Aspects of the novel
Standing at this table, I became conscious of the servile Pumblechook in
a black cloak and several yards of hat-band, who was alternately
stuffing himself, and making obsequious movements to catch my attention.
The moment he succeeded, he came over to me (breathing sherry and
crumbs) and said in a subdued voice, "May I, dear sir?" and did.
These two funerals did not by any means happen on the same day. One is
the funeral of Mr. Polly's father (1920), the other the funeral of Mrs.
Gargery in _Great Expectations_ (1860). Yet Wells and Dickens are
describing them from the same point of view and even using the same
tricks of style (cf. the two vases and the two decanters). They are,
both, humorists and visualizers who get an effect by cataloguing details
and whisking the page over irritably. They are generous-minded; they
hate shams and enjoy being indignant about them; they are valuable
social reformers; they have no notion of confining books to a library
shelf. Sometimes the lively surface of their prose scratches like a
cheap gramophone record, a certain poorness of quality appears, and the
face of the author draws rather too near to that of the reader. In other
words, neither of them has much taste: the world of beauty was largely
closed to Dickens, and is entirely closed to Wells. And there are other
parallels--for instance their method of drawing character, but that we
shall examine later on. And perhaps the great difference between them is
the difference of opportunity offered to an obscure boy of genius a
hundred years ago and to a similar boy forty years ago. The difference
is all in Wells' favour. He is far better educated than his predecessor;
in particular the addition of science has strengthened his mind out of
recognition and subdued his hysteria. He registers an improvement in
society: Dotheboys Hall has been superseded by the Polytechnic. But he
does not register any change in the novelist's art.
What about our next pair?
i. But as for that mark, I'm not sure about it; I don't believe it was
made by a nail after all; it's too big, too round, for that I might get
up, but if I got up and looked at it, ten to one I shouldn't be able to
say for certain; because once a thing's done, no one ever knows how it
happened. O dear me, the mystery of life! The inaccuracy of thought! The
ignorance of humanity! To show how very little control of our
possessions we have--what an accidental affair this living is after all
our civilization--let me just count over a few of the things lost on one
lifetime, beginning, for that always seems the most mysterious of
losses--what cat would gnaw, what rat would nibble--three pale blue
canisters of bookbinding tools? Then there were the birdcages, the iron
hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne coal-scuttle, the
bagatelle-board, the hand-organ--all gone, and jewels too. Opals and
emeralds, they lie about the roots of turnips. What a scraping paring
affair it is to be sure! The wonder is that I've any clothes on my back,
that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one
wants to compare life to anything one must liken it to being blown
through the Tube at fifty miles an hour....
ii. Every day for at least ten years together did my father resolve to
have it mended; 'tis not mended yet. No family but ours would have borne
with it an hour, and what is most astonishing, there was not a subject
in the world upon which my father was so eloquent as upon that of
door-hinges. And yet, at the same time, he was certainly one of the
greatest bubbles to them, I think, that history can produce; his
rhetoric and conduct were at perpetual handy-cuffs. Never did the
parlour door open but his philosophy or his principles fell a victim to
it; three drops of oil with a feather, and a smart stroke of a hammer,
had saved his honour for ever.
Inconsistent soul that man is; languishing under wounds which he has the
power to heal; his whole life a contradiction to his knowledge; his
reason, that precious gift of God to him (instead of pouring in oil),
serving but to sharpen his sensibilities, to multiply his pains, and
render him more melancholy and uneasy under them! Poor unhappy creature,
that he should do so! Are not the necessary causes of misery in this
life enough, but he must add voluntary ones to his stock of sorrow?
Struggle against evils which cannot be avoided, and submit to others
which a tenth part of the trouble they create him would remove from his
heart for ever.
By all that is good and virtuous, if there are three drops of oil to be
got and a hammer to be found within ten miles of Shandy Hall, the
parlour door hinge shall be mended this reign.
The passage last quoted is, of course, out of _Tristram Shandy_. The
other passage was from Virginia Woolf. She and Sterne are both
fantasists. They start with a little object, take a flutter from it, and
settle on it again. They combine a humorous appreciation of the muddle
of life with a keen sense of its beauty. There is even the same tone in
their voices--a rather deliberate bewilderment, an announcement to all
and sundry that they do not know where they are going. No doubt their
scales of value are not the same. Sterne is a sentimentalist, Virginia
Woolf (except perhaps in her latest work, _To the Lighthouse_) is
extremely aloof. Nor are their achievements on the same scale. But their
medium is similar, the same odd effects are obtained by it, the parlour
door is never mended, the mark on the wall turns out to be a snail, life
is such a muddle, oh, dear, the will is so weak, the sensations
fidgety--philosophy--God--oh, dear, look at the mark--listen to the
door--existence is really too ... what were we saying?
Does not chronology seem less important now that we have visualized six
novelists at their jobs? If the novel develops, is it not likely to
develop on different lines from the British Constitution, or even the
Women's Movement? I say "even the Women's Movement" because there
happened to be a close association between fiction in England and that
movement during the nineteenth century--a connection so close that it
has misled some critics into thinking it an organic connection. As women
bettered their position the novel, they asserted, became better too.
Quite wrong. A mirror does not develop because an historical pageant
passes in front of it. It only develops when it gets a fresh coat of
quicksilver--in other words, when it acquires new sensitiveness; and the
novel's success lies in its own sensitiveness, not in the success of its
subject matter. Empires fall, votes are accorded, but to those people
writing in the circular room it is the feel of the pen between their
fingers that matters most. They may decide to write a novel upon the
French or the Russian Revolution, but memories, associations, passions,
rise up and cloud their objectivity, so that at the close, when they
re-read, some one else seems to have been holding their pen and to have
relegated their theme to the background. That "some one else" is their
self no doubt, but not the self that is so active in time and lives
under George IV or V. All through history writers while writing have
felt more or less the same. They have entered a common state which it is
convenient to call inspiration,[2] and having regard to that state, we
may say that History develops, Art stands still.
History develops, Art stands still, is a crude motto, indeed it is
almost a slogan, and though forced to adopt it we must not do so without
admitting it vulgarily. It contains only a partial truth.
It debars us in the first place from considering whether the human mind
alters from generation to generation; whether, for instance, Thomas
Deloney, who wrote humorously about shops and pubs in the reign of Queen
Elizabeth, differs fundamentally from his modern representative--who
would be some one of the calibre of Neil Lyons or Pett Ridge. As a
matter of fact Deloney did not differ; differed as an individual, but
not fundamentally, not because he lived four hundred years ago. Four
thousand, fourteen thousand years might give us pause, but four hundred
years is nothing in the life of our race, and does not allow room for
any measurable change. So our slogan here is no practical hindrance. We
can chant it without shame.
It is more serious when we turn to the development of tradition and see
what we lose through being debarred from examining that. Apart from
schools and influences and fashions, there has been a technique in
English fiction, and this does alter from generation to generation. The
technique of laughing at characters for instance: to smoke and to rag
are not identical; the Elizabethan humorist picks up his victim in a
different way from the modern, raises his laugh by other tricks. Or the
technique of fantasy: Virginia Woolf, though her aim and general effect
both resemble Sterne's, differs from him in execution; she belongs to
the same tradition but to a later phase of it. Or the technique of
conversation: in my pairs of examples I could not include a couple of
dialogues, though I wanted to, for the reason that the use of the "he
said" and "she said" varies so much through the centuries that it
colours its surroundings, and though the speakers may be similarly
conceived they will not seem so in an extract. Well, we cannot examine
questions like these, and must admit we are the poorer, though we can
abandon the development of subject matter and the development of the
human race without regret. Literary tradition is the borderland lying
between literature and history, and the well-equipped critic will spend
much time there and enrich his judgment accordingly. We cannot go there
because we have not read enough. We must pretend it belongs to history
and cut it off accordingly. We must refuse to have anything to do with
chronology.
Let me quote here for our comfort from my immediate predecessor in this
lectureship, Mr. T. S. Eliot. Mr. Eliot enumerates, in the introduction
to _The Sacred Wood_, the duties of the critic. "It is part of his
business to preserve tradition--when a good tradition exists. It is part
of his business to see literature steadily and to see it whole; and this
is eminently to see it not as consecrated by time, but to see it beyond
time." The first duty we cannot perform, the second we must try to
perform. We can neither examine nor preserve tradition. But we can
visualize the novelists as sitting in one room, and force them, by our
very ignorance, from the limitations of date and place. I think that is
worth doing, or I should not have ventured to undertake this course.
How then are we to attack the novel--that spongy tract, those fictions
in prose of a certain extent which extend so indeterminately? Not with
any elaborate apparatus. Principles and systems may suit other forms of
art, but they cannot be applicable here--or if applied their results
must be subjected to re-examination. And who is the re-examiner? Well, I
am afraid it will be the human heart, it will be this man-to-man
business, justly suspect in its cruder forms. The final test of a novel
will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of
anything else which we cannot define. Sentimentality--to some a worse
demon than chronology--will lurk in the background saying, "Oh, but I
like that," "Oh, but that doesn't appeal to me," and all I can promise
is that sentimentality shall not speak too loudly or too soon. The
intensely, stiflingly human quality of the novel is not to be avoided;
the novel is sogged with humanity; there is no escaping the uplift or
the downpour, nor can they be kept out of criticism. We may hate
humanity, but if it is exorcised or even purified the novel wilts,
little is left but a bunch of words.