_ASPECTS_
OF THE NOVEL
E. M. FORSTER
NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1927, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
_By the same author_
A PASSAGE TO INDIA
HOWARDS END
A ROOM WITH A VIEW
THE LONGEST JOURNEY
WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD
THE CELESTIAL OMNIBUS _and other stories_
THE ETERNAL MOMENT _and other stories_
ABINGER HARVEST
GOLDSWORTHY LOWES DICKINSON
VIRGINIA WOOLF (_The Rede Lecture_)
_To_
CHARLES MAURON
NOTE
THESE are some lectures (the Clark lectures) which were delivered under
the auspices of Trinity College, Cambridge, in the spring of 1927. They
were informal, indeed talkative, in their tone, and it seemed safer when
presenting them in book form not to mitigate the talk, in case nothing
should be left at all. Words such as "I," "you," "one," "we," "curiously
enough," "so to speak," "only imagine," and "of course" will
consequently occur on every page and will rightly distress the sensitive
reader; but he is asked to remember that if these words were removed
others, perhaps more distinguished, might escape through the orifices
they left, and that since the novel is itself often colloquial it may
possibly withhold some of its secrets from the graver and grander
streams of criticism, and may reveal them to backwaters and shallows.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I INTRODUCTORY
II THE STORY
III PEOPLE
IV PEOPLE (_continued_)
V THE PLOT
VI FANTASY
VII PROPHECY
VIII PATTERN AND RHYTHM
IX CONCLUSION
INDEX OF MAIN REFERENCES
ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL
I
INTRODUCTORY
THIS lectureship is connected with the name of William George Clark, a
fellow of Trinity. It is through him we meet today, and through him we
shall approach our subject.
Clark was, I believe, a Yorkshireman. He was born in 1821, was at school
at Sedbergh and Shrewsbury, entered Trinity as an undergraduate in 1840,
became fellow four years later, and made the college his home for nearly
thirty years, only leaving it when his health broke, shortly before his
death. He is best known as a Shakespearian scholar, but he published two
books on other subjects to which we must here refer. He went as a young
man to Spain and wrote a pleasant lively account of his holiday called
_Gazpacho_: Gazpacho being the name of a certain cold soup which he ate
and appears to have enjoyed among the peasants of Andalusia: indeed he
appears to have enjoyed everything. Eight years later, as a result of a
holiday in Greece, he published a second book, _Peloponnesus_.
_Peloponnesus_ is a graver work and a duller. Greece was a serious place
in those days, more serious than Spain, besides, Clark had by now not
only taken Orders but become Public Orator, and he was, above all,
travelling with Dr. Thompson, the then Master of the college, who was
not at all the sort of person to be involved in a cold soup. The jests
about mules and fleas are consequently few, and we are increasingly
confronted with the remains of Classical Antiquity and the sites of
battles. What survives in the book--apart from its learning--is its
feeling for Greek country-side. Clark also travelled in Italy and
Poland.
To turn to his academic career. He planned the great _Cambridge
Shakespeare_, first with Glover, then with Aldis Wright (both librarians
of Trinity), and, helped by Aldis Wright, he issued the _Globe
Shakespeare_, a popular text. He collected much material for an edition
of Aristophanes. He also published some Sermons, but in 1869 he gave up
Holy Orders--which, by the way, will exempt us from excessive orthodoxy.
Like his friend and biographer Leslie Stephen, like Henry Sidgwick and
others of that generation, he did not find it possible to remain in the
Church, and he has explained his reasons in a pamphlet entitled _The
Present Dangers of the Church of England_. He resigned his post of
Public Orator in consequence, while retaining his college tutorship. He
died at the age of fifty-seven, esteemed by all who knew him as a
lovable, scholarly and honest man. You will have realized that he is a
Cambridge figure. Not a figure in the great world or even at Oxford, but
a spirit peculiar to these courts, which perhaps only you who tread them
after him can justly appreciate: the spirit of integrity. Out of a
bequest in his will, his old college has provided for a series of
lectures, to be delivered annually "on some period or periods of English
Literature not earlier than Chaucer," and that is why we meet here now.
Invocations are out of fashion, yet I wanted to make this small one, for
two reasons. Firstly, may a little of Clark's integrity be with us
through this course; and secondly, may he accord us a little
inattention! For I am not keeping quite strictly to the terms laid
down--"Period or periods of English Literature." This condition, though
it sounds liberal and is liberal enough in spirit, happens verbally not
quite to suit our subject, and I shall occupy the introductory lecture
in explaining why this is. The points raised may seem trivial. But they
will lead us to a convenient vantage post from which we can begin our
main attack next week.
We need a vantage post, for the novel is a formidable mass, and it is so
amorphous--no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even
a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of
literature--irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating
into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they
sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at
the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among
them. Perhaps we ought to define what a novel is before starting. This
will not take a second. M. Abel Chevalley has, in his brilliant little
manual,[1] provided a definition, and if a French critic cannot define
the English novel, who can? It is, he says, "a fiction in prose of a
certain extent" (une fiction en prose d'une certaine étendue). That is
quite good enough for us, and we may perhaps go so far as to add that
the extent should not be less than 50,000 words. Any fictitious prose
work over 50,000 words will be a novel for the purposes of these
lectures, and if this seems to you unphilosophic will you think of an
alternative definition, which will include _The Pilgrim's Progress_,
_Marius the Epicurean_, _The Adventures of a Younger Son_, _The Magic
Flute_, _The Journal of the Plague_, _Zuleika Dobson_, _Rasselas_,
_Ulysses_, and _Green Mansions_, or else will give reasons for their
exclusion? Parts of our spongy tract seem more fictitious than other
parts, it is true: near the middle, on a tump of grass, stand Miss
Austen with the figure of Emma by her side, and Thackeray holding up
Esmond. But no intelligent remark known to me will define the tract as a
whole. All we can say of it is that it is bounded by two chains of
mountains neither of which rises very abruptly--the opposing ranges of
Poetry and of History--and bounded on the third side by a sea--a sea
that we shall encounter when we come to _Moby Dick_.
Let us begin by considering the proviso "English Literature." "English"
we shall of course interpret as written in English, not as published
south of the Tweed or east of the Atlantic, or north of the Equator: we
need not attend to geographical accidents, they can be left to the
politicians. Yet, even with this interpretation, are we as free as we
wish? Can we, while discussing English fiction, quite ignore fiction
written in other languages, particularly French and Russian? As far as
influence goes, we could ignore it, for our writers have never been much
influenced by the continentals. But--for reasons soon to be explained--I
want to talk as little as possible about influence during these
lectures. My subject is a particular kind of book and the aspects that
book has assumed in English. Can we ignore its collateral aspects on the
continent? Not entirely. An unpleasant and unpatriotic truth has here to
be faced. No English novelist is as great as Tolstoy--that is to say has
given so complete a picture of man's life, both on its domestic and
heroic side. No English novelist has explored man's soul as deeply as
Dostoevsky. And no novelist anywhere has analysed the modern
consciousness as successfully as Marcel Proust. Before these triumphs we
must pause. English poetry fears no one--excels in quality as well as
quantity. But English Action is less triumphant: it does not contain the
best stuff yet written, and if we deny this we become guilty of
provincialism.
Now, provincialism does not signify in a writer, and may indeed be the
chief source of his strength: only a prig or a fool would complain that
Defoe is cockneyfied or Thomas Hardy countrified. But provincialism in a
critic is a serious fault. A critic has no right to the narrowness which
is the frequent prerogative of the creative artist. He has to have a
wide outlook or he has not anything at all. Although the novel exercises
the rights of a created object, criticism has not those rights, and too
many little mansions in English fiction have been acclaimed to their own
detriment as important edifices. Take four at random: _Cranford_, _The
Heart of Midlothian_, _Jane Eyre_, _Richard Feverel_. For various
personal and local reasons we may be attached to these four books.
_Cranford_ radiates the humour of the urban midlands, _Midlothian_ is a
handful out of Edinburgh, _Jane Eyre_ is the passionate dream of a fine
but still undeveloped woman. _Richard Feverel_ exudes farmhouse lyricism
and flickers with modish wit, but all four are little mansions, not
mighty edifices, and we shall see and respect them for what they are if
we stand them for an instant in the colonnades of _War and Peace_, or
the vaults of _The Brothers Karamazov_.
I shall not often refer to foreign novels in these lectures, still less
would I pose as an expert on them who is debarred from discussing them
by his terms of reference. But I do want to emphasize their greatness
before we start; to cast, so to speak, this preliminary shadow over our
subject, so that when we look back on it at the end we may have the
better chance of seeing it in its true lights.
So much for the proviso "English." Now for a more important proviso,
that of "period or periods." This idea of a period of a development in
time, with its consequent emphasis on influences and schools, happens to
be exactly what I am hoping to avoid during our brief survey, and I
believe that the author of _Gazpacho_ will be lenient. Time, all the way
through, is to be our enemy. We are to visualize the English novelists
not as floating down that stream which bears all its sons away unless
they are careful, but as seated together in a room, a circular room, a
sort of British Museum reading-room--all writing their novels
simultaneously. They do not, as they sit there, think "I live under
Queen Victoria, I under Anne, I carry on the tradition of Trollope, I am
reacting against Aldous Huxley." The fact that their pens are in their
hands is far more vivid to them. They are half mesmerized, their sorrows
and joys are pouring out through the ink, they are approximated by the
act of creation, and when Professor Oliver Elton says, as he does, that
"after 1847 the novel of passion was never to be the same again," none
of them understand what he means. That is to be our vision of them--an
imperfect vision, but it is suited to our powers, it will preserve us
from a serious danger, the danger of pseudo-scholarship.
Genuine scholarship is one of the highest successes which our race can
achieve. No one is more triumphant than the man who chooses a worthy
subject and masters all its facts and the leading facts of the subjects
neighbouring. He can then do what he likes. He can, if his subject is
the novel, lecture on it chronologically if he wishes because he has
read all the important novels of the past four centuries, many of the
unimportant ones, and has adequate knowledge of any collateral facts
that bear upon English fiction. The late Sir Walter Raleigh (who once
held this lectureship) was such a scholar. Raleigh knew so many facts
that he was able to proceed to influences, and his monograph on the
English novel adopts the treatment by period which his unworthy
successor must avoid. The scholar, like the philosopher, can contemplate
the river of time. He contemplates it not as a whole, but he can see the
facts, the personalities, floating past him, and estimate the relations
between them, and if his conclusions could be as valuable to us as they
are to himself he would long ago have civilized the human race. As you
know, he has failed. True scholarship is incommunicable, true scholars
rare. There are a few scholars, actual or potential, in the audience
today, but only a few, and there is certainly none on the platform. Most
of us are pseudo-scholars, and I want to consider our characteristics
with sympathy and respect, for we are a very large and quite a powerful
class, eminent in Church and State, we control the education of the
Empire, we lend to the Press such distinction as it consents to receive,
and we are a welcome asset at dinner-parties.
Pseudo-scholarship is, on its good side, the homage paid by ignorance to
learning. It also has an economic side, on which we need not be hard.
Most of us must get a job before thirty, or sponge on our relatives, and
many jobs can only be got by passing an exam. The pseudo-scholar often
does well in examination (real scholars are not much good), and even
when he fails he appreciates their innate majesty. They are gateways to
employment, they have power to ban and bless. A paper on _King Lear_ may
lead somewhere, unlike the rather far-fetched play of the same name. It
may be a stepping-stone to the Local Government Board. He does not often
put it to himself openly and say "That's the use of knowing things, they
help you to get on." The economic pressure he feels is more often
subconscious, and he goes to his exam, merely feeling that a paper on
King Lear is a very tempestuous and terrible experience but an intensely
real one. And whether he be cynical or naïf, he is not to be blamed. As
long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can
only be reached through exams, so long must we take the examination
system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much
so-called education would disappear, and no one be a penny the stupider.
It is when he comes to criticism--to a job like the present--that he can
be so pernicious, because he follows the method of a true scholar
without having his equipment. He classes books before he has understood
or read them; that is his first crime. Classification by chronology.
Books written before 1847, books written after it, books written after
or before 1848. The novel in the reign of Queen Anne, the pre-novel, the
ur-novel, the novel of the future. Classification by subject
matter--sillier still. The literature of Inns, beginning with _Tom
Jones_; the literature of the Women's Movement, beginning with
_Shirley_; the literature of Desert Islands, from _Robinson Crusoe_ to
_The Blue Lagoon_; the literature of Rogues--dreariest of all, though
the Open Road runs it pretty close; the literature of Sussex (perhaps
the most devoted of the Home Counties); improper books--a serious though
dreadful branch of enquiry, only to be pursued by pseudo-scholars of
riper years, novels relating to industrialism, aviation, chiropody, the
weather. I include the weather on the authority of the most amazing work
on the novel that I have met for many years. It came over the Atlantic
to me, nor shall I ever forget it. It was a literary manual entitled
_Materials and Methods of Fiction_. The writer's name shall be
concealed. He was a pseudo-scholar and a good one. He classified novels
by their dates, their length, their locality, their sex, their point of
view, till no more seemed possible. But he still had the weather up his
sleeve, and when he brought it out, it had nine heads. He gave an
example under each head, for he was anything but slovenly, and we will
run through his list. In the first place the weather can be
"decorative," as in Pierre Loti; then "utilitarian," as in _The Mill on
the Floss_ (no Floss, no Mill; no Mill, no Tullivers); "illustrative,"
as in _The Egoist_; "planned in pre-established harmony," as by Fiona
MacLeod; "in emotional contrast," as in _The Master of Ballantrae_;
"determinative of action," as in a certain Kipling story, where a man
proposes to the wrong girl on account of a mud storm; "a controlling
influence," _Richard Feverel_; "itself a hero," like Vesuvius in _The
Days of Pompeii_; and ninethly, it can be "non-existent," as in a
nursery tale. I liked him flinging in non-existence. It made everything
so scientific and trim. But he himself remained a little dissatisfied,
and having finished his classification he said yes, of course there was
one more thing, and that was genius; it was useless for a novelist to
know that there are nine sorts of weather, unless he has genius also.
Cheered by this reflection, he classified novels by their tones. There
are only two tones, personal and impersonal, and having given examples
of each he grew pensive again and said, "Yes, but you must have genius
too, or neither tone will profit."
This constant reference to genius is another characteristic of the
pseudo-scholar. He loves mentioning genius, because the sound of the
word exempts him from trying to discover its meaning. Literature is
written by geniuses. Novelists are geniuses. There we are; now let us
classify them. Which he does. Everything he says may be accurate but all
is useless because he is moving round books instead of through them, he
either has not read them or cannot read them properly. Books have to be
read (worse luck, for it takes a long time); it is the only way of
discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading
is the only method of assimilation revealed to the west. The reader must
sit down alone and struggle with the writer, and this the pseudo-scholar
will not do. He would rather relate a book to the history of its time,
to events in the life of its author, to the events it describes, above
all to some tendency. As soon as he can use the word "tendency" his
spirits rise, and though those of his audience may sink, they often pull
out their pencils at this point and make a note, under the belief that a
tendency is portable.
That is why, in the rather ramshackly course that lies ahead of us, we
cannot consider fiction by periods, we must not contemplate the stream
of time. Another image better suits our powers: that of all the
novelists writing their novels at once. They come from different ages
and ranks, they have different temperaments and aims, but they all hold
pens in their hands, and are in the process of creation. Let us look
over their shoulders for a moment and see what they are writing. It may
exorcise that demon of chronology which is at present our enemy and
which (we shall discover next week) is sometimes their enemy too. "Oh,
what quenchless feud is this, that Time hath with the sons of men,"
cries Herman Melville, and the feud goes on not only in life and death
but in the by-ways of literary creation and criticism. Let us avoid it
by imagining that all the novelists are at work together in a circular
room. I shall not mention their names until we have heard their words,
because a name brings associations with it, dates, gossip, all the
furniture of the method we are discarding.
They have been instructed to group themselves in pairs. We approach the
first pair, and read as follows:--
i. I don't know what to do--not I. God forgive me, but I am very
impatient! I wish--but I don't know what to wish without a sin. Yet I
wish it would please God to take me to his mercy!--I can meet with none
here.--What a world is this!--What is there in it desirable? The good we
hope for so strangely mixed, that one knows not what to wish for! And
one half of mankind tormenting the other and being tormented themselves
in tormenting.
ii. What I hate is myself--when I think that one has to take so much, to
be happy, out of the lives of others, and that one isn't happy even
then. One does it to cheat one's self and to stop one's mouth--but that
is only, at the best, for a little. The wretched self is always there,
always making us somehow a fresh anxiety. What it comes to is that it's
not, that it's never, a happiness, any happiness at all, to _take_. The
only safe thing is to give. It's what plays you least false.
It is obvious that here sit two novelists who are looking at life from
much the same angle, yet the first of them is Samuel Richardson, and the
second you will have already identified as Henry James. Each is an
anxious rather than an ardent psychologist. Each is sensitive to
suffering and appreciates self-sacrifice; each falls short of the
tragic, though a close approach is made. A sort of tremulous
nobility--that is the spirit that dominates them--and oh how well they
write!--not a word out of place in their copious flows. A hundred and
fifty years of time divide them, but are not they close together in other
ways, and may not their neighbourliness profit us? Of course as I say
this I hear Henry James beginning to express his regret--no, not his
regret but his surprise--no, not even his surprise but his awareness
that neighbourliness is being postulated of him, and postulated, must he
add, in relation to a shopkeeper. And I hear Richardson, equally
cautious, wondering whether any writer born outside England can be
chaste. But these are surface differences, are indeed no differences at
all, but additional points of contact. We leave them sitting in harmony,
and proceed to our next pair.
i. All the preparations for the funeral ran easily and happily under
Mrs. Johnson's skilful hands. On the eve of the sad occasion she
produced a reserve of black sateen, the kitchen steps, and a box of
tintacks, and decorated the house with festoons and bows of black in the
best possible taste. She tied up the knocker with black crêpe, and put
a large bow over the corner of the steel engraving of Garibaldi, and
swathed the bust of Mr. Gladstone that had belonged to the deceased with
inky swathings. She turned the two vases that had views of Tivoli and
the Bay of Naples round, so that these rather brilliant landscapes were
hidden and only the plain blue enamel showed, and she anticipated the
long contemplated purchase of a tablecloth for the front room, and
substituted a violet purple cover for the now very worn and faded
raptures and roses in plushette that had hitherto done duty there.
Everything that loving consideration could do to impart a dignified
solemnity to her little home was done.
ii. The air of the parlour being faint with the smell of sweet cake, I
looked about for the table of refreshments; it was scarcely visible
until one had got accustomed to the gloom, but there was a cut-up plum
cake upon it, and there were cut-up oranges, and sandwiches, and
biscuits, and two decanters that I knew very well as ornaments, but had
never seen used in all my life; one full of port, and one of sherry.
Standing at this table, I became conscious of the servile Pumblechook in
a black cloak and several yards of hat-band, who was alternately
stuffing himself, and making obsequious movements to catch my attention.
The moment he succeeded, he came over to me (breathing sherry and
crumbs) and said in a subdued voice, "May I, dear sir?" and did.
These two funerals did not by any means happen on the same day. One is
the funeral of Mr. Polly's father (1920), the other the funeral of Mrs.
Gargery in _Great Expectations_ (1860). Yet Wells and Dickens are
describing them from the same point of view and even using the same
tricks of style (cf. the two vases and the two decanters). They are,
both, humorists and visualizers who get an effect by cataloguing details
and whisking the page over irritably. They are generous-minded; they
hate shams and enjoy being indignant about them; they are valuable
social reformers; they have no notion of confining books to a library
shelf. Sometimes the lively surface of their prose scratches like a
cheap gramophone record, a certain poorness of quality appears, and the
face of the author draws rather too near to that of the reader. In other
words, neither of them has much taste: the world of beauty was largely
closed to Dickens, and is entirely closed to Wells. And there are other
parallels--for instance their method of drawing character, but that we
shall examine later on. And perhaps the great difference between them is
the difference of opportunity offered to an obscure boy of genius a
hundred years ago and to a similar boy forty years ago. The difference
is all in Wells' favour. He is far better educated than his predecessor;
in particular the addition of science has strengthened his mind out of
recognition and subdued his hysteria. He registers an improvement in
society: Dotheboys Hall has been superseded by the Polytechnic. But he
does not register any change in the novelist's art.
What about our next pair?
i. But as for that mark, I'm not sure about it; I don't believe it was
made by a nail after all; it's too big, too round, for that I might get
up, but if I got up and looked at it, ten to one I shouldn't be able to
say for certain; because once a thing's done, no one ever knows how it
happened. O dear me, the mystery of life! The inaccuracy of thought! The
ignorance of humanity! To show how very little control of our
possessions we have--what an accidental affair this living is after all
our civilization--let me just count over a few of the things lost on one
lifetime, beginning, for that always seems the most mysterious of
losses--what cat would gnaw, what rat would nibble--three pale blue
canisters of bookbinding tools? Then there were the birdcages, the iron
hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne coal-scuttle, the
bagatelle-board, the hand-organ--all gone, and jewels too. Opals and
emeralds, they lie about the roots of turnips. What a scraping paring
affair it is to be sure! The wonder is that I've any clothes on my back,
that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one
wants to compare life to anything one must liken it to being blown
through the Tube at fifty miles an hour....
ii. Every day for at least ten years together did my father resolve to
have it mended; 'tis not mended yet. No family but ours would have borne
with it an hour, and what is most astonishing, there was not a subject
in the world upon which my father was so eloquent as upon that of
door-hinges. And yet, at the same time, he was certainly one of the
greatest bubbles to them, I think, that history can produce; his
rhetoric and conduct were at perpetual handy-cuffs. Never did the
parlour door open but his philosophy or his principles fell a victim to
it; three drops of oil with a feather, and a smart stroke of a hammer,
had saved his honour for ever.
Inconsistent soul that man is; languishing under wounds which he has the
power to heal; his whole life a contradiction to his knowledge; his
reason, that precious gift of God to him (instead of pouring in oil),
serving but to sharpen his sensibilities, to multiply his pains, and
render him more melancholy and uneasy under them! Poor unhappy creature,
that he should do so! Are not the necessary causes of misery in this
life enough, but he must add voluntary ones to his stock of sorrow?
Struggle against evils which cannot be avoided, and submit to others
which a tenth part of the trouble they create him would remove from his
heart for ever.
By all that is good and virtuous, if there are three drops of oil to be
got and a hammer to be found within ten miles of Shandy Hall, the
parlour door hinge shall be mended this reign.
The passage last quoted is, of course, out of _Tristram Shandy_. The
other passage was from Virginia Woolf. She and Sterne are both
fantasists. They start with a little object, take a flutter from it, and
settle on it again. They combine a humorous appreciation of the muddle
of life with a keen sense of its beauty. There is even the same tone in
their voices--a rather deliberate bewilderment, an announcement to all
and sundry that they do not know where they are going. No doubt their
scales of value are not the same. Sterne is a sentimentalist, Virginia
Woolf (except perhaps in her latest work, _To the Lighthouse_) is
extremely aloof. Nor are their achievements on the same scale. But their
medium is similar, the same odd effects are obtained by it, the parlour
door is never mended, the mark on the wall turns out to be a snail, life
is such a muddle, oh, dear, the will is so weak, the sensations
fidgety--philosophy--God--oh, dear, look at the mark--listen to the
door--existence is really too ... what were we saying?
Does not chronology seem less important now that we have visualized six
novelists at their jobs? If the novel develops, is it not likely to
develop on different lines from the British Constitution, or even the
Women's Movement? I say "even the Women's Movement" because there
happened to be a close association between fiction in England and that
movement during the nineteenth century--a connection so close that it
has misled some critics into thinking it an organic connection. As women
bettered their position the novel, they asserted, became better too.
Quite wrong. A mirror does not develop because an historical pageant
passes in front of it. It only develops when it gets a fresh coat of
quicksilver--in other words, when it acquires new sensitiveness; and the
novel's success lies in its own sensitiveness, not in the success of its
subject matter. Empires fall, votes are accorded, but to those people
writing in the circular room it is the feel of the pen between their
fingers that matters most. They may decide to write a novel upon the
French or the Russian Revolution, but memories, associations, passions,
rise up and cloud their objectivity, so that at the close, when they
re-read, some one else seems to have been holding their pen and to have
relegated their theme to the background. That "some one else" is their
self no doubt, but not the self that is so active in time and lives
under George IV or V. All through history writers while writing have
felt more or less the same. They have entered a common state which it is
convenient to call inspiration,[2] and having regard to that state, we
may say that History develops, Art stands still.
History develops, Art stands still, is a crude motto, indeed it is
almost a slogan, and though forced to adopt it we must not do so without
admitting it vulgarily. It contains only a partial truth.
It debars us in the first place from considering whether the human mind
alters from generation to generation; whether, for instance, Thomas
Deloney, who wrote humorously about shops and pubs in the reign of Queen
Elizabeth, differs fundamentally from his modern representative--who
would be some one of the calibre of Neil Lyons or Pett Ridge. As a
matter of fact Deloney did not differ; differed as an individual, but
not fundamentally, not because he lived four hundred years ago. Four
thousand, fourteen thousand years might give us pause, but four hundred
years is nothing in the life of our race, and does not allow room for
any measurable change. So our slogan here is no practical hindrance. We
can chant it without shame.
It is more serious when we turn to the development of tradition and see
what we lose through being debarred from examining that. Apart from
schools and influences and fashions, there has been a technique in
English fiction, and this does alter from generation to generation. The
technique of laughing at characters for instance: to smoke and to rag
are not identical; the Elizabethan humorist picks up his victim in a
different way from the modern, raises his laugh by other tricks. Or the
technique of fantasy: Virginia Woolf, though her aim and general effect
both resemble Sterne's, differs from him in execution; she belongs to
the same tradition but to a later phase of it. Or the technique of
conversation: in my pairs of examples I could not include a couple of
dialogues, though I wanted to, for the reason that the use of the "he
said" and "she said" varies so much through the centuries that it
colours its surroundings, and though the speakers may be similarly
conceived they will not seem so in an extract. Well, we cannot examine
questions like these, and must admit we are the poorer, though we can
abandon the development of subject matter and the development of the
human race without regret. Literary tradition is the borderland lying
between literature and history, and the well-equipped critic will spend
much time there and enrich his judgment accordingly. We cannot go there
because we have not read enough. We must pretend it belongs to history
and cut it off accordingly. We must refuse to have anything to do with
chronology.
Let me quote here for our comfort from my immediate predecessor in this
lectureship, Mr. T. S. Eliot. Mr. Eliot enumerates, in the introduction
to _The Sacred Wood_, the duties of the critic. "It is part of his
business to preserve tradition--when a good tradition exists. It is part
of his business to see literature steadily and to see it whole; and this
is eminently to see it not as consecrated by time, but to see it beyond
time." The first duty we cannot perform, the second we must try to
perform. We can neither examine nor preserve tradition. But we can
visualize the novelists as sitting in one room, and force them, by our
very ignorance, from the limitations of date and place. I think that is
worth doing, or I should not have ventured to undertake this course.
How then are we to attack the novel--that spongy tract, those fictions
in prose of a certain extent which extend so indeterminately? Not with
any elaborate apparatus. Principles and systems may suit other forms of
art, but they cannot be applicable here--or if applied their results
must be subjected to re-examination. And who is the re-examiner? Well, I
am afraid it will be the human heart, it will be this man-to-man
business, justly suspect in its cruder forms. The final test of a novel
will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of
anything else which we cannot define. Sentimentality--to some a worse
demon than chronology--will lurk in the background saying, "Oh, but I
like that," "Oh, but that doesn't appeal to me," and all I can promise
is that sentimentality shall not speak too loudly or too soon. The
intensely, stiflingly human quality of the novel is not to be avoided;
the novel is sogged with humanity; there is no escaping the uplift or
the downpour, nor can they be kept out of criticism. We may hate
humanity, but if it is exorcised or even purified the novel wilts,
little is left but a bunch of words.
And I have chosen the title "Aspects" because it is unscientific and
vague, because it leaves us the maximum of freedom, because it means
both the different ways we can look at a novel and the different ways a
novelist can look at his work. And the aspects selected for discussion
are seven in number: The Story; People; The Plot; Fantasy; Prophecy;
Pattern and Rhythm.
[Footnote 1: _Le Roman Anglais de Notre Temps_. By Abel Chevalley,
(Oxford University Press, New York.)]
[Footnote 2: I have touched on this theory of inspiration in a short essay
called "Anonymity." (Hogarth Press, London.)]
II
THE STORY
WE shall all agree that the fundamental aspect of the novel is its
story-telling aspect, but we shall voice our assent in different tones,
and it is on the precise tone of voice we employ now that our subsequent
conclusions will depend.
Let us listen to three voices. If you ask one type of man, "What does a
novel do?" he will reply placidly: "Well--I don't know--it seems a funny
sort of question to ask--a novel's a novel--well, I don't know--I
suppose it kind of tells a story, so to speak." He is quite
good-tempered and vague, and probably driving a motor-bus at the same
time and paying no more attention to literature than it merits. Another
man, whom I visualize as on a golf-course, will be aggressive and brisk.
He will reply: "What does a novel do? Why, tell a story of course, and
I've no use for it if it didn't. I like a story. Very bad taste on my
part, no doubt, but I like a story. You can take your art, you can take
your literature, you can take your music, but give me a good story. And
I like a story to be a story, mind, and my wife's the same." And a third
man he says in a sort of drooping regretful voice, "Yes--oh, dear,
yes--the novel tells a story." I respect and admire the first speaker. I
detest and fear the second. And the third is myself. Yes--oh, dear,
yes—the novel tells a story. That is the fundamental aspect without
which it could not exist. That is the highest factor common to all
novels, and I wish that it was not so, that it could be something
different--melody, or perception of the truth, not this low atavistic
form.
For the more we look at the story (the story that is a story, mind), the
more we disentangle it from the finer growths that it supports, the less
shall we find to admire. It runs like a backbone--or may I say a
tape-worm, for its beginning and end are arbitrary. It is immensely
old--goes back to neolithic times, perhaps to palæolithic. Neanderthal
man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull. The
primitive audience was an audience of shock-heads, gaping round the
camp-fire, fatigued with contending against the mammoth or the woolly
rhinoceros, and only kept awake by suspense. What would happen next? The
novelist droned on, and as soon as the audience guessed what happened
next, they either fell asleep or killed him. We can estimate the dangers
incurred when we think of the career of Scheherazade in somewhat later
times. Scheherazade avoided her fate because she knew how to wield the
weapon of suspense--the only literary tool that has any effect upon
tyrants and savages. Great novelist though she was,--exquisite in her
descriptions, tolerant in her judgments, ingenious in her incidents,
advanced in her morality, vivid in her delineations of character, expert
in her knowledge of three Oriental capitals--it was yet on none of these
gifts that she relied when trying to save her life from her intolerable
husband. They were but incidental. She only survived because she managed
to keep the king wondering what would happen next. Each time she saw the
sun rising she stopped in the middle of a sentence, and left him gaping.
"At this moment Scheherazade saw the morning appearing and, discreet,
was silent." This uninteresting little phrase is the backbone of the
_One Thousand and One Nights_, the tape-worm by which they are tied
together and the life of a most accomplished princess was preserved.
We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what
happens next. That is universal and that is why the backbone of a novel
has to be a story. Some of us want to know nothing else--there is
nothing in us but primeval curiosity, and consequently our other
literary judgments are ludicrous. And now the story can be defined. It
is a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence--dinner coming
after breakfast, Tuesday after Monday, decay after death, and so on. Qua
story, it can only have one merit: that of making the audience want to
know what happens next. And conversely it can only have one fault: that
of making the audience not want to know what happens next. These are the
only two criticisms that can be made on the story that is a story. It is
the lowest and simplest of literary organisms. Yet it is the highest
factor common to all the very complicated organisms known as novels.
When we isolate the story like this from the nobler aspects through
which it moves, and hold it out on the forceps--wriggling and
interminable, the naked worm of time--it presents an appearance that is
both unlovely and dull. But we have much to learn from it. Let us begin
by considering it in connection with daily life.
Daily life is also full of the time-sense. We think one event occurs
after or before another, the thought is often in our minds, and much of
our talk and action proceeds on the assumption. Much of our talk and
action, but not all; there seems something else in life besides time,
something which may conveniently be called "value," something which is
measured not by minutes or hours, but by intensity, so that when we look
at our past it does not stretch back evenly but piles up into a few
notable pinnacles, and when we look at the future it seems sometimes a
wall, sometimes a cloud, sometimes a sun, but never a chronological
chart. Neither memory nor anticipation is much interested in Father
Time, and all dreamers, artists and lovers are partially delivered from
his tyranny; he can kill them, but he cannot secure their attention, and
at the very moment of doom, when the dock collected in the tower its
strength and struck, they may be looking the other way. So daily life,
whatever it may be really, is practically composed of two lives--the
life in time and the life by values--and our conduct reveals a double
allegiance. "I only saw her for five minutes, but it was worth it."
There you have both allegiances in a single sentence. And what the story
does is to narrate the life in time. And what the entire novel does--if
it is a good novel--is to include the life by values as well; using
devices hereafter to be examined. It, also, pays a double allegiance.
But in it, in the novel, the allegiance to time is imperative: no novel
could be written without it. Whereas in daily life the allegiance may
not be necessary: we do not know, and the experience of certain mystics
suggests, indeed, that it is not necessary, and that we are quite
mistaken in supposing that Monday is followed by Tuesday, or death by
decay. It is always possible for you or me in daily life to deny that
time exists and act accordingly even if we become unintelligible and are
sent by our fellow citizens to what they choose to call a lunatic
asylum. But it is never possible for a novelist to deny time inside the
fabric of his novel: he must cling however lightly to the thread of his
story, he must touch the interminable tapeworm, otherwise he becomes
unintelligible, which, in his case, is a blunder.
I am trying not to be philosophic about time, for it is (experts assure
us) a most dangerous hobby for an outsider, far more fatal than place;
and quite eminent metaphysicians have been dethroned through referring
to it improperly. I am only trying to explain that as I lecture now I
hear that clock ticking or do not hear it ticking, I retain or lose
the time sense; whereas in a novel there is always a clock. The author
may dislike his clock. Emily Brontë in _Wuthering Heights_ tried to
hide hers. Sterne, in _Tristram Shandy_, turned his upside down. Marcel
Proust, still more ingenious, kept altering the hands, so that his hero
was at the same period entertaining a mistress to supper and playing
ball with his nurse in the park. All these devices are legitimate, but
none of them contravene our thesis: the basis of a novel is a story, and
a story is a narrative of events arranged in time sequence. (A story, by
the way, is not the same as a plot. It may form the basis of one, but
the plot is an organism of a higher type, and will be defined and
discussed in a future lecture.)
Who shall tell us a story?
Sir Walter Scott of course.
Scott is a novelist over whom we shall violently divide. For my own part
I do not care for him, and find it difficult to understand his continued
reputation. His reputation in his day--that is easy to understand. There
are important historical reasons for it, which we should discuss if our
scheme was chronological. But when we fish him out of the river of time
and set him to write in that circular room with the other novelists, he
presents a less impressive figure. He is seen to have a trivial mind and
a heavy style. He cannot construct. He has neither artistic detachment
nor passion, and how can a writer who is devoid of both, create
characters who will move us deeply? Artistic detachment--perhaps it is
priggish to ask for that. But passion--surely passion is low brow
enough, and think how all Scott's laborious mountains and scooped-out
glens and carefully ruined abbeys call out for passion, passion and how
it is never there! If he had passion he would be a great writer--no
amount of clumsiness or artificiality would matter then. But he only has
a temperate heart and gentlemanly feelings, and an intelligent affection
for the country-side: and this is not basis enough for great novels. And
his integrity--that is worse than nothing, for it was a purely moral and
commercial integrity. It satisfied his highest needs and he never dreamt
that another sort of loyalty exists.
His fame is due to two causes. In the first place, many of the elder
generation had him read aloud to them when they were young; he is
entangled with happy sentimental memories, with holidays in or residence
in Scotland. They love him indeed for the same reason that I loved and
still love _The Swiss Family Robinson_. I could lecture to you now on
_The Swiss Family Robinson_ and it would be a glowing lecture, because
of the emotions felt in boyhood. When my brain decays entirely I shall
not bother any more over great literature. I shall go back to the
romantic shore where the "ship struck with a fearful shock," emitting
four demigods named Fritz, Ernest, Jack and little Franz, together with
their father, their mother, and a cushion, which contained all the
appliances necessary for a ten years' residence in the tropics. That is
my eternal summer, that is what _The Swiss Family Robinson_ means to me,
and is not it all that Sir Walter Scott means to some of you? Is he
really more than a reminder of early happiness? And until our brains do
decay, must not we put all this aside when we attempt to understand
books?
In the second place, Scott's fame rests upon one genuine basis. He could
tell a story. He had the primitive power of keeping the reader in
suspense and playing on his curiosity. Let us paraphrase _The
Antiquary_--not analyze it, analysis is the wrong method, but
paraphrase. Then we shall see the story unrolling itself, and be able to
study its simple devices.
THE ANTIQUARY
CHAPTER I
It was early in a fine summer's day, near the end of the eighteenth
century, when a young man of genteel appearance, having occasion to go
towards the north-east of Scotland, provided himself with a ticket in
one of those public carriages which travel between Edinburgh and the
Queensferry, at which place, as the name implies, and as is well known
to all my northern readers, there is a passage-boat for crossing the
Frith of Forth.