It is easy to say who are our British novelists of the first flight: they are Mr Conrad, Mr Hardy, Mr George Moore, Mr W.H. Hudson – and possibly Mr Bennett. That I regard as indisputable if we may take the novel as giving us something more than the tale – as being a tale with a projection of life, a philosophy, but not an obvious moral, or propagandist purpose. First-flight novelists, then, will be those who have perfected their methods and are resigned.
The second flight will be, in our literature, Pushkin’s ‘haughty and proud generation: vigorous and free in their passions and adventures’; they are such writers as Norman Douglas, P. Wyndham Lewis, D.H. Lawrence, Frank Swinnerton, Katherine Mansfield, Clemence Dane, Dorothy Richardson, and James Joyce. Your first flight will be wise; your second, dogmatic. One likes to thank them, for what it is worth, with one’s note of applause. But they will not thank you much in return because they are going on to the new adventures, the new explorations of method.
Let us for a moment differentiate between the novel and the tale – or let us at least try to get at a working definition. The novel of today is probably the only intellectual, poetic, or spiritual exercise that humanity is engaged in performing. It is probably, too, the only work of exact and dispassionate science.
We may consider the tale first. Mr Kipling, speaking at his reception at the Sorbonne, talked recently of ‘the literature of escape’. I don’t know whether this phrase is an accepted classification of academic criticism, or whether we owe it to the genius of Mr Kipling. Mr Arthur Symons said long ago that all art is an escape – but that is another matter. Anyhow, that is a very valuable phrase. For the literature of escape embraces whole century-long ranges of effort from The Golden Ass of Apuleius to the last sadic rubbish of Miss Dash; all the works from the story of Morgiana and the Forty Thieves to Treasure Island or Lorna Doone, reading which the tired city typewriter or the millionaire’s office boy may escape from their environments and so recruit their vital forces.
The tale – even the novel of commerce – should not be despised. Mr Gladstone sought refuge from the Irish Question in John Inglesant; Edward the Seventh read the nautical romances of Captain Marryat to solace himself whilst he was negotiating the Entente Cordiale, and thus we see the tale interlaced as it were with the greatest of international happenings. The King’s taste was sounder than that of the Prime Minister – but King or Premier, midinette1 or millionaire, you must come at last to this: you must find escape from yourself in the artless tale – in the fiction of commerce. The late Mr Meredith used to await with impatience the daily instalments of feuilleton in one of our ha’penny papers.
But when it comes to criticism of the tale one is, in England, thrown back almost entirely upon the ‘short story’. The English long tale is practically always merely anodyne, without art, construction, presentation, or progressive effect. You read it and ‘escape’, but you have no comment to make. It calls for none. And the short ‘short story’ is a very old form. Told by story-tellers in bazaars, by medieval queens to their courts, or by anecdote-cappers round the fires of smoking-rooms, the tale was constrained by time to be short and by the exacting nature of audiences to be well told. For people who listen must be gripped more firmly than people who read.
And one may say that all the pure art of the English-writing peoples has until quite lately gone into the short story. You could cite Mr Kipling, Mr Wells, and even Mr W.W. Jacobs without absolute shame against Continental writers of this one form. For the whole art of these three writers of genius has gone into their short stories – the whole, that is to say, of their senses of proportion, of narration, and of construction. The Country of the Blind volume of Mr Wells, any volume of the Indian tales of Mr Kipling, and any volume of Mr Jacobs are products of sheer genius in narration. Naturally any volume of Maupassant in his greatest vein – say, the original Yvette collection – excels the English books because in addition to skill of narration Maupassant had a great, gloomy, philosophic outlook which transfused all his really representative writing. And when an artist has the temperament that will let his work be transfused by a profound or a lofty perception of the broader aspects of human vicissitudes, his work will have greater value to the republic than that of the most skilled constructors of anecdotes. Chekhov, though not so practised in elisions as Maupassant, was to all intents and purposes as skilled a narrator and so, for the matter of that you might say, is Schnitzler.
Let us then put it that, although the writing of good short stories is not an essentially English occupation, when English men of genius do turn their attention to that form, they not infrequently attain to high achievement in pure art. But as far as this country is concerned, the practice of that form seems to be in abeyance. I cannot, at any rate, think of any English writer who could be classed as in the second flight of writers of the short story. Mr Kipling and Mr Wells of the indisputable first flight have turned their attention to other things; I have seen nothing by Mr Jacobs for a long time.
I ought perhaps to make a reservation in favour of Miss Katherine Mansfield. I have had for this lady for so long so considerable an admiration that, though dates are not my strong point, I think it possible that she stands chronologically with Mr Lawrence, Mr Joyce, and Mr Lewis. Certainly in prewar days – and that is probably the criterion for ‘second-flightness’ – Miss Mansfield had arrived at a strong, severe, at an almost virulent skill in sheer elision: relevancy. I can still remember with precision some of her contributions to a journal called Rhythm that must have lived out its quite valuable life in 1913 or 1914; and certainly in her volume entitled Bliss Miss Mansfield has carried the methods of tight, hard, cold – I wish there were some translation for the Latin word saeva – selection further than it has ever been carried in English work. I wish she did more. Bulk is not a quality for which one need feel any respect; but a number of instances is helpful when it is one’s task to generalize. And anyhow there is not too much in the literature of escape that one can read, not only to get away from the remembrance of one’s creditors, but also with the keen pleasure of appreciating the skill of chisel work. Miss Mansfield has spent a good deal of time, lately, in exercising a mordant pen on contemporary fiction. I wish she had not: we have so much more need of good stuff than of analysis of indifferent matter.
So we arrive at the novel and at the second generation of its practitioners. Compared with the short story which as an art form was certainly perfected in the day of the Parables – and who knows in how many generations of earlier Books of the Dead and on how many myriads of incised bricks? – the novel is still a babe in arms. Henry James was our first novelist; Mr Conrad our next – and then we come to the second flight. Henry James was our first Anglo-Saxon writer to perceive that this life of ours is an affair of terminations and of embarrassments. Mr Conrad was our next. He realized that the records of human lives cannot be set down as they are set down by the amiable, learned, and incompetent contributors to Dictionaries of National Biographies, as a straightforward ‘article’ with dates but not too many references.
Of course, the great master of both these great men was Flaubert, and, if you read the account of the adulterous courtship of Emma Bovary by Rodolphe, you read the germ of Ulysses, of Tarr, of all the works of Miss Dorothy Richardson, of most of the stories of Mr Lawrence. Rodolphe, the rather bounderish country gentleman is trying, at a cattle show, to seduce Emma Bovary, the wife of the country doctor. They are seated side by side on the seats of the tribune. Rodolphe says: ‘My love for you shall be eternal. We shall live as do the little birds in the sacred odour of Paradise.’ The Prefect cries out: ‘Trois boeufs; trois cochons; douze poules, et un coq! – Maitre Cornu!’ – ‘Three oxen; three sows; twelve hens, and a rooster! – First Prize: Mr Hornimann!’ Rodolphe continues: ‘Gracious being! At the mere sight of your form my heart…’ The Prefect shouts: ‘Four onions; twelve potatoes; twelve turnips! – First Prize: Mr Sprout!’ It is something like that: the constant alternation of the romantic-heroic with the products of dung and sweat. And that is our life.
Mr James must have known too many shrinkings, embarrassments, and fine shades to render them without remorse; Mr Conrad, much coarser and much less shuddering in fibre than the Master from New England, has limited himself – as far as form goes – to registering how human lives, in a thousand devious, unconnected anecdotes, present themselves to the memory of the teller of a story. Mr Conrad, in fact, is reconciled to, is tranquil in face of, his world of ships’ captains and revolutionaries. Mr James, much more akin in spirit to the Flaubert whom he could not bear – to the Flaubert who was really a good Christian horrified at the way in which Christian men mangled in their practice the precepts of Our Lord – Mr James, then, never got over the crudities of merely living.
It has remained for our novelists of the second flight to unite, as best they could, the practices of Mr James and of Mr Conrad and to carry the process that one step further that art forever demands. The formula, the discovery, has trembled as it were on the lips of generations of novelists the world over. You find it in the banquet of Trimalchio; in the Sancho Panza of Cervantes; in Shakespeare’s clowns; in Thackeray’s comments on his characters – the sense of the gross, the ironic, or the merely smug world that surrounds and nullifies the hero. It has remained, let us repeat, for our novelists of the second flight to carry the conviction of the grinning, complex world into the consciousness, into the springs of action of their characters – to render it, not objectively, but from the inside.
Gissing had got so far as to emphasize that the gross, ironic, smug – and sordid! – world paralyses the lives not only of heroes but of the least significant human beings. New Grub Street falls short of being a masterpiece of the first order only because, like Zola’s L’Oeuvre, it is perpetually harrowing – so ceaselessly harrowing that the mind cannot react against its protracted and heavy dragging. Still, L’Oeuvre and New Grub Street are serious studies of the hero as artist in process of strangulation by the drag of sordid material detail; just as The Town Traveller and Demos show the quite ordinary man’s character being preyed upon by the mere sordidnesses of dirty table-cloths, greasy bacon, and frayed trouser-ends.
Gissing is little read today, which is a pity, for he was a sound, industrious, and honest craftsman; and he has left practically no following. That is not so much to be regretted because his methods, as far as I can see, lead only into a cul-de-sac. And that brings me to Mr Swinnerton.
To read Mr Swinnerton at his best is to hear all the time the cadences of Gissing; and even in such carefully psychologized work as the character called Jenny of Nocturne there is the perpetual undertone of the dirty tablecloth and the greasy bacon. The mental states of the girl are continually at the mercy of re-hashed mutton and wet hat-trimmings – or of bisque de homard and peaches. Psychologically these are not trouvailles – only Mr Swinnerton’s neck of mutton and the bread pudding of the domestic hearth, as well as the Beaune in the glass of the seducer, are excellent renderings of still life.
But Mr Swinnerton – and Nocturne is incomparably his best book – is not just doing the sordid surroundings plus the young woman’s reaction into luxurious seduction on board a lordly yacht, that being the ‘plot’ of this work stated unsympathetically. (And the plot of every work worth consideration should be capable of standing up against unsympathetic statement.) He has sufficient perception of the complexity of life to attempt to crowd into the story of five or six hours the whole mental history, the whole progression, of his young woman’s ‘fall’. And not only does he attempt this but he succeeds in the attempt. That is a very considerable achievement. It may or may not be merely a technical feat; but the effect is to convey some at least of the flicker and waver of the human soul in the life that we live.
Descending then from Gissing – though I am quite prepared to have Mr Swinnerton or someone else write to the papers and declare that he has never felt the influence of the author of Henry Ryecroft – Mr Swinnerton makes his assault upon the Modern Position. Descending from Henry James, Miss Clemence Dane makes hers – not quite so uncompromisingly. Legend, which is Miss Dane’s most interesting book, though Regiment of Women contains more harrowing stuff, is another attempt to work into a single evening the story of a whole life, the whole work of an artist, the complete love affairs, and the death of an unknown, problematic woman of letters. Without Mr Swinnerton’s courage or technical ‘chic’, Miss Dane not only provides herself with a narrator, which of course is a necessity for her form, but provides the narrator with a humble, Jane Eyre-like psychology, vibrating sympathies, love affair, and marriage. Thus she carries the ‘story’ on, though only in a ‘prologue’, for months after the evening is over. Mr Swinnerton just leaves the evening there as far as Nocturne is concerned: we do not get told whether the skipper of the lordly yacht marries the girl, or whether the young woman has a baby, or any of the other details that, rounding up endings, leave the voracious reader with a comfortable feeling of repletion.
Nevertheless, Miss Dane’s attempt is an attempt – less to get at the complex impressionism of life than at the complexities of human judgements. A glamorous literary female figure is talked about from every point of view within the Jamesian-At-Home sphere of life, by almost every imaginable human type to be found in a South Kensington ‘highbrow at home’. A nasty writing man thinks ‘She’ does not love her husband; a nice painting man preserves discreet but illuminative silences; a ‘cattish’ writing woman thinks ‘Her’ second book a sentimental failure; a nice writing woman thinks it a monument of irony. So a curiously fussy image of the Figure is built up, the Figure herself dying in the distance whilst the ‘at home’ proceeds. Miss Dane in short employs Mr Conrad’s method in unfolding her story and goes to the Henry James of ‘The Aspern Papers’ and ‘The Real Thing’ for her curiously provincial atmosphere.
The point, however, about both Mr Swinnerton and Miss Dane is that they do have conceptions of life as a very complex affair of cross motives. Neither treats characters as simple beings whose story is a matter of straightforward achievement under one dominant passion – achievement of fame, fortune, automobiles, heroines, offspring. Nor does either of them seek to render the world a better place. Those are very good things.
We come, then, to the more obviously motive forces of the English novel of today. We may begin with Mr Douglas – the Mr Douglas of South Wind and They Went; though really you might just as well call Alone a novel with modern Italy as central character – modern Italy set down from as many angles, cut into as many-faceted a thing as the central figure of Legend, and provided with even more wines and dishes than the central figure of Nocturne.
In a sense Mr Douglas is a writer of an older generation – of a generation infinitely old, critically. To come upon passages of appraisement in Alone is to be bewildered by the feeling that one’s young, young youth has returned. You have Ouida and Mathilde Blind – Mathilde Blind of all people! – exalted at the expense of James; for all the world as if the late Mr Watts-Dunton were still setting the standard of the late Athenaeum. There is hardly anyone old enough to remember that literary point of view.
So that Mr Douglas, as far as his gifts are concerned, must have sprung fully armed from some militant head. He does not descend from Gissing or Mr Conrad; certainly James has not influenced him; it is impossible to imagine his having the patience to read Education sentimentale; he has none of the swift attack of Maupassant. He is most like Anatole France – and yet he is very unlike Anatole France. He is like, that is to say, because at any moment he will illuminate a modern predicament with an anecdote from the depths of a most profound antiquity – only you feel that Mr Douglas is quite capable of inventing his anecdote and conveying to it, with tremendous gusto and smacking of the lips, an almost too gorgeous patina. Not for nothing has he told us the story of the faun of Locri.
South Wind is the story, tremulous in surface and in treatment, of an affair – of, that is to say, an atmosphere. The bishop is nonsense; the duchess is nonsense; the millionaire, the boy, the count – they spring for moments into life that is more real than life and cast light, not on any humanity, but on a place that quivers in Mediterranean sunshine. Or let us put it that Mr Douglas’s central figure is the season of 19— in Taormina or Capri or some such place, and that Mr Douglas’s human dolls illuminate with their actions and illustrate with their disquisitions that period of fashionable time. I think this is the best way to put it: for this author’s savage, mordant dislike for humanity would hardly let him make his central figure a bishop or any other created human being. The central figure of They Went is the Devil, who, I imagine, was not created; but even with his own devil Mr Douglas has not very much patience, not enough to dwell very much or very often upon him. But here again his real hero is the fabulous city of the catastrophic end.
Loving the souls of places, not of men, Mr Douglas can afford to write a great deal more than the human-centred novelist of today; so he can afford to be relatively personal too. For it matters very little if the personality of your writer sticks out in the foreground of places where the sunlight always quivers. It does matter a great deal if that personality intrudes on the always shadowy renderings of human interplay. That is the weak spot of Tarr – which Mr Lewis wrote, not with as much aplomb, but quite as obtrusively as Mr Douglas. That is no doubt because both these important writers began as essayists – a school that is exceedingly deleterious to the novelist-beginner. For your essayist learns to rely on his personality rather than on anything else of all the things there are under the sun. What, for instance, might not the Mr Beerbohm of Seven Men be if he did not perpetually and for a living have to be Max – more blasé, more unpractical, more cynical, and less interested than any other man of London Town?
Mr Douglas probably imposes his personality out of sheer damn-your-eyes don’t-careness; but Mr Lewis does it of set purpose – and sometimes he forgets to do it, out of sheer fatigue, one suspects. Then he writes the straightforward story of the tale-teller, as he does throughout the adventures of Kreisler in Tarr, the Tarr episodes themselves being, except for the discussions, shadowy and unconvincing.
But in the discussions Mr Lewis shows himself an extraordinarily great artist, not, heaven knows, in what his characters say, but in the rendering of their temperamental and physical reactions one upon the other. Mr Lawrence is a great realist – except when he is recording conversations. Mr Lewis is our greatest anti-realist; but when he is rendering conversations he is so great a realist that he makes you shiver. His characters writhe – over the marble table-tops of restaurants where the waiters rush about, harried, in the serving of ‘bocks’, or over the gas cooking-stoves where they are making ‘lunches’ out of the débris, the scraps from paper parcels purchased from an adjacent crémerie. They indulge in meaningless scraps of talk; but their personalities are set ‘one over against another’, currents crossing, embarrassments, agonizing shynesses, remembrances – and nothing can be more bitter! – of points they might have made in their last speech but seven. That is very wonderful.
The characters of Mr Lawrence, infinitely more real, infinitely more provided with ancestries, their feet infinitely more on the ground, sit about in punts, in fields of asphodels, and talk pathologic nonsense, every word of which Mr Lawrence records as if he had been sitting on the other side of the hedge with a stenographer’s tablet. But as for interplay of personality with personality, in the works of Mr Lawrence there is none. Absolutely none. Lawrence’s men and women discuss Love and discuss Liberty as if they were looking up those words in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and reading out what there they found, with a profound solemnity, an unwinking preposterousness.
On the other hand, the author of Tarr could never have written ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’, the descriptions of how a coal-miner’s widow washed the body of her husband, killed by a fall in a pit. The odour of chrysanthemums drifts in all the while, it being autumn.
That is Mr Lawrence being almost greater than it is proper to be. For the Mr Lawrence of The White Peacock, of Sons and Lovers, is a writer of genius. But he indulges his moods too much – at the expense of his subject. And self-indulgence is the last thing that a writer at all concerned with realism can allow himself. Temperament is, of course, necessary for the genius; but the genius who lets his books be nothing but temperament falls either into boredom or the ridiculous. And so, in Women in Love, a recent novel, Mr Lawrence gives us in all seriousness, during a discussion of Love-in-Liberty and Liberty-in-Love the most ridiculous sentence that was ever set down by the human pen. I regret that it is too indecent to be quoted in this context.
The fact is that sex discussion occupies – such is the idiocy of the repressive laws of Great Britain and the still more stupid laws of the United States – far too great a part in the public mind of the lands that border the Atlantic. It becomes an obsession; it ends as a nuisance. Sex is, I suppose, one phenomenon in a chain of the phenomena of growth and of reproduction. It has its importance along with eating and other physical processes. One should – the novelist, above all, should – regard it with composure. But so few do.
Indeed, I fancy that Mr Joyce is the only artist we have today who with an utter composure regards processes of reproduction, of nourishment, and of physical renewal. But then Mr Joyce, the supreme artist, regards with an equal composure – all things. That is why the law of the United States has persecuted his publishers. For law cannot – any more than the average of excitable humanity – contemplate, composure with equanimity. It is in itself abhorrent. If we were all always composed, we should have no war, no crime, no daily journalism, no outcry, nothing contemptible, very little that was base. We should have nothing but the arts. What then would become of poor humanity – of l’homme moyen sensuel, of the preacher, the writer on morals and the always excited scientist? They must die! Some day they all will. But that time is not yet.
And Mr Joyce is a writer of very beautiful, composed English. To read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as against, say, Interim of Miss Dorothy Richardson is to recognize the difference between singularly fussy inclusiveness and absolutely aloof selection. There is really more enlightenment as to childhood and youth in the first three pages of Mr Joyce’s book – there is more light thrown on the nature of man – than in all Miss Richardson’s volumes.
And that is not to belittle Miss Richardson; for to be infinitely little set over against Mr Joyce, is to be yet considerable enough. But Mr Joyce measures his effects by things immense and lasting, Miss Richardson by the passing standards of the lower middle-class boarding-house. It is as you might say Flaubert against Gissing.
Mr Joyce’s work is a voyaging on a much higher spiritual plane: the embarrassments and glories of Miss Richardson’s young women are bound up in material details. You are embarrassed because of the fichu about your neck; you glory because, finding a restaurant open long after normal closing time, the Italian proprietor serves you himself, with an air of distinguished consideration, with a shiny roll and a cup of chocolate – at a table laid with the plates and cutlery for a party of four! Now, I am not decrying the rendering of that sort of glory or melancholy. A large part of the elation of our poor lives as now we live them may well come from the fact that with our insufficient means we have received at some restaurant more consideration than we had expected. Proprietors and waiters have some of the contempt of public officials for poor humanity, and some of the clairvoyance in appraising purses that belongs to the really successful tradesmen. To hoodwink such fearsome creatures is to achieve a feat such as seldom falls to our portion. But it is only a momentary pride. And the depression that comes with shabbiness of clothes, deep though it be, is not the essential depression of the healthy man.
That is why the school of Gissing is a lesser thing than the school of Joyce. You may put it medically. Doctors tell you that all your life you have in your throat seven million germs of the cold in the head: but it is only when your vitality is at a low ebb that those germs invade your system. For the Gissing of New Grub Street sordid tablecloths; monotonously passing lives, and material indigences were the fulcra, the essential motive powers, in the lives of heroes. But that is not true to life – or it so happens only when the system is in a state of low vitality. It is possible that the sudden perception of a dirty tablecloth, all other things being unbearable, might make a hero-poet rush out and sell his soul to an evening paper. But that would be an accidental culmination; a pathological state. The contemplation of mutton hash contributed largely to the seduction of Mr Swinnerton’s Jenny – and that, given all the sordidnesses of her day, was true enough. But a whole procession of days of mutton hash, a whole Sahara of tablecloths stained with rings from the bottoms of stout glasses, would not turn Mr Swinnerton’s brave London Jenny into a prostitute by temperament or a real poet into a born journalist. In fact mere irritation at the sordidness of his surroundings will do no more than make a sound man or woman commit now and then a lâcheté;2 it will never change the essentials of a character.
It is the perception of that fact that gives such great value to Mr Joyce – and to the whole movement of the second flight. The mind of every man is made up of several – three or four – currents all working side by side, all making their impress or getting their expression from separate and individual areas of the brain. It is not enough to say that every man is homo duplex; every man is homo x-plex. And this complexity pursues every man into the minutest transactions of his daily life. You go to a bookstall to ask the price of a certain publication. Yes! But part of your mind says to you very quickly: ‘This clerk has the nose of my uncle George!’ Another part feels that you have plenty of time for your train; another that the fish you had for breakfast is disagreeing with you. Generally you are under a deep depression caused by the morning’s international news, but you have a particular elation at some movement in the stock market. A lady passing leaves a scent of wallflowers; that calls up associations to which you hardly attend. Almost unknown to yourself, beneath your breath you are humming a tune that has yet other associations. It is this tenuous complexity of life that has its first artistic representation in the works of our second flight – and it is this that makes one feel hopeful in the general depression of the English literary world. It is true that it finds almost its sole appreciation in America; but America does at least keep it going. And as long as it keeps going – les idées sont en marche.
The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a book of such beauty of writing, such clarity of perception, such a serene love of and interest in life, and such charity that, being the ungenerous creature man is, one was inclined to say: ‘This surely must be a peak! It is unlikely that this man will climb higher!’ But even now that Mr Joyce has published Ulysses, it is too early to decide upon that. One can’t arrive at one’s valuation of a volume so loaded as Ulysses after a week of reading and two or three weeks of thought about it. Next year, or in twenty years, one may. For it is as if a new continent with new traditions had appeared, and demanded to be run through in a month. Ulysses contains the undiscovered mind of man; it is human consciousness analysed as it has never before been analysed. Certain books change the world. This, success or failure, Ulysses does: for no novelist with serious aims can henceforth set out upon a task of writing before he has at least formed his own private estimate as to the rightness or wrongness of the methods of the author of Ulysses. If it does not make an epoch – and it well may! – it will at least mark the ending of a period.
Yale Review, 11 (July 1922), 703–17.