Awarding the 1920 Prizes in Literature

A British Novelist Attempts to Revive an Ancient and Praise-worthy Custom

HUGH WALPOLE

THERE used to be a delightful habit in days gone by of writing lists, of giving marks, prizes and other rewards when summarizing the literary accomplishment of the dying year. That custom has passed away, I'm afraid, with the War, partly because there have been so many other things to think about, partly because there has really not been so much room in the papers as formerly for "mere literature." All the same the habit will,

I hope, soon be revived.

These lists and prizes clear the air and help us, a little, to see where we stand—only a little, because twelve months cannot possibly be time enough for any proper perspective. Nevertheless, it is instructive to observe how many books even six swift months can turn into dead-and-gone corpses. These judgments are, of course, always personal things, and it is extremely vain-hearted for anyone to pretend to be dogmatic about contemporary literature. But it is pleasing to dream a little and to imagine that one has been endowed by some benevolent millionaire with the allotting of certain awards. One, for the best book in any kind of English literature published in 1920. Two, for the best English novel published during the same period. Three, for the best work of poetry published during the same period.

In "English" is included any Scottish,

Welsh or Irish literature, but not American.

In considering the best book of the year one is at once confronted with personal prejudice, because for myself I should immediately award the prize to Percy Lubbock's edition of Henry James' Letters. For anyone who knew Henry James with any sort of intimacy, I cannot believe that any other work will rival this one, and, even when one rules out the personal equation, I should lay, I think, a pretty stiff wager that fifty years hence men who care for literature will acclaim this as the book of 1920. In estimating its value, we are certainly at present baffled by our nearness to the man. He has suffered since his death, as every man suffers, from a certain depreciation. All the critics— and they were many—who were irritated by the subtleties and elaborations of his later work, but kept silence while he was alive, have now burst forth into full cry. Undoubtedly, too, the years of the war have made us impatient of subtleties, and the world in which Henry James found his themes seems to us now romantic and simple and dramatic because of its tragic distance from our new complicated times.

Henry James and the War

A PART from all this, however, the Letters are surely a marvellous record of literary life in Europe during the last forty years; they afford also the complete manifestation of a great heroic, generous soul. I do not hesitate to call the War Letters at the end of the second volume epic in their poetry and courage.

Were I prevented for personal reasons from awarding the prize to the Henry James Volumes, I should give it, I think, to Mrs. Asquith's Autobiography. This book on its appearance was greeted with howls and shrieks of abuse. The Times had three long columns of pompous mid-Victorian vituperation. The reasons for this clamor were partly political, partly social and partly personal. There were certain lapses of taste; especially the now notorious Stevenson sentence was to be regretted and was at once eliminated from the second edition. But the whole question of Autobiography is raised by this book. We have suffered for years from a flood of dead, dull, insignificant autobiographies, and they were dull and insignificant because the writers were afraid of telling the truth. It was Mrs. Asquith's determination to have a personal portrait on the page, not so much because the writer felt herself to be a remarkable human being, but simply because the honest confessions of any human being, if they are honest, must be of compelling interest. That portrait she has achieved; no one can read the book and deny that there is a vivid personality there, honest in so far as anyone can be honest, and most certainly courageous.

The charge of egotism is especially absurd. What is an autobiography to be if it is not egoistic? What is the very meaning of autobiography but preoccupation with the soul of the writer? When the shouting has died away, the true merits of this very remarkable work will be clearly seen.

Many people would maintain that Wells's History of the World is the most remarkable book of 1920. With this judgment I cannot agree. Although it contains many pages of brilliant journalism and although Wells has gathered around him scholars to justify his detail, which is in most cases quite astonishingly accurate, the whole book is desperately vitiated by its wilful and over-emphasized bias towards a vague sentimental Internationalism. The portraits of Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon are ludicrously false, minor incidents are dragged forward, major incidents obscured and the work becomes, long before the end, a political thesis, a kind of leading article in a provincial newspaper.

How many of us long for the day when Wells will return to his earlier kind of novel-writing, and abandon, once and for all, this political and religious theorizing for which he is fitted neither by education nor temperament.

The only other book of the year I would mention here is Professor Elton's English Literature: 1830-1880. This is a continuation of his earlier 1770-1830 volumes, and it is so entirely admirable in its arrangement, style, balance and justice that it gives lustre and distinction to the whole literary production of the year.

The chapters on Carlyle and Ruskin, on the Brownings and Thackeray, should stand for many years to come as the best and most complete judgments on these masters.

The Novels of the Year

WHEN we come to the novels of the year there is another story to tell. It would be hard work for any critic to deny that 1920 has been the most disappointing year in English fiction for many a day. I cannot say what the severest years of the war produced, because I was out of England and must have missed many interesting books, but I cannot doubt that they were better than the year Nineteen Twenty.

It would be interesting here to make a little investigation into the fierce battle that British publishing is now making against fearful odds, but that is not the subject of this paper. The fact remains that novels are now so expensive that the libraries (formerly the principal buyers) take as few copies as they can, that the bookshops do likewise, and that reviewing in the newspapers is cut to the lowest possible minimum. A new novelist of individuality to-day has almost no chance of a hearing at all: the younger men of talent are turning to poetry and the essay and the drama.

We have, with the possible exceptions of Open the Door by Mrs. Carswell and Quiet Interior by Miss Jones, not had a single first novel of even decent promise this year. If I had to award a prize for the best novel of the year I should choose I think from the following half-dozen: Conrad's Rescue, Galsworthy's In Chancery, Sheila Kaye-Smith's Green Apple Harvest, May Sinclair's The Romantic, Frederic Niven's A Tale That Is Told, and Norman Douglas' They Went. This is, of course, a purely personal choice, and, if* American literature were considered, Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence and Joseph Hergersheimer's Linda, Condon would have to be included. It will be noticed that all these half-dozen novels are by old hands. Conrad has been writing for twenty-six years, Galsworthy for over twenty, May Sinclair for twenty, Norman Douglas for fifteen, Sheila Kaye-Smith and Frederic Niven for at least fifteen.

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Not one of these books, with the definite exception of Green Apple Harvest, is the best their author can give us. I should be inclined to give the prize for the novel of the year to Miss KayeSmith's book. The Rescue is, in my humble opinion, not the best possible Conrad. It does not compare with Nostromo, Lord Jim, The Nigger of the Narcissus or even Victory. It has magnificent things in it, things that no other novelist in the group could approach, but it remains an anecdote unduly expanded and Mrs. Travers is, I think, the most unconvincing figure in all Conrad's great gallery.

Green Apple Harvest surely sets a seal on Miss Kaye-Smith's arrival. She has been writing for many years now, she has many excellent novels to her credit, and Sussex Gorse, Little England and Tamarisk Town are securely set among the fine novels of the XXth century, but Green Apple Harvest has a maturity, a form and an assurance of method that belongs to none of the others. Nothing is harder to deal with than this business of religious conversion and to some materialists the book may seem a great deal of bother about nothing*at all; the book was assuredly not written for them. The Romantic is merely an episode, scarcely more than a short story. It is brilliantly done and magnificently written.

Norman Douglas achieved much fame some years ago with his fantastic satire, South Wind. The critics have naturally said that They Went is not so good as its predecessor. His method and irony are not so novel as they were then, and it would never do to allow one man two masterpieces in so short a time. Nevertheless They Went is a beautiful book, in many. ways more securely wrought than the other. What it is all about, only Norman Douglas can say. As a fairy tale it is beautiful enough, with its wicked and enchanting Princess, its city of mother-of-pearl, its paganism and irony. It might indeed stand for the novel of the year if it were a novel—it is in a class by itself and is not to be driven into literary sale divisions.

Galsworthy's In Chancery seems to me an admirable example of the difficulty of writing sequels. Galsworthy's art is all there; it is, I think, too much there. He is so anxious: to have no superfluous word, no unnecessary character or incident that he has almost squeezed the life out of it. The Forsytes, whatever else they were, had in A Man of Property an abundance of life. Now they seem to be terrified lest they should overstep their bounds. Galsworthy's eye is forever upon them, his moral has to be pointed, his balance maintained. Freedom is certainly not what the Forsytes deserve; it does not look as if they are likely to obtain it.

There remains Frederic Niven's A Tale That Is Told. This is a quiet, unobtrusive, almost casual story, beautiful in its artless art, memorable in its creation of character. When are people going to wake up and discover that in Niven we have one of the finest novelists alive? It is indeed remarkable that the author of Justice of the Peace, A Wilderness of Monkeys, Ellen Adair and now this book can continue unsung. Of course, the day will come. But it is stupid that it should be so long postponed.

The Close of a Period

I HAVE left the poetry to the last because there is so little of interest to record. The finest new poetic work of the year is, I think, Masefield's Right Royal, and the most interesting new poet Edmund Blunden, the author of The Waggoner. Right Royal has in it the strange lapses that we have now learned to expect in the longer Masefield poems, but it has quite astonishing beauties. It has life, personality, spirit and fire, essentials that so many of the younger poets omit as unimportant. Blunden is not one of these. The Waggoner is most individual work and he should have a fine career before him.

Other important publications have been the collected verse of John Freeman, Walter de la Mare, and Edward Thomas. The Poet Laureate has given us a volume, October; Thomas Hardy published in The Times one most beautiful poem on Armistice Day, showing once again that he is the greatest of them all, and there has been some fine poetry in the London Mercury from Thomas Armstrong, another new recruit. There has been a fifth volume of Wheels, the Sitwell annual.

It cannot be denied that the boom in poetry, so extraordinary during the last years of the War, is over. That is perhaps a good thing. Poets will have to be poets once more and not merely recounters of their war experiences.

It has been, in fine, a year of literary suspension. We know now what the older men can do; the younger men have not yet shown us. The Renaissance will come. What its form and colour will be no one can tell. But one thing is certain—that one Period of English Literature is now definitely closed. 1895-1915 is perhaps no bad definition of it. We have seen great men rise between, those dates. Their work is not yet over, but we know now what they can do.

A new period is about to begin. The curtain is just rising and we may await, breathlessly, the event.