Aspects of the novel
Genuine scholarship is one of the highest successes which our race can
achieve. No one is more triumphant than the man who chooses a worthy
subject and masters all its facts and the leading facts of the subjects
neighbouring. He can then do what he likes. He can, if his subject is
the novel, lecture on it chronologically if he wishes because he has
read all the important novels of the past four centuries, many of the
unimportant ones, and has adequate knowledge of any collateral facts
that bear upon English fiction. The late Sir Walter Raleigh (who once
held this lectureship) was such a scholar. Raleigh knew so many facts
that he was able to proceed to influences, and his monograph on the
English novel adopts the treatment by period which his unworthy
successor must avoid. The scholar, like the philosopher, can contemplate
the river of time. He contemplates it not as a whole, but he can see the
facts, the personalities, floating past him, and estimate the relations
between them, and if his conclusions could be as valuable to us as they
are to himself he would long ago have civilized the human race. As you
know, he has failed. True scholarship is incommunicable, true scholars
rare. There are a few scholars, actual or potential, in the audience
today, but only a few, and there is certainly none on the platform. Most
of us are pseudo-scholars, and I want to consider our characteristics
with sympathy and respect, for we are a very large and quite a powerful
class, eminent in Church and State, we control the education of the
Empire, we lend to the Press such distinction as it consents to receive,
and we are a welcome asset at dinner-parties.
Pseudo-scholarship is, on its good side, the homage paid by ignorance to
learning. It also has an economic side, on which we need not be hard.
Most of us must get a job before thirty, or sponge on our relatives, and
many jobs can only be got by passing an exam. The pseudo-scholar often
does well in examination (real scholars are not much good), and even
when he fails he appreciates their innate majesty. They are gateways to
employment, they have power to ban and bless. A paper on _King Lear_ may
lead somewhere, unlike the rather far-fetched play of the same name. It
may be a stepping-stone to the Local Government Board. He does not often
put it to himself openly and say "That's the use of knowing things, they
help you to get on." The economic pressure he feels is more often
subconscious, and he goes to his exam, merely feeling that a paper on
King Lear is a very tempestuous and terrible experience but an intensely
real one. And whether he be cynical or naïf, he is not to be blamed. As
long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can
only be reached through exams, so long must we take the examination
system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much
so-called education would disappear, and no one be a penny the stupider.
It is when he comes to criticism--to a job like the present--that he can
be so pernicious, because he follows the method of a true scholar
without having his equipment. He classes books before he has understood
or read them; that is his first crime. Classification by chronology.
Books written before 1847, books written after it, books written after
or before 1848. The novel in the reign of Queen Anne, the pre-novel, the
ur-novel, the novel of the future. Classification by subject
matter--sillier still. The literature of Inns, beginning with _Tom
Jones_; the literature of the Women's Movement, beginning with
_Shirley_; the literature of Desert Islands, from _Robinson Crusoe_ to
_The Blue Lagoon_; the literature of Rogues--dreariest of all, though
the Open Road runs it pretty close; the literature of Sussex (perhaps
the most devoted of the Home Counties); improper books--a serious though
dreadful branch of enquiry, only to be pursued by pseudo-scholars of
riper years, novels relating to industrialism, aviation, chiropody, the
weather. I include the weather on the authority of the most amazing work
on the novel that I have met for many years. It came over the Atlantic
to me, nor shall I ever forget it. It was a literary manual entitled
_Materials and Methods of Fiction_. The writer's name shall be
concealed. He was a pseudo-scholar and a good one. He classified novels
by their dates, their length, their locality, their sex, their point of
view, till no more seemed possible. But he still had the weather up his
sleeve, and when he brought it out, it had nine heads. He gave an
example under each head, for he was anything but slovenly, and we will
run through his list. In the first place the weather can be
"decorative," as in Pierre Loti; then "utilitarian," as in _The Mill on
the Floss_ (no Floss, no Mill; no Mill, no Tullivers); "illustrative,"
as in _The Egoist_; "planned in pre-established harmony," as by Fiona
MacLeod; "in emotional contrast," as in _The Master of Ballantrae_;
"determinative of action," as in a certain Kipling story, where a man
proposes to the wrong girl on account of a mud storm; "a controlling
influence," _Richard Feverel_; "itself a hero," like Vesuvius in _The
Days of Pompeii_; and ninethly, it can be "non-existent," as in a
nursery tale. I liked him flinging in non-existence. It made everything
so scientific and trim. But he himself remained a little dissatisfied,
and having finished his classification he said yes, of course there was
one more thing, and that was genius; it was useless for a novelist to
know that there are nine sorts of weather, unless he has genius also.
Cheered by this reflection, he classified novels by their tones. There
are only two tones, personal and impersonal, and having given examples
of each he grew pensive again and said, "Yes, but you must have genius
too, or neither tone will profit."
This constant reference to genius is another characteristic of the
pseudo-scholar. He loves mentioning genius, because the sound of the
word exempts him from trying to discover its meaning. Literature is
written by geniuses. Novelists are geniuses. There we are; now let us
classify them. Which he does. Everything he says may be accurate but all
is useless because he is moving round books instead of through them, he
either has not read them or cannot read them properly. Books have to be
read (worse luck, for it takes a long time); it is the only way of
discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading
is the only method of assimilation revealed to the west. The reader must
sit down alone and struggle with the writer, and this the pseudo-scholar
will not do. He would rather relate a book to the history of its time,
to events in the life of its author, to the events it describes, above
all to some tendency. As soon as he can use the word "tendency" his
spirits rise, and though those of his audience may sink, they often pull
out their pencils at this point and make a note, under the belief that a
tendency is portable.
That is why, in the rather ramshackly course that lies ahead of us, we
cannot consider fiction by periods, we must not contemplate the stream
of time. Another image better suits our powers: that of all the
novelists writing their novels at once. They come from different ages
and ranks, they have different temperaments and aims, but they all hold
pens in their hands, and are in the process of creation. Let us look
over their shoulders for a moment and see what they are writing. It may
exorcise that demon of chronology which is at present our enemy and
which (we shall discover next week) is sometimes their enemy too. "Oh,
what quenchless feud is this, that Time hath with the sons of men,"
cries Herman Melville, and the feud goes on not only in life and death
but in the by-ways of literary creation and criticism. Let us avoid it
by imagining that all the novelists are at work together in a circular
room. I shall not mention their names until we have heard their words,
because a name brings associations with it, dates, gossip, all the
furniture of the method we are discarding.
They have been instructed to group themselves in pairs. We approach the
first pair, and read as follows:--
i. I don't know what to do--not I. God forgive me, but I am very
impatient! I wish--but I don't know what to wish without a sin. Yet I
wish it would please God to take me to his mercy!--I can meet with none
here.--What a world is this!--What is there in it desirable? The good we
hope for so strangely mixed, that one knows not what to wish for! And
one half of mankind tormenting the other and being tormented themselves
in tormenting.
ii. What I hate is myself--when I think that one has to take so much, to
be happy, out of the lives of others, and that one isn't happy even
then. One does it to cheat one's self and to stop one's mouth--but that
is only, at the best, for a little. The wretched self is always there,
always making us somehow a fresh anxiety. What it comes to is that it's
not, that it's never, a happiness, any happiness at all, to _take_. The
only safe thing is to give. It's what plays you least false.
It is obvious that here sit two novelists who are looking at life from
much the same angle, yet the first of them is Samuel Richardson, and the
second you will have already identified as Henry James. Each is an
anxious rather than an ardent psychologist. Each is sensitive to
suffering and appreciates self-sacrifice; each falls short of the
tragic, though a close approach is made. A sort of tremulous
nobility--that is the spirit that dominates them--and oh how well they
write!--not a word out of place in their copious flows. A hundred and
fifty years of time divide them, but are not they close together in other
ways, and may not their neighbourliness profit us? Of course as I say
this I hear Henry James beginning to express his regret--no, not his
regret but his surprise--no, not even his surprise but his awareness
that neighbourliness is being postulated of him, and postulated, must he
add, in relation to a shopkeeper. And I hear Richardson, equally
cautious, wondering whether any writer born outside England can be
chaste. But these are surface differences, are indeed no differences at
all, but additional points of contact. We leave them sitting in harmony,
and proceed to our next pair.
i. All the preparations for the funeral ran easily and happily under
Mrs. Johnson's skilful hands. On the eve of the sad occasion she
produced a reserve of black sateen, the kitchen steps, and a box of
tintacks, and decorated the house with festoons and bows of black in the
best possible taste. She tied up the knocker with black crêpe, and put
a large bow over the corner of the steel engraving of Garibaldi, and
swathed the bust of Mr. Gladstone that had belonged to the deceased with
inky swathings. She turned the two vases that had views of Tivoli and
the Bay of Naples round, so that these rather brilliant landscapes were
hidden and only the plain blue enamel showed, and she anticipated the
long contemplated purchase of a tablecloth for the front room, and
substituted a violet purple cover for the now very worn and faded
raptures and roses in plushette that had hitherto done duty there.
Everything that loving consideration could do to impart a dignified
solemnity to her little home was done.
ii. The air of the parlour being faint with the smell of sweet cake, I
looked about for the table of refreshments; it was scarcely visible
until one had got accustomed to the gloom, but there was a cut-up plum
cake upon it, and there were cut-up oranges, and sandwiches, and
biscuits, and two decanters that I knew very well as ornaments, but had
never seen used in all my life; one full of port, and one of sherry.