There is an idea that story-telling is a cheap and vulgar thing; that it
fulfils no function; that it does not enlarge our knowledge of human
character and human life. And yet who is the more distinct to us,
Michael Fane or Sir Launcelot, Guinevere or Sylvia Scarlett? The
character of Michael Fane has been presented to us through many thousand
words of detailed analysis. Sir Launcelot is the hero of a few
incidents. But we know Launcelot better than we know Michael, for all
his many volumes. And do we know Jean Christophe as well as we know Saul
and Joab and the son of Jesse? There are fifteen hundred pages of Jean
Christophe, fifteen hundred pages of turmoil and conflict and desire; in
retrospect a confused impression. But we never forget the Sabine
incident, that perfect story, that diamond in a copper ring. The outline
blurs; one character merges into another. But there remains the picture
of Sabine sitting listlessly before her house; of Sabine pulling down
the blind across the window on the night when she realises that Jean
loves her; of Sabine shelling peas; of Sabine searching for a button in
the disorder of her shop; of Jean and Sabine shivering on either side of
the door afraid to turn the handle. Forty pages out of fifteen hundred,
but the most perfect in the prose literature of the last forty years.
Turgenev never organised his thought as Tolstoi did. He did not explain
himself in constructive argument. He had no need. There is implicit in
his work, the most gentle, the most tolerant, the most harmonious
philosophy that has been expounded by man since the Sermon on the Mount.
And Turgenev was a story-teller. He knew that no language speaks more
directly to the human heart than that of simple narrative. The Russians
hated and distrusted him, especially Dostoieffsky, who could never
forgive Turgenev for being a gentleman. But there has never been anyone
less a snob, intrinsically, than Turgenev, no one who has stood more
simply, less assumingly by his achievements. He was content to be an
artist, a maker of beautiful things. He did not, as Tolstoi did, assume
the rôle of prophet. “If story-telling is a cheap thing,” we can imagine
him to say, “I cannot help it. It is the thing that I was born to do.”
Turgenev knew that it was enough to create beauty: that it is
unprofitable folly to ask a direct influence of art; that it is for the
politician and the journalist, not the artist, to alter the social
fabric. Turgenev was an entertainer; nothing more, and nothing less.
To-day the artist has developed a sense of mission. He feels that he is
here to get something done. And is in danger, consequently, of
exchanging a temporal for an eternal view of life. We have come through
our familiarity with the daily press to associate the written word with
the statement of a case.
When we read a newspaper article on the conditions of life in Bermondsey
our first question is: “That is all very well. But is it thus that the
majority of people in Bermondsey exist?” And when we read a novel about
Bermondsey we apply the same standard. “Is this,” we ask ourselves, “how
the majority of Bermondsians live?” If we decide that it is not, we say
that the novel “is not true to life.” We find it hard to rid ourselves
of the idea that all writing must be a form of special reporting.
And, of course, for the purposes of a novel it does not in the least
matter whether the lives of the majority of Bermondsians do, or do not,
correspond with those of the hero and the heroine. Universality is not
obtained by cataloguing the routine of a number of uninteresting
persons. It is unlikely that many dairy-maids have been the victims of
such a disconcerting series of adventures as befell Tess of the
D’Urbevilles. But Tess is true to life. It is true to life because
Thomas Hardy is a novelist and not a journalist. If he had intended his
book to be an “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” if his creative impulse had been
inspired by a wish to improve the lot of the Wessex farm-hand, the
critics would have been justified in saying: “This is a piece of special
pleading based on a particularly unusual combination of circumstances.
We therefore consider it to be untrue to life.” For the journalist the
word “life” implies the external conditions under which the majority of
people live; for the artist, life is the reality behind livelihood, and
for the revelation of that reality the choice of subject is
comparatively unimportant. The same moment of reality may be presented
equally effectively through the most diverse mediums.
The appreciation of the temporal quality of life, of the approach of
age, the sense of weakening power, is found in the work of nearly all
great writers; but it is expressed by each writer in terms of the
phenomena with which he is most familiar. Anthony Trollope would find
relief from such a mood in the study of a kindly, ineffectual parson.
George Moore would tell the story of some butterfly of the Nouvelle
Athène, some Marie Pellegrin. Neville Cardus would recall the fleeting
splendour of Tom Richardson. To the journalist there would seem little
in common between these three studies. But the artist would see that the
subject was in each case the same. In “La Terre,” Zola told the same
story that Shakespeare told in “Lear.”
It is only the best sellers nowadays who are writing stories, really
writing stories, stories for their own sakes. That is why they are best
sellers. They may be bad stories that they are telling, or rather they
may be telling the stories badly. For there is no such thing as a new
story--it is the treatment that is all-important. But they are stories;
and most of their authors, if they chose, if they thought it worth the
doing, could write the sort of novel with three hundred readers that
would get half a column of serious consideration in the cultured
weeklies.
Berta Ruck, for instance. I do not know if her books are ever reviewed
in the sixpenny weeklies; I should be inclined to doubt it. But I have
not the slightest doubt that her books are a great deal better than the
majority of novels that are so honoured. She writes very jolly stories
about very jolly people. They begin with a highly improbable situation.
A woman persuades a man to become her husband in name so that she can
attend to her business unbothered by the attentions of a crowd of
suitors. A financier, to pacify his match-making parents, engages a
secretary to act as his official fiancée. A girl dresses up as a boy and
becomes a chauffeur. Highly improbable occurrences, undoubtedly. But it
is permissible to open on a situation of any degree of improbability,
provided the characters subsequently behave according to rule. And Berta
Ruck’s characters do. They are real people. And what is more important,
they are very jolly people. One has a genuine affection for them, which
is more than one can say of most modern novels. How often do we come
across a hero and a heroine that we really like, that we really want to
see in the last chapter happily married to the right person? We do in a
Berta Ruck novel, and we will pardon any stretching of coincidence if it
allows that fortunate encounter on the last page. To be able to do that,
to be able to write a jolly book about jolly people is very much more
worth while than.... But we will be neither personal nor malicious. Let
us be content to state that it would be certainly more charitable, and
probably more accurate to assume that a book sells on account of its
qualities rather than its defects.
One envies, sometimes, the people who were born a hundred years ago. It
must have been so easy to write then, when all the plots were new and
there were so few writers. To-day everyone is writing novels. One is
cultivating a soil that has yielded many harvests. One begins a story:
for a week, a month, a fortnight one is happy and excited, and then one
loses interest suddenly. It is _vieux jeu_, one says. It has all been
done so many times before. One is not good enough to make an old thing
new. Or, again, it may be that one can find no ending to a story, an
ending that has not become banal through other people’s exploitation of
it. This, for instance, this scene in a Soho restaurant: a small,
unobtrusive, unsensational, but very excellent foreign restaurant in
Dean Street, where I used to dine occasionally, in days when I had a
bungalow beneath the Downs, after a day’s football, before the last
train down to Sussex, when I was tired, when I did not want to be
disturbed by music and noise and laughter, when I wanted my eyes to rest
on quiet wallpaper and quiet dresses, when I knew exactly what I wanted,
and exactly where to find it; there: this one dramatic episode of which
it has been my fortune to be a witness.
I had only just taken my seat and begun my examination of the menu when
the double-doors of the restaurant swung open and a young girl paused
there in the doorway, looking round her with the expression of perplexed
embarrassment that the faces of young people assume in a strange place.
She made a pretty picture as she stood there, a fur cap fitting tightly
over the head, pressing the brown hair into a thick wave about her ears;
a small hand raised towards the throat, keeping in its place the
woollen scarf that was flung across the shoulder; a slim ankle
protruding beneath her skirt, a “tweazy” looking little thing; and if
her features were not beautiful, she had the prettiness of all young
girls whose figures are slim and graceful--the charm of the green leaf
and the bud, that fascinates a man more than beauty does, but that
passes quickly and lasts rarely into womanhood.
She stood there, looking round her for a moment, then the perplexed
expression left her; she smiled and walked down the centre of the room.
A man rose from a table in the corner and came to meet her. He was one
of those men whom it is almost impossible to describe, so much did he
resemble the rest of his sex in his dress, his manner, and the general
carriage of his person. He looked, and probably was, a gentleman; he was
about thirty years old; he had a small dark moustache, and he showed no
signs of baldness. Beyond that I could tell nothing. He was hidden in
complete security behind the technique of an upbringing.
I could not hear how they greeted each other, but in the way in which he
helped her off with her coat there was implied, I fancied, a suggestion
of uneasiness. “They do not know each other very well,” I said to
myself, and, moving my chair a little further to the right, I arranged
myself so that I should be able to watch them without turning my head.
The suggestion of uneasiness was repeated as he leaned over the table
towards her with the menu. “He is a little too eager,” I told myself.
“He is anxious to make a success of it, and he is overacting. He is
confoundedly uncomfortable.” And, calling the waiter, I ordered a dish
of which the preparation would take, I knew, a good twenty minutes--and
settled myself to enjoy the little comedy.
He had ordered an expensive dinner--champagne, a fried sole, a pheasant
and a Japanese salad, and a mushroom savoury. He was desperately anxious
to make it a success, and, to avoid awkward pauses, he was talking most
of the time: amusingly, too, I gathered, for she often smiled at what he
said, and once she burst out laughing--fresh, clear laughter; and that
laugh, which came about half-way through the meal, revealed to me what
indeed I should have seen before, that, while he was enduring agonies of
self-consciousness, she was solely concerned with the natural enjoyment
of a good dinner in pleasant company. “The plot thickens,” I said, for
this discovery ruled out the possibility of the pleasant little romance
I had been considering--their parents had forbidden their marriage, they
had decided to run away feeling very brave when the scheme was only
under discussion, but now that the moment had come they repented the
splendid resolution and would give anything to be in their respective
homes sitting before the fire, thinking pleasantly of bed. That solution
would have to go; for, if this was the case, she would certainly be as
nervous, and probably more nervous, than he, unless--but that was a
contingency of which I refused to consider the possibility. The
elopement idea would have to go, and, besides, there was not the least
suggestion that they were lovers; they had not once looked into each
other’s eyes; they had not been even silent together, and silence is the
beginning of love. They were not man and wife; they were not avowed
lovers; they did not even seem to be potential lovers.
And yet this dinner was for him certainly a big occasion. She meant
something to him. But what? It was possible, of course, that he was in
love with her, and not she with him. But that was no cause for shyness.
Courtship is a leisured and, on the whole, pleasant business; and surely
the young man was not so foolish as to be contemplating a premature
proposal on the way home. For there is nothing more fatal than a hurried
courtship. A moment comes when a girl expects a man to take her by the
hand and tell her that he loves her, and would be angry with him if he
did not. But it is disastrous to anticipate a climax. And this the young
man knows; being a man of thirty such moments must have often come to
him before. “And yet, perhaps,” I said to myself, “he is contemplating
this folly. Why?”
And, putting down my glass, I began to frame a story. He had been an
officer in the war, and after demobilisation had gone up to Oxford to
take his degree. That was quite possible, and would make him
twenty-eight years old to-day. Yes, he had gone up to Oxford, and had
decided to go in for the Civil Service; he had wanted a post in the Home
Civil, but he had not been able to make up for the years he had lost
during the war, and he had passed into the Indian Civil. In a fortnight
he would go abroad for several years, and there was this girl whom he
had met perhaps at tennis, and with whom he had fallen in love,
fascinated by her delicacy, her frail grace, her suggestion of the
butterfly. She was young and inexperienced, and had regarded his love as
comradeship, for he was undemonstrative, and talked about dancing and
the cricket championship; and now he was going away. He had asked her
out to dinner, and was desperately anxious to bring things to a head
before he went. And of all this she knew nothing.
An interesting situation that could be developed into a good story. In
the man’s failure to pass into the Home Civil Service there would be
just a hint of the sad position of the ex-soldier; he had served, and
had been passed over in favour of someone who had not. And on this
failure hung the significance of his romance. He had prepared himself
for a slow, quiet courtship, and now found that he had to compress into
a few days the campaign of several months--and, of course, he had not
been able to. He was not the man to capture a young girl’s heart by
storm. If he succeeded in making her fall in love with him, it would be
only after many weeks of growing intimacy. She would begin by confiding
in him--that would be the first step; and then--but it would be a slow
business, and, at any rate, it was impossible now. In three days he
would have to go to India.
It was really a capital story, and I began to plan it out: the meeting
at a tennis tournament; the news of his failure at the exam.; the dinner
party in the restaurant; and then the journey home in the taxi. I could
see it so clearly.
They would sit in silence for a while. Then he would lean forward and
whisper her name, and she would turn her head and look at him with
surprise.
“Yes,” she would say.
And he would not know what to do in the unaccustomed situation; and, as
he had over-acted in the restaurant to hide his nervousness, so would he
overact now. Without any warning he would take her in his arms and kiss
her awkwardly and say: “I love you.” It would be a horrible failure.
Very likely it would be her first kiss, and she would have her own
romantic conception of what a first kiss should be, and she would be
angry with him for his clumsiness. The kiss will have given her no
pleasure, and that she cannot forgive him. She will push him from her,
will probably say: “Now you’ve spoilt it all,” for at these moments it
is the ridiculous that occurs to us, and she would speak out of her
recollection of book and magazine heroines, and he would try and
explain, but she would shake her head angrily.
“Leave me alone! Leave me alone! Can’t you see that you’ve spoilt
everything?”
And, when they reached her home, she would jump out of the taxi and run
straight up the steps without turning to say good-bye to him, and he
would sit back in the cushions reflecting dismally that in three days he
would sail for India, and would not see her again for three--perhaps
four--years.
A good story! I would sit down to write it as soon as I got home, not
waiting for the morning to blur my impression of her startled girlhood.
And I should not find it difficult to end this story. While he was away
he would write to her and ask forgiveness, protesting that he loved her,
had always loved her, that he was sorry for his rudeness; and that, when
he came back, might he hope--a trite letter it would be; but then, if it
were anything but trite, he would be a writer of much talent, and that I
did not propose to make him. No; he would write her an ordinary
love-letter, and she, being an ordinary woman, would be moved by it,
and, with the distance hiding her blushes, she would write, saying that
she had been young and foolish, but was now wise, and would gladly wait
for him. And during four years they would create slowly, letter by
letter, an illusion of each other out of the enchantment of things
remote. He would become her Prince Charming, and she would be for him a
creature of infinite fragrance. And then, when they met again, she would
find herself in the arms of a prosaic Anglo-Indian, with thinning hair,
and he would find that a girl had become a woman, that her pretty
features had grown petulant during the years of waiting.
And in the morning I should have to decide whether or not they should
marry; probably they would, from a lack of the courage that looks at
itself in the glass and says: “You have failed, my friend.” Yes, it
would be truer to make them marry, and perhaps she might be happy in her
children, while he found pleasure in the society of another woman. But,
at any rate, a dream would have been passed, and that would be the
object of my story: to tell simply how everything changes, everything
passes; not a new philosophy and one that occurred to Heraclitus, but
true nevertheless.
And looking across at the couple in the corner, I thought with real
sympathy on their sad fate. They were just getting ready to go; the
waiter had brought the bill neatly folded upon a plate; the girl had
turned towards a large photograph of the Royal Family, and was
endeavouring to arrange her hair from the blurred reflection in it.
She was smiling and happy, ignorant of the disaster that awaited her.
Within five minutes she would have been embraced clumsily, would have
assured her lover that “he had spoiled everything,” and the curtain
would have descended on the first act of the tragedy. Could nothing be
done to save her; it was cruel--so young, so fresh and with so brief a
springtime.
I was indulging myself in this soft, sentimental reverie, for a
story-teller always runs in great danger of confusing his own reality
with that of the world, and of regarding everything that happens to
himself and to his friends as chapter headings in a novel. I was just, I
say, indulging my pet weakness to the top of my bent when suddenly, for
the first time in my life, I was the witness of a real dramatic
incident.
The girl had turned to arrange her hair in the blurred reflection of the
sheet of glass that protected the Royal Family from dust, and, in order
to brush a little powder from her chin, she had taken her
pocket-handkerchief from her bag. The bag lay open on the table, its
mouth pointing to her companion, and, to my amazement, I saw the man
lean forward, glance round the room to see if anyone was looking, and
then quickly take from the bag a couple of pound notes; these he placed
on the plate under the bill, added another note of his own, and called
the waiter’s attention to the plate. Then, a minute later, the plate
returned; the waiter received a substantial tip, in return for which he
helped his clients on with their coats and bowed them out of the
restaurant; all of which I watched in dazed, though intrigued,
wonderment. I suppose I ought to have risen from my seat and called the
girl’s attention to the theft, but it is hard for one who has chosen for
himself the rôle of onlooker to decide on violent and sudden action. And
besides, I have learnt that interference is invariably unwise, that I
cannot expect other people to mind their own business until I mind mine.
At any rate, whatever was the right thing to do, I did what it was
natural for me to do under such circumstances: I sat where I was, and in
five minutes became lost in a vague and wistful speculation.
The reasons for the man’s embarrassment were now clear; all the evening
he had been waiting his opportunity to steal his companion’s money--that
much was obvious. And to think that for half an hour I had been
concocting an absurd story after the manner of Turgenev, about an Indian
Civil Servant and “the girl he left behind him”! Impatiently I called
for my bill, tipped the waiter, and walked out into Dean Street.
The cool air did me good in restoring my self-confidence. It was a
mistake, I told myself, that anyone might have made. We do not expect
to meet thieves outside the Stock Exchange and the pages of the police
reports. And it was quite a good story that I had invented--a slight
debt to Turgenev perhaps, but then every short story that is written
owes something either to Turgenev or de Maupassant or Tchecov. And I
had, besides, the material for another really first-class tale. I could
see it so clearly: the young girl prattling away pleasantly and the man
getting more and more worried. “Will she never powder her nose?” he asks
himself, and tries to hide his anxiousness beneath a series of amusing
anecdotes. And no doubt I could make them discuss the modern girl, and
she will say that she hates the girl who powders and paints; and he will
have to agree with her, seeing that her complexion is her own, although
he is, for the first time in his life, hating the fresh bloom of her
cheek and praying that she were another sort of girl--a delightful
situation. And then, at last, when all seems lost, I could make her lean
forward to smell the flowers on the table, and a speck of yellow pollen
would attach itself to her chin, to which he would, of course, call her
attention.
“Is there really,” she would say, and, opening her bag, she would take
out her handkerchief, turn to the photograph beside them, and give him
his opportunity.
Up to that point it would be quite simple. But beyond it a lot of
thought would be required. So good a motive must not be flung away, and
all the way down the Charing Cross Road I turned the incident over in my
mind.
Fifteen years ago I could have made him an agent in the White Slave
Traffic. It was a popular theme then; every young girl who came up to
London looked round at Paddington apprehensively for the kindly old lady
who would ask her if she was new to these parts. Yes, fifteen years ago
it would have been a moving story. But, during the last fifteen years,
Villiers Street has become placarded with shilling descriptions of “Why
Girls Go Wrong”; and the Bishop of London has written a great many
prefaces and preached a great many sermons. The White Slave Traffic is
_vieux jeu_. Still, there was something in the seduction _motif_. “Yes,
certainly,” I said to myself, as I presented my season-ticket at the
barrier at Victoria and walked down the platform in search of a
corner-seat; something might be made out of it: and by the time we had
reached Selhurst a story had begun to form itself in my mind.
She had come up from the provinces for the day, and had met an old
friend of hers who had asked her out to dinner; she had intended to
catch the last train home. The man is smitten by her beauty and wonders
how he can best possess it. Should he steal her money she will be unable
to buy a ticket back.
The picture grew before me. I could see them at the booking-office. I
could see her fumbling in her bag, searching every pocket, and then
turning to him with a despairing look.
“I’ve lost the money.”
“Oh, no; surely not,” he would say. “It must be in one of your pockets.
Have another look.”
And she would make another long, careful search which would, of course,
be equally vain. And she would turn to him with tear-filled eyes.
“But what am I to do? I can’t get home. I haven’t any money to buy a
ticket.”
And in her voice would be the suggestion that he should lend her some,
and, of course, he would say that he had none with him, but that if she
would come back to his flat.... And she would thank him effusively and
they would leap into a taxi, but when they arrived at the flat, which
would be at the top of four flights of stairs, with the flat below
unoccupied, he would discover that he had no money after all, and that
the porter had gone, and that there was no one from whom he could borrow
any; she would sink down on the sofa, her hands clasped before her
knees, while he stood behind her wondering at what exact point----
But at that moment the train stopped at East Croydon, where I had to
change and wait twenty minutes for a connection; and, while I stamped up
and down the platform trying to keep warm, a swift dissatisfaction with
my story overcame me. What did it matter what he said next, or at what
exact point he ... for whatever he did, or whatever she did, the story
as I had elected to tell it could only end in one way--a row of dots,
and a short concluding paragraph: “Next morning, her dark hair scattered
across the pillow, she woke in a strange room....” And how often that
has been done. In how many novels has not that dark hair been scattered
across that pillow? It was theatrical, vulgar, the sort of plot that
occurs to one as one sits in the smoking-room of one’s club after a
heavy lunch and half a bottle of Pommard, and I walked up and down the
platform of East Croydon station in a state of cold and miserable
self-contempt.
But warmth revives us, and when I was again in the corner-seat of a
smoker, down the window of which the heat ran in long, straggly
trickles, I began to think that, after all, though I had to wash out the
seduction motive, there might be something in the idea of the lost
return-ticket, and the last train to Anerley. Suppose now that the young
man had for a long time besieged unsuccessfully his fair companion, and
that on the refusal of his third proposal he had decided that he would
never secure the hand of his beloved unless he managed to compromise
innocently her honour?
Yes, that might work out. He would steal her money at the restaurant;
they would reach the booking-office where the scene which I have already
described would be enacted. There would be the return to the flat and
the discovery that the porter was out, and that, after all, he had
forgotten to cash the cheque he had written out that morning.
“But what am I to do?” she would say.
And, with well-simulated confusion, he would mutter something about not
minding a “shake-down” on the sofa, and that if she would take his room
...
“Oh, but I couldn’t! How could I? What would mother say?”
Just a little touch that would place the mother at once before the
reader’s eye--a plump, heavy woman with a small, unsatisfactory husband.
A woman of strong passions, that have focussed themselves on a rigid
observance of the proprieties.
“But what else are you to do?” the young man would exclaim, and he would
stammer something about giving her his key. And, in the end, she would
consent to pass the night there, and next morning they would arrive at
Anerley together with the milk, and be received by the mother in the
front-parlour, a cold, melancholy room with the fire smoking dismally.
She would receive them with her hands on her hips, and she would say one
word, “Well!” and then listen while the young man stammered his
explanations. Of course she would not believe him: he had never expected
her to, and would have been miserably disappointed if she had. He would
listen to her threats and tirades, and then, at the right moment, he
would draw himself up to his full height.
“Madam,” he would say, “your accusations are untrue; the door of the
room in which your daughter slept was locked all night. I slept on the
sofa. But to prove my honour, and to vindicate hers, I am prepared--and
shall be proud--to marry your daughter.”
A slow smile would spread across the mother’s face. Honour saved, a
daughter off her hands; and at last the daughter, moved by his chivalry,
might even fall in love with her knight-errant.
I considered this solution during the two miles’ walk from Hassocks
station. It was original. I had never seen it done before. Such a
situation is common enough in modern fiction. But the mistake is usually
genuine, and that scene in the dismal parlour is the prelude to long
years of married misery. Occasionally the affair is arranged by the
girl, if she can trust her lover’s lack of enterprise. For a girl is
more interested in marriage than a man, and proposes it indirectly more
often than the admirers of the strong man would have us think. But for a
man to plan such an escapade--that would indeed be new. And I went to
sleep contented, thinking that the next day would pass pleasantly in
congenial work.
But there is a poem by a poetess, now little read, which contains the
lines:
“Colours seen by candlelight
Do not look the same by day,”
and when the sun shone next morning through my bedroom window my plot
seemed less original than I had thought it the night before. What was
it, after all, but a conceit? It said “black” to someone else’s “white”;
it turned an old coat inside out, and though it would no doubt cause
surprise if I were to walk down the village with my coat inside out, it
would not be a particularly original act, and it would be the same coat.
That is not the way to make a good story--to tack an old situation on to
a new one. I should have to find a different ending somehow; it was no
good setting out to write it yet. For want of anything better to do, I
walked out and began to weed the garden. But though I weeded the
flower-beds in front of the house, and did valiant work with a hoe
among the cabbages, no idea had come to me by lunch-time. And, though I
spent the whole afternoon before a jigsaw puzzle, the most restful of
all pursuits, tea-time found my mind a blank, and in this state it
remained until a friend, to whom I had related the incident, made a most
pertinent remark:
“Why, if the girl could see her face reflected in the photograph, did
she not see the young man take the money from her purse?”