What is beauty to one man is ugliness to another. There is a proverb
“about one man’s meat”; but there is a chariness about applying it to
literature. Writers like to believe that a criterion of criticism
exists; that their work is definitely good, bad, or indifferent.
Well; we are creatures of infinite limitations. A certain range of
sentiment comes within the province of our comprehension; vast tracts of
life must be for all time to us an unknown country. J. C. Squire
announces that _Jurgen_ is a poor book, but he does not persuade us that
our admiration has been misplaced. We regard his article as the
statement of a personal dislike. For criticism in the end comes always
back to this: “I like it, or I do not like it.” Criticism is
autobiography, as these pages are autobiography, the expression of
personal preferences and distastes. And, on the whole, I think critics
are ill advised to write of books that they do not like. Their inability
to appreciate the book is as likely to be their fault as the author’s.
And I find myself singularly out of sympathy with the type of critic who
tries to explain his enthusiasms and disapprovals by metaphysics. He
discusses for three pages what he considers to be the function of
literature. “Literature,” he concludes, “is the sublimation of
phenomena.” And, for the remainder of his article, proceeds to show
which poets do, and which do not, satisfy the requirements of his
formula. And, of course, he leaves us unimpressed. The ability to
conduct an argument is not a proof of literary taste. And if the
substance of the article is to be “I like, or do not like, this book,”
then the critic is beholden to persuade us that he is a person whose
opinion is deserving of attention. He can prove it to us in two ways,
preferably in both. He can show that he has read and appreciated a
quantity of good literature. “A man,” we say, “who has really
appreciated Turgenev, should have a standard implicit in his emotional
response to other books. If he says this book is good, there must be
something in it.” Or the critic may prove by writing well and
interestingly that he has a sense of literature. For there is nothing
more damning to a book than a favourable, but ill-written, notice. “If
the ass who wrote this,” the reader thinks, “liked that book, then I’m
pretty certain that I shouldn’t.” Criticism would carry much more weight
if it would forget its sense of responsibility, and would remember that
its purpose is, as that of all literature, the entertainment of the
reader.
And so back to that original, that disconcerting fact that Florence
Barclay was to me ten years ago an equivalent for Turgenev. She meant as
much; she revealed as much. She touched the heart as surely and as
deeply. And again comes that uncomfortable knowledge that a book is
after all only a focus for ourselves, a spade to unearth the absolute.
And does it matter what sort of a spade you use as long as the work gets
finished? The object of any emotion is of less matter than the intensity
of the emotion that object has evoked. Is a love any the less real, less
tender, less passionate, less unselfish because it has been inspired by
a shallow, trivial, worthless woman? Does it very much matter whence we
derive that state of heightened consciousness that we undoubtedly reach
through literature, as long as we do reach it? We come the richer from
_King Lear_, from _Anna Karenin_, from _Lycidas_, because these books
have revealed to us what is eternal in ourselves. In their company we
have forgotten momentarily the anxieties, the ambitions, the frivolities
that dazzle and distract us, that move in glittering, bewildering
profusion on the surface of our lives, that belong to time and space. In
such moments of heightened consciousness we are in harmony with
ourselves, we see ourselves as a part of that pattern that Pater spoke
of, the pattern whose threads pass out on either side of us.
And it is towards such moments that we are always striving, for the most
part indirectly, striving in our work, our love affairs, our amusements
and distractions. We are dissatisfied with what we are and with what we
have. That which is immortal in us struggles towards what is remote, in
the hope, in the belief that it may prove immortal. It may be that books
add something to our emotional, our intellectual stature, that they are
the rich soil in which we dig for treasure; but I prefer to think that
we are the rich soil, that we contain an immortal spirit, and that our
ultimate success or failure must be judged by our ability to keep that
spirit nourished and alive. If this be so, and it is a philosophy that
commended itself to Wordsworth, are we not right in saying that Florence
Barclay and Turgenev are fulfilling a similar function in different
spheres?
There is no difference in the quality nor the intensity of the emotion.
I am, I believe, tone deaf, and I have a perfectly deplorable taste in
music. But by some music I am very profoundly moved. Sometimes it is by
music with which I have personal associations--marches and dance tunes,
and that, of course, strictly speaking, should not count. The emotion is
inspired not by the music, but the scene evoked through it. But quite
often it is by some catchy affair heard for the first time in a
restaurant or across a street. I listen to it with enraptured pleasure,
thrilled by the tricks and twiddles and syncopations, and I am quite
prepared to accept my companion’s assurance that it is a cheap, vulgar,
sentimental thing. “I do not care,” I say, “these things are relative.
It moves me, therefore to me it is a masterpiece.”
Everyone has, I suppose, at one time or another paused to examine the
windows of the type of bookshop that abounds in certain streets in the
west end of London. They are curiously alike, these places. One side of
the window is stocked with articles the nature of which it is
unnecessary to particularise, and the other side with such literature as
the management appears to consider most likely to encourage the
purchase of them. The selection of that literature does not greatly
alter with the passage of time. There are no spring and autumn seasons
in these bookshops. Occasionally some new novel finds a home there;
occasionally a callous or unenterprising publisher allows some fading
favourite to pass from circulation. But there is, on the whole, a
commendable fidelity to old friends. Were you to be transplanted
miraculously to the Piccadilly of 1926 you would find of the volumes
that to-day adorn so proudly the front tables of Mr Hatchards’ bookshop
scarcely half a dozen, but the appearance of the questionable shop
window will be probably no more altered by 1930 than it has been since
1910. Victoria Cross will be there, and Elinor Glyn, and the confessions
of the retiring aristocrat who is content to sign himself “A Peer.”
There will be the same French classics, _Droll Stories_, _Madame
Bovary_, _A Woman’s Life_. The alliterative titles of Gertie de S.
Wentworth James will show against a circle of entwining arms. Between
_Bel-ami_ and _Anna Lombard_ will be spread enticingly _A Bed of Roses_.
The public, whatever it be, that patronises such establishments knows
its mind.
They are good hat-racks, these bookshops, for ridicule, for
denunciation, for satire. They can make a sermon for the priest, a
middle for the journalist, a simile for the politician. For the student
of life they are a subject of speculative curiosity.
What is, we ask ourselves, this public with so catholic a taste? We
rarely see anyone enter one of these bookshops. There are always two or
three people gazing enviously at the window, but self-consciousness
restrains them. They dare not publicly declare their interest by
purchasing a volume. Indeed, there are times when we wonder how these
shops carry on their business at all. Are they, we wonder, a spectacle
and nothing else? Do the same books remain there from one season to
another for the simple reason that no one buys them? A pleasant fancy,
but apparently they do carry on a very excellent, a very thriving,
trade. I once asked a proprietor if the trade slump had at all affected
him. “Very little,” he said. “Just before the armistice I ordered two
thousand copies of _Five Nights_, and I sold the last one yesterday.”
Two thousand copies of one book in one shop in three years. That man
must have sold on an average two copies of _Five Nights_ every day. Can
Mr Bumpus say as much for Shakespeare? Two thousand copies in three
years! It is easy, of course, to shrug one’s shoulders, to say: “But for
such stuff there will always be a public.” And yet so vague a gesture
provides no explanation of this incredible popularity. The appeal of
_Five Nights_ is not, I believe, due to what bishops describe as the
baser instincts of human nature. Victoria Cross wrote it in the
innocence of her heart, firmly believing it to be a good book. It is a
sincere book as _The Rosary_ is sincere, and _The Way of an Eagle_ is
sincere. It is written with feeling; she enjoyed writing it. Its
sentimental sensuality is warm and cloying and pleasant, like a hot bath
after too good a dinner. There even comes a moment when the heat of the
bath mingling with the heat of Pommard makes us ask ourselves whether
it is such appalling drivel after all. A couple of pages more we decide
it is; but there was that moment of doubt.
Thus it happens, I conjecture.
The shop assistant as he hurries homewards at the close of his day’s
work is moved with a sense of envy for the eager life of pleasure that
wakes in the city only at the moment that he leaves it. His own life is
tedious, with small excitements. He feels the need of vicarious
sensation. The cover and title of Miss Cross’s masterpiece allures him.
And as he journeys home he is pleasantly excited by the description of
the painter’s intrigue with the Chinese. He feels otherwise, however,
when he meets the heroine, and is confronted with what appears to him as
a picture of nobility and self-sacrifice. He is deeply moved. That it is
bad literature does not matter. It is enough that it should arouse in
him the same thoughts and emotions that _Anna Karenin_ stirs in a man of
letters. He feels himself in touch with a great passion, a passion that
can override the convention of an hour and a place, that destroys life
but makes of it first a thing worth having. In the world of popular
fiction _Five Nights_ bears to _The Rosary_ the same relation that in
the world of literature _Manon Lescaut_ bears to _On the Eve_.
I read while I was a prisoner in Germany Elinor Glyn’s novel, _Three
Weeks_, and I remember thinking that it was of its kind the very worst
novel that I had ever read. The grand passion is as rare as genius, and
it is as difficult to make the grand passion convincing in a novel as
to make a genius convincing. The novels in which a grand passion has
been “got over” could be counted on the fingers of one hand. But never,
I felt, had any novel of passion failed more lamentably, more
inexcusably, than _Three Weeks_.
But, as I said, these things are relative. To a couple of my
fellow-captives _Three Weeks_ was a window opening on the immortal
meadows. For days they discussed it exhaustively from every point of
view. It was, they were agreed, marvellously done. But they were
doubtful of its morals; such ardour, they felt, was only permissible
after a marriage ceremony, or, they were prepared to concede, as a
prelude to one. But it was the less real part of them that doubted.
Their instincts told them that the grand passion makes its own laws. And
finally they yielded to their deeper nature.
“After all,” they said, “those two were different from the rest of us.
They were wonderful characters. You can’t judge them as you judge
ordinary people.”
It is with such words that we acquit Paolo and Francesca, Antony and
Cleopatra, Lancelot and Guinevere. _Three Weeks_ said to my
fellow-captives what _Antony and Cleopatra_ says to a cultured public.
It was a focus for their belief in the grand passion.
One may well wonder, though, in what spirit the man who is deeply
stirred by Victoria Cross and Elinor Glyn reads such masterpieces of
prose narrative as _Une Vie_ and _Madame Bovary_ and _Mademoiselle de
Maupin_. They are bound in the same lurid cover, printed on the same
absorbent paper, and yet it is hard to believe that a man can be moved
equally by what is good and by what is bad. Is it not more likely that
he will be shocked and a little disgusted by Maupassant’s detachment and
cold restraint? “Pretty hot stuff,” he will say to himself of _Une Vie_,
but will add, “most awful filth.” And he will be ashamed of the book,
and secrete it at the bottom of his chest of drawers. A melancholy
reflection. It is, after all, of little matter that two thousand people
should in the course of three years purchase at one shop a rather silly,
sensual, sentimental book. But it is a little sad that only thus, in
this form, and in this type of shop, should be procurable in the English
language a complete translation of one of the world’s greatest novels, a
little sad that even then it should be only read by such a person, and
in such a spirit.
Sad though for the man of letters, not for the advocate of social
progress. I am convinced that these books are as completely harmless as
any book that may possibly encourage people to think for themselves can
be harmless.
There appeared a few months ago an article, I believe, by St John
Ervine, maintaining that the effect on the mind of the public of books
such as _The Way of an Eagle_, with their scenes of brutality and
masculine domination, was pernicious. And certainly they make melancholy
enough reading. But what are they, after all, but an expression for our
eternal human impulse to be swept off our feet, to be subjugated by a
force outside of and stronger than ourselves. And cannot we find in
literature equivalents enough for the cracked whip and the submissive
cheek of an Ethel Dell romance? Equivalents, but not parallels; for the
best seller is written for women, usually by women. And it is by a
masculine intelligence that the masterpieces of prose literature have
been produced. A man would, in search of such an equivalent, choose an
experience of which he was the object, not the subject. He would not
write of the dominant male, but of the siren. “Is it to be a kiss or a
blow?” asks the hero of popular fiction. In Turgenev, that woman who
“when she comes towards one, seems as though she is bringing all the
happiness of one’s life to meet one,” leans forward across a table and
taps the nails of one hand against the nails of the other. “Tell me,
tell me,” she says, “is it true, they say you are going to be married?”
It is from such reflections that we are forced to ask ourselves how much
purpose is served by our attempts to educate the public up to
Shakespeare. We are only giving them an equivalent for what they already
have. And the energy that we devote so prodigally to the organisation of
lectures and bazaars and repertory theatres might be spent so very much
more profitably on ourselves. I doubt if the Ethel Dell public would
find life any fuller, any more enraptured, by an exchange of _The Knave
of Diamonds_ for _Jude the Obscure_.
I suspect, indeed, that these educational movements are inspired
subconsciously for the most part, by the novelist’s desire to increase
his own public. “If only,” he says, “a sixth part of the 60,000 who buy
each novel by Ethel Dell would divert their attention towards my
admittedly superior work, how salutary it would be for them and how
charming it would be for me!” It sounds pleasant enough, but they are
dangerous things, these revolutions, and they have a way of turning on
their organisers. On the whole, I prefer to leave things as they are. It
would be perfectly delightful if that 60,000 public were to transfer its
affection to my humble efforts. If the public could be educated to a
wide appreciation of the tendenz novel, very well, very admirably well.
But this talk of Shakespeare and Fielding and the giants of the
eighteenth century, frankly, I distrust it. I have no wish to see the
public educated to that degree. Were it so to be, I can see that myself
and many other deserving and inoffensive persons would have to seek some
other means of livelihood--a procedure that would be most distasteful.
For were the public able to appreciate Fielding and Balzac, and Smollett
and Thomas Hardy, I cannot believe that it would take much interest in
the stories that I should have to tell it. I distrust these Literature
Promotion Leagues. I am disturbed when a new edition of Trollope is put
upon the market. But a deep content consumes me when I open my Sunday
newspaper and see that the publishers of Miss Dell’s new novel have
“called” already for a seventh printing. I smile. Things are as they
have been. The old standards remain. And I feel that there are still
left a few people whom my publishers may be able to persuade to take
some interest in my writings.