Every now and then a reviewer, recovering the enthusiasm of a critic,
discovers that the English novel has lost its form, that the men who
to-day, a little ineffectually, bid for immortality, are burning the
gods they once worshipped. They declare that the novel, because it is no
longer a story travelling harmoniously from a beginning towards a middle
and an end, is not a novel at all, that it is no more than a platform
where self-expression has given place to self-proclamation. And
sometimes, a little more hopefully, they venture to prophesy that soon
the proud Sicambrian will worship the gods that he burnt.
I suspect that this classic revival is not very likely to come about.
True, some writers, to-day in their cradles, may yet emulate Flaubert,
but they will not be Flaubert. They may take something of his essence
and blend it with their own; but that will create a new essence, for
literature does not travel in a circle. Rather it travels along a
cycloid, bending back upon itself, following the movement of man.
Everything in the world we inhabit conspires to alter in the mirror of
literature the picture it reflects; haste, luxury, hysterical
sensuousness, race-optimism and race-despair. And notably publicity, the
attitude of the Press. For the time has gone when novels were written
for young ladies, and told the placid love of Edwin and Angeline;
nowadays the novel, growing ambitious, lays hands upon science,
commerce, philosophy: we write less of moated granges, more of tea-shops
and advertising agencies, for the Press is teaching the people to look
to the novel for a cosmic picture of the day, for a cosmic commentary.
Evidently it was not always so. Flaubert, de Maupassant, Butler, Tolstoy
(who are not a company of peers), aspired mainly 'to see life sanely and
to see it whole.' Because they lived in days of lesser social
complexity, economically speaking, they were able to use a purely
narrative style, the only notable living exponent of which is Mr Thomas
Hardy. But we, less fortunate perhaps, confronted with new facts, the
factory system, popular education, religious unrest, pictorial
rebellion, must adapt ourselves and our books to the new spirit. I do
not pretend that the movement has been sudden. Many years before
_L'Education Sentimentale_ was written, Stendhal had imported chaos
(with genius) into the spacious 'thirties. But Stendhal was a meteor:
Dostoievsky and Mr Romain Rolland had to come to break up the old
narrative form, to make the road for Mr Wells and for the younger men
who attempt, not always successfully, to crush within the covers of an
octavo volume the whole of the globe spinning round its axis, to express
with an attitude the philosophy of life, to preach by gospel rather than
by statement.
Such movements as these naturally breed a reaction, and I confess that,
when faced with the novels of the 'young men,' so turgid, so bombastic,
I turn longing eyes towards the still waters of Turgenev, sometimes even
towards my first influence, now long discarded--the novels of Zola.
Though the Zeitgeist hold my hand and bid me abandon my characters,
forget that they should be people like ourselves, living, loving, dying,
and this enough; though it suggest to me that I should analyse the
economic state, consider what new world we are making, enlist under the
banner of the 'free spirits' or of the 'simple life,' I think I should
turn again towards the old narrative simplicities, towards the schedules
of what the hero said, and of what the vicar had in his drawing-room, if
I were not conscious that form evolves.
If literature be at all a living force it must evolve as much as man,
and more if it is to lead him; it must establish a correspondence
between itself and the uneasy souls for which it exists. So it is no
longer possible to content ourselves with such as Jane Austen; we must
exploit ourselves. Ashamed as we are of the novel with a purpose, we can
no longer write novels without a purpose. We need to express the motion
of the world rather than its contents. While the older novelists were
static, we have to be kinetic: is not the picture-palace here to give
us a lesson and to remind us that the waxworks which delighted our
grandfathers have gone?
But evolution is not quite the same thing as revolution. I do believe
that revolution is only evolution in a hurry; but revolution can be in
too great a hurry, and cover itself with ridicule. When the Futurists
propose to suppress the adjective, the adverb, the conjunction, and to
make of literature a thing of 'positive substantives' and 'dynamic
verbs'--when Mr Peguy repeats over and over again the same sentence
because, in his view, that is how we think--we smile. We are both right
and wrong to smile, for these people express in the wrong way that which
is the right thing. The modern novel has and must have a new
significance. It is not enough that the novelist should be cheery as
Dickens, or genially cynical as Thackeray, or adventurous as Fielding.
The passions of men, love, hunger, patriotism, worship, all these things
must now be shared between the novelist and his reader. He must
collaborate with his audience ... emulate the show-girls in a revue,
abandon the stage, and come parading through the stalls. A new passion
is born, and it is a complex of the old passions; the novelist of to-day
cannot end as Montaigne, say that he goes to seek a great perhaps. He
needs to be more positive, to aspire to know what we are doing with the
working-class, with the Empire, the woman question, and the proper use
of lentils. It is this aspiration towards truth that breaks up the old
form: you cannot tell a story in a straightforward manner when you do
but glimpse it through the veil of the future.
And so it goes hard with Edwin and Angeline. We have no more time to
tell that love; we need to break up their simple story, to consider
whether they are eugenically fitted for each other, and whether their
marriage settlement has a bearing upon national finance. Inevitably we
become chaotic; the thread of our story is tangled in the threads which
bind the loves of all men. We must state, moralise, explain, analyse
motives, because we try to fit into a steam civilisation the old
horse-plough of our fathers. I do not think that we shall break the old
plough; now and then we may use it upon sands, but there is much good
earth for it to turn.