men who open new regions to our view. A revelation has waited for him.
He is as much the master of his English compeers in originality as
Stevenson was their master in finished craftsmanship.
VI.--UNDER FRENCH ENCOURAGEMENT--THOMAS HARDY
Within the last half-score of years an extraordinary impulse towards
freedom in the artistic representation of life has touched some of our
English writers. Thackeray, in ‘Pendennis,’ laments that since Fielding
no English novelist has ‘dared to draw a man.’ Dr. George Macdonald, in
his ‘Robert Falconer,’ whispers, in a sort of stage _aside_, his wish
that it were possible to be both decent and honest in the exposition of
the character of the Baron of Rothie, who is a seducer by profession.
Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of Thackeray was, that
he was a gentleman, and that his good-breeding and his manliness were
essentially of the English pattern. Dr. Mac-donald’s most intense
impulse is towards purity of life, as an integral necessity for that
communion with the Eternal Fatherhood which he preaches with so much
earnestness and charm. That two such men should have felt that
their work was subject to a painful limitation on one side of it is
significant, but it is a fact which may be used with equal force as an
argument by the advocates of the old method and the adopters of the new.
It is perfectly true that they felt the restriction, but it is equally
true that they respected it, and were resolute not to break through it.
Their cases are cited here, not as an aid to argument on one side or the
other, but simply to show that the argument itself is no new thing--that
the question as to how far freedom is allowable has been debated in the
minds of honest writers, and decided in one way, long before it came to
be debated by another set of honest writers, who decided it in another.
There never was an age in which outspoken honesty was indecent. There
never was an age in which pruriency in any guise could cease to be
indecent. There never was an age when the fashion of outspoken honesty
did not give a seeming excuse to pruriency; and it is this fact,
that freedom in the artistic presentation of the sexual problems
has invariably led to license, which has in many successive ages of
literature forced the artist back to restraint, and has made him content
to be bound by a rigid puritanism. In the beat of the eternal pendulum
of taste it seems ordained that puritanism shall become so very
puritanic that art shall grow tired of its bonds, and that liberty in
turn shall grow offensive, and shall compel art by an overmastering
instinct to return towards puritanism.
It is France which has led the way in the latest protest against the
restrictions imposed by modern taste upon art. It may be admitted as a
fact that those restrictions were felt severely, for it is obvious
that until they began to chafe there was no likelihood of their being
violently broken. The chief apostle of the new movement towards entire
freedom is, of course, Emile Zola. After having excited for many years
an incredulous amazement and disgust, he is now almost universally
recognised as an honest and honourable artist, and as a great master in
his craft. Nobody who is at all instructed ventures any longer to say
that Zola is indecent because he loves indecency, or is pleased by the
contemplation of the squalid and obscene. We see him as he truly is--a
pessimist in humanity--sad and oppressed, and bitter with the gall of a
hopeless sympathy with suffering and distorted mankind.
One English artist, whom, in the just language of contemporary
criticism, it is no exaggeration to describe as great, has elected
(rather late in life for so strong a departure) to cast in his lot with
the new school. That his ambitions are wholly honourable it would be
the mere vanity of injustice to deny. That his new methods contrast very
unfavourably with his old ones, that he is lending the weight of his
authority to a movement which is full of mischief, that in obeying in
all sincerity an artistic impulse he is doing a marked disservice to
his own art in particular, and to English art in general, are with me so
many rooted personal convictions; but I dare not pretend that they are
more. Mr. Hardy is just as sincere in his belief that he is right as
I and others among his critics are in our belief that he is wrong. The
question must be threshed out dispassionately and judicially, if it be
faced at all. It cannot be settled by an appeal to personal sentiment
on either side. But in the limits to which I am now restricted it is
impossible to do justice to the discussion, and it would, indeed, be
barely possible to state even the whole of its terms.
I am forced to content myself, therefore, with a temperamental
expression of opinion in place of a judicial one, pleading only that the
arguments against me are recognised and respected, although I have no
present opportunity of recapitulating and disputing them. It appears,
then--to speak merely as an advocate _ex parte_--to us of the old school
that an essential part of the fiction writer’s duty is to be harmless.
That, of course, to the men of the cayenne-pepper-caster creed seems
a very milky sort of proclamation, but to us it is a matter of grave
moment. I have always thought, for my own part, that the novelist might
well take for his motto the last five words of that passage in ‘The
Tempest’ where we read: ‘This isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet
airs, which _give delight and hurt not!_ Simple as the motto seems, it
will be found to offer a fairly wide range. When Reade tilted against
prison abuses and the abuses of private asyla, or when Dickens rode down
on the law of Chancery as administered in his day, or when Thackeray
scourged snobbery and selfishness in society, they were all well within
the limits of this rule. We experience a delight which hurts not, but
on the contrary is entirely tonic and inspiring, when Satire swings his
lash on the bared back of Hypocrisy or cruel and intentioned Vice. We
experience a delight which hurts not, but on the contrary freshens the
whole flood of feeling within us, when a true artist deals truly with
the sorrows and infirmities of our kind. To offer it as our intent
to give delight and hurt not is no mere profession of an artistic
Grundyism. It is the proclamation of what is to our minds the simple
truth, that fiction should be a joyful, an inspiring, a sympathetic,
and a helpful art. There are certain questions the public discussion of
which we purposely avoid. There are certain manifestations of character
the exhibition of which we hold to be something like a crime.
Mr. Hardy would plead, and with perfectly apparent propriety, that he
does not choose to write for ‘the young person.’ But I answer that he
cannot help himself. He cannot choose his audience. Fiction appeals to
everybody, and fiction so robust, so delicate and charming as his own
finds its way into all hands. When a man can take a hall, and openly
advertise that he intends to speak therein ‘to men only,’ he is
reasonably allowed a certain latitude. If he pitches his cart on
the village green, and talks with the village lads and lasses within
hearing, he will, if he be a decent fellow, avoid the treatment of
certain themes.
To take the most striking example:--In ‘Jude the Obscure’ Mr. Hardy
deals very largely with the emotions and reasons which animate a young
woman when she decides not to sleep with her husband, when she decides
that she will sleep with her husband, when she decides to sleep with a
man who is not her husband, and when she decides not to sleep with
the man who is not her husband. Now, all this does not matter to the
mentally solid and well-balanced reader. It is not very interesting, for
one thing, and apart from the fact that it is, from a workman’s point of
view, astonishingly well done, it would not be interesting at all.
Mr. Hardy offers it as the study of a temperament. Very well. It is an
excellent study of a temperament, but it bores. The theme is not big
enough to be worth the effort expended upon it. Here is an hysterical,
wrong-headed, and confused-hearted little hussy who can’t make up her
mind as to what is right and what is wrong, and who is a prey to the
impulse of the moment, psychical or physical. I don’t think there are
many people like her. I don’t think that from the broad human-natural
point of view it matters a great deal how she decides. But I am sure of
this--that the more that kind of small monstrosity is publicly analysed
and anatomised and made much of, the more her morbidities will increase
in her, and the more unbearable in real life she is likely to become.
Mr. Hardy’s labour in this particular is a direct incentive to the study
of hysteria as a fine art amongst such women as are natively prone to
it. One of the gravest dangers which beset women is that of hysterical
self-deception. The common-sense fashion of dealing with them when they
suffer in that way is kindly and gently to ignore their symptoms until
the reign of common-sense returns. To make them believe that their
emotions are worthy of the scrutiny of a great analyst of the human
heart is to increase their morbid temptations, and in the end to render
those temptations irresistible. The one kind of person to whom ‘Jude the
Obscure’ must necessarily appeal with the greatest power is the kind
of person depicted in its pages, and the tendency of the book is
unavoidably towards the development and multiplication of the type
described. This is the only end the book can serve, apart from the fact
that it does reveal to us Mr. Hardy’s special knowledge of a dangerous
and disagreeable form of mental disorder, But it is not the physician’s
business to sow disease, and any treatise on hysteria which is thrown
into a captivating popular form, and makes hysteria look like an
interesting and romantic thing, will spread the malady as surely as
a spark will ignite gunpowder. This at least is not a mere matter of
opinion, but of sound scientific fact, which no student of that disorder
which Mr. Hardy has so masterfully handled will deny. In this respect,
then, the book is a centre of infection, and that the author of ‘A Pair
of Blue Eyes’ should have written it is matter at once for astonishment
and grief. That is to say, it is a matter of astonishment and grief
to me, and to those who think as I do. There is a large and growing
contingent of writers and readers to whom it is a theme for joyful
congratulation. It is one of the rules of the game we are now playing to
respect all honest conviction.
Of Mr. Hardy, from the purely artistic side, there is little time
to speak. On that side let me first set down what is to be said in
dispraise, for the mere sake of leaving a sweet taste in the mouth at
the end. Even from his own point of view--that lauded ‘sense of the
overwhelming sadness of modern life’ which captivates the admirers of
his latest style--it is possible to spread the epic table of sorrow
without finding a place upon it for scraps of the hoggish anatomy which
are not nameable except in strictly scientific or wholly boorish speech.
But it seems necessary to the new realism that its devotee should be
able to write for the perusal of gentlemen and ladies about things
he dared not mention orally in the presence of either; so that what a
drunken cabman would be deservedly kicked for saying in a lady’s hearing
may be honourably printed for a lady’s reading by a scholar and a sage.
It was once thought otherwise, but I am arguing here, not against
realism _per se_, but against the inartistic introduction of gross
episodes. Every reader of Mr. Hardy will recognise my meaning, and the
passage in my mind seems gratuitously and unserviceably offensive.
To come to less unpleasing themes, where, still expressing disapproval,
one may do it with some grace, one of the few limitations to Mr. Hardy’s
great charm as a writer lies in his tendency to encumber his page with
detail. At a supremely romantic moment one of his people sits down to
contemplate a tribe of ants, and watches them through two whole printed
pages. In another case a man in imminent deadly peril surveys through
two pages the history of the geologic changes which have befallen our
planet. Each passage, taken by itself, is good enough. Taken where it
is, each is terribly wearisome and wrong.
I do not know that any critic has yet recorded Mr. Hardy’s singular
limitations as to the invention of plot. Speaking from memory, I cannot
at this moment recall a novel of his in which some trouble does not
circle about a marriage licence, and I can recall many instances of
going to church to get married and coming back single. That, indeed, is
Mr. Hardy’s _pièce de résistance_ in the way of invention, and it crops
up in one book after another with a helpless inevitable-ness which at
last grows comic.
But here we can afford to have done with carping, and can turn to the
much more grateful task of praise. I do not think it too much to say
that Mr. Hardy has studied his own especial part of England, has made
himself master of its landscape, its town and hamlet life, its tradition
and sentiment, and general spiritual atmosphere, to such triumphant
effect as to set himself wholly apart from all other English writers
of fiction. His devotion to his own beloved Wessex has brought him
this rich and merited reward--that he is the recognised first and final
master of its field. His knowledge of rustic life within his own borders
is beautifully sympathetic and profound. His impression of the landscape
in the midst of which this life displays itself is broad and noble and
alive. His literary style is a thing to admire, to study, and to admire
again. All worthy readers of English fiction are his debtors for many
idyllic happy hours, and many deep inspirations of wholesome English
air. And if, at the parting of the ways, we wave a decisive farewell to
him, we are not unmindful of the time when he was the best and dearest
of our comrades, and we leave him in the certainty that, whatever path
he has chosen, he has been guided in his choice by an ambition which is
entirely honourable and sincere.
VII.--UNDER FRENCH ENCOURAGEMENT--GEORGE MOORE
That salt of sincerity which saves ‘Jude the Obscure’ and ‘Tess o’ the
D’Urber-villes’ from being wholly nauseous, is absent from ‘A Modern
Lover’ and ‘A Drama in Muslin,’ and its flavour is but faintly
perceptible in ‘Esther Waters.’ Except on the distinct understanding
that Thomas Hardy and George Moore are bracketed here, for the sake of
convenience, as being both ‘under French encouragement,’ it would be a
gross critical injustice to couple their names together at all. It is
not one man of letters in a hundred who has Mr. Hardy’s mere literary
faculty, which is native and brilliant, whilst Mr. Moore’s has been
painstakingly hunted for and brought from afar, and is, after much
polishing, still a trifle dull. Mr. Thomas Hardy is distinctly one of
those men who see things through an atmosphere of their own. Mr. George
Moore has borrowed his atmosphere. The one is a man of genius as well as
labour, and the other is a man of labour only.
It is very much of a pity that, a year or two ago, somebody’s sense
of Mr. Moore’s position in the world of letters should have been very
absurdly emphasised. It was solemnly advertised that a certain number of
copies of a book of his might be had on large paper, with the autograph
of the author. This was to be regretted, for Mr. Moore, in his own way,
is worth taking seriously, whilst the trick is one of those which, as a
rule, can only be played by the poorest kind of literary outsider. But
that the author should have permitted himself to be thus made ridiculous
is a characteristic thing, and one not to be passed in silence if we
wish to understand him.
Consulting the critics, one of the first things we find about Mr. Moore
is that he is an observer. As a matter of fact, that is absolutely
what he is not. He is so far from being an observer that he is that
diametrically opposite person, a man with a notebook. The man who
amongst men of letters deserves to be ranked as an observer is he who
naturally and without effort sees things in their just place, aspect,
proportion, and perspective. The man who is often falsely described
by the title which expresses this faculty is a careful and painstaking
soul, who is strenuously on the watch for detail, and who takes much
trouble to fill his pages with it.
Let me offer a concrete illustration. In ‘Esther Waters’ Mr. Moore is
curiously and meaninglessly emphatic in his description of a certain
room in which the heroine of his action sleeps. Esther, we are told,
slipped on her nightdress and got into bed. It was a brass bed without
curtains. There were two windows in the room. One of them was flush
with the head of the bed, and the other was beyond its foot. A chest of
drawers stood between them. An observer, unless he had a special purpose
in it, would never have dreamt of writing down this bald detail. Nothing
comes of the statement of fact. Nothing hangs on the relative position
of the bed and the windows and the chest of drawers. Nothing happens
in the course of the story which justifies the flat and flavourless
statement. It is wholly without meaning, apart from the fact that it
affords rather a plain insight into the author’s method of work. If a
child of three after visiting a strange bedroom were able to tell as
much about it as Mr. Moore has to tell about this apartment, his mother
would probably be proud of him, and his nurse would say that he was a
notice-taking little creature; but the critics would hardly hold him up
to admiration as an observer. Yet the child would tell us just as much
and just as little as Mr. Moore tells us in this particular instance.
It goes without saying that this is not a fair specimen of Mr. Moore’s
faculty, but it is significant of his general literary knack. He makes
it his business steadfastly to jot down what he sees, and it is not
impossible that in the course of a long and laborious life a man might
in this way cultivate to a reasonable growth a turn for observation
originally less than mediocre; but it is not the natural observer’s
method of seeing things, and it is not the natural artist’s method of
presenting them. If the critics in this case were in the right we should
have to acknowledge an auctioneer’s catalogue as a _chef d’ouvre_.
To the sympathetic reader it was evident from the first that Mr. Moore
was not greatly enamoured of his work for its own sake, and that he
chose his themes, not because of any imperative attraction they had for
him, but simply and purely for the use to which he could put them. His
choice of subject has always been the result of a deliberate search for
the effective. The mental process which gave rise to ‘A Mummer’s Wife’
is easily traceable. The domestic life of the class of people he made up
his mind to treat was as little known to him as to almost anybody, but
if properly handled it was pretty sure to make good copy. He must know
it first, however, and so he set himself to learn it. This is the Zola
method, but it is that method with a difference. The great French master
started with an inspired and inspiring scheme, his idea being no less
than to paint the society of an epoch from top to base, to present in a
series of books, the writing of which should fill his literary lifetime,
a completed portraiture of the whole people of his land and day. In the
course of such a labour as he had courageously appointed for himself,
many lines of special inquiry were necessarily indicated, but the
details for which he searched were all employed with an artistic
remorselessness in the building of that one great scheme of his, and
each successive book which left his hands was like one more nail driven
home and clinched for the support of his argument. Mr. Moore, as those
who are honoured by his personal acquaintance know better than those who
only read his books, resents with some warmth the obvious parallel which
has been drawn between Zola and himself; but he is a copyist of Zola’s
method for all that, and but for Zola’s influence would never have been
heard of on his own present lines. In the writing of the ‘Mummers Wife’
the first obvious impulse came from Zola, It should be the writer’s
business to discover a section of English life not hitherto
exploited--it should be his business to explore it with a minute
thoroughness--and it should, further, be his business to depict it as he
found it. To be thoroughly painstaking in inquiry, and without fear in
the exposition of facts discovered, were the aims before the writer. But
Mr. Moore forgot, as was inevitable in the circumstances, that no desire
for knowledge of things human is of real value without sympathy. He
followed the fortunes of a theatrical company touring in the provinces,
and though it is true enough that people who know that kind of life find
trivial errors here and there, it has to be admitted that on the whole
he gave a true and characteristic picture of the outside life of such a
community. How a certain class of theatrical people dress and talk, what
their work is, and what their outer ways are like, he has discovered
with infinite painstaking; but the fact remains that it is the work
of an outsider. He has never once got under the skin of any one of his
people, and this is true, because he was impelled to write about them,
not because they were human, and therefore endowed with all human
characteristics of hatefulness, and lovableness, and quaintness, and
humour, and vanity, and jealousy, but because he saw good copy in them.
He neither loves nor hates, nor, indeed, except for his own sake, is for
a. second even faintly interested. He is there to make a book, and
these people offer excellent material for a book. He is astonishingly
industrious, and his minuteness is without end, but he never warms to
his subject. His aim, in short, is one of total artistic selfishness.
It is very likely that he would accept this statement of his standpoint,
and would justify it as the only standpoint of an artist. But it is
answerable for the fact that his pages are sterile of laughter and
tears, of sympathy and of pity.
In ‘A Modern Lover’ and ‘A Drama in Muslin’ we find him dealing with a
life he knows. He is no longer on ground wholly foreign to him, and it
is no longer necessary that he should grope from one uncertain standing
place to another, verifying himself by the dark lantern of his note-book
as he goes. He moves with a more natural ease, views things with
a larger and more comprehensive eye, and has at least that outside
sympathy with his people which comes of community of taste and
knowledge, and of familiarity with a social _milieu_.