I was reading a novel, the other day; had got about half-way through
it. The novel in question was by one of the younger English authors.
It was very odd, I thought to myself as I perused it, that I should
not (for I read a great deal of fiction) have read before anything by
Mr. D. H. Lawrence. I had always meant to, but his work had, for some
reason or other, not come my way. And I was glad I was reading it. I
ought to have done D. H. Lawrence before. Some people had told me he
was “different.” He was not so different as all that; still, there was
something fresh about him. Perhaps one could differentiate within that
group, though I had long since despaired of doing so. I would certainly
get something else of D. H. Lawrence’s. At that point I decided to go
to bed, and shut the book up smartly. The cover revealed to me that
the author was J. D. Beresford. Why I had ever thought it was D. H.
Lawrence, I do not know. Some false association of ideas at the moment
of borrowing it, probably.
The joke is on me, as the younger generation would say. And yet,
there is something to be said on my side. The fact is that I had not
expected D. H. Lawrence to be one whit different from Hugh Walpole, J.
D. Beresford, Compton Mackenzie, Gilbert Cannan, Oliver Onions, and
W. L. George. I found, I thought, a little difference: not much, but
enough to give one hope. To be sure, the hope would have ebbed, in any
case, before the book was finished. My only gain was the knowledge
that Mr. Beresford can do something besides Jacob Stahl. I have yet to
experience D. H. Lawrence. Still, I submit that when, to distinguish
between one author and another, you are satisfied with so tiny a
difference in style as appears between two works by the same man, it
means that differences in style within that particular group are not
very startling. One would never have read half of _Tess_ and taken
it for the work of Henry James; or half of _Nostromo_ and taken
that for the work of Meredith. One would have been brought up standing
at the first page. It may be, as I say, that D. H. Lawrence is going to
be to me, some day, a revelation of individuality. But the reviews do
not give one much hope of that.
Now, there are three authors in England who stand a little away from
this larger group, though they are not precisely contemporaries
of Hardy or of Conrad. Wells and Bennett and Galsworthy have some
individuality of style. A chapter of Mr. Wells is “different.” A
chapter of Arnold Bennett or of Mr. Galsworthy is different. Or let me
put it in this way. You would not get through half of any one of Mr.
Wells’s later novels without a deal of pseudo-philosophical reflection
on the scheme of things. You would not read so far in any book by Mr.
Arnold Bennett without meeting and recognizing his peculiar kind of
humor: semi-grin, semi-farcical. And I am sure that you would not get
through many chapters of a typical Galsworthy novel without hearing a
bird calling to its mate--not if there were a human love-affair going
on. I do not think you could comfortably sit down with any one of them
for half an evening and think that you were reading D. H. Lawrence. You
would know whom you were reading.
These three gentlemen have, of course, been writing longer than the
aforesaid younger group. They are, one might say, the elder brothers
of the brood. If any one of them has served as model to the younger
fry, it is Mr. Wells. None of the younger fry has ever approached the
technical excellence of _Kipps_; but, on the other hand, almost
any one of them could have written _Ann Veronica_. Mr. Wells has
certainly led them all astray in his time. But there is another equally
important thing to be said: Mr. Wells has gone on. In his later phases,
he stands quite apart from them all. _The Research Magnificent_
and _Mr. Britling Sees It Through_ are perfectly individual:
they are not, and never could have been, the product of a syndicate.
Time was when Wells and Bennett seemed to be drawing near each other,
_Tono-Bungay_ is Bennett-ish in spots; and _Bealby_ is,
superficially, almost straight Bennett. But Mr. Wells, for weal or woe,
has always been interested in the social scheme. The most important
thing in _Tono-Bungay_ is Bladesover and Bladesover’s moral
effect; and even in the ridiculous _Bealby_ there is more than an
echo of Bladesover. Mr. Wells is interested in moral values. Sometimes
he has had very queer notions about them; but his reward for having
been perpetually pre-occupied with them is to have won through to _The
Research Magnificent_ and _Mr. Britling_. You may not agree
with the hero of either book; but at least he is a person for whom you
have respect. His is a dignified moral reaction, even if it is not
the moral reaction you would have preferred. He is a serious person,
envisaging his relations to the world in a serious temper.
One does not see Mr. Bennett’s characters thus envisaging the world;
not, at all events, since _The Old Wives’ Tale_. And even in
_The Old Wives’ Tale_ you feel rather the deterministic net
in which the characters are caught, than any personal decisions of
their own. The moral of the book is that heredity is more powerful
than environment, if these two come to grips. In the later books,
when they are not, like _Denry the Audacious_ and _Buried
Alive_, delicious bits of fooling, you get men and women of a
monstrous egotism, of whom it cannot be discerned that either heredity
or environment explicitly controls them against their will. An
acute critic, who has incidentally had his own say about Wells and
Bennett, told me the other day that he thought Bennett’s people had
“character.” I should have said rather that they were “characters,” in
the colloquial sense. They have self-assertiveness; like Aunty Hamps,
they may subjugate their world. But “character”? No: that is a finer,
more complicated possession. They want things, sometimes good things
and sometimes bad; but they are (especially the women) blond beasts as
to their methods. If there is, on the whole, a less decent creature in
modern fiction than Hilda Lessways, or a more idiotic one than Audrey
Moze, I have still to encounter her. They invoke their gods
By the hunger of change and emotion,
By the thirst of unbearable things.
Ann Veronica, as I once tried to point out, is not true to life:
she is a nice girl who proceeds to have reactions that a nice girl
does not have without a lot of intervening history. Hilda is never a
nice girl; she is a monster from the start and to the finish. As for
Audrey--_pace_ Mr. Bennett--she is a “moron,” or very near it.
Mr. Bennett spends more time on his female than on his male characters.
He began with the evident intention of “doing” young Clayhanger. But
poor Clayhanger eventually turned into Hilda’s daily bread. He exists
only to be masticated by her. She lifts her head from that “fiero
pasto,” immitigable as Ugolino.
Now, I may well be accused, by Mr. Bennett’s admirers, of a belated
Victorianism, because I do not like his Hildas and Leonoras and
Audreys. Well, I do not like Balzac’s Valérie Marneffe; yet surely
_La Cousine Bette_ is one of the great novels of the nineteenth
century. Henry James, some years ago, drew a distinction between
Thackeray and Balzac in their treatment of unpleasant characters;
insisting that Thackeray did not give his a fair chance. “Balzac loved
his Valérie as Thackeray did not love his Becky,” said Mr. James.
However much Balzac loved his Valérie, he did not love her to the point
of trying to make us think her delightful. The love he bore her was
a love as impersonal as the right hand of Rhadamanthus: a love that
consented to be just. Balzac may have loved his Valérie as Thackeray
did not love his Becky; but he did not love his Valérie as Mr. Bennett
loves his Hilda and his Audrey. He loved her, that is, in a quite
different sense. Mr. Bennett positively seems to think that Hilda is as
decent as any one else, and more interesting than most people. If he
does not really think so, then his method is at fault, and his books
belie him. His method is not at fault in _Denry_, because there
is no implication anywhere that Denry exists in a moral sense: he is a
“card,” and only a “card.” It is never hinted that we ought to take him
seriously. He is merely funny; the humor of him is the moral equivalent
of an obstacle race or the pursuit of a greased pig.
If only Mr. Bennett would keep to his Denrys! For in the realm of
extravaganza he is irresistible. Also, when he does the detail of the
Five Towns, he is delightful for sheer convincingness. But he must
stick to concrete detail. He must not deal with the human soul, for
when he comes to moral reactions, he shows that he has no conception of
differences. Mr. Bennett’s world, frankly, seems to me like the world
of the dead as described by the poet:
Outside of all the worlds and ages,
There where the fool is as the sage is,
There where the slayer is clean of blood;
No end, no passage, no beginning,
There where the sinner leaves off sinning,
There where the good man is not good.
There is not one thing with another,
But Evil saith to Good: My brother,
My brother, I am one with thee.
His world is a world where Evil saith to Good: “My brother, I am one
with thee.” If he cannot write us another _Old Wives’ Tale_, we
must at least hope, as I say, that he will stick to Denry and Alice
Challis. _The Lion’s Share_ does not give much promise that he
will do a second _Old Wives’ Tale_. He has a positive fondness for
mean people; people who walk blind through a world with beauty in it;
people who think their own emotions supremely valuable simply because
they are their own.
The realists, I know, have always contended that an author should be
impersonal; that he should not have an “attitude”; that he should
record life as it is, without comment. Into the possibility or
impossibility of that feat (the old technical controversy) we need
not go, here and now. The general opinion is that you can tell where
an author stands, in spite of him. Certainly Mr. Bennett is not
impersonal; he does have an attitude. Not in any of the permitted
ways (comment of other characters, logical and retributive results of
committed acts, etc.) does he show himself suspicious of his people’s
real natures, or disapproving of their odiousness. If he were only
scourging, satirist-fashion, the egotism of man-kind, one could bear it.
But no: Mr. Bennett seems to love his Yahoos. If he does not love them,
then, as I say, his methods are at fault.
Another author who has gone dwindling is Mr. Galsworthy. Tremendous
hopes of him and of our permanent joy in him, we had when _The Man
of Property_ appeared. And, of course, one knows people who stick to
him for his “style.” One does not quite know why: as style, it cannot
touch either Mr. Wells’s or Mr. Bennett’s style. I fancy it is because
there will always be a perceptible number of people who are reverent
before long descriptions of nature. Nature, when it gets into a book,
is somehow sacred. Perhaps it is Wordsworth’s fault. Literary pieties
die hard. Anyhow, there always are long descriptions of nature in Mr.
Galsworthy’s novels, and if they are delicately confused with mating
animals and human sex impulses, and all the connotation of stirring sap
and swelling buds and the like, that will certainly not make them any
less popular. Yet the fact is that Mr. Galsworthy has gone on, from
book to book, steadily becoming more sentimental and more flabby. I
am speaking here of his novels. His _Five Tales_ hold their own
with _The Man of Property_. His work cannot be called rich in
situations, since he has never, so far, failed to repeat (I think I am
not mistaken) the same situation: a man in love with some woman he has
no legal right to be in love with. Often, that is a very interesting
situation; but it is not the only source of drama in life, and one does
get tired of it. And I do not think that Mr. Galsworthy makes it any
more interesting or sympathetic by constantly involving the vegetable
world, or by punctuating every declaration of unlawful love with the
calls of mating birds. One is tempted to assure him that “The flowers
that bloom in the spring (tra-la!) have nothing to do with the case.”
But the sanity of W. S. Gilbert is gone from among us.
With Thomas Hardy, one feels at least the reality of this intrusion of
external nature; because, as some critic (I think, Mr. W. J. Dawson)
has said, his people are children of the soil in no trite sense. They
are akin to the landscape in which they move; they seem, that is, to
have a personal relation to Gaia, like mortals in an old myth; to
be half man, half rock or tree. They are apotheoses of the power of
natural environment. But Mr. Galsworthy’s civilized people run down
from town to hold hands amid the bracken because they feel that they
are somehow justified by the fact of sap. It is all vague, of course;
anything of that sort is bound to be vague. And if you are going
to lean heavily on the cosmos, you want first to be sure that your
_point d’appui_ is not a spot where the cosmic force has chosen to
manifest itself in vapor.
Mr. Galsworthy seems not to know in the least what he thinks about
life. That state of maze may be satisfying to a hyper-sensitive soul,
but it does not make for style. Besides, Mr. Galsworthy is old enough
to have some idea as to what he does think about life. As far as one
can make out, he thinks that most people are sensual, that everybody
ought to be kind, and that there is a sustaining sanction for sex
emotion in the fauna and flora of England. I do not know what Mr.
Galsworthy’s totem is; but it should be some small, defenceless bird.
The snipe, perhaps.
_Justice_ is said to have had a profound effect on English
officials. Of that, one is glad; but one’s quarrel with Mr. Galsworthy
is that he will never think anything out. He inveighs against solitary
confinement, which is a good thing to do; but he does not offer any
substitute solution, which would be an even better thing to do. He
sentimentalizes over dead pheasants and dead everything; but he gives
you no suggestions as to what kind of laws to pass. He objects to
existing divorce laws, but he does not come out into the open and say
just what divorce laws, if any, he would propose to enact. It is not,
apparently, either cowardice or expediency on his part; it is sheer
inability to think constructively in any way. That is characteristic
of many modern reformers: they want the bars let down here or there,
but they never tell you in what spot the bars ought to be set up again.
Beyond their gentle impulses, they are perfectly vague. It comes, I
suppose, of trying to do your thinking with your heart instead of with
your head. And in Mr. Galsworthy’s case, the vagueness has permeated
to the last recesses of his style. It is rhetorically accurate--“the
English of a gentleman”--but it is jejune and spineless. It has become,
you might say, a purely vegetarian meal. Only the graminivorous should
read the later Galsworthy. And he will not rid himself of that fault by
being increasingly explicit about sexual emotions. In fact, that never
was his game.
I may seem to speak bitterly. I confess that I feel some bitterness.
For I admired _The Man of Property_ exceedingly, and looked to Mr.
Galsworthy to carry on a great tradition of fiction. Instead of which,
he has gone on backing, backing--farther and farther away from the
Presence. Some people, I know, gave him up with _The Patrician_
because, they said, it was straight Mrs. Humphry Ward. I gave him up
forever with _The Freelands_ because it was bad Mrs. Humphrey
Ward; in fact, _The Coryston Family_ was much better.
Now we come to our syndicate. With which shall we begin? It is
hard to choose. Indeed, can you deal with them separately? For the
outstanding fact is that they all write alike; that they deal in the
same characters, the same backgrounds, and the same situations; and
that they have the same point of view. They are like the Pléïade or
the seven New Realists. Only they do not know it. At least, they give
no sign of intending to be several peas in one pod. Yet you would
almost say that none of them had ever read anything but the works of
the others. Is there some master-mind behind them, some literary Lloyd
George or Dr. Fu-Manchu, who assigns their tasks; who says that Mr.
Beresford, not Mr. Walpole, shall write of Jacob Stahl, and that Mr.
Mackenzie, not Mr. W. L. George, shall deal with Michael Fane? And
does Mr. Walpole sneak off o’ nights to Mr. Beresford and offer to do
some _Jacob Stahl_ if Mr. Beresford will take a few chapters of
_Fortitude_ off his hands? Does Mr. Mackenzie write a page of _A
Prelude to Adventure_ while Mr. Walpole takes a turn at _Sinister
Street_? Who does the murders? Is it Mr. Walpole or Mr. Onions?
Which one of them has been appointed to frequent the Empire? Does Mr.
George investigate female psychology for the group? And what (but this
I cannot even guess) does Mr. D. H. Lawrence “cover”?
This may seem to be mere petulance, but it is not. The chief value
of fiction is, I take it, to provide us with vicarious experience. A
great novelist who sticks to the truth is, above all, informing. We
enlarge our own world by reading him. No one, in his own person, can
investigate all social _milieux_ in all civilized lands; and the
big novels and the big plays are text-books to the humanist. How much
intimate knowledge of France should we lose if we lost Balzac; how
much intimate knowledge of England if we lost the great Victorians!
Did we really, before the war, know anything about the Russian soul
and temperament except what we got from the Russian novelists? Most of
us get our India from Kipling. There are not wanting people to quarrel
with Kipling’s interpretation, even with his description; but the fact
remains that a vast number of people know a few simple facts about
Indian and Anglo-Indian life that they would never have known without
him.
So that it is really not only the monotony, but the wilful
extravagance, of the British syndicate that we complain of. Why waste
half a dozen authors and a round score of novels to tell us the same
thing in the same way? They do not even react differently to the
same facts: they react precisely alike. Perhaps that is valuable as
reinforcing and emphasizing the stated or implied opinion. But one has
the sense that one is never going to learn anything more from any of
them; and that is discouraging to the humanist, on vicarious experience
bent. Perhaps one should except Mr. Walpole from that charge, to this
extent: he gave us something new in _The Dark Forest_. In that
book, at least, he made the Russians pleasanter than any of their
own novelists (except possibly Turgenev) have succeeded in making
them. But even so, if someone should tell us that Mr. Walpole, in
the flesh, went to Russia to work with an ambulance corps, and that
Mr. Beresford or Mr. Mackenzie wrote _The Dark Forest_ from Mr.
Walpole’s notes, who could, from any internal evidence, deny it? If
they were all Elizabethans, the scholars would still be wrangling
over problems of their collaboration. Their novels would be like the
Beaumont-Fletcher-Middleton-Rowley plays.
To begin with, there is always the same young man. Sometimes he
has a university education, and then he is the hero of _Sinister
Street_ or _The Stranger’s Wedding_; sometimes he has omitted
the university, and then he is the hero of _Jacob Stahl_ or
_Fortitude_. He has usually decided, when we meet him, that there
is nothing in religion; he is usually anxious to do something noble
and unconventional; and sooner or later he nearly always encounters
very seriously a young woman of, actually or potentially, light morals.
Sometimes he is rich and meets her at the Empire; sometimes he is poor
and meets her in the slums. Sometimes it is an accident, but usually
he might fairly be said to be looking for her. For he is humanitarian,
always; either by his gentle nature, or because socialistic arguments
have got hold of him; and a good deal of space is always given up to
sheer intellectual worrying. It _is_ worrying--it seldom “gets”
anywhere; and though Mr. Wells’s people “worry” similarly, and do not
always get anywhere, still, with Mr. Wells, you feel as if those men
would, perhaps, sometime win through to a philosophy of their own.
They go at it in a more mature fashion; and they possess themselves
of information. There is something of the hard scientific temper in
his men. They are more apt to have got their humanitarianism out of a
laboratory than out of their first sight of Piccadilly Circus at night.
Mr. Wells’s men, when they are likable at all, are likable for some
intellectual quality in them, for their attitude to ideas. When the
syndicate’s men are likable, it is for sheer pity, because they are
such helpless young fools.
One expects every one in fiction, nowadays, to be an egotist; but one
does sometimes sigh for the old days when an egotist knew enough to
be polite. No one, I think, could feel any affection for Jacob Stahl;
but it is possible to feel affection for Michael Fane, though it is
perfectly impossible to feel him important, except as a householder
always is important. Perhaps the most charming thing one remembers in
any of these novels (they do not abound in charm) is the description
of Oxford undergraduate life in _Sinister Street_. And it
leads to--what? Michael’s conscientious and pathetic progress among
prostitutes and ruffians. Luckily, he does not, in the end, marry
Lily; but he is saved from it by mere accident. There was no reason to
suppose that destiny would play on his side.
This excursion into the underworld has become, in English fiction,
almost as much _de rigueur_ for a young gentleman as the grand
tour used to be. Sometimes it is curiosity that urges him; but it is
more apt to be a kind of humanitarian sympathy. The adventure is not
new: one remembers, after all, Richard Feverel. But the temper in which
it is taken is new. Richard was a chivalrous young fool; but then
Mrs. Mount was something out of the ordinary. He did not, at first,
dream what she was; and when he found out, she was able to lure him
to think well of her. These young gentlemen we are considering do not
have to be lured to think well of the young women they altruistically
encounter. They know before they meet them what they are going to be.
They cultivate them because they are that, or are obviously going to
be that. They prefer the girl of the lower classes; prefer marriage
with her or free love with her, as the case may be. They find her
more interesting, just as a settlement-worker finds the slums more
interesting. The difference between them and the settlement-worker is
that they are not out to convert her to religion or even to better
manners. They are perfectly naïve in their refusal to perceive
differences. They have a preconceived notion to the effect that there
are no differences; and to that notion they often sacrifice themselves.
Sometimes they sacrifice the girl.
You see, they do not think much of marriage, these young men. Jacob
Stahl insists on going off to a solitary cottage with Betty Gale,
unblessed. (Of course, he does have a wife in the background.) He
never quite forgives her for wanting to be a legal wife. Though,
characteristically enough, by the time she has reconciled herself to
the irregularity (as any decent woman would have somehow to do, if
she were going to endure it) his wife dies, and he insists on Betty’s
marrying him so that they can have children. Ann Veronica over again!
But, indeed, Mr. Beresford has it in for marriage anyhow. I know of
nothing more pathetic in modern fiction than the way Dick Lynneker,
brought up among gentle-folk, successful in his own career, in love with
a girl of his own class, has to cast about in his mind for some way of
squaring that conventional situation with his radicalism. Up to that
time, his only chance has been in approving of his sister’s elopement
with the village carpenter. Now he is in love himself, and there is
no obstacle, social or financial, to his happiness. But he has not
protested against convention all his young life, only to sit down and
be comfortable now in a conventional situation. Listen:
“‘I never tried to fight against my love for you, dear, after that
first day at Oakstone,’ he went on. ‘I hadn’t ever cared before for
anyone like this. I’ve never had any sort of love-affair. And now, I
want....’”
“She clung to him eagerly.” ‘What do you want, darling?’ she asked, and
then added inconsequently, ‘I feel such a little thing.’
“He drew her down to her knees and knelt before her in the darkness.”
‘I want our love to be all our own. I don’t want it talked about and
stared at. If we get married, it must be as quietly as possible--and it
must be afterwards, if you know what I mean, dear? That legal business
isn’t for us at all; it’s only a kind of registration. Our love
hasn’t anything to do with anyone else. We must make our vows without
witnesses. Do you know what I mean, dear? Don’t you feel like that,
too?’
“He felt her heart throbbing violently against his; and they clung to
each other like two frightened children.” There, in the stillness and
the darkness, the world had vanished and they were alone; and afraid;
and yet passionately desirous to draw closer together.
“‘Oh! Dickie, I do love you so,’ she whispered, as she put her lips to
his.”
Mr. Beresford never tells us whether or not Dick put his idea through.
Sybil was the niece of a bishop. But then, Mr. Beresford made her.
Perhaps Dick succeeded. The implication certainly is that he was going
to succeed.
Now, I honestly think that pathetic. Not nearly so shocking as it is
pathetic. For the author is looking for the realities of life in the
wrong place. Every lover knows the sense of shrinking from a public
ceremony. I doubt if any two people deeply in love with each other
would choose, for their own sakes, a “wedding.” Dick Lynneker need not
think that his great idea is new. But look at the mad egotism of it!
Take it that the legal or the ecclesiastical ceremony is merely a heavy
price that one has to pay. Is that happiness not worth paying for?
Generations of lovers have thought that it was. Suppose, even, that you
think it not so much too heavy as the wrong kind of payment--something
unjustly, shamelessly exacted of you, that should never have been
exacted at all; a sort of Oriental “squeeze.” Other lovers, in other
times, have had a kindred sense of desecration; but they have realized
that society, from its point of view, had a right to demand of them
this public acknowledgment. They have realized, too, that no public act
of this kind could really touch or affect their private sense of their
private sacrament.
These modern folk are neither unselfish enough to make their little
salute to organized society cheerfully, nor strong enough to realize
that the merely conventional tribute cannot hurt their private
sanctities. There is no such unselfishness or strength possible to a
person like Dick Lynneker. If we must face free love, we must face
it, I suppose. But nothing in heaven or earth need make us face a
compromise like Dick’s. Defy all ritual and symbolism if you must. But,
for sheer topsy-turviness, commend me to his notion of insisting on the
consummation’s preceding, instead of following, the ceremony! There is
quite as much superstition in one order of things as in the other. Dick
Lynneker is bound, quite as much as his family, by prejudices. After
all, the black mass is only the real mass reversed.
I have dwelt on this instance because it seems to me typical, in its
way, of the work of the whole group of English novelists. Except
for Mr. Arnold Bennett, who seems to be satisfied with the mean and
low-minded people of whom he feels that the world consists, they are
all protesting. But they have nothing to suggest. When their own fitful
attempts to set things straight result in failure or disaster, they
blame the _status quo_. It never occurs to them to blame their
own way of going about the business of changing things. A little study
of history or even of sociology would teach them what not to waste
their time on. But their only use for the past is to “curse it out.”
“Les grands-pères ont toujours tort.” Yet they themselves go down like
ninepins, knocked over by the same forces that, for a few thousand
years at least, have been antagonizing the idealism and altruism of
men. As I said before, one has some sympathy with Mr. Wells; for his
people (his men, at least, since he does not think much better of women
than does Arnold Bennett) are trying to inform themselves, trying to
think it all out in terms of reason. The syndicate is not trying to
think anything out. It rests content with replying to every affirmation
of history: “You lie.” That is not argument: it is the mere sticking
out of tongues. The conventionally accepted thing _must_ be wrong;
and that is all there is to it.
Take the matter of their whole attitude to sex--which is, by and
large, the question they are most pre-occupied with. A certain person,
a scholar and a gentleman, was pointing out to me, the other day, the
accuracy of Chaucer’s treatment of Troilus. Troilus lets Cressida
go, not because he does not love her passionately, but because the
chivalrous Code demands it of him, demands that he should protect her
reputation. Pandar cannot move him from his knightly duty. If ever
a hero loved exuberantly, it was Troilus. Yet the inhibition works.
Chaucer knew what he was talking about. Whereas, as my interlocutor
went on to say, with these contemporary authors, the lack of inhibition
seems to be the index of emotion. They ask you to take lawlessness for
depth of feeling. The decorously behaved, according to them, are only
the passionless. That is plain bad psychology. For if love is the real
thing, it takes perpetually into account the duty to the beloved. Love
will bring out the scruples of a comparatively unscrupulous person. No
real lover wants to put the beloved “up against” anything disagreeable.
And this being brave for someone else is not a natural expression of
love. You may be brave to the rack and the gridiron for yourself; but
being vicariously brave to the rack and the gridiron is a mean, modern
kind of courage. Suppose you do not believe in the social order: the
social order, none the less, is powerful enough to make a decent man
want its approval for the woman he loves. He does not wish to have her
inconvenienced--not if he loves her.
But the woman who does not wish to run up against the social order
gets scant sympathy from the modern British hero. She ought to want to
run counter to it; and if he has anything to say about it, she will
jolly well have to. I do not know how other people feel about Betty
Gale, but I am exceedingly sorry for her. I am sufficiently sorry for
the girl who married Mr. Onions’s murderer, the hero of _The Debit
Account_ and _In Accordance with the Evidence_. I am even sorry
for Pauline in _Plashers Mead_; though, frankly, I think Mr.
Mackenzie is fairer to his characters than any of the others. These
young women (I am speaking, you see, at the moment, of the respectable
ones) have such selfish, cantankerous, and muddle-headed gentlemen to
deal with!
Our authors do succeed in making their conventional folk disagreeable.
That is, they make the hero acutely perceptive of the conventional
vices. But if ever there was a case of the beam and the mote! Look at
a fair list of them: the hero of _The Invisible Event_, of _The
Strangers’ Wedding_, of _Round the Corner_, of _Plashers
Mead_, of _The Debit Account_. Was there ever a more vaporing
bunch of egotists anywhere? A great deal of fun has been poked at the
heroes of the romantic period: the Manfreds and Laras, the Heathcliffs
and Rochesters. Their revolts against society have been jests for
the critics to split their sides over, these fifty years. But they
were dignified creatures in comparison, and they had far more sense
of fact. They knew, for example, when they bucked society, what they
were bucking. They knew the process was not going to be entirely
comfortable, and they did not complain of discomfort, because they saw
a reason why it should be made hot for them. They simply felt that
they had a _quid pro quo_. They had, as I have said elsewhere,
the Satanic charm; they had also some of the Satanic logic. These
heroes have been, for many decades, considered the wildest travesties
of humanity. But, indeed, they are far more comprehensible than the
young men in the modern British novels. A young woman in love with
Lara might well expect the worst; but at least she would know what
to expect. Lara would never have shilly-shallied about among the
conventions like Dick Lynneker, or Capes, or Jacob Stahl, changing his
mind from chapter to chapter, and never knowing precisely what he did
want, anyhow. Lara would have known what he wanted and why. He would
not even have hesitated to attribute to himself an evil motive, if he
had one. But none of these young men would attribute to himself an evil
motive. Whatever they want must be right; and if eventually they want
the exact opposite, then that must be right, too. The bewildered woman
follows in their wake.
That is why, by and large, they are so corrupting. Yes, more corrupting
than the effervescent geniuses of the nineties. You might be shocked
by Dorian Gray, or by Aubrey Beardsley’s gentlemen and ladies; but
you were never tricked into imagining that it was “up to you” to look
like an Aubrey Beardsley drawing or to behave like Dorian Gray. The
shining lights of the nineties lived to _épater le bourgeois_--and
they did it. On the whole, that was greatly to the credit of _le
bourgeois_. People who would rather die than show themselves
_épatés_ (there are always a lot of such folk) were very
entertained. I dare say some of these authors and poets did harm in
their day. But they did not do it by deluding the public into thinking
that they were virtuous: they did it by being witty at the expense of
virtue. Our novelists are not witty at the expense of virtue (or at
the expense of anything else, be it said in passing). They perform all
their antics in the very name of virtue. They are right, and everyone
else is wrong.
Now the _révolté_ with a programme we can endure, for we have
often, during the muddled history of civilization, had to endure him.
Sometimes he does a lot of damage; sometimes he does a lot of good.
The point is that, in either case, his emotional force has been at
the service of his programme. The trouble with these people is that
they have no programme. They are _révoltés_ because they are
dissatisfied or in hard luck, and they hit wildly. They have not the
brains to think anything out. Our friends of the nineties thought
that nothing was sacred--except, perhaps, beauty. These folk know
nothing about beauty--even Mr. Galsworthy, who may set you down on
a hillside to look at a lovely landscape, and leave you there for
several pages, but who spends his time during those pages in infecting
that natural loveliness with notions of agrarian reform. The only
thing that is sacred to these young folk is their own impulses;
which makes them about as satisfactory to deal with as the wild gun
in _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_. Since their own impulses chop and
change--and are always sacred--you can do nothing except express
perfect confidence in their temperaments. You are not to know them by
their fruits; you are to judge them by their good intentions--for which
you must take their own word.
Nor are they “ineffectual angels.” If they only were! They are guilty
of a lot of very ignoble impulses, and proceed often to gratify them.
So did the romantic hero-villains, you may say. Ah, but here is the
difference. The romantic hero-villains were proud, sometimes, of their
sin; but they called it sin, even while they boasted of it. So did
the æsthetes of the nineties. If it had not been sin, there would
have been no fun in it. A very lamentable point of view, doubtless;
but less dangerous to society than the contemporary mode. For while
you still call it sin, you are accepting the categories, if not the
judgments, of society. You will not hurt society much while you accept
its categories. What these young men and young women do is to call
anything virtuous that they happen to want to do. They have not even
the logic of Satanists, perceiving evil and preferring it. The thing
that is evil is the thing that makes them suffer; the thing that is
good is the thing that pleases them. When free love is convenient,
free love, only, is virtuous; marriage becomes virtuous the moment
marriage becomes convenient. As you never know when obstacles are going
to appear or disappear--as convenience is often in the hands of mere
fortuitous fate--there is no test left. You must, I repeat, have blind
faith in their temperaments. I do not think this is too hard a saying.
As for the women who match and mate with the men: they do not give us
much more hope. They are, to speak plainly, an unlovely lot. You may
be as sorry as you like for them, but pity is not praise. Mr. Wells’s
women are too apt to be selfish and treacherous; Mr. Bennett’s opinion
is evidently that no woman can be decent unless she is a fool--like
Constance, say, in _The Old Wives’ Tale_. (I know there is Alice
Challis; but I fancy Alice is only a symbol of what every man wants
and never gets.) And look, for a moment, at the women described by the
syndicate. They are cheap: hard without being strong; cold without
being pure; sentimental without being kind. There is the sensual
type--Madeline Paignton, the aristocratic wanton, or Lily Haden, who
cannot be continent for a few weeks, even for the sake of wealth
and a husband; there is all the crew of light women among whom the
heroes make their humanitarian progress. There is the intellectual
(God save the mark!) type: the heroine of _Gray Youth_, or even
Rachel Beaminster, whose mental energy all goes into revolt. If Mr.
Walpole had made the Duchess of Wrexe a human being, in whose reality
we could believe, we might have more sympathy with Rachel’s spiteful
traffickings with the family ne’er-do-well. But we should have to
be far sunk in fetishism to believe in the Duchess; she is a mere
Mumbo-Jumbo; and her family seems about as intelligent as the first
circles of Dahomey. Compare her, for an instant, with Lady Kew. No, a
tyranny like that is an invented tyranny; it has nothing to do with
life. The Duchess of Wrexe (to borrow a term from the anthropologists)
has no _mana_ at all. Rachel’s revolt is absurd; and simply shows
up Rachel as a very disagreeable and headstrong person. True, there
is always something to make their revolts absurd. They seem not to be
dealing with facts at all, these young people; probably because they
are all sentimentalists, and for a sentimentalist a delusion is as good
as a fact, any day. A wicked giant is, by definition, anything you
happen to be tilting at--even if in real life he is a windmill.
You may say that two facts these characters do often deal with:
poverty and the sex instinct. Yes, they are sometimes poor, and have a
hard time. But they have just as hard a time when they are not poor.
Poverty is not the root of all evil, logically exposed as such, as it
so often is in the work of George Gissing. Not one of this group of
authors has ever achieved the cumulative, inevitable tragedy of _New
Grub Street_, for example: a far better indictment of some of the
ills of the social order than all this modern mouthing. Indeed, not
one of them is able to make anything seem inevitable. If they would
only let the indictment be pitiless and let it stand; let us draw our
own conclusions! And as for poverty, have you noticed that even when
these young men are as poor as the hero of Mr. Onions’s trilogy, they
get over it? They never end in poverty. Yet their grievances are not
disposed of when they become rich. By that time, they are worried about
something else. They have the complaining habit. Rich or poor, married
or unmarried, they are always, one foresees, going to complain. These
authors convince one that their Utopia would be a hell on earth. They
cannot reason; they cannot even dream convincingly. They are in a state
of pitiful intellectual poverty--or, at least, penuriousness; for, if
they have wealth, they certainly do not distribute it.
The sex instinct is, on the whole, their long suit. I do not think
there is much more to be said about their treatment of it. They have
not painted for us a nobler, or a more romantic, or a more passionate
love between man and woman, than have some of their predecessors. I
cannot see that these novelists give us anything new in the way of
human information--except, perhaps, just one thing.
That one thing can best be described as a new theory--no, not a theory,
a kind of Futurist presentment--of human types. There are just two
possible things to do with the heroes and heroines of the new school;
either to say that, as human beings, they do not exist; or to assume
that they do exist and to lament the fact. The kinder, I believe, is to
say that they do not exist. It is also the easier conclusion. For they
are not consistent with themselves; they pass kaleidoscopically from
one state of being to its opposite; as mortals, they are incalculable,
and as literary creations they are unconvincing. “I don’t believe
there’s any sich a person,” is the natural reply to their presented
cases. The authors have not the power of assuring us of the real
existence of their characters. Life is not in them. If it is not a
fault of vision, then it is a fault of technique. I have spoken of
the complete unreality of the Duchess of Wrexe; but she is no more
unreal than Dick Lynneker, or the hero of Mr. Onions’s trilogy. You can
believe in far viler and wickeder people, if you must; you can believe
in Moll Flanders or Carker or Long John Silver. It is not moral but
intellectual squeamishness that makes it difficult to accept them.
Psychologically speaking, they are freaks in side-shows. Mr. Bennett
presents us with a whole gallery of ignoble folk; but one is inclined
to believe in some of them, at least. Indeed, one is inclined to
believe, thanks to Mr. Bennett, that the Five Towns are almost entirely
populated with such (which may be hard on the Five Towns, but that is
Mr. Bennett’s look-out). The syndicate has not Mr. Bennett’s technique.
Yet this is just where the very fact of the syndicate gives one pause.
Since there are so many novelists in England doing precisely the same
kind of inconsistent, unconvincing, unlovable person, there may well
be some genuine type that they are trying to describe. Almost never,
it seems to me, do they “get it across”; but there must be people
wandering about the English landscape who have given the syndicate the
idea. We hardly believe that their portraits are accurate; for their
portraits are not psychologically possible. But one comes to believe in
prototypes. The syndicate would not all, at a given signal, have gone
off their heads in exactly the same way. They must have some warrant
in fact. If the prototypes of Jacob Stahl and of Dick Lynneker, of
Rachel Beaminster and of the heroine of _Gray Youth_ exist, these
books are, in a sense, a portent. The Five Towns might be responsible
for Hilda Lessways, but the Five Towns are not responsible for the
girl in _Gray Youth_. One does not feel that the syndicate gives
one more than circumstantial evidence, but of that, there is an almost
overwhelming amount. This is depressing. Perhaps, eventually, Mr.
Compton Mackenzie will resign from the syndicate and really tell us
something. At present he too is bound by their conventions. But in
_Plashers Mead_, tiresome as it is with the reiterant egotism
of half-fledged youth, he does “get it across.” Certain people whose
opinion is worth much more than mine, tell me that Mr. Walpole has got
it across in _The Dark Forest_. I must admit, in my own case,
the strict limitations of western Europe: it will take more than
Mr. Walpole to make Russians credible to me. He seems to me no more
plausible than Dostoievsky, and far, far short of Turgenev. And, after
all, I am not sure that Nijinsky is not a better expositor than either.
It has been much more difficult than I dreamed, to deal with these
gentlemen at all. The work of one shifts and plays into the work
of the other so maddeningly that it is hard, not only to treat of
them individually, but to treat of them even as a group. You think
you have a line on Mr. Walpole, and you find him melting into Mr.
Beresford or Mr. Onions. Everyone knows what a miserable business a
composite photograph is. No feature is really defined. These authors
differentiate themselves just enough by detail of plot and setting
and diction, to avoid a grand inclusive charge of plagiarism. You
cannot say that one has filched a page from another, because there
is no telling who began it. But I believe that, as far as style is
concerned, if you inserted six consecutive pages written severally
by the six of them, in any chapter of any book, no one would ever
know the difference. Of course, you would have to allow for different
names of characters, and some havoc might be played with continuity of
plot--if there happened to be any plot in that chapter. But the style
would, I am sure, stand the test. Mr. Mackenzie forces his vocabulary
as the others do not (he prides himself, I fancy, particularly on the
number of his metaphors for the moon); but apart from Mr. Mackenzie’s
occasional exoticism, they write alike. They have the same rhythms,
the same sentence-structure, the same syntactical habits. It is
clever, nervous writing, but it is not the grand style. They are not
memorable: they do not stand out, any one of them, or any one of their
works, as a mental experience. The only adventure to be got from them
is to read them all, and then, forgetting (as you inevitably do) who is
who and which is which, analyze the effect of the group. It is a hazy
and perplexing effect--as I fear I have too meticulously said.
For in the long run, one’s main feeling about the younger English
writers is one of sheer disappointment. They have their reputation:
people are always telling you that this one or that one is really
important. I cannot believe that they are. As portrayers of life, they
do not convince--a matter partly of muddle-headedness and partly of
technique in the narrower sense. Moreover, they are dull. Mr. Bennett
may not convince in the end, because in the end one becomes aware of
his moral myopia; but he is not usually dull. He writes better than
they do--that is what it comes to. If there were only one of them, we
might put up with him; but how can we put up with six of him? There
is not time. As for their attack on convention, whatever it may be,
they will have to do it better to get any serious attention paid to
them. You need seasoned troops to attack that fortress--or at least
bigger guns. The only person who thinks that anything, no matter what,
is better than the _status quo_, is the anarchist. Most of us
are not anarchists; and while most of us are willing to have things
improved, if necessary, at our own expense, we want some assurance
that they will be improved. And if we must make blind experiments--as
the reformers all want us to--let us at least know the object of the
experiment. These writers do not seem to know what they would like to
achieve if they could.
What they chiefly breed in one is hopelessness. If this is the best
that England can do for us in the way of fiction, we must either
encourage our native product, or eschew fiction and take to “serious”
reading. These men are too dull. The time is ripe, once more, I
believe, for a few big picaresque novels: something in the mode of the
_Satyricon_, and _Gil Blas_, and _Huckleberry Finn_. For I do not think
that people will put up forever with being bored--especially as they
are not boring us in the interests of virtue.
To be sure--though it is some time since I began this essay--I have
still not read D. H. Lawrence.