In one sense, at any rate, it is more valuable to read bad literature
than good literature. Good literature may tell us the mind of one man;
but bad literature may tell us the mind of many men. A good novel tells
us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about
its author. It does much more than that, it tells us the truth about
its readers; and, oddly enough, it tells us this all the more the more
cynical and immoral be the motive of its manufacture. The more
dishonest a book is as a book the more honest it is as a public
document. A sincere novel exhibits the simplicity of one particular
man; an insincere novel exhibits the simplicity of mankind. The
pedantic decisions and definable readjustments of man may be found in
scrolls and statute books and scriptures; but men’s basic assumptions
and everlasting energies are to be found in penny dreadfuls and
halfpenny novelettes. Thus a man, like many men of real culture in our
day, might learn from good literature nothing except the power to
appreciate good literature. But from bad literature he might learn to
govern empires and look over the map of mankind.
There is one rather interesting example of this state of things in
which the weaker literature is really the stronger and the stronger the
weaker. It is the case of what may be called, for the sake of an
approximate description, the literature of aristocracy; or, if you
prefer the description, the literature of snobbishness. Now if any one
wishes to find a really effective and comprehensible and permanent case
for aristocracy well and sincerely stated, let him read, not the modern
philosophical conservatives, not even Nietzsche, let him read the Bow
Bells Novelettes. Of the case of Nietzsche I am confessedly more
doubtful. Nietzsche and the Bow Bells Novelettes have both obviously
the same fundamental character; they both worship the tall man with
curling moustaches and herculean bodily power, and they both worship
him in a manner which is somewhat feminine and hysterical. Even here,
however, the Novelette easily maintains its philosophical superiority,
because it does attribute to the strong man those virtues which do
commonly belong to him, such virtues as laziness and kindliness and a
rather reckless benevolence, and a great dislike of hurting the weak.
Nietzsche, on the other hand, attributes to the strong man that scorn
against weakness which only exists among invalids. It is not, however,
of the secondary merits of the great German philosopher, but of the
primary merits of the Bow Bells Novelettes, that it is my present
affair to speak. The picture of aristocracy in the popular sentimental
novelette seems to me very satisfactory as a permanent political and
philosophical guide. It may be inaccurate about details such as the
title by which a baronet is addressed or the width of a mountain chasm
which a baronet can conveniently leap, but it is not a bad description
of the general idea and intention of aristocracy as they exist in human
affairs. The essential dream of aristocracy is magnificence and valour;
and if the Family Herald Supplement sometimes distorts or exaggerates
these things, at least, it does not fall short in them. It never errs
by making the mountain chasm too narrow or the title of the baronet
insufficiently impressive. But above this sane reliable old literature
of snobbishness there has arisen in our time another kind of literature
of snobbishness which, with its much higher pretensions, seems to me
worthy of very much less respect. Incidentally (if that matters), it
is much better literature. But it is immeasurably worse philosophy,
immeasurably worse ethics and politics, immeasurably worse vital
rendering of aristocracy and humanity as they really are. From such
books as those of which I wish now to speak we can discover what a
clever man can do with the idea of aristocracy. But from the Family
Herald Supplement literature we can learn what the idea of aristocracy
can do with a man who is not clever. And when we know that we know
English history.
This new aristocratic fiction must have caught the attention of
everybody who has read the best fiction for the last fifteen years. It
is that genuine or alleged literature of the Smart Set which represents
that set as distinguished, not only by smart dresses, but by smart
sayings. To the bad baronet, to the good baronet, to the romantic and
misunderstood baronet who is supposed to be a bad baronet, but is a
good baronet, this school has added a conception undreamed of in the
former years—the conception of an amusing baronet. The aristocrat is
not merely to be taller than mortal men and stronger and handsomer, he
is also to be more witty. He is the long man with the short epigram.
Many eminent, and deservedly eminent, modern novelists must accept some
responsibility for having supported this worst form of snobbishness—an
intellectual snobbishness. The talented author of “Dodo” is
responsible for having in some sense created the fashion as a fashion.
Mr. Hichens, in the “Green Carnation,” reaffirmed the strange idea that
young noblemen talk well; though his case had some vague biographical
foundation, and in consequence an excuse. Mrs. Craigie is considerably
guilty in the matter, although, or rather because, she has combined the
aristocratic note with a note of some moral and even religious
sincerity. When you are saving a man’s soul, even in a novel, it is
indecent to mention that he is a gentleman. Nor can blame in this
matter be altogether removed from a man of much greater ability, and a
man who has proved his possession of the highest of human instinct, the
romantic instinct—I mean Mr. Anthony Hope. In a galloping, impossible
melodrama like “The Prisoner of Zenda,” the blood of kings fanned an
excellent fantastic thread or theme. But the blood of kings is not a
thing that can be taken seriously. And when, for example, Mr. Hope
devotes so much serious and sympathetic study to the man called
Tristram of Blent, a man who throughout burning boyhood thought of
nothing but a silly old estate, we feel even in Mr. Hope the hint of
this excessive concern about the oligarchic idea. It is hard for any
ordinary person to feel so much interest in a young man whose whole aim
is to own the house of Blent at the time when every other young man is
owning the stars.
Mr. Hope, however, is a very mild case, and in him there is not only an
element of romance, but also a fine element of irony which warns us
against taking all this elegance too seriously. Above all, he shows his
sense in not making his noblemen so incredibly equipped with impromptu
repartee. This habit of insisting on the wit of the wealthier classes
is the last and most servile of all the servilities. It is, as I have
said, immeasurably more contemptible than the snobbishness of the
novelette which describes the nobleman as smiling like an Apollo or
riding a mad elephant. These may be exaggerations of beauty and
courage, but beauty and courage are the unconscious ideals of
aristocrats, even of stupid aristocrats.
The nobleman of the novelette may not be sketched with any very close
or conscientious attention to the daily habits of noblemen. But he is
something more important than a reality; he is a practical ideal. The
gentleman of fiction may not copy the gentleman of real life; but the
gentleman of real life is copying the gentleman of fiction. He may not
be particularly good-looking, but he would rather be good-looking than
anything else; he may not have ridden on a mad elephant, but he rides a
pony as far as possible with an air as if he had. And, upon the whole,
the upper class not only especially desire these qualities of beauty
and courage, but in some degree, at any rate, especially possess them.
Thus there is nothing really mean or sycophantic about the popular
literature which makes all its marquises seven feet high. It is
snobbish, but it is not servile. Its exaggeration is based on an
exuberant and honest admiration; its honest admiration is based upon
something which is in some degree, at any rate, really there. The
English lower classes do not fear the English upper classes in the
least; nobody could. They simply and freely and sentimentally worship
them. The strength of the aristocracy is not in the aristocracy at all;
it is in the slums. It is not in the House of Lords; it is not in the
Civil Service; it is not in the Government offices; it is not even in
the huge and disproportionate monopoly of the English land. It is in a
certain spirit. It is in the fact that when a navvy wishes to praise a
man, it comes readily to his tongue to say that he has behaved like a
gentleman. From a democratic point of view he might as well say that
he had behaved like a viscount. The oligarchic character of the modern
English commonwealth does not rest, like many oligarchies, on the
cruelty of the rich to the poor. It does not even rest on the kindness
of the rich to the poor. It rests on the perennial and unfailing
kindness of the poor to the rich.
The snobbishness of bad literature, then, is not servile; but the
snobbishness of good literature is servile. The old-fashioned
halfpenny romance where the duchesses sparkled with diamonds was not
servile; but the new romance where they sparkle with epigrams is
servile. For in thus attributing a special and startling degree of
intellect and conversational or controversial power to the upper
classes, we are attributing something which is not especially their
virtue or even especially their aim. We are, in the words of Disraeli
(who, being a genius and not a gentleman, has perhaps primarily to
answer for the introduction of this method of flattering the gentry),
we are performing the essential function of flattery which is
flattering the people for the qualities they have not got. Praise may
be gigantic and insane without having any quality of flattery so long
as it is praise of something that is noticeably in existence. A man
may say that a giraffe’s head strikes the stars, or that a whale fills
the German Ocean, and still be only in a rather excited state about a
favourite animal. But when he begins to congratulate the giraffe on his
feathers, and the whale on the elegance of his legs, we find ourselves
confronted with that social element which we call flattery. The middle
and lower orders of London can sincerely, though not perhaps safely,
admire the health and grace of the English aristocracy. And this for
the very simple reason that the aristocrats are, upon the whole, more
healthy and graceful than the poor. But they cannot honestly admire the
wit of the aristocrats. And this for the simple reason that the
aristocrats are not more witty than the poor, but a very great deal
less so. A man does not hear, as in the smart novels, these gems of
verbal felicity dropped between diplomatists at dinner. Where he
really does hear them is between two omnibus conductors in a block in
Holborn. The witty peer whose impromptus fill the books of Mrs.
Craigie or Miss Fowler, would, as a matter of fact, be torn to shreds
in the art of conversation by the first boot-black he had the
misfortune to fall foul of. The poor are merely sentimental, and very
excusably sentimental, if they praise the gentleman for having a ready
hand and ready money. But they are strictly slaves and sycophants if
they praise him for having a ready tongue. For that they have far more
themselves.
The element of oligarchical sentiment in these novels, however, has, I
think, another and subtler aspect, an aspect more difficult to
understand and more worth understanding. The modern gentleman,
particularly the modern English gentleman, has become so central and
important in these books, and through them in the whole of our current
literature and our current mode of thought, that certain qualities of
his, whether original or recent, essential or accidental, have altered
the quality of our English comedy. In particular, that stoical ideal,
absurdly supposed to be the English ideal, has stiffened and chilled
us. It is not the English ideal; but it is to some extent the
aristocratic ideal; or it may be only the ideal of aristocracy in its
autumn or decay. The gentleman is a Stoic because he is a sort of
savage, because he is filled with a great elemental fear that some
stranger will speak to him. That is why a third-class carriage is a
community, while a first-class carriage is a place of wild hermits. But
this matter, which is difficult, I may be permitted to approach in a
more circuitous way.
The haunting element of ineffectualness which runs through so much of
the witty and epigrammatic fiction fashionable during the last eight or
ten years, which runs through such works of a real though varying
ingenuity as “Dodo,” or “Concerning Isabel Carnaby,” or even “Some
Emotions and a Moral,” may be expressed in various ways, but to most of
us I think it will ultimately amount to the same thing. This new
frivolity is inadequate because there is in it no strong sense of an
unuttered joy. The men and women who exchange the repartees may not
only be hating each other, but hating even themselves. Any one of them
might be bankrupt that day, or sentenced to be shot the next. They are
joking, not because they are merry, but because they are not; out of
the emptiness of the heart the mouth speaketh. Even when they talk pure
nonsense it is a careful nonsense—a nonsense of which they are
economical, or, to use the perfect expression of Mr. W. S. Gilbert in
“Patience,” it is such “precious nonsense.” Even when they become
light-headed they do not become light-hearted. All those who have read
anything of the rationalism of the moderns know that their Reason is a
sad thing. But even their unreason is sad.
The causes of this incapacity are also not very difficult to indicate.
The chief of all, of course, is that miserable fear of being
sentimental, which is the meanest of all the modern terrors—meaner
even than the terror which produces hygiene. Everywhere the robust and
uproarious humour has come from the men who were capable not merely of
sentimentalism, but a very silly sentimentalism. There has been no
humour so robust or uproarious as that of the sentimentalist Steele or
the sentimentalist Sterne or the sentimentalist Dickens. These
creatures who wept like women were the creatures who laughed like men.
It is true that the humour of Micawber is good literature and that the
pathos of little Nell is bad. But the kind of man who had the courage
to write so badly in the one case is the kind of man who would have the
courage to write so well in the other. The same unconsciousness, the
same violent innocence, the same gigantesque scale of action which
brought the Napoleon of Comedy his Jena brought him also his Moscow.
And herein is especially shown the frigid and feeble limitations of our
modern wits. They make violent efforts, they make heroic and almost
pathetic efforts, but they cannot really write badly. There are
moments when we almost think that they are achieving the effect, but
our hope shrivels to nothing the moment we compare their little
failures with the enormous imbecilities of Byron or Shakespeare.
For a hearty laugh it is necessary to have touched the heart. I do not
know why touching the heart should always be connected only with the
idea of touching it to compassion or a sense of distress. The heart can
be touched to joy and triumph; the heart can be touched to amusement.
But all our comedians are tragic comedians. These later fashionable
writers are so pessimistic in bone and marrow that they never seem able
to imagine the heart having any concern with mirth. When they speak of
the heart, they always mean the pangs and disappointments of the
emotional life. When they say that a man’s heart is in the right place,
they mean, apparently, that it is in his boots. Our ethical societies
understand fellowship, but they do not understand good fellowship.
Similarly, our wits understand talk, but not what Dr. Johnson called a
good talk. In order to have, like Dr. Johnson, a good talk, it is
emphatically necessary to be, like Dr. Johnson, a good man—to have
friendship and honour and an abysmal tenderness. Above all, it is
necessary to be openly and indecently humane, to confess with fulness
all the primary pities and fears of Adam. Johnson was a clear-headed
humorous man, and therefore he did not mind talking seriously about
religion. Johnson was a brave man, one of the bravest that ever
walked, and therefore he did not mind avowing to any one his consuming
fear of death.
The idea that there is something English in the repression of one’s
feelings is one of those ideas which no Englishman ever heard of until
England began to be governed exclusively by Scotchmen, Americans, and
Jews. At the best, the idea is a generalization from the Duke of
Wellington—who was an Irishman. At the worst, it is a part of that
silly Teutonism which knows as little about England as it does about
anthropology, but which is always talking about Vikings. As a matter of
fact, the Vikings did not repress their feelings in the least. They
cried like babies and kissed each other like girls; in short, they
acted in that respect like Achilles and all strong heroes the children
of the gods. And though the English nationality has probably not much
more to do with the Vikings than the French nationality or the Irish
nationality, the English have certainly been the children of the
Vikings in the matter of tears and kisses. It is not merely true that
all the most typically English men of letters, like Shakespeare and
Dickens, Richardson and Thackeray, were sentimentalists. It is also
true that all the most typically English men of action were
sentimentalists, if possible, more sentimental. In the great
Elizabethan age, when the English nation was finally hammered out, in
the great eighteenth century when the British Empire was being built up
everywhere, where in all these times, where was this symbolic stoical
Englishman who dresses in drab and black and represses his feelings?
Were all the Elizabethan palladins and pirates like that? Were any of
them like that? Was Grenville concealing his emotions when he broke
wine-glasses to pieces with his teeth and bit them till the blood
poured down? Was Essex restraining his excitement when he threw his hat
into the sea? Did Raleigh think it sensible to answer the Spanish guns
only, as Stevenson says, with a flourish of insulting trumpets? Did
Sydney ever miss an opportunity of making a theatrical remark in the
whole course of his life and death? Were even the Puritans Stoics? The
English Puritans repressed a good deal, but even they were too English
to repress their feelings. It was by a great miracle of genius
assuredly that Carlyle contrived to admire simultaneously two things so
irreconcilably opposed as silence and Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell was the
very reverse of a strong, silent man. Cromwell was always talking, when
he was not crying. Nobody, I suppose, will accuse the author of “Grace
Abounding” of being ashamed of his feelings. Milton, indeed, it might
be possible to represent as a Stoic; in some sense he was a Stoic, just
as he was a prig and a polygamist and several other unpleasant and
heathen things. But when we have passed that great and desolate name,
which may really be counted an exception, we find the tradition of
English emotionalism immediately resumed and unbrokenly continuous.
Whatever may have been the moral beauty of the passions of Etheridge
and Dorset, Sedley and Buckingham, they cannot be accused of the fault
of fastidiously concealing them. Charles the Second was very popular
with the English because, like all the jolly English kings, he
displayed his passions. William the Dutchman was very unpopular with
the English because, not being an Englishman, he did hide his emotions.
He was, in fact, precisely the ideal Englishman of our modern theory;
and precisely for that reason all the real Englishmen loathed him like
leprosy. With the rise of the great England of the eighteenth century,
we find this open and emotional tone still maintained in letters and
politics, in arts and in arms. Perhaps the only quality which was
possessed in common by the great Fielding, and the great Richardson was
that neither of them hid their feelings. Swift, indeed, was hard and
logical, because Swift was Irish. And when we pass to the soldiers and
the rulers, the patriots and the empire-builders of the eighteenth
century, we find, as I have said, that they were, If possible, more
romantic than the romancers, more poetical than the poets. Chatham,
who showed the world all his strength, showed the House of Commons all
his weakness. Wolfe walked about the room with a drawn sword calling
himself Caesar and Hannibal, and went to death with poetry in his
mouth. Clive was a man of the same type as Cromwell or Bunyan, or, for
the matter of that, Johnson—that is, he was a strong, sensible man
with a kind of running spring of hysteria and melancholy in him. Like
Johnson, he was all the more healthy because he was morbid. The tales
of all the admirals and adventurers of that England are full of
braggadocio, of sentimentality, of splendid affectation. But it is
scarcely necessary to multiply examples of the essentially romantic
Englishman when one example towers above them all. Mr. Rudyard Kipling
has said complacently of the English, “We do not fall on the neck and
kiss when we come together.” It is true that this ancient and universal
custom has vanished with the modern weakening of England. Sydney would
have thought nothing of kissing Spenser. But I willingly concede that
Mr. Broderick would not be likely to kiss Mr. Arnold-Foster, if that be
any proof of the increased manliness and military greatness of England.
But the Englishman who does not show his feelings has not altogether
given up the power of seeing something English in the great sea-hero of
the Napoleonic war. You cannot break the legend of Nelson. And across
the sunset of that glory is written in flaming letters for ever the
great English sentiment, “Kiss me, Hardy.”
This ideal of self-repression, then, is, whatever else it is, not
English. It is, perhaps, somewhat Oriental, it is slightly Prussian,
but in the main it does not come, I think, from any racial or national
source. It is, as I have said, in some sense aristocratic; it comes not
from a people, but from a class. Even aristocracy, I think, was not
quite so stoical in the days when it was really strong. But whether
this unemotional ideal be the genuine tradition of the gentleman, or
only one of the inventions of the modern gentleman (who may be called
the decayed gentleman), it certainly has something to do with the
unemotional quality in these society novels. From representing
aristocrats as people who suppressed their feelings, it has been an
easy step to representing aristocrats as people who had no feelings to
suppress. Thus the modern oligarchist has made a virtue for the
oligarchy of the hardness as well as the brightness of the diamond.
Like a sonneteer addressing his lady in the seventeenth century, he
seems to use the word “cold” almost as a eulogium, and the word
“heartless” as a kind of compliment. Of course, in people so incurably
kind-hearted and babyish as are the English gentry, it would be
impossible to create anything that can be called positive cruelty; so
in these books they exhibit a sort of negative cruelty. They cannot be
cruel in acts, but they can be so in words. All this means one thing,
and one thing only. It means that the living and invigorating ideal of
England must be looked for in the masses; it must be looked for where
Dickens found it—Dickens among whose glories it was to be a humorist,
to be a sentimentalist, to be an optimist, to be a poor man, to be an
Englishman, but the greatest of whose glories was that he saw all
mankind in its amazing and tropical luxuriance, and did not even notice
the aristocracy; Dickens, the greatest of whose glories was that he
could not describe a gentleman.