L’ENVOI IN THE LAST QUARTER OF A CENTURY

When the dust of the Yellow Book period died away with the trial and disappearance of Wilde there did nevertheless remain in the public and the literary mind some conception that novel-writing was an art and that the novel was a vehicle by means of which every kind of psychological or scientific truth connected with human life and affairs could be very fittingly conveyed. To-day I imagine that there would not be many found to deny that it is the vehicle by means of which those truths can be most fittingly investigated. To that we may some day return.

In the meantime the Yellow Book period also left behind it three men whose names must for ever stand out for the student of the history of the English Novel—they were Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Joseph Conrad. I do not purpose here to attempt an estimate of any one of the three; I merely wish to point out what it was that distinguished them from all of their predecessors and nearly all of their distinguished contemporaries. Their distinguished contemporaries are all, most fortunately, still alive and so beyond the reach of my pen—but it must, I imagine, he fairly obvious that, say, Mr. Wells, Mr. Kipling, Mr. Galsworthy, or Mr. Arnold Bennett are each solitary figures, ploughing lonely furrows and expressing their admirable selves in admirable ways known only to themselves.

About that other triad there was a certain solidarity, a certain oneness of method and even a certain comradeship. They lived in the same corner of England, saw each other often and discussed literary methods more thoroughly and more frequently than can ever at any other time in England have been the case. To be sure, not one of the three was English.

Indeed, some ten years or so ago my friend Mr. Wells wrote to the papers to say that in the first decade of this century a group of foreigners occupied that corner of England and were engaged in plotting against the English novel. At the time that appeared to be the sort of patriotic nonsense that occupied our minds a good deal just after the War—but Mr. Wells, as usual, was right. The extent of the conspiracy was this: the works of those three writers whose influence on the Anglo-Saxon—and even to some extent on the British—novel was overwhelming—were united by a common technique and their literary aims were to all intents exactly the same.

All three treated their characters with aloofness; all three kept themselves, their comments and their prejudices out of their works, and all three rendered rather than told. On the whole those characteristics which never before characterized the English novel characterize it to-day. No one, that is, would to-day set out to capture the suffrages of either the more instructed or of even the almost altogether naïf with a novel of the type of those written by the followers of Bunyan, Defoe, Fielding, Charles Reade, or William Black. No author would, like Thackeray, to-day intrude his broken nose and myopic spectacles into the middle of the most thrilling scene he ever wrote, in order to tell you that, though his heroine was rather a wrong ’un, his own heart was in his right place.

James, Conrad, and Crane differed from each other in minute points and indeed in broader characteristics. James was more introspective, Crane more incisive in his writing, Conrad more nearly approached the ordinary definition of the poet and was less remorselessly aloof than either of the others. But their common, Gallic origin united them, so that they had before all for their strongest passion the desire to convey vicarious experience to the reader. Conrad wrote of his literary aim: “It is above all to make you see,” and Crane might have written the same thing had he ever written about himself. And Henry James might have written if he could ever have brought himself to write anything so unqualified about his aims: “It is above all to make you feel!” At any rate, the common aim was to take the reader, immerse him in an Affair so completely that he was unconscious either of the fact that he was reading or of the identity of the author, so that in the end he might say—and believe: “I have been in a drawing-room overlooking Boston Common, in a drinking saloon in Yellow Sky or beneath the palm leaves of Palembang! I have been!”

At this aim, to which they certainly attained, they arrived by certain technical devices or rules. Most of these I have already foreshadowed and as I am not here writing a technical work, I do not propose to go into the others at all closely. The only sound technical rules are those that are founded on a study of what pleases: if what you write is to please you must see how your predecessors did it. There can be nothing either highbrow or recondite about your efforts; the nearer you are to your fellowman who differs from you only in not having literary ambitions or gifts, the nearer you are to universality; the nearer you are to universality the greater you are, the more nearly you will have justified your existence.

You must therefore write as simply as you can—with the extreme of the simplicity that is granted to you, and you must write of subjects that spring at your throat. But why subjects appeal to you you have no means of knowing. The appeal of the subject is nevertheless the only thing that is open to your native genius—the only thing as to which you can say: “I cannot help it: that is what appealed to me!” You must never, after that, say: “I write like this because I want to,” but you must say: “I write like this because I hope it is what the unspoiled reader likes!”

Having got your subject you will, if you are prudent, live with it for a long, long time before you sit down to write it. During that time you will be doing at odd moments what Conrad used to call “squeezing the guts out of it.” For it is a mistake to think that what looks like the rendering of an ordinary affair is ever an artless chronicling. Your “subject” may be just the merest nothing in the way of intrigue or plot—but to the merest nothings in human affairs all the intrigues of the universe have contributed since first this earth swung away, a drop of molten metal, from the first of all principles. Your “subject” might be no more than a child catching frogs in a swamp or the emotions of a nervous woman in a thunderstorm, but all the history of the world has gone to putting child or woman where they are and up to either subject you might lead with an epic as thrilling in its end as that of Othello or an episode as poignant with absolute relief as came to the world on the eleventh of November, 1918. You have at your disposal heredity, environment, the concatenation of the effects of the one damn thing after another that life is—and Destiny who is blind and august. Those are the colours of your palette: it is for you to see that line by line and filament of colour by filament, the reader’s eye is conducted to your culminating point.

That is, then, all that I have to say of the gradual progress of the English novel—to the point where it becomes the Novel. I have traced out as plainly as I could the lines of the pattern as it appears to me and the reader must use that pattern for what jumpings off of his own he chooses to make.

That this is not the final stage of the Novel is obvious; there will be developments that we cannot foresee, strain our visions how we may. There are probably—humanity being stable, change the world how it may—there are probably eternal principles for all the arts, but the applications of those principles are eternally changing, or eternally revolving. It is, for instance, an obvious and unchanging fact that if an author intrudes his comments into the middle of his story he will endanger the illusion conveyed by that story—but a generation of readers may come along who would prefer witnessing the capers of the author to being carried away by stories and that generation of readers may coincide with a generation of writers tired of self-obliteration. So you might have a world of Oscar Wildes or of Lylys. Or you might, again, have a world tired of the really well constructed novel every word of which carries its story forward: then you will have a movement towards diffuseness, backboneless sentences, digressions, and inchoatenesses.

But, for the moment, the outline that I have traced for you seems to have got about as far as we ourselves have.

Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd., Frome and London