its comedies brought scenery and attempts at scenic realism to the
stage, the Play and the Novel were practically the same form. Or it
might be better to put it that the Novel was the direct development of
the play--a development made possible by the art of printing. In effect
the plays of Shakespeare were novels written for recitation, and that,
naturally, was still more the case with the works of Shakespeare’s
predecessors. And it is significant that as reading became more common
with the establishment of Edward VI’s grammar schools, the play itself
became less a matter of rantings and by degrees even a medium for fine
writing. _Gorboduc_ and _Ferrex and Porrex_ or _Ralph Roister Doister_
were products of either a stilted classicism or of a boisterous, native
spirit of knockabout buffoonery, puns, and ribald jests. The classical
motive issued presently into a mode of over-written elegance that
speedily proved itself unreadable: then Lyly gave place to Shakespeare.
It has always seemed obvious to me--as a private conviction for which
I have no wish to do battle and which I have no wish to force on
the reader as any more than a suggestion--that Shakespeare himself
regretted the literary chastity of his muse. I mean that Shakespeare,
as gentleman and one wishing to sport his coat-of-arms in the very best
social and scholastic circles, deprecated the passing of the Unities
and of bombast and wished that the popular taste would have let him
make a living by verse in the style of the _Rape of Lucrece_ and the
more florid poems that decorate the last pages of editions of his
works. His speeches to the players in _Hamlet_ and all his life as far
as it is known would seem to indicate that. But it is not until you can
bring yourself to regard not merely the plays of Shakespeare but the
whole post-Lylian Elizabethan and Jacobean drama as novels written for
recitation that the great mystery of Shakespeare’s life seems to become
reasonably explicable. For the great mystery of Shakespeare as novelist
is simply: “Why did Shakespeare never correct his proofs?”
Beside this amazing enormity all questions as to the identity of Mr.
W. H. or the Dark Lady or Mary Fitton or of the motives of the sonnets
become paler and more ineffectual than any ghosts. For they at least
don’t matter. But that the greatest writer of all time should not have
taken the trouble ever to read his own works in print, preferring to
retire to Stratford, sue out his coat armour and so, on his profits
as theatre owner, become titularly and legally a Gentleman--that, if
you think about it and have ever known an author, is the most amazing
phenomenon known to the history of Literature. Napoleon at St. Helena,
renaming himself Monsieur Dupont and shuddering at the mention of
Austerlitz, would not be more astonishing. For this novelist never
blotted a line and never saw his work through the press!
On the face of it the plays of Shakespeare read extravagantly well
but, on the modern stage, play extravagantly badly. I have never in
my life been more bored and appalled than at having to sit through an
uncut performance of _Hamlet_, given by the most noted performers in
the world in front of a gigantic real castle. It was terrifying and
it lasted from nine at night till four in the morning. There was the
real castle, the real moon, real armour dating back to Shakespeare’s
days, real banners of the epoch; real soldiers played the troops of
Fortinbras--and to add a touch of reality of another sort, in the
middle of the performance real Communist groundlings demonstrated for
Saccho and Vanzetti!
But the point was that, with the real castle, pump and the rest,
all Shakespeare’s descriptions became intolerable pleonasms and gave
singular unreality to the characters that uttered them. For normal
humanity does not talk of patines of bright gold when considering the
night skies: it says “Look at the stars,” and possibly adds: “Aren’t
they jolly?” The stars in fact do the rest: and in this given case the
castle of Avignon, the Rhone, and the moon were admirably prepared to
replace all that anyone’s descriptions could do.
On the other hand, I have never in my life been so overwhelmed as by a
ranted performance given by capable actors in modern dress in a rather
bare modern studio that had galleries round it--a condition pretty
well reproducing that of the Shakespearean stage. Hero and heroine and
subordinate characters bellowed rhetorical periods, floods of bombast;
they threw their arms about, raved, fell down, and staggered to their
feet. The effect, as I have said, was overwhelming; no such other utter
tragedy has ever presented itself to the world for three hundred years;
the grief of the heroine was so insufferable that you could not sit in
your place; when the hero died you groaned aloud. Yet the play was only
Kyd’s _Spanish Tragedy_, ranking as a pretty poor work and to-day very
difficult to read.
Shakespeare, on the other hand, does read extravagantly well through
the greater part of his work--but large portions of the plays must
pay the penalty of all works intended for one medium and presented in
another. The sheer silliness of many--of most of his plots except in
the Chronicle Plays--their sheer silliness and negligence regarded from
the point of view of the art of the novel, become technical merit when
it is a matter of recitation; bareness of plot is then a necessity, the
mind having no time to turn back and pick up merely suggested clues.
And of course a great deal of his work must have seemed to a man of
his own delicacy of temperament much more the merest writing down to
the groundlings or coarse flatterings of those in authority than that
caviare to the general that he hoped to provide.
So that his inattention to the printing of his plays may very
conceivably have proceeded from sheer disgust at them--a frame of mind
not unfamiliar to the artist when viewing his work in the light of his
own ideals. Or of course it remains open to us--all things in the case
of Shakespeare being open to us--to consider that he really regarded
his work as commercial trivia that had much better be ignored in the
later stages of his aggrandizement to the state of gentility. That
frame of mind is so usual in the British novelist and ever since novels
have been translated or written in England has proved so disastrous to
the art itself that it is quite conceivable that the first--and the
greatest--of them all may have shared in that national characteristic.
Be that as it may, the assertion that the Elizabethan and Jacobean play
answered in advance the call from the public for the novel that was so
soon to come may very well be regarded as fact. And indeed the same
may be regarded as true of all pre-Elizabethan or rather pre-Edwardian
English literature. Or it might be more just to say that, the Grammar
School spreading at once the capacity and the taste for reading, the
enhanced national wealth of the age of Drake and countenanced piracy
in Elizabeth’s day made the purchase and dissemination of books a
possibility amongst a very much wider class of the public.
We may then regard the rule of thumb definition of the novel as
a printed book of some length telling one tale or relating the
adventures of one single personage as reasonably acceptable. In that
case you get an instance at once of supply created by demand and of
that supply being rendered possible by the fact that education and
material production arrived almost hand in hand. For although printing
was available as a means of spreading knowledge almost a couple of
centuries earlier, the exiguity of material wealth and leisure, the
turmoil and the scarcity of labour of the centuries of pestilence,
dynastic wars, and turmoil that preceded the firm establishment of the
Tudors on the throne infinitely delayed and indeed indefinitely put
back the clock of culture in these kingdoms.
Roughly speaking, we may say that Chaucer, the first English writer
of sustained imaginative pieces, was also the first English writer
for the Press--a writer, that is to say, for the individual reader in
his closet rather than a composer of lays, ballads, roundels, or even
epics, for recitation. The dictum should be accepted with caution. That
it is on the whole just is nevertheless demonstrable by the comparison
of the _Canterbury Tales_ or _Troilus and Cresseide_ with say the
_Faerie Queene_ or Drayton’s _Polyolbion_. That the work of Chaucer
is readable, whereas the epics of Spenser and Drayton practically
defy perusal, is not merely a matter of difference of greatness in
the respective authors. Chaucer was an infinitely greater writer than
either of his successors: his character-drawing is extraordinary,
his sense of beauty overwhelming, his minutely observing mind stalls
off the possibility of dullness in his pages. And read to himself
by an individual reader the work of Spenser is intolerably pompous,
allegorical and dull, and that of Drayton all too pedestrian because of
his lack of any powers of selection. But, if you will read the longer
works of Chaucer aloud you will find him a little difficult to follow
simply because of that very minuteness of observation and that very
lack of dullness; the others, on the other hand, gain immensely by
reading aloud or by recitation--both Spenser and Drayton taking on a
sort of jolly robustness that is even to-day by no means disagreeable
and that may well have been enormously engrossing in the mouth of a
good reader reading to audiences that had little to do but listen and
lacked the power of reading for themselves.
In the matter of the consumption of literature, in fact, the English
world had gone back several generations between the ages of Chaucer
and Spenser--if, that is to say, you regard the evolution of the
printed book and the arrival of the novel as Progress, for it is quite
open to you to regard the disappearance of oral poetry and the epic as
retrogression. Nevertheless, it is fairly true to say that Chaucer with
Caxton, the first printer, as an intimate wrote far more definitely
for the Press than did any of the Elizabethan imaginative writers.
Except in the internal style and the outward effect of his work there
is of course no evidence that Chaucer considered definitely that the
coming of the printing press called for a change in the technique of
the imaginative writer--but it would not be utterly fanciful to imagine
that he did at least consider himself a writer destined to have a great
number of individual readers rather than vast audiences destined to
listen to recitals of his work.
To what extent I am right in advancing the suggestion that Eastern
and Eastern-European audiences had tougher brain-stuffs than their
Anglo-Saxon contemporaries, at any rate in the matter of listening
to recitals of tales in prose or verse, the reader may decide for
himself. The suggestion is nevertheless handy as presenting a certain
not unuseful image. We may say that the printing press killed alike
the epic and all forms of metrical romance, or we may say that the
epic and the metrical romance are essentially foreign to the taste of
the Occidental reader--and the second statement is in effect merely a
repetition in other terms of the first.
Into that I do not propose to go. It is sufficient to say that when
I do make the assertion I find myself, as it were unexpectedly, in
company with the academic critic of to-day and yesterday. At any rate,
quite orthodox authorities have not unusually asserted that Romaunts
or Romances were, in England at least, intended for the personal
reading of the mediaeval courtly and clerical individual, whilst the
shorter lays, virelais, ballads, and the like were aimed, as being
less fatiguing, at popular and numerous audiences. This seems to be
merely common sense. On the other hand, very long metrical or prose
compositions did simultaneously appeal to Oriental audiences and it
is not unusual in academic circles to describe the _Canterbury Tales_
themselves as “Oriental in origin,” which seems queer but may for the
moment pass.
What, however, I am anxious to establish--at the risk of a certain
prolixity--is the fact that an appetite for fiction amounting also to
an expression of a necessity has, at least since the Dark Ages till
the present day, distinguished all humanity. The reason probably is,
as I have already hinted, that we need accounts of human life not so
much as matter from which to draw morals for our own particular cases
but rather as something that will take us outside ourselves and, as
it were, to a height from which we may the better observe ourselves
and our neighbours. The moral is usually thrown in by the moralist
who nevertheless insists or at any rate asserts that moralizing is
the sole purpose of his life and work. But the Morality Plays of the
Nun Hrotswitha, the Mysteries of every English town from Salisbury to
Lytham, the terrifically moralizing novels from _Guzman d’Alfarache_ to
the history of _Moll Flanders_, were simply evidence of the fact that
humanity did not want moralizing and did want fiction. They represent
the moralist throwing up the sponge and trying to get a pinch of salt
on to the tail of that difficult bird, man. It is obvious that large
audiences in days of complete boredom could be found for the sermons
of ranting monks and violent reformers. But even at that the appeal
was largely fictional and what the audiences went to hear--as was
the case with, say, Savonarola--was rather semi-hysterical and lively
descriptions of the sufferings of souls in eternal flame than any
doctrinal discourses on the life and teachings of Him Whose message
was: “Neither do I condemn thee!”
So, gradually, fiction emerging with timidity from under the wing
of the Church itself took such prentice flights in the direction of
pure rendering of life as picaresque novels like _Don Quixote_. It
is, however, doubtful if the adventures of the knight of la Mancha
would have got past the Index had not the Church been called in in
the person of the parish priest who in the end burns the poor hero’s
books of romance; and from that point of view Cervantes may be regarded
as simply drawing the cord of conventional morality closer round the
necks of the unfortunate public. The romance of _The Seven Champions
of Christendom_ had to be burned not because it was a silly book but
because its morality was insufficiently puritan, the Church of Rome in
the throes of the Catholic Reaction having to prove itself at least
as puritan as the Anabaptists of Münster. So the body that tolerated
Rabelais good-naturedly had to invent an _auto da fé_ in order to
deal with Amadis de Gaul; and Cervantes, for all the world like a
seventeenth-century Thackeray, had to attune his satire to the pipe
of a reacting church. Fiction, in short, had to pay an always greater
tribute to morality as it escaped from being the mere servant of
established religion.
In effect the Church--and then the Churches--said to the novel, the
play, the romance, and the ballad: “We are too busy cutting each
other’s throats and inventing newer theologies, to bother any more
about artistic productions. In the meantime we will remove the benefit
of clergy that used to shield those who could manipulate a pen. You may
write and compose what lay fictions you like, but the rack, the faggot
or the pillory will attend you if you publish anything that we _don’t_
like.” And the novelist, always a timid creature and in England avid
of social consideration, was quick to take the hint. So Don Quichotte
de la Mancha, the only gentleman produced by the genius of Cervantes,
and indeed by all the genius of that age, had to become a pitiable
lunatic. Yet it is impossible that a man of the perspicacity of the
writer of that work could not have seen that the Don, wiping curds from
his benign and tranquil countenance, was godlike in comparison to the
crooks and gross peasants--the cats and monkeys!--that surrounded him.
Nevertheless the Don must go!
With those Spaniards, then, the novel approached some sort of rendering
of life and that sort of rendering was soon enough to make its
appearance in England. It crossed the Bay of Biscay and the Channel
with a picaresque work of a prodigious popularity in its day--_Guzman
d’Alfarache_ or the _Story of a Rogue_. Less picaresque in the true
sense of being the strung-together life of a _picaro_ or professional
thief--less picaresque than the immortal _Lazarillo de Tormes_ and
less achingly tragic as a presentation of the life of the brothel and
wine-shop than _Celestina_, the work of Hermann Alemannos, whose name
betrays his Teutonic origin, was much more suited to the Anglo-Saxon
taste than either one of the other three Spanish books that I have
selected for mention.
The true Spanish genius is for us obviously too austere. Our public
could, it is true, guffaw over the discomfitures of the knight of the
Woeful Countenance and the manœuvre by which Lazarillo gets rid of
his blind master who himself was the most ferocious of scoundrels;
and the suicide from the tower in _Celestina_ may have excited
disagreeable emotions in the English reader who preferred to think that
punishment for sins was a matter of the hereafter. But the remorseless,
essentially Spanish black and white of the greater novels was no more
for the English public or the English litterateur than are _Titus
Andronicus_ and _Pericles_ when they can get the _Comedy of Errors_ or
the _Midsummer Night’s Dream_.
_Guzman d’Alfarache_, on the other hand, was a wilderness of enormous
passages of trite morality enlivened here and there with episodes
of cozening and purse-cutting and it has always been a matter of
speculation to me--for I have known these works ever since I was
a very small child--to what extent the seventeenth-century public
really liked the moralizings, to what extent it was merely hypocrisy,
and to what extent, again, readers were really tricked by the tiny
ha’-pennyworth of sack into consuming the intolerable quantity of
very dry bread. Obviously in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
mere length was not a deterrent, because there was an immense amount
of time for vacant minds to fill in and relatively very few books. So
that just as in distant colonies we will read home newspapers with
all the advertisements they contain three and four times over, so the
subjects of the James’s, Charles’s, and early George’s would accept
almost anything that could be read or listened to and probably from
being attuned to prolixities they would have disliked anything crisp if
anything crisp had been to be found.
That is perhaps a vain speculation, but a short consideration of the
first great English novelist, who was for a time at least nearly solely
novelist, would lead one to believe that such was indeed the case.
Defoe was born about the time of the restoration of Charles II--that
is to say, in 1660 or 1661--and died in 1731, aged in consequence
about seventy. And it is interesting to note that his novels were all
produced in the last twelve years of his life--as an expedient for
procuring bread and butter after bankruptcy produced by too ingenious
speculations both financial and philosophical.
That gets rid of the theory we might otherwise have entertained that
he was a Restoration novelist in the sense that the friends of Charles
II were Restoration dramatists. Nevertheless, the active portions
of Defoe’s life were so passed in the seventeenth century that it
comes naturally to think of him rather as Jacobean than Georgian or
eighteenth century. It is, that is to say, not in the pomposity of
the eighteenth century that Captain Singleton or Colonel Jack or Moll
Flanders seem to be clothed. They were rather mobile, swaggering,
piratical creatures seated on barrels and smoking their yards of clay
than strutters in brocades and ruffles. And probably Defoe’s ideal was
the substantial London merchant, sturdily planted over his stout calves
on square feet. That was his ideal because he had himself lamentably
failed in attaining to it.
His financial ideas are said to have found favour in succeeding
ages; his plans for increasing the national revenues, like Swift’s,
it is said, would have been admirable could they have been adopted.
So his moralities are practical rather than theological--it was to
the respectable suffrages of the merchants that his pious passages
addressed themselves. Thus his moralizings may have been less
hypocritical than those of most of his contemporaries, his predecessors
or descendants; but the aspiring after respectability was none the less
as marked.
What, however, is in him the most interesting from our special point
of view of tracing the development of the art of the novel is the
fact that Defoe may be called the first English or foreign writer to
strive after some sort of satisfactory convention for the novel. He
aimed, that is to say, at being convincing--at convincing his reader
that he was reading of real adventures set in the, as it were, official
biographies of real individuals. Such fictitious documents as _The
Apparition of Mrs. Veal_, the _Memoirs of a Cavalier_, or the _History
of the Plague in London_ are very near to historic forgeries and ought
perhaps to be regarded as fictitious journalism. For, whatever else he
was or wasn’t, Defoe was the first great journalist.
His _Review of the Affairs of France_, which was a periodical
news-pamphlet devoting itself to foreign affairs and what to-day
we should call Town Topics, was no doubt Defoe’s introduction to
fiction. When, that is to say, foreign news ran out he filled in his
space with the chronicles of an invented Scandalous Club and there, a
little in the style of La Bruyère and still more in the style of the
later _Tatlers_, _Ramblers_, and _Spectators_, he presented the Town
with slightly scandalous anecdotes of characters purely fictitious or
suggested faintly by well-known living men.
From that to inventing false news as in the case of the _Mrs.
Veal_ fascicule and from that again to the production of sham
autobiography-like _Robinson Crusoe_ is a very obvious progression. Few
journalists would make it to-day, but to-day news being more common is
more easily checked. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that, whether
it were his intention or no, he did evolve a convention for fiction
that up to a certain point was effective enough. That he intended so
to do there is not, as was on the other hand the case with his great
successor Samuel Richardson, any evidence. On the contrary, there is a
good deal of evidence that several of his works of fiction were really
intended as mystifications or frauds on the public.
That does not interfere with the artistic merit of his work, which
was very great. For whether you set out to hypnotize the public into
believing for the time being that they have attended at a scene, or
trick them into believing that they have read real memoirs when the
memoirs are fictitious, the artistic, if not the ethical, results are
nearly equal. There is, however, this difference: