that Ophelia's language should become coarse, like Lear's, in the full
tide of bitterness. It is the reaction after the perception of a
spiritual beauty. The beauty seems broken; the earth and its foulness
remain, and the anguished spirit sees the foulness exaggerated by
contrast with its ideal. Lear, who had seen his daughters as paragons,
sees them now as centaurs; he, who had adored their filial devotion,
compares them now to the most obscene things which can besmirch the
sight; nothing is too shameful to express the fall from that ideal.
We see, then, why it is that the highest forms of literature are
necessarily concerned with pain. It is not merely that art requires
intensity of feeling, and that the emotion of pain is the most intense
we know. It is because the highest literature must necessarily be
concerned with human beings in their most profound aspirations, in
their most deeply experienced strivings each after his own ideal,
according to his own conception of what will satisfy him; and it is
because in the nature of things such an ideal is more than experience
can satisfy that the anguish of striving and the anguish of failure
are the subjects of art. A play such as Marlowe's _Tamburlaine_ can
never be regarded as great drama. Amid scenes of magnificence and
splendid savage rhetoric Tamburlaine passes on from triumph to
triumph, the incarnation of the conquering will. There are numberless
detached passages of what we may call lyrical poetry--for a lyrical
poem expresses no more than a moment's mood, a single phase of the
sequence which is passion. But there is no passionate sequence in
_Tamburlaine_; it is a monotonous record of much-vaunted triumphs. We
do not feel the painful struggle; there is no prospect of defeat;
there is no storm and stress of an ideal at stake, a human being
battered by circumstance. We may, if we are brutal enough, bow down
before Tamburlaine's Juggernaut car; but he does not touch our
emotions; he is not a tragic hero. Tragedy has no interest in
supermen; unless, indeed, like Chapman's Bussy d'Ambois, the hero has
the courage of the superman with the limitations of the rest of
humanity.
But if the superman is not a possible subject for great art, neither
is the crawling earthworm. Many modern authors and critics seem to
consider that because tragic passion is always painful, therefore pain
is the essential thing in tragedy. It is this grossly false assumption
that is responsible for many disasters in contemporary literature; it
is the deep-lying error in much of our so-called "intellectual drama"
and "intellectual fiction." I have heard authors and critics complain
that the public will not read certain books or go to certain plays
because they are "painful" or "grim." If it had been because these
books or plays were "_passionate_" that the public had refused to
attend, I should have understood the complaint. Pain without passion
may be scientifically interesting, but it has no artistic content, no
high emotional significance. Indeed, it is not true to suppose that
the public dislikes the spectacle of the painful or the ugly. All know
something of the fascination which disturbed Leontius, the son of
Aglaion, who, coming up from the Piræus, observed dead bodies on the
ground; and desiring to look at them and loathing the thought opened
his eyes wide, exclaiming, "There, you wretches, take your fill of the
horrid sight!" If anyone doubts this let him recall that a painful and
sordid episode in the law-courts fascinates the public just as it is
fascinated by the crude villainies of East-end melodrama; and that the
most highly moralised section of the public can be stirred to attend
to the persecution of Congo natives or Macedonian Christians only by
the most appalling stories of massacre, outrage, and various forms of
extreme suffering.
Surely it is not because they are concerned with painful subjects that
many of the "intellectual" dramatists have failed--failed, I mean, not
only with the very ignorant public, but also with more discriminating
audiences. In some cases, which it is not my business here to specify,
they have failed because the authors have set their hearts on a
problem outside the subject of their art, and the art has suffered in
consequence; for only disinterested art has the power to move us. In
some cases they have failed because the authors have held theories
which I believe to be fatal to literature. The narrow view of what is
called Realism has been an adjunct to intellectual faddism and
propagandism, and has served to sterilise literature. The great
Realists have never been mere Realists; they have never thought that
to produce art it is sufficient merely to reproduce fact. The word
"Truth" has been introduced in the most shameless fashion. It is true
that there are men without arms and legs and noses, but to delineate
such a creature with exquisite accuracy is not to produce a faithful
rendering of life. It is true that there are drab, sordid,
expressionless lives, without happiness, without hope, without ideals.
To describe these lives in all their miserable detail may be of
infinite value for social and reforming purposes. It may be the duty
of every one of us to study these sores in the body politic for the
existence of which we are collectively responsible. It may be craven
cowardice not to open our eyes wide to these painful and hideous
facts, which cry out to be removed and prevented. And if any person
whose enthusiasm in life it is to abolish them hits upon an artistic
device for calling attention to them, he is justified by his object.
But let us nevertheless be frank about the matter. His object is the
removal of abuses. To stir emotions in a fine way is not his primary
end and aim; it is for him only a means to something else. We are not
condemning him when we say that his object is not the object of the
creative artist, who is concerned with life not in its partial
aspects, but as a whole. But he on his part has no right to complain
if he fails. The "truth" with which he is concerned is a scientific
case, not an artistic truth. He has failed to stir our emotions
because the attempt to stir emotions was only a dodge on his part; he
was playing a trick on us, for a laudable end, and if we are not taken
in the fault is not ours.
Drama, fiction, poetry, and the other fine arts cannot tolerate even
the best-intentioned insincerity. There is here no arbitrary dogma or
canon of art, but merely an assertion of the simple fact that you
cannot achieve two wholly different ends at one and the same time,
that success is dependent upon singleness of aim and enthusiasm. It is
true that there is no subject whatsoever that may not lend itself to
treatment. But it must be treated for its own sake, disinterestedly.
Literature will not move us greatly unless it is concerned with great
emotions. It will not move us finely except in the presence of an
ideal. For in the great passions of literature, as in the great
passions of life, there is always an ideal at stake, an ideal that is
more than the attainable, a grasping at a fulness of satisfaction
which is more than experience can afford.
I am making no appeal for what is misunderstood by the term "Art for
Art's sake," or for that typically French view the expression of which
I may take from the younger Dumas' _Affaire Clemenceau_:
Savez-vous ce que c'est que l'art? C'est le Beau dans le vrai,
et, d'après ce principe, l'art s'est créé des règles absolus,
que vous chercheriez en vain dans la nature seule. Si la nature
seule pouvait le satisfaire, vous n'auriez qu'à mouler un beau
modèle de la tête aux pieds, pour faire un chef d'œuvre. Ou,
si vous exécutiez cette idée, vous ne produiriez qu'un
grotesque. Le talent consiste à compléter la nature, Ã
recueillir çà et là ses indications merveilleuses, mais
partielles, à les résumer dans un ensemble homogène et a donner
à cet ensemble une pensée ou un sentiment, puisque nous pouvons
lui donner une âme.
I am in sympathy with that view so far as it implies that the artist
cannot be content with a slavish reproduction of isolated facts taken
from nature; and that he sets his gaze upon "_le Beau dans le vrai_,"
which I should like to render, not the "beautiful in the true," but
the "Ideal in the true." But I am not in sympathy with it so far as it
implies a formal beauty which the artist discerns in accordance with a
principle mysteriously and exclusively artistic, existing in a region
remote from life. Art is not a sacred mystery into which only the
initiated can penetrate. It is not concerned with beauties drawn from
a peculiar and exclusive artistic Absolute. Literature deals with
life, but in life in an intense manifestation, with that passionate
life which attains its richness, its breadth, its tremendous lustiness
through the desire for something more than normal life can give.
Nobody can object that these ideals are not real, that they are not
true to life, and indeed the most vital part of life. The passions
they call forth in men are the most real, the most vivid, the most
illuminating; they widen and refine experience; they bring us into a
larger universe, they add to the stature of personality, they are the
means of growth. Literature is an expansion of the mind out of the
narrower truth into the larger. It despises no experience, but drags
to light its hidden resources, its unexpected wealth. It is profoundly
interested in experience on its intense, that is to say, its
passionate side. The original mind, not content to find poetic value
in a single emotion such as that of love, finds it on all sides,
discovering interests here, there, and everywhere. If it concentrates
on one of these for the purposes of a poem, a play, a novel, it
neglects, of course, no adventitious aid which gives reality to the
persons, sufficiency to their motives, contrast, relief,
atmosphere--all that is expressed by the ordinary jargon of criticism.
To sum up: great creative literature does not deal with things painful
or otherwise merely because they are facts of life. Its business is
the intensification of life, to bring home to us its myriad
finenesses; it achieves this end by presenting persons passing through
the intense experiences which we call passions; and these are
conditions of the spirit in which an idealised object encourages,
thwarts, or tantalises the seeker, and dejects him utterly if the
reality turns out to be less than the ideal. The inquiry opens a
question for the metaphysician--What is the source of this ideal
element which enters into every object passionately sought, and so
transcends realisation that the object cannot be attained without a
sense of loss?
IV
THE POPULAR TASTE
If anything is worse than bad literature it is the tedious Pharisaism
of the "man of culture." How flattering to the self-esteem to cast a
supercilious eye upon the melodramatic, sentimental, unbeautiful books
which constitute the mass of modern literature! The mass of modern
literature is provided for the mass of men and women, but history has
proved that a small and educated public may embrace stupidities not
less desiccating than the stupidity of the million. A cultured public
in the eighteenth century which could tolerate Colley Cibber gains
nothing by comparison with an uncultured public which delights in Hall
Caine. An author who attempted a poetic drama in the eighteenth
century had to conform to the rules, but his compliance with
convention is worth no more to literature than the libertinism of the
modern reporter. The correct taste of that period is sufficiently
flagellated in Swift's _Recipe to make an Epic Poem_, wherein he
"makes it manifest that epic poems may be made without genius, nay
without learning or much reading.... It is easily brought about by him
that has a genius, but the skill lies in doing it without one." To
this day there exists an oligarchy of academic persons whose taste is
almost exactly on a par with the taste most in evidence two hundred
years ago. They are the people who estimate literature by its
correctness rather than by its fineness or power, who are impregnable
in their little fortress of pedantry, and are for ever secure against
the attacks of original genius.
If, then, we find that there is much in modern popular literature that
we dislike, this is a very different thing from saying that we prefer
the technical banalities dear to the pedant, or would set up the
standard of a barren culture. The popular taste is something not to be
scoffed at, but to be accounted for. To complain of it is wasted
effort; to explain it would be something to the purpose. And this we
can only do by keeping in mind that vital ideal which in spite of
every set-back the world has contrived to preserve, and endeavouring
to discover what it is--short of that ideal, or remote from it--that
the modern public wants: what taste it is that hundreds of modern
authors are trying to satisfy.
It is evidently a very various taste, for it is the taste of the whole
people. Everyone in the modern civilised state has been taught to
read, and almost everyone has had the written word thrust upon him; so
that reading has become a habit. At every turn the eye falls upon the
printed advertisement, the printed leaflet, the hand-written letter;
and the habit which is developed by the necessities of life has
intertwined itself also in the amenities. Newspapers, and weekly and
monthly periodicals, adapt themselves to the tastes of every class in
the community. The time is still far distant when books will be
universally and systematically read; but the number of volumes
annually distributed has increased at least tenfold in the last
generation; and a large proportion of this literature must find its
way to strata of society which fifty years ago read nothing at all.
It would be too much to expect that these millions of recruits to the
reading public would be drawn to that literature which can be classed
with the fine arts. One would no more expect them to admire it than
one would expect a child of five to admire _Hamlet_. The astonishing
thing is, not that so few people appreciate the best literature, as
that so many--_under direction_--are open to its influence, as we may
see from the immense sales of those popular volumes which Mr. Ernest
Rhys and others guarantee to be genuine "classics." Unfortunately, in
the case of recently written books, Mr. Rhys is not always at hand. In
such cases there is little direction for docile disciples of culture
excepting such as is given in newspaper reviews, and reviews are as
likely to misdirect and confuse as to encourage and guide.
But although this considerable and growing public of ambitious readers
already exists, and may some day come to the support of original
literature, it is at present easily swamped by that heterogeneous
public for which the largest number of books are provided. That
majority, in the nature of things, is unable to give the concentrated
attention, still less the selective appreciation, which literature of
the higher order requires. There is nothing to encourage them to
concentrate. The newspaper, the popular magazine, the theatre, the
moving-picture show, and the whole shifting, rapid panorama of modern
life discourage concentration. There are readers who can only give
the odds and ends of their time to reading. Most of them are devoting
the best efforts of their brain and attention to their business,
household duties, their social and domestic affairs, and they turn to
books only when their minds are fatigued and in need of repose. That
is to say, they read not for a renewal of activity, but for
distraction. With them, books satisfy the desire, not for an
enhancement of life, but for the forgetting of it. Their literature is
at the most a stimulant which excites without giving active play to
their faculties; it presents nothing which connects with life or
ideas, nothing even to call forth the effort demanded by their
practical affairs.
There are others, for the most part women not of the working class,
who support with apparent earnestness the purveyors of popular fiction
and biography, and even patronise poetry and genteel social
philosophy. Amongst them are to be found those to whom the sterner
actualities of life are unfamiliar and repugnant, for whom the
practice of trifling with books is rather an ornament than an
occupation, a mode of killing time rather than using it. They, too,
read to be distracted, choosing an emasculate literature which panders
to their essential dilettantism.
Now those who regard literature as an important thing, playing a
significant part in the life of a nation, must, as I have already
indicated, seek in it something more positive than a _distraction_
from life; for them it must be an _addition to life_. It must provide
experience compounded of the same stuff as other experience; but not
having the vividness which the direct impact of life carries with it,
it must gain its vividness by an intensity, a fineness, an interest of
its own--by a distinctive quality distilled into it from the
personality of the writer. It is imagination which achieves this, the
faculty so apprehensive of life that it can fashion life into images
which are projections of the artist, his own stamp upon the stuff of
life. To such an author literature cannot be a mere amusement or
profession. It deals with what he conceives to be the most essential
things in the world; it is his rendering of the world, his
perspective; and it is just in so far as he has made this, his ideal
and real world, appreciable also to us, that he has succeeded in his
art. Such imaginative reconstruction of the facts of life, such
impregnation of life with fineness, calls for alertness of faculty in
the reader, demands from him something of that eagerness to perceive
which characterises the artist himself. But how can the tired worker
seeking distraction, or the idle dilettante seeking only a drug or a
stimulant, muster that alertness of faculty and that eagerness to
perceive which are needed for the appreciation of art? It is not to be
expected. A coarser appeal will produce all that such minds are able
to assimilate. For good reading, like good writing, requires the
energy of men not robbed of leisure, men who can enjoy some respite
from the commonplace.
And yet it often happens, as we shall see, that those who have
succeeded in distracting the many have put into their work some
fineness which commends it also to the few. It is only in theory that
there is a fixed boundary between works of art and the works which
Philistines enjoy. In practice, merit and demerit exist side by side;
works crude in conception reveal a hundred finenesses, and works fine
in conception reveal crudenesses of execution. And just as there are
authors who mingle good and bad in their books, so too there are
readers who enjoy certain kinds of excellence though they can be
vulgarly excited by the cruder devices. And again there are persons
who appreciate to some extent genuine works of art, who in moments of
fatigue or jaded appetite can be diverted by the mere appeal to
sensation.
The clever publisher knows well that the public for whose distraction
he caters is divided into many classes, and that these classes must be
attracted each in a special way. For the purposes of my argument I
group these under five different heads, which are probably not
exhaustive and certainly not mutually exclusive, but correspond, I
think, to the five chief means of exciting and distracting the
multitude. The two largest classes constantly overlap, consisting:
firstly, of those whose love of sensation is satisfied by violent
incident; and secondly, of those who are especially susceptible to the
sentimental appeal. To a third class belong those who take pleasure in
the agitations of sex feeling; and to a fourth, those whose sense of
humour is tickled by the sallies of the literary clown. The fifth
class--a very large one--consists of those who are of a habit of mind
to be excited by sensations which can be associated with religion and
morality. It is useless to name as a sixth class those who are moved
by intellectual ideas, for so small a class is not the objective of
the popular author.
I. All novels must to some extent depend upon incident and arrangement
of incident, but there is a kind of novel which only interests through
the excitement of events in their nature fictitious, even when
accidentally true. Any really good book which may be spoken of as a
"novel of incident" will invariably prove to be very much more. To
take the case of Fielding's _Tom Jones_, one observes that it is an
imitation of life which is neither a slavish copying nor a
make-believe, but a vivid representation of eighteenth-century England
as Fielding saw it; it is a book which presents characters, and itself
has a character. Its atmosphere is quite unmistakable. It is not a
"slice" out of the eighteenth century--there can be no real "slice out
of life" excepting in life itself. It is Fielding's rendering of the
eighteenth century, in particular it is his assertion of the
_physicality_ (if I may use the term) of life, a direct assertion of
the boisterous physical vitality which, as Fielding presents it and as
Marlowe presented it, acquires value for the spirit and is acceptable
to the imagination. It is the original pagan assertion of life, which
finds its opposite in Euripides' conception of the ascetic Hippolytus;
an assertion which Propertius repeated in the language of mockery when
he speaks of a _lena_ as
"Docta vel Hippolytum Veneri mollire negantem."
Even Euripides himself was so infected with the pagan view that he
sees a sort of Nemesis pursuing the hero whom the slighted Aphrodite
reproaches with lack of reverence--religious reverence--for her power.
This primitive pagan view, crude, non-moral, but essentially sincere,
animates the story of Tom Jones and gives it a character which is
lacking in the popular "novel of incident."
_Tom Jones_ was and is a popular book. But I hope I am not wronging
the larger mass of mankind when I say that those (of the majority) who
like Fielding do not like him for his unique excellences; they would
be equally pleased if puppets instead of vital persons had passed
along the same course of exciting events; and that there are others
who would not read him even if he began writing to-day, because his
picture of life is too consistent with his imagination, and this very
tenacity would perturb and irritate the trivial. Nevertheless he would
have many readers among a large minority, just as Mr. Arnold Bennett
has to-day--readers who can appreciate a story which is direct, vivid,
and mainly external in treatment.
But the largest public is for writers like Mr. Cutcliffe Hyne or Mr.
William Le Queux. These more nearly represent the popular ideal in a
"novel of incident." For the former I have some respect. He shows
ingenuity in his concoction of improbable plots. In _Captain Kettle_
there is at least some attention to character--of a freakish kind--and
something of atmosphere which gives it a mock-romantic interest. It
holds the multitude by reason of the thrilling sensations extracted
from incidents wholly unlike anything possible in their lives, but
near enough to reported facts to be able to astonish and excite them.
Such improbable but ingeniously contrived events are enough to
distract them, and if there be more in Mr. Hyne's stories imparted by
his personal eagerness and honesty, it escapes them, or at least does
not annoy them.