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A NOVELIST ON NOVELS




_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

NOVELS:

  A BED OF ROSES
  THE CITY OF NIGHT
  ISRAEL KALISCH[1]
  THE MAKING OF AN ENGLISHMAN[2]
  THE SECOND BLOOMING
  THE STRANGERS' WEDDING
  OLGA NAZIMOV (Short Stories)

MISCELLANEOUS:

  WOMAN AND TO-MORROW
  ANATOLE FRANCE
  DRAMATIC ACTUALITIES
  THE INTELLIGENCE OF WOMAN ETC.

[Footnote 1: Published in the U.S.A. and Canada under the title, 'Until
the Day Break']

[Footnote 2: Published in the U.S.A. and Canada under the title, 'The
Little Beloved']




  A NOVELIST
  ON
  NOVELS

  BY
  W. L. GEORGE

  LONDON: 48 PALL MALL
  W. COLLINS SONS & CO. LTD.
  GLASGOW MELBOURNE AUCKLAND

  Copyright 1918




NOTE


The chapters that follow have been written in varying moods, and express
the fluctuating feelings aroused in the author by the modern novel and
its treatment at the hands of the public. Though unrelated with the
novel, the chapters on 'Falstaff,' 'The Esperanto of Art,' and 'The
Twilight of Genius' have been included, either because artistically in
keeping with other chapters, or because their general implications
affect the fiction form.

A half of the book has not before now been published in Great Britain
and Dominions.




CONTENTS


                                                                    PAGE

  A DECEPTIVE DEDICATION                                               1

  LITANY OF THE NOVELIST                                              24

  WHO IS THE MAN?                                                     62

  THREE YOUNG NOVELISTS:

      1. _D. H. LAWRENCE_                                             90

      2. _AMBER REEVES_                                              101

      3. _SHEILA KAYE-SMITH_                                         109

  FORM AND THE NOVEL                                                 118

  SINCERITY: THE PUBLISHER AND THE POLICEMAN                         124

  THREE COMIC GIANTS:

      1. _TARTARIN_                                                  147

      2. _FALSTAFF_                                                  161

      3. _MUeNCHAUSEN_                                                177

  THE ESPERANTO OF ART                                               191

  THE TWILIGHT OF GENIUS                                             208




A Deceptive Dedication


I

I have shown the manuscript of this book to a well-known author. One of
those staid, established authors whose venom has been extracted by the
mellow years. My author is beyond rancour and exploit; he has earned the
right to bask in his own celebrity, and needs to judge no more, because
no longer does he fear judgment. He is like a motorist who has sowed his
wild petrol. He said to me: 'You are very, very unwise. I never
criticise my contemporaries, and, believe me, it doesn't pay.' Well, I
am unwise; I always was unwise, and this has paid in a coin not always
recognised, but precious to a man's spiritual pride. Why should I not
criticise my contemporaries? It is not a merit to be a contemporary.
Also, they can return the compliment; some of them, if I may venture
upon a turn of phrase proper for Mr Tim Healy, have returned the
compliment before they got it. It may be unwise, but I join with
Voltaire in thanking God that he gave us folly. So I will affront the
condemnatory vagueness of wool and fleecy cloud, be content to think
that nobody will care where I praise, that everybody will think me
impertinent where I judge. I will be content to believe that the
well-known author will not mind if I criticise him, and that the others
will not mind either. I will hope, though something of a Sadducee, that
there is an angel in their hearts.

I want to criticise them and their works because I think the novel, this
latest born of literature, immensely interesting and important. It is
interesting because, more faithfully than any other form, it expresses
the mind of man, his pains that pass, his hopes that fade and are born
again, his discontent pregnant with energy, the unrulinesses in which he
misspends his vigour, the patiences that fit him to endure all things
even though he dare them not. In this, all other forms fail: history,
because it chronicles battles and dates, yet not the great movements of
the peoples; economics, because in their view all men are vile;
biography, because it leads the victim to the altar, but never
sacrifices it. Even poetry fails; I do not try to shock, but I doubt
whether the poetic is equal to the prose form.

I do not want to fall into the popular fallacy that prose and poetry
each have their own field, strictly preserved, for prose is not always
prosy, nor poetry always poetic; prose may contain poetry, poetry cannot
contain prose, just as some gentlemen are bounders, but no bounders are
gentlemen. But the admiration many people feel for poetry derives from a
lack of intelligence rather than from an excess of emotion, and they
would be cured if, instead of admiring, they read. Some subjects and
ideas naturally fall into poetry, mainly the lyric ideas; 'To Anthea,'
and 'The Skylark' would, in prose, lie broken-pinioned upon the ground,
but the exquisiteness of poetry, when it conveys the ultimate aspiration
of man, defines its limitations. Poetry is child of the austerity of
literature by the sensuality of music. Thus it is more and less than its
forbears; speaking for myself alone, I feel that 'Epipsychidion' and the
'Grecian Urn' are just a little less than the Kreutzer Sonata, that
Browning and Whitman might have written better in prose, though they
might thus have been less quoted. For poetry is too often
_schwaermerei_, a thing of lilts; when it conveys philosophical ideas,
as in Browning and in that prose writer gone astray, Shakespeare, it
suffers the agonising pains of constriction. Rhyme and scansion tend to
limit and hamper it; everything can be said in prose, but not in poetry;
to prose no licence need be granted, while poetry must use and abuse it,
for prose is free, poetry shackled by its form. No doubt that is why
poetry causes so much stir, for it surmounts extraordinary difficulties,
and men gape as at a tenor who attains a top note. However exquisite,
the scope of poetry is smaller than that of prose, and if any doubt it
let him open at random an English Bible and say if Milton can
out-thunder Job, or Swinburne outcloy the sweetness of Solomon's Song.

More than interesting, the novel is important because, low as its status
may be, it does day by day express mankind, and mankind in the making.
Sometimes it is the architect that places yet another brick upon the
palace of the future. Always it is the showman of life. I think of
'serious books,' of the incredible heaps of memoirs, works on finance,
strategy, psychology, sociology, biology, omniology... that fall every
day like manna (unless from another region they rise as fumes) into the
baskets of the reviewers. All this paper... they dance their little
dance to four hundred readers and a great number of second-hand
booksellers, and lo! the dust of their decay is on their brow. They live
a little longer than an article by Mr T. P. O'Connor, and live a little
less.

The novel, too, does not live long, but I have known one break up a
happy home, and another teach revolt to several daughters; can we give
greater praise? Has so much been achieved by any work entitled _The
Foundations of the Century_, or something of that sort? The novel,
despised buffoon that it is, pours out its poison and its pearls within
reach of every lip; its heroes and heroines offer examples to the reader
and make him say: 'That bold, bad man... you wouldn't think it to look
at me, who'm a linen-draper, but it's me.' If, in this preface, I may
introduce a personal reminiscence, I can strengthen my point by saying
that after publishing _The Second Blooming_ I received five letters from
women I did not know, who wholly recognised themselves in my principal
heroine, of course the regrettable one.

The novel moulds by precept and example, and therefore we modern
jesters, inky troubadours, are responsible for the gray power which we
wield behind the throne. Given this responsibility, it is a pity there
should be so many novels, for the reader is distracted with various
examples, and painfully hesitates between the career of Raffles and that
of John Inglesant. Thus the novel fires many a sanctimoniousness, makes
lurid many a hesitating life. If only we could endow it! But we cannot,
for the old saying can be garbled: call no novelist famous until he is
dead.

It is a fascinating idea, this one of endowing the novel. In principle
it is not difficult, only we must assume our capable committee and that
is quite as difficult as ignoring the weight of the elephant. I wonder
what would happen if an Act of Parliament were to endow genius! I wonder
who would sit on the sub-committee appointed by the British Government
to endow literature. I do not wonder, I know. There would be Professor
Saintsbury, Mr Austin Dobson, Professor Walter Raleigh, Sir Sidney Lee,
Professor Gollancz, all the academics, all the people drier than the
drought, who, whether the god of literature find himself in the car or
in the cart, never fail to get into the dickey. I should not even wonder
if, by request of the municipality of Burton-on-Trent, it were found
desirable to infuse a democratic element into the sub-committee by
adding the manager of the Army and Navy Stores and, of course, Mr
Bottomley. Do not protest: Mr Bottomley has recently passed embittered
judgments, under the characteristic heading 'Dam-Nation,' on Mr Alec
Waugh, who ventured, in a literary sketch, to show English soldiers
going over the top with oaths upon their lips and the courage born of
fear in their hearts. I think Mr Bottomley would like to have Mr Waugh
shot, and the editor of _The Nation_ confined for seven days in the
Press Bureau, for having told the truth in literary form. I do not
impugn his judgment of what it feels like to go over the top, for he
has had long experience of keeping strictly on the surface.

No, our sub-committee would be appointed without the help of Thalia and
Calliope. It would register judgments such as those of the famous
sub-committee that grants the Nobel Prizes. That committee, during its
short life, has managed to reward Sully-Prudhomme and to leave out
Swinburne, to give a prize to Sienkewicz, whom a rather more recent
generation has found so suitable for the cinema. It has even given a
prize to Mr Rudyard Kipling, but whether in memory of literature or
dynamite is not known.

So literary genius must, as before, look for its endowment in the
somewhat barren heart of man, and continue to shed a hundred seeds in
its stony places, in the forlorn hope that the fowls of the air may not
devour them all, and that a single ear of corn may wilt and wither its
way into another dawn.


II

The reading of most men and women provides distressing lists. So far as
I can gather from his conversation, the ordinary, busy man, concerned
with his work, finds his mental sustenance in the newspapers,
particularly in _Punch_, in the illustrated weeklies and in the journals
that deal with his trade; as for imaginative literature, he seems to
confine himself to Mr Nat Gould, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mr W. W.
Jacobs, Mr Mason, and such like, who certainly do not strain his
imaginative powers; he is greatly addicted to humour of the coarser
kind, and he dissipates many of his complexes by means of vile stories
which he exchanges with his fellows; these do not at all represent his
kindliness and his respectability. Sometimes he reads a shocker, the
sort that is known as 'railway literature,' presumably because it cannot
hold the attention for more than the time that elapses between two
stops.

The more serious and scholarly man, who abounds in every club, is
addicted to the monthly reviews, (price two-and-six; he does not like
the shilling ones), to the _Times_, to the _Spectator_; that kind of man
is definitely stodgy and prides himself upon being sound. He is fond of
memoirs, rather sodden accounts of aristocrats and politicians, of the
dull, ordinary lives of dull, ordinary people; when he has done with the
book it goes to the pulping machine, but some of the pulp gets into that
man's brain. ('Ashes to ashes, pulp to pulp.') He likes books of travel,
biographies, solid French books (strictly by academicians), political
works, economic works. His conversation sounds like it, and that is why
his wife is so bored; his emotions are reflex and run only round the
objects he can see; art cannot touch him, and no feather ever falls upon
his brow from an airy wing. He commonly tells you that good novels are
not written nowadays; he must be excused that opinion, for he never
tries to read them. The only novels with which the weary Titan refreshes
his mind are those of Thackeray, sometimes of Trollope; the more
frivolous sometimes go so far as to sip a little of the honey that falls
from the mellifluous lips of Mr A. C. Benson.

The condition of women is different. They care for little that ends in
'ic,' and so their consumption of novels is enormous. The commonplace
woman is attracted by the illustrated dailies and weeklies, but she also
needs large and continuous doses of religious sentimentality, of papier
mache romance, briefly, of novels described in literary circles as
'bilge,' such as the works of Mr Hall Caine, Mrs Barclay, Miss E. M.
Dell, and a great many more; if she is of the slightly faster kind that
gives smart lunch parties at the Strand Corner House, her diet is
sometimes a little stronger; she takes to novels of the orchid house and
the tiger's lair, to the artless erotics of Miss Elinor Glyn, Mr Hubert
Wales, and Miss Victoria Cross. She likes memoirs too, memoirs of vague
Bourbons and salacious Bonapartes; she takes great pleasure in the
historical irregularities of cardinals. She likes poetry too as conveyed
by Miss Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

If that type of woman were not a woman the arts could base as few hopes
on her as they do on men, but the most stupid woman is better ground
than the average man, because she is open, while he is smug. So it is no
wonder that among the millions of women who mess and muddle their way
through the conservatories and pigsties of literature, should be found
the true reading public, the women who are worth writing for, who read
the best English novels, who are in touch with French and Russian
literature, who reads plays, and even essays, ancient and modern. Hail
Mary, mother of mankind; but for these the arts must starve!

That fine public cannot carry us very far. They are not enough to keep
literature vigorous by giving it what it needs: a consciousness of
fellowship with many readers. If literature is to flourish (of which I
am not sure, though endure in some form it will), the general public
taste must be raised. I feel that taste can be raised and cultivated,
and many have felt that too. From the middle of the nineteenth century
onwards, and especially since 1870, an ascending effort has been made to
stimulate the taste of the rising artisan. Books like Lord Avebury's
_Pleasures of Life_, like _Sesame and Lilies_, collections such as the
_Hundred Best Books_ and the _Hundred Best Pictures_, have all been
attuned to that key. The only pity is that the selections, nearly all of
them excellent, were immeasurably above the heads of the public for
which they were meant. Two recent instances are worth analysing. One of
them is _A Library for Five Pounds_ by Sir William Robertson Nicoll,
(whom Mr Arnold Bennett delighteth to revile), the other _Literary Taste
and How to Form It_, by Mr Bennett himself. Now Sir William Robertson
Nicoll's book is much more sensible than the funereal lists available at
most polytechnics. The author does not pretend that one should read
Plato in one's bath; he seems to realise the state of mind of the
ordinary, fairly busy, fairly willing, fairly intelligent person. A sign
of it is that he selects only sixty-one works, and out of those allows
twenty-seven novels. Of the rest, most are readable, except _Pilgrim's
Progress_ and _The Origin of Species_, a touching couple. The list is by
far the best guide I have ever seen, but... there is not a living
author in it. It is not a library, it is a necropolis. The novelists
that Sir William Robertson Nicoll recommends are Scott, Jane Austen,
Dickens, Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Hawthorne, Trollope,
Blackmore, Defoe, and Swift. All their books are readable, but they do
not take by the hand the person who has thought wrong or not thought at
all. When you want to teach a child history you do not dump upon its
desk Hume and Smollett, in forty volumes; you lead it by degrees, by
means of text-books, that is _according to plan_. That is how I conceive
literary education, but before suggesting a list, let us glance at
_Literary Taste and How to Form It_. In this book the author shows
himself much more unpractical and much less sympathetic than Sir William
Robertson Nicoll (whom Mr Bennett delighteth to revile). The book itself
is very interesting; it is bright, intelligent; it teaches you how to
read, and how to make allowances for the classics; it tells you how you
may woo your way to Milton, but, after all, when you have done, you find
that you have not wooed your way an inch nearer. That is because Mr
Arnold Bennett takes up to his public an attitude more highbrowed than I
could imagine if I were writing a skit on his book. Mr Bennett's idea of
a list for the aspirant to letters is to throw the London Library at his
head; he lays before us a stodgy lump of two or three hundred volumes,
many of them excellent, and many more absolutely penal. It is enough to
say that he seriously starts his list with the Venerable Bede's
_Ecclesiastical History_. Bede! the dimmest, most distant of English
chroniclers, who depicts the dimmest and most distant period of English
history; once, in an A.B.C., I saw a shopman reading _Tono-Bungay_,
which was propped against the cruet. Does Mr Bennett imagine that man
dropping the tear of emotion and the gravy of excitement upon the
Venerable Bede? And if one goes on with the list and discovers the
_Autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury_, _Religio Medici_,
Berkeley's _Principles of Human Knowledge_, Reynold's _Discourses on
Art_, the works of Pope, _Voyage of the Beagle_... one comes to
understand how such readers may have been made by such masters. From the
beginning to the end of that list my mind is obsessed by the word
'stodge,' and the novels do not relieve it much. There are a good many,
but they comprise the usual Thackeray, Scott, Dickens... need I go on?
Relief is found only in Fielding, Sterne, and in one book each of
Marryat, Lever, Kingsley, and Gissing. These authors are admitted
presumably because they are dead.

In all this, where is hope? How many green daffodil heads, trying to
burst their painful way through the heavy earth of a dull life, has Mr
Bennett trampled on? Is it impossible to find some one who is (as Mr
Bennett certainly is), capable of the highest artistic appreciation and
of high literary achievement, and who will, for a moment, put himself in
the place of the people he is addressing? Is it impossible for an adult
to remember that as a boy he hated the classics? Has he forgotten that
as a young man he could be charmed, but educated only by means of a
machine like the one they use for stuffing geese? The people we want to
introduce to literature are, nearly all of them, people who work; some
earn thirty shillings a week, and ponder a great deal on how to live on
it; some earn hundreds a year and are not much better off; all are
occupied with material cares, their work, their games, their gardens,
their loves; nearly all are short of time, and expend on work, transit,
and meals, ten to twelve hours a day. They read in tubes and omnibuses,
in the midst of awful disturbance and overcrowding; also they are deeply
corrupted by the daily papers, where nothing over a column is ever
printed, where the news are conveyed in paragraphs and headlines, so
that they never have to concentrate, and find it difficult to do so;
they are corrupted too by the vulgarity and sensationalism which are the
bones and blood of the magazines, until they become unable to think