I am glad to take this, the first available opportunity, to acknowledge
the kindness with which _A Child of the Jago_ has been received: both by
the reading public, from which I have received many gratifying
assurances that what I have tried to say has not altogether failed of
its effect: and by the reviewers, the most of whom have written in very
indulgent terms.
I think indeed, that I am the more gratified by the fact that this
reception has not been unanimous: because an outcry and an opposition,
even from an unimportant minority, are proofs that I have succeeded in
saying, however imperfectly, something that was worth being said. Under
the conditions of life as we know it there is no truth worth telling
that will not interfere with some hearer's comfort. Various objections
have been made to _A Child of the Jago_, and many of them had already
been made to _Tales of Mean Streets_. And it has been the way of the
objectors as well as the way of many among the kindest of my critics, to
call me a 'realist.' The word has been used sometimes, it would seem, in
praise; sometimes in mere indifference as one uses a phrase of
convenient description; sometimes by way of an irremediable reproach. It
is natural, then, not merely that I should wish to examine certain among
the objections made to my work, but that I should feel some interest in
the definition and description of a realist. A matter never made clear
to me.
Now it is a fact that I have never called myself a 'realist,' and I have
never put forth any work as 'realism.' I decline the labels of the
schoolmen and the sophisters: being a simple writer of tales, who takes
whatever means lie to his hand to present life as he sees it; who
insists on no process; and who refuses to be bound by any formula or
prescription prepared by the cataloguers and the pigeon-holers of
literature.
So it happens that when those who use the word 'realist' use it with no
unanimity of intent and with a loose, inapprehensive application, it is
not easy for me, who repudiate it altogether, to make a guess at its
meaning. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the man who is called a
'realist' is one who, seeing things with his own eyes, discards the
conventions of the schools, and presents his matter in individual terms
of art. For awhile the schoolmen abuse him as a realist; and in twenty
years' time, if his work have life in it, he becomes a classic.
Constable was called a realist; so was Corot. Who calls these painters
realists now? The history of Japanese art affords a continuous
illustration. From the day when Iwasa Matahei impudently arose and dared
to take his subjects from the daily life of the people, to the day when
Hiroshige, casting away the last rag of propriety, adventurously drew a
cast shadow, in flat defiance of all the canons of Tosa and Kano--in all
this time, and through all the crowded history of the School of Ukioye,
no artist bringing something of his own to his art but was damned for a
realist. Even the classic Harunobu did not escape. Look now at the work
of these men, and the label seems grotesque enough. So it goes through
the making of all art. A man with the courage of his own vision
interprets what he sees in fresh terms, and gives to things a new
reality and an immediate presence. The schoolmen peer with dulled eyes
from amid the heap of precedents and prescriptions about them, and,
distracted by seeing a thing sanctioned neither by precedent nor by
prescription, dub the man realist, and rail against him for that his
work fits none of their pigeon-holes. And from without the schools many
cry out and complain: for truth is strong meat, and the weakling stomach
turns against it, except in minim doses smothered in treacle. Thus we
hear the feeble plea that the function of imagination is the distortion
of fact: the piteous demand that the artist should be shut up in a
flower-garden, and forbidden to peep through the hedge into the world.
And they who know nothing of beauty, who are innately incapable of
comprehending it, mistake it for mere prettiness, and call aloud for
comfits; and among them that cannot understand, such definitions of the
aims of art are bandied, as mean, if they mean anything, that art finds
its most perfect expression in pink lollipops and gilt boxes. But in
the end the truth prevails, if it be well set forth; and the schoolmen,
groaning in their infinite labour, wearily write another prescription,
admit another precedent, and make another pigeon-hole.
I have been asked, in print, if I think that there is no phase of life
which the artist may not touch. Most certainly I think this. More, I
know it. It is the artist's privilege to seek his material where he
pleases, and it is no man's privilege to say him nay. If the community
have left horrible places and horrible lives before his eyes, then the
fault is the community's; and to picture these places and these lives
becomes not merely his privilege, but his duty. It was my fate to
encounter a place in Shoreditch, where children were born and reared in
circumstances which gave them no reasonable chance of living decent
lives: where they were born fore-damned to a criminal or semi-criminal
career. It was my experience to learn the ways of this place, to know
its inhabitants, to talk with them, eat, drink, and work with them. For
the existence of this place, and for the evils it engendered, the
community was, and is, responsible; so that every member of the
community was, and is, responsible in his degree. If I had been a rich
man I might have attempted to discharge my peculiar responsibility in
one way; if I had been a statesman I might have tried another. Being
neither of these things, but a mere writer of fiction, I sought to do my
duty by writing a tale wherein I hoped to bring the conditions of this
place within the apprehension of others. There are those who say that I
should have turned away my eyes and passed by on the other side: on the
very respectable precedent of the priest and the Levite in the parable.
Now, when the tale was written and published it was found, as I have
said, to cause discomfort to some persons. It is needless to say more of
the schoolmen. Needless, too, to say much of the merely genteel: who
were shocked to read of low creatures, as Kiddo Cook and Pigeony Poll,
and to find my pages nowhere illuminated by a marquis. Of such are they
who delight to read of two men in velvet and feathers perforating each
other's stomachs with swords; while Josh Perrott and Billy Leary,
punching each other's heads, present a scene too sickening and brutal to
consider without disgust. And it was in defiance of the maunderings of
such as these that Charles Lamb wrote much of his essay _On the Genius
and Character of Hogarth_. But chiefly this book of mine disturbed those
who had done nothing, and preferred to do nothing, by way of discharging
their responsibility toward the Jago and the people in it. The
consciousness of duty neglected is discomforting, and personal comfort
is the god of their kind. They firmly believe it to be the sole function
of art to minister to their personal comfort--as upholstery does. They
find it comfortable to shirk consideration of the fate of the Jago
children, to shut their eyes to it, to say that all is well and the
whole world virtuous and happy. And this mental attitude they nickname
optimism, and vaunt it--exult in it as a quality. So that they cry out
at the suggestion that it is no more than a selfish vice; and finding
truth where they had looked for the materials of another debauch of
self-delusion, they moan aloud: they protest, and they demand as their
sacred right that the bitter cup be taken from before them. They have
moaned and protested at _A Child of the Jago_, and, craven and
bewildered, any protest seemed good enough to them. And herein they have
not wanted for allies among them that sit in committee-rooms, and
tinker. For your professed philanthropist, following his own spirit, and
seeing nothing, honestly resents the demonstration that his tinkering
profits little. There is a story current in the East End of London, of a
distracted lady who, being assailed with a request for the loan of a
saucepan, defended herself in these words:--'Tell yer mother I can't
lend 'er the saucepan, consekince o' 'avin' lent it to Mrs Brown,
besides which I'm a-usin' of it meself, an' moreover it's gone to be
mended, an' what's more I ain't got one.' In a like spirit of lavish
objection it has been proclaimed in a breath that I transgress:--because
(1) I should not have written of the Jago in all the nakedness of truth;
(2) my description is not in the least like; (3) moreover, it is
exaggerated; (4) though it may be true, it is quite unnecessary, because
the Jago was already quite familiar, and everybody knew all about it;
(5) the Jago houses have been pulled down; and (6) there never was any
such place as the Jago at all.
To objections thus handsomely variegated it is not easy to reply with
the tripping brevity wherewith they may be stated; and truly it is
little reply that they call for, except, perhaps, in so far as they may
be taken to impugn the sincerity of my work and the accuracy of my
picture. A few of the objectors have caught up enough of their wits to
strive after a war in my own country. They take hold of my technical
method, and accuse me of lack of 'sympathy'; they claim that if I write
of the Jago I should do so 'even weeping.' Now, my technical method is
my own, and is deliberately designed to achieve a certain result, as is
the method of every man--painter, poet, sculptor, or novelist--who is
not the slave and the plaything of his material. My tale is the tale of
my characters, and I have learned better than to thrust myself and my
emotions between them and my reader. The cant of the charge stares all
too plainly from the face of it. It is not that these good people wish
me to write 'even weeping': for how do they know whether I weep or not?
No: their wish is, not that I shall weep, but that I shall weep
obscenely in the public gaze. In other words, that I shall do their
weeping for them, as a sort of emotional bedesman: that I shall make
public parade of sympathy in their behalf, so that they may keep their
own sympathy for themselves, and win comfort from the belief that they
are eased of their just responsibility by vicarious snivelling.
But the protest, that my picture of the Jago is untrue, is another
thing. For the most part it has found very vague expression, but there
are instances of rash excursion into definiteness. Certain passages have
been denoted as exaggerations--as impossibilities. Now, I must confess
that, foreseeing such adventurous indiscretions, I had, for my own
diversion, set _A Child of the Jago_ with traps. For certain years I
have lived in the East End of London, and have been, not an occasional
visitor, but a familiar and equal friend in the house of the East-Ender
in all his degrees; for, though the steps between be smaller, there are
more social degrees in the East End than ever in the West. In this
experience I have seen and I have heard things that persons sitting in
committee-rooms would call diabolical fable; nevertheless, I have seen
them, and heard them. But it was none of my design to write of extreme
instances: typical facts were all I wanted; these, I knew, would be
met--or shirked--with incredulity; so that, whenever I saw reason to
anticipate a charge of exaggeration--as for instance, in the matter of
faction fighting--I made my typical incident the cold transcript of a
simple fact, an ordinary, easy-going fact, a fact notorious in the
neighbourhood, and capable of any amount of reasonable proof. If I
touched my fact at all, it was to subdue it; that and no more. The traps
worked well. Not one definite charge of exaggeration has been flung but
it has been aimed at one of the normal facts I had provided as a target:
not one. Sometimes the effect has had a humour of its own; as when a
critic in a literary journal, beginning by selecting two of my norms as
instances of 'palpable exaggeration,' went on to assure me that there
was no need to describe such life as the life in the Jago, because it
was already perfectly familiar to everybody.
Luckily I need not vindicate my accuracy. That has been done for me
publicly by independent and altogether indisputable authority. In
particular, the devoted vicar of the parish, which I have called the
Jago, has testified quite unreservedly to the truth of my presentation.
Others also, with special knowledge, have done the same; and though I
refer to them, and am grateful for their support, it is with no
prejudice to the validity of my own authority. For not only have I lived
in the East End of London (which one may do, and yet never see it) but
observation is my trade.
I have remarked in more than one place the expression of a foolish fancy
that because the houses of the Old Jago have been pulled down, the Jago
difficulty has been cleared out of the way. That is far from being the
case. The Jago, as mere bricks and mortar, is gone. But the Jago in
flesh and blood still lives, and is crowding into neighbourhoods already
densely over-populated.
In conclusion: the plan and the intention of my story made it requisite
that, in telling it, I should largely adhere to fact; and I did so. If I
write other tales different in scope and design, I shall adhere to fact
or neglect it as may seem good to me: regardless of anybody's
classification as a realist, or as anything else. For though I have made
a suggestion, right or wrong, as to what a realist may be, whether I am
one or not is no concern of mine; but the concern (if it be anybody's)
of the tabulators and the watersifters.