Praise and prejudice

GEORGE DANGERFIELD

Some thoughts on England's great capacity for crying, as evidenced by a certain weeping trend in recent English fiction ■ Some few days ago, having nothing better to do, I read for the second time James Hilton's Goodbye. Mr. (drips! Very few stories can stand a second reading, and perhaps this is not one of them. Indeed, what most struck me was a certain rcsemhlance between Mr. Chips and Little Nell; all the way through the hook, that is to say, Mr. Hilton was preparing his innocent old Englishman for an edifying death. And 1 have to admit that, when the time came, Mr. Chips made a good corpse.

The corpse of Mr. Chips would have decomposed quietly in the back shelves of a few bookstores, if it had not been embalmed in the polysyllabic spices of Alexander Woollcott's radio gossip. Thereafter, it became quite a famous corpse; it has been venerated from coast to coast; and in the matter of tear-jerking it is more potent than the relics of even the most pathetic of medieval saints.

This would be all right with me if Mr. Chips were just a literary saint; hut unfortunately he is more than that, lie is a literary symptom. For the sad fact is that in the last few years English fiction has been growing softer and softer and softer; you can prod it at almost any point with a critical finger, and it just gives. I am not referring simply to such notably marshy writers as Warwick Deeping. A. S. M. Hutchinson, Louis Golding, and Ethel Boileau: this softness has invaded much firmer ground. It has given Mrs. Delafield's once sprightly Provincial Lady more than the suspicion of a dewlap; it made Virginia Woolf so lethargic that she sank beneath The Moves, and has never quite recovered from her ducking; the satirical sap which coursed through Mr. A. G. Macdonell's budding gifts is, under its unkindly influence, no longer sap but soup. . . . Examples of this pervading softness could be multiplied ad melancholiam.

■ And when novelists go soft, that's news. Because every nation's Unconscious (that dim region where the public's collective, unrecognised desires float idly to and fro) is a place where novelists like specially to hang their hat; they are quite at home there. When London hank-clerks longed to think of themselves as potential empire-builders, Mr. Kipling served them with heroes who were constantly building dams and disembowelling Afghans. When English girls dreamed of pursuing their men, instead of just fainting in front of them, Mr. Wells appeared with Ann Veronica, who went after her victim like a beagle. Today, when the British public wants nothing so much as a shot of something soothing in the arm, its novelists are right at its elbow with the necessary dope. Tearful dope.

In spite of the still popular belief that when a Britisher weeps it is the greatest miracle since Moses struck the rock, the Englishman has always been one of the more tearful of God's creatures. Earlier novelists never made any bones about this: if you read the reforming novels of Dickens and the upper class novels of Thackeray, you get a distinct impression that early nineteenth century England wept itself out of a revolution and into an empire. And why not? W hen one is very vigorous what could be healthier than to take occasional time off for a nice long cry? But when one is tired . . . that's another story.

And modern England is tired; and so are its novelists. Those long and splendid years between Tom Jones and the Forsyte Saga seem to have exhausted all the literary material : so much so that, in the past six years, only two really pointed novels have come out of England. One is Somerset Maugham's Cakes And AJe, which has all the penetrating qualities of a thin draught through the drawing-room keyhole; the other is Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, which is a kind of tragic giggle. Otherwise nothing.

It is difficult for America to realise this exhaustion of material; American novelists are just at the beginning of discoveries. I hey have the proletarian novel, and the sophisticated novel, and the Faulknerian sentimental slumming novel—all more or less new. And they still have the long family novel: they still have Grandfather, who even though he would make a somewhat indifferent showing in a modern stag-line, is at least real.

In England, the novelists have even had to give Grandfather up. Galsworthy buried him (along with great-uncle and greataunt) up to his neck in the mildly bitter honey of the Forsyte Saga. Later writers tried from time to lime to take Grandfather out and clean him up; but he had become so sweet and slieky that they regretfully put him back again. Then they went in for Coincidence. and indulged in curious ecstasies of invention about the rather self-evident fact that in any large building, such as an hotel or a rooming house, several different things are likely to happen at exactly the same time. When the old gentleman, I mean, was dying quite alone on the top floor, the kitchen maid was giving birth to a child behind the basement boiler: and it was all very vox humana, and rather silly. Then they explored the sex life of ploughboys, which was of so startling a nature that we should all have turned green with envy if only the plough-boys had been credible, which they weren't. And now—while the more realistic novelists are just sitting around—the romantics appear to he headed for Arcadia.

Arcadia is not just a never-never-land, full of antique charm; it is Old England brought up to date, and the novelists, observing it through a shower of homesick tears, have printed upon its fading sunlight the palpable rainbow of Sentimentality. This kind of Arcadia has been vaguely in the background of English fiction for quite a while; but in the last six months (from the evidence of such novels as Mr. Ailingham's Cheapjack, Mr. Canning's Mr. Finchley's Holiday. Mr. Walsh's The Road To Nowhere, Mr. Spring's Shabby Tiger, Lady Eleanor Smith s Gypsy) it has begun to acquire a regular geography and some typical inhabitants. It is usually to he found in the rich southern and midland rural counties; it can be invaded by any hero who is (a) penniless (b) simple-minded to the very edge of certified imbecility (c) any kind of an under-dog; and its chief inhabitants are—the tender Itinerant Preacher, the beatified Gypsy, the embittered Artist, and the pagan Wench.

" These people—though at first sight they seem to he the most promising bunch of paranoiacs that ever escaped from what P. G. Wodehouse calls the looney-bin—are actually full of meaning. They represent what is left of Old, alias Merrie, England in this murderous world; their every gallant gesture proclaims that—in spite of disillusion and poverty and heartbreak—Old England is still Carrying On. And the public is with them, because there is nothing which brings tears to a tired Englishman's eyes more quickly than the thought that Old England is still carrying on. And the thought that Old England is carrying on like a third-rate circus all over the southern counties is, however you look at it, very full of pathos.

It isn't real, of course. These Arcadians are not actually at large along the public highways and byways: they are only at large in the public imagination. And they are roaming around in there because England doesn't at all like the modern world. It is conservative and it is tired and it wants to go hack to the good old days: and as long as it wants to go backwards, so long will its novelists raise their voices in a chorus which, for lack of a more forcible phrase, I humbly beg to describe as Drool, Britannia.

(Literary check list on page 72)