I.
"I have not read this author's books, and if I have read them I have
forgotten what they were about."
These words are reported as having been uttered in our midst not a
hundred years ago, publicly, from the seat of justice, by a civic
magistrate. The words of our municipal rulers have a solemnity and
importance far above the words of other mortals, because our municipal
rulers more than any other variety of our governors and masters represent
the average wisdom, temperament, sense and virtue of the community. This
generalisation, it ought to be promptly said in the interests of eternal
justice (and recent friendship), does not apply to the United States of
America. There, if one may believe the long and helpless indignations of
their daily and weekly Press, the majority of municipal rulers appear to
be thieves of a particularly irrepressible sort. But this by the way. My
concern is with a statement issuing from the average temperament and the
average wisdom of a great and wealthy community, and uttered by a civic
magistrate obviously without fear and without reproach.
I confess I am pleased with his temper, which is that of prudence. "I
have not read the books," he says, and immediately he adds, "and if I
have read them I have forgotten." This is excellent caution. And I like
his style: it is unartificial and bears the stamp of manly sincerity. As
a reported piece of prose this declaration is easy to read and not
difficult to believe. Many books have not been read; still more have
been forgotten. As a piece of civic oratory this declaration is
strikingly effective. Calculated to fall in with the bent of the popular
mind, so familiar with all forms of forgetfulness, it has also the power
to stir up a subtle emotion while it starts a train of thought--and what
greater force can be expected from human speech? But it is in
naturalness that this declaration is perfectly delightful, for there is
nothing more natural than for a grave City Father to forget what the
books he has read once--long ago--in his giddy youth maybe--were about.
And the books in question are novels, or, at any rate, were written as
novels. I proceed thus cautiously (following my illustrious example)
because being without fear and desiring to remain as far as possible
without reproach, I confess at once that I have not read them.
I have not; and of the million persons or more who are said to have read
them, I never met one yet with the talent of lucid exposition
sufficiently developed to give me a connected account of what they are
about. But they are books, part and parcel of humanity, and as such, in
their ever increasing, jostling multitude, they are worthy of regard,
admiration, and compassion.
Especially of compassion. It has been said a long time ago that books
have their fate. They have, and it is very much like the destiny of man.
They share with us the great incertitude of ignominy or glory--of severe
justice and senseless persecution--of calumny and misunderstanding--the
shame of undeserved success. Of all the inanimate objects, of all men's
creations, books are the nearest to us, for they contain our very
thought, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to
truth, and our persistent leaning towards error. But most of all they
resemble us in their precarious hold on life. A bridge constructed
according to the rules of the art of bridge-building is certain of a
long, honourable and useful career. But a book as good in its way as the
bridge may perish obscurely on the very day of its birth. The art of
their creators is not sufficient to give them more than a moment of life.
Of the books born from the restlessness, the inspiration, and the vanity
of human minds, those that the Muses would love best lie more than all
others under the menace of an early death. Sometimes their defects will
save them. Sometimes a book fair to see may--to use a lofty
expression--have no individual soul. Obviously a book of that sort
cannot die. It can only crumble into dust. But the best of books
drawing sustenance from the sympathy and memory of men have lived on the
brink of destruction, for men's memories are short, and their sympathy
is, we must admit, a very fluctuating, unprincipled emotion.
No secret of eternal life for our books can be found amongst the formulas
of art, any more than for our bodies in a prescribed combination of
drugs. This is not because some books are not worthy of enduring life,
but because the formulas of art are dependent on things variable,
unstable and untrustworthy; on human sympathies, on prejudices, on likes
and dislikes, on the sense of virtue and the sense of propriety, on
beliefs and theories that, indestructible in themselves, always change
their form--often in the lifetime of one fleeting generation.
II.
Of all books, novels, which the Muses should love, make a serious claim
on our compassion. The art of the novelist is simple. At the same time
it is the most elusive of all creative arts, the most liable to be
obscured by the scruples of its servants and votaries, the one
pre-eminently destined to bring trouble to the mind and the heart of the
artist. After all, the creation of a world is not a small undertaking
except perhaps to the divinely gifted. In truth every novelist must
begin by creating for himself a world, great or little, in which he can
honestly believe. This world cannot be made otherwise than in his own
image: it is fated to remain individual and a little mysterious, and yet
it must resemble something already familiar to the experience, the
thoughts and the sensations of his readers. At the heart of fiction,
even the least worthy of the name, some sort of truth can be found--if
only the truth of a childish theatrical ardour in the game of life, as in
the novels of Dumas the father. But the fair truth of human delicacy can
be found in Mr. Henry James's novels; and the comical, appalling truth of
human rapacity let loose amongst the spoils of existence lives in the
monstrous world created by Balzac. The pursuit of happiness by means
lawful and unlawful, through resignation or revolt, by the clever
manipulation of conventions or by solemn hanging on to the skirts of the
latest scientific theory, is the only theme that can be legitimately
developed by the novelist who is the chronicler of the adventures of
mankind amongst the dangers of the kingdom of the earth. And the kingdom
of this earth itself, the ground upon which his individualities stand,
stumble, or die, must enter into his scheme of faithful record. To
encompass all this in one harmonious conception is a great feat; and even
to attempt it deliberately with serious intention, not from the senseless
prompting of an ignorant heart, is an honourable ambition. For it
requires some courage to step in calmly where fools may be eager to rush.
As a distinguished and successful French novelist once observed of
fiction, "C'est un art _trop_ difficile."
It is natural that the novelist should doubt his ability to cope with his
task. He imagines it more gigantic than it is. And yet literary
creation being only one of the legitimate forms of human activity has no
value but on the condition of not excluding the fullest recognition of
all the more distinct forms of action. This condition is sometimes
forgotten by the man of letters, who often, especially in his youth, is
inclined to lay a claim of exclusive superiority for his own amongst all
the other tasks of the human mind. The mass of verse and prose may
glimmer here and there with the glow of a divine spark, but in the sum of
human effort it has no special importance. There is no justificative
formula for its existence any more than for any other artistic
achievement. With the rest of them it is destined to be forgotten,
without, perhaps, leaving the faintest trace. Where a novelist has an
advantage over the workers in other fields of thought is in his privilege
of freedom--the freedom of expression and the freedom of confessing his
innermost beliefs--which should console him for the hard slavery of the
pen.
III.
Liberty of imagination should be the most precious possession of a
novelist. To try voluntarily to discover the fettering dogmas of some
romantic, realistic, or naturalistic creed in the free work of its own
inspiration, is a trick worthy of human perverseness which, after
inventing an absurdity, endeavours to find for it a pedigree of
distinguished ancestors. It is a weakness of inferior minds when it is
not the cunning device of those who, uncertain of their talent, would
seek to add lustre to it by the authority of a school. Such, for
instance, are the high priests who have proclaimed Stendhal for a prophet
of Naturalism. But Stendhal himself would have accepted no limitation of
his freedom. Stendhal's mind was of the first order. His spirit above
must be raging with a peculiarly Stendhalesque scorn and indignation. For
the truth is that more than one kind of intellectual cowardice hides
behind the literary formulas. And Stendhal was pre-eminently courageous.
He wrote his two great novels, which so few people have read, in a spirit
of fearless liberty.
It must not be supposed that I claim for the artist in fiction the
freedom of moral Nihilism. I would require from him many acts of faith
of which the first would be the cherishing of an undying hope; and hope,
it will not be contested, implies all the piety of effort and
renunciation. It is the God-sent form of trust in the magic force and
inspiration belonging to the life of this earth. We are inclined to
forget that the way of excellence is in the intellectual, as
distinguished from emotional, humility. What one feels so hopelessly
barren in declared pessimism is just its arrogance. It seems as if the
discovery made by many men at various times that there is much evil in
the world were a source of proud and unholy joy unto some of the modern
writers. That frame of mind is not the proper one in which to approach
seriously the art of fiction. It gives an author--goodness only knows
why--an elated sense of his own superiority. And there is nothing more
dangerous than such an elation to that absolute loyalty towards his
feelings and sensations an author should keep hold of in his most exalted
moments of creation.
To be hopeful in an artistic sense it is not necessary to think that the
world is good. It is enough to believe that there is no impossibility of
its being made so. If the flight of imaginative thought may be allowed
to rise superior to many moralities current amongst mankind, a novelist
who would think himself of a superior essence to other men would miss the
first condition of his calling. To have the gift of words is no such
great matter. A man furnished with a long-range weapon does not become a
hunter or a warrior by the mere possession of a fire-arm; many other
qualities of character and temperament are necessary to make him either
one or the other. Of him from whose armoury of phrases one in a hundred
thousand may perhaps hit the far-distant and elusive mark of art I would
ask that in his dealings with mankind he should be capable of giving a
tender recognition to their obscure virtues. I would not have him
impatient with their small failings and scornful of their errors. I
would not have him expect too much gratitude from that humanity whose
fate, as illustrated in individuals, it is open to him to depict as
ridiculous or terrible. I would wish him to look with a large
forgiveness at men's ideas and prejudices, which are by no means the
outcome of malevolence, but depend on their education, their social
status, even their professions. The good artist should expect no
recognition of his toil and no admiration of his genius, because his toil
can with difficulty be appraised and his genius cannot possibly mean
anything to the illiterate who, even from the dreadful wisdom of their
evoked dead, have, so far, culled nothing but inanities and platitudes. I
would wish him to enlarge his sympathies by patient and loving
observation while he grows in mental power. It is in the impartial
practice of life, if anywhere, that the promise of perfection for his art
can be found, rather than in the absurd formulas trying to prescribe this
or that particular method of technique or conception. Let him mature the
strength of his imagination amongst the things of this earth, which it is
his business to cherish and know, and refrain from calling down his
inspiration ready-made from some heaven of perfections of which he knows
nothing. And I would not grudge him the proud illusion that will come
sometimes to a writer: the illusion that his achievement has almost
equalled the greatness of his dream. For what else could give him the
serenity and the force to hug to his breast as a thing delightful and
human, the virtue, the rectitude and sagacity of his own City, declaring
with simple eloquence through the mouth of a Conscript Father: "I have
not read this author's books, and if I have read them I have forgotten
. . ."