A Novelist on Novels Read online

  Form and the Novel

  Every now and then a reviewer, recovering the enthusiasm of a critic,discovers that the English novel has lost its form, that the men whoto-day, a little ineffectually, bid for immortality, are burning thegods they once worshipped. They declare that the novel, because it is nolonger a story travelling harmoniously from a beginning towards a middleand an end, is not a novel at all, that it is no more than a platformwhere self-expression has given place to self-proclamation. Andsometimes, a little more hopefully, they venture to prophesy that soonthe proud Sicambrian will worship the gods that he burnt.

  I suspect that this classic revival is not very likely to come about.True, some writers, to-day in their cradles, may yet emulate Flaubert,but they will not be Flaubert. They may take something of his essenceand blend it with their own; but that will create a new essence, forliterature does not travel in a circle. Rather it travels along acycloid, bending back upon itself, following the movement of man.Everything in the world we inhabit conspires to alter in the mirror ofliterature the picture it reflects; haste, luxury, hystericalsensuousness, race-optimism and race-despair. And notably publicity, theattitude of the Press. For the time has gone when novels were writtenfor young ladies, and told the placid love of Edwin and Angeline;nowadays the novel, growing ambitious, lays hands upon science,commerce, philosophy: we write less of moated granges, more of tea-shopsand advertising agencies, for the Press is teaching the people to lookto the novel for a cosmic picture of the day, for a cosmic commentary.

  Evidently it was not always so. Flaubert, de Maupassant, Butler, Tolstoy(who are not a company of peers), aspired mainly 'to see life sanely andto see it whole.' Because they lived in days of lesser socialcomplexity, economically speaking, they were able to use a purelynarrative style, the only notable living exponent of which is Mr ThomasHardy. But we, less fortunate perhaps, confronted with new facts, thefactory system, popular education, religious unrest, pictorialrebellion, must adapt ourselves and our books to the new spirit. I donot pretend that the movement has been sudden. Many years before_L'Education Sentimentale_ was written, Stendhal had imported chaos(with genius) into the spacious 'thirties. But Stendhal was a meteor:Dostoievsky and Mr Romain Rolland had to come to break up the oldnarrative form, to make the road for Mr Wells and for the younger menwho attempt, not always successfully, to crush within the covers of anoctavo volume the whole of the globe spinning round its axis, to expresswith an attitude the philosophy of life, to preach by gospel rather thanby statement.

  Such movements as these naturally breed a reaction, and I confess that,when faced with the novels of the 'young men,' so turgid, so bombastic,I turn longing eyes towards the still waters of Turgenev, sometimes eventowards my first influence, now long discarded--the novels of Zola.Though the Zeitgeist hold my hand and bid me abandon my characters,forget that they should be people like ourselves, living, loving, dying,and this enough; though it suggest to me that I should analyse theeconomic state, consider what new world we are making, enlist under thebanner of the 'free spirits' or of the 'simple life,' I think I shouldturn again towards the old narrative simplicities, towards the schedulesof what the hero said, and of what the vicar had in his drawing-room, ifI were not conscious that form evolves.

  If literature be at all a living force it must evolve as much as man,and more if it is to lead him; it must establish a correspondencebetween itself and the uneasy souls for which it exists. So it is nolonger possible to content ourselves with such as Jane Austen; we mustexploit ourselves. Ashamed as we are of the novel with a purpose, we canno longer write novels without a purpose. We need to express the motionof the world rather than its contents. While the older novelists werestatic, we have to be kinetic: is not the picture-palace here to giveus a lesson and to remind us that the waxworks which delighted ourgrandfathers have gone?

  But evolution is not quite the same thing as revolution. I do believethat revolution is only evolution in a hurry; but revolution can be intoo great a hurry, and cover itself with ridicule. When the Futuristspropose to suppress the adjective, the adverb, the conjunction, and tomake of literature a thing of 'positive substantives' and 'dynamicverbs'--when Mr Peguy repeats over and over again the same sentencebecause, in his view, that is how we think--we smile. We are both rightand wrong to smile, for these people express in the wrong way that whichis the right thing. The modern novel has and must have a newsignificance. It is not enough that the novelist should be cheery asDickens, or genially cynical as Thackeray, or adventurous as Fielding.The passions of men, love, hunger, patriotism, worship, all these thingsmust now be shared between the novelist and his reader. He mustcollaborate with his audience ... emulate the show-girls in a revue,abandon the stage, and come parading through the stalls. A new passionis born, and it is a complex of the old passions; the novelist of to-daycannot end as Montaigne, say that he goes to seek a great perhaps. Heneeds to be more positive, to aspire to know what we are doing with theworking-class, with the Empire, the woman question, and the proper useof lentils. It is this aspiration towards truth that breaks up the oldform: you cannot tell a story in a straightforward manner when you dobut glimpse it through the veil of the future.

  And so it goes hard with Edwin and Angeline. We have no more time totell that love; we need to break up their simple story, to considerwhether they are eugenically fitted for each other, and whether theirmarriage settlement has a bearing upon national finance. Inevitably webecome chaotic; the thread of our story is tangled in the threads whichbind the loves of all men. We must state, moralise, explain, analysemotives, because we try to fit into a steam civilisation the oldhorse-plough of our fathers. I do not think that we shall break the oldplough; now and then we may use it upon sands, but there is much goodearth for it to turn.