A Novelist on Novels. George Walter Lionel

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СКАЧАТЬ of following Mr Ford Madox Hueffer's advice, 'to sit down in the back garden with pen, ink, and paper, to put vine leaves in one's hair and to write'; when one remembers that in Flaubert's view the literary man's was a dog's life (metaphors about authors lead you back to the dog) but that none other was worth living. In those moods, one does not agree with Flaubert; rather, one agrees with Butler: —

      '… those that write in rhyme still make

      The one verse for the other's sake;

      For one for sense and one for rhyme,

      I think's sufficient at one time.'

      One sees life like Mr Polly, as 'a rotten, beastly thing.' One sighs for adventure, to become a tramp or an expert witness. One knows that one will never be so popular as Beecham's pills; thence is but a step to picture oneself as less worthy.

      We novelists are the showmen of life. We hold up its mirror, and, if it look at us at all, it mostly makes faces at us. Indeed a writer might have with impunity sliced Medusa's head: she would never have noticed him. The truth is that the novelist is a despised creature. At moments, when, say, a learned professor has devoted five columns to showing that a particular novelist is one of the pests of society, the writer feels exalted. But as society shows no signs of wanting to be rid of the pest, the novelist begins to doubt his own pestilency. He is wrong. In a way, society knows of our existence, but does not worry; it shows this in a curiously large number of ways, more than can be enumerated here. It sees the novelist as a man apart; as a creature fraught with venom, and, paradoxically, a creature of singularly lamb-like and unpractical temperament.

      Consider, indeed, the painful position of a respectable family whose sons make for Threadneedle Street every day, its daughters for Bond Street and fashion, or for the East End, good works, and social advancement. Imagine that family, who enjoys a steady income, shall we say in the neighbourhood of £5000 a year, enough to keep it in modest comfort, confronted with the sudden infatuation of one of its daughters for an unnamed person, met presumably in the East End where he was collecting copy. You can imagine the conversation after dinner: —

      Angeline: 'What does he do, father? Oh, well! he's a novelist.'

      Father: … What! a novelist! One of those long-haired, sloppy-collared ragamuffins without any soles to their boots! Do you think that because I've given you a motor-car I'm going to treat you to a husband? A bar loafer … (we are always intemperate) … A man whom your mother and sisters … (our morals are atrocious) … I should not wonder if the police … (we are all dishonest, and yet we never have any money) … I was talking to the Bishop … (we practise no religion, except that occasionally we are Mormons)…

      And so on, and so on. Father won't have it, and if in the end Father does have it he finds that Angeline's eyes are not blacked, but that Angeline's husband's boots are blacked, that the wretched fellow keeps a balance at the bank, can ride a horse, push a perambulator, drive a nail; but he does not believe it for a long time. For it is, if not against all experience, at any rate against all theory that a novelist should be eligible. The bank clerk is eligible, the novelist is not; we are not 'safe,' we are adventurers, we have theories, and sometimes the audacity to live up to them. We are often poor, which happens to other men, and this is always our own fault, while it is often their misfortune. Of late years, we have grown still more respectable than our forefathers, who were painfully such: Dickens lived comfortably in Marylebone; Thackeray reigned in a luxurious house near Kensington Square and in several first-class clubs; Walter Scott reached a terrible extreme of respectability; he went bankrupt, but later on paid his debts in full. Yet we never seem quite respectable, perhaps because respectability is so thin a varnish. Even the unfortunate girls whom we 'entice away from good homes' into the squalor of the arts, do not think us respectable. For them half the thrill of marrying a novelist consists in the horror of the family which must receive him; it is like marrying a quicksand, and the idea is so bitter that a novelist who wears his hair long might do well to marry a girl who wears hers short. He will not find her in the bourgeoisie.

      The novelist is despised because he produces a commodity not recognised as 'useful.' There is no definition of usefulness, yet everybody is clear that the butcher, the railway porter, the stock jobber are useful; that they fulfil a function necessary for the maintenance of the State. The pugilist, the dancer, the music hall actor, the novelist, produce nothing material, while the butcher does. To live, one wants meat, but not novels. We need not pursue this too far and ask the solid classes to imagine a world without arts, presumably they could not. It is enough to point the difference, and to suggest that we are deeply enthralled by the Puritan tradition which calls pleasure, if not noxious, at any rate unimportant; the maintenance of life is looked upon as more essential than the enjoyment thereof, so that many people picture an ideal world as a spreading cornfield dotted with cities that pay good rents, connected by railways which pay good dividends. They resemble the revolutionary, who on the steps of the guillotine said to Lavoisier: 'La Republique n'a pas besoin de savants.' This is obvious when the average man (which includes many women) alludes to the personality of some well-known writer. One he has come to respect: Mr Hall Caine, because popular report says that his latest novel brought him in about a hundred thousand pounds, but those such as Mr Arnold Bennett and Mr H. G. Wells leave strange shadows upon his memory. Of Mr Bennett he says: 'Oh, yes, he writes about the North Country, doesn't he? Or is it the West Country? Tried one of his books once. I forget its name, and now I come to think of it, it may have been by somebody else. He must be a dreary sort of chap, anyhow, sort of methodist.'

      Mr H. G. Wells is more clearly pictured: 'Wells? the fellow who writes about flying machines and men in the moon. Jules Verne sort of stuff, isn't it? He's a Socialist.'

      And so out with Mr Bennett, one of our best modern stylists, who in spite of an occasional crowding of the canvas has somehow fixed for us the singular and ferocious tribe from which he springs; so out with Mr Wells, with his restless, impulsive, combative, infinitely audacious mind. The average man says: 'Flying machines,' and the passion of Mr Wells for a beautiful, if somewhat over-hygienic world is swept away. Those are leading instances. Others, such as Mr Conrad, Miss Edith Wharton, O. Henry, Mr Galsworthy, are not mentioned at all; if the name of Mr Henry James is spoken, it leads up to a gibe at long sentences.

      The attitude is simple; we are not taken seriously. Novelists have to take mankind seriously because they want to understand it; mankind is exempt from the obligation because it does not conceive the desire. We are not people who take degrees, who can be scheduled and classified. We are not Doctors of Science, Licentiates of Music Schools. We are just men and women of some slight independence, therefore criminals, men who want to observe and not men who want to do, therefore incredible. And so, because we cannot fall into the classes made for those who can be classified, we are outside class, below class. We are the mistletoe on the social oak.

      It is perhaps in search of dignity and status that the modern novelist has taken to journalism. Journalism raises a novelist's status, for a view expressed by a fictitious character is not taken seriously, while the same view fastened to an event of the day acquires importance, satisfies the specific function of the press, which is more and more that of a champion of found causes. The newspaper is a better jumping-off ground than the pulpit or the professorial chair; it enjoys a vast circulation, which the novel does not; it conveys an idea to millions of people who would never think of buying a newspaper for the sake of an idea, but who buy it for news, murder cases or corn market reports; it is a place where a writer may be serious, because the newspaper is labelled as serious, while the novel is labelled as frivolous.

      This is vital to the proposition, and explains why so many novelists have sought refuge in the press. It is not exactly a question of money. Journalism rewards a successful novelist better than does the novel, though successful novelists make very good incomes; they often earn as much as the red-nosed comedian with the baggy trousers and the battered bowler. Thackeray, Washington Irving, Kingsley, and notably Dickens, knew the value of journalism. Dickens was the most peculiar case, for it is fairly clear that Nicholas Nickleby helped to СКАЧАТЬ