Part 2 (1/2)

We see, then, why it is that the highest forms of literature are necessarily concerned with pain. It is not merely that art requires intensity of feeling, and that the emotion of pain is the most intense we know. It is because the highest literature must necessarily be concerned with human beings in their most profound aspirations, in their most deeply experienced strivings each after his own ideal, according to his own conception of what will satisfy him; and it is because in the nature of things such an ideal is more than experience can satisfy that the anguish of striving and the anguish of failure are the subjects of art. A play such as Marlowe's _Tamburlaine_ can never be regarded as great drama. Amid scenes of magnificence and splendid savage rhetoric Tamburlaine pa.s.ses on from triumph to triumph, the incarnation of the conquering will. There are numberless detached pa.s.sages of what we may call lyrical poetry--for a lyrical poem expresses no more than a moment's mood, a single phase of the sequence which is pa.s.sion. But there is no pa.s.sionate sequence in _Tamburlaine_; it is a monotonous record of much-vaunted triumphs. We do not feel the painful struggle; there is no prospect of defeat; there is no storm and stress of an ideal at stake, a human being battered by circ.u.mstance. We may, if we are brutal enough, bow down before Tamburlaine's Juggernaut car; but he does not touch our emotions; he is not a tragic hero. Tragedy has no interest in supermen; unless, indeed, like Chapman's Bussy d'Ambois, the hero has the courage of the superman with the limitations of the rest of humanity.

But if the superman is not a possible subject for great art, neither is the crawling earthworm. Many modern authors and critics seem to consider that because tragic pa.s.sion is always painful, therefore pain is the essential thing in tragedy. It is this grossly false a.s.sumption that is responsible for many disasters in contemporary literature; it is the deep-lying error in much of our so-called ”intellectual drama”

and ”intellectual fiction.” I have heard authors and critics complain that the public will not read certain books or go to certain plays because they are ”painful” or ”grim.” If it had been because these books or plays were ”_pa.s.sionate_” that the public had refused to attend, I should have understood the complaint. Pain without pa.s.sion may be scientifically interesting, but it has no artistic content, no high emotional significance. Indeed, it is not true to suppose that the public dislikes the spectacle of the painful or the ugly. All know something of the fascination which disturbed Leontius, the son of Aglaion, who, coming up from the Pirus, observed dead bodies on the ground; and desiring to look at them and loathing the thought opened his eyes wide, exclaiming, ”There, you wretches, take your fill of the horrid sight!” If anyone doubts this let him recall that a painful and sordid episode in the law-courts fascinates the public just as it is fascinated by the crude villainies of East-end melodrama; and that the most highly moralised section of the public can be stirred to attend to the persecution of Congo natives or Macedonian Christians only by the most appalling stories of ma.s.sacre, outrage, and various forms of extreme suffering.

Surely it is not because they are concerned with painful subjects that many of the ”intellectual” dramatists have failed--failed, I mean, not only with the very ignorant public, but also with more discriminating audiences. In some cases, which it is not my business here to specify, they have failed because the authors have set their hearts on a problem outside the subject of their art, and the art has suffered in consequence; for only disinterested art has the power to move us. In some cases they have failed because the authors have held theories which I believe to be fatal to literature. The narrow view of what is called Realism has been an adjunct to intellectual faddism and propagandism, and has served to sterilise literature. The great Realists have never been mere Realists; they have never thought that to produce art it is sufficient merely to reproduce fact. The word ”Truth” has been introduced in the most shameless fas.h.i.+on. It is true that there are men without arms and legs and noses, but to delineate such a creature with exquisite accuracy is not to produce a faithful rendering of life. It is true that there are drab, sordid, expressionless lives, without happiness, without hope, without ideals.

To describe these lives in all their miserable detail may be of infinite value for social and reforming purposes. It may be the duty of every one of us to study these sores in the body politic for the existence of which we are collectively responsible. It may be craven cowardice not to open our eyes wide to these painful and hideous facts, which cry out to be removed and prevented. And if any person whose enthusiasm in life it is to abolish them hits upon an artistic device for calling attention to them, he is justified by his object.

But let us nevertheless be frank about the matter. His object is the removal of abuses. To stir emotions in a fine way is not his primary end and aim; it is for him only a means to something else. We are not condemning him when we say that his object is not the object of the creative artist, who is concerned with life not in its partial aspects, but as a whole. But he on his part has no right to complain if he fails. The ”truth” with which he is concerned is a scientific case, not an artistic truth. He has failed to stir our emotions because the attempt to stir emotions was only a dodge on his part; he was playing a trick on us, for a laudable end, and if we are not taken in the fault is not ours.

Drama, fiction, poetry, and the other fine arts cannot tolerate even the best-intentioned insincerity. There is here no arbitrary dogma or canon of art, but merely an a.s.sertion of the simple fact that you cannot achieve two wholly different ends at one and the same time, that success is dependent upon singleness of aim and enthusiasm. It is true that there is no subject whatsoever that may not lend itself to treatment. But it must be treated for its own sake, disinterestedly.

Literature will not move us greatly unless it is concerned with great emotions. It will not move us finely except in the presence of an ideal. For in the great pa.s.sions of literature, as in the great pa.s.sions of life, there is always an ideal at stake, an ideal that is more than the attainable, a grasping at a fulness of satisfaction which is more than experience can afford.

I am making no appeal for what is misunderstood by the term ”Art for Art's sake,” or for that typically French view the expression of which I may take from the younger Dumas' _Affaire Clemenceau_:

Savez-vous ce que c'est que l'art? C'est le Beau dans le vrai, et, d'aprs ce principe, l'art s'est cr des rgles absolus, que vous chercheriez en vain dans la nature seule. Si la nature seule pouvait le satisfaire, vous n'auriez qu' mouler un beau modle de la tte aux pieds, pour faire un chef d'uvre. Ou, si vous excutiez cette ide, vous ne produiriez qu'un grotesque. Le talent consiste completer la nature, recueillir et l ses indications merveilleuses, mais partielles, les rsumer dans un ensemble h.o.m.ogne et a donner cet ensemble une pense ou un sentiment, puisque nous pouvons lui donner une me.

I am in sympathy with that view so far as it implies that the artist cannot be content with a slavish reproduction of isolated facts taken from nature; and that he sets his gaze upon ”_le Beau dans le vrai_,”

which I should like to render, not the ”beautiful in the true,” but the ”Ideal in the true.” But I am not in sympathy with it so far as it implies a formal beauty which the artist discerns in accordance with a principle mysteriously and exclusively artistic, existing in a region remote from life. Art is not a sacred mystery into which only the initiated can penetrate. It is not concerned with beauties drawn from a peculiar and exclusive artistic Absolute. Literature deals with life, but in life in an intense manifestation, with that pa.s.sionate life which attains its richness, its breadth, its tremendous l.u.s.tiness through the desire for something more than normal life can give.

n.o.body can object that these ideals are not real, that they are not true to life, and indeed the most vital part of life. The pa.s.sions they call forth in men are the most real, the most vivid, the most illuminating; they widen and refine experience; they bring us into a larger universe, they add to the stature of personality, they are the means of growth. Literature is an expansion of the mind out of the narrower truth into the larger. It despises no experience, but drags to light its hidden resources, its unexpected wealth. It is profoundly interested in experience on its intense, that is to say, its pa.s.sionate side. The original mind, not content to find poetic value in a single emotion such as that of love, finds it on all sides, discovering interests here, there, and everywhere. If it concentrates on one of these for the purposes of a poem, a play, a novel, it neglects, of course, no advent.i.tious aid which gives reality to the persons, sufficiency to their motives, contrast, relief, atmosphere--all that is expressed by the ordinary jargon of criticism.

To sum up: great creative literature does not deal with things painful or otherwise merely because they are facts of life. Its business is the intensification of life, to bring home to us its myriad finenesses; it achieves this end by presenting persons pa.s.sing through the intense experiences which we call pa.s.sions; and these are conditions of the spirit in which an idealised object encourages, thwarts, or tantalises the seeker, and dejects him utterly if the reality turns out to be less than the ideal. The inquiry opens a question for the metaphysician--What is the source of this ideal element which enters into every object pa.s.sionately sought, and so transcends realisation that the object cannot be attained without a sense of loss?

IV

THE POPULAR TASTE

If anything is worse than bad literature it is the tedious Pharisaism of the ”man of culture.” How flattering to the self-esteem to cast a supercilious eye upon the melodramatic, sentimental, unbeautiful books which const.i.tute the ma.s.s of modern literature! The ma.s.s of modern literature is provided for the ma.s.s of men and women, but history has proved that a small and educated public may embrace stupidities not less desiccating than the stupidity of the million. A cultured public in the eighteenth century which could tolerate Colley Cibber gains nothing by comparison with an uncultured public which delights in Hall Caine. An author who attempted a poetic drama in the eighteenth century had to conform to the rules, but his compliance with convention is worth no more to literature than the libertinism of the modern reporter. The correct taste of that period is sufficiently flagellated in Swift's _Recipe to make an Epic Poem_, wherein he ”makes it manifest that epic poems may be made without genius, nay without learning or much reading.... It is easily brought about by him that has a genius, but the skill lies in doing it without one.” To this day there exists an oligarchy of academic persons whose taste is almost exactly on a par with the taste most in evidence two hundred years ago. They are the people who estimate literature by its correctness rather than by its fineness or power, who are impregnable in their little fortress of pedantry, and are for ever secure against the attacks of original genius.

If, then, we find that there is much in modern popular literature that we dislike, this is a very different thing from saying that we prefer the technical ba.n.a.lities dear to the pedant, or would set up the standard of a barren culture. The popular taste is something not to be scoffed at, but to be accounted for. To complain of it is wasted effort; to explain it would be something to the purpose. And this we can only do by keeping in mind that vital ideal which in spite of every set-back the world has contrived to preserve, and endeavouring to discover what it is--short of that ideal, or remote from it--that the modern public wants: what taste it is that hundreds of modern authors are trying to satisfy.

It is evidently a very various taste, for it is the taste of the whole people. Everyone in the modern civilised state has been taught to read, and almost everyone has had the written word thrust upon him; so that reading has become a habit. At every turn the eye falls upon the printed advertis.e.m.e.nt, the printed leaflet, the hand-written letter; and the habit which is developed by the necessities of life has intertwined itself also in the amenities. Newspapers, and weekly and monthly periodicals, adapt themselves to the tastes of every cla.s.s in the community. The time is still far distant when books will be universally and systematically read; but the number of volumes annually distributed has increased at least tenfold in the last generation; and a large proportion of this literature must find its way to strata of society which fifty years ago read nothing at all.

It would be too much to expect that these millions of recruits to the reading public would be drawn to that literature which can be cla.s.sed with the fine arts. One would no more expect them to admire it than one would expect a child of five to admire _Hamlet_. The astonis.h.i.+ng thing is, not that so few people appreciate the best literature, as that so many--_under direction_--are open to its influence, as we may see from the immense sales of those popular volumes which Mr. Ernest Rhys and others guarantee to be genuine ”cla.s.sics.” Unfortunately, in the case of recently written books, Mr. Rhys is not always at hand. In such cases there is little direction for docile disciples of culture excepting such as is given in newspaper reviews, and reviews are as likely to misdirect and confuse as to encourage and guide.

But although this considerable and growing public of ambitious readers already exists, and may some day come to the support of original literature, it is at present easily swamped by that heterogeneous public for which the largest number of books are provided. That majority, in the nature of things, is unable to give the concentrated attention, still less the selective appreciation, which literature of the higher order requires. There is nothing to encourage them to concentrate. The newspaper, the popular magazine, the theatre, the moving-picture show, and the whole s.h.i.+fting, rapid panorama of modern life discourage concentration. There are readers who can only give the odds and ends of their time to reading. Most of them are devoting the best efforts of their brain and attention to their business, household duties, their social and domestic affairs, and they turn to books only when their minds are fatigued and in need of repose. That is to say, they read not for a renewal of activity, but for distraction. With them, books satisfy the desire, not for an enhancement of life, but for the forgetting of it. Their literature is at the most a stimulant which excites without giving active play to their faculties; it presents nothing which connects with life or ideas, nothing even to call forth the effort demanded by their practical affairs.

There are others, for the most part women not of the working cla.s.s, who support with apparent earnestness the purveyors of popular fiction and biography, and even patronise poetry and genteel social philosophy. Amongst them are to be found those to whom the sterner actualities of life are unfamiliar and repugnant, for whom the practice of trifling with books is rather an ornament than an occupation, a mode of killing time rather than using it. They, too, read to be distracted, choosing an emasculate literature which panders to their essential dilettantism.

Now those who regard literature as an important thing, playing a significant part in the life of a nation, must, as I have already indicated, seek in it something more positive than a _distraction_ from life; for them it must be an _addition to life_. It must provide experience compounded of the same stuff as other experience; but not having the vividness which the direct impact of life carries with it, it must gain its vividness by an intensity, a fineness, an interest of its own--by a distinctive quality distilled into it from the personality of the writer. It is imagination which achieves this, the faculty so apprehensive of life that it can fas.h.i.+on life into images which are projections of the artist, his own stamp upon the stuff of life. To such an author literature cannot be a mere amus.e.m.e.nt or profession. It deals with what he conceives to be the most essential things in the world; it is his rendering of the world, his perspective; and it is just in so far as he has made this, his ideal and real world, appreciable also to us, that he has succeeded in his art. Such imaginative reconstruction of the facts of life, such impregnation of life with fineness, calls for alertness of faculty in the reader, demands from him something of that eagerness to perceive which characterises the artist himself. But how can the tired worker seeking distraction, or the idle dilettante seeking only a drug or a stimulant, muster that alertness of faculty and that eagerness to perceive which are needed for the appreciation of art? It is not to be expected. A coa.r.s.er appeal will produce all that such minds are able to a.s.similate. For good reading, like good writing, requires the energy of men not robbed of leisure, men who can enjoy some respite from the commonplace.

And yet it often happens, as we shall see, that those who have succeeded in distracting the many have put into their work some fineness which commends it also to the few. It is only in theory that there is a fixed boundary between works of art and the works which Philistines enjoy. In practice, merit and demerit exist side by side; works crude in conception reveal a hundred finenesses, and works fine in conception reveal crudenesses of execution. And just as there are authors who mingle good and bad in their books, so too there are readers who enjoy certain kinds of excellence though they can be vulgarly excited by the cruder devices. And again there are persons who appreciate to some extent genuine works of art, who in moments of fatigue or jaded appet.i.te can be diverted by the mere appeal to sensation.

The clever publisher knows well that the public for whose distraction he caters is divided into many cla.s.ses, and that these cla.s.ses must be attracted each in a special way. For the purposes of my argument I group these under five different heads, which are probably not exhaustive and certainly not mutually exclusive, but correspond, I think, to the five chief means of exciting and distracting the mult.i.tude. The two largest cla.s.ses constantly overlap, consisting: firstly, of those whose love of sensation is satisfied by violent incident; and secondly, of those who are especially susceptible to the sentimental appeal. To a third cla.s.s belong those who take pleasure in the agitations of s.e.x feeling; and to a fourth, those whose sense of humour is tickled by the sallies of the literary clown. The fifth cla.s.s--a very large one--consists of those who are of a habit of mind to be excited by sensations which can be a.s.sociated with religion and morality. It is useless to name as a sixth cla.s.s those who are moved by intellectual ideas, for so small a cla.s.s is not the objective of the popular author.

I. All novels must to some extent depend upon incident and arrangement of incident, but there is a kind of novel which only interests through the excitement of events in their nature fict.i.tious, even when accidentally true. Any really good book which may be spoken of as a ”novel of incident” will invariably prove to be very much more. To take the case of Fielding's _Tom Jones_, one observes that it is an imitation of life which is neither a slavish copying nor a make-believe, but a vivid representation of eighteenth-century England as Fielding saw it; it is a book which presents characters, and itself has a character. Its atmosphere is quite unmistakable. It is not a ”slice” out of the eighteenth century--there can be no real ”slice out of life” excepting in life itself. It is Fielding's rendering of the eighteenth century, in particular it is his a.s.sertion of the _physicality_ (if I may use the term) of life, a direct a.s.sertion of the boisterous physical vitality which, as Fielding presents it and as Marlowe presented it, acquires value for the spirit and is acceptable to the imagination. It is the original pagan a.s.sertion of life, which finds its opposite in Euripides' conception of the ascetic Hippolytus; an a.s.sertion which Propertius repeated in the language of mockery when he speaks of a _lena_ as

”Docta vel Hippolytum Veneri mollire negantem.”

Even Euripides himself was so infected with the pagan view that he sees a sort of Nemesis pursuing the hero whom the slighted Aphrodite reproaches with lack of reverence--religious reverence--for her power.

This primitive pagan view, crude, non-moral, but essentially sincere, animates the story of Tom Jones and gives it a character which is lacking in the popular ”novel of incident.”

_Tom Jones_ was and is a popular book. But I hope I am not wronging the larger ma.s.s of mankind when I say that those (of the majority) who like Fielding do not like him for his unique excellences; they would be equally pleased if puppets instead of vital persons had pa.s.sed along the same course of exciting events; and that there are others who would not read him even if he began writing to-day, because his picture of life is too consistent with his imagination, and this very tenacity would perturb and irritate the trivial. Nevertheless he would have many readers among a large minority, just as Mr. Arnold Bennett has to-day--readers who can appreciate a story which is direct, vivid, and mainly external in treatment.