in Carthage before its destruction by the Romans you might almost
answer in the affirmative with truth, whereas in the same scale of
things if you were asked if you had been present at the Fire of London
and had read Defoe’s _History_ you could not answer more than that you
had read a very authentic account by an eye-witness. And inasmuch as an
authentic rendering--a rendering made with extreme artistic skill--will
give you more the sense of having been present at an event than if
you had actually been corporeally present, whereas the reading of the
most skilful of literary forgeries will only leave you with the sense
that you have read a book, the artistic rendering is the more valuable
to you and therefore the greater achievement. I once heard a couple
of French marine engineers agreeing that although they had traversed
the Indian Ocean many times and had several times passed through, or
through the fringes of, typhoons, neither of them had ever been in one
till they had read Conrad’s _Typhoon_. And indeed I have myself had the
singular experience of looking out at dawn from a tent-flap and seeing
the tents of a sleeping army running up into deep woods. And having
just been reading Stephen Crane’s _Red Badge of Courage_, which opens
with the description of the dawn breaking on the tents of a sleeping
army, for some minutes I was confused, not being able to understand why
the one or two men that I saw about were dressed in our khaki instead
of in the blue of the Federal troops of the United States during the
Civil War. That is what I mean by saying that one might answer with
truth that one had been present at a rendered scene although one might
never physically have been present there. For to me it is certain that
I was at that given moment more present at the preparation of a battle
somewhere near Gettysburg in the ’sixties of last century than actually
amongst British troops in support at a battle that was then proceeding
in the Belgian Salient in September, 1916.
To produce that or similar effects is the ambition of the novel of
to-day.
Two centuries before--by, say, 1716--the novel had proceeded but a very
little way. I should say that Bunyan in the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ and
still more in _The Holy War_ had gone as far as any writer till that
day and dying in 1688 he anticipated Defoe as novelist by at least a
generation. Ostensibly the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ is an allegorical work
just as the English Bible is a theological or even a doctrinal one;
but just as in the Morality Plays which were produced by professionally
religious writers or actors and the Mysteries which were religious
spectacles produced and acted under the direction of clerics by members
of the professedly lay Guilds--just as in those productions the real
attraction was the imaginative presentation of realities rather than
the pious aspirations of authors or producers, so it is strongly to
be suspected that the realistically human appeal of the _Pilgrim’s
Progress_ far outweighs the moral or religious interests. Indeed in
_The Holy War_, which is an allegorical presentation of the eternal
struggle between the unseen forces that make for good and evil on
earth, the presentation of seventeenth-century warfare is for long
passages so realistic that one might accuse Bunyan of having thrown
up the moral sponge and of taking a pagan pleasure in fighting for
fighting’s sake. He renders, in short, battles of the Great Rebellion
in which he took part or on whose outskirts he was present. He rendered
them and did not write about them.
But the moral fervour and fierce sincerity of Bunyan are so far above
suspicion that the mere fact that at times he was carried away in a
sheer outburst of the artist’s spirit and love of terrestrial aspects
for the mere sake of those aspects--his moral fervour is so great and
so deserving of respect that no slightest tang of hypocrisy can attach
to him any more than it can attach to the translators of the English
Bible. And, if we except Smollett and possibly Samuel Richardson who
was the real great precursor of the modern novel, we cannot say as much
for any other English novelist who wrote before the later years of the
nineteenth century. For it is impossible to absolve such writers as
Defoe, Fielding, or Thackeray from the charge of deliberately writing
with their tongues in their cheeks passages of virtuous aspirations
that were in no way any aspirations of theirs and that in consequence
very seriously detracted from the value of their works as art.
With Bunyan that was not the case. He desired to inculcate certain
moral teachings and he had the sense to see that the best way to
inculcate a doctrine and to get it deep into the brain and marrow
of the reader was to make him be vicariously present at scenes the
contemplation of which would cause certain moral or practical ideas
to arise in the mind. And the deservedly prodigious--the deservedly
unrivalled popular appeal of the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ is sufficient
testimony at once to the immense skill and the unparalleledly simple
moral fervour of its author. For the reader attending on the episode
of the Slough of Despond is actually in a bog a little way away from
his native town and the man who reads of Giant Despair is in all truth
confronted with either Gog or Magog of the Lord Mayor’s procession in
the very flesh. At any rate, it is to be remembered that, the world
over, together with the _Imitation of Christ_ and _Madame Bovary_, the
_Pilgrim’s Progress_ is the most read book in Christendom. And this we
must put down to the artistic skill--to the power of presentation and
of rendering of the author.
For there is no other criterion of art but success, and the more
lasting the success the better the art. I wish to strike that note
very strongly because as soon as one begins to talk about an art
misinterpretations come creeping in and one is at once suspected of at
the least asserting one’s possession of superior knowledges or--let
us say--of high-hatting one’s neighbour. Nothing is less true. The
knowledge of the art of novel writing is open to every one who takes
the trouble to like one book better than another and the literary
tastes of men are fairly identical the world over and throughout time.
The great art of the world is found in books that are familiar to
millions, if not the world over, then, at any rate, down several ages
of several continents.
The difference between Bunyan and his predecessors is one more than
anything of whole-heartedness and if there is only one work of
fiction--for one can hardly call the Bible a work of fiction--if there
is one work of prose fiction in England that, written before the birth
of Bunyan, has survived to our time it is Malory’s _Morte d’Arthur_ and
that survives because Malory whole-heartedly and unassumingly collected
such legends of the Arthurian cycle as he liked and wrote them down
simply and without flourishes. Otherwise, none of the pre-Elizabethan
prose romances could to-day be read with any other than archæological
pleasure, nor could any of the prose fiction which began to be mildly
abundant in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean days. I suppose you
might read Deloney’s _Jack of Newbury_ with some pleasure if you were
interested in Elizabethan guild or household mysteries. But I cannot
imagine anyone reading for pleasure either _Euphues_ or Greene’s
_Menaphon_, either Lodge’s _Rosalynde_ or even Sidney’s _Arcadia_. One
may glance at them from time to time, more or less in order to keep
one’s end up against the literary archæologist, but they would all,
including _Amadis de Gaul_, prove intolerable as books for “reading
in”--to use an old phrase which meant a long, long, engrossed perusal.
Nash’s _Jack of Wilton_ has been compared to _Don Quixote_, but there
is no sense in reading the Englishman’s satire of forgotten manners
when one can re-read Cervantes’ satire on things that are at the root
of the human heart.
The difference between Malory and the earlier romances or _Euphues_
or _Menaphon_ is simply the difference in the relative sincerities of
their authors. Malory records what a simple mediaeval knight liked
and to some extent how he looked at the world: it is modest and, its
author being wrapped up in his subject, the work has no eye to the
modes of the time--or to displaying the cleverness of the writer. You
can engross yourself in the _Morte d’Arthur_ if your tastes lie in the
least in Malory’s direction and, except that finally you may arrive at
the conclusion that he was a modest and pleasant gentleman, you need
never give the author a thought.
With _Amadis de Gaul_ or _Euphues_, on the other hand, you are for
ever thinking of the cleverness of the author. And you are meant to
think of the cleverness of the author, and so you are in the case
of _Rosalynde_ and an enormous proportion of the Elizabethan drama.
The prose and even the blank verse of that age sparkled with trope,
metaphor, image, simile, plays upon words, conceits and every type of
verbal felicity, so that the last thing that comes to the mind in the
case of almost any work of that age is the subject treated of.
Hundreds of thousands--nay millions--of readers have read the
_Pilgrim’s Progress_ and _Robinson Crusoe_ without giving a thought to
or even knowing the name of Defoe or Bunyan. I asked the other day in
France a child who was reading about Crusoe who had written it and she
replied: “Je crois que c’est par ... par Madame de Ségur ... Ou non:
peut-être, Madame d’Aulnoy. Enfin, je n’y ai jamais pensé.” And that
is about the highest compliment that could be paid to Defoe. I may as
well add the same child’s comment on the story itself. She did not
much like _Robinson Crusoe_ because, she said, the sufferings depicted
in it were true. She liked, like all children, to read of sufferings,
bloodsheddings, and horrors but only as long as she could believe that
they were invented, whereas she was of opinion that the prolonged
loneliness and fears of Crusoe had actually occurred. Similarly she
found the story of the Crucifixion insupportable. The root of all adult
criticism is to be found in those revelations.
As long, that is to say, as a work remains in fashion you can be
contented to read it in order to remain in the fashion yourself. It
matters very little to you that whereas _Robinson Crusoe_ is just
_Robinson Crusoe_, or _Othello_ just _Othello_, _Euphues_ is Lyly’s
_Euphues_, the _Groat’s Worth of Wit_ Greene’s _Groat’s Worth_ or the
_Spanish Tragedy_ Kyd’s _Spanish Tragedy_. For it is impossible to talk
of almost any sixteenth-century work without prefixing the author’s
name, if the name is known--simply because the attraction, and even the
attraction that it once had, lies and lay in the verbal juggleries of
the author. I must have read _Euphues_ once at least right through and
have looked into it several times--but I have not the least idea what
it is all about. And even although I have read Lyly’s _Campaspe_ once
or twice, I remember only that the plot is a classical plot--and the
lyric:
Cupid and my Campaspe played
At cards for kisses, Cupid paid....
The fact is that with Elizabeth English became a supple and easily
employable language and, making the discovery that words could be
played with as if they were oranges or gilt balls to be tossed half a
dozen together in the air, mankind rushed upon it as colts will dash
into suddenly opened rich and easy pastures. So it was, for the rich
and cultured, much more a matter of who could kick heels the higher and
most flourish tail and mane than any ambition of carrying burdens or
drawing loads.
In the end, however, what humanity needs is that burdens should be
carried, and provided that things get from place to place the name
of carter or horse is of very secondary importance. If it is in the
fashion we will go down to the meadow and watch the colts cavorting:
but all the while we are aware that the business of words as of colts
or of the arts is to carry things and we tire reasonably soon of
watching horse-play! For if I say: “I am hungry,” the business of those
words is to carry that information to you, and if you read the _Iliad_
it is that the art of that epic may make Hecuba significant to you.
Consider the prose of Cranmer!
CHAPTER THREE
TOWARDS FLAUBERT
It may at first sight seem curious that a section of a small work
devoted to the English--and of course the American--Novel should be
captioned with the name of a French novelist. But in the first place
the art and still more the frame of mind of the Sage of Croisset are
so deep-embedded in the art and frame of mind of the English and still
more of the American novelist and all thought of the great, Nordic work
of “that poor dear Gustave,” as Mr. Henry James used to call him, is
so cast out of all French literary practices or aspirations to-day that
if Flaubert is not an English novelist his Titanic and Norman ghost has
no place at all. To state one of those half-truths that are infinitely
illuminating, you may say that without _Madame Bovary_, _Babbitt_ could
never have existed and without _Bouvard et Pécuchet_ there could have
been no _Way of All Flesh_. For all I know Mr. Sinclair Lewis may
never have read a word of Flaubert and I will bet my hat that, for the
purposes of this discussion, the shade of Samuel Butler would declare
that he knew no French at all. But the point is that, without those two
works in French, those two national monuments in English could hardly
at this time exist or weigh with the public since the public would not
be prepared for them.
Let us go a step further and declare that without Cranmer we should
have had another three centuries to wait for Flaubert, Henry James,
Stephen Crane, Joseph Conrad, Mr. John Galsworthy, and my friend “Red”
Lewis. For without the English Prayer Book and its follower in date
and style the English Bible, with or without Cranmer’s suppressed
preface, and without the followers in date and style of Defoe, Bunyan,
and Samuel Richardson, how should we have to-day any English prose,
novel-form or any English frame of mind? Or any Anglo-American Concord
literature; or any British Empire or any Anglo-Saxon anything?
You may say that that is stretching things a little. And yet I do not
know that it is. Let us make concessions. If you will concede to me my
little point about the descent of the English Novel from Cranmer’s
prayer book and the English Bible--which cannot matter to you at all,
I will willingly concede to you that it was the phraseology if not the
doctrine of the Book of Common Prayer and the frame of mind of the Old
Testament As By Law Appointed that gave to England the Empire of India
and to the world the United States of North America, those two shining
products of English stiff-neckedness and non-theological Bible-reading.
For how without the Books of Kings could either Clive or, say, Andrew
Jackson have found heart or courage to continue in their courses? Of
course a thought or so might be given to North’s _Plutarch_ that was
published in 1579.
Be that as it may, what I am here getting at is the fact that preceding
and underlying the ornate florescences of Lyly and the prodigious
formlessnesses of Spenser and preceding and underlying the incredible
verbal felicity and neat plottings of Shakespeare himself went the
stream of dogged, menacing prose and the realist’s native imagery
of those two religious compilations. And that subterranean stream
immensely fecundated--to make no larger claim--at once the Anglo-Saxon
national character and the literature that is to be found in the
English language.
I am aware that here we are on ticklish ground and that reformers and
the advanced generally deny with a great deal of heat that literature
has any influence at all on peoples. I remember once being furiously
lectured by the most moral and one of the most advanced of English
novelists--being furiously and minatorily taken to task because mildly
and to make conversation I alleged that _Don Quixote_ had something to
do with the passing of the sham chivalric spirit in Europe. The lecture
was indeed so furious that, being a non-combative person and caring
nothing about the matter, I have from that day to this rather given up
considering the subject at all. You see, my friend the novelist was so
notoriously virtuous and benevolent that hitherto I should have hated
to hurt his feelings by advancing that anyone could be influenced by
any book at all. For what he alleged, like an apostle announcing some
kind of creed, was that populaces influence literature--that Cervantes
was produced because a widespread spirit of mockery for chivalry, real
or sham, was so abroad in the world that _Don Quixote_ was written
merely in answer to a demand, as articles on the Calcutta Sweepstake
are written about the time when Derby Day approaches.
As to that I am no authority and the reader must settle for himself
whether that hen or that egg came first--I mean whether the spirit of
the English populace demanded first the English Prayer Book and the
English Bible and demanded afterwards in due course the _Pilgrim’s
Progress_ and _Robinson Crusoe_, or whether the English Bible so
influenced the English people that they demanded in due course the
works of Bunyan and Defoe. Or as a third proposition: Did the English
Bible so influence Bunyan and both so influence Defoe that in the end
the product was _Pamela_, the short tales of Diderot, the novels of
Stendhal, Flaubert, and his successors and so on until the novel of
to-day was arrived at?
As I have said, I do not immensely care about the matter. Bunyan
may never have read the Bible, Defoe may never have read Bunyan, or
Richardson Defoe. But it makes such a convenient pattern to assume that
writers are descended the one from the other that I mean to assume it
and the reader must modify the theory how he will.
Regarded from that point of view, in pre- as in post-Elizabethan days
and underlying Elizabethan days themselves, you did have that stern
but decorated prose and that determination to rely on illustrations,
parables, and images drawn solely from material to be found about
normal people the world over and throughout time; simultaneously, on
the surface of things you had a courtlier and more elaborated prose
which had the Sublime as its ideal and nothing less vulgar than
passages modelled on Juvenal or the plays of Plautus for its light
relief. The Bible says: “Take us the little foxes, the foxes that eat
our grapes” as an illustration of love, and “He shall feed his sheep”
as the highest expression of the divine functionings of the Saviour.
The _Faerie Queene_ cannot deal with any fox or any hound of lower
extraction than Cerberus and the only redeemer who could have saved the
world for the writers of Romances was, in his panoply, King Arthur with
Lancelot, Gawain, and the rest of his apostles all pricking over the
plains of Camelot.
So let us say that it was to the homespun illustrations, the simple
imagery and the stern diction of the Bible that we owe Bunyan--for
obviously Bunyan read the Scriptures, year in and year out, during
a lifetime of Bedford Gaol, of persecution and turmoil, whereas the
only remains of the courtlier modes are found to come from North’s
_Plutarch_ which influenced profoundly Shakespeare and possibly Sir
Thomas Browne. But Shakespeare obviously could not have any successors
and Browne found none till R. L. S. came to be his sedulous ape. So
that the influence of North’s translation remained, if profound, at
least rather ethical than literary--until it was finally ousted by the
versions of the Langhornes and Church’s of days much more modern.
Our space not being boundless we must now skip to Richardson. For
Richardson I have the profoundest respect that amounts as nearly as
possible to an affection--if that is to say it is possible to have an
affection for a man whose death preceded one’s birth by one hundred
and twelve years. I do not apologize for the fact that _Pamela_ is my
personal favourite, whereas the graver critics and mankind in general
prefer _Clarissa_. By that the reader need not be guided, but he should
certainly pay a good deal of attention to the works of Richardson--and
indeed to Richardson himself.
That tranquil person came into the world in 1689--twenty-seven or
eight years after the birth of Defoe and one year after the death of
Bunyan. But whereas both of his predecessors seem to strike notes
almost entirely of the seventeenth century, Richardson seems to be
absolutely of the eighteenth and, with him, sentimentality was born
in the world of the novel. That perhaps was necessary to an age that
banished if not conventional, then at least doctrinal, moralizings to
its collections of sermons in volume form. For them of course there was
a prodigious demand.
Of course, too, it would be wrong to assert that moralizing found no
place in the novels of Richardson since the high moral purpose breathes
from every pore of his pages. But it was not with moralizing that he
made his primary appeal as had been the case with Bunyan, nor was it
likely that had he so done he would have found many readers. No, it is
his sentimentalizing that is his E string.
Against that I have nothing to say. Anglo-Saxons are sentimentalists
before everything and in all their arts, and it is probable that
without sentimentality as an ingredient no Anglo-Saxon artist
could work: certainly he could have no appeal. To produce national
masterpieces in paint Turner must bathe his canvases deep in that
gentle fluid; the English lyric is a marvel of sentimentality and so is
English domestic architecture with its mellow--or mellowed!--red brick,
its dove-cotes, its south walls for netted fruits. So the first of
modern novelists must be one of the greatest of sentimentalists. And on
those lines his appeal is universal and everlasting.
Only to-day an American left the ship on which I am writing in the port
of Lisbon and, I happening to mention because he was in my mind the
name of Richardson, this American--professor at that and practitioner
of a sister art--this American gentleman assured me solemnly that he
read _Clarissa Harlowe_ at least twice every year and cried often
during each reading. Now there must be some reason for this phenomenon,
which appears very singular. It is not, however, rare, for the hottest
literary discussions I have ever had in England--where, of course, the
discussion of literature is not in good form--have been with laymen
like professors or lawyers as to the relative merits of _Pamela_ and
_Clarissa_.
For me, I read Richardson for a hearty and wholesome dose of
sentimentality and if one does that one may as well have that quality
laid on as thickly as it will go. And it seems to me that the history
of a serving-maid who resists her master’s efforts at seduction and
ultimately forces him to marry her is a more sentimental affair than
that of a young lady of quality who permits herself to be seduced by a
relatively commonplace Lothario. For myself I have always felt inclined
to cheer over the success of the one young female rather than to weep
for the tribulations of the other. Pamela certainly seems to be the
more sporting character of the two.
Still, one should perhaps not read Richardson for his sporting quality,
and that sort of thing is really no affair of mine. The main point is
that Samuel Richardson is still read and read with enthusiasm. I have
even met persons who were engrossed by the conversations in the Cedar
Parlour of _Sir Charles Grandison_.
That Richardson’s tender muse was at times too much for the robuster
and more cynical taste of his age is proved by the fact that Fielding’s
first famous novel was begun as a parody on the first famous novel of
Richardson. By that date the novel of commerce was well on the way to
the market and young ladies lying on sofas reading the latest fiction
or furiously sending their maids to the circulating libraries for the
next five volumes of their latest favourite--such young ladies were
familiar features of the social landscape. Literature had, in fact,
become a sound, if not an immensely lucrative, proposition.
And it is pleasant to think that, happy as he was in everything that he
touched, Richardson was not only novelist but printer and publisher and
quite a warm business man in either capacity. He was, too, a favourite
correspondent and companion of innumerable young ladies who consulted
him as to their amatory predicaments and because of that he is not only
the first novelist in the modern sense of the word but also the first
literary feminist. You might call him an eighteenth-century Henry James
and not go so far wrong.
At any rate, he stands alone as a modern novelist and had in England
neither appreciable imitators nor rivals until the arrival on the scene
of the author of the _Barchester Towers_ series.