books as I have chanced to read. I may have been unlucky in my
selection, and there may be admirable qualities in those of his novels
which I have not read. But in the three or four volumes known to me I
found that the persons were puppets, moving in unnatural situations,
meeting sensational adventures which constituted all that there was of
an improbable and slenderly connected plot. We all know the sort of
book. But what is it that makes this, and others like it, popular?
There were scenes of spurious passion. There were incidents in which
action assumed the proportions of prodigy. There was vague sensation.
In one of his novels I found an introduction by Lord Roberts warning
Englishmen to prepare for the German invasion planned by Mr. Le Queux
for 1910! History has not yet revealed the horror and devastation of
that war; but this horror and devastation lent to Mr. Le Queux's book
the interest which it required.
Yet the novel which is read mainly for the thrill of the incident may
be written in a far finer spirit. Most historical novels depend mainly
upon the vigour of the action. The very best historical novelists must
be excepted; in Scott, for example, as in Fielding, there is so much
which depends on character and atmosphere that there is always much
more than thrilling incident to hold the attention. In the books of a
modern writer like Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer, at his best, there is an
artistry of composition, a synthetic quality in the romance, a unity
of pictorial effort which give to them a quality of design and
exquisiteness; they are a distillation of Mr. Hueffer's romantic
personality. But if we consider Mr. Stanley Weyman, we are taking a
novelist in whom everything depends upon the thrill of incident.
Still, he has made of his work a fine craft. He uses words
conscientiously. He has exceptional skill in tracing his ingenious
plots. He has read history carefully, and for the most part adheres
faithfully to facts--though I believe he is not so well instructed in
German as in French history. The scrupulousness which refines his work
gives quality to his narrative, and he can be read with pleasure by
persons of exacting taste. And, again, we might take the case of
Richard Dehan, author of _The Dop Doctor_. That writer is not innocent
of the crudest melodrama. She is diffuse, extravagant, formless. But
she has imagined and created certain characters. She has at moments
touched profoundly that most rudimentary of all emotions--the
war-emotion--an emotion which may be experienced intensely by every
member of an energetic community, and therefore affords the basis of a
real popular art--just as certain universal sentiments afforded the
basis of folk-songs, which were constantly taken up and moulded into
fine artistic forms. _The Dop Doctor_ is a book compounded of vulgar
sensationalism on the one hand, and a strange imaginative vigour and
actuality on the other.
But the sensibility of the crudest and, it is to be feared, the (at
present) largest strata of society can be touched, as we have seen, by
the sheer extravagance of the novel of incident, by action distorted
out of the proportions of life and made astonishing, by violent
assaults upon the reader calculated to arouse him like pistol-shots,
since a more moderate appeal would escape his attention. Just as a
donkey with a hard mouth can only be guided by violent jerks upon the
reins, so a dull sensibility can only be awakened by the harshest
literary appeal. Style in such cases must adapt itself to the subject.
Redundant words are heaped up where one would suffice for the trained
intelligence. A multitude of violent, flamboyant phrases assist to the
excitement of fever. It is possible, indeed, that some rudimentary
art-feeling lurks behind this pandemonium of crude literature, more
probably in cases where lawlessness is the result not of indolence,
but of some sort of vigour and spontaneity. But it should be
remembered that the mimetic impulses in which art among primitive
races is supposed to originate, are not themselves art; and
continually to whet the appetite with such primitive exercises is to
perpetuate the rudimentary condition and stifle the finer faculties.
II. The sentimental absurdities of Pyramus and Thisbe are the occasion
of some apt criticism which Shakespeare puts into the mouths of
Hippolyta and Theseus:
HIPPOLYTA. This is the silliest stuff that e'er I heard.
THESEUS. The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are
no worse, if imagination amend them.
HIPPOLYTA. It must be your imagination then, and not theirs.
Shakespeare is commenting on the sentimentality which is generally
pleasing to Quince, Snug, Bottom, and the like. If he is mistaken it
is in suggesting that this sickliness is confined to the company of
carpenters and bellows-menders, and is not equally to be found among
those of the high estate of Hermia, Helena, and Hippolyta herself. But
it would never have done to admit so much before an audience of
tinkers and tailors, splendidly patronised by a few young bloods of
noble birth. Sentiment is distinguished from sentimentality precisely
as Shakespeare suggests. The one is concerned with real emotions, the
other with shadows. The first is informed by the imagination, the
second is devoid of it, and is divorced alike from intellect and
common sense. To touch the chord of sentiment justly and truly is one
of the most difficult things in literature. Shakespeare himself by no
means always succeeded. There is often an affectation in his lighter
love-scenes which destroys the impression of sincerity. Even in life
one may see how at any time the note of sentiment may be turned to
absurdity by the least discordant element. The lover whose tender
expressions are wholly pleasing to his lady may become an object of
ridicule before an uninvited audience. Everyone can remember some
occasion when a whole company of persons, wistfully alluding to a
recent death, has suddenly burst into uncontrollable laughter,
betraying, not lack of respect for the dead, but ridicule at some
falsity of expression.
Sentiment is one of the everyday emotions, fine and light in its
texture, requiring the tenderest and most delicate treatment, and
often it must pass off in laughter. It is something less than passion.
It is not concerned with tragedies or crises, but the subtlest
apprehensions of what comes and goes at every moment of life. It must
never be treated as if it were passion, or the slender threads of
which it consists will snap, and ridicule will justly reveal the
unbalanced judgment of the sentimentalist. Nor must it ever be far
from laughter, or it will collapse under its own strain, and we may be
betrayed into thinking that the cynic is the best judge of life. It is
the imagination exercising itself among things real, but not of the
first order of importance. If you attribute to them that importance,
you are guilty of false sentiment. The facts of life convict you.
See how delicately Charles Lamb could hold the balance in such an
essay as _Dream Children_. Great-grandmother Field is just in her
place, upright, graceful, and the best of dancers; and Alice's little
right foot plays its involuntary movement in the nick of time; and
when Uncle John died, the "children fell a-crying" at the narrative
and asked about the mourning which they were wearing. It is all just
important enough, just trivial enough, to carry its fragile burden of
sentiment--so much, and no more. The charm is complete. Conceive what
Dickens would have made of the story if he had been writing it! How
sickly a fantasy of Paul Dombeys and Little Nells and garrulous "wild
waves" he would have conjured up for _his_ dream children! His dream
children--the good ones, at any rate--were little old people,
monstrosities, freaks. Reality rejects monstrosities, and what reality
rejects is no subject for literature--strictly speaking, is no subject
at all--save when, like goblins and fairies, it assumes the
quasi-reality of fantasy and dreams.
I remember a story by a popular modern writer, Mr. E. Temple Thurston.
It appeared in a volume entitled _Thirteen_. The author arranged his
story with skill. He led up to his _dénouement_ with admirable
stage-management. The story was about a little boy who understood that
his father wanted a shop and fifty pounds to buy it with. This amiable
child sallies forth from his poor quarter of the city and tramps to
the distant regions where rich people live. Nothing doubting, he asks
for fifty pounds. He receives sixpence. He exchanges it for a pair of
braces and an insurance ticket. He drowns himself with exquisite
deliberation, and on the merits of his death and the insurance ticket
the fifty pounds are forthcoming.
The defects of the story are obvious. The little boy has no proper
place in this world, and his drowning, so far from being pathetic, was
the best thing that could happen to him. For he was a freak, a
monstrosity. Even those who may not accept this view must at least
agree that he ought to have known better, and deserved a whipping
rather than the reward of martyrdom and sentimental praise. But even
if we assume that the boy is a possible creature, and that his act in
begging for the money was beautiful and moving, we cannot escape the
objection that the fatal ending is pitched in a discordant note of
tragedy. The tragic conclusion is appropriate to a tale of passion, or
to a tale which arouses a sense of the most urgent things in life. But
to turn a slender sentiment into a thing of tragedy is to pass the
limits of sentiment; it cannot carry the burden. The conclusion is not
true enough to be even shocking. It is merely disgusting.
How is it that this mimicry of sentiment proves effective in moving
the multitude, when the real thing so often fails to please? The
answer, I think, is, that the artistic imagination can neither express
itself through distorted objects, nor can it confuse in one blurred
series of images the trivial and the urgent; its business being to see
life with such sense of proportion as the concentrated artistic vision
of the artist ensures. But careless readers do not see objects until
they are exaggerated out of resemblance to life; the adjustments of
the artistic vision are too delicate to reach their perceptions. Mr.
Thurston's little boy is seen to be very good, and to the
sentimentalist his mere goodness is "beautiful." When he tramps across
London his fatigue is sad, and the sadness of it is beautiful. When
the rich gentleman gives him sixpence instead of fifty pounds, the
reader sheds happy, thoughtless tears, and his beautiful death at the
end is all that he requires as the final "assault upon his feelings."
The phrase, of course, is Stevenson's, and it can hardly be avoided.
Popularity rewards the writer who can _assault_ the feelings of his
readers, and anyone who uses a more delicate method must be content
with a smaller circle of readers.
It is in this manner, amiably enough, that Miss Ella Wheeler Wilcox
can conquer America with sentimental poems, as Ian Maclaren once
conquered England with sentimental stories. They touch us where the
intellect and the common sense are in abeyance, and the moral sense is
steeped in false sentiment. Thus it was that when a sort of torpor
came upon the intellect and the common sense of Mr. A.C. Benson, he,
who had been formerly a scholar and a friend of literature, became
merely a sentimentalist. The author of _The Sick-a-bed Lady_ (Eleanor
Halliwell Abbott) is for the same reason esteemed as highly in America
as the author of _Letters to My Son_ is esteemed in England. The
trowel is the instrument with which these honours--and these
fortunes--are won.
III. It might seem that the popular literature of love ought to have
been treated under the same head as that of sentimental literature.
But it will become clear not only that there can be a popular erotic
literature of a quite different order, but that I might have
subdivided this class into two: one concerned with the popular
literature of passion, the other with that of sensualism. There is, of
course, a sentiment of love which is sufficiently considered in the
last section. But I have made a distinction between sentiment and
passion, which for my view is important; and I must add the further
and more obvious distinction between the love passion, which is an
intense emotional experience affecting the imagination no less than
the senses, and that sex feeling, which in essence is merely sensual.
Leaving out of count, then, the "sentiment" of love, we have an
obvious distinction between the literature which deals with the love
passion and the literature which deals with sensual desire. But I do
not propose any grandmotherly legislation which permits one subject to
the artist and relegates the other to the pornographer. For it is
clear that an author may deal well or ill with a subject intended to
yield genuine passion (though in the latter case the popular interest
will attach to the sensational character of the incidents rather than
to the treatment of passion as such, and a book of this kind may be
considered as I have already considered the "novel of incident"). And,
again, an author may deal well or ill with the sensations of sex;
those sensations can provide material for fine art. It is a matter of
treatment. Upon feelings of this sort Maupassant based some of his
most felicitous stories. But Maupassant did not use sexual incidents
for the sake of sex feeling; for him such incidents were various
symbols, flickering images, of life, incarnations of the brooding
spirit of cynicism and scorn. We have already seen that to Fielding,
for whom they were of less special significance on their own account,
they were presented as assertions of boisterous physical eagerness, of
delight in energetic life for its own sake.
It has already become obvious that the tendency of the most popular
literature is to substitute the cruder sensations for the higher
emotions and sentiments. We have seen how incident is liked for the
mere sensation it can afford; how sentiment is turned into
sentimentality. As a rule, in discussing inferior literature the
higher emotions need be taken little into account. But in the case of
love it is different. The average man, by reason of his pre-occupation
and his averageness, is little affected by a variety of fine emotions;
the hard facts of life smother them. But everyone can observe that the
emotion of love is not only an emotion to which most men at a certain
age are susceptible, but that it seems to present itself, at some time
or another, in a form finer than that of any other feeling entertained
by average men. I believe that all observers would agree that
innumerable men and women who cannot be touched in a subtle way by any
other emotion--unless we except, especially in primitive men, the
emotion of war; and then it is rather intense than subtle--can be and
are so touched by the emotion of love.
Here, then, we might expect to find the basis for a literature which
may be both widely popular and at the same time finely imagined.
Within certain limits I believe the love passion does afford such a
basis. If we can imagine an artist confining himself to this single
issue, relying on no finenesses outside it, then we might have a work
of art which men and women, representing in other respects any degree
of imagination and dullness, might all almost equally enjoy. In
practice it is seldom that an artist is content to confine himself so
exclusively to this issue; it is not in the nature of the imaginative
temperament to limit itself in that way. But I think we have an
example approximating to the supposed type in Emily Brontë's
_Wuthering Heights_. The strenuousness of the love emotion is in this
book rendered with consummate power, and hence the hold it has over
men of intelligence and over fools. But in almost every other respect
the novel is sheer rhetoric, crudeness, and unshapeliness.
The novel (or popular biography) which deals not with the emotion of
love but the sex sensation, requires little discussion. If the object
of the writer is to treat such a theme with imaginative criticism,
well and good. If he intends only to reproduce the sensation, he is a
pornographer.
IV. It is extraordinary that there should be so little humorous
literature distributed among the English-speaking peoples, for a sense
of humour is a boon which has been allotted to a very large minority
of the human race, and some sense of the ridiculous to the majority.
It is through his sense of what is ridiculous in life, and his power
of presenting it imaginatively, that Dickens seems to have acquired
not only a permanent place in English literature, but a popularity
quite unique among standard English novelists. The jocularity of Mark
Twain is equally dexterous, but it is not so completely imagined as
the humour of Dickens; it springs more often from situation than from
character, and to that extent belongs more to the accidents than to
the essentials of life. Mr. W.W. Jacobs deserves a higher place than
is usually accorded to him in contemporary literature. His short
stories are excellently contrived within their limits; the humour
springs from situation and character conjoined. When a clever writer
is content to confine himself primarily to the ridiculous in life, it
is possible for him to make his effect both for the million and the
more exacting few. As _Wuthering Heights_ was popular because it was
little more than a brilliant presentation of the love passion, so
_Many Cargoes_ and _Light Freights_ are popular as well as excellent
because they aim at nothing but the broad effect of laughter. Mr.
Jacobs is inferior to Dickens because he is a humorist and nothing
more, and also because he has an infinitely narrower range. His art is
one which presents but a single aspect of life, and suggests no
ambition to exhibit a large grasp upon life as a whole. But he
succeeded exactly in what he set out to do.
But have any of Mr. Jacobs' books, or any of Dickens', enjoyed greater
popularity than fell to Mr. Jerome's _Three Men in a Boat_? In this
book the humour sprang in no sense out of character; nor did it even
spring out of situations contrived with especial skill. It consisted
of a series of ludicrous impressions such as that of a man sitting on
a pat of butter. Well, a man sitting on a pat of butter is a funny
thing--when it happens naturally in life. But a collection of
incidents, each of which might be funny if it happened among the
accidents of life, are a poor source of entertainment when strung
together without the life which makes them real. It should be
remembered that what is an accident in life ceases to be an accident
when it is invented in a story. A writer must needs supply from the
imagination something which may give the artistic effect of accident.
Even farce misses its true effects if it contains no verisimilitude.
To see your friend sitting on a pat of butter is amusing; to listen to
an invented account of besmeared garments is not amusing; for it
misses the amusing point--which was the fact of its happening. But the
admirers of _Three Men in a Boat_ see only trousers and butter,
trousers and butter; and they find nothing offensive in the manner in
which this incongruity has been thrust upon their sight. Their
complacent minds receive this funny visual impression because they do
not perceive the glaring artifice which for another banishes the
humour.
V. Morality among the Anglo-Saxon races is a popular theme. It can
cover a multitude of artistic sins. Religion is popular in all
countries, and is not always associated with good morals; but in
England and the United States good religion and good morals fall under
the same hierarchy. Both have their corresponding sensations and
emotions. We may see them violently operative at revival meetings,
distracting agents which are sometimes indeed so powerful as to lead
to extraordinary reactions. It is difficult to attain the same
violence with the written as with the spoken word, but if any living
novelist has succeeded in attaining the effect of pandemonium through
the use of religious and moral subjects, it is Miss Marie Corelli. As
_proxime accessit_ I might name Mr. Hall Caine. By the same methods
Mr. Guy Thorne (_alias_ Ranger Gull) attained, with the pulpit
assistance of the Bishop of London, a sensational popular success in
_When it was Dark_. There have also been many fine writers who did
not aim at spurious effects, but received praise by reason of their
"moral tone" in circles where they would never have received it on the
grounds of literary excellence. If George Eliot had not been a
moralist she would not have been so popular in England. If Ruskin had
not been primarily a preacher he could never have wielded his vast
influence. Tennyson was beloved as much for his moralism as for his
sweetness; and to-day so admirable a writer as Mr. John Galsworthy is,
even in "serious" circles, regarded as a serious novelist mainly
because he is a critic of morals. Mr. John Masefield wrote many novels
and plays in which he showed singular fineness of feeling and beauty
of style. But when he wrote a poem called _The Everlasting Mercy_--a
story of thrilling incident with an admirable moral--lo! his popular
reputation was made! People could understand a story of sensational
incident. They could understand the moral. They flattered themselves
that they were enjoying poetry!
* * * * *
If anyone should reproach me with adopting the tone of that odious
thing the "superior person," and should declare that I underestimate
the intelligence and good sense of the majority of readers, my reply
is that the finest literature is not that which is most read, and I am
compelled to conclude that the finest ideas are not those which are
most often embraced. To assert this is not to disparage the common
sense and the practical intelligence of the mass of mankind. I believe
that they are capable of vast activity and eagerness, much of which
runs to waste through the fatigues of excessive labour; much, through
lack of training and mental stimulus, can find no congenial outlet
through the mysterious processes of art. The outlet which the majority
of men find for their superfluous energy is not through the channel of
fine ideas. Such literature as they read is for distraction and not
for the vigorous use of their faculties. It cannot be otherwise. That
is the condition imposed by the fragmentary education alone vouchsafed
to the majority of men and women, giving them no more than that
modicum of learning which is a dangerous thing. And it is a matter of
supreme importance because this new reading habit of the million has
turned the energies of authors and publishers from the few to the
many. It has introduced into the literary profession a demagogic
habit, and has set up a quantitative instead of a qualitative
standard.
PART TWO
LITERATURE AND MODERN LIFE
I.
TO-DAY AND YESTERDAY
1.
"We must read what the world reads at the moment," said Dr. Johnson,
giving the remark an ironical meaning when he added, "A man will have
more gratification for his vanity in conversation from having read
modern books than from having read the best works of antiquity."
Nevertheless, one great difference between the time of Dr. Johnson and
the world of to-day is, that whilst the former lived in perpetual
admiration of antiquity, we live in perpetual admiration of ourselves.
Though Johnson agreed that Pope's poetry was not talked of so much
after his death as in his lifetime, he declared that it had "been as
much admired since his death as during his life.... Virgil is less
talked of than Pope, and Homer is less talked of than Virgil; but they
are not less admired."