For the practised novelist knows that when he is introducing

THE

ENGLISH NOVEL

From the Earliest Days

to the Death of

Joseph Conrad

by

FORD MADOX FORD

LONDON

CONSTABLE & CO.

1930

PUBLISHED BY

_Constable & Company Limited_

_London W. C. 2_

BOMBAY

CALCUTTA MADRAS

LEIPZIG

_Oxford University Press_

Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd., Frome and London

AUTHOR’S APOLOGY

To Hugh Walpole.

MY DEAR WALPOLE,--

This little book was intended at the time it was written solely for

the consumption of students in the United States at a time when I had

arrived at a decision to publish nothing more in the country of my

birth. A curious set of circumstances all happening on the same day

have made me change my decision, at least as to this book. In the

first place I received in the morning the present publisher’s offer to

publish the book; in the afternoon some kindly person gave me a copy

of the _New York Herald’s_ Literary Supplement containing your far too

eulogistic references to myself; and in the evening a Rhodes Scholar

from one of the Oxford Colleges told me that in that place of education

typewritten and then mimeographed copies of this work were--the book

being unobtainable in England--being used by certain students as a

textbook in their English classes. They were all, I understand, Rhodes

Scholars.

I had by that time turned down the publisher’s offer. Indeed, I had

thought that the publisher must be mad, for he must be as aware as I

that a good average of English readers of my works has for many years

been about four hundred. I do not mean to say that that is all that

English editions of my books have sold, for there is a fashion in the

United States of ordering the first editions (which are generally the

London ones) of certain authors, those including my fortunate self. And

the first edition of this book has appeared so long ago in the United

States that that sale must be lost. But the thought of all those Rhodes

Scholars having to take that trouble made me wish to make the matter

easier for their devoted selves, and the reading of your words coming

on top of so many generosities of yours towards me as writer made me

determine to manifest some sense of my real gratitude towards yourself.

And how could I do it better than by addressing to you a work,

however small, on the subject of an art that you have for so long, so

steadfastly, and so unswervingly pursued?

I have never felt so mortified with myself as when on the occasion

of a public dinner given to us, in conjunction I think, in New York,

you, speaking first, talked of my work with such enthusiasm and such

enviable generosity--for to know how to be so generous is a thing for

which one may well be envied!--that I was covered with confusion and

quite literally had the tears in my eyes. I was indeed so affected as

to be totally unable to make any adequate reply and must have seemed

curmudgeonly in the extreme to our audience.

And then, subsequently during a tour of lectures at the English

Classes of certain American Universities, I found that you had spoken

of me already to them with the same magnificent generosity, so that I

understood that it was your praise of my work that had actually secured

me the invitation to deliver those lectures--why, then I conceived

towards yourself a warmth of feeling of which you can be only too

little aware and I far, far too little able to express. Why should

you go out of your way to do these things? I have never done you any

service; I have never in that city which for long now has been my

spiritual home heard of any other English novelist going out of his

way to speak a kind word for any other one, and, that city being the

immense whispering gallery that it is, I have heard of many unkind

sayings as to my works and much unkinder ones as to my person uttered

there in public and private by visiting English novelists. But you just

came there and ran about and said in innumerable places the dearest

things--dearest to me; just, as the saying is, for the love of God.

Because how can you retain enthusiasms for books who must have read so

many?

I do not think that these things are too private between us to be

spoken of. For in the weary business that is the writing of books the

sudden discovery of generosities towards oneself by persons hardly

personally known to one--it must be twenty-three years or so since, in

the old _English Review_ days and a little after we infrequently met

until we thus again in Gotham came together--such sudden discoveries

of generosities are so refreshing against the dust and the haze of the

road that is always uphill that their publication seems almost a duty.

For how different might not have been the history of that which I am

here tracing had such a sense of the co-operative thing that our art

is, distinguished the long line of its practitioners from Cædmon to

... oh, to whom you will! Such a sense as must be yours....

The reason why I did not wish to publish this work in England was

simply that, in that country, I have never found anyone to take the

remotest interest in the subject and such occasional opuscules as I

have there devoted to it have invariably been received with very bitter

disfavour. Because it is obviously an impertinence in a novelist to

insist that his art is an art or of service to the republic, and as not

more than four hundred English read my novels, the craftsman’s notes

of a person so ignored can have little or no interest. In the United

States it is different. Even if I had no following there, the interest

taken in the technical sides of any arts or processes is, in that

country of intellectual curiosities, so keen, that I should without

scruple have ventured on publishing for the benefit of students the

notes that have occurred to me during the thirty-seven years in which

I have been publishing novels. For I must be pretty nearly the doyen

of English writers of the imaginative type--I mean of course in dates

of publication, not in terms of age and of course not in terms of

merit. And if, faint yet pursuing, I have been able to keep on finding

American publishers during such a long space of time, there must be

there some sort of a public that will take a little interest in the

professional matters that so passionately have interested me. And I

do not adopt an apologetic tone towards this work. I may be perfectly

wrong in almost everything that I say. If I am, that is the end of me.

But the great use of technical discussion is that it arouses interest

in the subject discussed. I have had in my day a great number of

disciples--mostly of course on the Western side of the Atlantic--and

several of them have risen to positions of considerable prominence

and are doing work of great beauty. But there is not one of them who

to-day acts in any way according to the maxims that I enjoined on him

or her. And that is how it should be, the new generation attaining

its eminences by using the maxims of the generation preceding as its

jumping-off posts. And if the older generation can get its craftsman’s

maxims clearly expressed, the process of demolition is all the easier

and more thorough.

So, my dear Walpole, I at least see it. And since the book is written

and as if by _force majeure_ makes its appearance in our country, I

do desire that its theories should secure as wide an attention as may

be. So I have adopted the stratagem of attaching your name to it.

Nevertheless, my gratitude is very profound, and it is in all sincerity

that I inscribe myself

Your humble, obedient and

very thankful servant,

F. M. F.

This book was written in New York, on board the S.S. _Patria_, and

in the port and neighbourhood of Marseilles during July and August,

1927. For the purpose of rendering it more easily understood by the

English reader I have made certain alterations in phrases, in Paris

during the last four days of 1929 and the first two of 1930.

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

I THE FUNCTION OF THE NOVEL IN THE MODERN WORLD 1

II TOWARDS DEFOE 29

III TOWARDS FLAUBERT 65

IV TO JOSEPH CONRAD 105

_L’ENVOI_: IN THE LAST QUARTER OF A CENTURY 135

CHAPTER ONE

THE FUNCTION OF THE NOVEL IN THE MODERN WORLD

1

One finds--or at any rate I have always found--English History

relatively easy to grasp because in it it is not difficult to see a

pattern of what some one has called Freedom slowly broadening down from

precedent to precedent. One may or may not agree with the statement,

one may or may not like the fact, if it is a fact, that it sets forth;

but at least it gives us that pattern, some sort of jumping-off place,

something by which one may measure and co-relate various phases of the

story. The histories of most other races are more difficult to grasp

or follow because they are less systematized and more an affair of

individuals. One may be aware that the pre-Revolution history of France

is an affair of power gradually centralizing itself on the throne, and

that the Fronde was an episode in that progression. Nevertheless, the

Fronde with its violent personalities, its purely individual intrigues,

its Cardinals, Queens, Condés, Chevreuses and the rest, was a baffling

affair to follow, and obscures the issue which doubtless was that, all

power being concentrated under one hat, the neck which supported the

head which supported that hat was easy to strike off.

But when it comes to the History of Literature--and to that of the

Novel in particular, almost the exact inverse is the case. Whereas

almost every country other than England--or indeed every race other

than Anglo-Saxondom--has a tradition of literature in which some sort

of precedent broadens down into some other, it would appear that

however docile the Anglo-Saxon may be in the hands of politicians or

leaders--usually of a Leftwards complexion--the moment any æsthetic

discipline proposes itself for his direction he becomes at least as

refractory as any Condé and almost more intriguing than any Chevreuse.

Any sort of English writer takes any sort of pen and on any sort of

paper with in his hair whatever sort of vine-leaves you will and at his

elbow any nectar from metheglin to Chateau Yquem or pale ale, writes

any sort of story in any sort of method--or in any sort of mixture of

any half-dozen methods. So, if he have any of the temperament of an

artist, you have a Fielding or a Trollope, a Samuel Butler or a George

Meredith, each rising as a separate peak but each absolutely without

interrelation with any other.

That was never better exemplified than quite lately when you had--all

living simultaneously but all, alas, now dead--Thomas Hardy, George

Meredith, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Mark Twain. Each was a

considerable figure but each sat, as it were, alone on his little peak

surrounded by his lay satellites, and each was entirely uninfluenced by

the work of all the others--two solitary Englishmen, two Americans and

one alien. Whether or no there was any resultant literary movement I am

about to try to trace for you, looking at the matter with the eyes of a

craftsman surveying his own particular job.

In the case of any other country or race such a proceeding would be

comparatively easy. In France, for instance, living at the same time

as, but all predeceasing, the distinguished Anglo-Saxons and the alien

of genius that I have named above, you had Flaubert, Maupassant,

Turgenev, the Goncourt brothers, Gautier, Daudet--six Frenchmen and an

alien of beautiful genius. They all met frequently, dining together

almost weekly at Brébant’s--where Henry James in the wake of Turgenev

dined from time to time too. With amiability, with acidity, with

passion or frenzies of hatred they discussed words, cadences, forms,

progressions of effect--or the cannon-strokes with which one concludes

short short-stories. They were during those meetings indifferent to

fame, wealth, the course of public affairs, ruin, death. For them there

was only one enduring Kingdom--that of the Arts--and only one Republic

that shall be everlasting: the Republic of Letters.

The resultant literary movement--for with their deaths it crossed the

Channel--I shall endeavour to trace, and the enterprise will concern

itself with the modern English novel. For the Art of Writing is an

affair as international as are all the other Arts--as International,

as Co-operative and as mutually uniting. Shakespeare could not have

written as he did had not Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Plutarch preceded

him, nor could Flaubert have written _Madame Bovary_ as he wrote it

had there not been before then the _Clarissa Harlowe_ of Richardson.

Nor yet could Conrad have written _Heart of Darkness_ or _Lord Jim_ had

Flaubert not written _Bouvard et Pécuchet_ or Alphonse Daudet, _Jack_.

It is, at any rate, in this spirit that, in this small monograph, I

shall present to you my reflections on the English Novel--which is the

same thing as the Novel--and the pattern that, for me, it seems to

make down the short ages during which it has existed. It will differ

very widely from the conclusions arrived at--and above all from the

estimates formed by--my predecessors in this field who have seldom

themselves been imaginative writers let alone novelists, and who,

by the exigencies of their professions, have usually been what it

is the custom to call academic. That I cannot help. For the benefit

of the reader who wishes to know what is generally thought of these

subjects I have tried to state along with my own differing conclusions

what that general thought is. If, I mean, I belabour the winking

lewdness of _Tom Jones_, I am careful to point out that most of my

professional predecessors or contemporaries beatify Fielding because

of his refreshing carelessness in most matters to which decent men pay

attention. The young, earnest student of literature for professional

purposes should, if he desires good marks, write in his thesis for

examination pretty well the opposite of what I have here set down.

But, in the end, it is as useful to have something that will awaken

you by its disagreements with yourself as to live for ever in concord

with somnolent elders. It gives you another point of view, though you

may return to the plane from which you started. I was once watching a

painter painting a field of medicinal poppies which from where he sat

appeared quite black. Suddenly, he grasped me by the wrist and dragged

me up a small hill. From there that field appeared dark-purple shot

with gold. I said: “It doesn’t make any difference, does it, to your

composition?” He answered: “No, it doesn’t make any difference, but

I wish the d--d things would not do it, for, when I have finished, I

shall have to come up here and do them all over again!”

2

Since the day when Thackeray obsequiously apologized to the world

and his readers for being a mere novelist, in the interests of a

pompous social system which decreed that the novel should not be

seriously regarded and the novelist himself be stigmatized as something

detrimental to good order and the decorous employment of spare

time--since, then, Thackeray poked fun at the greatest of all his books

which may well be regarded, if you will, as the greatest work in the

English language, an immense change has occurred in the relative place

accorded to the Novel in the Anglo-Saxon social cosmogony. Because, as

novelist, Thackeray felt his social position insecure, he must attempt

to retrieve himself by poking fun at his book and so proving that at

least he did not take the Novel seriously, his heart being in the right

place be his occupation never so ungentlemanly. So he must needs write

his epilogue as to the showman rolling up his marionettes in green

baize and the rest of it.

To-day, however, even the most fugitive of novelists takes his work

more seriously and, perhaps all unconsciously, the public accords to

the more serious amongst the novelists an attention that formerly it

accorded solely to politicians, preachers, scientists, medical men, and

the like. This is because the novel has become indispensable to the

understanding of life.

It is, that is to say, the only source to which you can turn in order

to ascertain how your fellows spend their entire lives. I use the words

“entire lives” advisedly.

In older days--dating back to improvement in locomotion--it was

possible for anyone, whatever his station, to observe, at any rate

roughly as it were, a complete cross-section of the lives from cradle

to coffin of a whole social order. In England up to the days of the

stage-coach, families were planted on the land practically to all

eternity and even within my memory it was nearly impossible for the

agricultural labourer to move from one parish--nay, from one farm to

another. One of the most vivid of my souvenirs as a boy was seeing a

ploughman weep on a great down. He was weeping because he had five

children and a bad master who paid him thirteen and six a week and he

was utterly unable to get together the guinea that it would cost him

to hire a farm wagon and move his sticks of furniture to another and

better farm. Nevertheless that man knew more about human lives and

their tides and vicissitudes than I or any other town-dweller in an

age of shiftings.

He could follow the lives of local peer, local squire, doctor, lawyer,

gentleman-farmer, tenant farmer, butcher, baker, barber, parson,

gamekeeper, water-warden, and so on right down to those of the great

bulk of the population, his fellows and equals. He could follow them

from the time the kid-glove was affixed to the door-knocker as a symbol

of birth and until the passing-bell heralded their disappearance into

the clay in the shadow of the church-walls. And although that was more

emphatically true in Great Britain, the first home of the English

novel, it was almost equally true--_mutatis mutandis_--of the earlier

settled colonial districts in the United States. Until, say, the early

forties of the nineteenth century it must have been almost equally

difficult to remove from Rochester, N.Y., as from the Rochester of

Dickens, and as difficult to move from the Birmingham that gave to the

world the word Brummagem as a term of contempt, as from the Birmingham

in a Southern State of the North American Republic.

Then, with ease of locomotion came the habit of flux--which is

infinitely more developed to-day in the United States than in Great

Britain. In London and the urban districts that house by far the

greater bulk of the English population the prevalence of the seven

years’ lease has hitherto tended to anchor families in one spot for at

least that length of time, but even that space is not sufficient to

give a family much insight into the lives and habits of its neighbours.

In any case it is significant that novel-reading is almost infinitely

more a permanent habit in the United States than in Great Britain, and

the position of the imaginative writer in so far more satisfactory.

In observing a social phenomenon like the novel these social changes

must be considered. The fact is that gossip is a necessity for keeping

the mind of humanity as it were aerated and where, owing to lack of

sufficiently intimate circumstances in communities gossip cannot exist,

its place must be supplied--and it is supplied by the novel. You may

say that for the great cities of to-day its place is taken by what in

the United States is called the “tabloid” and in England the “yellow”

or “gutter” Press. But these skilful sensational renderings of merely

individual misfortunes, necessary as they are to human existence

and sanity in the great cities, are yet too highly coloured by their

producers, and the instances themselves are too far from the normal

to be of any great educational value. An occasional phrase in, say, a

Peaches-Browning case may now and then ring true, but the sound common

sense of great publics is aware that these affairs are too often merely

put-up jobs to attach any importance to them as casting light on normal

human motives.

The servant of a country parsonage leaning over the yew-hedge giving

on the turnpike and saying that the vicar’s wife was carrying on

something dreadful with Doctor Lambert might convey some sort of view

of life, ethics, morals, and the rest to another young woman; but the

minute dissection by commonplace-minded reporters of the actions and

agonies of a lady who essays first unsuccessfully to poison her husband

and finally dispatches him with a club--these minute dissections are

not only usually read with a grain of salt, but not unusually, too,

they are speedily forgotten. Scenes on the other hand presented with

even a minimum of artistry will remain in the mind as long as life

lasts: _Ivanhoe_ must permanently represent mediaevalism for a great

proportion of the inhabitants of the globe, though Scott was a very

poor artist; and the death of Emma Bovary will remain horrific in

the reader’s mind, whilst the murder of yesterday is on the morrow

forgotten.

It is this relative difference in the permanence of impression that

distinguishes the work of the novelist as artist from all the other

arts and pursuits of the world. _Trilby_, for instance, was no great

shakes of a book in the great scale of things, but an American

gentleman asserted to me the other day that that work did more to

cosmopolitanize the populations of the Eastern States than any movement

of an international nature that has been seen since the Declaration

of Independence. I don’t know if that is true, but it usefully puts a

point of view--and I am not the one to deny it.

It is, in short, unbearable to exist without some view of life as a

whole, for one finds oneself daily in predicaments in which some sort

of a pointer is absolutely necessary. Even though no novel known to you

may exactly meet your given case, the novel does supply that cloud of

human instances without which the soul feels unsafe in its adventures

and the normal mind fairly easily discerns what events or characters

in its fugitive novels are meretricious in relation to life however

entertaining they may be as fiction.

That the republic--the body politic--has need of these human-filtered

insights into lives is amply proved by the present vogue of what I

will call novelized biography. Lives of every imaginable type of

human being from Shelley to Washington are nowadays consumed with

singular voracity, and if some of the impeccable immortals are in the

upshot docked of their pedestals there can, I think, be little doubt

that, in the process, the public consciousness of life is at once

deepened and rendered more down to the ground. And the human mind is

such a curiously two-sided affair that, along with down-to-the-ground

renderings, it is perfectly able to accept at once the liveliest

efforts of hero-worshippers, denigrators, or whitewashers. The

amiable mendacities of the parson who gave to us the little axe and

the cherry-tree are to-day well known to be the sheerest inventions;

the signal reputed to have been given at the battle of Trafalgar is

far more soul-stirring than the actual rather stilted message that

Lord Nelson composed. And even if Henri IV of France never uttered

his celebrated words about the chicken in the pot, humanity must

have invented them--and that too must have been the case with the

cherry-tree. In the days when these catch-phrases received worldwide

acceptance the public was in fact doing for itself what to-day is left

to the writer of fiction.

For the practised novelist knows that when he is introducing a

character to his reader it is expedient that the first speech of that

character should be an abstract statement--and an abstract statement

striking strongly the note of that character. First impressions are

the strongest of all, and once you have established in that way the

character of one of your figures you will find it very hard to change

it. So humanity, feeling the need for great typical figures with

whose example to exhort their children or to guide themselves, adopts

with avidity, invents or modifies the abstract catchwords by which

that figure will stand or fall. What Nelson actually desired to say

was: “The country confidently anticipates that in this vicissitude

every man of the fleet will perform his functions with accuracy and

courage!”--or something equally stiff, formal and in accord with

what was the late eighteenth-century idea of fine writing. Signal

flags, however, would not run to it: the signaller did his best, and

so we have Nelson. Had the signal gone out as Nelson conceived it,

not Southey nor any portraitist could have given him to us. Or had

Gilbert Stuart’s too faithful rendering of the facial effects of

badly-fitting false teeth been what we first knew of Washington our

views of the Father of His Country would be immensely modified. But the

folk-improved or adopted sayings were the first things that at school

or before school we heard of these heroic figures of our self-made

novel, and neither denigrator nor whitewasher will ever much change

them for us, any more than the probably false verdict of posterity on

John Lackland who had Dante to damn him will ever be reversed.

As to whether the sweeping away of the humaner classical letters in

the interests of the applied sciences as a means of culture is a good

thing or a bad there must be two opinions--but there is no doubt that

by getting rid of Plutarch the change will extraordinarily influence

humanity. Ethics, morality, rules of life must of necessity be

profoundly modified and destandardized. For I suppose that no human

being from the end of the Dark Ages to the beginning of the late

War--no human being in the Western World who was fitting himself for a

career as member of the ruling-classes--was not profoundly influenced

by that earliest of all novelist-biographers. And, if you sweep away

Marcus Aurelius as altruist-moralist, the Greek Anthology as a standard

of poetry, Livy as novelist-historian, Cicero as rhetorician, and

Pericles as heaven-born statesman, you will make a cleavage between

the world cosmos of to-day and that of all preceding ages such as no

modern inventions and researches of the material world have operated.

For though swiftening of means of locomotion may have deprived humanity

of knowledge of mankind, it did little to change the species of

generalizations that mankind itself drew from its more meagre human

instances. Till the abolition of classical culture in the Western World

the ruling-classes went on measuring Gladstone or the late Theodore

Roosevelt by Plutarchian standards--but neither post-1918 King George

V nor any future President of the United States can hope to escape by

that easy touchstone. From the beginnings of industrialism till 1918

we went on rolling round within the immense gyrations of buzzings,

clicks, rattles, and bangs that is modern life under the auspices of

the applied sciences; we went on contentedly spinning round like worms

within madly whirling walnuts. But as a guide the great figure had gone.

There is not only no such figure in the world as Washington, Nelson,

or even Napoleon--but there is no chance that such a figure can ever

arise again. Nay, even the legendary figures that remain have lost

at least half of their appeal. A statue of Washington adorns the

front of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, but it is doubtful

if one in a thousand of the passers-by have even heard of the axe

and the cherry-tree, let alone knowing anything of his tenacity,

single-mindedness, and moral courage. And who in the North American

Republic has heard of Nelson and his signal? For the matter of that,

as I have elsewhere related, a young lady science graduate of a very

distinguished Eastern University was lately heard to ask when she

caught sight of the dome of the Invalides: “Who _was_ this Napollyong

they talk so much about here?” Of course pronunciation may have had

something to do with that. But it was in 1923 that the question was

asked, and since then a popularizing novel-biography of Napoleon has

had an immense vogue in the United States.

Nevertheless it is to be doubted if ever again figures will be known

to the whole world. It is possible that my distinguished namesake is

so known because of his popularization of a cheap form of transport,

and there are prize-fighters, aviators, and performers for the cinema.

But these scarcely fill in the departments of public morals and ethical

codes the places that used to be occupied by Pericles, Cicero, and

Lucius Junius Brutus.

I am not writing in the least ironically, nor in the least in the

spirit of the _laudator temporis acti_. We have scrapped a whole

culture; the Greek Anthology and Tibullus and Catullus have gone the

way of the earliest locomotive and the first Tin Lizzie. We have, then,

to supply their places--and there is only the novel that for the moment

seems in the least likely or equipped so to do. That at least cheers

me, my whole life having been devoted to the cause of the Novel--I

don’t mean to the writing of works of fiction but to the furthering of

the views that I am here giving you.

One must live in, one must face with equanimity, the circumstances of

one’s own age. I regret that the figures of Tibullus and our Saviour do

not occupy on the stage of the lives of men the place that they did in

the days of my childhood--but I have courageously to face the fact that

they do not. For it is obvious that it is not to the parson and hardly

to the priest that one would go for counsel as to one’s material life;

still less could the spirit of Alcestis’ address to her bed inspire the

young woman to-day contemplating matrimony.

In short, if you look abroad upon the world you will see that the

department of life that was formerly attended upon by classical culture

has to-day little but the modern work of the imagination to solace it.

And that the solace of Literature and the Arts is necessary for--is a

craving of--humanity few but the most hardened captains of industry

or the most arrogant of professors of Applied Science will be found

to deny. Our joint Anglo-Saxon civilization to-day is a fairly savage

and materialistic affair, but it is also an affair relatively new and

untried. It is perhaps more materialistic than was the civilization of

Ancient Rome and a little less savage than the early Dark Ages. But

both these former periods of human activity had in the end to develop

arts and that, it is probable, will be the case with us. The Romans,

it is true, relied for their arts mostly on Greek slaves or on such

imitators of the Greeks as Horace and Virgil, and the Dark Ages almost

solely on Churchmen who led precarious existences in hidden valleys.

But the respective futures of these Ages are worth considering for

our present purposes. For the break-up of the Roman Empire for which

innumerable reasons have been found by innumerable pundits remains at

least as mysterious as it was before the first ancestor of Mommsen

first dug up his first tile and upon it wrote his first monograph.

Mommsen, to be sure, used to tell us that Rome disappeared because it

had no Hohenzollern family to guide its destinies--and that may be true

enough. Gibbon ascribed to Christianity the Fall of the Roman Empire

and People; others of the learned have laid that catastrophe at the

door of difficulties of communication, of the lack of a modern banking

system, of the want of organization of the system of Imperial Finances,

or of a mysterious and unexplained slackness that overcame alike the

Western and Eastern Empires--a slackness due to the pleasures of the

table, the wine-cup, of sex and the like.

But we, as upholders of the Arts, the Moralist having been pretty well

blotted out as a national or international factor by the avalanche

that in 1914 began to overwhelm alike classical culture and revealed

religion, we then might just as well ascribe the Fall of Rome to the

inartistic materialism of the true-Roman citizen as to any other cause.

For the function of the Arts in the State--apart from the consideration

of æsthetics--is so to aerate the mind of the taxpayer as to make

him less dull a boy. Or if you like, it is by removing him from his

own immediate affairs and immersing him in those of his fellows to

give him a better view of the complicated predicaments that surround

him. A financier, that is to say, who turns from the bewildering

and complicated antics of a maze of tape from tickers, or a realtor

who turns from the consideration of corner lots and the tangled and

exhausting intrigues that shall make the new boulevard of his city run

through land controlled by his interests--both these pillars of the

modern State may be expected to return as it were with minds refreshed

if, taking a short respite from their arduous and necessary tasks, they

lose themselves for a moment in the consideration of the adventures and

predicaments of the _Babbitt_ of Mr. Sinclair Lewis or the attempts

at escape from the chair of the central character of Mr. Dreiser’s

_American Tragedy_.

I permit myself to mention the works of friends of my own because I

must have illustrations for my theme and those illustrations must be

works of to-day of sufficient likelihood to last long enough not to be

forgotten at the next fall of the leaf--and Mr. Lewis and Mr. Dreiser

are so much more my personal friends than immersed in my own particular

little technical swim that they are more apposite to my immediate

purpose than would be, say, the authors of _The Sun Also Rises_ or of

_My Heart and My Flesh_--or of _Ulysses_.

3

Arrived at that particular five-cornered plot in the territory of

the Novel I have foreshadowed the end of this small monograph. For,

having traced the gradual course of the development from Apuleius to

Joseph Conrad, having followed it from the Rome of Petronius Arbiter

to the Spain of Lope da Vega, to the London of Defoe and Richardson,

to the Paris of Diderot, Stendhal, and Flaubert--with side glances at

the Cockaigne of Thackeray and Dickens and the Russia of Turgenev,

Dostoieffsky and Tchekov--and back again to the London of Conrad,

Henry James, and Stephen Crane--which last two writers America will

not whole-heartedly accept as American, whilst England won’t accept

them at all--having followed the devious course of the thin stream of

development of the novel from the Mediterranean to the Bay of Biscay,

from the Bay of Biscay to the Port of London and so backwards and

forwards across the English Channel, I shall leave it and you with a

bump and with some regret at the gateway to the Middle-West--say at

about Altoona. For it is there that the Novel, throughout the Ages the

poor Cinderella of the Arts, is nowadays erecting itself into the sole

guide and monitor of the world.

I should like to have allowed myself to say a few words about the

modern Middle-Western development, which is for the moment the final

stage, of the art to whose furtherance I have obscurely devoted my

half-century of existence. But I am condemned like Moses only to

perceive that Promised Land. This is a monograph on the English

Novel--which includes _The House of the Seven Gables_ or _What

Maisie Knew_, not on the Middle-Western Novel of to-day which very

emphatically doesn’t include--oh, say _Riceyman Steps_ and _Mr.

Britling Sees it Through_.

I should like to observe for the benefit of the Lay Reader, to whom I

am addressing myself--for the Professional Critic will pay no attention

to anything that I say, contenting himself with cutting me to pieces

with whips of scorpions for having allowed my head to pop up at all--to

the Lay Reader I should like to point out that what I am about to write

is highly controversial and that he must take none of it too much _au

pied de la lettre_. I don’t mean to say that it will not be written

with almost ferocious seriousness. But what follows are suggestions not

dictates, for in perusing this sort of book the reader must be prepared

to do a great deal of the work himself--within his own mind.

If I choose to write that great imaginative literature began in

England with Archbishop Warham in the sixteenth century and ended

with the death of Thomas Vaughan, the Silurist, in the first year

of the eighteenth century, to come to life again with Joseph Conrad

and the Yellow Book about 1892, and once more to disappear on the

fourth of August, 1914--if I choose to write those extreme statements

it is because I _want_ the Reader mentally to object to them the

names of Swift, Keats, Thackeray, Browning, Swinburne, Meredith--or

even those of Messrs. Galsworthy, Bennett, Wells and, say, Virginia

Woolf. I _want_ the Lay Reader to make those mental reservations for

himself. I should hate to be a professor, I should hate to be taken

as dogmatizing, and I should still more hate that what dogmatizing I

do perforce indulge in should be unquestioningly accepted by any poor

victim.

So that if I should say--as I probably shall--that, along with all

his contemporaries, as a constructive artist even of the picaresque

school, Dickens was contemptible, or if I say that Meredith as a

stylist in comparison with Henry James was simply detestable, or that

the conception of novel-writing as an art began for Anglo-Saxondom

with Joseph Conrad, or that _Babbitt_ dealt a shrewder blow at the

pre-war idealization of the industrial system and the idolatry of

materialism than _Don Quixote_ at sixteenth-century vestiges of the

chivalric spirit, or that _The Time of Man_ is the most beautiful

individual piece of writing that has as yet come out of America, or

that _The Lighthouse_ is the only piece of British--as opposed to

English--writing that has latterly excited my craftsman’s mind--the

only piece since the decline and death of Conrad ... if I commit myself

to all these statements the reader must at once violently object that

I am a log-roller writing up my personal friends--though I never knew,

or even know anyone that knew, Miss Virginia Woolf. He must object that

I have forgotten not only Trollope in my aspersions on mid-Victorian

novelists, but that I have also forgotten Mr. George Moore. (Alas, I

always forget Mr. George Moore, who is probably the greatest and most

dispassionate technician that English Literature has ever seen.)

He must make all these objections for himself as violently as possible:

then, in reaction, thinking it over he will probably find that there

is something in what I say. At any rate, he will have a sort of

rudimentary map of the Kingdom of the Art of Letters in his mind. The

old-fashioned maps had their advantages. Their cartographer left in his

plans blank spaces in places where his enemies dwelt and labelled them:

“Here be Crocodiles,” “Here be Stenches!” or “Anthropophagi! Avoid this

Land!”--and that was useful because it told you what parts of the earth

were pernicious to that type of Cartographer. So, if you were of his

type, you avoided territories by him miscalled. On the other hand, if

you disliked the sort of fellow that that map-maker was, you adventured

into the territory labelled “of the Anthropophagi” to find it inhabited

solely by sirens, into the Land of Stenches to find it distinguished by

the most beneficent of chalybeate springs, or amongst the Crocodiles,

who were charming people, ready at any moment to shed tears over your

depleted pockets, your lost loves, or your rheumatic-gout!

It is with a map of that sort that I am trying to provide you. No other

sort is of the remotest value. Nor is it even possible, critics being

human.

I am looking at the last page of a Manual of English Literature

compiled by a critic who takes himself and is taken very seriously

indeed. I read:

“_His work often decadent, appealing to senses; a pessimist. Lacks

restraint; small variety in mood!_”

Think of that as the last word--the very last word--of a Manual of

English Literature for the use of the English Classes of the most

numerically attended University in the Universe! Could I at my worst do

worse? Or so badly!

For that is that writer’s critical estimate--that is all that thirty

thousand pupils of a State University are given as an appraisal

of--Algernon Charles Swinburne!

CHAPTER TWO

TOWARDS DEFOE

It is not part of my purpose--nor within the scope of a short manual

would it be possible!--to trace the influence of the _Golden Ass_ or

the _Satiricon_ on the course or development of the novel--and indeed

their influences probably came into action so late that the effect was

rather to give coloration to the pastiches of later writers like the

late Mr. Walter Pater or the very much living Mr. Ezra Pound. It is the

same, to all intents and purposes, with such mediaeval compilations

of short-stories as the _Decameron_, the _Heptameron_ or the _Cent

Nouvelles Nouvelles_. The _Decameron_ must in particular have been

as enormously read in the course of centuries as _Madame Bovary_,

but, except for the _Heptameron_ and the rest of the works of that

tradition, it can have led to no developments but merely to a few

imitations such as the _Contes Drolatiques_ of Balzac.

To our immediate purpose they are germane solely as indicating the

desire--the necessity--that humanity has always experienced for fiction

of one kind or another, if merely as an expedient for clarifying the

mind. The mediaeval European intellect seems to have been able to

appreciate these crystallizing shocks only in smallish doses, and in

Europe it was not until sixteenth-century Spain that humanity seems

to have been able to sustain its interest for the course of a long

tale--a series of rambling incidents in the life of one or of one

or two central characters. And again it was not until the middle

nineteenth century in France and the very late nineteenth or early

twentieth that in England the mind of the public could be expected

to take in the rendering--not the narrating--of a work whose central

character was not an individual of slightly superhuman proportions.

Still less could it take in an Affair whose participants, as befits

a democratic age, if not all exactly equal in the parts they play in

the Affair’s development, are at least nearly all as normally similar

in aspirations, virtues and vices as is usual in one’s surrounding

humanity.

Let us for a moment consider the difference--if difference there

be--between the apparently artless tale and the novel that fulfils my

definition of the functions of the work of fiction in the modern body

politic. The artless tale, then, is nothing but a _conte_--a thing told

to keep the hearers gasping or at least engrossed. Told verbally it is

usually short, but professional story-tellers have been found--as in

the case of the group-authors of the _Arabian Nights_--to make them

very long indeed. And the habit of telling very long tales that are

practically serials still persists in Eastern bazaars.

You may say that listening to tales for the mere purpose of being

thrilled or engrossed has nothing to do with the gaining of vicarious

experience, so that the stories of the _Decameron_ or the ordinary

novels of commerce were and are of no value to the body politic, but a

little reflection will show that the reverse is the case in practice.

Human experience is built up by the averaging out of a great many

cases--some inclining, as it were, to the extreme right, some to the

extreme left, and the majority probably approaching the normal.

Personally, on the face of it, I ought to be glad if, in the

interests of non-commercial literature, the novel of commerce could

be suppressed, but as a matter of fact I should be the first to

lament such a catastrophe. Humanity, in fact, needs care-free

entertainment--and in search of it it seldom goes very far wrong. That

is proved by the fact that, ever since books were books, the great

public has devoured with avidity only two kinds of work--the very worst

from the point of view of the literary artists, and the very best!

The four most popular books the world over at any given moment since,

say, eighteen-sixty have always been the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, _Madame

Bovary_ and two sempiternally changing works of egregious silliness and

popularity. But whereas the so-called popular books change with the

turn of each year, the more serious works continue to stand at the head

of the best-sellers of the world year in and year out.

That is a consideration to which we may return; the point that I wish

to make here is that when _contes_ and _nouvelles_ of the type to be

found in the _Decameron_ were of an almost boundless popularity, not

only had the serious novel no existence but the reprehension that the

Victorian moralist and industrialist expressed also found then no

expression. As I am never tired of relating, my grand-aunt Eliza was

the first utterer of the famous saying: “Sooner than be idle I’d take

a book and read”; but that utterance, perfectly normal and applauded

about 1860 when it was first presented to the world, is to-day purely

risible and could not in serious earnestness be uttered in the

household of any family more comfortable in its circumstances than

those of the lower-paid manual labourer.

It would have been equally unthinkable at any date from the tenth

century to the early nineteenth. During those nine centuries, in fact,

the professional moralist was only too glad to enlist the services of

the fiction-teller under the sacred banners of Faith and Good Works,

and although towards the end of the eighteenth century the habits of

young ladies who lay day-long on sofas reading the thousandfold novels

of popular female authors from Aphra Behn to Sarah Fielding--although

that habit was lightly satirized by dramatists and occasionally

scourged in the sermons of nonconformist divines, these occurrences

were very sporadic and altogether too infrequent to form a national

habit. Indeed, until the nineteenth century was under way it might even

be advanced that the writers of such works of fiction as the _Pilgrim’s

Progress_, _Rasselas_, or _Robinson Crusoe_ were eagerly sought as

allies by the professional, ecclesiastical, or nonconformist moralist.

And that was even more pronouncedly the case in days still earlier when

in Europe a universal and all-powerful church dictated the morals of

gentle and simple alike. Indeed, whatever may or may not be said of

Catholicism in the way of praise or blame, it cannot be alleged that

when she was all-powerful she was ever afraid of the Arts or afraid to

employ them for her own purposes. The Moralities of the Nun Hrotswitha,

the mystery plays and mummings of every town-guild in the Middle Ages,

are alone overwhelming evidence that the church, representing the

professional moralists of five or six centuries, was only too glad to

avail itself of forms of art as an indispensable means of spreading

her teachings. Nor indeed until the Puritan Divines of the sixteenth

and seventeenth centuries turned upon the art of fiction as presented

on the stage did that form of art do anything other than bend itself

willingly to the services of morality. For you might say that the drama

of Wycherley and Killigrew was as much a protest against the oppression

of the then professional moralist as any spontaneous movement for the

supply of lecherous fiction to the public. The greater part of the

plays of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists--by far the greater

part--consisted of works of profound--and quite conventional--moral

purpose; the earlier drama, and even the pace-egging and mumming

of country shows, were nothing but pietistic pronouncements put as

picturesquely--and as alluringly spiced with alliterations in the

prosody and low comedy in the plots--as the fiction-writers of the day

could contrive. Hell always yawned before the audience beneath the high

trestle-boards and stages of these shows; in the flies Heaven and its

denizens were always visible, whilst in what would to-day be called

the wings there waited perpetually visible, on the one hand the Devil

ready to pitchfork the wicked into the lower story of the stage--and

Man’s Good Angel to conduct him to the Better Place. And clowns and

characters called Vices were always ready to endure the drubbings

that, enlivening the public, were the portion of the mildly wicked and

foolish.

No, decidedly the mediaeval and early renaissance art of fiction, quite

as much as Matthew Arnold, was on the side of the angels.