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diff --git a/78426-0.txt b/78426-0.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5b918bb --- /dev/null +++ b/78426-0.txt @@ -0,0 +1,2979 @@ +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78426 *** + + + 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. + +*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78426 *** |