A Novelist on Novels

The Vicar of Wakefield (Goldsmith)

The Way of All Flesh (Butler)

Quentin Durward (Scott)

Guy Mannering (Scott)

Briefly, the bulk of the works of Thackeray, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot. 'Barry Lyndon' twice, and Trollope never. Here, at last, the solid curriculum, but only, you will observe, when a little of the mud of the magazines had been cleaned off. Rather more verse too, beginning with Tennyson and Henley, passing on to Rossetti and perhaps to Swinburne. Verse, however, should not be pressed. But I think I should propose modern plays of the lighter kind, Mr Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara and John Bull's Other Island, for instance. One could pass by degrees to the less obvious plays of Mr Shaw, certainly to those of St John Hankin, and perhaps to The Madras House. I think also a start might be made on foreign works, but these would develop mainly in the

Fourth Period

Good translations being available, I would suggest notably: —

Madame Bovary (Flaubert)

Resurrection (Tolstoi)

Fathers and Children (Turgenev)

Various short stories of Tchekoff.

And then, if the subject seemed to enjoy these works,

L'Education Sentimentale (Flaubert)

Le Rouge et le Noir (Stendhal)

The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoievsky)

Mark this well, if the subject seemed to enjoy them. If there is any strain, any boredom, there is lack of continuity, and a chance of losing the subject's interest altogether. I think the motto should be 'Don't press'; that is accepted when it comes to golf; why has it never been accepted when it affects man? This period would, I think, end with the lighter plays of Shakespeare, such as The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Taming of the Shrew, and perhaps Hamlet. I think modern essays should also come in via Mr E. V. Lucas, Mr Belloc, and Mr Street; also I would suggest Synge's travels in Wicklow, Connemara, and the Arran Islands; this would counteract the excessive fictional quality of the foregoing.

Fifth Period

I submit that, by that time, if the subject had a good average mind, he would be prepared by habit to read older works related with the best modern works. The essays of Mr Lucas would prepare him for the works of Lamb; those of Mr Belloc, for the essays of Carlyle and Bacon. Thus would I lead back to the heavier Victorian novels, to the older ones of Fielding and Sterne. If any taste for plays has been developed by Shakespeare, it might be turned to Marlowe, Congreve, and Sheridan. The drift of my argument is: read the easiest first; do not strain; do not try to 'improve your mind,' but try to enjoy yourself. Than books there is no better company, but it is no use approaching them as dour pedagogues. Proceed as a snob climbing the social ladder, namely, know the best people in the neighbourhood, then the best people they know. The end is not that of snobbery, but an eternal treasure.

I think that my subject, if capable of developing taste, would find his way to the easier classic works, such as Carlyle's French Revolution, Boswell's Life of Johnson, perhaps even to Wesley's Journal. But at that stage the subject would have to be dismissed to live or die. Enough would have been done to lead him away from boredom, from dull solemnity and false training, to purify his taste and make it of some use. The day is light and the past is dark; all eyes can see the day and find it splendid, but eyes that would pierce the darkness of the past must grow familiar with lighter mists; to every man the life of the world about him is that man's youth, while old age is ill to apprehend.

Litany of the Novelist

There are times when one wearies of literature; when one reads over one's first book, reflects how good it was, and how greatly one was misunderstood; when one considers the perils and misadventures of so accidental a life and likens oneself to those dogs described by Pliny who run fast as they drink from the Nile for fear they should be seized by the crocodiles; when one tires of following Mr Ford Madox Hueffer's advice, 'to sit down in the back garden with pen, ink, and paper, to put vine leaves in one's hair and to write'; when one remembers that in Flaubert's view the literary man's was a dog's life (metaphors about authors lead you back to the dog) but that none other was worth living. In those moods, one does not agree with Flaubert; rather, one agrees with Butler: —

'… those that write in rhyme still make
The one verse for the other's sake;
For one for sense and one for rhyme,
I think's sufficient at one time.'

One sees life like Mr Polly, as 'a rotten, beastly thing.' One sighs for adventure, to become a tramp or an expert witness. One knows that one will never be so popular as Beecham's pills; thence is but a step to picture oneself as less worthy.

We novelists are the showmen of life. We hold up its mirror, and, if it look at us at all, it mostly makes faces at us. Indeed a writer might have with impunity sliced Medusa's head: she would never have noticed him. The truth is that the novelist is a despised creature. At moments, when, say, a learned professor has devoted five columns to showing that a particular novelist is one of the pests of society, the writer feels exalted. But as society shows no signs of wanting to be rid of the pest, the novelist begins to doubt his own pestilency. He is wrong. In a way, society knows of our existence, but does not worry; it shows this in a curiously large number of ways, more than can be enumerated here. It sees the novelist as a man apart; as a creature fraught with venom, and, paradoxically, a creature of singularly lamb-like and unpractical temperament.

Consider, indeed, the painful position of a respectable family whose sons make for Threadneedle Street every day, its daughters for Bond Street and fashion, or for the East End, good works, and social advancement. Imagine that family, who enjoys a steady income, shall we say in the neighbourhood of £5000 a year, enough to keep it in modest comfort, confronted with the sudden infatuation of one of its daughters for an unnamed person, met presumably in the East End where he was collecting copy. You can imagine the conversation after dinner: —

Angeline: 'What does he do, father? Oh, well! he's a novelist.'

Father: … What! a novelist! One of those long-haired, sloppy-collared ragamuffins without any soles to their boots! Do you think that because I've given you a motor-car I'm going to treat you to a husband? A bar loafer … (we are always intemperate) … A man whom your mother and sisters … (our morals are atrocious) … I should not wonder if the police … (we are all dishonest, and yet we never have any money) … I was talking to the Bishop … (we practise no religion, except that occasionally we are Mormons)…

And so on, and so on. Father won't have it, and if in the end Father does have it he finds that Angeline's eyes are not blacked, but that Angeline's husband's boots are blacked, that the wretched fellow keeps a balance at the bank, can ride a horse, push a perambulator, drive a nail; but he does not believe it for a long time. For it is, if not against all experience, at any rate against all theory that a novelist should be eligible. The bank clerk is eligible, the novelist is not; we are not 'safe,' we are adventurers, we have theories, and sometimes the audacity to live up to them. We are often poor, which happens to other men, and this is always our own fault, while it is often their misfortune. Of late years, we have grown still more respectable than our forefathers, who were painfully such: Dickens lived comfortably in Marylebone; Thackeray reigned in a luxurious house near Kensington Square and in several first-class clubs; Walter Scott reached a terrible extreme of respectability; he went bankrupt, but later on paid his debts in full. Yet we never seem quite respectable, perhaps because respectability is so thin a varnish. Even the unfortunate girls whom we 'entice away from good homes' into the squalor of the arts, do not think us respectable. For them half the thrill of marrying a novelist consists in the horror of the family which must receive him; it is like marrying a quicksand, and the idea is so bitter that a novelist who wears his hair long might do well to marry a girl who wears hers short. He will not find her in the bourgeoisie.

The novelist is despised because he produces a commodity not recognised as 'useful.' There is no definition of usefulness, yet everybody is clear that the butcher, the railway porter, the stock jobber are useful; that they fulfil a function necessary for the maintenance of the State. The pugilist, the dancer, the music hall actor, the novelist, produce nothing material, while the butcher does. To live, one wants meat, but not novels. We need not pursue this too far and ask the solid classes to imagine a world without arts, presumably they could not. It is enough to point the difference, and to suggest that we are deeply enthralled by the Puritan tradition which calls pleasure, if not noxious, at any rate unimportant; the maintenance of life is looked upon as more essential than the enjoyment thereof, so that many people picture an ideal world as a spreading cornfield dotted with cities that pay good rents, connected by railways which pay good dividends. They resemble the revolutionary, who on the steps of the guillotine said to Lavoisier: 'La Republique n'a pas besoin de savants.' This is obvious when the average man (which includes many women) alludes to the personality of some well-known writer. One he has come to respect: Mr Hall Caine, because popular report says that his latest novel brought him in about a hundred thousand pounds, but those such as Mr Arnold Bennett and Mr H. G. Wells leave strange shadows upon his memory. Of Mr Bennett he says: 'Oh, yes, he writes about the North Country, doesn't he? Or is it the West Country? Tried one of his books once. I forget its name, and now I come to think of it, it may have been by somebody else. He must be a dreary sort of chap, anyhow, sort of methodist.'

Mr H. G. Wells is more clearly pictured: 'Wells? the fellow who writes about flying machines and men in the moon. Jules Verne sort of stuff, isn't it? He's a Socialist.'

And so out with Mr Bennett, one of our best modern stylists, who in spite of an occasional crowding of the canvas has somehow fixed for us the singular and ferocious tribe from which he springs; so out with Mr Wells, with his restless, impulsive, combative, infinitely audacious mind. The average man says: 'Flying machines,' and the passion of Mr Wells for a beautiful, if somewhat over-hygienic world is swept away. Those are leading instances. Others, such as Mr Conrad, Miss Edith Wharton, O. Henry, Mr Galsworthy, are not mentioned at all; if the name of Mr Henry James is spoken, it leads up to a gibe at long sentences.

The attitude is simple; we are not taken seriously. Novelists have to take mankind seriously because they want to understand it; mankind is exempt from the obligation because it does not conceive the desire. We are not people who take degrees, who can be scheduled and classified. We are not Doctors of Science, Licentiates of Music Schools. We are just men and women of some slight independence, therefore criminals, men who want to observe and not men who want to do, therefore incredible. And so, because we cannot fall into the classes made for those who can be classified, we are outside class, below class. We are the mistletoe on the social oak.

It is perhaps in search of dignity and status that the modern novelist has taken to journalism. Journalism raises a novelist's status, for a view expressed by a fictitious character is not taken seriously, while the same view fastened to an event of the day acquires importance, satisfies the specific function of the press, which is more and more that of a champion of found causes. The newspaper is a better jumping-off ground than the pulpit or the professorial chair; it enjoys a vast circulation, which the novel does not; it conveys an idea to millions of people who would never think of buying a newspaper for the sake of an idea, but who buy it for news, murder cases or corn market reports; it is a place where a writer may be serious, because the newspaper is labelled as serious, while the novel is labelled as frivolous.

This is vital to the proposition, and explains why so many novelists have sought refuge in the press. It is not exactly a question of money. Journalism rewards a successful novelist better than does the novel, though successful novelists make very good incomes; they often earn as much as the red-nosed comedian with the baggy trousers and the battered bowler. Thackeray, Washington Irving, Kingsley, and notably Dickens, knew the value of journalism. Dickens was the most peculiar case, for it is fairly clear that Nicholas Nickleby helped to suppress the ragged schools and that Oliver Twist was instrumental in reforming workhouse law; both works were immensely successful, but Dickens felt that he wanted a platform where he could be always wholly serious: for this the Daily News was born in 1846. Likewise Mr Wells has written enormously upon the war and economics; Mr Arnold Bennett has printed many political articles; Mr Galsworthy has become more direct than a novelist can be and written largely on cruelty to animals, prison reform, etc. It is the only way in which we can be taken seriously. We must be solemn, a little dull, patriotic or unpatriotic, socialistic or conservative; there is only one thing we may not be, and that is creative and emotional.

It should be said in passing that even the press does not think much of us. Articles on solid subjects by novelists are printed, well paid for, sought after; it does a paper good to have an article on Imperial Federation by Mr Kipling, or on Feminism by Mr Zangwill. The novelist amounts to a poster; he is a blatant advertisement; he is a curiosity, the man who makes the public say: 'I wonder what the Daily – is up to now.' Be assured that Mr Zangwill's views on Feminism do not command the respectful treatment that is accorded a column leader in the Times; he is too human; he sparkles too much; he has not the matchless quality of those leaders which compels you to put on an extra stamp if you have to send the paper through the post.

The newspapers court the novelist as the people of a small town court the local rich man, but neither newspaper nor little town likes very much the object of its courtship. Except when they pay us to express them, the newspapers resent our having any views at all; the thought behind is always: 'Why can't the fellows mind their own business, and go on writing about love and all that sort of stuff?' During the war, references to novelists who express their views have invariably been sneering; it is assumed that because we are novelists we are unable to comprehend tactics, politics, in fact any 'ics,' except perhaps the entirely unimportant aesthetics. But the peculiarity of the situation is that not a voice has been raised against professors of philology, who write on finance, against Bishops dealing with land settlement, against doctors when they re-map Europe, against barristers, businessmen… These may say anything they like; they are plain, hard-headed men, while our heads are soft enough to admit a new idea.

To define the attitude of the press is in modern times to define the attitude of the State. From our point of view this is frigid. In America, there are no means of gauging a novelist's position, for American classification rests upon celebrity and fortune. Ours rests upon breeding and reliability. America is more adventurous; Britannia rides in a chariot, while the American national emblem foreshadowed the aeroplane. And so, in the United States it may profit a man as well to be a Jack London as an Elihu Root. America has no means of recognising status, while in England we have honours. We distribute a great many honours, and indeed the time may come, as Mr Max Beerbohm says, when everybody will be sentenced to a knighthood without the option of a fine. Honours are rather foolish things, monuments that create a need for circumspection; they are often given for merits not easily perceived, but still they are a rough test of status. Setting aside money, which is the primary qualification, and justifies Racine in saying that without money honour is nothing but a disease, a title is a fairly clear sign of distinction. Sir Edward Shackleton, Sir Douglas Haig, Sir Frederick Treves, Lord Reading, Sir William Crookes, Lord Lister, all those titles are obvious recognition of prominence in Polar Exploration, the Army, the Law, Medicine, Research, as the case may be; there are scores of Medical Knights, many Law Lords, many Major Generals and Admirals endowed with the Knight Commandership of the Bath. We do not complain. They deserve their honours, most of them. They deserve them more than the politicians who have received for long service rewards that ability could not give them, than the Lord Mayors who are titled because they sold, for instance, large quantities of kitchen fenders. When we consider the arts, we observe a discrepancy. The arts do not ask for honours; they are too arrogant, and know that born knights cannot be knighted. Only they claim that an attempt should be made to honour them, to grant them Mr Gladstone's and Mr Chamberlain's privilege of refusing honours.

Consider, for instance, the Order of Merit, one of the highest honours that the British Crown can confer. At the end of last year it numbered twenty-one members. Among them were some distinguished foreigners, Prince Oyama, Prince Yamagata and Admiral Togo; historians, pro-consuls, four Admirals … and one novelist. Mr Thomas Hardy. We do not complain that only Mr Thomas Hardy was chosen, for there is nobody else to set at his side … only we do complain that in this high order four admirals find a place. Are we then so rich in admiralty, so poor in literature? The same is still truer when we come to the inferior orders, which are still fairly high, such as the Commandership of the Bath. That ancient order is almost entirely recruited from amongst soldiers, sailors, politicians, and civil servants; it does not hold the name of a single novelist. No novelist is a Privy Councillor, though the position is honorific and demands no special knowledge. On the Privy Council you find labour members of Parliament, barristers, coal owners, sellers of chemicals and other commodities, but no novelists. In all the other orders it is the same thing; for novelists there are neither commanderships of the Bath, nor of the Victorian Order, nor of St Michael and St George, no honours great or minor; no man has ever in England been offered a peerage because he wrote novels; and yet he has been offered a peerage because he sold beer. George Meredith was not offered a peerage, even though some think that his name will live when those of captains and kings have melted into dust. Our little band of recognised men, such as Sir James Barrie, Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins, Sir Rider Haggard, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, small is the toll they have taken of public recognition; perhaps they should not expect it; perhaps they have been recognised only because of certain political activities; but must we really believe that so many lawyers and so few writers are worthy of an accolade? Is the novelist worthless until he is dead?

This picture may seem too black, but it is that of Great Britain, where contempt for literature has risen to a peculiar degree. Make an imaginative effort; see yourself in the drawing-room of some social leader, where a 'crush' of celebrities is taking place. A flunkey at the head of the stairs announces the guests. He announces: 'Lord Curzon! … Mr Joseph Conrad! … The Bishop of London!' Who caused a swirl in the 'gilded throng?' The cleric? The politician? Or the novelist? Be honest in your reply, and you will know who, at that hypothetical reception, created a stir. The stir, according to place or period, greeted the politician or the bishop, and only in purely literary circles would Mr Conrad have been preferred… For the worship of crowds goes to power rather than to distinction, to the recognised functionary of the State, to him whose power can give power, to all the evanescent things, and seldom to those stockish things, the milestones on the road to eternity. The attitude of the crowd is the attitude of the State, for the State is only the crowd, and often just the mob; it is the chamberlain of ochlocracy, the leader who follows. In all times, the State has shown its indifference, its contempt, for the arts, and particularly for literature. Now and then a prince, such as Louis of Bavaria, Philip of Spain, Lorenzo the Magnificent, has given to literature more than respect. He has given love, but that only because he was a man before a prince. The prince must prefer the lawyer, the politician, the general, and indeed, of late years what prince was found to patron George Meredith or Henry James?

The attitude of the State to the novelist defines itself most clearly when a royal commission is appointed. In England, royal commissions are ad hoc bodies appointed by the government from among men of political influence and special knowledge, to investigate a special question.

As a rule they are well composed. For instance, a royal commission on water supply would probably comprise two or three members of Parliament of some standing, the President of the Institute of Civil Engineers, a professor of sanitation, a canal expert, one or two trade unionists, one or two manufacturers, and a representative of the Home Office or the Board of Trade. Any man of position who has shown interest in public affairs may be asked to sit on a royal commission … provided he is not a novelist. Only one novelist has attained so giddy a height: Sir Rider Haggard; how it happened is not known: it must have been a mistake. We are not weighty enough, serious enough to be called on, even if our novels are so weighty and so serious that hardly anybody can read them. We are a gay tribe of Ariels, too light to discuss even our own trade. For royal commissions concern themselves with our trade, with copyright law, with the restrictions of the paper supply. You might think that, for instance, paper supply concerned us, for we use cruel quantities, yet no recognised author sat on the commission; a publisher was the nearest approach. Apparently there were two great consumers of paper, authors and grocers, but alone the grocers were consulted. What is the matter with us? Is our crime that we put down in indecent ink what we think and feel, while other people think and feel the same, but prudently keep it down? Possibly our crimes are our imagination and our tendency to carry this imagination into action. Bismarck said that a State conducted on the lines of the Sermon on the Mount would not last twenty-four hours; perhaps it is thought that a State in the conduct of which a novelist had a share would immediately resolve itself into a problem play. Something like that, though in fact it is unlikely that Ariel come to judgment would be much more fanciful in his decrees than the historic Solomon.

All this because we lack solidity … and yet the public calls us commercial, self-advertisers, money-grubbers. It is thought base that we should want three meals a day, though nobody suggests that we can hope to find manna in the street, or drink in our parks from the fountain Hippocrene. We are told that we make our contracts too keenly, that we are grasping, that we are not straight … and yet we are told that we are not business men. What are we to do? Shall we form a trade union and establish a piece rate? Shall we sell our novels by the yard? May we not be as commercial and respected as the doctor who heals with words and the lawyer who strangles with tape? Now and then the defences of society and state are breached, and a novelist enters Parliament. Mr Hilaire Belloc, Mr A. E. W. Mason, followed Disraeli into the House of Commons, but it is very extraordinary. No one knows how these gentlemen managed to convince the electors that with their eye 'in fine frenzy rolling' they would not scandalise their party by voting against it. (Those writing chaps, you know, they aren't safe!)

It must be said that in Parliament the novelists did not have a very good time; they were lucky in having been preferred to a landowner or a pawnbroker, but once in they had not the slightest chance of being preferred to those estimable members of society. It was not a question of straight votes; it never came to that, for Mr Belloc soon disagreed with both sides and became a party of one, while Mr A. E. W. Mason as a rushlight flickered his little flicker and went out. It is as well; they would never have been taken seriously. It is almost a tradition that they should not be taken seriously, and it is on record in most of the worldly memoirs of the nineteenth century that the two main objections to Disraeli were his waistcoats and his authorship of Contarini Fleming. Nero liked to see people burnt alive; Disraeli wrote novels. Weaknesses are found in all great men.

There seems in this to lie error as well as scandal; when a new organisation is created, say for the control of lamp oil, obviously a novelist should not be made its chairman, but why should a blotting paper merchant be preferred? Indeed, one might side with Mr Zangwill, who demands representation for authors in the Cabinet itself, on the plea that they would introduce the emotion which is necessary if the Cabinet is to manage impulsive mankind. As he finely says, we are professors of human nature; if only some University would give us a title and some initials to follow our name, say P.H.N., people might believe that we knew something of it. But the attitude of the State in these matters is steadfast enough. It recognises us as servants rather than as citizens; if in our later years we come upon hard times, we can be given, through the Civil List, pensions which rescue us from the indignities of the poorhouse, but no more. Mostly these pensions benefit our heirs, but the offering is so small that it shocks; it is like tipping an archbishop. Thus Mr W. B. Yeats enjoys a pension of £150, Mr Joseph Conrad, of £100. Why give us pensions at all if they must be alms? One cannot be dignified on £100 a year; one can be dignified on £5000 a year, because the world soon forgets that you ride a gift horse if that horse is a fine, fat beast. The evidence is to be found in the retiring pensions of our late Lord Chancellors, who receive £5000 a year, of our Judges, £1000 to £3750, in the allowances made to impoverished politicians, which attain £2000. Out of a total of £320,000 met by our civil list, literature, painting, science, research, divide every year £1200. Nor do the immediate rewards show greater equality. Lord Roberts was voted £100,000 for his services in South Africa; Mr Thomas Hardy has not yet been voted anything for The Dynasts.

The shame of literature is carried on even into following generations. The present Lord Nelson, who is not a poor man, for he owns 7000 acres of land, is still drawing a pension of £5000 a year, earned by his august ancestor, but the daughter of Leigh Hunt must be content with £50. We are unknown. We are nobody. Rouget de l'Isle, author of La Marseillaise, gave wings to the revolutionary chariot, but tiny, bilious, tyrannic Robespierre rode in it, and rides in it to-day through the pages of history, while men go to their death singing the words of Rouget de l'Isle and know him not.

Even in our own profession of authorship the novelist is an object of disdain. We are less than the economists, the historians, the political writers: we amuse while they teach; they bore, and as they bore it is assumed that they educate, dullness always having been the sorry companion of education. Evidence is easily found; there exists a useful, short encyclopædia called Books That Count. It contains the names of about 4000 authors, out of whom only sixty-three are novelists. Divines whose sermons do not fetch a penny at the second-hand bookseller's, promoters of economic theories long disproved, partisan historians, mendacious travellers … they crowd out of the 'books that count' the pale sixty-three novelists, all that is left of the large assembly that gave us Tom Jones and The Way of All Flesh. This attitude we observe in most reference books. We observe it, for instance, in the well-known Who's Who Year Book, which, amazing as it seems, contains no list of authors. The book contains a list of professors, including those of dental surgery, a list of past Presidents of the Oxford Union, a list of owners of Derby winners, but not a list of authors. The editors of this popular reference book know what the public wants; apparently the public wants to know that Mr Arthur H. King is General Manager of the Commercial Bank of London Ltd. … but the public does not want to know that Mr Anatole France is a great man. The only evidence of notice is a list of our pseudonyms. It matters that Mr Richard Le Gallienne should write under the name of 'Logroller,' for that is odd. Mr Le Gallienne, being an author, is a curiosity; it matters to nobody that he is a man.

II

What is the area of a novelist's reputation? How far do the ripples extend when he casts a novel into the whirlpool of life? It is difficult to say, but few novelists were ever so well known to the people as were in their time such minor figures as Bradlaugh and Dr Grace, nor is there a novelist to-day whose fame can vie with that of, say, Mr Roosevelt. It is strange to think that Dickens himself could not in his own day create as much stir as, say, Lord Salisbury. He lacked political flavour; he was merely one of the latter day prophets who lack the unique advertisement of being stoned. It will be said that such an instance is taken from the masses of the world, most of whom do not read novels, while all are affected by the politician, but in those circles that support literature the same phenomenon appears; the novel may be known; the novelist is not. The novel is not respected and, indeed, one often hears a woman, at a big lending library, ask for 'three of the latest novels.' New novels! Why not new potatoes? She takes the books away calmly, without looking at the titles or the names. She is quite satisfied; sometimes she does not care much whether or not she has read those novels before, for she does not remember them. They go in at one ear and come out at the other presumably, as a judge said, because there is nothing to stop them.