Aspects of the novel
conjectural. We move between two darknesses. Certain people pretend to
tell us what birth and death are like: a mother, for instance, has her
point of view about birth, a doctor, a religious, have their points of
view about both. But it is all from the outside, and the two entities
who might enlighten us, the baby and the corpse, cannot do so, because
their apparatus for communicating their experiences is not attuned to
our apparatus for reception.
So let us think of people as starting life with an experience they
forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot
understand. These are the creatures whom the novelist proposes to
introduce as characters into books; these, or creatures plausibly like
them. The novelist is allowed to remember and understand everything, if
it suits him. He knows all the hidden life. How soon will he pick up his
characters after birth, how close to the grave will he follow them? And
what will he say, or cause to be felt, about these two queer
experiences?
Then food, the stoking up process, the keeping alive of an individual
flame, the process that begins before birth and is continued after it by
the mother, and finally taken over by the individual himself, who goes
on day after day putting an assortment of objects into a hole in his
face without becoming surprised or bored: food is a link between the
known and the forgotten; closely connected with birth, which none of us
remembers, and coming down to this morning's breakfast. Like
sleep--which in many ways it resembles--food does not merely restore our
strength, it has also an æsthetic side, it can taste good or bad. What
will happen to this double-faced commodity in books?
And fourthly, sleep. On the average, about a third of our time is not
spent in society or civilization or even in what is usually called
solitude. We enter a world of which little is known and which seems to
us after leaving it to have been partly oblivion, partly a caricature of
this world and partly a revelation. "I dreamt of nothing" or "I dreamt
of a ladder" or "I dreamt of heaven" we say when we wake. I do not want
to discuss the nature of sleep and dreams--only to point out that they
occupy much time and that what is called "History" only busies itself
with about two-thirds of the human cycle, and theorizes accordingly.
Does fiction take up a similar attitude?
And lastly, love. I am using this celebrated word in its widest and
dullest sense. Let me be very dry and brief about sex in the first
place. Some years after a human being is born, certain changes occur in
it, as in other animals, which changes often lead to union with another
human being, and to the production of more human beings. And our race
goes on. Sex begins before adolescence, and survives sterility; it is
indeed coeval with our lives, although at the mating age its effects are
more obvious to society. And besides sex, there are other emotions, also
strengthening towards maturity: the various upliftings of the spirit,
such as affection, friendship, patriotism, mysticism--and as soon as we
try to determine the relation between sex and these other emotions we
shall of course begin to quarrel as violently as we ever could about
Walter Scott, perhaps even more violently. Let me only tabulate the
various points of view. Some people say that sex is basic and underlies
all these other loves--love of friends, of God, of country. Others say
that it is connected with them, but laterally, it is not their root.
Others say that it is not connected at all. All I suggest is that we
call the whole bundle of emotions love, and regard them as the fifth
great experience through which human beings have to pass. When human
beings love they try to get something. They also try to give something,
and this double aim makes love more complicated than food or sleep. It
is selfish and altruistic at the same time, and no amount of
specialization in one direction quite atrophies the other. How much time
does love take? This question sounds gross but it must be asked because
it bears on our present enquiry. Sleep takes about eight hours out of
the twenty-four, food about two more. Shall we put down love for another
two? Surely that is a handsome allowance. Love may weave itself into our
other activities--so may drowsiness and hunger. Love may start various
secondary activities: for instance, a man's love for his family may
cause him to spend a good deal of time on the Stock Exchange, or his
love for God a good deal of time in church. But that he has emotional
communion with any beloved object for more than two hours a day may be
gravely doubted, and it is this emotional communion, this desire to give
and to get, this mixture of generosity and expectation, that
distinguishes love from the other experiences on our list.
That is the human make-up--or part of it. Made up like this himself, the
novelist takes his pen in his hand, gets into the abnormal state which
it is convenient to call "inspiration," and tries to create characters.
Perhaps the characters have to fall in with something else in his novel:
this often happens (the books of Henry James are an extreme case), and
then the characters have, of course, to modify the make-up accordingly.
However, we are considering now the more simple case of the novelist
whose main passion is human beings and who will sacrifice a great deal
to their convenience--story, plot, form, incidental beauty.
Well, in what senses do the nations of fiction differ from those of the
earth? One cannot generalize about them, because they have nothing in
common in the scientific sense; they need not have glands, for example,
whereas all human beings have glands. Nevertheless, though incapable of
strict definition, they tend to behave along the same lines.
In the first place, they come into the world more like parcels than
human beings. When a baby arrives in a novel it usually has the air of
having been posted. It is delivered "off"; one of the elder characters
goes and picks it up and shows it to the reader, after which it is
usually laid in cold storage until it can talk or otherwise assist in
the action. There is both a good and a bad reason for this and for all
other deviations from earthly practice; these we will note in a minute,
but do just observe in what a very perfunctory way the population of
noveldom is recruited. Between Sterne and James Joyce, scarcely any
writer has tried either to use the facts of birth or to invent a new set
of facts, and no one, except in a sort of auntish wistful way, has tried
to work back towards the psychology of the baby's mind and to utilize
the literary wealth that must lie there. Perhaps it cannot be done. We
shall decide in a moment.
Death. The treatment of death, on the other hand, is nourished much more
on observation, and has a variety about it which suggests that the
novelist finds it congenial. He does, for the reason that death ends a
book neatly, and for the less obvious reason that working as he does in
time he finds it easier to work from the known towards the darkness
rather than from the darkness of birth towards the known. By the time
his characters die, he understands them, he can be both appropriate and
imaginative about them--strongest of combinations. Take a little
death--the death of Mrs. Proudie in the _Last Chronicle of Barset_. All
is in keeping, yet the effect is terrifying, because Trollope has ambled
Mrs. Proudie down many a diocesan bypath, showing her paces, making her
snap, accustoming us, even to boredom, to her character and tricks, to
her "Bishop, consider the souls of the people," and then she has a heart
attack by the edge of her bed, she has ambled far enough,--end of Mrs.
Proudie. There is scarcely anything that the novelist cannot borrow from
"daily death"; scarcely anything he may not profitably invent. The doors
of that darkness lie open to him and he can even follow his characters
through it, provided he is shod with imagination and does not try to
bring us back scraps of séance information about the "life beyond."
What of food, the third fact upon our list? Food in fiction is mainly
social. It draws characters together, but they seldom require it
physiologically, seldom enjoy it, and never digest it unless specially
asked to do so. They hunger for each other, as we do in life, but our
equally constant longing for breakfast and lunch does not get reflected.
Even poetry has made more of it--at least of its æsthetic side. Milton
and Keats have both come nearer to the sensuousness of swallowing than
George Meredith.
Sleep. Also perfunctory. No attempt to indicate oblivion or the actual
dream world. Dreams are either logical or else mosaics made out of hard
little fragments of the past and future. They are introduced with a
purpose and that purpose is not the character's life as a whole, but
that part of it he lives while awake. He is never conceived as a
creature a third of whose time is spent in the darkness. It is the
limited daylight vision of the historian, which the novelist elsewhere
avoids. Why should he not understand or reconstruct sleep? For remember,
he has the right to invent, and we know when he is inventing truly,
because his passion floats us over improbabilities. Yet he has neither
copied sleep nor created it. It is just an amalgam.
Love. You all know how enormously love bulks in novels, and will
probably agree with me that it has done them harm and made them
monotonous. Why has this particular experience, especially in its sex
form, been transplanted in such generous quantities? If you think of a
novel in the vague you think of a love interest--of a man and woman who
want to be united and perhaps succeed. If you think of your own life in
the vague, or of a group of lives, you are left with a very different
and a more complex impression.
There would seem to be two reasons why love, even in good sincere
novels, is unduly prominent.
Firstly, when the novelist ceases to design his characters and begins to
create them--"love" in any or all of its aspects becomes important in
his mind, and without intending to do so he makes his characters unduly
sensitive to it--unduly in the sense that they would not trouble so much
in life. The constant sensitiveness of characters for each other--even
in writers called robust like Fielding--is remarkable, and has no
parallel in life, except among people who have plenty of leisure.
Passion, intensity at moments--yes, but not this constant awareness,
this endless readjusting, this ceaseless hunger. I believe that these
are the reflections of the novelist's own state of mind while he
composes, and that the predominance of love in novels is partly because
of this.
A second reason; which logically comes into another part of our enquiry,
but it shall be noted here. Love, like death, is congenial to a novelist
because it ends a book conveniently. He can make it a permanency, and
his readers easily acquiesce, because one of the illusions attached to
love is that it will be permanent. Not has been--will be. All history,
all our experience, teaches us that no human relationship is constant,
it is as unstable as the living beings who compose it, and they must
balance like jugglers if it is to remain; if it is constant it is no
longer a human relationship but a social habit, the emphasis in it has
passed from love to marriage. All this we know, yet we cannot bear to
apply our bitter knowledge to the future; the future is to be so
different; the perfect person is to come along, or the person we know
already is to become perfect. There are to be no changes, no necessity
for alertness. We are to be happy or even perhaps miserable for ever and
ever. Any strong emotion brings with it the illusion of permanence, and