W. Somerset Maugham
The Summing Up
Pan Books, 1976.
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[First
lines:]
This is not
an autobiography nor is it a book of recollections. In one way and another I
have used in my writings whatever has happened to me in the course of my life.
Sometimes an experience I have had has served as a theme and I have invented a
series of incidents to illustrate it; more often I have taken persons with whom
I have been slightly or intimately acquainted and used them as the foundation for
characters of my invention. Fact and fiction are so intermingled in my work
that now, looking back on it, I can hardly distinguish one from the other. It
would not interest me to record the facts, even if I could remember them, of
which I have already made a better use. They would seem, moreover, very tame. I
have had a varied, and often an interesting, life, but not an adventurous one.
[…]
I have never
kept a diary. I wish now that during the year that followed my first success as
a dramatist I had done so, for I met then many persons of consequence, and it
might have proved an interesting document. At that period the confidence of the
people in the aristocracy and the landed gentry had been shattered by the
muddle they had made of things in South Africa Ireland
[…]
During this
period I met persons who by their rank, fame, or position might very well have
thought themselves destined to become historical figures. I did not find them
as brilliant as my fancy had painted them. The English are a political nation,
and I was often asked to houses where politics were the ruling interest. I
could not discover in the eminent statesmen I met there any marked capacity. I
concluded, perhaps rashly, that no great degree of intelligence was needed to
rule a nation. Since then I have known in various countries a good many
politicians who have attained high office. I have continued to be puzzled by
what seemed to me the mediocrity of their minds. I have found them ill-informed
upon the ordinary affairs of life, and I have not often discovered in them
either subtlety of intellect or liveliness of imagination. At one time I was
inclined to think that they owed their illustrious position only to their gift
of speech, for it must be next door to impossible to rise to power in a
democratic community unless you can catch the ears of the public; and the gift
of speech, as we know, is not often accompanied by the power of thought. But
since I have seen statesmen who did not seem to me very clever conduct public
affairs with reasonable success I cannot but think I was wrong: it must be that
to govern a nation you need a specific talent and that this may very well exist
without general ability. In the same way I have known men of affairs who have
made great fortunes and brought vast enterprises to prosperity, but in
everything unconcerned with their business appear to be devoid even of common
sense.
Nor was the
conversation that I heard then as clever as I had expected. It seldom gave you
much to think about. It was easy, though not always, gay, amiable and
superficial. Serious topics were not dealt with, for there was a feeling that
to discuss them in general company was embarrassing, and the fear of ‘shop’
seemed to prevent most people from speaking of the subjects in which they were
most interested. So far as I could judge conversation consisted in little more
than a decorous badinage; but it was not often that you heard a witticism worth
repeating. One might have thought that the only use of culture was to enable
one to talk nonsense with distinction.
[…]
[Chapter II]
I have always
wondered at the passion many people have to meet the celebrated. The prestige
you acquire by being able to tell your friends that you know famous men proves
only that you are yourself of small account. The celebrated develop a technique
to deal with the persons they come across. They show the world a mask, often an
impressive one, but take care to conceal their real selves. They play the part
that is expected from them, and with practice learn to play it very well, but
you are stupid if you think that this public performance of theirs corresponds
with the man within.
I have been
attached, deeply attached, to a few people; but I have been interested in men
in general not for their own sakes, but for the sake of my work. I have not, as
Kant enjoined, regard each man as an end in himself, but as material that might
be useful to me as a writer. I have been more concerned with the obscure than
with the famous. They are more often themselves. They have had no need to
create a figure to protect themselves from the world or to impress it. Their
idiosyncrasies have had more chance to develop in the limited circle of their
activity, and since they have never been in the public eye it has never
occurred to them that they have anything to conceal. They display their
oddities because it has never struck them that they are odd. And after all it
is with the common run of men that we writers have to deal; kings, dictators,
commercial magnates are from our point of view very unsatisfactory. To write
about them is a venture that has often tempted writers, but the failure that
has attended their efforts shows that such beings are too exceptional to form a
proper ground for a work of art. They cannot be made real. The ordinary is the
writer’s richer field. Its unexpectedness, its singularity, its infinite
variety afford unending material. The great man is too often all of a piece; it
is the little man that is a bundle of contradictory elements. He is
inexhaustible. You never come to the end of surprises he has in store for you.
For my part I would much sooner spend a month on a desert island with a
veterinary surgeon than with a prime minister.
[Chapter III]
In this book
I am going to try to sort out my thoughts on the subjects that have chiefly
interested me during the course of my life. But such conclusions as I have come
to have drifted about my mind like the wreckage of a foundered ship on a
restless sea. It has seemed to me that if I set them down in some sort of order
I should see for myself more distinctly what they really were and so might get
some kind of coherence into them. I have long thought that I should like to
make such an attempt and more than once, when starting on a journey that was to
last for several months, have determined to set about it. The opportunity
seemed ideal. But I have always found that I was assailed by so many impressions,
I saw so many strange things, and met so many people who excited my fancy, that
I had no time to reflect. The experience of the moment was so vivid that I
could not attune my mind to introspection.
I have been
held back also by the irksomeness of setting down my thoughts in my own person.
For though I have written a good deal from this standpoint I have written as a
novelist and so in a manner have been able to regard myself as a character in
the story. Long habit has made it more comfortable for me to speak through the
creatures of my invention. I can decide what they would think more readily than
I can decide what I think myself. The one has always been a pleasure to me; the
other has been a labour that I have willingly put off.
[…]
I am glad at
last to collect all these thoughts that for so long have floated at haphazard
on the various levels of my consciousness. When they are written down I shall
have finished with them and my mind will be free to occupy itself with other
things. […] When I have finished this book I shall know where I stand. I can
afford then to do what I choose with the years that remain to me.
[Chapter IV]
It is
inevitable that in it I should say many things that I have said before; that is
why I have called it The Summing Up. When
a judge sums up a case he recapitulates the facts that have been put before the
jury and comments on the speeches of counsel. He does not offer new evidence.
And since I have put the whole of my life into my books much of what I have to
say will naturally have found a place in them. There are few subjects within
the compass of my interests that I have not lightly or seriously touched upon.
All I can attempt to do now is to give a coherent picture of my feelings and
opinions; and here and there, maybe, to state with greater elaboration some
idea which the limitations I have thought fit to accept in fiction and in the
drama have only allowed me to hint at.
This book
must be egoistic. It is about certain subjects that are important to me and it
is about myself because I can only treat of these subjects as they have
affected me. But it is not about my doings. I have no desire to lay bare my
heart, and I put limits to the intimacy that I wish the reader to enter upon
with me. There are matters on which I am content to maintain my privacy. No one
can tell the whole truth about himself. It is not only vanity that has prevented
those who have tried to reveal themselves to the world from telling the whole
truth; it is direction of interest; their disappointment with themselves, their
surprise that they can do things that seem to them so abnormal, make them place
too great an emphasis on occurrences that are more common than they suppose. Rousseau in the
course of his Confessions
narrates incidents that have profoundly shocked the sensibility of mankind. By
describing them so frankly he falsified his values and so gave them in his book
a greater importance than they had in his life. They were events among a
multitude of others, virtuous or at least neutral, that he omitted because they
were too ordinary to seem worth recording. There is a sort of man who pays no
attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones. This is the
type that most often writes about himself. He leaves out his redeeming
qualities, and so appears only weak, unprincipled, and vicious.
[Chapter V]
I write this
book to disembarrass my soul of certain notions that have hovered about in it
too long for my comfort. I do not seek to persuade anybody. I am devoid of the pedagogic
instinct, and when I know a thing never feel in myself the desire to impart it
to others. I do not much care if people agree with me. Of course I think I am
right, otherwise I should not think as I do, and they are wrong, but it does
not offend me that they should be wrong. Nor does it greatly disturb me to
discover that my judgement is at variance with that of the majority. I have a
certain confidence in my instinct.
I must write
as though I were a person of importance; and indeed, I am – to myself. To
myself I am the most important person in the world; though I do not forget
that, not even taking into consideration so grand a conception as the Absolute,
but from the standpoint of common sense, I am of no consequence whatever. It
would have made small difference to the universe if I had never existed. Though
I may seem to write as though significance must necessarily be attached to
certain of my works, I mean only that they are of moment to me for the purpose
of any discussion during which I may have occasion to mention them. I think few
serious writers, by which I do not mean only writers of serious things, can be
entirely indifferent to the fate that will befall their works after their death.
It is pleasant to think, not that one may achieve immortality (immortality for
literary productions lasts in any case but a few hundred years, and then is
seldom more than the immortality of the school-room) but that one may be read
with interest by a few generations and find a place, however small, in the
history of one’s country’s literature. But so far as I am concerned, I look
upon this modest possibility with scepticism. Even in my life I have seen
writers who made much more stir in the world of letters than ever I have, sink
into oblivion.
[…]
If in the
following pages I seem to express myself dogmatically, it is only because I
find it very boring to qualify every phrase with an “I think” or “to my mind”.
Everything I say is merely an opinion of my own. The reader can take it or
leave it. If he has the patience to read what follows he will see that there is
only one thing about which I am certain, and this is that there is very little
about which one can be certain.
[Chapter VI]
When I began
to write I did so as though it were the most natural thing in the world. I took
to it as a duck takes to water. I have never quite got over my astonishment at
being a writer; there seems no reason for my having become one except an
irresistible inclination, and I do not see why such an inclination should have
arisen in me.
[…]
[Chapter IX]
[…]
When Henry Arthur Jones,
then a well-known playwright, read my first novel, he told a friend that in due
course I should be one of the most successful dramatists of the day. I suppose
he saw in it directness and an effective way of presenting a scene that
suggested a sense of the theatre. My language was commonplace, my vocabulary
limited, my grammar shaky, and my phrases hackneyed. But to write was an
instinct that seemed to me as natural as to breathe, and I did not stop to
consider if I wrote well or badly. It was not till some years later that it
dawned upon me that it was a delicate art that must be painfully acquired. The
discovery was forced upon me by the difficulty I found in getting my meaning
down on paper. I wrote dialogue fluently, but when it came to a page of
description I found myself entangled in all sorts of quandaries. I would
struggle for a couple of hours over two or three sentences that I could in no
way straighten out. I made up my mind to teach myself how to write.
[…]
But at that
time a florid prose was admired. Richness of texture was sought by means of a
jewelled phrase and sentences stiff with exotic epithets: the ideal was a
brocade so heavy with gold that it stood up by itself. The intelligent young read
Walter Pater with
enthusiasm. My common sense suggested to me that it was anaemic stuff; behind
those elaborate, gracious periods I was conscious of a tired, wan personality.
I was young, lusty and energetic; I wanted fresh air, action, violence, and I
found it hard to breathe that dead, heavily-scented atmosphere and sit in those
hushed rooms in which it was indecorous to speak above a whisper. But I would not listen to my common sense. I persuaded myself that this was the height of
culture and turned a scornful shoulder on the outside world where men shouted
and swore, played the fool, wenched, and got drunk. I read Intentions
and The Picture of
Dorian Gray. I was intoxicated by the colour and rareness of the
fantastic words that thickly stud the pages of Salome.
Shocked by the poverty of my own vocabulary, I went to the British Museum
The first
fruit of this labour was a little book about Andalusia
called The Land of the
Blessed Virgin. I had occasion to read parts of it the other day. I
know Andalusia a great deal better than I knew
it then, and I have changed my mind about a good many things of which I wrote.
Since it has continued in America
[Chapter X]
I do not know
whether it was a subconscious feeling that this sort of writing was contrary to
my bent or naturally methodical cast of mind that led me then to turn my
attention to the writers of the Augustan Period.
The prose of Swift
enchanted me. […] I cannot imagine that English can be better written. Here are
no flowery periods, fantastic turns of phrase, or high-flown images. It is a
civilized prose, natural, discreet, and pointed. There is no attempt to
surprise by an extravagant vocabulary. It looks as though Swift made do with
the first word that came to hand, but since he had an acute and logical brain
it was always the right one, and he put it in the right place. […] It is an
impeccable prose.
But
perfection has one grave defect: it is apt to be dull. Swift’s prose is like a
French canal, bordered with poplars, that runs through a gracious and
undulating country. Its tranquil charm fills you with satisfaction, but it
neither excites the emotion nor stimulates the imagination. You go on and on,
and presently you are a trifle bored. So, much as you may admire Swift’s
wonderful lucidity, his terseness, his naturalness, his lack of affectation,
you find your attention wandering after a while unless his matter peculiarly
interests you. I think if I had my time over again I would give to the prose of
Dryden the close study
I gave to that of Swift. I did not come across it till I had lost the
inclination to take so much pains. The prose of Dryden is delicious. It has not
the perfection of Swift nor the easy elegance of Addison, but it has
a springtime gaiety, conversational ease, a blithe spontaneousness that are
enchanting. Dryden was a very good poet, but it is not the general opinion that
he had a lyrical quality; it is strange that it is just this that sings in his
softly sparkling prose. Prose had never been written in England England
The work I
did was certainly very good for me. I began to write better; I did not write
well. I wrote stiffly and self-consciously. […] I then wrote a number of plays
and ceased to occupy myself with anything but dialogue. It was not till five
years had passed that I set out again to write a novel. By then I no longer had
any ambition to be a stylist; I put aside all thought of fine writing. I wanted
to write without any frills of language, in as bare and unaffected a manner as
I could. I had so much to say that I could afford to lose no words. I wanted
merely to set down the facts. […] I have not read it since I corrected the
proofs and do not know how near I came to doing what I tried. My impression is
that it is written at least more naturally than anything I had written before;
but I am sure it is often slipshod, and I daresay there are in it a good many
mistakes in grammar.
Since then I
have written many other books; and though ceasing my methodical study of the
old masters (for though the spirit is willing, the flesh is weak), I have
continued with increasing assiduity to try to write better. I discovered my
limitations and it seemed to me that the only sensible thing was to aim at what
excellence I could within them. I knew that I had no lyrical quality. I had a
small vocabulary and no efforts that I could make to enlarge it much availed
me. I had little gift of metaphor; the original and striking simile seldom
occurred to me. Poetic flights and the great imaginative sweep were beyond my
powers. I could admire them in others as I could admire their far-fetched
tropes and the unusual but suggestive language in which they clothed their
thoughts but my own invention never presented me with such embellishments; and
I was tired of trying to do what did not come easily to me. On the other hand,
I had an acute power of observation and it seemed to me that I could see a
great many things that other people missed. I could put down in clear terms
what I saw. I had a logical sense, and if no great feeling for the richness and
strangeness of words, at all events a lively appreciation of their sound. I
knew that I should never write as well as I could wish, but I thought with
pains I could arrive at writing as well as my natural defects allowed. On
taking thought it seemed to me that I must aim at lucidity, simplicity and
euphony. I have put these three qualities in the order of the importance I
assigned to them.
[Chapter XI]
I have never
had much patience with the writers who claim from the reader an effort to
understand their meaning. […] There are two sorts of obscurity that you find in
writers. One is due to negligence and the other to wilfulness. People often
write obscurely because they have never taken the trouble to learn to write
clearly. This sort of obscurity you find too often in modern philosophers, in
men of science, and even in literary critics. Here it is indeed strange. You
would have thought that men who passed their lives in the study of the great
masters of literature would be sufficiently sensitive to the beauty of language
to write, if not beautifully, at least with perspicuity. Yet you will find in
their works sentence after sentence that you must read twice in order to
discover the sense. Often you can only guess at it, for the writers have
evidently not said what they intended.
Another cause
of obscurity is that the writer is himself not quite sure of his meaning. He
has a vague impression of what he wants to say, but has not, either from lack
of mental power or from laziness, exactly formulated it in his mind, and it is
natural enough that he should not find a precise expression for a confused
idea. This is due largely to the fact that many writers think, not before, but
as they write. The pen originates the thought. The disadvantage of this, and
indeed it is a danger against which the author must always be on his guard, is
that there is a sort of magic in the written word. The idea acquires substance
by taking on a visible nature, and then stands in the way of its own
clarification. But this sort of obscurity merges very easily into the wilful. Some
writers who do not think clearly are inclined to suppose that their thoughts
have a significance greater than at first sight appears. It is flattering to
believe that they are too profound to be expressed so clearly that all who run
may read, and very naturally it does not occur to such writers that the fault
is with their own minds which have not the faculty of precise reflection. Here
again the magic of the written word obtains. It is very easy to persuade
oneself that a phrase that one does not quite understand may mean a great deal
more than one realises. From this there is only a little way to go to fall into
the habit of setting down one's impressions in all their original vagueness.
Fools can always be found to discover a hidden sense in them. There is another
form of wilful obscurity that masquerades as aristocratic exclusiveness. The
author warps his meaning in mystery so that the vulgar shall not participate in
it. His soul is a secret garden in which the elect can penetrate only after
overcoming a number of perilous obstacles. But this kind of obscurity is not
only pretentious; it is short-sighted. For time plays it an odd trick. If the
sense is meagre time reduces it to a meaningless verbiage that no one thinks of
reading.
[…]
[Chapter XII]
Simplicity is
not such an obvious merit as lucidity. I have aimed at it because I have no
gift for richness. Within limits I admire richness in others, though I find it
difficult to digest in quantity. I can read one page of Ruskin with delight,
but twenty only with weariness. The rolling period, the stately epithet, the
noun rich in poetic associations, the subordinate clauses that give the
sentence weight and magnificence, the grandeur like that of wave following wave
in the open sea; there is no doubt that in all this there is something inspiring.
Words thus strung together fall on the ear like music. The appeal is sensuous
rather than intellectual, and the beauty of the sound leads you easily to
conclude that you need not bother about the meaning. But words are tyrannical
things, they exist for their meanings, and if you will not pay attention to
these, you cannot pay attention at all. Your mind wanders. This kind of writing
demands a subject that will suit it. It is surely out of place to write in the
grand style of inconsiderable things. No one wrote in this manner with greater success
than Sir Thomas Browne,
but even he did not always escape this pitfall. In the last chapter of Hydriotaphia
the matter, which is the destiny of man, wonderfully fits the baroque splendour
of the language, and here the Norwich doctor produced a piece of prose that has
never been surpassed in our literature; but when he describes the finding of
his urns in the same splendid manner the effect (at least to my taste) is less
happy. When a modern writer is grandiloquent to tell you whether or no a little
trollop will hop into bed with a commonplace young man you are right to be
disgusted.
But if
richness needs gifts with which not everyone is not endowed, simplicity by no
means comes by nature. To achieve it needs rigid discipline. So far as I know
ours is the only language in which it has been found necessary to give a name
to the piece of prose which is described as purple patch; it would not have
been necessary to do so unless it were characteristic. English prose is
elaborate rather than simple. It was not always so. Nothing could be more racy,
straightforward, and alive than the prose of Shakespeare; but it must be
remembered that this was dialogue written to be spoken. We do not know how he
would have written if like Corneille he had composed prefaces to his plays. It
may be that they would have been as euphuistic as the letters of Queen
Elizabeth. But earlier prose, the prose of Sir Thomas More, for
instance, is neither ponderous, flowery, nor oratorical. It smacks of the
English soil. To my mind King
James’s Bible has had a harmful influence on English prose. I am not so
stupid as to deny its great beauty, and it is obvious that there are passages
in it of a simplicity which is deeply moving. But it is an oriental book. Its
alien imagery has nothing to do with us. Those hyperboles, those luscious
metaphors, are foreign to our genius. I cannot but think that not the least of
the misfortunes that the Secession from Rome brought upon the spiritual life of
our country is that this work for so long a period became the daily, and with
many the only, reading of our people. Those rhythms, that powerful vocabulary,
that grandiloquence, became part and parcel of the national sensibility. The
plain, honest English speech was overwhelmed with ornament. Blunt Englishmen
twisted their tongues to speak like Hebrew prophets. There was evidently
something in the English temper to which this was congenial, perhaps a native
lack of precision in thought, perhaps a naïve delight in fine words for their
own sake, an innate eccentricity and love of embroidery, I do not know; but the
fact remains that ever since, English prose has had to struggle against the
tendency to luxuriance. When from time to time the spirit of the language has
reasserted itself, as it did with Dryden and the writers of Queen Anne, it was
only to be submerged once more by the pomposities of Gibbon and Dr Johnson. When
English prose recovered simplicity with Hazlitt, the Shelley
of the letters, and Charles
Lamb at his best, it lost it again with de Quincey, Carlyle, Meredith, and Walter Pater. It is
obvious that the grand style is more striking than the plain. Indeed many
people think that a style that does not attract notice is not style. They will
admire Walter Pater’s, but will read an essay of Matthew Arnold
without giving a moment’s attention to the elegance, distinction, and sobriety
with which he set down what he had to say.
The dictum
that the style is the man is well known. It is one of those aphorisms that say
too much to mean a great deal. Where is the man in Goethe, in his
bird-like lyrics or in his clumsy prose? And Hazlitt? But I suppose that if a
man has a confused mind he will write in a confused way, if his temper is
capricious his prose will be fantastical, and if he has a quick, darting
intelligence that is reminded by the matter in hand of a hundred things he
will, unless he has great self-control, loads his pages with metaphors and
similes. There is a great difference between the magniloquence of the Jacobean
writers, who were intoxicated with the new wealth that had been brought into
the language, and the turgidity of Gibbon and Dr Johnson, who were the victims
of bad theories. I can read every word that Dr Johnson wrote with delight, for
he had good sense, charm, and wit. No one could have written better if he had
not wilfully set himself to write in the grand style. He knew good English when
he saw it. No critic has praised Dryden’s prose more aptly. He said of him that
he appeared to have no art other than that of expressing with clearness what he
thought with vigour. And one of his Lives
he finished with the words: “Whoever wishes to attain an English style,
familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days
and nights to the volumes of Addison.” But when
he himself sat down to write it was with a different aim. He mistook the
orotund for the dignified. He had not the good breeding to see that simplicity
and naturalness are the truest mark of distinction.
For to write
good prose is an affair of good manners. It is, unlike verse, a civil art.
Poetry is baroque. Baroque is tragic, massive, and mystical. It is elemental. It
demands depth and insight. I cannot but feel that the prose writers of the
baroque period, the authors of the King James’s Bible, Sir Thomas Browne,
Glanville, were poets who had lost their way. Prose is a rococo art. It needs
taste rather than power, decorum rather than inspiration, and vigour rather
than grandeur. Form for the poet is the bit and the bridle without which
(unless you are an acrobat) you cannot ride your horse; but for the writer of
prose it is the chassis without which your car does not exist. It is not an
accident that the best prose was written when rococo, with its elegance and
moderation, at its birth attained the greatest excellence. For rococo was
evolved when baroque had become declamatory, and the world, tired of the
stupendous, asked for restraint. It was the natural expression of persons who
valued a civilised life. Humour, tolerance and horse-sense made the great
tragic issues that had preoccupied the first half of the seventeenth century
seem excessive. […] This is a soil very suitable for prose. It is not to be
wondered at that it gave a fitting opportunity for the appearance of the best
writer of prose the modern world has seen, Voltaire.
[…]
[Chapter
XIII]
Whether you
ascribe importance to euphony, the last of the three qualities that I mentioned,
must depend on the sensitiveness of your ear. A great many readers, and many
admirable writers, are devoid of this quality. […] Many writers without
distress will put two rhyming words together, join a monstrous long adjective
to a monstrous long noun, or between the end of one word and the beginning of
another have a conjunction of consonants that almost breaks your jaw. These are
trivial and obvious instances. I mention them only to prove that if careful
writers can do such things it is only because they have no ear. Words have
weight, sound, and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can
write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to.
[…]
I have given the matter of
style a great deal of thought and have taken great pains. I have written few
pages that I feel I could not improve and far too many that I have left with
dissatisfaction because, try as I would, I could do no better. I cannot say of
myself what Johnson said of Pope: "He never passed a fault unamended by indifference,
nor quitted it by despair." I do not write as I want to; I write as I can.
[…]
I do not
think that a far-fetched, an archaic, or even an affected word is out of place
when it sounds better than the blunt, obvious one or when it gives a sentence a
better balance. But, I hasten to add, though I think you may without misgiving
make this concession to pleasing sound, I think you should make none to what
may obscure your meaning. Anything is better than not to write clearly. There
is nothing to be said against lucidity, and against simplicity only the
possibility of dryness. This is a risk well worth taking when you reflect how
much better it is to be bald than to wear a curly wig. But there is in euphony
a danger that must be considered. It is very likely to be monotonous.
[…]
If you could
write lucidly, simply, euphoniously and yet with liveliness you would write
perfectly: you would write like Voltaire. And yet we
know how fatal the pursuit of liveliness may be: it may result in the tiresome
acrobatics of Meredith.
Macaulay and Carlyle were in their
different ways arresting; but at the heavy cost of naturalness. Their flashy
effects distract the mind. They destroy their persuasiveness; you would not
believe a man was very intent on ploughing a furrow if he carried a hoop with
him and jumped through it every other step. A style should show no sign of
effort. What is written should seem a happy accident. […] But it does not
matter how one gets the effect of ease. For my part, if I get it at all, it is
only by strenuous effort. Nature seldom provides me with the word, the turn of
phrase, that is appropriate without being farfetched or commonplace.
[Chapter XIV]
[…]
It has been
an advantage to American writers, many of whom at one time or another have been
reporters, that their journalism has been written in a more trenchant, nervous,
graphic English than ours. For we read the newspaper now as our ancestors read
the Bible. Not without profit either; for the newspaper, especially when it is
of the popular sort, offers us a part of experience that we writers cannot
afford to miss. It is raw material straight from the knacker’s yard, and we are
stupid if we turn up our noses because it smells of blood and sweat. We cannot,
however willingly we would, escape the influence of this workday prose. But the
journalism of a period has very much the same style; it might all have been
written by the same hand; it is impersonal. It is well to counteract its affect
by reading of another kind. One can do this only by keeping constantly in touch
with the writing of an age not too remote from one’s own. So can one have a
standard by which to test one’s own style and an ideal which in one’s modern
way one can aim at. For my part the two writers I have found most useful to
study for this purpose are Hazlitt and Cardinal Newman. I
would try to imitate neither. Hazlitt can be unduly rhetorical; and sometimes
his decoration is as fussy as Victorian Gothic. Newman can be a trifle flowery.
But at their best both are admirable. Time has little touched their style; it
is almost contemporary. Hazlitt is vivid, bracing, and energetic; he has
strength and liveliness. You feel the man in his phrases, not the mean,
querulous, disagreeable man that he appeared to the world that knew him, but
the man within of his own ideal vision. (And the man within us is as true in
reality as the man, pitiful and halting, of our outward seeming.) Newman had an
exquisite grace, music, playful sometimes and sometimes grave, a woodland
beauty of phrase, dignity and mellowness. Both wrote with extreme lucidity.
Neither is quite as simple as the purest taste demands. Here I think Matthew
Arnold excels them. Both had a wonderful balance of phrase and both knew how to
write sentences pleasing to the eye. Both had an ear of extreme sensitiveness.
If anyone
could combine their merits in the manner of writing of the present day he would
write as well as it is possible for anyone to write.
[Chapter XV]
From time to
time I have asked myself whether I should have been a better writer if I had devoted my whole
life to literature. Somewhat early, but at what age I cannot remember, I made
up my mind that, having but one life, I should like to get the most I could out
of it. It did not seem to me enough merely to write. I wanted to make
a pattern of my life, in which writing would be an essential element, but which
would include all the other activities proper to man, and which death would in
the end round off in complete fulfilment. I had many disabilities. I was small;
I had endurance but little physical strength; I stammered; I was shy; I had
poor health. I had no facility for games, which play so great a part in the
normal life of Englishmen; and I had, whether for any of these reasons or from
nature I do not know, an instinctive shrinking from my fellow men that has made
it difficult for me to enter into any familiarity with them. I have loved
individuals; I have never much cared for men in the mass. I have none of that
engaging come-hitherness that makes people take to one another on first
acquaintance. Though in the course of years I have learnt to assume an air of
heartiness when forced into contact with a stranger, I have never liked anyone
at first sight. I do not think I have ever addressed someone I did not know in
a railway carriage or spoken to a fellow-passenger on board ship unless he
first spoke to me. The weakness of my flesh has prevented me from enjoying that
communion with the human race that is engendered by alcohol; long before I
could reach the state of intoxication that enables so many, more happily
constituted, to look upon all men as their brothers, my stomach has turned upon
me and I have been as sick as a dog. These are grave disadvantages both to the
writer and the man. I have had to make the best of them. I have followed the
pattern I made with persistence. I do not claim that it was a perfect one. I
think it was the best that I could hope for in the circumstances and with the
very limited powers that were granted to me by nature.
[…]
Philosophers
and moralists have looked at the body with misgiving. They have pointed out
that its satisfactions are brief. But a pleasure is none the less a pleasure
because it does not please for ever. It is delightful to plunge into cold water
on a hot day even though in a moment your skin is no longer sensitive to the
coldness. […] I looked upon it then as part of the pattern I was attempting to
draw to experience all the pleasures of sense. I have not been afraid of
excess: excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from
acquiring the deadening effect of a habit. It tonifies the system and rests the
nerves. The spirit is often most free when the body is satiated with pleasure;
indeed, sometimes the stars shine more brightly seen from the gutter than from
the hilltop. The keenest pleasure to which the body is susceptible is that of
sexual congress. I have known men who gave up their whole lives to this; they
are grown old now, but I have noticed, not without surprise, that they look
upon them as well spent. It has been my misfortune that a native fastidiousness
has prevented me from indulging as much in this particular delight as I might
have. I have exercised moderation because I was hard to please. When from time
to time I have seen the persons with whom the great lovers satisfied their
desires I have been more often astonished by the robustness of their appetites
than envious of their successes. It is obvious that you need not often go
hungry if you are willing to dine on mutton hash and turnip tops.
Most people
live haphazard lives subject to the varying winds of fortune. Many are forced
by the situation in which they were born and the necessity of earning a living
to keep to a straight and narrow road in which there is no possibility of
turning to the right or to the left. Upon these the pattern is imposed. Life
itself has forced it on them. There is no reason why such a pattern should not
be as complete as that which anyone has tried self-consciously to make. But the
artist is in a privileged position. I use the word artist, not meaning to
attach any measure of value to what he produces, but merely to signify someone
who is occupied with the arts. I wish I could find a better word. Creator is
pretentious and seems to make a claim to originality that can seldom be
justified. Craftsman is not enough. A carpenter is a craftsman, and though he
may be in the narrower sense an artist, he has not as a rule the freedom of
action which the most incompetent scribbler, the poorest dauber, possesses. The
artist can within certain limits make what he likes of his life. In other
callings, in medicine for instance or the law, you are free to choose whether
you will adopt them or not, but having chosen, you are free no longer. You are
bound by the rules of your profession; a standard of conduct is imposed upon
you. The pattern is predetermined. It is only the artist, and maybe the
criminal, who can make his own.
Perhaps it was
a natural sense of tidiness that engaged me, when still so young, to design a
pattern for my life; perhaps it was due to something I discovered in myself
about which I shall have a little to say later. The defect of such an
undertaking is that it may kill spontaneity. One great difference between the
persons of real life and the persons of fiction is that the persons of real
life are creatures of impulse. [...] I think a greater defect is that it leads
you to live too much in the future. I have long known that this was a fault of
mine and have in vain tried to correct it. I have never, except by an effort of
will, wished that the passing moment might linger so that I could get more
enjoyment from it, for even when it has brought me something I had immensely
looked forward to, my imagination in the very moment of fulfilment has been
busy with the problematical delight of whatever was to come. I have never
walked down the south side of Piccadilly without being all in a dither about
what was happening on the north. This is folly. The passing moment is all we
can be sure of; it is only common sense to extract its utmost value from it;
the future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the
present does now.
[…]
I have made a
great many mistakes. I have at times fallen victim to a snare to which the
writer is peculiarly liable, the desire to carry out in my own life certain
actions which I made the characters of my invention do. I have attempted things
that were foreign to my nature and obstinately persevered in them because in my
vanity I would not confess myself beaten. I have paid too much attention to the
opinion of others. I have made sacrifices to unworthy objects because I had not
the courage to inflict pain. I have committed follies. I have a sensitive
conscience, and I have done certain things in my life that I am unable entirely
to forget; if I had been fortunate enough to be a Catholic I could have
delivered myself of them at confession and after performing the penance imposed
received absolution and put them out of my mind for ever. I have had to deal
with them as my common sense suggested. I do not regret them, for I think it is
because of my own grave faults that I have learnt indulgence to others. It took
me a long time. In youth I was harshly intolerant. I remember my indignation
upon hearing someone make the remark, not an original one, but new to me then, that
hypocrisy was the tribute that vice paid to virtue. I thought that one should
have the courage of one’s vices. I had ideals of honesty, uprightness, truth; I
was impatient not of human weakness, but of cowardice, and I would make no
allowances for those who hedged and temporised. It never occurred to me that no
one stood in greater need of indulgence than I.
[Chapter XVI]
At first
sight it is curious that our own offences should seem to us so much less heinous
than the offences of others. I suppose the reason is that we know all the
circumstances that have occasioned them and so manage to excuse in ourselves
what we cannot excuse in others. We turn our attention away from our own
defects, and when we are forced by untoward events to consider them find it
easy to condone them. For all I know we are right to do this; they are part of
us and we must accept the good and the bad in ourselves together. But when we
come to judge others it is not by ourselves as we really are that we judge
them, but by an image that we have formed of ourselves from which we have left
out everything that offends our vanity or would discredit us in the eyes of the
world. [...] We are shocked when we discover that great men were weak and
petty, dishonest or selfish, sexually vicious, vain or intemperate; and many
people think it disgraceful to disclose to the public its heroes' failings.
There is not much to choose between men. They are all a hotchpotch of greatness
and littleness, of virtue and vice, of nobility and baseness. Some have more
strength of character, or more opportunity, and so in one direction or another
give their instincts freer play, but potentially they are the same. For my part
I do not think I am any better or any worse than most people, but I know that
if I set down every action in my life and every thought that has crossed my
mind the world would consider me a monster of depravity.
I wonder how
anyone can have the face to condemn others when he reflects upon his own
thoughts. A great part of our lives is occupied in reverie, and the more
imaginative we are, the more varied and vivid this will be. How many of us
could face having our reveries automatically registered and set before us? We
should be overcome with shame. We should cry that we could not really be as
mean, as wicked, as petty, as selfish, as obscene, as snobbish, as vain, as
sentimental, as that. Yet surely our reveries are as much part of us as our
actions, and if there were a being to whom our inmost thoughts were known we
might just as well be held responsible for them as for our deeds. Men forget
the horrible thoughts that wander through their own minds, and are indignant
when they discover them in others. In Goethe's Wahrheit und Dichtung he relates how in his youth he could not bear
the idea that his father was a middle-class lawyer in Frankfurt .
He felt that noble blood must flow in his veins. So he thought to persuade himself
that some prince travelling through the city had met and loved his mother, and
that he was the offspring of the union. The editor of the copy I read wrote an
indignant footnote on the subject. It seemed to him unworthy of so great a poet
that he should impugn the undoubted virtue of his mother in order snobbishly to
plume himself on his bastard aristocracy. Of course it was disgraceful, but it
was not unnatural and I venture to say not uncommon. There must be few
romantic, rebellious and imaginative boys who have not toyed with the idea that
they could not be the son of their dull and respectable father, but ascribe the
superiority they feel in themselves, according to their own idiosyncrasies, to
an unknown poet, great statesman or ruling prince. The Olympian attitude of
Goethe's later years inspires me with esteem; this confession arouses in me a
warmer feeling. Because a man can write great works he is none the less a man.
It is, I
suppose, these lewd, ugly, base and selfish thoughts, dwelling in their minds
against their will, that have tormented the saints when their lives were
devoted to good works and repentance had redeemed the sins of their past. [...]
It would be a comfort to know that even the saints were thus afflicted. When I
have seen the great ones of the earth, so upright and dignified, sitting in
state I have often asked myself whether at such moments they ever remembered
how their minds in solitude were sometimes occupied and whether it ever made
them uneasy to think of the secrets that their subliminal self harboured. It
seems to me that the knowledge that these reveries are common to all men should
inspire one with tolerance to oneself as well as to others. It is well also if
they enable us to look upon our fellows, even the most eminent and respectable,
with humour and if they lead us to take ourselves not too seriously. When I
have heard judges on the bench moralising with unction I have asked myself
whether it was possible for them to have forgotten their humanity so completely
as their words suggested. I have wished that beside his bunch of flowers at the
Old Bailey, his lordship had a packet of toilet paper. It would remind him that
he was a man like any other.
[Chapter
XVII]
I have been
called cynical. I have been accused of making men out worse than they are. I do
not think I have done that. All I have done is to bring into prominence certain
traits that many writers shut their eyes to. I think what has chiefly struck me
in human beings is their lack of consistency. I have never seen people all of a
piece. It has amazed me that the most incongruous traits should exist in the
same person and for all that yield a plausible harmony. I have often asked
myself how characteristics, seemingly irreconcilable, can exist in the same person.
[…] The contrast that I have found in people has interested me, but I do not
think I have unduly emphasised it. The censure that has from time to time been
passed on me is due perhaps to the fact that I have not expressly condemned
what was bad in the characters of my invention and praised what was good. It
must be a fault in me that I am not gravely shocked at the sins of others
unless they personally affect me, and even when they do I have learnt at last
generally to excuse them. It is meet not to expect too much of others. You
should be grateful when they treat you well, but unperturbed when they treat
you ill. [...] It is want of imagination that prevents people from seeing
things from any point of view but their own, and it is unreasonable to be angry
with them because they lack this faculty.
I think I
could be justly blamed if I saw only people's faults and were blind to their
virtues. I am not conscious that this is the case. There is nothing more
beautiful than goodness and it has pleased me very often to show how much of it
there is in persons who by common standards would be relentlessly condemned. I
have shown it because I have seen it. It has seemed to me sometimes to shine
more brightly in them because it was surrounded by the darkness of sin. I take
the goodness of the good for granted and I am amused when I discover their
defects or their vices; I am touched when I see the goodness of the wicked and
I am willing enough to shrug a tolerant shoulder at their wickedness. I am not
my brother's keeper. I cannot bring myself to judge my fellows; I am content to
observe them. My observation has led me to believe that, all in all, there is
not so much difference between the good and the bad as the moralists would have
us believe.
[…]
[Chapter XIX]
For here [in the
wards of St Thomas
At that time
(a time to most people of sufficient ease, when peace seemed certain and
prosperity secure) there was a school of writers who enlarged upon the moral
value of suffering. They claimed that it was salutary. They claimed that it
increased sympathy and enhanced the sensibilities. They claimed that it opened
to the spirit new avenues of beauty and enabled it to get into touch with the
mystical kingdom
of God
All this was
a valuable experience to me. I do not know a better training for a writer than
to spend some years in the medical profession. I suppose you can learn a good
deal about human nature in a solicitor’s office; but there on the whole you
have to deal with men in full control of themselves. They lie perhaps as much
as they lie to the doctor, but they lie more consistently, and it may be that
for the solicitor it is not so necessary to know the truth. The interests he
deals with, besides, are usually material. He sees human nature from a
specialised standpoint. But the doctor, especially the hospital doctor, sees it
bare. Reticences can generally be undermined; very often there are none. Fear
for the most part will shatter every defence; even vanity is unnerved by it.
Most people have a furious itch to talk about themselves and are restrained
only by the disinclination of others to listen. Reserve is an artificial
quality that is developed in most of us as the result of innumerable rebuffs.
The doctor is discreet. It is his business to listen, and no details are too
intimate for his ears.
But of course
human nature may be displayed before you and if you have not the eyes to see
you will learn nothing. If you are hidebound with prejudice, if your temper is
sentimental, you can go through the wards of a hospital and be as ignorant of
man at the end as you were at the beginning. If you want to get any benefit
from such an experience you must have an open mind and an interest in human
beings. I look upon myself as very fortunate in that though I have never much
liked men I have found them so interesting that I am almost incapable of being
bored by them. I do not particularly want to talk and I am very willing to
listen. I do not care if people are interested in me or not. I have no desire
to impart any knowledge I have to others, nor do I feel the need to correct
them if they are wrong. You can get a great deal of entertainment out of
tedious people if you keep your head.
[…]
I do not want to spend too
long a time with boring people, but then I do not want to spend too long a time
with amusing ones. I find social intercourse fatiguing. Most persons, I think, are
both exhilarated and rested by conversation; to me it has always been an
effort. When I was young and stammered, to talk for long singularly exhausted
me, and even now that I have to some extent cured myself, it is a strain. It is
a relief to me when I can get away and read a book.
[Chapter XX]
I would not
claim for a moment that those years I spent at St Thomas St
Thomas
But I must
admit that, with these reservations that I have tried always to remember, the
experience of all the years that have followed has only confirmed the
observations that I made, not deliberately, for I was too young, but
unconsciously, in the outpatients’ departments and in the wards of St Thomas’s
Hospital. I have seen men since as I saw them then, and thus have I drawn them.
It may not be a true picture and I know many have thought it an unpleasant one.
It is doubtless partial, for naturally I have seen men through my own
idiosyncrasies. A buoyant, optimistic, healthy and sentimental person would
have seen the same people quite differently. I can only claim to have seen them
coherently. Many writers seem to me not to observe at all, but to create their
characters in stock sizes from images in their own fancy. They are like
draughtsmen who draw their figures from recollections of the antique and have
never attempted to draw from the living model. At their best they can only give
a specious shape to the fantasies of their own minds. If their minds are noble
they can give you noble figures, and perhaps it does not matter if they lack
the infinite complication of common life.
[…]
The normal is
what you find but rarely. The normal is an ideal. It is a picture that one
fabricates of the average characteristics of men, and to find them all in a
single man is hardly to be expected. It is this false picture that the writers
I have spoken of take as their model, and it is because they describe what is
so exceptional that they seldom achieve the effect of life. Selfishness and
kindliness, idealism and sensuality, vanity, shyness, disinterestedness,
courage, laziness, nervousness, obstinacy, and diffidence, they can all exist
in a single person and form a plausible harmony. It has taken a long time to
persuade readers of the truth of this.
[…]
I suppose it
is a natural prepossession of mankind to take people as though they were
homogenous. It is evidently less trouble to make up one’s mind about a man one
way or the other and dismiss suspense with the phrase, he’s one of the best or,
he’s a dirty dog. It is disconcerting to find that the saviour of his country
may be stingy or that the poet who has opened new horizons to our consciousness
may be a snob. Our natural egoism leads us to judge people in their relation to
ourselves. We want them to be certain things to us, and for us that is what
they are; because the rest of them is no good to us, we ignore it.
These reasons
perhaps explain why there is so great a disinclination to accept the attempts
to portray man with his incongruous and diverse qualities, and why people turn
away with dismay when candid biographers reveal the truth about famous persons.
It is distressing to think that the composer of the quintet in the Meistersinger
was dishonest in money matters and treacherous to those who had benefited him. But
it may be that he could not have had great qualities if he had not also had
great failings. I do not believe they are right who say that the defects of
famous men should be ignored; I think it is better that we should know them. Then,
though we are conscious of having faults as glaring as theirs, we can believe
that that is no hindrance to our achieving also some of their virtues.
[…]
[Chapter XXII]
I lived at
this time [the years after he graduated from St Thomas
Of course it
is from among those who possess by nature this facility that the artist is produced. Without
it he cannot have talent; but it is only a part of talent. We start by living,
each one of us, in the solitariness of our minds, and from the data given us
and our communications with other minds we construct the outside world to suit
our needs. Because we are all the result of one evolutionary process, and our
environment is more or less the same, the constructions we make are roughly
similar. For convenience and simplicity we accept them as identical and speak
of a common world. The peculiarity of the artist is that he is in some
particular different from other men, and so the world of his construction is
different too. It is this idiosyncrasy that is the better part of his
equipment.
[…]
I do not
believe that genius is an entirely different thing from talent. I am not even
sure that it depends on any great difference in the artist’s natural gifts. For
example, I do not think that Cervantes had an exceptional gift for writing; few
people would deny him genius. Nor would it be easy in English literature to
find a poet with a happier gift than Herrick and yet no one would claim that he
had more than a delightful talent. It seems to me that what makes genius is the
combination of natural gifts for creation with an idiosyncrasy that enables its
possessor to see the world personally in the highest degree, and yet with
catholicity that his appeal is not to this type of man or to that one, but to
all men. His private world is that of common men, but ampler and more pithy. His
communication is universal, and though men may not be able to tell exactly what
it signifies they feel that it is important. He is supremely normal. By a happy
accident of nature seeing life with immense vivacity, as it were at concert
pitch, he sees it, with its infinite diversity, in the healthy way that mankind
at large sees it. In Matthew Arnold’s phrase he sees it steadily and sees it
whole. But genius arises once or twice in a century. […] It is foolish to do as
many do now and call a man genius because he has written half a dozen clever
plays or painted a score of good pictures. It is very well to have talent; few
people have. With talent the artist will only reach the second class, but that
need not disturb him, for it contains the names of many whose works have
uncommon merit. When you think it has produced such novels as Le Rouge
et le noir, such poems as The
Shropshire Lad, such paintings as those of Watteau, there is not
much to be ashamed of. Talent cannot reach the utmost heights, but it can show
you many an unexpected and delicious view, an unfrequented dell, a bubbling
brook, or a romantic cavern, on the way that leads to them. The forwardness of
human nature is such that it falters sometimes when it is bidden to take the
broadest of all surveys of human nature. It will shrink from the splendour of Tolstoi’s War and
Peace to turn with complacency to Voltaire’s Candide.
It would be hard to live always with Michelangelo’s ceiling in the Sistine Chapel,
but anyone could do with one of Constable’s
pictures of Salisbury Cathedral.
My sympathies
are limited. I can only be myself, and partly by nature, partly by
circumstances of my life, it is a partial self. I am not a social person. I
cannot get drunk and feel a great love for my fellow-men. Convivial amusement
has always somewhat bored me. When people sitting in an ale-house or drifting
down the river in a boat start singing I am silent. I have never even sung a
hymn. I do not much like being touched and I have always to make a slight effort
over myself not to draw away when someone links his arm in mine. I can never
forget myself. The hysteria of the world repels me and I never feel more aloof
than when I am in the midst of a throng surrendered to a violent feeling of
mirth or sorrow. Though I have been in love a good many times I have never
experienced the bliss of requited love. I know that this is the best thing that
life can offer and it is a thing that almost all men, though perhaps only for a
short time, have enjoyed. I have most loved people who cared little or nothing
for me and when people have loved me I have been embarrassed. It has been a
predicament that I have not quite known how to deal with. In order not to hurt
their feelings I have often acted a passion that I did not feel. I have tried,
with gentleness when possible, and if not, with irritation, to escape from the
trammels with which their love bound me. I have been jealous of my
independence. I am incapable of complete surrender. And so, never having felt
some of the fundamental emotions of normal men, it is impossible that my work
should have the intimacy, the broad human touch and the animal serenity which
the greatest writers alone can give.
[Chapter XXIII]
It is
dangerous to let the public behind the scenes. They are easily disillusioned
and then they are angry with you, for it was the illusion they loved; they do
not understand that what interests you is the way in which you have created the
illusion. Anthony Trollope ceased to be read for thirty years because he confessed
that he wrote at regular hours and took care to get the best price he could for
his work.
But for me
the race now is nearly run and it would ill become me to conceal the truth. I
do not want anyone to think better of me than I deserve. Let those who like me
take as I am and let the rest leave me. I have more character than brains and
more brains than specific gifts.
[…]
I am told
that there are natural singers and made singers. Though of course he must have
something of a voice the made singer owes the better part of his accomplishment
to training; with taste and musical ability he can eke out the relative poverty
of his organ and his singing can afford a great deal of pleasure, especially to
the connoisseur; but he will never move you as you are moved to ecstasy by the
pure, bird-like notes of the natural singer. The natural singer may be
inadequately trained, he may have neither tact nor knowledge, he may outrage
all the canons of art, but such is the magic of his voice that you are
captivated. You forgive the liberties he takes, his vulgarities, his appeals to
obvious emotion, when those heavenly sounds enchant your ear. I am a made
writer. But it would be vanity if I thought that such results as I have
achieved on myself were due to a design that I deliberately carried out. I was
drawn to various courses by very simple motives, and it is only on looking back
that I discover myself subconsciously working to a certain end. The end was to
develop my character and so make up for the deficiencies in my natural gifts.
I have a
clear and logical brain, but not a very subtle nor a very powerful one. For long I
wished it were better. […] It took me a long time to resign
myself to making the best of what I had. I think it was a good enough brain to
have brought me success in whatever profession I had adopted.
I am not one of those persons who is a fool at everything but his own
specialty. In law, medicine and politics a clear mind and insight into men are
useful.
I have had
one advantage; I have never wanted a subject. I have always had more stories in
my head than I ever had time to write. […] I am almost inclined to say that I
could not spend an hour in anyone’s company without getting the material to
read at least a readable story about him. It is pleasant to have so many
stories in mind that whatever your mood you have one upon which, for an hour or
two, for a week or so, you can let your fancy linger. Reverie is the groundwork
of creative imagination; it is the privilege of the artists that with him it is
not as with other men an escape from reality, but the means by which he accedes
to it. His reverie is purposeful. It affords him a delight in comparison with
which the pleasures of sense are pale and it affords him the assurance of his
freedom. One cannot wonder if sometimes he is unwilling to exchange its
enjoyment for the drudgery and loss of execution.
But though I
have had variety of invention, and this is not strange since it is the outcome
of the variety of mankind, I have had small power of imagination. I have taken
living people and put them into the situations, tragic or comic, that their
characters suggested. I might well say that they invented their own stories. I
have been incapable of those great, sustained flights that carry the author on
broad pinions into a celestial sphere. My fancy, never very strong, has been
hampered by my sense of probability. I have painted easel pictures, not
frescoes.
[Chapter XXIV]
[…]
The value of
culture is its effect on character. It avails nothing unless it ennobles and
strengthens that. Its use is for life. Its aim is not beauty but goodness. Too
often, as we know, it gives rise to self-complacency. Who has not seen the
scholar’s thin-lipped smile when he corrects a misquotation and the
connoisseur’s pained look when someone praises a picture he does not care for?
There is no more merit in having read a thousand books than in having ploughed
a thousand fields. There is no more merit in being able to attach a correct
description to a picture than in being able to find out what is wrong with a
stalled motor-car. In each case it is special knowledge. The stockbroker has
his knowledge too and so has the artisan. It is a silly prejudice of the
intellectual that his is the only one that counts. The True, the Good, and the
Beautiful are perquisites of those who have been to expensive schools, burrowed
in libraries, and, frequented museums. The artist has no excuse when he uses
others with condescension. He is a fool if he thinks his knowledge is more
important than theirs and an oaf if he cannot comfortably meet them on an equal
footing. Matthew Arnold did a great disservice to culture when he insisted on
its opposition to philistinism.
[Chapter XXV]
[…]
Now and then
journalists in search of copy ask me what is the most thrilling moment of my
life. If I were not ashamed to, I might answer that it is the moment when I
began to read Goethe’s Faust. I have
never quite lost this feeling, and even now the first pages of a book sometimes
send the blood racing through my veins. To me reading is a rest as to other
people conversation or a game of cards. It is more than that; it is a
necessity, and if I am deprived of it for a long while I find myself as
irritable as the addict deprived of his drug. I would sooner read a time-table
or a catalogue than nothing at all. That is putting it too low. I have spent
many delightful hours poring over the price-list of the Army and Navy Stores,
the lists of second-hand book-sellers, and the ABC. All these are redolent of
romance. They are much more entertaining than half the novels that are written.
[…]
[Chapter XXVII]
Young
persons, who are anxious to write, sometimes pay me the compliment of asking me
to tell them of certain books necessary for them to read. I do. They seldom
read them, for they seem to have little curiosity. They do not care what their
predecessors have done. […] It is true that contemporary literature has a
vividness of appeal that classical literature can never have, and it is well
for a young writer to know what his contemporaries are writing and how. But
there are fashions in literature and it is not easy to tell what intrinsic
value there is in a style of writing that happens to be the vogue at the
moment. An acquaintance with the great books of the past serves as a very good
standard of comparison. I have sometimes wondered whether it is due to their
ignorance that many young writers, notwithstanding their facility and
cleverness, their skilful technique, so frequently fizzle out. They write two
or three books that are not only brilliant, but mature, and then they are done
for. But that is not what enriches the literature of a country. For that you
must have writers who can produce not just two or three books, but a great body
of work. Of course it will be uneven, because so many fortunate circumstances must
go together to produce a masterpiece; but a masterpiece is more likely to come
as the culminating point of a laborious career than as the lucky fluke of untaught
genius. The writer can only be fertile if he renews himself, and he can only
renew himself if his soul is constantly enriched by fresh experience. There is
no more fruitful source of this than the enchanting exploration of the great
literature of the past.
[…]
But I am not
impatient with the young when, only at their request I insist, I advise them to
read Shakespeare and Swift, and they tell
me that they read Gulliver’s
Travels in their nursery and Henry IV at
school; and if they find Vanity Fair
unendurable and Anna Karenina
footling it is their own affair. No reading is worth while unless you enjoy it.
There is at least this to be said for them that they do not suffer from the
self-conceit of knowledge. They are not withdrawn by a wide culture from
sympathy with the common run of men who are after all their material. They are
nearer to their fellows, and the art they practice is not a mystery, but a craft
on the same footing as any other. They write novels and plays as unaffectedly
as other men build motorcars. This is much to the good. For the artist, the
writer especially, in the solitariness of his own mind constructs a world that
is different from other men’s; the idiosyncrasy that makes him a writer
separates him from them, and the paradox emerges that though his aim is to
describe them truthfully his gift prevents him from knowing them as they really
are. It is as though he wanted urgently to see a certain thing and by the act
of looking at it drew before it a veil that obscured it. The writer stands
outside the very action he is engaged in. He is the comedian who never quite
loses himself in the part, for he is at the same time spectator and actor. […] It
may be that the writers of the present day, who seem to be so much nearer to
their raw material, ordinary men among ordinary men, rather than artists in an
alien crowd, may break down the barrier that their peculiar gift cannot but
raise and so come nearer to the plain truth than has ever been done before.[1]
[Chapter
XXVIII]
I had my full
share of the intellectual’s arrogance and if, as I hope, I have lost it, I must
ascribe it not to my own virtue or wisdom but to the chance that made more of a
traveller than most writers. I am attached to England England Heidelberg I
managed to visit a good many places in Germany
(at Munich I saw Ibsen drinking a glass of beer
at the Maximilianerhof and with a scowl of his face reading the paper) and I
went to Switzerland ; but the
first real journey I made was to Italy England
A year later
I went to Italy again,
travelling as far down as Naples , and discovered
Capri. It was the most
enchanting spot I had ever seen, and the following summer I spent the whole of
my vacation there. […] I listened with transport to conversations, up at Anacapri at the colonel's
house, or at Morgano's, the wine shop just off the Piazza, when they talked of
art and beauty, literature and Roman history. I saw two men fly at one
another's throats because they disagreed over the poetic merit for Heredia's
sonnets. I thought it all grand. Art, art for art's sake, was the only thing
that mattered in the world; and the artist alone gave this ridiculous world
significance. Politics, commerce, the learned professors - what did they amount
to from the standpoint of the Absolute? They might disagree, these friends of
mine (dead, dead every jack one of them), about the value of a sonnet or the
excellence of a Greek bas-relief (Greek, my eye! I tell you it's a Roman copy
and if I tell you a thing it is so); but they were all agreed about this, that
they burned with a hard, gem-like flame. I was too shy to tell them that I had
written a novel and was half-way through another and it was a great
mortification to me, burning as I was too with a hard, gem-like flame, to be
treated as a philistine who cared for nothing but dissecting dead bodies and
would seize an unguarded moment to give his best friend an enema.
[Chapter
XXIX]
Presently I
was qualified. I had already published a novel and it had had an unexpected
success. I thought my fortune was made, and, abandoning medicine to become a
writer, I went to Spain Seville Seville Guadalquivir ,
I dawdled about the Cathedral, I went to bull-fights and made light love to
pretty little creatures whose demands on me were no more than my exiguous means
could satisfy. It was heavenly to live in Seville
[…]
[Chapter XXX]
[…]
I tried to go
to my own first nights as though they were somebody else’s; but even at that I
found it a disagreeable experience. It did me no good to hear the laughter that
rewarded a happy jest or the applause that broke out on the fall of the curtain
when an act had pleased. The fact is that, even in my lightest pieces, I had
put in so much of myself that I was embarrassed to hear it disclosed to a crowd
of people. Because they were words I had written myself they had for me an intimacy
that I shrank from sharing with all and sundry. This unreasonable feeling I
have had even when I have gone to see a play of mine in a translation and have
sat in the theatre as an entirely unknown member of the public. Indeed I should
never have gone to see my plays at all, on the first night or any other, if I
had not thought it necessary to see the effect they had on the audience in
order to learn how to write them.
[Chapter XXXI]
The actor’s
calling is a hard one. I am not speaking now of the young women who go on the
stage because they have a pretty face and if good looks were a qualification
for typists might just as well have gone into an office, or of the young men
who do so because they have a good figure and no particular aptitude for
anything else. They drift in and out of the profession; the women marry and the
men get into a wine-merchant’s office or take up interior decoration. I am
speaking of the actors by vocation. They have a natural gift and the desire to
use it. It is a profession that requires assiduous labour to achieve
proficiency, so that by the time an actor knows how to act any sort of part he
is often too old to act any but few; it requires boundless patience; it is
fraught with disappointments. Long stretches of enforced idleness must be
endured. The prizes are few and can be held but for a brief period. The rewards
are inadequate. The actor is at the mercy of fortune and the inconstant favour
of the public. He is forgotten as soon as he ceases to please. Then it will
avail him nothing to have been the idol of the crowd. He can starve for all
they care. It is when I think of this that I find it easy to be indulgent to
the actor’s airs and graces, his exigence and vanity, when he is on the crest
of the wave. Let him be flamboyant and absurd if he likes. It all lasts such a
little while. And after all his egotism is part of his talent.
[…]
I have known
a number of actors very well. I have found them good company. Their gift of
mimicry, their knack of telling a story, their quick wit, make them often
highly entertaining. They are generous, kindly, and courageous. But I have
never quite been to look upon them as human beings. I have never succeeded in
achieving any intimacy with them. They are like crossword puzzles in which
there are no words to fit the clues. The fact is, I suppose, their personality is
made of the parts they play and that the basis of it is something amorphous. It
is a soft, malleable thing that is capable of taking any shape and being
painted in any colour. An ingenious writer has suggested that it is not
surprising if for so long they were refused burial in consecrated ground
because it is preposterous to suppose that they have souls. This is probably an
extravagance. They are certainly very interesting. And the novelist, if he is
sincere, cannot but acknowledge that there is between him and them a certain
affinity: their character, like his, is a harmony that is none too plausible;
they are all the persons they can mirror, while he is all the persons he can
beget. The writer and the actor represent emotions they do not, at the moment
at all events, feel; and standing with one side of themselves outside life
portray it for the satisfaction of their creative instinct. Make-believe is
their reality, and the public, which is at once their material and their judge,
is also their dupe. Because make-believe is their reality they can look upon
reality as make-believe.
[…]
[Chapter
XXXV]
[…]
The
playwright and the journalist need very similar gifts, a quick eye for a good
story and a telling point, animation, and a vivid way of writing. All the
dramatist needs besides is a specific knack. I do not know that anyone has been
able to discover what this knack consists of. It cannot be learnt. It can exist
without education or culture. It is a faculty that enables the playwright so to
put words that they carry across the footlights and to tell a story, as it were
stereoscopically, so that it visibly moves before an audience. It is a very
rare faculty: that is why dramatists are so much more highly paid than other
artists. It has nothing to do with literary ability, as we know from the fact
that the most distinguished novelists have generally failed lamentably when they
have tried to write plays. It is a faculty, like that of being able to play by
ear, of no spiritual importance. But without it, though your ideas may be
profound, your theme original, and your characterisation acute, you will never
be able to write a play.
[…]
The best way
of learning how to write a play is to see one of your own produced. That will
teach you how to write lines that the actors find easy to say and, if you have
an ear, how far you can carry the rhythm of a sentence without losing the
spontaneity of conversation. It will show you what sort of speech and what sort
of scenes are effective. But I think the secret of play-writing can be given in
two maxims: stick to the point, and, whenever you can, cut. The first of these
demands a logical mind. Few of us have it. One idea suggests another; it is
very pleasant to pursue it, even though it is not directly concerned with the
subject. The inclination to digress is human. But the dramatist must avoid it
even more strenuously than the saint must avoid sin, for sin may be venial,
digression is mortal. The principle is of direction of interest. It is
important in a novel too, but here greater space permits of greater latitude
and, just as according to the idealists evil is transformed into the perfect
good of the Absolute, so certain digressions may take their necessary part in
the development of the main theme. […] The astute dramatist presents his
subject as early as possible, and if for theatrical effectiveness he does not
introduce his principal characters till later, the conversation of the persons
on the stage at the rising of the curtain concentrates the attention of the audience
on them so that the delay in their appearance increases the expectation. No one
followed this practice more scrupulously than that very competent dramatist William Shakespeare.
[…]
Now I come to
my second maxim. However brilliant a scene may be, however witty a line or
profound a reflection, if it is not essential to his play the dramatist must
cut it. Here it may serve him if he is also a man of letters. The pure
dramatist looks upon it as something of a miracle that he should be able to put
words on paper at all, and when they are there, out of his own brain, if not
straight from heaven, he looks upon them as sacred. He cannot bear to sacrifice
one of them. I well remember Henry Arthur Jones showing me one of his
manuscripts and my surprise on noticing that he had written such a simple
sentence as, will you have sugar in your tea? in three different ways. It is no
wonder that people to whom words come so reluctantly should attach an
inordinate importance to them. The man of letters is accustomed to writing; he
has learnt how to express himself without intolerable labour and so can cut
with fortitude. Of course every writer hits now and then upon a thought that
seems to him so happy, a repartee that amuses him so much, that to cut it is
worse than having a tooth out: it is then that it is well to have engraved on
his heart the maxim: if you can, cut.
[…]
[Chapter
XXXVI]
A play is the
result of a collaboration between the author, the actors, the audience, and, I
suppose one must add now, the director. For the moment I will consider the
audience. All the best dramatists have written with their eye on it, and though
they have more often spoken of it with contempt than with good will they have
known that they were dependent on it. It is the public that pays, and if it is
not pleased with the entertainment that is offered it, stays away. A play does
not exist without an audience. […] A play written to be read in a study is a
form of the novel in dialogue in which the author for some reason of his own
(obscure to most of us) has eschewed the ordinary advantages of narrative. A
play that does not appeal to an audience may have merits, but it is no more a
play than a mule is a horse. (Alas, all of us dramatists from time to time give
birth to these unsatisfactory hybrids.)
[…]
Now the
audience is a very curious animal. It is shrewd rather than intelligent. Its
mental capacity is less than that of its most intellectual members. If these
were graded from A to Z, decreasing with succeeding letters to the zero of the
hysterical shop-girl, I should say its mental capacity would come round about
the letter O. It is immensely suggestible; individuals will laugh at a joke
they have not seen because others who see it do. It is emotional; but it
instinctively resents having its emotions stirred and is always ready to escape
with a giggle. It is sentimental; but will only accept sentimentality of its
own brand: thus in England
[…]
[Chapter
XXXVII]
I have given
this little analysis of an audience because the nature of the audience is for
the dramatist the most important of the conventions within which he must work. Every
artist must accept the conventions of the art which he pursues, but it may be
that these are of such a nature as to make the art a minor one. […] Now, the
fact that the general mentality of an audience is so very much lower than that
of its more intellectual members is a factor that the author must deal with. I
think it definitely reduces prose drama to a minor place. […] I have a notion
that when the intelligent look for thought in a playhouse, they show less
intelligence than one would have expected of them. Thought is a private thing.
It is the offspring of reason. It depends on the mental capacity of the individual
and on his education. Its communication is private from the mind that conceives
it to the mind that is prepared to receive it, and if one man’s meat is another
man’s poison, still more is one man’s thought another man’s truism. But an
audience is affected by mass suggestion, and mass suggestion is affected by
emotion.
[…]
The only two
dramatists in our time who have made their mark as thinkers are Ibsen and Shaw. Both were
fortunate in the time of their appearance. Ibsen’s advent coincided with the
movement for liberation of women from the inferior position in which they had
so long stood; Shaw’s with the revolt of youth from the conventionality of the
Victorian epoch and the trammels that age has set upon it. They had to their
hands subjects new to the theatre that could be displayed with dramatic
effectiveness. Shaw had the advantage, useful to any dramatist, of high
spirits, rollicking humour, wit, and fertility of comic invention. Ibsen as we
know had a meagre power of invention; his characters under different names are
dully repeated, and his intrigue from play to play is little varied. It is not
a gross exaggeration to say that his only gambit is the sudden arrival of a
stranger who comes into a stuffy room and opens the window; whereupon the
people who were sitting there catch their death of cold and everything ends
unhappily. When you consider the mental content of what these authors had to
offer, you can, unless you are but ill educated, hardly fail to see that it
consisted of no more than the common culture of the day. Shaw’s ideas were
expressed with great vivacity. They could only have surprised because the
intellectual capacity of the audience was inconsiderable. They surprise no
longer; indeed, the young tend to look on them now as antiquated buffooneries. The
disadvantage of ideas in the theatre is that if they are acceptable, they are
accepted and so kill the play that helped to diffuse them. For nothing is so
tiresome in the theatre as to be forced to listen to the exposition of ideas
that you are willing to take for granted. Now that everyone admits the right of
a woman to her own personality it is impossible to listen to A Doll’s House
without impatience. The dramatist of ideas loads the dice against himself.
Plays are ephemeral enough in any case, because they must be dressed in the
fashion of the moment, and fashions change so that they lose the actuality
which is one of their attractive features; it seems a pity to make more
ephemeral still by founding them on ideas that will be stale the day after
tomorrow.
[…]
Let no one think
that commercial plays succeed because they are bad plays. The story they tell
may be hackneyed, the dialogue commonplace, and the characterisation ordinary,
they succeed notwithstanding because they have the essential, though doubtless
trivial, merit of holding their audiences by the specific appeal of drama. But
that this need not be the only merit of the commercial play is shown by those
of Lope de Vega, Shakespeare, and Moliere.
[Chapter
XXXVIII]
If I have
thus enlarged on the play of ideas, it is because I think the demand for it is
responsible for the lamentable decadence of our theatre. The critics clamour
for them. Now, the critics are of necessity the worst judges of plays. For
consider, the play appeals to the audience as a unity, the current that passes
from one person to another is essential to the dramatist; he wants to excite a
contagion; he must take people out of themselves so that they become an
instrument for him to play on, and what they give back, the resonance, the
tone, the emotion, is part of his play. But the critic is there not to feel but
to judge. He must hold aloof from the contagion that has captured the group and
keep his self-possession. He must not allow his heart to carry him away; his
head must remain well screwed on his shoulders. He must take care not to become
part of the audience. He is not there to play his part in the play, but to
watch it from the outside. The result is that he does not see the play they see
because he has not, as they have, acted in it. It is natural enough then that
he should ask for different things in a play from those the audience asks for. There
is no reason why he should get it. Plays are not written for critics. Or at
least, they should not be.
[…]
The influence
of Shaw on the English stage of today has been devastating. The public have not
always liked his plays, any more than they liked Ibsen’s, but after seeing them
they have liked those written according to the old conventions even less.
Disciples arose who sought to follow in his steps, but the event has proved
that is impossible to do so without his great gifts.
[…]
The lesser
followers of Bernard Shaw have only copied his defects. Shaw has succeeded on
stage not because he is a dramatist of ideas, but because he is a dramatist. But
he is inimitable. He owes his originality to an idiosyncrasy, not of course
peculiar to himself, that had never before found expression on the stage. The
English, whatever they were in the Elizabethan era, are not an amorous race.
Love with them is more sentimental than passionate. They are of course
sufficiently sexual for the purpose of reproducing their species, but they
cannot control the instinctive feeling that the sexual act is disgusting. They
are more inclined to look upon love as affection or benevolence than as
passion. […] That love should absorb a man has seemed to them unworthy. In France a man who has ruined himself for women is
generally regarded with sympathy and admiration; there is a feeling that it was
worth while, and the man who has done feels even a certain pride in the fact;
in England
To audiences
who had been forced to sit through plays in which love was the motive of the
intrigue, but who had an instinctive feeling that love, though all very well in
its own way, was not really quite so important as dramatists pretended, for
after all there were politics, golf, getting on with one’s job, and all sorts
of other things, it was a welcome relief to come upon a dramatist for whom love
was a tiresome, secondary business, a quick gratification of a momentary
impulse whose consequences were generally awkward. Though put as things must be
put on the stage in an exaggerated way (and it should never be forgotten that
Shaw is an extremely skilful dramatist) there was enough truth in this attitude
to impress. It responded to the deep-seated puritanism of the Anglo-Saxon race.
But, if not amorous, the English are sentimental and emotional, and they felt
that it was not the whole truth. When other dramatists repeated it, not because
it was, as with Shaw, a natural expression of a personality, but it was
striking and effective, its one-sidedness became tediously apparent. The author
describes for you his private world, and if it interests you, you will give him
your attention. There is no reason why you should trouble yourself with a
description of it second-hand. It is inept to say again what Shaw has said so well.
[Chapter
XXXIX]
To my mind,
the drama took a wrong turning when the demand for realism led it to abandon
the ornament of verse. Verse has a specific dramatic value as anyone can see by
observing in himself the thrilling effect of a tirade in one of Racine
[…]
[Chapter XL]
[…]
Instances
have been known of directors who imagined that they were playwrights. Gerald du Maurier, a
very good director, told me himself that he took no interest in directing a
play that he could not partly rewrite. This was an extreme case. But it has
certainly become very hard to find a director who is content to interpret his
author’s play; he has too often come to look upon it as an opportunity for
original creation of his own. The public would be surprised if they knew how
often an author’s purport is misrepresented by the director’s stupid obstinacy
and how much vulgarity and silliness for which they blame him is due to the
director. The director is a man of ideas, but of few, and that is a disastrous
thing. To conceive ideas is exhilarating, but it is only safe when you conceive
so many that you ascribe no undue consequence to them and can take them for what
they are worth. People who conceive few find it very difficult not to regard
them with inordinate respect. A director who thinks of a scrap of dialogue, a
bit of business, or a scenic effect, will attach so much importance to it that
he will cheerfully hang up the action of the play or distort its meaning in
order to introduce it. Too often the director is vain, self-opinionated, and
unimaginative; he is sometimes so autocratic that he will force the cast to
reproduce his own intonations and his own mannerisms; the actors, dependent of
his good word to get parts and on their docility to gain his favour, can but
slavishly do as they are told, thus taking all spontaneity from their
performance. The best director is the one who does least.
[…]
Direction is
a business, or an art, that needs technical knowledge of an elaborate order. It
needs moreover tact, patience, good humour, firmness, and pliability. For
myself, I have been well aware that I possessed none of the knowledge and few
of the qualities that are needed to direct a play. I was hampered besides by my
stammer and by the unfortunate accident that after I had written a play and
finally corrected the typescript I could no longer take any great interest in
it. I was curious to see how it would act, but when once I had given it over to
others, like a bitch who takes no more concern in her puppies when others have
handled them, I could no longer look upon it any more as intimately my own. I
have been blamed often for yielding too easily to directors and accepting their
opinions when they were contrary to my own; the fact is that I have always been
inclined to think that others knew better than I; I have never liked rows
unless I was in a temper and I am seldom in a temper; and lastly, I did not
very much care. What added to my growing distaste for the theatre was not that
directors were sometimes incompetent, but they were necessary at all.
[Chapter XLI]
[…]
I had long
come to the conclusion that there was not much point in a play that was not
successful, and I thought I knew exactly how to write a successful play. I
knew, that is to say, what I could expect from an audience. Without their
collaboration I could do nothing, and I knew how far their collaboration could
go. I found myself increasingly dissatisfied with this. […] I was tired of
giving half a truth because that was all they were prepared to take. I grew
tired of the absurdity that admits in conversation all manner of facts that
must be denied on the stage. I wearied of the necessity of fitting my theme
into a certain compass, drawing it out to an unnecessary length, or unduly
constricting because a play to attract had to be of a definite length. I grew
bored with trying never to be boring. In fact, I did not want to conform any
longer to the necessary conventions of the drama. I suspected that I was out of
touch with the taste of the public, and to decide the matter went to a number
of plays that were drawing the town. I found them tedious. I could not laugh at
the jokes that amused the delighted audience, and the scenes that moved them to
tears left me stone cold. That settled it.
I sighed for
the liberty of fiction, and I thought with pleasure of the lonely reader who
was willing to listen to all I had to say and with whom I could effect an
intimacy that I could never hope for in the garish publicity of the theatre. I
had known too many dramatists who had survived their popularity. I had seen
them pitifully writing their own plays over and over again without an inkling
that the times had changed; I had seen others desperately attempting to capture
the modern spirit and dismayed when their efforts were treated with derision. I
had seen famous authors treated with contumely when they offered a play to
managers who had once pestered them with contracts. I had heard actors’
scornful comments on them. I had seen the bewilderment, the consternation, the
bitterness with which they realised at last that the public was finished with
them. I had heard Arthur
Pinero and Henry
Arthur Jones, both celebrated in their day, say to me identically the same
words, one with a grim, sardonic humour, the other with a puzzled exasperation;
the words were: “They don’t want me any more.” I thought I would go while the
going was good.
[Chapter
XLII]
[…]
I wrote my
first full-length play in 1898, my last in 1933. In that time I have seen
dialogue change from the turgid, pedantic speech of Pinero, from the elegant
artificiality of Oscar Wilde, to the extreme colloquialism of the present day. The
demand for realism has inveigled dramatists into a naturalism ever greater and
greater, a style that has been cultivated to its utmost limit, as we know, by Noel Coward. Not only
is the “literary” avoided, but actuality has been so much sought after that
grammar is eschewed, sentences are broken, for it is said that in ordinary life
people speak ungrammatically and in short or unfinished sentences, and a
vocabulary has been employed in which only the simplest and most ordinary words
are allowed. This dialogue is eked out with shrugs, waves of the hand, and
grimaces. In thus yielding to the fashion it seems to me that dramatists have gravely
handicapped themselves. For this slangy, clipped, broken speech they reproduce
is only the speech of a class, the speech of the young, ill-educated
well-to-do, who are described in the papers as the smart set. They are the persons
who figure in the gossip columns and in the pages of illustrated weeklies. It
may be a fact that the English are tongue-tied, but I do not think they are so
tongue-tied as we are now asked to believe. There are a great many people, members
of the various professions and cultured women, who clothe their thoughts in
grammatical, well-chosen language and can say what they want to in the right
words, put in the right order, with distinction. The present mode, which forces
a judge or an eminent physician to express himself as inadequately as a
bar-lounger, grossly misrepresents the truth. It has narrowed the range of
character that the dramatist can deal with, for he can only this by speech, and
it is impossible to portray people of any subtlety of mind or intricacy of
emotion when his dialogue is but a sort of spoken hieroglyph.
[…]
[Chapter XLIII]
…for
imagination grows by exercise and contrary to common belief is more powerful in
the mature than in the young…
[…]
It was a
novel set in Italy during the Renaissance [The
Making of a Saint, Maugham’s second novel, first published in 1898], and it
was founded on a story I had read in Machiavelli’s History of
Florence. I wrote it because of some articles by Andrew Lang that I read on
the art of fiction. In one of them he argued, very convincingly to me, that
historical novel was the only one that the young writer could hope to write
with success. For he could not have sufficient experience of life to write of
contemporary manners; history provided him with a story and characters, and the
romantic fervour of his young blood with the dash that was needed for this sort
of composition. I know now that this was nonsense. In the first place it is not
true that the young author has not sufficient knowledge to write about his
contemporaries. I do not suppose one ever in after life knows people so
intimately as those with whom one’s childhood and early youth have been passed.
One’s family, the servants with whom so much of a child’s life is spent, one’s
masters at school, other boys and girls – the boy knows a great deal about
them. He sees them with directness. Adults discover themselves, consciously and
unconsciously, to the very young as they never do to other adults. And the
child, the boy, is aware of his environment, the house he lives in, the
countryside or the streets of the town, in a detail that he can never realise
again when a multitude of past impressions has blurred his sensibilities. The
historical novel calls surely for a profound experience of men to create living
people out of those persons who with their different manners and different
notions at first sight seem so alien to us; and to recreate the past needs not
only a vast knowledge but an effort of imagination hardly to be expected in the
young. I should have said that the truth was exactly contrary to what Andrew
Lang said. The novelist should turn to the historical novel towards the end of
his career, when thought and the vicissitudes of his own life have brought him
knowledge of the world, and when, having for years explored the personalities
of people around him, he has acquired an intuition into human nature that will
enable him to understand and so to recreate the figures of a past age. I had
written my first novel of what I knew, but now, seduced by this bad advice, set
to work on a historical romance. I wrote it in Capri ,
during the long vacation, and such was my ardour that I had myself awakened
every morning at six and wrote with perseverance till hunger forced me to break
off and have breakfast. I had at least the sense to spend the rest of the
morning in the sea.
[…]
[Chapter XLV]
[…]
It was
fortunate for me that I suddenly achieved popularity as a dramatist and so was
relieved of the necessity of writing a novel once a year to earn my living. I
found plays easy to write; the notoriety they brought me was not unpleasing;
and they earned for me enough money to enable me to live less straitly than I
had been obliged to. I have never had the bohemian trait of being unconcerned
about the morrow. I have never liked to borrow money. I have hated to be in
dept. Nor has the squalid life had any attraction for me. I was not born in
squalid circumstances. As soon as I could afford it I bought a house in Mayfair .
There are
people who despise possessions. Of course when they say that it ill becomes the
artist thus to cumber himself they may be right, but it is not a view that
artists themselves have held. They have never lived from choice in the garrets
in which their admirers like to see them. They have much more often ruined
themselves by the extravagance with which they conducted themselves. After all
they are creatures of imagination, and state appeals to them, fine houses,
servants to do their bidding, rich carpets, lovely pictures, and sumptuous
furniture. Titian and Rubens lived like
princes. Pope had his
Grotto and his Quincunx, and Sir Walter
his Gothic Abbotsford. El Greco with his suites of rooms,
his musicians to play to him while he ate, his library, and his grand clothes,
died bankrupt. It is unnatural for the artist to live in a semi-detached villa
and eat cottage pie cooked by a maid of all work. It shows, not
disinterestedness, but an arid, petty soul. For of course to the artist the
luxury with which he likes surround himself is but a diversion. His house, his
grounds, his cars, his pictures, are playthings to amuse his fancy; they are
visible tokens of his power; they do not penetrate to his essential aloofness. For
myself I can say that, having had every good thing that money can buy, an
experience like another, I could part without a pang with every possession I
have. We live in uncertain times and our all may yet be taken from us. With
enough plain food to satisfy my small appetite, a room to myself, books from a
public library, pens and paper, I should regret nothing.
[…]
[Chapter
XLVI]
I am a writer
as I might have been a doctor or a lawyer. It is so pleasant a profession that
it is not surprising if a vast number of people adopt it who have no
qualifications for it. It is exciting and various. The writer is free to work
in whatever place and at whatever time he chooses; he is free to idle if he
feels ill or dispirited. But it is a profession that has disadvantages. One is
that though the whole world, with everyone in it and all its sights and events,
is your material, you yourself can only deal with what corresponds to some
secret spring in your own nature. The mine is incalculably rich, but each one
of us can get from it only a definite amount of ore. Thus in the midst of
plenty the writer may starve to death. His material fails him and we say that
he has written himself out. I think there are few writers who are not haunted
by the fear of this. Another disadvantage is that the professional writer must
please. Unless a sufficient number of persons can be found to read him he will
starve. Sometimes the stress of circumstances is too great for him and with
rage in his heart he yields to the demand of the public. One must not expect
too much from human nature and an occasional pot-boiler may be accepted from
him with lenity. The writers who are in independent circumstances should
sympathise with, rather than sneer at, those of their brethren whom hard
necessity sometimes forces to do hack work. One of the minor sages of Chelsea
[…]
There are
many instances of artists whose work for long has been little appreciated and
who yet in the end achieved fame. We do not, however, hear of those whose work
has continued to be ignored. Their number is far greater. Where are the votive
offerings of those who perished. If it is true that talent consists in a
certain facility combined with a peculiar outlook on the world it is very
understandable that originality should not at first be welcomed. In this
perpetually changing world people are suspicious of novelty and it takes them
some time before they can accustom themselves to it. A writer with an
idiosyncrasy has to find little by little the people to whom it appeals. Not
only does it take him time to be himself, for the young are themselves only
with timidity, but it takes him time to convince that body of persons, whom he
will eventually rather pompously call his public, that he has something to give
them that they want. The more individual he is the harder will he find it to
achieve this and the longer will it take him to earn his living. Nor can he be
sure that the result will be lasting, for it may be that with all his
individuality he has but one or two things to give, and then he will soon sink
back into the obscurity from which he difficultly emerged[3].
[…]
But the author
does not only write when he is at his desk; he writes all day long, when he is
thinking, when he is reading, when he is experiencing; everything he sees and
feels is significant to his purpose and, consciously or unconsciously, he is
for ever storing and making over his impressions. He cannot give an undivided
attention to any other calling. He will not follow it to his own satisfaction
or that of his employers. The most common one for him to adopt is journalism,
because it seems to have a closer connexion[4]
with his proper work. It is the most dangerous. There is an impersonality in a
newspaper that insensibly affects the writer. People who write much for the
press seem to lose the faculty of seeing things for themselves; they see them
from a generalised standpoint, vividly often, sometimes with hectic brightness,
yet never with that idiosyncrasy which may give only a partial picture of the
facts, but is suffused by the personality of the observer. The press, in fact,
kills the individuality of those who write for it. Nor is reviewing less
harmful; the writer has not the time to read any books but those that directly
concern him, and this reading of hundreds of books haphazard, not for the
spiritual advantage he may gain from
them but give reasonably honest account of them, deadens the sensibilities and
impedes the free flow of his own imagination. Writing is a whole time job. To
write must be the main object of the author’s life; that is to say, he must be
a professional writer. He is lucky if he has sufficient fortune to make him
independent of his earnings, but that does not prevent him from being a
professional writer. Swift
with his deanery, Wordsworth
with his sinecure, were just as much professional writers as Balzac and Dickens.
[Chapter XLVII]
It is
acknowledged that the technique of painting and of musical composition can only
be acquired by assiduous labour, and the productions of dilettantes are rightly
regarded with good-humoured or exasperated contempt. We all congratulate
ourselves that the radio and the gramophone have driven from our drawing-rooms
the amateur pianist and the amateur singer. The technique of writing is no less
difficult than that of the other arts and yet, because he can read and write a
letter, there is a notion that anyone can write well enough to write a book. Writing
seems now the favourite relaxation of the human race. Whole families will take
to it as in happier times they entered religious houses. Women will write
novels to while away their pregnancies; bored nobleman, axed officers, retired
civil servants, fly to the pen as one might fly to the bottle. There is an
impression abroad that everyone has it in him to write one book; but if by this
is implied a good book the impression is false. It is true that the amateur may
sometimes produce a work of merit. By a lucky chance he may have a natural
facility for writing well, he may have had experiences that are themselves
interesting, or he may have a charming or quaint personality that his very
inexpertness helps him to get down on the printed page. But let him remember
that the saying only asserts only that everyone has it in him to write one
book; it says nothing about a second. The amateur is wise not to try his luck
again. His next book is pretty sure to be worthless.
For one of
the great differences between the amateur and the professional is that the
latter has the capacity to progress. The literature of a country is made not by
a few excellent books, I repeat, but by a great body of work, and this can only
be produced by professional writers. […] The author, like other men, learns by
the method of trial and error. His early works are tentative; he tries his hand
at various subjects and various methods and at the same time develops his
character. By a simultaneous process he discovers himself, which is what he has
to give, and learns how to display this discovery to the best advantage. Then,
in full possession of his faculties, he produces the best of which he is
capable. Since writing is a healthy occupation, he will probably go on living
long after he has done this, and since by this time writing will have become an
ingrained habit he will doubtless continue to produce works of no great
consequence. These the public may legitimately neglect. From the standpoint of
the reader, very little that the writer produces in the whole course of his
life is essential. (By essential, I mean only that small part of him that
expresses his individuality, and I attach no implication of absolute value to
the word.) But I think he can only give this as the result of a long
apprenticeship and at the cost of a good many failures. To do it he must make
literature his life’s work. He must be a professional author.
[Chapter XLVIII]
I have spoken
of the disadvantages of the author’s profession; now I should like to speak of
its dangers.
It is evident
that no professional writer can afford only to write when he feels like it. If
he waits till he is in the mood, till he has the inspiration as he says, he
waits indefinitely and ends by producing little or nothing. The professional
writer creates the mood. He has his inspiration too, but he controls and
subdues it to his bidding by setting himself regular hours of work. But in time
writing becomes a habit, and like the old actor in retirement, who gets
restless when the hour arrives at which he has been accustomed to go down to
the theatre and make for the evening performance, the writer itches to get to his
pens and paper at the hours at which he has been used to write. Then he writes
automatically. Words come easily to him and words suggest ideas. They are old and
empty ideas, but his practised hand can turn out an acceptable piece. He goes
down to luncheon or goes to bed with the assurance that he has done a good
day’s work. Every production of an artist should be the expression of an
adventure of his soul. This is a counsel of perfection, and in an imperfect
world a certain indulgence should be bestowed on the professional writer; but
this surely is the aim he should keep before him. He does well only to write to
liberate his spirit of a subject that he has so long meditated that it burdens
him, and if he is wise he will take care to write only for the sake of his own
peace. Perhaps the simplest way to break the habit of writing is by changing
the environment to one that gives no opportunity for the daily task. You cannot
write well or much (and I venture the opinion that you cannot write well unless
you write much) unless you form a habit; but habits in writing as in life are
only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.
But the
greatest danger that besets the professional writer is one that unfortunately
only a few have to guard against. Success. It is the most difficult thing the
writer has to cope with. When after a long and bitter struggle he has at last
achieved it he finds that it spreads a snare to entangle and destroy him. Few
of us have the determination to avoid its perils. It must be dealt with
wearily. The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain,
egotistic, and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary it makes them, for
the most part, humble, tolerant, and kind. Failure makes people bitter and cruel.
Success improves the character of the man; it does not always improve the
character of the author. It may very well deprive him of that force which has
brought him success. His individuality has been formed by his experiences, his
struggles, his frustrated hopes, his efforts to adapt himself to a hostile
world; it must be very stubborn if it is not modified by the softening
influences of success.
Success
besides often bears within itself the seed of destruction, for it may very well
cut the author off from the material that was its occasion. He enters a new
world. He is made much of. He must be almost super-human if he is not
captivated by the notice taken of him by the great and remains insensible to
the attentions of beautiful women. He grows accustomed to another way of life,
probably more luxurious than that which he has been used, and to people who
have more of the social graces than those with whom he has consorted before. They
are more intellectual and their superficial brilliance is engaging. How
difficult it is for him then to move freely still in the circles with which he
has been familiar and which have given him his subjects! His success has
changed him in the eyes of his old associates and they are no longer at home
with him. They may look upon him with envy or with admiration, but no longer as
one of themselves. The new world into which his success has brought him excites
his imagination and he writes about it; but he sees it from the outside and can
never so penetrate it as to become a part of it. No better example of this can
be given than Arnold
Bennett. He never knew anything intimately but the life of the Five Towns
in which he had been born and bred, and it was only when he dealt with them
that his work had character. When success brought him into the society of
literary people, rich men and smart women, and he sought to deal with them,
what he wrote was worthless. Success destroyed him.
[Chapter XLIX]
The writer is
wise then who is wary of success. He must look with dread on the claims that
others make on him because of it, the responsibilities it forces on him, and
the hindering activities that it brings in its wake. It can only give him two
good things; one, the more important by far, is the freedom to follow his own
bent, and the other is confidence in himself. Notwithstanding his pretension
and his susceptible vanity the author when he compares his work with what he
intended it to be is never free from misgiving. There is so great a distance
between what he saw in his mind’s eye and the best he has been able to do that to
him the result is no more than a makeshift. He may be pleased with a page here
or there and regard an episode or a character with approval; I think it must be
very seldom that he looks upon any work of his as a whole with complete
satisfaction. At the back of his mind is the suspicion that it is not good at
all, and the praise of the public, even if he is inclined to doubt its value,
is a heaven-sent reassurance.
That is why
praise is important to him. It is a weakness that he should hanker for it; though
perhaps a pardonable one. For the artist should be indifferent to praise and
blame, since he is concerned with his work only in its relation to himself, and
how it affects the public is a matter in which he is materially perhaps, but
not spiritually, concerned. The artist produces for the liberation of his soul.
It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down hill. It is
not for nothing that artists have called their works the children of their
brains and likened the pains of production to the pains of childbirth. It is
something like an organic thing that develops, not of course only in their
brains, but in their hearts, their nerves, and their viscera, something that
their creative instinct evolves out of the experiences of their soul and their
body, and that at last becomes so oppressive that they must rid themselves of
it. When this happens they enjoy a sense of liberation and for one delicious
moment rest in peace. But unlike human mothers, they lose interest very soon in
the child that is born. It is no longer a part of them. It has given them its
satisfaction, and now their souls are open to a new impregnation.
In the
production of his work, the author has fulfilled himself. But that is not to
say that it has any value for anyone else. The reader of a book, the observer
of a picture, is not concerned with the artist’s feelings. The artist has
sought release, but the layman seeks for a communication, and he alone can
judge whether the communication is valuable to him. To the artist the
communication he offers is a by-product. I am not speaking now of those who
practise an art to teach; they are propagandists and with them art is a side-issue.
Artistic creation is a specific activity that is satisfied by its own exercise.
The work created may be good art or bad art. That is a matter for the layman to
decide. He forms his decision from the aesthetic value of the communication
that is offered to him. If it yields escape from the reality of the world he
will welcome it, but is very likely at best to describe it only as minor art;
if it enriches his soul and enlarges his personality he will rightly describe
it as great. But this, I insist, has nothing to do with the artist; it is human
that he should be pleased if he has given others pleasure or greater strength;
but he should not take it amiss if they find nothing to their purpose in the
results of his production. He has already had his reward in the satisfaction of
his creative instinct. Now this is no counsel of perfection; it is the only
condition on which the artist can work his way towards the unattainable
perfection that is his aim. If he is a novelist he uses his experience of
people and places, his apprehension of himself, his love and hate, his deepest
thoughts, his passing fancies, to draw in one work after another a picture of
life. It can never be more than a partial one, but if he is fortunate he will
succeed in the end in doing something else; he will draw a complete picture of
himself.
At all events
to think thus is a consolation when you cast your eye over the publishers’
advertisements. When you read those long lists of books and when you discover
that reviewers have extolled their wit, profundity, originality, and beauty
your heart sinks; how can you hope to compete with so much genius? The
publishers will tell you that the average life of a novel is ninety days. It is
hard to reconcile yourself to the fact that a book into which you have put, beside
your whole self, several months of anxious toil, should be read in three or
four hours and after so short a period forgotten. Though it will do him no
good, there is no author so small-minded as not to have a secret hope that some
part of his work at least will survive him for a generation or two. The belief
in posthumous fame is a harmless vanity which often reconciles the artist to
the disappointments and failures of his life. […] There is one very odd, and
some may think very unfair, thing about posterity; it seems to choose the works
to which it gives attention from those of authors who have been popular in
their time. The writers who delight a clique and never reach the great public
will never delight posterity, for posterity will never hear of them. It is a
consolation to the popular authors who have had it impressed upon them that
their popularity was sufficient proof of their worthlessness. It may be that
Shakespeare, Scott and Balzac did not write for the minor sage of Chelsea
[Chapter L]
For the
disadvantages and dangers of the author's calling are offset by an advantage so
great as to make all its difficulties, disappointments, and maybe hardships,
unimportant. It gives him spiritual freedom. To him life is a tragedy and by
his gift of creation he enjoys the catharsis, the purging of pity and terror,
which Aristotle tells us is the object of art. For his sins and his follies,
the unhappiness that befalls him, his unrequited love, his physical defects,
illness, privation, his hopes abandoned, his griefs, humiliations, everything
is transformed by his power into material and by writing it he can overcome it.
Everything is grist to his mill, from the glimpse of a face in the street to a
war that convulses the civilised world, from the scent of a rose to the death
of a friend. Nothing befalls him that he cannot transmute into a stanza, a song
or a story, and having done this be rid of it. The artist is the only free man.
Perhaps that
is why the world on the whole has had the profound suspicion of him that we
know. It is not sure that he can be trusted when he reacts to the common impulses
of men so unaccountably. And indeed the artist, to the indignation of mankind, has
never felt himself bound by ordinary standards. Why should he? With men in
general the primary end of thought and action is to satisfy their needs and
preserve their being; but the artist satisfies his needs and preserves his
being by the pursuit of art: their pastime is his grim earnest and so his
attitude to life can never be the same as theirs. He creates his own values. Men
think him cynical because he does not attach importance to the values and is
not revolted by the vices that move them. He is not cynical. But what they call
virtue and what they call vice are not the sort of things that he takes any particular
interest in. They are indifferent elements in the scheme of things out of which
he constructs his own freedom. Of course common men are quite right to be
indignant with him. But that isn’t going to do him any good. He is
incorrigible.
[…]
[Chapter LII]
[…]
I was forty.
If I meant to marry and have children it was high time I did so, and for some
time I had amused my imagination with pictures of myself in the married state. There
was no one I particularly wanted to marry. It was the condition that attracted
me. It seemed a necessary motif in the pattern of life that I had designed, and
to my ingenuous fancy (for though no longer young and thinking myself so
worldly wise, I was still in many ways incredibly naive) it offered peace; peace
from the disturbance of love affairs, casual it might be in the beginning, but
bringing in their train such troublesome complications (for it takes two to
make a love affair and a man’s meat is too often a woman’s poison); peace that
would enable me to write what I wanted to write without the loss of precious
time or disturbance of mind; peace and a settled and dignified way of life. I
sought freedom and I thought I could find it in marriage. I conceived these
notions when I was still at work on Of
Human Bondage, and turning my wishes into fiction, as writers will, towards
the end of it I drew a picture of the marriage I should have liked to make. Readers
on the whole have found it the least satisfactory part of my book.
[…]
[Chapter
LIII]
[…]
I wanted to recover my peace of mind
shattered through my own foolishness and vanity by occurrences[5]
upon which I need not dwell and so made up my mind to go to the South Seas .
[…]
I went,
looking for beauty and romance and glad to put a great ocean between me and the
trouble that harassed me. I found beauty and romance, but I found also
something I had never expected. I found a new self. Ever since I left St. Thomas
I stepped off
my pedestal. It seemed to me that these men had more vitality than those I had
known hitherto. They did not burn with a hard, gem-like flame, but with a hot,
smoky, consuming fire. They had their own narrownesses. They had their
prejudices. They were often dull and stupid. I did not care. They were different.
In civilized communities men's idiosyncrasies are mitigated by the necessity of
conforming to certain rules of behaviour. Culture is a mask that hides their
faces. Here people showed themselves bare. These heterogeneous creatures thrown
into a life that had preserved a great deal of its primitiveness had never felt
the need to adapt themselves to conventional standards. Their peculiarities had
been given opportunity to develop unchecked. In great cities men are like a lot
of stones thrown together in a bag; their jagged corners are rubbed off till in
the end they are as smooth as marbles. These men had never had their jagged
corners rubbed away. They seemed to me nearer to the elementals of human nature
than any of the people I had been living with for so long and my heart leapt towards
them as it had done years before to the people who filed into the outpatients' room
at St. Thomas
[Chapter LIV]
[…]
I went to see
the most eminent specialist I could find in London St.
Moritz
I
had a grand time. I discovered for the first time in my life how very delightful
it is to he in bed. It is astonishing how varied life can be when you stay in
bed all day and how much you find to do. I delighted in the privacy of my room
with the immense window wide open to the starry winter night. It gave me a
delicious sense of security, aloofness and freedom. The silence was enchanting.
Infinite space seemed to enter it and my spirit, alone with the stars, seemed capable
of any adventure. My imagination was never more nimble; it was like a barque
under press of sail scudding before the breeze. The monotonous days,
whose only excitement was the books I read and my reflections, passed with
inconceivable rapidity. I left my bed with a pang.[7]
It was a strange world that I entered
when I grew well enough to mix during part of the day with my fellow patients. In
their different ways these people, some of whom had been in the sanatorium for
years, were as singular as any of those I had met in the South
Seas . Illness and the queer, sheltered life affected them
strangely, twisting, strengthening, deteriorating their character just as in
Samoa or Tahiti it was deteriorated,
strengthened or twisted by the languorous climate and the alien environment. I think
I learnt a good deal about human nature in that sanatorium that otherwise I
should never have known.[8]
[Chapter LV
[…]
I became
aware of the specific benefit I was capable of getting from travel; before, it
had been only an instinctive feeling. This was freedom of the spirit on the one
hand, and on the other, the collection of all manner of persons who might serve
my purposes. After that I travelled to many countries. I journeyed over a dozen
seas, in liners, in tramps, in schooners; I went by train, by car, by chair, on
foot or on horseback. I kept my eyes open for character, oddness and
personality. I learnt very quickly when a place promised me something and then
I waited till I had got it. Otherwise I passed on. I accepted every experience
that came my way. When I could I travelled as comfortably as my ample means
allowed, for it seemed to me merely silly to rough it for the sake of roughing
it; but I do not think I ever hesitated to do anything because it was
uncomfortable or dangerous.
I have never
been much of a sightseer. So much enthusiasm has been expended over the great
sights of the world that I can summon up very little when I am confronted with
them. I have preferred common things, a wooden house on piles nestling among
fruit trees, the bend of a little bay lined with coconuts, or a group of
bamboos by the wayside. My interest has been in men and the lives they led. I
am shy of making acquaintance with strangers, but I was fortunate enough to
have on my journeys a companion who had an inestimable social gift. He had an
amiability of disposition that enabled him in a very short time to make friends with
people in ships, clubs, bar-rooms and hotels, so that through him I was able to
get into easy contact with an immense number of persons whom otherwise I should
have known only from a distance.
[…]
One reads
that no one exactly resembles anyone else, and that every man is unique, and in
a way this is true, but it is a truth easy to exaggerate: in practice men are
very much alike. They are divided into comparatively few types. The same
circumstances mould them in the same way. Certain characteristics infer certain
others. You can, like the palaeontologist, reconstruct the animal from a single
bone. […] The slightly abnormal circumstances in which men live in the
countries where life is primitive or the environment alien to them, emphasize their
ordinariness so that it gains a character of its own; and when they are in
themselves extraordinary, which of course they sometimes are, the want of the
usual restraints permits them to develop their kinks with a freedom that in
more civilized communities can be but hardly won. Then you have creatures that
realism can scarcely cope with. […] At last, after seven, I think, of these
long journeys I found a certain sameness in people. I met more and more often
types that I had met before. They ceased to interest me so much. I concluded
that I had come to the end of my capacity for seeing with passion and
individuality the people I went so far to find, for I had never doubted that it
was I who gave them the idiosyncrasy that I discovered in them, and so I
decided that there was no further profit for me in travel. I had twice nearly
died of fever, I had been nearly drowned, I had been shot at by bandits. I was glad
to resume a more ordered way of life.
I came back
from each of my journeys a little different. In my youth I had read a great
deal, not because I supposed that it would benefit me, but from curiosity and
the desire to learn; I travelled because it amused me, and to get material that
would be of use to me: it never occurred to me that my new experiences were
having an effect on me, and it was not till long afterwards that I saw how they
had formed my character. In contact with all these strange people I lost the
smoothness that I had acquired when, leading the humdrum life of a man of
letters, I was one of the stones in a bag. I got back my jagged edges. I was at
last myself. I ceased to travel because I felt that travel could give me
nothing more. I was capable of no new development. I had sloughed the arrogance
of culture. My mood was complete acceptance. I asked from nobody more than he
could give me. I had learnt toleration. I was pleased with the goodness of my
fellows; I was not distressed by their badness. I had acquired independence of
spirit. I had learnt to go my own way without bothering with what others thought
about it. I demanded freedom for myself and I was prepared to give freedom to
others. It is easy to laugh and shrug your shoulders when people act badly to
others; it is much more difficult when they act badly to you. I have not found
it impossible. The conclusion I came to about men I put into the mouth of a man
I met on board ship in the China
Seas
[…]
[Chapter LVII]
[…]
I have been
blamed because I have drawn my characters from living persons, and from
criticisms that I have read one might suppose that nobody had ever done this
before. That is nonsense. It is the universal custom. From the beginning of
literature authors have had originals for their creations. […] The very
virtuous and upright Scott drew a bitter portrait of his father in one book and
a pleasanter one, when the passage of years had softened his asperity, in
another. Stendhal, in one of his manuscripts, has written the names of the
persons who had suggested his characters; Dickens, as we all know, portrayed
his father in Mr. Micawber and Leigh Hunt in Harold Skimpole. Turgenev stated that he could
not create a character at all unless as a starting point he could fix his
imagination on a living person. I suspect that the writers who deny that they
use actual persons deceive themselves (which is not impossible, since you can
be a very good novelist without being very intelligent) or deceive us. When
they tell the truth and have in fact had no particular person in mind, it will
be found, I think, that they owe their characters rather to their memory than
to their creative instinct. […] I should say that the practice of drawing
characters from actual models is not only universal but necessary. I do not see
why any writer should be ashamed to acknowledge it. As Turgenev said, it is
only if you have a definite person in your mind that you can give vitality and idiosyncrasy
to your own creation.
I
insist that it is a creation. We know very little even of the persons we know
most intimately; we do not know them enough to transfer them to the pages of a
book and make human beings of them. People are too elusive, too shadowy, to be
copied; and they are also too incoherent and contradictory. The writer does not
copy his originals; he takes what he wants from them, a few traits that have
caught his attention, a turn of mind that has fired his imagination, and
therefrom constructs his character. He is not concerned whether it is a
truthful likeness; he is concerned only to create a plausible harmony
convenient for his own purposes. So different may be the finished product from
the original that it must be a common experience of authors to be accused of having
drawn a lifelike portrait of a certain person when they had in mind someone
quite different. Further, it is just chance whether the author chooses his
models from persons with whom he is intimately connected or not. It is often
enough for him to have caught a glimpse of someone in a teashop or chatted with
him for a quarter of an hour in a ship's smoking-room. All he needs is that
tiny, fertile substratum which he can then build up by means of his experience
of life, his knowledge of human nature and his native intuition.
The whole business would
be plain sailing if it were not for the susceptibilities of the persons who
serve as models for the author's characters. So colossal is human egotism that people
who have met an author are constantly on the lookout for portraits of
themselves in his works and if they can persuade themselves that such and such
a character is drawn from them they are bitterly affronted if it is drawn with
any imperfections. Though they will find fault with their friends freely and
ridicule their absurdities, their vanity is so
outrageous that they cannot reconcile themselves to the fact that they too have
faults and absurdities. The matter is made worse for them by their friends who
with malicious indignation offer them feigned sympathy for the outrage they
have suffered. Of course there is a lot of humbug about it all. I do not
suppose I am the only author who has been vilified by women who claimed that I
had stayed with them and abused their hospitality by writing about them when
not only had I not stayed with them, but neither knew nor had ever heard of them.
The poor drabs were so vain and their lives so empty that they deliberately identified
themselves with a creature of odious character in order in some small circle to
give themselves a petty notoriety.
Sometimes the author takes a very commonplace
person and from him invents a character who is noble, self-controlled and
courageous. He has seen in that person a significance that had escaped those he
lived with. Then oddly enough the original goes unrecognized; it is only when
you show somebody with faults or ridiculous foibles that a name is at once
assigned. I have been forced to conclude from this that we know our friends by
their defects rather than by their merits. The author seldom has the wish to give
offence and he uses what means he can to protect his originals; he puts the
persons of his invention in different places, gives them another means of livelihood,
situates them perhaps in a different class; what he cannot so easily do is to
change their appearance. The physical traits of a man influence his character
and contrariwise his character is expressed, at least in the rough, in his
appearance. You cannot make a tall man short and otherwise keep him the same. A
man's height gives him a different outlook on his environment and so changes
his character. Nor to cover your tracks can you make a little brunette into a
massive blonde. You have to leave them very much as they are or you will lose what
it was that moved you to draw a character from them. But no one has
the right to take a character in a book and say, this is meant for me. All he may
say is, I provided the suggestion for this character. If he has any common sense
he will be interested rather than vexed; and the author's inventiveness and
intuition may suggest to him things about himself that it is useful for him to
know.[9]
[Chapter LVIII]
I have no
illusions about my literary position. There are but two important critics in my
own country who have troubled to take me seriously and when clever young men
write essays about contemporary fiction they never think of considering me. I
do not resent it. It is very natural. I have never been a propagandist. The
reading public has enormously increased during the last thirty years and there
is a large mass of ignorant people who want knowledge that can be acquired with
little labour. They have thought that they were learning something when they
read novels in which the characters delivered their views on the burning topics
of the day. A bit of love-making thrown in here and there made the information
they were given sufficiently palatable. The novel was regarded as a convenient
pulpit for the dissemination of ideas and a good many novelists were willing
enough to look upon themselves as leaders of thought. The novels they wrote
were journalism rather than fiction. They had a news value. Their disadvantage was
that after a little while they were as unreadable as last week's paper. But the
demand of this great new public for knowledge has of late given rise to the
production of a number of books in which subjects of common interest, science,
education, social welfare and I know not what, are treated in non-technical
language. Their success has been very great and has killed the propaganda
novel. But it is evident that while its vogue lasted it seemed much more
significant and so offered a better subject of discourse than the novel of
character or adventure.
The intelligent critics,
the more serious novel readers, have since then given most of their attention
to the writers who seemed to offer something new in technique, and this is very
comprehensible, for the novelties they presented gave a sort of freshness to well-worn
material and were a fruitful matter of discussion.
It seems strange that so
much attention has been paid to these things. The method that Henry James
devised and brought to a high degree of perfection of telling his story through
the sensibilities of an observer who had some part in its action was an ingenious
dodge that gave the dramatic effect he sought in fiction, a verisimilitude
grateful to an author much influenced by the French naturalists and a means of
getting round some of the difficulties of the novelist who takes up the
attitude of an all-seeing and all-wise narrator. What this observer did not
know could be left conveniently mysterious. It was, however, only a slight
variation from the autobiographical form that has many of the same advantages,
and to speak of it as though it were a great aesthetic discovery is somewhat
absurd. Of the other experiments that have been made the most important is the use
of the stream of thought. […] It was a clever and amusing trick, but nothing
more. When writers, instead of using it as an occasional device for a
particular purpose, ironical, dramatic or explanatory, made it the basis of their
work it proved tedious. I conjecture that what is useful in this and similar
devices will be absorbed into the general technique of fiction, but that the
works that introduced them will soon lose their interest. It seems to have
escaped the attention of those who have been taken by these curious experiments
that the matter treated of in the books in which they are made use of is of an
extreme triviality. It almost looks as though their authors had been driven to
these contrivances by an uneasy consciousness of their own emptiness. The
persons they describe with all this ingenuity are intrinsically uninteresting
and the subjects at issue unimportant. This might be expected. For the artist
is absorbed by his technique only when his theme is of no pressing interest to
him. When he is obsessed by his topic he has not much time over to think of the
artfulness of his presentation. […] It may be that the interest that has been
taken during recent years in every form of technical experiment in the arts
points to the fact that our civilization is crumbling; the subjects that seemed
important to the nineteenth century have lost their interest, and artists do not
yet see what the great issues are that will affect the generation which will
create the civilization that is in course of displacing our own.
[Chapter LIX]
I look upon it as very natural then that
the world of letters should have attached no great importance to my work. In
the drama I have found myself at home in the traditional moulds. As a writer of
fiction I go back, through innumerable generations, to the teller of tales
round the fire in the cavern that sheltered Neolithic men. I have had some sort
of story to tell and it has interested me to tell it. To me it has been a
sufficient object in itself. It has been my misfortune that for some time now a
story has been despised by the intelligent. I have read a good many books on
the art of fiction and all ascribe very small value to the plot. […] From these
books you would judge that it is only a hindrance to the intelligent author and
a concession that he makes to the stupid demands of the public. Indeed,
sometimes you might think that the best novelist is the essayist, and that the
only perfect short stories have been written by Charles Lamb and Hazlitt.
But the delight in listening to stories
is as natural to human nature as the delight in looking at the dancing and
miming out of which drama arose. That it exists unimpaired is shown by the
vogue of the detective novel. The most intellectual persons read them, with
condescension of course, but they read them, and why, if not because the
psychological, the pedagogic, the psycho-analytic novels which alone their
minds approve do not give them the satisfaction of this particular need? There
are a number of clever writers who, with all sorts of good things in their
heads to say and a gift for creating living people, do not know what on earth
to do with them when they have created them. They cannot invent a plausible
story. Like all writers (and in all writers there is a certain amount of
humbug) they make a merit of their limitations and either tell the reader that
he can imagine for himself what happens or else berate him for wanting to know.
They claim that in life stories are not finished, situations are not rounded off
and loose ends are left hanging. This is not always true, for at least death
finishes all our stories; but even if it were it would not be a good argument.
[…]
The chief use of a plot is one that
many people do not seem to have noticed. It is a line to direct the reader's
interest. That is possibly the most important thing in fiction, for it is by
direction of interest that the author carries the reader along from page to
page and it is by direction of interest that he induces in him the mood he
desires. The author always loads his dice, but he must never let the reader see
that he has done so, and by the manipulation of his plot he can engage the
reader's attention so that he does not perceive what violence has been done
him. I am not writing a technical treatise on the novel, so I need not
enumerate the various devices that novelists have used to achieve this. But how
efficacious this direction of interest may be and how injurious its neglect is
well shown in Sense and Sensibility
and in L’Éducation
Sentimentale. Jane
Austen leads the reader so firmly along the line of the simple story that
he does not stop to reflect that Elinor is a prig, Marianne a fool, and the
three men lifeless dummies. Flaubert, aiming at a
rigid objectivity, directs the reader's interest so little that he is perfectly
indifferent to the fortunes of the various characters. This makes the novel
very difficult to read. I cannot think of another that has so many merits and
leaves so shadowy an impression.
[Chapter LX]
In my
twenties the critics said I was brutal, in my thirties they said I was
flippant, in my forties they said I was cynical, in my fifties they said I was
competent, and now in my sixties they say I am superficial. I have gone my way,
following the course I had mapped out for myself, and trying with my works to
fill out the pattern I looked for. I think authors are unwise who do not read
criticisms. It is salutary to train oneself to be no more affected by censure than
by praise; for of course it is easy to shrug one's shoulders when one finds
oneself described as a genius, but not so easy to be unconcerned when one is
treated as a nincompoop. The history of criticism is there to show that
contemporary criticism is fallible. It is a nice point to decide how far the
author should consider it and how far ignore it. And such is the diversity of
opinion that it is very difficult for an author to arrive at any conclusion
about his merit.
[…]
I have read
lately two or three books in which a claim is made to form an exact science of
criticism. They have not convinced me that such a thing is possible. Criticism
to my mind is a personal matter, but there is nothing against that if the
critic has a great personality. It is dangerous for him to look upon his
activity as creative. His business is to guide, to appraise, and to point to
new avenues of creation, but if he looks upon himself as creative he will be
more occupied with creation, the most enthralling of human activities, than
with the functions proper to him. It is perhaps well for him to have written a
play, a novel and some verse, for thus as in no other way can he acquire the
technique of letters; but he cannot be a great critic unless he has realized
that to create is not his affair. One of the reasons why current criticism is
so useless is that it is done as a side-issue by creative writers. It is only
natural that they should think the sort of thing they do the thing best worth doing.
The great critic should have a sympathy as wide as his knowledge is universal.
It should be grounded not on a general indifference, such as makes men tolerant
of things they care nothing about, but on an active delight in diversity. He
must be a psychologist and a physiologist, for he must know how the basic
elements of literature are related to the minds and bodies of men; and he must
be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and
the transitoriness of human things. He must be familiar not only with the literature
of his native land. With standards founded on the literature of the past, and
studious of contemporary literature in other countries, he will see clearly the
trend that literature in its evolution is pursuing and so be enabled profitably
to direct that of his own countrymen. He must support himself on tradition, for
tradition is the expression of the inevitable idiosyncrasies of a nation's
literature, but he must do everything he can to encourage its development in
its natural direction. Tradition is a guide and not a jailer. He must have
patience, firmness and enthusiasm. Each book he reads should be a new and
thrilling adventure; he judges it by the universality of his knowledge and the strength
of his character. In fact the great critic must be a great man. He must be
great enough to recognize with good-humoured resignation that his work, though
so important, can have but an ephemeral value; for his merit is that he
responds to the needs of, and points the way to, his own generation. A new
generation arises with other needs, a new way stretches before it; he has
nothing more to say and is thrown with all his works into the dust-heap.
To
spend his life to such an end can only be worth his while if he thinks
literature one of the most important of human pursuits.
[Chapter
LXI]
That is a
claim that the author has always made and to this he has added another claim: he
has asserted that he was not as other men and in consequence not amenable to
their rules. Other men have received it with obloquy, derision and contempt.
This he has met in different ways according to his idiosyncrasy. Sometimes he
has flaunted his difference from what he was inclined to call the common herd
by wilful eccentricity and to épater le
bourgeois has paraded the red waistcoat of Theophile Gautier
or, like Gérard
de Nerval, led a lobster tied by a pink ribbon down the street; sometimes
he has taken an ironic pleasure in pretending to be the same as every one else
and with Browning has dressed the poet within him in the likeness of a
prosperous banker. It may be that we are all of us a bundle of mutually
contradictory selves, but the writer, the artist, is deeply conscious of it.
With other men, the life they lead makes one side of them predominant, so that,
except perhaps in the depths of the subconscious, it ends by being the whole
man. But the painter, the writer, the saint, is always looking in himself for
new facets; he is bored at repeating himself and seeks, though it may be
without actually knowing it, to prevent himself from becoming one-sided. He
never gets the opportunity to grow into a self-consistent, coherent creature.
Other men
have been outraged on discovering, as they so often have, the discrepancy
between the artist's life and his work. They have not been able to reconcile
Beethoven's idealism with his meanness of spirit, Wagner's heavenly rapture
with his selfishness and dishonesty, Cervantes' moral obliquity with his
tenderness and magnanimity. Sometimes, in their indignation, they have sought
to persuade themselves that the work of such men could not possess the value
they thought. When it has been brought to their knowledge that great and pure poets
had left behind them a large body of obscene verse they have been horrified.
They have had an uneasy feeling that the whole thing was a sham. "What
arrant humbugs these people are!" they say. But the point of the writer is
that he is not one man but many. It is because he is many that he can create
many and the measure of his greatness is the number of selves that he
comprises. When he fashions a character that does not carry conviction it is
because there is in himself nothing of that person; he has had to fall back on
observation, and so has only described, not begotten. The writer does not feel
with; he feels in. It is not sympathy that he has, that too often results in
sentimentality; he has what the psychologists call empathy. It is because Shakespeare had this to so
great a degree that he was at once the most living and the least sentimental of
authors. I think Goethe was
the first writer to grow conscious of this multiple personality and it troubled
him all his life. He was always comparing the writer that he was with the man
and he could not quite reconcile the discongruity. But the end of the artist and
the end of other men are different, for the end of the artist is production while
the end of other men is right action. And so the artist's attitude to life is
in a certain way peculiar to himself. The psychologists tell us that with the
ordinary man an image is less vivid than a sensation. It is an attenuated
experience that serves to give information about objects of sense and in the
world of sense is a guide to action. His day-dreams satisfy emotional needs and
fulfil desires that in the world of affairs are frustrated. But they are pale
shadows of real life and at the back of his mind is the awareness that the
demands of the world of sense have another validity. To the writer this is not
so. The images, free ideas that throng his mind, are not guides but materials
for action. They have all the vividness of sensation. His day-dreams are so
significant to him that it is the world of sense that is shadowy and he has to
reach out for it by an effort of will. His castles in Spain
The artist's
egoism is outrageous: it must be; he is by nature a solipsist and the world
exists only for him to exercise upon it his powers of creation. He partakes of
life only with part of him and never feels the common emotions of men with his
whole being, for however urgent the necessity he is an observer as well as an
actor. It often makes him seem heartless. Women with their shrewd sense are on
their guard against him; they are attracted by him, but instinctively feel that
they can never completely dominate him, which is their desire, for they know that
somehow he escapes them. Has not Goethe, that great lover, himself told us how
he composed verses in the arms of his beloved and with singing fingers softly
tapped the beat of his hexameters on her shapely back? The artist is ill to
live with. He can be perfectly sincere in his creative emotion and yet there is
someone else within him who is capable of cocking a snook at its exercise. He
is not dependable.
[…]
Realism is
relative. The most realistic writer by the direction of his interests falsifies
his creatures. He sees them through his own eyes. He makes them more
self-conscious than they really are. He makes them more reflective and more
complicated. He throws himself into them, trying to make them ordinary men, but
he never quite succeeds; for the peculiarity that gives him his talent and
makes him a writer forever prevents him from knowing exactly what ordinary men are.
It is not truth he attains, but merely a transposition of his own personality. And
the greater his talent, the more powerful his individuality, the more fantastic
is the picture of life he draws. It has sometimes seemed to me that if
posterity wants to know what the world of today was like it will not go to
those writers whose idiosyncrasy has impressed our contemporaries, but to the
mediocre ones whose ordinariness has allowed them to describe their
surroundings with a greater faithfulness. I do not mention them since, even
though they may be assured of the appreciation of after ages, people do not
like to be labelled as mediocre. But I think it may be admitted that one gets
the impression of a truer picture of life in the novels of Anthony Trollope than
in those of Charles Dickens.
[Chapter LXII]
[…]
Thinking that
not the whole of life was long enough to learn to write well, I have been
unwilling to give to other activities time that I so much needed to achieve the
purpose I had in mind. I have never been able intimately to persuade myself
that anything else mattered. Notwithstanding, when men in millions are living
on the border-line of starvation, when freedom in great parts of the inhabited
globe is dying or dead, when a terrible war has been succeeded by years during
which happiness has been out of the reach of the great mass of the human race,
when men are distraught because they can see no value in life and the hopes
that had enabled them for so many centuries to support its misery seem
illusory; it is hard not to ask oneself whether it is anything but futility to
write plays and stories and novels. The only answer I can think of is that some
of us are so made that there is nothing else we can do. We do not write because
we want to; we write because we must. There may be other things in the world
that more pressingly want doing: we must liberate our souls of the burden of
creation. We must go on though Rome
[…]
[Chapter
LXIII]
When I
started this book I warned the reader that perhaps the only thing of which I
was certain was that I was certain of nothing else. I was trying to put my
thoughts on sundry subjects in order and I asked no one to agree with me in my
opinions. On revising what I have written, I have cut out the words, I think,
in a great many places because, though they came to my pen naturally, I found them
tedious, but they are to be understood as qualifying my every statement. And
now that I come to this last section of my book, I am constrained more
anxiously than ever to repeat that what I give are my own private convictions.
It may be that they are superficial. It may be that some of them are
contradictory. It is unlikely that surmises that are the outcome of thoughts,
feelings, and desires built up out of all sorts of haphazard experiences and
coloured by a particular personality should fit with the logical precision of a
proposition of Euclid
[…]
But
metaphysics never lets you down. You can never come to the end of it. It is as
various as the soul of man. It has greatness, for it deals with nothing less
than the whole of knowledge. It treats of the universe, of God and immortality,
of the properties of human reason and the end and purpose of life, of the power
and limitations of man; and if it cannot answer the questions that assail him
on his journey through this dark and mysterious world it persuades him to
support his ignorance with good humour. It teaches resignation and inculcates
courage. It appeals to the imagination as well as to the intelligence; and to
the amateur, much more, I suppose, than to the professional it affords matter
for that reverie which is the most delicious pleasure with which man can
beguile his idleness.
Since,
inspired by Kuno Fischer's lectures, I began to read Schopenhauer I have
read pretty well all the most important works of the great classical
philosophers. Though there is in them a great deal that I did not understand,
and perhaps I did not even understand as much as I thought, I have read them
with passionate interest. The only one who has consistently bored me is Hegel. […] But to
the others, from Plato
onwards, I surrendered myself, one after the other, with the pleasure of a
traveller adventuring into an unknown country. I did not read critically, but
as I might have read a novel, for the excitement and delight of it. (I have
already confessed that I read a novel not for instruction, but for pleasure. I
crave my reader's indulgence.) A student of character, I got an immense amount
of pleasure out of the self-revelation which these various writers offered to
my survey. I saw the man behind his philosophy and I was exalted by the
nobility I found in some and amused by the queerness I discerned in others. […]
I look upon my first reading of Spinoza as one of the signal experiences of
my life. It filled me with just that feeling of majesty and exulting power that
one has at the sight of a great mountain range.
And when I came to the
English philosophers, with perhaps a slight prejudice, for it had been
impressed upon me in Germany
[…]
[Chapter LXIV]
There is no reason why philosophers should
not be also men of letters. But to write well does not come by instinct; it is
an art that demands arduous study. The philosopher does not speak only to other
philosophers and to undergraduates working for a degree; he speaks also to the
men of letters, politicians and reflective persons who directly mould the ideas
of the coming generation. They, naturally enough, are taken by a philosophy
that is striking and not too difficultly assimilated. We all know how the
philosophy of Nietzsche
has affected some parts of the world and few would assert that its influence
has been other than disastrous. It has prevailed, not by such profundity of
thought as it may have, but by a vivid style and an effective form. The
philosopher who will not take the trouble to make himself clear shows only that
he thinks his thought of no more than academic value.
[…]
The
determinist thinks that you cannot take a step in life that is not motivated by
what you are at the moment; and you are not only your muscles, your nerves, your
entrails and your brain; you are your habits, your opinions and your ideas.
However little you may be aware of them, however contradictory, unreasonable
and prejudiced they may be, they are there, influencing your actions and
reactions. Even if you have never put them into words they are your philosophy.
Perhaps it is well enough that most people should leave this unformulated. It
is hardly thoughts they have, at least not conscious thoughts, it is a kind of
vague feeling, a sort of experience like that muscular sense that the
physiologists not so long ago discovered, which they have absorbed from the
notions current in the society in which they live and which has been faintly
modified by their own experience. They lead their ordered lives and this confused
body of ideas and feelings is enough. Since it includes something of the wisdom
of the ages, it is adequate for the ordinary purposes of the ordinary life. But
I have sought to make a pattern of mine and from an early age tried to find out
what were the elements I had to deal with. I wanted to get what knowledge I
could about the general structure of the universe; I wanted to make up my mind
whether I had to consider only this life or a life to come; I wanted to
discover whether I was a free agent or whether my feeling that I could mould
myself according to my will was an illusion; I wanted to know whether life had
any meaning or whether it was I that must strive to give it one. So in a
desultory way I began to read.
[Chapter LXV]
The first
subject that attracted my attention was religion. For it seemed to me of the
greatest importance to decide whether this world I lived in was the only one I
had to reckon with or whether I must look upon it as no more than a place of
trial which was to prepare me for a life to come. When I wrote Of Human Bondage I gave a chapter to my
hero's loss of the faith in which he had been brought up. The book was read in
typescript by a very clever woman who at that time was good enough to be
interested in me. She told me that this chapter was inadequate. I rewrote it;
but I do not think I much improved it. For it described my own experience and I
have no doubt that my reasons for coming to the conclusion I came to were
inadequate. They were the reasons of an ignorant boy. They were of the heart
rather than of the head.
[…]
But when I
went to Germany Germany Heidelberg South Germany , and then I should naturally have been
brought up as a Catholic. I found it very hard that thus through no fault of my
own I should have been condemned to everlasting torment. My ingenuous nature
revolted at the injustice. The next step was easy; I came to the conclusion
that it could not matter a row of pins what one believed; God could not condemn
people just because they were Spaniards or Hottentots. I might have stopped
there and if I had been less ignorant adopted some form of deism like that
which was current in the eighteenth century. But the beliefs that had been
instilled into me hung together and when one of them came to seem outrageous
the others participated in its fate. The whole horrible structure, based not on
the love of God but on the fear of Hell, tumbled down like a house of cards.
With my mind
at all events I ceased to believe in God; I felt the exhilaration of a new
freedom. But we do not believe only with our minds; in some deep recess of my
soul there lingered still the old dread of hell-fire, and for long my
exultation was tempered by the shadow of that ancestral anxiety. I no longer
believed in God; I still, in my bones, believed in the Devil.
[Chapter
LXVI]
[…]
But if there
was no God who could consign me to eternal flames and no soul that could be
thus consigned, if I was the plaything of mechanical forces and the struggle
for life was the impelling force, I could not see that there was any meaning in
good such as I had been taught it. I began to read Ethics. I waded conscientiously
through many formidable tomes. I came to the conclusion that man aimed at
nothing but his own pleasure and that
when he sacrificed himself for others it was only an illusion that led him to
believe that he was seeking anything but his own gratification. And since the
future was uncertain it was only common sense to seize every pleasure that the
moment offered. I decided that right and wrong were merely words and that the
rules of conduct were no more than conventions that men had set up to serve their
own selfish purposes. The free man had no reason to follow them except in so
far as they suited his convenience. Having then an epigrammatic turn, and
epigrams being the fashion, I put my conviction into a phrase and said to
myself: follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the
corner. By the time I was twenty-four I had constructed a complete system of
philosophy. It rested on two principles: The Relativity of Things and The
Circumferentiality of Man. I have learnt since that the first of these was not
a very original discovery. It may be that the other was profound, but though I
have racked my brains I cannot for the life of me remember what on earth it
meant.[10]
[…]
I read and
read. From the classical philosophers I turned to the modems, thinking that
among them, perhaps, I should find what I wanted. I could not discover much
agreement among them. […] The impression suggested itself to me that
notwithstanding their learning, their logic and their classifications,
philosophers embraced such-and-such beliefs not because they were led to them
by their reason, but because their temperaments forced these beliefs upon them.
Otherwise I could not understand how after all this time they differed from one
another so profoundly. When I read, I do not know where, that Fichte had said
that the kind of philosophy a man adopts depends on the kind of man he is, it
occurred to me that perhaps I was looking for something that could not be
found. It seemed to me then that if there was in philosophy no universal truth
that everyone could accept, but only a truth that agreed with the personality
of the individual, the only thing for me was to narrow my search and look for
some philosopher whose system suited me because I was the same sort of man that
he was.
[…]
The
pragmatists had vigour. They were very much alive. The most important of them
wrote well, and they gave an appearance of simplicity to problems which I had
not been able to make head or tail of. But much as I should have liked to I
could not bring myself to believe, as they did, that truth is fashioned by us
to meet our practical needs. The sense-datum, on which I thought all knowledge
was based, seemed to me something given, which had to be accepted whether it
suited the convenience or not. Nor did I feel comfortable with the argument
that God existed if it consoled me to believe that he did. The pragmatists
ceased to interest me so much. I found Bergson good to
read, but singularly unconvincing; nor did I find in Benedetto Croce
anything to my purpose. On the other hand, in Bertrand Russell I
discovered a writer who greatly pleased me; he was easy to understand and his
English was good. I read him with admiration.
I was very willing to accept him as
the guide I sought. He had worldly wisdom and common sense. He was tolerant of
human weakness. But I discovered in time that he was a guide none too certain
of the way. His mind was restless. He was like an architect who, when you want
a house to live in, having persuaded you to build it of brick, then sets before
you good reasons why it should be built of stone; but when you have agreed to this
produces reasons just as good to prove that the only material to use is reinforced
concrete. Meanwhile you have not a roof to your head. I was looking for a
system of philosophy as coherent and self-contained as Bradley's, in which one
part hung necessarily on another, so that nothing could be altered without the
whole fabric falling to pieces. This Bertrand Russell could not give me.
[…]
I abandoned
the idea and all I have to show for my efforts now are the few desultory notes
that follow. I claim no originality for them, or even for the words in which I
have put them. I am like a tramp who has rigged himself up as best he could
with a pair of trousers from a charitable farmer's wife, a coat off a scarecrow,
odd boots out of a dustbin, and a hat that he has found in the road. They are
just shreds and patches, but he has fitted himself into them pretty comfortably
and, uncomely as they may be, he finds that they suit him well enough. When he
passes a gentleman in a smart blue suit, a new hat and well-polished shoes, he
thinks he looks very grand, but he is not so sure that in that neat and
respectable attire he would be nearly so much at his ease as in his own rags
and tatters.
[Chapter LXVII]
When I read Kant I found myself obliged
to abandon the materialism in which in my youth I had exulted and the
physiological determinism that went with it. I did not then know the objections
that have riddled Kant's system and I found an emotional satisfaction in his
philosophy. It excited me to contemplate that unknowable "thing in
itself" and I was content with a world that man had constructed from
appearances. It gave me a peculiar sense of liberation. I jibbed at his maxim
that you should so act that your action may be a universal rule. I was too much
convinced of the diversity of human nature to believe that this was reasonable.
I thought that what was right for one person might very well be wrong for
another. For my part I chiefly wanted to be let alone, but I had discovered
that not many wanted that, and if I let them alone they thought me unkind,
indifferent and selfish. But one cannot study the idealistic philosophers long without
coming into touch with solipsism. […] The solipsist believes only in himself and
his experience. He creates the world as the theatre of his activity, and the
world he creates consists of himself and his thoughts and feelings; and beyond
that nothing has being. Everything knowable, every fact of experience, is an
idea in his mind, and without his mind does not exist. There is no possibility
and no necessity for him to postulate anything outside himself. For him dream
and reality are one. Life is a dream in which he creates the objects that come before
him, a coherent and consistent dream, and when he ceases to dream, the world,
with its beauty, its pain and sorrow and unimaginable variety, ceases to be. It
is a perfect theory; it has but one defect; it is unbelievable.[11]
[…]
It would be
difficult to persuade an author that there was not a close interaction between
the body and the mind. The experience of Flaubert when he suffered from the
symptoms of arsenical poisoning while writing of Emma Bovary's suicide is but
an extreme instance of what every novelist has undergone. Most writers have chills
and fevers, aches and pains, nausea at times, when they are engaged in
composition; and contrariwise they are aware to what morbid states of their
body they owe many of their happiest inventions. Knowing that many of their
deepest emotions, many of the reflections seem to come straight from heaven,
may be due to want of exercise or a sluggish liver, they can hardly fail to
regard their spiritual experiences with a certain irony; which is all to the
good, for thus they can manage and manipulate them. For my part, of the various
theories of the relations between matter and spirit that are offered by the philosophers
for the consideration of the plain man that which still seems to me most
satisfactory is Spinoza's conception that substance thinking and substance
extended are one and the same substance. But of course today it is more
convenient to call it energy. Unless I misunderstand him Bertrand Russell has
expressed in his modern fashion an idea not very dissimilar when he speaks of a
neutral stuff which is the raw material of the mental and physical worlds.
Trying to form for myself some sort of picture of this, I have seen spirit in
the likeness of a river that forces its way through the jungle of matter; but river
is jungle and jungle is river, for river and jungle are one. It does not seem
impossible that the biologists will in the future succeed in creating life in
their laboratories and then it may be that we shall know more of these matters.
[Chapter
LXVIII]
But the plain man's interest in philosophy
is practical. He wants to know what is the value of life, how he should live
and what sense he can ascribe to the universe. When philosophers stand back and
refuse to give even tentative answers to these questions they shirk their
responsibilities. Now, the most urgent problem that confronts the plain man is
the problem of evil.
It is curious
to notice that when they speak of evil, philosophers so often use toothache as
their example. They point out with justice that you cannot feel my toothache. In
their sheltered, easy lives it looks as though this were the only pain that had
much afflicted them and one might almost conclude that with the improvement of
American dentistry the whole problem could be conveniently shelved. I have
sometimes thought that it would be a very good thing if before philosophers
were granted the degrees that will enable them to impart their wisdom to the
young, they had to spend a year in social service in the slums of a great city
or earn their living by manual labour. If they had ever seen a child die of
meningitis they would face some of the problems that concern them with other
eyes.
If the
subject were not of such pressing moment it would be difficult to read the chapter
on evil in Appearance
and Reality without ironic amusement. It is appallingly gentlemanlike. It
leaves you with the impression that it is really rather bad form to attach any
great importance to evil, and though its existence must be admitted it is
unreasonable to make a fuss about it. In any case it is much exaggerated and it
is evident that there is a lot of good in it. Bradley held that there
was no pain on the whole. The Absolute is the richer for every discord and for
all diversity which it embraces. Just as in a machine, he tells us, the
resistance and pressure of the parts subserve an end beyond any of them, so at
a much higher level it may be with the Absolute; and if this is possible it is
indubitably real. Evil and error subserve a wider scheme and in this are
realized. They play a part in a higher good and in this sense unknowingly are
good. Evil in short is a deception of our senses and nothing more.
I have tried
to find out what philosophers of other schools had to say on this question.
This is not very much. […] And in the little they have said I can find less to
satisfy me. It may be that the evils we endure educate us and so make us
better; but observation does not allow us to think that this is a universal
rule. It may be that courage and sympathy are excellent and that they could not
come into existence without danger and suffering. It is hard to see how the
Victoria Cross that rewards the soldier who has risked his life to save a
blinded man is going to solace him
for the loss of his sight. To give alms shows charity, and charity is a virtue,
but does that good compensate for the
evil of the cripple whose poverty has called it forth? Evils are there,
omnipresent; pain and disease, the death of those we love, poverty, crime, sin,
frustrated hope: the list is interminable. What explanations have the
philosophers to offer? Some say that evil is logically necessary so that we may
know good; some say that by the nature of the world there is an opposition
between good and evil and that each is metaphysically necessary to the other.
What explanations have the theologians to offer? Some say that God has placed
evils here for our training; some say that he has sent them upon men to punish
them for their sins. But I have seen
a child die of meningitis. I have only found one explanation that appealed
equally to my sensibility and to my imagination. This is the doctrine of the
transmigration of souls. […] I can only regret that I find the doctrine as
impossible to believe[12]
as the solipsism of which I spoke just now.
[Chapter
LXIX]
But I have not done with evil yet. The
problem presses when you come to consider whether God exists, and if he does,
what nature must be ascribed to him. The time came when, like everybody else, I
read the engaging works of the physicists. I was seized with awe at the
contemplation of the immense distances that separated the stars and the vast stretches
of time that light traversed in order to come from them to us. I was staggered
by the unimaginable extent of the nebulae. […] I seemed
inevitably drawn to the conception of a creator, and what could create this
vast, this stupendous universe but a being all-powerful? But the evil on the
world then forces on us the conclusion that this being cannot be all-powerful
and all-good. A God who is all-powerful may be justly blamed for the evil of
the world and it seems absurd to consider him with admiration or accord him
worship. But mind and heart revolt against the conception of a God who is not
all-good. We are forced then to accept the supposition of a God who is not
all-powerful: such a God contains within himself no explanation of his own
existence or of that of the universe he creates.
[…]
Most of us
find it embarrassing when flowery compliments are paid to us. It is strange
that the devout should think God can be pleased when they slavishly pay them to
him. When I was young I had an elderly friend who used often to ask me to stay
with him in the country. He was a religious man and he read prayers to the
assembled household every morning. But he had crossed out in pencil all the
passages in the Book of Common Prayer that praised God. He said that there was
nothing so vulgar as to praise people to their faces and, himself a gentleman,
he could not believe that God was so ungentlemanly as to like it. At the time
it seemed to me a curious eccentricity. I think now that my friend showed very
good sense.[13]
Men are
passionate, men are weak, men are stupid, men are pitiful; to bring to bear on
them anything so tremendous as the wrath of God seems strangely inept. It is
not very difficult to forgive other people their sins. When you put yourself
into their shoes it is generally easy to see what has caused them to do things
they should not have done and excuses can be found for them. There is a natural
instinct to anger when some harm is done one that leads one to revengeful
action, and it is hard in what concerns oneself to take up an attitude of
detachment; but a little reflection enables one to look upon the situation from
the outside and with practice it is no more difficult to forgive the harm that
is done one than any other. It is much harder to forgive people the harm one
has done them; that indeed requires a singular power of mind.
Every artist
wishes to be believed in, but he is not angry with those who will not accept
the communication he offers. God is not so reasonable. He craves so urgently to
be believed in that you might think he needed your belief in order to reassure
himself of his own existence. He promises rewards to those who believe in him
and threatens with horrible punishment those who do not. For my part I cannot
believe in a God who is angry with me because I do not believe in him. I cannot
believe in a God who is less tolerant than I. I cannot believe in a God who has
neither humour nor common sense.
[…]
But though
men have ascribed to God imperfections that they would deplore in themselves
that does not prove that God does not exist. It proves only that the religions
that men have accepted are but blind alleys cut into an impenetrable jungle and
none of them leads to the heart of the great mystery. […] Experience has shown
that the prevalence of a belief, no matter for how long it has been held, is no
guarantee of its truth. It appears, then, that none of the arguments for the
existence of God is valid. But of course you do not disprove his existence
because you cannot prove it. Awe remains, man's sense of helplessness, and his
desire to attain harmony between himself and the universe at large. These,
rather than the worship of nature or of ancestors, magic or morality, are the
sources of religion. There is no reason to believe that what you desire exists,
but it is a hard saying that you have no right to believe what you cannot
prove; there is no reason why you should not believe so long as you are aware
that your belief lacks proof. I suppose that if your nature is such that you
want comfort in your trials and a love that sustains and encourages you, you
will neither ask for proofs nor have need of them. Your intuition suffices.
Mysticism is
beyond proof and indeed demands no more than an indwelling conviction. It is
independent of the creeds, for it finds sustenance in all of them, and it is so
personal that it satisfies every idiosyncrasy. It is the feeling that the world
we live in is but part of a spiritual universe and from this gains its significance;
it is the sense of a present God who supports and comforts us. The mystics have
narrated their experience so often, and in terms so similar, that I do not see
how one can deny its reality. Indeed, I have myself had on one occasion an
experience that I could only describe in the words the mystics have used to
describe their ecstasy. I was sitting in one of the deserted mosques near Cairo when suddenly I felt myself rapt as Ignatius of
Loyola was rapt when he sat by the river at Manresa
Faced with
this, awed by the greatness of the universe and malcontent with what the
philosophers told me, and what the saints, I have sometimes gone back, beyond
Mohammed, Jesus and Buddha, beyond the gods of Greece
[Chapter LXX]
Belief in God is not essential to belief
in immortality, but it is difficult to dissociate one from the other. […] And practically,
as we know, the two notions have been so inseparably connected that a life
after death has always been looked upon as the most powerful instrument to
God's hand in his dealings with the human race. It has offered a merciful God
the happiness of rewarding the good and a revengeful one the satisfaction of punishing
the wicked. The arguments for immortality are simple enough, but, if not
meaningless, they have no great force unless the premiss of God's existence is
accepted first.
[…]
Immortality is
too stupendous a notion to be entertained in connection with common mortals.
They are too insignificant to deserve eternal punishment or to merit eternal
bliss. So philosophers have been found to suggest that such as have the
possibility of spiritual fulfilment will enjoy a limited survival till they
have had the opportunity of reaching the perfection of which they are capable
and will then suffer a welcome extinction, while those who have no such
possibility will be forthwith mercifully annihilated. But when one comes to
enquire into the qualities which in this case will admit the chosen few into
the blessings of this limited survival one makes the disconcerting discovery
that they are those that few but philosophers possess. One cannot but wonder,
however, in what manner the philosophers will pass their time when their virtue
has received its due reward, for the questions that occupied them during their
sojourn on earth will presumably have received their adequate replies. One can
only suppose that they will take piano lessons from Beethoven or learn to paint
in water colour under the guidance of Michelangelo. Unless these two great men
have much changed they will find them irascible masters.
[…]
For my part I cannot see how
consciousness can persist when its physical basis has been destroyed and I am
too sure of the interconnection of my body and my mind to think that any
survival of my consciousness apart from my body would be in any sense the
survival of myself. Even if one could persuade oneself that there was any truth
in the suggestion that the human consciousness survives in some general
consciousness, there would be small comfort in it, and to be satisfied with the
notion that one survives in such spiritual force as one has produced is merely
to cheat oneself with idle words. The only survival that has any value is the
complete survival of the individual.
[Chapter LXXI]
Most people
think little. They accept their presence in the world; blind slaves of the
striving which is their mainspring they are driven this way and that to satisfy
their natural impulses, and when it dwindles they go out like the light of a
candle. Their lives are purely instinctive. It may be that theirs is the
greater wisdom. But if your consciousness has so far developed that you find
certain questions pressing upon you and you think the old answers wrong, what
are you going to do? What answers will you give? To at least one of these
questions two of the wisest men who ever lived have given their own answers.
When you come to look at them they seem to mean pretty much the same thing and
I am not so sure that that is very much. Aristotle has said that the end of
human activity is right action, and Goethe that the secret of life is living. I
suppose that Goethe means that man makes most of his life when he arrives at
self-realisation; he had small respect for a life governed by passing whims and
uncontrolled instincts. But the difficulty of self-realisation, that bringing
to the highest perfection every faculty of which you are possessed, so that you
get from life all the pleasure, beauty, emotion and interest you can wring from
it, is that the claims of other people constantly limit your activity; and
moralists, taken by the reasonableness of the theory, but frightened of its
consequences, have spilt much ink to prove that in sacrifice and selflessness a
man most completely realises himself. That is certainly not what Goethe meant
and it does not seem to be true. That there is a singular delight in
self-sacrifice few would deny, and in so far as it offers a new field of
activity and the opportunity to develop a new side of the self, it has value in
self-realisation; but if you aim at self-realisation only in so far as it
interferes with no one else's attempts at the same thing you will not get very
far. Such an aim demands a good deal of ruthlessness and an absorption in
oneself which is offensive to others and thus often stultifies itself. As we
know many of those who came in contact with Goethe were outraged by his frigid
egotism.
[Chapter
LXXII]
[…]
I have sought
to make a pattern of my life. This, I suppose, might be described as self-realisation
tempered by a lively sense of irony; making the best of a bad job. But a
question presents itself which I shirked when, at the beginning of my book, I
dealt with this subject; and now that I can avoid it no longer I cannot but
draw back. I am conscious that here and there I have taken free-will for granted;
I have spoken as though I had power to mould my intentions and direct my
actions as the whim took me. In other places I have spoken as though I accepted
determinism. Such shilly-shallying would have been deplorable had I been
writing a philosophical work. I make no such pretension. But how can I, an
amateur, be expected to settle a question which the philosophers have not yet
ceased to argue?
[…]
It might seem only sensible to leave the
matter alone, but it happens to be one in which the writer of fiction is peculiarly
concerned. For as a writer he finds himself compelled by his readers to rigid
determination.
[…]
But when I look back upon my own life
I cannot but notice how much that vitally affected me has been due to
circumstances that it is hard not to regard as pure chance. Determinism tells
us that choice follows the line of least resistance or the strongest motive. I
am not conscious that I have always followed the line of least resistance, and
if I have followed the strongest motive that motive has been an idea of myself
that I have gradually evolved. The metaphor of chess, though frayed and shop-worn,
is here wonderfully apposite. The pieces were provided and I had to accept the
mode of action that was characteristic of each one; I had to accept the moves
of the persons I played with; but it has seemed to me that I had the power to
make on my side, in accordance perhaps with my likes and dislikes and the ideal
that I set before me, moves that I freely willed. It has seemed to me that I
have now and then been able to put forth an effort that was not wholly
determined. If it was an illusion it was an illusion that had its own efficacy.
The moves I made, I know now, were often mistaken, but in one way and another
they have tended to the end in view. I wish that I had not committed a great
many errors, but I do not deplore them nor would I now have them undone.
[…]
[Chapter LXXIII]
[…]
There is no
explanation for evil. It must be looked upon as a necessary part of the order
of the universe. To ignore it is childish; to bewail it senseless. Spinoza
called pity womanish; the epithet has a harsh sound on the lips of that tender
and austere spirit. I suppose he thought that it was but waste of emotion to
feel strongly about what you could not alter.
I am not a
pessimist. Indeed, it would be nonsensical of me to be so, for I have been one
of the lucky ones. I have often wondered at my good fortune. I am well aware
that many who were more deserving than I have not had the happy fate that has
befallen me. An accident here, an accident there, might have changed everything
and frustrated me as so many with talents equal to, or greater than, mine, with
equal opportunities, have been frustrated. […] With all my limitations, physical
and mental, I have been glad to live. I would not live my life over again.
There would be no point in that. Nor would I care to pass again through
the anguish I have suffered. It is one of the faults of my nature
that I have suffered more from the pains, than I have enjoyed the pleasures, of
my life. But without my physical imperfections, with a stronger body and a
better brain, I would not mind entering upon the world afresh. The years that
now stretch immediately in front of us look as if they would be interesting.
[…]
With this
book I shall have completed in sufficient outline the pattern I set myself to
make. If I live I shall write other books, for my amusement and I hope for the
amusement of my readers, but I do not think they will add anything essential to
my design. The house is built. There will be additions, a terrace from which
one has a pretty view, or an arbour in which to meditate in the heat of summer;
but should death prevent me from producing them, the house, though the
housebreakers may set to work on it the day after I am buried in an obituary
notice, will have been built.
[…]
[LXXIV]
Spinoza says that a free man thinks
of nothing less than of death. It is unnecessary to dwell upon it, but it is
foolish, as so many do, to shrink from all consideration of it. It is well to
make up one's mind about it. […] I do not think I have a very strong
instinctive hold on life. I have had a good many serious illnesses, but have
only once known myself to be within measurable distance of death; then I was so
tired that I could not fear, I only wanted to be done with the struggle[14].
Death is inevitable and it does not much matter how one meets it. I do not
think one can be blamed if one hopes that one will not be aware of its
imminence and be fortunate enough to undergo it without pain.
[…]
[Chapter LXXV]
The egoism of man makes him unwilling
to accept the meaninglessness of life and when he has unhappily found himself
no longer able to believe in a higher power whose ends he could flatter himself
that he subserved he has sought to give it significance by constructing certain
values beyond those that seem to further his immediate welfare. The wisdom of the
ages has chosen three of these as most worthy. To aim at them for their own
sake has seemed to give life some kind of sense. […] Their nobility strengthens
his wavering sense of his spiritual significance and, whatever the result, the
pursuit of them appears to justify his efforts. Oases in the vast desert of
existence, since he knows no other end to his journey, man persuades himself
that they at all events are worth reaching and that there he will find rest and
the answer to his question. These three values are Truth, Beauty and Goodness.
I have a
notion that Truth finds a place in this list for rhetorical reasons. Man invests
it with ethical qualities, such as courage, honour and independence of spirit,
which indeed are often shown by his insistence on truth, but which in effect
have nothing whatever to do with it. Finding in it so great an occasion for his
own self-assertion he will be indifferent to any sacrifice that it entails. But
then his interest is in himself and not in the truth. If truth is a value it is
because it is true and not because it is brave to speak it. […] Man has always
sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives not by truth
but by make-believe, and his idealism, it has sometimes seemed to me, is merely
his effort to attach the prestige of truth to the fictions he has invented to
satisfy his self-conceit.
[Chapter
LXXVI]
Beauty[15]
stands in a better case. For many years I thought that it was beauty alone that
gave significance to life and that the only purpose that could be assigned to
the teeming generations that succeed one another on the face of the earth was
to produce now and then an artist. The work of art, I decided, was the crowning
product of human activity, and the final justification for all the misery, the
endless toil and the frustrated strivings of humanity. So that Michelangelo might
paint certain figures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, so that Shakespeare
might write certain speeches and Keats his odes, it seemed to me worth while
that untold millions should have lived and suffered and died. And though I
modified this extravagance later by including the beautiful life among the
works of art that alone gave a meaning to life, it was still beauty that I
valued. All these notions I have long since abandoned.
In the first
place I discovered that beauty was a full stop. When I considered beautiful
things I found that there was nothing for me to do but to gaze and admire. The
emotion they gave me was exquisite, but I could not preserve it, nor could I
indefinitely repeat it; the most beautiful things in the world finished by
boring me. I noticed that I got a more lasting satisfaction from works of a
more tentative character. Because they had not achieved complete success they
gave more scope for the activity of my imagination. In the greatest of all
works of art everything had been realized, I could give nothing, and my
restless mind tired of passive contemplation. It seemed to me that beauty was
like the summit of a mountain peak; when you had reached it there was nothing
to do but to come down again. Perfection is a trifle dull. It is not the least
of life's ironies that this, which we all aim at, is better not quite achieved.
I suppose
that we mean by beauty that object, spiritual or material, more often material,
which satisfies our aesthetic sense. That, however, tells you just about as
much as you would know about water if you were told that it was wet. […] One of
the most curious things that has forced itself on my notice is that there is no
permanence in the judgment of beauty. The museums are full of objects which the
most cultivated taste of a period considered beautiful, but which seem to us
now worthless; and in my own lifetime I have seen the beauty evaporate from
poems and pictures, exquisite not so long ago, like hoar frost before the
morning sun. Vain as we may be we can hardly think our own judgment ultimate;
what we think beautiful shall doubtless be scorned in another generation, and
what we have despised may be raised to honour. The only conclusion is that
beauty is relative to the needs of a particular generation, and that to examine
the things we consider beautiful for qualities of absolute beauty is futile. If
beauty is one of the values that give life significance it is something that is
constantly changing and thus cannot be analyzed, for we can as little feel the
beauty our ancestors felt as we can smell the roses they smelt.
[…]
What exactly
is one's reaction to a great work of art? What does one feel when for instance
one looks at Titian's Entombment in
the Louvre or listens to the quintet in the Meistersinger?
I know what mine is. It is an excitement that gives me a sense of exhilaration,
intellectual but suffused with sensuality, a feeling of well-being in which I
seem to discern a sense of power and of liberation from human ties; at the same
time I feel in myself a tenderness which is rich with human sympathy; I feel
rested, at peace and yet spiritually aloof. Indeed on occasion, looking at
certain pictures or statues, listening to certain music, I have had an emotion
so strong that I could only describe it in the same words as those the mystics
use to describe the union with God. That is why I have thought that this sense
of communion with a larger reality is not only the privilege of the religious,
but may be reached by other paths than prayer and fasting. But I have asked
myself what was the use of this emotion. Of course it is delightful and
pleasure in itself is good, but what is there in it that makes it superior to
any other pleasure, so superior that to speak of it as pleasure at all seems to
depreciate it? Was Jeremy Bentham so foolish after all when he said that one
sort of happiness was as good as another, and if the amount of pleasure was
equal pushpin as good as poetry? The answer the mystics gave to this question
was unequivocal. They said that rapture was worthless unless it strengthened
the character and rendered man more capable of right action. The value of it
lay in works.
It has been
my lot to live much among persons of aesthetic sensibility. I am not speaking
now of the creators: to my mind there is a great difference between those who
create art and those who enjoy it; the creators produce because of that urge
within them that forces them to exteriorize their personality. It is an
accident if what they produce has beauty; that is seldom their special aim.
Their aim is to disembarrass their souls of the burdens that oppress them and
they use the means, their pen, their paints or their clay, for which they have
by nature a facility. I am speaking now of those to whom the contemplation and
appreciation of art is the main business of life. I have found little to admire
in them. They are vain and self-complacent. Inapt for the practical affairs of
life, they disdain those who with humility perform the modest offices to which
their destiny has constrained them. Because they have read a great many books
or seen a great many pictures they think themselves superior to other men. They
use art to escape the realities of life and in their imbecile contempt for
common things deny value to the essential activities of humanity. They are no
better really than drug-fiends; worse rather, for the drug-fiend at all events
does not set himself on a pedestal from which to look down on his fellow-men. The
value of art, like the value of the Mystic
Way
If beauty is
one of the great values of life, then it seems hard to believe that the
aesthetic sense which enables men to appreciate it should be the privilege only
of a class. It is not possible to maintain that a form of sensibility that is
shared but by the elect can be a necessity of human life. Yet that is what the
aesthetics claim. I must confess that in my foolish youth when I considered
that art (in which I included the beauties of nature, for I was very much of
opinion, as indeed I still am, that their beauty was constructed by men as
definitely as they constructed pictures or symphonies) was the crown of human
endeavour and the justification of man's existence, it gave me a peculiar
satisfaction to think that it could be appreciated only by the chosen few. But
this notion has long stuck in my gizzard. I cannot believe that beauty is the
appanage of a set and I am inclined to think that a manifestation of art that
has a meaning only to persons who have undergone a peculiar training is as
inconsiderable as the set to which it appeals. An art is only great and
significant if it is one that all may enjoy. The art of a clique is but a plaything.
[…]
[Chapter LXXVII]
It appears then impossible
to say that either truth or beauty has intrinsic value. What about goodness?
But before I speak of goodness I would speak of love; for there are
philosophers who, thinking that it embraced every other, have accepted it as
the highest of human values. Platonism and Christianity have combined to give
it a mystical significance. The associations of the word lend it an emotion that
makes it more exciting than plain goodness. Goodness in comparison is a trifle
dull. But love has two meanings, love pure and simple, sexual love, namely; and
loving-kindness. I do not think that even Plato distinguished them with
exactness. He seems to me to ascribe the exultation, the sense of power, the
feeling of heightened vitality which accompany sexual love to that other love
which he calls the heavenly love and which I should prefer to call
loving-kindness; and by doing so infects it with the ineradicable vice of
earthly love. For love passes. Love dies. The great tragedy of life is not that
men perish, but that they cease to love. Not the least of the evils of life,
and one for which there is small help, is that someone whom you love no longer
loves you; when La Rochefoucauld discovered that between two lovers there is
one who loves and one who lets himself be loved he put in an epigram the
discord that must ever prevent men from achieving in love perfect happiness. However
much people may resent the fact and however angrily deny it, there can surely
be no doubt that love depends on certain secretions of the sexual glands. In
the immense majority these do not continue indefinitely to be excited by the
same object and with advancing years they atrophy. People are very hypocritical
in this matter and will not face the truth. They so deceive themselves that
they can accept it with complacency when their love dwindles into what they
describe as a solid and enduring affection. As if affection had anything to do
with love![16] Affection is created by
habit, community of interests, convenience and the desire of companionship. It
is a comfort rather than an exhilaration. We are creatures of change, change is
the atmosphere we breathe, and is it likely that the strongest but one of all
our instincts should be free from the law? We are not
the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance
if we, changing, continue to love a changed person. Mostly, different
ourselves, we make a desperate, pathetic effort to love in a different person
the person once loved. It is only because the power of love when it seizes us
seems so mighty that we persuade ourselves that it will last for ever. When it
subsides, we are ashamed, and, duped, blame ourselves for our weakness, whereas
we should accept our change of heart as a natural effect of our humanity.
[…] Love is not always blind and there are few things that cause greater wretchedness
than to love with all your heart someone who you know is unworthy of love.[17]
[…]
In
loving-kindness the sexual instinct is sublimated, but it lends the emotion
something of its own warm and vitalizing energy. Loving-kindness is the better
part of goodness. It lends grace to the sterner qualities of which this
consists and makes it a little less difficult to practise those minor virtues
of self-control and self-restraint, patience, discipline and tolerance, which
are the passive and not very exhilarating elements of goodness. Goodness is the
only value that seems in this world of appearances to have any claim to be an
end in itself. Virtue is its own reward. I am ashamed to have reached so
commonplace a conclusion. With my instinct for effect I should have liked to
end my book with some startling and paradoxical announcement or with a cynicism
that my readers would have recognised with a chuckle as characteristic. It
seems I have little more to say than can be read in any copybook or heard from
any pulpit. I have gone a long way round to discover what everyone knew
already.
I have little
sense of reverence. There is a great deal too much of it in the world. It is
claimed for many objects that do not deserve it. It is often no more than the
conventional homage we pay to things in which we are not willing to take an
active interest. The best homage we can pay to the great figures of the past,
Dante, Titian, Shakespeare, Spinoza, is to treat them not with reverence, but
with the familiarity we should exercise if they were our contemporaries. Thus,
we pay them the highest compliment we can; our familiarity acknowledges that they
are alive for us. But when now and then I have come across real goodness I have
found reverence rise naturally in my heart. It has not seemed to matter then
that its rare possessors were perhaps sometimes a trifle less intelligent than
I should have liked them to be.
[…]
When I look
back on my life, with its successes and its failures, its endless errors, its
deceptions and its fulfilments, its joys and miseries, it seems to me strangely
lacking in reality. It is shadowy and unsubstantial. It may be that my heart,
having found rest nowhere, had some deep ancestral craving for God and
immortality which my reason would have no truck with. In default of anything
better it has seemed to me sometimes that I might pretend to myself that the
goodness I have not so seldom after all come across in many of those I have
encountered on my way had reality. It may be that in goodness we may see, not a reason for life nor an
explanation of it, but an extenuation. […] Unlike beauty, it can be perfect without
being tedious, and, greater than love, time does not wither its delight. But
goodness is shown in right action and who can tell in this meaningless world
what right action is? It is not action that aims at happiness; it is a happy
chance if happiness results. Plato, as we know, enjoined upon his wise man to
abandon the serene life of contemplation for the turmoil of practical affairs
and thereby set the claim of duty above the desire for happiness; and we have
all of us, I suppose, on occasion adopted a course because we thought it right
though we well knew that it could bring us happiness neither then nor in the
future. What then is right action? For my own part the best answer I know is
that given by Fray Luis de Leon. To follow it does not look so difficult that
human weakness quails before it as beyond its strength. With it I can end my
book. The beauty of life, he says, is nothing but this, that each should act in
conformity with his nature and his business.
[1] Mr.
Maugham Himself, Doubleday, 1954, ed. John Beecroft, p. 582. There is one
sentence more at the end of Chapter XXVII: “But then you have to make up your
mind about the relations between truth and art.”
[2] Typo silently fixed (“brought”).
[3] Mr.
Maugham Himself, Doubleday, 1954, ed. John Beecroft, p. 617. The end of this
paragraph reads “from which he with difficulty emerged.”
[4] Ibid., p. 618, “connection”.
[5] Was Maugham referring to the birth of his
daughter out of wedlock and his promise to marry her mother?
[6] See A
Writer’s Notebook (1949), the section titled “1916”. Extensive selections
from the book may be consulted here.
[7] During this holiday in bed Maugham wrote
the farce Home and Beauty. First
produced in the US as Too Many Husbands at the Globe Theatre, Atlantic City London
[8] Cf. the short story “Sanatorium”: Cosmopolitan, v105#6, December 1938, pp.
26-29, 108-112; Creatures of Circumstance
(1947); The Complete Short Stories,
vol. 2 (Heinemann, 1951; Doubleday, 1952, The
World Over); Collected Short Stories,
vol. 3.
[9] Cf. the discussion of character creation
in these four paragraphs with the original prefaces to Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular, Heinemann, 1931, pp.
vii-x, and East and West, Doubleday,
1934, pp. xvi-xix.
[10] Cf. A
Writer’s Notebook (1949), the parts from “1892” to “1902”. There is nothing
about “The Relativity of Things” or “The Circumferentiality of Man”, but on the
whole they confirm Maugham’s bleak outlook at the time.
[11] Cf. the words of Dr Saunders in The Narrow Corner (1932):
I believe in nothing but myself and my
experience. The world consists of me and my thoughts and my feelings; and
everything else is mere fancy. Life is a dream in which I create the objects
that come before me. Everything knowable, every object of experience, is an
idea in my mind, and without my mind it does not exist. There is no possibility
and no necessity to postulate anything outside myself. Dream and reality are one.
Life is a connected and consisted dream, and when I cease to dream, the world,
with its beauty, its pain and sorrow, its unimaginable variety, will cease to
be.
[12] See A
Writer’s Notebook (1949), the postscript dated “1944”, p. 327 in the
Mandarin edition (1991), and The Partial
View, Heinemann, 1954, preface, p. xi. At both places Maugham dismissed
this doctrine as “no more than an impressive fantasy.”
[13] This is clearly a reference to Augustus Hare
(1834-1903), the Victorian travel writer to whom Maugham dedicated his essay
“Augustus” from the collection The
Vagrant Mood (1952). There he related the same story thus:
I was
accustomed to family prayers and I noticed that some of the prayers Augustus
read sounded strangely in my ears. Then I discovered that he had neatly inked
out many lines in the Prayer Book he read from. I asked him why.
'I've crossed
out all the passages in glorification of God,' he said. 'God is certainly a
gentleman, and no gentleman cares to be praised to his face. It is tactless,
impertinent and vulgar. I think all that fulsome adulation must be highly
offensive to him.'
At the time
this notion seemed odd to me and even comic, but since I have come to think
that there was some sense in it.
[14] Maugham probably refers to his nearly
drowning during one of his Far Eastern travels. The incident is described in
both fiction and non-fiction. See A
Writer’s Notebook (1949), chapter “1922”, pp. 181-185 in the Mandarin
edition (1991), and the short story “The Yellow Streak”, first published in Cosmopolitan, August 1925, pp. 106-109
and 215-220, reprinted in The Casuarina
Tree (1926) and The Complete Short
Stories, vol. 1 (Heinemann, 1951; Doubleday, 1952, titled East and West).
[15] Cf. Maugham’s reflections on aesthetics
in chapter 11 of Cakes and Ale
(1930), chapter 9 of Don Fernando
(1935, rev. 1950), several notes from “1933” and 1940” in A Writer’s Notebook (1949), pp. 233 and 307-8 in the Mandarin
edition (1991), and especially the essay “Reflections on a Certain Book” from
the collection The Vagrant Mood
(1952).
[16] Cf. Maugham’s first person narrator in
the short story “The Book-Bag” from the
collection Ah King (1933):
Though I said that affection was the greatest enemy
of love, I would never deny that it's a very good substitute. I'm not sure that
a marriage founded on it isn't the happiest.
[17] Did Willie have Gerald in mind when he
wrote that?
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