ASHFIELD,
SETTLE,
Aug. 27, 1904.
DEAR HERBERT,--You ask me to send you out some novels, and you have put
me in a difficulty. It seems hardly worth while sending out books which
will just be read once or twice in a lazy mood and then thrown aside;
yet I can find no others. It seems to me that our novelists are at the
present moment affected by the same wave which seems to be passing over
the whole of our national life; we have in every department a large
number of almost first-rate people, men of talent and ability; but very
few geniuses, very few people of undisputed pre-eminence. In literature
this is particularly the case; poets, historians, essayists,
dramatists, novelists; there are so many that reach a high level of
accomplishment, and do excellent work; but there are no giants, or they
are very small ones. Personally, I do not read a great many novels; and
I find myself tending to revert again and again to my old favourites.
Of course there are some CONSPICUOUS novelists. There is George
Meredith, though he has now almost ceased to write; to speak candidly,
though I recognise his genius, his creative power, his noble and subtle
conception of character, yet I do not feel the reality of his books; or
rather I feel that the reality is there, but disguised from me by a
veil--a dim and rich veil, it is true--which is hung between me and the
scene. The veil is George Meredith's personality. I confess that it is
a dignified personality enough, the spirit of a grand seigneur. But I
feel in reading his books as if I were staying with a magnificent
person in a stately house; but that, when I wanted to go about and look
at things for myself, my host, with splendid urbanity, insisted on
accompanying me, pointed out objects that interested himself, and
translated the remarks of the guests and the other people who appeared
upon the scene into his own peculiar diction. The characters do not
talk as I think they would have talked, but as George Meredith would
have talked under the given circumstances. There is no repose about his
books; there is a sense not only of intellectual but actually of moral
effort about reading them; and further, I do not like the style; it is
highly mannerised, and permeated, so to speak, with a kind of rich
perfume, a perfume which stupefies rather than enlivens. Even when the
characters are making what are evidently to them perfectly natural and
straightforward remarks, I do not feel sure what they mean; and I
suffer from paroxysms of rage as I read, because I feel that I cannot
get at what is there without a mental agility which seems to me
unnecessarily fatiguing. A novel ought to be like a walk; George
Meredith makes it into an obstacle race.
Then, again, Henry James is an indubitably great writer; though you
amused me once by saying that you felt you really had not time to read
his later books. Well, for myself, I confess that his earlier books,
such as Roderick Hudson and the Portrait of a Lady, are books that I
recur to again and again. They are perfectly proportioned and admirably
lucid. If they have a fault, and I do not readily admit it, it is that
the characters are not quite full-blooded enough. Still, there is quite
enough of what is called "virility" about in literature; and it is
refreshing to find oneself in the company of people who preserve at all
events the conventional decencies of life. But Henry James has in his
later books taken a new departure; he is infinitely subtle and
extraordinarily delicate; but he is obscure where he used to be lucid,
and his characters now talk in so allusive and birdlike a way, hop so
briskly from twig to twig, that one cannot keep the connection in one's
mind. He seems to be so afraid of anything that is obvious or
plain-spoken, that his art conceals not art but nature. I declare that
in his conversations I have not unfrequently to reckon back to see who
has got the ball; then, too, those long, closely printed pages, such as
one sees in The Wings of a Dove, without paragraphs, without breathing
places, pages of minute and refined analysis--there is a high
intellectual pleasure in reading them, but there is a mental strain as
well. It is as though one wandered in tortuous passages, full of
beautiful and curious things, without ever reaching the rooms of the
house. What I want, in a work of imagination, is to step as simply as
possible into the presence of an emotion, the white heat of a
situation. With Henry James I do not feel certain what the situation
is. At the same time his books are full of fine things; he has learnt a
splendid use of metaphor, when the whole page seems, as it were,
stained with some poetical thought, as though one had shut a fruit into
the book, and its juice had tinted the whole of a page. But that is not
sufficient; and I confess I close one of his later volumes in a
condition of admiring mystification. I do not know what it has all been
about; the characters have appeared, have nodded and smiled
inscrutably, have let fall sentences which seem like sparkling
fragments of remarks; I feel that there is a great conception behind,
but I am still in the dark as to what it is.
There are two or three other authors whose books I read with interest.
One of these is John Oliver Hobbes. Her books do not seem to me to be
exactly natural; it is all of the nature of a scenic display. But there
is abundance of nobility and even of passion; and the style is
original, nervous, and full of fine aphorisms. There is a feeling of
high and chivalrous courage about her characters; they breathe perhaps
too lofty an air, and are, if anything, too true to themselves. But it
is a dignified romance, rather mediaeval than modern, and penetrated
with a pungent aromatic humour which has a quality of its own.
Mrs. Humphry Ward is another writer whose books I always read. I am
constantly aware of a great conscientiousness in the background. The
scenery, the people, are all studied with the most sedulous and patient
care; but I somehow feel, at all events in the earlier works, that the
moral attitude of the writer, a kind of Puritan agnosticism, interferes
with the humanity of the books; they seem to me to be as saturated with
principle as Miss Yonge's books, written from a very different
standpoint, were. I feel that I am not to be allowed my own
preferences, and that to enjoy the books I must be in line with the
authoress. Mrs. Ward's novels, in fact, seem to me the high-water mark
of what great talent, patient observation, and faithful work can do;
but the light does not quite shine through. Yet it is only just to say
that every book Mrs. Ward writes seems an improvement on the last.
There is a wider, larger, freer conception of life; more reality, more
humanity, as well as more artistic handling; and they are worth careful
reading; I shall certainly include one or two in my consignment.
George Moore seems to me to be one of the best writers on the stage.
Esther Waters, Evelyn Innes, and Sister Theresa, are books of the
highest quality. I have a sense in these books of absolute reality. I
may think the words and deeds of the characters mysterious, surprising,
and even sometimes disgusting; but they surprise and disgust me just as
the anomalies of human beings affect me. I may not like them, but I do
not question the fact that the characters spoke and behaved as they are
supposed to behave. Moreover, Evelyn Innes and Sister Theresa are
written in a style of matchless lucidity and precision; they have
passages of high poetry. Old Mr. Innes, with his tiresome
preoccupations, his pedantic taste, his mediaeval musical instruments,
affects me exactly as an unrelenting idealist does in actual life. The
mystical Ulick has a profound charm; the Sisters in the convent, all
preoccupied with the same or similar ideas, have each a perfectly
distinct individuality. Evelyn herself, even with all her frank and
unashamed sensuality, is a deeply attractive figure; and I know no
books which so render the evasive charm of the cloistered life. But
George Moore has two grave faults; he is sometimes vulgar and he is
sometimes brutal. Evelyn's worldly lover is a man who makes one's flesh
creep, and yet one feels he is intended to represent the fascination of
the world. Then it does not seem to me to be true realism to depict
scenes of frank animalism. Such things may occur; but the actors in
such a carnival could not speak of them, even to each other; it may be
prudish, but I cannot help feeling that one ought not to have
represented in a book what could not be repeated in conversation or
depicted in a picture. One may be plain-spoken enough in art, but one
ought not to have the feeling that one would be ashamed, in certain
passages, to catch the author's eye. If it were not for these lapses, I
should put George Moore at the head of all contemporary novelists; and
I am not sure that I do not do so as it is. Do give them another trial;
I always thought you were too easily discouraged in your attempt to
grapple with his books; probably my admiration for them only aroused
your critical sense; and I admit that there is much to criticise.
Then there is another writer, lately dead, alas, whose books I used to
read with absorbing interest, George Gissing. They had, when he treated
of his own peculiar stratum, the same quality of hard reality which I
value most of all in a work of fiction. The actors were not so much
vulgar as underbred; their ambitions and tastes were often deplorable.
But one felt that they were real people. The wall of the suburban villa
was gently removed, and the life was before your eyes. The moment he
strayed from that milieu, the books became fantastic and unreal. But in
the last two books, By the Ionian Sea and the Papers of Henry Rycroft,
Gissing stepped into a new province, and produced exquisitely beautiful
and poetical idealistic literature.
Thomas Hardy is a poetical writer. But his rustic life, dreamy,
melancholy, and beautiful as it is, with the wind blowing fragrant out
of the heart of the wood, or the rain falling on the down, seems to me
to be no more real than the scenes in As You Like It or The Tempest.
The figures are actors playing a part. And then there is through his
books so strong a note of sex, and people under the influence of
passion seem to me to behave in so incomprehensible a way, in a manner
so foreign to my own experience, that though I would not deny the truth
of the picture, I would say that it is untrue for me, and therefore
unmeaning.
I have never fallen under the sway of Rudyard Kipling. Whenever I read
his stories I feel myself for the time in the grip of a strong mind,
and it becomes a species of intoxication. But I am naturally sober by
inclination, and though I can unreservedly admire the strength, the
vigour, the splendid imaginativeness of his conceptions, yet the whole
note of character is distasteful to me. I don't like his male men; I
should dislike them and be ill at ease with them in real life, and I am
ill at ease with them in his books. This is purely a matter of taste;
and as to the animal stories, terrifically clever as they are, they
appear to me to be no more true to life than Landseer's pictures of
dogs holding a coroner's inquest or smoking pipes. The only book of his
that I re-read is The Light that Failed, for its abundant vitality and
tragicalness; but the same temperamental repugnance overcomes me even
there.
For pure imagination I should always fly to a book by H. G. Wells. He
has that extraordinary power of imagining the impossible, and working
it out in a hard literal way which is absolutely convincing. But he is
a teller of tales and not a dramatist.
Well, you will be tired of all these fussy appreciations. But what one
seems to miss nowadays is the presence of a writer of superlative
lucidity and humanity, for whose books one waits with avidity, and
orders them beforehand, as soon as they are announced. For one thing,
most people seem to me to write too much. The moment a real success is
scored, the temptation, no doubt adroitly whispered by publishers, to
produce a similar book on similar lines, becomes very strong. Few
living writers are above the need for earning money; but even that
would not spoil a genius if we had him.
These writers whom I have mentioned seem to me all like little bubbling
rivulets, each with a motion, a grace, a character of its own. But what
one craves for is a river deep and wide, for some one, with a great
flood of humanity like Scott, or with a leaping cataract of
irrepressible humour like Dickens, or with a core of white-hot passion
like Charlotte Bronte, or a store of brave and wholesome gaiety and
zest, such as Stevenson showed.
Well, we must wait and hope. Meanwhile I will write to my great
book-taster; one of the few men alive with great literary vitality, who
has never indulged the temptation to write, and has never written a
line. I will show him the manner of man you are, and a box of bright
volumes shall be packed for you. The one condition is that you shall
write me in return a sheet of similar appreciations. The only thing is
to know what one likes, and strike out a line for oneself; the rest is
mere sheep-like grazing--forty feeding like one.--Ever yours,