The English political novel appeared somewhat earlier than its American
counterpart. Its subjects range over a wider area and its varieties
of political experience are more numerous. As a political instrument,
however, the English novel is very like the American.
=Benjamin Disraeli: Revitalized Toryism=
In the preface to the fifth edition of _Coningsby_, coming five years
after first publication in 1844, Benjamin Disraeli, later Prime
Minister and Earl of Beaconsfield, made no pretense about his intent:
The main purpose of its writer was to vindicate the just claims
of the Tory party to be the popular political confederation of
the country.... It was not originally the intention of the writer
to adopt the form of fiction as the instrument to scatter his
suggestions, but, after reflection, he resolved to avail himself of
a method which, in the temper of the times, offered the best chance
of influencing opinion.
This novel was the first of three which comprised Disraeli’s _Young
England_ trilogy. In a somewhat unsubstantial way, the three books set
forth the principles which were to create a revitalized Tory party.
In _The Political Novel_ Morris Speare concludes that the four major
points of the program deal with the nobility, the middle class, the
working class, and the English church. The nobility was to reassume the
leadership it held before patents of nobility were doled out freely
to clever entrepreneurs and favorite retainers of great families. An
aristocracy in function as well as name, it was to be assisted by the
vigorous industrial and mercantile middle class which had arisen in
England since the industrial revolution. The lot of the working class
was to be bettered by a sympathetic government rather than by militant
movements from within its own ranks. Moral and spiritual leadership
was to be supplied by a revitalized church true to its fundamental
religious tradition. Harry Coningsby, grandson of the dissolute and
immensely powerful Lord Monmouth, is the personification of Young
England. A hero at Eton and Cambridge, he returns from a year of travel
on the continent to enter politics. Refusing to sit in Parliament for
one of Monmouth’s rotten boroughs and act as a rubber stamp for old
Tory policies, Coningsby is cut out of Monmouth’s will. Monmouth’s
death and a neatly juggled legacy eventually pave the way for
Coningsby’s entry into Parliament on his own terms. Patly, Coningsby
of the nobility marries Edith Millbank, daughter of a middle class
tycoon.
A year later, _Sybil_ followed _Coningsby_. Like substitutes in a
football game, Charles Egremont and Trafford go in for Coningsby
and Millbank. Much of the book is concerned with the working class.
Disraeli shows the reader the horrible conditions in which many of
its members live and the violence of their attempts to better them.
Bishop Hatton, barbarous ruler of the locksmiths of the mining district
village of Wodgate, leads his “Hell-cats” in an assault upon ancient
Mowbray Castle. Unions are presented as groups of violent men, cloaked
and hooded. Supplementing this portrayal is one of a decaying and
greedy aristocracy. One can perhaps imagine the reaction of the landed
or moneyed English voter. He might well accept Disraeli’s opinion that
something had to be done.
_Tancred_ completed the trilogy in 1847. The hero is the sheltered
great-grandson of the Duke of Bellamont, who “might almost be placed
at the head of the English nobility.” The introspective Tancred is
preoccupied with religion and the direction it can give to human
affairs particularly in the areas of politics and government. Unable
to find the answers to his questions in England and unwilling to enter
Commons until he has them, he makes a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. At
this point the novel dissolves into a panorama of kidnapings, desert
intrigues, and mountain kingdoms reminiscent of Rudolph Valentino
movies. Tancred becomes absorbed with “the great Asian mystery” which
is to assist in the moral regeneration of the West, particularly
England. Overwhelmed by Emirs and Sheikhs, Turks and Druses, the novel
is the weakest of the three. But together the books are a prime example
of an art form carefully selected and used to gain a hearing for a
political program.
=Henry James: The Breakup of Victorian Tranquillity=
_The Princess Casamassima_, published by Henry James in 1886, is one
of the novels which focused upon the revolutionary currents beginning
to stir beneath the surface of English political life. Irving Howe has
called it a warning that something had to be done to alleviate the
misery of the poor. These conditions had given rise to radical groups
such as that which met at the Sun and Moon Tavern under the leadership
of Paul Muniment. The personal tragedy of his friend Hyacinth Robinson
forms the novel’s central theme. The sensitive, disinherited inhabitant
of two worlds, Robinson is the illegitimate son of a Frenchwoman who
had murdered her titled lover. Robinson’s maternal grandfather had
fallen on the barricades of the French Revolution. Raised with the help
of Eustache Poupin, exiled veteran of the French Commune, Robinson
feels that he is heir to a revolutionary background. Emotionally
exalted, he declares his willingness for self-sacrifice at a group
meeting. From that time on, like the protagonist of _The Beast in
the Jungle_, Robinson waits for the summons to fulfill his destiny.
But meanwhile he falls under the spell of the Princess, who takes a
dilettante interest in the lives of the poor and the activities of
the radical movement. Partly under her influence and partly as a
result of a trip to Venice and Paris made possible by a small legacy,
Robinson finds his revolutionary ardor waning. In his admiration for
the richness of European civilization, he becomes reluctant to act as
an agent of its eventual destruction. When the summons comes for him to
assassinate a duke, he shoots himself instead. James presents a gallery
of types: the guilty aristocrat, a member of the decayed gentility, the
professional revolutionary, and the industrious poor. In this novel
James is concerned as always with personal relationships, backgrounds,
and motivations. He also presents an environment out of which political
violence can explode. And his feelings about the need for preventing it
are clear.
=Joseph Conrad: Early Cloak and Dagger=
In 1907 Joseph Conrad explored this problem from the same point of view
in _The Secret Agent_. In the author’s note which introduced the novel,
Conrad wrote that a friend had mentioned anarchist activities. This was
the germ of the story:
I remember, however, remarking on the criminal futility of the
whole thing, doctrine, action, mentality; and on the contemptible
aspect of the half-crazy pose as of a brazen cheat exploiting the
poignant miseries and passionate credulities of a mankind always so
tragically eager for self-destruction. That was what made for me
its philosophical pretences so unpardonable.
Conrad then had his point of view; his recollection of an attempt to
blow up the Greenwich Observatory gave him the outlines of his plot. A
“delegate of the Central Red Committee,” Adolf Verloc is actually an
informer and agent provocateur for many years in the pay of the embassy
of a “great power” (probably Russia). His principal function is to
transmit warnings of planned bomb-throwings to insure the safety of
“royal, imperial, or grand-ducal journeys....” Called to the embassy,
Verloc is told by first secretary Vladimir that the conference in Milan
is lagging in its “deliberations upon international action for the
suppression of political crime....” England is chiefly responsible,
Vladimir tells him. He orders Verloc to provide a stimulus in the
form of an attack “with all the shocking senselessness of gratuitous
blasphemy.” Verloc is ordered to blow up the Observatory. Always a
businessman and never a terrorist, he is deeply disturbed. Obtaining
a bomb, Verloc sends his admiring half-wit brother-in-law Stevie out
with it. But Stevie stumbles and blows up himself rather than the
Observatory. When Verloc’s wife learns what has happened, she kills him
and then commits suicide. To add to the impact of the story, Conrad
wove into it the characters of Karl Yundt, an evil old terrorist, and
the Professor, a “perfect anarchist” who spends his life in experiments
to develop the perfect detonator. In _The Great Tradition_ F. R.
Leavis has rightly called this book “one of Conrad’s two supreme
masterpieces.” In its structure, its delineation of personality, and
its masterful manipulation of point of view, the book is a classic. It
is an example of the superiority of the European political novel, one
of the finest works in the entire genre.
_Under Western Eyes_ was written from the same point of view as _The
Secret Agent_. Appearing in 1910, the novel dealt with the same
sort of groups Conrad had treated three years earlier. But now the
area was wider, the figures larger, and the stakes bigger. Kirylo
Razumov, another illegitimate like Hyacinth Robinson, is studying
at St. Petersburg University for a career in the civil service. His
life is disrupted when Victorovitch Haldin seeks refuge in his rooms
after blowing up the President of a Repressive Commission which had
imprisoned, exiled, or hanged many Russians considered disloyal to
the Czar. Afraid of being suspected of complicity and enraged at what
he feels is gratuitous destruction of the only life he can make for
himself, Razumov, on the advice of his father, Prince K----, betrays
Haldin to the police. His life now completely disoriented, Razumov is
persuaded by the Prince and Councilor Mikulin to go to Geneva. Regarded
as a hero and the accomplice of Haldin, he enters the revolutionary
circle led by the famous Peter Ivanovitch. His job is to report their
plans to Mikulin. But then, despite himself, he falls in love with
Haldin’s sister Nathalia. He confesses his betrayal of Haldin to her
and then to the circle. Maimed by the circle’s executioner, Razumov
stumbles out onto the street and into the path of a tram car. At the
novel’s end he has returned to Russia with but a short time to live.
Again, Conrad’s point of view affects the reader through the tragedies
he describes, the object-lesson characters he creates, and the comments
they make. The narrator and Conrad’s raisonneur, an anonymous teacher
of English in Geneva, is the source of many of these comments. When
he sees Nathalia about to return to Russia as a dedicated worker, he
thinks of her believing in “the advent of loving accord springing like
a heavenly flower from the soil of men’s earth, soaked in blood, torn
by struggles, watered with tears.”
=E. M. Forster: The Problem of Imperialism=
Out of E. M. Forster’s _A Passage to India_ (1924) comes a
compassionate plea for British understanding of India. But even
understanding is not enough; there must also be love. This great
subcontinent, divided by geography, economics, caste, and religion,
has a heritage of misery and discord. The book’s two great themes are
the divisions which sunder India and the love which alone can make it
whole. It has been taken by the British without love in a union which
is rape. In one of the parallels which inform the theme, this action
is represented on the interpersonal level by the projected loveless
marriage of Adela Quested and British civil servant Ronny Heaslop. The
novel moves to a climax when the hysterical Adela mistakenly accuses
the sensitive Dr. Aziz, a Mohammedan Indian, of attempted rape in the
sinister Marabar caves. Aziz is acquitted, but his career is ruined
and his spirit desolated. But the influence of Ronny’s dead mother,
Mrs. Moore, returns, through the memory of her and the presence of her
two other children, to dispel some of the evil. At the book’s end Aziz
achieves a partial reconciliation with Cyril Fielding, the Englishman
who has defended him at the cost of ostracism. But as they part Aziz
shouts:
If it’s fifty-five hundred years we shall get rid of you, yes, we
shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea, and then ... you
and I shall be friends.
As an appeal either for love or withdrawal from India, the book is a
political instrument. It is also a revealing commentary upon one of
the causes of what Winston Churchill called “the dismemberment of the
British Empire.”
=Aldous Huxley and George Orwell: The Future in Perspective=
Huxley’s _Brave New World_ (1932) and Orwell’s _1984_, which followed
it seventeen years later, are political instruments through the honor
and revulsion they will create in any reader whose political beliefs
are formed by the democratic tradition. Although both these fine novels
are written in the future, neither is a fairy tale spun from air. Their
only resemblance to fairy tales is a horde of enough all-too-real
goblins and witches to make a month of _Walpurgisnachts_. Huxley, using
godlessness and immorality, and Orwell, using totalitarian government,
create nightmares well calculated to increase resistance to tendencies
in modern life which could produce the results so strikingly conjured
up in their novels.