dullest sense. Let me be very dry and brief about sex in the first
place. Some years after a human being is born, certain changes occur in
it, as in other animals, which changes often lead to union with another
human being, and to the production of more human beings. And our race
goes on. Sex begins before adolescence, and survives sterility; it is
indeed coeval with our lives, although at the mating age its effects are
more obvious to society. And besides sex, there are other emotions, also
strengthening towards maturity: the various upliftings of the spirit,
such as affection, friendship, patriotism, mysticism--and as soon as we
try to determine the relation between sex and these other emotions we
shall of course begin to quarrel as violently as we ever could about
Walter Scott, perhaps even more violently. Let me only tabulate the
various points of view. Some people say that sex is basic and underlies
all these other loves--love of friends, of God, of country. Others say
that it is connected with them, but laterally, it is not their root.
Others say that it is not connected at all. All I suggest is that we
call the whole bundle of emotions love, and regard them as the fifth
great experience through which human beings have to pass. When human
beings love they try to get something. They also try to give something,
and this double aim makes love more complicated than food or sleep. It
is selfish and altruistic at the same time, and no amount of
specialization in one direction quite atrophies the other. How much time
does love take? This question sounds gross but it must be asked because
it bears on our present enquiry. Sleep takes about eight hours out of
the twenty-four, food about two more. Shall we put down love for another
two? Surely that is a handsome allowance. Love may weave itself into our
other activities--so may drowsiness and hunger. Love may start various
secondary activities: for instance, a man's love for his family may
cause him to spend a good deal of time on the Stock Exchange, or his
love for God a good deal of time in church. But that he has emotional
communion with any beloved object for more than two hours a day may be
gravely doubted, and it is this emotional communion, this desire to give
and to get, this mixture of generosity and expectation, that
distinguishes love from the other experiences on our list.
That is the human make-up--or part of it. Made up like this himself, the
novelist takes his pen in his hand, gets into the abnormal state which
it is convenient to call "inspiration," and tries to create characters.
Perhaps the characters have to fall in with something else in his novel:
this often happens (the books of Henry James are an extreme case), and
then the characters have, of course, to modify the make-up accordingly.
However, we are considering now the more simple case of the novelist
whose main passion is human beings and who will sacrifice a great deal
to their convenience--story, plot, form, incidental beauty.
Well, in what senses do the nations of fiction differ from those of the
earth? One cannot generalize about them, because they have nothing in
common in the scientific sense; they need not have glands, for example,
whereas all human beings have glands. Nevertheless, though incapable of
strict definition, they tend to behave along the same lines.
In the first place, they come into the world more like parcels than
human beings. When a baby arrives in a novel it usually has the air of
having been posted. It is delivered "off"; one of the elder characters
goes and picks it up and shows it to the reader, after which it is
usually laid in cold storage until it can talk or otherwise assist in
the action. There is both a good and a bad reason for this and for all
other deviations from earthly practice; these we will note in a minute,
but do just observe in what a very perfunctory way the population of
noveldom is recruited. Between Sterne and James Joyce, scarcely any
writer has tried either to use the facts of birth or to invent a new set
of facts, and no one, except in a sort of auntish wistful way, has tried
to work back towards the psychology of the baby's mind and to utilize
the literary wealth that must lie there. Perhaps it cannot be done. We
shall decide in a moment.
Death. The treatment of death, on the other hand, is nourished much more
on observation, and has a variety about it which suggests that the
novelist finds it congenial. He does, for the reason that death ends a
book neatly, and for the less obvious reason that working as he does in
time he finds it easier to work from the known towards the darkness
rather than from the darkness of birth towards the known. By the time
his characters die, he understands them, he can be both appropriate and
imaginative about them--strongest of combinations. Take a little
death--the death of Mrs. Proudie in the _Last Chronicle of Barset_. All
is in keeping, yet the effect is terrifying, because Trollope has ambled
Mrs. Proudie down many a diocesan bypath, showing her paces, making her
snap, accustoming us, even to boredom, to her character and tricks, to
her "Bishop, consider the souls of the people," and then she has a heart
attack by the edge of her bed, she has ambled far enough,--end of Mrs.
Proudie. There is scarcely anything that the novelist cannot borrow from
"daily death"; scarcely anything he may not profitably invent. The doors
of that darkness lie open to him and he can even follow his characters
through it, provided he is shod with imagination and does not try to
bring us back scraps of séance information about the "life beyond."
What of food, the third fact upon our list? Food in fiction is mainly
social. It draws characters together, but they seldom require it
physiologically, seldom enjoy it, and never digest it unless specially
asked to do so. They hunger for each other, as we do in life, but our
equally constant longing for breakfast and lunch does not get reflected.
Even poetry has made more of it--at least of its æsthetic side. Milton
and Keats have both come nearer to the sensuousness of swallowing than
George Meredith.
Sleep. Also perfunctory. No attempt to indicate oblivion or the actual
dream world. Dreams are either logical or else mosaics made out of hard
little fragments of the past and future. They are introduced with a
purpose and that purpose is not the character's life as a whole, but
that part of it he lives while awake. He is never conceived as a
creature a third of whose time is spent in the darkness. It is the
limited daylight vision of the historian, which the novelist elsewhere
avoids. Why should he not understand or reconstruct sleep? For remember,
he has the right to invent, and we know when he is inventing truly,
because his passion floats us over improbabilities. Yet he has neither
copied sleep nor created it. It is just an amalgam.
Love. You all know how enormously love bulks in novels, and will
probably agree with me that it has done them harm and made them
monotonous. Why has this particular experience, especially in its sex
form, been transplanted in such generous quantities? If you think of a
novel in the vague you think of a love interest--of a man and woman who
want to be united and perhaps succeed. If you think of your own life in
the vague, or of a group of lives, you are left with a very different
and a more complex impression.
There would seem to be two reasons why love, even in good sincere
novels, is unduly prominent.
Firstly, when the novelist ceases to design his characters and begins to
create them--"love" in any or all of its aspects becomes important in
his mind, and without intending to do so he makes his characters unduly
sensitive to it--unduly in the sense that they would not trouble so much
in life. The constant sensitiveness of characters for each other--even
in writers called robust like Fielding--is remarkable, and has no
parallel in life, except among people who have plenty of leisure.
Passion, intensity at moments--yes, but not this constant awareness,
this endless readjusting, this ceaseless hunger. I believe that these
are the reflections of the novelist's own state of mind while he
composes, and that the predominance of love in novels is partly because
of this.
A second reason; which logically comes into another part of our enquiry,
but it shall be noted here. Love, like death, is congenial to a novelist
because it ends a book conveniently. He can make it a permanency, and
his readers easily acquiesce, because one of the illusions attached to
love is that it will be permanent. Not has been--will be. All history,
all our experience, teaches us that no human relationship is constant,
it is as unstable as the living beings who compose it, and they must
balance like jugglers if it is to remain; if it is constant it is no
longer a human relationship but a social habit, the emphasis in it has
passed from love to marriage. All this we know, yet we cannot bear to
apply our bitter knowledge to the future; the future is to be so
different; the perfect person is to come along, or the person we know
already is to become perfect. There are to be no changes, no necessity
for alertness. We are to be happy or even perhaps miserable for ever and
ever. Any strong emotion brings with it the illusion of permanence, and
the novelists have seized upon this. They usually end their books with
marriage, and we do not object because we lend them our dreams.
Here we must conclude our comparison of those two allied species, Homo
Sapiens and Homo Fictus. Homo Fictus is more elusive than his cousin. He
is created in the minds of hundreds of different novelists, who have
conflicting methods of gestation, so one must not generalize. Still, one
can say a little about him. He is generally born off, he is capable of
dying on, he wants little food or sleep, he is tirelessly occupied with
human relationships. And--most important--we can know more about him
than we can know about any of our fellow creatures, because his creator
and narrator are one. Were we equipped for hyperbole we might exclaim at
this point: "If God could tell the story of the Universe, the Universe
would become fictitious."
For this is the principle involved.
Let us, after these high speculations, take an easy character and study
it for a little. Moll Flanders will do. She fills the book that bears
her name, or rather stands alone in it, like a tree in a park, so that
we can see her from every aspect and are not bothered by rival growths.
Defoe is telling a story, like Scott, and we shall find stray threads
left about in much the same way, on the chance of the writer wanting to
pick them up afterwards: Moll's early batch of children for instance.
But the parallel between Scott and Defoe cannot be pressed. What
interested Defoe was the heroine, and the form of his book proceeds
naturally out of her character. Seduced by a younger brother and married
to an elder, she takes to husbands in the earlier and brighter part of
her career: not to prostitution, which she detests with all the force of
a decent and affectionate heart. She and most of the characters in
Defoe's underworld are kind to one another, they save each other's
feelings and run risks through personal loyalty. Their innate goodness
is always flourishing despite the author's better judgment, the reason
evidently being that the author had some great experience himself while
in Newgate. We do not know what it was, probably he himself did not know
afterwards, for he was a busy slipshod journalist and a keen politician.
But something occurred to him in prison, and out of its vague, powerful
emotion Moll and Roxana are born. Moll is a character physically, with
hard plump limbs that get into bed and pick pockets. She lays no stress
upon her appearance, yet she moves us as having height and weight, as
breathing and eating, and doing many of the things that are usually
missed out. Husbands were her earlier employ: she was trigamous if not
quadrigamous, and one of her husbands turned out to be a brother. She
was happy with all of them, they were nice to her, she nice to them.
Listen to the pleasant jaunt her draper husband took her--she never
cared for him much.
"Come, my dear," says he to me one day, "shall we go and take a turn
into the country for about a week?" "Ay, my dear," says I, "whither
would you go?" "I care not whither," says he, "but I have a mind to look
like quality for a week. We'll go to Oxford," says he. "How," says I,
"shall we go? I am no horse-woman, and 'tis too far for a coach." "Too
far!" says he; "no place is too far for a coach-and-six. If I carry you
out, you shall travel like a duchess." "Hum," says I, "my dear, 'tis a
frolic; but if you have a mind to it, I don't care." Well, the time was
appointed, we had a rich coach, very good horses, a coachman, postilion,
and two footmen in very good liveries; a gentleman on horseback, and a
page with a feather in his hat upon another horse. The servants all
called my lord, and the innkeepers, you may be sure, did the like, and I
was her honour the Countess, and thus we travelled to Oxford, and a very
pleasant journey we had; for, give him his due, not a beggar alive knew
better how to be a lord than my husband. We saw all the rarities at
Oxford, talked with two or three Fellows of Colleges about putting out a
young nephew, that was left to his lordship's care, to the University,
and of their being his tutors. We diverted ourselves with bantering
several other poor Scholars, with hopes of being at least his lordship's
chaplains, and putting on a scarf; and thus having lived like quality,
indeed, as to expense, we went away for Northampton, and, in a word, in
about twelve days' ramble came home again, to the tune of about £93
expense.
Contrast with this the scene with her Lancashire husband, whom she
deeply loved. He is a high-wayman, and each by pretending to wealth has
trapped the other into marriage. After the ceremony, they are mutually
unmasked, and if Defoe were writing mechanically he would set them to
upbraid one another, like Mr. and Mrs. Lammle in _Our Mutual Friend_.
But he has given himself over to the humour and good sense of his
heroine. She guides him through.
"Truly," said I to him, "I found you would soon have conquered me; and
it is my affliction now, that I am not in a condition to let you see how
easily I should have been reconciled to you, and have passed by all the
tricks you had put upon me, in recompense of so much good-humour. But,
my dear," said I, "what can we do now? We are both undone, and what
better are we for our being reconciled together, seeing we have nothing
to live on?"
We proposed a great many things, but nothing could offer where there was
nothing to begin with. He begged me at last to talk no more of it, for,
he said, I would break his heart; so we talked of other things a little,
till at last he took a husband's leave of me, and so we went to sleep.
Which is both truer to daily life and pleasanter to read than Dickens.
The couple are up against facts, not against the author's theory of
morality, and being sensible good-hearted rogues, they do not make a
fuss. In the later part of her career she turns from husbands to
thieving; she thinks this a change for the worse and a natural darkness
spreads over the scene. But she is as firm and amusing as ever. How just
are her reflections when she robs of her gold necklace the little girl
returning from the dancing-class. The deed is done in the little passage
leading to St. Bartholomew's, Smithfield (you can visit the place
today--Defoe haunts London) and her impulse is to kill the child as
well. She does not, the impulse is very feeble, but conscious of the
risk the child has run she becomes most indignant with the parents for
"leaving the poor little lamb to come home by itself, and it would teach
them to take more care of it another time." How heavily and
pretentiously a modern psychologist would labour to express this! It
just runs off Defoe's pen, and so in another passage, where Moll cheats
a man, and then tells him pleasantly afterwards that she has done so,
with the result that she slides still further into his good graces, and
cannot bear to cheat him any more. Whatever she does gives us a slight
shock--not the jolt of disillusionment, but the thrill that proceeds
from a living being. We laugh at her, but without bitterness or
superiority. She is neither hypocrite nor fool.
Towards the end of the book she is caught in a draper's shop by two
young ladies from behind the counter: "I would have given them good
words but there was no room for it: two fiery dragons could not have
been more furious than they were"--they call for the police, she is
arrested and sentenced to death and then transported to Virginia
instead. The clouds of misfortune lift with indecent rapidity. The
voyage is a very pleasant one, owing to the kindness of the old woman
who had originally taught her to steal. And (better still) her
Lancashire husband happens to be transported also. They land at Virginia
where, much to her distress, her brother-husband proves to be in
residence. She conceals this, he dies, and the Lancashire husband only
blames her for concealing it from him: he has no other grievance, for
the reason that he and she are still in love. So the book closes
prosperously, and firm as at the opening sentence the heroine's voice
rings out: "We resolve to spend the remainder of our years in sincere
penitence for the wicked lives we have led."
Her penitence is sincere, and only a superficial judge will condemn her
as a hypocrite. A nature such as hers cannot for long distinguish
between doing wrong and getting caught--for a sentence or two she
disentangles them but they insist on blending, and that is why her
outlook is so cockneyfied and natural, with "sich is life" for a
philosophy and Newgate in the place of Hell. If we were to press her or
her creator Defoe and say, "Come, be serious. Do you believe in
Infinity?" they would say (in the parlance of their modern descendants),
"Of course I believe in Infinity--what do you take me for?"--a
confession of faith that slams the door on Infinity more completely than
could any denial.
_Moll Flanders_ then shall stand as our example of a novel, in which a
character is everything and is given freest play. Defoe makes a slight
attempt at a plot with the brother-husband as a centre, but he is quite
perfunctory, and her legal husband (the one who took her on the jaunt to
Oxford) just disappears and is heard of no more. Nothing matters but the
heroine; she stands in an open space like a tree, and having said that
she seems absolutely real from every point of view, we must ask
ourselves whether we should recognize her if we met her in daily life.
For that is the point we are still considering: the difference between
people in life and people in books. And the odd thing is, that even
though we take a character as natural and untheoretical as Moll who
would coincide with daily life in every detail, we should not find her
there as a whole. Suppose I suddenly altered my voice from a lecturing
voice into an ordinary one and said to you, "Look out--I can see Moll in
the audience--look out, Mr."--naming one of you by name--"she as near as
could be got your watch"--well, you would know at once that I was wrong,
that I was sinning not only against probabilities, which does not
signify, but against daily life and books and the gulf that divides
them. If I said, "Look out, there's some one like Moll in the audience,"
you might not believe me but you would not be annoyed by my imbecile
lack of taste: I should only be sinning against probability. To suggest
that Moll is in Cambridge this afternoon or anywhere in England, or has
been anywhere in England is idiotic. Why?
This particular question will be easy to answer next week, when we shall
deal with more complicated novels, where the character has to fit in
with other aspects of fiction. We shall then be able to make the usual
reply, which we find in all manuals of literature, and which should
always be given in an examination paper, the æsthetic reply, to the
effect that a novel is a work of art, with its own laws, which are not
those of daily life, and that a character in a novel is real when it
lives in accordance with such laws. Amelia or Emma, we shall then say,
cannot be at this lecture because they exist only in the books called
after them, only in worlds of Fielding or Jane Austen. The barrier of
art divides them from us. They are real not because they are like
ourselves (though they may be like us) but because they are convincing.
It is a good answer, it will lead on to some sound conclusions. Yet it
is not satisfactory for a novel like _Moll Flanders_, where the
character is everything and can do what it likes. We want a reply that
is less aesthetic and more psychological. Why cannot she be here? What
separates her from us? Our answer has already been implied in that
quotation from Alain: she cannot be here because she belongs to a world
where the secret life is visible, to a world that is not and cannot be
ours, to a world where the narrator and the creator are one. And now we
can get a definition as to when a character in a book is real: it is
real when the novelist knows everything about it. He may not choose to
tell us all he knows--many of the facts, even of the kind we call
obvious, may be hidden. But he will give us the feeling that though the
character has not been explained, it is explicable, and we get from this
a reality of a kind we can never get in daily life.
For human intercourse, as soon as we look at it for its own sake and not
as a social adjunct, is seen to be haunted by a spectre. We cannot
understand each other, except in a rough and ready way; we cannot reveal
ourselves, even when we want to; what we call intimacy is only a
makeshift; perfect knowledge is an illusion. But in the novel we can
know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading,
we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life. In this
direction fiction is truer than history, because it goes beyond the
evidence, and each of us knows from his own experience that there is
something beyond the evidence, and even if the novelist has not got it
correctly, well--he has tried. He can post his people in as babies, he
can cause them to go on without sleep or food, he can make them be in
love, love and nothing but love, provided he seems to know everything
about them, provided they are his creations. That is why Moll Flanders
cannot be here, that is one of the reasons why Amelia and Emma cannot be
here. They are people whose secret lives are visible or might be
visible: we are people whose secret lives are invisible.
And that is why novels, even when they are about wicked people, can
solace us; they suggest a more comprehensible and thus a more manageable
human race, they give us the illusion of perspicacity and of power.
[Footnote 3: Paraphrased from _Système des Beaux Arts_, pp. 314-315.
I am indebted to M. André Maurois for introducing me to this
stimulating essay.]
IV
PEOPLE (_continued_)
WE now turn from transplantation to acclimatization. We have discussed
whether people could be taken out of life and put into a book, and
conversely whether they could come out of books and sit down in this
room. The answer suggested was in the negative and led to a more vital
question: can we, in daily life, understand each other? Today our
problems are more academic. We are concerned with the characters in
their relation to other aspects of the novel; to a plot, a moral, their
fellow characters, atmosphere, etc. They will have to adapt themselves
to other requirements of their creator.