Modern Fiction (1919 / 1925)
In making any survey, even the freest and loosest, of modern fiction it
is difficult not to take it for granted that the modern practice of the
art is somehow an improvement upon the old. With their simple tools and
primitive materials, it might be said, Fielding did well and Jane Austen
even better, but compare their opportunities with ours! Their
masterpieces certainly have a strange air of simplicity. And yet the
analogy between literature and the process, to choose an example, of
making motor cars scarcely holds good beyond the first glance. It is
doubtful whether in the course of the centuries, though we have learnt
much about making machines, we have learnt anything about making
literature. We do not come to write better; all that we can be said to
do is to keep moving, now a little in this direction, now in that, but
with a circular tendency should the whole course of the track be viewed
from a sufficiently lofty pinnacle. It need scarcely be said that we
make no claim to stand, even momentarily, upon that vantage ground. On
the flat, in the crowd, half blind with dust, we look back with envy to
those happier warriors, whose battle is won and whose achievements wear
so serene an air of accomplishment that we can scarcely refrain from
whispering that the fight was not so fierce for them as for us. It is
for the historian of literature to decide; for him to say if we are now
beginning or ending or standing in the middle of a great period of prose
fiction, for down in the plain little is visible. We only know that
certain gratitudes and hostilities inspire us; that certain paths seem
to lead to fertile land, others to the dust and the desert; and of this
perhaps it may be worth while to attempt some account.
Our quarrel, then, is not with the classics, and if we speak of
quarrelling with Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett, and Mr. Galsworthy it is partly
that by the mere fact of their existence in the flesh their work has a
living, breathing, every day imperfection which bids us take what
liberties with it we choose. But it is also true that, while we thank
them for a thousand gifts, we reserve our unconditional gratitude for
Mr. Hardy, for Mr. Conrad, and in a much lesser degree for the Mr.
Hudson, of The Purple Land, Green Mansions, and Far Away and Long
Ago. Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett, and Mr. Galsworthy have excited so many
hopes and disappointed them so persistently that our gratitude largely
takes the form of thanking them for having shown us what they might have
done but have not done; what we certainly could not do, but as
certainly, perhaps, do not wish to do. No single phrase will sum up the
charge or grievance which we have to bring against a mass of work so
large in its volume and embodying so many qualities, both admirable and
the reverse. If we tried to formulate our meaning in one word we should
say that these three writers are materialists. It is because they are
concerned not with the spirit but with the body that they have
disappointed us, and left us with the feeling that the sooner English
fiction turns its back upon them, as politely as may be, and marches, if
only into the desert, the better for its soul. Naturally, no single word
reaches the centre of three separate targets. In the case of Mr. Wells
it falls notably wide of the mark. And yet even with him it indicates to
our thinking the fatal alloy in his genius, the great clod of clay that
has got itself mixed up with the purity of his inspiration. But Mr.
Bennett is perhaps the worst culprit of the three, inasmuch as he is by
far the best workman. He can make a book so well constructed and solid
in its craftsmanship that it is difficult for the most exacting of
critics to see through what chink or crevice decay can creep in. There
is not so much as a draught between the frames of the windows, or a
crack in the boards. And yet—if life should refuse to live there? That
is a risk which the creator of The Old Wives’ Tale, George Cannon,
Edwin Clayhanger, and hosts of other figures, may well claim to have
surmounted. His characters live abundantly, even unexpectedly, but it
remains to ask how do they live, and what do they live for? More and
more they seem to us, deserting even the well-built villa in the Five
Towns, to spend their time in some softly padded first-class railway
carriage, pressing bells and buttons innumerable; and the destiny to
which they travel so luxuriously becomes more and more unquestionably an
eternity of bliss spent in the very best hotel in Brighton. It can
scarcely be said of Mr. Wells that he is a materialist in the sense that
he takes too much delight in the solidity of his fabric. His mind is too
generous in its sympathies to allow him to spend much time in making
things shipshape and substantial. He is a materialist from sheer
goodness of heart, taking upon his shoulders the work that ought to have
been discharged by Government officials, and in the plethora of his
ideas and facts scarcely having leisure to realise, or forgetting to
think important, the crudity and coarseness of his human beings. Yet
what more damaging criticism can there be both of his earth and of his
Heaven than that they are to be inhabited here and hereafter by his
Joans and his Peters? Does not the inferiority of their natures tarnish
whatever institutions and ideals may be provided for them by the
generosity of their creator? Nor, profoundly though we respect the
integrity and humanity of Mr. Galsworthy, shall we find what we seek in
his pages.
If we fasten, then, one label on all these books, on which is one word
materialists, we mean by it that they write of unimportant things; that
they spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the
transitory appear the true and the enduring.
We have to admit that we are exacting, and, further, that we find it
difficult to justify our discontent by explaining what it is that we
exact. We frame our question differently at different times. But it
reappears most persistently as we drop the finished novel on the crest
of a sigh—Is it worth while? What is the point of it all? Can it be
that owing to one of those little deviations which the human spirit
seems to make from time to time Mr. Bennett has come down with his
magnificent apparatus for catching life just an inch or two on the wrong
side? Life escapes; and perhaps without life nothing else is worth
while. It is a confession of vagueness to have to make use of such a
figure as this, but we scarcely better the matter by speaking, as
critics are prone to do, of reality. Admitting the vagueness which
afflicts all criticism of novels, let us hazard the opinion that for us
at this moment the form of fiction most in vogue more often misses than
secures the thing we seek. Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or
reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to
be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide.
Nevertheless, we go on perseveringly, conscientiously, constructing our
two and thirty chapters after a design which more and more ceases to
resemble the vision in our minds. So much of the enormous labour of
proving the solidity, the likeness to life, of the story is not merely
labour thrown away but labour misplaced to the extent of obscuring and
blotting out the light of the conception. The writer seems constrained,
not by his own free will but by some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant
who has him in thrall to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy,
love, interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole so
impeccable that if all his figures were to come to life they would find
themselves dressed down to the last button of their coats in the fashion
of the hour. The tyrant is obeyed; the novel is done to a turn. But
sometimes, more and more often as time goes by, we suspect a momentary
doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as the pages fill themselves in the
customary way. Is life like this? Must novels be like this?
Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being “like this”.
Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind
receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or
engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an
incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape
themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls
differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but
there; so that if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could
write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon
his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no
comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted
style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street
tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically
arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding
us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of
the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed
spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little
mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading
merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper
stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.
It is, at any rate, in some such fashion as this that we seek to define
the quality which distinguishes the work of several young writers, among
whom Mr. James Joyce is the most notable, from that of their
predecessors. They attempt to come closer to life, and to preserve more
sincerely and exactly what interests and moves them, even if to do so
they must discard most of the conventions which are commonly observed by
the novelist. Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the
order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected
and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon
the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more
fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought
small. Any one who has read The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
or, what promises to be a far more interesting work, Ulysses[10] now
appearing in the _Little Review_, will have hazarded some theory of this
nature as to Mr. Joyce’s intention. On our part, with such a fragment
before us, it is hazarded rather than affirmed; but whatever the
intention of the whole there can be no question but that it is of the
utmost sincerity and that the result, difficult or unpleasant as we may
judge it, is undeniably important. In contrast with those whom we have
called materialists Mr. Joyce is spiritual; he is concerned at all costs
to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its
messages through the brain, and in order to preserve it he disregards
with complete courage whatever seems to him adventitious, whether it be
probability, or coherence or any other of these signposts which for
generations have served to support the imagination of a reader when
called upon to imagine what he can neither touch nor see. The scene in
the cemetery, for instance, with its brilliancy, its sordidity, its
incoherence, its sudden lightning flashes of significance, does
undoubtedly come so close to the quick of the mind that, on a first
reading at any rate, it is difficult not to acclaim a masterpiece. If we
want life itself here, surely we have it. Indeed, we find ourselves
fumbling rather awkwardly if we try to say what else we wish, and for
what reason a work of such originality yet fails to compare, for we must
take high examples, with Youth or The Mayor of Casterbridge. It
fails because of the comparative poverty of the writer’s mind, we might
say simply and have done with it. But it is possible to press a little
further and wonder whether we may not refer our sense of being in a
bright yet narrow room, confined and shut in, rather than enlarged and
set free, to some limitation imposed by the method as well as by the
mind. Is it the method that inhibits the creative power? Is it due to
the method that we feel neither jovial nor magnanimous, but centred in a
self which, in spite of its tremor of susceptibility, never embraces or
creates what is outside itself and beyond? Does the emphasis laid,
perhaps didactically, upon indecency, contribute to the effect of
something angular and isolated? Or is it merely that in any effort of
such originality it is much easier, for contemporaries especially, to
feel what it lacks than to name what it gives? In any case it is a
mistake to stand outside examining “methods”. Any method is right, every
method is right, that expresses what we wish to express, if we are
writers; that brings us closer to the novelist’s intention if we are
readers. This method has the merit of bringing us closer to what we were
prepared to call life itself; did not the reading of _Ulysses_ suggest
how much of life is excluded or ignored, and did it not come with a
shock to open _Tristram Shandy_ or even _Pendennis_ and be by them
convinced that there are not only other aspects of life, but more
important ones into the bargain.
However this may be, the problem before the novelist at present, as we
suppose it to have been in the past, is to contrive means of being free
to set down what he chooses. He has to have the courage to say that what
interests him is no longer “this” but “that”: out of “that” alone must
he construct his work. For the moderns “that”, the point of interest,
lies very likely in the dark places of psychology. At once, therefore,
the accent falls a little differently; the emphasis is upon something
hitherto ignored; at once a different outline of form becomes necessary,
difficult for us to grasp, incomprehensible to our predecessors. No one
but a modern, perhaps no one but a Russian, would have felt the interest
of the situation which Tchekov has made into the short story which he
calls “Gusev”. Some Russian soldiers lie ill on board a ship which is
taking them back to Russia. We are given a few scraps of their talk and
some of their thoughts; then one of them dies and is carried away; the
talk goes on among the others for a time, until Gusev himself dies, and
looking “like a carrot or a radish” is thrown overboard. The emphasis is
laid upon such unexpected places that at first it seems as if there were
no emphasis at all; and then, as the eyes accustom themselves to
twilight and discern the shapes of things in a room we see how complete
the story is, how profound, and how truly in obedience to his vision
Tchekov has chosen this, that, and the other, and placed them together
to compose something new. But it is impossible to say “this is comic”,
or “that is tragic”, nor are we certain, since short stories, we have
been taught, should be brief and conclusive, whether this, which is
vague and inconclusive, should be called a short story at all.
The most elementary remarks upon modern English fiction can hardly avoid
some mention of the Russian influence, and if the Russians are mentioned
one runs the risk of feeling that to write of any fiction save theirs is
waste of time. If we want understanding of the soul and heart where else
shall we find it of comparable profundity? If we are sick of our own
materialism the least considerable of their novelists has by right of
birth a natural reverence for the human spirit. “Learn to make yourself
akin to people. . . . But let this sympathy be not with the mind—for it
is easy with the mind—but with the heart, with love towards them.” In
every great Russian writer we seem to discern the features of a saint,
if sympathy for the sufferings of others, love towards them, endeavour
to reach some goal worthy of the most exacting demands of the spirit
constitute saintliness. It is the saint in them which confounds us with
a feeling of our own irreligious triviality, and turns so many of our
famous novels to tinsel and trickery. The conclusions of the Russian
mind, thus comprehensive and compassionate, are inevitably, perhaps, of
the utmost sadness. More accurately indeed we might speak of the
inconclusiveness of the Russian mind. It is the sense that there is no
answer, that if honestly examined life presents question after question
which must be left to sound on and on after the story is over in
hopeless interrogation that fills us with a deep, and finally it may be
with a resentful, despair. They are right perhaps; unquestionably they
see further than we do and without our gross impediments of vision. But
perhaps we see something that escapes them, or why should this voice of
protest mix itself with our gloom? The voice of protest is the voice of
another and an ancient civilisation which seems to have bred in us the
instinct to enjoy and fight rather than to suffer and understand.
English fiction from Sterne to Meredith bears witness to our natural
delight in humour and comedy, in the beauty of earth, in the activities
of the intellect, and in the splendour of the body. But any deductions
that we may draw from the comparison of two fictions so immeasurably far
apart are futile save indeed as they flood us with a view of the
infinite possibilities of the art and remind us that there is no limit
to the horizon, and that nothing—no “method”, no experiment, even of
the wildest—is forbidden, but only falsity and pretence. “The proper
stuff of fiction” does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of
fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit
is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss. And if we can imagine the art
of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly
bid us break her and bully her, as well as honour and love her, for so
her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.
[Footnote 10: Written April 1919.]