Intentions
the _Lancet_. As for Mr. Rider Haggard, who really has, or had once, the
makings of a perfectly magnificent liar, he is now so afraid of being
suspected of genius that when he does tell us anything marvellous, he
feels bound to invent a personal reminiscence, and to put it into a
footnote as a kind of cowardly corroboration. Nor are our other
novelists much better. Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a
painful duty, and wastes upon mean motives and imperceptible “points of
view” his neat literary style, his felicitous phrases, his swift and
caustic satire. Mr. Hall Caine, it is true, aims at the grandiose, but
then he writes at the top of his voice. He is so loud that one cannot
bear what he says. Mr. James Payn is an adept in the art of concealing
what is not worth finding. He hunts down the obvious with the enthusiasm
of a short-sighted detective. As one turns over the pages, the suspense
of the author becomes almost unbearable. The horses of Mr. William
Black’s phaeton do not soar towards the sun. They merely frighten the
sky at evening into violent chromolithographic effects. On seeing them
approach, the peasants take refuge in dialect. Mrs. Oliphant prattles
pleasantly about curates, lawn-tennis parties, domesticity, and other
wearisome things. Mr. Marion Crawford has immolated himself upon the
altar of local colour. He is like the lady in the French comedy who
keeps talking about “le beau ciel d’Italie.” Besides, he has fallen into
the bad habit of uttering moral platitudes. He is always telling us that
to be good is to be good, and that to be bad is to be wicked. At times
he is almost edifying. _Robert Elsmere_ is of course a masterpiece—a
masterpiece of the “genre ennuyeux,” the one form of literature that the
English people seems thoroughly to enjoy. A thoughtful young friend of
ours once told us that it reminded him of the sort of conversation that
goes on at a meat tea in the house of a serious Nonconformist family, and
we can quite believe it. Indeed it is only in England that such a book
could be produced. England is the home of lost ideas. As for that great
and daily increasing school of novelists for whom the sun always rises in
the East-End, the only thing that can be said about them is that they
find life crude, and leave it raw.
‘In France, though nothing so deliberately tedious as _Robert Elsmere_
has been produced, things are not much better. M. Guy de Maupassant,
with his keen mordant irony and his hard vivid style, strips life of the
few poor rags that still cover her, and shows us foul sore and festering
wound. He writes lurid little tragedies in which everybody is
ridiculous; bitter comedies at which one cannot laugh for very tears. M.
Zola, true to the lofty principle that he lays down in one of his
pronunciamientos on literature, “L’homme de génie n’a jamais d’esprit,”
is determined to show that, if he has not got genius, he can at least be
dull. And how well he succeeds! He is not without power. Indeed at
times, as in _Germinal_, there is something almost epic in his work. But
his work is entirely wrong from beginning to end, and wrong not on the
ground of morals, but on the ground of art. From any ethical standpoint
it is just what it should be. The author is perfectly truthful, and
describes things exactly as they happen. What more can any moralist
desire? We have no sympathy at all with the moral indignation of our
time against M. Zola. It is simply the indignation of Tartuffe on being
exposed. But from the standpoint of art, what can be said in favour of
the author of _L’Assommoir_, _Nana_ and _Pot-Bouille_? Nothing. Mr.
Ruskin once described the characters in George Eliot’s novels as being
like the sweepings of a Pentonville omnibus, but M. Zola’s characters are
much worse. They have their dreary vices, and their drearier virtues.
The record of their lives is absolutely without interest. Who cares what
happens to them? In literature we require distinction, charm, beauty and
imaginative power. We don’t want to be harrowed and disgusted with an
account of the doings of the lower orders. M. Daudet is better. He has
wit, a light touch and an amusing style. But he has lately committed
literary suicide. Nobody can possibly care for Delobelle with his “Il
faut lutter pour l’art,” or for Valmajour with his eternal refrain about
the nightingale, or for the poet in _Jack_ with his “mots cruels,” now
that we have learned from _Vingt Ans de ma Vie littéraire_ that these
characters were taken directly from life. To us they seem to have
suddenly lost all their vitality, all the few qualities they ever
possessed. The only real people are the people who never existed, and if
a novelist is base enough to go to life for his personages he should at
least pretend that they are creations, and not boast of them as copies.
The justification of a character in a novel is not that other persons are
what they are, but that the author is what he is. Otherwise the novel is
not a work of art. As for M. Paul Bourget, the master of the _roman
psychologique_, he commits the error of imagining that the men and women
of modern life are capable of being infinitely analysed for an
innumerable series of chapters. In point of fact what is interesting
about people in good society—and M. Bourget rarely moves out of the
Faubourg St. Germain, except to come to London,—is the mask that each one
of them wears, not the reality that lies behind the mask. It is a
humiliating confession, but we are all of us made out of the same stuff.
In Falstaff there is something of Hamlet, in Hamlet there is not a little
of Falstaff. The fat knight has his moods of melancholy, and the young
prince his moments of coarse humour. Where we differ from each other is
purely in accidentals: in dress, manner, tone of voice, religious
opinions, personal appearance, tricks of habit and the like. The more
one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner
or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.
Indeed, as any one who has ever worked among the poor knows only too
well, the brotherhood of man is no mere poet’s dream, it is a most
depressing and humiliating reality; and if a writer insists upon
analysing the upper classes, he might just as well write of match-girls
and costermongers at once.’ However, my dear Cyril, I will not detain
you any further just here. I quite admit that modern novels have many
good points. All I insist on is that, as a class, they are quite
unreadable.
CYRIL. That is certainly a very grave qualification, but I must say that
I think you are rather unfair in some of your strictures. I like _The
Deemster_, and _The Daughter of Heth_, and _Le Disciple_, and _Mr.
Isaacs_, and as for _Robert Elsmere_, I am quite devoted to it. Not that
I can look upon it as a serious work. As a statement of the problems
that confront the earnest Christian it is ridiculous and antiquated. It
is simply Arnold’s _Literature and Dogma_ with the literature left out.
It is as much behind the age as Paley’s _Evidences_, or Colenso’s method
of Biblical exegesis. Nor could anything be less impressive than the
unfortunate hero gravely heralding a dawn that rose long ago, and so
completely missing its true significance that he proposes to carry on the
business of the old firm under the new name. On the other hand, it
contains several clever caricatures, and a heap of delightful quotations,
and Green’s philosophy very pleasantly sugars the somewhat bitter pill of
the author’s fiction. I also cannot help expressing my surprise that you
have said nothing about the two novelists whom you are always reading,
Balzac and George Meredith. Surely they are realists, both of them?
VIVIAN. Ah! Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos
illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered
everything except language: as a novelist he can do everything, except
tell a story: as an artist he is everything except articulate. Somebody
in Shakespeare—Touchstone, I think—talks about a man who is always
breaking his shins over his own wit, and it seems to me that this might
serve as the basis for a criticism of Meredith’s method. But whatever he
is, he is not a realist. Or rather I would say that he is a child of
realism who is not on speaking terms with his father. By deliberate
choice he has made himself a romanticist. He has refused to bow the knee
to Baal, and after all, even if the man’s fine spirit did not revolt
against the noisy assertions of realism, his style would be quite
sufficient of itself to keep life at a respectful distance. By its means
he has planted round his garden a hedge full of thorns, and red with
wonderful roses. As for Balzac, he was a most remarkable combination of
the artistic temperament with the scientific spirit. The latter he
bequeathed to his disciples. The former was entirely his own. The
difference between such a book as M. Zola’s _L’Assommoir_ and Balzac’s
_Illusions Perdues_ is the difference between unimaginative realism and
imaginative reality. ‘All Balzac’s characters;’ said Baudelaire, ‘are
gifted with the same ardour of life that animated himself. All his
fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams. Each mind is a weapon loaded
to the muzzle with will. The very scullions have genius.’ A steady
course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our
acquaintances to the shadows of shades. His characters have a kind of
fervent fiery-coloured existence. They dominate us, and defy scepticism.
One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of Lucien de
Rubempré. It is a grief from which I have never been able completely to
rid myself. It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it when
I laugh. But Balzac is no more a realist than Holbein was. He created
life, he did not copy it. I admit, however, that he set far too high a
value on modernity of form, and that, consequently, there is no book of
his that, as an artistic masterpiece, can rank with _Salammbô_ or
_Esmond_, or _The Cloister and the Hearth_, or the _Vicomte de
Bragelonne_.
CYRIL. Do you object to modernity of form, then?
VIVIAN. Yes. It is a huge price to pay for a very poor result. Pure
modernity of form is always somewhat vulgarising. It cannot help being
so. The public imagine that, because they are interested in their
immediate surroundings, Art should be interested in them also, and should
take them as her subject-matter. But the mere fact that they are
interested in these things makes them unsuitable subjects for Art. The
only beautiful things, as somebody once said, are the things that do not
concern us. As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us, or affects
us in any way, either for pain or for pleasure, or appeals strongly to
our sympathies, or is a vital part of the environment in which we live,
it is outside the proper sphere of art. To art’s subject-matter we
should be more or less indifferent. We should, at any rate, have no
preferences, no prejudices, no partisan feeling of any kind. It is
exactly because Hecuba is nothing to us that her sorrows are such an
admirable motive for a tragedy. I do not know anything in the whole
history of literature sadder than the artistic career of Charles Reade.
He wrote one beautiful book, _The Cloister and the Hearth_, a book as
much above _Romola_ as _Romola_ is above _Daniel Deronda_, and wasted the
rest of his life in a foolish attempt to be modern, to draw public
attention to the state of our convict prisons, and the management of our
private lunatic asylums. Charles Dickens was depressing enough in all
conscience when he tried to arouse our sympathy for the victims of the