there is a tendency to despise the traditions of English literature
and to worship only the idol of originality. In a paper largely
devoted to literary matters I recently read a statement to the effect
that many authors, indifferent to books, neither buy nor read them,
whilst others positively dislike them. Mr. Shaw's quarrel with
Shakespeare has been of long standing, but at least Mr. Shaw has done
his old-fashioned rival the honour of reading him. Mr. Arnold Bennett,
on the other hand, who is undoubtedly one of the most brilliant
contemporary novelists, has declared, not without pride, that the only
novel of Dickens that he had ever read was _Little Dorrit_, and this
but recently, and that he considered him a greatly overrated novelist.
The conclusion is not surprising, and the living author is no doubt
confirmed in his opinion that the works of Mr. Bennett are of vastly
superior merit.
This modern self-confidence is undoubtedly a healthy sign of
intellectual activity and eagerness. It goes to show that authors are
scrutinising keenly the life that is going on around them; that they
are interested in facts and things, and seeking to give them a larger
reality in terms of ideas; and we see that they are finding a similar
response from the reading public. It was not without significance that
all through the period of the great Coal Strike publishers reduced
their output of books to the smallest possible dimensions, and
especially refrained from issuing books of the highest class. I do not
believe that this was merely due to the fact that in times of economic
crisis there is a lack of pocket-money with which to purchase
literature. The fact surely was that much of the attention which in
many circles is given to modern books was drawn away by the stirring
events that were happening in our midst. The study and contemplation
of the Coal Strike were of precisely the same nature as the study and
contemplation of original contemporary literature. For that
literature in its most characteristic forms is concerned with the
problems and the structure of modern society.
If at the time of the Coal Strike we had inquired what English plays
had recently called forth the most criticism and interest in
intellectual circles, we should probably have named, first, Mr.
Galsworthy's _Justice_, and secondly, his _Strife_. The latter was
concerned with a situation exactly similar to that developed by the
Coal Strike. The action of the drama took place in the middle of a
great strike. Mr. Galsworthy presented typical characters representing
owners and men, both acting on principle, both determined and
irreconcilable, stubborn and loyal, both betraying human qualities
fundamentally the same. I am not for the moment concerned with the
conclusion drawn by the dramatist, but with the fact that the serious
attention which is given to modern literature and drama is the same
sort of attention as that given to the great social questions of our
time.
2.
To search for hidden unities in the literature of an age is often to
distort facts in the interest of theory. But there may come a
point--and I think the most notable literature of the year preceding
the Coal Strike marks such a point--when certain salient facts emerge
so violently and so repeatedly from the written page that no one but
the blindest can ignore or deny them. If one should take six books
written in that period by six authors who are fairly representative of
contemporary English literature--E.M. Forster, Arnold Bennett, H.G.
Wells, Granville Barker, Bernard Shaw, and John Galsworthy--there
would be found one truth about them so obvious that it has been
remarked by dozens of reviewers. It is that they are concerned with
the same social problems as those which fall under the science of
sociology; that they advocate, criticise, or imply reforms scarcely
less directly than do those for whom social reform is a profession.
But this, I think, is scarcely the most satisfactory way of putting
the matter. The same truth may perhaps be expressed in wider and more
significant terms by saying that the characteristic literature of
to-day is the literature of change. The most vigorous writers are
generally those who respond most to their environment, in the same
sense that to such men everything must be full of suggestion,
interesting, and matter for the interpretative mind; though the
greatest of all are those who nourish themselves at all the sources of
inspiration, in the past and the present, in the seen and the unseen.
The latter are in consequence not so purely representative of their
own special time as are those vigorous, active minds which fill a
secondary place in the world's literature, but bulk largest to their
contemporaries. Shakespeare is not so representative of the
Elizabethans as is Marlowe or Chapman. Probably if a greater number of
Greek plays survived we should find that Sophocles is less
characteristically Athenian than Euripides. And in the same way Mr.
Joseph Conrad is not so representative of the contemporary world as is
Mr. Bernard Shaw or Mr. Wells. But it is in men of the latter type
that we shall find the qualities by which their epoch is
differentiated from others, the qualities which to some extent appear
in the greatest, which appear far more abundantly in those biggest
only in contemporary estimation--which in any case mark the trend of
thought and the peculiar contribution of the time. The literature
produced by men of this type is most profoundly impressed by what may
be called the spirit of change.
The briefest consideration of contemporary literature is sufficient to
prove how powerfully these minds have been moulded, either by
observing this fact of change or contemplating its possibility. The
fact itself may perhaps best be illustrated by the case of Mr. Edmund
Gosse and the story told in his memorable book, _Father and Son_. As a
piece of biography alone that book stands high, for the fine drawing
of the mind and character of the father. But the noticeable point lies
in the vivid contrast between the father and son, the transition from
the hard-headed, scrupulous, rigid, narrow-minded Puritan, who is so
typical of the Victorian age, to the broad-minded, cultured
_littérateur_ of to-day. There is the fact of change--the Rev. Philip
Gosse of forty years ago has become the Mr. Edmund Gosse of to-day.
If we would see how this actual change in the outward and inward order
of the world has affected novelists we may turn to Mr. Arnold Bennett,
Mr. Wells, or Mr. E.M. Forster. In _Clayhanger_, as in _Old Wives'
Tales_, Mr. Bennett traces the progression of the English world from
the generation of our grandfathers to our own generation; he shows
this change creeping upon us at an accelerated pace, catching the
older inhabitants unawares, a visible change in bricks and mortar, in
widening streets, in enlarged factories, in the introduction of trams
which in due course became electric trams; and a change no less
decisive in customs and habits, the older folk marvelling at the
new-fangled independence of the young; the whole being nothing less
than a revolution which has descended with the sure but imperceptible
advance of a glacier, so that within living memory the face and
character of England have been altered. In _Milestones_ he has more
recently given us another account of the same historic progression.
And an exactly similar idea has captured the imagination of Mr. Wells.
In _The New Machiavelli_, as in _Tono-Bungay_ and other books, he
tells the story of the rapidly evolving world in which his heroes have
grown up; of the ever-spreading suburbs stretching out their tentacles
north and south and east and west, of the mushroom houses which arose
without order or system, of the changing system of education, the
changing ideas towards parents--everything spasmodic, growing,
muddled. Similarly, Mr. E.M. Forster, in _Howard's End_, shows the old
house so dear to the heart of Mrs. Wilcox, as the symbol of permanence
in an unfixed society which is homeless, restless, changing. Even if
we look abroad we shall find something of this same sense of the
transformation in the order of things; in America, Mr. Winston
Churchill has written a series of novels to illustrate the successive
phases in the American character; and in France authors like M. Paul
Bourget and M. René Bazin emphasise respectively the change from
aristocracy to democracy, and from the reverence of orthodoxy to the
revolutionary secular spirit.
In a somewhat different way Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Shaw, and Mr.
Granville Barker are affected by the fluidity of their environment. Of
Mr. Galsworthy I shall have something more to say, and need merely
point out for the moment that in _Fraternity_, _Strife_, and
especially _Justice_, the author is not merely indicating but
advocating changes which, instead of being left to accident, are to be
guided in accordance with a definite human purpose. Mr. Shaw is so
minded that he preaches against change wherever he perceives it, and
clamours for it when he perceives it not. Thus in _The Doctor's
Dilemma_ and the Preface to it, finding himself confronted with great
changes in medical science, he denounces medical progress and its
pretensions as a superstition and a fraud. In _Getting Married_, on
the other hand, finding that the public is still often content with
old-fashioned ideas of sex relations and home life, he ridicules "home
life as we understand it," on the ground that it is "no more natural
to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo." I am not accusing him of
any real inconsistency in thus alternating between conservative and
revolutionary dogmas. He would doubtless hold that changes ought to
have been made where there have been none, and that those which have
occurred have not followed the course which he, or men gifted with
similar foresight, would have prescribed.
It may be objected that the influence of change upon literature is
not only felt by our contemporaries, but has affected the literature
of all times; that it is the function of men of letters to be ahead of
their contemporaries and to initiate ideas which are productive of
change; that the history of literature is the history of the progress
of thought and imagination; and that therefore the present age does
not differ in this respect from others. To which I would reply that
whilst other literatures have represented or initiated change, there
has never been a time when so many of the best creative intellects
have consciously concerned themselves with this process, making change
of conditions either their artistic subject or their deliberate
practical object. The reason, of course, is obvious; there never has
been a time when the world was undergoing such a startling and rapid
transformation. It is true, the economic, material, scientific, and
moral changes in the Athens of the fifth century came about quickly
and drastically, and the reconstitution of intellectual and moral
ideas mooted by the Sophists found a profound expression in the
dialectic of the drama. How far the Elizabethans were influenced by
the revival of learning and science, the discovery of the new world
and the expansion of commerce, is a question I need not embark upon.
But it will not be disputed that the face of the world has never in
any known period of history been so changed out of all recognition as
it has been by the scientific and industrial revolutions of the
nineteenth century. The barbarian invasions which put an end to
Imperial Rome can have had no outward and visible effect comparable
to that of the invasion of the machine. What wonder that the
superficial, hurried reader of to-day finds little to satisfy him in
the literature of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, the former
so much concerned either with religion or pleasure, the latter with
the moral virtues or their opposites!
The Renaissance did not reach its moral consummation till the time of
the French Revolution, its intellectual consummation till the
nineteenth century, its material consummation till the twentieth
century and thereafter. The growth of science first affected the
imagination, for it was an emancipating idea; its first offspring was
Romanticism and the idea of liberty and democracy. But science as it
progressed in the nineteenth century came, first with the machine and
the whip, then with the machine and the moralist, at its elbow. But
wherever and however it came, it transformed with lightning rapidity,
just in that way in which Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett, Mr. Forster, and Mr.
Winston Churchill, the American, have indicated; till the mere fact of
its transforming became so remarkable and absorbing that that fact has
almost exhausted the attention of three-fourths of the artists and
intellectuals of our age.
So habituated then have we become to rapid change in the conditions of
life that the first thing we postulate is further change. The rustic
accustomed to the same food every day of his life does not criticise
his fare; it is the epicure, accustomed to variety, who is critical of
the menu. The active mind which witnesses perpetual variety must be
perpetually critical. To be aware that the conditions of to-day are
different from the conditions of yesterday and of to-morrow is,
according to the temperament of the beholder, to lament the past or to
hasten the future. In this respect the Radical and the Conservative
are alike, that it is the perception of change which determines them,
though it determines them in different ways, the one being affected by
hope, the other by fear. Both are discontented with the present, the
one because it falls short of the future, which he imagines, the other
because it has departed from the security of the past, which he
idealises. And, as we have seen, even the creative artist cannot
escape from the fascination of this ever-changing environment, where
the unsystematised present obtrudes its fresh discontents, and the
unknown future is pregnant with possibilities of good and the
alternative of unimaginable evil. All perceive that something must be
done to direct the plunging course of this hydra-headed democracy
which, as its onrush is in any case irresistible, may at any moment
deviate from the path and fling itself headlong to perdition. When the
guns are firing and the battle is joined and the cries of the wounded
fill the air, there are not many who can sit down in the midst, like
the German philosopher at the battle of Austerlitz, to contemplate the
Absolute. Most of them, even though their function is art, rush out to
join the mêlée; and this is why they incur the censure of the
reviewers, making fiction and drama a branch of sociology.
But one seems to hear, distinguishable occasionally amidst the din, a
low, faint murmur. This way madness lies. Is man, the master of his
soul, to be thus enslaved to his conditions? Is he to be tossed
hither and thither by changes which he did not create, by ideas to
which he did not subscribe, by a tempest he never wished to combat? Is
there no quiet place of refuge wherein he may be at peace to live as
his ancestors lived, and to cherish the humble ambitions which they
cherished? The answer, in a certain sense, is "No." The conventions
which served their purpose have in many cases lost their meaning; the
duties our ancestors performed have lost their usefulness; the old
bottles will not hold the new wine which our generation serves to us.
And this is one reason why so many people rate and gibe at what they
call the "muddle-headed British public; "because it cannot change its
ideas so quickly as it is forced to change its conditions of life.
But is there not an important significance in the very fact which
makes our intellectuals desperate with indignation, the fact that you
cannot change the "public mind" so rapidly as you can change its
tramway services, its government, or the place--the cellar, the crust
of the earth, or the sky--in which it is to be housed? It is easier to
take a man up in an aeroplane than it is to make him agree that his
neighbour ought to run away with his wife, or that his sons ought not
to read Thucydides. Even amongst those writers whom I have named there
is beginning to arise a half-formed consciousness that amid all these
changes in circumstances we must be careful how we admit changes in
character and in mental calibre; a consciousness that we are in need
of some fixed point by which the world may be enabled to retain its
sanity. Now there are two classes of people who believe in permanence:
those who think that the world is the same always because they are too
silly to open their eyes; and the very small class of those who have
felt profoundly that all things are changing in something more than
the Heraclitean sense, who have yet penetrated to the necessity of a
permanence, of an organic human continuity, underlying the multiplex
circumstances and ideas of our life.
And this brings me back to Mr. Forster and Mr. Galsworthy. "Howard's
End," the old-fashioned house which gives its name to Mr. Forster's
novel, is contrasted with the new buildings which are occupied and
vacated, which spring up on all sides and are vicariously inhabited,
which draw nearer and nearer to the garden and the wych-elm of
"Howard's End." It is the symbol of permanence, of the old order which
"connects" the past with the present, the personal and individual with
the cosmopolitan and indifferent; it is the something sacred which
neither an individual nor a nation can afford to neglect. Mr. Forster,
impressed as he is with the need of change, directed instead of
haphazard, nevertheless perceives that there are permanent elements,
belonging to character, in our blood and our tradition, which cannot
be ignored without peril.
Mr. Galsworthy, in _The Patrician_, is no longer the mere antagonist
of the established order of things. He seems to have attained a sort
of optimism strangely at variance with his earlier views; to have
declared that running through all these conflicts, revolutions, and
evolutions there is and has been a certain national sense, a sort of
collective reasonableness, which is constantly making itself felt, and
being expressed in its best form by the leaders of opinion, the
aristocrats of nature; that the torrent runs, as it were, between
solid banks; that in the long run character triumphs over confusion.
3.
It would be folly to regret that the drama of modern life, of our
swiftly evolving modern society, has become absorbingly interesting to
so many of the best brains of the time. Although we may detect a
serious limitation to literature, a didacticism alien to the
disinterested spirit of art, still we cannot fail to see that a new
sort of vitality, belonging rather to the moral sense than the
intellect or the perceptions, has been infused into imaginative
literature. Something, at least, which is fresh and real and vital has
been introduced, exclusive of much that we have been accustomed to
regard as excellent, but serving surely to give a distinctive and far
from negligible character to the typical literature of our time. That
typical literature, in its most important manifestations, is concerned
with the events that are happening around us here and now--with ideas,
largely partisan, that give meaning to them--with the purposes that
direct and determine them. Criticism, if it is to be vital criticism,
cannot dissociate itself from those ideas, nor look on with sublime
indifference to opinions as to the true and the false, the desirable
and the undesirable.
But when we have said that, we are also bound to recognise the
drawbacks and serious limitations of the modern tendency. It
includes--and we come back to the point at which we started--a
tendency to dissociate modern writing from the continuous stream of
English and world literature. Incidentally the didacticism of modern
writers, and their absorption in the affairs of the moment, have not
only served to make a breach between themselves and English literature
as a whole, to the detriment of their perspective, but have also set a
gulf between themselves and those of another school, for whom world
literature is more important than the literature of to-day, for whom
erudition and interest in the past are not to be lightly dismissed as
academicism. I can imagine no greater disaster to letters than a
breach between the literary originator and the man of learning. Such a
breach can only mean that learning is cast back upon itself, loses
humanity, and becomes academic; and that the author who despises or
ignores erudition, and with it the sense of human continuity and
permanence for which it ought to stand, tends to become opinionative
and shallow. His work must lack the imaginative range, the mellowness,
the beauty which cannot take form through instinct alone, which cannot
be expressed by those who have not lovingly studied the models of
antiquity and our own literature, who have not sought contact with the
life of other times as well as with the life of to-day.
The great gain to literature in recent years is that it is more
closely related to action and those general ideas which lead to
action. Its great corresponding defect--and this is immeasurable--is
its loss in form, in universality, in that disinterestedness which is
essential to art. Erudition, when it is humane, and even when it is
merely academic, has, at any rate, always that disinterestedness which
is essential alike to science and art. If it is humane--as it was, on
the whole, in the Elizabethan age--its whole moral support, vast in
this age of idol-worshippers, will be on the side of disinterested art
and literature. We do not hope, or wish, that all authors should be
men of learning--they should be of all sorts. But if authors and men
of learning continue to be removed in sympathy, interests, and ideals,
it is a sign that both are in a bad way.
II
PROFESSIONAL POLITICS
"Take my word for this, reader, and say a fool told it you, if you
wish: that he who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture, hath pounds
of much worse matter in his composition." These words were written by
an irresponsible fellow before the days of "responsibility" were
inaugurated; before politicians had become a race apart, admired or
execrated according to the temperament of the beholder; before writers
were solemnly divided into men-of-letters, novelists, _littérateurs_,
journalists, hacks, and professors; before physicians had become a
close corporation of certificated benefactors; not, indeed, before
lawyers had learnt to trade on human litigiousness, but before they
had won the respect of the public for the disinterested exercise of
their talents. The days of specialism have added to the sum-total of
human knowledge; but they have diminished intercourse, they have made
men more inaccessible to one another, they have promoted new
groupings, new atmospheres, new officialdoms, new barriers and
water-tight compartments.
The professional spirit has affected and infected the whole of modern
society; we see its results in what we call the "disappearance of
wit," or the "loss of the conversational faculty," or the "didactic
habit," or anything else implying regret for the individualism of the
past. It means that our several callings have separated us, have made
us into creatures of our profession, have established us on our own
particular pedestals on which, as good statues, we must remain, and
that our common humanity is an insufficient link between us. Our
special knowledge, our special habit, our special highly-esteemed
reputation, sets up a barrier which cuts us off from our fellows and
destroys community of feeling.
The politician of mediocre capacity may know enough to cut a figure
among his political associates only by judicious silence, or by
talkativeness on those subjects of which others are ignorant. But put
him among his non-political friends, and he is an oracle of wisdom
upon the law and the Constitution. The doctor, who has forgotten his
scientific principles but has picked up some empirical knowledge, has
the advantage of experience and authority as against the layman for
whom he prescribes. The lawyer, the civil servant, the professional
theologian, and the diplomat are in the same position. They all know
enough of their subject to be superior to those who know next to
nothing of it. They know enough to have pedestals of their own; to be
on their guard; to have a reputation to maintain; to conceal the "dram
of folly;" to be, to that extent, artificial in their relations with
men. They dare not betray the "laughable blunder," which, said Charles
Lamb, is the test your neighbour giveth you "that he will not betray
or over-reach you."