but it gives us the time, the place, and a young man,--it sets the
story-teller's scene. We feel a moderate interest in what the young man
will do next. His name is Lovel, and there is a mystery about him. He is
the hero or Scott would not call him genteel, and he is sure to make the
heroine happy. He meets the Antiquary, Jonathan Oldbuck. They get into
the coach, not too quickly, become acquainted, Lovel visits Oldbuck at
his house. Near it they meet a new character, Edie Ochiltree. Scott is
good at introducing fresh characters. He slides them very naturally, and
with a promising air. Edie Ochiltree promises a good deal. He is a
beggar--no ordinary beggar, a romantic and reliable rogue, and will he
not help to solve the mystery of which we saw the tip in Lovel? More
introductions: to Sir Arthur Wardour (old family, bad manager); to his
daughter Isabella (haughty), whom the hero loves unrequited; and to
Oldbuck's sister Miss Grizzle. Miss Grizzle is introduced with the same
air of promise. As a matter of fact she is just a comic turn--she leads
nowhere, and your story-teller is full of these turns. He need not
hammer away all the time at cause and effect. He keeps just as well
within the simple boundaries of his art if he says things that have no
bearing on the development. The audience thinks they will develop, but
the audience is shock-headed and tired and easily forgets. Unlike the
weaver of plots, the story-teller profits by ragged ends. Miss Grizzle
is a small example of a ragged end; for a big one I would refer to a
novel that professes to be lean and tragic: _The Bride of Lammermoor_.
Scott presents the Lord High Keeper in this book with great emphasis and
with endless suggestions that the defects of his character will lead to
the tragedy, while as a matter of fact the tragedy would occur in almost
the same form if he did not exist--the only necessary ingredients in it
being Edgar, Lucy, Lady Ashton and Bucklaw. Well, to return to _The
Antiquary_, then there is a dinner, Oldbuck and Sir Arthur quarrel, Sir
Arthur is offended and leaves early with his daughter, and they try to
walk back to their own house across the sands. Tides rise over sands.
The tide rises. Sir Arthur and Isabel are cut off, and are confronted in
their peril by Edie Ochiltree. This is the first serious moment in the
story and this is how the story-teller who is a story-teller handles it:
While they exchanged these words, they paused upon the highest ledge of
rock to which they could attain; for it seemed that any farther attempt
to move forward could only serve to anticipate their fate. Here then
they were to await the sure, though slow progress of the raging element,
something in the situation of the martyrs of the Early Church, who,
exposed by heathen tyrants to be slain by wild beasts, were compelled
for a time to witness the impatience and rage by which the animals were
agitated, while awaiting the signal for undoing their grates and letting
them loose upon the victims.
Yet even this fearful pause gave Isabella time to collect the powers of
a mind naturally strong and courageous, and which rallied itself at this
terrible juncture. "Must we yield life," she said, "without a struggle?
Is there no path, however dreadful, by which we could climb the crag, or
at least attain some height above the tide, where we could remain till
morning, or till help comes? They must be aware of our situation, and
will raise the country to relieve us."
Thus speaks the heroine, in accents which certainly chill the reader.
Yet we want to know what happens next. The rocks are of cardboard, like
those in my dear Swiss Family; the tempest is turned on with one hand
while Scott scribbles away about Early Christians with the other; there
is no sincerity, no sense of danger in the whole affair; it is all
passionless, perfunctory, yet we do just want to know what happens next.
Why--Lovel rescues them. Yes; we ought to have thought of that; and what
then?
Another ragged end. Lovel is put by the Antiquary to sleep in a haunted
room, where he has a dream or vision of his host's ancestor, who says to
him, "Kunst macht Gunst," words which he does not understand at the
time, owing to his ignorance of German, and learns afterwards that they
mean "Skill wins Favour": he must pursue the siege of Isabella's heart.
That is to say the supernatural contributes nothing to the story. It is
introduced with tapestries and storms, but only a copy-book maxim
results. The reader does not know this though. When he hears "Kunst
macht Gunst," his attention reawakens ... then his attention is diverted
to something else, and the time-sequence goes on.
Picnic in the ruins of St. Ruth. Introduction of Dousterswivel, a wicked
foreigner, who has involved Sir Arthur in mining schemes and whose
superstitions are ridiculed because not of the genuine Border brand.
Arrival of Hector McIntyre, the Antiquary's nephew, who suspects Lovel
of being an impostor. The two fight a duel; Lovel, thinking he has
killed his opponent, flies with Edie Ochiltree, who has turned up as
usual. They hide in the ruins of St. Ruth, where they watch
Dousterswivel gulling Sir Arthur in a treasure-hunt. Lovel gets away on
a boat and--out of sight out of mind; we do not worry about him until he
turns up again. Second treasure-hunt at St. Ruth. Sir Arthur finds a
hoard of silver. Third treasure-hunt. Dousterswivel is soundly
cudgelled, and when he comes to himself sees the funeral rites of the
old Countess of Glenallan, who is being buried there at midnight and
with secrecy, that family being of the Romish persuasion.
Now the Glenallans are very important in the story, yet how casually
they are introduced! They are hooked on to Dousterswivel in the most
artless way. His pair of eyes happened to be handy, so Scott had a peep
through them. And the reader by now is getting so docile under the
succession of episodes that he just gapes, like a primitive cave man.
Now the Glenallan interest gets to work, the ruins of St. Ruth are
switched off, and we enter what may be called the "pre-story," where two
new characters intervene, and talk wildly and darkly about a sinful
past. Their names are: Elspeth Mucklebackit, a Sibyl of a fisherwoman,
and Lord Glenallan, son of the dead countess. Their dialogue is
interrupted by other events--by the arrest, trial and release of Edie
Ochiltree, by the death by drowning of another new character, and by the
humours of Hector McIntyre's convalescence at his uncle's house. But the
gist is that Lord Glenallan many years ago had married a lady called
Evelina Nevile, against his mother's wish, and had then been given to
understand that she was his half-sister. Maddened with horror, he had
left her before she gave birth to a child. Elspeth, formerly his
mother's servant, now explains to him that Evelina was no relation to
him, that she died in childbirth--Elspeth and another woman
attending--and that the child disappeared. Lord Glenallan then goes to
consult the Antiquary, who, as a Justice of the Peace, knew something of
the events of the time, and who had also loved Evelina. And what happens
next? Sir Arthur Wardour's goods are sold up, for Dousterswivel has
ruined him. And then? The French are reported to be landing. And then?
Lovel rides into the district leading the British troops. He calls
himself "Major Nevile" now. But even "Major Nevile" is not his right
name, for he is who but the lost child of Lord Glenallan, he is none
other than the legitimate heir to an earldom. Partly through Elspeth
Mucklebackit, partly through her fellow servant whom he meets as a nun
abroad, partly through an uncle who has died, partly through Edie
Ochiltree, the truth has come out. There are indeed plenty of reasons
for the dénouement, but Scott is not interested in reasons; he dumps
them down without bothering to elucidate them; to make one thing happen
after another is his only serious aim. And then? Isabella Wardour
relents and marries the hero. And then? That is the end of the story. We
must not ask "And then?" too often. If the time-sequence is pursued one
second too far it leads us into quite another country.
_The Antiquary_ is a book in which the life in time is celebrated
instinctively by the novelist, and this must lead to slackening of
emotion and shallowness of judgment, and in particular to that idiotic
use of marriage as a finale. Time can be celebrated consciously also,
and we shall find an example of this in a very different sort of book, a
memorable book: Arnold Bennett's _The Old Wives' Tale_. Time is the real
hero of _The Old Wives' Tale_. He is installed as the lord of
creation--excepting indeed of Mr. Critchlow, whose bizarre exemption
only gives added force. Sophia and Constance are the children of Time
from the instant we see them romping with their mother's dresses; they
are doomed to decay with a completeness that is very rare in literature.
They are girls, Sophia runs away and marries, the mother dies, Constance
marries, her husband dies, Sophia's husband dies, Sophia dies, Constance
dies, their old rheumatic dog lumbers up to see whether anything remains
in the saucer. Our daily life in time is exactly this business of
getting old which clogs the arteries of Sophia and Constance, and the
story that is a story and sounded so healthy and stood no nonsense
cannot sincerely lead to any conclusion but the grave. It is an
unsatisfactory conclusion. Of course we grow old. But a great book must
rest on something more than an "of course," and _The Old Wives' Tale_ is
very strong, sincere and sad,--it misses greatness.
What about _War and Peace_? that is certainly great, that likewise
emphasizes the effects of time and the waxing and waning of a
generation. Tolstoy, like Bennett, has the courage to show us people
getting old--the partial decay of Nicolay and Natasha is really more
sinister than the complete decay of Constance and Sophia: more of our
own youth seems to have perished in it. Then why is _War and Peace_ not
depressing? Probably because it has extended over space as well as over
time, and the sense of space until it terrifies us is exhilarating, and
leaves behind it an effect like music. After one has read _War and
Peace_ for a bit, great chords begin to sound, and we cannot say exactly
what struck them. They do not arise from the story, though Tolstoy is
quite as interested in what comes next as Scott, and quite as sincere as
Bennett. They do not come from the episodes nor yet from the characters.
They come from the immense area of Russia, over which episodes and
characters have been scattered, from the sum-total of bridges and frozen
rivers, forests, roads, gardens, fields, which accumulate grandeur and
sonority after we have passed them. Many novelists have the feeling for
place--Five Towns, Auld Reekie, and so on. Very few have the sense of
space, and the possession of it ranks high in Tolstoy's divine
equipment. Space is the lord of _War and Peace_, not time.
A word in conclusion about the story as the repository of a voice. It is
the aspect of the novelist's work which asks to be read out loud, which
appeals not to the eye, like most prose, but to the ear; having indeed
this much in common with oratory. It does not offer melody or cadence.
For these, strange as it may seem, the eye is sufficient; the eye,
backed by a mind that transmutes, can easily gather up the sounds of a
paragraph or dialogue when they have æsthetic value, and refer them to
our enjoyment,--yes, can even telescope them up so that we get them
quicker than we should do if they were recited, just as some people can
look through a musical score quicker than it can be rapped out on the
piano. But the eye is not equally quick at catching a voice. That
opening sentence of _The Antiquary_ has no beauty of sound, yet we
should lose something if it was not read aloud. Our mind would commune
with Walter Scott's silently, and less profitably. The story, besides
saying one thing after another, adds something because of its connection
with a voice.
It does not add much. It does not give us anything as important as the
author's personality. His personality--when he has one--is conveyed
through nobler agencies, such as the characters or the plot or his
comments on life. What the story does do in this particular capacity,
all it can do, is to transform us from readers into listeners, to whom
"a" voice speaks, the voice of the tribal narrator, squatting in the
middle of the cave, and saying one thing after another until the
audience falls asleep among their offal and bones. The story is
primitive, it reaches back to the origins of literature, before reading
was discovered, and it appeals to what is primitive in us. That is why
we are so unreasonable over the stories we like, and so ready to bully
those who like something else. For instance, I am annoyed when people
laugh at me for loving _The Swiss Family Robinson_, and I hope that I
have annoyed some of you over Scott! You see what I mean. Intolerance is
the atmosphere stories generate. The story is neither moral nor is it
favourable to the understanding of the novel in its other aspects. If we
want to do that we must come out of the cave.
We shall not come out of it yet, but observe already how that other
life--the life by value--presses against the novel from all sides, how
it is ready to fill and indeed distort it, offering it people, plots,
fantasies, views of the universe, anything except this constant "and
then ... and then," which is the sole contribution of our present
inquiry. The life in time is so obviously base and inferior that the
question naturally occurs: cannot the novelist abolish it from his work,
even as the mystic asserts he has abolished it from his experience, and
install its radiant alternative alone?
Well, there is one novelist who has tried to abolish time, and her
failure is instructive: Gertrude Stein. Going much further than Emily
Brontë, Sterne or Proust, Gertrude Stein has smashed up and pulverized
her clock and scattered its fragments over the world like the limbs of
Osiris, and she has done this not from naughtiness but from a noble
motive: she has hoped to emancipate fiction from the tyranny of time and
to express in it the life by values only. She fails, because as soon as
fiction is completely delivered from time it cannot express anything at
all, and in her later writing we can see the slope down which she is
slipping. She wants to abolish this whole aspect of the story, this
sequence in chronology, and my heart goes out to her. She cannot do it
without abolishing the sequence between the sentences. But this is not
effective unless the order of the words in the sentences is also
abolished, which in its turn entails the abolition of the order of the
letters or sounds in the words. And now she is over the precipice. There
is nothing to ridicule in such an experiment as hers. It is much more
important to play about like this than to rewrite the Waverley Novels.
Yet the experiment is doomed to failure. The time-sequence cannot be
destroyed without carrying in its ruin all that should have taken its
place; the novel that would express values only becomes unintelligible
and therefore valueless.
That is why I must ask you to join me in repeating in exactly the right
tone of voice the words with which this lecture opened. Do not say them
vaguely and good-temperedly like a busman: you have not the right. Do
not say them briskly and aggressively like a golfer: you know better.
Say them a little sadly, and you will be correct. Yes--oh, dear,
yes--the novel tells a story.
III
PEOPLE
HAVING discussed the story--that simple and fundamental aspect of the
novel--we can turn to a more interesting topic: the actors. We need not
ask what happened next, but to whom did it happen; the novelist will be
appealing to our intelligence and imagination, not merely to our
curiosity. A new emphasis enters his voice: emphasis upon value.
Since the actors in a story are usually human, it seemed convenient to
entitle this aspect People. Other animals have been introduced, but with
limited success, for we know too little so far about their psychology.
There may be, probably will be, an alteration here in the future,
comparable to the alteration in the novelist's rendering of savages in
the past. The gulf that separates Man Friday from Batouala may be
paralleled by the gulf that will separate Kipling's wolves from their
literary descendants two hundred years hence, and we shall have animals
who are neither symbolic, nor little men disguised, nor as four-legged
tables moving, nor as painted scraps of paper that fly. It is one of the
ways where science may enlarge the novel, by giving it fresh subject
matter. But the help has not been given yet, and until it comes we may
say that the actors in a story are, or pretend to be, human beings.
Since the novelist is himself a human being, there is an affinity
between him and his subject matter which is absent in many other forms
of art. The historian is also linked, though, as we shall see, less
intimately. The painter and sculptor need not be linked: that is to say
they need not represent human beings unless they wish, no more need the
poet, while the musician cannot represent them even if he wishes,
without the help of a programme. The novelist, unlike many of his
colleagues, makes up a number of word-masses roughly describing himself
(roughly: niceties shall come later), gives them names and sex, assigns
them plausible gestures, and causes them to speak by the use of inverted
commas, and perhaps to behave consistently. These word-masses are his
characters. They do not come thus coldly to his mind, they may be
created in delirious excitement, still, their nature is conditioned by
what he guesses about other people, and about himself, and is further
modified by the other aspects of his work. This last point--the relation
of characters to the other aspects of the novel--will form the subject
of a future enquiry. At present we are occupied with their relation to
actual life. What is the difference between people in a novel and people
like the novelist or like you, or like me, or Queen Victoria?
There is bound to be a difference. If a character in a novel is exactly
like Queen Victoria--not rather like but exactly like--then it actually
is Queen Victoria, and the novel, or all of it that the character
touches, becomes a memoir. A memoir is history, it is based on evidence.
A novel is based on evidence + or − _x_, the unknown quantity being
the temperament of the novelist, and the unknown quantity always
modifies the effect of the evidence, and sometimes transforms it
entirely.
The historian deals with actions, and with the characters of men only so
far as he can deduce them from their actions. He is quite as much
concerned with character as the novelist, but he can only know of its
existence when it shows on the surface. If Queen Victoria had not said,
"We are not amused," her neighbours at table would not have known she
was not amused, and her ennui could never have been announced to the
public. She might have frowned, so that they would have deduced her
state from that--looks and gestures are also historical evidence. But if
she remained impassive--what would any one know? The hidden life is, by
definition, hidden. The hidden life that appears in external signs is
hidden no longer, has entered the realm of action. And it is the
function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to
tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to
produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.
The interesting and sensitive French critic, who writes under the name
of Alain, has some helpful if slightly fantastic remarks on this point.
He gets a little out of his depth, but not as much as I feel myself out
of mine, and perhaps together we may move toward the shore. Alain
examines in turn the various forms of æsthetic activity, and coming in
time to the novel (le roman) he asserts that each human being has two
sides, appropriate to history and fiction. All that is observable in a
man--that is to say his actions and such of his spiritual existence as
can be deduced from his actions--falls into the domain of history. But
his romanceful or romantic side (sa partie romanesque ou romantique)
includes "the pure passions, that is to say the dreams, joys, sorrows
and self-communings which politeness or shame prevent him from
mentioning"; and to express this side of human nature is one of the
chief functions of the novel. "What is fictitious in a novel is not so
much the story as the method by which thought develops into action, a
method which never occurs in daily life.... History, with its emphasis
on external causes, is dominated by the notion of fatality, whereas
there is no fatality in the novel; there, everything is founded on human
nature, and the dominating feeling is of an existence where everything
is intentional, even passions and crimes, even misery."[3]
This is perhaps a roundabout way of saying what every British schoolboy
knew, that the historian records whereas the novelist must create.
Still, it is a profitable roundabout, for it brings out the fundamental
difference between people in daily life and people in books. In daily
life we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor
complete confessional exists. We know each other approximately, by
external signs, and these serve well enough as a basis for society and
even for intimacy. But people in a novel can be understood completely by
the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer
life can be exposed. And this is why they often seem more definite than
characters in history, or even our own friends; we have been told all
about them that can be told; even if they are imperfect or unreal they
do not contain any secrets, whereas our friends do and must, mutual
secrecy being one of the conditions of life upon this globe.
Now let us restate the problem in a more schoolboyish way. You and I are
people. Had not we better glance through the main facts in our own
lives--not in our individual careers but in our make-up as human beings?
Then we shall have something definite to start from.
The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and
death. One could increase the number--add breathing for instance--but
these five are the most obvious. Let us briefly ask ourselves what part
they play in our lives, and what in novels. Does the novelist tend to
reproduce them accurately or does he tend to exaggerate, minimize,
ignore, and to exhibit his characters going through processes which are
not the same through which you and I go, though they bear the same
names?
To consider the two strangest first: birth and death; strange because
they are at the same time experiences and not experiences. We only know
of them by report. We were all born, but we cannot remember what it was
like. And death is coming even as birth has come, but, similarly, we do
not know what it is like. Our final experience, like our first, is
conjectural. We move between two darknesses. Certain people pretend to
tell us what birth and death are like: a mother, for instance, has her
point of view about birth, a doctor, a religious, have their points of
view about both. But it is all from the outside, and the two entities
who might enlighten us, the baby and the corpse, cannot do so, because
their apparatus for communicating their experiences is not attuned to
our apparatus for reception.
So let us think of people as starting life with an experience they
forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot
understand. These are the creatures whom the novelist proposes to
introduce as characters into books; these, or creatures plausibly like
them. The novelist is allowed to remember and understand everything, if
it suits him. He knows all the hidden life. How soon will he pick up his
characters after birth, how close to the grave will he follow them? And
what will he say, or cause to be felt, about these two queer
experiences?
Then food, the stoking up process, the keeping alive of an individual
flame, the process that begins before birth and is continued after it by
the mother, and finally taken over by the individual himself, who goes
on day after day putting an assortment of objects into a hole in his
face without becoming surprised or bored: food is a link between the
known and the forgotten; closely connected with birth, which none of us
remembers, and coming down to this morning's breakfast. Like
sleep--which in many ways it resembles--food does not merely restore our
strength, it has also an æsthetic side, it can taste good or bad. What
will happen to this double-faced commodity in books?
And fourthly, sleep. On the average, about a third of our time is not
spent in society or civilization or even in what is usually called
solitude. We enter a world of which little is known and which seems to
us after leaving it to have been partly oblivion, partly a caricature of
this world and partly a revelation. "I dreamt of nothing" or "I dreamt
of a ladder" or "I dreamt of heaven" we say when we wake. I do not want
to discuss the nature of sleep and dreams--only to point out that they
occupy much time and that what is called "History" only busies itself
with about two-thirds of the human cycle, and theorizes accordingly.
Does fiction take up a similar attitude?