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Title: The English novel
From the earliest days to the death of Joseph Conrad
Author: Ford Madox Ford
Release date: April 12, 2026 [eBook #78426]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Constable & Company Limited, 1930
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78426
Credits: Sean (@parchmentglow)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ENGLISH NOVEL ***
THE
ENGLISH NOVEL
From the Earliest Days
to the Death of
Joseph Conrad
by
FORD MADOX FORD
LONDON
CONSTABLE & CO.
1930
PUBLISHED BY
_Constable & Company Limited_
_London W. C. 2_
BOMBAY
CALCUTTA MADRAS
LEIPZIG
_Oxford University Press_
Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd., Frome and London
AUTHOR’S APOLOGY
To Hugh Walpole.
MY DEAR WALPOLE,--
This little book was intended at the time it was written solely for
the consumption of students in the United States at a time when I had
arrived at a decision to publish nothing more in the country of my
birth. A curious set of circumstances all happening on the same day
have made me change my decision, at least as to this book. In the
first place I received in the morning the present publisher’s offer to
publish the book; in the afternoon some kindly person gave me a copy
of the _New York Herald’s_ Literary Supplement containing your far too
eulogistic references to myself; and in the evening a Rhodes Scholar
from one of the Oxford Colleges told me that in that place of education
typewritten and then mimeographed copies of this work were--the book
being unobtainable in England--being used by certain students as a
textbook in their English classes. They were all, I understand, Rhodes
Scholars.
I had by that time turned down the publisher’s offer. Indeed, I had
thought that the publisher must be mad, for he must be as aware as I
that a good average of English readers of my works has for many years
been about four hundred. I do not mean to say that that is all that
English editions of my books have sold, for there is a fashion in the
United States of ordering the first editions (which are generally the
London ones) of certain authors, those including my fortunate self. And
the first edition of this book has appeared so long ago in the United
States that that sale must be lost. But the thought of all those Rhodes
Scholars having to take that trouble made me wish to make the matter
easier for their devoted selves, and the reading of your words coming
on top of so many generosities of yours towards me as writer made me
determine to manifest some sense of my real gratitude towards yourself.
And how could I do it better than by addressing to you a work,
however small, on the subject of an art that you have for so long, so
steadfastly, and so unswervingly pursued?
I have never felt so mortified with myself as when on the occasion
of a public dinner given to us, in conjunction I think, in New York,
you, speaking first, talked of my work with such enthusiasm and such
enviable generosity--for to know how to be so generous is a thing for
which one may well be envied!--that I was covered with confusion and
quite literally had the tears in my eyes. I was indeed so affected as
to be totally unable to make any adequate reply and must have seemed
curmudgeonly in the extreme to our audience.
And then, subsequently during a tour of lectures at the English
Classes of certain American Universities, I found that you had spoken
of me already to them with the same magnificent generosity, so that I
understood that it was your praise of my work that had actually secured
me the invitation to deliver those lectures--why, then I conceived
towards yourself a warmth of feeling of which you can be only too
little aware and I far, far too little able to express. Why should
you go out of your way to do these things? I have never done you any
service; I have never in that city which for long now has been my
spiritual home heard of any other English novelist going out of his
way to speak a kind word for any other one, and, that city being the
immense whispering gallery that it is, I have heard of many unkind
sayings as to my works and much unkinder ones as to my person uttered
there in public and private by visiting English novelists. But you just
came there and ran about and said in innumerable places the dearest
things--dearest to me; just, as the saying is, for the love of God.
Because how can you retain enthusiasms for books who must have read so
many?
I do not think that these things are too private between us to be
spoken of. For in the weary business that is the writing of books the
sudden discovery of generosities towards oneself by persons hardly
personally known to one--it must be twenty-three years or so since, in
the old _English Review_ days and a little after we infrequently met
until we thus again in Gotham came together--such sudden discoveries
of generosities are so refreshing against the dust and the haze of the
road that is always uphill that their publication seems almost a duty.
For how different might not have been the history of that which I am
here tracing had such a sense of the co-operative thing that our art
is, distinguished the long line of its practitioners from Cædmon to
... oh, to whom you will! Such a sense as must be yours....
The reason why I did not wish to publish this work in England was
simply that, in that country, I have never found anyone to take the
remotest interest in the subject and such occasional opuscules as I
have there devoted to it have invariably been received with very bitter
disfavour. Because it is obviously an impertinence in a novelist to
insist that his art is an art or of service to the republic, and as not
more than four hundred English read my novels, the craftsman’s notes
of a person so ignored can have little or no interest. In the United
States it is different. Even if I had no following there, the interest
taken in the technical sides of any arts or processes is, in that
country of intellectual curiosities, so keen, that I should without
scruple have ventured on publishing for the benefit of students the
notes that have occurred to me during the thirty-seven years in which
I have been publishing novels. For I must be pretty nearly the doyen
of English writers of the imaginative type--I mean of course in dates
of publication, not in terms of age and of course not in terms of
merit. And if, faint yet pursuing, I have been able to keep on finding
American publishers during such a long space of time, there must be
there some sort of a public that will take a little interest in the
professional matters that so passionately have interested me. And I
do not adopt an apologetic tone towards this work. I may be perfectly
wrong in almost everything that I say. If I am, that is the end of me.
But the great use of technical discussion is that it arouses interest
in the subject discussed. I have had in my day a great number of
disciples--mostly of course on the Western side of the Atlantic--and
several of them have risen to positions of considerable prominence
and are doing work of great beauty. But there is not one of them who
to-day acts in any way according to the maxims that I enjoined on him
or her. And that is how it should be, the new generation attaining
its eminences by using the maxims of the generation preceding as its
jumping-off posts. And if the older generation can get its craftsman’s
maxims clearly expressed, the process of demolition is all the easier
and more thorough.
So, my dear Walpole, I at least see it. And since the book is written
and as if by _force majeure_ makes its appearance in our country, I
do desire that its theories should secure as wide an attention as may
be. So I have adopted the stratagem of attaching your name to it.
Nevertheless, my gratitude is very profound, and it is in all sincerity
that I inscribe myself
Your humble, obedient and
very thankful servant,
F. M. F.
This book was written in New York, on board the S.S. _Patria_, and
in the port and neighbourhood of Marseilles during July and August,
1927. For the purpose of rendering it more easily understood by the
English reader I have made certain alterations in phrases, in Paris
during the last four days of 1929 and the first two of 1930.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I THE FUNCTION OF THE NOVEL IN THE MODERN WORLD 1
II TOWARDS DEFOE 29
III TOWARDS FLAUBERT 65
IV TO JOSEPH CONRAD 105
_L’ENVOI_: IN THE LAST QUARTER OF A CENTURY 135
CHAPTER ONE
THE FUNCTION OF THE NOVEL IN THE MODERN WORLD
1
One finds--or at any rate I have always found--English History
relatively easy to grasp because in it it is not difficult to see a
pattern of what some one has called Freedom slowly broadening down from
precedent to precedent. One may or may not agree with the statement,
one may or may not like the fact, if it is a fact, that it sets forth;
but at least it gives us that pattern, some sort of jumping-off place,
something by which one may measure and co-relate various phases of the
story. The histories of most other races are more difficult to grasp
or follow because they are less systematized and more an affair of
individuals. One may be aware that the pre-Revolution history of France
is an affair of power gradually centralizing itself on the throne, and
that the Fronde was an episode in that progression. Nevertheless, the
Fronde with its violent personalities, its purely individual intrigues,
its Cardinals, Queens, Condés, Chevreuses and the rest, was a baffling
affair to follow, and obscures the issue which doubtless was that, all
power being concentrated under one hat, the neck which supported the
head which supported that hat was easy to strike off.
But when it comes to the History of Literature--and to that of the
Novel in particular, almost the exact inverse is the case. Whereas
almost every country other than England--or indeed every race other
than Anglo-Saxondom--has a tradition of literature in which some sort
of precedent broadens down into some other, it would appear that
however docile the Anglo-Saxon may be in the hands of politicians or
leaders--usually of a Leftwards complexion--the moment any æsthetic
discipline proposes itself for his direction he becomes at least as
refractory as any Condé and almost more intriguing than any Chevreuse.
Any sort of English writer takes any sort of pen and on any sort of
paper with in his hair whatever sort of vine-leaves you will and at his
elbow any nectar from metheglin to Chateau Yquem or pale ale, writes
any sort of story in any sort of method--or in any sort of mixture of
any half-dozen methods. So, if he have any of the temperament of an
artist, you have a Fielding or a Trollope, a Samuel Butler or a George
Meredith, each rising as a separate peak but each absolutely without
interrelation with any other.
That was never better exemplified than quite lately when you had--all
living simultaneously but all, alas, now dead--Thomas Hardy, George
Meredith, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Mark Twain. Each was a
considerable figure but each sat, as it were, alone on his little peak
surrounded by his lay satellites, and each was entirely uninfluenced by
the work of all the others--two solitary Englishmen, two Americans and
one alien. Whether or no there was any resultant literary movement I am
about to try to trace for you, looking at the matter with the eyes of a
craftsman surveying his own particular job.
In the case of any other country or race such a proceeding would be
comparatively easy. In France, for instance, living at the same time
as, but all predeceasing, the distinguished Anglo-Saxons and the alien
of genius that I have named above, you had Flaubert, Maupassant,
Turgenev, the Goncourt brothers, Gautier, Daudet--six Frenchmen and an
alien of beautiful genius. They all met frequently, dining together
almost weekly at Brébant’s--where Henry James in the wake of Turgenev
dined from time to time too. With amiability, with acidity, with
passion or frenzies of hatred they discussed words, cadences, forms,
progressions of effect--or the cannon-strokes with which one concludes
short short-stories. They were during those meetings indifferent to
fame, wealth, the course of public affairs, ruin, death. For them there
was only one enduring Kingdom--that of the Arts--and only one Republic
that shall be everlasting: the Republic of Letters.
The resultant literary movement--for with their deaths it crossed the
Channel--I shall endeavour to trace, and the enterprise will concern
itself with the modern English novel. For the Art of Writing is an
affair as international as are all the other Arts--as International,
as Co-operative and as mutually uniting. Shakespeare could not have
written as he did had not Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Plutarch preceded
him, nor could Flaubert have written _Madame Bovary_ as he wrote it
had there not been before then the _Clarissa Harlowe_ of Richardson.
Nor yet could Conrad have written _Heart of Darkness_ or _Lord Jim_ had
Flaubert not written _Bouvard et Pécuchet_ or Alphonse Daudet, _Jack_.
It is, at any rate, in this spirit that, in this small monograph, I
shall present to you my reflections on the English Novel--which is the
same thing as the Novel--and the pattern that, for me, it seems to
make down the short ages during which it has existed. It will differ
very widely from the conclusions arrived at--and above all from the
estimates formed by--my predecessors in this field who have seldom
themselves been imaginative writers let alone novelists, and who,
by the exigencies of their professions, have usually been what it
is the custom to call academic. That I cannot help. For the benefit
of the reader who wishes to know what is generally thought of these
subjects I have tried to state along with my own differing conclusions
what that general thought is. If, I mean, I belabour the winking
lewdness of _Tom Jones_, I am careful to point out that most of my
professional predecessors or contemporaries beatify Fielding because
of his refreshing carelessness in most matters to which decent men pay
attention. The young, earnest student of literature for professional
purposes should, if he desires good marks, write in his thesis for
examination pretty well the opposite of what I have here set down.
But, in the end, it is as useful to have something that will awaken
you by its disagreements with yourself as to live for ever in concord
with somnolent elders. It gives you another point of view, though you
may return to the plane from which you started. I was once watching a
painter painting a field of medicinal poppies which from where he sat
appeared quite black. Suddenly, he grasped me by the wrist and dragged
me up a small hill. From there that field appeared dark-purple shot
with gold. I said: “It doesn’t make any difference, does it, to your
composition?” He answered: “No, it doesn’t make any difference, but
I wish the d--d things would not do it, for, when I have finished, I
shall have to come up here and do them all over again!”
2
Since the day when Thackeray obsequiously apologized to the world
and his readers for being a mere novelist, in the interests of a
pompous social system which decreed that the novel should not be
seriously regarded and the novelist himself be stigmatized as something
detrimental to good order and the decorous employment of spare
time--since, then, Thackeray poked fun at the greatest of all his books
which may well be regarded, if you will, as the greatest work in the
English language, an immense change has occurred in the relative place
accorded to the Novel in the Anglo-Saxon social cosmogony. Because, as
novelist, Thackeray felt his social position insecure, he must attempt
to retrieve himself by poking fun at his book and so proving that at
least he did not take the Novel seriously, his heart being in the right
place be his occupation never so ungentlemanly. So he must needs write
his epilogue as to the showman rolling up his marionettes in green
baize and the rest of it.
To-day, however, even the most fugitive of novelists takes his work
more seriously and, perhaps all unconsciously, the public accords to
the more serious amongst the novelists an attention that formerly it
accorded solely to politicians, preachers, scientists, medical men, and
the like. This is because the novel has become indispensable to the
understanding of life.
It is, that is to say, the only source to which you can turn in order
to ascertain how your fellows spend their entire lives. I use the words
“entire lives” advisedly.
In older days--dating back to improvement in locomotion--it was
possible for anyone, whatever his station, to observe, at any rate
roughly as it were, a complete cross-section of the lives from cradle
to coffin of a whole social order. In England up to the days of the
stage-coach, families were planted on the land practically to all
eternity and even within my memory it was nearly impossible for the
agricultural labourer to move from one parish--nay, from one farm to
another. One of the most vivid of my souvenirs as a boy was seeing a
ploughman weep on a great down. He was weeping because he had five
children and a bad master who paid him thirteen and six a week and he
was utterly unable to get together the guinea that it would cost him
to hire a farm wagon and move his sticks of furniture to another and
better farm. Nevertheless that man knew more about human lives and
their tides and vicissitudes than I or any other town-dweller in an
age of shiftings.
He could follow the lives of local peer, local squire, doctor, lawyer,
gentleman-farmer, tenant farmer, butcher, baker, barber, parson,
gamekeeper, water-warden, and so on right down to those of the great
bulk of the population, his fellows and equals. He could follow them
from the time the kid-glove was affixed to the door-knocker as a symbol
of birth and until the passing-bell heralded their disappearance into
the clay in the shadow of the church-walls. And although that was more
emphatically true in Great Britain, the first home of the English
novel, it was almost equally true--_mutatis mutandis_--of the earlier
settled colonial districts in the United States. Until, say, the early
forties of the nineteenth century it must have been almost equally
difficult to remove from Rochester, N.Y., as from the Rochester of
Dickens, and as difficult to move from the Birmingham that gave to the
world the word Brummagem as a term of contempt, as from the Birmingham
in a Southern State of the North American Republic.
Then, with ease of locomotion came the habit of flux--which is
infinitely more developed to-day in the United States than in Great
Britain. In London and the urban districts that house by far the
greater bulk of the English population the prevalence of the seven
years’ lease has hitherto tended to anchor families in one spot for at
least that length of time, but even that space is not sufficient to
give a family much insight into the lives and habits of its neighbours.
In any case it is significant that novel-reading is almost infinitely
more a permanent habit in the United States than in Great Britain, and
the position of the imaginative writer in so far more satisfactory.
In observing a social phenomenon like the novel these social changes
must be considered. The fact is that gossip is a necessity for keeping
the mind of humanity as it were aerated and where, owing to lack of
sufficiently intimate circumstances in communities gossip cannot exist,
its place must be supplied--and it is supplied by the novel. You may
say that for the great cities of to-day its place is taken by what in
the United States is called the “tabloid” and in England the “yellow”
or “gutter” Press. But these skilful sensational renderings of merely
individual misfortunes, necessary as they are to human existence
and sanity in the great cities, are yet too highly coloured by their
producers, and the instances themselves are too far from the normal
to be of any great educational value. An occasional phrase in, say, a
Peaches-Browning case may now and then ring true, but the sound common
sense of great publics is aware that these affairs are too often merely
put-up jobs to attach any importance to them as casting light on normal
human motives.
The servant of a country parsonage leaning over the yew-hedge giving
on the turnpike and saying that the vicar’s wife was carrying on
something dreadful with Doctor Lambert might convey some sort of view
of life, ethics, morals, and the rest to another young woman; but the
minute dissection by commonplace-minded reporters of the actions and
agonies of a lady who essays first unsuccessfully to poison her husband
and finally dispatches him with a club--these minute dissections are
not only usually read with a grain of salt, but not unusually, too,
they are speedily forgotten. Scenes on the other hand presented with
even a minimum of artistry will remain in the mind as long as life
lasts: _Ivanhoe_ must permanently represent mediaevalism for a great
proportion of the inhabitants of the globe, though Scott was a very
poor artist; and the death of Emma Bovary will remain horrific in
the reader’s mind, whilst the murder of yesterday is on the morrow
forgotten.
It is this relative difference in the permanence of impression that
distinguishes the work of the novelist as artist from all the other
arts and pursuits of the world. _Trilby_, for instance, was no great
shakes of a book in the great scale of things, but an American
gentleman asserted to me the other day that that work did more to
cosmopolitanize the populations of the Eastern States than any movement
of an international nature that has been seen since the Declaration
of Independence. I don’t know if that is true, but it usefully puts a
point of view--and I am not the one to deny it.
It is, in short, unbearable to exist without some view of life as a
whole, for one finds oneself daily in predicaments in which some sort
of a pointer is absolutely necessary. Even though no novel known to you
may exactly meet your given case, the novel does supply that cloud of
human instances without which the soul feels unsafe in its adventures
and the normal mind fairly easily discerns what events or characters
in its fugitive novels are meretricious in relation to life however
entertaining they may be as fiction.
That the republic--the body politic--has need of these human-filtered
insights into lives is amply proved by the present vogue of what I
will call novelized biography. Lives of every imaginable type of
human being from Shelley to Washington are nowadays consumed with
singular voracity, and if some of the impeccable immortals are in the
upshot docked of their pedestals there can, I think, be little doubt
that, in the process, the public consciousness of life is at once
deepened and rendered more down to the ground. And the human mind is
such a curiously two-sided affair that, along with down-to-the-ground
renderings, it is perfectly able to accept at once the liveliest
efforts of hero-worshippers, denigrators, or whitewashers. The
amiable mendacities of the parson who gave to us the little axe and
the cherry-tree are to-day well known to be the sheerest inventions;
the signal reputed to have been given at the battle of Trafalgar is
far more soul-stirring than the actual rather stilted message that
Lord Nelson composed. And even if Henri IV of France never uttered
his celebrated words about the chicken in the pot, humanity must
have invented them--and that too must have been the case with the
cherry-tree. In the days when these catch-phrases received worldwide
acceptance the public was in fact doing for itself what to-day is left
to the writer of fiction.
For the practised novelist knows that when he is introducing a
character to his reader it is expedient that the first speech of that
character should be an abstract statement--and an abstract statement
striking strongly the note of that character. First impressions are
the strongest of all, and once you have established in that way the
character of one of your figures you will find it very hard to change
it. So humanity, feeling the need for great typical figures with
whose example to exhort their children or to guide themselves, adopts
with avidity, invents or modifies the abstract catchwords by which
that figure will stand or fall. What Nelson actually desired to say
was: “The country confidently anticipates that in this vicissitude
every man of the fleet will perform his functions with accuracy and
courage!”--or something equally stiff, formal and in accord with
what was the late eighteenth-century idea of fine writing. Signal
flags, however, would not run to it: the signaller did his best, and
so we have Nelson. Had the signal gone out as Nelson conceived it,
not Southey nor any portraitist could have given him to us. Or had
Gilbert Stuart’s too faithful rendering of the facial effects of
badly-fitting false teeth been what we first knew of Washington our
views of the Father of His Country would be immensely modified. But the
folk-improved or adopted sayings were the first things that at school
or before school we heard of these heroic figures of our self-made
novel, and neither denigrator nor whitewasher will ever much change
them for us, any more than the probably false verdict of posterity on
John Lackland who had Dante to damn him will ever be reversed.
As to whether the sweeping away of the humaner classical letters in
the interests of the applied sciences as a means of culture is a good
thing or a bad there must be two opinions--but there is no doubt that
by getting rid of Plutarch the change will extraordinarily influence
humanity. Ethics, morality, rules of life must of necessity be
profoundly modified and destandardized. For I suppose that no human
being from the end of the Dark Ages to the beginning of the late
War--no human being in the Western World who was fitting himself for a
career as member of the ruling-classes--was not profoundly influenced
by that earliest of all novelist-biographers. And, if you sweep away
Marcus Aurelius as altruist-moralist, the Greek Anthology as a standard
of poetry, Livy as novelist-historian, Cicero as rhetorician, and
Pericles as heaven-born statesman, you will make a cleavage between
the world cosmos of to-day and that of all preceding ages such as no
modern inventions and researches of the material world have operated.
For though swiftening of means of locomotion may have deprived humanity
of knowledge of mankind, it did little to change the species of
generalizations that mankind itself drew from its more meagre human
instances. Till the abolition of classical culture in the Western World
the ruling-classes went on measuring Gladstone or the late Theodore
Roosevelt by Plutarchian standards--but neither post-1918 King George
V nor any future President of the United States can hope to escape by
that easy touchstone. From the beginnings of industrialism till 1918
we went on rolling round within the immense gyrations of buzzings,
clicks, rattles, and bangs that is modern life under the auspices of
the applied sciences; we went on contentedly spinning round like worms
within madly whirling walnuts. But as a guide the great figure had gone.
There is not only no such figure in the world as Washington, Nelson,
or even Napoleon--but there is no chance that such a figure can ever
arise again. Nay, even the legendary figures that remain have lost
at least half of their appeal. A statue of Washington adorns the
front of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, but it is doubtful
if one in a thousand of the passers-by have even heard of the axe
and the cherry-tree, let alone knowing anything of his tenacity,
single-mindedness, and moral courage. And who in the North American
Republic has heard of Nelson and his signal? For the matter of that,
as I have elsewhere related, a young lady science graduate of a very
distinguished Eastern University was lately heard to ask when she
caught sight of the dome of the Invalides: “Who _was_ this Napollyong
they talk so much about here?” Of course pronunciation may have had
something to do with that. But it was in 1923 that the question was
asked, and since then a popularizing novel-biography of Napoleon has
had an immense vogue in the United States.
Nevertheless it is to be doubted if ever again figures will be known
to the whole world. It is possible that my distinguished namesake is
so known because of his popularization of a cheap form of transport,
and there are prize-fighters, aviators, and performers for the cinema.
But these scarcely fill in the departments of public morals and ethical
codes the places that used to be occupied by Pericles, Cicero, and
Lucius Junius Brutus.
I am not writing in the least ironically, nor in the least in the
spirit of the _laudator temporis acti_. We have scrapped a whole
culture; the Greek Anthology and Tibullus and Catullus have gone the
way of the earliest locomotive and the first Tin Lizzie. We have, then,
to supply their places--and there is only the novel that for the moment
seems in the least likely or equipped so to do. That at least cheers
me, my whole life having been devoted to the cause of the Novel--I
don’t mean to the writing of works of fiction but to the furthering of
the views that I am here giving you.
One must live in, one must face with equanimity, the circumstances of
one’s own age. I regret that the figures of Tibullus and our Saviour do
not occupy on the stage of the lives of men the place that they did in
the days of my childhood--but I have courageously to face the fact that
they do not. For it is obvious that it is not to the parson and hardly
to the priest that one would go for counsel as to one’s material life;
still less could the spirit of Alcestis’ address to her bed inspire the
young woman to-day contemplating matrimony.
In short, if you look abroad upon the world you will see that the
department of life that was formerly attended upon by classical culture
has to-day little but the modern work of the imagination to solace it.
And that the solace of Literature and the Arts is necessary for--is a
craving of--humanity few but the most hardened captains of industry
or the most arrogant of professors of Applied Science will be found
to deny. Our joint Anglo-Saxon civilization to-day is a fairly savage
and materialistic affair, but it is also an affair relatively new and
untried. It is perhaps more materialistic than was the civilization of
Ancient Rome and a little less savage than the early Dark Ages. But
both these former periods of human activity had in the end to develop
arts and that, it is probable, will be the case with us. The Romans,
it is true, relied for their arts mostly on Greek slaves or on such
imitators of the Greeks as Horace and Virgil, and the Dark Ages almost
solely on Churchmen who led precarious existences in hidden valleys.
But the respective futures of these Ages are worth considering for
our present purposes. For the break-up of the Roman Empire for which
innumerable reasons have been found by innumerable pundits remains at
least as mysterious as it was before the first ancestor of Mommsen
first dug up his first tile and upon it wrote his first monograph.
Mommsen, to be sure, used to tell us that Rome disappeared because it
had no Hohenzollern family to guide its destinies--and that may be true
enough. Gibbon ascribed to Christianity the Fall of the Roman Empire
and People; others of the learned have laid that catastrophe at the
door of difficulties of communication, of the lack of a modern banking
system, of the want of organization of the system of Imperial Finances,
or of a mysterious and unexplained slackness that overcame alike the
Western and Eastern Empires--a slackness due to the pleasures of the
table, the wine-cup, of sex and the like.
But we, as upholders of the Arts, the Moralist having been pretty well
blotted out as a national or international factor by the avalanche
that in 1914 began to overwhelm alike classical culture and revealed
religion, we then might just as well ascribe the Fall of Rome to the
inartistic materialism of the true-Roman citizen as to any other cause.
For the function of the Arts in the State--apart from the consideration
of æsthetics--is so to aerate the mind of the taxpayer as to make
him less dull a boy. Or if you like, it is by removing him from his
own immediate affairs and immersing him in those of his fellows to
give him a better view of the complicated predicaments that surround
him. A financier, that is to say, who turns from the bewildering
and complicated antics of a maze of tape from tickers, or a realtor
who turns from the consideration of corner lots and the tangled and
exhausting intrigues that shall make the new boulevard of his city run
through land controlled by his interests--both these pillars of the
modern State may be expected to return as it were with minds refreshed
if, taking a short respite from their arduous and necessary tasks, they
lose themselves for a moment in the consideration of the adventures and
predicaments of the _Babbitt_ of Mr. Sinclair Lewis or the attempts
at escape from the chair of the central character of Mr. Dreiser’s
_American Tragedy_.
I permit myself to mention the works of friends of my own because I
must have illustrations for my theme and those illustrations must be
works of to-day of sufficient likelihood to last long enough not to be
forgotten at the next fall of the leaf--and Mr. Lewis and Mr. Dreiser
are so much more my personal friends than immersed in my own particular
little technical swim that they are more apposite to my immediate
purpose than would be, say, the authors of _The Sun Also Rises_ or of
_My Heart and My Flesh_--or of _Ulysses_.
3
Arrived at that particular five-cornered plot in the territory of
the Novel I have foreshadowed the end of this small monograph. For,
having traced the gradual course of the development from Apuleius to
Joseph Conrad, having followed it from the Rome of Petronius Arbiter
to the Spain of Lope da Vega, to the London of Defoe and Richardson,
to the Paris of Diderot, Stendhal, and Flaubert--with side glances at
the Cockaigne of Thackeray and Dickens and the Russia of Turgenev,
Dostoieffsky and Tchekov--and back again to the London of Conrad,
Henry James, and Stephen Crane--which last two writers America will
not whole-heartedly accept as American, whilst England won’t accept
them at all--having followed the devious course of the thin stream of
development of the novel from the Mediterranean to the Bay of Biscay,
from the Bay of Biscay to the Port of London and so backwards and
forwards across the English Channel, I shall leave it and you with a
bump and with some regret at the gateway to the Middle-West--say at
about Altoona. For it is there that the Novel, throughout the Ages the
poor Cinderella of the Arts, is nowadays erecting itself into the sole
guide and monitor of the world.
I should like to have allowed myself to say a few words about the
modern Middle-Western development, which is for the moment the final
stage, of the art to whose furtherance I have obscurely devoted my
half-century of existence. But I am condemned like Moses only to
perceive that Promised Land. This is a monograph on the English
Novel--which includes _The House of the Seven Gables_ or _What
Maisie Knew_, not on the Middle-Western Novel of to-day which very
emphatically doesn’t include--oh, say _Riceyman Steps_ and _Mr.
Britling Sees it Through_.
I should like to observe for the benefit of the Lay Reader, to whom I
am addressing myself--for the Professional Critic will pay no attention
to anything that I say, contenting himself with cutting me to pieces
with whips of scorpions for having allowed my head to pop up at all--to
the Lay Reader I should like to point out that what I am about to write
is highly controversial and that he must take none of it too much _au
pied de la lettre_. I don’t mean to say that it will not be written
with almost ferocious seriousness. But what follows are suggestions not
dictates, for in perusing this sort of book the reader must be prepared
to do a great deal of the work himself--within his own mind.
If I choose to write that great imaginative literature began in
England with Archbishop Warham in the sixteenth century and ended
with the death of Thomas Vaughan, the Silurist, in the first year
of the eighteenth century, to come to life again with Joseph Conrad
and the Yellow Book about 1892, and once more to disappear on the
fourth of August, 1914--if I choose to write those extreme statements
it is because I _want_ the Reader mentally to object to them the
names of Swift, Keats, Thackeray, Browning, Swinburne, Meredith--or
even those of Messrs. Galsworthy, Bennett, Wells and, say, Virginia
Woolf. I _want_ the Lay Reader to make those mental reservations for
himself. I should hate to be a professor, I should hate to be taken
as dogmatizing, and I should still more hate that what dogmatizing I
do perforce indulge in should be unquestioningly accepted by any poor
victim.
So that if I should say--as I probably shall--that, along with all
his contemporaries, as a constructive artist even of the picaresque
school, Dickens was contemptible, or if I say that Meredith as a
stylist in comparison with Henry James was simply detestable, or that
the conception of novel-writing as an art began for Anglo-Saxondom
with Joseph Conrad, or that _Babbitt_ dealt a shrewder blow at the
pre-war idealization of the industrial system and the idolatry of
materialism than _Don Quixote_ at sixteenth-century vestiges of the
chivalric spirit, or that _The Time of Man_ is the most beautiful
individual piece of writing that has as yet come out of America, or
that _The Lighthouse_ is the only piece of British--as opposed to
English--writing that has latterly excited my craftsman’s mind--the
only piece since the decline and death of Conrad ... if I commit myself
to all these statements the reader must at once violently object that
I am a log-roller writing up my personal friends--though I never knew,
or even know anyone that knew, Miss Virginia Woolf. He must object that
I have forgotten not only Trollope in my aspersions on mid-Victorian
novelists, but that I have also forgotten Mr. George Moore. (Alas, I
always forget Mr. George Moore, who is probably the greatest and most
dispassionate technician that English Literature has ever seen.)
He must make all these objections for himself as violently as possible:
then, in reaction, thinking it over he will probably find that there
is something in what I say. At any rate, he will have a sort of
rudimentary map of the Kingdom of the Art of Letters in his mind. The
old-fashioned maps had their advantages. Their cartographer left in his
plans blank spaces in places where his enemies dwelt and labelled them:
“Here be Crocodiles,” “Here be Stenches!” or “Anthropophagi! Avoid this
Land!”--and that was useful because it told you what parts of the earth
were pernicious to that type of Cartographer. So, if you were of his
type, you avoided territories by him miscalled. On the other hand, if
you disliked the sort of fellow that that map-maker was, you adventured
into the territory labelled “of the Anthropophagi” to find it inhabited
solely by sirens, into the Land of Stenches to find it distinguished by
the most beneficent of chalybeate springs, or amongst the Crocodiles,
who were charming people, ready at any moment to shed tears over your
depleted pockets, your lost loves, or your rheumatic-gout!
It is with a map of that sort that I am trying to provide you. No other
sort is of the remotest value. Nor is it even possible, critics being
human.
I am looking at the last page of a Manual of English Literature
compiled by a critic who takes himself and is taken very seriously
indeed. I read:
“_His work often decadent, appealing to senses; a pessimist. Lacks
restraint; small variety in mood!_”
Think of that as the last word--the very last word--of a Manual of
English Literature for the use of the English Classes of the most
numerically attended University in the Universe! Could I at my worst do
worse? Or so badly!
For that is that writer’s critical estimate--that is all that thirty
thousand pupils of a State University are given as an appraisal
of--Algernon Charles Swinburne!
CHAPTER TWO
TOWARDS DEFOE
It is not part of my purpose--nor within the scope of a short manual
would it be possible!--to trace the influence of the _Golden Ass_ or
the _Satiricon_ on the course or development of the novel--and indeed
their influences probably came into action so late that the effect was
rather to give coloration to the pastiches of later writers like the
late Mr. Walter Pater or the very much living Mr. Ezra Pound. It is the
same, to all intents and purposes, with such mediaeval compilations
of short-stories as the _Decameron_, the _Heptameron_ or the _Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles_. The _Decameron_ must in particular have been
as enormously read in the course of centuries as _Madame Bovary_,
but, except for the _Heptameron_ and the rest of the works of that
tradition, it can have led to no developments but merely to a few
imitations such as the _Contes Drolatiques_ of Balzac.
To our immediate purpose they are germane solely as indicating the
desire--the necessity--that humanity has always experienced for fiction
of one kind or another, if merely as an expedient for clarifying the
mind. The mediaeval European intellect seems to have been able to
appreciate these crystallizing shocks only in smallish doses, and in
Europe it was not until sixteenth-century Spain that humanity seems
to have been able to sustain its interest for the course of a long
tale--a series of rambling incidents in the life of one or of one
or two central characters. And again it was not until the middle
nineteenth century in France and the very late nineteenth or early
twentieth that in England the mind of the public could be expected
to take in the rendering--not the narrating--of a work whose central
character was not an individual of slightly superhuman proportions.
Still less could it take in an Affair whose participants, as befits
a democratic age, if not all exactly equal in the parts they play in
the Affair’s development, are at least nearly all as normally similar
in aspirations, virtues and vices as is usual in one’s surrounding
humanity.
Let us for a moment consider the difference--if difference there
be--between the apparently artless tale and the novel that fulfils my
definition of the functions of the work of fiction in the modern body
politic. The artless tale, then, is nothing but a _conte_--a thing told
to keep the hearers gasping or at least engrossed. Told verbally it is
usually short, but professional story-tellers have been found--as in
the case of the group-authors of the _Arabian Nights_--to make them
very long indeed. And the habit of telling very long tales that are
practically serials still persists in Eastern bazaars.
You may say that listening to tales for the mere purpose of being
thrilled or engrossed has nothing to do with the gaining of vicarious
experience, so that the stories of the _Decameron_ or the ordinary
novels of commerce were and are of no value to the body politic, but a
little reflection will show that the reverse is the case in practice.
Human experience is built up by the averaging out of a great many
cases--some inclining, as it were, to the extreme right, some to the
extreme left, and the majority probably approaching the normal.
Personally, on the face of it, I ought to be glad if, in the
interests of non-commercial literature, the novel of commerce could
be suppressed, but as a matter of fact I should be the first to
lament such a catastrophe. Humanity, in fact, needs care-free
entertainment--and in search of it it seldom goes very far wrong. That
is proved by the fact that, ever since books were books, the great
public has devoured with avidity only two kinds of work--the very worst
from the point of view of the literary artists, and the very best!
The four most popular books the world over at any given moment since,
say, eighteen-sixty have always been the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, _Madame
Bovary_ and two sempiternally changing works of egregious silliness and
popularity. But whereas the so-called popular books change with the
turn of each year, the more serious works continue to stand at the head
of the best-sellers of the world year in and year out.
That is a consideration to which we may return; the point that I wish
to make here is that when _contes_ and _nouvelles_ of the type to be
found in the _Decameron_ were of an almost boundless popularity, not
only had the serious novel no existence but the reprehension that the
Victorian moralist and industrialist expressed also found then no
expression. As I am never tired of relating, my grand-aunt Eliza was
the first utterer of the famous saying: “Sooner than be idle I’d take
a book and read”; but that utterance, perfectly normal and applauded
about 1860 when it was first presented to the world, is to-day purely
risible and could not in serious earnestness be uttered in the
household of any family more comfortable in its circumstances than
those of the lower-paid manual labourer.
It would have been equally unthinkable at any date from the tenth
century to the early nineteenth. During those nine centuries, in fact,
the professional moralist was only too glad to enlist the services of
the fiction-teller under the sacred banners of Faith and Good Works,
and although towards the end of the eighteenth century the habits of
young ladies who lay day-long on sofas reading the thousandfold novels
of popular female authors from Aphra Behn to Sarah Fielding--although
that habit was lightly satirized by dramatists and occasionally
scourged in the sermons of nonconformist divines, these occurrences
were very sporadic and altogether too infrequent to form a national
habit. Indeed, until the nineteenth century was under way it might even
be advanced that the writers of such works of fiction as the _Pilgrim’s
Progress_, _Rasselas_, or _Robinson Crusoe_ were eagerly sought as
allies by the professional, ecclesiastical, or nonconformist moralist.
And that was even more pronouncedly the case in days still earlier when
in Europe a universal and all-powerful church dictated the morals of
gentle and simple alike. Indeed, whatever may or may not be said of
Catholicism in the way of praise or blame, it cannot be alleged that
when she was all-powerful she was ever afraid of the Arts or afraid to
employ them for her own purposes. The Moralities of the Nun Hrotswitha,
the mystery plays and mummings of every town-guild in the Middle Ages,
are alone overwhelming evidence that the church, representing the
professional moralists of five or six centuries, was only too glad to
avail itself of forms of art as an indispensable means of spreading
her teachings. Nor indeed until the Puritan Divines of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries turned upon the art of fiction as presented
on the stage did that form of art do anything other than bend itself
willingly to the services of morality. For you might say that the drama
of Wycherley and Killigrew was as much a protest against the oppression
of the then professional moralist as any spontaneous movement for the
supply of lecherous fiction to the public. The greater part of the
plays of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists--by far the greater
part--consisted of works of profound--and quite conventional--moral
purpose; the earlier drama, and even the pace-egging and mumming
of country shows, were nothing but pietistic pronouncements put as
picturesquely--and as alluringly spiced with alliterations in the
prosody and low comedy in the plots--as the fiction-writers of the day
could contrive. Hell always yawned before the audience beneath the high
trestle-boards and stages of these shows; in the flies Heaven and its
denizens were always visible, whilst in what would to-day be called
the wings there waited perpetually visible, on the one hand the Devil
ready to pitchfork the wicked into the lower story of the stage--and
Man’s Good Angel to conduct him to the Better Place. And clowns and
characters called Vices were always ready to endure the drubbings
that, enlivening the public, were the portion of the mildly wicked and
foolish.
No, decidedly the mediaeval and early renaissance art of fiction, quite
as much as Matthew Arnold, was on the side of the angels.
It might be as well here to point out that until the Restoration and
its comedies brought scenery and attempts at scenic realism to the
stage, the Play and the Novel were practically the same form. Or it
might be better to put it that the Novel was the direct development of
the play--a development made possible by the art of printing. In effect
the plays of Shakespeare were novels written for recitation, and that,
naturally, was still more the case with the works of Shakespeare’s
predecessors. And it is significant that as reading became more common
with the establishment of Edward VI’s grammar schools, the play itself
became less a matter of rantings and by degrees even a medium for fine
writing. _Gorboduc_ and _Ferrex and Porrex_ or _Ralph Roister Doister_
were products of either a stilted classicism or of a boisterous, native
spirit of knockabout buffoonery, puns, and ribald jests. The classical
motive issued presently into a mode of over-written elegance that
speedily proved itself unreadable: then Lyly gave place to Shakespeare.
It has always seemed obvious to me--as a private conviction for which
I have no wish to do battle and which I have no wish to force on
the reader as any more than a suggestion--that Shakespeare himself
regretted the literary chastity of his muse. I mean that Shakespeare,
as gentleman and one wishing to sport his coat-of-arms in the very best
social and scholastic circles, deprecated the passing of the Unities
and of bombast and wished that the popular taste would have let him
make a living by verse in the style of the _Rape of Lucrece_ and the
more florid poems that decorate the last pages of editions of his
works. His speeches to the players in _Hamlet_ and all his life as far
as it is known would seem to indicate that. But it is not until you can
bring yourself to regard not merely the plays of Shakespeare but the
whole post-Lylian Elizabethan and Jacobean drama as novels written for
recitation that the great mystery of Shakespeare’s life seems to become
reasonably explicable. For the great mystery of Shakespeare as novelist
is simply: “Why did Shakespeare never correct his proofs?”
Beside this amazing enormity all questions as to the identity of Mr.
W. H. or the Dark Lady or Mary Fitton or of the motives of the sonnets
become paler and more ineffectual than any ghosts. For they at least
don’t matter. But that the greatest writer of all time should not have
taken the trouble ever to read his own works in print, preferring to
retire to Stratford, sue out his coat armour and so, on his profits
as theatre owner, become titularly and legally a Gentleman--that, if
you think about it and have ever known an author, is the most amazing
phenomenon known to the history of Literature. Napoleon at St. Helena,
renaming himself Monsieur Dupont and shuddering at the mention of
Austerlitz, would not be more astonishing. For this novelist never
blotted a line and never saw his work through the press!
On the face of it the plays of Shakespeare read extravagantly well
but, on the modern stage, play extravagantly badly. I have never in
my life been more bored and appalled than at having to sit through an
uncut performance of _Hamlet_, given by the most noted performers in
the world in front of a gigantic real castle. It was terrifying and
it lasted from nine at night till four in the morning. There was the
real castle, the real moon, real armour dating back to Shakespeare’s
days, real banners of the epoch; real soldiers played the troops of
Fortinbras--and to add a touch of reality of another sort, in the
middle of the performance real Communist groundlings demonstrated for
Saccho and Vanzetti!
But the point was that, with the real castle, pump and the rest,
all Shakespeare’s descriptions became intolerable pleonasms and gave
singular unreality to the characters that uttered them. For normal
humanity does not talk of patines of bright gold when considering the
night skies: it says “Look at the stars,” and possibly adds: “Aren’t
they jolly?” The stars in fact do the rest: and in this given case the
castle of Avignon, the Rhone, and the moon were admirably prepared to
replace all that anyone’s descriptions could do.
On the other hand, I have never in my life been so overwhelmed as by a
ranted performance given by capable actors in modern dress in a rather
bare modern studio that had galleries round it--a condition pretty
well reproducing that of the Shakespearean stage. Hero and heroine and
subordinate characters bellowed rhetorical periods, floods of bombast;
they threw their arms about, raved, fell down, and staggered to their
feet. The effect, as I have said, was overwhelming; no such other utter
tragedy has ever presented itself to the world for three hundred years;
the grief of the heroine was so insufferable that you could not sit in
your place; when the hero died you groaned aloud. Yet the play was only
Kyd’s _Spanish Tragedy_, ranking as a pretty poor work and to-day very
difficult to read.
Shakespeare, on the other hand, does read extravagantly well through
the greater part of his work--but large portions of the plays must
pay the penalty of all works intended for one medium and presented in
another. The sheer silliness of many--of most of his plots except in
the Chronicle Plays--their sheer silliness and negligence regarded from
the point of view of the art of the novel, become technical merit when
it is a matter of recitation; bareness of plot is then a necessity, the
mind having no time to turn back and pick up merely suggested clues.
And of course a great deal of his work must have seemed to a man of
his own delicacy of temperament much more the merest writing down to
the groundlings or coarse flatterings of those in authority than that
caviare to the general that he hoped to provide.
So that his inattention to the printing of his plays may very
conceivably have proceeded from sheer disgust at them--a frame of mind
not unfamiliar to the artist when viewing his work in the light of his
own ideals. Or of course it remains open to us--all things in the case
of Shakespeare being open to us--to consider that he really regarded
his work as commercial trivia that had much better be ignored in the
later stages of his aggrandizement to the state of gentility. That
frame of mind is so usual in the British novelist and ever since novels
have been translated or written in England has proved so disastrous to
the art itself that it is quite conceivable that the first--and the
greatest--of them all may have shared in that national characteristic.
Be that as it may, the assertion that the Elizabethan and Jacobean play
answered in advance the call from the public for the novel that was so
soon to come may very well be regarded as fact. And indeed the same
may be regarded as true of all pre-Elizabethan or rather pre-Edwardian
English literature. Or it might be more just to say that, the Grammar
School spreading at once the capacity and the taste for reading, the
enhanced national wealth of the age of Drake and countenanced piracy
in Elizabeth’s day made the purchase and dissemination of books a
possibility amongst a very much wider class of the public.
We may then regard the rule of thumb definition of the novel as
a printed book of some length telling one tale or relating the
adventures of one single personage as reasonably acceptable. In that
case you get an instance at once of supply created by demand and of
that supply being rendered possible by the fact that education and
material production arrived almost hand in hand. For although printing
was available as a means of spreading knowledge almost a couple of
centuries earlier, the exiguity of material wealth and leisure, the
turmoil and the scarcity of labour of the centuries of pestilence,
dynastic wars, and turmoil that preceded the firm establishment of the
Tudors on the throne infinitely delayed and indeed indefinitely put
back the clock of culture in these kingdoms.
Roughly speaking, we may say that Chaucer, the first English writer
of sustained imaginative pieces, was also the first English writer
for the Press--a writer, that is to say, for the individual reader in
his closet rather than a composer of lays, ballads, roundels, or even
epics, for recitation. The dictum should be accepted with caution. That
it is on the whole just is nevertheless demonstrable by the comparison
of the _Canterbury Tales_ or _Troilus and Cresseide_ with say the
_Faerie Queene_ or Drayton’s _Polyolbion_. That the work of Chaucer
is readable, whereas the epics of Spenser and Drayton practically
defy perusal, is not merely a matter of difference of greatness in
the respective authors. Chaucer was an infinitely greater writer than
either of his successors: his character-drawing is extraordinary,
his sense of beauty overwhelming, his minutely observing mind stalls
off the possibility of dullness in his pages. And read to himself
by an individual reader the work of Spenser is intolerably pompous,
allegorical and dull, and that of Drayton all too pedestrian because of
his lack of any powers of selection. But, if you will read the longer
works of Chaucer aloud you will find him a little difficult to follow
simply because of that very minuteness of observation and that very
lack of dullness; the others, on the other hand, gain immensely by
reading aloud or by recitation--both Spenser and Drayton taking on a
sort of jolly robustness that is even to-day by no means disagreeable
and that may well have been enormously engrossing in the mouth of a
good reader reading to audiences that had little to do but listen and
lacked the power of reading for themselves.
In the matter of the consumption of literature, in fact, the English
world had gone back several generations between the ages of Chaucer
and Spenser--if, that is to say, you regard the evolution of the
printed book and the arrival of the novel as Progress, for it is quite
open to you to regard the disappearance of oral poetry and the epic as
retrogression. Nevertheless, it is fairly true to say that Chaucer with
Caxton, the first printer, as an intimate wrote far more definitely
for the Press than did any of the Elizabethan imaginative writers.
Except in the internal style and the outward effect of his work there
is of course no evidence that Chaucer considered definitely that the
coming of the printing press called for a change in the technique of
the imaginative writer--but it would not be utterly fanciful to imagine
that he did at least consider himself a writer destined to have a great
number of individual readers rather than vast audiences destined to
listen to recitals of his work.
To what extent I am right in advancing the suggestion that Eastern
and Eastern-European audiences had tougher brain-stuffs than their
Anglo-Saxon contemporaries, at any rate in the matter of listening
to recitals of tales in prose or verse, the reader may decide for
himself. The suggestion is nevertheless handy as presenting a certain
not unuseful image. We may say that the printing press killed alike
the epic and all forms of metrical romance, or we may say that the
epic and the metrical romance are essentially foreign to the taste of
the Occidental reader--and the second statement is in effect merely a
repetition in other terms of the first.
Into that I do not propose to go. It is sufficient to say that when
I do make the assertion I find myself, as it were unexpectedly, in
company with the academic critic of to-day and yesterday. At any rate,
quite orthodox authorities have not unusually asserted that Romaunts
or Romances were, in England at least, intended for the personal
reading of the mediaeval courtly and clerical individual, whilst the
shorter lays, virelais, ballads, and the like were aimed, as being
less fatiguing, at popular and numerous audiences. This seems to be
merely common sense. On the other hand, very long metrical or prose
compositions did simultaneously appeal to Oriental audiences and it
is not unusual in academic circles to describe the _Canterbury Tales_
themselves as “Oriental in origin,” which seems queer but may for the
moment pass.
What, however, I am anxious to establish--at the risk of a certain
prolixity--is the fact that an appetite for fiction amounting also to
an expression of a necessity has, at least since the Dark Ages till
the present day, distinguished all humanity. The reason probably is,
as I have already hinted, that we need accounts of human life not so
much as matter from which to draw morals for our own particular cases
but rather as something that will take us outside ourselves and, as
it were, to a height from which we may the better observe ourselves
and our neighbours. The moral is usually thrown in by the moralist
who nevertheless insists or at any rate asserts that moralizing is
the sole purpose of his life and work. But the Morality Plays of the
Nun Hrotswitha, the Mysteries of every English town from Salisbury to
Lytham, the terrifically moralizing novels from _Guzman d’Alfarache_ to
the history of _Moll Flanders_, were simply evidence of the fact that
humanity did not want moralizing and did want fiction. They represent
the moralist throwing up the sponge and trying to get a pinch of salt
on to the tail of that difficult bird, man. It is obvious that large
audiences in days of complete boredom could be found for the sermons
of ranting monks and violent reformers. But even at that the appeal
was largely fictional and what the audiences went to hear--as was
the case with, say, Savonarola--was rather semi-hysterical and lively
descriptions of the sufferings of souls in eternal flame than any
doctrinal discourses on the life and teachings of Him Whose message
was: “Neither do I condemn thee!”
So, gradually, fiction emerging with timidity from under the wing
of the Church itself took such prentice flights in the direction of
pure rendering of life as picaresque novels like _Don Quixote_. It
is, however, doubtful if the adventures of the knight of la Mancha
would have got past the Index had not the Church been called in in
the person of the parish priest who in the end burns the poor hero’s
books of romance; and from that point of view Cervantes may be regarded
as simply drawing the cord of conventional morality closer round the
necks of the unfortunate public. The romance of _The Seven Champions
of Christendom_ had to be burned not because it was a silly book but
because its morality was insufficiently puritan, the Church of Rome in
the throes of the Catholic Reaction having to prove itself at least
as puritan as the Anabaptists of Münster. So the body that tolerated
Rabelais good-naturedly had to invent an _auto da fé_ in order to
deal with Amadis de Gaul; and Cervantes, for all the world like a
seventeenth-century Thackeray, had to attune his satire to the pipe
of a reacting church. Fiction, in short, had to pay an always greater
tribute to morality as it escaped from being the mere servant of
established religion.
In effect the Church--and then the Churches--said to the novel, the
play, the romance, and the ballad: “We are too busy cutting each
other’s throats and inventing newer theologies, to bother any more
about artistic productions. In the meantime we will remove the benefit
of clergy that used to shield those who could manipulate a pen. You may
write and compose what lay fictions you like, but the rack, the faggot
or the pillory will attend you if you publish anything that we _don’t_
like.” And the novelist, always a timid creature and in England avid
of social consideration, was quick to take the hint. So Don Quichotte
de la Mancha, the only gentleman produced by the genius of Cervantes,
and indeed by all the genius of that age, had to become a pitiable
lunatic. Yet it is impossible that a man of the perspicacity of the
writer of that work could not have seen that the Don, wiping curds from
his benign and tranquil countenance, was godlike in comparison to the
crooks and gross peasants--the cats and monkeys!--that surrounded him.
Nevertheless the Don must go!
With those Spaniards, then, the novel approached some sort of rendering
of life and that sort of rendering was soon enough to make its
appearance in England. It crossed the Bay of Biscay and the Channel
with a picaresque work of a prodigious popularity in its day--_Guzman
d’Alfarache_ or the _Story of a Rogue_. Less picaresque in the true
sense of being the strung-together life of a _picaro_ or professional
thief--less picaresque than the immortal _Lazarillo de Tormes_ and
less achingly tragic as a presentation of the life of the brothel and
wine-shop than _Celestina_, the work of Hermann Alemannos, whose name
betrays his Teutonic origin, was much more suited to the Anglo-Saxon
taste than either one of the other three Spanish books that I have
selected for mention.
The true Spanish genius is for us obviously too austere. Our public
could, it is true, guffaw over the discomfitures of the knight of the
Woeful Countenance and the manœuvre by which Lazarillo gets rid of
his blind master who himself was the most ferocious of scoundrels;
and the suicide from the tower in _Celestina_ may have excited
disagreeable emotions in the English reader who preferred to think that
punishment for sins was a matter of the hereafter. But the remorseless,
essentially Spanish black and white of the greater novels was no more
for the English public or the English litterateur than are _Titus
Andronicus_ and _Pericles_ when they can get the _Comedy of Errors_ or
the _Midsummer Night’s Dream_.
_Guzman d’Alfarache_, on the other hand, was a wilderness of enormous
passages of trite morality enlivened here and there with episodes
of cozening and purse-cutting and it has always been a matter of
speculation to me--for I have known these works ever since I was
a very small child--to what extent the seventeenth-century public
really liked the moralizings, to what extent it was merely hypocrisy,
and to what extent, again, readers were really tricked by the tiny
ha’-pennyworth of sack into consuming the intolerable quantity of
very dry bread. Obviously in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
mere length was not a deterrent, because there was an immense amount
of time for vacant minds to fill in and relatively very few books. So
that just as in distant colonies we will read home newspapers with
all the advertisements they contain three and four times over, so the
subjects of the James’s, Charles’s, and early George’s would accept
almost anything that could be read or listened to and probably from
being attuned to prolixities they would have disliked anything crisp if
anything crisp had been to be found.
That is perhaps a vain speculation, but a short consideration of the
first great English novelist, who was for a time at least nearly solely
novelist, would lead one to believe that such was indeed the case.
Defoe was born about the time of the restoration of Charles II--that
is to say, in 1660 or 1661--and died in 1731, aged in consequence
about seventy. And it is interesting to note that his novels were all
produced in the last twelve years of his life--as an expedient for
procuring bread and butter after bankruptcy produced by too ingenious
speculations both financial and philosophical.
That gets rid of the theory we might otherwise have entertained that
he was a Restoration novelist in the sense that the friends of Charles
II were Restoration dramatists. Nevertheless, the active portions
of Defoe’s life were so passed in the seventeenth century that it
comes naturally to think of him rather as Jacobean than Georgian or
eighteenth century. It is, that is to say, not in the pomposity of
the eighteenth century that Captain Singleton or Colonel Jack or Moll
Flanders seem to be clothed. They were rather mobile, swaggering,
piratical creatures seated on barrels and smoking their yards of clay
than strutters in brocades and ruffles. And probably Defoe’s ideal was
the substantial London merchant, sturdily planted over his stout calves
on square feet. That was his ideal because he had himself lamentably
failed in attaining to it.
His financial ideas are said to have found favour in succeeding
ages; his plans for increasing the national revenues, like Swift’s,
it is said, would have been admirable could they have been adopted.
So his moralities are practical rather than theological--it was to
the respectable suffrages of the merchants that his pious passages
addressed themselves. Thus his moralizings may have been less
hypocritical than those of most of his contemporaries, his predecessors
or descendants; but the aspiring after respectability was none the less
as marked.
What, however, is in him the most interesting from our special point
of view of tracing the development of the art of the novel is the
fact that Defoe may be called the first English or foreign writer to
strive after some sort of satisfactory convention for the novel. He
aimed, that is to say, at being convincing--at convincing his reader
that he was reading of real adventures set in the, as it were, official
biographies of real individuals. Such fictitious documents as _The
Apparition of Mrs. Veal_, the _Memoirs of a Cavalier_, or the _History
of the Plague in London_ are very near to historic forgeries and ought
perhaps to be regarded as fictitious journalism. For, whatever else he
was or wasn’t, Defoe was the first great journalist.
His _Review of the Affairs of France_, which was a periodical
news-pamphlet devoting itself to foreign affairs and what to-day
we should call Town Topics, was no doubt Defoe’s introduction to
fiction. When, that is to say, foreign news ran out he filled in his
space with the chronicles of an invented Scandalous Club and there, a
little in the style of La Bruyère and still more in the style of the
later _Tatlers_, _Ramblers_, and _Spectators_, he presented the Town
with slightly scandalous anecdotes of characters purely fictitious or
suggested faintly by well-known living men.
From that to inventing false news as in the case of the _Mrs.
Veal_ fascicule and from that again to the production of sham
autobiography-like _Robinson Crusoe_ is a very obvious progression. Few
journalists would make it to-day, but to-day news being more common is
more easily checked. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that, whether
it were his intention or no, he did evolve a convention for fiction
that up to a certain point was effective enough. That he intended so
to do there is not, as was on the other hand the case with his great
successor Samuel Richardson, any evidence. On the contrary, there is a
good deal of evidence that several of his works of fiction were really
intended as mystifications or frauds on the public.
That does not interfere with the artistic merit of his work, which
was very great. For whether you set out to hypnotize the public into
believing for the time being that they have attended at a scene, or
trick them into believing that they have read real memoirs when the
memoirs are fictitious, the artistic, if not the ethical, results are
nearly equal. There is, however, this difference:
If you should read _Salammbo_ and should be asked if you had ever been
in Carthage before its destruction by the Romans you might almost
answer in the affirmative with truth, whereas in the same scale of
things if you were asked if you had been present at the Fire of London
and had read Defoe’s _History_ you could not answer more than that you
had read a very authentic account by an eye-witness. And inasmuch as an
authentic rendering--a rendering made with extreme artistic skill--will
give you more the sense of having been present at an event than if
you had actually been corporeally present, whereas the reading of the
most skilful of literary forgeries will only leave you with the sense
that you have read a book, the artistic rendering is the more valuable
to you and therefore the greater achievement. I once heard a couple
of French marine engineers agreeing that although they had traversed
the Indian Ocean many times and had several times passed through, or
through the fringes of, typhoons, neither of them had ever been in one
till they had read Conrad’s _Typhoon_. And indeed I have myself had the
singular experience of looking out at dawn from a tent-flap and seeing
the tents of a sleeping army running up into deep woods. And having
just been reading Stephen Crane’s _Red Badge of Courage_, which opens
with the description of the dawn breaking on the tents of a sleeping
army, for some minutes I was confused, not being able to understand why
the one or two men that I saw about were dressed in our khaki instead
of in the blue of the Federal troops of the United States during the
Civil War. That is what I mean by saying that one might answer with
truth that one had been present at a rendered scene although one might
never physically have been present there. For to me it is certain that
I was at that given moment more present at the preparation of a battle
somewhere near Gettysburg in the ’sixties of last century than actually
amongst British troops in support at a battle that was then proceeding
in the Belgian Salient in September, 1916.
To produce that or similar effects is the ambition of the novel of
to-day.
Two centuries before--by, say, 1716--the novel had proceeded but a very
little way. I should say that Bunyan in the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ and
still more in _The Holy War_ had gone as far as any writer till that
day and dying in 1688 he anticipated Defoe as novelist by at least a
generation. Ostensibly the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ is an allegorical work
just as the English Bible is a theological or even a doctrinal one;
but just as in the Morality Plays which were produced by professionally
religious writers or actors and the Mysteries which were religious
spectacles produced and acted under the direction of clerics by members
of the professedly lay Guilds--just as in those productions the real
attraction was the imaginative presentation of realities rather than
the pious aspirations of authors or producers, so it is strongly to
be suspected that the realistically human appeal of the _Pilgrim’s
Progress_ far outweighs the moral or religious interests. Indeed in
_The Holy War_, which is an allegorical presentation of the eternal
struggle between the unseen forces that make for good and evil on
earth, the presentation of seventeenth-century warfare is for long
passages so realistic that one might accuse Bunyan of having thrown
up the moral sponge and of taking a pagan pleasure in fighting for
fighting’s sake. He renders, in short, battles of the Great Rebellion
in which he took part or on whose outskirts he was present. He rendered
them and did not write about them.
But the moral fervour and fierce sincerity of Bunyan are so far above
suspicion that the mere fact that at times he was carried away in a
sheer outburst of the artist’s spirit and love of terrestrial aspects
for the mere sake of those aspects--his moral fervour is so great and
so deserving of respect that no slightest tang of hypocrisy can attach
to him any more than it can attach to the translators of the English
Bible. And, if we except Smollett and possibly Samuel Richardson who
was the real great precursor of the modern novel, we cannot say as much
for any other English novelist who wrote before the later years of the
nineteenth century. For it is impossible to absolve such writers as
Defoe, Fielding, or Thackeray from the charge of deliberately writing
with their tongues in their cheeks passages of virtuous aspirations
that were in no way any aspirations of theirs and that in consequence
very seriously detracted from the value of their works as art.
With Bunyan that was not the case. He desired to inculcate certain
moral teachings and he had the sense to see that the best way to
inculcate a doctrine and to get it deep into the brain and marrow
of the reader was to make him be vicariously present at scenes the
contemplation of which would cause certain moral or practical ideas
to arise in the mind. And the deservedly prodigious--the deservedly
unrivalled popular appeal of the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ is sufficient
testimony at once to the immense skill and the unparalleledly simple
moral fervour of its author. For the reader attending on the episode
of the Slough of Despond is actually in a bog a little way away from
his native town and the man who reads of Giant Despair is in all truth
confronted with either Gog or Magog of the Lord Mayor’s procession in
the very flesh. At any rate, it is to be remembered that, the world
over, together with the _Imitation of Christ_ and _Madame Bovary_, the
_Pilgrim’s Progress_ is the most read book in Christendom. And this we
must put down to the artistic skill--to the power of presentation and
of rendering of the author.
For there is no other criterion of art but success, and the more
lasting the success the better the art. I wish to strike that note
very strongly because as soon as one begins to talk about an art
misinterpretations come creeping in and one is at once suspected of at
the least asserting one’s possession of superior knowledges or--let
us say--of high-hatting one’s neighbour. Nothing is less true. The
knowledge of the art of novel writing is open to every one who takes
the trouble to like one book better than another and the literary
tastes of men are fairly identical the world over and throughout time.
The great art of the world is found in books that are familiar to
millions, if not the world over, then, at any rate, down several ages
of several continents.
The difference between Bunyan and his predecessors is one more than
anything of whole-heartedness and if there is only one work of
fiction--for one can hardly call the Bible a work of fiction--if there
is one work of prose fiction in England that, written before the birth
of Bunyan, has survived to our time it is Malory’s _Morte d’Arthur_ and
that survives because Malory whole-heartedly and unassumingly collected
such legends of the Arthurian cycle as he liked and wrote them down
simply and without flourishes. Otherwise, none of the pre-Elizabethan
prose romances could to-day be read with any other than archæological
pleasure, nor could any of the prose fiction which began to be mildly
abundant in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean days. I suppose you
might read Deloney’s _Jack of Newbury_ with some pleasure if you were
interested in Elizabethan guild or household mysteries. But I cannot
imagine anyone reading for pleasure either _Euphues_ or Greene’s
_Menaphon_, either Lodge’s _Rosalynde_ or even Sidney’s _Arcadia_. One
may glance at them from time to time, more or less in order to keep
one’s end up against the literary archæologist, but they would all,
including _Amadis de Gaul_, prove intolerable as books for “reading
in”--to use an old phrase which meant a long, long, engrossed perusal.
Nash’s _Jack of Wilton_ has been compared to _Don Quixote_, but there
is no sense in reading the Englishman’s satire of forgotten manners
when one can re-read Cervantes’ satire on things that are at the root
of the human heart.
The difference between Malory and the earlier romances or _Euphues_
or _Menaphon_ is simply the difference in the relative sincerities of
their authors. Malory records what a simple mediaeval knight liked
and to some extent how he looked at the world: it is modest and, its
author being wrapped up in his subject, the work has no eye to the
modes of the time--or to displaying the cleverness of the writer. You
can engross yourself in the _Morte d’Arthur_ if your tastes lie in the
least in Malory’s direction and, except that finally you may arrive at
the conclusion that he was a modest and pleasant gentleman, you need
never give the author a thought.
With _Amadis de Gaul_ or _Euphues_, on the other hand, you are for
ever thinking of the cleverness of the author. And you are meant to
think of the cleverness of the author, and so you are in the case
of _Rosalynde_ and an enormous proportion of the Elizabethan drama.
The prose and even the blank verse of that age sparkled with trope,
metaphor, image, simile, plays upon words, conceits and every type of
verbal felicity, so that the last thing that comes to the mind in the
case of almost any work of that age is the subject treated of.
Hundreds of thousands--nay millions--of readers have read the
_Pilgrim’s Progress_ and _Robinson Crusoe_ without giving a thought to
or even knowing the name of Defoe or Bunyan. I asked the other day in
France a child who was reading about Crusoe who had written it and she
replied: “Je crois que c’est par ... par Madame de Ségur ... Ou non:
peut-être, Madame d’Aulnoy. Enfin, je n’y ai jamais pensé.” And that
is about the highest compliment that could be paid to Defoe. I may as
well add the same child’s comment on the story itself. She did not
much like _Robinson Crusoe_ because, she said, the sufferings depicted
in it were true. She liked, like all children, to read of sufferings,
bloodsheddings, and horrors but only as long as she could believe that
they were invented, whereas she was of opinion that the prolonged
loneliness and fears of Crusoe had actually occurred. Similarly she
found the story of the Crucifixion insupportable. The root of all adult
criticism is to be found in those revelations.
As long, that is to say, as a work remains in fashion you can be
contented to read it in order to remain in the fashion yourself. It
matters very little to you that whereas _Robinson Crusoe_ is just
_Robinson Crusoe_, or _Othello_ just _Othello_, _Euphues_ is Lyly’s
_Euphues_, the _Groat’s Worth of Wit_ Greene’s _Groat’s Worth_ or the
_Spanish Tragedy_ Kyd’s _Spanish Tragedy_. For it is impossible to talk
of almost any sixteenth-century work without prefixing the author’s
name, if the name is known--simply because the attraction, and even the
attraction that it once had, lies and lay in the verbal juggleries of
the author. I must have read _Euphues_ once at least right through and
have looked into it several times--but I have not the least idea what
it is all about. And even although I have read Lyly’s _Campaspe_ once
or twice, I remember only that the plot is a classical plot--and the
lyric:
Cupid and my Campaspe played
At cards for kisses, Cupid paid....
The fact is that with Elizabeth English became a supple and easily
employable language and, making the discovery that words could be
played with as if they were oranges or gilt balls to be tossed half a
dozen together in the air, mankind rushed upon it as colts will dash
into suddenly opened rich and easy pastures. So it was, for the rich
and cultured, much more a matter of who could kick heels the higher and
most flourish tail and mane than any ambition of carrying burdens or
drawing loads.
In the end, however, what humanity needs is that burdens should be
carried, and provided that things get from place to place the name
of carter or horse is of very secondary importance. If it is in the
fashion we will go down to the meadow and watch the colts cavorting:
but all the while we are aware that the business of words as of colts
or of the arts is to carry things and we tire reasonably soon of
watching horse-play! For if I say: “I am hungry,” the business of those
words is to carry that information to you, and if you read the _Iliad_
it is that the art of that epic may make Hecuba significant to you.
Consider the prose of Cranmer!
CHAPTER THREE
TOWARDS FLAUBERT
It may at first sight seem curious that a section of a small work
devoted to the English--and of course the American--Novel should be
captioned with the name of a French novelist. But in the first place
the art and still more the frame of mind of the Sage of Croisset are
so deep-embedded in the art and frame of mind of the English and still
more of the American novelist and all thought of the great, Nordic work
of “that poor dear Gustave,” as Mr. Henry James used to call him, is
so cast out of all French literary practices or aspirations to-day that
if Flaubert is not an English novelist his Titanic and Norman ghost has
no place at all. To state one of those half-truths that are infinitely
illuminating, you may say that without _Madame Bovary_, _Babbitt_ could
never have existed and without _Bouvard et Pécuchet_ there could have
been no _Way of All Flesh_. For all I know Mr. Sinclair Lewis may
never have read a word of Flaubert and I will bet my hat that, for the
purposes of this discussion, the shade of Samuel Butler would declare
that he knew no French at all. But the point is that, without those two
works in French, those two national monuments in English could hardly
at this time exist or weigh with the public since the public would not
be prepared for them.
Let us go a step further and declare that without Cranmer we should
have had another three centuries to wait for Flaubert, Henry James,
Stephen Crane, Joseph Conrad, Mr. John Galsworthy, and my friend “Red”
Lewis. For without the English Prayer Book and its follower in date
and style the English Bible, with or without Cranmer’s suppressed
preface, and without the followers in date and style of Defoe, Bunyan,
and Samuel Richardson, how should we have to-day any English prose,
novel-form or any English frame of mind? Or any Anglo-American Concord
literature; or any British Empire or any Anglo-Saxon anything?
You may say that that is stretching things a little. And yet I do not
know that it is. Let us make concessions. If you will concede to me my
little point about the descent of the English Novel from Cranmer’s
prayer book and the English Bible--which cannot matter to you at all,
I will willingly concede to you that it was the phraseology if not the
doctrine of the Book of Common Prayer and the frame of mind of the Old
Testament As By Law Appointed that gave to England the Empire of India
and to the world the United States of North America, those two shining
products of English stiff-neckedness and non-theological Bible-reading.
For how without the Books of Kings could either Clive or, say, Andrew
Jackson have found heart or courage to continue in their courses? Of
course a thought or so might be given to North’s _Plutarch_ that was
published in 1579.
Be that as it may, what I am here getting at is the fact that preceding
and underlying the ornate florescences of Lyly and the prodigious
formlessnesses of Spenser and preceding and underlying the incredible
verbal felicity and neat plottings of Shakespeare himself went the
stream of dogged, menacing prose and the realist’s native imagery
of those two religious compilations. And that subterranean stream
immensely fecundated--to make no larger claim--at once the Anglo-Saxon
national character and the literature that is to be found in the
English language.
I am aware that here we are on ticklish ground and that reformers and
the advanced generally deny with a great deal of heat that literature
has any influence at all on peoples. I remember once being furiously
lectured by the most moral and one of the most advanced of English
novelists--being furiously and minatorily taken to task because mildly
and to make conversation I alleged that _Don Quixote_ had something to
do with the passing of the sham chivalric spirit in Europe. The lecture
was indeed so furious that, being a non-combative person and caring
nothing about the matter, I have from that day to this rather given up
considering the subject at all. You see, my friend the novelist was so
notoriously virtuous and benevolent that hitherto I should have hated
to hurt his feelings by advancing that anyone could be influenced by
any book at all. For what he alleged, like an apostle announcing some
kind of creed, was that populaces influence literature--that Cervantes
was produced because a widespread spirit of mockery for chivalry, real
or sham, was so abroad in the world that _Don Quixote_ was written
merely in answer to a demand, as articles on the Calcutta Sweepstake
are written about the time when Derby Day approaches.
As to that I am no authority and the reader must settle for himself
whether that hen or that egg came first--I mean whether the spirit of
the English populace demanded first the English Prayer Book and the
English Bible and demanded afterwards in due course the _Pilgrim’s
Progress_ and _Robinson Crusoe_, or whether the English Bible so
influenced the English people that they demanded in due course the
works of Bunyan and Defoe. Or as a third proposition: Did the English
Bible so influence Bunyan and both so influence Defoe that in the end
the product was _Pamela_, the short tales of Diderot, the novels of
Stendhal, Flaubert, and his successors and so on until the novel of
to-day was arrived at?
As I have said, I do not immensely care about the matter. Bunyan
may never have read the Bible, Defoe may never have read Bunyan, or
Richardson Defoe. But it makes such a convenient pattern to assume that
writers are descended the one from the other that I mean to assume it
and the reader must modify the theory how he will.
Regarded from that point of view, in pre- as in post-Elizabethan days
and underlying Elizabethan days themselves, you did have that stern
but decorated prose and that determination to rely on illustrations,
parables, and images drawn solely from material to be found about
normal people the world over and throughout time; simultaneously, on
the surface of things you had a courtlier and more elaborated prose
which had the Sublime as its ideal and nothing less vulgar than
passages modelled on Juvenal or the plays of Plautus for its light
relief. The Bible says: “Take us the little foxes, the foxes that eat
our grapes” as an illustration of love, and “He shall feed his sheep”
as the highest expression of the divine functionings of the Saviour.
The _Faerie Queene_ cannot deal with any fox or any hound of lower
extraction than Cerberus and the only redeemer who could have saved the
world for the writers of Romances was, in his panoply, King Arthur with
Lancelot, Gawain, and the rest of his apostles all pricking over the
plains of Camelot.
So let us say that it was to the homespun illustrations, the simple
imagery and the stern diction of the Bible that we owe Bunyan--for
obviously Bunyan read the Scriptures, year in and year out, during
a lifetime of Bedford Gaol, of persecution and turmoil, whereas the
only remains of the courtlier modes are found to come from North’s
_Plutarch_ which influenced profoundly Shakespeare and possibly Sir
Thomas Browne. But Shakespeare obviously could not have any successors
and Browne found none till R. L. S. came to be his sedulous ape. So
that the influence of North’s translation remained, if profound, at
least rather ethical than literary--until it was finally ousted by the
versions of the Langhornes and Church’s of days much more modern.
Our space not being boundless we must now skip to Richardson. For
Richardson I have the profoundest respect that amounts as nearly as
possible to an affection--if that is to say it is possible to have an
affection for a man whose death preceded one’s birth by one hundred
and twelve years. I do not apologize for the fact that _Pamela_ is my
personal favourite, whereas the graver critics and mankind in general
prefer _Clarissa_. By that the reader need not be guided, but he should
certainly pay a good deal of attention to the works of Richardson--and
indeed to Richardson himself.
That tranquil person came into the world in 1689--twenty-seven or
eight years after the birth of Defoe and one year after the death of
Bunyan. But whereas both of his predecessors seem to strike notes
almost entirely of the seventeenth century, Richardson seems to be
absolutely of the eighteenth and, with him, sentimentality was born
in the world of the novel. That perhaps was necessary to an age that
banished if not conventional, then at least doctrinal, moralizings to
its collections of sermons in volume form. For them of course there was
a prodigious demand.
Of course, too, it would be wrong to assert that moralizing found no
place in the novels of Richardson since the high moral purpose breathes
from every pore of his pages. But it was not with moralizing that he
made his primary appeal as had been the case with Bunyan, nor was it
likely that had he so done he would have found many readers. No, it is
his sentimentalizing that is his E string.
Against that I have nothing to say. Anglo-Saxons are sentimentalists
before everything and in all their arts, and it is probable that
without sentimentality as an ingredient no Anglo-Saxon artist
could work: certainly he could have no appeal. To produce national
masterpieces in paint Turner must bathe his canvases deep in that
gentle fluid; the English lyric is a marvel of sentimentality and so is
English domestic architecture with its mellow--or mellowed!--red brick,
its dove-cotes, its south walls for netted fruits. So the first of
modern novelists must be one of the greatest of sentimentalists. And on
those lines his appeal is universal and everlasting.
Only to-day an American left the ship on which I am writing in the port
of Lisbon and, I happening to mention because he was in my mind the
name of Richardson, this American--professor at that and practitioner
of a sister art--this American gentleman assured me solemnly that he
read _Clarissa Harlowe_ at least twice every year and cried often
during each reading. Now there must be some reason for this phenomenon,
which appears very singular. It is not, however, rare, for the hottest
literary discussions I have ever had in England--where, of course, the
discussion of literature is not in good form--have been with laymen
like professors or lawyers as to the relative merits of _Pamela_ and
_Clarissa_.
For me, I read Richardson for a hearty and wholesome dose of
sentimentality and if one does that one may as well have that quality
laid on as thickly as it will go. And it seems to me that the history
of a serving-maid who resists her master’s efforts at seduction and
ultimately forces him to marry her is a more sentimental affair than
that of a young lady of quality who permits herself to be seduced by a
relatively commonplace Lothario. For myself I have always felt inclined
to cheer over the success of the one young female rather than to weep
for the tribulations of the other. Pamela certainly seems to be the
more sporting character of the two.
Still, one should perhaps not read Richardson for his sporting quality,
and that sort of thing is really no affair of mine. The main point is
that Samuel Richardson is still read and read with enthusiasm. I have
even met persons who were engrossed by the conversations in the Cedar
Parlour of _Sir Charles Grandison_.
That Richardson’s tender muse was at times too much for the robuster
and more cynical taste of his age is proved by the fact that Fielding’s
first famous novel was begun as a parody on the first famous novel of
Richardson. By that date the novel of commerce was well on the way to
the market and young ladies lying on sofas reading the latest fiction
or furiously sending their maids to the circulating libraries for the
next five volumes of their latest favourite--such young ladies were
familiar features of the social landscape. Literature had, in fact,
become a sound, if not an immensely lucrative, proposition.
And it is pleasant to think that, happy as he was in everything that he
touched, Richardson was not only novelist but printer and publisher and
quite a warm business man in either capacity. He was, too, a favourite
correspondent and companion of innumerable young ladies who consulted
him as to their amatory predicaments and because of that he is not only
the first novelist in the modern sense of the word but also the first
literary feminist. You might call him an eighteenth-century Henry James
and not go so far wrong.
At any rate, he stands alone as a modern novelist and had in England
neither appreciable imitators nor rivals until the arrival on the scene
of the author of the _Barchester Towers_ series.
Except for Smollett--whom it is hopeless to expect Anglo-Saxon readers
to appreciate or to consume, the main stream of development of the
novel passed once more to the Continent of Europe. Smollett begat
Captain Marryat, who was one of the greatest of English novelists and
is therefore regarded as a writer for boys, Smollett himself being
most prized by the purveyors of books called “curious” in second-hand
catalogues.
Before, however, considering Diderot, Stendhal, Chateaubriand, and
Flaubert, all avowed followers of the author of _Clarissa_, it might
be as well to think a little about Fielding--as at once a dreadful
example of how not to do things and as the begetter of Thackeray and
the product that it is convenient to call the nuvvle as opposed to the
novel. For at about the date of the births of Napoleon, Wellington,
Ney, and many others who began the modern world, and just a little
after the death of Richardson, and just a little before the birth
of the North American Republic, and still a little more before the
Cæsarian operation that produced the French Republic, distinct
cleavages began to make themselves observed in the fields of writing,
these eventually hardening themselves into the three main streams of
the Literature of Escape from the everyday world; into the commercial
product that Mamma selected for your reading, that it is convenient to
call the nuvvle and that formed the immense bulk of the reading matter,
and finally into the modern novel which does not avoid the problems of
the day and is written with some literary skill. This last Richardson
begat.
And it is convenient to say that Defoe, in spite of his moralizations,
was the first writer of the Literature of Escape, just as Smollett
and Marryat may be described as carrying it on and the young H. G.
Wells and the young Rudyard Kipling as bringing it--at any rate
temporarily--to a triumphant close.
Were it not that they were avowed moralizers of a
middle-to-lower-middle-class type, the Fielding-to-Thackeray lineage
of writers might also be regarded as purveyors of the Literature of
Escape, but their continually brought-in passages of moralizations are
such a nuisance that they cannot be ignored. Though they were both
amateurs in the sense that neither knew how to write or cared anything
about it, Thackeray at times projected his scenes so wonderfully
that now and then he trembles dreadfully excitingly on the point of
passing from the stage of purveyor of the nuvvle to that of the real
novelist. And it is to be said for Fielding that although _Tom Jones_
contains an immense amount of rather nauseous special-pleading, the
author does pack most of it away into solid wads of hypocrisy at the
headings of Parts or Chapters. These can in consequence be skipped and
the picaresque story with its mildly salacious details can without
difficulty be followed. One might indeed almost say that Fielding was
a natural story-teller, whereas Thackeray was none at all. Fielding
at least, like a story-teller in a school dormitory, does manage
to lose himself in details of people running into and out of each
others’ bedrooms in hotel corridors at night--something like that. But
Thackeray never could: the dread spectre of the Athenæum Club was for
ever in his background.
And I imagine that the greatest literary crime ever committed was
Thackeray’s sudden, apologetic incursion of himself into his matchless
account of the manœuvres of Becky Sharp on Waterloo day in Brussels.
The greatest crime that anyone perhaps ever committed! For the
motive of most crimes is so obscure, so pathological or so fatalized
by hereditary weakness, that there is almost nothing that cannot be
pardoned once one has dived beneath the calm surface of things. But
Thackeray as child-murderer can never be forgiven: the deeper you delve
into the hidden springs of his offence the more unforgivable does he
appear.
I had better perhaps explain the cause of all this emotion for the
benefit of the lay reader who has not yet got at what I am writing
about.
The struggle--the aspiration--of the novelist down the ages has been
to evolve a water-tight convention for the framework of the novel. He
aspires--and for centuries has aspired--so to construct his stories and
so to manage their surfaces that the carried-away and rapt reader shall
really think himself to be in Brussels on the first of Waterloo days or
in Grand Central Station waiting for the Knickerbocker Express to come
in from Boston though actually he may be sitting in a cane lounge on a
beach of Bermuda in December. This is not easy.
Of the three major novelists that we have hitherto examined each in
his own way had a try, consciously or unconsciously, at performing
this conjuring trick. Bunyan tried to do it--and succeeded remarkably
well--by the simplest of story-teller’s devices. He just told on in
simple language, using such simple images that the reader, astonished
and charmed to find the circumstances of his own life typified in words
and glorified by print, is seized by the homely narrative and carried
clean out of himself into the world of that singular and glorious
tinker.
Defoe, on the other hand, in the conscious or unconscious effort
to achieve a convention for the novel, adopted the biographical or
autobiographical form, relying on the verisimilitude of the details
that he invented to confirm the reader in the belief that his
characters had really existed and so to awaken the sympathy that makes
books readable. And had he possessed a little more power of projection
or a little more subtlety in presenting his figures and had his writing
been a little less pedestrian his works might have gained and held the
power to arouse a great deal more enthusiasm than they actually do.
Richardson, going a good deal further, has left it on record that he
was actually bothered by the problem of the novelistic convention
and that he racked his brain a long time before arriving at the one
he finally adopted. He asked himself, that is to say, how the reader
was to be convinced that the author--and by analogy still more his
characters--how could they know all the details that go to making up a
book? If, to reduce the matter to its most elementary form, Sir Charles
Grandison is walking in the Yew Walk, how can he know what characters
are present and what conversations are being carried on in the Cedar
Parlour, and since, to satisfy the reader, the author is to be supposed
to be cognizant of all that passes in his novel, how is _he_ to know
simultaneously what is happening in both places?
That at least is what bothered Richardson and what has bothered
all other novelists since his day, though until quite lately no
English novelist made any serious attempt to attack the problem.
The method that Richardson with characteristically homespun common
sense eventually worked out was simply to cast the whole novel into
correspondence, the characters exchanging letters as to events and as
to their psychologies with other characters or with anyone to whom
a letter could be handily addressed. In that way any character who
was needed to know anything could be given the information and the
author had only to let it be supposed that he had an unusual knack of
getting hold of the correspondence of other people to convince the
reader for all eighteenth-century purposes. For in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, as every one knows, every one from Madame de
Sevigné upwards and downwards addressed to every one else letters of
prodigious length and in the most excruciating detail--and Richardson
himself, as we have seen, had a prodigious knowledge of the prodigious
letters that eighteenth-century young ladies could address to even
unknown correspondents once their hearts and feelings were touched. So
that although to-day the letter is one of the worst of methods that
exist for telling a story if the dictates of probability are to be
considered, Richardson may be considered to have done very well indeed
with his peculiar form.
To its disadvantages in other hands we shall come in due time, but
meanwhile enormous applause is due to the author of _Pamela_ for having
given the matter any thought at all. And in any case his is a figure
so sympathetic and so craftsmanlike that we do well to love him. He
is sound, quiet, without fuss, going about his work as a carpenter
goes about making a chair and in the end turning out an article of
supreme symmetry and consistence. I know of no other figure in English
literature--if it be not that of Trollope--who so suggests the two
supreme artists of the world--Holbein and Bach.
It would be hyperbole to suggest that Richardson is as great in his
art as either of the other two. He had neither their power over
their materials nor their sense of the beauty of natural things. Our
gratitude to him nevertheless should be great, for he worked with the
simplest materials and manœuvred only the most normal of characters in
the most commonplace of events and yet contrived to engross the minds
of a large section of mankind. How to do that is the problem that,
Richardson having been dead a century and a half, still engrosses the
novelist.
And what more than anything is impressive about his figure is that
one knows almost nothing about it: he is as little overdrawn as are
his characters, whereas the besetting sin of almost all other English
novelists from Fielding to George Meredith is that they seem to cut
their characters out with hatchets and to colour them with the brushes
of house-painters and, never, even at that, being able to let them
alone, they are perpetually pushing their own faces and winking at
you over the shoulders of Young Blifil, Uncle Toby, the Widow Wadman,
Dick Swiveller, the Marchioness, Becky Sharp, Evan Harrington, and
the rest. That is usually applauded by orthodox Anglo-Saxon criticism
and to talk of the gallery of portraits left by this or that novelist
is considered to be high praise indeed. But, as a matter of fact, the
overdrawing of characters is merely a symptom of the laziness and
contempt for their vehicle that is the too usual hall-mark of the
English writer of nuvvles. And that it should be tremendously applauded
is a symptom of the disdain that the English critic really feels for
the novel. If English painting consisted of nothing but the caricatures
of Rowlandson, Gillray, or Cruikshank, the art-critic would discover
very soon that that grew monotonous, but since it is merely a matter of
prose-fiction it is easily accepted as good enough; that which is too
stupid to be said in any other way being consigned to the novel.
Of course if you choose to consider Swift and, say, Beckford as
novelists you do arrive at something that you must, as you might
say, chew upon--at something that has some mental dignity; and
Smollett presents you with problems of humanity that are at least
worth consideration. And naturally great vital spirits like Dickens,
floundering away in oceans of words and eccentricities, will from time
to time hit upon collocations of words and confrontations of characters
that are unsurpassed in the literature of any time or nation. But from
the death of Swift to the publication of _The Way of All Flesh_ there
is very little to be found in the English novel that is not slightly
unworthy of the whole attention of a grown-up man--say of a grown-up
Frenchman.
I have adumbrated somewhere--in some previous pessimism!--the
perturbation that must beset any Anglo-Saxon who desired to point out
to almost any grown-up foreigner of average intelligence the glories
of the English novel before, say, the day of the _Yellow Book_. Let
us then examine with a little more attention the chief lights of that
Institution between, say, 1745, the year of the death of Swift, and,
say, 1890, when the _Yellow Book_ was well on the way.
Swift himself is obviously one of those solitary figures like, in
their different ways, Shakespeare or Smollett or the author of _The
Way of All Flesh_. In a sense he resembles Bunyan, that is to say he
wrote allegories which, as a literary _genre_, are usually tiresome
and unconvincing; but in his case, as in that of Bunyan, his fierce
powers of observation and rendering carry him, as it were, in spite
of himself, into the realms of realism. It is to be doubted if Swift
ever aimed--as did, say, Mr. H. G. Wells in, say, _The First Men in
the Moon_,--at giving the reader the sense of vicarious experience.
Nevertheless he got there all the same and the corrosive nature of his
misanthropy almost aids the sense of reality with which he overwhelms
us. The “purpose” of _Gulliver’s Travels_ was no doubt philosophic, as
the purpose of the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ was moral; but Lilliput is as
real to us as the Slough of Despond and the Yahoos are the figures of
the most horrible experience of every man who has come across them.
So that if to your intelligent--and of course slightly
cynical--foreigner you presented _Gulliver_ and left it at that he
might remain edified or horror-struck according as his individual frame
of mind were pessimist of the other thing. But supposing you were to
present him with the Steele-cum-Addison collaboration of the _Tatler_
or the _Spectator_ or with _Tom Jones_ itself, which was written
about a quarter of a century later than _Gulliver_ and thirty years
or so after the last number of the _Spectator_ appeared in 1714: and
supposing you added--yes, certainly, suppose you add _Tristram Shandy_
and the _Sentimental Journey_, the first appearing or being written
between 1760 and 1767 and the second being published in 1768! Keep up
your sleeve Tobias Smollett whose _Humphry Clinker_ was published three
years after the _Sentimental Journey_ and in the year of Smollett’s
death at the age of fifty. And let us conclude this immediate inquiry
of ours as ending with the awful name of the Wizard of the North who
was born in the year of Smollett’s death and lived to be sixty.
As we have seen, Defoe in his _Advice from the Scandalous Club_,
that was a “feature” of his periodical _Review of the Affairs of
France_, very little anticipated--but by five years, indeed--what
may be regarded as the fiction of the Addison-Steele collaboration.
One is so apt to regard Defoe as of the seventeenth and Addison as
of the eighteenth centuries that this appears rather astonishing,
but actually the _Review_ ran from 1704 to 1713 and the _Tatler_ plus
_Spectator_ from 1709 to 1714. Defoe’s publication was so essentially
commercial and the other two so essentially social that the matter is
rather one of chronology than comparison.
The fact that the novel had not yet begun as a commercial “proposition”
to come into its own reduced Addison and Steele no doubt from the
rank of novelists to those of draftsmen of “characters.” The novels
of Defoe were “faked” memoirs and the other fiction of the period
mostly consisted of equally “faked” memoirs of persons of quality,
court-mistresses, and the like. And the “characters” and sham
correspondence about social questions of the day that characterized the
_Spectator_ may well be considered as developments of those popular,
fictitious productions. Sir Roger de Coverley, Will Wimble, and the
rest are as it were the characters of a novel, standing about and
waiting for employment as the leaden soldiers of a child await their
owner’s orders to fall in.
The idea of sustained fiction might indeed, if you liked and if you
analysed the matter very closely, be said not by any means yet to have
reached the public consciousness, and though for us _Clarissa_ may seem
to be the first of novels, its peculiar form--of correspondence--may
well, in the public mind of its day, have given it the aspect of the
last of the spurious memoirs. And, considering the nature of the future
influence of Richardson over the French realists from Diderot to
Flaubert, it may be more accurate to regard that aspect as the truer
one. For, in effect, the French realist movement from Diderot’s _Le
Neveu de Rameau_ to _Le Rouge et le Noir_ and again to _Madame Bovary_
may in the last event be regarded as much more a movement for the
production of fictitious memoirs than the narration of sustained tales,
the difference between Richardson, Flaubert, and Joseph Conrad or
Turgenev being simply one of form. Richardson, that is to say, tried to
assure you that Clarissa was a real person by the mechanical device of
publishing her letters, whilst Flaubert and his school try to hypnotize
you into believing in their characters by methods of projection rather
than of narration.
And the trouble with the English nuvvelist from Fielding to Meredith
is that not one of them cares whether you quite believe in their
characters or not. If you had told Flaubert or Conrad in the midst of
their passionate composings that you were not convinced of the reality
of Homais or Tuan Jim, as like as not they would have called you out
and shot you, and in similar circumstances Richardson would have showed
himself extremely disagreeable. But Fielding, Thackeray, or Meredith
would have cared relatively little about that, though any one of them
would have knocked you down if they could, supposing you had suggested
that he was not a “gentleman.” So would any English novelist to-day.
That of course is admirable in its effect on Anglo-Saxon
literary-social life where anyone taking pen in hand becomes _ipso
fatso_ an esquire for all users of type-writing machines. But it is
bitter bad for the English novel.
It is bitter bad for the English novel because--as is the case with
all human enterprises--the art of the novel is so difficult a thing
that unless a man’s whole energies are given to it he had much
better otherwise occupy himself. For if Shakespeare’s ambitions for
coat-armour had antedated instead of coming after _The Tempest_, where
should we be to-day? We have to thank our stars that he was probably
first a lousy, adulterous, poaching scoundrel--like Villon!
The lot of the novelist is, in fact, hard--but not harder than
that of any other man. If you put it to bakers, tram-conductors,
politicians, or musicians that they must be first bakers and the rest
and then gentlemen, they will sigh, but admit it. It is almost only
the English novelist who will aspire at being first gentleman and
then craftsman--or even not craftsman at all since it is not really
gentlemanly to think of being anything but a gentleman.
This is an incisive way of putting a truth that might perhaps be more
wrapped up in social or material generalizations, but it is none the
less a hard truth, and if you consider the case of Fielding, connected
with the best families, placeman and diplomatist in a small way, and
compare him with Smollett who was socially nothing at all with no
chance of a change, you will see that truth all the more clearly.
God forbid that I should say anything really condemnatory of any book
by any brother-novelist, alive or dead. One is here to commend all that
one can commend and to leave the rest alone. But there are few books
that I more cordially dislike than _Tom Jones_. That is no critical
pronouncement but merely a statement of a personal prejudice: one may
dislike grape-fruit and yet acknowledge its admirable qualities, or
one may, as I do, dislike the quality of goose-flesh that reading Mr.
George Moore will confer on one’s skin and yet acknowledge Mr. Moore as
easily the greatest of living technicians.
But as regards _Tom Jones_ my personal dislike goes along with a
certain cold-blooded, critical condemnation. I dislike Tom Jones, the
character, because he is a lewd, stupid, and treacherous phenomenon;
I dislike Fielding, his chronicler, because he is a bad sort of
hypocrite. Had Fielding been in the least genuine in his moral
aspirations it is Blifil that he would have painted attractively and
Jones who would have come to the electric chair, as would have been the
case had Jones lived to-day.
Of course that is merely saying that Fielding liked a type that I
dislike--but what appals me in view of the serious, cynical foreigner
that I have postulated our taking about with us is the extremely thin
nature of all the character-drawing, of all the events and of all
the catastrophes. Is it to be seriously believed that Tom Jones’s
benefactor would have turned upon him on the flimsy nature of the
evidence adduced against him, or, equally, is it to be believed that
Tom Jones’s young woman would have again taken up with him after all
the eye-openers she had had, she being represented as a girl of spirit?
It simply isn’t in any world of any seriousness at all. The fact, in
short, is that Tom Jones is a papier-mâché figure, the catastrophes the
merest invention without any pretence at being convincing and even the
mere morality of the most leering and disastrous kind.
For myself, I am no moralist: I consider that if you do what you want
you must take what you get for it and that if you deny yourself things
you will be better off than if you don’t. But fellows like Fielding,
and to some extent Thackeray, who pretend that if you are a gay
drunkard, lecher, squanderer of your goods and fumbler in placket-holes
you will eventually find a benevolent uncle, concealed father or
benefactor who will shower on you bags of tens of thousands of guineas,
estates and the hands of adorable mistresses--those fellows are dangers
to the body politic and horribly bad constructors of plots.
It is all very well to say that such happy endings were the convention
of the day, that you find them in the _School for Scandal_, _The Vicar
of Wakefield_ and in every eighteenth-century romance that you pick up
out of the twopenny book-box, and it is all very well to say that the
public demands a happy ending. But the really great writer is not bound
by the conventions of his day, nor, if he desires to give his reader a
happy ending, need he select a wastrel like Jones as the recipient of
his too easily bestowed favours.
If, in short, we are to regard Fielding as a serious writer writing
for grown-up people, we must regard him also as a rather intolerable
scoundrel with perhaps _Jonathan Wild_ to his credit. But _Jonathan
Wild_ is of another category and, neither winking nor leering, might be
regarded as the finger on the wall, pointing out what happens to the
Tom Joneses of the world if their case is regarded with any seriousness.
But the fact is that for a century and a half after the death of
Fielding nothing in the Anglo-Saxon world was further from anyone,
either novelist or layman, than the idea that the novel could be taken
seriously. It was a thing a little above a fairy-tale for children, a
little above a puppet-play; and, if not actually as damned socially
and clerically as the actor who could not be either received at court
or buried in consecrated ground, the novelist was practically without
what the French call an _état civil_ because his was not a serious
profession. In England that state of things still pertains. In the
demobilization forms after the late War the novelist was actually
placed in the eighteenth category--along with gipsies, vagrants, and
other non-productive persons; and my last public act in Great Britain
being to allow my name to be placed on a list of voters, when I gave
my avocation to the political agent as being that of a novelist, he
exclaimed: “Oh, don’t say that, sir. Say ‘Gentleman’!” He was anxious
that his list should appear as serious as possible.
That being the state of things and the novelist being human--for you
cannot be a novelist and lack the ordinary aspirations of the human
being!--for that century and a half the Anglo-Saxon public had the
novels that it deserved. I do not mean to say that generous spirits
lacked amongst the ranks of fiction-writers. That great genius,
Dickens, thrashed oppressions and shams with the resplendent fury of an
Isaiah; and that singular megalomaniac, Charles Reade, did, with _It
Is Never Too Late to Mend_, really succeed in modifying the system of
solitary confinement in English gaols. And you have had _Uncle Tom’s
Cabin_. But those works of propaganda had either no literary value at
all or when, as in the case of Dickens, they did have the literary
value that genius can infuse into work however faulty, their work
itself suffered by the very intensity of their reforming passions.
That tendency alone has deprived the novel in Anglo-Saxondom of almost
all the artistic or even the social value that it might have had, since
it became a vehicle for preventing the comfortable classes thinking of
unpleasant subjects whilst presenting their agreeable somnolences with
the warming possibilities of considering their neighbours’ defects. It
became, that is to say, the week-day, post-prandial sermon preached
by a family divine above all anxious to avoid giving offence to those
who provided his daily bread. And gentlemanly reformer, the British
novelist consciously or unconsciously remains to this day--in the great
bulk.
That Dickens, on the other hand, had, any more than Bunyan, any
_arrière-pensée_ at all should never for a moment be thought. His
was an agonized soul shuddering at the tortures that, as a poor
child, he had seen inflicted on the sufferings of non-comfortable
humanity in the horrible days--for the under-dog!--of the last
years of the reigns of the Georges and of the early years of the
reign of Queen Victoria. All the horrors of insanitation, filth,
child-labour, imprisonment for debt, the gallows for petty theft, the
hulks and the rest he had himself witnessed or endured and at these
horrors he lashed with the mad enthusiasm of a wolf that snaps at
the insupportable whip of the trainer. His novels were probably--at
least in the beginning--relatively nothing to him; if he could have
found any other way he would have poured out his feelings as readily
in that. But, happening on the novel and having a matchless command
of English, he took the simple course of presenting you with villains
all black, heroes all white and ringletted heroines all pink. He had
to see--though that is to reverse the colours--the world in terms of
Legrees, Uncle Toms, or Amelia Osbornes.
That, in effect, was the beginning of the end, the novel becoming
_the_ vehicle for the reform of abuses. And it is astonishing how
short has been the career of the novel as an art compared with that of
pottery-moulding, baking, weaving, or any other human avocation. You
may say that it began with Richardson and ended--for the time being
and as far as Anglo-Saxondom is concerned--with _Oliver Twist_, which,
significantly enough, appeared in the first year of Victoria’s spacious
reign.
Richardson, that is to say, did have an artistic convention of sorts,
did try in some way to render life, did deal almost exclusively in
neither very moral nor very immoral personages, but there almost
all attempts at rendering life or the normal almost came to an end.
_The Vicar of Wakefield_, “noted for purity and optimism,” says my
official guide to dates, was an obviously Richardsonian _pastiche_;
Henry Mackenzie’s _Man of Feeling_ may be said to have exaggerated
Richardson’s tearful sentimentality; and Smollett (“marked by
coarseness and brutality”) whose first book was published eight
years after the publication of _Pamela_ and in the same year as
_Clarissa_, undoubtedly had a shot at rendering the same world that
Richardson rendered. It is not as absurd as it may seem to say that
_Pamela_ suggested _Roderick Random_; it certainly suggested _Madame
Bovary_--and _Babbitt_!
It would, however, undoubtedly be absurd to suggest to the public
that Smollett was a greater artist or a greater novelist than either
Fielding or Dickens: and yet, if the novel is to be regarded as a
rendering of life, there is not much way out of it. He remains,
however, and will probably always remain, an isolated figure. He was
bitter, and as he rendered what he had seen and since what he had
seen had been coarse and brutal, those will be the epithets that
Anglo-Saxondom will for ever bestow on him. He wrote about the sea in
a period glorious for England’s sea-history--but in spite of that he
could hardly be regarded--as is Marryat--as a writer for boys. The
life of which he treated was too remote from to-day for the reader
interested in the renderings of the life of to-day to read of it with
any enthusiasm; he was little less virulent than Swift and, if he is
even less read, he receives even less lip-service. So no doubt he is
contented.
Marryat--as a writer read by boys, men being already too dulled in
the sense at twenty to appreciate him--has probably, through the
boys, exercised the greatest influence on the English character that
any writer ever did exercise. His magnificent gifts of drawing--not
exaggerating--character and of getting an atmosphere have so worked
that few of us have not been to sea in frigates before the age of
eighteen and come in some way in contact with non-comfortable men
and women. I have seldom been so impressed as when, the other day, I
re-read _Peter Simple_ for my pleasure. It was to come into contact
with a man who could write and see and feel. For me, nothing in _War
and Peace_ is as valuable as the boat cutting-out expeditions of
Marryat and for me he remains the greatest of English novelists. His
name is not even mentioned in the manual of literary dates with which I
have just been refreshing my memory.
I do not, however, dwell at any length on either Smollett or Marryat
because, great as for me they seem, they still remain individual
figures leaving very little trace on the traditions of English
literature--and that indeed was the case with Fenimore Cooper who was
one of the most beautiful pure stylists that the English language has
yet excited into writing. There is in _The Two Admirals_ a passage
descriptive of mists rising from the sails and cordage of battleships
as seen from the turf of cliff-tops at dawn, that remains for me one
of the incomparable passages in the language. And, whilst I am about
the matter of pure style, I may as well explain here why lately I
mentioned that I was then writing in Lisbon harbour. That apparently
egotistic excrescence was due to the fact that I liked to remember
that--no, not Fielding--but Beckford once lay in Lisbon harbour and
wrote most beautiful prose there. Beckford is known only as the
author of _Vathek_, which is, to be sure, most remarkable as a _tour
de force_--and which is usually bound up with _Rasselas_ in popular
reprints; but he is also the author of _Letters from Portugal_ which
might almost be regarded as a novel, such an admirable autobiographical
portrait do they give of their writer in his adventurous progress from
the city of Camoens and Vasco da Gama to the monastery of Batalha.
Prose, I suppose, is to some extent the business of a writer on the
English Novel, so I suppose I may be pardoned my digression about
Beckford and make the note that if I wanted to put together a small,
exquisitely pleasing fascicule of admirable because simple English
prose I should take a passage from the suppressed Preface to the Bible,
a passage from Henry V’s address to his soldiers before Agincourt,
one from Clarendon, one from _Gulliver_, one from Johnson’s _Life of
Drake_, the passage from Cooper that I have mentioned above, and one
from the _Letters from Portugal_, one from Maine’s _Ancient Law_--and
then one from any book of W. H. Hudson. The English language is not
very distinguished for its prose, but that would make a very admirable
little volume! One might almost add the opening description of the
village from White’s _Selborne_.
It is of course impossible to exhaust the topic of the English novel
from Fielding to Henry James in a few paragraphs of a small book.
But the topic of main currents of that literature is more easily got
rid of simply because there are practically no main currents at all.
There are some good writers, but of a Tradition practically no trace.
The writers who spring most immediately to the imagination as being
somewhere near in their works to the main stream of the international
novel--for the Novel is after all an international affair--the most
unforgettable writers of that type are two or three women. That I
suppose is because, whilst the men ran about actively intent on proving
that they were gentlemen or in improving the ungentle world, the women
had to prove that they were not unladylike and so remained at home and
looked at life, without any very immediate aim at publicity or even at
publication.
At any rate, if you take Miss Burney’s _Evelina_, Miss Edgeworth’s
_Castle Rackrent_, Miss Austen’s _Sense and Sensibility_, Mrs.
Gaskell’s _Mary Barton_, George Eliot’s _Scenes from Clerical Life_,
and Miss Brontë’s _Villette_, you do get something of a kinship, if not
much of a tradition, and if you add to them the _Barchester Towers_
series of Trollope and the works of Mark Rutherford and George Gissing
you do get, too, some attempts at rendering English life that are above
the attention of adults with the mentality of French boys of sixteen.
At rendering, that is to say, rather than at the mere relating of a
more or less arbitrary tale so turned as to ensure a complacent view of
life and carried on by characters that as a rule are--six feet high and
gliding two inches above the ground!
That is, of course, an arbitrary generalization as to all the English
nuvvles that string out from, say, Scott to, say, the late Marion
Crawford. But if sweeping it is not _completely_ unfair. Obviously even
Scott’s _Antiquary_ is worth consideration if one had the time, or _The
Cloister and the Hearth_, or let us say _Lorna Doone_. That last work I
read over twelve times when I was a boy and from the beginning: “If any
man would hear a plain tale told plainly, I John Ridd of the parish
of Oare” to the end; I dare say I could recite half the book to-day.
But then Blackmore was a market-gardener! Let me lay on his altar these
alms for oblivion, for I suppose that few people to-day read of the
Doones of Badgeworthy or of how John Ridd took his Lorna home in the
great snows.
In short, if you omit Dickens and Thackeray as immense amateurs who
wrote from time to time very admirable passages, and if you do not like
the works--from _Evelina_ to _New Grub Street_--that I have mentioned
in my last paragraph but two, the amount of work that you can read
in English produced between 1799 and 1899 or so will seem extremely
small--supposing you to be of any at all adult tastes or of any
seriousness of approach to literary matters.
If, on the other hand, you are indifferent to whether you are convinced
by what you read and care little with what you occupy your spare time
and desire to fill up your hours with an occupation calling for as
little mental concentration as, say, a game of golf, I dare say you
could agreeably narcotize yourself still with _Rob Roy_ or _The Tower
of London_ or _The Woman in White_ or, say, _Rudder Grange_.
CHAPTER FOUR
TO JOSEPH CONRAD
Thus in Mid-Victorian years there established itself for all the world
to see--The English Nuvvle.
And inasmuch as this phenomenon was really, in the last event,
combined--and no doubt unconscious--socio-political propaganda, it
was accepted by the whole world--and by the whole world even more
than by England. For if, as it were, you shut your eyes and consider
what images are brought up before you by the words The English Novel
you will see a Manor House, inhabited by the Best People: Sir Thomas,
amiable but not bright; Lady Charlotte, benevolent, charitable, in an
ample crinoline, an Earl’s daughter; the Misses Jean and Charlotte as
pure as dew within lily-chalices; Mr. Tom--not absolutely satisfactory;
Mr. Edward, always satisfactory; pigeons, shorthorns, a rose-garden,
a still-room, a housekeeper, a rectory. And you will see a whole
countryside, a whole continent, a whole world so conducted that those
amiable but not bright personages shall lead amiable, idle, and almost
blameless existences in an atmosphere of curtsyings and cap-touchings.
It was a world-ideal: you found households modelling themselves upon it
in the Government of Kiev, in the State of Massachusetts, in Pomerania,
in the department of the Var. So that God’s Englishman of the novels of
William Black--God’s drooping-bearded Englishman with his crinolined
or be-bustled consort, carrying fly-fishing rods and croquet mallets,
became the type which the whole world sighingly aped. For these
nuvvles--to which nobody surely could object--were read in Sarajevo as
in Potsdam, in Washington as on the Berkshire downs. They were works
written for the would-be gentry by the near-gentry which latter, if
their books proved sufficiently acceptable, might almost aspire to such
establishments as they described and, in the second generation, to
authentic gentrydom. The writer himself, like Shakespeare, would as a
rule have to content himself with a grant of arms from the College of
Heralds. But one could always, if one were a novelist, dazzle one’s
mind with the idea that Edward Bulwer Lytton, author of _The Last Days
of Pompeii_, became successively Sir Edward Bulwer, and Lord, Lytton,
and Benjamin Disraeli, also a novelist, Earl of Beaconsfield and
favourite of his Sovereign.
The nuvvles, naturally, differed in subject and even sometimes in
treatment. _The Woman in White_ was, I think, written in letters for
all the world like _Clarissa_; _Esmond_--which described the founding
of a county-family in Virginia, U.S.A.,--was autobiographical; or you
might have several characters each speaking in solid autobiographical
wads; or several diarists. There was, in fact, no literary convention
in particular--there was only the point of view. _Romola_ and _Far From
the Madding Crowd_ had to be recognized as of the same ethical family
as _Pelham_ or _Lorna Doone_ or they would not do at all.
Occasionally disturbing breaths swept across the trout-ponds. The
newest novel of Thackeray might cause a great deal of trepidating
discussion under the breath, or the latest passionate outpouring of
Dickens might cause Mamma to ask dear Papa whether Lucy and Emily
ought really to be allowed to read it. Steerforth and Little Em’ly
came _very_ near the Knuckle: but the lap-dog died amongst such
lamentations and the first heroine so delicately, and such refined
retribution overtook alike Steerforth and the young woman that, if
_Copperfield_ itself was put on the index of the young ladies’ boudoir,
_Bleak House_ which “introduced Society” could not be kept from the
fair denizens of that be-chintzed sanctuary. I believe, however, that
_Great Expectations_, the last of Dickens’ works to show his passionate
compassion for the under-dog, had a pretty rough passage.
I came into the world myself at about the hey-day of this national
phenomenon, but, by the time I had any real literary consciousness,
its supremacy was beginning to be already challenged. My own mother
enjoined on me the reading of _Silas Marner_, _The Mill on the Floss_,
_Wuthering Heights_, _Sidonia the Sorceress_, _Lorna Doone_, _The
Woman in White_, _The Moonstone_, _Diana of the Crossways_, and _Far
From the Madding Crowd_. But then my mother was “advanced” and never
wore a crinoline. My father thought Dickens was vulgar and though he
did not forbid me to read he certainly deprecated my expressing any
enthusiasm for--_Bleak House_. He thought too--I don’t know why--that
Robert Louis Stevenson was meretricious, except for the _Inland
Voyage_. My grandfather, who was considerably more “advanced” than
either my father or my mother, first recommended me to read--when
I was about seventeen--_Madame Bovary_, _Tartarin de Tarascon_ and
_Tartarin sur les Alpes_. He was pleased when at school they gave us
the _Lettres de mon Moulin_ of Daudet and a little later made me read
_Roderick Random_, _Humphry Clinker_, _Snarleyyow_, _Midshipman Easy_,
Waterton’s _Wanderings in South America_, which was all the same as
a novel. My uncle William Rossetti gave me _The Castle of Otranto_,
_Caleb Williams_, _Frankenstein_ and another novel of Meinhold’s--_The
Amber Witch_. I inherited from my uncle Oliver Madox Brown a large
number of translations from the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
Spanish. Trollope I had to find out for myself, oddly enough. I suppose
my own family were too advanced to care to advocate the reading of
projections of the lives of the cathedral clergy. That, at any rate,
was the reading of a boy of from twelve to eighteen of fairly advanced
family in the ’eighties of last century. It will be observed that,
with the possible exception of Wilkie Collins’ two books, these were
all works that would not normally be read in Middle Class families,
either because of social outspokennesses, individuality of outlook,
or difficulties of style. But even for my family it was then possible
to go too far. I remember my mother being seriously perturbed because
at the age of thirteen or so I was kissed at a tea-party by Mrs. Lynn
Lynton whose gleaming spectacles certainly frightened me and whose
novels advocated the Revolt of the Daughters of that day--and, if it
had lain within the ideas of right and wrong of my family to forbid
anyone to read anything, I should certainly have been forbidden to read
the works of Rhoda Broughton, who advocated the giving of latchkeys to
women.
Nemesis was by then on the way.
The newer ideas began with the cheapening of the products of the
press--and I dare say that cheapening was a good deal hastened by
the pirating of American works. I remember still with delight the
shilling edition--it was bound in scarlet paper--in which I first
purchased at the age of fourteen in a place called Malvern Wells,
Artemus Ward’s _Among the Mormons_, Sam Slick’s _The Clockmaker_, Mark
Twain’s _Mississippi Pilot_, Carleton’s _Farm Ballads_, and ever so
many other American books which I suppose must have been pirated or
they could scarcely have been sold for a shilling. And, though I was
ready at the injunctions of my family to read Lope da Vega or Smollett,
nothing would have induced me to spend sixpence on taking out from a
circulating library the three-volume novels of William Black, Besant
and Rice and the other purveyors of the nuvvle when by saving up my
pocket-money I could buy for a shilling--or ninepence net--the _Biglow
Ballads_ or _Hans Breitmann_.
So that of the novel of commerce of those days I really know very
little--and I do not think that there is very much about it that anyone
need know. That it existed in great numbers in three volumes apiece
was obvious. In every little town in England there was in those days a
circulating library and in every circulating library in every town were
shelves on shelves of obfusc bindings--but even the literary textbooks
of to-day give you no more names for the Victorian period than Dickens,
Thackeray, George Eliot, the Brontës, Charles Kingsley, Robert Louis
Stevenson (who died in 1894), George Meredith and Thomas Hardy. So that
even the official list is a pretty meagre one and if I rack my brains
really hard I cannot add many names to it. I have already given you
Black, Blackmore, Besant and Rice who collaborated--and of writers of
considerable merit, Mark Rutherford and Samuel Butler, but neither of
these really belong to the period--and Jane Austen really precedes
it, though we may well say that she originated the novel of the
country-house that was followed--at such great intervals--by the swarm
of commercial writers.
That all the commercial writers who solidly turned out solid
three-deckers produced absolute rubbish need not be assumed. Miss
Braddon, authoress of _Lady Audley’s Secret_, did honest, sound
journeyman’s work, year in, year out, during a very long life--and
obviously such a writer as Mrs. Gaskell will not ever be entirely
forgotten, if only on account of _Cranford_. I wish, myself, that
more weight attached to her _Mary Barton_, a grim--and indeed an
extraordinarily painful--account of Mid-Victorian labour troubles.
And of course there is Trollope.
Trollope and Miss Austen--like Shakespeare and Richardson--stand
so absolutely alone that nothing very profitable can be said about
them by a writer analysing British fiction in search of traces of
main-currents of tradition. They were both so aloof, so engrossed, so
contemplative--and so masterly--that beyond saying that some people
prefer _The Warden_ to _Framley Parsonage_ and _Sense and Sensibility_
to _Pride and Prejudice_, and that others think the reverse, there is
very little to be said. These at least are authentic writers: they
neither flare out into passages that are all super-genius--as in
Dickens’ passage about the dry leaves at Mr. Pecksniff’s back-door,
nor do they descend to the intolerable banalities of the endings of
_Copperfield_ or _Vanity Fair_. But, as in the case of Turgenev, the
aspiring writer can learn very little of either. These novelists
write well, know how to construct a novel so as to keep the interest
going with every word until the last page--but after that all you
can say is that they were just temperaments, and quiet ones at that.
Inimitable--that is what they are. You could imitate Oscar Wilde--but
never Trollope giving you the still, slow stream of English country and
small-town life. Nor could anyone else ever give you such pure agony of
interest and engrossment as you can get out of the financial troubles
over a few pounds of the poor clergyman in _Framley Parsonage_. I
shiver every time that I think of that book.
But once those tributes are paid it is astonishing to look back on
the course of the novel in England from the earliest times to say,
1895, Bunyan, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and then the few
Victorians of whom we have been treating. It is an astonishingly small
crop, even if you let me add Marryat and add for yourselves the other
solitary figure of Mark Twain, one of the greatest prose-writers the
English language has produced.
In the meantime, across the Channel, the main stream of the Novel
pursued its slow course.
It had begun with Richardson. His vogue with the French would be
incomprehensible if we were not able to consider that the French
Revolution was, in the end, a sentimental movement, basing itself on
civic, parental, filial, and rhetorical virtues. If the French beheaded
Marie Antoinette it was in order that Monsieur Durand, stay-maker of
the Passage Choiseul, might be sufficiently well-fed to utter tearful
homilies to his children; for homilies uttered by starving peasants
with their bones pushing through their skins and rags--such homilies
would little impress their children with the solid advantages of
virtuous careers. And the moment you consider pre-revolutionary France
from that angle the appeal of the author of _Pamela_ becomes instantly
blindingly clear.
At any rate, Diderot wrote _Rameau’s Nephew_ as a direct imitation of
that work of Richardson and a whole school of the contemporaries of
Diderot imitated _Rameau’s Nephew_. The influence, again, of Richardson
is plainly visible in Chateaubriand--for without Richardson how could
he have written long passages like: “How sad it is to think that eyes
that are too old to see have not yet outlived the ability to shed
tears,” and the like. And if the Richardsonian influence upon Stendhal
does not so immediately spring to the eye, we know from Stendhal’s
letters that it was extremely profound.
It was to Diderot--and still more to Stendhal--that the Novel owes its
next great step forward. That consisted in the discovery that words
put into the mouth of a character need not be considered as having
the personal backing of the author. At that point it became suddenly
evident that the Novel as such was capable of being regarded as a means
of profoundly serious and many-sided discussion and therefore a medium
of profoundly serious investigation into the human case. It came into
its own.
It is obvious of course that before the day of Diderot authors had
put into the mouths of their characters sentiments with which they
themselves could not be imagined to sympathize. But that was done only
by characters marked “villain,” all the sympathetic characters having
to utter sentiments which were either those of the author or those with
which the author imagined the solid middle classes would agree. Young
Mr. Blifil, Mrs. Slipslop, and the rest might say very wicked things,
but they were so obviously wicked and absurd that no one could take
them with any seriousness either as pronouncements or as worthy to be
taken as the author’s opinion: Mr. Allworthy or Amelia Dobbin, on the
other hand, could never utter anything without the reader having to
exclaim: “_How_ virtuous!”... And consider the material success that
always awaited the good!
By the time the thirty years or so that stretched between 1790 and
1820 had impinged on the world it had gradually become evident, on the
Continent at least, that so many differing codes of morality could
synchronize in the same era, in the same nation and even in the same
small community--it had become so evident that if Simeon Stylites
and Oliver Cromwell were saints, Jesus Christ and Gautama Buddha and
several Chinese philosophers were very good men, that the Novel, if it
was at all to express its day, must express itself through figures less
amateurishly blacked than Uriah Heep and less sedulously whited than
the Cherryble brothers.
Changes in literary methods are brought about very slowly and permeate
more slowly still into the taste of the more or less unlettered classes
who make up the bulk of the desirable readers for an author. As a
rule the process begins with the younger writers who find tiresome
or ludicrous the accepted work of their day; a little later the more
experienced of readers, tiring in their turn of accepted methods in
the works they consume, turn with relief to the younger writers,
the professorial and established critics still thundering violently
against the younger schools. For, everywhere but in England, schools
establish themselves as soon as restlessnesses betray themselves
in artistic circles. The more experienced readers, in spite of the
critics, spreading abroad amongst the larger classes of the relatively
unlettered the taste for the newer modes, at first that larger class
become converts and then the professional critics whose bread and
butter depends on their following the public taste. So a school is
established and for a time holds its own. Then it gives place to other
modes.
That is the quite invariable process with all the products and all
the methods, of all the arts. But naturally, as the arts grow older,
their practitioners have a better chance of evolving newer and sounder
methods, for the number of their predecessors has inevitably increased.
Bunyan must evolve his method for himself; Defoe could study Bunyan;
Richardson, Bunyan and Defoe; Diderot, Richardson and his predecessors;
Stendhal could draw on the experience of four generations; Flaubert
on that of five; Conrad on that of six. This of course is a source
of danger to weaker brethren, for in each generation an enormous
amount of insipid art is turned out by inferior students receiving
their instruction at the hands of academic instructors. That cannot
be helped. But the fact remains that to a real master possessed of a
real individuality the study of the methods of his predecessors must
be of enormous use. Anyone at all instructed, reading the work of
Conrad, must find evidence of an almost lifelong and almost incredibly
minute study of writers preceding him and the amount of reading and
of study--for they are not the same thing--that must have gone to the
making of the author of _Ulysses_, who is certainly the greatest of all
prose virtuosi of the word--that beggars the imagination!
So it happened that in France from, say, the ’fifties to the early
’nineties of the last century, you had a place of dignity found for the
hitherto despised Novel--and in consequence you very speedily found
an accepted convention. For once an occupation is discovered to be
dignified you will very soon find that investigators of methods are
at work upon it. The game of marbles was, in my hey-day, regarded as
an occupation solely for little boys; but with the institution some
few years ago of an international championship it came in for the most
serious of study by grown men, and the photographs of last year’s
world-contest that a little time ago filled the public prints, showed
the competitors to be white-headed, grey-bearded, or very rotund of
figure. The champion was eventually found, as far as I can remember, in
a gentleman of sixty and over.
So with _Le Rouge et le Noir_ it became evident to the world that the
novel of discussion or of investigation was a possibility and, with
that discovery, the great novels began to come. The discussions to
be found in the very few works of fiction by Diderot were naturally
experimental and amateurish. Like Richardson he was tremendously on the
side of the more or less patriarchal and civic angels. Nevertheless,
he could give you a parasite talking in favour of his profession or
a rogue justifying his courses with a sincerity and a reasonable
ingenuousness that differed extremely from the exaggerated speeches
of the villains of the Fielding, the Dickens, or the commercial,
nuvvle. Stendhal, on the other hand, being what one might call a cold
Nietzschean--or it might be more just to say that Nietzsche was a
warmed-up Stendhalean--Stendhal, then, swung the balance rather to
the other extreme, tending to make his detrimentals argumentatively
masterly and his conventionally virtuous characters banal and impotent.
At any rate, with or after Stendhal, it became evident that, if the
novel was to have what is called _vraisemblance_, if it was so to
render life as to engross its reader, the novelist must not take sides
either with the virtuous whose virtues cause them to prosper or with
the vicious whose very virtues drive them always nearer and nearer to
the gallows or the pauper’s grave. That does not say that the author
need abstain from letting his conventionally virtuous characters
prosper to any thinkable extent. For however scientifically the
matter be considered, material if not intellectual honesty, sobriety,
continence, frugality, parsimony, and the other material virtues will
give any man a better chance of fourteen thousand--pounds or dollars--a
year than if he should be, however intellectually honest, financially
unsound, or a drunkard or a dreamer or one who never talks about the
baths he takes. The publisher, in fact, has a better chance of both
terrestrial and skyey mansions than the novelist.
Nevertheless, the novelist must not, by taking sides, exhibit his
preferences. He must not show his publisher as all shining benevolence
and well-soaped chastity without pointing out that his fellows, the
unwashed, incontinent, wastrel Villons of the world, sometimes practise
Robin Hoodish generosities and sometimes smooth with their works the
pillows of the agonized and sleepless. And in between the starving
Chatterton and the august house of, say, Longmans, Norton, Hurst,
Rees, and Co.--who did not publish Chatterton--he must place and set
in motion the teeming world of averagely sensual, averagely kindly,
averagely cruel, averagely honest, averagely imbecile human beings
whose providentially appointed mission would seem to be to turn into
the stuff that fills graveyards. So that it is not so much the function
of the novelist to hold the balance straight as, dispensing with all
scales or instruments for measuring, to show all the human beings of
his creation going about their avocations. He has, that is to say, to
render and not to tell. (If I say, “The wicked Mr. Blank shot nice
Blanche’s dear cat!” that is telling. If I say: “Blank raised his rifle
and aimed it at the quivering, black-burdened topmost bough of the
cherry-tree. After the report a spattered bunch of scarlet and black
quiverings dropped from branch to branch to pancake itself on the
orchard grass!” that is rather bad rendering, but still rendering. Or
if I say Monsieur Chose was a vulgar, coarse, obese and presumptuous
fellow--that is telling. But if I say, “He was a gentleman with red
whiskers that always preceded him through a doorway,” there you have
him rendered--as Maupassant rendered him.)
It was Flaubert who most shiningly preached the doctrine of the
novelist as Creator who should have a Creator’s aloofness, rendering
the world as he sees it, uttering no comments, falsifying no issues
and carrying the subject--the Affair--he has selected for rendering,
remorselessly out to its logical conclusion.
There came thus into existence the novel of Aloofness. It had even
in France something of a struggle for that existence and the author
of _Madame Bovary_ which was the first great novel logically--and
indeed passionately--to carry out this theory, had to face a criminal
prosecution because in the opinion of the Government of Napoleon III a
book that is not actively on the side of constituted authority and of
established morality is of necessity dangerous to morals and subversive
of good government.
That view--it is still largely entertained by the academic critics of
Anglo-Saxondom--is of course imbecile, but it is not without a certain
basis in the sentiments of common humanity. It is normal for poor,
badgered men to desire to read of a sort of representative type who,
as hero of a book, shall triumph over all obstacles with surprising
ease and as if with the backing of a deity. In that way they can dream
of easy ends for themselves. So they will dislike authors who do not
side with their own types. And as constituted governments and academic
bodies are made up of what the French call _hommes moyen sensuels_,
such corporations will do what they can to prevent novelists from not
taking sides with agreeable characters.
To the theory of Aloofness added itself, by a very natural process,
the other theory that the story of a novel should be the history of an
Affair and not a tale in which a central character with an attendant
female should be followed through a certain space of time until the
book comes to a happy end on a note of matrimony or to an unhappy
end--represented by a death. That latter--the normal practice of
the earlier novelist and still the normal expedient of the novel of
commerce or of escape--is again imbecile, but again designed to satisfy
a very natural human desire for finality. We have a natural desire to
be kidded into thinking that for nice agreeable persons like ourselves
life will finally bring us to a stage where an admirably planned
villa, a sempiternally charming--and yet changing--companion, and a
sufficiency of bathrooms, automobiles, gramophones, radios, and grand
pianos to establish us well in the forefront of the class to which
we hope to belong, shall witness the long, uneventful, fortunate and
effortless closing years of our lives. And our desire to be kidded into
that belief is all the stronger in that whenever we do examine with
any minuteness into the lives of our fellow human beings practically
nothing of the sort ever happens to them. So we say: “Life is too sad
for us to want to read books that remind us of it!”
But that is the justification for the novel of Aloofness, rendering
not the arbitrary felicities of a central character but the singular
normalities of an Affair. Normal humanity, deprived of the possibility
of viewing either lives or life, makes naturally for a pessimism that
demands relief either in the drugs of the happy endings of falsified
fictions or in the anodynes of superstition--one habit being as
fatal to the human intelligence as the other. But there is no need
to entertain the belief that life is sad any more than there is any
benefit to be derived from the contemplation of fictitious and banal
joys. The French peasant long ago evolved the rule that life is never
either as good or as bad as one expects it to be and so the French
peasant, like every proper man, faces life with composure--and reads
_Madame Bovary_, whilst the English, say, lawyer has never got beyond
_The Three Musketeers_.
The progress from the one to the other is simple and logical enough.
If you no longer allow yourself to take sides with your characters you
begin very soon to see that such a thing as a hero does not exist--a
discovery that even Thackeray could make. And, from there to seeing
that it is not individuals but enterprises or groups that succeed or
fail is a very small step to take. And then immediately there suggests
itself the other fact that it is not the mere death and still less
the mere marriage of an individual that brings to an end either a
group or an enterprise. It is perhaps going too far to say that _no_
man is indispensable, but it is far more usual to find that, when a
seemingly indispensable individual disappears for one reason or another
from an enterprise, that adventure proceeds with equanimity and very
little shock. I suppose the most co-operative and at the same time the
most one-man concern of to-day is the newspaper or the periodical
publication, and I suppose that in my time I must have been acquainted
with something at least of the affairs of at least a hundred journals
or periodicals each of them of necessity more or less autocratically
conducted, simply because a journal running along and having to
appear on a stated day, it is hardly ever practicable to get together
an editorial committee soon enough to make momentous decisions that
may have to be arrived at in a minute or two. Yet almost the first
discovery that the most strong-minded of editors makes after he has got
the periodical of his founding running for a month or two is that it
is the periodical that has taken charge--and the most notable fact of
journalism is that even when the most noted of editors suddenly dies
his paper in the immense majority of cases goes on running in perfect
tranquillity and with no apparent change for a period sufficiently long
to make it perfectly manifest that the great man was not in the least
indispensable.
And, as with newspapers, so with nearly all the other enterprises of
life. I am not of course saying that no great man exists or no founder
of great enterprises, though I should imagine that there must be
even more mute inglorious Miltons than ever got a chance of putting
their epics before the public. Still, the evolver of a new process or
a revived combination does exist and not infrequently does get his
chance: and there is no particular reason why the serious novelist
should not select the Affair of a successful individual for treatment.
That he seldom does so is usually because, having studied the cases
of successful men, he is apt to come to the conclusion that they are
not unseldom neither edifying as histories nor psychologically very
interesting. Alexander, that is to say, may have sighed for new worlds
to conquer, but it is probable that he would have bartered several of
his empires for the certainty of a little peace at his own fireside and
an improved digestion.
Flaubert, then, gave us _Madame Bovary_, which may be described as the
first great novel that aimed at aloofness. That it did not succeed
in its aim, Flaubert being in the end so fascinated by his Emma that
beside her and the ingenuous weakness of her genuine romanticism every
other character in the book is either hypocritical, mean or meanly
imbecile--that it did not succeed in that aim is not to be wondered at
when we consider the great, buoyant, and essentially optimist figure
that he was. And indeed, all authors being men, it is very unlikely
that the completely aloof novel will ever see the light. If you want
to be a novelist you must first be a poet and it is impossible to be a
poet and lack human sympathies or generosity of outlook. In _Education
Sentimentale_--which, if I had to decide the matter, though fortunately
I don’t, I should call the greatest novel ever written--the author of
_Madame Bovary_ gave us a nearly perfect group novel, written from a
standpoint of very nearly complete aloofness. In _Bouvard et Pécuchet_,
abandoning as it were human measures of success and failure, he takes
as his hero the imbecility of co-operative mankind and as his heroine
the futility of the accepted idea, and, being thus as it were detached
from the earth and its standards, he could draw in Bouvard and his
mate, two of the most lovable of human beings that ever set out upon a
forlorn hope. He died in the attempt.
The Flaubert school or group lasted sufficiently long in France,
though, after the late War, its influence was completely washed out
by a sort of eclecticism whose main features it is very difficult to
trace and into whose ramifications I do not intend to enter, for it
has had practically no time to influence the work of Anglo-Saxon novel
writers. Flaubert, Maupassant, Turgenev, the Gourmonts, Daudet, and the
rest of those who had their places at Brébant’s died in their allotted
years, the last survivor of any prominence being Anatole France, whose
death was greeted by an outburst of furious hatred in France such as
can seldom have greeted the passing of a distinguished figure. That
was because the French young, saddened and rendered starving by the
War which just preceded France’s death, turned with loathing from the
rather _débonnaire_ aloofness of the author of _Histoire Comique_. And
indeed if we Anglo-Saxons had suffered in the least as much as those
Latins I might well expect to find myself lynched for writing what I
have done above. I have seldom witnessed anything to equal the dismay
of a great French gathering of _littérateurs_ when their honoured
guest, an English novelist of distinction and indeed of internationally
public literary functions, told them in quite immaculate French that
all he knew of writing he had from France, and that all that he had
from France he had learned from the works of Guy de Maupassant! If he
had gone round that great assembly and had, with his glove, flicked
each one of the guests in the face, he could not have caused greater
consternation. Nevertheless it is true that Maupassant must have had
more influence on the Anglo-Saxon writer of to-day than any other
writer of fiction, Henry James possibly excepted.
In England, meantime, slightly before the 1890’s, the solid vogue
of--or the somnolent rumination over--the three-volumed nuvvle of
commerce had been seriously threatened by the slow spread of the idea
that writing might be an art, by a tremendous drop in the prices at
which books might be sold and by revolutionary attacks on Victorian
conventional morality. The loosening in morality need not concern
us except in so far as it shook the idea that the novelist must of
necessity colour all his characters with one or other hue, but the drop
in the price of books facilitated at least all sorts of experimental
adventures. Whilst the nuvvle remained a thirty-shilling three-decker
publishers must needs play for safety whether in morals or methods
and neither, say, the _Hill-top_ novels of Grant Allen, which were
pseudo-scientific attacks on conventional morality, nor yet _Almayer’s
Folly_, which was an attempt to introduce the artistic standards
and methods of Flaubert into Anglo-Saxondom, could have had even the
remotest chance of publication had the novel remained at its former
price.
On the other hand, such writers as Wilde, Stevenson, Pater, and
Meredith did, dealing mostly in verbal felicities or infelicities,
begin rather vaguely to perceive that writing was an art. Neither
Wilde nor Pater were novelists in the sense of devoting the greater
part of their time or energies to the art of fiction, and Stevenson
remained an avowed moralist, whilst Meredith devoted himself to large
national aspirations--which have nothing to do with art. And all the
four, as I have said, were essentially rather stylists _tels quels_
than anything else. When Pater, Wilde, or Meredith had succeeded in a
passage in showing what clever fellows they were they were satisfied
and Stevenson, if he had some conception of how to tell a story, was
far more gratified if he had succeeded in producing a quaint sentence
with turns of phrase after the manner of Sir Thomas Browne than intent
on the fact that every sentence--nay, every word!--should carry on the
effect of the story to be told.
But the mere fact that writers were then beginning to pay some
attention to manner rather than to matter or morals--that they were
intent on being writers rather than gentlemen--that mere fact is one
to excite lively gratitude in lands like ours and the job of being
a novelist is one of such excruciating difficulty that it would be
ungrateful to ask of pioneers that they should be more than pioneers.
The effect of their propaganda almost more than of their achievements,
combined with the cheapening of books and the impingement on
Anglo-Saxon shores of French examples of how things should be done--for
it was not until the late ’eighties that Flaubert, Maupassant, and
Turgenev really produced any overwhelming effect in either England or
the United States--the effect then of all these factors coming almost
together was an outburst of technical effort such as can have rarely
been witnessed in any other race or time. The idea that writing was an
art and as such had its dignity, that it had methods to be studied and
was therefore such another acknowledged craft as is shoe-making--such
ideas acted for a time, in the days of the _Yellow Book_, like magic on
a whole horde of English--and still more of American--writers.
I have of course not here the space to go with any minuteness into the
history of the _Yellow Book_ period. Founded by two Americans--Henry
James and Henry Harland--in London where circumstances were certainly
more favourable than they would have been in, say, New York or Boston,
the _Yellow Book_ did undoubtedly promote an interest in technical
matters that hardly any other periodical or Movement could have
done. James was a direct pupil of Turgenev; Harland and most of the
contributors to the periodical were products rather of a general
“Frenchness” than the students of any one author--the products of a
blend of Mallarmé, Mérimée, Murger, and Maupassant and a Quartier Latin
frame of mind and personal untidiness.
Its defect as a movement was that its supporters, also, probably aimed
rather at displaying personal cleverness than at the concealment of
themselves beneath the surfaces of their works. They had not yet learnt
the sternest of all lessons--that the story is the thing, and the story
and then the story, and that there is nothing else that matters in the
world.
_L’ENVOI_
IN THE LAST QUARTER OF A CENTURY
When the dust of the _Yellow Book_ period died away with the trial and
disappearance of Wilde there did nevertheless remain in the public
and the literary mind some conception that novel-writing was an art
and that the novel was a vehicle by means of which every kind of
psychological or scientific truth connected with human life and affairs
could be very fittingly conveyed. To-day I imagine that there would not
be many found to deny that it is the vehicle by means of which those
truths can be most fittingly investigated. To that we may some day
return.
In the meantime the _Yellow Book_ period also left behind it three men
whose names must for ever stand out for the student of the history of
the English Novel--they were Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Joseph
Conrad. I do not purpose here to attempt an estimate of any one of the
three; I merely wish to point out what it was that distinguished them
from all of their predecessors and nearly all of their distinguished
contemporaries. Their distinguished contemporaries are all, most
fortunately, still alive and so beyond the reach of my pen--but it
must, I imagine, he fairly obvious that, say, Mr. Wells, Mr. Kipling,
Mr. Galsworthy, or Mr. Arnold Bennett are each solitary figures,
ploughing lonely furrows and expressing their admirable selves in
admirable ways known only to themselves.
About that other triad there was a certain solidarity, a certain
oneness of method and even a certain comradeship. They lived in the
same corner of England, saw each other often and discussed literary
methods more thoroughly and more frequently than can ever at any other
time in England have been the case. To be sure, not one of the three
was English.
Indeed, some ten years or so ago my friend Mr. Wells wrote to the
papers to say that in the first decade of this century a group of
foreigners occupied that corner of England and were engaged in plotting
against the English novel. At the time that appeared to be the
sort of patriotic nonsense that occupied our minds a good deal just
after the War--but Mr. Wells, as usual, was right. The extent of the
conspiracy was this: the works of those three writers whose influence
on the Anglo-Saxon--and even to some extent on the British--novel was
overwhelming--were united by a common technique and their literary aims
were to all intents exactly the same.
All three treated their characters with aloofness; all three kept
themselves, their comments and their prejudices out of their works, and
all three rendered rather than told. On the whole those characteristics
which never before characterized the English novel characterize it
to-day. No one, that is, would to-day set out to capture the suffrages
of either the more instructed or of even the almost altogether naïf
with a novel of the type of those written by the followers of Bunyan,
Defoe, Fielding, Charles Reade, or William Black. No author would, like
Thackeray, to-day intrude his broken nose and myopic spectacles into
the middle of the most thrilling scene he ever wrote, in order to tell
you that, though his heroine was rather a wrong ’un, his own heart was
in his right place.
James, Conrad, and Crane differed from each other in minute points
and indeed in broader characteristics. James was more introspective,
Crane more incisive in his writing, Conrad more nearly approached the
ordinary definition of the poet and was less remorselessly aloof than
either of the others. But their common, Gallic origin united them, so
that they had before all for their strongest passion the desire to
convey vicarious experience to the reader. Conrad wrote of his literary
aim: “It is above all to make you see,” and Crane might have written
the same thing had he ever written about himself. And Henry James might
have written if he could ever have brought himself to write anything so
unqualified about his aims: “It is above all to make you feel!” At any
rate, the common aim was to take the reader, immerse him in an Affair
so completely that he was unconscious either of the fact that he was
reading or of the identity of the author, so that in the end he might
say--and believe: “I have been in a drawing-room overlooking Boston
Common, in a drinking saloon in Yellow Sky or beneath the palm leaves
of Palembang! I _have_ been!”
At this aim, to which they certainly attained, they arrived by certain
technical devices or rules. Most of these I have already foreshadowed
and as I am not here writing a technical work, I do not propose to go
into the others at all closely. The only sound technical rules are
those that are founded on a study of what pleases: if what you write
is to please you must see how your predecessors did it. There can be
nothing either highbrow or recondite about your efforts; the nearer you
are to your fellowman who differs from you only in not having literary
ambitions or gifts, the nearer you are to universality; the nearer you
are to universality the greater you are, the more nearly you will have
justified your existence.
You must therefore write as simply as you can--with the extreme of the
simplicity that is granted to you, and you must write of subjects that
spring at your throat. But why subjects appeal to you you have no means
of knowing. The appeal of the subject is nevertheless the only thing
that is open to your native genius--the only thing as to which you can
say: “I cannot help it: that is what appealed to me!” You must never,
after that, say: “I write like this because I want to,” but you must
say: “I write like this because I hope it is what the unspoiled reader
likes!”
Having got your subject you will, if you are prudent, live with it for
a long, long time before you sit down to write it. During that time
you will be doing at odd moments what Conrad used to call “squeezing
the guts out of it.” For it is a mistake to think that what looks like
the rendering of an ordinary affair is ever an artless chronicling.
Your “subject” may be just the merest nothing in the way of intrigue
or plot--but to the merest nothings in human affairs all the intrigues
of the universe have contributed since first this earth swung away, a
drop of molten metal, from the first of all principles. Your “subject”
might be no more than a child catching frogs in a swamp or the emotions
of a nervous woman in a thunderstorm, but all the history of the world
has gone to putting child or woman where they are and up to either
subject you might lead with an epic as thrilling in its end as that of
_Othello_ or an episode as poignant with absolute relief as came to the
world on the eleventh of November, 1918. You have at your disposal
heredity, environment, the concatenation of the effects of the one
damn thing after another that life is--and Destiny who is blind and
august. Those are the colours of your palette: it is for you to see
that line by line and filament of colour by filament, the reader’s eye
is conducted to your culminating point.
That is, then, all that I have to say of the gradual progress of the
English novel--to the point where it becomes the Novel. I have traced
out as plainly as I could the lines of the pattern as it appears to me
and the reader must use that pattern for what jumpings off of his own
he chooses to make.
That this is not the final stage of the Novel is obvious; there will
be developments that we cannot foresee, strain our visions how we may.
There are probably--humanity being stable, change the world how it
may--there are probably eternal principles for all the arts, but the
applications of those principles are eternally changing, or eternally
revolving. It is, for instance, an obvious and unchanging fact that if
an author intrudes his comments into the middle of his story he will
endanger the illusion conveyed by that story--but a generation of
readers may come along who would prefer witnessing the capers of the
author to being carried away by stories and that generation of readers
may coincide with a generation of writers tired of self-obliteration.
So you might have a world of Oscar Wildes or of Lylys. Or you might,
again, have a world tired of the really well constructed novel
every word of which carries its story forward: then you will have a
movement towards diffuseness, backboneless sentences, digressions, and
inchoatenesses.
But, for the moment, the outline that I have traced for you seems to
have got about as far as we ourselves have.
Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd., Frome and London
Transcriber’s note: Italics are indicated by _underscores_.
As no original book cover image is available, a cover image made by
the transcriber is placed in the public domain.
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