Part 4 (1/2)
What canst thou have, O spoiler, Which dead men did not own?'
But I do not think so. I do not know whether she will be great. It is enough that to-day she is already alone.
Form and the Novel
Every now and then a reviewer, recovering the enthusiasm of a critic, discovers that the English novel has lost its form, that the men who to-day, a little ineffectually, bid for immortality, are burning the G.o.ds they once wors.h.i.+pped. They declare that the novel, because it is no longer a story travelling harmoniously from a beginning towards a middle and an end, is not a novel at all, that it is no more than a platform where self-expression has given place to self-proclamation. And sometimes, a little more hopefully, they venture to prophesy that soon the proud Sicambrian will wors.h.i.+p the G.o.ds that he burnt.
I suspect that this cla.s.sic revival is not very likely to come about.
True, some writers, to-day in their cradles, may yet emulate Flaubert, but they will not be Flaubert. They may take something of his essence and blend it with their own; but that will create a new essence, for literature does not travel in a circle. Rather it travels along a cycloid, bending back upon itself, following the movement of man.
Everything in the world we inhabit conspires to alter in the mirror of literature the picture it reflects; haste, luxury, hysterical sensuousness, race-optimism and race-despair. And notably publicity, the att.i.tude of the Press. For the time has gone when novels were written for young ladies, and told the placid love of Edwin and Angeline; nowadays the novel, growing ambitious, lays hands upon science, commerce, philosophy: we write less of moated granges, more of tea-shops and advertising agencies, for the Press is teaching the people to look to the novel for a cosmic picture of the day, for a cosmic commentary.
Evidently it was not always so. Flaubert, de Maupa.s.sant, Butler, Tolstoy (who are not a company of peers), aspired mainly 'to see life sanely and to see it whole.' Because they lived in days of lesser social complexity, economically speaking, they were able to use a purely narrative style, the only notable living exponent of which is Mr Thomas Hardy. But we, less fortunate perhaps, confronted with new facts, the factory system, popular education, religious unrest, pictorial rebellion, must adapt ourselves and our books to the new spirit. I do not pretend that the movement has been sudden. Many years before _L'Education Sentimentale_ was written, Stendhal had imported chaos (with genius) into the s.p.a.cious 'thirties. But Stendhal was a meteor: Dostoievsky and Mr Romain Rolland had to come to break up the old narrative form, to make the road for Mr Wells and for the younger men who attempt, not always successfully, to crush within the covers of an octavo volume the whole of the globe spinning round its axis, to express with an att.i.tude the philosophy of life, to preach by gospel rather than by statement.
Such movements as these naturally breed a reaction, and I confess that, when faced with the novels of the 'young men,' so turgid, so bombastic, I turn longing eyes towards the still waters of Turgenev, sometimes even towards my first influence, now long discarded--the novels of Zola.
Though the Zeitgeist hold my hand and bid me abandon my characters, forget that they should be people like ourselves, living, loving, dying, and this enough; though it suggest to me that I should a.n.a.lyse the economic state, consider what new world we are making, enlist under the banner of the 'free spirits' or of the 'simple life,' I think I should turn again towards the old narrative simplicities, towards the schedules of what the hero said, and of what the vicar had in his drawing-room, if I were not conscious that form evolves.
If literature be at all a living force it must evolve as much as man, and more if it is to lead him; it must establish a correspondence between itself and the uneasy souls for which it exists. So it is no longer possible to content ourselves with such as Jane Austen; we must exploit ourselves. Ashamed as we are of the novel with a purpose, we can no longer write novels without a purpose. We need to express the motion of the world rather than its contents. While the older novelists were static, we have to be kinetic: is not the picture-palace here to give us a lesson and to remind us that the waxworks which delighted our grandfathers have gone?
But evolution is not quite the same thing as revolution. I do believe that revolution is only evolution in a hurry; but revolution can be in too great a hurry, and cover itself with ridicule. When the Futurists propose to suppress the adjective, the adverb, the conjunction, and to make of literature a thing of 'positive substantives' and 'dynamic verbs'--when Mr Peguy repeats over and over again the same sentence because, in his view, that is how we think--we smile. We are both right and wrong to smile, for these people express in the wrong way that which is the right thing. The modern novel has and must have a new significance. It is not enough that the novelist should be cheery as d.i.c.kens, or genially cynical as Thackeray, or adventurous as Fielding.
The pa.s.sions of men, love, hunger, patriotism, wors.h.i.+p, all these things must now be shared between the novelist and his reader. He must collaborate with his audience ... emulate the show-girls in a revue, abandon the stage, and come parading through the stalls. A new pa.s.sion is born, and it is a complex of the old pa.s.sions; the novelist of to-day cannot end as Montaigne, say that he goes to seek a great perhaps. He needs to be more positive, to aspire to know what we are doing with the working-cla.s.s, with the Empire, the woman question, and the proper use of lentils. It is this aspiration towards truth that breaks up the old form: you cannot tell a story in a straightforward manner when you do but glimpse it through the veil of the future.
And so it goes hard with Edwin and Angeline. We have no more time to tell that love; we need to break up their simple story, to consider whether they are eugenically fitted for each other, and whether their marriage settlement has a bearing upon national finance. Inevitably we become chaotic; the thread of our story is tangled in the threads which bind the loves of all men. We must state, moralise, explain, a.n.a.lyse motives, because we try to fit into a steam civilisation the old horse-plough of our fathers. I do not think that we shall break the old plough; now and then we may use it upon sands, but there is much good earth for it to turn.
Sincerity: the Publisher and the Policeman
There is always much talk of sincerity in literature. It is a favourite topic in literary circles, but often the argument sounds vain, for English literature seldom attains sincerity; it may never do so until Englishmen become Russians or Frenchmen, which, in spite of all temptations, they are not likely to do.
Once upon a time we had a scapegoat ready, the circulating libraries, for they made themselves ridiculous when they banned _Black Sheep_ and _The Uncounted Cost_, while every now and then they have banned a book of artistic value, likely to lead astray the mothers rather than the daughters. Like the others, I foamed and fumed against the libraries, who after all were only conducting their business according to their commercial interests; like many others, I set up the idea that the circulating library was a sort of trustee for literature, and after this coronation I abused the library as one unworthy of a crown. It was rather unfair, for the conditions which militate against the free embodiment of brute facts into fiction form prevailed before the Library Censors.h.i.+p was thought of; the libraries have not made public opinion but followed it; nowadays they slightly influence it. For public opinion is not the opinion of the public, it is the opinion of a minority. The opinion of a minority makes the opinion of the majority, because the latter has, as a rule, no opinion at all.
Who the censorious minority is I do not quite know. I have a vision of a horrid conclave made up of the National Council of Public Morals, some shopkeepers addicted to their chapel in default of other vices, of anti-suffragists who think _Ann Veronica_ dangerous; it must number some elderly ladies too, tired of converting the stubborn heathen, and I think some bishops, quite elderly and still more ladylike; there are celibates with whom celibacy has not agreed and who naturally want to serve out the world; there is everybody who in the name of duty, decency, self-control, purity, and such like catch-words, has stuffed his ears against the pipes of Pan with the cotton wool of aggressive respectability. A pretty congress, and like all congresses it talks as abundantly and as virulently as any young novelist. The vocal opinion of these people is well described in a recent successful revue: 'To the pure all things are impure.' Often of late years it has run amuck. Not long ago it caused the Munic.i.p.al Libraries of Doncaster and Dewsbury to banish _Tom Jones_ and to p.r.o.nounce _Westward Ho!_ unfit for devout Roman Catholics; it still spreads into the drama and holds such plays as _Waste_, _Mrs Warren's Profession_, _Monna Vanna_ well hidden under the calico and red flannel of British rect.i.tude; it has had its outbursts in picture palaces and music halls, where it happened to overlook the Salome dance and living pictures; often it unchains merriment, as on the perfect days when it cropped t.i.tles that seemed suggestive and caused plays to appear under more stimulating t.i.tles of 'The Girl Who Went' ...
and 'The Girl Who Lost' ... (I do not remember what she lost, but I pa.s.sionately want to know; such are the successes of Puritanism).
It is true that in some directions Puritanism has recently weakened.
Plays long outcast, such as 'Damaged Goods,' 'Ghosts,' and 'The Three Daughters of Monsieur Dupont' have unashamedly taken the boards, but I fear that this does not exhibit the redemption of virtue by sin: if the newspapers had not conducted a campaign for the protection of the notoriously guileless New Zealand soldiers against the flapper with the hundred heads (every one of them filled with evil), if contagious diseases had not suddenly become fas.h.i.+onable, these plays would still be lying with the other unborn in the limbo of the Lord Chamberlain. But Puritanism has long teeth; it can still drive out of politics our next Charles Dilke, our next Parnell, however generous or gifted; it still hangs over the Law Courts, where women may be ordered out, or where cases may be heard _in camera_; it still holds some sway over everything but private life, where humanity recoups its public losses.
Puritan opinion has therefore a broader face of attack on the novel than is afforded by the Library Censors.h.i.+p. For the latter can injure a book but it cannot suppress it; on the whole banned books have suffered, but they have also benefited because many people buy what they cannot borrow, and because many buy the books which the Puritans advertise as unfit to read. (They are much disappointed, as a rule, unless they are themselves Puritans.) That buying cla.s.s is not very large, but it counts, and I suppose we must charitably a.s.sume that the people who post to the bookseller to purchase the works which the library has rejected are supporters of literary sincerity; we must form our private opinion as to that. But whether the people who buy the banned book are or are not eager to obtain four-and-six penn'orth of truth, the fact remains that they do buy, that the deplorable authors do live, and that they do persist in writing their regrettable novels. The libraries have not killed sincerity; they have done no more than trammel it. For instance, in the well-known cases of _The Devil's Garden_, _Sinister Street_, and _The Woman Thou Gavest Me_, the faltering hesitation of the circulating libraries resulted in a colossal advertis.e.m.e.nt, of which Mr Maxwell and Mr Compton Mackenzie made the best, and Mr Hall Caine of course a little more. The libraries did not deprive of sustenance the authors of _Limehouse Nights_ and _Capel Sion_, and in their new spirit did not interfere when Mr Galsworthy's heroine, in _Beyond_, made the best of one world and of two men.
The a.s.sa.s.sins of sincerity are the publisher and the policeman. Dismiss the illusion that banned books are bold and bad; for the most part they are kindly and mild, silly beyond the conception of Miss Elinor Glyn, beyond the sentimental limits of Mrs Barclay; they are seldom vicious in intent, and too devoid of skill to be vicious in achievement. The real bold books are unwritten or unpublished; for n.o.body but a fool would expect a publisher to be fool enough to publish them. There are, it is true, three or four London publishers who are not afraid of the libraries, but they are afraid of the police, and any one who wishes to test them can offer them, for instance, a translation of _Le Journal d'une Femme de Chambre_. A publisher is to a certain extent a human being; he knows that works of this type (and this one is masterly) are often works of art; he knows that they are saleable, and that a.s.sured profits would follow on publication, were the books not suppressed by the police. But he does not publish them, because he also knows that the police and its backers, purity societies and common informers, would demand seizure of the stock after the first review and hurry to Bow Street all those who had taken part in the printing and issue of the works. As a result many of these books are driven underground into the vile atmosphere of the vilest shops; some are great works of art; one is, in the words of Mr Anatole France, 'minded to weep over them with the nine Muses for company.' Need I say more than that _Madame Bovary_, the greatest novel the world has seen, is now being sold in a s.h.i.+lling paper edition under a cover which shows Madame Bovary in a sort of private dining-room, dressed in a chemise, and preparing to drink off a b.u.mper of champagne. (Possibly the designer of this cover has in his mind sparkling burgundy.)
Several cases are fresh in my memory where purity, living in what Racine called 'the fear of G.o.d, sir, and of the police,' has intervened to stop the circulation of a novel. One is that of _The Yoke_, a novel of no particular merit, devoid of subversive teaching, but interesting because it was frank, because it did not portray love on the lines of musical comedy, because it faced the common s.e.x problem of the middle aged spinster and the very young man, because it did not ignore the peril which everybody knows to be lurking within a mile of Charing Cross. _The Yoke_ enjoyed a large sale at 6s. and was not interfered with, presumably because those who can afford 6s. may be abandoned to the scarlet woman. It was then published at a s.h.i.+lling. Soon after, the secret combination of common informer, purity group, and police forced the publisher into a police court, compelled him to express regret for the publication, and to destroy all the remaining copies and moulds.
That is a brief tragedy, and it in no wise involves the library system.
Another tragedy may be added. In 1910 Sudermann's novel, _Das Hohe Lied_, was published under the t.i.tle of _The Song of Songs_. It is not a very interesting novel; it is long, rather crude, but it relates faithfully enough the career of a woman who lived by the sale of herself. The trouble was that she made rather a success of it, and it was shown in a few scenes that she did not always detest the incidents of this career, which is not unnatural. In December, 1910, two inspectors from the Criminal Investigation Department called on the publisher and informed his manager that a complaint had been made against the book; it was described as obscene. The officers apparently went on to say that their director, Sir Melville Macnaghten, did not a.s.sociate himself with that opinion, but their object was to draw the publisher's attention to the fact that a complaint had been made.
Thereupon, without further combat, the publisher withdrew the book.