the stars that are
the brain of heaven, the army of unalterable law, remain untouched--and
novels of this type have an improvised air, which is the secret of their
force and charm. They may contain solid character-drawing, penetrating
and bitter criticism of conduct and civilization; yet our simile of the
beam of light must remain, and if one god must be invoked specially, let
us call upon Hermes--messenger, thief, and conductor of souls to a not
too terrible hereafter.

You will expect me now to say that a fantastic book asks us to accept
the supernatural. I will say it, but reluctantly, because any statement
as to their subject matter brings these novels into the claws of
critical apparatus, from which it is important that they should be
saved. It is truer of them than of most books that we can only know what
is in them by reading them, and their appeal is specially personal--they
are sideshows inside the main show. So I would rather hedge as much as
possible, and say that they ask us to accept either the supernatural or
its absence.

A reference to the greatest of the them--_Tristram Shandy_--will make
this point clear. The supernatural is absent from the Shandy ménage,
yet a thousand incidents suggest that it is not far off. It would not be
really odd, would it, if the furniture in Mr. Shandy's bedroom, where he
retired in despair after hearing the omitted details of his son's birth,
should come alive like Belinda's toilette in _The Rape of the Lock_, or
that Uncle Toby's drawbridge should lead into Lilliput? There is a
charmed stagnation about the whole epic--the more the characters do the
less gets done, the less they have to say the more they talk, the harder
they think the softer they get, facts have an unholy tendency to unwind
and trip up the past instead of begetting the future, as in
well-conducted books, and the obstinacy of inanimate objects, like Dr.
Slop's bag, is most suspicious. Obviously a god is hidden in _Tristram
Shandy_, his name is Muddle, and some readers cannot accept him. Muddle
is almost incarnate--quite to reveal his awful features was not Sterne's
intention; that is the deity that lurks behind his masterpiece--the army
of unutterable muddle, the universe as a hot chestnut. Small wonder that
another divine muddler, Dr. Johnson, writing in 1776, should remark,
"Nothing odd will do long: _Tristram Shandy_ did not last!" Doctor
Johnson was not always happy in his literary judgments, but the
appropriateness of this one passes belief.

Well, that must serve as our definition of fantasy. It implies the
supernatural, but need not express it. Often it does express it, and
were that type of classification helpful, we could make a list of the
devices which writers of a fantastic turn have used--such as the
introduction of a god, ghost, angel, monkey, monster, midget, witch into
ordinary life; or the introduction of ordinary men into no man's land,
the future, the past, the interior of the earth, the fourth dimension;
or divings into and dividings of personality; or finally the device of
parody or adaptation. These devices need never grow stale; they will
occur naturally to writers of a certain temperament, and be put to fresh
use; but the fact that their number is strictly limited is of interest;
and suggests that the beam of light can only be manipulated in certain
ways.

I will select, as a typical example, a recent book about a witch:
_Flecker's Magic_, by Norman Matson. It seemed to me good and I
recommended it to a friend whose judgment I respect. He thought it poor.
That is what is so tiresome about new books; they never give us that
restful feeling which we have when perusing the classics. _Flecker's
Magic_ contains scarcely anything that is new--fantasies cannot: only
the old old story of the wishing ring which brings either misery or
nothing at all. Flecker, an American boy who is learning to paint in
Paris, is given the ring by a girl in a café; she is a witch, she tells
him; he has only to be sure what he wants and he will get it. To prove
her power, a motor-bus rises slowly from the street and turns upside
down in the air. The passengers, who do not fall out, try to look as if
nothing was happening. The driver, who is standing on the pavement at
the moment, cannot conceal his surprise, but when his bus returns safe
to earth again he thinks it wiser to get into his seat and drive off as
usual. Motor-buses do not revolve slowly through the air--so they do
not. Flecker now accepts the ring. His character, though slightly
sketched, is individual, and this definiteness causes the book to grip.

It proceeds with a growing tension, a series of little shocks. The
method is Socratic. The boy starts by thinking of something obvious,
like a Rolls-Royce. But where shall he put the beastly thing? Or a
beautiful lady. But what about her carte d'identité? Or money? Ah,
that's more like it--he is almost a beggar. Say a million dollars. He
prepares to turn the ring for this wish--except while one's about it two
millions seem safer--or ten--or--and money blares out into madness, and
the same thing happens when he thinks of long life: to die in forty
years--no, in fifty--in one hundred--horrible, horrible. Then a solution
occurs. He has always wanted to be a great painter. Well, he'll be it at
once. But what kind of greatness? Giotto's? Cézanne's? Certainly not;
his own kind, and he does not know what that is, so this wish likewise
is impossible.

And now a horrible old woman begins to haunt his days and dreams. She
reminds him vaguely of the girl who gave him the ring. She knows his
thoughts and she is always sidling up to him in the streets and saying,
"Dear boy--darling boy--wish for happiness." We learn in time that she
is the real witch--the girl was a human acquaintance whom she used to
get into touch with Flecker. The last of the witches--very lonely. The
rest have committed suicide during the eighteenth century--they could
not endure to survive into the world of Newton where two and two make
four, and even the world of Einstein is not sufficiently decentralised
to revive them. She has hung on in the hope of smashing this world, and
she wants the boy to ask for happiness because such a wish has never
been made in all the history of the ring.


Perhaps Flecker was the first modern man to find himself in this
predicament? The people of the old world had so little they knew surely
what they wanted. They knew about Almighty God, who wore a beard and sat
in an armchair about a mile above the fields, and life was very short
and very long too, for the days were so full of unthinking effort.

The people of the recorded olden times wished for a beautiful castle on
a high hill and lived therein until death. But the hill was not so high
one might see from the windows back along thirty centuries--as one may
from a bungalow. In the castle there were no great volumes filled with
words and pictures of things dug up by man's relentless curiosity from
sand and soil in all comers of the world; there was a sentimental
half-belief in dragons, but no knowledge that once upon a time only
dragons had lived on the earth--that man's grandfather and grandmother
were dragons; there were no movies flickering like thoughts against a
white wall, no phonograph, no machinery with which to achieve the
sensation of speed; no diagrams of the fourth dimension, no contrasts in
life like that of Waterville, Minn., and Paris, France. In the castle
the light was weak and flickering, hallways were dark, rooms deeply
shadowed. The little outside world was full of shadow, and on the very
top of the mind of him who lived in the castle played a dim
light--underneath were shadows, fear, ignorance, will-to-ignorance. Most
of all, there was not in the castle on the hill the breathless sense of
imminent revelation--that today or surely tomorrow Man would at a stroke
double his power and change the world again.

The ancient tales of magic were the mumbling thoughts of a distant
shabby little world--so, at least, thought Flecker, offended. The tales
gave him no guidance. There was too much difference between his world
and theirs.

He wondered if he hadn't dismissed the wish for happiness rather
heedlessly? He seemed to get nowhere thinking about it. He was not wise
enough. In the old tales a wish for happiness was never made! He
wondered why.

He might chance it--just to see what would happen. The thought made him
tremble. He leaped from his bed and paced the red-tiled floor, rubbing
his hands together.

"I want to be happy for ever," he whispered, to hear the words, careful
not to touch the ring. "_Happy ... for ever_"--the two syllables of the
first word, like hard little pebbles, struck musically against the bell
of his imagination, but the second was a sigh. _For ever_--his spirit
sank under the soft heavy impact of it. Held in his thought the word
made a dreary music, fading. "_Happy for ever_"--NO!!


Thus again and again--the mark of the true fantasist--does Norman Matson
merge the kingdoms of magic and common sense by using words that apply
to both, and the mixture he has created comes alive. I will not tell the
end of the story. You will have guessed its essentials, but there are
always surprises in the working of a fresh mind, and to the end of time
good literature will be made round this notion of a wish.

To turn from this simple example of the supernatural to a more
complicated one--to a highly accomplished and superbly written book
whose spirit is farcical: _Zuleika Dobson_ by Max Beerbohm. You all know
Miss Dobson--not personally, or you would not be here now. She is that
damsel for love of whom all the undergraduates of Oxford except one
drowned themselves during Eights week, and he threw himself out of a
window.

A superb theme for a fantasy, but all will depend on the handling. It is
treated with a mixture of realism, wittiness, charm and mythology, and
the mythology is most important. Max has borrowed or created a number of
supernatural machines--to have entrusted Zuleika to one of them would be
inept; the fantasy would become heavy or thin. But we pass from the
sweating emperors to the black and pink pearls, the hooting owls, the
interference of the Muse Clio, the ghosts of Chopin and George Sand, of
Nellie O'Mora; just as one fails another starts, to uphold this gayest
and most exquisite of funeral palls.


Through the square, across the High, down Grove Street they
passed. The Duke looked up at the tower of Merton, _ώs oὔπoτ' αὗθιs
ἀλλὰ νῦν πανύστατoν_. Strange that tonight it would still be
standing here, in all its sober and solid beauty--still be
gazing, over the roofs and chimneys, at the tower of Magdalen, its
rightful bride. Through untold centuries of the future it would stand
thus, gaze thus. He winced. Oxford walls have a way of belittling us;
and the Duke was loth to regard his doom as trivial.

Aye, by all minerals we are mocked. Vegetables, yearly deciduous, are
far more sympathetic. The lilac and laburnum, making lovely now the
railed pathway to Christ Church meadow, were all a-swaying and nodding
to the Duke as he passed by. "Adieu, adieu, your Grace," they were
whispering. "We are very sorry for you, very sorry indeed. We never
dared suppose you would predecease us. We think your death a very great
tragedy. Adieu! Perhaps we shall meet in another world--that is, if the
members of the animal kingdom have immortal souls, as we have."

The Duke was little versed in their language; yet, as he passed between
these gently garrulous blooms, he caught at the least the drift of their
salutation, and smiled a vague but courteous acknowledgment, to the
right and the left alternately, creating a very favourable impression.


Has not a passage like this--with its freedom of invocation--a beauty
unattainable by serious literature? It is so funny and charming, so
iridescent yet so profound. Criticisms of human nature fly through the
book, not like arrows but upon the wings of sylphs. Towards the
end--that dreadful end often so fatal to fiction--the book rather flags:
the suicide of all the undergraduates of Oxford is not as delightful as
it ought to be when viewed at close quarters, and the defenestration of
Noaks almost nasty. Still it is a great work--the most consistent
achievement of fantasy in our time, and the closing scene in Zuleika's
bedroom with its menace of further disasters is impeccable.


And now with pent breath and fast-beating heart, she stared at the lady
of the mirror, without seeing her; and now she wheeled round and swiftly
glided to that little table on which stood her two books. She snatched
Bradshaw.

We always intervene between Bradshaw and any one whom we see consulting
him. "Mademoiselle will permit me to find that which she seeks?" asked
Melisande.

"Be quiet," said Zuleika. We always repulse, at first, any one who
intervenes between us and Bradshaw.

We always end by accepting the intervention. "See if it is possible to
go direct from here to Cambridge," said Zuleika, handing the book on.
"If it isn't, then--well, see how one _does_ get there."

We never have any confidence in the intervener. Nor is the intervener,
when it comes to the point, sanguine. With mistrust mounting to
exasperation Zuleika sat watching the faint and frantic researches of
her maid.

"Stop!" she said suddenly. "I have a much better idea. Go down very
early to the station. See the stationmaster. Order me a special train.
For ten o'clock, say."

Rising, she stretched her arms above her head. Her lips parted in a
yawn, met in a smile. With both hands she pushed back her hair from her
shoulders, and twisted it into a loose knot. Very lightly she slipped up
into bed, and very soon she was asleep.


So Zuleika ought to have come on to this place. She does not seem ever
to have arrived and we can only suppose that through the intervention of
the gods her special train failed to start, or, more likely, is still in
a siding at Bletchley.

Among the devices in my list I mentioned "parody" or "adaptation" and
would now examine this further. The fantasist here adopts for his
mythology some earlier work and uses it as a framework or quarry for his
own purposes. There is an aborted example of this in _Joseph Andrews_.
Fielding set out to use _Pamela_ as a comic mythology. He thought it
would be fun to invent a brother to Pamela, a pure-minded footman, who
should repulse Lady Booby's attentions just as Pamela had repulsed Mr.
B.'s, and he made Lady Booby Mr. B.'s aunt. Thus he would be able to
laugh at Richardson, and incidentally express his own views of life.
Fielding's view of life however was of the sort that only rests content
with the creation of solid round characters, and with the growth of
Parson Adams and Mrs. Slipslop the fantasy ceases, and we get an
independent work. _Joseph Andrews_ (which is also important
historically) is interesting to us as an example of a false start. Its
author begins by playing the fool in a Richardsonian world, and ends by
being serious in a world of his own--the world of Tom Jones and Amelia.

Parody or adaptation have enormous advantages to certain novelists,
particularly to those who may have a great deal to say and plenty of
literary genius, but who do not see the world in terms of individual men
and women--who do not, in other words, take easily to creating
characters. How are such men to start writing? An already existing book
or literary tradition may inspire them--they may find high up in its
cornices a pattern that will serve as a beginning, they may swing about
in its rafters and gain strength. That fantasy of Lowes Dickinson, _The
Magic Flute_, seems to be created thus: it has taken as its mythology
the world of Mozart. Tamino, Sarastro, and the Queen of the Night stand
in their enchanted kingdom ready for the author's thoughts, and when
these are poured in they become alive and a new and exquisite work is
born. And the same is true of another fantasy, anything but
exquisite--James Joyce's _Ulysses_[6] That remarkable affair--perhaps
the most interesting literary experiment of our day--could not have been
achieved unless Joyce had had, as his guide and butt, the world of the
_Odyssey_.

I am only touching on one aspect of _Ulysses_: it is of course more than
a fantasy--it is a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud, it is
an inverted Victorianism, an attempt to make crossness and dirt succeed
where sweetness and light failed, a simplification of the human
character in the interests of Hell. All simplifications are fascinating,
all lead us away from the truth (which lies far nearer the muddle of
_Tristram Shandy_), and _Ulysses_ must not detain us on the ground that
it contains a morality--otherwise we shall also have to discuss Mrs.
Humphry Ward. We are concerned with it because, through a mythology,
Joyce has been able to create the peculiar stage and characters he
required.

The action of those 400,000 words occupies a single day, the scene is
Dublin, the theme is a journey--the modern man's journey from morn to
midnight, from bed to the squalid tasks of mediocrity, to a funeral,
newspaper office, library, pub, lavatory, lying-in hospital, a saunter
by the beach, brothel, coffee stall, and so back to bed. And it coheres
because it depends from the journey of a hero through the seas of
Greece, like a bat hanging to a cornice.

Ulysses himself is Mr. Leopold Bloom--a converted Jew--greedy,
lascivious, timid, undignified, desultory, superficial, kindly and
always at his lowest when he pretends to aspire. He tries to explore
life through the body. Penelope is Mrs. Marion Bloom, an overblown
soprano, by no means harsh to her suitors. The third character is young
Stephen Dedalus, whom Bloom recognizes as his spiritual son much as
Ulysses recognizes Telemachus as his actual son. Stephen tries to
explore life through the intellect--we have met him before in _The
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_, and now he is worked into this
epic of grubbiness and disillusion. He and Bloom meet half way through
in Night Town (which corresponds partly to Homer's Palace of Circe,
partly to his Descent into Hell) and in its supernatural and filthy
alleys they strike up their slight but genuine friendship. This is the
crisis of the book, and here--and indeed throughout--smaller mythologies
swarm and pullulate, like vermin between the scales of a poisonous
snake. Heaven and earth fill with infernal life, personalities melt,
sexes interchange, until the whole universe, including poor,
pleasure-loving Mr. Bloom, is involved in one joyless orgy.

Does it come off? No, not quite. Indignation in literature never quite
comes off either in Juvenal or Swift or Joyce; there is something in
words that is alien to its simplicity. The Night Town scene does not
come off except as a superfetation of fantasies, a monstrous coupling of
reminiscences. Such satisfaction as can be attained in this direction is
attained, and all through the bode we have similar experiments--the aim
of which is to degrade all things and more particularly civilization and
art, by turning them inside out and upside down. Some enthusiasts may
think that _Ulysses_ ought to be mentioned not here but later on, under
the heading of prophecy, and I understand this criticism. But I prefer
to mention it today with _Tristram Shandy_, _Flecker's Magic_, _Zuleika
Dobson_, and _The Magic Flute_, because the raging of Joyce, like the
happier or calmer moods of the other writers, seems essentially
fantastic, and lacks the note for which we shall be listening soon.

We must pursue this notion of mythology further, and more circumspectly.


[Footnote 6: _Ulysses_ (Shakespeare & Co., Paris) is not at present
obtainable in England. America, more enlightened, has produced a
mutilated version without the author's permission and without
paying him a cent.]




VII

PROPHECY


WITH prophecy in the narrow sense of foretelling the future we have no
concern, and we have not much concern with it as an appeal for
righteousness. What will interest us today--what we must respond to, for
interest now becomes an inappropriate word--is an accent in the
novelist's voice, an accent for which the flutes and saxophones of
fantasy may have prepared us. His theme is the universe, or something
universal, but he is not necessarily going to "say" anything about the
universe; he proposes to sing, and the strangeness of song arising in
the halls of fiction is bound to give us a shock. How will song combine
with the furniture of common sense? we shall ask ourselves, and shall
have to answer "not too well": the singer does not always have room for
his gestures, the tables and chairs get broken, and the novel through
which bardic influence has passed often has a wrecked air, like a
drawing-room after an earthquake or a children's party. Readers of D. H.
Lawrence will understand what I mean.

Prophecy--in our sense--is a tone of voice. It may imply any of the
faiths that have haunted humanity--Christianity, Buddhism, dualism,
Satanism, or the mere raising of human love and hatred to such a power
that their normal receptacles no longer contain them: but what
particular view of the universe is recommended--with that we are not
directly concerned. It is the implication that signifies and will filter
into the turns of the novelist's phrase, and in this lecture, which
promises to be so vague and grandiose, we may come nearer than elsewhere
to the minutiae of style. We shall have to attend to the novelist's
state of mind and to the actual words he uses; we shall neglect as far
as we can the problems of common sense. As far as we can: for all novels
contain tables and chairs, and most readers of fiction look for them
first. Before we condemn him for affectation and distortion we must
realize his view point. He is not looking at the tables and chairs at
all, and that is why they are out of focus. We only see what he does not
focus--not what he does--and in our blindness we laugh at him.

I have said that each aspect of the novel demands a different quality in
the reader. Well, the prophetic aspect demands two qualities: humility
and the suspension of the sense of humour. Humility is a quality for
which I have only a limited admiration. In many phases of life it is a
great mistake and degenerates into defensiveness or hypocrisy. But
humility is in place just now. Without its help we shall not hear the
voice of the prophet, and our eyes will behold a figure of fun instead
of his glory. And the sense of humour--that is out of place: that
estimable adjunct of the educated man must be laid aside. Like the
schoolchildren in the Bible, one cannot help laughing at a prophet--his
bald head is so absurd--but one can discount the laughter and realize
that it has no critical value and is merely food for bears.

Let us distinguish between the prophet and the non-prophet.

There were two novelists, who were both brought up in Christianity. They
speculated and broke away, yet they neither left nor did they want to
leave the Christian spirit which they interpreted as a loving spirit.
They both held that sin is always punished, and punishment a purgation,
and they saw this process not with the detachment of an ancient Greek or
a modern Hindu, but with tears in their eyes. Pity, they felt, is the
atmosphere in which morality exercises its logic, a logic which
otherwise is crude and meaningless. What is the use of a sinner being
punished and cured if there is not an addition in the cure, a heavenly
bonus? And where does the addition come from? Not out of the machinery,
but out of the atmosphere in which the process occurs, out of the love
and pity which (they believed) are attributes of God.

How similar these two novelists must have been! Yet one of them was
George Eliot and the other Dostoevsky.

It will be said that Dostoevsky had vision. Still, so had George Eliot.
To classify them apart--and they must be parted--is not so easy. But the
difference between them will define itself at once exactly if I read two
passages from their works. To the classifier the passages will seem
similar: to any one who has an ear for song they come out of different
worlds.

I will begin with a passage--fifty years ago it was a very famous
passage--out of _Adam Bede_. Hetty is in prison, condemned to die for
the murder of her illegitimate child. She will not confess, she is hard
and impenitent. Dinah, the Methodist, comes to visit her and tries to
touch her heart.


Dinah began to doubt whether Hetty was conscious who it was that sat
beside her. But she felt the Divine presence more and more--nay, as if
she herself were a part of it, and it was the Divine pity that was
beating in her heart, and was willing the rescue of this helpless one.
At last she was prompted to speak, and find out how far Hetty was
conscious of the present.

"Hetty," she said gently, "do you know who it is that sits by your
side?"

"Yes," Hetty answered slowly, "it's Dinah." Then, after a pause, she
added, "But you can do nothing for me. You can't make 'em do anything.
They'll hang me o' Monday--it's Friday now."

"But, Hetty, there is some one else in this cell besides me, some one
close to you."

Hetty said, in a frightened whisper, "Who?"

"Some one who has been with you through all your hours of sin and
trouble--who has known every thought you have had--has seen where you
went, where you lay down and rose up again, and all the deeds you have
tried to hide in darkness. And on Monday, when I can't follow you, when
my arms can't reach you, when death has parted us, He who is
with you now and knows all, will be with you then. It makes no
difference--whether we live or die we are in the presence of God."

"Oh, Dinah, won't nobody do anything for me? _Will_ they hang me for
certain? ... I wouldn't mind if they'd let me live ... help me.... I
can't feel anything like you ... my heart is hard."

Dinah held the clinging hand, and all her soul went forth in her voice:
"... Come, mighty Saviour! let the dead hear Thy voice; let the eyes of
the blind be opened: let her see that God encompasses her; let her
tremble at nothing but the sin that cuts her off from Him. Melt the hard
heart; unseal the closed lips: make her cry with her whole soul,
'Father, I have sinned.'"

"Dinah," Hetty sobbed out, throwing her arms round Dinah's neck, "I will
speak ... I will tell ... I won't hide it any more. I did do it,
Dinah ... I buried in the wood ... the little baby ... and it cried ... I
heard it cry ... ever such a way off ... all night ... and I went back
because it cried."

She paused and then spoke hurriedly in a louder pleading tone.

"But I thought perhaps it wouldn't die--there might somebody find it. I
didn't kill it--I didn't kill it myself. I put it down there and covered
it up, and when I came back it was gone.... I don't know what I felt
until I found that the baby was gone. And when I put it there, I thought
I should like somebody to find it and save it from dying, but when I saw
it was gone, I was struck like a stone, with fear. I never thought o'
stirring, I felt so weak. I knew I couldn't run away, and everybody as
saw me 'ud know about the baby. My heart went like stone; I couldn't
wish or try for anything; it seemed like as if I should stay there for
ever, and nothing 'ud ever change. But they came and took me away."

Hetty was silent, but she shuddered again, as if there was still
something behind: and Dinah waited, for her heart was so full that tears
must come before words. At last Hetty burst out with a sob.

"Dinah, do you think God will take away that crying and the place in the
wood, now I've told everything?"

"Let us pray, poor sinner: let us fall on our knees again, and pray to
the God of all mercy."


I have not done justice to this scene, because I have had to cut it, and
it is on her massiveness that George Eliot depends--she has no nicety of
style. The scene is sincere, solid, pathetic, and penetrated with
Christianity. The god whom Dinah summons is a living force to the
authoress also: he is not brought in to work up the reader's feelings;
he is the natural accompaniment of human error and suffering.

Now contrast with it the following scene from _The Brothers Karamazov_
(Mitya is being accused of the murder of his father, of which he is
indeed spiritually though not technically guilty).


They proceeded to a final revision of the protocol. Mitya got up, moved
from his chair to the corner by the curtain, lay down on a large chest
covered by a rug, and instantly fell asleep.

He had a strange dream, utterly out of keeping with the place and the
time.

He was driving somewhere in the steppes, where he had been stationed
long ago, and a peasant was driving him in a cart with a pair of horses,
through snow and sleet. Not far off was a village; he could see the
black huts, and half the huts were burned down, there were only the
charred beams sticking up. And as they drove in, there were peasant
women drawn up along the road, a lot of women, a whole row, all thin and
wan, with their faces a sort of brownish colour, especially one at the
edge, a tall bony woman, who looked forty, but might have been only
twenty, with a long thin face. And in her arms was a little baby crying.
And her breasts seemed so dried up that there was not a drop of milk in
them. And the child cried and cried, and held out its little bare arms,
with its little fists blue from cold.

"Why are they crying? Why are they crying?" Mitya asked as they dashed
gaily by.

"It's the babe," answered the driver. "The babe weeping."

And Mitya was struck by his saying, in his peasant way, "the babe," and
he liked the peasant calling it "the babe." There seemed more pity in
it.

"But why is it weeping?" Mitya persisted stupidly. "Why are its little
arms bare? Why don't they wrap it up?"

"Why, they're poor people, burnt out. They've no bread. They're begging
because they've been burnt out."

"No, no," Mitya, as it were, still did not understand. "Tell me, why is
it those poor mothers stand there? Why are people poor? Why is the babe
poor? Why is the steppe barren? Why don't they hug each other and kiss?
Why don't they sing songs of joy? Why are they so dark from black
misery? Why don't they feed the babe?"

And he felt that, though his questions were unreasonable and senseless,
yet he wanted to ask just that, and he had to ask it just in that way.
And he felt that a passion of pity, such as he had never known before,
was rising in his heart, that he wanted to cry, that he wanted to do
something for them all, so that the babe should weep no more, so that
the dark-faced dried-up mother should not weep, that no one should shed
tears again from that moment, and he wanted to do it at once, at once,
regardless of all obstacles, with all the recklessness of the
Karamazovs.... And his heart glowed, and he struggled forward towards
the light, and he longed to live, to go on and on, towards the new
beckoning light, and to hasten, hasten, now, at once!

"What! Where?" he exclaimed, opening his eyes, and sitting up on the
chest, as though he had revived from a swoon, smiling brightly. Nikolay
Parfenovitch was standing over him, suggesting that he should hear the
protocol read aloud and sign it. Mitya guessed that he had been asleep
an hour or more, but he did not hear Nikolay Parfenovitch. He was
suddenly struck by the fact that there was a pillow under his head,
which hadn't been there when he leant back exhausted, on the chest.

"Who put that pillow under my head? Who was so kind?" he cried, with a
sort of ecstatic gratitude, and tears in his voice, as though some great
kindness had been shown him.

He never found out who this kind man was, perhaps one of the peasant
witnesses, or Nikolay Parfenovitch's little secretary had
compassionately thought to put a pillow under his head, but his whole
soul was quivering with tears. He went to the table and said he would
sign whatever they liked.

"I've had a good dream, gentlemen," he said in a strange voice, with a
new light, as of joy, in his face.


Now what is the difference in these passages--a difference that throbs
in every phrase? It is that the first writer is a preacher, and the
second a prophet. George Eliot talks about God, but never alters her
focus; God and the tables and chairs are all in the same plane, and in
consequence we have not for a moment the feeling that the whole universe
needs pity and love--they are only needed in Hetty's cell. In Dostoevsky
the characters and situations always stand for more than themselves;
infinity attends them; though yet they remain individuals they expand to
embrace it and summon it to embrace them; one can apply to them the
saying of St. Catherine of Siena that God is in the soul and the soul is
in God as the sea is in the fish and the fish is in the sea. Every
sentence he writes implies this extension, and the implication is the
dominant aspect of his work. He is a great novelist in the ordinary
sense--that is to say his characters have relation to ordinary life and
also live in their own surroundings, there are incidents which keep us
excited, and so on; he has also the greatness of a prophet, to which our
ordinary standards are inapplicable.

That is the gulf between Hetty and Mitya, though they inhabit the same
moral and mythological worlds. Hetty, taken by herself, is quite
adequate. She is a poor girl, brought to confess her crime, and so to a
better frame of mind. But Mitya, taken by himself, is not adequate. He
only becomes real through what he implies, his mind is not in a frame at
all. Taken by himself he seems distorted out of drawing, intermittent;
we begin explaining him away and saying he was disproportionately
grateful for the pillow because he was overwrought--very like a Russian
in fact. We cannot understand him until we see that he extends, and that
the part of him on which Dostoevsky focused did not lie on that wooden
chest or even in dreamland but in a region where it could be joined by
the rest of humanity. Mitya is--all of us. So is Alyosha, so is
Smerdyakov. He is the prophetic vision, and the novelist's creation
also. He does not become all of us here: he is Mitya here as Hetty is
Hetty. The extension, the melting, the unity through love and pity occur
in a region which can only be implied and to which fiction is perhaps
the wrong approach. The world of the Karamazovs and Myshkin and
Raskolnikov, the world of Moby Dick which we shall enter shortly, it is
not a veil, it is not an allegory. It is the ordinary world of fiction,
but it reaches back. And that tiny humorous figure of Lady Bertram whom
we considered some time ago--Lady Bertram sitting on her sofa with
pug--may assist us in these deeper matters. Lady Bertram, we decided,
was a flat character, capable of extending into a round when the action
required it. Mitya is a round character, but he is capable of extension.
He does not conceal anything (mysticism), he does not mean anything
(symbolism), he is merely Dmitri Karamazov, but to be merely a person in
Dostoevsky is to join up with all the other people far back.
Consequently the tremendous current suddenly flows--for me in those
closing words: "I've had a good dream, gentlemen." Have I had that good
dream too? No, Dostoevsky's characters ask us to share something deeper
than their experiences. They convey to us a sensation that is partly
physical--the sensation of sinking into a translucent globe and seeing
our experience floating far above us on its surface, tiny, remote, yet
ours. We have not ceased to be people, we have given nothing up, but
"the sea is in the fish and the fish is in the sea."

There we touch the limit of our subject. We are not concerned with the
prophet's message, or rather (since matter and manner cannot be wholly
separated) we are concerned with it as little as possible. What matters
is the accent of his voice, his song. Hetty might have a good dream in
prison, and it would be true of her, satisfyingly true, but it would
stop short. Dinah would say she was glad, Hetty would recount her dream,
which, unlike Mitya's, would be logically connected with the crisis, and
George Eliot would say something sound and sympathetic about good dreams
generally, and their inexplicably helpful effect on the tortured breast.
Just the same and absolutely different are the two scenes, the two
books, the two writers.

Now another point appears. Regarded merely as a novelist the prophet has
certain uncanny advantages, so that it is sometimes worth letting him
into a drawing-room even on the furniture's account. Perhaps he will
smash or distort, but perhaps he will illumine. As I said of the
fantasist, he manipulates a beam of light which occasionally touches the
objects so sedulously dusted by the hand of common sense, and renders
them more vivid than they can ever be in domesticity. This intermittent
realism pervades all the greater works of Dostoevsky and Herman
Melville. Dostoevsky can be patiently accurate about a trial or the
appearance of a staircase. Melville can catalogue the products of the
whale ("I have ever found the plain things the knottiest of all," he
remarks). D. H. Lawrence can describe a field of grass and flowers or
the entrance into Fremantle. Little things in the foreground seem to be
all that the prophet cares about at moments--he sits down with them so
quiet and busy like a child between two romps. What does he feel during
these intermittencies? Is it another form of excitement, or is he
resting? We cannot know. No doubt it is what A.E. feels when he is doing
his creameries, or what Claudel feels when he is doing his diplomacy,
but what is that? Anyhow, it characterizes these novels and gives them
what is always provocative in a work of art: roughness of surface. While
they pass under our eyes they are full of dents and grooves and lumps
and spikes which draw from us little cries of approval and disapproval.
When they have past, the roughness is forgotten, they become as smooth
as the moon.

Prophetic fiction, then, seems to have definite characteristics. It
demands humility and the absence of the sense of humour. It reaches
back--though we must not conclude from the example of Dostoevsky that it
always reaches back to pity and love. It is spasmodically realistic. And
it gives us the sensation of a song or of sound. It is unlike fantasy
because its face is towards unity, whereas fantasy glances about. Its
confusion is incidental, whereas fantasy's is fundamental--_Tristram
Shandy_ ought to be a muddle, _Zuleika Dobson_ ought to keep changing
mythologies. Also the prophet--one imagines--has gone "off" more
completely than the fantasist, he is in a remoter emotional state while
he composes. Not many novelists have this aspect. Poe is too incidental.
Hawthorne potters too anxiously round the problem of individual
salvation to get free. Hardy, a philosopher and a great poet, might seem
to have claims, but Hardy's novels are surveys, they do not give out
sounds. The writer sits back, it is true, but the characters do not
reach back. He shows them to us as they let their arms rise and fall in
the air; they may parallel our sufferings but can never extend
them--never, I mean, could Jude step forward like Mitya and release
floods of our emotion by saying "Gentlemen, I've had a bad dream."
Conrad is in a rather similar position. The voice, the voice of Marlow,
is too full of experiences to sing, it is dulled by many reminiscences
of error and beauty, its owner has seen too much to see beyond cause and
effect. To have a philosophy--even a poetic and emotional philosophy
like Hardy's and Conrad's--leads to reflections on life and things. A
prophet does not reflect. And he does not hammer away. That is why we
exclude Joyce. Joyce has many qualities akin to prophecy and he has
shown (especially in the _Portrait of the Artist_) an imaginative grasp
of evil. But he undermines the universe in too workmanlike a manner,
looking round for this tool or that: in spite of all his internal
looseness he is too tight, he is never vague except after due
deliberation; it is talk, talk, never song.

So, though I believe this lecture is on a genuine aspect of the novel,
not a fake aspect, I can only think of four writers to illustrate
it--Dostoevsky, Melville, D. H. Lawrence and Emily Brontë. Emily
Brontë shall be left to the last, Dostoevsky I have alluded to,
Melville is the centre of our picture, and the centre of Melville is
_Moby Dick_.

_Moby Dick_ is an easy book, as long as we read it as a yarn or an
account of whaling interspersed with snatches of poetry. But as soon as
we catch the song in it, it grows difficult and immensely important.
Narrowed and hardened into words the spiritual theme of _Moby Dick_ is
as follows: a battle against evil conducted too long or in the wrong
way. The White Whale is evil, and Captain Ahab is warped by constant
pursuit until his knight-errantry turns into revenge. These are words--a
symbol for the book if we want one--but they do not carry us much
further than the acceptance of the book as a yarn--perhaps they carry us
backwards, for they may mislead us into harmonizing the incidents, and
so losing their roughness and richness. The idea of a contest we may
retain: all action is a battle, the only happiness is peace. But contest
between what? We get false if we say that it is between good and evil or
between two unreconciled evils. The essential in _Moby Dick_, its
prophetic song, flows athwart the action and the surface morality like
an undercurrent. It lies outside words. Even at the end, when the ship
has gone down with the bird of heaven pinned to its mast, and the empty
coffin, bouncing up from the vortex, has carried Ishmael back to the
world--even then we cannot catch the words of the song. There has been
stress, with intervals: but no explicable solution, certainly no
reaching back into universal pity and love; no "Gentlemen, I've had a
good dream."

The extraordinary nature of the book appears in two of its early
incidents--the sermon about Jonah and the friendship with Queequeg.

The sermon has nothing to do with Christianity. It asks for endurance or
loyalty without hope of reward. The preacher "kneeling in the pulpit's
bows, folded his large brown hands across his chest, uplifted his closed
eyes, and offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and
praying at the bottom of the sea." Then he works up and up and concludes
on a note of joy that is far more terrifying than a menace.


Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him when the ship of
this base treacherous world has gone down beneath him. Delight is to him
who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns and destroys all sin
though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges.
Delight--top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord,
but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven. Delight is to
him, whom all the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob
can never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and
deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his
final breath--O Father!--chiefly known to me by thy rod--mortal or
immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this
world's or mine own. Yet this is nothing: I leave eternity to Thee: for
what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?


I believe it is not a coincidence that the last ship we encounter at the
end of the book before the final catastrophe should be called the
Delight; a vessel of ill omen who has herself encountered Moby Dick and
been shattered by him. But what the connection was in the prophet's mind
I cannot say, nor could he tell us.

Immediately after the sermon, Ishmael makes a passionate alliance with
the cannibal Queequeg, and it looks for a moment that the book is to be
a saga of blood-brotherhood. But human relationships mean little to
Melville, and after a grotesque and violent entry, Queequeg is almost
forgotten. Almost--not quite. Towards the end he falls ill and a coffin
is made for him which he does not occupy, as he recovers. It is this
coffin, serving as a life-buoy, that saves Ishmael from the final
whirlpool, and this again is no coincidence, but an unformulated
connection that sprang up in Melville's mind. _Moby Dick_ is full of
meanings: its meaning is a different problem. It is wrong to turn the
Delight or the coffin into symbols, because even if the symbolism is
correct, it silences the book. Nothing can be stated about _Moby Dick_
except that it is a contest. The rest is song.

It is to his conception of evil that Melville's work owes much of its
strength. As a rule evil has been feebly envisaged in fiction, which
seldom soars above misconduct or avoids the clouds of mysteriousness.
Evil to most novelists is either sexual and social or is something very
vague for which a special style with implications of poetry is thought
suitable. They want it to exist, in order that it may kindly help them
on with the plot, and evil, not being kind, generally hampers them with
a villain--a Lovelace or Uriah Heep, who does more harm to the author
than to the fellow characters. For a real villain we must turn to a
story of Melville's called _Billy Budd_.[7]

It is a short story, but must be mentioned because of the light it
throws on his other work. The scene is on a British man-of-war soon
after the Mutiny at the Nore--a stagey yet intensely real vessel. The
hero, a young sailor, has goodness--which is faint beside the goodness
of Alyosha; still he has goodness of the glowing aggressive sort which
cannot exist unless it has evil to consume. He is not aggressive
himself. It is the light within him that irritates and explodes. On the
surface he is a pleasant, merry, rather insensitive lad, whose perfect
physique is marred by one slight defect, a stammer, which finally
destroys him. He is "dropped into a world not without some mantraps, and
against whose subtleties simple courage without any touch of defensive
ugliness is of little avail; and where such innocence as man is capable
of does yet, in a moral emergency, not always sharpen the faculties or
enlighten the will." Claggart, one of the petty officers, at once sees
in him the enemy--his own enemy, for Claggart is evil. It is again the
contest between Ahab and Moby Dick, though the parts are more clearly
assigned, and we are further from prophecy and nearer to morality and
common sense. But not much nearer. Claggart is not like any other
villain.


Natural depravity has certain negative virtues, serving it as silent
auxiliaries. It is not going too far to say that it is without vices or
small sins. There is a phenomenal pride in it that excludes them from
anything--never mercenary or avaricious. In short, the character here
meant partakes nothing of the sordid or sensual. It is serious, but free
from acerbity.


He accuses Billy of trying to foment a mutiny. The charge is ridiculous,
no one believes it, and yet it proves fatal. For when the boy is
summoned to declare his innocence, he is so horrified that he cannot
speak, his ludicrous stammer seizes him, the power within him explodes,
and he knocks down his traducer, kills him, and has to be hanged.

_Billy Budd_ is a remote unearthly episode, but it is a song not without
words, and should be read both for its own beauty and as an introduction
to more difficult works. Evil is labelled and personified instead of
slipping over the ocean and round the world, and Melville's mind can be
observed more easily. What one notices in him is that his apprehensions
are free from personal worry, so that we become bigger not smaller after
sharing them. He has not got that tiresome little receptacle, a
conscience, which is often such a nuisance in serious writers and so
contracts their effects--the conscience of Hawthorne or of Mark
Rutherford. Melville--after the initial roughness of his
realism--reaches straight back into the universal, to a blackness and
sadness so transcending our own that they are undistinguishable from
glory. He says, "in certain moods no man can weigh this world without
throwing in a something somehow like Original Sin to strike the uneven
balance." He threw it in, that undefinable something, the balance
righted itself, and he gave us harmony and temporary salvation.

It is no wonder that D. H. Lawrence should have written two penetrating
studies of Melville, for Lawrence himself is, as far as I know, the only
prophetic novelist writing today--all the rest are fantasists or
preachers: the only living novelist in whom the song predominates, who
has the rapt bardic quality, and whom it is idle to criticize. He
invites criticism because he is a preacher also--it is this minor aspect
of him which makes him so difficult and misleading--an excessively
clever preacher who knows how to play on the nerves of his congregation.
Nothing is more disconcerting than to sit down, so to speak, before your
prophet, and then suddenly to receive his boot in the pit of your
stomach. "I'm damned if I'll be humble after that," you cry, and so lay
yourself open to further nagging. Also the subject matter of the sermon
is agitating--hot denunciations or advice--so that in the end you cannot
remember whether you ought or ought not to have a body, and are only
sure that you are futile. This bullying, and the honeyed sweetness which
is a bully's reaction, occupy between them the foreground of Lawrence's
work; his greatness lies far, far back, and rests, not like Dostoevsky's
upon Christianity, nor like Melville's upon a contest, but upon
something æsthetic. The voice is Balder's voice, though the hands are
the hands of Esau. The prophet is irradiating nature from within, so
that every colour has a glow and every form a distinctness which could
not otherwise be obtained. Take a scene that always stays in the memory:
that scene in _Women in Love_ where one of the characters throws stones
into the water at night to shatter the image of the moon. Why he throws,
what the scene symbolizes, is unimportant. But the writer could not get
such a moon and water otherwise; he reaches them by his special path
which stamps them as more wonderful than any we can imagine. It is the
prophet back where he started from, back where the rest of us are
waiting by the edge of the pool, but with a power of re-creation and
evocation we shall never possess.

Humility is not easy with this irritable and irritating author, for the
humbler we get, the crosser he gets. Yet I do not see how else to read
him. If we start resenting or mocking, his treasure disappears as surely
as if we started obeying him. What is valuable about him cannot be put
into words; it is colour, gesture and outline in people and things, the
usual stock-in-trade of the novelist, but evolved by such a different
process that they belong to a new world.

But what about Emily Brontë? Why should _Wuthering Heights_ come into
this enquiry? It is a story about human beings, it contains no view of
the universe.

My answer is that the emotions of Heathcliffe and Catherine Earnshaw
function differently to other emotions in fiction. Instead of inhabiting
the characters, they surround them like thunder clouds, and generate the
explosions that fill the novel from the moment when Lockwood dreams of
the hand at the window down to the moment when Heathcliffe, with the
same window open, is discovered dead. _Wuthering Heights_ is filled with
sound--storm and rushing wind--a sound more important than words and
thoughts. Great as the novel is, one cannot afterwards remember anything
in it but Heathcliffe and the elder Catherine. They cause the action by
their separation: they close it by their union after death. No wonder
they "walk"; what else could such beings do? even when they were alive
their love and hate transcended them.

Emily Brontë had in some ways a literal and careful mind. She
constructed her novel on a time chart even more elaborate than Miss
Austen's, and she arranged the Linton and Earnshaw families
symmetrically, and she had a clear idea of the various legal steps by
which Heathcliffe gained possession of their two properties.[8] Then why
did she deliberately introduce muddle, chaos, tempest? Because in our
sense of the word she was a prophetess: because what is implied is more
important to her than what is said; and only in confusion could the
figures of Heathcliffe and Catherine externalize their passion till it
streamed through the house and over the moors. _Wuthering Heights_ has
no mythology beyond what these two characters provide: no great book is
more cut off from the universals of Heaven and Hell. It is local, like
the spirits it engenders, and whereas we may meet Moby Dick in any pond,
we shall only encounter them among the harebells and limestone of their
own county.

A concluding remark. Always, at the back of my mind, there lurks a
reservation about this prophetic stuff, a reservation which some will
make more strongly while others will not make it at all. Fantasy has
asked us to pay something extra; and now prophecy asks for humility and
even for a suspension of the sense of humour, so that we are not allowed
to snigger when a tragedy is called _Billy Budd_. We have indeed to lay
aside the single vision which we bring to most of literature and life
and have been trying to use through most of our enquiry, and take up a
different set of tools. Is this right? Another prophet, Blake, had no
doubt that it was right.


                         May God us keep
    From single vision and Newton's sleep,


he cried and he has painted that same Newton with a pair of compasses in
his hand, describing a miserable mathematical triangle, and turning his
back upon the gorgeous and immeasurable water growths of _Moby Dick_.
Few will agree with Blake. Fewer will agree with Blake's Newton. Most of
us will be eclectics to this side or that according to our temperament.
The human mind is not a dignified organ, and I do not see how we can
exercise it sincerely except through eclecticism. And the only advice I
would offer my fellow eclectics is: "Do not be proud of your
inconsistency. It is a pity, it is a pity that we should be equipped
like this. It is a pity that Man cannot be at the same time impressive
and truthful." For the first five lectures of this course we have used
more or less the same set of tools. This time and last we have had to
lay them down. Next time we shall take them up again, but with no
certainty that they are the best equipment for a critic or that there is
such a thing as a critical equipment.


[Footnote 7: Only to be found in a collected edition. For knowledge
of it, and for much else, I am indebted to Mr. John Freeman's
admirable monograph on Melville.]

[Footnote 8: See that sound and brilliant essay, _The Structure
of Wuthering Heights_, by C.P.S. (Hogarth Press.)]




VIII

PATTERN AND RHYTHM


OUR interludes, gay and grave, are over, and we return to the general
scheme of the course. We began with the story, and having considered
human beings, we proceeded to the plot which springs out of the story.
Now we must consider something which springs mainly out of the plot, and
to which the characters and any other element present also contribute.
For this new aspect there appears to be no literary word--indeed the
more the arts develop the more they depend on each other for definition.
We will borrow from painting first and call it the pattern. Later we
will borrow from music and call it rhythm. Unfortunately both these
words are vague--when people apply rhythm or pattern to literature they
are apt not to say what they mean and not to finish their sentences: it
is, "Oh, but surely the rhythm ..." or "Oh, but if you call that
pattern ..."

Before I discuss what pattern entails, and what qualities a reader must
bring to its appreciation, I will give two examples of books with
patterns so definite that a pictorial image sums them up: a book the
shape of an hour-glass and a book the shape of a grand chain in that
old-time dance, the Lancers.

_Thais_, by Anatole France, is the shape of an hour-glass.

There are two chief characters, Paphnuce the ascetic, Thais the
courtesan. Paphnuce lives in the desert, he is saved and happy when the
book starts. Thais leads a life of sin in Alexandria, and it is his duty
to save her. In the central scene of the book they approach, he
succeeds; she goes into a monastery and gains salvation, because she has
met him, but he, because he has met her, is damned. The two characters
converge, cross, and recede with mathematical precision, and part of the
pleasure we get from the book is due to this. Such is the pattern of
Thais--so simple that it makes a good starting-point for a difficult
survey. It is the same as the story of _Thais_, when events unroll in
their time-sequence, and the same as the plot of _Thais_, when we see
the two characters bound by their previous actions and taking fatal
steps whose consequence they do not see. But whereas the story appeals
to our curiosity and the plot to our intelligence, the pattern appeals
to our æsthetic sense, it causes us to see the book as a whole. We do
not see it as an hour-glass--that is the hard jargon of the lecture room
which must never be taken literally at this advanced stage of our
enquiry. We just have a pleasure without knowing why, and when the
pleasure is past, as it is now, and our minds are left free to explain
it, a geometrical simile such as an hour-glass will be found helpful. If
it was not for this hour-glass the story, the plot, and the characters
of Thais and Paphnuce would none of them exert their full force, they
would none of them breathe as they do. "Pattern," which seems so rigid,
is connected with atmosphere, which seems so fluid.

Now for the book that is shaped like the grand chain: _Roman Pictures_
by Percy Lubbock.

_Roman Pictures_ is a social comedy. The narrator is a tourist in Rome;
he there meets a kindly and shoddy friend of his, Deering, who rebukes
him superciliously for staring at churches and sets him out to explore
society. This he does, demurely obedient; one person hands him on to
another; café, studio, Vatican and Quirinal purlieus are all reached,
until finally, at the extreme end of his career he thinks, in a most
aristocratic and dilapidated palazzo, whom should he meet but the
second-rate Deering; Deering is his hostess's nephew, but had concealed
it owing to some backfire of snobbery. The circle is complete, the
original partners have rejoined, and greet one another with mutual
confusion which turns to mild laughter.

What is so good in _Roman Pictures_ is not the presence of the "grand
chain" pattern--any one can organize a grand chain--but the suitability
of the pattern to the author's mood. Lubbock works all through by
administering a series of little shocks, and by extending to his
characters an elaborate charity which causes them to appear in a rather
worse light than if no charity was wasted on them at all. It is the
comic atmosphere, but sub-acid, meticulously benign. And at the end we
discover to our delight that the atmosphere has been externalized, and
that the partners, as they elide together in the marchesa's
drawing-room, have done the exact thing which the book requires, which
it required from the start, and have bound the scattered incidents
together with a thread woven out of their own substance.

_Thais_ and _Roman Pictures_ provide easy examples of pattern; it is not
often that one can compare a book to a pictorial object with any
accuracy, though curves, etc., are freely spoken of by critics who do
not quite know what they want to say. We can only say (so far) that
pattern is an æsthetic aspect of the novel, and that though it may be
nourished by anything in the novel--any character, scene, word--it draws
most of its nourishment from the plot. We noted, when discussing the
plot, that it added to itself the quality of beauty; beauty a little
surprised at her own arrival: that upon its neat carpentry there could
be seen, by those who cared to see, the figure of the Muse; that Logic,
at the moment of finishing its own house, laid the foundation of a new
one. Here, here is the point where the aspect called pattern is most
closely in touch with its material; here is our starting point. It
springs mainly from the plot, accompanies it like a light in the clouds,
and remains visible after it has departed. Beauty is sometimes the shape
of the book, the book as a whole, the unity, and our examination would
be easier if it was always this. But sometimes it is not. When it is not
I shall call it rhythm. For the moment we are concerned with pattern
only.

Let us examine at some length another book of the rigid type, a book
with a unity, and in this sense an easy book, although it is by Henry
James. We shall see in it pattern triumphant, and we shall also be able
to see the sacrifices an author must make if he wants his pattern and
nothing else to triumph.

_The Ambassadors_, like _Thais_, is the shape of an hour-glass. Strether
and Chad, like Paphnuce and Thais, change places, and it is the
realization of this that makes the book so satisfying at the close. The
plot is elaborate and subtle, and proceeds by action or conversation or
meditation through every paragraph. Everything is planned, everything
fits; none of the minor characters are just decorative like the
talkative Alexandrians at Nirias' banquet; they elaborate on the main
theme, they work. The final effect is pre-arranged, dawns gradually on
the reader, and is completely successful when it comes. Details of
intrigue, of the various missions from America, may be forgotten, but
the symmetry they have created is enduring.

Let us trace the growth of this symmetry.[9]

Strether, a sensitive middle-aged American, is commissioned by his old
friend, Mrs. Newsome, whom he hopes to marry, to go to Paris and rescue
her son Chad, who has gone to the bad in that appropriate city. The
Newsomes are sound commercial people, who have made money over
manufacturing a small article of domestic utility. Henry James never
tells us what the small article is, and in a moment we shall understand
why. Wells spits it out in _Tono Bungay_, Meredith reels it out in _Evan
Harrington_, Trollope prescribes it freely for Miss Dunstable, but for
James to indicate how his characters made their pile--it would not do.
The article is somewhat ignoble and ludicrous--that is enough. If you
choose to be coarse and daring and visualize it for yourself as, say, a
button-hook, you can, but you do so at your own risk: the author remains
uninvolved.

Well, whatever it is, Chad Newsome ought to come back and help make it,
and Strether undertakes to fetch him. He has to be rescued from a life
which is both immoral and unremunerative.

Strether is a typical James character--he recurs in nearly all the books
and is an essential part of their construction. He is the observer who
tries to influence the action, and who through his failure to do so
gains extra opportunities for observation. And the other characters are
such as an observer like Strether is capable of observing--through
lenses procured from a rather too first-class oculist. Everything is
adjusted to his vision, yet he is not a quietist--no, that is the
strength of the device; he takes us along with him, we move as well as
look on.

When he lands in England (and a landing is an exalted and enduring
experience for James, it is as vital as Newgate for Defoe; poetry and
life crowd round a landing): when Strether lands, though it is only old
England, he begins to have doubts of his mission, which increase when he
gets to Paris. For Chad Newsome, far from going to the bad, has
improved; he is distinguished, he is so sure of himself that he can be
kind and cordial to the man who has orders to fetch him away; his
friends are exquisite, and as for "women in the case" whom his mother
anticipated, there is no sign of them whatever. It is Paris that has
enlarged and redeemed him--and how well Strether himself understands
this!


His greatest uneasiness seemed to peep at him out of the possible
impression that almost any acceptance of Paris might give one's
authority away. It hung before him this morning, the vast bright
Babylon, like some huge iridescent object, a jewel brilliant and hard,
in which parts were not to be discriminated nor differences comfortably
marked. It twinkled and trembled and melted together; and what seemed
all surface one moment seemed all depth the next. It was a place of
which, unmistakably, Chad was fond; wherefore, if he, Strether, should
like it too much, what on earth, with such a bond, would become of
either of them?


Thus, exquisitely and firmly, James sets his atmosphere--Paris
irradiates the book from end to end, it is an actor though always
unembodied, it is a scale by which human sensibility can be measured,
and when we have finished the novel and allow its incidents to blur that
we may see the pattern plainer, it is Paris that gleams at the centre of
the hour-glass shape--Paris--nothing so crude as good or evil. Strether
sees this soon, and sees that Chad realizes it better than he himself
can; and when he has reached this stage of initiation the novel takes a
turn: there is, after all, a woman in the case; behind Paris,
interpreting it for Chad, is the adorable and exalted figure of Mme. de
Vionnet. It is now impossible for Strether to proceed. All that is noble
and refined in life concentrates in Mme. de Vionnet and is reinforced by
her pathos. She asks him not to take Chad away. He promises--without
reluctance, for his own heart has already shown him as much--and he
remains in Paris not to fight it but to fight for it.

For the second batch of ambassadors now arrives from the New World. Mrs.
Newsome, incensed and puzzled by the unseemly delay, has despatched
Chad's sister, his brother-in-law, and Mamie, the girl whom he is
supposed to marry. The novel now becomes, within its ordained limits,
most amusing. There is a superb set-to between Chad's sister and Mme. de
Vionnet, while as for Mamie--here is disastrous Mamie, seen as we see
all things, through Strether's eyes.


As a child, as a "bud," and then again as a flower of expansion, Mamie
had bloomed for him, freely, in the almost incessantly open doorways of
home; where he remembered her at first very forward, as then very
backward--for he had carried on at one period, in Mrs. Newsome's
parlours, a course of English literature reinforced by exams and
teas--and once more, finally, as very much in advance. But he had kept
no great sense of points of contact; it not being in the nature of
things at Woollett that the freshest of the buds should find herself in
the same basket with the most withered of the winter apples.... He none
the less felt now, as he sat with the charming girl, the signal growth
of a confidence. For she _was_ charming, when all was said, and none the
less so for the visible habit and practice of freedom and fluency. She
was charming, he was aware, in spite of the fact that if he hadn't found
her so he would have found her something he should have been in peril of
expressing as "funny." Yes, she was funny, wonderful Mamie, and without
dreaming it; she was bland, she was bridal--with never, that he could
make out as yet, a bridegroom to support it; she was handsome and
portly, and easy and chatty, soft and sweet and almost disconcertingly
reassuring. She was dressed, if we might so far discriminate, less as a
young lady than as an old one--had an old one been supposable to
Strether as so committed to vanity; the complexities of her hair missed
moreover also the looseness of youth; and she had a mature manner of
bending a little, as to encourage and reward, while she held neatly in
front of her a pair of strikingly polished hands: the combination of all
of which kept up about her the glamour of her "receiving," placed her
again perpetually between the windows and within sound of the ice cream
plates, suggested the enumeration of all the names, gregarious specimens
of a single type, she was happy to "meet."


Mamie! She is another Henry James type; nearly every novel contains a
Mamie--Mrs. Gereth in _The Spoils of Poynton_ for instance, or Henrietta
Stackpole in _The Portrait of a Lady_. He is so good at indicating
instantaneously and constantly that a character is second rate,
deficient in sensitiveness, abounding in the wrong sort of worldliness;
he gives such a character so much vitality that its absurdity is
delightful.

So Strether changes sides and loses all hopes of marrying Mrs. Newsome.
Paris is winning--and then he catches sight of something new. Is not
Chad, as regards any fineness in him, played out? Is not Chad's Paris
after all just a place for a spree? This fear is confirmed. He goes for
a solitary country walk, and at the end of the day he comes across Chad
and Mme. de Vionnet. They are in a boat, they pretend not to see him,
because their relation is at bottom an ordinary liaison, and they are
ashamed. They were hoping for a secret week-end at an inn while their
passion survived; for it will not survive, Chad will tire of the
exquisite Frenchwoman, she is part of his fling; he will go back to his
mother and make the little domestic article and marry Mamie. They know
all this, and it is revealed to Strether though they try to hide it;
they lie, they are vulgar--even Mme. de Vionnet, even her pathos, once
so exquisite, is stained with commonness.


It was like a chill in the air to him, it was almost appalling, that a
creature so fine could be, by mysterious forces, a creature so
exploited. For, at the end of all things, they _were_ mysterious; she
had but made Chad what he was--so why could she think she had made him
infinite? She had made him better, she had made him best, she had made
him anything one would; but it came to our friend with supreme queerness
that he was none the less only Chad. The work, however admirable, was
nevertheless of the strict human order, and in short it was
marvellous that the companion of mere earthly joys, of comforts,
aberrations--however one classed them--within the common experience,
should be so transcendency prized.

She was older for him tonight, visibly less exempt from the touch of
time; but she was as much as ever the finest and subtlest creature, the
happiest apparition, it had been given him, in all his years, to meet;
and yet he could see her there as vulgarly troubled, in very truth, as a
maidservant crying for a young man. The only thing was that she judged
herself as the maidservant wouldn't; the weakness of which wisdom too,
the dishonour of which judgment, seemed but to sink her lower.


So Strether loses them too. As he says: "I have lost everything--it is
my only logic." It is not that they have gone back. It is that he has
gone on. The Paris they revealed to him--he could reveal it to them now,
if they had eyes to see, for it is something finer than they could ever
notice for themselves, and his imagination has more spiritual value than
their youth. The pattern of the hour-glass is complete; he and Chad have
changed places, with more subtle steps than Thais and Paphnuce, and the
light in the clouds proceeds not from the well-lit Alexandria, but from
the jewel which "twinkled and trembled and melted together, and what
seemed all surface one moment seemed all depth the next."

The beauty that suffuses _The Ambassadors_ is the reward due to a fine
artist for hard work. James knew exactly what he wanted, he pursued the
narrow path of æsthetic duty, and success to the full extent of his
possibilities has crowned him. The pattern has woven itself with
modulation and reservations Anatole France will never attain. Woven
itself wonderfully. But at what sacrifice!

So enormous is the sacrifice that many readers cannot get interested in
James, although they can follow what he says (his difficulty has been
much exaggerated), and can appreciate his effects. They cannot grant his
premise, which is that most of human life has to disappear before he can
do us a novel.

He has, in the first place, a very short list of characters. I have
already mentioned two--the observer who tries to influence the action,
and the second-rate outsider (to whom, for example, all the brilliant
opening of _What Maisie Knew_ is entrusted). Then there is the
sympathetic foil--very lively and frequently female--in _The
Ambassadors_. Maria Gostrey plays this part; there is the wonderful rare
heroine, whom Mme. de Vionnet approached and who is consummated by Milly
in _The Wings of the Dove_; there is sometimes a villain, sometimes a
young artist with generous impulses; and that is about all. For so fine
a novelist it is a poor show.

In the second place, the characters, beside being few in number, are
constructed on very stingy lines. They are incapable of fun, of rapid
motion, of carnality, and of nine-tenths of heroism. Their clothes will
not take off, the diseases that ravage them are anonymous, like the
sources of their income, their servants are noiseless or resemble
themselves, no social explanation of the world we know is possible for
them, for there are no stupid people in their world, no barriers of
language, and no poor. Even their sensations are limited. They can land
in Europe and look at works of art and at each other, but that is all.
Maimed creatures can alone breathe in Henry James's pages--maimed yet
specialized. They remind one of the exquisite deformities who haunted
Egyptian art in the reign of Akhenaton--huge heads and tiny legs, but
nevertheless charming. In the following reign they disappear.

Now this drastic curtailment, both of the numbers of human beings and of
their attributes, is in the interests of the pattern. The longer James
worked, the more convinced he grew that a novel should be a whole--not
necessarily geometric like _The Ambassadors_, but it should accrete
round a angle topic, situation, gesture, which should occupy the
characters and provide a plot, and should also fasten up the novel on
the outside--catch its scattered statements in a net, make them cohere
like a planet, and swing through the skies of memory. A pattern must
emerge, and anything that emerged from the pattern must be pruned off as
wanton distraction. Who so wanton as human beings? Put Tom Jones or Emma
or even Mr. Casaubon into a Henry James book, and the book will burn to
ashes, whereas we could put them into one another's books and only cause
local inflammation. Only a Henry James character will suit, and though
they are not dead--certain selected recesses of experience he explores
very well--they are gutted of the common stuff that fills characters in
other books, and ourselves. And this castrating is not in the interests
of the Kingdom of Heaven, there is no philosophy in the novels, no
religion (except an occasional touch of superstition), no prophecy, no
benefit for the superhuman at all. It is for the sake of a particular
æsthetic effect which is certainly gained, but at this heavy price.

H. G. Wells has been amusing on this point, and perhaps profound. In
_Boon_--one of his liveliest works--he had Henry James much upon his
mind, and wrote a superb parody of him.


James begins by taking it for granted that a novel is a work of art that
must be judged by its oneness. Some one gave him that idea in the
beginning of things and he has never found it out. He doesn't find
things out. He doesn't even seem to want to find things out. He accepts
very readily and then--elaborates.... The only living human motives left
in his novels are a certain avidity and an entirely superficial
curiosity.... His people nose out suspicions, hint by hint, link by
link. Have you ever known living human beings do that? The thing his
novel is _about_ is always there. It is like a church lit but with no
congregation to distract you, with every light and line focussed on the
high altar. And on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely there,
is a dead kitten, an egg shell, a piece of string.... Like his _Altar of
the Dead_ with nothing to the dead at all.... For if there was, they
couldn't all be candles, and the effect would vanish.


Wells sent _Boon_ as a present to Janies, apparently thinking the master
would be as much pleased by such heartiness and honesty as was he
himself. The master was far from pleased, and a most interesting
correspondence ensued.[10] Each of the eminent men becomes more and more
himself as it proceeds. James is polite, reminiscent, bewildered, and
exceedingly formidable: he admits that the parody has not "filled him
with a fond elation," and regrets in conclusion that he can sign himself
"only yours faithfully, Henry James." Wells is bewildered too, but in a
different way; he cannot understand why the man should be upset. And,
beyond the personal comedy, there is the great literary importance of
the issue. It is this question of the rigid pattern: hour-glass or grand
chain or converging lines of the cathedral or diverging lines of the
Catherine wheel, or bed of Procrustes--whatever image you like as long
as it implies unity. Can it be combined with the immense richness of
material which life provides? Wells and James would agree it cannot,
Wells would go on to say that life should be given the preference, and
must not be whittled or distended for a pattern's sake. My own
prejudices are with Wells. The James novels are a unique possession and
the reader who cannot accept his premises misses some valuable and
exquisite sensations. But I do not want more of his novels, especially
when they are written by some one else, just as I do not want the art of
Akhenaton to extend into the reign of Tutankhamen.

That then is the disadvantage of a rigid pattern. It may externalize the
atmosphere, spring naturally from the plot, but it shuts the doors on
life and leaves the novelist doing exercises, generally in the
drawing-room. Beauty has arrived, but in too tyrannous a guise. In
plays--the plays of Racine, for instance--she may be justified because
beauty can be a great empress on the stage, and reconcile us to the loss
of the men we knew. But in the novel, her tyranny as it grows powerful
grows petty, and generates regrets which sometimes take the form of
books like _Boon_. To put it in other words, the novel is not capable of
as much artistic development as the drama: its humanity or the grossness
of its material hinder it (use whichever phrase you like). To most
readers of fiction the sensation from a pattern is not intense enough to
justify the sacrifices that made it, and their verdict is "Beautifully
done, but not worth doing."

Still this is not the end of our quest. We will not give up the hope of
beauty yet. Cannot it be introduced into fiction by some other method
than the pattern? Let us edge rather nervously towards the idea of
"rhythm."

Rhythm is sometimes quite easy. Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, for
instance, starts with the rhythm "diddidy dum," which we can all hear
and tap to. But the symphony as a whole has also a rhythm--due mainly to
the relation between its movements--which some people can hear but no
one can tap to. This second sort of rhythm is difficult, and whether it
is substantially the same as the first sort only a musician could tell
us. What a literary man wants to say though is that the first kind of
rhythm, the diddidy dum, can be found in certain novels and may give
them beauty. And the other rhythm, the difficult one--the rhythm of the
Fifth Symphony as a whole--I cannot quote you any parallels for that in
fiction, yet it may be present.

Rhythm in the easy sense, is illustrated by the work of Marcel
Proust.[11]

Proust's conclusion has not been published yet, and his admirers say
that when it comes everything will fall into its place, times past will
be recaptured and fixed, we shall have a perfect whole. I do not believe
this. The work seems to me a progressive rather than an æsthetic
confession, and with the elaboration of Albertine the author was getting
tired. Bits of news may await us, but it will be surprising if we have
to revise our opinion of the whole book. The book is chaotic, ill
constructed, it has and will have no external shape; and yet it hangs
together because it is stitched internally, because it contains rhythms.

There are several examples (the photographing of the grandmother is one
of them) but the most important from the binding point of view is his
use of the "little phrase" in the music of Vinteuil. It does more than
anything else--more even than the jealousy which successively destroys
Swann, the hero, and Charlus--to make us feel that we are in a
homogeneous world. We first hear Vinteuil's name in hideous
circumstances. The musician is dead--an obscure little country organist,
unknown to fame--and his daughter is defiling his memory. The horrible
scene is to radiate in several directions, but it passes, we forget
about it.

Then we are at a Paris salon. A violin sonata is performed and a little
phrase from its andante catches the ear of Swann and steals into his
life. It is always a living being, but takes various forms. For a time
it attends his love for Odette. The love affair goes wrong, the phrase
is forgotten, we forget it. Then it breaks out again when he is ravaged
by jealousy, and now it attends his misery and past happiness at once,
without losing its own divine character. Who wrote the sonata? On
hearing it is by Vinteuil, Swann says, "I once knew a wretched little
organist of that name--it couldn't be by him." But it is, and Vinteuil's
daughter and her friend transcribed and published it.

That seems all. The little phrase crosses the book again and again, but
as an echo, a memory; we like to encounter it, but it has no binding
power. Then, hundreds and hundreds of pages on, when Vinteuil has become
a national possession, and there is talk of raising a statue to him in
the town where he has been so wretched and so obscure, another work of
his is performed--a posthumous sextet. The hero listens--he is in an
unknown rather terrible universe while a sinister dawn reddens the sea.
Suddenly for him and for the reader too, the little phrase of the sonata
recurs--half heard, changed, but giving complete orientation, so that he
is back in the country of his childhood with the knowledge that it
belongs to the unknown.

We are not obliged to agree with Proust's actual musical descriptions
(they are too pictorial for my own taste): but what we must admire is
his use of rhythm in literature, and his use of something which is akin
by nature to the effect it has to produce--namely a musical phrase.
Heard by various people--first by Swann, then by the hero--the phrase of
Vinteuil is not tethered; it is not a banner such as we find George
Meredith using--a double-blossomed cherry tree to accompany Clara
Middleton, a yacht in smooth waters for Cecilia Halkett. A banner can
only reappear, rhythm can develop, and the little phrase has a life of
its own, unconnected with the lives of its auditors, as with the life of
the man who composed it. It is almost an actor, but not quite, and that
"not quite" means that its power has gone towards stitching Proust's
book together from the inside, and towards the establishment of beauty
and the ravishing of the reader's memory. There are times when the
little phrase--from its gloomy inception, through the sonata into the
sextet--means everything to the reader. There are times when it means
nothing and is forgotten, and this seems to me the function of rhythm in
fiction; not to be there all the time like a pattern, but by its lovely
waxing and waning to fill us with surprise and freshness and hope.

Done badly, rhythm is most boring, it hardens into a symbol and instead
of carrying us on it trips us up. With exasperation we find that
Galsworthy's spaniel John, or whatever it is, lies under the feet again;
and even Meredith's cherry trees and yachts, graceful as they are, only
open the windows into poetry. I doubt that it can be achieved by the
writers who plan their books beforehand, it has to depend on a local
impulse when the right interval is reached. But the effect can be
exquisite, it can be obtained without mutilating the characters, and it
lessens our need of an external form.

That must suffice on the subject of easy rhythm in fiction: which may be
defined as repetition plus variation, and which can be illustrated by
examples. Now for the more difficult question. Is there any effect in
novels comparable to the effect of the Fifth Symphony as a whole,
where, when the orchestra stops, we hear something that has never
actually been played? The opening movement, the andante, and the
trio-scherzo-trio-finale-trio-finale that composes the third block, all
enter the mind at once, and extend one another into a common entity.
This common entity, this new thing, is the symphony as a whole, and it
has been achieved mainly (though not entirely) by the relation between
the three big blocks of sound which the orchestra has been playing. I am
calling this relation "rhythmic." If the correct musical term is
something else, that does not matter; what we have now to ask ourselves
is whether there is any analogy to it in fiction.

I cannot find any analogy. Yet there may be one; in music fiction is
likely to find its nearest parallel.

The position of the drama is different. The drama may look towards the
pictorial arts, it may allow Aristotle to discipline it, for it is not
so deeply committed to the claims of human beings. Human beings have
their great chance in the novel. They say to the novelist: "Recreate us
if you like, but we must come in," and the novelist's problem, as we
have seen all along, is to give them a good run and to achieve something
else at the same time. Whither shall he turn? not indeed for help but
for analogy. Music, though it does not employ human beings, though it is
governed by intricate laws, nevertheless does offer in its final
expression a type of beauty which fiction might achieve in its own way.
Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must ding to. Not completion.
Not rounding off but opening out. When the symphony is over we feel that
the notes and tunes composing it have been liberated, they have found in
the rhythm of the whole their individual freedom. Cannot the novel be
like that? Is not there something of it in _War and Peace_?--the book
with which we began and in which we must end. Such an untidy book. Yet,
as we read it, do not great chords begin to sound behind us, and when we
have finished does not every item--even the catalogue of
strategies--lead a larger existence than was possible at the time?


[Footnote 9: There is a masterly analysis of _The Ambassadors_
from another standpoint in _The Craft of Fiction_.]

[Footnote 10: See the _Letters of H. James_, Vol. II.]

[Footnote 11: The first three books of _À la recherche du temps
perdu_ have been excellently translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff
under the title of _Remembrance of Things Past_. (A. & C. Boni.)]




IX

CONCLUSION


IT is tempting to conclude by speculations as to the future of the
novel, will it become more or less realistic, will it be killed by the
cinema, and so on. Speculations, whether sad or lively, always have a
large air about them, they are a very convenient way of being helpful or
impressive. But we have no right to entertain them. We have refused to
be hampered by the past, so we must not profit by the future. We have
visualized the novelists of the last two hundred years all writing
together in one room, subject to the same emotions and putting the
accidents of their age into the crucible of inspiration, and whatever
our results, our method has been sound--sound for an assemblage of
pseudo-scholars like ourselves. But we must visualize the novelists of
the next two hundred years as also writing in the room. The change in
their subject matter will be enormous; they will not change. We may
harness the atom, we may land on the moon, we may abolish or intensify
warfare, the mental processes of animals may be understood; but all
these are trifles, they belong to history not to art. History develops,
art stands still. The novelist of the future will have to pass all the
new facts through the old if variable mechanism of the creative mind.

There is however one question which touches our subject, and which only
a psychologist could answer. But let us ask it. Will the creative
process itself alter? Will the mirror get a new coat of quicksilver? In
other words, can human nature change? Let us consider this possibility
for a moment--we are entitled to that much relaxation.

It is amusing to listen to elderly people on this subject. Sometimes a
man says in confident tones: "Human nature's the same in all ages. The
primitive cave man lies deep in us all. Civilization--pooh! a mere
veneer. You can't alter facts." He speaks like this when he is feeling
prosperous and fat. When he is feeling depressed and is worried by the
young, or is being sentimental about them on the ground that they will
succeed in life when he has failed, then he will take the opposite view
and say mysteriously, "Human nature is not the same. I have seen
fundamental changes in my own time. You must face facts." And he goes on
like this day after day, alternately facing facts and refusing to alter
them.

All I will do is to state a possibility. If human nature does alter it
will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way.
Here and there people--a very few people, but a few novelists are among
them--are trying to do this. Every institution and vested interest is
against such a search: organized religion, the State, the family in its
economic aspect, have nothing to gain, and it is only when outward
prohibitions weaken that it can proceed: history conditions it to that
extent. Perhaps the searchers will fail, perhaps it is impossible for
the instrument of contemplation to contemplate itself, perhaps if it is
possible it means the end of imaginative literature--which if I
understand him rightly is the view of that acute enquirer, Mr. I. A.
Richards. Anyhow--that way lies movement and even combustion for the
novel, for if the novelist sees himself differently he will see his
characters differently and a new system of lighting will result.

I do not know on the verge of which philosophy or what rival
philosophies the above remarks are wavering, but as I look back at my
own scraps of knowledge and into my own heart, I see these two movements
of the human mind: the great tedious onrush known as history, and a shy
crablike sideways movement. Both movements have been neglected in these
lectures: history because it only carries people on, it is just a train
full of passengers; and the crablike movement because it is too slow and
cautious to be visible over our tiny period of two hundred years. So we
laid it down as an axiom when we started that human nature is
unchangeable, and that it produces in rapid succession prose fictions,
which fictions, when they contain 50,000 words or more, are called
novels. If we had the power or license to take a wider view, and survey
all human and pre-human activity, we might not conclude like this; the
crablike movement, the shiftings of the passengers, might be visible,
and the phrase "the development of the novel" might cease to be a
pseudo-scholarly tag or a technical triviality, and become important,
because it implied the development of humanity.




INDEX OF MAIN REFERENCES


  Alain, 73-74
  Aristotle, 126-129
  Asquith, Mr., 161
  Austen, Jane, 100-101, 112-114

  Beerbohm, Max, 171-175
  Bennett, Arnold, 62-63
  Birth, treatment of, 76-77,
    81-82
  Blake, William, 211
  Brontë, Charlotte, 139-140
  Brontë, Emily, 209-211

  C. P. S., 210
  Chevalley, Abel, 17
  Clark, W. G., 13-15

  Death, treatment of, 76, 82-83
  Defoe, Daniel, 87-95
  Dickens, Charles, 32-34, 104,
    108-109, 119-120
  Dickinson, Lowes, 177
  Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 188-195
  Douglas, Norman, 107-108

  Eliot, George, 184-188
  Eliot, T. S., 41

  Fantasy defined, 158-159
  Fielding, Henry, 118, 124,
    175-176
  "Flat" characters, 103-112
  Food, treatment of, 77, 83
  France, Anatole, 214-215
  Freeman, John, 204

  Garnett, David, 161
  Gide, André, 121-122, 146-153
  Goldsmith, Oliver, 143

  Hardy, Thomas, 140-142, 198

  Inspiration, nature of, 39

  James, Henry, 30-31, 218-234
  Joyce, James, 177-180, 199

  Lawrence, D. H., 107, 207-209
  Literary tradition, 40-41
  Love, treatment of, 78-80, 86-87
  Lubbock, Percy, 118-119,
    216-217

  Matson, Norman, 166-171
  Melville, Herman, 199-206
  Meredith George, 106,
    134-138

  Novel defined, 17
  "Novelist's touch," the, 107

 _One Thousand and One Nights_,
    47

  Pattern defined, 218
  Plot defined, 130
  Point of view, 118-125
  Prophecy defined, 182-183
  Proust, Marcel, 104, 236-239
  Provincialism, 19
  Pseudo-scholarship, 23-28

  Raleigh, Walter, 22
  Rhythm, two kinds of, 240-241
  Richards, I. A., 245
  Richardson, Samuel, 29-30
 "Round" characters, 112-118

  Scott, Walter, 51-62, 104
  Sleep, treatment of, 80, 84
  Stein, Gertrude, 67-68
  Sterne, Laurence, 35-37,
    157-158
  Story, definition of, 44-45; the
    repository of a voice, 64-65
 _Swiss Family Robinson_, 52-53

  Thackeray, W. M., 118, 124
  Tolstoy, Leo, 63-64, 122-123,
    242
  Trollope, Anthony, 82-83

  Victoria, Queen, 71-72

  Wells, H. G., 31-34, 109-110,
    231-233
  Woolf, Virginia, 34-37

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