papers to say that in the first decade of this century a group of
foreigners occupied that corner of England and were engaged in plotting
against the English novel. At the time that appeared to be the
sort of patriotic nonsense that occupied our minds a good deal just
after the War--but Mr. Wells, as usual, was right. The extent of the
conspiracy was this: the works of those three writers whose influence
on the Anglo-Saxon--and even to some extent on the British--novel was
overwhelming--were united by a common technique and their literary aims
were to all intents exactly the same.
All three treated their characters with aloofness; all three kept
themselves, their comments and their prejudices out of their works, and
all three rendered rather than told. On the whole those characteristics
which never before characterized the English novel characterize it
to-day. No one, that is, would to-day set out to capture the suffrages
of either the more instructed or of even the almost altogether naïf
with a novel of the type of those written by the followers of Bunyan,
Defoe, Fielding, Charles Reade, or William Black. No author would, like
Thackeray, to-day intrude his broken nose and myopic spectacles into
the middle of the most thrilling scene he ever wrote, in order to tell
you that, though his heroine was rather a wrong ’un, his own heart was
in his right place.
James, Conrad, and Crane differed from each other in minute points
and indeed in broader characteristics. James was more introspective,
Crane more incisive in his writing, Conrad more nearly approached the
ordinary definition of the poet and was less remorselessly aloof than
either of the others. But their common, Gallic origin united them, so
that they had before all for their strongest passion the desire to
convey vicarious experience to the reader. Conrad wrote of his literary
aim: “It is above all to make you see,” and Crane might have written
the same thing had he ever written about himself. And Henry James might
have written if he could ever have brought himself to write anything so
unqualified about his aims: “It is above all to make you feel!” At any
rate, the common aim was to take the reader, immerse him in an Affair
so completely that he was unconscious either of the fact that he was
reading or of the identity of the author, so that in the end he might
say--and believe: “I have been in a drawing-room overlooking Boston
Common, in a drinking saloon in Yellow Sky or beneath the palm leaves
of Palembang! I _have_ been!”
At this aim, to which they certainly attained, they arrived by certain
technical devices or rules. Most of these I have already foreshadowed
and as I am not here writing a technical work, I do not propose to go
into the others at all closely. The only sound technical rules are
those that are founded on a study of what pleases: if what you write
is to please you must see how your predecessors did it. There can be
nothing either highbrow or recondite about your efforts; the nearer you
are to your fellowman who differs from you only in not having literary
ambitions or gifts, the nearer you are to universality; the nearer you
are to universality the greater you are, the more nearly you will have
justified your existence.
You must therefore write as simply as you can--with the extreme of the
simplicity that is granted to you, and you must write of subjects that
spring at your throat. But why subjects appeal to you you have no means
of knowing. The appeal of the subject is nevertheless the only thing
that is open to your native genius--the only thing as to which you can
say: “I cannot help it: that is what appealed to me!” You must never,
after that, say: “I write like this because I want to,” but you must
say: “I write like this because I hope it is what the unspoiled reader
likes!”
Having got your subject you will, if you are prudent, live with it for
a long, long time before you sit down to write it. During that time
you will be doing at odd moments what Conrad used to call “squeezing
the guts out of it.” For it is a mistake to think that what looks like
the rendering of an ordinary affair is ever an artless chronicling.
Your “subject” may be just the merest nothing in the way of intrigue
or plot--but to the merest nothings in human affairs all the intrigues
of the universe have contributed since first this earth swung away, a
drop of molten metal, from the first of all principles. Your “subject”
might be no more than a child catching frogs in a swamp or the emotions
of a nervous woman in a thunderstorm, but all the history of the world
has gone to putting child or woman where they are and up to either
subject you might lead with an epic as thrilling in its end as that of
_Othello_ or an episode as poignant with absolute relief as came to the
world on the eleventh of November, 1918. You have at your disposal
heredity, environment, the concatenation of the effects of the one
damn thing after another that life is--and Destiny who is blind and
august. Those are the colours of your palette: it is for you to see
that line by line and filament of colour by filament, the reader’s eye
is conducted to your culminating point.
That is, then, all that I have to say of the gradual progress of the
English novel--to the point where it becomes the Novel. I have traced
out as plainly as I could the lines of the pattern as it appears to me
and the reader must use that pattern for what jumpings off of his own
he chooses to make.
That this is not the final stage of the Novel is obvious; there will
be developments that we cannot foresee, strain our visions how we may.
There are probably--humanity being stable, change the world how it
may--there are probably eternal principles for all the arts, but the
applications of those principles are eternally changing, or eternally
revolving. It is, for instance, an obvious and unchanging fact that if
an author intrudes his comments into the middle of his story he will
endanger the illusion conveyed by that story--but a generation of
readers may come along who would prefer witnessing the capers of the
author to being carried away by stories and that generation of readers
may coincide with a generation of writers tired of self-obliteration.
So you might have a world of Oscar Wildes or of Lylys. Or you might,
again, have a world tired of the really well constructed novel
every word of which carries its story forward: then you will have a
movement towards diffuseness, backboneless sentences, digressions, and
inchoatenesses.
But, for the moment, the outline that I have traced for you seems to
have got about as far as we ourselves have.
Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd., Frome and London
Transcriber’s note: Italics are indicated by _underscores_.
As no original book cover image is available, a cover image made by
the transcriber is placed in the public domain.