put into the mouths of their characters sentiments with which they
themselves could not be imagined to sympathize. But that was done only
by characters marked “villain,” all the sympathetic characters having
to utter sentiments which were either those of the author or those with
which the author imagined the solid middle classes would agree. Young
Mr. Blifil, Mrs. Slipslop, and the rest might say very wicked things,
but they were so obviously wicked and absurd that no one could take
them with any seriousness either as pronouncements or as worthy to be
taken as the author’s opinion: Mr. Allworthy or Amelia Dobbin, on the
other hand, could never utter anything without the reader having to
exclaim: “_How_ virtuous!”... And consider the material success that
always awaited the good!
By the time the thirty years or so that stretched between 1790 and
1820 had impinged on the world it had gradually become evident, on the
Continent at least, that so many differing codes of morality could
synchronize in the same era, in the same nation and even in the same
small community--it had become so evident that if Simeon Stylites
and Oliver Cromwell were saints, Jesus Christ and Gautama Buddha and
several Chinese philosophers were very good men, that the Novel, if it
was at all to express its day, must express itself through figures less
amateurishly blacked than Uriah Heep and less sedulously whited than
the Cherryble brothers.
Changes in literary methods are brought about very slowly and permeate
more slowly still into the taste of the more or less unlettered classes
who make up the bulk of the desirable readers for an author. As a
rule the process begins with the younger writers who find tiresome
or ludicrous the accepted work of their day; a little later the more
experienced of readers, tiring in their turn of accepted methods in
the works they consume, turn with relief to the younger writers,
the professorial and established critics still thundering violently
against the younger schools. For, everywhere but in England, schools
establish themselves as soon as restlessnesses betray themselves
in artistic circles. The more experienced readers, in spite of the
critics, spreading abroad amongst the larger classes of the relatively
unlettered the taste for the newer modes, at first that larger class
become converts and then the professional critics whose bread and
butter depends on their following the public taste. So a school is
established and for a time holds its own. Then it gives place to other
modes.
That is the quite invariable process with all the products and all
the methods, of all the arts. But naturally, as the arts grow older,
their practitioners have a better chance of evolving newer and sounder
methods, for the number of their predecessors has inevitably increased.
Bunyan must evolve his method for himself; Defoe could study Bunyan;
Richardson, Bunyan and Defoe; Diderot, Richardson and his predecessors;
Stendhal could draw on the experience of four generations; Flaubert
on that of five; Conrad on that of six. This of course is a source
of danger to weaker brethren, for in each generation an enormous
amount of insipid art is turned out by inferior students receiving
their instruction at the hands of academic instructors. That cannot
be helped. But the fact remains that to a real master possessed of a
real individuality the study of the methods of his predecessors must
be of enormous use. Anyone at all instructed, reading the work of
Conrad, must find evidence of an almost lifelong and almost incredibly
minute study of writers preceding him and the amount of reading and
of study--for they are not the same thing--that must have gone to the
making of the author of _Ulysses_, who is certainly the greatest of all
prose virtuosi of the word--that beggars the imagination!
So it happened that in France from, say, the ’fifties to the early
’nineties of the last century, you had a place of dignity found for the
hitherto despised Novel--and in consequence you very speedily found
an accepted convention. For once an occupation is discovered to be
dignified you will very soon find that investigators of methods are
at work upon it. The game of marbles was, in my hey-day, regarded as
an occupation solely for little boys; but with the institution some
few years ago of an international championship it came in for the most
serious of study by grown men, and the photographs of last year’s
world-contest that a little time ago filled the public prints, showed
the competitors to be white-headed, grey-bearded, or very rotund of
figure. The champion was eventually found, as far as I can remember, in
a gentleman of sixty and over.
So with _Le Rouge et le Noir_ it became evident to the world that the
novel of discussion or of investigation was a possibility and, with
that discovery, the great novels began to come. The discussions to
be found in the very few works of fiction by Diderot were naturally
experimental and amateurish. Like Richardson he was tremendously on the
side of the more or less patriarchal and civic angels. Nevertheless,
he could give you a parasite talking in favour of his profession or
a rogue justifying his courses with a sincerity and a reasonable
ingenuousness that differed extremely from the exaggerated speeches
of the villains of the Fielding, the Dickens, or the commercial,
nuvvle. Stendhal, on the other hand, being what one might call a cold
Nietzschean--or it might be more just to say that Nietzsche was a
warmed-up Stendhalean--Stendhal, then, swung the balance rather to
the other extreme, tending to make his detrimentals argumentatively
masterly and his conventionally virtuous characters banal and impotent.
At any rate, with or after Stendhal, it became evident that, if the
novel was to have what is called _vraisemblance_, if it was so to
render life as to engross its reader, the novelist must not take sides
either with the virtuous whose virtues cause them to prosper or with
the vicious whose very virtues drive them always nearer and nearer to
the gallows or the pauper’s grave. That does not say that the author
need abstain from letting his conventionally virtuous characters
prosper to any thinkable extent. For however scientifically the
matter be considered, material if not intellectual honesty, sobriety,
continence, frugality, parsimony, and the other material virtues will
give any man a better chance of fourteen thousand--pounds or dollars--a
year than if he should be, however intellectually honest, financially
unsound, or a drunkard or a dreamer or one who never talks about the
baths he takes. The publisher, in fact, has a better chance of both
terrestrial and skyey mansions than the novelist.
Nevertheless, the novelist must not, by taking sides, exhibit his
preferences. He must not show his publisher as all shining benevolence
and well-soaped chastity without pointing out that his fellows, the
unwashed, incontinent, wastrel Villons of the world, sometimes practise
Robin Hoodish generosities and sometimes smooth with their works the
pillows of the agonized and sleepless. And in between the starving
Chatterton and the august house of, say, Longmans, Norton, Hurst,
Rees, and Co.--who did not publish Chatterton--he must place and set
in motion the teeming world of averagely sensual, averagely kindly,
averagely cruel, averagely honest, averagely imbecile human beings
whose providentially appointed mission would seem to be to turn into
the stuff that fills graveyards. So that it is not so much the function
of the novelist to hold the balance straight as, dispensing with all
scales or instruments for measuring, to show all the human beings of
his creation going about their avocations. He has, that is to say, to
render and not to tell. (If I say, “The wicked Mr. Blank shot nice
Blanche’s dear cat!” that is telling. If I say: “Blank raised his rifle
and aimed it at the quivering, black-burdened topmost bough of the
cherry-tree. After the report a spattered bunch of scarlet and black
quiverings dropped from branch to branch to pancake itself on the
orchard grass!” that is rather bad rendering, but still rendering. Or
if I say Monsieur Chose was a vulgar, coarse, obese and presumptuous
fellow--that is telling. But if I say, “He was a gentleman with red
whiskers that always preceded him through a doorway,” there you have
him rendered--as Maupassant rendered him.)
It was Flaubert who most shiningly preached the doctrine of the
novelist as Creator who should have a Creator’s aloofness, rendering
the world as he sees it, uttering no comments, falsifying no issues
and carrying the subject--the Affair--he has selected for rendering,
remorselessly out to its logical conclusion.
There came thus into existence the novel of Aloofness. It had even
in France something of a struggle for that existence and the author
of _Madame Bovary_ which was the first great novel logically--and
indeed passionately--to carry out this theory, had to face a criminal
prosecution because in the opinion of the Government of Napoleon III a
book that is not actively on the side of constituted authority and of
established morality is of necessity dangerous to morals and subversive
of good government.
That view--it is still largely entertained by the academic critics of
Anglo-Saxondom--is of course imbecile, but it is not without a certain
basis in the sentiments of common humanity. It is normal for poor,
badgered men to desire to read of a sort of representative type who,
as hero of a book, shall triumph over all obstacles with surprising
ease and as if with the backing of a deity. In that way they can dream
of easy ends for themselves. So they will dislike authors who do not
side with their own types. And as constituted governments and academic
bodies are made up of what the French call _hommes moyen sensuels_,
such corporations will do what they can to prevent novelists from not
taking sides with agreeable characters.
To the theory of Aloofness added itself, by a very natural process,
the other theory that the story of a novel should be the history of an
Affair and not a tale in which a central character with an attendant
female should be followed through a certain space of time until the
book comes to a happy end on a note of matrimony or to an unhappy
end--represented by a death. That latter--the normal practice of
the earlier novelist and still the normal expedient of the novel of
commerce or of escape--is again imbecile, but again designed to satisfy
a very natural human desire for finality. We have a natural desire to
be kidded into thinking that for nice agreeable persons like ourselves
life will finally bring us to a stage where an admirably planned
villa, a sempiternally charming--and yet changing--companion, and a
sufficiency of bathrooms, automobiles, gramophones, radios, and grand
pianos to establish us well in the forefront of the class to which
we hope to belong, shall witness the long, uneventful, fortunate and
effortless closing years of our lives. And our desire to be kidded into
that belief is all the stronger in that whenever we do examine with
any minuteness into the lives of our fellow human beings practically
nothing of the sort ever happens to them. So we say: “Life is too sad
for us to want to read books that remind us of it!”
But that is the justification for the novel of Aloofness, rendering
not the arbitrary felicities of a central character but the singular
normalities of an Affair. Normal humanity, deprived of the possibility
of viewing either lives or life, makes naturally for a pessimism that
demands relief either in the drugs of the happy endings of falsified
fictions or in the anodynes of superstition--one habit being as
fatal to the human intelligence as the other. But there is no need
to entertain the belief that life is sad any more than there is any
benefit to be derived from the contemplation of fictitious and banal
joys. The French peasant long ago evolved the rule that life is never
either as good or as bad as one expects it to be and so the French
peasant, like every proper man, faces life with composure--and reads
_Madame Bovary_, whilst the English, say, lawyer has never got beyond
_The Three Musketeers_.
The progress from the one to the other is simple and logical enough.
If you no longer allow yourself to take sides with your characters you
begin very soon to see that such a thing as a hero does not exist--a
discovery that even Thackeray could make. And, from there to seeing
that it is not individuals but enterprises or groups that succeed or
fail is a very small step to take. And then immediately there suggests
itself the other fact that it is not the mere death and still less
the mere marriage of an individual that brings to an end either a
group or an enterprise. It is perhaps going too far to say that _no_
man is indispensable, but it is far more usual to find that, when a
seemingly indispensable individual disappears for one reason or another
from an enterprise, that adventure proceeds with equanimity and very
little shock. I suppose the most co-operative and at the same time the
most one-man concern of to-day is the newspaper or the periodical
publication, and I suppose that in my time I must have been acquainted
with something at least of the affairs of at least a hundred journals
or periodicals each of them of necessity more or less autocratically
conducted, simply because a journal running along and having to
appear on a stated day, it is hardly ever practicable to get together
an editorial committee soon enough to make momentous decisions that
may have to be arrived at in a minute or two. Yet almost the first
discovery that the most strong-minded of editors makes after he has got
the periodical of his founding running for a month or two is that it
is the periodical that has taken charge--and the most notable fact of
journalism is that even when the most noted of editors suddenly dies
his paper in the immense majority of cases goes on running in perfect
tranquillity and with no apparent change for a period sufficiently long
to make it perfectly manifest that the great man was not in the least
indispensable.
And, as with newspapers, so with nearly all the other enterprises of
life. I am not of course saying that no great man exists or no founder
of great enterprises, though I should imagine that there must be
even more mute inglorious Miltons than ever got a chance of putting
their epics before the public. Still, the evolver of a new process or
a revived combination does exist and not infrequently does get his
chance: and there is no particular reason why the serious novelist
should not select the Affair of a successful individual for treatment.
That he seldom does so is usually because, having studied the cases
of successful men, he is apt to come to the conclusion that they are
not unseldom neither edifying as histories nor psychologically very
interesting. Alexander, that is to say, may have sighed for new worlds
to conquer, but it is probable that he would have bartered several of
his empires for the certainty of a little peace at his own fireside and
an improved digestion.
Flaubert, then, gave us _Madame Bovary_, which may be described as the
first great novel that aimed at aloofness. That it did not succeed
in its aim, Flaubert being in the end so fascinated by his Emma that
beside her and the ingenuous weakness of her genuine romanticism every
other character in the book is either hypocritical, mean or meanly
imbecile--that it did not succeed in that aim is not to be wondered at
when we consider the great, buoyant, and essentially optimist figure
that he was. And indeed, all authors being men, it is very unlikely
that the completely aloof novel will ever see the light. If you want
to be a novelist you must first be a poet and it is impossible to be a
poet and lack human sympathies or generosity of outlook. In _Education
Sentimentale_--which, if I had to decide the matter, though fortunately
I don’t, I should call the greatest novel ever written--the author of
_Madame Bovary_ gave us a nearly perfect group novel, written from a
standpoint of very nearly complete aloofness. In _Bouvard et Pécuchet_,
abandoning as it were human measures of success and failure, he takes
as his hero the imbecility of co-operative mankind and as his heroine
the futility of the accepted idea, and, being thus as it were detached
from the earth and its standards, he could draw in Bouvard and his
mate, two of the most lovable of human beings that ever set out upon a
forlorn hope. He died in the attempt.
The Flaubert school or group lasted sufficiently long in France,
though, after the late War, its influence was completely washed out
by a sort of eclecticism whose main features it is very difficult to
trace and into whose ramifications I do not intend to enter, for it
has had practically no time to influence the work of Anglo-Saxon novel
writers. Flaubert, Maupassant, Turgenev, the Gourmonts, Daudet, and the
rest of those who had their places at Brébant’s died in their allotted
years, the last survivor of any prominence being Anatole France, whose
death was greeted by an outburst of furious hatred in France such as
can seldom have greeted the passing of a distinguished figure. That
was because the French young, saddened and rendered starving by the
War which just preceded France’s death, turned with loathing from the
rather _débonnaire_ aloofness of the author of _Histoire Comique_. And
indeed if we Anglo-Saxons had suffered in the least as much as those
Latins I might well expect to find myself lynched for writing what I
have done above. I have seldom witnessed anything to equal the dismay
of a great French gathering of _littérateurs_ when their honoured
guest, an English novelist of distinction and indeed of internationally
public literary functions, told them in quite immaculate French that
all he knew of writing he had from France, and that all that he had
from France he had learned from the works of Guy de Maupassant! If he
had gone round that great assembly and had, with his glove, flicked
each one of the guests in the face, he could not have caused greater
consternation. Nevertheless it is true that Maupassant must have had
more influence on the Anglo-Saxon writer of to-day than any other
writer of fiction, Henry James possibly excepted.
In England, meantime, slightly before the 1890’s, the solid vogue
of--or the somnolent rumination over--the three-volumed nuvvle of
commerce had been seriously threatened by the slow spread of the idea
that writing might be an art, by a tremendous drop in the prices at
which books might be sold and by revolutionary attacks on Victorian
conventional morality. The loosening in morality need not concern
us except in so far as it shook the idea that the novelist must of
necessity colour all his characters with one or other hue, but the drop
in the price of books facilitated at least all sorts of experimental
adventures. Whilst the nuvvle remained a thirty-shilling three-decker
publishers must needs play for safety whether in morals or methods
and neither, say, the _Hill-top_ novels of Grant Allen, which were
pseudo-scientific attacks on conventional morality, nor yet _Almayer’s
Folly_, which was an attempt to introduce the artistic standards
and methods of Flaubert into Anglo-Saxondom, could have had even the
remotest chance of publication had the novel remained at its former
price.
On the other hand, such writers as Wilde, Stevenson, Pater, and
Meredith did, dealing mostly in verbal felicities or infelicities,
begin rather vaguely to perceive that writing was an art. Neither
Wilde nor Pater were novelists in the sense of devoting the greater
part of their time or energies to the art of fiction, and Stevenson
remained an avowed moralist, whilst Meredith devoted himself to large
national aspirations--which have nothing to do with art. And all the
four, as I have said, were essentially rather stylists _tels quels_
than anything else. When Pater, Wilde, or Meredith had succeeded in a
passage in showing what clever fellows they were they were satisfied
and Stevenson, if he had some conception of how to tell a story, was
far more gratified if he had succeeded in producing a quaint sentence
with turns of phrase after the manner of Sir Thomas Browne than intent
on the fact that every sentence--nay, every word!--should carry on the
effect of the story to be told.
But the mere fact that writers were then beginning to pay some
attention to manner rather than to matter or morals--that they were
intent on being writers rather than gentlemen--that mere fact is one
to excite lively gratitude in lands like ours and the job of being
a novelist is one of such excruciating difficulty that it would be
ungrateful to ask of pioneers that they should be more than pioneers.
The effect of their propaganda almost more than of their achievements,
combined with the cheapening of books and the impingement on
Anglo-Saxon shores of French examples of how things should be done--for
it was not until the late ’eighties that Flaubert, Maupassant, and
Turgenev really produced any overwhelming effect in either England or
the United States--the effect then of all these factors coming almost
together was an outburst of technical effort such as can have rarely
been witnessed in any other race or time. The idea that writing was an
art and as such had its dignity, that it had methods to be studied and
was therefore such another acknowledged craft as is shoe-making--such
ideas acted for a time, in the days of the _Yellow Book_, like magic on
a whole horde of English--and still more of American--writers.
I have of course not here the space to go with any minuteness into the
history of the _Yellow Book_ period. Founded by two Americans--Henry
James and Henry Harland--in London where circumstances were certainly
more favourable than they would have been in, say, New York or Boston,
the _Yellow Book_ did undoubtedly promote an interest in technical
matters that hardly any other periodical or Movement could have
done. James was a direct pupil of Turgenev; Harland and most of the
contributors to the periodical were products rather of a general
“Frenchness” than the students of any one author--the products of a
blend of Mallarmé, Mérimée, Murger, and Maupassant and a Quartier Latin
frame of mind and personal untidiness.
Its defect as a movement was that its supporters, also, probably aimed
rather at displaying personal cleverness than at the concealment of
themselves beneath the surfaces of their works. They had not yet learnt
the sternest of all lessons--that the story is the thing, and the story
and then the story, and that there is nothing else that matters in the
world.
_L’ENVOI_
IN THE LAST QUARTER OF A CENTURY
When the dust of the _Yellow Book_ period died away with the trial and
disappearance of Wilde there did nevertheless remain in the public
and the literary mind some conception that novel-writing was an art
and that the novel was a vehicle by means of which every kind of
psychological or scientific truth connected with human life and affairs
could be very fittingly conveyed. To-day I imagine that there would not
be many found to deny that it is the vehicle by means of which those
truths can be most fittingly investigated. To that we may some day
return.
In the meantime the _Yellow Book_ period also left behind it three men
whose names must for ever stand out for the student of the history of
the English Novel--they were Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Joseph
Conrad. I do not purpose here to attempt an estimate of any one of the
three; I merely wish to point out what it was that distinguished them
from all of their predecessors and nearly all of their distinguished
contemporaries. Their distinguished contemporaries are all, most
fortunately, still alive and so beyond the reach of my pen--but it
must, I imagine, he fairly obvious that, say, Mr. Wells, Mr. Kipling,
Mr. Galsworthy, or Mr. Arnold Bennett are each solitary figures,
ploughing lonely furrows and expressing their admirable selves in
admirable ways known only to themselves.
About that other triad there was a certain solidarity, a certain
oneness of method and even a certain comradeship. They lived in the
same corner of England, saw each other often and discussed literary
methods more thoroughly and more frequently than can ever at any other
time in England have been the case. To be sure, not one of the three
was English.