Writing not long ago to my oldest literary friend, I expressed in a
moment of heedless sentiment the wish that we might have again one of
our talks of long-past days, over the purposes and methods of our art.
And my friend, wiser than I, as he has always been, replied with this
doubting phrase “Could we recapture the zest of that old time?”
I would not like to believe that our faith in the value of imaginative
art has diminished, that we think it less worth while to struggle for
glimpses of truth and for the words which may pass them on to other
eyes; or that we can no longer discern the star we tried to follow; but
I do fear, with him, that half a lifetime of endeavour has dulled the
exuberance which kept one up till morning discussing the ways and means
of aesthetic achievement. We have discovered, perhaps with a certain
finality, that by no talk can a writer add a cubit to his stature, or
change the temperament which moulds and colours the vision of life he
sets before the few who will pause to look at it. And so—the rest is
silence, and what of work we may still do will be done in that dogged
muteness which is the lot of advancing years.
Other times, other men and modes, but not other truth. Truth, though
essentially relative, like Einstein's theory, will never lose its
ever-new and unique quality-perfect proportion; for Truth, to the human
consciousness at least, is but that vitally just relation of part to
whole which is the very condition of life itself. And the task before
the imaginative writer, whether at the end of the last century or all
these aeons later, is the presentation of a vision which to eye and ear
and mind has the implicit proportions of Truth.
I confess to have always looked for a certain flavour in the writings of
others, and craved it for my own, believing that all true vision is so
coloured by the temperament of the seer, as to have not only the just
proportions but the essential novelty of a living thing for, after all,
no two living things are alike. A work of fiction should carry the hall
mark of its author as surely as a Goya, a Daumier, a Velasquez, and a
Mathew Maris, should be the unmistakable creations of those masters.
This is not to speak of tricks and manners which lend themselves to that
facile elf, the caricaturist, but of a certain individual way of seeing
and feeling. A young poet once said of another and more popular poet:
“Oh! yes, but be cuts no ice.” And, when one came to think of it, he did
not; a certain flabbiness of spirit, a lack of temperament, an absence,
perhaps, of the ironic, or passionate, view, insubstantiated his work;
it had no edge—just a felicity which passed for distinction with the
crowd.
Let me not be understood to imply that a novel should be a sort of
sandwich, in which the author's mood or philosophy is the slice of ham.
One's demand is for a far more subtle impregnation of flavour; just
that, for instance, which makes De Maupassant a more poignant and
fascinating writer than his master Flaubert, Dickens and Thackeray more
living and permanent than George Eliot or Trollope. It once fell to
my lot to be the preliminary critic of a book on painting, designed to
prove that the artist's sole function was the impersonal elucidation of
the truths of nature. I was regretfully compelled to observe that there
were no such things as the truths of Nature, for the purposes of art,
apart from the individual vision of the artist. Seer and thing seen,
inextricably involved one with the other, form the texture of any
masterpiece; and I, at least, demand therefrom a distinct impression
of temperament. I never saw, in the flesh, either De Maupassant or
Tchekov—those masters of such different methods entirely devoid of
didacticism—but their work leaves on me a strangely potent sense of
personality. Such subtle intermingling of seer with thing seen is the
outcome only of long and intricate brooding, a process not too favoured
by modern life, yet without which we achieve little but a fluent chaos
of clever insignificant impressions, a kind of glorified journalism,
holding much the same relation to the deeply-impregnated work of
Turgenev, Hardy, and Conrad, as a film bears to a play.
Speaking for myself, with the immodesty required of one who hazards
an introduction to his own work, I was writing fiction for five years
before I could master even its primary technique, much less achieve that
union of seer with thing seen, which perhaps begins to show itself a
little in this volume—binding up the scanty harvests of 1899, 1900, and
1901—especially in the tales: “A Knight,” and “Salvation of a Forsyte.”
Men, women, trees, and works of fiction—very tiny are the seeds from
which they spring. I used really to see the “Knight”—in 1896, was
it?—sitting in the “Place” in front of the Casino at Monte Carlo; and
because his dried-up elegance, his burnt straw hat, quiet courtesy of
attitude, and big dog, used to fascinate and intrigue me, I began to
imagine his life so as to answer my own questions and to satisfy, I
suppose, the mood I was in. I never spoke to him, I never saw him again.
His real story, no doubt, was as different from that which I wove around
his figure as night from day.
As for Swithin, wild horses will not drag from me confession of where
and when I first saw the prototype which became enlarged to his bulky
stature. I owe Swithin much, for he first released the satirist in me,
and is, moreover, the only one of my characters whom I killed before I
gave him life, for it is in “The Man of Property” that Swithin Forsyte
more memorably lives.
Ranging beyond this volume, I cannot recollect writing the first words
of “The Island Pharisees”—but it would be about August, 1901. Like all
the stories in “Villa Rubein,” and, indeed, most of my tales, the book
originated in the curiosity, philosophic reflections, and unphilosophic
emotions roused in me by some single figure in real life. In this case
it was Ferrand, whose real name, of course, was not Ferrand, and who
died in some “sacred institution” many years ago of a consumption
brought on by the conditions of his wandering life. If not “a beloved,”
he was a true vagabond, and I first met him in the Champs Elysees, just
as in “The Pigeon” he describes his meeting with Wellwyn. Though drawn
very much from life, he did not in the end turn out very like the
Ferrand of real life—the figures of fiction soon diverge from their
prototypes.
The first draft of “The Island Pharisees” was buried in a drawer; when
retrieved the other day, after nineteen years, it disclosed a picaresque
string of anecdotes told by Ferrand in the first person. These
two-thirds of a book were laid to rest by Edward Garnett's dictum that
its author was not sufficiently within Ferrand's skin; and, struggling
heavily with laziness and pride, he started afresh in the skin of
Shelton. Three times be wrote that novel, and then it was long in
finding the eye of Sydney Pawling, who accepted it for Heinemann's in
1904. That was a period of ferment and transition with me, a kind of
long awakening to the home truths of social existence and national
character. The liquor bubbled too furiously for clear bottling. And
the book, after all, became but an introduction to all those following
novels which depict—somewhat satirically—the various sections of English
“Society” with a more or less capital “S.”
Looking back on the long-stretched-out body of one's work, it is
interesting to mark the endless duel fought within a man between the
emotional and critical sides of his nature, first one, then the other,
getting the upper hand, and too seldom fusing till the result has the
mellowness of full achievement. One can even tell the nature of one's
readers, by their preference for the work which reveals more of this
side than of that. My early work was certainly more emotional than
critical. But from 1901 came nine years when the critical was, in the
main, holding sway. From 1910 to 1918 the emotional again struggled for
the upper hand; and from that time on there seems to have been something
of a “dead beat.” So the conflict goes, by what mysterious tides
promoted, I know not.
An author must ever wish to discover a hapless member of the Public who,
never yet having read a word of his writing, would submit to the ordeal
of reading him right through from beginning to end. Probably the effect
could only be judged through an autopsy, but in the remote case of
survival, it would interest one so profoundly to see the differences,
if any, produced in that reader's character or outlook over life. This,
however, is a consummation which will remain devoutly to be wished, for
there is a limit to human complaisance. One will never know the exact
measure of one's infecting power; or whether, indeed, one is not just a
long soporific.
A writer they say, should not favouritize among his creations; but
then a writer should not do so many things that he does. This writer,
certainly, confesses to having favourites, and of his novels so far be
likes best: The Forsyte Series; “The Country House”; “Fraternity”; “The
Dark Flower”; and “Five Tales”; believing these to be the works which
most fully achieve fusion of seer with thing seen, most subtly disclose
the individuality of their author, and best reveal such of truth as has
been vouchsafed to him. JOHN GALSWORTHY.