A Novelist on Novels

Walter Lionel George

A Novelist on Novels

Published by Good Press, 2022

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EAN 4064066208356

Table of Contents

I

II

Litany of the Novelist

II

Who is the Man?

I

II

III

IV

V

Three Young Novelists

Form and the Novel

Sincerity: the Publisher and the Policeman

Three Comic Giants

The Esperanto of Art

The Twilight of Genius

I

II

III

A Deceptive Dedication

Table of Contents

I

Table of Contents

I have shown the manuscript of this book to a well-known author. One of those staid, established authors whose venom has been extracted by the mellow years. My author is beyond rancour and exploit; he has earned the right to bask in his own celebrity, and needs to judge no more, because no longer does he fear judgment. He is like a motorist who has sowed his wild petrol. He said to me: 'You are very, very unwise. I never criticise my contemporaries, and, believe me, it doesn't pay.' Well, I am unwise; I always was unwise, and this has paid in a coin not always recognised, but precious to a man's spiritual pride. Why should I not criticise my contemporaries? It is not a merit to be a contemporary. Also, they can return the compliment; some of them, if I may venture upon a turn of phrase proper for Mr Tim Healy, have returned the compliment before they got it. It may be unwise, but I join with Voltaire in thanking God that he gave us folly. So I will affront the condemnatory vagueness of wool and fleecy cloud, be content to think that nobody will care where I praise, that everybody will think me impertinent where I judge. I will be content to believe that the well-known author will not mind if I criticise him, and that the others will not mind either. I will hope, though something of a Sadducee, that there is an angel in their hearts.

I want to criticise them and their works because I think the novel, this latest born of literature, immensely interesting and important. It is interesting because, more faithfully than any other form, it expresses the mind of man, his pains that pass, his hopes that fade and are born again, his discontent pregnant with energy, the unrulinesses in which he misspends his vigour, the patiences that fit him to endure all things even though he dare them not. In this, all other forms fail: history, because it chronicles battles and dates, yet not the great movements of the peoples; economics, because in their view all men are vile; biography, because it leads the victim to the altar, but never sacrifices it. Even poetry fails; I do not try to shock, but I doubt whether the poetic is equal to the prose form.

I do not want to fall into the popular fallacy that prose and poetry each have their own field, strictly preserved, for prose is not always prosy, nor poetry always poetic; prose may contain poetry, poetry cannot contain prose, just as some gentlemen are bounders, but no bounders are gentlemen. But the admiration many people feel for poetry derives from a lack of intelligence rather than from an excess of emotion, and they would be cured if, instead of admiring, they read. Some subjects and ideas naturally fall into poetry, mainly the lyric ideas; 'To Anthea,' and 'The Skylark' would, in prose, lie broken-pinioned upon the ground, but the exquisiteness of poetry, when it conveys the ultimate aspiration of man, defines its limitations. Poetry is child of the austerity of literature by the sensuality of music. Thus it is more and less than its forbears; speaking for myself alone, I feel that 'Epipsychidion' and the 'Grecian Urn' are just a little less than the Kreutzer Sonata, that Browning and Whitman might have written better in prose, though they might thus have been less quoted. For poetry is too often schwaermerei, a thing of lilts; when it conveys philosophical ideas, as in Browning and in that prose writer gone astray, Shakespeare, it suffers the agonising pains of constriction. Rhyme and scansion tend to limit and hamper it; everything can be said in prose, but not in poetry; to prose no licence need be granted, while poetry must use and abuse it, for prose is free, poetry shackled by its form. No doubt that is why poetry causes so much stir, for it surmounts extraordinary difficulties, and men gape as at a tenor who attains a top note. However exquisite, the scope of poetry is smaller than that of prose, and if any doubt it let him open at random an English Bible and say if Milton can out-thunder Job, or Swinburne outcloy the sweetness of Solomon's Song.

More than interesting, the novel is important because, low as its status may be, it does day by day express mankind, and mankind in the making. Sometimes it is the architect that places yet another brick upon the palace of the future. Always it is the showman of life. I think of 'serious books,' of the incredible heaps of memoirs, works on finance, strategy, psychology, sociology, biology, omniology ... that fall every day like manna (unless from another region they rise as fumes) into the baskets of the reviewers. All this paper ... they dance their little dance to four hundred readers and a great number of second-hand booksellers, and lo! the dust of their decay is on their brow. They live a little longer than an article by Mr T. P. O'Connor, and live a little less.

The novel, too, does not live long, but I have known one break up a happy home, and another teach revolt to several daughters; can we give greater praise? Has so much been achieved by any work entitled The Foundations of the Century, or something of that sort? The novel, despised buffoon that it is, pours out its poison and its pearls within reach of every lip; its heroes and heroines offer examples to the reader and make him say: 'That bold, bad man ... you wouldn't think it to look at me, who'm a linen-draper, but it's me.' If, in this preface, I may introduce a personal reminiscence, I can strengthen my point by saying that after publishing The Second Blooming I received five letters from women I did not know, who wholly recognised themselves in my principal heroine, of course the regrettable one.

The novel moulds by precept and example, and therefore we modern jesters, inky troubadours, are responsible for the gray power which we wield behind the throne. Given this responsibility, it is a pity there should be so many novels, for the reader is distracted with various examples, and painfully hesitates between the career of Raffles and that of John Inglesant. Thus the novel fires many a sanctimoniousness, makes lurid many a hesitating life. If only we could endow it! But we cannot, for the old saying can be garbled: call no novelist famous until he is dead.

It is a fascinating idea, this one of endowing the novel. In principle it is not difficult, only we must assume our capable committee and that is quite as difficult as ignoring the weight of the elephant. I wonder what would happen if an Act of Parliament were to endow genius! I wonder who would sit on the sub-committee appointed by the British Government to endow literature. I do not wonder, I know. There would be Professor Saintsbury, Mr Austin Dobson, Professor Walter Raleigh, Sir Sidney Lee, Professor Gollancz, all the academics, all the people drier than the drought, who, whether the god of literature find himself in the car or in the cart, never fail to get into the dickey. I should not even wonder if, by request of the municipality of Burton-on-Trent, it were found desirable to infuse a democratic element into the sub-committee by adding the manager of the Army and Navy Stores and, of course, Mr Bottomley. Do not protest: Mr Bottomley has recently passed embittered judgments, under the characteristic heading 'Dam-Nation,' on Mr Alec Waugh, who ventured, in a literary sketch, to show English soldiers going over the top with oaths upon their lips and the courage born of fear in their hearts. I think Mr Bottomley would like to have Mr Waugh shot, and the editor of The Nation confined for seven days in the Press Bureau, for having told the truth in literary form. I do not impugn his judgment of what it feels like to go over the top, for he has had long experience of keeping strictly on the surface.

No, our sub-committee would be appointed without the help of Thalia and Calliope. It would register judgments such as those of the famous sub-committee that grants the Nobel Prizes. That committee, during its short life, has managed to reward Sully-Prudhomme and to leave out Swinburne, to give a prize to Sienkewicz, whom a rather more recent generation has found so suitable for the cinema. It has even given a prize to Mr Rudyard Kipling, but whether in memory of literature or dynamite is not known.

So literary genius must, as before, look for its endowment in the somewhat barren heart of man, and continue to shed a hundred seeds in its stony places, in the forlorn hope that the fowls of the air may not devour them all, and that a single ear of corn may wilt and wither its way into another dawn.

II

Table of Contents

The reading of most men and women provides distressing lists. So far as I can gather from his conversation, the ordinary, busy man, concerned with his work, finds his mental sustenance in the newspapers, particularly in Punch, in the illustrated weeklies and in the journals that deal with his trade; as for imaginative literature, he seems to confine himself to Mr Nat Gould, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mr W. W. Jacobs, Mr Mason, and such like, who certainly do not strain his imaginative powers; he is greatly addicted to humour of the coarser kind, and he dissipates many of his complexes by means of vile stories which he exchanges with his fellows; these do not at all represent his kindliness and his respectability. Sometimes he reads a shocker, the sort that is known as 'railway literature,' presumably because it cannot hold the attention for more than the time that elapses between two stops.

The more serious and scholarly man, who abounds in every club, is addicted to the monthly reviews, (price two-and-six; he does not like the shilling ones), to the Times, to the Spectator; that kind of man is definitely stodgy and prides himself upon being sound. He is fond of memoirs, rather sodden accounts of aristocrats and politicians, of the dull, ordinary lives of dull, ordinary people; when he has done with the book it goes to the pulping machine, but some of the pulp gets into that man's brain. ('Ashes to ashes, pulp to pulp.') He likes books of travel, biographies, solid French books (strictly by academicians), political works, economic works. His conversation sounds like it, and that is why his wife is so bored; his emotions are reflex and run only round the objects he can see; art cannot touch him, and no feather ever falls upon his brow from an airy wing. He commonly tells you that good novels are not written nowadays; he must be excused that opinion, for he never tries to read them. The only novels with which the weary Titan refreshes his mind are those of Thackeray, sometimes of Trollope; the more frivolous sometimes go so far as to sip a little of the honey that falls from the mellifluous lips of Mr A. C. Benson.

The condition of women is different. They care for little that ends in 'ic,' and so their consumption of novels is enormous. The commonplace woman is attracted by the illustrated dailies and weeklies, but she also needs large and continuous doses of religious sentimentality, of papier maché romance, briefly, of novels described in literary circles as 'bilge,' such as the works of Mr Hall Caine, Mrs Barclay, Miss E. M. Dell, and a great many more; if she is of the slightly faster kind that gives smart lunch parties at the Strand Corner House, her diet is sometimes a little stronger; she takes to novels of the orchid house and the tiger's lair, to the artless erotics of Miss Elinor Glyn, Mr Hubert Wales, and Miss Victoria Cross. She likes memoirs too, memoirs of vague Bourbons and salacious Bonapartes; she takes great pleasure in the historical irregularities of cardinals. She likes poetry too as conveyed by Miss Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

If that type of woman were not a woman the arts could base as few hopes on her as they do on men, but the most stupid woman is better ground than the average man, because she is open, while he is smug. So it is no wonder that among the millions of women who mess and muddle their way through the conservatories and pigsties of literature, should be found the true reading public, the women who are worth writing for, who read the best English novels, who are in touch with French and Russian literature, who reads plays, and even essays, ancient and modern. Hail Mary, mother of mankind; but for these the arts must starve!

That fine public cannot carry us very far. They are not enough to keep literature vigorous by giving it what it needs: a consciousness of fellowship with many readers. If literature is to flourish (of which I am not sure, though endure in some form it will), the general public taste must be raised. I feel that taste can be raised and cultivated, and many have felt that too. From the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, and especially since 1870, an ascending effort has been made to stimulate the taste of the rising artisan. Books like Lord Avebury's Pleasures of Life, like Sesame and Lilies, collections such as the Hundred Best Books and the Hundred Best Pictures, have all been attuned to that key. The only pity is that the selections, nearly all of them excellent, were immeasurably above the heads