A Retrospect

HUGH WALPOLE

Suggesting that it Might Be Better if the Modern Novelist Were Less Concerned with His Own Cleverness

IT is customary, I think, when one reaches the last paper of a series, to indulge in some kind of review, melancholy or otherwise. One is, as a matter of fact, continually tempted to throw one's eye back over the literary horizon of the last few years, because, like Sister Anne in the story, one is up in the tower searching eagerly through the landscape for some splendid knight errant who will deliver the spirit of good literature from her bondage.

For eight years now we have been expecting, waiting, hoping. As I said in a recent paper, the war has produced almost nothing that can be considered of lasting value in English literature, and for nearly three years we have been exclaiming that now that the war is over something is surely going to happen. Nothing happens at all. The few signs of advance that did seem in 1918 to be strong and important, now in 1921 are receding and weakening. I cannot speak for American literature of the last six months, because so little of it penetrates over here, but at least in fiction we have seen Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence, Sinclair Lewis's Main Street, and James Branch Cabell's Figures of Earth. There are definite signs that America at last, for the first time for thirty years, is producing a literature which is entirely her own, something that is not derivative and that no other country is capable of producing.

And what are we doing over here? The spring publishing season of 1921 is practically at an end and it has given us almost nothing. We have had one book of the very first order, Lytton Strachey's Queen Victoria, four or five novels of interest—Mr. Brett Young's Black Diamond, Mr. J. D. Beresford's Revolution, Mr. Michael Sadler's Privilege, and Miss Dorothy Richardson's Deadlock, and one first novel of real promise, Mr. Norman Davey's Pilgrim of a Smile. In poetry there has been Robert Graves's Pier Glass, Paris and Helen by Mr. Turner, and John Drinkwater's Mary Stuart. There have been some essays by Joseph Conrad, an interesting book on Verlaine by Mr. Harold Nicholson, and that is all.

A Caution Against Cleverness

THE first thing that must strike any dispassionate reader of these volumes is the cleverness that runs through them all. Cleverness is a hateful word to use about art, but it is the only word possible here. In Mr. Beresford's novel there is a deep and most earnest purpose that makes it something very much more than clever, but he has, I think, sacrificed his characters to his idea, and more and more one feels in his writing that ideas are of greater importance to him thqn human beings. He is nevertheless one of the most interesting figures in the literature of to-day, and his sincerity, honesty and absence of all smallness and pettiness of feeling make him, in these difficult times, of very great value to the community at large.

If, however, I wanted to point out to some friend who had been absent from Europe for the last twenty years why it seems to me that the new English literature is moving, in so far as it is moving at all, in all the wrong direction, I would suggest to him that he should read the books of Miss Dorothy Richardson and especially her last, and I think her best, Deadlock. Deadlock is of very real importance, because in it, for the first time, Miss Richardson has come out into the open, has definitely created a character outside her narrator, has evoked an emotional scene and has tried to evoke an emotional climax.

She has been hailed by many people .during the last few years as a real force in English fiction and especially as a signpost pointing the way along which the novel of the future is likely to go. Now, I believe it impossible for anyone who has a little patience and a real interest in what the newer novelists are doing and, more than that, a curiosity about modem post-war existence, to read Deadlock without an almost absorbing interest. I challenge him also to read it without feeling at the close an irritable sense of disappointment and dissatisfaction.

A few evenings ago I was in the company of a number of writers and critics who were discussing the novel, and someone mentioned the name of Sir Walter Scott. There was an outburst of derisive laughter and one very able critic gave it as his definite opinion that for anyone in these days to assert that he had been able to read from beginning to end the whole of a Waverley novel was proof sufficient of childish naivete and mental anaemia. Next day there was sent to me a new book about Sir Walter Scott, whose introduction had this remarkable sentence; "After all, let the literary say what they please, books are a small affair. ... Sir Walter thought a great deal more of his daily life, of his friends, sports, plantings, and jokes than of books—his own or anybody's else. Accordingly it is not surprising that his books should not have the stuff of endurance in them."

Stirred by this deliverance, I picked up Guy Mannering and let myself move for an hour in the company of Dandie Dimmont and Meg Merrilees. I may be showing mental anaemia when I say that Dandie, his wife, his children, and his dog were immensely more vivid to me at the end of an hour in his company than the soul of Miss Richardson's Miriam, although we have had six whole volumes concerning her. This is not a question of denying Scott's faults. No one would pretend to assert that his prose was always good, that his stories were never clumsy, that his anachronisms were not sometimes startling; but he succeeded, when all is said and done, in creating a world of characters that move as vitally and securely to-day as they did a hundred years ago, even though the machinery that moved them is cumbersome and heavy.

There is very little to be said against, the machinery of these modern novels that I have mentioned. They are amazingly adroit in their technique, their cleverness of phrase, their power of swift and accurate description, their naturalness of dialogue, their consistency of theme—all these things are admirable. And yet the root of the matter, with the definite exception of Mr. Brett Young's bpok, is not in them. The novel stands apart from the other forms of literary art simply in this—that style, theme, and color are all subservient to the one business of the creation of character. We have become, I believe, so subtle in our analysis of motive, we have learnt so completely the exterior business of our job that it is very easy to-day to produce a novel that looks very brilliant, that is easily read, and amusing and romantic while it lasts, but the heart of the matter is as difficult to secure as ever it was.

Richardson, Fielding and Scott had learnt no tricks, and if their characters were not there, full-blooded on their page, the reader instantly perceived it. To-day's readers are being perpetually taken in and then finally disappointed. One perceives again and again in the modern novel a real terror of going outside actual experience lest the result should be untrue. Scott had nothing to do but to put his ear to the ground and listen to the noises that Dandie Dimmont was making and report them as fast as he could. He did not perhaps take himself seriously enough as an artist. Very often when his characters were on the stage he was quite baffled as to what to do with them and his conclusions were hurried and inartistic.

To-day, we know exactly what we are going to do with our puppets, but our attention is absorbed by a thousand things to which we have been told that we must attend. Trollope was the last English novelist, until Conrad appeared, to be completely absorbed by his characters and his characters alone. His fable was the feeblest, his style most pedestrian, but Mrs. Proudie and Lily Dale and Mr. Crawley were as real to him as his own flesh and blood. Gissing was led away from the main business by his sense of social grievance, Stevenson by his pursuit after style, Meredith by his earth philosophy, Hardy by his sense of fate, and so on.

The Creation of Characters

CLEVERNESS has become so easy and fear of outraging the literary proprieties so general. In poetry and criticism we find the same disease, a desperate, over-sophistication that has come from a diligent reading of other people's work, and a general determination not to be called a fool. It is not, for instance, that Miss Richardson does not create her little Russian in her last book. He is created, but he is so elusive, she is so frightened of saying anything really simple and straightforward about him that he is always just on the outside of our consciousness instead of right inside it as he ought to be. If, for instance, she gave us one straightforward page about his meals, his clothes and his neuralgia, we should have a real feeling that we had met him and shaken hands with him. What she does give us is his accent, admirably conveyed, but we hear his voice as though it were at the far end of a railway carriage and then we see his little figure flitting off into the shadow and our main reflection is that we would like to have known him better, that he interested us, but that we haven't been close enough to him to remember him for very long.

It is the eternal self-consciousness of the modem writer that gets so desperately in our way. Evecy clever book that appears seems like a thin shadow of some other clever book. Paris and Helen, for instance, has many passages in it of beautiful poetry, and Mr. Turner's gift is quite definitely a true and original one, but we feel that it would have been a far stronger and more actual poem to us if its author hadn't read so many poems by other people and hadn't discussed poetry so often with his friends. Is it possible, perhaps, that all the accustomed forms of literature are outworn? This is not the first time in the world's history that men have asked themselves this question. So far as the novel is concerned, it can never die until the interest of human beings in one another dies, but it is very difficult for the modern novelist to write as though no other novels had ever been written before. Until he achieves some aloofness of attitude, writing—as it were, with his characters around him, taking down from their lips their stories and considering nothing else until those stories are concluded—he will never achieve that greatness of creation which Conrad and Arnold Bennett (in at least two of his books) alone among living novelists, with the exception of Hardy, have succeeded in achieving.

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Yes, this is a thin time, and not only in England but in France, Scandinavia, Italy, Spain, the same troubles are abroad. I do not wish to conclude the last of these little papers on a pessimistic note. I am no pessimist. Nothing can kill art and every generation will have its manifestations of art, great or small, carrying on the undying spirit that will breathe through the world until the last trump and probably beyond. But men are tired, and it is just at the moment when the old forms seem a little worn that the new forms begin to appear, often surreptitiously, unseen .by their contemporaries. There is perhaps a fine time ahead for the new generation, but then the next generation must drop some of the superiority that is hampering every artist to-day. I heard the other week of a new group of Quietist—some dozen men and women who were going into some mountain valley to live where the telephone was unknown and whither the newspaper could not penetrate. I hope that they include in their group a modern novelist and a poet or two.

What books one of the children of that group will write if she can only grow up without knowing that Dostoevsky, Chekov, De Maupassant, Flaubert and Hardy ever existed!

Meanwhile for those of us who cannot so easily escape, the only thing is to put cottonwool in our ears, and then listen to the real voices.