Few attentive readers, I take it, would deny that the English
novelist—from whom, in this case, there happens to be even less
occasion than usual for distinguishing the American—testifies in his
art much more than his foreign comrade, from whatever quarter, to the
rigour of convention. There are whole sides of life about which he has
as little to say as possible, about which he observes indeed in general
a silence that has visibly ended by becoming for the foreign comrade his
great characteristic. He strikes the spectator as having with a
misplaced humility consented once for all to be admonished as to what he
shall or shall not “mention”—and to be admonished in especial by an
authority altogether indefinite. He subscribes, when his turn comes
round, to an agreement in the drawing-up of which he has had no hand; he
sits down to his task with a certain received canon of the “proper”
before his eyes. The critic I am supposing reproaches him, naturally, in
this critic’s way, with a marked failure ever to challenge, much less to
analyse, that conception; with having never, as would appear, so much as
put to himself in regard to most of the matters of which he makes his
mystery the simple question “Proper to what?” How can any authority,
even the most embodied, asks the exponent of other views, decide for us
in advance what shall in any case be proper—with the consequent
implication of impropriety—to our given subject?
The English novelist would, I imagine, even sometimes be led on to
finding that he has practically had to meet such an overhauling by a
further admission, though an admission still tacit and showing him not a
little shy of the whole discussion—principles and formulas being in
general, as we know, but little his affair. Would he not, if off his
guard, have been in peril of lapsing into the doctrine—suicidal when
reflected upon—that there may be also an _a priori_ rule, a “Thou shalt
not,” if not a “Thou shalt,” as to treatable subjects themselves? Then
it would be that his alien foe might fairly revel in the sense of having
him in a corner, laughing an evil laugh to hear him plead in explanation
that it is exactly _most_ as to the subject to be treated that he feels
the need laid upon him to conform. What is he to do when he has an idea
to embody, we might suspect him rashly to inquire, unless, frankly to
ask himself in the first place of _all_ if it be proper? Not indeed—we
catch the reservation—that he is consciously often accessible to ideas
for which that virtue may not be claimed. Naturally, however, still,
such a plea only brings forth for his interlocutor a repetition of the
original appeal: “Proper to what?” There is only one propriety the
painter of life can ask of his morsel of material: Is it, or is it not,
of the stuff of life? So, in simplified terms at any rate, I seem to
hear the interchange; to which I need listen no longer than thus to have
derived from it a word of support for my position. The question of our
possible rejoinder to the scorn of societies otherwise affected I must
leave for some other connection. The point is—if point I may expect to
obtain any countenance to its being called—that, in spite of our great
Dickens and, in a minor degree, of our great George Eliot, the
limitations of our practice are elsewhere than among ourselves pretty
well held to have put us out of court. The thing least conceded to us
moreover is that we handle at all frankly—if we put forward such a
claim—even our own subject-matter or in other words our own life. “Your
own is all we want of you, all we should like to see. But that your
system really touches your own is exactly what we deny. Never, never!”
For what it really comes to is that practically we, of all people in the
world, are accused of a system. Call this system a conspiracy of
silence, and the whole charge is upon us.
The fact of the silence, whether or no of the system, is fortunately all
that at present concerns us. Did this not happen to be the case nothing
could be more interesting, I think, than to follow somewhat further
several of the bearings of the matter, which would bring us face to face
with some wonderful and, I hasten to add, by no means doubtless merely
disconcerting truths about ourselves. It has been given us to read a
good deal, in these latter days, about _l’âme Française_ and _l’âme
Russe_—and with the result, in all probability, of our being rather
less than more penetrated with the desire, in emulation of these
opportunities, to deliver ourselves upon the English or the American
soul. There would appear to be nothing we are totally conscious of that
we are less eager to reduce to the mere expressible, to hand over to
publicity, current journalistic prose aiding, than either of these fine
essence; and yet incontestably there are neighbourhoods in which we feel
ourselves within scent and reach of them by something of the same sense
that in thick forests serves the hunter of great game. He may not quite
touch the precious presence, but he knows when it is near. So somehow we
know that the “Anglo-Saxon” soul, the modern at least, is not far off
when we frankly consider the practice of our race—comparatively recent
though it be—in taking for granted the “innocence” of literature.
Our perhaps a trifle witless way of expressing our conception of this
innocence and our desire for it is, characteristically enough, by taking
refuge in another vagueness, by invoking the allowances that we
understand works of imagination and of criticism to make to the “young.”
I know not whether it has ever officially been stated for us that, given
the young, given literature, and given, under stress, the need of
sacrificing one or the other party, it is not certainly by our sense of
“style” that our choice would be determined: no great art in the reading
of signs and symptoms is at all events required for a view of our
probable instinct in such a case. That instinct, however, has too many
deep things in it to be briefly or easily disposed of, and there would
be no greater mistake than to attempt too simple an account of it. The
account most likely to be given by a completely detached critic would be
that we are as a race better equipped for action than for thought, and
that to let the art of expression go by the board is through that very
fact to point to the limits of what we mostly have to express. If we
accept such a report we shall do so, I think, rather from a strong than
from a weak sense of what may easily be made of it; but I glance at
these things only as at objects almost too flooded with light, and come
back after my parenthesis to what more immediately concerns me: the
plain reflection that, if the elements of compromise—compromise with
fifty of the “facts of life”—be the common feature of the novel of
English speech, so it is mainly indebted for this character to the sex
comparatively without a feeling for logic.
Nothing is at any rate _a priori_ more natural than to trace a
connection between our general mildness, as it may conveniently be
called, and the fact that we are likewise so generally feminine. Is the
English novel “proper” because it is so much written by women, or is it
only so much written by women because its propriety has been so firmly
established? The intimate relation is on either determination all that
is here pertinent—effect and cause may be left to themselves. What is
further pertinent, as happens, is that on a near view the relation is
not constant; by which I mean that, though the ladies are always
productive, the fashion of mildness is not always the same. Convention
in short has its ups and downs, and these votaries have of late years, I
think, been as often seen weltering in the hollow of the wave as borne
aloft on its crest. Some of them may even be held positively to have
distinguished themselves most—whether or no in veils of anonymity—on
the occasion of the downward movement; making us really wonder if their
number might not fairly, under any steadier force of such a movement, be
counted on to increase. All sorts of inquiries are suggested in truth by
the sight. “Emancipations” are in the air, and may it not possibly be
that we shall see two of the most striking coincide? If convention has,
to the tune to which I just invited an ear, blighted our fiction, what
shall we say of its admitted, its still more deprecated and in so many
quarters even deplored, effect upon the great body under the special
patronage of which the “output” has none the less insisted on becoming
incomparably copious? Since the general inaptitude of women appears by
this time triumphantly to have been proved an assumption particularly
hollow, despoiled more and more each day of the last tatters of its
credit, why should not the new force thus liberated really, in the
connection I indicate, give something of its measure?
It is at any rate keeping within bounds to say that the novel will
surely not become less free in proportion as the condition of women
becomes more easy. It is more or less in deference to their constant
concern with it that we have seen it, among ourselves, pick its steps so
carefully; but there are indications that the future may reserve us the
surprise of having to thank the very class whose supposed sensibilities
have most oppressed us for teaching it not only a longer stride, but a
healthy indifference to an occasional splash. It is for instance only of
quite recent years that the type of fiction commonly identified as the
“sexual” has achieved—for purposes of reference, so far as notices in
newspapers may be held to constitute reference—a salience variously
estimated. Now therefore, though it is early to say that all
“imaginative work” from the female hand is subject to this description,
there is assuredly none markedly so subject that is _not_ from the
female hand. The female mind has in fact throughout the competition
carried off the prize in the familiar game, known to us all from
childhood’s hour, of playing at “grown-up;” finding thus its
opportunity, with no small acuteness, in the more and more marked
tendency of the mind of the other gender to revert, alike in the grave
and the gay, to those simplicities which there would appear to be some
warrant for pronouncing puerile. It is the ladies in a word who have
lately done most to remind us of man’s relations with himself, that is
with woman. His relations with the pistol, the pirate, the police, the
wild and the tame beast—are not these prevailingly what the gentlemen
have given us? And does not the difference sufficiently point my moral?
Let me, however, not seem to have gone too far afield to seek it; for my
reflections—general perhaps to excess—closely connect themselves with
a subject to which they are quite ready to yield in interest. I have
lately been giving a happy extension to an old acquaintance, dating from
early in the eighties, with the striking romantic work of Matilde Serao;
a writer who, apart from other successes, has the excellent effect, the
sign of the stronger few, that the end of her story is, for her reader,
never the end of her work. On thus recently returning to her I have
found in her something much more to my present purpose than the mere
appearance of power and ease. If she is interesting largely because she
is, in the light of her free, her extraordinary Neapolitan temperament,
a vivid painter and a rich register of sensations and impressions, she
is still more so as an exceptionally compact and suggestive _case_, a
case exempt from interference and presenting itself with a beautiful
unconsciousness. She has had the good fortune—if it be, after all, not
the ill—to develop in an air in which convention, in our invidious
sense, has had as little to say to her as possible; and she is
accordingly a precious example of the possibilities of free exercise.
The questions of the proper and the improper are comfortably far from
her; and though more than in the line of her sisters of English speech
she may have to reckon with prescriptions as to form—a burden at which
in truth she snaps her fingers with an approach to impertinence—she
moves in a circle practically void of all pre-judgment as to subject and
matter. Conscious enough, doubtless, of a literary law to be offended,
and caring little in fact, I repeat—for it is her weakness—what wrong
it may suffer, she has not even the agreeable incentive of an ability to
calculate the “moral” shocks she may administer.
Practically chartered then she is further happy—since they both
minister to ease—in two substantial facts: she is a daughter of the
veritable south and a product of the contemporary newspaper. A
Neapolitan by birth and a journalist by circumstance, by marriage and in
some degree doubtless also by inclination, she strikes for us from the
first the note of facility and spontaneity and the note of initiation
and practice. Concerned, through her husband, in the conduct of a
Neapolitan morning paper, of a large circulation and a radical colour,
she has, as I infer, produced her novels and tales mainly in such
snatches of time and of inspiration as have been left her by urgent
day-to-day journalism. They distinctly betray, throughout, the
conditions of their birth—so little are they to the literary sense
children of maturity and leisure. On the question of style in a foreign
writer it takes many contributive lights to make us sure of our ground;
but I feel myself on the safe side in conceiving that this lady, full of
perception and vibration, can not only not figure as a purist, but must
be supposed throughout, in spite of an explosive eloquence, to pretend
but little to distinction of form: which for an Italian is a much graver
predicament than for one of our shapeless selves. That, however, would
perhaps pass for a small quarrel with a writer, or rather with a talker
and—for it is what one must most insist on—a _feeler_, of Matilde
Serao’s remarkable spontaneity. Her Neapolitan nature is by itself a
value, to whatever literary lapses it may minister. A torch kindled at
that flame can be but freely waved, and our author’s arm has a fine
action. Loud, loquacious, abundant, natural, happy, with luxurious
insistences on the handsome, the costly and the fleshly, the fine
persons and fine clothes of her characters, their satin and velvet,
their bracelets, rings, white waistcoats, general appointments and
bedroom furniture, with almost as many repetitions and as free a tongue,
in short, as Juliet’s nurse, she reflects at every turn the wonderful
mixture that surrounds her—the beauty, the misery, the history, the
light and noise and dust, the prolonged paganism and the renewed
reactions, the great style of the distant and the past and the generally
compromised state of the immediate and the near. These things were all
in the germ for the reader of her earlier novels—they have since only
gathered volume and assurance—so that I well remember the impression
made on me, when the book was new (my copy, apparently of the first
edition, bears the date of 1885), by the rare energy, the immense
_disinvoltura_, of “La Conquista di Roma.” This was my introduction to
the author, in consequence of which I immediately read “Fantasia” and
the “Vita e Avventure di Riccardo Joanna,” with some smaller pieces;
after which, interrupted but not detached, I knew nothing more till, in
the course of time, I renewed acquaintance on the ground of “Il Paese di
Cuccagna,” then, however, no longer in its first freshness. That work
set me straightway to reading everything else I could lay hands on, and
I think therefore that, save “Il Ventre di Napoli” and two or three
quite recent productions that I have not met, there is nothing from our
author that I have not mastered. Such as I find her in everything, she
remains above all things the signal “case.”
If, however, she appears, as I am bound to note, not to have kept the
full promise of her early energy, this is because it has suited her to
move less in the direction—where so much might have awaited her—of
“Riccardo Joanna” and “La Conquista” than in that, on the whole less
happily symptomatic, of “Fantasia.” “Fantasia” is, before all else, a
study of “passion,” or rather of the intenser form of that mystery which
the Italian _passione_ better expresses; and I hasten to confess that
had she not so marked herself an exponent of this specialty I should
probably not now be writing of her. I conceive none the less that it
would have been open to her to favour more that side of her great talent
of which the so powerful “Paese di Cuccagna” is the strongest example.
There is by good fortune in this large miscellaneous picture of
Neapolitan life no _passione_ save that of the observer curiously and
pityingly intent upon it, that of the artist resolute at any cost to
embrace and reproduce it. Admirably, easily, convincingly objective, the
thing is a sustained panorama, a chronicle of manners finding its unity
in one recurrent note, that of the consuming lottery-hunger which
constitutes the joy, the curse, the obsession and the ruin, according to
Matilde Serao, of her fellow-citizens. Her works are thus divided by a
somewhat unequal line, those on one side of which the critic is tempted
to accuse her of having not altogether happily sacrificed to those on
the other. When she for the most part invokes under the name of
_passione_ the main explanation of the mortal lot it is to follow the
windings of this clue in the upper walks of life, to haunt the
aristocracy, to embrace the world of fashion, to overflow with clothes,
jewels and promiscuous intercourse, all to the proportionate eclipse of
her strong, full vision of the more usually vulgar. “La Conquista” is
the story of a young deputy who comes up to the Chamber, from the
Basilicata, with a touching candour of ambition and a perilous ignorance
of the pitfalls of capitals. His dream is to conquer Rome, but it is by
Rome naturally that he is conquered. He alights on his political twig
with a flutter of wings, but has reckoned in his innocence without the
strong taste in so many quarters for sport; and it is with a charge of
shot in his breast and a drag of his pinions in the dust that he takes
his way back to mediocrity, obscurity and the parent nest. It is from
the ladies—as was indeed even from the first to be expected with
Serao—that he receives his doom; _passione_ is in these pages already
at the door and soon arrives; _passione_ rapidly enough passes its
sponge over everything not itself.
In “Cuore Infermo,” in “Addio Amore,” in “Il Castigo,” in the two
volumes of “Gli Amanti” and in various other pieces this effacement is
so complete that we see the persons concerned but in the one relation,
with every other circumstance, those of concurrent profession,
possession, occupation, connection, interest, amusement, kinship,
utterly superseded and obscured. Save in the three or four books I have
named as exceptional the figures evoked are literally professional
lovers, “available,” as the term is, for _passione_ alone: which is the
striking sign, as I shall presently indicate, of the extremity in which
her enjoyment of the freedom we so often have to envy has strangely
landed our author. “Riccardo Joanna,” which, like “La Conquista,” has
force, humour and charm, sounding with freshness the note of the general
life, is such a picture of certain of the sordid conditions of Italian
journalism as, if I may trust my memory without re-perusal, sharply and
pathetically imposes itself. I recall “Fantasia” on the other hand as
wholly _passione_—all concentration and erotics, the latter practised
in this instance, as in “Addio Amore,” with extreme cruelty to the
“good” heroine, the person innocent and sacrificed; yet this volume too
contributes its part in the retrospect to that appearance of marked
discipleship which was one of the original sources of my interest.
Nothing could more have engaged one’s attention in these matters at that
moment than the fresh phenomenon of a lady-novelist so confessedly
flushed with the influence of Émile Zola. Passing among ourselves as a
lurid warning even to workers of his own sex, he drew a new grace from
the candid homage—all implied and indirect, but, as I refigure my
impression, not the less unmistakable—of that half of humanity which,
let alone attempting to follow in his footsteps, was not supposed even
to turn his pages. There is an episode in “Fantasia”—a scene in which
the relations of the hero and the “bad” heroine are strangely
consolidated by a visit together to a cattle-show—in which the courage
of the pupil has but little to envy the breadth of the master. The hot
day and hot hour, the heavy air and the strong smells, the great and
small beasts, the action on the sensibilities of the lady and the
gentleman of the rich animal life, the collapse indeed of the lady in
the presence of the prize bull—all these are touches for which luckily
our author has the warrant of a greater name. The general picture, in
“Fantasia,” of the agricultural exhibition at Caserta is in fact not the
worse at any point for a noticeable echo of more than one French model.
Would the author have found so full an occasion in it without a fond
memory of the immortal Cornices of “Madame Bovary”?
These, however, are minor questions—pertinent only as connecting
themselves with the more serious side of her talent. We may rejoice in
such a specimen of it as is offered by the too brief series of episodes
of “The Romance of the Maiden.” These things, dealing mainly with the
small miseries of small folk, have a palpable truth, and it is striking
that, to put the matter simply, Madame Serao is at her best almost in
direct proportion as her characters are poor. By poor I mean literally
the reverse of rich; for directly they _are_ rich and begin, as the
phrase is, to keep their carriage, her taste totters and lapses, her
style approximates at moments to that of the ladies who do the fashions
and the letters from the watering-places in the society papers. She has
acutely and she renders with excellent breadth the sense of benighted
lives, of small sordid troubles, of the general unhappy youthful (on the
part of her own sex at least) and the general more or less starved
plebeian consciousness. The degree to which it testifies to all this is
one of the great beauties of “Il Paese di Cuccagna,” even if the moral
of that dire picture be simply that in respect to the gaming-passion,
the madness of “numbers,” no walk of life at Naples is too high or too
low to be ravaged. Beautiful, in “Il Romanzo della Fanciulla,” are the
exhibitions of grinding girl-life in the big telegraph office and in the
State normal school. The gem of “Gli Amanti” is the tiny tale of
“Vicenzella,” a masterpiece in twenty small pages—the vision of what
three or four afternoon hours could contain for a slip of a creature of
the Naples waterside, a poor girl who picks up a living by the cookery
and sale, on the edge of a parapet, of various rank dismembered polyps
of the southern sea, and who is from stage to stage despoiled of the
pence she patiently pockets for them by the successive small emissaries
of her artful, absent lover, constantly faithless, occupied, not too far
off, in regaling a lady of his temporary preference, and proportionately
clamorous for fresh remittances. The moment and the picture are but a
scrap, yet they are as large as life.
“Canituccia,” in “Piccole Anime,” may happily pair with “Vicenzella,”
Canituccia being simply the humble rustic guardian, in field and
wood—scarce more than a child—of the still more tender Ciccotto; and
Ciccotto being a fine young pink-and-white pig, an animal of endowments
that lead, after he has had time to render infatuated his otherwise
quite solitary and joyless friend, to his premature conversion into
bacon. She assists, helplessly silent, staring, almost idiotic, from a
corner of the cabin-yard, by night and lamplight, in the presence of
gleaming knives and steaming pots and bloody tubs, at the sacrifice that
deprives her of all company, and nothing can exceed the homely truth of
the touch that finally rounds off the scene and for which I must refer
my reader to the volume. Let me further not fail to register my
admiration for the curious cluster of scenes that, in “Il Romanzo,”
bears the title of “Nella Lava.” Here frankly, I take it, we have the
real principle of “naturalism”—a consistent presentment of the famous
“slice of life.” The slices given us—slices of shabby hungry maidenhood
in small cockney circles—are but sketchily related to the volcanic
catastrophe we hear rumbling behind them, the undertone of all the noise
of Naples; but they have the real artistic importance of showing us how
little “story” is required to hold us when we get, before the object
evoked and in the air created, the impression of the real thing.
Whatever thing—interesting inference—has but effectively to _be_ real
to constitute in itself story enough. There is no story without it, none
that is not rank humbug; whereas with it the very desert blooms.
This last-named phenomenon takes place, I fear, but in a minor degree in
such of our author’s productions as “Cuore Infermo,” “Addio Amore,” “Il
Castigo” and the double series of “Gli Amanti”; and for a reason that I
the more promptly indicate as it not only explains, I think, the
comparative inanity of these pictures, but does more than anything else
to reward our inquiry. The very first reflection suggested by Serao’s
novels of “passion” is that they perfectly meet our speculation as to
what might with a little time become of our own fiction were our
particular convention suspended. We see so what, on its actual lines,
does, what _has_, become of it, and are so sated with the vision that a
little consideration of the latent other chance will surely but refresh
us. The effect then, we discover, of the undertaking to give _passione_
its whole place is that by the operation of a singular law no place
speedily appears to be left for anything else; and the effect of that in
turn is greatly to modify, first, the truth of things, and second, with
small delay, what may be left them of their beauty. We find ourselves
wondering after a little whether there may not really be more truth in
the world misrepresented according to our own familiar fashion than in
such a world as that of Madame Serao’s exuberant victims of Venus. It is
not only that if Venus herself is notoriously beautiful her altar, as
happens, is by no means always proportionately august; it is also that
we draw, in the long run, small comfort from the virtual suppression, by
any painter, of whatever skill—and the skill of this particular one
fails to rise to the height—of every relation in life but that over
which Venus presides. In “Fior di Passione” and the several others of a
like connection that I have named the suppression is really complete;
the common humanities and sociabilities are wholly absent from the
picture.
The effect of this is extraordinarily to falsify the total show and to
present the particular affair—the intimacy in hand for the moment,
though the moment be but brief—as taking place in a strange false
perspective, a denuded desert which experience surely fails ever to give
us the like of and the action of which on the faculty of observation in
the painter is anything but favourable. It strikes at the root, in the
impression producible and produced, of discrimination and irony, of
humour and pathos. Our present author would doubtless contend on behalf
of the works I have mentioned that pathos at least does abound in
them—the particular bitterness, the inevitable despair that she again
and again shows to be the final savour of the cup of _passione_. It
would be quite open to her to urge—and she would be sure to do so with
eloquence—that if we pusillanimously pant for a moral, no moral really
can have the force of her almost inveterate evocation of the absolute
ravage of Venus, the dry desolation that in nine cases out of ten Venus
may be perceived to leave behind her. That, however, but half meets our
argument—which bears by no means merely on the desolation behind, but
on the desolation before, beside and generally roundabout. It is not in
short at all the moral but the fable itself that in the exclusively
sexual light breaks down and fails us. Love, at Naples and in Rome, as
Madame Serao exhibits it, is simply unaccompanied with any interplay of
our usual conditions—with affection, with duration, with circumstances
or consequences, with friends, enemies, husbands, wives, children,
parents, interests, occupations, the manifestation of tastes. Who are
these people, we presently ask ourselves, who love indeed with
fury—though for the most part with astonishing brevity—but who are so
without any suggested situation in life that they can only strike us as
loving for nothing and in the void, to no gain of experience and no
effect of a felt medium or a breathed air. We know them by nothing but
their convulsions and spasms, and we feel once again that it is not the
passion of hero and heroine that gives, that can ever give, the heroine
and the hero interest, but that it is they themselves, with the ground
they stand on and the objects enclosing them, who give interest to their
passion. This element touches us just in proportion as we see it mixed
with other things, with all the things with which it has to reckon and
struggle. There is moreover another reflection with which the pathetic
in this connection has to count, even though it undermine not a little
the whole of the tragic effect of the agitations of _passione_. Is it,
ruthlessly speaking, certain that the effect most consonant, for the
spectator, with truth is half as tragic as it is something else? Should
not the moral be sought in the very different quarter where the muse of
comedy rather would have the last word? The ambiguity and the difficulty
are, it strikes me, of a new growth, and spring from a perverse desire
on the part of the erotic novelist to secure for the adventures he
depicts a dignity that is not of the essence. To compass this dignity he
has to cultivate the high pitch and beat the big drum, but when he has
done so he has given everything the wrong accent and the whole the wrong
extravagance. Why see it all, we ask him, as an extravagance of the
solemn and the strained? Why make _such_ an erotic a matter of tears and
imprecations, and by so doing render so poor a service both to pleasure
and to pain? Since by your own free showing it is pre-eminently a matter
of folly, let us at least have folly with her bells, or when these
must—since they must—sound knells and dirges, leave them only to the
light hand of the lyric poet, who turns them at the worst to music.
Matilde Serao is in this connection constantly lugubrious; even from the
little so-called pastels of “Gli Amanti” she manages, with an ingenuity
worthy of a better cause, to expunge the note of gaiety.
This dismal _parti pris_ indeed will inevitably, it is to be feared,
when all the emancipations shall have said their last word, be that of
the ladies. Yet perhaps too, whatever such a probability, the tone
scarce signifies—in the presence, I mean, of the fundamental mistake
from which the author before us warns us off. That mistake, we gather
from her warning, would be to encourage, after all, any considerable
lowering of the level of our precious fund of reserve. When we come to
analyse we arrive at a final impression of what we pay, as lovers of the
novel, for such a chartered state as we have here a glimpse of; and we
find it to be an exposure, on the intervention at least of such a
literary temperament as the one before us, to a new kind of vulgarity.
We have surely as it is kinds enough. The absence of the convention
throws the writer back on tact, taste, delicacy, discretion, subjecting
these principles to a strain from which the happy office of its presence
is, in a considerable degree and for performers of the mere usual
endowment, to relieve him. When we have not a very fine sense the
convention appears in a manner to have it on our behalf. And how
frequent to-day, in the hurrying herd of brothers and sisters of the
pen, _is_ a fine sense—of _any_ side of their affair? Do we not
approach the truth in divining that only an eminent individual here and
there may be trusted for it? Here—for the case is our very lesson—is
this robust and wonderful Serao who is yet not to be trusted at all.
Does not the dim religious light with which we surround its shrine do
more, on the whole, for the poetry of _passione_ than the flood of
flaring gas with which, in her pages, and at her touch, it is drenched?
Does it not shrink, as a subject under treatment, from such expert
recognitions and easy discussions, from its so pitiless reduction to the
category of the familiar? It issues from the ordeal with the aspect with
which it might escape from a noisy family party or alight from a crowded
omnibus. It is at the category of the familiar that vulgarity begins.
There may be a cool virtue therefore even for “art,” and an appreciable
distinction even for truth, in the grace of hanging back and the choice
of standing off, in that shade of the superficial which we best defend
by simply practising it in season. A feeling revives at last, after a
timed intermission, that we may not immediately be quite able, quite
assured enough, to name, but which, gradually clearing up, soon defines
itself almost as a yearning. We turn round in obedience to
it—unmistakably we turn round again to the opposite pole, and there
before we know it have positively laid a clinging hand on dear old Jane
Austen.
THE NEW NOVEL
1914
We feel it not to be the paradox it may at the first blush seem that the
state of the novel in England at the present time is virtually very much
the state of criticism itself; and this moreover, at the risk perhaps of
some added appearance of perverse remark, by the very reason that we see
criticism so much in abeyance. So far as we miss it altogether how and
why does its “state” matter, and why and how can it or should it, as an
absent force, enjoy a relation to that constant renewal of our supply of
fiction which is a present one so far as a force at all? The relation is
this, in the fewest words: that no equal outpouring of matter into the
mould of literature, or what roughly passes for such, has been noted to
live its life and maintain its flood, its level at least of quantity and
mass, in such free and easy independence of critical attention. It
constitutes a condition and a perversity on the part of this element to
remain irresponsive before an appeal so vociferous at least and so
incessant; therefore how can such a neglect of occasions, so careless a
habit in spite of marked openings, be better described than as
responsibility declined in the face of disorder? The disorder thus
determines the relation, from the moment we feel that it might be less,
that it might be different, that something in the way of an order even
might be disengaged from it and replace it; from the moment in fact that
the low critical pitch is logically _reflected_ in the poetic or, less
pedantically speaking, the improvisational at large. The effect, if not
the prime office, of criticism is to make our absorption and our
enjoyment of the things that feed the mind as aware of itself as
possible, since that awareness quickens the mental demand, which thus in
turn wanders further and further for pasture. This action on the part of
the mind practically amounts to a reaching out for the reasons of its
interest, as only by its so ascertaining them can the interest grow more
various. This is the very education of our imaginative life; and thanks
to it the general question of how to refine, and of why certain things
refine more and most, on that happy consciousness, becomes for us of the
last importance. Then we cease to be only instinctive and at the mercy
of chance, feeling that we can ourselves take a hand in our satisfaction
and provide for it, making ourselves safe against dearth, and through
the door opened by that perception criticism enters, if we but give it
time, as a flood, the great flood of awareness; so maintaining its high
tide unless through some lapse of our sense for it, some flat reversion
to instinct alone, we block up the ingress and sit in stale and
shrinking waters. Stupidity may arrest any current and fatuity transcend
any privilege. The comfort of those who at such a time consider the
scene may be a little, with _their_ curiosity still insistent, to survey
its platitude and record the exhibited shrinkage; which amounts to the
attempt to understand how stupidity could so have prevailed. We take it
here that the answer to that inquiry can but be ever the same. The flood
of “production” has so inordinately exceeded the activity of control
that this latter anxious agent, first alarmed but then indifferent, has
been forced backward out of the gate, leaving the contents of the
reservoir to boil and evaporate. It is verily on the wrong side of the
gate that we just now seem to see criticism stand, for never was the
reservoir so bubblingly and noisily full, at least by the superficial
measure of life. We have caught the odd accident in the very fact of its
occurrence; we have seen the torrent swell by extravagant cheap
contribution, the huge increase of affluents turbid and unstrained.
Beyond number are the ways in which the democratic example, once
gathering momentum, sets its mark on societies and seasons that stand in
its course. Nowhere is that example written larger, to our perception,
than in “the new novel”; though this, we hasten to add, not in the least
because prose fiction now occupies itself as never before with the
“condition of the people,” a fact quite irrelevant to the nature it has
taken on, but because that nature amounts exactly to the complacent
declaration of a common literary level, a repudiation the most operative
even if the least reasoned of the idea of differences, the virtual law,
as we may call it, of sorts and kinds, the values of individual quality
and weight in the presence of undiscriminated quantity and
rough-and-tumble “output”—these attestations made, we naturally mean,
in the air of composition and on the esthetic plane, if such terms have
still an attenuated reference to the case before us. With which, if we
be asked, in the light of that generalisation, whether we impute to the
novel, or in other words the novelist, _all_ the stupidity against which
the spirit of appreciation spends itself in vain, we reply perforce that
we stop short of that, it being too obvious that of an exhibition so
sterilised, so void of all force and suggestion, there would be nothing
whatever to say. Our contention is exactly that, in spite of all vain
aspects, it does yet present an interest, and that here and there seem
written on it likelihoods of its presenting still more—always on
condition of its consenting to that more intimate education which is
precisely what democratised movements look most askance at. It strikes
us as not too much to say that our actual view of the practice of
fiction gives as just a measure as could be desired of the general, the
incurable democratic suspicion of the selective and comparative
principles in almost any application, and the tendency therewith to
regard, and above all to treat, one manner of book, like one manner of
person, as, if not absolutely as good as another, yet good enough for
any democratic use. Criticism reflects contentiously on that appearance,
though it be an appearance in which comfort for the book and the manner
much resides; so that the idea prompting these remarks of our own is
that the comfort may be deeply fallacious.
I
Still not to let go of our imputation of interest to some part at least
of what is happening in the world of production in this kind, we may say
that non-selective and non-comparative practice appears bent on showing
us all it can do and how far or to what appointed shores, what waiting
havens and inviting inlets, the current that is mainly made a current by
looseness, by want of observable direction, shall succeed in carrying
it. We respond to any sign of an intelligent view or even of a lively
instinct—which is why we give the appearance so noted the benefit of
every presumption as to its life and health. It may be that the dim
sense is livelier than the presentable reason, but even that is no
graceless fact for us, especially when the keenness of young curiosity
and energy is betrayed in its pace, and betrayed, for that matter, in no
small abundance and variety. The new or at least the young novel is up
and doing, clearly, with the best faith and the highest spirits in the
world; if we but extend a little our measure of youth indeed, as we are
happily more and more disposed to, we may speak of it as already
chin-deep in trophies. The men who are not so young as the youngest were
but the other day very little older than these: Mr. Joseph Conrad, Mr.
Maurice Hewlett and Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. H. G. Wells and Mr. Arnold
Bennett, have not quite perhaps the early bloom of Mr. Hugh Walpole, Mr.
Gilbert Cannan, Mr. Compton Mackenzie and Mr. D. H. Lawrence, but the
spring unrelaxed is still, to our perception, in their step, and we see
two or three of them sufficiently related to the still newer generation
in a quasi-parental way to make our whole enumeration as illustrational
as we need it. Mr. Wells and Mr. Arnold Bennett have their strongest
mark, the aspect by which we may most classify them, in common—even if
their three named contemporaries are doubtless most interesting in one
of the connections we are not now seeking to make. The author of
“Tono-Bungay” and of “The New Machiavelli,” and the author of “The Old
Wives’ Tale” and of “Clayhanger,” have practically launched the boat in
which we admire the fresh play of oar of the author of “The Duchess of
Wrexe,” and the documented aspect exhibited successively by “Round the
Corner,” by “Carnival” and “Sinister Street,” and even by “Sons and
Lovers” (however much we may find Mr. Lawrence, we confess, hang in the
dusty rear). We shall explain in a moment what we mean by this
designation of the element that these best of the younger men strike us
as more particularly sharing, our point being provisionally that Mr.
Wells and Mr. Arnold Bennett (speaking now only of them) began some time
back to show us, and to show sundry emulous and generous young spirits
then in the act of more or less waking up, what the state in question
might amount to. We confound the author of “Tono-Bungay” and the author
of “Clayhanger” in this imputation for the simple reason that with the
sharpest differences of character and range they yet come together under
our so convenient measure of value by _saturation_. This is the greatest
value, to our sense, in either of them, their other values, even when at
the highest, not being quite in proportion to it; and as to be saturated
is to be documented, to be able even on occasion to prove quite enviably
and potently so, they are alike in the authority that creates emulation.
It little signifies that Mr. Wells’s documented or saturated state in
respect to a particular matter in hand is but one of the faces of his
_generally_ informed condition, of his extraordinary mass of gathered
and assimilated knowledge, a miscellaneous collection more remarkable
surely than any teller of “mere” tales, with the possible exception of
Balzac, has been able to draw upon, whereas Mr. Arnold Bennett’s
corresponding provision affects us as, though singularly copious,
special, exclusive and artfully economic. This distinction avails
nothing against that happy fact of the handiest possession by Mr. Wells
of immeasurably more concrete material, amenable for straight and vivid
reference, convertible into apt illustration, than we should know where
to look for other examples of. The author of “The New Machiavelli”
knows, somehow, to our mystified and dazzled apprehension, because he
writes and because that act constitutes for him the need, on occasion a
most desperate, of absorbing knowledge at the pores; the chronicler of
the Five Towns writing so much more discernibly, on the other hand,
because he knows, and conscious of no need more desperate than that
particular circle of civilisation may satisfy.
Our argument is that each is ideally immersed in his own body of
reference, and that immersion in any such degree and to the effect of
any such variety, intensity and plausibility is really among us a new
feature of the novelist’s range of resource. We have seen him, we have
even seen _her_, otherwise auspiciously endowed, seen him observant,
impassioned, inspired, and in virtue of these things often very
charming, very interesting, very triumphant, visibly qualified for the
highest distinction before the fact and visibly crowned by the same
after it—we have seen him with a great imagination and a great sense of
life, we have seen him even with a great sense of expression and a
considerable sense of art: so that we have only to reascend the stream
of our comparatively recent literature to meet him serene and immortal,
brow-bound with the bay and erect on his particular pedestal. We have
only to do that, but have only also, while we do it, to recognise that
meantime other things still than these various apotheoses have taken
place, and that, to the increase of our recreation, and even if our
limited space condemns us to put the matter a trifle clumsily, a change
has come over our general receptive sensibility not less than over our
productive tradition. In these connections, we admit, overstatement is
easy and over-emphasis tempting; we confess furthermore to a frank
desire to enrich the case, the historic, with all the meaning we can
stuff into it. So viewed accordingly it gives us the “new,” to repeat
our expression, as an appetite for a closer notation, a sharper
specification of the signs of life, of consciousness, of the human scene
and the human subject in general, than the three or four generations
before us had been at all moved to insist on. They had insisted indeed,
these generations, we see as we look back to them, on almost nothing
whatever; what was to come to them had come, in enormous affluence and
freshness at its best, and to our continued appreciation as well as to
the honour of their sweet susceptibility, because again and again the
great miracle of genius took place, while they gaped, in their social
and sentimental sky. For ourselves that miracle has not been markedly
renewed, but it has none the less happened that by hook and by crook the
case for appreciation remains interesting. The great thing that saves
it, under the drawback we have named, is, no doubt, that we have
simply—always for appreciation—learned a little to insist, and that we
thus get back on one hand something of what we have lost on the other.
We are unable of course, with whatever habit of presumption engendered,
to insist upon genius; so that who shall describe the measure of success
we still achieve as not virtually the search for freshness, and above
all for closeness, in quite a different direction? To this nearer view
of commoner things Mr. Wells, say, and Mr. Arnold Bennett, and in their
degree, under the infection communicated, Mr. D. H. Lawrence and Mr.
Gilbert Cannan and Mr. Compton Mackenzie and Mr. Hugh Walpole, strike us
as having all gathered themselves up with a movement never yet
undertaken on our literary scene, and, beyond anything else, with an
instinctive divination of what had most waved their predecessors off it.
What had this lion in the path been, we make them out as after a fashion
asking themselves, what had it been from far back and straight down
through all the Victorian time, but the fond superstition that the key
of the situation, of each and every situation that could turn up for the
novelist, was the sentimental key, which might fit into no door or
window opening on closeness or on freshness at all? Was it not for all
the world as if even the brightest practitioners of the past, those we
now distinguish as saved for glory in spite of themselves, had been as
sentimental as they could, or, to give the trick another name, as
romantic and thereby as shamelessly “dodgy”?—just in order _not_ to be
close and fresh, not to be authentic, as that takes trouble, takes
talent, and you can be sentimental, you can be romantic, you can be
dodgy, alas, not a bit less on the footing of genius than on the footing
of mediocrity or even of imbecility? Was it not as if the sentimental
had been more and more noted as but another name for the romantic, if
not indeed the romantic as but another name for the sentimental, and as
if these things, whether separate or united, had been in the same degree
recognised as unamenable, or at any rate unfavourable, to any consistent
fineness of notation, once the tide of the copious as a condition of the
thorough had fairly set in?
So, to express it briefly, the possibility of hugging the shore of the
real as it had not, among us, been hugged, and of pushing inland, as far
as a keel might float, wherever the least opening seemed to smile,
dawned upon a few votaries and gathered further confidence with
exercise. Who could say, of course, that Jane Austen had not been close,
just as who could ask if Anthony Trollope had not been copious?—just as
who could _not_ say that it all depended on what was meant by these
terms? The demonstration of what was meant, it presently appeared, could
come but little by little, quite as if each tentative adventurer had
rather anxiously to learn for himself what _might_ be meant—this
failing at least the leap into the arena of some great demonstrative,
some sudden athletic and epoch-making authority. Who could pretend that
Dickens was anything but romantic, and even more romantic in his humour,
if possible, than in pathos or in queer perfunctory practice of the
“plot”? Who could pretend that Jane Austen didn’t leave much more untold
than told about the aspects and manners even of the confined circle in
which her muse revolved? Why shouldn’t it be argued against her that
where her testimony complacently ends the pressure of appetite within us
presumes exactly to begin? Who could pretend that the reality of
Trollope didn’t owe much of its abundance to the diluted, the quite
extravagantly watered strain, no less than to the heavy hand, in which
it continued to be ladled out? Who of the younger persuasion would not
have been ready to cite, as one of the liveliest opportunities for the
critic eager to see representation searching, such a claim for the close
as Thackeray’s sighing and protesting “look-in” at the acquaintance
between Arthur Pendennis and Fanny Bolton, the daughter of the Temple
laundress, amid the purlieus of that settlement? The sentimental habit
and the spirit of romance, it was unmistakably chargeable, stood out to
sea as far as possible the moment the shore appeared to offer the least
difficulty to hugging, and the Victorian age bristled with perfect
occasions for our catching them in the act of this showy retreat. All
revolutions have been prepared in spite of their often striking us as
sudden, and so it was doubtless that when scarce longer ago than the
other day Mr. Arnold Bennett had the fortune to lay his hand on a
general scene and a cluster of agents deficient to a peculiar degree in
properties that might interfere with a desirable density of
illustration—deficient, that is, in such connections as might carry the
imagination off to some sport on its own account—we recognised at once
a set of conditions auspicious to the newer kind of appeal. Let us
confess that we were at the same time doubtless to master no better way
of describing these conditions than by the remark that they were, for
some reason beautifully inherent in them, susceptible at once of being
entirely known and of seeming detectably thick. Reduction to exploitable
knowledge is apt to mean for many a case of the human complexity
reduction to comparative thinness; and nothing was thereby at the first
blush to interest us more than the fact that the air and the very smell
of packed actuality in the subject-matter of such things as the author’s
two longest works was clearly but another name for his personal
competence in that matter, the fulness and firmness of his embrace of
it. This was a fresh and beguiling impression—that the state of
inordinate possession on the chronicler’s part, the mere state as such
and as an energy directly displayed, _was_ the interest, neither more
nor less, _was_ the sense and the meaning and the picture and the drama,
all so sufficiently constituting them that it scarce mattered what they
were in themselves. Of what they were in themselves their being in Mr.
Bennett, as Mr. Bennett to such a tune harboured them, represented their
one conceivable account—not to mention, as reinforcing this, our own
great comfort and relief when certain high questions and wonderments
about them, or about our mystified relation to them, began one after
another to come up.
Because such questions did come, we must at once declare, and we are
still in presence of them, for all the world as if that case of the
perfect harmony, the harmony between subject and author, were just
marked with a flaw and didn’t meet the whole assault of restless
criticism. What we make out Mr. Bennett as doing is simply recording his
possession or, to put it more completely, his saturation; and to see him
as virtually shut up to that process is a note of all the more moment
that we see our selected cluster of his interesting juniors, and whether
by his direct action on their collective impulse or not, embroiled, as
we venture to call it, in the same predicament. The act of squeezing out
to the utmost the plump and more or less juicy orange of a particular
acquainted state and letting this affirmation of energy, however
directed or undirected, constitute for them the “treatment” of a
theme—_that_ is what we remark them as mainly engaged in, after
remarking the example so strikingly, so originally set, even if an undue
subjection to it be here and there repudiated. Nothing is further from
our thought than to undervalue saturation and possession, the fact of
the particular experience, the state and degree of acquaintance
incurred, however such a consciousness may have been determined; for
these things represent on the part of the novelist, as on the part of
any painter of things seen, felt or imagined, just one half of his
authority—the other half being represented of course by the application
he is inspired to make of them. Therefore that fine secured half is so
much gained at the start, and the fact of its brightly being there may
really by itself project upon the course so much colour and form as to
make us on occasion, under the genial force, almost not miss the answer
to the question of application. When the author of “Clayhanger” has put
down upon the table, in dense unconfused array, every fact required,
every fact in any way invocable, to make the life of the Five Towns
press upon us, and to make our sense of it, so full-fed, content us, we
may very well go on for the time in the captive condition, the beguiled
and bemused condition, the acknowledgment of which is in general our
highest tribute to the temporary master of our sensibility. Nothing at
such moments—or rather at the end of them, when the end begins to
threaten—may be of a more curious strain than the dawning unrest that
suggests to us fairly our first critical comment: “Yes, yes—but is this
_all_? These are the circumstances of the interest—we see, we see; but
where is the interest itself, where and what is its centre, and how are
we to measure it in relation to _that_?” Of course we may in the act of
exhaling that plaint (which we have just expressed at its mildest) well
remember how many people there are to tell us that to “measure” an
interest is none of our affair; that we have but to take it on the
cheapest and easiest terms and be thankful; and that if by our very
confession we have been led the imaginative dance the music has done for
us all it pretends to. Which words, however, have only to happen to be
for us the most unintelligent conceivable not in the least to arrest our
wonderment as to where our bedrenched consciousness may still not
awkwardly leave us for the pleasure of appreciation. That appreciation
is also a mistake and a priggishness, being reflective and thereby
corrosive, is another of the fond dicta which we are here concerned but
to brush aside—the more closely to embrace the welcome induction that
appreciation, attentive and reflective, inquisitive and conclusive, is
in this connection absolutely the golden _key_ to our pleasure. The more
it plays up, the more we recognise and are able to number the sources of
our enjoyment, the greater the provision made for security in that
attitude, which corresponds, by the same stroke, with the reduced danger
of waste in the undertaking to amuse us. It all comes back to our
amusement, and to the noblest surely, on the whole, we know; and it is
in the very nature of clinging appreciation not to sacrifice
consentingly a single shade of the art that makes for that blessing.
From this solicitude spring our questions, and not least the one to
which we give ourselves for the moment here—this moment of our being
regaled as never yet with the fruits of the movement (if the name be not
of too pompous an application where the flush and the heat of accident
too seem so candidly to look forth), in favour of the “expression of
life” in terms as loose as may pretend to an effect of expression at
all. The relegation of terms to the limbo of delusions outlived so far
as ever really cultivated becomes of necessity, it will be plain, the
great mark of the faith that for the novelist to show he “knows all
about” a certain congeries of aspects, the more numerous within their
mixed circle the better, is thereby to set in motion, with due
intensity, the pretension to interest. The state of knowing all about
whatever it may be has thus only to become consistently and abundantly
active to pass for his supreme function; and to its so becoming active
few difficulties appear to be descried—so great may on occasion be the
mere excitement of activity. To the fact that the exhilaration is, as we
have hinted, often infectious, to this and to the charming young good
faith and general acclamation under which each case appears to
proceed—each case we of course mean really repaying attention—the
critical reader owes his opportunity so considerably and so gratefully
to generalise.