I
I have shown the manuscript of this book to a well-known author. One of
those staid, established authors whose venom has been extracted by the
mellow years. My author is beyond rancour and exploit; he has earned the
right to bask in his own celebrity, and needs to judge no more, because
no longer does he fear judgment. He is like a motorist who has sowed his
wild petrol. He said to me: 'You are very, very unwise. I never
criticise my contemporaries, and, believe me, it doesn't pay.' Well, I
am unwise; I always was unwise, and this has paid in a coin not always
recognised, but precious to a man's spiritual pride. Why should I not
criticise my contemporaries? It is not a merit to be a contemporary.
Also, they can return the compliment; some of them, if I may venture
upon a turn of phrase proper for Mr Tim Healy, have returned the
compliment before they got it. It may be unwise, but I join with
Voltaire in thanking God that he gave us folly. So I will affront the
condemnatory vagueness of wool and fleecy cloud, be content to think
that nobody will care where I praise, that everybody will think me
impertinent where I judge. I will be content to believe that the
well-known author will not mind if I criticise him, and that the others
will not mind either. I will hope, though something of a Sadducee, that
there is an angel in their hearts.
I want to criticise them and their works because I think the novel, this
latest born of literature, immensely interesting and important. It is
interesting because, more faithfully than any other form, it expresses
the mind of man, his pains that pass, his hopes that fade and are born
again, his discontent pregnant with energy, the unrulinesses in which he
misspends his vigour, the patiences that fit him to endure all things
even though he dare them not. In this, all other forms fail: history,
because it chronicles battles and dates, yet not the great movements of
the peoples; economics, because in their view all men are vile;
biography, because it leads the victim to the altar, but never
sacrifices it. Even poetry fails; I do not try to shock, but I doubt
whether the poetic is equal to the prose form.
I do not want to fall into the popular fallacy that prose and poetry
each have their own field, strictly preserved, for prose is not always
prosy, nor poetry always poetic; prose may contain poetry, poetry cannot
contain prose, just as some gentlemen are bounders, but no bounders are
gentlemen. But the admiration many people feel for poetry derives from a
lack of intelligence rather than from an excess of emotion, and they
would be cured if, instead of admiring, they read. Some subjects and
ideas naturally fall into poetry, mainly the lyric ideas; 'To Anthea,'
and 'The Skylark' would, in prose, lie broken-pinioned upon the ground,
but the exquisiteness of poetry, when it conveys the ultimate aspiration
of man, defines its limitations. Poetry is child of the austerity of
literature by the sensuality of music. Thus it is more and less than its
forbears; speaking for myself alone, I feel that 'Epipsychidion' and the
'Grecian Urn' are just a little less than the Kreutzer Sonata, that
Browning and Whitman might have written better in prose, though they
might thus have been less quoted. For poetry is too often
_schwaermerei_, a thing of lilts; when it conveys philosophical ideas,
as in Browning and in that prose writer gone astray, Shakespeare, it
suffers the agonising pains of constriction. Rhyme and scansion tend to
limit and hamper it; everything can be said in prose, but not in poetry;
to prose no licence need be granted, while poetry must use and abuse it,
for prose is free, poetry shackled by its form. No doubt that is why
poetry causes so much stir, for it surmounts extraordinary difficulties,
and men gape as at a tenor who attains a top note. However exquisite,
the scope of poetry is smaller than that of prose, and if any doubt it
let him open at random an English Bible and say if Milton can
out-thunder Job, or Swinburne outcloy the sweetness of Solomon's Song.
More than interesting, the novel is important because, low as its status
may be, it does day by day express mankind, and mankind in the making.
Sometimes it is the architect that places yet another brick upon the
palace of the future. Always it is the showman of life. I think of
'serious books,' of the incredible heaps of memoirs, works on finance,
strategy, psychology, sociology, biology, omniology ... that fall every
day like manna (unless from another region they rise as fumes) into the
baskets of the reviewers. All this paper ... they dance their little
dance to four hundred readers and a great number of second-hand
booksellers, and lo! the dust of their decay is on their brow. They live
a little longer than an article by Mr T. P. O'Connor, and live a little
less.
The novel, too, does not live long, but I have known one break up a
happy home, and another teach revolt to several daughters; can we give
greater praise? Has so much been achieved by any work entitled _The
Foundations of the Century_, or something of that sort? The novel,
despised buffoon that it is, pours out its poison and its pearls within
reach of every lip; its heroes and heroines offer examples to the reader
and make him say: 'That bold, bad man ... you wouldn't think it to look
at me, who'm a linen-draper, but it's me.' If, in this preface, I may
introduce a personal reminiscence, I can strengthen my point by saying
that after publishing _The Second Blooming_ I received five letters from
women I did not know, who wholly recognised themselves in my principal
heroine, of course the regrettable one.
The novel moulds by precept and example, and therefore we modern
jesters, inky troubadours, are responsible for the gray power which we
wield behind the throne. Given this responsibility, it is a pity there
should be so many novels, for the reader is distracted with various
examples, and painfully hesitates between the career of Raffles and that
of John Inglesant. Thus the novel fires many a sanctimoniousness, makes
lurid many a hesitating life. If only we could endow it! But we cannot,
for the old saying can be garbled: call no novelist famous until he is
dead.
It is a fascinating idea, this one of endowing the novel. In principle
it is not difficult, only we must assume our capable committee and that
is quite as difficult as ignoring the weight of the elephant. I wonder
what would happen if an Act of Parliament were to endow genius! I wonder
who would sit on the sub-committee appointed by the British Government
to endow literature. I do not wonder, I know. There would be Professor
Saintsbury, Mr Austin Dobson, Professor Walter Raleigh, Sir Sidney Lee,
Professor Gollancz, all the academics, all the people drier than the
drought, who, whether the god of literature find himself in the car or
in the cart, never fail to get into the dickey. I should not even wonder
if, by request of the municipality of Burton-on-Trent, it were found
desirable to infuse a democratic element into the sub-committee by
adding the manager of the Army and Navy Stores and, of course, Mr
Bottomley. Do not protest: Mr Bottomley has recently passed embittered
judgments, under the characteristic heading 'Dam-Nation,' on Mr Alec
Waugh, who ventured, in a literary sketch, to show English soldiers
going over the top with oaths upon their lips and the courage born of
fear in their hearts. I think Mr Bottomley would like to have Mr Waugh
shot, and the editor of _The Nation_ confined for seven days in the
Press Bureau, for having told the truth in literary form. I do not
impugn his judgment of what it feels like to go over the top, for he
has had long experience of keeping strictly on the surface.
No, our sub-committee would be appointed without the help of Thalia and
Calliope. It would register judgments such as those of the famous
sub-committee that grants the Nobel Prizes. That committee, during its
short life, has managed to reward Sully-Prudhomme and to leave out
Swinburne, to give a prize to Sienkewicz, whom a rather more recent
generation has found so suitable for the cinema. It has even given a
prize to Mr Rudyard Kipling, but whether in memory of literature or
dynamite is not known.
So literary genius must, as before, look for its endowment in the
somewhat barren heart of man, and continue to shed a hundred seeds in
its stony places, in the forlorn hope that the fowls of the air may not
devour them all, and that a single ear of corn may wilt and wither its
way into another dawn.