Virginia Woolf’s attack on Bennett and her proclamation of the need to break with what she saw as his adherence to a ‘materialist’ tradition has been of surprising importance in later discussions of fiction and especially in discussions of the nature of‘Modernism’. ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ and, even more, ‘Modern Fiction’, which I quoted at length in my last chapter, have figured largely in critical studies and critical anthologies. There are several very obvious reasons for this. They are very quotable and very attractively written; how often must readers have heaved a sigh of relief when they have fought through more rebarbative matter to reach them! They provide a brief account by a novelist of how a ‘stream of consciousness’ is envisaged. They have, moreover, a certain rarity value. It is easy to find general statements about modern poets by Pound, Eliot, Yeats, and others, but few novelists have proclaimed a Modernist aesthetic. Joyce was not given to general statements, Conrad is rarely very specific, Lawrence is usually either talking about the novels he is reviewing or about his own novels, or he is making general statements about the novel with no particular reference to modernity. Virginia Woolf, by contrast, writes about her own fictional technique and about its inevitability for modern writers in terms of changes in society and our perception of human nature. She is, in short, producing exactly what is needed in the way of exemplification by anyone seeking a theory of Modernism which will implicitly suggest that it is comprehensive.
I have already suggested that so far as the adoption of the ‘stream of consciousness’ is concerned she is right in recognizing a Zeitgeist which influences a number of writers; but the implications of her case go further than this and here the logical objections to it are relevant, as they are not when we think only of her argument in relation to her own practice. The essays imply a great deal which is not examined. The two central points are the rejection of the traditional realistic form of the novel in favour of tracing the atoms as they fall upon the mind and the rejection of the assumption that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small. But more atoms fall than we can register, so that their pattern is created by the writer in terms of what he or she thinks significant, and what is commonly thought big is so considered because human experience has had it so. The beliefs which lie behind the choice of which pattern to trace are just as real as those paraded by authorial commentators, though they may not be as immediately recognizable, and the choice of what is commonly thought small amounts very often to a rejection not of fictional conventions but of common experience.
But many later critics who are documenting what they see as ‘Modernism’ have been happy to accept her statements without reservations about their logic. It is not my purpose to take issue with individual writers who have written on this subject, more particularly because the generalizations with which I am concerned have now filtered down so widely and have become so much received wisdom that the general impression is more significant than any specific analysis. Suffice it to say that I have in mind such a view as that which is enshrined in the Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought1 or in the writings, listed in my Bibliography, of Gabriel Josipovici, Malcolm Bradbury, and Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson.
Despite minor differences such accounts seem to be in agreement that from some time late in the nineteenth century onwards (for Virginia Woolf’s date of 1910 is clearly too late, at least for the Continent) artists in all media broke decisively with their predecessors, abandoning tonality in music, and turning away in painting and literature from the representational and the mimetic to the abstract and the autonomous. Certain major figures are always associated with this movement - Kafka, Picasso, Pound, Webern, Eliot, Joyce; the names alone assure us that one of the striking characteristics of the movement is that it is international. It is normally seen as including within it various lesser trends: surrealism, dadaism, imagism, vorticism, cubism, acmeism. It is seen as a response to a general breakdown in agreement about continuity and order in society and is consequently marked by fragmentation, discontinuity, and introversion.
It is in this last matter - the relationship of artistic novelty to social changes - that Virginia Woolf’s line of thought has proved so useful. Her emphasis on the need to move away from the public to the private, the social to the introspective, the political to the individual, fits well kwith that rejection of the public sphere which characterizes so many of the artists who are central in all accounts of Modernism.
This may at first sight appear paradoxical. Has it not been characteristic of many of the artists of this period that they have been embroiled in political issues, some because they took up political positions and some because their works were regarded as inherently subversive or decadent? Here, I think, it is essential to remind ourselves that it is totally unhistorical to postulate a relationship to society which applies to Wilhelminian Germany, Habsburg Austria, Czarist Russia, post-Risorgimento Italy, Edwardian England, and America in the 1890s. There may be some common factors, but the differences between Kafka’s alienation from Prague, say, and the situation of Pound or Eliot in America and Great Britain, or Yeats’s in Ireland, are far greater than the similarities. What is striking about the English writers who are commonly thought of as Modernists is that they are, indeed, often concerned with social and political issues but they are at odds with their societies in a very distinctively unpublic and unsocial way. They are mostly inherently anti-democratic, in the sense that they do not feel themselves to be part of a society or of a section of society (unless that section is ‘artists’) which they accept and which rightly demands of them some political responsibility. Moreover their political principles normally rely upon a strikingly unhistorical yearning for a supposed past golden age. It is easy to laugh at the conception of the English working man held by Auden and his fellow Communists in the 1930s. Eliot’s conception of traditional English society is equally ludicrous, and so is Yeats’s vision of the ‘indomitable Irishry’. The tendency to grasp at extreme and apocalyptic interpretations and creeds - whether Pound’s Mussoliniesque fantasies or the self-regarding despair so fashionable on the campus - is a characteristic of those who do not wish to test their highly individual visions against the perceptions of their fellow citizens. We may not unreasonably see this as a survival of that strain in Romanticism which exalts the unique individual vision after its libertarian drive has perished.
But if Virginia Woolf’s rejection of the public has fitted well with this view of Modernism and, in particular, has made it easier to suggest that English writers were responding to the same pressures as those in other, often widely different, cultures, the question remains as to whether it fitted equally well with what she was writing about - modern fiction in Great Britain. It is a characteristic of large generalizations that we cannot expect a perfect fit. But here, I think, the fit is very bad. Do the novelists whom she calls ‘Georgians’ share her rejection of that documentation which insists that the personality of a man or woman is to a considerable extent determined by what she calls ‘house property’, the external economic, social, and public aspects of their life? Do they share her sense that human nature changed in 1910 (or whatever period we choose to replace this metaphorical date)? Do they share her belief that ‘issues’ are death to the novel and the pursuit of the flow of momentary sensation alone a worthy aim?
The answer to the first question can be most briefly given in the form of a quotation:
Nor is it merely in the ‘Ithaca’ section that Joyce’s almost maniacal love of detail appears. Hilda Lessways was never documented like Leopold Bloom or Stephen Dedalus.
Nor does Joyce’s use of a stream of consciousness method in various parts of his work seem to derive from a belief that human nature changed in a dramatic manner during or shortly before his lifetime. It is a device to record the mind, and though it is perfectly true, as I have said, that it would not have been available to him much earlier, we are surely meant to feel that Molly’s great-great-grandmother, lying drowsily in bed, would have ruminated and fantasized much as her twentieth-century descendant does. Similarly, H. C. Earwicker’s experience proclaims that human nature does not change, that H. C. E. is manifested as Haveth Childers Everywhere because Here Comes Everyone.
D. H. Lawrence did believe that he lived in an age of crisis and to this extent may have agreed with Virginia Woolf that human nature had in some senses changed; but it cannot be said that he regarded ‘issues’ as contaminants. Conrad (whom she mentions in ‘Modern Fiction’ but does not talk about on the rather frivolous grounds that he is a Pole) may be thought the greatest political novelist in the language; the last words of Forster’s A Passage to India assert as clearly as possible that human relationships can be spoilt by political issues.
It is unlikely that Virginia Woolf herself would have been surprised at these divergencies; she was trying to work out her own literary method and taking part in a local argument and it is hard to have one’s periodical essays or evening lectures scrutinized as Holy Writ half a century and more afterwards. What I am concerned with is the way in which her statements were taken up and used in the construction of an ideology which ignores some of the evidence. Let us suppose for a moment that we abandoned the commonly asserted pattern: alienation from society, fragmentation, stream of consciousness, Woolf, The Waste Land, Finnegans Wake, Gertrude Stein, and replaced it by: awareness of the lives of those less gifted than the writer, Jude the Obscure, Bennett, Leopold Bloom, Henry Green’s Living, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, would this tradition not be just as convincing? And just as tendentious? Could we not, by different selections, produce many patterns?
Various suggestions have been made of late by such critics as Donald Davie and Philip Hobsbaum for a possible reinterpretation of the tradition of poetry in this century which would give more prominence to those writers who do not fit into a ‘Modernist’ tradition - Hardy, Edward Thomas, a number of the poets of the Great War, Larkin. My suggestion is of the same kind though I do not think that we need necessarily lean towards the mildly chauvinist opposition of international Modernism and sturdy Englishness. Parts of Thomas Mann’s novels can be accommodated within the orthodox Modernist pattern, but much cannot; the same is true of Faulkner and Svevo and Proust. It may be that fiction is too much of a social art to reject society for very long. What is quite certain is that the orthodox generalization seems always to acquire its force when dealing with literature and especially with fiction by assimilating minor and sometimes rather bad writers to a tradition constructed from selective elements of some major ones. Martin Green in Children of the Sun exemplifies this very neatly when he says: ‘they [Brian Howard and Harold Acton] were impresarios of others’ talents and of the international modernist movements. They were friends of the Sitwells and Gertrude Stein and Jean Cocteau and others.’
I would not wish to be understood as saying that there was no such thing as a Modernist movement; it is not possible to discuss much which has happened in the arts during the last century without making use of the term, not least because so many of the artists of the period proclaimed the need to ‘make it new’. But it is not a comprehensive tradition and it applies much less to fiction than to the other arts, so that it is vital to distinguish propaganda from analysis and to avoid the undue neatness and tidiness achieved by blurring distinctions between minor symptoms and major aims and by omitting some writers from the record. Moreover the need to challenge simple ideas of ‘movements’ is particularly pressing, as I indicate in Chapter 11, because the concept of ‘Modernism’ has grown up in the age of the professionalization of literary study and it has acquired the kind of academic acceptance handed on from teacher to pupil, with which the Romantics, for example, were not so speedily threatened.
I would place a good deal of emphasis in any discussion of the evolution of the concept of Modernism in England on the social circumstances which caused a number of writers and critics to take kindly to the idea of a conflict between the perceptive few and the insensitive masses. It is inevitable that anyone fighting for the acceptance of new works will expect to meet incomprehension and often downright hostility. But it is notable that many of the leading English ‘impresarios’ (to use Martin Green’s term) - editors, publishers, literary journalists, critics - were marked by their origin from a small section of the community, by an education at public schools and, often, the older universities, which not merely limited their experience but tended to make them feel that the mass of the population was both unknown and inferior. It is surely obvious that Virginia Woolf’s case against Bennett is not only against his realism or his supposedly inert documentation but against taking seriously the kind of people about whom he writes. Why else in ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ should she feel that Mrs Brown, with whom we are to sympathize, though impoverished, ‘came of gentlefolks who kept servants’ while Mr Smith, with whom we do not sympathize, ‘was of a bigger, burlier, less refined type … very likely a respectable corn-chandler from the North’.
There are other ways besides social snobbery of feeling that one is part of an élite and consequently of distorting one’s reactions to works of literature, and I deal with some of these in Chapter 11. But in the England of the period with which I am dealing one of the unconscious motives behind the view that artists must break with convention was surely a sense of belonging to a socially defined minority of superior souls. The paradox which escaped the observation of such critics was that the greatest novelists of the period were those least likely to be in sympathy with this outlook.