In 1890 Queen Victoria still had a decade to reign and Gladstone had not yet formed his last administration; the internal combustion engine was a novelty and the aeroplane was not to be invented for another thirteen years. In 1940 Winston Churchill formed his National Government, British forces were evacuated from Dunkirk, and London was heavily bombed; penicillin was developed and work started on the giant cyclotron at Berkeley. In 1890 Thomas Hardy, who had been born ten years before Wordsworth’s death, had not yet published Tess of the d’Urbervilles; in 1940 Graham Greene, who is still writing, published The Power and the Glory.
All ages doubtless seem to be moving fast to those who are living in them but the transformation in this half-century from the late Victorian world to one recognizably like our own was vertiginous.1 We ask, inevitably, whether and in what ways these immense changes were reflected in the literature of the period. Can we detect a new literary era akin to that brought about by the technological and political change? Epochs are normally named retrospectively; only in parodies of Hollywood epics do we hear such stirring cries as ‘Forward, Men of the Middle Ages!’, but in the early years of this century various writers were sure that they were ‘Modernists’ and a great deal of criticism has been directed towards the question of what is the nature of modern literature, with the tacit assumption that some generalizations will be possible.
It is natural to seek to relate literary works to the society in and for which they are written and to do so in a way which suggests a coherent line of development. This has seemed particularly important for some writers and critics over the last century, understandably enough in the case of Marxist critics, for a method of analysis which claims omni-competence must of necessity include the arts in its explanations. But this tendency has not been confined to Marxists; T. S. Eliot’s description of Ulysses as based upon a myth so as to give some shape to ‘the panorama of futility which is the modern world’, Virginia Woolf’s statement that ‘in 1910 human nature changed’ and that the writer’s task was to do justice to this change, do not merely suggest that individual works may illuminate some aspect of the life of a community or deal with social changes which we can all observe; they postulate a Zeitgeist which infuses a whole society and to which great works of literature bear witness.
There are a number of reasons for such a belief. Apart from those who accept Marxism it seems likely that the possibility of such a comprehensive conceptual framework has attracted even those who oppose this particular system. The great expansion of literary studies as an academic discipline inevitably leads to a desire on the part of those who practise it to elevate their subject-matter to an index of social change or, in some cases, the moral health of a society. Moreover, despite the attacks on Romanticism which accompanied the proclamations of such influential theorists as T. S. Eliot, the assumptions of Romanticism have remained strong and these take much more kindly than do, say, the assumptions of the eighteenth century, to the concept of great writers as, in Shelley’s noble words, ‘the unacknowledged legislators of mankind’. Pope might have thought of himself as speaking for the wits or Fielding as being the voice of the sound country party; only with the rise of Romanticism could a writer think that he was speaking for Man.
There has been no shortage of socio-literary accounts of the development of modern literature and Modernism in general, and there are a number of well-established schools of thought. I would refer readers to the Bibliography and I discuss the matter further in Chapter 9. But some of the assumptions are so pervasive that it seems necessary to refer briefly to them in this Introduction.
The most prevalent line of thought goes roughly thus. Between 1890 and 1940 there were immense and often catastrophic shifts of power, both between countries and within them, and these were accompanied not only by much physical suffering but also by a breakdown of assumptions about continuity and stability. For some this represented new hope but for many it was profoundly distressing. The speed of technological change was so great as sometimes to suggest that it had a life of its own, beyond human control (though to others it suggested rather that control over nature by man which Bacon had preached 300 years before). In the sphere of ideas such revolutionary theories as those of Freud changed our conceptions of human nature and of the assumed rationality and knowableness of the human personality. In the arts, the argument goes on, this was reflected in works which broke sharply with the conventions, both of technique and subject-matter, of the past; much of the art of the period was marked by disjunction, fragmentariness, the denial of logic, and the breaking of previously assumed patterns of response. Only such an age could have produced Picasso, Joyce, the Surrealists, Eliot, the Expressionists, and serial music. This Modernist movement is, as the names suggest, to be found in all the arts and it is international in scope.
Such generalizations are inevitably made in large terms, jump about a good deal in time and space, and are most convincing when viewed from a distance. To say this is not to imply that they are necessarily false or shallow. It is the nature of generalizations to be general. The problems arise when we try to fit a number of highly individualistic writers within them, or when we try to answer such questions as whether they have distorted our judgement of some novelists, or why, from about 1930 onwards, the influences seem to have ceased to operate within most English fiction. I shall revert to these specific points in later chapters.
For the moment I wish to consider a few factors which ought to be in our minds when we think about the relationship between literature and society. Mostly we have to mediate between extremes. It is not difficult to achieve an eye-catching tour d’horizon which makes enough connections to impress us with its plausibility but which ignores all those parts of the literary and historical scene which do not fit; one incidental effect of this is that English fiction in this period seems to be rather peripheral, even at times provincial. It is equally easy to make generalizations impossible by demanding such proofs of causality as cannot be given so that we end with the conclusion that, each book being unique, no general statements can be valid. In an attempt to make possible some middle position I set out here some reflections which bear upon the criteria of relevance for any generalizations which we may want to make.
Any choice of a starting-point for a development is arbitrary; in particular we must resist any suggestion that there existed a stable situation which was broken by ‘modern’ developments. Individual countries may have periods of relative stability, but if Modernism is taken as an international movement, we have to remember that famine, wars, revolutions, pogroms, broke out in various places in Europe throughout the nineteenth century and, indeed, earlier; a conception of a period of order rudely disrupted is fallacious. The same is true of ideas; Freud is certainly of importance in helping to change conceptions of personality and responsibility, but the impact of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) was very quickly felt and we can, if we wish, trace much earlier assaults on orthodoxy - Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea, for example, appeared in 1819.
But to say that an influence was quickly felt can mean only that it was felt by some. The permeation of ideas is a very complex matter, moving very fast in some places and very slowly in others. Moreover people, including writers, do not always acquire their ideas directly from their originators. Ideas, often partial and distorted, filter down through many channels. The influence of Schopenhauer on Conrad has been much discussed, but Zdzisław Najder, in his Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle, shows beyond doubt that many of Conrad’s most Schopenhauerian utterances can actually be traced to Anatole France. If we note that Hardy was at the suggestible age of nineteen when Darwin’s great work was published it should not necessarily be because we think that he read it (though he claimed to have done so) but because some of the basic ideas in it were likely to have filtered down, diluted and contaminated and possibly misunderstood, to Hardy and those with whom he talked. Not all Marxists have read Marx and an actual reading of Freud might inhibit Freudian generalizations.
In mentioning Hardy’s formative youth I am suggesting that most people form their ideas and attitudes fairly early in life. They may not ossify thereafter but their general outlook and assumptions are usually set. This means that for the writers with whom I shall be concerned in this study the currents of thought most likely to have influenced them were those which were circulating long before their major works were published. This is well shown in D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record by E. T. (Jessie Chambers). She gives an account of what books excited Lawrence when he was a young man, sometimes to agreement and sometimes to resistance, and we observe him arguing about and annotating not only such recent works as Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe (1899) and William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) but also Thoreau’s Walden (1854), Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833), and Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), together with large numbers of ephemeral works from which he took what he wanted at the time.
We should also beware of producing a canon which allows tendentious circular arguing. In choosing which writers to discuss we are all, of course, engaged in producing a canon. I am well aware that there are many minor interesting writers whom I shall not have time to discuss in this book (Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero, 1929, and Antonia White’s Frost in May, 1933, come to mind at once) but the kind of canon which I have in mind is that which is created by the adoption of a theory. If, for example, we become convinced from our reading of both serious writers and best sellers that there is an appalling gap between the two and if we relate this to the rise of the popular press and popular magazines in response to the coming of universal elementary education in this country we may come to believe that there has been a catastrophic lowering of general human standards. One effect of this is to make us overvalue the evidential significance of certain writers who fit in with the generalization and to play down those who do not; the obstinate fact, for example, that Bennett’s Old Wives’ Tale was immensely popular is dismissed because Bennett is not taken with the seriousness which he deserves, while some of D. H. Lawrence’s more dubious utterances about the spiritual state of modern man are taken as self-evident truths. The selective choice of works is then fed back into the argument via the assumption that our literary tastes are an adequate guide to our moral and emotional lives to demonstrate the impoverishment of feeling among the mass of the golden age. I discuss this tendency in Chapter 11.
But though such factors as these convince me that any overarching scheme which achieves a tidy fit between literature and society is bound to be dubious yet obviously the writers were affected by the great changes of the half-century, though they responded to them in different ways.
Inevitably they were influenced by the political forces and, more strikingly, they were aware of this influence. Our lives have always been largely controlled by economic and political realities, and this is true whether we realize it or not. The structure of village society of which Jane Austen wrote was determined by Great Britain’s position as a trading nation and by continuing conflicts between different groups within society. But it was possible to be an intelligent and sensitive observer and not to show any awareness of this. By the period with which I am dealing this unawareness was no longer possible except for the stupid or the deliberately blinkered.
The shifts of power within society were of a kind which could not be ignored, though attempts to come to terms with them in fiction often seem inadequate. Forster’s Leonard Bast, whom he sees as the progenitor of those who will inherit the country, is far from convincing and it is hard not to feel that Virginia Woolf’s Charles Tansley is seen by her as a Jude the Obscure who has been let in. One of the most sustained attempts in fiction to diagnose the effects of industrial change is in the works of Lawrence, though it is, in my opinion, the weakest part of his work.
The one catastrophic happening from which few escaped was, of course, the Great War (as it was called until after the end of the period of this study), though we should remember that James Joyce, a refugee in Zurich, shows little sign of having been affected by the disaster. There are no war novelists of the same significance as some of the poets, though Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero (1929), R. H. Mottram’s The Spanish Farm (1924), Frederic Manning’s Her Privates We (1930) and Ford Madox Ford’s Tietjens tetralogy (1924–28) are not negligible. Moreover an awareness of the recent bloodletting lies behind much of Lawrence’s later work and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925).
But, partly because of the chances of birthplace and job, the political aspect which is most treated by the great novelists is the impact of imperialism. By 1890 Great Britain was at the height of its imperial power and the arguments for and against imperialism were widespread; hardly a year passed between 1890 and 1910 without either the annexation of territory or a colonial war, though the Boer War of 1899—1902 was the only one which much affected the general public. Conrad, Kipling, and Forster all see the imperial situation and colonialism as central political facts, as do, a little later, George Orwell and Joyce Cary. In discussing their works I shall not only deal with their approach to imperialism as such but also the implications about class and national identity which are inherent in it.
Changes in fundamental belief are as important as political changes and it is generally agreed that belief in orthodox Christianity was declining, especially among the educated.2 The causes of this were manifold. The specific assault of science on what were thought of as necessary doctrines was perhaps the most obvious and here the most powerful cause of scandal was the effect of the ideas of Darwin and other biologists on the concept of man as a special creation. Such anthropological studies as those of J. G. Fraser, whose The Golden Bough appeared from 1890 onwards, encouraged a relativist attitude towards the claims of one unique religion. The general diffusion of the concepts of positivism and other philosophies hostile to Christianity made a large effect, though no doubt often at second and third hand.
In our period some writers, such as Joyce, record the struggle for emancipation from orthodoxy; some, like Bennett, take the decline of religion for granted; some search angrily or, in Forster’s phrase, ‘wistfully’ for something to take its place. Of these last the most striking is Lawrence, though I hope to show that Virginia Woolf as well as Forster is a sceptic with a sense of loss.
Linked with this loss of religious certainty goes a feeling that social, familial stability has been weakened, not merely in such obvious matters as changes in sexual mores and standards of decorum and in relationships between parents and children, but in larger and more impalpable ways. This is at the heart of some of the large generalizations which I have previously mentioned and of which I am dubious. But it is clear that during this period the novel shows in the hands of many of its practitioners a tendency to move away from supposedly objective representations of social life towards the inner experiences of the characters, and there is an increasing tendency for the novel to be left in suspense at its conclusion as if to assert the impossibility of the stable resolution which is normal in earlier fiction. We find novels in this period of which this is not true, just as we find earlier works which have some of these ‘modern’ characteristics, but there are enough which fit the generalization to suggest that the point is worth exploring. There is one very obvious correlation - that between theories of the mind which reach their culmination in the work of Freud and his associates and the attempt on the part of some writers to do justice to irrational and unconscious elements of personality by means of the technique which is commonly called the ‘stream of consciousness’.
Concern with this large and impalpable area of modern consciousness will not be confined to discussion of any one writer or group, but some of its implications for the doctrines of ‘Modernism’ are explored in Chapter 9 on Virginia Woolf’s contest with Arnold Bennett, since this has so often been taken as a locus classicus of Modernist criticism and so much used by those who have held that modern consciousness is in some ways strikingly different from earlier ways of looking at the world and that new forms alone can represent it.
Though the chief literary influences on most of the novelists of this period were doubtless earlier English writers, when they proclaim their loyalties they just as frequently name novelists from other languages. This is not, perhaps, surprising when we consider the diversity of their backgrounds. Henry James was an expatriate American who had been given a deliberately cosmopolitan education; Joyce, Jesuit-educated, lived most of his adult life in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris; Conrad, born in Russian-occupied Poland, did not even learn English until he was twenty-one. But cosmopolitan sympathies were not merely the result of upbringing; Bennett, born in the Midlands and the most obviously regional novelist after Hardy, lived in France for nine years, married a Frenchwoman, proclaimed himself a disciple of the de Goncourt brothers and was on familiar terms with many French painters, musicians, and writers. This period was one in which national and linguistic boundaries were crossed far more than previously and more than has happened in the last half-century. This was particularly true of the poets and critics who thought of themselves as being in the forefront of change. - Pound, Eliot, T. E. Hulme, Wyndham Lewis; their points of reference are as often Mallarmé, Rimbaud, de Gourmont, and Laforgue as their English forebears. The novelists have much less sense of being part of a movement or of wishing to create one, but they, too, in their letters and essays pay their debts to Zola, Maupassant, Flaubert, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky.
It remains to say that the response of authors to the happenings, the ideas, the beliefs, the changes which they experienced manifest themselves in different and often contradictory ways. Increasing democratization, the sense that men and women should be treated equally, and the increasing power of the enfranchised population can be seen in Forster as a sense that Leonard Bast’s child ought to inherit Howards End and that the Indians should not be excluded from the club. In Virginia Woolf it shows itself as a withdrawal from the public world of issues and the cultivation of private sensations. In Waugh, a generation on, it displays itself as a rampant yearning for county families and in Ivy Compton-Burnett as a feeling that she cannot write about anything after 1910. The decline of religion is aided and abetted by Hardy and Joyce; its lack is felt by Lawrence as a central absence of meaning. Kipling is obsessed by a fear of anarchy and the need for rules and control; Conrad is unable to believe in the legitimacy of any government.
This book is not organized on a chronological basis because I do not detect any important line of chronological development. The writers who contributed most to the art of fiction in this period were extraordinarily different from one another. They could not possibly see themselves as part of a developing tradition. This is obvious if we think of the following sequence of novels, one from each of the major novelists of this period, and reflect on their astonishing variety: Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), What Maisie Knew (1897), Nostromo (1904), The Old Wives’ Tale (1908), The Rainbow (1915), Ulysses (1922), A Passage to India (1924), To the Lighthouse (1927). It is, of course, possible to find links between them. Lawrence had some admiration for that other Midlands novelist, Bennett; Virginia Woolf asserted some similarity of aim with Joyce, though she repudiated it almost as much; Conrad had a slightly wary respect for the old master, James. But to pursue these links in the hope of distinguishing a general line of development or even the existence of a number of schools is a waste of time. I have chosen instead to include a number of chapters which suggest connections - and contrasts - between various writers, and which consider their relationship to social and other developments. Thus, for example, a discussion of political issues follows chapters on Conrad, Kipling, and Forster and a chapter on changes in the reading public follows my discussion of James Joyce. But it must not be forgotten that these are only some of the issues raised by the writers. Conrad, Kipling, and Forster all grappled with crucial political issues of their age and in ways very different from one another; but Conrad can also be discussed as an example of a writer who operated in terms of symbolic patterns and in this has resemblances to some aspects of the work of Lawrence; Forster has often been discussed as an associate member of the Bloomsbury Group and as such has links with Virginia Woolf.
Nor have I followed a systematic procedure in discussing the writers with whom I deal because it seems to me that what is needed varies from one author to another. I have confined discussion of Bennett largely to one book, The Old Wives’ Tale. This is because, although he is not as disregarded as he was twenty years ago, he is still frequently underrated or praised in ways which suggest that he belongs to a different kind of literature from D. H. Lawrence, say, or Virginia Woolf. It seems important, therefore, to treat one of his books with the thoroughness and rigour which we reserve for great novels. If I convince my readers of his value they can be trusted to move on to such other major works as Clayhanger and Riceyman Steps. Forster, by contrast, has received a great deal of critical attention and there is no need to argue that A Passage to India should be taken with full seriousness; but a proper understanding of his work demands a recognition of the similarity of theme in all his books, combined with a consideration of why only one of them is a major success and one a major failure. Consequently I discuss his whole œuvre. Kipling gets, perhaps, more space than he deserves in terms of quality because his work raises so acutely questions about how we come to terms with outdated attitudes of mind and because it seems necessary to disentangle what is good in his work from what is not merely bad but atrocious. I have concentrated in my chapter on Joyce on the question of how to read him - how much attention to give to arcane and cryptographic elements - because this issue is perhaps the most important with which readers are now faced, though the form in which it presents itself may have changed somewhat.
I shall disappoint some readers - to some extent I disappoint myself—by not discussing a whole host of minor but not valueless writers. Shortage of space would only allow a cursory and hence superficial account of them. They should be read and not read about, so I have included many in the Bibliographies and hope that my readers will turn to them. The Bibliographies are intended to supplement what I have to say and the books cited will often be found to put counterarguments to mine.
Finally, I must emphasize that I do not present a clear and logical picture of literary development because I do not believe that it exists. The more I read in this period and think about it the harder I find it to make generalizations or trace patterns of development. This is perhaps true for all periods of literature, but I am convinced that it is particularly true of fiction in this period. I detect some patterns and I hope that readers will detect some of their own, but they are always limited ones and can only be made comprehensive by Procrustean exercises.