TOWARDS AN APPRECIATION OF LITERATURE

By
FRANK O’CONNOR


1945
METROPOLITAN PUBLISHING CO. LTD.
32 BACHELOR’S WALK
DUBLIN




Note

_As this book is one of a series I have not dealt with Poetry and
Drama except where it was necessary to clarify the argument. These
subjects are being dealt with by others.
F.O’C._


PRINTED IN IRELAND BY CAHILL & CO. LTD. PARKGATE PRINTING WORKS,
DUBLIN FOR METROPOLITAN PUBLISHING CO, LTD., DUBLIN




TOWARDS AN APPRECIATION OF LITERATURE

I

As this little book is intended as an introduction to literature, I
may, perhaps, begin by describing my own introduction to it.

My parents were poor and I was an only child. That meant that from the
beginning I was thrown very much upon myself, so I learned to read
when I was still very young. The only papers I could afford or come by
were English school stories. Those papers have been brilliantly and
devastatingly analysed by George Orwell, and I feel sure they were
just as snobbish and silly as he suggests. They dealt with young
fellows whose fathers had titles and cars and who had lots of money to
spend in the tuck shop. They were, I am certain, just as bad for me as
love stories for a servant girl, except that I am not at all certain
that love stories are bad for servant girls, nor have I ever been able
to bring myself to believe that Mme. Bovary really did go to pieces as
a result of reading the novels of Scott.

Undoubtedly, like love stories with servant girls, they created
standards of behaviour in my mind which could not be fitted in to the
life about me. I don’t honestly think that those standards were ever
standards of money or rank. I liked the public school code so far as
it was reflected in them, and I still like it. I liked boys who didn’t
tell lies, and who didn’t split on one another when they were caught
out. In the same way, I believe that love stories give servant girls
(and other girls) ideals of manners and behaviour which they do not
find among their boy friends, but I am not at all sure that the fault
is not with the boy friends rather than with the story books. Anyway,
outside the work of some French naturalists, I cannot think of any
form of literature in which the reader is safe from ideals of
character and conduct which transcend everyday experience

The rest of my education was acquired haphazard in a public
library. It was a very good library, run by an Englishman who took his
work seriously; yet, in spite of that, and in spite of the fact that I
became a public librarian myself, public libraries seem to me terrible
places with a degrading air of institutionalism and of
pseudo-professionalism. They still function as a branch of local
government without reference to any system of education. I know that
your true auto-didact is a tough Alpine plant, and though not very
beautiful in himself, is guaranteed to grow almost anywhere with the
minimum of attention, but it seems to me that the minimum requires
that the public library should be utilised as part of an adult
educational system; should be a centre for lectures, recitals and
exhibitions of art sufficient to ensure that the borrowers know at
least how to use it.

Thanks to public libraries my own education was as slow and painful as
it could well be, given my temperament. Those were the days before
borrowers were allowed even to see the shelves and one had to choose
one’s books from a card catalogue. School stories apart, the only
things I knew anything about were the two things which every Irish
child knows far too much about: politics and religion. Having almost
poisoned my mind by reading every standard Irish patriotic book, I got
on to the works of Canon Sheehan, a clerical novelist with a
delightful habit of quoting Goethe’s poems in the original. With the
simple optimism of the auto-didact, I decided that it would be a good
idea to learn German and meanwhile to read all Goethe in
English. Somehow or other I managed to do both in a sort of way;
heaven knows how, for I had left school before we got so far as long
division, and I was twenty before I found out what the simplest
grammatical terms meant. I tried my hand at writing, in Irish, another
language which I was under the impression I knew, and finally
something I published in a weekly paper attracted the attention of an
old teacher of mine, a fine novelist, who, before I could waste any
more of my life, introduced me to English literature. He also
introduced me to Seán O Faolain, a few years older than myself. When I
was twenty-three or four I got a job in a public library with a poet
who made me read Yeats, Pound, Eliot and the rest of the moderns,
criticised my early efforts at writing and introduced me to A-E. who
published my first articles and poems; and to him I owe the most
pleasant period of my education.

I came to literature as I fancy a great many people come to it,
because they need companionship, and a wider and more civilised form
of life than they can find in the world about them, all the more since
that world is being more and more steadily drained of whatever beauty
it had; but the city of literature is just as big and complicated as
any other capital, and a man can be just as lonely there. It has its
sharks and bores, its snobbish quarters and stews, and a great many
quiet suburbs where all sorts of obscure and attractive people live.
As I grow older, the books I put most value on are the good books of
criticism like those of David Cecil on the Victorian novelists and
Bonamy Dobree on the Restoration dramatists, but that sort of book is
either very rare or else lives in the suburbs where I do not visit.

What leads me to think my own experience is not so eccentric as it may
seem to some people, is that I was exceedingly lucky in having met so
many men of talent by the time I was twenty odd. There must be many a
great deal less lucky than that. You will see exactly how hard the
struggle can be if you read the three volumes of Maxim Gorky’s fine
autobiography. What strikes me most looking back on it is the waste,
the disproportion between the modest aim and the effort involved. I
know the argument that obstacles develop the character, but it seems
to me that character developed in that way is liable to develop all
awry, and I shall continue to think so until I find some educationist
who deliberately and successfully puts obstacles in the way of his
students. Meanwhile the faults I contracted in those years will be
with me till the day I die: the lack of method, the opinionatedness,
and the inability to do the simplest thing without first pulling down
the house to get at it.


II

The first thing that seems to emerge from this is that the primary
business of literature is entertainment. Children, who are frequently
bored, and servant girls who are permanently bored, usually ask
nothing else of it. If I am tired, nothing refreshes me so much as a
good detective story, for it is the form of literature which happens
to make the least demand on my emotions and intelligence, though as
Yeats once wisely remarked: “You can have too much detection in a
detective story”, or in the words of the captain of a Kerry football
team: “Never mind the bloody ball! Let’s get on with the game!”

But after reading three or four detective stories in quick succession
I feel as if I had been on a very bad drunk. The entertainment has
been merely diversion, not recreation. It is as if by some ingenious
bit of mechanism one’s heart has been stopped and re-started, so many
hours during which one might as well have been dead. It would be
better from my point of view if I had forced myself to read some
Restoration comedy which has defeated me, and at least kept myself
awake. We shall be dead long enough.

The point at which diversion begins to be recreation is the one which
interests me now, because it is precisely at this point that I think
imaginative literature begins. Let me take as example an old favourite
of mine, Somerville and Ross’s _An Irish R.M. and His Experiences_, the
whole saga in the omnibus edition. On the surface this is diversion
pure and simple, a series of misadventure, misunderstandings and
practical jokes, invented by two women, and turning in their hands
into a sort of game carried on with horrid schoolgirl vivacity. The
humour, if you can call it humour, is of the same extravert, slapstick
kind I remember from the public school stories of my boyhood. The
supreme moment of fun is when the hero breaks his eyeglass or puts his
foot through the aneroid barometer. The number of mishaps that occur
at the local agricultural show passes all reckoning. The water jump
dries up, the distracted stewards fill it with lime, the horses refuse
to jump.

Why then do I not treat it as I should treat a detective story which
had diverted me for a few hours, and get rid of it as speedily as
possible? Why do I keep on reading the book year after year and
grudgingly refuse to lend it to anybody except intimate friends? Read
this, and decide for yourself:


If, as I suppose, the object was to delude the horses into the belief
that it was a water jump, it was a total failure; they immediately
decided it was a practical joke, dangerous and in indifferent
taste. If, on the other side, a variety entertainment for the public
was aimed at, nothing could have been more successful. Every known
class of refusal was successfully exhibited. One horse endeavoured
to climb the rails into the Grand Stand; another, having stopped dead
at the critical point, swung round and returned in consternation to
the starting point, with his rider hanging like a locket round his
neck. Another, dowered with a sense of humour unusual among horses,
stepped delicately over the furze-bushes, and amidst rounds of
applause, walked through the lime with a stoic calm. Yet another, a
ponderous warhorse of seventeen hands, hung, trembling like an aspen,
on the brink, till a sympathiser, possibly his owner, sprang
irrepressibly from his seat on the stand, climbed through the rails,
and attacked him from behind with a large umbrella. It was during this
three-cornered conflict that the green-eyed filly forced herself into
the front rank of events. A chorus of “Hi, hi, hi!” fired at the rate
of about fifty per second, volleyed in warning from the crowd round
the starting point, and a white-legged chestnut with an unearthly
white face and flying flounces of tawny mane and tail came thundering
down upon the jump. Neither umbrella nor warhorse turned her by a
hairsbreadth from her course, still less did her rider, a lean and
long-legged country boy, whose single object was to keep upon her
back.


To me the attractiveness of this is altogether in the writing. It is
as though the authors, or rather the author, for two of them can
hardly have written one paragraph, becomes amused herself at the
absurdities she recounts, and suddenly it ceases to be merely
entertainment, and becomes entertainment that is being commented on; I
find myself listening to the voice of the commentator till she becomes
a real person for me, somebody I know and like and enjoy, and though a
part of my attention goes to what she is describing, it is not any
longer for its own sake, but as an excuse for keeping her talking a
little longer. And that “comment” seems to me to be what I mean when I
talk of literature; a way of describing and judging so vivid and
personal that if I saw a passage in the same manner even in the wilds
of Timbuctoo, I should say “That’s Somerville and Ross!” It means that
that particular voice is as clear in my mind as the voice of somebody
I have known; that, in fact, I have made a new friend far more gifted
than I am. A book like this is a real event because it is a form of
experience.

Somerville and Ross are the sort of friends you make on sight. Jane
Austen is the sort you may take ten years to know, and even then never
acquire a taste for at all unless at the same time you are prepared to
take lessons from her in good breeding and literary taste. If you open
a book like Emma for the first time you are quite liable to find it
very small beer. There is very little comedy visible to the naked eye.
The hero doesn’t break his monocle, put his foot through an aneroid
barometer or arrive with a pair of grass-green dancing breeches
instead of a present of salmon. There are misadventures of a sort;
there are misunderstandings of a sort, but both are of a very quiet
and apparently unimportant kind. The heroine does not use goat’s
milk at the tea party, but she does imagine that the hero,
Mr. Knightly, disapproves of her when he is really in love with
her. Even that misunderstanding is kept so quiet that you may quite
easily read on without noticing that it has taken place. That is one
of the little lessons in taste which Jane Austen teaches in passing,
and once it is mastered, it becomes a subtle form of flattery. It
persuades you that you are really divinely intelligent—quite
divinely intelligent!—not one of these stupid people who need to have
everything explained to them. Of course, a passage like this will
cause you no difficulty whatever!


“I have heard it asserted,” said John Knightly (John is the brother of
Mr. Knightly who, Emma thinks, disapproves of her, and is married to
Emma’s sister, Isabella) “that the same sort of handwriting often
prevails in a family; and where the same master teaches, it is natural
enough. But, for that reason, I should imagine that the likeness must
be chiefly confined to the females, for boys have very little teaching
after an early age, and scramble into any hand they can get.

Isabella and Emma, I think, do write very much alike. I have not
always known their writing apart.”

“Yes,” said his brother hesitatingly, “there is a likeness. I know
what you mean—but Emma’s hand is the strongest.”


That is all! If you have spotted that Mr. Knightly instead of
disapproving of Emma, is head over ears in love with her, you are
naturally so pleased by the flattery that like Slipper you murmur:
“Oh, divil so pleasant a day I ever spent!” and, if you haven’t,
after all, Miss Austen is a lady to her fingertips and never cries
“Booby!” in a vulgar way; Emma herself hadn’t spotted it either, for
here she is, thirty pages later, talking to Harriet, the girl she had
deluded into the belief that Mr. Elton loved her—and how well she has
managed it!


“I do remember it,” cried Emma. “I perfectly remember it. Talking
about spruce beer. Oh! yes. Mr. Knightly and I both saying we liked
it, and Mr. Elton’s seeming resolved to learn to like it too. I
perfectly remember it. Stop—Mr. Knightly was standing just here, was
not he? I have an idea. he was standing just here.” .

“Ah, I do not know. I cannot recollect. It is very odd, but I cannot
recollect. Mr. Elton was sitting here, I remember, much about where I
am now.”


Once more, have you noticed that Emma is in love with Mr. Knightly and
doesn’t realise it herself? The flattery is so outrageous; the
temptation to cry out that there is no other novelist but Jane
Austen—meaning no other novelist who smooths our fur so
delicately—should almost make us suspect some brand of snobbery in
ourselves.

Again, so cleverly has it been done, so little does Jane Austen seem
to expound her characters, that at a first reading it might almost
seem that there was no commentator there at all. Oh, but isn’t there?
Read again that innocent speech of Mr. John Knightly’s on the subject
of handwriting, and ask yourself if it is really and truly the voice
of Mr. John Knightly, a rising professional man, or the demure and
almost deferential voice of Miss Austen, taking him off with just the
faintest hint of malice. There the little claws are barely
perceptible, but watch how they come out in the following passage; the
noble pathos of “probably with rather thinner clothing than usual ’,
the dramatic emphasis of the arithmetic: ‘five hours! four horses!
four servants; five people!’ Notice, too, how the passage goes on a
shade too long, a sentence or two down the other side of the hill
between delight and boredom.


“A man,” said he, “must have a very good opinion of himself when he
asks people to leave their own fireside, and encounter such a day as
this, for the sake of coming to see him. He must think himself a most
agreeable fellow; I could not do such a thing. It is the greatest
absurdity—actually snowing at this moment! The folly of not allowing
people to be comfortable at home, and the folly of people’s not
staying comfortably at home when they can! If we were obliged to go
out such an evening as this by any call of duty or business, what a
hardship we should deem it—and here are we, probably with rather
thinner clothing than usual, setting forward voluntarily, without
excuse, in defiance of the voice of nature, which tells man, in
everything given to his view or his feelings, to stay at home himself,
and keep all under shelter that he can; here are we setting forward to
spend five dull hours in another man’s house, with nothing to say or
hear that was not said and heard yesterday and may not be said and
heard again to-morrow. Going in dismal weather, to return probably in
worse; four horses and four servants taken out for nothing but to
convey five idle shivering creatures into colder rooms and worse
company than they might have found at home!”


The art of living is the art of collecting and generalising from
experiences, and literature with its events which are almost real
events, like Emma’s misunderstanding of Mr. Knightly’s intentions, and
its commentators who are almost real friends like Jane Austen, ekes
out the little quantity of actual experience and friendship which is
granted to us, and enables us to form a completer picture of life than
we could ever hope to do without it. In writing this two passages came
my way which seemed to me to define the purpose of literature as
neatly as any definitions. One is that in which Saint Simon, who had
seen more of life than most of us can ever hope to do, criticises his
old friend, Lauzun, who had commanded King James’ army in Ireland,
carried the Royal family to safety in France, been the lover of
Mademoiselle and her all-but husband, been a prisoner in one of the
King’s dungeons, because—“never having read anything but fairy tales,
he knew nothing but what he had seen himself.” The second is David
Cecil’s conclusion to his essay on Jane Austen. “If I were in doubt as
to the wisdom of one of my actions, I should not consult Flaubert or
Dostoevsky. The opinion of Balzac or Dickens would carry little weight
with me; were Stendhal to rebuke me it would only convince me that I
had done right: even in the judgment of Tolstoy 1 should not put
complete confidence. But I should be seriously upset, I should worry
for weeks and weeks, if I incurred the disapproval of Jane Austen.”

That, then, is literature, not a substitute for life but a completion
and an explanation, which, if it always lacks the intensity of real
experience, frequently makes up for it in profundity,


III

For me, and I think for most of my generation, The experience of
literature came through the study of the 19th-century novel, and our
views of literature are largely coloured and limited by that
particular approach. I do not know whether another generation can
approach literature in the same way, whether in some manner which I
haven’t yet detected, the 19th-century novel has not begun to
date. For us it was still contemporary, and we could consider the fate
of Mme. Bovary as if she were a next door neighbour, without referring
to any historical notes to explain her to ourselves.

We were lucky in that, for the 19th-century novel still seems to me
incomparably the greatest of the modern arts, the art in which the
modern world has expressed itself most completely. You have merely to
think of the names—Jane Austen, Stendhal, Dickens, Thackeray,
Trollope, Tolstoy, Balzac, and these do not even skim the cream. It is
what the drama was to the Elizabethans and the Athenians, a popular
art which was shared by the whole community, as the 18th-century novel
wasn’t, and the modern novel most certainly is not. I remember a most
moving story of Kuprin’s which describes how an old deacon of the
Orthodox Church is called on to take part in the excommunication
service against Tolstoy. At first the name of the person to be
excommunicated doesn’t convey anything to him, and he practises his
chant with all the gusto of a popular singer. But gradually things
begin to come back into his mind; scenes from Tolstoy’s novel, _The
Cossacks_; the unforgettable descriptions of the wild scenery and the
courtship of Mariana and when the moment comes for him to intone the
horrible curses of the excommunication service he bursts out into an
exultant _Ad Multos Annos_. Tolstoy in Russia was worshipped as much
as Dickens in England and for the same reasons. Can one imagine a
parish priest in the world who would hesitate over the excommunication
of a Proust or a Joyce?* [* As I corrected these proofs I found in an
article by T. C, Murray a reference to an old woman he knew who always
added to her prayers special one for Dickens!]

Our peculiar method of writing literary history by countries instead
of by periods makes it difficult to realise what a literary phenomenon
the 19th-century novel was or what it achieved. Dickens and Thackeray
and Trollope tend to get dwarfed in the history of English literature,
and I have just been glancing at a history of French literature from
which, if I hadn’t known better, I might have concluded that Stendhal
and Flaubert were minor figures not worthy of being ranked with great
poetic geniuses like Leconte de Lisle. You will not get that
impression about the novel from Mrs. Woolf’s wise and charming essays
in _The Common Reader_, but you may, unless you happen to be of
Russian parentage, come away from it with the feeling of that
character in one of Dostoevsky’s novels who, having gone into the
matter carefully and decided that the Russian was an inferior race,
came to the conclusion that the only honourable course open to him was
suicide. The Russian novel, one gathers from Mrs. Woolf, is a quite
different article to the English novel, and so far superior that
suicide may appear the only possible course. “Doubtful as we
frequently are,” she says, “whether either the French or the
Americans, who have so much in common with us, can yet understand
English literature, we must admit graver doubts still whether for all
their enthusiasm, the English can understand Russian literature.” And
as if to prove that the French cannot possibly understand English
literature, there chimes in the voice of a French critic, M. Maurois,
whom I happen to be reading. “Let us note in passing that this
philosophy (of Dickens) is admirably suited to the English
temperament. This remark is important because it helps us to
understand the immense popularity of Dickens. The English are at the
same time sentimental, timid and obedient. Because they know they are
too sentimental, they feel the need to keep a watch on themselves and
dislike having their emotions roused without at the same time being
offered a remedy. Because they are timid, they have little taste for
direct attack upon an individual or an institution. They like the
humorous form of attack because in appearance it allows the object
attacked to remain.”

Let me say at once that I do not believe that M. Maurois’
misunderstandings of Dickens are proof of a peculiarly French
inability to understand English literature or Mrs. Woolf’s of
Dostoevsky of an English inability to understand Russian
literature. The misunderstanding, the falsification, is in the
application to literature of standards which are only to a very minor
degree relevant to the arts. It is an example of what I feel inclined
to call the modern heresy, the betrayal of the classical heritage. You
can scarcely open a book or paper without reading what “we Irish” or
“we English” like, or what “the French” or “the Germans” approve. I
have before me a witty and learned review of a book by Sacheverell
Sitwell on _British Architects and Craftsmen_, which says:
“Palladianism and the Picturesque represent two sides of the English
character which belong together, as the exterior and interior of Moor
Park belong together, or as tails and tweeds in our way of dressing.”

Perhaps, having had an overdose of it in youth, I am more conscious of
the absurdity of it in middle age. I have cycled through Ireland
collecting the views of the peasantry on the difference between
themselves and the inhabitants of neighbouring counties, and have it
on the unimpeachable authority of a Kilkenny woman that a Leix man
would not go to the workhouse without a collar and tie.

The idea that there is such a thing as English literature is a
convenient fiction which provides a suitable field for study for
people who know only one language well. Of course, writers who live in
the same country and are subjected to the same geographical conditions
will tend to have certain characteristics in common. Swift, Wilde,
Yeats and Joyce have certain characteristics like insolence,
introspection and a tendency to wear a mask which are not uncommon
among writers brought up in Ireland; Macpherson, who faked the Ossian
translations, Boswell, Scott and Burns, as I shall probably have
occasion to point out, have certain things in common which associate
them in the Romantic revival; but similar common characteristics occur
in people of one religion, whatever their nationality, in people of
one profession, of one political party and even of one income group,
and any form of literary criticism, like that of the Marxists, which
concentrates on such incidental characteristics sooner or later goes
off like M. Maurois into plain moonshine. Dickens could never have
been a representative English writer for the simple reason that
Dickens never was a representative Englishman.

It will, I think, be a real help to you in appreciating literature to
remember that the only natural classification of European literature
is by periods; that any English writer of the 18th century is likely
to have more in common with a French writer of the 18th century than
with any English writer of our time, and that, the further a period is
removed from us in time, the more its literature becomes portion of
history and has to be eked out by a knowledge of history.

It is much easier to understand the realistic novel if we remember
that it is a 19th-century art, and a European art and that its
variations are merely local. Here is a timetable jotted down from
the handful of books on my own shelves within a few minutes:—


1850   _David Copperfied_. _The Scarlet Letter_.
1851   _House of the Seven Gables_.
1852   Tolstoy’s _Childhood_. _Esmond_.
1853   _Bleak House_.
1854   _Hard Times_.
1855   _The Warden_. Tolstoy’s _Sevastopol_.
1856   Turgenev’s _Rudin_.
1857   _Mme. Bovary_. _Barchester Towers_. Tolstoy’s _Youth_.
1858   Turgenev’s _Liza_. Goncharov’s _Oblomov_. _Clerical Life_.
1859   Tolstoy’s _Family Happiness_. _Richard Feverel_. _On the Eve_.
1860   Tolstoy’s _Cossacks_. _The Mill on the Floss_.


It is fairly clear even from such a limited chronology that the
European novel is not three arts but one art, and that its origin, its
development and decline must be traced to a common source. It seems to
me to be the characteristic art of the middle classes, released by the
French Revolution from their intellectual dependence on the
aristocracy. Though it spread to other countries, it is mainly a
product of England, France and Russia; Germany, for some reason, never
seems to have produced a novelist. As an art form it is really the
abortive comedy of humours and trades of Shakespeare’s day raised to
the maximum power. “I will have a citizen and he shall be of my own
trade”; as the character in _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_ says: “I
will have a grocer and he shall do admirable things.” It satisfies a
deep longing of the middle classes in every century for the study of
society, classes, professions and trades instead of the study of
classical antiquity, but whereas these had always been treated as
something which had to be apologised for, they are now treated with
the greatest seriousness, and as the form develops you find novelists
specialising in the description of certain professions, naval,
military and clerical, for instance.

The morality which motivates it is largely that of the merchant
classes who produced Protestantism, and it has suffered by it in more
ways than the obvious one of being subjected to the intensest form of
literary censorship. It moves within the narrowest range; a scruple
about a public position or a misunderstanding about a cheque is all
the motivation Trollope needs for a story, and _Anna Karenina_ and
_Tess of the D’Urbervilles_ show us just how far it could afford to go
in sympathy for sexual offences. Yet at the same time, this simple
clear workmanlike ethic gives it a characteristic note of deep human
feeling which may perhaps preserve it from the fate of Elizabethan
tragedy, forever sunk because of its moral anarchy. It is a profoundly
serious art—sometimes as in Tolstoy’s _Sevastopol_ we get the
impression that never before has so grave a subject been adequately
treated;—is respectful of human life and dignity, and from the very
beginning has been the normal medium for the expression of
humanitarian sentiment.

Though Jane Austen was the first great novelist of the century, the
novel as such owes nothing to her. Before it could ever become the
great popular art of the middle classes the instrument had to be
enlarged and given tones which were never within her range. It had to
be made capable of expressing passionate emotion, and as much
sensibility as the 18th century had expended on the novel, it had
never succeeded in making it fit for much more than light comedy. It
had now to find an equivalent for the poetry of Elizabethan tragedy,
and that equivalent may almost be said to be the invention of
Scott. If you take any typical passage of Sterne, Fielding or even
Jane Austen and put it side by side with an equally typical passage of
Scott, regardless of whether it is description or dialogue, it is
exactly like playing a tune first on a harpsichord and then on a grand
piano. The difference is accounted for by Scott’s superb use of local
colour, a thing which seems quite normal to us but was a marvel to his
own generation. “As a house,” Jane says tartly, “Barton Cottage
though small was comfortable and compact; but as a cottage it was
defective, for the building was regular, the roof was tiled, the
window-shutters were not painted green, nor were the walls covered
with honeysuckle.” And that is all we ever hear about the home of
Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, nor, indeed, is the description of the
two heroines much more informative. When Jane Austen wants to describe
a character, she does not begin by a study of his behaviour and
language.

She assumes that as the character is a member of a certain class,
these will be just like anybody else’s. She watches the working of his
mind, and it is the uncanny knowledge she shows of Mr. John Knightly’s
mental processes which gives us the impression that the man has been
described. But Scott would describe the cottage, every crack in it,
the landscape, the lighting; he would draw men and women, misshapen
and powerful, and give us the very ring of character in a speech. Rob
Roy knows that Bailie Jarvie will not arrest him “first for auld
langsyne;—second, for the sake of the auld wife ayont the fire at
Stuckavrallachan, that made some mixture of our bluids, to my own
proper shame be it spoken!  that has a cousin wi’ accounts, and yarn
winnles, and looms and shuttles like a mechanical person;—and, lastly,
Bailie, because if I saw a sign of your betraying me, I would plaster
that wa’ with your harns ere the hand of man could rescue you.” The
tune may only be something out of _Trovatore_; but the sheer volume of
sound, the intoxicating effect of the magnificent instrument can still
excite us across the years.

It excited his contemporaries so effectively that men as great as
Balzac and Gogol assumed that to emulate Scott, they, too, had to
write historical romances, and it was only gradually that it dawned on
them that the appropriate use of local colour was in realistic
stories. The greatest of Scott’s immediate successors, Stendhal, was
the only one who wasn’t swept away by the flood of local colour. In
Balzac, Dickens and Gogol story-telling for a time loses all
cohesion. What the middle classes had always desired, they pour out
brimful and overflowing: sentiment and character exaggerated into
emotionalism and caricature; the romance of trade, wealth and luxury;
the humours of law and government, all in the marvellous medium which
Scott had created. “Fog everywhere,” writes Dickens. ‘Fog up the
river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river
where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside
pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog
on the Kentish heights.” Their intoxication with it leads them into
abysses of absurdity, for not only will Balzac paint you an
unforgettable description of the old miser Grandet’s house, he will
tell you exactly what rises in funded securities enabled him to
increase his wealth, or make use of an impassioned declaration of love
to introduce a fresh dab of it. “Eve, dearest,” says David in _Lost
Illusions_, “this is the first moment of pure and unmixed joy that
fate has given to me!.... Since the downfall of the Empire, calico has
come more and more into use because it is so much cheaper than
linen. At the present moment paper is made of a mixture of hemp and
linen rags, but the raw material is dear, and the expense naturally
retards the great advance which the French press is bound to make. Now
you cannot increase the output of linen rags, a given population gives
a pretty constant result, and it only increases with the
birth-rate. To make any perceptible difference in the population for
this purpose, it would take a quarter of a century and a great
revolution in habits of life, trade and agriculture. And if the supply
of linen rags is not enough to meet one-half nor one-third of the
demand, some cheaper material than linen rags must be found for cheap
paper. ... The Angouleme paper makers, the last to use pure linen
rags, say that the proportion of cotton in the pulp has increased to a
frightful extent of late years,”

By 1850, if you look at the little time-table I have drawn up, you
will see that that sort of story-telling was already old-fashioned,
and Trollope in England, Flaubert in France and Turgenev in Russia
could afford to turn up their noses at it, as two at least of them
did. But the Russians were the luckiest, for in their country there
was a hereditary aristocracy which took to the new middle-class art,
and accordingly we get novels and stories which can use the whole of
society for a keyboard, while in other countries, particularly in
England where social stratification is well-defined, characters tend
to be falsified whenever they move outside the author’s own class.

In Turgenev’s _Sportsman’s Sketches_, which were being published
through the forties, we find this new, artistic sort of story-telling,
and with it a new technical device which was to be very important in
Russian literature, above all in the short story. If you take one of
the stories, _Byezhin Meadow_, written in 1851, you find it contains
nothing but a description of the author alone with a lot of little
boys who are minding the family horses in the meadow one summer night
and who pass the hours telling ghost stories. It is many years since I
read it first, but I can still remember the thrilling effect of those
children’s voices whispering under the great arch of the night
sky. Few stories convey such an overwhelming sense of the mystery of
life. Now, if you compare a thriller with a novel by Trollope, say,
you will see that one of the great problems of the story-teller is to
carry the reader’s attention on by spinning a yarn, yet at the same
time to spin it in such a way that when the reader’s curiosity is
satisfied he doesn’t throw the book away as most people do with even
the best detective stories; to stop that leakage at the end and force
the reader to look at it complete as if it were a picture. Even a very
great novel like Stendhal’s _Charterhouse of Parma_ leaks at the end
like that; each time you read it, your growing familiarity with the
story makes it lose something, whereas the story-teller’s ideal is to
write in such a way that the more your interest in the story slackens,
the more you should be interested in the detail.

In the use of local colour Scott had shown one method for holding up
the episodic quality of a story, but what Turgenev did in _A
Sportsman’s Sketches_ was to graft on to the story, the formal, static
quality of an essay or a poem, so that when the interest of one was
exhausted, the other came into play. The practice of that sort of
writing which magazine editors still dismiss as “the sketch” enabled
the Russian writers, particularly Chekhov, who seems to me to have
steeped himself in the study of Turgenev, to do something which other
writers rarely achieved, and compose novels with the bare minimum of
episodic interest. “To do something with the least possible number of
movements is the definition of grace,” said Chekhov. It isn’t, but it
is the definition of the peculiar sort of grace which we find in
Turgenev’s stories and his own.

Turgenev’s passionate lyricism—he was really a spoiled poet, and even
in this story, the English translation I have read seems to me to miss
something of the hush and mystery he evokes—makes him an uncertain
story-teller. Like Thackeray, he has a fondness for writing his
stories in the guise of an old man, looking back upon his youth, which
gives them a certain unity of tone, and a delightful nostalgic
colouring, but it is always a dangerous device for the writer, for the
sentimentality of retrospection tends to rob character of its
preciseness and incidents of their importance. “It’ll all be the same
in a hundred years”; “vanity of vanities” or as a little girl in an
Irish village once expressed it to me, “The flowers is fading and
we’ll soon be fading ourselves”, sentiments proper to poets, are most
dangerous to writers who must show us in the light of eternity the
importance of a missing cheque for twenty-five pounds. Yet at his
best, in novels like _Fathers and Children_ and _Torrents of Spring_
and in his own characteristic form, the short novel or long short
story like _The Watch_, _Punin and Baburin_ and _Old Portraits_, he
seems to me greater than any Russian writer with the exception of
Chekhov. The death of the old nobleman in _Old Portraits_ is a perfect
example of the blending of retrospective sentiment with precise and
restrained observation.


“No, no pain... but it’s difficult...difficult to breathe.” Then
after a brief silence: “Malania,” he said, “so life has slipped
by—and do you remember when we were married...what a couple we
were?” “Yes, we were, my handsome, charming Alexis!” The old man was
silent again. “Malania, my dear, shall we meet again in the next
world?” “I will pray God for it, Alexis,” and the old woman burst
into tears. “Come, don’t cry, silly; maybe the Lord God will make us
young again then—and again we shall be a fine pair!” “He will make us
young, Alexis!” “With the Lord all things are possible,” observed
Alexis Sergeitch. “He worketh great marvels!—maybe he will make you
sensible. ... There, my love, I was joking; come, let me kiss your
hand.” “And I yours.” And the two old people kissed each other’s hands
simultaneously.


Let me confess that as often as I have read that story, I cannot even
transcribe this passage without emotion. It is as close as makes no
difference to being fine poetry, but in all my reading of Tolstoy I
have never come across a single passage which moved me in the
slightest. Tolstoy’s supreme quality as a story-teller is a wonderful
narrative gift which enables him to see and describe with absolute
verisimilitude whatever the characters are doing and thinking. In
everything he is the very opposite of Turgenev. Where Turgenev is
always too relaxed, too inclined for an emotional sprawl, Tolstoy
seems to have electricity in his veins instead of blood, and as I read
I cannot help murmuring to myself: “That’s all right, old man, relax
now! The story’s going splendidly; just forget about it for a few
moments.” But Tolstoy never seems to forget about it. These tiny,
harsh, disjointed sentences are always rippling on with the purr of a
well-oiled mowing machine, and wherever they pass they seem to sweep
up everything in their path. Tolstoy is the perfect model for anybody
who wants to learn the art of telling a story. The dreariest scene
comes out as fresh as paint because of the minute observations and
contradictions of which it is composed. There is an extraordinarily
taut, braced, tonic quality about it.


“What is it?” asked Stepan Arkadyevitch, coming in and addressing his
wife.

By the tone of his voice, both Kitty and Anna knew that the
reconciliation had taken place.

“I wanted to instal Anna here, but we should have had to put up some
curtains. No one knows how to do it, and so I must,” said Dolly in
reply to her husband’s question.

“God knows if they have made it up,” thought Anna as she noticed
Dolly’s cold and even tone.

“Don’t, Dolly, don’t make mountains out of molehills. If you like I
will arrange everything.”—

“Yes,” thought Anna, “it must have been settled.”

“I know how you arrange things,” said Dolly with a mocking smile:
“you give Matve an order which he doesn’t understand, and then you go
off, and he gets everything into a muddle.” .

“Complete, complete reconciliation, complete,” thought Anna. “Thank
God.”


As story-telling pure and simple that passage couldn’t be
bettered. There is literally hardly a word in it which doesn’t carry
the reader’s attention forward, and yet as with Turgenev I wish for
some more tonic quality, I cannot help wishing that Tolstoy would
occasionally slow up, and let the emotion emerge. Compare with that
passage I have quoted from _Old Portraits_ this from Tolstoy’s _Two
Hussars_. It describes the feelings of a young officer who has lost
the Government money with which he was entrusted at cards. One can
imagine quite well how Turgenev would have done it; how the young
officer, retiring to his bedroom, would lie upon the bed, thinking of
his boyhood and of his mother. Tolstoy is much too vigorous for that
sort of treatment, but it seems to me that he falls into the opposite
fault, and by the time he has finished with the situation leaves us
not caring what happens his hero.


“I have ruined my young life,” he said to himself; not because he
really thought he had ruined his young life—he was not indeed thinking
about it at all—but the phrase happened to occur to his mind.

“What am I to do now?” he meditated. “Borrow from some one and go
away.” A lady walked along the pavement. “What a foolish looking
lady!” he thought inconsequently. “There’s no one to borrow
from. I’ve ruined my young life.” He reached the shops. A merchant in
a fox-lined cloak was standing at the door of his shop touting for
customers. “If I hadn’t taken up the eight I should have made up what
I’d lost.” An old beggar-woman followed him whimpering. “There’s no
one to borrow from.” A gentleman in a bear-skinned cloak drove by; a
watchman stood still. “What could one do out of the ordinary? Take a
shot at these people. No, it’s a bore! I’ve ruined my young life. Ah,
these are nice bridles hanging there with ornaments on them. I should
like a drive in a sledge now with three horses—ah, the darlings!”


In 1857, the same year as Trollope’s _Barchester Towers_, Flaubert’s
_Madame Bovary_ appeared. Historically, it is probably the most
important novel of the century. I do not mean it is the best, or even
among the best; for myself I should not rank it with _Pride and
Prejudice_, _The Red and Black_ or _Vanity Fair_. It is easily the
most beautifully written; perfectly proportioned, every paragraph
containing some tiny picture beautifully drawn and coloured.


“Once, during a thaw, when the snow was melting off the roofs and the
moisture oozing out of the trees in the courtyard, on reaching the
door, she returned to fetch her parasol and opened it.

The silken parasol, coloured like a pigeon’s breast, as it was pierced
by the sunbeams, revealed with its shifting reflections the skin of
her beautiful face. She smiled under the genial warmth while drops of
water could be heard, one by one, fall on the stretched silk.


But no English translation can give you the poetic beauty of
Flaubert’s French, and really to know what sort of writer he was you
need either to read him in French or study the effect of his style in
the work of Joyce, who copied him very closely, as in this sentence
from _The Portrait of the Artist_. “In the soft grey silence he could
hear the bump of the balls: and from here and from there through the
quiet air the sound of the cricket bats: pick, pack, pock, puck: like
drops of water in a fountain falling softly in the brimming bowl.”
_Madame Bovary_ has the beauty of a medieval picture book; it is
something to linger over and reread.

I am not so certain of the characterisation. It is the story of a
middle-class woman who is so saturated with romantic fiction that she
involves herself in discreditable love affairs, gets into debt, and
finally commits suicide. Being a little that way inclined myself, I
doubt whether romantic extravagance ever induced anybody to commit any
crime more serious than the excesses of Marianne Dashwood in _Sense
and Sensibility_; at least, without much graver faults of character to
account for it; and these are not suggested by Flaubert. I have sat in
court watching processions of poor girls who had gone to what the law
believed to be the dogs, but never yet saw one of whom I could
honestly say that she looked as though she had been influenced by
D. H. Lawrence or Aldous Huxley. Nor do I think Flaubert believed it
himself. He was essentially a satirist; he detested the French middle
class in a way which was hardly known in England before the nineties;
and they returned the compliment by prosecuting _Madame Bovary_ for
indecency. It was largely this prosecution which made it the standard
for what we now call Naturalism in fiction. The Naturalists—though
their work does not become really important until much later in the
century—shared Flaubert’s views about the middle classes, and deplored
the excesses into which writers like Balzac were drawn by their
whole-hearted acceptance of middle-class standards. They prided
themselves on not selecting and on not commenting. They simply picked
on any particular aspect of life which came their way, and painted it
as well as they could.

You will find a typical example of Naturalism in the second story of
Joyce’s _Dubliners_. Here two young fellows mitching from school meet
a queer man who talks to them about little girls; goes away, comes
back, and talks to them about little girls again, but in a quite
different tone. What he is, and what he has been up to in the meantime
are merely hinted at with a shrug of the shoulders. It is no business
of Joyce’s. “Here is an episode. This is where it begins; this is
where it ends: now, watch me do it!” I have always suspected that that
theory of writing must have originated in a painter’s studio, for it
is by its very nature unliterary. Literature, as I shall have occasion
to remind you, is a frightfully impure art. A painter can paint a
good-looking poisoner without bothering his head about whether or not
he approves of poisoning on principle, but there is always something
freakish about a writer who refrains from moral judgment and
feeling. When Flaubert ends the story of _Herodias_ with the lines,
“And all three having taken the head of Iaokanann went off in the
direction of Galilee. As it was very heavy, they carried it turn and
turn about”, he is writing artificially, to a theory, and puts me in
mind of Miss Liza Doolittle’s drawing-room manner as she inquires:
“What call would a woman with that strength in her have to die of
influenza? What become of her new straw hat that should have come to
me? Somebody pinched it; and what I say is, them as pinched it done
her in.”

The fifties, sixties and seventies are the greatest period of the
novel, and it would probably be true to say that in that period not a
year passed without the appearance of a work of major
importance. English people put on a curiously coy air when they speak
of Trollope, as though they had to apologise for liking him, but there
is no need for apology, because Trollope was a novelist of the same
rank as Jane Austen, though with a coarse streak which comes out all
too plainly in his _Autobiography_. It was that coarse streak which
made him spoil _Barchester Towers_ by the introduction of the
Stanhopes, and his masterpiece, _The Last Chronicle of Barset_, by
padding it out to such a degree that in order to appreciate its true
artistic quality, you have to skip almost every second chapter. But to
find anything to equal the splendid seriousness and tenderness of the
portrait of Mr. Crawley in that novel you have to turn to the stories
like _Punin and Baburin_ which Turgeney was writing about the same
time.

Hardy’s work comes later, and though he is far inferior to Trollope
and George Eliot as a novelist, he is equally superior to both as a
writer. Hardy is an extraordinary example of the importance of local
colour in the novel, and in his work more than in that of any other
novelist we can see that its real purpose is that of poetry in an
Elizabethan play, a powerful cement which binds together a rubble of
invention which, without it, would collapse in bathos. Whether he knew
it or not, Hardy was affected by the Naturalists, and in him we can
trace the development of a purely pictorial kind of writing derived
from Flaubert. Unlike Flaubert, he never allows it to settle into neat
little miniatures, and long before the cinema, had invented a
technique which anticipates it, as in the wonderful opening of _The
Mayor of Casterbridge_ where he begins in the air high above the town
as it lies in evening light; fades to a horizon view of it, far away
and flat upon the plain, and then tracks slowly towards the tree-lined
rampart which surrounds it, and down the main street, pausing to give
us a close-up of shuttered window or inn-sign. No other writer has the
same feeling for material as Hardy has; it is always of some artist
that he reminds us, and as he describes the surface of something it is
like examining a Cotman drawing in which we can identify the very
quality of wood, tile and stone. With every rereading we suffer more
from his scraggy plots and tongue-tied characters but put up with them
for those unforgettable paragraphs when somebody walks down a street
and we can feel the heat reflected from the old, sun-warmed brick, or
a wain of hay passes by the window and the faces of those inside are
painted gold in the reflected light. “On the grey moisture of the
grass were marks where the cows had lain through the night—dark-green
islands of dry herbage the size of their carcases in the general sea
of dew. From each island proceeded a serpentine trail, by which the
cow had rambled away to feed after getting up, at the end of which
trail they found her; the snoring puff from her nostrils, when she
recognised them, making an intenser little fog of her own amid the
prevailing one.” Poetry has no lovelier image of morning, nor an
evening scene drawn with more tenderness and sureness than that first
glimpse of Casterbridge.


The lamplights now glimmered through the engirdling trees, conveying a
sense of great snugness and comfort inside, and rendering at the same
time the unlighted country without strangely solitary and vacant in
aspect, considering its nearness to life. The difference between burgh
and champaign was increased too by sounds which now reached them
above others —the notes of a brass band. The travellers returned into
the High Street, where there were timber houses with overhanging
stories, whose small-paned lattices were screened by dimity curtains
on a drawing string, and under whose barge-boards old cobwebs waved
in the breeze. There were houses of brick-nogging, which derived their
chief support from those adjoining. There were slate roofs patched
with tiles, and tile roofs patched with slate, with occasionally a
roof of thatch.


The year 1880 roughly represents the end of the realistic novel as
such with the rise of Moore in England, Maupassant in France, Chekhov
in Russia, all of them declared Naturalists, two of them best known as
short story writers. Chekhov took naturally to the theory, because as
a doctor he found the detached description of natural phenomena
sufficiently like the work of contemporary scientists. “Anatomy and
the arts,” he said, “are of equally noble descent. They have the same
purpose and the same enemy —the devil—and there is absolutely nothing
for them to fight about.”  There is a whole group of his stories,
clinically correct descriptions of madness, degeneracy, marital
unhappiness and what not, which seem to me typical museum pieces of
the naturalistic school. But by nature, he was a humorous, poetic sort
of man (“My ideal is to be idle and love a plump girl”, which may be
set with Dr. Johnson’s of driving in a post-chaise with a pretty
woman) and in the stories which are characteristically Chekhovian we
are conscious that the man is better than the theory; he comments
wisely and endlessly.

He is not by any means an easy writer, though like Jane Austen he is
one who steadily grows on you, and for the same reason, that a quiet
realism which finds its poetry in everyday things and is based upon an
adequate ethical code seems to be that which retains its freshness
longest. All the exciting episodes and profound moral problems which
interest us so much at first, tend each time to lose something in
rereading, while Emma’s misunderstandings of Mr. Knightley’s intentions
and Elizabeth Bennet’s prejudice against Mr. Darcy improve with the
years. The impression you get on reading Chekhov for the first time is
rather like that of walking out of a very bright light into a dim,
cool, shadowy interior, mistaking the butler for your host and the
local school-mistress for your hostess, and of conversing with
somebody who appears to be a Polar explorer and turns out to be the
village doctor. The voice of the commentator if you can discern it at
all seems to be equally confusing, for it is intermittent, irritable
and apologetic.

The heroine of one of his most famous stories is a doctor’s wife who
becomes the mistress of an artist (you will notice as you go on an
under-current of dislike for artists in Chekhov’s stories) and
neglects her apparently stupid and good-natured husband, but when he
dies, sucking the poison from a child’s throat, it is slowly borne in
on her that everybody but herself had recognised him as a great and
famous scientist. You might think she was being punished for her
unfaithfulness to him until you read another story (_The Lady with the
Toy Dog_, which, incidentally, is one of the great short stories of
the world). This is about a young woman, married to a dull official,
who meets a married man at the seaside and becomes his mistress. She
is punished too, but this time it seems to be because she does not
leave her husband altogether. It is all very difficult. A woman is
punished for going away with a lover, or for not going away with a
lover, but the lover seems to have nothing to do with her real sin
which you may find it hard to identify. But after your eyes have grown
used to the shadowy interior, and your ears to the diffident voice of
the commentator, you begin to discover that the stories all add up to
something, and that if Chekhov’s people are not being punished for
adultery, they are being punished and punished very severely for
quarreling at meals, leaving syringes in the bathroom, criticising the
local teacher or doctor, or for being late at the office. Implicit in
all of them is a very personal and very noble ideal of the lady and
gentleman, derived from, but transcending, the rough and ready ethical
code of the novelist.


“This soup tastes like liquorice,” he said, smiling; he made an
effort to control himself and seem amiable, but could not refrain from
saying, “Nobody looks after the house-keeping.
...If you are too ill or busy with reading, let me look after the
cooking.”

In earlier days she would have said to him: “Do, by all means,” or, “I
see you want to turn me into a cook,” but now she only looked at him
timidly and flushed crimson.


That is not just mere naturalistic detail as it would be in the work
of a French writer; like the coarseness of Lydia Bennet and her mother
it is intended to express by implication an ideal of conduct which
Laevsky and his mistress fall short of and gives us the clue to
understanding their misfortunes. Nadyezhda is deceiving him with
another man, and has got herself into the other man’s power; Laevsky
is planning to leave her in the lurch. Unfortunately for him, though
the local doctor would lend him the money, he in turn has to borrow it
from a lodger, a scientist called Von Koren who loathes both Laevsky
and Nadyezhda because of some stupid criticisms they have made on
science, Von Koren will not part with the money unless Laevsky
guarantees to take Nadyezhda with him, and maddens Laevsky to the
point of challenging him. The prospect of imminent death brings out a
real element of seriousness in Laevsky’s character. The duel takes
place; the scientist is just on the point of killing him in cold blood
when they are interrupted and the shot grazes Laevsky’s neck. But he
has had a shock, becomes reconciled to Von Koren, marries Nadyezhda
and settles down to a dull and useful life with her.

Perhaps this isn’t Chekhov’s greatest story (it is superbly written)
but in it the diffident voice is just a shade louder and more
explicit, and the story throws light on all the other mysterious and
beautiful stories which haunt our memory for years like passages of
poetry. As in Shaw’s _Candida_ and Joyce’s _Ulysses_ I get the
impression that the two contrasted characters, are not two characters
but two different aspects of the same character, which may or may not
be the author’s, and that some sort of internal conflict is being
externalised through them. At any rate I do not think it is fanciful
to suggest that Chekhov, the doctor, the naturalist and Utopian, had a
rather shady artistic alter ego which he found it necessary to
struggle with and overthrow.

It is not enough to think of Chekhov merely as a Russian and a
fellow-countryman of Dostoevsky. He is also a strict contemporary of
Shaw and H. G. Wells, and has considerably more in common with them
than with Dostoevsky. Like them he is fundamentally optimistic (it is
only a very superficial criticism which sees Chekhov as a gloomy
writer), and like them, he is optimistic because he believes in
science. Where he does differ from them is that he recognises that
his scientific Utopia will be unlivable in unless human beings change
their behaviour. “If we respect science and culture,” the
commentator seems to say, “we shall in the end conquer disease and
poverty and ignorance. Life in a thousand years will be unimaginably
beautiful, because there is such a thing as progress. As a child I
used to be beaten, so, you see, I know. But what use will progress be
if it doesn’t mean spiritual progress; if we are still rude to the men
and women we live with, and have no useful work to keep us occupied
and to help on the business of progress.

So we must all be more polite and tender and truthful, and work very
much harder than we do, and then, in a thousand years’ time life on
this planet will be really worth while. But, of course, we mustn’t
take it too seriously, for we shall die all the same. But still, you
know Afanasey Andreitch, my guinea-pig, my little sucking dove (or
whatever bit of translator’s Anglo-Russian you like to put in) we
ought to work harder.”

It is the final unanswerable doubting re-statement of the middle-class
creed of the 19th-century novel. Since then there have been some great
writers, but none of them has written under its inspiration. Those
like John Galsworthy who have gone on writing novels in the convention
may have been admirable writers but they are not artists. When you
read a Galsworthy novel it is rather like reading one of those
political manifestos which advise us to get back to the England of
Palmerston or Gladstone. It isn’t that one doesn’t admire the period
that the pamphleteer admires; it is that the pamphlet is unreal. It is
impossible to write a novel in the manner of Dickens or Thackeray,
because it is impossible to get back to the convictions which they
shared with their audience. The middle classes, it seems, have, for
the moment at least, lost faith in their own mission.


IV

I don’t pretend that the books I have mentioned in the last chapter
(and the scores of other novelists I haven’t mentioned at all) are
all easy reading, or that many of them may not at first pass over your
head as they did over mine when I first read them. But they are a
popular art; and they do, I think, contain a sufficiently substantial
amount of necessary entertainment to yield up their beauty to you
without too much knowledge or effort.

But when once you get back beyond the 19th century the difficulties
begin. It is of no use to you to invent a sort of pedigree, and call
it English literature, and treat it as an integral thing from
Chaucer’s day to ours. My own experience has been that while there are
few famous books of the 19th century which I cannot read with
pleasure, there are quite a number of 18th-century books which I
cannot read at all; and that when I go back further, the-great writers
I can read are outnumbered by those I can’t. It is sad but true that I
who can read Mr. Evelyn’ Waugh with the greatest pleasure have to
force myself to read Ben Jonson, Montaigne and Rabelais. Mr. Dobree on
the Restoration dramatists I can read with delight, but the
Restoration dramatists themselves, apart from Congreve, I find very
difficult to get through.

I think the fact is—and it may spare you many dreary hours of
discouragement to reflect on it—that, as I have said before,
literature, apart from lyric poetry, is a very imperfect art. It is
composed of words, images, ideas and conventions, all of which change,
many of which disappear entirely. I have argued in another place that
drama is the most ephemeral of the literary arts, being based upon a
collaboration between author, audience and performers. This is not
true to anything like the same degree of literature which is intended
to be read, but it is far truer than professors of literature ever
care to admit, for within five or six hundred years it cannot be read
at all, except by those who have devoted considerable time to a study
of the language, or else in some sort of translation; while even the
very best translation will be largely unintelligible unless the reader
pays attention to the footnotes.

That evanescence of literature is reflected for us in criticism.
Mr. Dobree seems to me to tell me all I want to know about
the Restoration dramatists, but I cannot think of one single critical
work on Shakespeare which I could recommend. The reason for that is
simple. To write criticism you must have certain simple facts
established. You must know what the author wrote and when he wrote
it. You must have some rough and ready idea of his intentions when he
wrote it. With Shakespeare most of these things are either very hard
or impossible to establish.

Falstaff is perhaps Shakespeare’s single greatest character. He was
enormously popular on the stage. At the end of _Henry IV, Part II_,
the author promises to bring him on the stage again in _Henry V_, but
instead of that fobs us off with an account of his death (off-stage).
Why? ‘Professor Wilson in one book suggests that Falstaff had become
so popular that in order to escape a life-time of Falstaff,
Shakespeare had to kill him off summarily. In a later book he accepts
the theory that the actor who played Falstaff had left the company,
and identifies him with William Kempe. Dr. Harrison seems to think he
had lost the knack of writing about Falstaff. None of these
explanations seems to me likely, and my own guess, for what it is
worth, is that Lord Cobham, who had already compelled the company to
alter the name of Oldcastle to Falstaff, brought influence to bear to
prevent his appearance on the stage in any relation to _Henry V_.

That, you may think, has no importance one way or another, but, in
fact, it is crucial. Whole books have been written condemning or
explaining the conduct of Prince Hal in casting off old Falstaff at
the end of _Henry IV_, but quite obviously, if Shakespeare intended to
write a third part in which Falstaff accompanied the King to France,
he must have intended some sort of reconciliation scene between them
which would have altered the whole emphasis of the trilogy.

Let me take one last example from _Hamlet_. After the ghost has passed
another ghost enters who to me is every bit as mysterious as the
first. Marcellus asks what is going on in Denmark, and Horatio in a
long speech explains that a Norwegian prince called Fortinbras is
raising an army to invade Denmark. This young man is my ghost. He
appears again a few scenes later when two ambassadors (two perfectly
good actors from the theatre manager’s point of view) are sent to
Norway to protest against his warlike preparations. They return later
with the news that Fortinbras had been intending to invade Denmark,
but that the King of Norway has now persuaded him to have a go at
Poland instead, Will the Danes object to his crossing Danish
territory? No, the Danes do not object, so the ghost makes another
appearance, this time on his way to Poland with an army. Nor is this
all. He returns at the precise moment when Hamlet has been stabbed
with the poisoned foil, and hearing him approach, Hamlet who has been
dying in a cloud of the most exquisite poetry, sits up to give him a
vote for the succession of Denmark. There are no historical notes on
that in any of my editions of _Hamlet_! It is one of the most absurd
and inexplicable episodes in literature, but not much more absurd than
what follows, because Fortinbras, without asking anybody’s leave,
announces that he intends to take the throne of Denmark anyway, and
Horatio, forgetting all about his dead friend, hurriedly begs him to
do it quick before anybody can anticipate him—


  Even while men’s minds are wild, lest some mischance
  On plots, and errors happen.


Now, if you ask me what business Fortinbras has in the play, I can
only reply that I haven’t the foggiest notion, and that I doubt very
much whether anybody else has either. As Nature abhors a vacuum, I
explain it tentatively to myself by fancying that perhaps after all
the date of the final draft of _Hamlet_ is not 1601 but the spring
months of 1603 when the old Queen was dying and Cecil trying to
prepare public opinion for the accession of a most unpopular and
unpleasant foreign prince; perhaps even that Hamlet was the very
service for which James on his accession appointed Shakespeare’s
company as the King’s Players. You may notice for instance how
Rosencrantz and Gildenstern expatiate on the dangers attending “the
cease of majesty” and how Laertes arrives on the scene accompanied by
a mob howling to have him made king instead of Claudius; the prosaic
solder with which the Fortinbras scenes are joined on like “I think it
be no other but e’en so” or “this business is very well ended”, and
the maturity of the style—but I have said enough to suggest the
difficulties that confront you in a really topical writer like Ben
Jonson.

Sometimes, in reading Dante, Chaucer, Villon and ever Shakespeare I am
reminded of a visit to a ruined castle or abbey. Clearly, people in
most ways like myself have lived and died here, and as I wander
through room after room, 1 cannot help wondering what they were really
like, and fancying that round the next corner I shall come upon some
monk or girl, strayed out of history, who will tell me. I should
confine myself to the architecture? I know that, and I try to do it,
but human nature is very feeble, and besides I am an ignorant man. I
don’t know what this wall is doing right across the nave or what room
this is with a spy-hole overlooking the high altar. A genuine
archæologist can help me enormously by telling me what all these
things are about, which is why I would have you above everything else
learn to appreciate the work of scholars, but in the end there is
something which escapes me, something which I know is buried in the
churchyard nearby, and that leaves me with an ache for buildings in
the idiom of my own time, all with neat inscriptions on the doors:
“Town Clerk,” “City Engineer,” “Rates Department on the Next Floor.”


V

I have no desire to exaggerate the difficulties, and you may have
gathered that I have myself succeeded in getting a considerable amount
of pleasure out of Gothic abbeys and Elizabethan plays, but I am
always slightly suspicious of those simple-minded villagers who are
alleged to have enjoyed a performance of Oedipus Rex, and it is just
as well to make clear that I think there are difficulties, and that
all literature before the 19th century is a portion of history which
has to be read in its historic context.

I should make one exception to this. If the unsophisticated villager
is capable of enjoying any classic work, he would probably find less
to puzzle him in a Greek play than in most of more modern date, and
granted a reasonably good prose translation, I find that Aristophanes
is considerably fresher than Swift and Kenophon than Gibbon.

That may be merely a fancy of mine, but it is what one would expect,
because the historical context which embraces Swift and Gibbon is part
of an historical process which began with the Greeks. I cannot read a
single word of either Greek or Latin, and most of the arguments which
defend the teaching of them as “a mental discipline” and what not seem
to me grotesque. The real significance of the classical languages is
that our whole civilisation is based on them; that the way we think,
the way we feel, Mr. Eliot’s latest poem and the atomic bomb, all
derive ultimately from certain principles laid down by Greek thinkers
and writers five hundred years before Christ, and established
throughout Europe by Roman armies and administrators, and that if the
study of Greek and Latin ceased throughout Europe, our civilisation
would collapse in ruin within fifty years.

You will understand that better if you consider what happens to
Christianity whenever knowledge of the Bible declines, and how every
movement leading to reform in the Church begins with a return to
Biblical simplicity. The classics are to civilisation as a whole what
the Bible is to religion. They are our charter, our terms of
reference, and whenever we depart from them it is in the direction of
barbarism. What we call realism in art is the artistic equivalent of
logical thought, and the intricate Celtic pattern on a coin or shield
and the wild fantasy of the Irish saga _Tain Bo Cualgne_ are both
barbarian attempts to imitate a realistic Roman figure or a Latin epic
poem. Even in England you can’t go very far without coming upon a
church or house which reminds you of Pope’s, “We still defied the
Romans as of old.”

When we cross the border from the 19th to the 18th century we find
ourselves in an alien world, a country infinitely more foreign to us
than Russia or China of our own time. And that feeling of strangeness
isn’t a new thing. Matthew Arnold, who, Heaven knows, was no jingo,
had to invent a theory that the English had a better sense of what was
fitting to the stage than the French in order to explain to himself
why he liked Shakespeare’s blank verse, and did not like French rhymed
couplets. Hardy, who delights to describe every detail of a
16th-century house, dismisses an 18th century one in a few curt lines
as “a compilation”. I believe I could even put my hand on the
guide-book to Bath which apologises for the fact that, apart from the
Abbey, the town has no architectural interest!

When we open the work of an 18th-century writer, as likely as not, we
shall light upon some passage which does not seem to be addressed to
us at all; which is like one of those conversations we overhear on the
telephone, and which always sound so absurd when we recount them
afterwards. Take this for instance: “In my humble opinion, the
clergy’s business lies entirely among the laity; neither is there,
perhaps, a more effectual way to forward the salvation of men’s souls,
than for spiritual persons to make themselves as agreeable as they can
in the conversations of the world; for which a learned education gives
them a great advantage, if they would please to improve and apply it.”
Now, that is not from the pen of any obscure country parson; it is the
work of Dean Swift who is rightly one of the most famous figures of
the century, but to me it is exactly like a stranger’s voice gabbling
wildly on the telephone, and having given it a few doubtful “Hello’s”
without attracting its attention, I make another determined effort to
get on to the exchange.


  Close by theses Meads for ever crown’d with Flow’rs,
  Where Thames with Pride surveys his rising Tow’rs
  There stands a Structure of Majestic Fame,
  Which from the neighb’ring Hampton takes its Name.


What was it our grandfathers disliked so much about all this? What was
it that made them uncomfortable in long, broad, beautifully
proportioned streets of red-brick Georgian houses? Principally it was
the social approach. Our grandfathers were more individualistic
than we; they came home from business through Romanesque railway
stations to some neat little Gothic or Tudor villa, packed with the
spoils of half a dozen civilisations, and when they felt religious
read a chapter of the Bible or the Bhagavad Gita.


  Yes, in the sea of life enisl’d,
  With echoing straits between us thrown,
  Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
  We mortal millions live _alone_—


sang Matthew Arnold, underlining the last word lest there might be any
possible misunderstanding about it, and, considering the best advice
he might offer to a restless generation, set up as ideals of conduct
the stars and the tides.


  And with joy the stars perform their shining,
  And the sea its long moon-silvered roll.
  For alone they live, nor pine with noting
  All the fever of some differing soul.


If he and his contemporaries did not fully appreciate the 18th century
it was not that they did not know Greek and Latin. It was principally
that they knew other things also, and that they were quite ready to
compound a Whole Duty of Man from the classics, the Bible, Shakespeare
and the Bhagavad Gita. That was what really upset them—what still
upsets us though to a lesser degree because we have seen the effects
of cultural eclecticism—the amazing way 18th-century culture is
integrated into the social system. Other periods have national
differentiations of a sort, and the 16th century in England is not
quite the same as the 16th century anywhere else, but the culture of
the 18th century stretches from Limerick to Leningrad, and one of its
most characteristic poems, Bryan Merryman’s _Midnight Court_, comes
from a wild Irish-speaking district in the hills over the Shannon
which is still at the back of beyond. Other periods talk a lot to
themselves about such things for instance as the dangers incident to
“the cease of majesty” or the growing arrogance of play actors, but
rarely without letting us hear pretty soon the lonely human lyric
voice. “I will live in thy heart, die in thy lap and be buried in thy
eyes: and moreover, I will go with thee to thy uncle’s.” No period
talks to itself so consistently as the 18th century, none throws off
less of those lyric passages which fit so neatly into a Whole Duty of
Man or would be so astonished at being advised to imitate the stars.

The 18th century in literature then is a number of people who for the
most part talk to themselves rather than to us; “spiritual persons”
and “men of quality” with “a learned education” (meaning a classical
education), which they are pleased to “improve and apply” for the
benefit of “polite society”. They live in very large and very formal
houses which to our eyes, accustomed to the joyous eclecticism of
railway Romanesque and university Gothic, all seem to be as like as
council houses, and if we succeed in getting past the formal fronts we
are astonished by the gaiety and colourfulness of the decoration
(though whether this is because the English nature inclines to outward
reserve and intimate abandon or not, I leave you to decide). The men
and women shave their heads and wear wigs; Homer is not allowed to nod
and talks in heroic couplets,


  But why should’st thou suspect the war’s success?
  None fears it more as none promotes it less.


Religion has lost much of its terrors, for spiritual persons make
themselves as agreeable as they can, and the writers, instead of
living _alone_ in Gothic villas, meditating upon human destiny, try to
make themselves useful and popular—for what is the good of a great
poet if he is not agreeable?

This utilitarian view of religion and culture is one of the
characteristic and disturbing things about the period. Our
grandfathers wisely or unwisely elaborated æsthetics to the point at
which they could satisfy themselves that a thing was beautiful in
itself, regardless of purpose, and we in our turn are prepared to
concede that an abstract pattern _may_ be a work of art or that
Joyce’s description of a sexual pervert in _Dubliners_ is justified by
the beauty of the writing. It is always rather surprising to find the
18th century looking for a definite purpose. What lesson does Othello
teach? it asks itself. Should one describe a great man’s vices when
writing his biography, and is the description calculated to make
others imitate him or to avoid the dangers?

Again it is the social, utilitarian approach which we are most aware
of when we try to discover the characteristic literature of the
period. That the superior of the local seminary should be regularly
entrusted with the task of lacing Mme. de Waren’s stays was nothing
unusual—was it not the duty of spiritual persons to make themselves
agreeable? Church-going was a social function, so that sermons became
a very important and popular form of literature, shading off into
meditations and essays aimed at the correction of social
abuses. Essays themselves shade off into pamphlets, and these were
innumerable and written by the best intellects of the time. When we
open Swift’s works we cannot but be slightly shocked at their apparent
triviality and inconsequence. That so very great a writer should have
turned out so many ephemeral trifles on Education, Style, Astrologers
and other Quacks, Money, Beggars and Politics, not to mention that
_Project for the Advancement of Religion_ from which I have already
quoted, is something that to our minds is bound to appear extravagant.

Conversation which in a period so social must have been magnificent we
can only guess at from books like Fanny Burney’s Diary and Boswell. It
was the art to which all the other arts led up. The men of talent by
their labours had produced the most cultivated society seen in Western
Europe since classical times and enjoyed the benefit of it. Not only
do we feel in reading the letters of Oxford to Swift that no man of
intellect of our own time has the cultural richness of one who was,
after all, a very indifferent politician, but we feel in reading Swift
and Johnson that no politician of our time has anything like the
profound knowledge of life possessed by these men, both poets, both
religious men with a wealth of piety and charity in their make-up,
Swift at least a raging idealist.

Nothing perhaps expresses this period so well as its letters for they
are the literary equivalent of conversation. Cowper’s descriptions of
the little events of village life, Walpole’s of society, Swift and
Pope on literature are admirable, though none of them so perfect as
those of the earlier Mme. de Sévigné: some piece of gossip from the
court, a domestic misunderstanding, a question about her attitude to
approaching death serves as theme for some little exquisite bubble of
prose intended for the amusement of a few friends. And this is the
real difficulty we shall probably find, the inability to detach the
literature from the gossip, to disintegrate something so highly
articulated as this classical civilisation.

It is a mistake to try to do so; to come to the 18th century looking
for a Shakespeare or a Villon, for a _Divine Comedy_ or a _Canterbury
Tales_. The greatness of Swift is a part of the greatness of the 18th
century, and whereas we get an overwhelming picture of the greatness
of Shakespeare while knowing practically nothing about him, Swift’s
works are little more than a sketch of the man whom his contemporaries
admired. And I think it is perhaps truer of this than of any other
period that the more you know about it, the more you realise the
greatness of its great men. It is like a jig-saw puzzle in the way in
which things which regarded by themselves seem unimportant, become
important when they are regarded together. This is Swift, ridiculing
Partridge, the fashionable astrologer, by posing as Isaac Bickerstaff,
a rival with a serious grasp of the profession—a mild enough squib
which must, of course, have delighted the London society which knew
all about Partridge but tends to hang a bit heavy on the mind of a
modern reader.


“My first prediction is but a trifle, yet I will mention it to show
how ignorant these sottish pretenders to Astrology are in their own
concerns: it relates to Partridge the Almanack-maker; I have
consulted the star of his nativity by my own rules, and find he will
infallibly die upon the 29th of March next, about eleven at night, of
a raging fever; therefore I advise him to consider of it, and settle
his affairs in time.”


Shortly after he publishes an account of the supposed death of
Partridge described by an intimate.


“After half an hour’s conversation I took my leave, being half
stifled by the closeness of the room. I imagined he could not hold out
long, and therefore withdrew to a little coffee house hard by, leaving
a servant at the house with orders to come immediately, and tell me as
near as he could the minute when Partridge should expire, which was
not above two hours after; when looking upon my watch, I found it to
be above five minutes after seven; by which it is clear that
Mr. Bickerstaff was mistaken almost two hours in his calculation.”


That, as I say, now seems rather a damp squib, but turn to Pope’s
description of Swift in London, and notice how Swift’s solemn raillery
gives you the very accent which people heard when they first read the
Bickerstaff papers; how in an art so very social as irony it helps you
to distinguish the brisk, businesslike tone of Swift, driving the
joke right through to the last limit of absurdity from, for instance,
the languid, malicious feminine irony of Gibbon which barely troubles
to take the edge off the sneer.


‘“Heyday, gentlemen (says the Doctor), what’s the meaning of this
visit? How came you to leave all the great lords you are so fond of,
to come hither to see a poor Dean?”——“Because we would rather see you
than any of them.”——“Anyone that did not know so well as I do, might
believe you. But since you are come, I must get some supper for you, I
suppose.”——“No, Doctor, we have supped already.”——“Supped already,
that’s impossible! Why, it is not eight o’clock yet. That’s very
strange! But if you had not supped, I must have got something for
you. Let me see, what should I have had? a couple of lobsters; ay,
that would have done very well; two shillings—tarts a shilling: but
you will drink a glass of wine with me, though you supped so much
before your usual time only to spare my pocket.”—— “No, we had rather
talk with you than drink with you.”——“But if you had supped with me,
as in all reason you ought to have done, you must then have drunk with
me. A bottle of wine, two shillings—two and two is four and one is
five; just two and sixpence apiece. There, Pope, there’s half a crown
for you, and there’s another for you, sir; for I won’t save anything
by you, I am determined.” This was all said and done with his usual
seriousness on such occasions; and in spite of everything we could say
to the contrary, he actually obliged us to take the money.”’


But why should I stress the point when it is made already in Boswell’s
_Life of Johnson_? Johnson was of the stuff of Swift and Pope, a man
whom his contemporaries recognised as a great man, yet whose published
works would make even a lesser show than Swift’s or Pope’s. Without
Boswell we should know him as the compiler of a Dictionary and the
author of some very shrewd criticisms; a respectable talent certainly,
but it was Boswell’s genius which realised that by gathering together
all his friend dissipated in conversation, letter writing and
occasional journalism, he could create the masterpiece which Johnson
himself would never create.

That great book which synthesises the whole 18th century for us is at
the same time not of the 18th century at all, any more than Boswell
himself was. It is part of a movement which was rising up to destroy
the classical view of life. Under all the superficial contentment with
their lot it is hard not to feel that men of letters were profoundly
unhappy. How can one ignore the fact that Cowper, Swift and Johnson,
all three religious men, were either deranged or overthrown by
insanity? The attempt at self-discipline, the approximation to
classical standards had been going on for such a very long time, and
become so much more exacting that it actually seems to have distorted
the intellect of men who could not hold themselves on so tight a
rein. At any rate I cannot overlook the fact that if I were asked to
choose the three great books of the 18th century, all three would be
autobiographies of one sort or another; Boswell’s _Life_, Saint
Simon’s _Memoirs_ and Rousseau’s _Confessions_. Autobiography is the
art of the misfit, and though two of these books appear to be
straightforward descriptions of individuals or groups, I think you
will find that the other people are described in immediate relation to
the writer, and that in describing them he is working off some
unhappiness of his own; is as it were on tiptoe, talking to us beyond
his century and his circumstances as the great writers of all ages try
to do.

The _Life of Johnson_ has been a booby trap for people of every
period. Boswell was a great but unhappy man who because of his race
and upbringing was incapable of living up to the 18th-century
conception of a gentleman. Even his own man-servant reproved him for
being so badly educated. “Monsieur has not the manners of a
gentleman. His heart is too open.” He suffered atrociously from the
emotional instability of a primitive race brought into contact with a
civilisation which was perhaps the most stable the world had known;
his extreme sensibility made him subject to violent emotional
upheavals which plunged him from one excess into another. In him we
are always conscious of the screaming of the bagpipes, the childlike
goodness and the vicious propensities, the rapturous affection and
unreasonable malice. “This evening, while some of the tunes of
ordinary composition were played with no great skill, my frame was
agitated, and I was conscious of a generous attachment to Dr. Johnson,
as my preceptor and friend, mixed with an affectionate regret that he
was an old man, whom I should probably lose in a short time. I thought
I could defend him at the point of my sword. My reverence and
affection for him were in full glow.”  After reporting fully the
remark of Johnson’s that a madman loves to be in the company of those
he stands in awe of, he quite innocently remarks that he himself
“complained of a wretched changefulness, so that I could not preserve,
for any long continuance, the same views of anything. It was most
comfortable to me to experience in Dr.  Johnson’s company, a relief
from this uneasiness. His steady vigorous mind held firm before me
those objects which my own feeble and tremulous imagination frequently
presented in such a wavering state that my reason could not judge well
of them.” His dependence upon Johnson’s balance sometimes makes us
shout with laughter as when he says: “Even the powerful mind of
Johnson seemed foiled by futurity.”

But it is a very shallow amusement to laugh at Boswell without
realising first that his hysterical emotionalism, of a piece with
MacPherson’s _Ossian_, Scott’s wild romanticism and the terrifying
sentiment of Burns, was part of a wave of rebellion which was tossing
beneath the whole smooth surface of 18th-century life and breaking
into foam only on those wild fringes where the Romans had not left
their tracks; and secondly, without appreciating the supreme artistry
with which he uses it. Sometimes he exaggerates it deliberately and
dramatises himself as freely as he dramatises Johnson, but one should
never forget that it is this clash of opposites, the reaction upon a
quivering sensibility of a superbly integrated character which throws
that character into such startling relief. Johnson, written about in
the same style by a man of his own type, would never have produced a
masterpiece. So read it not as the impression left by a great man on a
little one, but as a portrait of a Roman by a Celt, of the 18th
century by the century which followed; or call it _Sense and
Sensibility_ and read it as the masterpiece which Jane Austen, because
of her partisanship of sense, did not succeed in writing.

Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_ is a strange book, but probably the
strangest book of the period is Saint Simon’s _Memoirs of the Court of
Louis XIV_, and I regret that more than a hundred years after its
publication, there is not even a reasonably good translation or
selection to be had in English—not at any rate, within my means. Like
Boswell it is one of these great capacious comforting books one can
fall back on in hours of depression. Like Boswell, too, it is
sufficiently wrong-headed to reassure us about the humanity of the
writer. Saint Simon drivelling away about the hereditary rights of the
peerage or the shocking, unheard-of, anarchic precedence which the
doting King is granting to the royal bastards might be Boswell
fulminating about the wickedness of those who opposed the ancient,
honourable, humanitarian business of the slave trader. There is even
something similar about the inspiration of the two men. “I felt a
pleasure in walking about Derby,” says Boswell, “such as I always have
in walking about any town to which I am not accustomed. There is an
immediate sensation of novelty; and one speculates on the way in which
life is passed in it, which although there is a sameness everywhere
upon the whole, is yet minutely diversified. The minute diversities in
every thing are wonderful.”  That is Boswell, but it might as well be
Saint Simon.

“I find myself,” he writes, “between the fear of repetitiousness and
that of not sufficiently explaining in detail curious things which we
miss in all the histories and almost all the memoirs of different
periods. One would like to see in them princes with their mistresses
and their ministers, in their everyday life.” There was one very good
reason for this which Saint Simon knew as well as anyone, and he
realised that his own memoirs could not appear, if they appeared at
all, until after his death. (They were not published until after the
Revolution.) He was literally writing as a dead man, for somebody not
yet born, some serious-minded lad like himself who, closing the
history book, would cover his eyes and think (as we have most of us
thought at one time or another). “But I wonder what it was really
like?” “And did you once see Shelley plain?” He dips his pen again and
writes away furiously in a string of loosely connected ungrammatical
clauses, covering two more sheets with a description of the agonies
suffered by the ladies who travelled with Louis XIV because he liked
fresh air and objected to women’s causing the carriage to halt while
they relieved themselves. And at once we are in the carriage with
these great ladies, rich and cultured beyond anything we could
imagine, with the greatest men in the world for lovers, yet in misery
like servant girls from the country travelling for the first time by
train. And Saint Simon, inspired by the thought of those who will read
the lines after he himself is rotten, adds complacently: “These things
which seem to be nothing, and which in fact are nothing, are too
characteristic to be omitted.”

“These things which seem to be nothing and are nothing”—that contains
the very essence of Saint Simon; the man on tiptoe, the awareness of
time to come, the voice we hear rather than the voice we
overhear. Even French critics, usually so discerning, have done small
justice to Saint Simon, and assume that his fondness for discovering
these great ladies in distress or chattering on their close-stools, is
some sort of schoolboy obsession or inspired by some hatred of life
like Swift’s; but they forget that the adorable Dauphine who skips
through his pages like an April day, and whom he like all the other
courtiers worshipped, is described in precisely the same way; and when
he has done dissecting her features, almost all but the eyes hideous
to our judgment, he will cry out: “The graces grew of their own accord
from her every step, her every gesture and her most commonplace
utterance.”

He is, of course, one of the best of all gossip writers. Think of the
glorious fable about the girl queen of Spain who got homesick after
her marriage and wanted to go home to her mother, and Saint Simon’s
sardonic amusement at the proceedings of the Council of State which
was called to consider this national crisis. But a good story is never
enough for him. The root of the matter is in men and women,
particularly in men with women; and so we get that astounding
description of the etiquette of the Spanish court, and begin to
suspect with Saint Simon that the whole trend of Spanish politics is
affected by the fact that the King and Queen, apart from the short
period allotted each morning to private audiences, are always
together; even their close-stools are set side by side; or we follow
him through the grounds of Marly in the train of the King of France
and Mme. de Maintenon.


“The King often walked in front beside the chair. At every moment he
took off his hat and stooped to speak to Mme. de Maintenon, or reply
to her if she spoke to him, which happened less frequently, for he
always had something to say or point out to her. As she feared the air
even in the finest, calmest weather, she pushed the window sideways
each time with three fingers and shut it again immediately. Put down
to look at the new fountain, the same thing took place. Sometimes the
Dauphine came and perched on one of the front poles, but the front
window remained always shut. At the end of the walk the King escorted
Mme. de Maintenon to a point near the chateau, where he took his leave
and resumed his walk.” And once more we catch Saint Simon on tiptoe,
speaking to us across the centuries. “It was a sight one could not get
used to. These trifles almost always escape the memoir writers.
Nevertheless, more than anything else, they give us a precise idea of
all that we look for in (books), which is the character of what has
once existed, which is thus shown naturally by the circumstances.”


For that, after all, is how history is made, and not by grave
decisions taken in council. Spanish etiquette put the commodes of the
King and Queen side by side, and Louis XIV conducted the business of
State in Mme. de Maintenon’s apartments of a winter’s evening while
she read or embroidered.


“She heard all that passed between the King and the minister who both
spoke in fairly loud voices. She rarely interrupted, even more rarely
did she interrupt with any remark of consequence. The King often asked
her advice. Then she replied with great circumspection. Never, or
hardly ever, did she appear to set her heart on anything, still less,
to favour anyone; but she was in an understanding with the minister
who in private dared not refuse anything she asked, and even less to
fail her in her presence. ...

That done (an understanding come to between them) the minister made a
proposal and produced a list of candidates. If by chance the King
paused at the man whom Mme. de Maintenon favoured, the minister left
it at that, and acted as though they need proceed no further. If the
King lingered over somebody else, the minister suggested that they
should first glance over the other names, and then let the King give
his views, taking advantage of this to exclude. He rarely expressly
proposed the man he favoured, but always a number, whom he played off
one against the other so as to confuse the King. Then the King asked
his advice, and he went through the qualifications of a few, coming to
rest finally on the man he favoured. The King nearly always weighed
the matter, and asked Mme. de Maintenon’s opinion. She smiled, played
the incompetent, sometimes said a word for somebody else, and then
came back, if she had not already done so, to the man whom the
minister had recommended, and clinched it at that; so much so that
three-quarters of the favours and appointments and three-quarters more
of the remaining quarter, which passed through the hands of ministers
working in her apartments, were disposed of by her.”


Literature then has two dimensions, a dimension in time which is
history, and a dimension in space which is contemporary literature.
From the first we derive our standards, our sense of what is important
and what is of merely temporary significance, from the other the
living impact of contemporary thought which is too confused to allow
us to do much more than guess at what is important in it and what is
not, whose writers are people relatively as well as absolutely like
ourselves, and in whom we do not have to separate the incidentals of
period, race and profession. Without that, I doubt if one can
appreciate literature at all. One would like to meet Meres, who by
1598 had realised that Shakespeare was a writer comparable with the
greatest of classical times, or even Webster, who in 1610 was still
under the impression that he was a mere theatrical hack like Heywood,
but spare us from the man who knows the winner after the race is won!
Whenever you hear somebody say “I really can’t be bothered with modern
poetry” or “When somebody advises me to read a new book I read an old
one instead” it is a safe guess, in the absence of further evidence,
that this is somebody who is incapable of appreciating any literature,
new or old; an antiquarian who likes the element of history in
literature for its own sake.

I was still quite a young man when in a Paris bookshop I saw a book
called _In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower_ by a writer called
Marcel Proust whom I had never heard of. I took the book for the sake
of the title, but it was months before I settled down to read it. My
first impression was one of intense disappointment. It seemed to have
very little to do with girls and nothing at all to do with
flowers. Then suddenly one day I began to be excited by it. I can
still go through the book and notice the things that interested me
then.


“Still Gilberte did not always return to the Champs Elysees.
Nevertheless, I needed to see her, because I could not remember even
her face. The searching, anxious, exacting way in which we look at the
woman we love, our expectation of the words which will give or
withdraw the hope of a meeting next day, and (till the words are
uttered) the alternative if not actually simultaneous vision of
delight or despair—all this makes our attention before the beloved too
unstable to allow it receive a precise image. Perhaps also this
activity of all the senses together which tries to identify something
external to themselves by means of the sight alone, makes them more
indulgent to the thousand forms, the savours, the movements of the
living woman; when we do not love a thing we immobilise it. The
beloved model, on the other hand, moves; we never have anything but
spoiled photographs.”


What was it, this queer sinuous quality, which took something a 19th
century novelist would have dismissed in a line, and dissected and
then expanded it into an almost independent existence. You couldn’t
call it a novel: it ran to sixteen volumes, and all the incident it
contained could have been adequately dealt with in one. It was more
like a commentary on a novel. For instance, a sentence like this
occupied my mind for days. “It is our attention which puts objects
into a room, and habit which takes them out again and leaves space for
ourselves there.” Or this: “It is always in a temporary state of mind
that we take definitive resolutions.” Or this: “One builds one’s life
for a woman’s sake, and when at last one can receive her there, she
does not come, and dies so far as oneself is concerned, and then one
lives on, a prisoner in a house which was intended only for her.”

Even stranger than the form of the book were the theories it
suggested, and which become clarified in the later volumes: that the
essential realities of literature are not contained in the conscious
mind at all, but in the memory and the subconscious mind from which
the writer dredges them. “The artist’s labour, of trying to perceive
under matter, under experience, under words, something which differs
from them, is exactly the inverse labour to that which, at every
moment when we live diverted from ourselves, self-love, passion,
intelligence and habit also accomplish in us, by heaping above our
real impressions to hide them from us the names and practical aims of
what we falsely call life.”

That great book which still delights me as much as it did when I first
read it was my inseparable companion for months. It seemed to
summarise and explain many things which troubled me in contemporary
literature. It complemented the very different work of James Joyce
which in those days I read nearly as much.

Joyce’s earlier stories were straightforward imitations of
naturalistic stories in the manner of Flaubert. Joyce was a man with a
curiously sensitive ear, and had a terrific tendency to parody. For
instance, this is how he ends one of his stories: “‘What do you think
of that, Crofton?’ cried Mr. Hency. “Isn’t that fine? What?”
Mr. Crofton said it was a very fine piece of writing”—which may or
may not remind you of Flaubert’s ending to the tale of Herodias “As
it (the head) was very heavy, they carried it turn and turn about.”

But naturalism has one fatal weakness which shows how much it has
derived from a painter’s studio. After you have described a scene as
if it were a leg of mutton, there is quite a lot of loose creative
stuff hanging about in you, and it has a tendency to make the pendulum
swing in an alarming way. For instance, Ibsen begins with a sort of
symbolism, swings violently in the direction of naturalism and swings
back even more violently into symbolism again. In Flaubert it had the
effect of driving him to romantic excesses of the wildest kind. The
form it took in Joyce was autobiography. _The Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man_ is Joyce looking back on his childhood and boyhood in
Dublin. The remarkable thing about it is that it is not all written in
one style. In Joyce’s early work he had shown a remarkable aptitude
for copying the style of another writer, and between the first draft,
portion of which has been published under the title of Stephen Hero,
and the completed version, he had taken the fancy to write in a
succession of styles which would convey a sense of the change from
childhood into boyhood and adolescence. It begins in baby talk, and
when Joyce is describing himself at the age of ten or twelve he writes
in the style of a schoolboy’s essay.


“It was queer they hadn’t given him any medicine. Perhaps Brother
Michael would bring it back when he came. They said you got stinking
stuff to drink when you were in the infirmary. But he felt better now
than before. It would be nice getting better slowly. You could get a
book then. There was a book in the library about Holland.”


When he is a few years older and discovers religion for the first
time, the style is modified again and becomes sickly sweet in the
manner of a devotional book for young people.


“It was easy to be good. God’s yoke was sweet and light. It was
better never to have sinned, to have remained always a child, for God
loved little children and suffered them to come to Him. It was a
terrible and a sad thing to sin. But God was merciful to poor sinners
who were truly sorry. How true that was! That was indeed goodness.”


After that young Daedalus goes to the university, and the style
changes to a nauseating imitation of the Pateresque prose of the
nineties. Notice how the principal words are repeated mechanically:
touch, touch, touch, touch; woman, woman, woman; figure, figure, boy,
boy, in a maddeningly wearisome way; yet in its place in the book this
passage does give us a sense of the sick sentimentality of
adolescence.


“The soft beauty of the Latin word touched with an enchanting touch
the dark of the evening, with a touch fainter and more persuading than
the touch of music or of a woman’s hand. The strife of their minds was
quelled. The figure of a woman as she appears in the liturgy of the
church passed silently through the darkness: a white-robed figure,
small and slender as a boy, and with a falling girdle. Her voice,
frail and high as a boy’s, was heard intoning from a distant choir the
first words of a woman which pierce the gloom and clamour of the first
chanting of the Passion: _Et tu cum Jesu Galilæao eras_.

And all hearts were touched and turned to her voice, shining like a
young star, shining clearer as the voice intoned the proparoxyton and
more faintly as the cadence died.”


But it was not so much that book, though I must have read it scores of
times, which really excited my generation. _Ulysses_ opened up a new
world to us. It is the story of one day in the life of two Dubliners:
Daedalus, the hero of _Portrait of the Artist_, and a Jew called
Bloom. Both are lonely; Stephen Daedalus has lost his religion and
left his family; Bloom has lost his son and his wife is unfaithful to
him. They are followed all day in their wanderings; at times they
almost meet. They meet at night in a brothel, and when Daedalus gets
involved in a brawl with two drunken English soldiers, the Jew forgets
himself and calls “Stephen!” The whole vast book is centred about
that one word which passes unnoticed both by Bloom and Stephen; and
when it has been spoken the two men begin to drift apart again; the
world turns towards morning, and their essential solitude is resumed.

Because Bloom made Joyce think of Ulysses in the Greek epic, the whole
story is made to fit into the framework of the _Odyssey_, and the
various episodes of the poem have their counterparts in the book. _The
Lotus Eaters_ has its counterpart in the Turkish Bath; _Hades_ in
Glasnevin Cemetery. The style of each episode is varied to correspond
with the subject. In the episode in the lying-in hospital the birth of
a child is represented by a series of parodies of English prose from
its earliest example to the present day—an elaboration of the trick he
had used in _Portrait of the Artist_. _Proteus_ takes place on
Sandymount Strand, and as sand is itself an image of change, the style
drifts along, mirroring change in every form.


“In long lassoes from the Cockle Lake the water flowed full, covering
green-goldenly lagoons of sand, rising, flowing. My ashplant will
float away. I shall wait. No, they will pass on, passing chafing
against the low rocks, swirling, passing. Better get this job over
quick. Listen: a four-worded wave-speech: seesoo, hrss, rseiss,
oos. Vehement breath of waters and seasnakes, rearing horses,
rocks. In cups of rocks it slops, slop, slop, slap: bounded in
barrels. And spent, its speech ceases. It flows purling, widely
flowing, floating foampool, flower unfurling.”


Even more fantastic in conception and style was Joyce’s last work,
_Finnegan’s Wake_, which I cannot read now, but which delighted me
when it first began to appear. The hero of this (at least, so we are
told) is a Dublin publican with his wife, two sons and a daughter
(though these, too, we must take on trust from those who have had it
from the stables because we never meet them). The hero has fallen
asleep before the book opens, and in his dreams imagines himself to be
Dublin, his wife the River Liffey, his sons the North Side and South
Side, the respectable and Bohemian extremes of the city. He has, it
seems, been flirting with a nursemaid, and is actually tried by a
court consisting of the Four Evangelists and the Twelve
Apostles. There are no characters, merely principles; men are earth
and women water, and they change their shapes and relive mythology and
history. _Ulysses_ was based on the _Odyssey_. This is based on the
philosophy of Vico, a form of the cyclic theory of civilisation. The
thunder begins it; civilisation begins with religion, and works
through various phases till it has completed its circle and then
reverts. It is the same theory which inspires all Yeats’ later
poetry. “All things fall and are built again;”


  Man’s life is thought,
  And he, despite his terror, cannot cease,
  Ravening through century after century.
  Ravening, raging and uprooting that he may come
  Into the desolation of reality.


The style is as abnormal as the conception, because almost every word
and sentence is distorted as it is in dreams in which we can dream the
word “umbrella”: and know perfectly well that it really means
“whiskey”, some censor of the soul having endeavoured to conceal from
us the fact that we like whiskey. In Joyce the inflection of a word
may mean that, or it may mean that the dreamer is thinking of a
previous existence in which he was St. Michael the Archangel or Dean
Swift.

There was a third writer who had the same sort of influence on my
generation as Proust and Joyce. That was D. H. Lawrence. Like Joyce,
he began as a story-teller in the old sense of the word, and from the
purely literary point of view, never again wrote anything so good as
his first important novel, _Sons and Lovers_. His later works are
prophetic and religious. Lawrence has some quality which is very
difficult to define, some extreme sensitiveness to nature and the
forces of nature. He could describe people in a field, and the people
would be shadows, but the field would be a personality. As primitive
people have faculties sharper than ours, Lawrence seems to have had an
extraordinary sense of the natural powers flowing through life,
obstructed by man-made notions and creeds. Ultimately, his was the
revolt of the senses against the mind, against knowledge in any
rational form, and a reversion to sheer animal instinct. It is
probably useless to try to formulate such a creed in words because
there are no words to adumbrate it. Nor was Lawrence the patient sort
of writer who sits for days in agony waiting for an equivalent image
to form in his mind. The creative impulse flowed through him
continuously, and poured out of him in travel sketches, stories and
poems in which places, people, and incidents are caricatured in
impatient, sometimes hysterical language, yet even at his most
outrageous, we never feel he is talking nonsense. We feel, as we often
feel with dreams, that the creative impulse has been trying to say
something to us, and that nothing is wrong but the words.

But the fact that these three writers were the most representative and
influential of their time shows just how far the world of the
19th-century novel had been shaken. Each of them instead of dealing
with the social reality was digging away at its roots; each of them
instead of writing novels was writing autobiography of one sort or
another. There were other important writers like Virginia Woolf in
England and Kafka in Germany who were doing the same sort of thing in
slightly different ways, and wherever a novelist tried to write the
19th century type of novel, as Galsworthy did in _The Forsythe Saga_,
it seemed incredibly meaningless and old-fashioned. It bore the same
relation to living literature as Drinkwater’s “I’ve never been to
Mamble that lies upon the Teme” bore to Eliot’s ugly powerful poetry.

What had happened to make Galsworthy seem old-fashioned? I think much
the same sort of thing that happened to make 18th century poetry seem
old-fashioned to our grandfathers, but on a far greater scale. The
rule of the middle classes liberated certain forces which hadn’t been
calculated on. Countrysides were drained of life and cities expanded
with a vast army of people who had lost their traditional life and had
not found a civilised one to replace it. Scientific discovery went on,
and faced with distances and periods of time which staggered the human
imagination, traditional belief declined. Even in _Madame Bovary_ we
can see the writer’s sensitive nature withdrawing from contact with
this ubiquitous crude humanity without any rich interior life, without
even the instinct which enables the bird to build its nest. It is at
this point that we begin to perceive the rent in our civilisation;
either the mind turns inwards looking for the richness it has lost,
which produces autobiographical writing, or it looks at the bank
holiday crowd with distasteful objectivity. _Ulysses_ combines the
two, the introspection of Stephen Daedalus and the spiritual emptiness
of Mr. Bloom.


“Never know anything about it. Waste of time. Gasballs spinning about,
crossing each other, passing. Same old ding-dong always. Gas, then
solid, then world, then cold, then dead shell drifting round, frozen
rock like that Pineapple rock.”


That, of course, is not only the Little Man, but Joyce himself and
all of us.


“He must be fed up with that job, shaking that thing over all the
corpses they trot up. What harm if he could see what he was shaking it
over. Every mortal day a fresh batch: middle-aged men, old women,
children, women dead in childbirth, men with beards, baldheaded
business men, consumptive girls with little sparrows’ breasts. All the
year round he prayed the same thing over them all and shook water on
top of them: sleep. On Dignam now.—_In paradisum_. Said he was going to
paradise or is in paradise. Says that over everybody. Tiresome kind of
job. But he has to say something.”


What can one do with the Little Man? We see some novelists in a fury
of rage turning to Catholicism, and Graham Greene makes his hero of a
murderer who is also a pious Catholic. Far better to be a murderer,
and damn your soul consistently and burn forever in Hell than believe
that “it’s only gasballs spinning about. Same old ding-dong.” Others
turn Communist—the Little Man is very susceptible to organisation; all
he wants is to be told what to do. Not having any soul to damn he can
be killed off in very large numbers as required—Kulaks, Communists,
Japanese—the atomic bomb is a notable addition to the list of valuable
scientific discoveries and will shortly make it impossible for the
Little Man to live in cities at all.


  Ravening, raging and uprooting that he may come
  Into the desolation of reality.


But this, after all, is a book about literature, not about philosophy,
and you do not want to know whether I think the solution is in
authoritarianism or in Communism, or whether I believe with Yeats that
a cycle of life is over and a new Dark Age beginning. If I have
introduced all these disturbing ideas, it is only because literature
is communication, and while it lifts the burden of solitude and puts
us in contact with other minds, it puts us in contact with their
doubts and fears as well as with their pleasures and hopes.


Source: Scans from
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.198119