Chapter FOUR: To Joseph Conrad

Thus in Mid-Victorian years there established itself for all the world to see--The English Nuvvle.

And inasmuch as this phenomenon was really, in the last event, combined--and no doubt unconscious--socio-political propaganda, it was accepted by the whole world--and by the whole world even more than by England. For if, as it were, you shut your eyes and consider what images are brought up before you by the words The English Novel you will see a Manor House, inhabited by the Best People: Sir Thomas, amiable but not bright; Lady Charlotte, benevolent, charitable, in an ample crinoline, an Earl’s daughter; the Misses Jean and Charlotte as pure as dew within lily-chalices; Mr. Tom--not absolutely satisfactory; Mr. Edward, always satisfactory; pigeons, shorthorns, a rose-garden, a still-room, a housekeeper, a rectory. And you will see a whole countryside, a whole continent, a whole world so conducted that those amiable but not bright personages shall lead amiable, idle, and almost blameless existences in an atmosphere of curtsyings and cap-touchings. It was a world-ideal: you found households modelling themselves upon it in the Government of Kiev, in the State of Massachusetts, in Pomerania, in the department of the Var. So that God’s Englishman of the novels of William Black--God’s drooping-bearded Englishman with his crinolined or be-bustled consort, carrying fly-fishing rods and croquet mallets, became the type which the whole world sighingly aped. For these nuvvles--to which nobody surely could object--were read in Sarajevo as in Potsdam, in Washington as on the Berkshire downs. They were works written for the would-be gentry by the near-gentry which latter, if their books proved sufficiently acceptable, might almost aspire to such establishments as they described and, in the second generation, to authentic gentrydom. The writer himself, like Shakespeare, would as a rule have to content himself with a grant of arms from the College of Heralds. But one could always, if one were a novelist, dazzle one’s mind with the idea that Edward Bulwer Lytton, author of _The Last Days of Pompeii_, became successively Sir Edward Bulwer, and Lord, Lytton, and Benjamin Disraeli, also a novelist, Earl of Beaconsfield and favourite of his Sovereign.

The nuvvles, naturally, differed in subject and even sometimes in treatment. _The Woman in White_ was, I think, written in letters for all the world like _Clarissa_; _Esmond_--which described the founding of a county-family in Virginia, U.S.A.,--was autobiographical; or you might have several characters each speaking in solid autobiographical wads; or several diarists. There was, in fact, no literary convention in particular--there was only the point of view. _Romola_ and _Far From the Madding Crowd_ had to be recognized as of the same ethical family as _Pelham_ or _Lorna Doone_ or they would not do at all.

Occasionally disturbing breaths swept across the trout-ponds. The newest novel of Thackeray might cause a great deal of trepidating discussion under the breath, or the latest passionate outpouring of Dickens might cause Mamma to ask dear Papa whether Lucy and Emily ought really to be allowed to read it. Steerforth and Little Em’ly came _very_ near the Knuckle: but the lap-dog died amongst such lamentations and the first heroine so delicately, and such refined retribution overtook alike Steerforth and the young woman that, if _Copperfield_ itself was put on the index of the young ladies’ boudoir, _Bleak House_ which “introduced Society” could not be kept from the fair denizens of that be-chintzed sanctuary. I believe, however, that _Great Expectations_, the last of Dickens’ works to show his passionate compassion for the under-dog, had a pretty rough passage.

I came into the world myself at about the hey-day of this national phenomenon, but, by the time I had any real literary consciousness, its supremacy was beginning to be already challenged. My own mother enjoined on me the reading of _Silas Marner_, _The Mill on the Floss_, _Wuthering Heights_, _Sidonia the Sorceress_, _Lorna Doone_, _The Woman in White_, _The Moonstone_, _Diana of the Crossways_, and _Far From the Madding Crowd_. But then my mother was “advanced” and never wore a crinoline. My father thought Dickens was vulgar and though he did not forbid me to read he certainly deprecated my expressing any enthusiasm for--_Bleak House_. He thought too--I don’t know why--that Robert Louis Stevenson was meretricious, except for the _Inland Voyage_. My grandfather, who was considerably more “advanced” than either my father or my mother, first recommended me to read--when I was about seventeen--_Madame Bovary_, _Tartarin de Tarascon_ and _Tartarin sur les Alpes_. He was pleased when at school they gave us the _Lettres de mon Moulin_ of Daudet and a little later made me read _Roderick Random_, _Humphry Clinker_, _Snarleyyow_, _Midshipman Easy_, Waterton’s _Wanderings in South America_, which was all the same as a novel. My uncle William Rossetti gave me _The Castle of Otranto_, _Caleb Williams_, _Frankenstein_ and another novel of Meinhold’s--_The Amber Witch_. I inherited from my uncle Oliver Madox Brown a large number of translations from the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish. Trollope I had to find out for myself, oddly enough. I suppose my own family were too advanced to care to advocate the reading of projections of the lives of the cathedral clergy. That, at any rate, was the reading of a boy of from twelve to eighteen of fairly advanced family in the ’eighties of last century. It will be observed that, with the possible exception of Wilkie Collins’ two books, these were all works that would not normally be read in Middle Class families, either because of social outspokennesses, individuality of outlook, or difficulties of style. But even for my family it was then possible to go too far. I remember my mother being seriously perturbed because at the age of thirteen or so I was kissed at a tea-party by Mrs. Lynn Lynton whose gleaming spectacles certainly frightened me and whose novels advocated the Revolt of the Daughters of that day--and, if it had lain within the ideas of right and wrong of my family to forbid anyone to read anything, I should certainly have been forbidden to read the works of Rhoda Broughton, who advocated the giving of latchkeys to women.

Nemesis was by then on the way.

The newer ideas began with the cheapening of the products of the press--and I dare say that cheapening was a good deal hastened by the pirating of American works. I remember still with delight the shilling edition--it was bound in scarlet paper--in which I first purchased at the age of fourteen in a place called Malvern Wells, Artemus Ward’s _Among the Mormons_, Sam Slick’s _The Clockmaker_, Mark Twain’s _Mississippi Pilot_, Carleton’s _Farm Ballads_, and ever so many other American books which I suppose must have been pirated or they could scarcely have been sold for a shilling. And, though I was ready at the injunctions of my family to read Lope da Vega or Smollett, nothing would have induced me to spend sixpence on taking out from a circulating library the three-volume novels of William Black, Besant and Rice and the other purveyors of the nuvvle when by saving up my pocket-money I could buy for a shilling--or ninepence net--the _Biglow Ballads_ or _Hans Breitmann_.

So that of the novel of commerce of those days I really know very little--and I do not think that there is very much about it that anyone need know. That it existed in great numbers in three volumes apiece was obvious. In every little town in England there was in those days a circulating library and in every circulating library in every town were shelves on shelves of obfusc bindings--but even the literary textbooks of to-day give you no more names for the Victorian period than Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, the Brontës, Charles Kingsley, Robert Louis Stevenson (who died in 1894), George Meredith and Thomas Hardy. So that even the official list is a pretty meagre one and if I rack my brains really hard I cannot add many names to it. I have already given you Black, Blackmore, Besant and Rice who collaborated--and of writers of considerable merit, Mark Rutherford and Samuel Butler, but neither of these really belong to the period--and Jane Austen really precedes it, though we may well say that she originated the novel of the country-house that was followed--at such great intervals--by the swarm of commercial writers.

That all the commercial writers who solidly turned out solid three-deckers produced absolute rubbish need not be assumed. Miss Braddon, authoress of _Lady Audley’s Secret_, did honest, sound journeyman’s work, year in, year out, during a very long life--and obviously such a writer as Mrs. Gaskell will not ever be entirely forgotten, if only on account of _Cranford_. I wish, myself, that more weight attached to her _Mary Barton_, a grim--and indeed an extraordinarily painful--account of Mid-Victorian labour troubles.

And of course there is Trollope.

Trollope and Miss Austen--like Shakespeare and Richardson--stand so absolutely alone that nothing very profitable can be said about them by a writer analysing British fiction in search of traces of main-currents of tradition. They were both so aloof, so engrossed, so contemplative--and so masterly--that beyond saying that some people prefer _The Warden_ to _Framley Parsonage_ and _Sense and Sensibility_ to _Pride and Prejudice_, and that others think the reverse, there is very little to be said. These at least are authentic writers: they neither flare out into passages that are all super-genius--as in Dickens’ passage about the dry leaves at Mr. Pecksniff’s back-door, nor do they descend to the intolerable banalities of the endings of _Copperfield_ or _Vanity Fair_. But, as in the case of Turgenev, the aspiring writer can learn very little of either. These novelists write well, know how to construct a novel so as to keep the interest going with every word until the last page--but after that all you can say is that they were just temperaments, and quiet ones at that. Inimitable--that is what they are. You could imitate Oscar Wilde--but never Trollope giving you the still, slow stream of English country and small-town life. Nor could anyone else ever give you such pure agony of interest and engrossment as you can get out of the financial troubles over a few pounds of the poor clergyman in _Framley Parsonage_. I shiver every time that I think of that book.

But once those tributes are paid it is astonishing to look back on the course of the novel in England from the earliest times to say, 1895, Bunyan, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and then the few Victorians of whom we have been treating. It is an astonishingly small crop, even if you let me add Marryat and add for yourselves the other solitary figure of Mark Twain, one of the greatest prose-writers the English language has produced.

In the meantime, across the Channel, the main stream of the Novel pursued its slow course.

It had begun with Richardson. His vogue with the French would be incomprehensible if we were not able to consider that the French Revolution was, in the end, a sentimental movement, basing itself on civic, parental, filial, and rhetorical virtues. If the French beheaded Marie Antoinette it was in order that Monsieur Durand, stay-maker of the Passage Choiseul, might be sufficiently well-fed to utter tearful homilies to his children; for homilies uttered by starving peasants with their bones pushing through their skins and rags--such homilies would little impress their children with the solid advantages of virtuous careers. And the moment you consider pre-revolutionary France from that angle the appeal of the author of _Pamela_ becomes instantly blindingly clear.

At any rate, Diderot wrote _Rameau’s Nephew_ as a direct imitation of that work of Richardson and a whole school of the contemporaries of Diderot imitated _Rameau’s Nephew_. The influence, again, of Richardson is plainly visible in Chateaubriand--for without Richardson how could he have written long passages like: “How sad it is to think that eyes that are too old to see have not yet outlived the ability to shed tears,” and the like. And if the Richardsonian influence upon Stendhal does not so immediately spring to the eye, we know from Stendhal’s letters that it was extremely profound.

It was to Diderot--and still more to Stendhal--that the Novel owes its next great step forward. That consisted in the discovery that words put into the mouth of a character need not be considered as having the personal backing of the author. At that point it became suddenly evident that the Novel as such was capable of being regarded as a means of profoundly serious and many-sided discussion and therefore a medium of profoundly serious investigation into the human case. It came into its own.

It is obvious of course that before the day of Diderot authors had put into the mouths of their characters sentiments with which they themselves could not be imagined to sympathize. But that was done only by characters marked “villain,” all the sympathetic characters having to utter sentiments which were either those of the author or those with which the author imagined the solid middle classes would agree. Young Mr. Blifil, Mrs. Slipslop, and the rest might say very wicked things, but they were so obviously wicked and absurd that no one could take them with any seriousness either as pronouncements or as worthy to be taken as the author’s opinion: Mr. Allworthy or Amelia Dobbin, on the other hand, could never utter anything without the reader having to exclaim: “_How_ virtuous!”... And consider the material success that always awaited the good!

By the time the thirty years or so that stretched between 1790 and 1820 had impinged on the world it had gradually become evident, on the Continent at least, that so many differing codes of morality could synchronize in the same era, in the same nation and even in the same small community--it had become so evident that if Simeon Stylites and Oliver Cromwell were saints, Jesus Christ and Gautama Buddha and several Chinese philosophers were very good men, that the Novel, if it was at all to express its day, must express itself through figures less amateurishly blacked than Uriah Heep and less sedulously whited than the Cherryble brothers.

Changes in literary methods are brought about very slowly and permeate more slowly still into the taste of the more or less unlettered classes who make up the bulk of the desirable readers for an author. As a rule the process begins with the younger writers who find tiresome or ludicrous the accepted work of their day; a little later the more experienced of readers, tiring in their turn of accepted methods in the works they consume, turn with relief to the younger writers, the professorial and established critics still thundering violently against the younger schools. For, everywhere but in England, schools establish themselves as soon as restlessnesses betray themselves in artistic circles. The more experienced readers, in spite of the critics, spreading abroad amongst the larger classes of the relatively unlettered the taste for the newer modes, at first that larger class become converts and then the professional critics whose bread and butter depends on their following the public taste. So a school is established and for a time holds its own. Then it gives place to other modes.

That is the quite invariable process with all the products and all the methods, of all the arts. But naturally, as the arts grow older, their practitioners have a better chance of evolving newer and sounder methods, for the number of their predecessors has inevitably increased. Bunyan must evolve his method for himself; Defoe could study Bunyan; Richardson, Bunyan and Defoe; Diderot, Richardson and his predecessors; Stendhal could draw on the experience of four generations; Flaubert on that of five; Conrad on that of six. This of course is a source of danger to weaker brethren, for in each generation an enormous amount of insipid art is turned out by inferior students receiving their instruction at the hands of academic instructors. That cannot be helped. But the fact remains that to a real master possessed of a real individuality the study of the methods of his predecessors must be of enormous use. Anyone at all instructed, reading the work of Conrad, must find evidence of an almost lifelong and almost incredibly minute study of writers preceding him and the amount of reading and of study--for they are not the same thing--that must have gone to the making of the author of _Ulysses_, who is certainly the greatest of all prose virtuosi of the word--that beggars the imagination!

So it happened that in France from, say, the ’fifties to the early ’nineties of the last century, you had a place of dignity found for the hitherto despised Novel--and in consequence you very speedily found an accepted convention. For once an occupation is discovered to be dignified you will very soon find that investigators of methods are at work upon it. The game of marbles was, in my hey-day, regarded as an occupation solely for little boys; but with the institution some few years ago of an international championship it came in for the most serious of study by grown men, and the photographs of last year’s world-contest that a little time ago filled the public prints, showed the competitors to be white-headed, grey-bearded, or very rotund of figure. The champion was eventually found, as far as I can remember, in a gentleman of sixty and over.

So with _Le Rouge et le Noir_ it became evident to the world that the novel of discussion or of investigation was a possibility and, with that discovery, the great novels began to come. The discussions to be found in the very few works of fiction by Diderot were naturally experimental and amateurish. Like Richardson he was tremendously on the side of the more or less patriarchal and civic angels. Nevertheless, he could give you a parasite talking in favour of his profession or a rogue justifying his courses with a sincerity and a reasonable ingenuousness that differed extremely from the exaggerated speeches of the villains of the Fielding, the Dickens, or the commercial, nuvvle. Stendhal, on the other hand, being what one might call a cold Nietzschean--or it might be more just to say that Nietzsche was a warmed-up Stendhalean--Stendhal, then, swung the balance rather to the other extreme, tending to make his detrimentals argumentatively masterly and his conventionally virtuous characters banal and impotent.

At any rate, with or after Stendhal, it became evident that, if the novel was to have what is called _vraisemblance_, if it was so to render life as to engross its reader, the novelist must not take sides either with the virtuous whose virtues cause them to prosper or with the vicious whose very virtues drive them always nearer and nearer to the gallows or the pauper’s grave. That does not say that the author need abstain from letting his conventionally virtuous characters prosper to any thinkable extent. For however scientifically the matter be considered, material if not intellectual honesty, sobriety, continence, frugality, parsimony, and the other material virtues will give any man a better chance of fourteen thousand--pounds or dollars--a year than if he should be, however intellectually honest, financially unsound, or a drunkard or a dreamer or one who never talks about the baths he takes. The publisher, in fact, has a better chance of both terrestrial and skyey mansions than the novelist.

Nevertheless, the novelist must not, by taking sides, exhibit his preferences. He must not show his publisher as all shining benevolence and well-soaped chastity without pointing out that his fellows, the unwashed, incontinent, wastrel Villons of the world, sometimes practise Robin Hoodish generosities and sometimes smooth with their works the pillows of the agonized and sleepless. And in between the starving Chatterton and the august house of, say, Longmans, Norton, Hurst, Rees, and Co.--who did not publish Chatterton--he must place and set in motion the teeming world of averagely sensual, averagely kindly, averagely cruel, averagely honest, averagely imbecile human beings whose providentially appointed mission would seem to be to turn into the stuff that fills graveyards. So that it is not so much the function of the novelist to hold the balance straight as, dispensing with all scales or instruments for measuring, to show all the human beings of his creation going about their avocations. He has, that is to say, to render and not to tell. (If I say, “The wicked Mr. Blank shot nice Blanche’s dear cat!” that is telling. If I say: “Blank raised his rifle and aimed it at the quivering, black-burdened topmost bough of the cherry-tree. After the report a spattered bunch of scarlet and black quiverings dropped from branch to branch to pancake itself on the orchard grass!” that is rather bad rendering, but still rendering. Or if I say Monsieur Chose was a vulgar, coarse, obese and presumptuous fellow--that is telling. But if I say, “He was a gentleman with red whiskers that always preceded him through a doorway,” there you have him rendered--as Maupassant rendered him.)

It was Flaubert who most shiningly preached the doctrine of the novelist as Creator who should have a Creator’s aloofness, rendering the world as he sees it, uttering no comments, falsifying no issues and carrying the subject--the Affair--he has selected for rendering, remorselessly out to its logical conclusion.

There came thus into existence the novel of Aloofness. It had even in France something of a struggle for that existence and the author of _Madame Bovary_ which was the first great novel logically--and indeed passionately--to carry out this theory, had to face a criminal prosecution because in the opinion of the Government of Napoleon III a book that is not actively on the side of constituted authority and of established morality is of necessity dangerous to morals and subversive of good government.

That view--it is still largely entertained by the academic critics of Anglo-Saxondom--is of course imbecile, but it is not without a certain basis in the sentiments of common humanity. It is normal for poor, badgered men to desire to read of a sort of representative type who, as hero of a book, shall triumph over all obstacles with surprising ease and as if with the backing of a deity. In that way they can dream of easy ends for themselves. So they will dislike authors who do not side with their own types. And as constituted governments and academic bodies are made up of what the French call _hommes moyen sensuels_, such corporations will do what they can to prevent novelists from not taking sides with agreeable characters.

To the theory of Aloofness added itself, by a very natural process, the other theory that the story of a novel should be the history of an Affair and not a tale in which a central character with an attendant female should be followed through a certain space of time until the book comes to a happy end on a note of matrimony or to an unhappy end--represented by a death. That latter--the normal practice of the earlier novelist and still the normal expedient of the novel of commerce or of escape--is again imbecile, but again designed to satisfy a very natural human desire for finality. We have a natural desire to be kidded into thinking that for nice agreeable persons like ourselves life will finally bring us to a stage where an admirably planned villa, a sempiternally charming--and yet changing--companion, and a sufficiency of bathrooms, automobiles, gramophones, radios, and grand pianos to establish us well in the forefront of the class to which we hope to belong, shall witness the long, uneventful, fortunate and effortless closing years of our lives. And our desire to be kidded into that belief is all the stronger in that whenever we do examine with any minuteness into the lives of our fellow human beings practically nothing of the sort ever happens to them. So we say: “Life is too sad for us to want to read books that remind us of it!”

But that is the justification for the novel of Aloofness, rendering not the arbitrary felicities of a central character but the singular normalities of an Affair. Normal humanity, deprived of the possibility of viewing either lives or life, makes naturally for a pessimism that demands relief either in the drugs of the happy endings of falsified fictions or in the anodynes of superstition--one habit being as fatal to the human intelligence as the other. But there is no need to entertain the belief that life is sad any more than there is any benefit to be derived from the contemplation of fictitious and banal joys. The French peasant long ago evolved the rule that life is never either as good or as bad as one expects it to be and so the French peasant, like every proper man, faces life with composure--and reads _Madame Bovary_, whilst the English, say, lawyer has never got beyond _The Three Musketeers_.

The progress from the one to the other is simple and logical enough. If you no longer allow yourself to take sides with your characters you begin very soon to see that such a thing as a hero does not exist--a discovery that even Thackeray could make. And, from there to seeing that it is not individuals but enterprises or groups that succeed or fail is a very small step to take. And then immediately there suggests itself the other fact that it is not the mere death and still less the mere marriage of an individual that brings to an end either a group or an enterprise. It is perhaps going too far to say that _no_ man is indispensable, but it is far more usual to find that, when a seemingly indispensable individual disappears for one reason or another from an enterprise, that adventure proceeds with equanimity and very little shock. I suppose the most co-operative and at the same time the most one-man concern of to-day is the newspaper or the periodical publication, and I suppose that in my time I must have been acquainted with something at least of the affairs of at least a hundred journals or periodicals each of them of necessity more or less autocratically conducted, simply because a journal running along and having to appear on a stated day, it is hardly ever practicable to get together an editorial committee soon enough to make momentous decisions that may have to be arrived at in a minute or two. Yet almost the first discovery that the most strong-minded of editors makes after he has got the periodical of his founding running for a month or two is that it is the periodical that has taken charge--and the most notable fact of journalism is that even when the most noted of editors suddenly dies his paper in the immense majority of cases goes on running in perfect tranquillity and with no apparent change for a period sufficiently long to make it perfectly manifest that the great man was not in the least indispensable.

And, as with newspapers, so with nearly all the other enterprises of life. I am not of course saying that no great man exists or no founder of great enterprises, though I should imagine that there must be even more mute inglorious Miltons than ever got a chance of putting their epics before the public. Still, the evolver of a new process or a revived combination does exist and not infrequently does get his chance: and there is no particular reason why the serious novelist should not select the Affair of a successful individual for treatment. That he seldom does so is usually because, having studied the cases of successful men, he is apt to come to the conclusion that they are not unseldom neither edifying as histories nor psychologically very interesting. Alexander, that is to say, may have sighed for new worlds to conquer, but it is probable that he would have bartered several of his empires for the certainty of a little peace at his own fireside and an improved digestion.

Flaubert, then, gave us _Madame Bovary_, which may be described as the first great novel that aimed at aloofness. That it did not succeed in its aim, Flaubert being in the end so fascinated by his Emma that beside her and the ingenuous weakness of her genuine romanticism every other character in the book is either hypocritical, mean or meanly imbecile--that it did not succeed in that aim is not to be wondered at when we consider the great, buoyant, and essentially optimist figure that he was. And indeed, all authors being men, it is very unlikely that the completely aloof novel will ever see the light. If you want to be a novelist you must first be a poet and it is impossible to be a poet and lack human sympathies or generosity of outlook. In _Education Sentimentale_--which, if I had to decide the matter, though fortunately I don’t, I should call the greatest novel ever written--the author of _Madame Bovary_ gave us a nearly perfect group novel, written from a standpoint of very nearly complete aloofness. In _Bouvard et Pécuchet_, abandoning as it were human measures of success and failure, he takes as his hero the imbecility of co-operative mankind and as his heroine the futility of the accepted idea, and, being thus as it were detached from the earth and its standards, he could draw in Bouvard and his mate, two of the most lovable of human beings that ever set out upon a forlorn hope. He died in the attempt.

The Flaubert school or group lasted sufficiently long in France, though, after the late War, its influence was completely washed out by a sort of eclecticism whose main features it is very difficult to trace and into whose ramifications I do not intend to enter, for it has had practically no time to influence the work of Anglo-Saxon novel writers. Flaubert, Maupassant, Turgenev, the Gourmonts, Daudet, and the rest of those who had their places at Brébant’s died in their allotted years, the last survivor of any prominence being Anatole France, whose death was greeted by an outburst of furious hatred in France such as can seldom have greeted the passing of a distinguished figure. That was because the French young, saddened and rendered starving by the War which just preceded France’s death, turned with loathing from the rather _débonnaire_ aloofness of the author of _Histoire Comique_. And indeed if we Anglo-Saxons had suffered in the least as much as those Latins I might well expect to find myself lynched for writing what I have done above. I have seldom witnessed anything to equal the dismay of a great French gathering of _littérateurs_ when their honoured guest, an English novelist of distinction and indeed of internationally public literary functions, told them in quite immaculate French that all he knew of writing he had from France, and that all that he had from France he had learned from the works of Guy de Maupassant! If he had gone round that great assembly and had, with his glove, flicked each one of the guests in the face, he could not have caused greater consternation. Nevertheless it is true that Maupassant must have had more influence on the Anglo-Saxon writer of to-day than any other writer of fiction, Henry James possibly excepted.

In England, meantime, slightly before the 1890’s, the solid vogue of--or the somnolent rumination over--the three-volumed nuvvle of commerce had been seriously threatened by the slow spread of the idea that writing might be an art, by a tremendous drop in the prices at which books might be sold and by revolutionary attacks on Victorian conventional morality. The loosening in morality need not concern us except in so far as it shook the idea that the novelist must of necessity colour all his characters with one or other hue, but the drop in the price of books facilitated at least all sorts of experimental adventures. Whilst the nuvvle remained a thirty-shilling three-decker publishers must needs play for safety whether in morals or methods and neither, say, the _Hill-top_ novels of Grant Allen, which were pseudo-scientific attacks on conventional morality, nor yet _Almayer’s Folly_, which was an attempt to introduce the artistic standards and methods of Flaubert into Anglo-Saxondom, could have had even the remotest chance of publication had the novel remained at its former price.

On the other hand, such writers as Wilde, Stevenson, Pater, and Meredith did, dealing mostly in verbal felicities or infelicities, begin rather vaguely to perceive that writing was an art. Neither Wilde nor Pater were novelists in the sense of devoting the greater part of their time or energies to the art of fiction, and Stevenson remained an avowed moralist, whilst Meredith devoted himself to large national aspirations--which have nothing to do with art. And all the four, as I have said, were essentially rather stylists _tels quels_ than anything else. When Pater, Wilde, or Meredith had succeeded in a passage in showing what clever fellows they were they were satisfied and Stevenson, if he had some conception of how to tell a story, was far more gratified if he had succeeded in producing a quaint sentence with turns of phrase after the manner of Sir Thomas Browne than intent on the fact that every sentence--nay, every word!--should carry on the effect of the story to be told.

But the mere fact that writers were then beginning to pay some attention to manner rather than to matter or morals--that they were intent on being writers rather than gentlemen--that mere fact is one to excite lively gratitude in lands like ours and the job of being a novelist is one of such excruciating difficulty that it would be ungrateful to ask of pioneers that they should be more than pioneers.

The effect of their propaganda almost more than of their achievements, combined with the cheapening of books and the impingement on Anglo-Saxon shores of French examples of how things should be done--for it was not until the late ’eighties that Flaubert, Maupassant, and Turgenev really produced any overwhelming effect in either England or the United States--the effect then of all these factors coming almost together was an outburst of technical effort such as can have rarely been witnessed in any other race or time. The idea that writing was an art and as such had its dignity, that it had methods to be studied and was therefore such another acknowledged craft as is shoe-making--such ideas acted for a time, in the days of the _Yellow Book_, like magic on a whole horde of English--and still more of American--writers.

I have of course not here the space to go with any minuteness into the history of the _Yellow Book_ period. Founded by two Americans--Henry James and Henry Harland--in London where circumstances were certainly more favourable than they would have been in, say, New York or Boston, the _Yellow Book_ did undoubtedly promote an interest in technical matters that hardly any other periodical or Movement could have done. James was a direct pupil of Turgenev; Harland and most of the contributors to the periodical were products rather of a general “Frenchness” than the students of any one author--the products of a blend of Mallarmé, Mérimée, Murger, and Maupassant and a Quartier Latin frame of mind and personal untidiness.

Its defect as a movement was that its supporters, also, probably aimed rather at displaying personal cleverness than at the concealment of themselves beneath the surfaces of their works. They had not yet learnt the sternest of all lessons--that the story is the thing, and the story and then the story, and that there is nothing else that matters in the world.

_L’ENVOI_

IN THE LAST QUARTER OF A CENTURY

When the dust of the _Yellow Book_ period died away with the trial and disappearance of Wilde there did nevertheless remain in the public and the literary mind some conception that novel-writing was an art and that the novel was a vehicle by means of which every kind of psychological or scientific truth connected with human life and affairs could be very fittingly conveyed. To-day I imagine that there would not be many found to deny that it is the vehicle by means of which those truths can be most fittingly investigated. To that we may some day return.

In the meantime the _Yellow Book_ period also left behind it three men whose names must for ever stand out for the student of the history of the English Novel--they were Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Joseph Conrad. I do not purpose here to attempt an estimate of any one of the three; I merely wish to point out what it was that distinguished them from all of their predecessors and nearly all of their distinguished contemporaries. Their distinguished contemporaries are all, most fortunately, still alive and so beyond the reach of my pen--but it must, I imagine, he fairly obvious that, say, Mr. Wells, Mr. Kipling, Mr. Galsworthy, or Mr. Arnold Bennett are each solitary figures, ploughing lonely furrows and expressing their admirable selves in admirable ways known only to themselves.

About that other triad there was a certain solidarity, a certain oneness of method and even a certain comradeship. They lived in the same corner of England, saw each other often and discussed literary methods more thoroughly and more frequently than can ever at any other time in England have been the case. To be sure, not one of the three was English.

Indeed, some ten years or so ago my friend Mr. Wells wrote to the papers to say that in the first decade of this century a group of foreigners occupied that corner of England and were engaged in plotting against the English novel. At the time that appeared to be the sort of patriotic nonsense that occupied our minds a good deal just after the War--but Mr. Wells, as usual, was right. The extent of the conspiracy was this: the works of those three writers whose influence on the Anglo-Saxon--and even to some extent on the British--novel was overwhelming--were united by a common technique and their literary aims were to all intents exactly the same.

All three treated their characters with aloofness; all three kept themselves, their comments and their prejudices out of their works, and all three rendered rather than told. On the whole those characteristics which never before characterized the English novel characterize it to-day. No one, that is, would to-day set out to capture the suffrages of either the more instructed or of even the almost altogether naïf with a novel of the type of those written by the followers of Bunyan, Defoe, Fielding, Charles Reade, or William Black. No author would, like Thackeray, to-day intrude his broken nose and myopic spectacles into the middle of the most thrilling scene he ever wrote, in order to tell you that, though his heroine was rather a wrong ’un, his own heart was in his right place.

James, Conrad, and Crane differed from each other in minute points and indeed in broader characteristics. James was more introspective, Crane more incisive in his writing, Conrad more nearly approached the ordinary definition of the poet and was less remorselessly aloof than either of the others. But their common, Gallic origin united them, so that they had before all for their strongest passion the desire to convey vicarious experience to the reader. Conrad wrote of his literary aim: “It is above all to make you see,” and Crane might have written the same thing had he ever written about himself. And Henry James might have written if he could ever have brought himself to write anything so unqualified about his aims: “It is above all to make you feel!” At any rate, the common aim was to take the reader, immerse him in an Affair so completely that he was unconscious either of the fact that he was reading or of the identity of the author, so that in the end he might say--and believe: “I have been in a drawing-room overlooking Boston Common, in a drinking saloon in Yellow Sky or beneath the palm leaves of Palembang! I _have_ been!”

At this aim, to which they certainly attained, they arrived by certain technical devices or rules. Most of these I have already foreshadowed and as I am not here writing a technical work, I do not propose to go into the others at all closely. The only sound technical rules are those that are founded on a study of what pleases: if what you write is to please you must see how your predecessors did it. There can be nothing either highbrow or recondite about your efforts; the nearer you are to your fellowman who differs from you only in not having literary ambitions or gifts, the nearer you are to universality; the nearer you are to universality the greater you are, the more nearly you will have justified your existence.

You must therefore write as simply as you can--with the extreme of the simplicity that is granted to you, and you must write of subjects that spring at your throat. But why subjects appeal to you you have no means of knowing. The appeal of the subject is nevertheless the only thing that is open to your native genius--the only thing as to which you can say: “I cannot help it: that is what appealed to me!” You must never, after that, say: “I write like this because I want to,” but you must say: “I write like this because I hope it is what the unspoiled reader likes!”

Having got your subject you will, if you are prudent, live with it for a long, long time before you sit down to write it. During that time you will be doing at odd moments what Conrad used to call “squeezing the guts out of it.” For it is a mistake to think that what looks like the rendering of an ordinary affair is ever an artless chronicling. Your “subject” may be just the merest nothing in the way of intrigue or plot--but to the merest nothings in human affairs all the intrigues of the universe have contributed since first this earth swung away, a drop of molten metal, from the first of all principles. Your “subject” might be no more than a child catching frogs in a swamp or the emotions of a nervous woman in a thunderstorm, but all the history of the world has gone to putting child or woman where they are and up to either subject you might lead with an epic as thrilling in its end as that of _Othello_ or an episode as poignant with absolute relief as came to the world on the eleventh of November, 1918. You have at your disposal heredity, environment, the concatenation of the effects of the one damn thing after another that life is--and Destiny who is blind and august. Those are the colours of your palette: it is for you to see that line by line and filament of colour by filament, the reader’s eye is conducted to your culminating point.

That is, then, all that I have to say of the gradual progress of the English novel--to the point where it becomes the Novel. I have traced out as plainly as I could the lines of the pattern as it appears to me and the reader must use that pattern for what jumpings off of his own he chooses to make.

That this is not the final stage of the Novel is obvious; there will be developments that we cannot foresee, strain our visions how we may. There are probably--humanity being stable, change the world how it may--there are probably eternal principles for all the arts, but the applications of those principles are eternally changing, or eternally revolving. It is, for instance, an obvious and unchanging fact that if an author intrudes his comments into the middle of his story he will endanger the illusion conveyed by that story--but a generation of readers may come along who would prefer witnessing the capers of the author to being carried away by stories and that generation of readers may coincide with a generation of writers tired of self-obliteration. So you might have a world of Oscar Wildes or of Lylys. Or you might, again, have a world tired of the really well constructed novel every word of which carries its story forward: then you will have a movement towards diffuseness, backboneless sentences, digressions, and inchoatenesses.

But, for the moment, the outline that I have traced for you seems to have got about as far as we ourselves have.

Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd., Frome and London

Transcriber’s note: Italics are indicated by _underscores_.
As no original book cover image is available, a cover image made by
the transcriber is placed in the public domain.