The Novels of W. L. George

An Appreciation of the Author of "Caliban" and "A Bed of Roses"

H. L. MENCKEN

I.

IN the same issue of an eminent family magazine, toward the end of 1911, I reviewed two novels by English debutants: The Gods and Mr. Perrin, by Hugh Walpole, and A Bed of Roses, by W. L. George. Two very sound and amusing books, each announcing a new and vigorous talent—and yet neither author has developed along the lines thus indicated, and neither, I fancy, would be capable of doing hjs first book today. As for Walpole, the fact is certain. He has abandoned the realism of The Gods and Mr. Perrin for a poetical manner that often shows touches of mysticism, and when I told him, during his visit to the United States last year, that Mr. Perrin was still my favourite among all his books, he coughed behind his hand very asthmatically, as if to say, "Du heiliger Herr Jesus, der Kerl ist mashuggah!" and turned the conversation to the subject of eating and drinking. I doubt that George would be any more pleased by a corresponding encomium of A Bed of Roses. He has not departed quite as far from his first manner as Walpole, but nevertheless he has departed. His work has steadily increased in scale and in earnestness. A Bed of Roses was, at bottom, simply a diverting fable. It concerned itself with a singular woman in a singular situation; it related itself only in the most casual fashion to the lives of people in general. Its aim was a good deal less to study and anatomize these people in general than to prick them and perhaps shock them.

The George of today has got far beyond that sort of thing. The novels of his later canon are surely anything but idle tales. Behind the superficial drama that holds them together and makes them move, there is a profounder and more powerful drama. They bring their lights to bear, not only upon the relatively small concerns of their actual people, but also upon the larger concerns (and motives, and weaknesses, and tricks of mind) of a whole society, a whole civilization, to wit, the society and civilization of the England of our time. Without ever falling for an instant into the humourless preachiness, the fatuous reforming and forward-looking that corrupts most of the late work of H. G. Wells, they are, in a very real sense, social documents, for they not only depict the life that they deal with with great accuracy; they also criticize it with great penetration. What one gets out of such a novel as The Making of an Englishman is not merely pleasant entertainment; it is a new and better understanding of the typical Englishman of the better sort—a clearer view of what goes on in his mind, and makes him what he is. And what one gets out of such a novel as Caliban is not only capital grotesque farce; it is, above all, an instructive and disquieting insight into the ways and means of manufacturing public opinion under" a democracy—a grasp of the process whereby the ideals of great and puissant peoples are made to order by shady lawyers, snide professors and unconscionable newspaper proprietors, and so pumped into the hollow heads of the populace under a pressure of fifty atmospheres, to the corruption of history and the shame of sense.

I doubt that George has any deliberate intent to edify and improve the world by such autopsies. As I have said, he keeps himself quite free of the pontifical absurdities of Wells. Not, of course, that he cannot imagine improvements, or is disinclined to discuss them. On the contrary, there is a crusader in him as well as an artist, and he has often maintained strange ideas (particularly about women) waspishly and effectively, and is even now touring the hinterland of the Republic on a lecture trip. But he keeps his propaganda and his novels separate, for he is far too sound an artist ever to try to convert the latter into the former. You will search Caliban from end to end without getting the slightest sniff of the Sovereign Remedy that Wells is always offering—and that George himself, perhaps, is offering to the boobery in the chautauquas. Nay, what he has to say in that department he says in books that are not disguised as novels— such books as The Intelligence of Women and Literary Chapters. When he writes a novel, he writes a novel. What moves him is not the heat of the reformer but the finer glow of the artist—a glow that comes out of enchanted contemplation of this damndest and most fascinating of all possible worlds—the glow of one who feels an irresistible impulse to get the -thing upon paper, to describe it as it is, to preserve and point up its gaudy colors, to reveal and interpret the drama of it, without pausing to say anything about what it might be, but isn't. The artist represents and interprets, and then he criticizes: beyond that he cannot safely go. , Beyond that lies the domain of the uplifter, the forward-looker, the reformer—and if you will kindly overlook my prejudice, I shall beg to be excused from entering into it.

II

PROBABLY the best of George's novels, considered judicially, is Blind Alley. The thing is full of brilliant character studies, and the structure of it is thoroughly sound. No better novel of the war has yet come out of England. Arnold Bennett's Pretty Lady, if carried to a logical conclusion, might have been a rival to it, but Bennett, as everyone knows, got tired of his story before he had worked it out, and so brought it to a lame and impotent conclusion. Wells' Mr. Britling Sees It Through, for all its popular success, is not to be mentioned in the same breath with this pair of stories. Wells simply set out to make capital of the puerile sentimentality of the time—and succeeded handsomely. But Bennett and George tried to get beneath the superficial war blather, and both of them thus outraged the great herd of right-thinking men and women. George still suffers from that resentment. He has never got his just dues from English criticism, nor even the half of them. The camorra of loving brothers which tries to convince us that Frank Swinnerton and J. D. Beresford are great geniuses is unalterably against him, and pursues him with considerable ferocity. This animosity even goes so far that it includes attacks upon foreign critics who refuse to accept the new evangel. Ordinarily, American criticism follows any such English leadership with docility, but in the present case, for some reason unknown to me, it shows independence and even a certain pugnacity. George is thus better appreciated and more praised in the United States than he is in England. His Caliban was furiously slated in England, but over here all save a minority of extravagant Anglomaniacs have liked it and said so. It is a relentless and bitter novel—perhaps a bit too bitter—but it is honest. The chief character is not the grandiloquent Bulmer, who occupies the center of the stage; the chief character is the English people.

I say that Blind Alley is probably George's best novel, but the one that I personally enjoyed most was and remains The Making of an Englishman. Here the author tackled a genuinely difficult job, and one that many expert fellows, including Thackeray, had often tackled before him, to wit, the job of analyzing the English gentleman, of trying to discover the ideas at the bottom of his peculiar view of the world, of unearthing and estimating the basic traits of his character. For this enterprise he was unusually well fitted. An Englishman born andthus having easy access to the unspoken notions of other Englishmen, he had lived in France so long that he could yet look upon the national scene with the sharp eyes of a stranger. The story of his hero, Lucien Cadoresse, is essentially the story of himself. The difficulties that Cadoresse, a youth from Marseilles, encountered in London when he tried to understand the English character and to make himself an Englishman are no doubt difficulties that George himself tasted when he came home. But in George there was something that Cadoresse lacked, and that was skill at analyzing phenomena, at penetrating to the well-springs of motive, at working out the logical ideas under mere habit and prejudice. His book remains the best study of the normal Englishman that I know of—that is, of the well-fed and civilized Englishman. It is a fine piece of descriptive psychology, and it is also an excellent story. No moral purpose is visible in it. There is abundant irony, but there is no indignation.

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III.

HEN I heard George deliver his lecture on women in New York I was rather disappointed. What he said was, in the main, obvious, and what is worse, often a bit sentimental. It was a warm night and I was full of misogynical fury. It seemed to me that he had misgauged his American audience: that what it came to hear was not a common-sense philosophy, so-called, but scandal—that he would have got further by throwing in the gas and giving them something to make them gasp. There were many clergymen and fat women present—two classes that crave to be shocked. But the lecture turned out to be only half the show—in fact, only a sort of quiet, disarming overture to the show. When, at its conclusion, the

elderly spinsters downstairs and the East Side Freudians in the galleries began to ask questions, George rubbed his hands and fell upon them. What followed was extraordinarily amusing and stimulating. At last the author of Caliban and The Making of an Englishman began to emerge from his funereal dress-suit. As question after question fell upon him, he answered them aptly, wittily, and, above all, with tremendous audacity. The whole thing rose to a new plane. The discreet lecturer was gone, and in his place stood the daring and ingenious ironist, the shrewd observer of the human farce, the man with something to say. This man is always visible in the George novels. There is a brilliant novelty of attitude in all of them. They treat the life of our time with a refreshing courage and impudence. They are absolutely devoid of all the customary cant and pishposh. They reflect a personality that is shrewd, and original, and extremely attractive.