A Novelist on Novels

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  A NOVELIST ON NOVELS

  _BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

  NOVELS:

  A BED OF ROSES THE CITY OF NIGHT ISRAEL KALISCH[1] THE MAKING OF AN ENGLISHMAN[2] THE SECOND BLOOMING THE STRANGERS' WEDDING OLGA NAZIMOV (Short Stories)

  MISCELLANEOUS:

  WOMAN AND TO-MORROW ANATOLE FRANCE DRAMATIC ACTUALITIES THE INTELLIGENCE OF WOMAN ETC.

  [Footnote 1: Published in the U.S.A. and Canada under the title, 'Untilthe Day Break']

  [Footnote 2: Published in the U.S.A. and Canada under the title, 'TheLittle Beloved']

  A NOVELIST ON NOVELS

  BY W. L. GEORGE

  LONDON: 48 PALL MALL W. COLLINS SONS & CO. LTD. GLASGOW MELBOURNE AUCKLAND

  Copyright 1918

  NOTE

  The chapters that follow have been written in varying moods, and expressthe fluctuating feelings aroused in the author by the modern novel andits treatment at the hands of the public. Though unrelated with thenovel, the chapters on 'Falstaff,' 'The Esperanto of Art,' and 'TheTwilight of Genius' have been included, either because artistically inkeeping with other chapters, or because their general implicationsaffect the fiction form.

  A half of the book has not before now been published in Great Britainand Dominions.

  CONTENTS

  PAGE

  A DECEPTIVE DEDICATION 1

  LITANY OF THE NOVELIST 24

  WHO IS THE MAN? 62

  THREE YOUNG NOVELISTS:

  1. _D. H. LAWRENCE_ 90

  2. _AMBER REEVES_ 101

  3. _SHEILA KAYE-SMITH_ 109

  FORM AND THE NOVEL 118

  SINCERITY: THE PUBLISHER AND THE POLICEMAN 124

  THREE COMIC GIANTS:

  1. _TARTARIN_ 147

  2. _FALSTAFF_ 161

  3. _MUeNCHAUSEN_ 177

  THE ESPERANTO OF ART 191

  THE TWILIGHT OF GENIUS 208

  A Deceptive Dedication

  I

  I have shown the manuscript of this book to a well-known author. One ofthose staid, established authors whose venom has been extracted by themellow years. My author is beyond rancour and exploit; he has earned theright to bask in his own celebrity, and needs to judge no more, becauseno longer does he fear judgment. He is like a motorist who has sowed hiswild petrol. He said to me: 'You are very, very unwise. I nevercriticise my contemporaries, and, believe me, it doesn't pay.' Well, Iam unwise; I always was unwise, and this has paid in a coin not alwaysrecognised, but precious to a man's spiritual pride. Why should I notcriticise my contemporaries? It is not a merit to be a contemporary.Also, they can return the compliment; some of them, if I may ventureupon a turn of phrase proper for Mr Tim Healy, have returned thecompliment before they got it. It may be unwise, but I join withVoltaire in thanking God that he gave us folly. So I will affront thecondemnatory vagueness of wool and fleecy cloud, be content to thinkthat nobody will care where I praise, that everybody will think meimpertinent where I judge. I will be content to believe that thewell-known author will not mind if I criticise him, and that the otherswill not mind either. I will hope, though something of a Sadducee, thatthere is an angel in their hearts.

  I want to criticise them and their works because I think the novel, thislatest born of literature, immensely interesting and important. It isinteresting because, more faithfully than any other form, it expressesthe mind of man, his pains that pass, his hopes that fade and are bornagain, his discontent pregnant with energy, the unrulinesses in which hemisspends his vigour, the patiences that fit him to endure all thingseven though he dare them not. In this, all other forms fail: history,because it chronicles battles and dates, yet not the great movements ofthe peoples; economics, because in their view all men are vile;biography, because it leads the victim to the altar, but neversacrifices it. Even poetry fails; I do not try to shock, but I doubtwhether the poetic is equal to the prose form.

  I do not want to fall into the popular fallacy that prose and poetryeach have their own field, strictly preserved, for prose is not alwaysprosy, nor poetry always poetic; prose may contain poetry, poetry cannotcontain prose, just as some gentlemen are bounders, but no bounders aregentlemen. But the admiration many people feel for poetry derives from alack of intelligence rather than from an excess of emotion, and theywould be cured if, instead of admiring, they read. Some subjects andideas naturally fall into poetry, mainly the lyric ideas; 'To Anthea,'and 'The Skylark' would, in prose, lie broken-pinioned upon the ground,but the exquisiteness of poetry, when it conveys the ultimate aspirationof man, defines its limitations. Poetry is child of the austerity ofliterature by the sensuality of music. Thus it is more and less than itsforbears; speaking for myself alone, I feel that 'Epipsychidion' and the'Grecian Urn' are just a little less than the Kreutzer Sonata, thatBrowning and Whitman might have written better in prose, though theymight thus have been less quoted. For poetry is too often_schwaermerei_, a thing of lilts; when it conveys philosophical ideas,as in Browning and in that prose writer gone astray, Shakespeare, itsuffers the agonising pains of constriction. Rhyme and scansion tend tolimit and hamper it; everything can be said in prose, but not in poetry;to prose no licence need be granted, while poetry must use and abuse it,for prose is free, poetry shackled by its form. No doubt that is whypoetry causes so much stir, for it surmounts extraordinary difficulties,and men gape as at a tenor who attains a top note. However exquisite,the scope of poetry is smaller than that of prose, and if any doubt itlet him open at random an English Bible and say if Milton canout-thunder Job, or Swinburne outcloy the sweetness of Solomon's Song.

  More than interesting, the novel is important because, low as its statusmay be, it does day by day express mankind, and mankind in the making.Sometimes it is the architect that places yet another brick upon thepalace of the future. Always it is the showman of life. I think of'serious books,' of the incredible heaps of memoirs, works on finance,strategy, psychology, sociology, biology, omniology ... that fall everyday like manna (unless from another region they rise as fumes) into thebaskets of the reviewers. All this paper ... they dance their littledance to four hundred readers and a great number of second-handbooksellers, and lo! the dust of their decay is on their brow. They livea little longer than an article by Mr T. P. O'Connor, and live a littleless.

  The novel, too, does not live long, but I have known one break up ahappy home, and another teach revolt to several daughters; can we givegreater praise? Has so much been achieved by any work entitled _TheFoundations of the Century_, or something of that sort? The novel,despised buffoon that it is, pours out its poison and its pearls withinreach of every lip; its heroes and heroines offer examples to the readerand make him say: 'That bold, bad man ... you wouldn't think it to lookat me, who'm a linen-draper, but it's me.' If, in this preface, I mayintroduce a personal reminiscence, I can strengthen my point by sayingthat after publishing _The Second Blooming_ I received five letters fromwomen I did not know, who wholly recognised themselves in my principalheroine, of course the regrettable one.

  The novel moulds
by precept and example, and therefore we modernjesters, inky troubadours, are responsible for the gray power which wewield behind the throne. Given this responsibility, it is a pity thereshould be so many novels, for the reader is distracted with variousexamples, and painfully hesitates between the career of Raffles and thatof John Inglesant. Thus the novel fires many a sanctimoniousness, makeslurid many a hesitating life. If only we could endow it! But we cannot,for the old saying can be garbled: call no novelist famous until he isdead.

  It is a fascinating idea, this one of endowing the novel. In principleit is not difficult, only we must assume our capable committee and thatis quite as difficult as ignoring the weight of the elephant. I wonderwhat would happen if an Act of Parliament were to endow genius! I wonderwho would sit on the sub-committee appointed by the British Governmentto endow literature. I do not wonder, I know. There would be ProfessorSaintsbury, Mr Austin Dobson, Professor Walter Raleigh, Sir Sidney Lee,Professor Gollancz, all the academics, all the people drier than thedrought, who, whether the god of literature find himself in the car orin the cart, never fail to get into the dickey. I should not even wonderif, by request of the municipality of Burton-on-Trent, it were founddesirable to infuse a democratic element into the sub-committee byadding the manager of the Army and Navy Stores and, of course, MrBottomley. Do not protest: Mr Bottomley has recently passed embitteredjudgments, under the characteristic heading 'Dam-Nation,' on Mr AlecWaugh, who ventured, in a literary sketch, to show English soldiersgoing over the top with oaths upon their lips and the courage born offear in their hearts. I think Mr Bottomley would like to have Mr Waughshot, and the editor of _The Nation_ confined for seven days in thePress Bureau, for having told the truth in literary form. I do notimpugn his judgment of what it feels like to go over the top, for hehas had long experience of keeping strictly on the surface.

  No, our sub-committee would be appointed without the help of Thalia andCalliope. It would register judgments such as those of the famoussub-committee that grants the Nobel Prizes. That committee, during itsshort life, has managed to reward Sully-Prudhomme and to leave outSwinburne, to give a prize to Sienkewicz, whom a rather more recentgeneration has found so suitable for the cinema. It has even given aprize to Mr Rudyard Kipling, but whether in memory of literature ordynamite is not known.

  So literary genius must, as before, look for its endowment in thesomewhat barren heart of man, and continue to shed a hundred seeds inits stony places, in the forlorn hope that the fowls of the air may notdevour them all, and that a single ear of corn may wilt and wither itsway into another dawn.

  II

  The reading of most men and women provides distressing lists. So far asI can gather from his conversation, the ordinary, busy man, concernedwith his work, finds his mental sustenance in the newspapers,particularly in _Punch_, in the illustrated weeklies and in the journalsthat deal with his trade; as for imaginative literature, he seems toconfine himself to Mr Nat Gould, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mr W. W.Jacobs, Mr Mason, and such like, who certainly do not strain hisimaginative powers; he is greatly addicted to humour of the coarserkind, and he dissipates many of his complexes by means of vile storieswhich he exchanges with his fellows; these do not at all represent hiskindliness and his respectability. Sometimes he reads a shocker, thesort that is known as 'railway literature,' presumably because it cannothold the attention for more than the time that elapses between twostops.

  The more serious and scholarly man, who abounds in every club, isaddicted to the monthly reviews, (price two-and-six; he does not likethe shilling ones), to the _Times_, to the _Spectator_; that kind of manis definitely stodgy and prides himself upon being sound. He is fond ofmemoirs, rather sodden accounts of aristocrats and politicians, of thedull, ordinary lives of dull, ordinary people; when he has done with thebook it goes to the pulping machine, but some of the pulp gets into thatman's brain. ('Ashes to ashes, pulp to pulp.') He likes books of travel,biographies, solid French books (strictly by academicians), politicalworks, economic works. His conversation sounds like it, and that is whyhis wife is so bored; his emotions are reflex and run only round theobjects he can see; art cannot touch him, and no feather ever falls uponhis brow from an airy wing. He commonly tells you that good novels arenot written nowadays; he must be excused that opinion, for he nevertries to read them. The only novels with which the weary Titan refresheshis mind are those of Thackeray, sometimes of Trollope; the morefrivolous sometimes go so far as to sip a little of the honey that fallsfrom the mellifluous lips of Mr A. C. Benson.

  The condition of women is different. They care for little that ends in'ic,' and so their consumption of novels is enormous. The commonplacewoman is attracted by the illustrated dailies and weeklies, but she alsoneeds large and continuous doses of religious sentimentality, of papiermache romance, briefly, of novels described in literary circles as'bilge,' such as the works of Mr Hall Caine, Mrs Barclay, Miss E. M.Dell, and a great many more; if she is of the slightly faster kind thatgives smart lunch parties at the Strand Corner House, her diet issometimes a little stronger; she takes to novels of the orchid house andthe tiger's lair, to the artless erotics of Miss Elinor Glyn, Mr HubertWales, and Miss Victoria Cross. She likes memoirs too, memoirs of vagueBourbons and salacious Bonapartes; she takes great pleasure in thehistorical irregularities of cardinals. She likes poetry too as conveyedby Miss Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

  If that type of woman were not a woman the arts could base as few hopeson her as they do on men, but the most stupid woman is better groundthan the average man, because she is open, while he is smug. So it is nowonder that among the millions of women who mess and muddle their waythrough the conservatories and pigsties of literature, should be foundthe true reading public, the women who are worth writing for, who readthe best English novels, who are in touch with French and Russianliterature, who reads plays, and even essays, ancient and modern. HailMary, mother of mankind; but for these the arts must starve!

  That fine public cannot carry us very far. They are not enough to keepliterature vigorous by giving it what it needs: a consciousness offellowship with many readers. If literature is to flourish (of which Iam not sure, though endure in some form it will), the general publictaste must be raised. I feel that taste can be raised and cultivated,and many have felt that too. From the middle of the nineteenth centuryonwards, and especially since 1870, an ascending effort has been made tostimulate the taste of the rising artisan. Books like Lord Avebury's_Pleasures of Life_, like _Sesame and Lilies_, collections such as the_Hundred Best Books_ and the _Hundred Best Pictures_, have all beenattuned to that key. The only pity is that the selections, nearly all ofthem excellent, were immeasurably above the heads of the public forwhich they were meant. Two recent instances are worth analysing. One ofthem is _A Library for Five Pounds_ by Sir William Robertson Nicoll,(whom Mr Arnold Bennett delighteth to revile), the other _Literary Tasteand How to Form It_, by Mr Bennett himself. Now Sir William RobertsonNicoll's book is much more sensible than the funereal lists available atmost polytechnics. The author does not pretend that one should readPlato in one's bath; he seems to realise the state of mind of theordinary, fairly busy, fairly willing, fairly intelligent person. A signof it is that he selects only sixty-one works, and out of those allowstwenty-seven novels. Of the rest, most are readable, except _Pilgrim'sProgress_ and _The Origin of Species_, a touching couple. The list is byfar the best guide I have ever seen, but ... there is not a livingauthor in it. It is not a library, it is a necropolis. The noveliststhat Sir William Robertson Nicoll recommends are Scott, Jane Austen,Dickens, Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Hawthorne, Trollope,Blackmore, Defoe, and Swift. All their books are readable, but they donot take by the hand the person who has thought wrong or not thought atall. When you want to teach a child history you do not dump upon itsdesk Hume and Smollett, in forty volumes; you lead it by degrees, bymeans of text-books, that is _according to plan_. That is how I conceiveliterary education, but before suggesting a list, let us glance at_Literary Taste and
How to Form It_. In this book the author showshimself much more unpractical and much less sympathetic than Sir WilliamRobertson Nicoll (whom Mr Bennett delighteth to revile). The book itselfis very interesting; it is bright, intelligent; it teaches you how toread, and how to make allowances for the classics; it tells you how youmay woo your way to Milton, but, after all, when you have done, you findthat you have not wooed your way an inch nearer. That is because MrArnold Bennett takes up to his public an attitude more highbrowed than Icould imagine if I were writing a skit on his book. Mr Bennett's idea ofa list for the aspirant to letters is to throw the London Library at hishead; he lays before us a stodgy lump of two or three hundred volumes,many of them excellent, and many more absolutely penal. It is enough tosay that he seriously starts his list with the Venerable Bede's_Ecclesiastical History_. Bede! the dimmest, most distant of Englishchroniclers, who depicts the dimmest and most distant period of Englishhistory; once, in an A.B.C., I saw a shopman reading _Tono-Bungay_,which was propped against the cruet. Does Mr Bennett imagine that mandropping the tear of emotion and the gravy of excitement upon theVenerable Bede? And if one goes on with the list and discovers the_Autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury_, _Religio Medici_,Berkeley's _Principles of Human Knowledge_, Reynold's _Discourses onArt_, the works of Pope, _Voyage of the Beagle_ ... one comes tounderstand how such readers may have been made by such masters. From thebeginning to the end of that list my mind is obsessed by the word'stodge,' and the novels do not relieve it much. There are a good many,but they comprise the usual Thackeray, Scott, Dickens ... need I go on?Relief is found only in Fielding, Sterne, and in one book each ofMarryat, Lever, Kingsley, and Gissing. These authors are admittedpresumably because they are dead.

  In all this, where is hope? How many green daffodil heads, trying toburst their painful way through the heavy earth of a dull life, has MrBennett trampled on? Is it impossible to find some one who is (as MrBennett certainly is), capable of the highest artistic appreciation andof high literary achievement, and who will, for a moment, put himself inthe place of the people he is addressing? Is it impossible for an adultto remember that as a boy he hated the classics? Has he forgotten thatas a young man he could be charmed, but educated only by means of amachine like the one they use for stuffing geese? The people we want tointroduce to literature are, nearly all of them, people who work; someearn thirty shillings a week, and ponder a great deal on how to live onit; some earn hundreds a year and are not much better off; all areoccupied with material cares, their work, their games, their gardens,their loves; nearly all are short of time, and expend on work, transit,and meals, ten to twelve hours a day. They read in tubes and omnibuses,in the midst of awful disturbance and overcrowding; also they are deeplycorrupted by the daily papers, where nothing over a column is everprinted, where the news are conveyed in paragraphs and headlines, sothat they never have to concentrate, and find it difficult to do so;they are corrupted too by the vulgarity and sensationalism which are thebones and blood of the magazines, until they become unable to thinkwithout stimulants.

  It is no use saying those people are lost. They are not lost, but theyhave gone astray, or rather, nobody has ever tried to turn their facesthe right way. Certainly Mr Arnold Bennett does nothing for them. Ifthey could read _The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ they would,but they cannot. People cannot plunge into old language, oldatmospheres; they have no links with these things; their imagination isnot trained to take a leap; many try, and nearly all fail because theirliterary leaders go to sleep, or march them into bogs. No crude mind canjump into ancient literature; modern literature alone can help it,namely cleanse its _nearest_ section, and prepare it for further strain.The limits of literary taste can, in each person, be carried as far asthat person's intellectual capacity goes, but only _by degrees_. Inother words, limit your objective instead of failing at a largeoperation.

  I am not prepared to lay down a complete list, but I am prepared to hintat one. If I had to help a crude but willing taste, I would handle itsreading as follows:--

  FIRST PERIOD

  Reading made up exclusively of recent novels, good, well-written,thoughtful novels, not too startling in form or contents. I would beginon novels because anybody can read a novel, and because the firstcleansing operation is to induce the subject to read good novels insteadof bad ones. Here is a preliminary list:--

  _Tony-Bungay_ (Wells) _Kipps_ (Wells) _The Custom of the Country_ (Wharton) _The Old Wives' Tale_ (Bennett) _The Man of Property_ (Galsworthy) _Jude the Obscure_ (Hardy) _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_ (Hardy) _Sussex Gorse_ (Kaye-Smith)

  and say twenty or thirty more of this type, all published in the lastdozen years. It is, of course, assumed that interest would bemaintained by conversation.

  SECOND PERIOD

  After the subject (victim, if you like) had read say thirty of the bestsolid novels of the twentieth century, I think I should draw him to themore abstruse modern novels and stories. In the first period he wouldcome in contact with a general criticism of life. In the second periodhe would read novels of a more iconoclastic and constructive kind, suchas:--

  _The Island Pharisees_ (Galsworthy) _The New Machiavelli_ (Wells) _Sinister Street_ (Mackenzie) _The Celestial Omnibus_ (Forster) _The Longest Journey_ (Forster) _Sons and Lovers_ (Lawrence) _The White Peacock_ (Lawrence) _Ethan Frome_ (Wharton) _Round the Corner_ (Cannan)

  Briefly, the more ambitious kind of novel, say thirty or fortyaltogether. At that time, I should induce the subject to browseoccasionally in the _Oxford Book of English Verse_.

  THIRD PERIOD

  Now only would I come to the older novels, because, by then, the mindshould be supple enough to stand their congestion of detail, theirtendency to caricature, their stilted phrasing, and yet recognise theirqualities. Here are some:--

  _The Rise of Silas Lapham_ (Howells) _Vanity Fair_ (Thackeray) _The Vicar of Wakefield_ (Goldsmith) _The Way of All Flesh_ (Butler) _Quentin Durward_ (Scott) _Guy Mannering_ (Scott)

  Briefly, the bulk of the works of Thackeray, Jane Austen, CharlotteBronte, and George Eliot. 'Barry Lyndon' twice, and Trollope never.Here, at last, the solid curriculum, but only, you will observe, when alittle of the mud of the magazines had been cleaned off. Rather moreverse too, beginning with Tennyson and Henley, passing on to Rossettiand perhaps to Swinburne. Verse, however, should not be pressed. But Ithink I should propose modern plays of the lighter kind, Mr BernardShaw's _Major Barbara_ and _John Bull's Other Island_, for instance. Onecould pass by degrees to the less obvious plays of Mr Shaw, certainly tothose of St John Hankin, and perhaps to _The Madras House_. I think alsoa start might be made on foreign works, but these would develop mainlyin the

  FOURTH PERIOD

  Good translations being available, I would suggest notably:--

  _Madame Bovary_ (Flaubert) _Resurrection_ (Tolstoi) _Fathers and Children_ (Turgenev) Various short stories of Tchekoff.

  And then, _if the subject seemed to enjoy these works_,

  _L'Education Sentimentale_ (Flaubert) _Le Rouge et le Noir_ (Stendhal) _The Brothers Karamazov_ (Dostoievsky)

  Mark this well, if the subject seemed to enjoy them. If there is anystrain, any boredom, there is lack of continuity, and a chance of losingthe subject's interest altogether. I think the motto should be 'Don'tpress'; that is accepted when it comes to golf; why has it never beenaccepted when it affects man? This period would, I think, end with thelighter plays of Shakespeare, such as _The Merry Wives of Windsor_, _TheTaming of the Shrew_, and perhaps _Hamlet_. I think modern essays shouldalso come in _via_ Mr E. V. Lucas, Mr Belloc, and Mr Street; also Iwould suggest Synge's travels in Wicklow, Connemara, and the ArranIslands; this would counteract the excessive fictional quality of theforegoing.

  FIFTH PERIOD

  I submit that, by that time, if the subject had a good average mind, hewould be prepared by habit to read older works related with the bestmodern works. The essays of Mr Lucas would prepare him for the works ofLamb; those of
Mr Belloc, for the essays of Carlyle and Bacon. Thuswould I lead back to the heavier Victorian novels, to the older ones ofFielding and Sterne. If any taste for plays has been developed byShakespeare, it might be turned to Marlowe, Congreve, and Sheridan. Thedrift of my argument is: read the easiest first; do not strain; do nottry to 'improve your mind,' but try to enjoy yourself. Than books thereis no better company, but it is no use approaching them as dourpedagogues. Proceed as a snob climbing the social ladder, namely, knowthe best people in the neighbourhood, then the best people they know.The end is not that of snobbery, but an eternal treasure.

  I think that my subject, if capable of developing taste, would find hisway to the easier classic works, such as Carlyle's _French Revolution_,Boswell's _Life of Johnson_, perhaps even to Wesley's _Journal_. But atthat stage the subject would have to be dismissed to live or die. Enoughwould have been done to lead him away from boredom, from dull solemnityand false training, to purify his taste and make it of some use. The dayis light and the past is dark; all eyes can see the day and find itsplendid, but eyes that would pierce the darkness of the past must growfamiliar with lighter mists; to every man the life of the world abouthim is that man's youth, while old age is ill to apprehend.