THE NEW FICTION
The realist movement spread among novelists and writers of fiction with
even more rapidity than it invaded the dramatic realm. With epidemic
suddenness writers of all kinds began to be realistic in their fiction.
The reading public was not unprepared for the new tendency, for, at
about the same time, a cheap edition of the novels of Zola was put upon
the market and devoured eagerly without anybody appearing to be more
than pleasantly shocked. The edition was expurgated somewhat, but even
then passages were left untouched which only a very few years earlier
would have aroused the condemnation of the Nonconformist conscience.
Still, what a Frenchman might do with impunity did not go without
question when repeated, even in a milder way, by native writers. There
was a storm-in-a-tea-cup in certain circles, for instance, when Thomas
Hardy issued _Jude the Obscure_, and George Moore, _Esther
Waters_; and the storm was heightened on the appearance of Grant
Allen’s _Woman Who Did_, and such realistic studies of slum life
as Arthur Morrison’s _Tales of Mean Streets_ and _A Child of
the Jago_. But even this blew over when the newspapers considered
their readers had had enough of the subject, and no more serious damage
was done than a few suppressions by the autocrats of the popular
lending libraries, notably in the cases of _Jude the Obscure_ and
_Esther Waters_, which prohibitions, as might have been expected,
had the result of drawing more than usual attention to these remarkable
books. The matter in the end was not settled one way or the other; it
simply lapsed, and publishers and authors proceeded to develop from
frankness to frankness without either endangering their reputations,
their readers’ morals, or, ultimately, of causing surprise or sustained
opposition from any quarter.
It is a curious fact, however, that, whilst the more daring of the
realists aroused a new interest in the art of the novel, there were
still more critics to denounce than to uphold the new method. Not only
was this the fact with reference to realism, but it was the fact also
with reference to the problem novel, what was called “the novel with
a purpose,” and also to the still more modern fiction of temperament
and psychological analysis represented by such writers as George
Egerton and Sarah Grand. Discussions were lengthy and heated, and
many good people of the time, looking backward at the large geniality
and splendid sanity of Charles Dickens, the high moral purpose of
George Eliot, and the fine culture and unimpeachable respectability
of Thackeray, had grave forebodings for their own times and serious
doubts as to the wisdom of the successors of the accepted masters. They
forgot, of course, that the realism of _Oliver Twist_ had been
criticised in its day, and that there were even people who doubted the
wisdom of Thackeray’s mild frankness in _Vanity Fair_.
What the objectors did not realise, and this was perhaps the most
important circumstance of all, was that the new fiction was big enough
and attractive enough to be worth a fight, and that that in itself
was a sign of literary health and vitality. Discussion is always a
characteristic of renascent periods in art and life. “Art lives upon
discussion,” avows Henry James, “upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon
variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views, and the comparison of
standpoints; and there is a presumption that the times when no one has
anything particular to say about it, and has no reason to give for
practice or preference, though they may be times of honour, are not
times of development--are times, possibly, even, a little of dullness.”
There can be little doubt that the times under review were times of
creative development, and above all they were far from dull in any
branch of art, particularly in that of the novel.
A new impetus and a wider range of action, amounting to a new lease of
life, had been given to that literary form by the abolition of the old
three-volume method of publication, whose unwieldy size and exorbitant
price had had the effect of chaining the novel to the circulating
libraries. Many authors, notably Hall Caine, worked tirelessly for the
abolition of the outmoded three-volume novel, and finally they won a
victory more swiftly and more completely than their wildest hopes had
anticipated. After a remarkably short fight the publishers capitulated
and introduced the now familiar and, until quite recently, omnipresent
six-shilling volume. The passing of the old novel format was important
because it represented a great deal more than the passing of a mere
form of publication. Actually it was the capitulation of a type of
novel: the old sentimental lending-library novel of polite romantic
atmosphere and crudely happy endings; the novel which was guaranteed to
tax no brain by thought and to vex no code of morals by revolutionary
suggestions, but by a determined rejection of anything approaching
problem or idea, or even psychology, was calculated to produce that
drowsy state of mild peacefulness which many people believe to be
the end and aim of all good literature. There were few to regret its
demise, and even these were ironical in the hour of regret. Chief among
them was Rudyard Kipling, who gave the departed three-volume novel
poetical honours in some verses called “The Three-Decker”:
“We asked no social questions--we pumped no hidden shame--
We never talked obstetrics when the Little Stranger came:
We left the Lord in Heaven, we left the fiends in Hell.
We weren’t exactly Yussufs, but--Zuleika didn’t tell.”
The new fiction did all these things, and, to its credit be it said,
it did them within the limits of the art of the novel and with the
ultimate result of increasing the number of novel readers beyond all
bounds.
Some idea of the more reputable body of opinion aroused against the
manifestation of realistic tendencies in literature may be gathered
from an article, entitled “Reticence in Literature,” contributed
by Arthur Waugh to the first number of _The Yellow Book_. The
beginnings of the new frankness, particularly in its insistence upon
sex, is traced in this article to Swinburne; but the frankness of the
modern novel had descended directly from the French realists. Arthur
Waugh detected two developments of modern realism; one towards excess
promoted by effeminacy, “by the want of restraint which starts from
enervated sensations”; and the other towards “the excess which results
from a certain brutal virility, which proceeds from coarse familiarity
with indulgence.” He went on to say that, “The one whispers, the
other shouts; the one is the language of the courtesan, the other of
the bargee. What we miss in both alike,” he continued, “is that true
frankness which springs from the artistic and moral temperament; the
episodes are not part of a whole in unity with itself; the impression
they leave upon the reader is not the impression of Hogarth’s pictures;
in one form they employ all their art to render vice attractive; in the
other, with absolutely no art at all, they merely reproduce, with the
fidelity of the kodak, scenes and situations the existence of which we
all acknowledge, while taste prefers to forget them.” He then proceeded
to stigmatise the latest development of literary frankness which he
believed to be both inartistic and a danger to art. “A new school has
arisen which combines the characteristics of effeminacy and brutality.
In its effeminate aspect it plays with the subtler emotions of sensual
pleasure, on its brutal side it has developed into that class of
fiction which for want of a better word I must call chirurgical. In
poetry it deals with very much the same passions as those which we have
placed in the verses to which allusion has been made above[6]; but,
instead of leaving these refinements of lust to the haunts to which
they are fitted, it has introduced them into the domestic chamber,
and permeated marriage with the ardours of promiscuous intercourse.
In fiction it affects its heroines with acquired diseases of names
unmentionable, and has debased the beauty of maternity by analysis
of the process of gestation. Surely the inartistic temperament can
scarcely abuse literature further. I own I can conceive nothing less
beautiful.” Tennyson was quoted in a familiar couplet to buttress this
argument, and the critic concluded by advocating reticence and humility
in art as being the most necessary equipment for the production of
beauty and the achievement of immortality.
The line of defence taken by the upholders of frankness in literature
began by repudiating any precise desire for either immortality, beauty
or even morality. The modernist was not only frank, he was frankly
amoral; his one concern was to get into his work the quality of
life, the sense of reality, irrespective of the presence or absence
of moral ideas, leaving beauty and immortality to chance. At that
period there was no very particular denial of the idea or necessity
of beauty, as there is among the more “advanced” artists of to-day,
nor did the writers of the time repudiate immortality. Immortality,
they implied, should, like Whistler’s idea of art, happen, but as to
beauty, they were convinced that what they did sincerely, truthfully
and realistically, would ultimately be considered beautiful. And
Hubert Crackanthorpe, in a reply to Arthur Waugh, was so convinced of
the righteousness of the modern method in fiction that he was able to
write: “Let our artistic objector but weary the world sufficiently
with his despair concerning the permanence of the cheerlessness of
modern realism, and some day a man will arise who will give us a
study of human happiness as fine, as vital as anything we owe to
Guy de Maupassant or to Ibsen. That man will have accomplished the
infinitely difficult, and in admiration and in awe shall we bow down
our heads before him.” And this youthful and accomplished realist was
arrogant enough on the one hand to admit that fiction was a young art
“struggling desperately to reach expression, with no great past to
guide it,” and humble enough, on the other, to admit that it was matter
for wonder, not that the new school stumbled into certain pitfalls, but
that they did not fall headlong into a hundred more.
But what may be called the artistic defence was not the only bulwark
against the attack of the old school. Fresh defences were found
necessary owing to the nervousness of moralists who, weary of decrying
the artistic value of realism, attacked it on ethical and even
pathological lines. The new fiction, it was said, was calculated to
undermine morality not only because it was immoral, but because it was
“morbid,” “neurotic,” and “diseased.” Havelock Ellis defended Thomas
Hardy’s _Jude the Obscure_ against this line of attack, in _The
Savoy_; and, in that article, he took the war into the enemy’s
camp by saying that, the more exact an artist’s powers of observation
became, the more vital and profound became his art as an instrument
of morality. “The fresher and more intimate his vision of Nature,
the more startling his picture of morals.” And in defence of Hardy’s
treatment of the passionate experiences of Jude and Sue against the
charge of neurosis, he says: “Jude and Sue are represented as crushed
by a civilisation to which they were not born, and though civilisation
may in some respects be regarded as a disease and unnatural, in others
it may be said to bring out those finer vibrations of Nature which are
overlaid by rough and bucolic conditions of life. The refinement of
sexual sensibility with which this book largely deals is precisely such
a vibration. To treat Jude, who wavers between two women, and Sue, who
finds the laws of marriage too mighty for her lightly poised organism,
as shocking monstrosities, reveals a curious attitude in the critics
who have committed themselves to that view. Clearly they consider human
sexual relationships to be as simple as those of the farmyard. They
are as shocked as a farmer would be to find that a hen had views of
her own concerning the lord of the harem. If, let us say, you decide
that Indian Game and Plymouth Rock make a good cross, you put your
cocks and hens together, and the matter is settled, and if you decide
that a man and a woman are in love with each other, you marry them and
the matter is likewise settled for the whole term of their natural
lives. I suppose that the farmyard view is really the view of the
ordinary wholesome-minded novelist--I mean of course in England--and
of his ordinary critic. Indeed, in Europe generally, a distinguished
German anthropologist has lately declared, sensible and experienced
men still often exhibit a knowledge of sexual matters such as we might
expect from a milkmaid. But assuredly the farmyard view corresponds
imperfectly to the facts of human life in our time. Such things as
_Jude_ is made of are, in our time at all events, life, and life
is still worthy of her muse.”
And Vincent O’Sullivan, a modern of the moderns, in a plea which made
hash of the old sentimental library novel, wrote: “It is more easy--if
more degrading--to write a certain kind of novel. To take a fanciful
instance, it is more easy to write the history of Miss Perfect; how,
upon the death of her parents, she comes to reside in the village, and
lives there mildly and sedately; and how one day, in the course of
her walk abroad, she is noticed by the squire’s lady, who straightway
transports her to the Hall. And, of course, she soon becomes mighty
well with the family, and the squire’s son becomes enamoured of her.
Then the clouds must gather: and a villain lord comes on the scene
to bombard her virtue with clumsy artillery. Finding after months
that her virtue dwells in an impregnable citadel, he turns to, and
jibes and goads the young squire to the fighting point. And, presto!
there they are, hard at it with bare steel, on the Norman beach, of
a drizzling morning; and the squire who is just pressing hot upon
my lord, when--it’s hey! for the old love and ho! for the new--out
rushes Miss Perfect to our great amazement, and falls between the
swords down on the stinging sands in the sight of the toiling sea. Now
I maintain, that a novel woven of these meagre threads, and set out
in three volumes and a brave binding, would put up a good front at
Mudie’s; would become, it too, after a while, morality packed in a box.
For nowadays we seem to nourish our morals with the thinnest milk and
water, with a good dose of sugar added, and not a suspicion of lemon at
all.” The need of such a plea for frank record of personal impression,
even though it led writers to “go out in the black night and follow
their own sullen will-o’-the-wisps,” is all the more remarkable because
it came at a time when realism had fought the good fight and was near
upon winning.
It is not necessary at this date to defend the realism of the
Nineties, for franknesses then considered shocking are now accepted as
commonplaces of fiction. That does not mean that the merely silly novel
of shallow romance has passed away; not even the Eighteen Nineties
could bring about so complete a revolution as that. But it does
mean that, since the _fin de siècle_ battle was fought between
reticence and frankness, the bounds of literary expression have been so
broadened as to make it possible for readers of all types, even those
who can survive a considerable demand upon their thinking powers, to
find fiction to suit their needs. The popular novel of the past, and to
some extent of the present, ended more or less happily with the sound
of wedding bells. The new novel very often began there. It was realised
by the modern school of novelists that married life provided a whole
realm of sensations and experiences hitherto neglected by their art or
but partially exploited. Into this realm they plunged with enthusiasm,
and so distinct were the results, when put into the form of fiction,
that readers who had been familiar with them in real life were so
amazed with this revelation of truth that, almost in self-defence, they
were forced to conclude that the new fiction was scandalous when it was
not morbid.
But although realistic and introspective fiction was the chief
contribution of the period to this form of literary art, all kinds
of fiction seemed to receive an impetus, which resulted in a general
improvement in style, imagination and thoughtfulness. The influence
of Meredith, Hardy and, to a lesser extent, Henry James was apparent
in much of the work of the younger writers; whilst French fiction
writers, such as Flaubert, Huysmans and Guy de Maupassant, were having
a profound effect upon other imaginations. The realistic school
produced George Moore, Hubert Crackanthorpe, Arthur Morrison, George
Gissing, as more or less acknowledged disciples, and it influenced
the birth of occasional novels from writers who were not definitely
realistic, or specifically novelists, but who were impelled by the
mood of the moment to produce works in key with the realistic mood.
Among such novels may be named _The Woman Who Did_, by Grant
Allen, _No. 5 John Street_, by Richard Whiteing, and _Liza of
Lambeth_, by Somerset Maugham. Another important contribution to
the fiction of the period was made by a group of women novelists who
showed remarkable powers of psychological analysis and observation,
and in several instances the faculty of expressing that modern revolt
of women which found a voice in Olive Schreiner’s _Story of an
African Farm_ (1881). Among these writers were Sarah Grand, “George
Egerton” (Mrs Golding Bright), “John Oliver Hobbes” (Mrs Craigie),
“Iota” (Mrs Mannington Caffyn), Mrs W. K. Clifford, Menie Muriel
Dowie, Emma Frances Brooke, Beatrice Harraden and Elizabeth Robins.
Mrs Humphry Ward must also be reckoned among the women novelists of
the period, although she, as I have noted in an earlier chapter, had
an established reputation as the author of _Robert Elsmere_,
written in 1888. Equally characteristic of the period were the writers
of comedy-fiction. Some of the early novels of H. G. Wells, such as
_The Wonderful Visit_ (1895), and _The Wheels of Chance_
(1896), are in this class, as are also the witty works of John Oliver
Hobbes, particularly _The Sinner’s Comedy_ (1892), _A Study in
Temptations_ (1893) and _The School for Saints_ (1897). But the
most characteristic writers of comedy-fiction were: Henry Harland, E.
F. Benson, G. S. Street and Frederick Wedmore.
It was during the Nineties also that the use of dialect in fiction
delighted an ever-growing number of novel readers. First among writers
in this manner stands J. M. Barrie, whose studies in Scottish life were
a revelation and a delight to a vast number of people on both sides of
the Tweed, and elsewhere. The first of these, _Auld Licht Idylls_
and _A Window in Thrums_, were published respectively in 1888
and 1889. Then followed _The Little Minister_, in 1891, and
_Sentimental Tommy_ and _Margaret Ogilvy_, in 1896. Inspired
by the success of these works, S. R. Crockett produced many Scottish
studies, beginning with _The Stickit Minister_, in 1893, and “Ian
Maclaren” published the phenomenally successful _Beside the Bonnie
Brier Bush_, in 1894. Jane Barlow did something of the same service
for Ireland in her _Bogland Studies_ (1892); and the discovery by
novelists of the value of local colour doubtless made for the success
of Israel Zangwill’s fine studies of Jewish life, _Children of the
Ghetto_ (1892), _Ghetto Tragedies_ (1893), and _The King
of the Schnorrers_ (1894); and also to the same interest must be
attributed the revival of the Cockney dialect in fiction, set to a
tragic theme by realists like Arthur Morrison and Somerset Maugham, but
given a delightfully humorous turn by Barry Pain, Pett Ridge and Edwin
Pugh.
Romantic fiction once more became distinguished during the period,
and in some of its finest results it owed its renaissance to Science
which, almost a century before, Keats had said would clip the wings of
Romance. This new romance produced two of the most gifted of modern
writers: Rudyard Kipling and H. G. Wells. The first of that series
of scientific romances which has made the name of H. G. Wells famous
throughout the world, _The Time Machine_, was published in 1895,
and in 1898 and 1899 he published _The War of the Worlds_ and
_When the Sleeper Wakes_. But the spirit of romance not only
breathed life into the facts of science; once more taking its cue from
the realists it revivified the spirit of adventure in the modern world.
Robert Louis Stevenson had shown the way, and during the Nineties he
was writing in collaboration with his son-in-law, Lloyd Osbourne,
tales, like _The Wrecker_ and _The Ebb Tide_, which made the
old feel young again and the young desire to live more adventurously.
But in the year 1895 came a new master with a book called _Almayer’s
Folly_. He was a sailor by profession, a Pole by birth, but he wrote
in English, a strange, strong and arresting English, and his name was
Joseph Conrad. In 1896 he published _An Outcast of the Islands_,
and in the two succeeding years _The Nigger of the Narcissus_
and _Tales of Unrest_. Conrad was not alone in his mastery of
the art of turning experience into romance, for with him were Louis
Becke, Frank T. Bullen, Morley Roberts, R. B. Cunninghame Graham,
Henry Seton Merriman and Frank Harris, all of whom published their
earliest books during the decade. The old romance found a new and
subtle exponent in Maurice Hewlett, for _The Forest Lovers_ was
issued in 1898, _Little Novels from Italy_ in 1899, and _Richard
Yea and Nay_ in 1900, whilst in such writers as Conan Doyle, who
published _The White Company_ in 1891, _Sherlock Holmes_ in
1892, and _Rodney Stone_ in 1896; Anthony Hope, who published
_The Prisoner of Zenda_ in 1894; Stanley J. Weyman, E. W. Hornung
and Quiller Couch, popular romance found inspired representatives. Even
the romance of powerful and widespread human interest rose again into
distinction with Hall Caine, whose best works, if _The Deemster_,
published in 1887, be excepted, appeared during these extraordinarily
productive years. And the name of Marie Corelli became still further
associated with that species of sensationalism which she had already
made her own.
So active was the romantic spirit of the period that it did not
scruple about using many mediums for its purpose, hitherto neglected.
Thus ideas both spiritual and intellectual were pressed into its
service, the former finding striking expression in Harold Frederic’s
_Illumination_ (1896), and in the Celtic romances of “Fiona
Macleod”; and the latter in the bookish but always charming romances of
Richard Le Gallienne. Type of his period, Le Gallienne infused into the
old form of the Picaresque romance a great deal of the buoyant gaiety
of the time as it inspired young people to prance about among books,
ideas, conventions and dreams. In _The Book Bills of Narcissus_
(1891) he has caught this joyous intellectuality in full flight, with
all its hopes and enthusiasms; and later, when he, greatly daring,
ventured into the realm of Laurence Sterne with a new _Sentimental
Journey_, called _The Quest of the Golden Girl_ (1896). The
result was interesting, for with delicate indelicacy he translated the
emotional unrest of the hour into a fancifully impossible romance which
future generations will read for delight or for a truthful, though
not impartial, picture of a certain corner of the age. In 1895 George
du Maurier revived, in _Trilby_, the romance of Bohemianism as
discovered by Henri Murger, and Arthur Machen, in _The Great God
Pan_ (1894), took romance once more into the abode of terror in a
manner as startling as it was elementally true. It is not unnatural to
find that a period so bent on discovering--or rediscovering--romance in
many things and experiences did not overlook the romance of childhood.
This enchanted land had been discovered, as we know, by Lewis Carroll
and Robert Louis Stevenson, but a new realm was explored with happy
results by Kenneth Grahame, who with _The Golden Age_ (1896) and
_Dream Days_ (1898) created a new delight by introducing us into a
delectable kingdom whose existence we had only imagined.
Last in this long gallery of writers of fiction, but none the less
valued on that account, came the humorists. Although H. D. Traill
was convinced that “The New Humour” turned out to be simply the Old
Buffoonery “writ small,” there was a New Humour which, in the amusing
tales of Jerome K. Jerome, W. W. Jacobs, Israel Zangwill, J. M.
Barrie, Pett Ridge and Barry Pain, was as much a characteristic of
the Nineties as the problem novel. For it certainly made a departure
from tradition, although the laughter it raised was the same as all
laughter--of Eternity rather than of Time. It probably differed from
the old humour in that it was more self-conscious and less capable of
laughing at itself. The New Humour when it was _new_ was perhaps a
little inhuman, and it reached its highest expression not in any of the
works deliberately written with an eye on laughter, but in works like
the plays of Bernard Shaw, which provoked laughter out of more serious
business.
The novels and stories of the period, however, did not revolutionise so
much as extend established methods.
It would not be easy to point to another decade in which English
literature produced so many varieties of fiction, possessing the
attractions of novelty or artistic distinction, or both. These works
have at least one thing in common: they all represent more than
ordinary ability within their own spheres. Some of them are now
admitted to the first class of English fiction. And so balanced is
the expression of the majority that they can be said to stand for
many generations rather than for a special period. Few of these works
are peculiar to their period after the manner of much of the poetry
written in the decade. Oscar Wilde’s _Dorian Gray_, Richard Le
Gallienne’s _Quest of the Golden Girl_ and Aubrey Beardsley’s
_Under the Hill_ have each of them characteristics which would
have made their appearance irrelevant before or after the decade in
which they were published, and so, for the same reason, have the
satires upon those authors and their works: _The Green Carnation_,
_The Autobiography of a Boy_ and _The Quest of the Gilt-Edged
Girl_. But for the rest, novelties of thought and utterance are
sufficiently balanced by normal vision to defy many trespassing years
to come. In the main, the best fiction of the decade achieved that
thoughtfulness and that freedom of expression for which the upholders
of the higher drama were still fighting. The native-born realistic play
had yet to come, and its arrival was still a matter of anticipation
and conjecture. But the realistic novel came complete with _Esther
Waters_ and _Jude the Obscure_.
Nothing essentially English was added to the novel as such. What was
new was the result of outside influence. But in a less popular form of
fiction, the short story, a mastery was achieved hitherto unknown in
this country. So successful a contributor to this class of fiction as
H. G. Wells has referred[7] to the short-story harvest of the Nineties,
in comparison with a later decade, in the following terms:
“The Nineties was a good and stimulating period for a short-story
writer. Mr Kipling had made his astonishing advent with a series of
little blue-grey books, whose covers opened like window-shutters to
reveal the dusty sun-glare and blazing colours of the East; Mr Barrie
had demonstrated what could be done in a little space through the
panes of his _Window in Thrums_. _The National Observer_ was at the
climax of its career of heroic insistence upon lyrical brevity and a
vivid finish, and Mr Frank Harris was not only printing good short
stories by other people, but writing still better ones himself in the
dignified pages of _The Fortnightly Review_. _Longmans’ Magazine_,
too, represented a _clientèle_ of appreciative short-story readers
that is now scattered. Then came the generous opportunities of _The
Yellow Book_, and _The National Observer_ died only to give birth to
_The New Review_. No short story of the slightest distinction went for
long unrecognised. The sixpenny popular magazines had still to deaden
down the conception of what a short story might be to the imaginative
limitation of the common reader--and a maximum length of six thousand
words. Short stories broke out everywhere. Kipling was writing short
stories; Barrie, Stevenson, Frank Harris; Max Beerbohm wrote at least
one perfect one, _The Happy Hypocrite_; Henry James pursued his
wonderful and inimitable bent; and among other names that occur to me,
like a mixed handful of jewels drawn from a bag, are George Street,
Morley Roberts, George Gissing, Ella D’Arcy, Murray Gilchrist, E.
Nesbit, Stephen Crane, Joseph Conrad, Edwin Pugh, Jerome K. Jerome,
Kenneth Grahame, Arthur Morrison, Marriott Watson, George Moore, Grant
Allen, George Egerton, Henry Harland, Pett Ridge, W. W. Jacobs (who
alone seems inexhaustible).... I do not think the present decade can
produce any parallel to this list, or what is more remarkable, that
the later achievements in this field of any of the survivors from
that time, with the sole exception of Joseph Conrad, can compare with
the work they did before 1900. It seems to me this outburst of short
stories came not only as a phase in literary development, but also as a
phase in the development of the individual writers concerned.”
In both the novel and the short story the sane tradition of English
fiction by which a delicate balance was maintained between realism and
romance rarely broke down. Even the traditional sentimentalism of the
English novel was maintained for those who continued to desire it.
However, the modernists who were caught in the impulsion towards French
realism soon saw the insufficiency of the most carefully observed
facts unless they were clothed with the stuff of the imagination and
the soul. What happened to George Moore may be taken as symbolical
of the return to romance. In one masterpiece, _Esther Waters_,
he gave us reality with a frankness hitherto unknown in this country.
He wrote a novel in which he revealed the pilgrimage of a human being
as a physical entity. That was very well in its way, especially when
that way was the way of a master. But when he came to write _Evelyn
Innes_ he wrote the epic of a soul’s pilgrimage with all his
experience as a realist ready to his hand. In that novel romanticism
and realism met, co-ordinating much that was tentative and whimsical in
the period in one finished and enduring work of art.