Somebody says the novel is doomed. Somebody else says it is the green
bay tree getting greener. Everybody says something, so why shouldn’t I!
Mr. Santayana sees the modern novel expiring because it is getting so
thin; which means, Mr. Santayana is bored.
I am rather bored myself. It becomes harder and harder to read the
_whole_ of any modern novel. One reads a bit, and knows the rest; or
else one doesn’t want to know any more.
This is sad. But again, I don’t think it’s the novel’s fault. Rather the
novelists’.
You can put anything you like in a novel. So why do people _always_ go
on putting the same thing? Why is the _vol au vent_ always chicken!
Chicken _vol au vents_ may be the rage. But who sickens first shouts
first for something else.
The novel is a great discovery: far greater than Galileo’s telescope or
somebody else’s wireless. The novel is the highest form of human
expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the
absolute.
In a novel, everything is relative to everything else, if that novel is
art at all. There may be didactic bits, but they aren’t the novel. And
the author may have a didactic “purpose” up his sleeve. Indeed most
great novelists have, as Tolstoi had his Christian-socialism, and Hardy
his pessimism, and Flaubert his intellectual desperation. But even a
didactic purpose so wicked as Tolstoi’s or Flaubert’s cannot put to
death the novel.
You can tell me, Flaubert had a “philosophy”, not a “purpose”. But what
is a novelist’s philosophy but a purpose on a rather higher level? And
since every novelist who amounts to anything has a philosophy--even
Balzac--any novel of importance has a purpose. If only the “purpose” be
large enough, and not at outs with the passional inspiration.
Vronsky sinned, did he? But also the sinning was a consummation devoutly
to be wished. The novel makes that obvious: in spite of old Leo Tolstoi.
And the would-be-pious Prince in _Resurrection_ is a muff, with his
piety that nobody wants or believes in.
There you have the greatness of the novel itself. It won’t _let_ you
tell didactic lies, and put them over. Nobody in the world is anything
but delighted when Vronsky gets Anna Karénina. Then what about the
sin?--Why, when you look at it, all the tragedy comes from Vronsky’s
and Anna’s fear of _society_. The monster was social, not phallic at
all. They couldn’t live in the pride of their sincere passion, and spit
in Mother Grundy’s eye. And that, that cowardice, was the real “sin”.
The novel makes it obvious, and knocks all old Leo’s teeth out. “As an
officer I am still useful. But as a man, I am a ruin,” says Vronsky--or
words to that effect. Well what a skunk, collapsing as a man and a male,
and remaining merely as a social instrument; an “officer”, God love
us!--merely because people at the opera turn backs on him! As if
people’s backs weren’t preferable to their faces, anyhow!
And old Leo tries to make out, it was all because of the phallic sin.
Old liar! Because where would any of Leo’s books be, without the phallic
splendour? And then to blame the column of blood, which really gave him
all his life riches! The Judas! Cringe to a mangy, bloodless Society,
and try to dress up that dirty old Mother Grundy in a new bonnet and
face-powder of Christian-Socialism. Brothers indeed! Sons of a castrated
Father!
The novel itself gives Vronsky a kick in the behind, and knocks old
Leo’s teeth out, and leaves us to learn.
It is such a bore that nearly all great novelists have a didactic
purpose, otherwise a philosophy, directly opposite to their passional
inspiration. In their passional inspiration, they are all phallic
worshippers. From Balzac to Hardy, it is so. Nay, from Apuleius to E. M.
Forster. Yet all of them, when it comes to their philosophy, or what
they think-they-are, they are all crucified Jesuses. What a bore! And
what a burden for the novel to carry!
But the novel has carried it. Several thousands of thousands of
lamentable crucifixions of self-heroes and self-heroines. Even the silly
duplicity of _Resurrection_, and the wickeder duplicity of Salammbô,
with that flayed phallic Matho, tortured upon the Cross of a gilt
Princess.
You can’t fool the novel. Even with man crucified upon a woman: his
“dear cross”. The novel will show you how dear she was: dear at any
price. And it will leave you with a bad taste of disgust against these
heroes who _turn_ their women into a “dear cross”, and _ask_ for their
own crucifixion.
You can fool pretty nearly every other medium. You can make a poem
pietistic, and still it will be a poem. You can write _Hamlet_ in drama:
if you wrote him in a novel, he’d be half comic, or a trifle suspicious:
a suspicious character, like Dostoevsky’s Idiot. Somehow, you sweep the
ground a bit too clear in the poem or the drama, and you let the human
Word fly a bit too freely. Now in a novel there’s always a tom-cat, a
black tom-cat that pounces on the white dove of the Word, if the dove
doesn’t watch it; and there is a banana-skin to trip on; and you know
there is a water-closet on the premises. All these things help to keep
the balance.
If, in Plato’s _Dialogues_, somebody had suddenly stood on his head and
given smooth Plato a kick in the wind, and set the whole school in an
uproar, then Plato would have been put into a much truer relation to the
universe. Or if, in the midst of the Timaeus, Plato had only paused to
say: “And now, my dear Cleon--(or whoever it was)--I have a bellyache,
and must retreat to the privy: this too is part of the Eternal Idea of
man”, then we never need have fallen so low as Freud.
And if, when Jesus told the rich man to take all he had and give it to
the poor, the rich man had replied: “_All right, old sport! You are
poor, aren’t you? Come on, I’ll give you a fortune. Come on!_” Then a
great deal of snivelling and mistakenness would have been spared us all,
and we might never have produced a Marx and a Lenin. If only Jesus had
_accepted_ the fortune!
Yes, it’s a pity of pities that Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John didn’t
write straight novels. They did write novels; but a bit crooked. The
_Evangels_ are wonderful novels, by authors “with a purpose.” Pity
there’s so much Sermon-on-the-Mounting.
“Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John
Went to bed with their breeches on!”--
as every child knows. Ah, if only they’d taken them off!
Greater novels, to my mind, are the books of the Old Testament, Genesis,
Exodus, Samuel, Kings, by authors whose purpose was so big, it didn’t
quarrel with their passionate inspiration. The purpose and the
inspiration were almost one. Why, in the name of everything bad, the two
ever should have got separated, is a mystery! But in the modern novel
they are hopelessly divorced. When there _is_ any inspiration there, to
be divorced from.
This, then, is what is the matter with the modern novel. The modern
novelist is possessed, hag-ridden, by such a stale old “purpose”, or
idea-of-himself, that his inspiration succumbs. Of course he denies
having any didactic purpose at all: because a purpose is supposed to be
like catarrh, something to be ashamed of. But he’s got it. They’ve all
got it: the same snivelling purpose.
They’re all little Jesuses in their own eyes, and their “purpose” is to
prove it. Oh Lord!--_Lord Jim!_ _Sylvestre Bonnard!_ _If Winter Comes!_
_Main Street!_ _Ulysses!_ _Pan!_ They are all pathetic or sympathetic or
antipathetic little Jesuses _accomplis_ or _manqués_. And there is a
heroine who is always “pure”, usually, nowadays, on the muck-heap! Like
the Green Hatted Woman. She is all the time at the feet of Jesus, though
her behaviour there may be misleading. Heaven knows what the Saviour
really makes of it: whether she’s a Green Hat or a Constant Nymph
(eighteen months of constancy, and her heart failed), or any of the rest
of ’em. They are all, heroes and heroines, novelists and she-novelists,
little Jesuses or Jesusesses. They may be wallowing in the mire: but
then didn’t Jesus harrow Hell! _A la bonne heure!_
Oh, they are all novelists with an idea of themselves! Which is a
“purpose”, with a vengeance! For what a weary, false, sickening idea it
is nowadays! The novel gives them away. They can’t fool the novel.
Now really, it’s time we left _off_ insulting the novel any further. If
your purpose is to prove your own Jesus qualifications, and the thin
stream of your inspiration is “sin”, then dry up, for the interest is
dead. _Life as it is!_ What’s the good of pretending that the lives of a
set of tuppenny Green Hats and Constant Nymphs is Life-as-it-is, when
the novel itself proves that all it amounts to is life as it is isn’t
life, but a sort of everlasting and intricate and boring habit: of Jesus
peccant and _Jesusa peccante_.
These wearisome sickening little personal novels! After all, they aren’t
novels at all. In every great novel, who is the hero all the time? Not
any of the characters, but some unnamed and nameless flame behind them
all. Just as God is the pivotal interest in the books of the _Old
Testament_. But just a trifle too intimate, too _frére et cochon_,
there. In the great novel, the felt but unknown flame stands behind all
the characters, and in their words and gestures there is a flicker of
the presence. If you are _too personal, too human_, the flicker fades
out, leaving you with something awfully lifelike, and as lifeless as
most people are.
We have to choose between the quick and the dead. The quick is
God-flame, in everything. And the dead is dead. In this room where I
write, there is a little table that is dead: it doesn’t even weakly
exist. And there is a ridiculous little iron stove, which for some
unknown reason is quick. And there is an iron wardrobe trunk, which for
some still more mysterious reason is quick. And there are several books,
whose mere corpus is dead, utterly dead and non-existent. And there is a
sleeping cat, very quick. And a glass lamp, that, alas, is dead.
What makes the difference? _Quien sabe!_ But difference there is. And I
_know_ it.
And the sum and source of all quickness, we will call God. And the sum
and total of all deadness we may call human.
And if one tries to find out, wherein the quickness of the quick lies,
it is in a certain weird relationship between that which is quick and--I
don’t know; perhaps all the rest of things. It seems to consist in an
odd sort of fluid, changing, grotesque or beautiful relatedness. That
silly iron stove somehow _belongs_. Whereas this thin-shanked table
doesn’t belong. It is a mere disconnected lump, like a cut-off finger.
And now we see the great, great merits of the novel. It can’t exist
without being “quick”. The ordinary unquick novel, even if it be a best
seller, disappears into absolute nothingness, the dead burying their
dead with surprising speed. For even the dead like to be tickled. But
the next minute, they’ve forgotten both the tickling and the tickler.
Secondly, the novel contains no didactive absolute. All that is quick,
and all that is said and done by the quick, is, in some way godly. So
that Vronsky’s taking Anna Karénina we must count godly, since it is
quick. And that Prince in _Resurrection_, following the convict girl, we
must count dead. The convict train is quick and alive. But that
would-be-expiatory Prince is as dead as lumber.
The novel itself lays down these laws for us, and we spend our time
evading them. The man in the novel must be “quick”. And this means one
thing, among a host of unknown meaning: it means he must have a quick
relatedness to all the other things in the novel: snow, bed-bugs,
sunshine, the phallus, trains, silk-hats, cats, sorrow, people, food,
diphtheria, fuchsias, stars, ideas, God, tooth-paste, lightning, and
toilet-paper. He must be in quick relation to all these things. What he
says and does must be relative to them all.
And this is why Pierre, for example, in _War and Peace_, is more dull
and less quick than Prince André. Pierre is quite nicely related to
ideas, tooth-paste, God, people, foods, trains, silk-hats, sorrow,
diphtheria, stars. But his relation to snow and sunshine, cats,
lightning and the phallus, fuchsias and toilet-paper, is sluggish and
mussy. He’s not quick enough.
The really quick, Tolstoi loved to kill them off or muss them over. Like
a true Bolshevist. One can’t help feeling Natasha is rather mussy and
unfresh, married to that Pierre.
Pierre was what we call, “so human”. Which means, “so limited”. Men
clotting together into social masses in order to limit their individual
liabilities: this is humanity. And this is Pierre. And this is Tolstoi,
the philosopher with a very nauseating Christian-brotherhood idea of
himself. Why limit man to a Christian-brotherhood? I myself, I could
belong to the sweetest Christian-brotherhood one day, and ride after
Attila with a raw beefsteak for my saddle-cloth, to see the red cock
crow in flame over all Christendom, next day.
And that is man! That, really, was Tolstoi. That, even, was Lenin, God
in the machine of Christian-brotherhood, that hashes men up into social
sausage-meat.
Damn all absolutes. Oh damn, damn, damn all absolutes! I tell you, no
absolute is going to make the lion lie down with the lamb: unless, like
the limerick, the lamb is inside.
“They returned from the ride
With lamb Leo inside
And a smile on the face of the tiger!
Sing fol-di-lol-lol!
Fol-di-lol-lol!
Fol-di-lol-ol-di-lol-olly!”
For man, there is neither absolute nor absolution. Such things should be
left to monsters like the right-angled triangle, which does only exist
in the ideal consciousness. A man can’t have a square on his hypotenuse,
let him try as he may.
Ay! Ay! Ay!--Man handing out absolutes to man, as if we were all books
of geometry with axioms, postulates and definitions in front. God with a
pair of compasses! Moses with a set square! Man a geometric bifurcation,
not even a radish!
Holy Moses!
“Honour thy father and thy mother!” That’s awfully cute! But supposing
they are not honorable? How then, Moses?
Voice of thunder from Sinai: “_Pretend to honour them!_”
“Love thy neighbour as thyself.”
Alas, my neighbour happens to be mean and detestable.
Voice of the lambent Dove, cooing: “_Put it over him, that you love
him._”
Talk about the cunning of serpents! I never saw even a serpent kissing
his instinctive enemy.
Pfui! I wouldn’t blacken my mouth, kissing my neighbour, who, I repeat,
to me is mean and detestable.
Dove, go home!
The Goat and Compasses, indeed!
Everything is relative. Every Commandment that ever issued out of the
mouth of God or man, is strictly relative: adhering to the particular
time, place and circumstance.
And this is the beauty of the novel; everything is true in its own
relationship, and no further.
For the relatedness and interrelatedness of all things flows and changes
and trembles like a stream, and like a fish in the stream the characters
in the novel swim and drift and float and turn belly-up when they’re
dead.
So, if a character in a novel wants two wives--or three--or thirty:
well, that is true of that man, at that time, in that circumstance. It
may be true of other men, elsewhere and elsewhen. But to infer that all
men at all times want two, three, or thirty wives; or that the novelist
himself is advocating furious polygamy; is just imbecility.
It has been just as imbecile to infer that, because Dante worshipped a
remote Beatrice, every man, all men, should go worshipping remote
Beatrices.
And that wouldn’t have been so bad, if Dante had put the thing in its
true light. Why do we slur over the actual fact that Dante had a cosy
bifurcated wife in his bed, and a family of lusty little Dantinos?
Petrarch, with his Laura in the distance, had _twelve_ little legitimate
Petrarchs of his own, between his knees. Yet all we hear is _Laura!
Laura! Beatrice! Beatrice! Distance! Distance!_
What bunk! Why didn’t Dante and Petrarch chant in chorus: