What is the area of a novelist's reputation? How far do the ripples
extend when he casts a novel into the whirlpool of life? It is difficult
to say, but few novelists were ever so well known to the people as were
in their time such minor figures as Bradlaugh and Dr Grace, nor is there
a novelist to-day whose fame can vie with that of, say, Mr Roosevelt. It
is strange to think that Dickens himself could not in his own day create
as much stir as, say, Lord Salisbury. He lacked political flavour; he
was merely one of the latter day prophets who lack the unique
advertisement of being stoned. It will be said that such an instance is
taken from the masses of the world, most of whom do not read novels,
while all are affected by the politician, but in those circles that
support literature the same phenomenon appears; the novel may be known;
the novelist is not. The novel is not respected and, indeed, one often
hears a woman, at a big lending library, ask for 'three of the latest
novels.' New novels! Why not new potatoes? She takes the books away
calmly, without looking at the titles or the names. She is quite
satisfied; sometimes she does not care much whether or not she has read
those novels before, for she does not remember them. They go in at one
ear and come out at the other presumably, as a judge said, because there
is nothing to stop them.
It is undeniable that the great mass of readers forget either names or
titles; many forget both. Some of the more educated remember the author
and ask their library for 'something by E. M. Dell,' because she writes
such sweet, pretty books, a definition where slander subtly blends with
veracity. But, in most cases, nothing remains of either author or title
except a hazy impression; the reader is not quite sure whether the book
she liked so much is _Fraternity_ or the _Corsican Brothers_. She will
know that it had something to do with family, and that the author's name
began with 'G' ... unless it was 'S'. It cannot be otherwise, so long as
novels are read in the way they are read, that is to say, if they are
taken as drugs. Generally, novels are read to dull the mind, and many
succeed, ruining the chances of those whose intent is not morphean,
which fulfil the true function of art, viz., to inflame. The object of a
novel is not to send the reader to sleep, not to make him oblivious of
time on a railway journey; it is meant to show character, to stimulate
observation, to make life vivid, and as life is most vivid when it is
most unpleasant, the novel that is worth reading is naturally set
aside. For such novels stir the brain too much to let it go to sleep.
Those novels are judged in the same way as the baser kind, and that is,
perhaps, why the novel itself stands so low. It does stand low, at least
in England, for it is almost impossible to sell it. Inquiries made of
publishers show that they expect to sell to the circulating libraries
seventy to seventy-five per cent. of the copies printed. To sell to a
circulating library is not selling; it is lending at one remove; it
means that a single copy bought by a library is read by anything between
twenty and a hundred people. Sometimes it is read by more, for a copy
bought by Mudie's is sold off when the subscribers no longer ask for it.
It goes to a town of the size of, say Winchester. Discarded after a year
or so by the subscribers it may be sold off for a penny or twopence,
with one thrown into the dozen for luck, and arrive with its cover
hanging on in a way that is a testimonial to the binder, with its pages
marked with thumbs, stained with tears, or, as the case may be, with
soup, at some small stationer's shop in a little market town, to go out
on hire at a penny a week, until it no longer holds together, and goes
to its eternal rest in the pulping machine. On the way, nobody has
bought it except to let it out, as the padrone sends out the pretty
Italian boys with an organ and a monkey. The public have not bought the
book to read and to love. The twenty-five or thirty per cent. actually
sold have been disposed of as birthday or Christmas presents, because
one has to give something, and because one makes more effect with a
well-bound book costing six shillings than with six shillings' worth of
chocolates. Literature has been given its royalty on the bread of shame.
Yet, impossible as the novel finds it to tear its shilling from the
public, the theatre easily wheedles it into paying a guinea or more for
two stalls. It seems strange that two people will pay a guinea to see
_Three Weeks_ on the boards, yet would never dream of giving four and
sixpence for Miss Elinor Glyn's book. That is because theatre seats must
be paid for, while books can be borrowed. It goes so far that novelists
are continually asked 'where one can get their books,' meaning 'where
they can be borrowed'; often they are asked to lend a copy, while no one
begs a ride from a cabman.
In England, the public of the novel is almost exclusively feminine. Few
men read novels, and a great many nothing at all except the newspaper.
They say that they are too busy, which is absurd when one reflects how
busy is the average woman. The truth is that they are slack and
ignorant. They have some historic reason to despise the novel, for it is
quite true that in the nineteenth century, with a few exceptions, such
as Thackeray, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Dickens, Scott, George Eliot, the three volume novel was trash. It
dealt, generally, with some rhetorical Polish hero, a high-born English
maiden, cruel parents, and Italian skies. Right up to 1885 that sort of
thing used to arrive every morning outside Mudie's in a truck, but if it
still arrives at Mudie's in a truck it should not be forgotten that
other novels arrive. That is what the men do not know. If they read at
all you will find them solemnly taking in _The Reminiscences of Mr
Justice X. Y. Z._ or _Shooting Gazelle in Bulbulland_, _Political
Economics_, or _Economic Politics_, (it means much the same either way
up). All that sort of thing, that frozen, dried-up, elderly waggishness,
that shallow pomp, is mentally murderous. Sometimes men do read novels,
mostly detective stories, sporting or very sentimental tales. When
observed, they apologise and say something about resting the brain. That
means that they do not respect the books they read, which is base; it is
like keeping low company, where one can yawn and put one's boots on the
sofa. Now, no company is low unless you think it is. As soon as you
realise that and stay, you yourself grow naturalised to it. Likewise, if
you read a book without fellowship and respect for its author, you are
outraging it. But mankind is stupid, and it would not matter very much
that a few men should read novels in that shamefaced and patronising way
if they were not so open about it. If they do not apologise, they boast
that they never read a novel; they imply superiority. Their feminine
equivalent is the serious-minded girl, who improves her mind with a book
like _Vicious Viscounts of Venice_; if she reads novels at all she holds
that like good wine they improve with keeping, and must be at least
fifty years old. By that time the frivolous author may have redeemed his
sins.
It is because of all these people, the people who borrow and do not
cherish, the people who skim, the people who indulge and cringe, and the
people who do not indulge at all, that we have come to a corruption of
literary taste, where the idea is abashed before the easy emotion, where
religiosity expels religion, and the love passion turns to heroics or to
maundering, that the success of the second-rate, of Mrs Barclay, of Miss
Gene Stratton Porter, of Mr Hall Caine, has come about. It is a killing
atmosphere. It is almost incomprehensible, for when the talk is of a
political proposal, say, of land settlement in South Africa, or of a new
type of oil engine, hardly a man will say: 'I am not interested.' He
would be ashamed to say that. It would brand him as a retrograde person.
Sometimes he will say: 'I do not like music,' but he will avoid that if
he can, for music is an evidence of culture; he will very seldom confess
that he does not care for pictures; he will confess without any
hesitation that he does not care for any kind of book. He will be rather
proud to think that he prefers a horse or a golf-stick. It will seldom
occur to him that this literature of which some people talk so much can
hold anything for him. It will not even occur to him to try, for
literature is judged at Jedburgh. It hardly ever occurs to any one that
literature has its technique, that introductions to it are necessary; a
man will think it worth while to join a class if he wants to acquire
scientific knowledge, but seldom that anything in the novel justifies
his taking preliminary steps. It is not that literature repels him by
its occasional aridity; it is not that he has stumbled upon classics,
which, as Mr Arnold Bennett delightfully says, 'are not light women who
turn to all men, but gracious ladies whom one must long woo.' Men do not
think the lady worth wooing. This brings us back to an early conclusion
in this chapter; novelists are not useful; we are pleasant, therefore
despicable. Our novels do not instruct; all they can do is to delight or
inflame. We can give a man a heart, but we cannot raise his bank
interest. So our novels are not worthy of his respect because they do
not come clad in the staid and reassuring gray of the text-book; they
are not dull enough to gain the respect of men who can appreciate only
the books that bore them, who shrink away from the women who charm them
and turn to those who scrag their hair off their forehead, and bring
their noses, possibly with a cloth, to a disarming state of brilliancy.
Sometimes, when the novelist thinks of all these things, he is overcome
by a desperate mood, decides to give up literature and grow respectable.
He thinks of becoming a grocer, or an attorney, and sometimes he wants
to be the owner of a popular magazine, where he will exercise, not the
disreputable function of writing, but the estimable one of casting
pleasant balance sheets. Then the mood passes, and he is driven back to
Flaubert's view that it is a dog's life, but the only one. He decides to
live down the extraordinary trash that novelists produce. Incredible as
truth may be, fiction is stranger still, and there is no limit to the
intoxications of the popular novelist. Consider, indeed, the following
account of six novels, taken from the reviews in the literary supplement
of the _Times_, of 27th July, 1916. In the first, _Seventeen_, Mr Booth
Tarkington depicts characters of an age indicated by the title,
apparently concerned with life as understood at seventeen, who conduct
baby talk with dogs. In the second, _Blow the Man Down_, by Mr Holman
Day, an American financier causes his ship to run ashore, while the
captain is amorously pursued by the daughter of the villainous
financier, and cuts his way out through the bottom of a schooner. _The
Plunderers_, by Mr Edwin Lefevre, is concerned with robbers in New York,
whose intentions are philanthropic; we observe also _Wingate's Wife_, by
Miss Violet Tweedale, where the heroine suffers 'an agony of
apprehension,' and sees a man murdered; but all is well, as the victim
happens to be the husband whom she had deserted twenty years before.
There is also _The Woman Who Lived Again_, by Mr Lindsey Russell, where
a cabinet, in office when the war breaks out, concerns itself with
German spies and an ancient Eurasian, who with Eastern secrets revives a
dead girl and sends her back to England to confound the spies. There is
also _Because It Was Written_, by Princess Radziwill, where Russian and
Belgian horrors are framed in between a prologue and epilogue entirely
devoted to archangels. There is nothing extraordinary in these novels;
they merely happen to be reviewed on the same day. The collection
compares perfectly with another, in the _Daily News_ of the 19th
September, 1916, where are reviewed a novel by Miss C. M. Matheson, one
by Mr Ranger Gull, and one by 'Richard Dehan.' They are the usual sort
of thing. The first is characterised by Mr Garnett as 'a hash of trite
images and sentimental meanderings.' Miss Matheson goes so far as to
introduce a shadowy, gleaming figure, which, with hand high upraised
over the characters' heads, describes the Sign of the Cross. Mr Ranger
Gull introduces as a manservant one of the most celebrated burglars of
the day, a peer poisoned with carbon disulphide, wireless apparatus, and
the lost heir to a peerage. As for 'Richard Dehan,' it is enough to
quote one of her character's remarks: 'I had drained my cup of shame to
the dregs.'
This sort of thing is produced in great abundance, and has helped to
bring the novel down. Unreality, extravagance, stage tears, offensive
piety, ridiculous abductions and machinery, because of those we have
'lost face,' like outraged Chinamen. No wonder that people of common
intelligence, who find at their friend's house drivel such as this,
should look upon the novel as unworthy. It is natural, though it is
unjust. The novel is a commodity, and if it seeks a wide public it must
make for a low one: the speed of a fleet is that of its slowest ship;
the sale of a novel is the capacity of the basest mind. Only it might be
remembered that all histories are not accurate, all biographies not
truthful, all economic text-books not readable. Likewise, it should be
remembered, and we need quote only Mr Conrad, that novels are not
defined by the worst of their kind.... It is men's business to find out
the best books; they search for the best wives, why not for the best
novels? There are novels that one can love all one's life, and this
cannot be said of every woman.
There are to-day in England about twenty men and women who write novels
of a certain quality, and about as many who fail, but whose appeal is to
the most intelligent. These people are trying to picture man, to
describe their period, to pluck a feather from the wing of the fleeting
time. They do not write about radium murders, or heroines clad in
orchids and tiger skins. They strive to seize a little of the raw life
in which they live. The claim is simple; even though we may produce two
thousand novels a year which act upon the brain in the evening as
cigarettes do after lunch, we do put forth a small number of novels
which are the mirror of the day. Very few are good novels, and perhaps
not one will live, but many a novel concerned with labour problems,
money, freedom in love, will have danced its little dance to some
purpose, will have created unrest, always better than stagnation, will
have aroused controversy, anger, impelled some people, if not to change
their life, at least to tolerate that others should do so. _The New
Machiavelli_, _Lord Jim_, _The White Peacock_, _The Rise of Silas
Lapham_, _Ethan Frome_, none of those are supreme books, but every one
of them is a hand grenade flung at the bourgeoisie; we do not want to
kill it, but we do want to wake it up.
It is the bourgeoisie's business to find out the novels that will wake
it up; it should take as much pains to do this as to find out the best
cigar. The bourgeoisie has congestion of the brain; the works of
scholars will stupefy it still more; only in the novelists of the day,
who are rough, unpleasant, rebellious, restless, will they find a
remedy.
Whether the reading public can discern that undying flame in the choking
smoke of books written for money and not for love, is another question.
Every year more novels are published; but when one considers the
novelists of the past, Thackeray's continual flow of sugary claptrap,
the incapacity of Dickens to conceive beauty, the almost unrelieved,
stagey solemnity of Walter Scott, the novelist of to-day is inclined to
thank God that he is not as other men. Those old writers trod our paths
for us, but they walked blindfold; let us recognise their splendid
qualities, their feeling for atmosphere, their knowledge of men, but we
find more that is honest and hopeful in a single page of _Tono Bungay_
than in all the great Victorians put together. Yes, we are arrogant; why
not? Why should it be natural to us to see our faults and not our
talents? We are held in contempt, but such was the fate of every
prophet; they make us into mummers and we learn mummery, but Balzac and
Turgenev rise from their own dust. We are not safe people, or quiet
people; not tame rabbits in a hutch, nor even romantic rogues: most of
us are no more romantic than jockeys.
It is, perhaps, because we are not safe (and are we any less safe than
company promoters?) that we are disliked. We are disliked, as Stendhal
says, because all differences create hatred; because by showing it its
face in the glass we tend to disrupt society, to exhibit to its shocked
eyes what is inane in its political constitution, barbarous in its moral
code. We are queer people, nasty people, but we are neither nastier nor
queerer than our fellows. We are merely more shameless and exhibit what
they hide. We have got outside, and we hate being outside; we should so
much like to enlist under the modern standard, the silk hat, and yet we
are arrogant. Doctors, judges, bishops, merchants, think little of us;
we regret it and rejoice in it. We are unhappy and exalted adventurers
in the frozen fields of human thought. We are the people who make the
'footprints on the sands of time.' Later on, the bourgeoisie will tread
in them.
Who is the Man?
I
And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe, and then from hour to hour we
rot and rot. A gloomy saying, but one which applies to men as well as to
empires, and to none, perhaps, more than to those men who stand in the
vanguard of literature. Of very few writers, save those who were so
fortunate as to be carried away by death in the plenitude of their
powers (unless, like Mr Thomas Hardy, they drew back from the battle of
letters) can it be said that the works of their later years were equal
to those of their maturity. The great man has his heir in the world, one
who impatiently waits for his shoes and is assured that he will fill
them. It is well so, for shoes must be filled, and it is good to know
the claimants.
Who are these men? Is it possible already to designate them? To mark out
the Hardy or the Meredith of to-morrow? The Bennett, the Wells, or the
Galsworthy? It is difficult. I shall not be surprised if some quarrel
with these names, cavil at the selection and challenge a greatness which
they look upon as transient. Those critics may be right. I do not, in
this article, attempt a valuation of those whom I will call the literary
novelists, that is to say, the men who have 'somehow,' and owing to
hardly ascertained causes, won their way into the front rank of modern
English letters. It may be urged that these are not our big men, and
that the brazen blaring of popular trumpets has drowned the blithe
piping of tenderer songsters. But, if we view facts sanely, we must all
agree that there are in England five men, of whom one is a foreigner,
who hold without challenge the premier position among novelists: Mr
Arnold Bennett, Mr Joseph Conrad, Mr John Galsworthy, Mr Thomas Hardy,
and Mr H. G. Wells. Theirs is a special position: there is not one of
them, probably, whose sales would create envy in the bosom of Mr Harold
Bell Wright or of Mrs Barclay; nor are they of the super-hyper class
whose works are issued in wisely limited editions and printed in
over-beautiful type. They are, in a very rough way, the men of their
time and, a very little, the men of all time. Whatever be their
greatness or their littleness, they are the men who will, for the
University Extension Lecturer of 1950, represent the English novel in a
given period; they are not the most literary of their contemporaries;
they have not more ideas than some of their contemporaries, and all of
them have their faults, their mannerisms, and their lapses, but yet, in
a rough and general way, these five men combine more ideas with more
style than any who are beyond their group. 'Somehow' they stand at the
head, and I make no attempt to criticise them, to classify them: I have
even named them in alphabetical order. Now not one of these men is under
forty; one is over seventy; one approaches sixty. They must be replaced.
Not yet, of course, though some of the young begin, a little rashly, to
cast stones at those mature glories. But still, some time, faced as we
are with a horde of novelists, not less in these islands than fifteen
hundred, we must ask ourselves: Who are the young men who rear their
heads above the common rank? Which ones among them are likely to inherit
the purple?