I have not hesitated to point out the defects as well
as the merits that I see in these various novels, for nothing is of greater
disservice to the general reader than the indiscriminate praise that is
sometimes bestowed on certain works that are rightly accepted as classics. He
reads and finds that such and such a motive is unconvincing, a certain
character unreal, such and such episode irrelevant and a certain description
tedious. If he is of an impatient temper, he will cry that the critics who tell
him that the novel he is reading is a masterpiece are a set of fools, and if he
is of a modest one, he will blame himself and think that it is above his head
and not for the likes of him; if, on the other hand, he is by nature dogged and
persistent he will read on conscientiously, though without enjoyment. But a
novel is to be read with enjoyment. If
it doesn't give the reader that, it is, so far as he is concerned, valueless.
In this respect every reader is his own best critic, for he alone knows what he
enjoys and what he doesn't. I think, however, that the novelist may claim that
you do not do him justice unless you admit that he has the right to demand
something of his readers. He has the right to demand that they should possess the
small amount of application that is needed to read a book of three or four
hundred pages. He has the right to demand that they should have sufficient
imagination to be able to interest themselves in the lives, joys and sorrows,
tribulations, dangers and adventures of the characters of his invention. Unless
a reader is able to give something of himself he cannot get from a novel the
best it has to give. And if he isn't able to do that, he had better not read it
at all. There is no obligation to read a work of fiction.
A novelist, I have written these essays from my own
standpoint. The danger of this is that the novelist is very apt to like best
the sort of thing he does himself, and he will judge the work of others by how
nearly they approach his own practice. In order to do full justice to works
with which he has no natural sympathy, he needs a dispassionate integrity, a
liberality of spirit, of which the members of an irritable race are seldom
possessed. On the other hand, the critic who is not himself a creator is likely
to know little about the technique of the novel, and so in his criticism he
gives you either his personal impressions, which may well be of no great value,
unless like Desmond MacCarthy he is not only a man of letters but also a man of
the world; or else he proffers a judgement founded on hard and fast rules which
must be followed to gain his approbation. It is as though a shoemaker made
shoes only in two sizes and if neither ot them fitted your foot, you could for
all he cared go shoeless.
The fact remains that to describe a novelist as a
mere storyteller is to dismiss him with contumely. I venture to suggest that
there is no such creature. By the incidents he chooses to relate, the
characters he selects and his attitude towards them, the author offers you a
criticism of life. It may not be a very original one, or very profound, but it
is there; and consequently, though he may not know it, he is in his own modest
way a moralist. But morals, unlike mathematics, are not a precise science. Morals
cannot be inflexible for they deal with the behaviour of human beings, and
human beings, as we know, are vain, changeable and vacillating.
When I consider how many obstacles the novelist has
to contend with, how many pitfalls to avoid, I am not surprised that even the
greatest novels are imperfect; I am only surprised that they are not more
imperfect than they are.
What it all comes down to is the question whether the
novel is a form of art or not. Is its aim to instruct or to please? If its aim
is to instruct, then it is not a form of art. For the aim of art is to please.
[...] But it is a truth that shocks a good many people, since Christianity has
taught them to look upon pleasure with misgiving as snare to entangle the
immortal soul. It seems more reasonable to look upon pleasure as a good, but to
remember that certain pleasures have mischievous consequence and so may more
wisely be eschewed. There is a general disposition to look upon pleasure as
merely sensual, and that is natural since the sensual pleasures are more vivid
than the intellectual; but that is surely an error, for there are pleasures of
the mind as well as of the body, and if they are not so keen, they are more
enduring.
I think it is an abuse to use the novel as a pulpit
or a platform and I believe readers are misguided when they suppose they can
thus easily acquire knowledge. It is a great nuisance that knowledge can only
be acquired by hard work. It would be fine if we could swallow the powder of
profitable information made palatable by the jam of fiction. But the truth is
that, so made palatable, we can't be sure that the powder will be profitable,
for the knowledge the novelist imparts is biased and thus unreliable; and it is
better not know a thing at all than to know it in distorted fashion. There is
no reason why a novelist should be anything but a novelist. It is enough if he
is a good novelist. He should know a little about great many things, but it is
unnecessary, and sometimes even harmful, for him to be a specialist in any
particular subject. He need not eat a whole sheep to know what mutton tastes
like; it is enough if he eats a chop. Then, by applying his imagination and his
creative faculty to the chop he has eaten, he can give you a pretty good idea
of an Irish stew; but when he goes on from this to broach his views on
sheep-raising, the wool industry and the political situation in Australia, it
is wise to accept them with reserve.
Now, owing to the invention of contraceptives, the
high value that was once placed on chastity no longer obtains. Novelists have
not been slow to notice the difference this has made in the relations of the
sexes and so, whenever they feel that something must be done to sustain the
reader's flagging interest, they cause their characters to indulge in
copulation. I am not sure they are well advised. Of sexual intercourse Lord
Chesterfield said that the pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous and
the expense damnable: if he had lived to read modern fiction he might have
added that there is a monotony about the act which renders the reiterated
narration of it excessively tedious.
The novelist is at the mercy of his bias. The
subjects he chooses, the characters he invents and his attitude towards them
are conditioned by it. Whatever he writes is the expression of his personality
and it is the manifestation of his innate instincts, his feelings and his
experience. However hard he tries to be objective, he remains the slave of his
own idiosyncrasies. However hard he tries to be impartial, he cannot help
taking sides. He loads his dice. [...] Henry James insisted again and again
that the novelist must dramatize. That is a telling, though perhaps not very
lucid, way of saying that he must arrange his facts in such a manner as to
capture and hold your attention. So, if need be, he will sacrifice
verisimilitude and credibility to the effect he wants to get. That, as we know,
is not the way a work of scientific or informative value is written. The aim of
the writer of fiction is not to instruct but to please.
=============================================================
[Portraits of the authors by Robert W. Arnold. From Great Novelists and Their Novels, John C. Winston, 1948; the first version of Ten Novels and Their Authors, Heinemann, 1954.]
[Jane Austen and Pride and
Prejudice]
Most of Jane’s letters that
have remained were written to Cassandra when one or other of the sisters was
staying away. Many of her warmest admirers have found them paltry, and have
thought they showed that she was cold and unfeeling and that her interests were
trivial. I am surprised. They are very natural. Jane Austen never imagined that
anyone but Cassandra would read them, and she told her just the sort of things
she knew would interest her. She told her what people were wearing, and how
much she had paid for the flowered muslin she had bought, what acquaintances
she had made, what old friends she had met and what gossip she had heard.
Of late years, several
collections of letters by eminent authors have been published, and for my part,
when I read them, I am now and then disposed to suspect that the writers had at
the back of their minds the notion that one day they might find their way into
print. And when I learn that they had kept copies of their letters, the
suspicion is changed into certainty.
[…]
In one of her letters to
Cassandra, Jane said: “I have now attained the true art of letter-writing,
which we are always told is to express on paper exactly what one would say to
the same person by word of mouth. I have been talking to you almost as fast as
I could the whole of this letter.” Of course she was quite right; that is the art of letter-writing. She
attained it with consummate ease, and since she says that her conversation was
exactly like her letters, and her letters are full of witty, ironical and
malicious remarks, we may be pretty sure that her conversation was delightful. She
hardly ever wrote a letter that had not a smile or a laugh in it, and for the
delectation of the reader I will give some examples of her manner:
“Single women have a dreadful
propensity for being poor, which is one very strong argument in favour of
matrimony.”
“Only think of Mrs. Holder
being dead! Poor woman, she has done the only thing in the world she could
possibly do to make one cease to abuse her.”
“Mrs. Hale, of Sherborne, was
brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, owing
to a fright. I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.”
[…]
“Mrs. Richard Harvey is going
to be married, but as it is a great secret, and only known to half the
neighbourhood, you must not mention it.”
“Dr. Hale is in such very
deep morning that either his mother, his wife or himself must be dead.”
[…]
A relation of the Austens
seems to have given occasion to gossip owing to the behaviour of a certain Dr.
Mant, behaviour such that his wife retired to her mother’s, whereupon Jane
wrote: “But as Dr. M. is a clergyman their attachment, however immoral, has a
decorous air.”
Miss Austen had a sharp
tongue and a prodigious sense of humour. She liked to laugh, and she liked to
make others laugh. It is asking too much of the humorist to expect him – or her
– to keep a good thing to himself when he thinks of it. And, heaven knows, it
is hard to be funny without being sometimes a little malicious. There is not
much kick in the milk of human kindness. Jane had a keen appreciation of the
absurdity of others, their pretensions, their affectations and their
insincerities; and it is to her credit that they amused rather than annoyed
her. She was too amiable to say things to people that would pain them, but she
certainly saw no harm in amusing herself at their expense with Cassandra. I see
no ill-nature even in the most biting of her remarks; her humour was based, as
humour should be, on observation and mother-wit.
[…]
Jane Austen shared the
opinions common in her day and, so far as one can tell from her books and
letters, was satisfied with the conditions that prevailed. She had no doubt
that social distinctions were of importance, and she found it natural that
there should be rich and poor. Young men, as was right and proper, obtained
advancement in the service of the King by the influence of powerful friends. A
woman's business was to marry, for love certainly, but in satisfactory
conditions. This was in the order of things, and there is no sign that Miss
Austen saw anything in it to object to. In one of her letters to Cassandra she
remarks: “Carlo and his wife live in the most private manner imaginable in Portsmouth, without
keeping a servant of any kind. What a prodigious amount of virtue she must have
to marry under such circumstances.” The vulgar squalor in which Fanny Price’s
family lived, owing to her mother’s imprudent marriage, was an object-lesson to
show how careful a young woman should be.
Jane Austen’s novels are pure
entertainment. If you happen to believe that to entertain should be the
novelist’s main endeavour, you must put her in a class by herself. Greater
novels than hers have been written, War
and Peace, for example, and the Brothers
Karamazov; but you must be fresh and alert to read them with profit. No
matter if you are tired or dispirited, Jane Austen’s enchant.
At the time she wrote, it was
thought far from lady-like to do so. Monk Lewis observed: “I have an aversion,
a pity and contempt for all female scribblers. The needle, not the pen, is the
instrument they should handle, and the only one they ever use dexterously.” The
novel was a form held in scant esteem, and Miss Austen was herself not a little
perturbed that Sir Walter Scott, a poet, should write fiction. She was “careful
that her occupation should not be suspected by servants, or visitors, or any
person beyond her family party. She wrote upon small sheets of paper which
could easily be put away, or covered with a piece of blotting paper. There was
between the front door and the offices, a swing door which creaked when it was
opened; but she objected to having this little inconvenience remedied, because
it gave her notice when anyone was coming.” Her eldest brother, James, never
even told his son, then a boy at school, that the books he read with delight
were by his Aunt Jane; and her brother Henry in his Memoir states: “No accumulation of fame would have induced her, had
she lived, to affix her name to any productions of her pen.” So her first book
to be published, Sense and Sensibility,
was described on the title page as “by a Lady”.
It was not the first she
completed. That was a novel called First
Impressions. Her father wrote to a publisher offering for publication, at
the author’s expense or otherwise, “a manuscript novel, comprising three
volumes; about the length of Miss Burney’s Evelina”.
The offer was refused by return of post. First
Impressions was begun during the winter of 1796 and finished in August
1797; it is generally supposed to have been substantially the same book as
sixteen years later was issued as Pride
and Prejudice. Then, in quick succession she wrote Sense and Sensibility and Northanger
Abbey, but had no better luck with them, though after five years a Mr.
Richard Crosby bought the latter, then called Susan, for ten pounds. He never published it, and eventually sold
it back for what he had paid: since Miss Austen’s novels were published
anonymously, he had no notion that the book with which he had parted for so
small a sum was by the successful and popular author of Pride and Prejudice.
She seems to have written little but a fragment, The Watsons, between 1798, when she finished Northanger Abbey, and 1809. It is a long time for a writer of such
creative power to remain silent, and it has been suggested that the cause was a
love affair that occupied her to the exclusion of other interests. We are told
that, when staying with her mother and sister at a seaside resort in Devonshire, “she became acquainted with a gentleman,
whose charm of person, mind and manners was such that Cassandra thought him
worthy to possess and likely to win her sister’s love. When they parted he
expressed his intention of soon seeing them again; and Cassandra felt no doubt
as to his motives. But they never met again. Within a short time, they heard of
his sudden death.” The acquaintance was short, and the author of Memoir adds that he is unable to say
“whether her feelings were of such a nature as to affect her happiness’. I do
not for my part think they were. I do not believe that Miss Austen was capable
of being very much in love. If she had been, she would surely have attributed
to her heroines a greater warmth of emotion than in fact she did. There is no
passion in their love. Their inclinations are tempered with prudence and
controlled by common sense. Real love has no truck with these estimable
qualities. Take Persuasion: Jane
states that Anne Elliot and Wentworth fell deeply in love with one another.
There, I think, she deceived herself and deceives her readers. On Wentworth’s
side it was certainly what Stendhal called amour
passion, but on Anne’s no more than what he called amour goût. They became engaged. Anne allows herself to be
persuaded by that interfering snob, Lady Russell, that it would be imprudent to
marry a poor man, a naval officer, who might be killed in the war. If she had
been deeply in love with Wentworth, she would surely have taken the risk. It
was not a very great one, for on her marriage she was to receive her share of
her mother’s fortune; this share amounted to rather more than three thousand
pounds, equivalent now to over twelve thousand; so in any case she would not
have been penniless. She might very well, like Captain Benwick and Miss
Hargreaves, have remained engaged to Wentworth till he got his command and so
was able to marry her. Anne Elliot broke off her engagement because Lady
Russell persuaded her that she might make a better match if she waited, and it
was not till no suitor, whom she was prepared to marry, presented himself that
she discovered how much she loved Wentworth. We may be pretty sure that Jane
Austen thought her behaviour natural and sensible.
The most plausible
explanation of her long silence is that she was discouraged by her inability to
find a publisher. Her close relations, to whom she read her novels, were
charmed by them, but she was as sensible as she was modest, and she may well
have decided that their appeal was only to persons who were fond of her, and
had, perhaps, a shrewd idea who the models of her characters were. The author
of the Memoir rejects emphatically that she had such models and Dr. Chapman[1] seems to agree with him. They are claiming for Jane Austen a power of invention
which is frankly incredible. All the greatest novelists, Stendhal and Balzac,
Tolstoy and Turgenev, Dickens and Thackeray, have had models from whom they
created their characters. It is true that Jane said: ''I am too proud of my
gentlemen to admit that they were only Mr. A., or Colonel B.'' There the significant
word is only. As with every other
novelist, by the time her imagination had worked on the person who had
suggested the character, he was to all intents and purposes her own creation;
but that is not to say that he was not evolved from an original Mr. A. or
Colonel B.
Be that as it may, in 1809,
in which year Jane settled with her mother and sister in the quiet of Chawton,
she set about revising her old manuscripts, and in 1811 Sense and Sensibility at last appeared. By then it was no longer
outrageous for a woman to write. Professor Spurgeon, in a lecture on Jane
Austen delivered to the Royal Society of Literature, quotes a preface to Original Letters from India by Eliza
Fay. This lady had been urged to publish them in 1782, but public opinion was
so averse “to female authorship” that she declined. But writing in 1816, she
said: “Since then a considerable change has gradually taken place in public
sentiment, and its development; we have now not only as in former days a number
of women who do honour to their sex as literary characters, but many
unpretending females, who fearless of the critical perils that once attended
the voyage, venture to launch their little barks on the vast ocean through
which amusement or instruction is conveyed to a reading public.”
Pride
and Prejudice was published in 1813. Jane Austen sold the copyright for one hundred
and ten pounds.
Besides the three novels
already mentioned, she wrote three more, Mansfield Park,
Emma and Persuasion. On these few books her fame rests, and her fame is
secure. She had to wait a long time to get a book published, but she no sooner
did than her charming gifts were recognized. Since then, the most eminent
persons have agreed to praise her. I will only quote what Sir Walter Scott had
to say; it is characteristically generous: “that young lady had a talent for
describing the involvements, feelings and characters of ordinary life which is
to me the most wonderful I have ever met with. The big bow-wow I can do myself
like anyone going; but the exquisite touch which renders commonplace things and
characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is
denied to me.”
It is odd that that Sir
Walter should have omitted to make mention of the young lady’s most precious
talent: her observation was searching and her sentiment edifying, but it was
her humour that gave point to her observation and prim liveliness to her
sentiment. Her range was narrow. She wrote very much the same sort of story in
all her books, and there is no great variety in her characters. They are very
much the same persons, seen from a somewhat different point of view. She had
common sense in a high degree, and no one knew better than she her limitations.
Her experience of life was confined to a small circle of provincial society and
that is what she was content to deal with. She wrote only of what she knew. As
was first pointed out by Dr. Chapman, she never attempted to reproduce a
conversation of men when by themselves, which in nature of things she could
never have heard.
[…]
Most novelists have their ups
and downs. Miss Austen is the only exception I know to prove the rule that only
the mediocre maintain an equal level, a level of mediocrity. She is never more
than a little below her best. Even in Sense
and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey,
in which there is much to cavil at, there is more to delight. Each of the
others had its devoted, and even fanatic, admirers. Macaulay thought Mansfield
Park her greatest
achievement; other readers, equally illustrious, have preferred Emma; Disraeli read Pride and Prejudice seventeen times; to-day many look upon Persuasion as her most finished work. The
great mass of readers, I believe, has accepted Pride and Prejudice as her masterpiece, and in such case I think it
well to accept their judgement. What makes a classic is not that it is praised
by critics, expounded by professors and studied in schools, but that large
numbers of readers, generation after generation, have found pleasure and
spiritual profit in reading it.
I myself think that Pride and Prejudice is on the whole the
most satisfactory of all the novels. Its first sentence puts you in good
humour: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in
possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” It sets the note, and
the good humour it induces remains with you till, with regret, you have reached
the last page. Emma is the only one
of Miss Austen’s novels that I find long-winded. I can take no great interest
in the love affair of Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax; and, though Miss Bates
is immensely amusing, don’t we get a little too much of her? The heroine is a
snob, and the way she patronizes those whom she looks upon as her social
inferiors is repulsive. But we must not blame Miss Austen for that: we must
remember that we of to-day do not read the same novel that was read by the
readers of her day. Changes in
manners and customs have wrought changes in our outlook; in some ways we are
narrower than our forebears, in others more liberal; an attitude which even a
hundred years ago was general now affects us with malaise. We judge the books
we read by our own prepossessions and our own standards of behaviour. This is
unfair, but inevitable. In Mansfield Park the hero and heroine, Fanny and
Edmund, are intolerable prigs; and all my sympathies go out to the
unscrupulous, sprightly and charming Henry and Mary Crawford. I cannot understand
why Sir Thomas Bertram should have been enraged when, on his return from
overseas, he found his family amusing themselves with private theatricals. Since
Jane herself thoroughly enjoyed them, one cannot see why she found his anger
justifiable. Persuasion has a rare
charm, and though one may wish that Anne were a little less matter-of-fact, a
little more disinterested, a little more impulsive – in fact a little less
old-maidish – except for the incident on the Cobb at Lyme Regis, I should be
forced to look upon it as the most perfect of the six. Jane Austen had no
particular gift for inventing incident of an unusual character, and this one
seems to me a very clumsy contrivance. Louisa Musgrove runs up some steep
steps, and is “jumped down” by her admirer, Captain Wentworth. He misses her,
she falls on her head and is stunned. If he were going to give her his hands,
as we are told he had been in the habit of doing in “jumping her off” a stile,
even if the Cobb then were twice as high as it is now, she could not have been
more than six feet from the ground and, as she was jumping down, it is
impossible that she should have fallen on her head. In any case, she would have
fallen against the stalwart sailor and, though perhaps shaken and frightened,
could hardly have hurt herself. Anyhow, she was unconscious, and the fuss that
ensued is unbelievable. Captain Wentworth, who has seen action and made a
fortune from prize-money, is paralysed with horror. The immediately subsequent
behaviour of all concerned is so idiotic that I find it hard to believe that
Miss Austen, who was able to take the illnesses and death of her friends and
relations with quiet fortitude, did not look upon it as uncommonly foolish.
Professor Garrod[2],
a learned and witty critic, has said that Jane Austen was incapable of writing
a story, by which, he explains, he means a sequence of happenings, either
romantic or uncommon. But that is not what Jane had a talent for, and not what
she tried to do. She had too much sense, and too sprightly a humour, to be
romantic, and she was interested not in the uncommon, but in the common. She made it uncommon by the keenness of her
observation, her irony and her playful wit.
[…]
Pride
and Prejudice is a very well-constructed book. The incidents follow one another
naturally, and one’s sense of probability is nowhere outraged. It is, perhaps,
odd that Elizabeth and Jane should be well-bred and well-behaved, whereas their
mother and their three younger sisters should be, as Lady Knatchbull put it,
“very much below par as to good society and its ways”; but that this should be
so was essential to the story. I have allowed myself to wonder that Miss Austen
did not avoid this stumbling-block by making Elizabeth and Jane the daughters of a first marriage
of Mr. Bennet and making the Mrs. Bennet of the novel his second wife and the
mother of the three younger daughters. She liked Elisabeth best of all her
heroines. "I must confess,” she wrote, ''that I think her as delightful a
creature as ever appeared in print.'' If, as some have thought, she was herself
the original for her portrait of Elisabeth – and she has certainly given her
own gaiety, high spirit and courage, wit and readiness, good sense and right
feeling – it is perhaps not rash to suppose that when she drew the placid,
kindly and beautiful Jane Bennet she had in mind her sister Cassandra. Darcy
has been generally regarded as a fearful cad. His first offence was his
disinclination to dance with people he didn’t know, and didn’t want to know, at
a public ball to which he had gone with a party. Not a very heinous one. It was
unfortunate that Elizabeth
should overhear the derogatory terms in which he spoke of her to Bingley, but
he could not know that she was listening, and his excuse might have been that
his friend was badgering him to do what he had no wish to. It is true that when
Darcy proposes to Elizabeth
it is with an unpardonable insolence, but pride, pride of birth and position,
was the predominant trait of his character, and without it there would have
been no story to tell. The manner of his proposal, moreover, gave Jane Austen
opportunity for the most dramatic scene in the book; it is conceivable that,
with the experience she gained later, she might have been able to indicate
Darcy’s feelings, very natural and comprehensible feelings, in such a way as to
antagonize Elizabeth, without putting into his mouth speeches so outrageous as
to shock the reader. There is, perhaps, some exaggeration in the drawing of
Lady Catherine and Mr Collins, but to my mind little more than comedy allows.
Comedy sees life in a light more sparkling, but colder, than that of common
day, and a touch of exaggeration, that is, of farce, is often no disadvantage.
A discreet amount of farce, like sprinkle of sugar on strawberries, may well
make comedy more palatable. With regard to Lady Catherine, one must remember
that in Miss Austen's day rank gave its possessors a sense of immense
superiority over persons of inferior station; and they not only expected to be
treated by them with utmost deference, but were. In my own youth I knew great
ladies whose sense of importance, though not quite so blatant, was not far
removed from Lady Catherine's. And as for Mr. Collins, who has not known, even
to-day, men with that combination of obsequiousness and pomposity? That they
have learnt to screen it with a front of geniality only makes it more odious.
Jane Austen was not a great
stylist, but she wrote plainly and without affectation. I think the influence
of Dr. Johnson may be discerned in the structure of her sentences. She is apt
to use the word of Latin origin rather than the homely English one. It gives
her phrase a slight formality which is far from unpleasant; indeed, it often
adds point to a witty remark, and a demure savour to a malicious one. Her
dialogue is probably as natural as dialogue could then be. To us it may seem
somewhat stilted. Jane Bennet, speaking of her lover’s sisters, says: “They
were certainly no friends to his acquaintance with me, which I cannot wonder
at, since he might have chosen so much more advantageously in many respects.”
It may, of course, be that these were the very words she uttered; I think it
unlikely. It is obviously not how a modern novelist would phrase the same
remark. To set down on paper speech exactly as it is spoken is very tedious,
and some arrangement of it is certainly necessary. It is only of late years,
comparatively, that novelists, striving for verisimilitude, have been at pains
to make their dialogue as colloquial as possible: I suspect that it was a
convention of the past to cause persons of education to express themselves with
a balance, and with a grammatical correctness, which cannot commonly have been
at their command, and I presume readers accepted it as natural.
Allowing, then, for the
slight formality of Miss Austen’s dialogue, we must admit that she invariably
made the person[s] of her stories speak in character. I have only noticed one
occasion upon which she slipped up: “Anne smiled and said, ‘My idea of good
company, Mr. Elliot, is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a
great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company’ ‘You are
mistaken, said he gently, ‘that is not good company that is the best.’”
Mr. Elliot had faults of
character; but if he was capable of making so admirable a reply to Anne’s
remark, he must have had qualities with which his creator did not see fit to
acquaint us. For my part, I am so charmed with it that I would have been
content to see her marry him rather than the stodgy Captain Wentworth. It is
true that Mr. Elliot had married a woman “of inferior station” for her money,
and neglected her; and his treatment of Mrs. Smith was ungenerous; but, after
all, we only have her side of the story, and it may be that, had we been given
a chance to hear his, we should have found his conduct pardonable.
There is one merit which Miss
Austen has and which I have almost omitted to mention. She is wonderfully
readable – more readable than some greater and more famous novelists. She
deals, as Walter Scott said, with commonplace things, ''the involvements,
feelings and characters of ordinary life''; nothing very much happens in her
books, and yet, when you come to the bottom of a page, you eagerly turn it to
learn what will happen next. Nothing very much does and again you eagerly turn
the page. The novelist who has the power to achieve this has the most precious
gift a novelist can possess.
[1] R. W. Chapman, Jane Austen: Facts and Problems,
first published in 1948. Ed.
[2] H. W. Garrod, Jane Austen: A Deprecation, first
published in 1928. Ed.
=============================================================
[Charles Dickens and David Copperfield]
In a famous essay Matthew Arnold insists that poetry
to be truly excellent must have a high seriousness, and because he finds it
lacking in Chaucer, refuses him, though praising him handsomely, a place among
the greatest poets. Arnold was too austere not to look upon humour with a faint
misgiving, and I don’t suppose he could ever have been brought to admit that
there might be as high a seriousness in Rabelais’ laughter as in Milton’s
desire to justify the works of God to man. But I see his point, and it does not
apply only to poetry. It may be because this high seriousness is lacking in
Dickens’s novels that, for all their great merits, they leave us faintly
dissatisfied. When we read them now with the great French and Russian novels in
mind, and not only those, but George Eliot’s, we are taken aback by their naïveté.
In comparison with them, Dickens’s are
scarcely adult. But, of course, we must remember that we do not read the novel
he wrote. We have changed, and they have changed with us. It is impossible to
recapture the emotions with which his contemporaries read them, as they came
hot from the press.
For my part, I find myself still immensely amused by
Dickens’s humour, but his pathos leaves me cold. I am inclined to say that he
had strong emotions, but no heart. I hasten to qualify that. He had a generous
heart, a passionate sympathy with the poor and oppressed, and, as we know, he
took a persistent and effective interest in social reform. But it was an
actor’s heart, by which I mean that he could feel intensely an emotion that he
wished to depict in the same way as an actor playing a tragic part can feel the
emotion he represents. ‘What’s he to Hecuba or Hecuba to him?’ […] I have no
doubt that Dickens was sincere, but it was an actor’s sincerity; and that,
perhaps, is why now, no matter how he piled up the agony, we feel that his
pathos was not quite genuine and so are no longer moved by it.
Dickens’s general method of
creating character was to exaggerate the traits, peculiarities, foibles, of his
models and to put into the mouth of each one some phrase, or string of phrases,
which stamped his quintessence on the reader’s mind. He never showed the
development of characters and, on the whole, what his creatures were at the
beginning they remain at the end. (There are in Dickens’s work one or two
exceptions, but the change of nature he has indicated is highly unconvincing;
it is occasioned to bring about a happy ending.) The danger of drawing
character in this way is that the limits of plausibility may be exceeded, and
the result is caricature. Caricature is all very well when the author presents
you with character at whom you can laugh, as you can at Mr Micawber, but it
will not serve when he expects you to sympathize. Dickens was never
particularly successful with his female characters unless, like Mrs. Micawber,
with her “I will never desert Mr. Micawber”, and Betsy Trotwood, they were caricatured.
Dora, drawn after Dickens’s first love, Maria Beadnell, is too silly and too
childish; Agnes, drawn after Mary and Georgy Hogarth, is too good and too
sensible: they are both fearfully tiresome. Little Em’ly seems to me a failure:
she only got what she asked for. Her ambition was to be a “lady”, and in the
hope, presumably, that she would be able to get Steerforth to marry her, she
ran away with him. She seems to have made him a most unsatisfactory mistress,
sullen, tearful and sorry for herself; and it is no wonder that he grew tired
of her. The most baffling female character in David Copperfield is Rosa Dartle. I suspect that Dickens meant to
make greater use of her in his story than he did, and if he did not do so, it
was because he feared to offend his public. I can only suppose that Steerforth
had been her lover and she hated him because he had abandoned her, but,
notwithstanding, loved him still with a jealous, hungry, vindictive love.
Dickens here invented a character that Balzac would have made much of. Of the
leading actors in David Copperfield,
Steerforth is the only one that is drawn “straight”, using the word as actors
do when they speak of a “straight part”. Dickens has given the reader an
admirable impression of Steerforth’s charm, grace and elegance, his
friendliness, his kindliness, his amiable gift of being able to get on with all
kinds of people, his gaiety, his courage, his selfishness, his
unscrupulousness, his recklessness, his callousness. He has drawn here a
portrait of the sort of man that most of us have known, who gives delight
wherever he goes and leaves disaster behind him. […] To-day, the novelist is
under the necessity of making the events he relates not only likely, but so far
as possible inevitable. Dickens was under no such constraint. That Steerforth,
coming from Portugal by sea
after an absence from England
of some years, should be wrecked and drowned in sight of Yarmouth just when David Copperfield had gone
there on a brief visit to his old friends, is a coincidence that really puts
too great a strain on the reader’s credulity. If Steerforth had to die in order
to satisfy the Victorian demand that vice should be punished, Dickens might
surely have thought of a more plausible way of bringing this about.
So to see people well suited
the idiosyncrasy of Dickens’s temper. Mr. Micawber was drawn from his father.
John Dickens was grandiloquent in speech and shifty in money matters, but he
was no fool and far from incompetent; he was industrious, kindly and
affectionate. We know what Dickens made of him. If Falstaff is the greatest
comic character in literature, Mr. Micawber is the greatest but one. Dickens
has been blamed, to my mind unjustly, for making him end up as a respectable
magistrate in Australia,
and some critics have thought that he should have remained reckless and
improvident to the end. Australia
was a sparsely settled country. Mr. Micawber was a man of fine presence, of
some education and of flamboyant address; I do not see why, in that environment
and with those advantages, he should not have attained official position. But
it was not only in his creation of comic characters that Dickens was masterly.
Steerforth’s smooth servant is admirably drawn; he has a mysterious, sinister
quality which sends cold shivers down one’s back. Uriah Heep smacks of what
used to be called transpontine melodrama; but for all that he is a powerful,
horrifying figure, and he is most skilfully presented. Indeed, David Copperfield is filled with
characters of the most astonishing variety, vividness and originality. There
never were such people as the Micawbers, Peggotty and Barkis, Traddles, Betsy
Trotwood and Mr Dick, Uriah Heep and his mother: they are the fantastic
inventions of Dickens’s exultant imagination; but they have so much vigour,
they are so consistent, they are presented with so much verisimilitude and with
so much conviction, that while you read you cannot but believe in them. They
may not be real; they are very much alive.
But we have no right to ask
of an author more than he can give, and if Dickens lacked that high seriousness
which Matthew Arnold demanded of the greatest poets, he had much else. He was a
very great novelist. He had enormous gifts. He thought David Copperfield the best of all his books. An author is not
always a good judge of his own work, but in this case Dickens’s judgement seems
to me correct. David Copperfield, as
I suppose everyone knows, is in great part autobiographical; but Dickens was
writing a novel, not an autobiography, and though he drew much of his material
from his own life, he made only such use of it as suited his purpose. For the
rest, he fell back on his vivid imagination. He was never much of a reader,
literary conversation bored him, and such acquaintance with literature as he
made later in life seems to have had little effect in lessening the very strong
impressions he had received from the works he first read as a boy at Chatham.
Of these it was, I think, the novels of Smollett that in the long run chiefly
influenced him. The figures Smollett presents to the reader are not so much
larger than life as more highly coloured. They are “humours” rather than
characters.
It was a misfortune for English literature that Keats
died too soon and Wordsworth too late; it was a misfortune almost as serious
that, just at the time when the greatest novelists our country has produced
were in full possession of their gifts, the methods of publication then
prevalent encouraged, to the detriment of their production, the tendency to
diffuseness and prolixity and digression to which by their nature English
novelists have for the most part been inclined. The Victorian novelists were
working men who lived by their pen. They had to accept contracts to provide a
definite amount of copy for eighteen, twenty or twenty-four numbers, and they
had so to arrange their narrative as to end each number in such a way as to
induce the reader the buy the following one. They doubtless had in mind the
main lines of the story they set out to tell, but we know that they were
satisfied if they had two or three numbers written before publication started.
They wrote the rest as they were needed, trusting that their invention would
provide them with enough material to fill the requisite number of pages; and we
know, from their own admissions, that on occasion their invention failed them
and they had to make the best job they could when they had nothing to write
about. Sometimes it happened that their story was finished when there were
perhaps two or three numbers still to be written, and then they had to use any
device they could think of to delay the conclusion. Naturally their novels were
shapeless and long-winded; they were forced to digression and prolixity.
[...]
Dickens did not escape the
danger that confronts the author of a semi-autobiographical novel in which
himself is the principal character. David Copperfield at the age of ten was put
to work by his stern stepfather, as Charles Dickens was by his father, and suffered from the “degradation” of having to mix
with boys of his own age whom he did not consider his social equals, in the
same way as Dickens, in the fragment of autobiography which he gave to Forster,
persuaded himself that he had suffered. Dickens did all he could to excite the
reader’s sympathy for his hero, and indeed on the celebrated journey to Dover,
when David ran away in order to seek the protection of his aunt Betsy Trotwood,
a delightful, amusing character, he loads his dice without scruple. Innumerable
readers have found the narration of this escapade wonderfully pathetic. I am
made of sterner stuff. I am surprised that the little boy should have been such
a ninny as to let everyone he came across rob and cheat him. After all, he had
been in the factory for some months and had wandered about London early and
late; one would have thought that the other boys at the factory, even though
they were not up to his social standard, would have taught him a thing or two;
he had lived with the Micawbers and pawned their bits and pieces for them, and
had visited them at the Marshalsea: if he had really been the bright boy he is
described to be, even at that tender age he would surely have acquired some
knowledge of the world and enough sharpness to fend for himself. But it is not
only in his childhood that David Copperfield shows himself sadly incompetent.
He is incapable of coping with a difficulty. His weakness with Dora, his lack
of common sense in dealing with the ordinary problems of domestic life, are
almost more than one can bear; and he is so obtuse that he does not guess that
Agnes is in love with him. I cannot persuade myself that in the end he became
the successful novelist we are told he did. If he wrote novels, I suspect that
they were more like those of Mrs. Henry Wood than those of Charles Dickens. It
is strange that his creator should have given him none of his own drive,
vitality and exuberance. David was slim and good-looking; and he had charm, or
he would not have attracted the affection of almost everyone he encountered; he
was honest, kindly and conscientious; but he was surely a bit of a fool. He
remains the least interesting person in the book. Nowhere does he show himself
in so poor a light, so feckless, so incapable of dealing with an awkward
situation, as in the monstrous scene between Little Em’ly and Rosa Dartle in
the attic in Soho which David witnesses but,
for the very flimsiest reason, makes no attempt to stop. This scene affords a
good example how the method of writing a novel in the first person may result
in the narrator being forced into a position so shockingly false, so unworthy
of a hero of fiction, that the reader is justly indignant with him. If
described in the third person, from the standpoint of omniscience, the scene
would still have been melodramatic and repellent, but, even though with
difficulty, credible. But of course the pleasure one gets from reading David Copperfield does not arise from
any persuasion one may have that life is, or ever was, anything like what
Dickens describes. That is not to depreciate him. Fiction, like the kingdom of
heaven, has many mansions, and the author may invite you to visit whichever he
chooses. One has just as much right to exist as another, but you must suit
yourselves to the surroundings into which you are led. […] David Copperfield is a fantastication, sometimes gay, sometimes
pathetic, on life, composed out of recollections and wish-fulfilments by a man
of lively imagination and warm feelings. You must read it in the same spirit as
you read As You Like It. It provides an entertainment almost as delightful.
=============================================================
[Flaubert and Madame Bovary]
[Opening lines.]
If, as I believe, the sort of books an author writes
depends on the sort of man he is, and so it is well to know what is relevant to
his personal history, this, as will presently appear, in the case of Flaubert
is essential. He was a very unusual man. No writer that we know of devoted
himself with such a fierce and indomitable industry to the art of literature.
It was not with him, as it is with most authors, an activity of paramount
importance but one that allows for other activities which rest the mind,
refresh the body and enrich experience. He did not think that to live was the object
of life; for him the object of life was to write: no monk in his cell more
resolutely sacrificed the pleasures of the world to the love of God than
Flaubert sacrificed the fullness and variety of life to his ambition to create
a work of art. He was at once a romantic and a realist. Now, at the bottom of
romanticism, as I said in speaking of Balzac, is a hatred of reality and a
passionate desire to escape from it. Like the rest of the romantics, Flaubert
sought refuge in the extraordinary and the fantastic, in the Orient and in
antiquity; and yet, for all his hatred of reality, for all his loathing of the
meanness, the platitude, the imbecility of the bourgeois, he was fascinated by
it; for there was something in his nature that horribly attracted him to what
he most detested. Human stupidity had a revolting charm for him, and he took a
morbid delight in exhibiting it in all its odiousness. It got on his nerves
with the force of any obsession; it was like a sore on the body that is pain to
touch and that yet you can’t help touching. The realist in him pored over human
nature as though it were a pile of garbage, not to find something he could
value, but to show to all and sundry how base, for all their outward seeming,
were human beings.
[…]
He was emotional and imaginative, and, like many
another child and boy, was troubled by that sense of inner loneliness which the
sensitive carry with them all their lives. ‘I went to school when I was only
ten,’ he wrote, ‘and I very soon contracted a profound aversion to the human
race.’ This is not just a quip; he meant it. He was a pessimist from his youth
up.
[…]
‘Your love isn’t love,’ Louise [Colet, his mistress]
wrote, ‘in any case it doesn’t mean much in your life.’ To this he replied:
‘You want to know if I love you. Well, yes, as much as I can love; that’s to
say, for me love isn’t the first thing in life, but the second.’ Flaubert
prided himself on his frankness; it was indeed brutal. His tactlessness was amazing. On one occasion, he
asked Louise to find out from a friend of hers who had lived in Cayenne what had happened to Eulalie Foucaud, the object
of his adventure in Marseilles,
and even asked her to have a letter delivered to her; he was frankly astonished
when she accepted the commission with irritation. He even told her of his
encounters with prostitutes, for whom he had, according to his own story, an
inclination which he frequently gratified. But there is nothing men lie about
so much as about their sex life, and it is probable that he was boasting of
powers which he did not possess.
[…]
With the exception of La Tentation de St Antoine, the more important of his early works
had been strictly personal; they were, in fact, novelizations of his amorous
experience: his aim now was to be strictly objective. He determined to tell the
truth without being bias or prejudice, narrating the facts and exposing the
characters of the persons he had to deal with without comment of his own,
neither condemning nor praising: if he sympathized with one, not to show it; if
the stupidity of another exasperated him, the malice of a third outraged him,
not to allow word of his own to reveal it. This, on the whole, is what he
succeeded in doing, and that is perhaps why many readers have found a certain
coldness in the novel. There is nothing heart-warming in this calculated,
obstinate detachment. Though it may be a weakness in us, my impression is that,
as readers, we find comfort in knowing that the author shares the emotions he
had made us feel.
But the attempt at complete impersonality fails with
Flaubert, as it fails with every novelist, because complete impersonality is
impossible to achieve. It is very well that the writer should let his
characters explain themselves and, as far as may be, let their actions be the
outcome of their natures, and he may easily make a nuisance of himself when he
draws your attention to his heroine’s charm or his villain’s malevolence, when
he moralizes or irrelevantly digresses, when, in short, he is a personage in
the story he is telling; but this is only a matter of method, one that some
very good novelists have used and, if it happens to have gone out of fashion at
the moment, this is not to say it is a bad one. But the author who avoids it
keeps his personality only out of the surface of his novel; he reveals it
willy-nilly by his choice of subject, his choice of character and the point of
view from which he describes them. Flaubert eyed the world with gloomy
indignation. He was violently intolerant. He had no patience with stupidity.
The bourgeois, the commonplace, the ordinary filled him with exasperation. He
had no pity. He had no charity. Most of his adult life he was a sick man,
oppressed by the humiliation which his distemper caused him to feel. His nerves
were in a constant state of perturbation. He was, as I have said, at once a
romantic and a realist; and he flung himself into the sordid story of Emma
Bovary with the fury of a man revenging himself by wallowing in the gutter
because life has not met the demands of his passion for the ideal. We are introduced
to many persons in the course of the novel’s five hundred pages, and but for Dr
Lariviére, a minor character, they have hardly a redeeming feature. They are
base, mean, stupid, trivial and vulgar. A great many people are, but not all;
and it is inconceivable that in a town, however small, there should not be
found one person at least, if not two or three, who is sensible, kindly and
helpful. Flaubert failed to keep his personality out of his novel.
[…]
His
deliberate intention was to choose a set of characters who were thoroughly
commonplace, and devise incidents that would inevitably arise from their nature
and their circumstances; but he was well aware of the possibility that no one
would be interested in persons so dull, and that the incidents he had to relate
would prove tedious. How he proposed to deal with this I will come to later.
Before doing so, I want to consider how far he succeeded in his attempt. The
characters are drawn with consummate skill. We are persuaded of their truth. We
no sooner meet them than we accept them as living creatures, standing on their
own feet, in the world we know. We take them for granted, as we take our
plumber, our grocer, our doctor. It never occurs to us that they are figures in
a novel. Homais, to mention one, is a creature as humorous as Mr. Micawber, and
he has become as familiar to the French as Mr. Micawber is to us; and we
believe in him as we can never quite believe in Mr. Micawber, for, unlike Mr.
Micawber, he is always consistently himself. But Emma Bovary is not by any
means the ordinary farmer’s daughter. That there is in her something of every
woman and of every man is true. We are all given to extravagant and absurd
reveries, in which we see ourselves rich, handsome, successful, the heroes or
heroines of romantic adventures; but most of us are too sensible, too timorous
or too unadventurous to let our day-dreams seriously affect our behaviour. Emma
Bovary was exceptional in that she tried to live her fantasies; she was
exceptional in her beauty. As is well known, when the novel was published
author and printer were prosecuted on the charge that it was immoral. I have
read the speeches of the public prosecutor and of the defending counsel. The
prosecutor recited a number of passages which he claimed were pornographic:
they make one smile now, they are so restrained in comparison with the
descriptions of sexual intercourse to which modern novelists have accustomed us;
but one cannot believe that even then (in 1875) the prosecutor was shocked by
them. The defending counsel pleaded that the passages were necessary, and that
the moral of the novel was good because Emma Bovary suffered for her
misconduct. The judges accepted this view, and the defendants were acquitted. It
is evident, however, that if Emma came to a bad end, it was not, as the
morality of the time demanded, because she had committed adultery, but because
she run up bills that she hadn’t the money to pay, and if she had had the notoriously
thrifty instincts of the Norman peasant, there was no reason why she should not
have gone from lover to lover without coming to harm.
On
publication, Flaubert’s great novel was enthusiastically received by readers
and immediately became a best-seller, but the critics were, when not hostile,
indifferent. Strange as it may seem, they were more inclined to attach
importance to a novel called Fanny by
a certain Ernest Feydeau, which was issued about the same time; and it was only
the deep impression that Madame Bovary
made on the public, and the influence it had on subsequent writers of fiction, that
obliged them in the end to take it seriously.
Madame Bovary is a hard-luck story
rather than a tragedy. I should say that the difference between the two is that
in a hard-luck story the events that occur are brought about by chance, whereas
in a tragedy they are the result of the characters of the persons engaged. It
was bad luck that, with her looks and charm, Emma should have married such a
dull fool as Charles Bovary. It was bad luck that when she was pregnant and wanted
a son to make up for the disillusionment of her marriage, she should have a
daughter. It was bad luck that Rodolphe Boulanger, Emma’s first lover, was a
selfish, brutal fellow who let her down. It was bad luck that her second was
mean, weak and timorous. It was bad luck that when she was desperate, the
village priest, to whom she went for help and guidance, should be a callous and
fatuous dolt. It was bad luck that when Emma found herself hopelessly in debt
and, threatened with proceedings, so far humiliated herself as to ask Rodolphe
for money, he couldn’t give it her, though we are told he would have been ready
to do so, because he didn’t happen to have any with him. It was bad luck that
it ever occurred to him that his credit was good and his lawyer would
immediately have given him the required sum. The story Flaubert had to tell
necessarily ended in Emma’s death, but it must be confessed that the means by which
he brought it about strains the reader’s credulity to the breaking-point.
Some
have found it a fault that, though Emma is the central character, the novel
begins with an account of Bovary’s early youth and his first marriage, and ends
with his disintegration and death. I surmise Flaubert’s idea was enclose the
story of Emma Bovary within that of her husband, as you enclose a painting in a
frame. He may have felt that thus he rounded off his narrative and gave it the
unity of a work of art. If this was his intention, it would have been more
evident if the end were not hurried and arbitrary. Throughout the book, Charles
Bovary has been shown to be weak and easily led. Flaubert tells us that after
Emma’s death he changed utterly. That is very summary. Broken as he was, it is
hard to credit that he should have become quarrelsome, self-willed and obstinate.
Though a stupid man, he was conscientious, and it seems strange that he should
have neglected his patients. He badly needed their money. He had Emma’s debts
to pay and his daughter to provide for. The radical change in Bovary’s
character requires a good deal more explanation than Flaubert has given it.
Finally he dies. He was a robust man in the prime of life, and the only reason
one can give for his death is that Flaubert, after fifty-five months of
exhausting labour, wanted to be done with the book. Since we are expressly told
that Bovary’s memories of Emma with time grew dim, and so presumably less
poignant, one cannot but ask oneself why Flaubert did not let Bovary’s mother
arrange a third marriage for him, as she had arranged the first. It would have
added one more note of futility to the story of Emma Bovary, and accorded well
with Flaubert’s ferocious sense of irony.
[...]
On
the whole, Madame Bovary gives an impression
of intense reality, and this arises, I think, not only because Flaubert’s
characters are eminently lifelike, but because he has described detail with
extreme accuracy. The first four years of Emma’s married life were passed in a
village called Tostes; she was hideously bored there, but for the balance of
the book this period had to be described at the same pace and with the same
detail as the rest. Now, it is difficult to describe a boring time without
boring the reader; yet you read the long passage with interest. Flaubert has
narrated a series of very trivial incidents, and you are not bored because you
are reading something fresh all the time; but since each little incident,
whether it is something that Emma does, feels or sees, is so commonplace, so
trivial, you do get a vivid impression of her boredom. [...] Flaubert introduces
his characters in action, and we learn of their appearance, their mode of
living, their setting, in a continuous process; as, in fact, we come know
people in real life.
After the publication of Madame Bovary Flaubert wrote
Salambô, which is generally
considered a failure, then another version of L’Education Sentimentale, in which he again described his love for
Elisa Schlesinger. Many men of letters in France look upon it as his
masterpiece. It is confused and hard to read. Frédéric Moreau, the hero, is
partly a portrait of Flaubert, as he saw himself, and partly a portrait of
Maxime du Camp as he saw him; but the two men were two different to make a
plausible amalgam, and the character remains unconvincing. He is singularly
uninteresting. The book, however, begins admirably, and towards the end there
is a parting scene between Madame Arnoux (Elisa Schlesinger) and Frédéric
(Flaubert) of rare beauty. Then, for the third time, he wrote La Tentation de St. Antoine. Though
Flaubert said he had enough ideas for books to last him to the end of his life,
they remained vague projects. It is curious that with the exception of Madame
Bovary, the story of which was given him ready-made, the only novels he wrote
were founded on ideas he had had early in his life. He aged prematurely. At
thirty he was already bald and pot-bellied. It may well be, as Maxime de Camp
said, that his nerve storms and the depressing sedatives he took to counteract
them impaired his power of imagination creation.
[…]
The last work he published was a volume of three
stories, one of which, Un Coeur Simple,
is of a rare excellence. He engaged upon a novel called Bouvard et Pecuchet, in which he determined to have still another
fling at the stupidity of the human race, and with his usual thoroughness he
read fifteen hundred books to provide himself with the material he thought
necessary. It was to be in two volumes, and he almost reached the end of the
first. On the morning of May 8, 1880, the maid went into the library into
eleven to bring him lunch. She found him lying on the divan, muttering
incomprehensible words. She ran for the doctor and brought him back with her.
He could do nothing. In less than an hour Gustave Flaubert was dead.
The only woman he sincerely, devotedly and
disinterestedly loved in his life was Elisa Schlesinger. One evening at dinner chez Magny, when Theophile Gautier,
Taine and Edmond de Goncourt were present, Flaubert made a curious statement:
he said that he had never really possessed a woman, that he was virgin, that
all the women that he had had were never anything but “mattresses” for another
woman, the woman of his dreams. Maurice Schlesinger’s speculations had ended in
disaster, and he took his wife and children to Baden.
In 1871 he died. Flaubert, after loving Elisa for thirty-five years, wrote his
first love letter to her. Instead of beginning as he had been used to do: “Chère Madame,” he began: “My old love,
my only loved one.” She came to Croisset. Both were greatly changed since they
had last seen one another. Flaubert was gross and fat, his face red and
blotchy; he wrote an immense moustache and to cover his baldness a black cap.
Elisa had grown thin, her skin had lost its delicate hues and her hair was
white. The lovely description in L’Education
Sentimentale of the last meeting of Madame Arnoux and Frédéric Moreau
probably faithfully describes the meeting of Flaubert and Elisa after so many
years. They met once or twice after that, and then, so far as anyone knows,
never again.
A year after Flaubert’s death, Maxime du Camp spent
the summer at Baden, and one day, when he was
out shooting, found himself near the lunatic asylum of Illenau. The gates were
opened to allow the female inmates, under the care of keepers, to take their
daily walk. They came out two by two. Among them was one who bowed to him. It
was Elisa Schlesinger, the woman whom Flaubert so long and so vainly loved.
=============================================================
[Herman Melville and Moby Dick]
Melville’s reading, though
desultory, had always been wide. It seems that he was chiefly attracted by the
poets and prose writers of the seventeenth century, and one must presume that
he found in them something that peculiarly accorded with his own confused propensities.
Whether their influence was harmful to him or beneficial is a matter of
personal opinion. His early education was slight and, as often happens in such
cases, he did not quite assimilate the culture he acquired in later years.
Culture is not something you put on like a ready-made suit of clothes, but a
nourishment you absorb to build up your personality, just as food builds up the
body of a growing boy; it is not an ornament to decorate a phrase, still less
to show off your knowledge, but a means, painfully acquired, to enrich your
soul.
[…]
“To produce a mighty book,”
wrote Melville, “you must choose a mighty theme,” and it is pretty clear that
he thought it must be dealt with in the grand style. Robert Louis Stevenson
claimed that Melville had no ear; I don’t know what he meant by that. Melville
had a true sense of rhythm, and the balance of his sentences, however long, is
in general excellent. He liked the high-sounding phrase, and the stately
vocabulary he employed in fact enabled him frequently to get effects of great
beauty. Sometimes this inclination led him to tautology, as when he speaks of
the “umbrageous shade”, which only means the shady shade; but you can scarcely
deny that the sound is rich. Sometimes one is pulled up by such a tautology as
“hasty precipitancy” only to discover with some awe that Milton wrote: “Thither they hasted with glad
precipitance.” Sometimes Melville uses common words in an unexpected way, and
often obtains by this a pleasant novelty of effect; and even when it seems to
you that he has used them in a sense they cannot bear, it is rash to blame him
with “hasty precipitancy”, for he may well have authority to go on. When he
speaks of “redundant hair”, it may occur to you that hair may be redundant on a
maiden’s lip, but hardly on a young man’s head; but if you look it out in the
dictionary you will find that the second sense of redundant is copious, and Milton wrote of
“redundant locks”.
The difficulty of the kind of
writing Melville set himself to use in Moby
Dick is that the rhetorical level must be maintained throughout. The matter
must fit the manner. The writer cannot afford to be sentimental or humorous.
Melville was too often both, and then you read him with embarrassment.
His taste was unsure and
sometimes, attempting the poetic, he only succeeded in being absurd: “But few
thoughts of Pan stirred Ahab’s brain, as standing like an iron statue at his
accustomed place beside the mizzen rigging, with one nostril he unthinkingly
sniffed the sugary musk from the Banshee isles (in whose sweet woods mild
lovers must be walking), and with the other consciously inhaled the salt breath
of the new-found sea….” To smell one odour with one nostril and, at the same
time, another with the other is more than a remarkable feat; it is an
impossible one. I have little sympathy with Melville’s partiality for archaic
words and words only in poetic usage: o’er
for over; nigh for near; ere for before; anon and eftsoons; they
give a fusty, meretricious air to prose that at its best is solid and virile. He
had an extensive vocabulary, and sometimes it run away with him. He found it
hard to set down a noun without tacking on it an adjective and often two or
three. He was peculiarly fond of the adjective mystic, and used it as though it meant strange, mysterious,
awe-inspiring, frightening, in fact whatever at the moment he wanted it to
mean. Professor Stoll in the article to which I have already referred[1], and
which is as eminently, and even as devastatingly, sensible as everything he
writes, has justly stigmatized this as pseudo-poetic. In this article Professor
Stoll has remarked on a characteristic that must disturb all readers of
Melville, and that is his predilection for adverbs formed out of participles. It
may be that it is on this account that Stevenson claimed that Melville had no
ear, for one has to admit that these constructions seldom have euphony to
recommend them. The most ill-sounding that I have noticed is whistlingly, but Professor Stoll has
quoted others, burstingly, suckingly, and he might have quoted a
hundred more that run it pretty close. Newton Arvin in his painstaking, but to
my mind wrong-headed, book in the American Men of Letters Series has given examples
of Melville’s coining of words: footmanism,
omnitooled, uncatastrophied, domineerings;
and appears to think that they add a peculiar excellence to his style. They
certainly add to its idiosyncrasy, but surely not to its beauty. If Melville
had had an education more catholic, and taste less uncertain, he could have
achieved the effects he was presumably aiming at without the distortions of
language he affected.
[…]
But for all that,
notwithstanding the reservations one may make, Melville wrote English
uncommonly well. Sometimes, as I have pointed out, the manner he had acquired
led him to rhetorical extravagance, but at its best it has a copious
magnificence, a sonority, a grandeur, an eloquence that no modern writer, so far
as I know, has achieved. It does, indeed, at times recall the majestic phrase
of Sir Thomas Browne and the stately period of Milton. I should like to call the reader’s
attention to the ingenuity with which Melville wove into the elaborate pattern
of his prose the ordinary nautical terms used by sailor-men in the course of
their daily work. The effect is to bring a note of realism, a savour of the
fresh salt of the sea, to the sombre symphony which is the strange and powerful
novel of Moby Dick. Every author has
the right to be judged by his best. How good Melville’s best is the reader can
judge for himself by reading the chapter entitled ‘The Great Armada.’ When he
has action to describe, he does it magnificently, with force, and then his
formal manner of writing grandly enhances the thrilling effect.
No one who has read anything
I have written will expect me to speak of Moby
Dick, Melville’s only title to rank with the great writers of fiction, as
an allegory. Readers must go elsewhere for that. I can only deal with it from
my own standpoint of a not inexperienced novelist. The purpose of fiction is to
give aesthetic pleasure. It has no practical ends. The business of the novelist
is not to advance philosophical theories; that is the business of the
philosopher, who can do it better. But since some very intelligent persons have
taken Moby Dick for an allegory, it
is proper that I should deal with the matter. They have regarded as ironical
Melville’s own remark: “He feared,” he wrote, “that his work might be looked
upon as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and
intolerable allegory.” Is it rash to assume that when a practised writer says a
thing, he is more likely to mean what he says than what his commentators think
he means? It is true that in a letter to Mrs. Hawthorne he stated that he had,
while writing, “some vague idea that the whole book was susceptible of an
allegorical construction”; but that is slender evidence that he had the
intention of writing an allegory. May it not be possible that if, in fact, it
is susceptible to such an interpretation, it is something that came about by
accident and, as his words to Mrs. Hawthorne seem to indicate, not a little to
his dismay? I don’t how critics write novels, but I have some notion how
novelists write them. They do not take a general proposition, such as Honesty
is the Best Policy or All is not Gold that Glitters, and say: “Let’s write an
allegory about that.” A group of characters, generally suggested by persons
they have known, excites their imagination, and sometimes simultaneously,
sometimes after an interval, an incident or a string of incidents, experienced,
heard or invented, appears to them out of the blue to enable them to make
suitable use of it in the development of the theme that has arisen in their
minds by a sort of collaboration between the characters and the incidents.
Melville was not fanciful, or at least, when he attempted to be so, as in Mardi, he came a cropper. To imagine,
and his imagination was powerful, he needed a solid basis of fact. Indeed,
certain critics have on this account accused him of lacking invention – I
think, without reason. It is true that he invented more convincingly when he
had a substratum of experience, his own or that of others, to sustain him; but
then so do most novelists; and when he had this, his imagination worked freely
and with power. When, as in Pierre, he had
not, he wrote absurdly. It is true that Melville was of a “pondering” turn and,
as he grew older, he became absorbed in metaphysics, which Raymond Weaver,
strangely enough, states is “but misery dissolved in thought”.[2] That is a narrow view: there is no subject to which a man can more fitly give
his attention, for it deals with the greatest problems that confront his soul.
Melville’s approach to them was not intellectual, but emotional; he thought as
he did because he felt as he did; but this does not prevent many of his
reflections from being memorable. I should have thought that deliberately to
write an allegory required an intellectual detachment of which Melville was
incapable.
Professor Stoll has shown how
ridiculous and contradictory are the symbolic interpretations of Moby Dick that have been hurled at the
heads of an inoffensive public. He has done it so conclusively that there is no
need for me to enlarge upon the topic. In defence of these critics, however, I
would say this: the novelist does not copy life, he arranges it to suit his
purpose. He disposes of the data given him according to the peculiarity of his
own temperament. He draws a coherent pattern, but the pattern he draws varies
according to the attitude, interests and idiosyncrasy of the reader. According
to your proclivities, you may take a snow-clad Alpine peak, as it rises to the
empyrean in radiant majesty, as a symbol of man’s aspiration to union with the
Infinite; or since, if you like to believe that, a mountain range may be thrown
up by some violent convulsion in the earth’s depths, you may take it as a symbol
of the dark and sinister passions of man that lour to destroy him; of, if you
want to be in the fashion, you may take it a phallic symbol. Newton Arvin
regards Ahab’s ivory leg as “an equivocal symbol both of his impotence and of
the independent male principle directed cripplingly against him”, and the white
whale as “the archetypal Parent; the father, yes, but the mother also, so far
as she becomes a substitute for the father”. For Ellery Sedgwick[3],
who claims that it is its symbolism that makes the book great, Ahab is “Man –
Man sentient, speculative, purposive, religious, standing his full stature
against the immense mystery of creation. His antagonist, Moby Dick, is that
immense mystery. He is not the author of it, but is identical with that galling
impartiality in the laws and lawlessness of the universe which Isaiah devoutly
fathered on the Creator.” Lewis Mumford[4] takes Moby Dick as a symbol of evil, and Ahab’s conflict with him as the
conflict of good and evil in which good is finally vanquished. There is a
certain plausibility in this, and it accords well with Melville’s moody
pessimism.
But allegories are awkward
animals to handle; you can take them by the head or by the tail, and it seems
to me that an interpretation quite contrary is equally possible. Why should it
be assumed that Moby Dick is a symbol of evil? It is true that Melville causes
Ishmael, the narrator, to adopt Ahab’s crazy passion to revenge himself on the
dumb beast that had maimed him; but that is a literary artifice which he had to
make use of, first, because there was Starbuck already there to represent
common sense, and second, because he needed someone to share, and to an extent
sympathize with, Ahab’s tenacious purpose, and so induce the reader to accept
it as not quite unreasonable. Now, the “empty malice” of which Professor
Mumford speaks consists in Moby Dick defending himself when he is attacked.
“Cet animal est très méchant,
Quand
on l’attaque, il se défend.”[5]
Why should the White Whale
not represent goodness rather than evil? Splendid in beauty, vast in size,
great in strength, he swims the seas in freedom. Ahab, with his insane pride,
is pitiless, harsh, cruel and vindictive; he
is evil; and when the final encounter comes and Ahab and his crew of “mongrel renegades,
castaways and cannibals” is destroyed, and the White Whale, imperturbable,
justice having been done, goes his mysterious way, evil has been vanquished and
good at last triumphed. This seems to me as plausible an interpretation as any
other; for let us not forget that Typee
is a glorification of the noble savage, uncorrupted by the vices of
civilization, and that Melville looked upon the natural man as good.
Fortunately Moby Dick may be read, and read with
intense interest, without a thought of what allegorical or symbolic
significance it may or may not have. I cannot repeat too often that a novel is
not to be read for instruction or edification, but for intelligent enjoyment,
and if you find you cannot get this from it you had far better not read it at
all. But it must be admitted that Melville seems to have done his best to
hinder his readers’ enjoyment. He was writing a strange, original and thrilling
story, but a perfectly straightforward one. The romantic beginning is
admirable. Your interest is aroused and held. The characters, as they are
introduced one by one, are clearly presented, alive and plausible. The tension
rises and, with the acceleration of the action, your excitement increases. The
climax is intensely dramatic. It is hard to understand why Melville should have
deliberately sacrificed the grip he had got on his readers by pausing here and
there to write chapters dealing with the natural history of the whale, its
size, skeleton, amours and so forth. It is as senseless, on the face of it, as
it would be for a man telling a story over the dinner table to stop now and
then to tell you the etymological meaning of some word he had used. Montgomery
Belgion, in a judicious introduction to an edition of Moby Dick[6], has
supposed that since it is a tale of pursuit, and the end of a pursuit must be
perpetually delayed, Melville wrote these chapters merely to do so. I cannot
believe that. Had he had any such purpose, during the three years he spent in
the Pacific he must surely have witnessed incidents, or been told tales, that
he could have woven into his narrative more fitly to effect it. I myself think
that Melville wrote these chapters for the simple reason that, like many
another self-educated man, he attached an exaggerated importance to the
knowledge he had so painfully acquired and could not resist the temptation to
parade it, just as in his earlier writings he “called up Burton, Shakespeare,
Byron, Milton, Coleridge and Chesterfield, as well as Prometheus and Cinderella,
Mahomet and Cleopatra, Madonna and Houris, Medici and Mussulman, to stew
carelessly across his pages.”
For my part, I can read most
of these chapters with interest, but it cannot be denied that they are
digressions which sadly impair the tension. Melville lacked what the French
call l’esprit de suite, and it would
be stupid to assert that the novel is well-constructed. But if he composed it
in the way he did, it is because that is how he wanted it. You must take it or
leave it. He knew very well that Moby
Dick would not please. He was of an obstinate temper, and it may be that
the neglect of the public, the savage onslaught of the critics, and the lack of
understanding in those nearest to him only confirmed him in his determination
to write exactly as he chose. You must put up with his vagaries, his faulty
taste, his ponderous playfulness, his errors of construction, for the sake of
his excellencies, the frequent splendour of his language, his vivid and
thrilling descriptions of action, his delicate sense of beauty and the tragic
power of his “mystic” ponderings which, perhaps because he was somewhat
muddleheaded, with no striking gift of ratiocination, for just that reason are
emotionally impressive. But, of course, it is the sinister and gigantic figure
of Captain Ahab that pervades the book and gives it its unique force. You must
go to the Greek dramatists for anything like that sense of doom with which
everything you are told about him fills you, and to Shakespeare to find beings
of such terrible power. It is because Herman Melville created him that,
notwithstanding any reservation one may make, Moby Dick is a great
book.
I have said, and said again,
that in order to get a real insight into a great novel you must know what there
is to be known about the man who wrote it. I have an idea that in the case of
Melville something like the contrary obtains. When one reads, and re-reads, Moby Dick, it seems to me that one gets
a more convincing, a more definite, impression of the man than from anything
one may learn of his life and circumstances; an impression of a man endowed by
nature with a great gift blighted by an evil genius, so that, like the agave,
no sooner had it put forth its splendid blooming than it withered; a moody, unhappy
man tormented by instincts he shrank from with horror; a man conscious that the
virtue had gone out of him, and embittered by failure and poverty; a man of
heart craving for friendship, only to find that friendship too was vanity.
Such, as I see him, was Herman Melville, a man whom one can only regard with
deep compassion.
[1] Elmer E. Stoll, “Symbolism
in Moby-Dick”, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Jun., 1951),
pp. 440-465. Ed.
[2] Raymond Weaver, Herman Melville: Mariner and
Mystic, George H. Doran [1921], p. 16. Ed.
[3] William Ellery Sedgwick, Herman Melville: The
Tragedy of Mind, first published in 1944. Ed.
[4] Lewis Mumford, Herman Melville: A Study of His
Life and Vision, Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1929. A Revised Edition appeared in
1956; too late for Maugham to make use of it in Ten Novels and Their Authors. Ed.
[5] “This animal is very malicious; when
attacked it defends itself.” Ed.
[6] London: Cresset Press,
1946. Ed.
=============================================================
[Emily Brontë and Wuthering Heights]
Wuthering Heights is an
extraordinary book. For the most part, novels betray their period, not only in
the manner of writing common to the time at which they were written, but also
by their concurrence with the climate of opinion of their day, the moral
outlook of their authors, the prejudices they accept or reject. […] But Wuthering Heights
is an exception. It is related in no way to the fiction of the time. It is a
very bad novel. It is a very good one. It is ugly. It has beauty. It is a
terrible, an agonizing, a powerful and a passionate book. Some have thought it
impossible that a clergyman’s daughter who led a retired humdrum life, and knew
few people and nothing of the world, could have written it. This seems to me
absurd. Wuthering Heights is wildly
romantic. Now, romanticism eschews the patient observation of realism; it
revels in the unbridled flight of the imagination and indulges, sometimes with
gusto, sometimes with gloom, in horror, mystery, passion and violence. Given
Emily Brontë’s character, and fierce,
repressed emotions, which what we know of her suggests, Wuthering Heights is
just the sort of book one would have expected her to write.
[…]
It must be admitted that it
is badly written. The Brontë sisters did not write
well. Like the governesses they were, they affected the turgid and pedantic style
for which the word litératise has
been coined. The main part of the story is told by Mrs Dean, a Yorkshire maid of all work like the Brontës’ Tabby; a conversational style would have been suitable;
Emily makes her express herself as no human being could. Here is a typical
example: “I tried to smooth away all disquietude on the subject, by affirming,
with frequent iteration, that that betrayal of trust, if it merited so harsh an
appellation, should be the last.” Emily Brontë
seems to have been aware that she was putting in Mrs. Dean’s mouth words that it
was unlikely she would have known, and, to explain it, makes her say that in
the course of her service she has had the opportunity to read books, but, even
at that, the pretentiousness of her discourse is appalling. She does not read a
letter, she peruses an epistle; she doesn’t send a letter, but a missive. She
does not leave a room, she quits a chamber. She calls her day’s work her
diurnal occupation. She commences rather than begins. People don’t shout or
yell, they vociferate; nor do they listen, they hearken. There is pathos in
this parson’s daughter striving so hard to write in a lady-like way, only to
succeed in being genteel. Yet one would not wish Wuthering Heights to have been written with
grace: it would be none the better for being better written. Just as in one of
those early Flemish pictures of the burial of Christ the anguished grimaces of
the emaciated creatures concerned, their stiff, ungainly gestures, seem to add
a greater horror, a matter-of-fact brutality, to the scene, which makes it more
poignant, more tragic, than when the same event is pictured in beauty by
Titian; so there is in this uncouth stylization of the language something which
strangely heightens the violent passion of the story.
Wuthering Heights
is clumsily constructed. That is not surprising, for Emily Brontë had never written a novel before, and she had a
complicated story to tell, dealing with two generations. This is a difficult
thing to do because the author has to give some sort of unity to two sets of
characters and two sets of events; and he must be careful not to allow the
interest of one to overshadow the interest of the other. This Emily did not
succeed in doing. After the death of Catherine Earnshaw there is, until you
come to the last finely imaginative pages, some loss of power. The younger
Catherine is an unsatisfactory character, and Emily Brontë seems not to have known what to make of her; obviously
she could not give her the passionate independence of the older Catherine, nor
the foolish weakness of her father. She is a spoilt, silly, wilful, and
ill-mannered creature; and you cannot greatly pity her sufferings. The steps
are not made clear which to her falling in love with young Hareton. He is a
shadowy figure, and you know no more of him than that he was sullen and
handsome. […] I do not suppose that Emily Brontë
deliberately thought out how to get a unit of impression into a straggling
story, but I think she must have asked herself how to make it coherent; and it
may have occurred to her that she could best do this by making one character
narrate the long succession of events to another. It is a convenient way of
telling a story, and she did not invent it. Its disadvantage is that it is
impossible to maintain anything like a conversational manner when the narrator
has to tell a number of things, descriptions of scenery for instance, which no
sane person would think of doing.
[…]
But more than
that, I think the method she adopted might have been expected of her, when you
consider her extreme, her morbid, shyness and her reticence. What were the
alternatives? One was to write the novel from the standpoint of omniscience,
as, for instance, Middlemarch and Madame Bovary were written. I think it would
have shocked her harsh, uncompromising virtue to tell the outrageous story as a
creation of her own; and if she had, moreover, she could hardly have avoided
giving some account of Heathcliff during the few years he spent away from
Wuthering Heights – years in which he managed to acquire an education and to
make quite a lot of money. She couldn’t do this, because she simply didn’t know
how he had done it. The fact the reader is asked to accept is hard to believe,
and she was content to state it and leave it at that. Another alternative was
to have the story narrated to her, Emily Brontë,
by Mrs. Dean, say, and tell it then in the first person; but I suspect that
that, too, would have brought her into a contact with the reader too close for
her quivering sensitivity. By having the story in its beginning told by
Lockwood, and unfolded to Lockwood by Mrs Dean, she hid herself behind, as it
were, a double mask.
[…]
And why did Emily
need to hide herself when she wrote this powerful, passionate and terrible
book? I think because she disclosed in it her innermost instincts. She looked
deep into the well of loneliness in her heart, and saw there unavowable secrets
of which, notwithstanding, her impulse as a writer drove her to unburden
herself. It is said that her imagination was kindled by the weird stories her
father used to tell of the Ireland of his youth, and by the tales of Hoffmann
which she learned to read when she went to school in Belgium, and which she
continued to read, we are told, back at the parsonage, seated on a hearthrug by
the fire with her arm around Keeper’s neck. I am willing to believe that she
found in the stories of mystery, violence and horror of the German romantic
writers something that appealed to her own fierce nature; but I think she found
Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw in the hidden depths of her own soul. I think
she was herself Heathcliff, I think she was herself Catherine Earnshaw. Is it
strange that she should have put herself into the two chief characters of her
book? Not at all. We are none of us all of a piece; more than one person dwells
within us, often in uncanny companionship with his fellows; and the peculiarity
of the writer of fiction is that he has the power to objectify the diverse
persons of which he is compounded in individual characters: his misfortune is
that he cannot bring to life characters, however necessary to his story they
may be, in which there is no part of himself. That is why the younger Catherine
in Wuthering Heights is unsatisfactory.
[…]
Wuthering
Heights is a love story, perhaps the strangest that was ever written, and not
the least strange part of it is that the lovers remain chaste. Catherine was
passionately in love with Heathcliff, as passionately in love with him as
Heathcliff was with her. One wonders why those two people who were consumed
with love did not, whatever the poverty that might have faced them, run away
together. One wonders why they didn’t become real lovers. It may be that
Emily’s upbringing caused her to look upon adultery as an unforgivable sin, or
it may be that the idea of sexual intercourse between the sexes filled her with
disgust. I believe both the sisters were highly sexed. Charlotte was plain, with a sallow skin and a
large nose on one side of her face. She had proposals of marriage when she was
obscure and penniless, and at that period a man expected his wife to bring a
portion with her. But beauty is not the only thing that makes a woman
attractive; indeed, great beauty is often somewhat chilling: you admire, but
are not moved. If young men fell in love with Charlotte, a captious and critical young
woman, it can surely have only been because they found her sexually attractive,
which means that they felt obscurely that she was highly sexed. She was not in
love with Mr Nicholls when she married him; she thought him narrow, dogmatic,
sullen and far from intelligent. It is clear from her letters that after she
married him she felt very differently towards him; for her they are positively
skittish. She fell in love with him, and his defects ceased to matter. The most
probable explanation is that those sexual desires of hers were at last
satisfied. There is no reason to suppose that Emily was less highly sexed than Charlotte.
[…]
But though, as I have said,
it is conceivable that Emily constructed Wuthering Heights entirely out of her own
fantasies, I do not believe it. I should have thought that it was only very
rarely that the fruitful idea that will give rise to a fiction comes to an
author, like a falling star, out of the blue; for the most part, it comes to
him from an experience, generally emotional, of his own, or, if it is told him
by another, emotionally appealing; and then his imagination in travail,
character and incidents little by little grow out of it, until at length the
finished work comes into being. Few people, however, know how small a hint, how
trivial to all appearances an occurrence, may be that will serve to set the
spark that will kindle the author’s invention. When you look at the cyclamen
with its heart-shaped leaves surrounding a profusion of flowers, their careless
petals wearing a wilful look as though they grew haphazard, it seems incredible
that this luscious beauty, this rich colour, should have come from a seed
hardly larger than a pin’s head. So it may be with the productive seed that
will give rise to an immortal book.
It seems to me that one only
has to read Emily Brontë’s poems to guess what the
emotional experience was that led her to seek release from cruel pain by
writing Wuthering Heights. She wrote a good deal of verse. It is uneven; some
of it is commonplace, some of it moving, some of it lovely. […] In 1845,
three years before her death, she wrote a poem called The Prisoner. So far as is known, she had never read the works of
any of the mystics, yet in these verses she so describes the mystical
experience that it is impossible to believe that they do not tell of what she
knew from personal acquaintance. She uses almost the very words that the
mystics use when they describe the anguish felt on the return from union with
the Infinite:
Oh dreadful is the
check – intense the agony –
When the ear
begins to hear, the eye begins to see;
When the pulse
begins to throb, the brain to think again;
The soul to feel
the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.
These lines surely reflect a
felt, a deeply felt, experience. Why should one suppose that Emily Brontë’s love poems were no more than a literary
exercise? I should have thought they pointed very clearly to her having fallen
in love, to her love having being repulsed, and then to her having been
bitterly hurt. She wrote these particular poems when she was teaching at a
girls’ school at Law Hill, near Halifax.
She was nineteen. There was little chance of her meeting men there (and we know
how she fled from men), and so, from what we surmise of her disposition, it is
likely enough that she fell in love with one or other of the mistresses, or
with one of the girls. It was the only love of her life. It may well be that
the unhappiness it caused her sufficed to implant the seed in the fruitful soil
of her tortured sensibility which enabled her to create the strange book we
know. I can think of no other novel in which the pain, the ecstasy, the
ruthlessness of love have been so powerfully set forth. Wuthering Heights has great faults, but they do not matter; they
matter as little as the fallen tree-trunks, the strewn rock, the snow-drifts
which impede, but do not stem, the alpine torrent in its tumultuous course down
the mountain-side. You cannot liken Wuthering Heights to any other book. You can liken
it only to one of those great pictures of El Greco in which in a sombre, arid
landscape, under clouds heavy with thunder, long emaciated figures in contorted
attitudes, spell-bound by an unearthly emotion, hold their breath. A streak of
lightning, flitting across the leaden sky, gives a mysterious terror to the
scene.
===========================================================
[Dostoyevsky and The Brothers
Karamazov]
Dostoevsky was vain,
envious, quarrelsome, suspicious, cringing, selfish, boastful, unreliable,
inconsiderate, narrow and intolerant. In short he had an odious character. But
that is not the whole story. If it had been, it is unimaginable that he could
have created Alyosha Karamazov, perhaps the most engaging creature in all
fiction. It is unimaginable that he could have created the saintly Father
Zosima. Dostoevsky was the least censorious of men. While in prison, he had
learned that men may commit fearful crimes, murder, rape and banditry, and yet
have qualities of courage, generosity and loving-kindness towards their
fellows.
[...]
I can think of no one in
whom the dichotomy between the man and the writer has been greater than it was
in Dostoevsky. It probably exists in all creative artists, but it is more
conspicuous in authors than in others because their medium is words, and the
contradiction between their behaviour and their communication is more shocking.
It may be that the creative gift, a normal faculty of childhood and early
youth, if it persists after adolescence is a disease which can only flourish at
the expense of normal human attributes and, just as the melon is sweeter when
grown in manure, thrives best in a soil compounded of vicious traits. It was
not the good in Dostoevsky, it was the bad that was the source of the startling
originality which made him one of the supreme novelists of the world.
Balzac and Dickens created
an immense number of characters. They were fascinated by the diversity of human
beings, and their imagination was kindled by the differences they saw in them
and the peculiarities that individualized them. No matter if men were good or
bad, stupid or clever, they were themselves, and so, material to be put to good
use. I suspect that Dostoevsky was interested in no one but himself, and in
others only as they intimately affected him. He was in a way like those people
who care about beautiful objects only if they own them. He was content to make
do with a very small number of characters, and they are repeated in novel after
novel. Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov
is the same man, less the epilepsy, as Prince Myshkin in The Idiot; Stavrogin in The
Possessed is merely an elaboration of Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment. The hero of that book, Raskolnikov, is a less
forcible version of Ivan in The Brothers
Karamazov. All are emanations of Dostoevsky’s tortured, warped, morbid
sensibility. There is even less variety in his female characters. Polina
Alexandrovna in The Gambler,
Lizabetta in The Possessed, Nastasia
in The Idiot, Katrina and Grushenka
in The Brothers Karamazov are the
same woman; they are modelled directly on Polina Suslova. The suffering she
caused him, the indignities she heaped upon him, were the fillip he needed to
satisfy his masochism. He knew that she hated him; he felt sure that she loved
him; and so the women who are modelled on her want to dominate and torture the
man they love, and at the same time submit to him and suffer at his hands. They
are hysterical, spiteful and malevolent because Polina was. Some years after
the break, Dostoevsky met her in Petersburg and made her still another proposal
of marriage. She refused it. He could not bring himself to believe that she simply
did not like him, and so conceived the idea, to salve, one may suppose, his
wounded vanity, that a woman attaches so great an importance to her virginity
that she can only hate a man who has taken it without being married to her.
[...]
Dostoevsky was deeply
conscious of the duality in himself, and he ascribed it to all his self-willed
characters. His meek characters, of which Prince Myshkin and Alyosha are
examples, with all their sweetness are strangely ineffectual. But the very word
duality suggests a simplification of human nature which does not accord with
the facts. Man is an imperfect creature. The mainspring of his being is
self-interest, it is folly to deny it; but it is folly to deny that he is capable
of disinterestedness which is sublime. We all know to what heights he may rise
in a moment of crisis, and then show a nobility which neither he nor anyone
else knew was in him. Spinoza has told us that “everything in so far as it is
in itself endeavours to persevere in its own being”; and yet we know that it is
not so rare for a man to lay down his life for his friend. Man is a jumble of
vices and virtues, goodness and badness, of selfishness and unselfishness, of
fears of all kinds and the courage to face them, of tendencies and
predispositions which lure this way and that. He is made up of elements so
discordant that it is amazing that they can exist together in the individual,
and yet so come to terms with one another as to form a plausible harmony. There
is no such complication in the creatures of Dostoevsky’s invention. They are
constituted of a desire to dominate and a desire to submit themselves, of love
devoid of tenderness and hate charged with malice. They are strangely lacking
in the normal attributes of human beings. They only have passions. They have
neither self-control nor self-respect. Their evil instincts are not mitigated
by education, the experience of life or that sense of decency which prevents a
man from disgracing himself. This is why, to common sense, their activities
seem wildly improbable and the motives of them madly inconsequential.
We in Western Europe
consider their unaccountable behaviour with astonishment and accept it, if we
do accept it, as the natural behaviour of Russians. But are Russians like that?
Were Russians like that in Dostoevsky’s day? Turgenev and Tolstoy were his
contemporaries. Turgenev’s characters very much resemble ordinary people. [...]
[Dostoevsky’s characters] are devoid of culture. They have atrocious manners.
They take a malignant pleasure in being rude to one another merely in order to
wound and humiliate. In The Idiot
Varvara spits in her brother’s face because he is proposing to marry a woman
she does not approve of, and in The
Brothers Karamazov Dmitri, when Madame Hohlakov refuses him the loan of a
large sum of money which there is no reason for her to lend him, in his anger
spits on the floor of the room in which she has received him. They are an
outrageous lot. But they are extraordinarily interesting. Raskolnikov,
Stavrogin, Ivan Karamazov are of the same breed as Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff
and Melville’s Captain Ahab. They palpitate with life.
Dostoevsky had been
pondering over The Brothers Karamazov
for a long time, and he took more pains over it than his financial difficulties
had allowed him to take with any novel since his first. On the whole it is his
best constructed work. As his letters show, he implicitly believed in that
mysterious entity which we call inspiration, and counted upon it to enable him
to write what he vaguely saw in his mind’s eye. Now, inspiration is uncertain.
It is more apt to come in isolated passages. To construct a novel, you need esprit de suite, that logical sense by
means of which you may arrange your material in a coherent order, so that the
various parts shall follow one another with verisimilitude and the whole shall
be complete, with no loose ends hanging. Dostoevsky had no great capacity for
this. That is why he is best in scenes. He had a truly remarkable gift for
creating suspense and dramatizing a situation. I know no scene in fiction more
terrifying than that in which Raskolnikov murders the old pawnbroker, and few more
striking than that in The Brothers
Karamazov in which Ivan meets in the form of a devil his troubled
conscience. With the prolixity of which he could not correct himself,
Dostoevsky indulges in conversations of immense length; but even though the
persons concerned express themselves with such abandon that you can hardly
believe that human beings can so conduct themselves, they are almost always
enthralling.
[...]
Alyosha was designed to be
the central figure of The Brothers Karamazov,
as is plainly indicated by the first sentence: “Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov was
the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a landowner well-known in the
district in his own day, and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and
tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall describe in
its proper place.” Dostoevsky was too practised a novelist to have without
intention begun his book with a definite statement that marks Alyosha out. But
in the novel, as we have it, he plays a subordinate role compared with those of
his brothers Dmitri and Ivan. He passes in and out of the story, and seems to
have little influence on the persons who play their more important parts in it.
His own activity is chiefly concerned with a group of schoolboys whose doings, beyond
showing Alyosha’s charm and loving-kindness, have nothing to do with the
development of the theme.
The explanation is that The Brothers Karamazov, which runs in
Mrs. Garnett’s translation to 838 pages, is but a fragment of the novel
Dostoevsky proposed to write. He intended in further volumes to continue the
development of Alyosha, taking him through a number of vicissitudes, in which
it is supposed he was to undergo the great experience of sin and finally,
through suffering, achieve salvation. But death prevented Dostoevsky from
carrying out his intention, and The
Brothers Karamazov remains a fragment. It is, nevertheless, one of the
greatest novels ever written, and stands at the head of the small, wonderful
group of works of fiction which by their intensity and power hold a place apart
from other novels, conspicuous as their different merits may be, and of which
two thrilling examples are Wuthering
Heights and Moby Dick.
Fyodor Pavlovitch
Karamazov, a besotted buffoon, has four sons, Dmitri, Ivan and Alyosha, whom I
have already spoken of, and a bastard, Smerdyakov, who lives in his house as
cook and valet. The two elder sons hate their disgraceful father; Alyosha, the
only lovable character in the book, is incapable of hating anyone. Professor E.
J. Simmons thinks[1] Dmitri should be considered the hero of the novel. He is the
sort of man whom the tolerant are apt to describe as his own worst enemy, and,
as such men often are, he is attractive to women. “Simplicity and deep feeling
are the essence of his nature,” says Professor Simmons; and further: “There is
poetry in his soul which is reflected in his behaviour and colourful language.
His whole life is like an epic in which the turbulent action is relieved by
occasional lyric flights.” It is true that he makes high-flown protestations of
his moral aspirations, but as they do not lead to any change for the better in
his conduct, I think one is justified in attaching small importance to them. It
is true that he is capable on occasion of great generosity, but he is also
capable of shocking meanness. He is a drunken, boastful bully, recklessly
extravagant, dishonest and dishonourable. Both he and his father are furiously
in love with Grushenka, a kept woman who lives in the town, and he is insanely
jealous of the old man.
Ivan, to my mind, is a more
interesting character. He is highly intelligent, prudent, determined to make
his way in the world and ambitious. At the age of twenty-four he has already
made something of a name for himself by the brilliant articles he has
contributed to the reviews. Dostoevsky describes him as practical, and intellectually
superior to the mass of needy and unfortunate students who hang about newspaper
offices. He, too, hates his father. The sensual old wretch is murdered by
Smerdyakov for the three thousand roubles he had hidden away to give Grushenka
if she could be induced to go to bed with him, and Dmitri, who had often threatened
to kill his father, is accused of the crime, tried and convicted. It was in
accordance with Dostoevsky’s plan that he should be, but in order to effect
this he was obliged to make the various persons concerned behave in a manner
that outrages probability. On the eve of the trial, Smerdyakov goes to Ivan and
confesses that it was he who had committed the crime and returns him the money
he had stolen. He makes it plain to Ivan that he had murdered the old man on
his (Ivan’s) instigation, and with his connivance. Ivan goes all to pieces,
just as Raskolnikov does after murdering the old pawnbroker. But Raskolnikov
was wildly neurotic, half-starved and destitute. Ivan was not. His first
impulse is to go at once to the public prosecutor and tell him the facts, but
he decides to wait and do so at the trial. Why? So far as I can see, only
because Dostoevsky saw that then the confession would come with more thrilling
effect. Then comes the very curious scene, to which I have already referred, in
which Ivan has an hallucination in which his double, in the form of a shabby
gentleman in reduced circumstances, confronts him with his worse self, with its
baseness and insincerity. There is a furious knocking at the door. It is
Alyosha. He comes in and tells Ivan that Smerdyakov has hanged himself. The
situation is critical. Dmitri’s fate is in the balance. It is true that Ivan
was distraught, but he was not demented. From what we know of his character, we
would have expected him at such a moment to have the strength to pull himself
together and act with common sense. The natural thing, the obvious thing, was
for the two of them to go there and then to the defending counsel, tell him of
Smerdyakov’s confession and suicide and give him the three thousand roubles he
had stolen. With these materials the defending counsel, who, we are told, was
an uncommonly able man, would surely have thrown enough doubt in the jury’s
minds to cause them to hesitate to bring a verdict of guilty. Alyosha puts cold
compresses on Ivan’s head and tucks him up in bed. I have mentioned before
that, for all his goodness, this gentle creature was strangely ineffectual. He
was never more so than on this occasion.
Nor is an explanation given
of Smerdyakov’s suicide. He has been shown to be the most calculating, callous,
clear-headed and self-confident of Karamazov’s four sons. He had made his plans
beforehand. With great presence of mind, he seized the opportunity that a lucky
chance presented to him, and killed the old man. He had a reputation for
complete honesty and no one could have suspected him of stealing the money. The
evidence pointed to Dmitri. So far as I can see, there was no reason for
Smerdyakov to hang himself, except to give Dostoevsky the occasion to end a
chapter with a highly dramatic announcement. Dostoevsky was a sensational, not
a realistic, writer, and so felt himself justified in using methods which the latter
is bound to eschew.
After Dmitri has been found
guilty, he makes a statement in which he proclaims his innocence and ends it
with the words: “I accept the torture of accusation, and my public shame. I
want to suffer, and by suffering I shall purify myself.” Dostoevsky had a
deep-rooted belief in the spiritual value of suffering, and thought that by the
willing acceptance of it one atoned for one’s sins, and so reached happiness.
From this the surprising inference seems to emerge that, since it gives rise to
suffering and suffering leads to happiness, sin is necessary and profitable.
But was Dostoevsky right in thinking that suffering cleanses and refines the
character? There is no evidence in The
House of the Dead that it had any such effect on his fellow convicts, and
it certainly had none on him: as I have said, he emerged from prison the same
man as he entered it. So far as physical suffering is concerned, my experience
is that long and painful illness makes people querulous, egotistic, intolerant,
petty and jealous. Far from making them better, it makes them worse. Of course
I know that there are some, and I have known one or two myself, who in a long
and distressing illness, from which recovery was impossible, have shown
courage, unselfishness, patience and resignation; but they had those qualities
before. The occasion revealed them. There is spiritual suffering too. No one
can have lived long in the world of letters without having known men who had
enjoyed success and then, for one reason or another, lost it. It made them
sullen, bitter, spiteful and envious. I can think of only one case in which
this misfortune, accompanied as it is by humiliations which only those who have
witnessed them know, has been borne with courage, dignity and good humour. The
man of whom I speak no doubt had those qualities before, but the mask of
frivolity he wore prevented one from discerning them. Suffering is part of our
human lot, but that does not make it any the less evil.
Though one may deplore
Dostoevsky’s prolixity, a fault he was well aware of, but could not, or would
not, correct; though one may wish he had seen fit to avoid the improbabilities
– improbabilities of character, improbabilities of incident – which cannot but
disconcert the attentive reader; though one may think some of his ideas erroneous,
The Brothers Karamazov remains a
stupendous book. It has a theme of profound significance. Many critics have
said that this was the quest of God; I, for my part, should have said it was
the problem of evil. It is in the section called “Pro and Contra”, which
Dostoevsky rightly considered the culminating point of his novel, that it is
dealt with. “Pro and Contra” consists of a long monologue which Ivan delivers
to the sweet Alyosha. To the human intelligence the existence of a God who is
all-powerful and all-good seems incompatible with the existence of evil. That
men should suffer for their sins seems reasonable enough, but that innocent
children should suffer revolts the heart as well as the head. Ivan tells
Alyosha a horrible story. A little serf boy, a child of eight, threw a stone
and by accident lamed his master’s favourite dog. His master, owner of great
estates, had the child stripped naked and made to run; and as he ran he set his
pack of hounds on him and he is torn to pieces before his mother’s eyes. Ivan
is willing to believe that God exists, but he cannot accept the cruelty of the
world God created. He insists that there is no reason for the innocent to
suffer for the sins of the guilty; and if they do, and they do, God either is
evil or does not exist. Dostoevsky never wrote with greater power than in this
piece; but having written it, he was afraid of what he had done. The argument
was cogent, but the conclusion repugnant to what with all his heart he wished
to believe, namely that the world, for all its evil, is beautiful because it is
the creation of God. He hastened to write a refutation. No one was better aware
than he that he had not succeeded. The section is tedious and the refutation
unconvincing.
The problem of evil still
awaits solution, and Ivan Karamazov’s indictment has not yet been answered.
_________________________________
[1] Probably in Dostoevsky: The Making of a Novelist,
New York: Alfred A. Knopf and Random House, 1940. Ed.
===========================================================
[Henry Fielding and Tom Jones]
The
difficulty of writing about Henry Fielding, the man, is that very little is
known about him. Arthur Murphy, who wrote a short life of him in 1762, only
eight years after his death, as an introduction to an edition of his works,
seems to have known him, if he knew him at all, only in his later years, and
had so little material to work with that, presumably to fill the eighty pages
of his essay[1], he indulged in long and
tedious digressions. The facts he tells are few, and subsequent research has
shown that they are not always accurate. The last author to deal at length with
Fielding is Dr. Homes Dudden, Master of Pembroke. The two stout volumes of his
work are a monument of painstaking industry.[2] By giving a lively picture of the political circumstances of the times, and a
vivid account of the Young Pretender’s disastrous adventure in 1745, he has
added colour, depth and substance to the narrative of his hero’s checkered
career. I don’t believe that there is anything to be said about Henry Fielding
that the eminent Master of Pembroke has left unsaid.
Fielding
was a gentleman born. His father was the third son of John Fielding, a Canon of
Salisbury, and he in turn was the fifth son of an Earl of Desmond. The Desmonds
were a younger branch of the family of Denbigh, who flattered themselves that
they were descended from the Habsburgs. Gibbon, the Gibbon of The Decline and Fall, wrote in his
autobiography: “The successors of Charles the Fifth may disdain their brethren of
England; but the romance of Tom Jones,
that exquisite picture of human manners, will outlive the palace of Escorial,
and the imperial eagle of the House of Austria.” The phrase has a fine
resonance, and it is a pity that the claim of these noble lords has been shown
to have no foundation.
[...]
If
I have dwelt on his activity as a playwright, though it was after all not much
more than an episode in his career, it is because I think it was important to
his development as a novelist. Quite a number of novelists have tried their
hands at playwriting, but I cannot think of any that have conspicuously
succeeded.[3] The fact is that the techniques are very different, and to have learnt how to
write a novel is of no help when it comes to writing a play. The novelist has
all the time he wants to develop his theme, he can describe his characters as
minutely as he chooses and make their behaviour plain to the reader by relating
their motives; if he is skilful, he can give verisimilitude to improbabilities;
if he has a gift for narrative, he can gradually work up to a climax which a
long preparation makes more striking (a supreme example of this is Clarissa’s
letter in which she announces her seduction); he does not have to show action,
but only to tell it; he can make the persons explain themselves in dialogue for
as many pages as he likes. But a play depends on action, and by action, of
course, I don’t mean violent action like falling off a precipice or being run
over by a bus; such an action as handling a person a glass of water may be of
the highest dramatic intensity. The power of attention that an audience has is
very limited, and it must be held by a constant succession of incidents;
something fresh must be doing all the time; the theme must be presented at once
and its development must follow a definite line, without digression into
irrelevant bypaths; the dialogue must be crisp and to the point, and it must be
so put that the listener can catch its meaning without having to stop and
think; the characters must be all of a piece, easily grasped by the eye and the
understanding, and however complex, their complexity must be plausible. A play
cannot afford loose ends; however slight, its foundation must be secure and its
structure solid.
When
the playwright, who has acquired the qualities which I have suggested are
essential to writing a play which audiences will sit through with pleasure,
starts writing novels, he is at an advantage. He has learnt to be brief; he has
learnt the value of rapid incident; he has learnt not to linger on the way, but
to stick to his point and get on with his story; he has learnt to make his
characters display themselves by their words and actions, without the help of
description; and so, when he comes to work on the larger canvas which the novel
allows, he can not only profit by the advantages peculiar to the form of the
novel, but his training as a playwright will enable him to make his novel
lively, swift-moving and dramatic. These are excellent qualities, and some very
good novelists, whatever their other merits, have not possessed them. I cannot
look upon the years Fielding spent writing plays as wasted; I think, on the
contrary, the experience he gained then was of value to him when he came to
writing novels.
[...]
When
I consider Fielding’s life, which from inadequate material I have briefly
sketched, I am seized with a singular emotion. He was a man. As you read his
novels, and few novelists have put more of themselves into their books than he,
you feel the same sort of affection as you feel for someone with whom you have
been for years intimate. There is something contemporary about him. There is a
sort of Englishman that till recently was far from uncommon. You might meet him
in London, at Newmarket, in Leicestershire during the hunting season, at Cowes
in August, at Cannes or Monte Carlo in mid-winter. He is a gentleman, and he
has good manners. He is good-looking, good-natured, friendly and easy to get on
with. He is not particularly cultured, but he is tolerant of those who are. He
is fond of the girls and is apt to find himself cited as a co-respondent. He is
not one of the world’s workers, but he sees no reason why he should be. Though
he does nothing, he is far from idle. He has an adequate income and is free
with his money. If war breaks out, he joins up and his gallantry is
conspicuous. There is absolutely no harm in him and everyone likes him. The
years pass and youth is over, he is not so well-off anymore and life is not so
easy as it was. He has had to give up hunting, but he still plays a good game
of golf and you are always glad to see him in the card-room of your club. He
marries an old flame, a widow with money, and, settling down to middle age,
makes her a very good husband. The world to-day has no room for him and in a
few years his type will be extinct. Such a man, I fancy, was Fielding. But he
happened to have the great gift which made him the writer he was and, when he
wanted to, he could work hard. He was fond of the bottle and he liked women.
When people speak of virtue, it is generally sex they have in mind, but
chastity is only a small part of virtue, and perhaps not the chief one. Fielding
had strong passions, and he had no hesitation in yielding to them. He was
capable of loving tenderly. Now love, not affection, which is a different
thing, is rooted in sex, but there can be sexual desire without love. It is
only hypocrisy or ignorance that denies it. Sexual desire is an animal
instinct, and there is nothing more shameful in it than in thirst or hunger,
and no more reason not to satisfy it. If Fielding enjoyed, somewhat
promiscuously the pleasures of sex, he was not worse than most men. Like most
of us, he regretted his sins, if sins they are, but when opportunity occurred,
committed them again. He was hot-tempered, but kind-hearted, generous and, in a
corrupt age, honest; an affectionate husband and father; courageous and
truthful, and a good friend to his friends, who till his death remained
faithful to him. Though tolerant to the faults of others, he hated brutality
and double-dealing. He was not puffed up by success and, with the help of a
brace of partridges and a bottle of claret, bore adversity with fortitude. He
took life as it came, with high spirits and good humour, and enjoyed it to the
full. In fact he was very like his own Tom Jones, and not unlike his own Billy
Booth. He was a very proper man.
I
should, however, tell the reader that the picture I have drawn of Henry
Fielding does not at all accord with that drawn by the Master of Pembroke in
the monumental work to which I have often referred, and to which I owe much
useful information. “Until comparatively recently,” he writes, “the conception
of Fielding which prevailed in the popular imagination was that of a man of
brilliant genius, endowed with what is called ‘a good heart’ and many amiable
qualities, but dissipated and irresponsible, guilty of regrettable follies, and
not wholly unstained even by graver vices.” And he has done his best to
persuade his readers that Fielding has been grossly maligned.
But
this conception, which Dr. Dudden tries to refute, is that which prevailed in
Fielding’s lifetime. It was held by persons who knew him well. It is true that
he was violently attacked in his own day by his political and literary enemies,
and it is very likely that the charges that were brought against him were
exaggerated; but if charges are to be damaging they must be plausible.
[...]
Common
opinion in his own day decided that Fielding was licentious and profligate. The
evidence that he was is too great to be ignored. If he had been the respectable,
chaste, abstemious creature that the Master of Pembroke would have us believe,
it is surely very unlikely that he would have written Tom Jones. I think what has misled Dr. Dudden, in his perhaps
meritorious attempt to whitewash Fielding, is that it has not occurred to him
that contradictory, even mutually exclusive, qualities may exist in the same
man and somehow or other form a tolerably plausible harmony. That is natural
enough in one who has led a sheltered, academic life. Because Fielding was
generous, good-hearted, upright, kindly, affectionate and honest, it has seemed
to the Master impossible that he should have been at the same time a
spendthrift who would cadge a dinner and a guinea from his rich friends, who
would haunt taverns and drink to the ruin of his health, and who would engage
in sexual congress whenever he had the chance. Dr. Dudden states that, as long
as his first wife lived, Fielding was absolutely faithful to her. How does he
know? Certainly Fielding loved her, he loved her passionately, but he would not
have been the first loving husband who, when the circumstances were propitious,
had a flutter on the side; and it is very probable that after such an
occurrence, like his own Captain Booth in similar circumstances, he bitterly
regretted it; but that did not prevent him from transgressing again when the
opportunity offered.
In
one of her letters Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu wrote: “I am sorry for H.
Fielding’s death, not only as I shall read no more of his writings, but I
believe he lost more than others, as no man enjoyed life more than he did,
though few had less reason to do so, the highest of his preferment being raking
in the lowest sinks of vice and misery. I should think it a nobler and less
nauseous employment to be one of the staff officers that conduct the nocturnal
weddings. His happy constitution (even when he had, with great pains, half
demolished it) made him forget everything when he was before a venison pasty,
or over a flask of champagne; and I am persuaded he has known more happy
moments than any prince upon earth.”
There
are people who cannot read Tom Jones.
I am not thinking of those who never read anything but the newspapers and the
illustrated weeklies, or of those who never read anything but detective
stories; I am thinking of those who would not demur if you classed them as
members of the intelligentsia, of those who read and re-read Pride and Prejudice with delight, Middlemarch with self-complacency, and The Golden Bowl with reverence. The
chances are that it has never even occurred to them to read Tom Jones; but, sometimes, they have
tried and not been able to get on with it. It bores them. Now it is no good
saying that they ought to like it. There is no ‘ought’ about the matter. You
read a novel for its entertainment, and, I repeat, if it does not give you
that, it has nothing to give you at all. No one has the right to blame you because
you don’t find it interesting, any more than anyone has the right to blame you
because you don’t like oysters. I cannot but ask myself, however, what it is
that puts readers off a book which Gibbon described as an exquisite picture of
human manners, which Walter Scott praised as truth and human nature itself,
which Dickens admired and profited by, and of which Thackeray wrote: “The novel
of Tom Jones is indeed exquisite; as
a work a construction quite a wonder; the by-play of wisdom, the power of
observation, the multiplied felicitous turns and thoughts, the varied character
of the great comic epic, keep the reader in a perpetual admiration and
curiosity.” Is it that they cannot interest themselves in the way of life, the
manners and customs, of persons who lived two hundred years ago? Is it the
style? It is easy and natural. It has been said – I forget by whom, Fielding’s
friend, Lord Chesterfield, perhaps – that a good style should resemble the
conversation of a cultivated man. That is precisely what Fielding’s style does.
He is talking to the reader and telling him the story of Tom Jones as he might
tell over the dinner-table with a bottle of wine to a number of friends. He
does not mince his words. The beautiful and virtuous Sophia was apparently
quite used to hearing such words as “whore”, “bastard”, “strumpet”, and that
which, for a reason hard to guess, Fielding writes “b..ch”. In fact, there were
moments when her father, Squire Western, applied them very freely to herself.
The
conversational method of writing a novel, the method in which the author takes
you into his confidence, telling you what he feels about the creatures of his
invention and the situations in which he had placed them, has its dangers. The
author is always at your elbow, and so hinders your immediate communication
with the persons of his story. He is apt to irritate you sometimes by
moralizing and once he starts to digress, is apt to be tedious. You do not want
to hear what he has to say on some moral or social point; you want him to get
on with his story. Fielding’s digressions are nearly always sensible or
amusing; they are brief, and he has the grace to apologise for them. His good
nature shines through them. When Thackeray unwisely imitated him in this, he was
priggish, sanctimonious and, you cannot but suspect, insincere.
Fielding
prefaced each of the books into which Tom
Jones is divided with an essay. Some critics have greatly admired them, and
have looked upon them as adding to the excellence of the novel. I can only
suppose that is because they were not interested in it as a novel. An essayist
takes a subject and discusses it. If his subject is new to you, he may tell you
something that you didn’t know before, but new subjects are hard to find and, in
general, he expects to interest you by his own attitude and the characteristic
way in which he regards things. That is to say, he expects to interest you in
himself. But that is not what you want to do when you read a novel. You don’t
care about the author; he is there to tell you a story and introduce you to a
group of characters. The reader of a novel should want to know what happens
next to the persons in whom the author has interested him and, if he doesn’t,
there is no reason for him to read the novel at all. For the novel, I can never
repeat too often, is not to be looked upon as a medium of instruction or
edification, but as a source of intelligent diversion. It appears that Fielding
wrote the essays with which he introduced the successive books of Tom Jones after he had finished the
novel. They have hardly anything to do with the books they introduce; they gave
him, he admits, a lot of trouble, and one wonders why he wrote them at all. He
cannot have been unaware that many readers would look upon his novel as low,
none too moral, and possibly even bawdy; and it may be that by them he thought
to give it a certain elevation. These essays are sensible, and sometimes
uncommonly shrewd; and when you know the novel well, you can read them with a certain
amount of pleasure; but anyone who is reading Tom Jones for the first time is well advised to skip them. The plot
of Tom Jones has been much admired. I
learn from Dr. Dudden that Coleridge exclaimed: ‘What a master of composition
Fielding was!’ Scott and Thackeray were equally enthusiastic. Dr. Dudden quotes
the latter as follows: ‘Moral or immoral, let any man examine this romance as a
work of art merely, and it must strike him as the most astonishing production
of human ingenuity. There is not an incident ever so trifling but advances the
story, grows out of former incidents, and is connected with the whole. Such a
literary providence, if we may use
such a word, is not to be seen in any other work of fiction. You might cut out
half of Don Quixote, or add,
transpose, or alter any given romance of Walter Scott, and neither would
suffer. Roderick Random and heroes of that sort run through a series of
adventures, at the end of which the fiddles are brought, and there is a
marriage. But the history of Tom Jones
connected the very first page with the very last, and it is marvellous to think
how the author could have built and carried all the structure in his brain, as
he must have done, before he put it on paper.’
There
is some exaggeration here. Tom Jones
is fashioned on the model of the Spanish picaresque novels and of Gil Blas, and the simple structure
depends on the nature of the genre: the hero for one reason or another leaves
his home, has a variety of adventures on his travels, mixes with all sorts and
conditions of men, has his ups and downs of fortune, and in the end achieves
prosperity and marries a charming wife. Fielding, following his models,
interrupted his narrative with stories that had nothing to do with it. This was
an unhappy device that authors adopted not only, I think, for the reason I give
in my first chapter, because they had to furnish a certain amount of matter to
the bookseller and a story or two served to fill up; but partly, also, because
they feared that a long string of adventures would prove tedious, and felt it
would give the reader a fillip if they provided him here and there with a tale;
and partly because if they were minded to write a short story, there was no
other way to put it before the public. The critics chid, but the practice died
hard, and, as we know, Dickens resorted to it in The Pickwick Papers. The reader of Tom Jones can without loss skip the story of ‘The Man of the Hill’
and Mrs. Fitzherbert’s narrative. Nor is Thackeray quite accurate in saying
that there is not an incident that does not advance the story and grow out of
former incidents. Tom Jones’s encounter with the gipsies leads to nothing; and
the introduction of Mrs. Hunt, and her proposal of marriage to Tom, is very
unnecessary. The incident of the hundred-pound bill has no use and is, besides,
grossly, fantastically improbable. Thackeray marvelled that Fielding could have
carried all the structure in his brain before he began to put it on paper. I
don’t believe that he did anything of the sort, any more than Thackeray did before
he began to write Vanity Fair. I
think it much more probable that, with the main lines of his novel in his mind,
Fielding invented the incidents as he went along. For the most part they are
happily devised. Fielding was as little concerned with probability as the
picaresque novelists who wrote before him, and the most unlikely events occur,
the most outrageous coincidences bring people together; yet he bustles you
along with such gusto that you have hardly time, and in any case little inclination,
to protest. The characters are painted in primary colours with a slap-dash
bravura, and if they somewhat lack subtlety, they make up for it by animation.
They are sharply individualized, and if they are drawn with some exaggeration,
that was the fashion of the day, and perhaps their exaggeration is no greater
than comedy allows. I am afraid Mr. Allworthy is a little too good to be true,
but here Fielding failed, as every novelist since has failed who has attempted
to depict a perfectly virtuous man. Experience seems to show that it is
impossible not to make him a trifle stupid. One is impatient with a character
who is so good that he lets himself be imposed upon by all and sundry. Mr.
Allworthy is said to have been a portrait of Ralph Allen of Prior Park. If this
is so, and the portrait is accurate, it only shows that a character taken
straight from life is never quite convincing in a piece of fiction.
Blifil,
on the other hand, has been thought too bad to be true. Fielding hated deceit
and hypocrisy, and his detestation of Blifil was such that it may be he laid on
his colours with too heavy a hand; but Blifil, a mean, sneaking, self-seeking,
cold-blooded fish, is not an uncommon type. The fear of being found out is the
only thing that keeps him from being an utter scoundrel. But I think we should
have believed more in Blifil if he had not been so transparent. He is
repellent. He is not alive, as Uriah Heep is alive, and I have asked myself
whether Fielding did not deliberately under-write him from an instinctive
feeling that if he gave him a more active and prominent role, he would make him
so powerful and sinister a figure as to overshadow his hero.
On
its appearance, Tom Jones was an
immediate success with the public, but the critics were on the whole severe.
Some of the objections were rather touchingly absurd: Lady Luxborough, for
instance, complained that the characters were too like the persons “one meets
with in the world”. It was on its supposed immorality, however, that the novel
was generally condemned. Hannah More in her memoirs relates that she never saw
Dr. Johnson angry with her but once, and that was when she alluded to some
witty passage in Tom Jones. “I am
shocked to hear you quote from so vicious a book,” he said. “I am sorry to hear
you have read it: a confession which no modest lady should ever make. I
scarcely know a more corrupt work.” Now, I should say that a modest lady would
do very well to read the book before marriage. It will tell her pretty well all
she needs to know about the facts of life, and a lot about men which cannot
fail to be useful to her before entering upon that difficult state. But no one
has ever looked upon Dr. Johnson as devoid of prejudice. He would allow no
literary merit to Fielding, and once described him as a blockhead. When Boswell
demurred, he said: “What I mean by his being a blockhead is that he was a barren
rascal.” “Will you not allow, Sir, that he draws very natural pictures of human
life?” answered Boswell. “Why, Sir, it is of very low life. Richardson used to
say that had he not known who Fielding was he should have believed that he was
an ostler.” We are used to low life in fiction now, and there is nothing in Tom Jones that the novelists of our own
day have not made us familiar with. Dr. Johnson might have remembered that in
Sophia Western Fielding drew a charming and tender portrait of as delightful a
young woman as ever enchanted a reader of fiction. She is simple but not silly,
virtuous but no prude; she has character, determination and courage; she has a
loving heart, and she is beautiful. Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu, who very
properly thought that Tom Jones was
Fielding’s masterpiece, regretted that he did not perceive that he had made his
hero a scoundrel. I suppose that she referred to the incident that has been
looked upon as the most reprehensible in the career of Mr. Jones. Lady Bellaston
took a fancy to him, and found him not unprepared to gratify her desires, for
he regarded it as a part of good breeding to behave with “gallantry” with a
woman who showed an inclination for sexual commerce; he hadn’t a penny in his
pocket, not even a shilling in his pocket to pay for a chair to convey him to
her abode, and Lady Bellaston was rich. With a generosity unusual with women,
who are apt to be lavish with the money of others but careful with their own,
she handsomely relieved his necessities. Well, it is doubtless not a pretty
thing for a man to accept money from a woman; it is also an unprofitable one,
because rich ladies in these circumstances demand much more than their money’s
worth; but morally it is no more shocking than for a woman to accept money from
a man, and it is only foolishness on the part of common opinion to regard it as
such. Our own day has found it necessary to invent a term, gigolo, to describe
the male who turns his personal attractiveness into a source of profit; so Tom’s
lack of delicacy, however reprehensible, can hardly be regarded as unique. I
have no doubt that the gigolo flourished as hardily under the reign of George
the Second as he did under that of George the Fifth. It was characteristic, and
to Tom Jones’s credit, that on the very day on which Lady Bellaston had given
him fifty pounds for passing the night with her, he was so moved by a hard-luck
story which his landlady told him about some relations of hers that he handed
her his purse and told her to take what she thought needful to relieve their
distress. Tom Jones was honestly, sincerely and deeply in love with the
charming Sophia, and yet felt no qualms about indulging in the pleasures of the
flesh with any woman who was attractive and facile. He loved Sophia none the
less for these episodes. Fielding was much too sensible to make his hero more
continent than the normal man. He knew we should all be more virtuous if we
were as prudent at night as we are in the morning. Nor was Sophia unreasonably
vexed when she heard of these adventures. That in this particular she showed
common sense unusual to her sex is surely one of the most engaging of her
traits. It was well said by Austin Dobson, though with no elegance of style,
that Fielding “made no pretence to produce models of perfection, but pictures
of ordinary humanity, rather perhaps in the rough than in the polished, the
natural than the artificial, his desire is to do this with absolute
truthfulness, neither extenuating nor disguising defects and shortcomings.”
That is what the realist strives to do and, throughout history, he has always
been more or less violently attacked for it. For this the two main reasons, so
far as I know, are as follows: there is a vast number of people, especially
among the elderly, the well-to-do, the privileged, who take up the attitude: “Of
course we know that there is a lot of crime and immorality in the world,
poverty and unhappiness, but we don’t want to read about it. Why should we make
ourselves uncomfortable? It is not as though we could do anything about it.
After all, there always have been rich and poor in the world.” Another sort of
people have other reasons for condemning the realist. They admit that there are
vice and wickedness in the world, cruelty and oppression; but, they ask, is
this proper matter for fiction? Is it well that the young should read about
things which their elders know, but deplore, and may they not be corrupted by
reading stories which are suggestive if not actually obscene? Surely fiction is
better employed in showing how much beauty, kindness, self-sacrifice,
generosity and heroism there is in the world. The answer the realist makes is
that he is interested in telling the truth, as he sees it, about the world he
has come in contact with. He does not believe in the unalloyed goodness of
human beings; he thinks them a mixture of good and bad; and he is tolerant to
idiosyncrasies of human nature which conventional morality reprobates, but
which he accepts as human, natural, and therefore to be palliated. He hopes
that he depicts the good in his characters as faithfully as the bad in them,
and it is not his fault if his readers are more interested in their vices than
in their virtues. That is a curious trait in the human animal for which he
cannot be held responsible. If, however, he is honest with himself, he will
admit that vice can be painted in colours that glow, whereas virtue seems to
bear a hue that is somewhat dun. If you asked him how he could defend himself
against the charge of corrupting the young, he would answer that it is very
well for the young to learn what sort of a world it is that they will have to
cope with. The result may be disastrous if they expect too much. If the realist
can teach them to expect little from others; to realise from the beginning that
each one’s main interest is in himself; if he can teach them that, in some way
or other, they will have to pay for everything they get, be it place, fortune,
honour, love, reputation; and that a great part of wisdom is not to pay for anything
more than it is worth, he will have done more than all the pedagogues and
preachers to enable them to make the best of this difficult business of living.
He will add, however, that he is not a pedagogue or a preacher, but, he hopes,
an artist.
[1] “An Essay on the Life and
Genius of Henry Fielding, Esq.” in The Works of Henry
Fielding, Esq., first published in 1762 in 12 volumes, later reprinted
numerous times in 10 volumes. Ed.
[2] F. Homes Dudden, Henry
Fielding: his life, works, and times, Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1952, 2
vols., 1183 pages. Reprinted in 1966 “with permission in an unaltered and
unabridged edition” by Archon Books (Hamden, Connecticut). Ed.
[3] Maugham himself was, of
course, very successful as both novelist and playwright, but his natural
modesty prevented him from even alluding to this fact. Ed.
===========================================================
[Balzac and Le Père Goriot]
Of
all the great novelists that have enriched with their works the spiritual
treasures of the world, Balzac is to my mind the greatest. He is the only one
to whom I would without hesitation ascribe genius. Genius is a word that is
very loosely used nowadays. It is ascribed to persons to whom a more sober
judgment would be satisfied to allow talent. Genius and talent are very
different things. Many people have talent; it is not rare: genius is. Talent is
adroit and dexterous; it can be cultivated: genius is innate, and too often
strangely allied to grave defects. But what is genius? The Oxford Dictionary
tells us that it is a “native intellectual power of an exalted type, such as is
attributed to those who are esteemed greater in any department of art,
speculation or practice; (an) instinctive and extraordinary capacity for
imaginative creation, original thought, invention, or discovery”. Well,
instinctive and extraordinary capacity for imaginative creation is precisely
what Balzac had. He was not a realist, as Stendhal in part was, and as Flaubert
was in Madame Bovary, but a romantic;
and he saw life not as it really was, but coloured, often garishly, by the
predispositions he shared with his contemporaries.
There
are writers who have achieved fame on the strength of one or two books;
sometimes because, from the mass they have written, only a fragment has proved
of enduring value – such is l’Abbé Prévost’s Manon Lescaut; sometimes because their inspiration, growing out of
a special experience, or owing to a peculiarity of temper, only served for a
production of little bulk. They say their say once for all and, if they write
again, repeat themselves or write what is negligible. Balzac’s fertility was
prodigious. Of course he was uneven. In such a volume of work as he produced,
it was impossible for him always to be at his best. Literary critics are apt to
look askance at fertility. I think they are wrong. Matthew Arnold, indeed,
looked upon it as a characteristic of genius. He said of Wordsworth that what
struck him with admiration, what established in his own opinion the poet’s
superiority, was the great and ample body of powerful work which remained to
him, even after all his inferior work had been cleared away. He goes on to say:
“If it were a comparison of single pieces, or of three or four pieces, by each
poet, I do not say that Wordsworth would stand decisively above Gray, or Burns,
or Coleridge or Keats…. It is in his ampler body of powerful work that I find
his superiority.” Balzac never wrote a novel with the epic grandeur of War and Peace, one with the sombre,
thrilling power of The Brothers Karamazov,
nor one with the charm and distinction of Pride
and Prejudice: his greatness lies not in a single work, but in the
formidable mass of his production.
Balzac’s
field was the whole life of his time, and his range was as extensive as the
frontiers of his country. His knowledge of men, however come by, was rare,
though in some directions less exact than in others; and he described the
middle class of society, doctors, lawyers, clerks and journalists, shopkeepers,
village priests, more convincingly than either the world of fashion, the world
of city workers, or of the tillers of the soil. Like all novelists, he wrote of
the wicked more successfully than of the good. His invention was stupendous;
his power of creation extraordinary. He was like a force of nature, a
tumultuous river overflowing its banks and sweeping everything before it, or a
hurricane blustering its wild way across quiet country places and through the
streets of populous cities.
As
a painter of society, his distinctive gift was not only to envisage men in
their relations to one another – all novelists, except the writers of
adventure-stories pure and simple, do that – but also, and especially, in their
relations to the world they live in. Most novelists take a group of persons,
sometimes no more than two or three, and treat them as though they lived under a
glass case. This often produces an effect of intensity, but at the same time,
unfortunately, one of artificiality. People not only live their own lives, they
live also in the lives of others: in their own, they play leading parts; in
those of others, parts that are sometimes important, but often trivial. You go
to the barber’s to get your hair cut; it means nothing to you, but because of
some casual remark of yours it may be a turning-point in the barber’s life. By
realizing all that this implies, Balzac was able to give a vivid and exciting
impression of the multifariousness of life, its confusions and cross-purposes,
and of the remoteness of the causes that result in significant effects. I
believe he was the first novelist to dwell on the paramount importance of
economics in everybody’s life. He would not have thought it enough to say that
money is the root of all evil; he thought the desire for money, the appetite
for money, was the mainspring of human action.
One
must ever bear in mind that Balzac was a romantic. Romanticism, as we know, was
a reaction from classicism, but to-day it is more convenient to contrast it
with realism. The realist is a determinist, and he aims in his narratives at a
logical verisimilitude. His observation is naturalistic. The romantic finds the
life of every day humdrum and platitudinous, and he seeks to escape from the
real world to a world of the imagination. He pursues strangeness and adventure;
he wishes to surprise, and if he can only do so at the expense of probability he
does not care. The characters he invents are intense and extreme. Their
appetites are unfettered. They despise self-control, which they look upon as
the dull virtue of the bourgeois. They approve with their whole being that
saying of Pascal’s: Le cœur a ses raisons
que la raison ne connaît point. Their admiration goes to him who is
prepared to sacrifice everything and hesitates at nothing to achieve wealth and
power. This attitude towards life exactly suited Balzac’s exuberant temper; it
is hardly too much to say that if romanticism had not existed, he would have
invented it. His observation was minute and precise, but he used it as a basis
for the fabrications of his fantastic imagination. The idea that every man has
a ruling passion suited his instinct. It is one that has always attracted the
writers of fiction, for it enables them to give a dramatic force to the
creatures of their invention; these stand out vividly, and the reader, from
whom nothing is demanded but to know that they are misers or lechers, harpies
or saints, understands them without effort. We of to-day, largely through the
works of the novelists who have sought to interest us in the psychology of
their characters, no longer believe that men are all of a piece. We know that
they are made up of contradictory and seemingly irreconcilable elements; it is
just these discordances in them that intrigue us and, because we know them in
ourselves, excite our sympathy. Balzac’s greatest characters are formed on the
model of those older writers who drew every man in his humour. Their ruling
passion has absorbed them to the exclusion of all else. They are propensities
personified; but they are presented with such wonderful power, solidity and
distinctness that, even though you may not quite believe in them, you can never
forget them.
[...]
He
was a great note-taker. Wherever he went he had his notebook with him, and when
he happened upon something that might be useful to him, hit upon an idea of his
own or was taken with someone else’s, he jotted it down. When possible, he
visited the scene of his stories, and sometimes drove long distances to see a
street or a house that he wished to describe. He chose the names of his
characters with care, for he had a notion that the name should correspond with
the personality and appearance of the individual who bore it. It is generally
conceded that he wrote badly. George Saintsbury thought this was owing to the
fact that for ten years he had written, post-haste, a mass of novels just to
make a bare living. That does not convince me. Balzac was a vulgar man (but was
not his vulgarity an integral part of his genius?) and his prose was vulgar. It
was prolix, portentous and too often incorrect. Emile Faguet, a critic, in his
time, of importance, has given in his book on Balzac a whole chapter to the
faults of taste, style, syntax and language of which the author was guilty;
and, indeed, some of them are so gross that it needs no profound knowledge of
French to perceive them. Balzac had no feeling for the elegance of his native
tongue. It can never have occurred to him that prose may have a comeliness and
a grace as delightful in its different way as verse. But for all that, when his
exuberant volubility did not run away with him, he could give succinct and
pithy expression to the apophthegms and maxims that are scattered about his
novels. Neither in their matter nor in their manner would they have dishonoured
La Rochefoucauld.
Balzac
was not a writer who knew what he wanted to say from the start. He began with a
rough draft, which he re-wrote and corrected so drastically that the manuscript
which he finally sent to the printers was almost impossible to decipher. The
proof was returned to him, and this he treated as if it were but an outline of
the projected work. He not only added words, he added sentences, not only
sentences but paragraphs, and not only paragraphs but chapters. When his proofs
were once more set up, with all the alterations and corrections he had made,
and a fair set delivered to him, he went to work on them again and made more
changes. Only after this would he consent to publication, and then only on
condition that in a future edition he should be allowed to make further
revisions. The expense of all this was great, and resulted in constant quarrels
with his publishers.
[...]
George
Sand rightly said that each of Balzac’s books was in fact a page of one great
book, which would be imperfect if he had omitted that page. In 1833 he
conceived the idea of combining the whole of his production into one whole under
the name of La Comédie Humaine. When
it occurred to him, he ran to see his sister: ‘Salute me,’ he cried, ‘because
I’m quite plainly (tout simplement)
on the way to become a genius.’ He described as follows what he had in mind:
‘The social world of France would be the historian, I should be merely the
secretary. In setting forth an inventory of vices and virtues, in assembling
the principal facts of the passions, in painting characters, in choosing the
principal incidents of the social world, in composing types by combining the
traits of several homogeneous characters, perhaps I could manage to write the
history forgotten by so many historians, the history of manners and customs,’
It was an ambitious scheme. He did not live to carry it to completion. It is
evident that some of the pages in the vast work he left, though perhaps
necessary, are less interesting than others. In a production of such bulk, that
was inevitable. But in almost all Balzac’s novels there are two or three
characters which, because they are obsessed by a simple, primitive passion,
stand out with extraordinary force. It was in the depiction of just such
characters that his strength lay; when he had to deal with a character of any
complexity, he was less happy. In almost all his novels there are scenes of
great power, and in several an absorbing story.
If
I were asked by someone who had never read Balzac to recommend the novel which
best represented him, which gave the reader pretty well all the author had to
give, I should without hesitation advise him to read Le Père Goriot. The story it tells is continuously interesting. In
some of his novels, Balzac interrupts his narrative to discourse on all sorts
of irrelevant matters, or to give you long accounts of people in whom you
cannot take the faintest interest; but from these defects Le Père Goriot is free. He lets his characters explain themselves
by their words and actions as objectively as it was in his nature to do. The
novel is extremely well constructed; and the two threads, the old man’s
self-sacrificing love for his ungrateful daughters, and the ambitious
Rastignac’s first steps in the crowded, corrupt Paris of his day, are
ingeniously interwoven. It illustrates the principles which in La Comédie Humaine Balzac was concerned
to bring to light: “Man is neither good nor bad, he is born with instincts and
aptitudes; the world (la société),
far from corrupting him, as Rousseau pretended, perfects him, makes him better;
but self-interest then enormously develops his evil propensities.”
[...]
I
believe Balzac to have been the first novelist to use a boarding-house as the
setting for a story. It has been used many times since, for it is a convenient
way of enabling the author to present together a variety of characters in
sundry predicaments, but I don’t know that it has ever been used with such
happy effect as in Le Père Goriot. We
meet in this novel perhaps the most thrilling character that Balzac ever
created – Vautrin. The type has been reproduced a thousand times, but never
with such striking and picturesque force, nor with such convincing realism.
Vautrin has a good brain, will-power and immense vitality. These were traits
that appealed to Balzac, and, ruthless criminal though he was, he fascinated
his author. It is worth the reader’s while to notice how skilfully, without
giving away a secret he wanted to keep till the end of the book, he has managed
to suggest that there is something sinister about the man. He is jovial,
generous and good-natured; he has great physical strength, he is clever and
self-possessed; you cannot but admire him, and sympathise with him, and yet he
is strangely frightening. He obsesses you, as he did Rastignac, the ambitious,
well-born young man who comes to Paris to make his way in the world; but you
feel in the convict’s company the same uneasiness as Rastignac felt. Vautrin is
a great creation.
His
relations with Eugène de Rastignac are admirably presented. Vautrin sees into
the young man’s heart and proceeds subtly to sap his moral sense: true, Eugène
revolts when he learns to his horror that Vautrin has had a man killed to
enable him to marry an heiress; but the seeds are sown.
Le Père Goriot ends with the
old man’s death. Rastignac goes to his funeral and afterwards, remaining alone
in the cemetery, surveys Paris lying below him along the two banks of the
Seine. His eyes dwell on that part of the city in which reside the denizens of
the great world he wishes to enter. “À nous deux maintenant,” he cries. It may
interest the reader who has not felt inclined to read all the novels in which
Rastignac plays a part, more or less conspicuous, to know what came of
Vautrin’s influence. Madame de Nucingen, old Goriot’s daughter and the wife of
the rich banker, the Baron de Nucingen, having fallen in love with him, took and
expensively furnished for him, an apartment, and provided him with money to
live like a gentleman. Since her husband kept her short of cash, Balzac has not
made clear how she managed to do this: perhaps he thought that when a woman in
love needs money to support a lover she will somehow manage to get it. The
Baron seems to have taken a tolerant view of the situation, and in 1826 made
use of Rastignac in a financial transaction in which a number of the young
man’s friends were ruined, but from which he, as his share of the swag,
received from Nucingen four hundred thousand francs. On part of this he dowered
his two sisters, so that they could make good marriages, and was left with
twenty thousand francs a year: ‘The price of keeping a stable’, he told his
friend Bianchon. Being thus no longer dependent on Madame de Nucingen, and
realising that a liaison that lasts too long has all the drawbacks of marriage,
without its advantages, he made up his mind to throw her over and become the
lover of the Marquise d’Espard, not because he was in love with her, but
because she was rich, a great lady and influential. “Perhaps some day I’ll
marry her,” he added. “She’ll put me in a position in which at length I shall
be able to pay my debts.” This was in 1828. It is uncertain whether Madame
d’Espard succumbed to his blandishments, but if she did, the affair did not
last long, and he continued to be the lover of Madame de Nucingen. In 1831 he
thought of marrying an Alsatian girl, but drew back on discovering that her fortune
was not so great as he had been led to believe. In 1832, through the influence
of Henry de Marsay, a former lover of Madame de Nucingen, who, Louis Philippe
being then King of France, was a Minister, Rastignac was made Under-Secretary
of State. He was able, while holding this office, largely to increase his
fortune. His relations with Madame de Nucingen apparently continued till 1835,
when, perhaps by mutual agreement, they were broken off; and three years later
he married her daughter Augusta. Since she was the only child of a very rich
man, Rastignac did well for himself. In 1839 he was created a Count and again
entered the Ministry. In 1845 he was made a peer of France and had an income of
three hundred thousand francs a year (£12,000), which for the time was great
wealth.
Balzac
had a marked predilection for Rastignac. He endowed him with noble birth, good
looks, charm, wit; and made him immensely attractive to women. Is it fanciful
to suggest that he saw in Rastignac the man he would have given all but his
fame to be? Balzac worshipped success. Perhaps Rastignac was a rascal, but he
succeeded. True, his fortune was founded on the ruin of others, but they were
fools to let themselves be taken in by him, and Balzac had little sympathy with
fools. Lucien de Rubempré, another of Balzac’s adventurers, failed because he
was weak; but Rastignac, because he had courage, determination and strength,
succeeded. From the day when, at Père-Lachaise, he had flung his challenge in
the face of Paris, he had let nothing stand in his way. He had resolved to
conquer Paris; he conquered it. Balzac could not bring himself, I fancy, to
regard Rastignac’s moral delinquencies with censure. And after all, he was a
good sort: though ruthless and unscrupulous where his interests were concerned,
he was to the end ever willing to do a service to the old friends of his
poverty-stricken youth. From the beginning, his aim had been to live in
splendour, to have a fine house with a host of servants, carriages and horses,
a string of mistresses and a rich wife. He had achieved his aim: I don’t
suppose it ever occurred to Balzac that it was a vulgar one.
==========================================================
[Stendhal and Le Rouge et le Noir]
One
of the odd things about Stendhal is that though he was always on the watch lest
anyone made a fool of him, he was constantly making a fool of himself.
[...]
Stendhal
was an eccentric. His character was even more incongruous than that of most
men, and one is amazed that so many contradictory traits should co-exist in one
and the same person. They do not form a harmony that is in any way plausible.
He had great virtues and great defects. He was sensitive, emotional, diffident,
talented, a hard worker when there was work to be done, cool and brave in
danger, a good friend and of a remarkable originality. His prejudices were
absurd, his aims unworthy. He was distrustful (and so an easy dupe),
intolerant, uncharitable, none too conscientious, fatuously vain and
vainglorious, sensual without delicacy, and licentious without passion. But if
we know that he had these defects, it is because he has told us so himself.
Stendhal was not a professional author, he was hardly even a man of letters,
but he wrote incessantly, and he wrote almost entirely about himself. For years
he kept a journal, of which great sections have come down to us, and it is
plain that he wrote with no view to publication; but in his early fifties he
wrote an autobiography in five hundred pages, which carried him to the age of
seventeen, and this, though left unrevised at his death, he meant to be read.
In it he sometimes makes himself out more important than he really was, and
claims to have done things he did not do, but on the whole it is truthful. He
does not spare himself, and I imagine that few can read these books, and they
are not easy to read, since they are in parts dull and often repetitive,
without asking themselves whether, if they were unwise enough to expose
themselves with so much frankness, they would make a much better showing.
[...]
Many
an author has consoled himself for the neglect of his contemporaries by a
confidence that posterity will recognize his merits. It seldom does. Posterity
is busy and careless and, when it concerns itself with the literary productions
of the past, makes its choice among those that were successful in their own
day. It is only by a remote chance that a dead author is rescued from the
obscurity in which he languished during his lifetime. In the case of Stendhal,
a professor, otherwise unknown, in his lectures at the École Normale
enthusiastically praised his books, and there happened to be among his students
some clever young men who later made a name for themselves. They read them, and
finding in them something that suited the climate of opinion at the time
prevalent among the young, became fanatical admirers. The ablest of these young
men was Hippolyte Taine, and many years later, by which time he has become a
well-known and influential man of letters, he wrote a long essay in which he
called attention especially to Stendhal’s psychological insight.
[...]
I
know of no novelist of the first rank, other than Stendhal, who has so directly
found his inspiration in what he has read. I do not remark on this in
disparagement, but merely as a curious fact. Stendhal was not greatly
inventive; but, how it came about none can tell, nature had endowed this vulgar
buffoon with a wonderful gift of accurate observation, and with a piercing
insight into the intricacies, vagaries and bizarreries of the human heart. He
had a very poor opinion of his fellow-creatures, but was intensely interested
in them.
[...]
Of
the two great novels, La Chartreuse de
Parme is the more agreeable to read. I do not think Saint-Beuve was right
when he called the characters lifeless puppets. It is true that Fabrice, the
hero, and Clelia Conti, the heroine, are shadowy, and for the most part play a
somewhat passive role in the story; but Count Mosca and the Duchess Sanseverino
are intensely alive. The gay, licentious, unscrupulous Duchess is a masterpiece
of characterization. But Le Rouge et le
Noir is by far the more striking, the more original, and the more
significant performance. It is because of it that Zola called Stendhal the
father of the naturalistic school, and that Bourget and André Gide have claimed
him (not quite accurately) as the originator of the psychological novel.
Unlike
most authors, Stendhal accepted criticism, however damning, with good humour;
but what is even more remarkable, when he sent manuscripts of his books to
friends whose opinions he wanted, he adopted without hesitation the revisions,
often ample, which they recommended. Mérimée states that though he constantly
rewrote, he never corrected. I am not sure that this is a fact. In a manuscript
of his that I have seen he put a little cross over a number of words that he
was not satisfied with, and did this surely with the intention of altering them
when he came to revise. He hated the flowery manner of writing made fashionable
by Chateaubriand, and which a hundred lesser authors had sedulously aped.
Stendhal’s aim was to set down whatever he had to say as plainly and exactly as
he could, without frills, rhetorical flourishes or picturesque verbiage. He
said (probably not quite truly) that before starting to write he read a page of
the Code Napoléon in order to chasten
his language. He eschewed description of scenery and the abundant metaphors
which were popular in his day. The cold, lucid, self-controlled style he
adopted admirably increases the horror of the story he has to tell in Le Rouge
et le Noir, and adds to its enthralling interest.
It
is to Le Rouge et le Noir that Taine
in his famous essay gave most of his attention; but being an historian and a
philosopher, he was chiefly interested in Stendhal’s psychological acuteness,
his shrewd analysis of motives, and the freshness and originality of his
opinions. He pointed out with justice that Stendhal was concerned not with
action for its own sake, but only in so far as it was occasioned by the emotions
of his personages, the singularities of their character and the vicissitudes of
their passions. This made him avoid describing dramatic incidents in a dramatic
manner. As an illustration of this, Taine quoted Stendhal’s description of his
hero’s execution, and very truly remarked that most authors would have looked
upon this as an event on which they could expatiate. This is how Stendhal
treated it:
“The
bad air of the cell was becoming intolerable to Julien; happily, on the day on
which they told him he was to die, a lovely sun enlivened nature, and Julien
was in a courageous mood. To walk in the open air was to him a delicious
sensation, as to walk on land might be to a sailor who has been long at sea.
Well, everything is going well, he told himself, I don’t lack courage. Never
had that head been so poetic as when it was about to fall. The sweet moments he
had passed in the woods of Vergy crowded upon his memory with the utmost force.
Everything took place simply, decently, and on his side without affectation.”
But
Taine was apparently not interested in the novel as a work of art. His aim in
writing was to awaken interest in a neglected author, and it was a panegyric he
wrote rather than a critical study. The reader who is induced by Taine’s essay to
acquaint himself with Le Rouge et le Noir
may well be a trifle disappointed. For as a work of art it is sadly imperfect.
Stendhal
was more interested in himself than in anyone else, and he was always the hero
of his novels, Octave in Armance,
Fabrice in La Chartreuse de Parme,
and Lucien Leuwen in the unfinished novel of that name. Julien Sorel, the hero
of Le Rouge et le Noir, is the kind
of man Stendhal would have liked to be. He made him attractive to women and
successful in winning their love, as he himself would have given everything to
be, and too seldom was. He made him achieve his ends with them by just those
methods that he had concocted for his own use, and that had consistently
failed. He made him as brilliant a talker as he was himself; he was wise
enough, however, never to give an example of his brilliance, but only affirmed
it, since he knew that when a novelist has told his reader that a character is
witty, and then gives examples of his wit, they are apt not to come up to the
reader’s expectation. He gave him his own astonishing memory, his own courage,
his own timidity, his own ambition, sensitiveness, calculating brain, his own
suspiciousness and vanity and quickness to take offence, his own
unscrupulousness and his own ingratitude. The pleasantest trait he gives him,
again one that he found in himself, is Julien’s faculty of being moved to tears
when he meets with disinterestedness and loving-kindness: it suggests that if
the circumstances of his life had been different, he would not have been so
vile.
As
I have said, Stendhal had no gift for making up a story out of his own head,
and he took the plot of Le Rouge et le
Noir from newspaper reports of a trial that at the time had excited great
interest. A young seminarist called Antoine Berthet was tutor in the house of a
M. Michoud, then in that of a M. de Cordon; he tried to seduce, or did seduce,
the wife of the first and the daughter of the second. He was discharged. He
attempted then to resume his studies for the priesthood, but owing to his bad
reputation no seminary would receive him. He took it into his head that the
Michouds were responsible for this, and in revenge shot Madame Michoud while
she was in church, and then himself. The wound was not fatal and he was tried;
he sought to save himself at the expense of the unfortunate woman, but was
condemned to death.
This
ugly, sordid story appealed to Stendhal. He regarded Berthet’s crime as the
reaction of a strong, rebellious nature against the social order, and as the
expression of the natural man, untrammelled by the conventions of an artificial
society. He held his fellow-Frenchmen in scorn because they had lost the energy
which they had had in the Middle Ages, and were becoming law-abiding,
respectable, prosaic, commonplace and incapable of passion. It might, perhaps,
have occurred to him that after the horrors of the Terror, after the
catastrophic wars of Napoleon, it was natural that they should welcome peace
and quiet. Stendhal prized energy above all other qualities of man, and if he
adored Italy, and sooner lived there than in his native land, it was because he
persuaded himself that it was the “country of love and hate”. There men loved
with frenzy and for love’s sake died. There men and women surrendered to their
passions, careless of the disaster that might ensue. There men, in a sudden
attack of blind rage, killed, and killing, dared to be themselves. This is pure
romanticism, and it is plain that what Stendhal called energy is what most
people call violence. And condemn.
“The
people alone,” he wrote, “nowadays have some remnants of energy. There is none
of it in the upper classes”; so, when he came to write Le Rouge et le Noir, he made Julien a working-class boy; but he
furnished him with a better brain, more strength of will, and greater courage
than were possessed by his wretched model. The character he drew with
consummate skill is of perennial interest; he is devoured with envy and hatred
of those born in a more privileged class, and well represents a type that
occurs in every generation, and will presumably continue to do so until there
is a classless society. Then human nature will doubtless have changed, and the
less intelligent, the less competent, the less enterprising will no longer
resent it if the more enterprising, the more competent and the more intelligent
enjoy advantages that are denied them. Here, when we catch our first glimpse of
Julien, is how Stendhal describes him: “He was a small young man of eighteen or
nineteen, weakly to look at, with irregular, delicate features and an aquiline
nose. His large black eyes, which in moments of tranquillity suggested
reflection and fire, were lit up at that instant with an expression of the
fiercest hate. His dark chestnut hair, growing very low, gave him a small
forehead and in moments of anger a look of wickedness…. His slender, well-set
figure suggested lightness rather than vigour.” Not an attractive portrait, but
a good one, because it does not predispose the reader in Julien’s favour. The
principal character in a novel, as I have said, naturally enlists the reader’s
sympathy, and Stendhal, having chosen a villain for his hero, had to take care
from the start that his readers should not sympathise with him overmuch. On the
other hand, he had to interest them in him. He could not afford to make him too
repulsive, so he modified his first description by dwelling repeatedly on his
fine eyes, his graceful figure and his delicate hands. On occasion, he
describes him as positively beautiful. But he does not forget from time to time
to call your attention to the malaise he arouses in persons who came in contact
with him, and to the suspicion with which he is regarded by all save those who
have most cause to be on their guard against him.
Madame
de Rênal, the mother of the children Julien is engaged to teach, is an
admirably drawn character of a kind most difficult to depict. She is a good
woman. Most novelists at one time have tried to create one, but have only
succeeded in producing a goose. I suppose the reason is that there is only one
way of being good, whereas there are dozens of being bad. This obviously gives
the novelist greater scope. Madame de Rênal is charming, virtuous, sincere; and
the narrative of her growing love for Julien, with its fears and hesitations,
and the flaming passion which it becomes, is told in a masterly fashion. She is
one of the most touching creatures of fiction. Julien, feeling that it is a
duty he owes himself, decides that if one evening he does not hold her hand he
will take his own life; just as Stendhal, wearing his best trousers, vowed that
if, on reaching a certain point, he did not declare his love to Countess Daru,
he would blow his brains out. Julien eventually seduces Madam de Rênal, not
because he is in love with her, but partly to revenge himself on the class she
belongs to, and partly to satisfy his own pride; but he does fall in love with
her and, for a while, his baser instincts are dormant. For the first time in
his life he is happy, and you begin to feel sympathy for him. But the imprudence
of Madame de Rênal gives rise to gossip, and it is arranged that Julien should
enter a seminary to study for the priesthood. I don’t see how the parts that
deal with Julien’s life with the Rênal and at the seminary could be better;
there is no need to exercise a willing suspension of disbelief, the truth of
what Stendhal tells you is manifest; it is when the scene is changed to Paris
that I, for my part, find myself incredulous. When Julien has finished his
course at the seminary, the principal secures him a post as secretary to the
Marquis de la Môle, and he finds himself admitted to the most aristocratic
circle in the capital. The picture Stendhal draws of it does not carry
conviction. He had never moved in good society; he was familiar chiefly with
the bourgeoisie, which the Revolution and the Empire had brought into
prominence; and he did not know how well-bred people behave. He had never
encountered pride of birth. Stendhal was at heart a realist, but no one,
however hard he tries, can fail to be influenced by the psychic atmosphere of
his time. Romanticism was rampant. Stendhal, notwithstanding his appreciation
of the good sense and urbane culture of the eighteenth century, was deeply
affected by it. As I have indicated, he was fascinated by the ruthless men of
the Italian Renaissance who were troubled neither by scruple nor remorse, and
hesitated at no crime to satisfy their ambition, gratify their lust, or avenge
their honour. He prized their energy, their disregard of consequences, their scorn
of convention and their freedom of soul. It is because of this romantic
predilection that the last half of Le
Rouge et le Noir is unsatisfactory. You are asked to accept improbabilities
that you cannot swallow, and to interest yourself in episodes that are
pointless.
M.
de la Môle had a daughter. Her name was Mathilde. She was beautiful, but
haughty and wilful; she was intensely conscious of her high descent, and proud
of those ancestors of hers who, risking their lives for a great prize, had been
executed, one under Charles IX and another under Louis XIII. By a natural
coincidence, she attached the same high value to ‘energy’ as Stendhal did, and
she despised the commonplace young nobles who sought her hand.
[...]
What
happens after the seduction is again admirably described. Those two
self-centred, irritable, moody creatures scarcely know if they love with
passion, or hate with frenzy. Each tries to dominate the other; each seeks to
anger, wound and humiliate the other. At length Julien, by means of a banal
trick, brings the proud girl to her feet. Presently she finds herself pregnant,
and tells her father that she intends to marry her lover. M. de la Môle is
obliged to consent. But now, when Julien, by dissimulation, diplomacy and
self-restraint, is in sight of achieving all his ambition craved, he commits a
foolish error. From then on the book goes to pieces.
We
are told that Julien is clever and immensely cunning; and yet, to recommend
himself to his future father-in-law, he asks him to write to Madame de Rênal
for a certificate of character. He knew that she sincerely repented the sin of
adultery that she had committed, and might bitterly blame him, as women all
over the world are accustomed to do, for her own weakness; he knew, also, that
she loved him passionately, and it should have occurred to him that she might
not welcome the prospect of his marrying another woman. On the direction of her
confessor, she wrote a letter to the Marquis in which she told him that it was
Julien’s practice to insinuate himself into a family in order to destroy its
peace, and that his great and sole object was by a show of disinterestedness to
contrive to secure control of the master of the house, and over his fortune.
She had no reason whatever to make either of these charges. She said he was a
hypocrite and a vile intriguer: Stendhal does not seem to have noticed that
though we readers, to whom every movement of Julien’s mind has been exposed,
know that indeed he was, Madam de Rênal did not; she knew only that he had performed
his duties as tutor to her children in an exemplary manner, and had won their
affection; and that he loved her so much that on the last occasion on which she
had seen him he had risked his career, and even his life, to pass a few hours
with her. She was a conscientious woman, and it is hard to believe that,
whatever pressure her confessor brought to bear, she would have consented to
write things which she had no reason to think were true. Anyhow, when M. de la
Môle receives the letter, he is horrified and refuses absolutely to let the
marriage proceed. Why did not Julien say that the letter was a tissue of lies
and merely the hysterical outburst of a madly jealous woman? He might have
admitted that he had been Madame de Rênal’s lover; but she was thirty and he
was nineteen: was it not more probable that it was she who had seduced him? It
was not a fact, as we know, but it was uncommonly plausible. M. de la Môle was
a man of the world. The man of the world has an inclination to think the worst
of his fellow-creatures, a mild cynicism which leads him to believe that where
there is smoke there is fire; and, at the same time, an easy tolerance of human
frailty. It would surely have seemed to M. de la Môle amusing, rather than
shocking, that his secretary should have had an affair with the wife of a
provincial gentleman of no social consequence.
But
in any case Julien held all the cards. M. de la Môle had got him a commission
in a crack regiment, and given him an estate which produced a sufficient
income. Mathilde refused to have an abortion and, madly in love, had expressed
her determination to live with Julien, married or not. Julien had only to state
the plain facts of the situation, and the Marquis would have been obliged to
give in. We have been shown, from the beginning of the novel, that the strength
of Julien consisted precisely in his self-control. His passions, envy, hatred,
pride, never dominated him; and his lust, the strongest passion of all, was, as
with Stendhal himself, not so much a matter of urgent desire as of vanity. At
the crisis of the book, Julien does the fatal thing in a novel: he acts out of
character. Just when he most needs his self-control he behaves like a fool. On
reading Madame de Rênal’s letter, he takes pistols, drives down to Verrières,
and shoots her, not killing, but wounding her.
This
unintelligible behaviour of Julien’s has greatly puzzled the critics, and they
have sought explanations for it. One is that it was the fashion of the day to
end a novel with a melodramatic incident, preferably with a tragic death; but
if such was the fashion, that would surely have been sufficient reason for
Stendhal, with his determination to run counter to accepted usage, to eschew
it. Others have suggested that an explanation may be found in his fantastic
cult of the crime of violence as the supreme manifestation of energy. I find
this no more likely. It is true, of course, that Stendhal looked upon Berthet’s
monstrous action as a beau crime, but can he have failed to see that he had made
Julien a very different creature from the miserable blackmailer? Verrières was
two hundred and fifty miles from Paris, and even with a change of horses at
every stage, even if Julien drove day and night, the journey would take nearly
two days, long enough for his rage to lessen and give way to the counsels of
common sense. Then, the character that Stendhal has so penetratingly drawn
would have turned back and, having faced M. de la Môle with the brutal fact of
Mathilde’s pregnancy, forced him to consent to the marriage.
What
then made Stendhal make the strange mistake which everyone agrees is a flaw in
his great novel? It is evident that he could not allow Julien to succeed and,
achieving his ambition, with Mathilde and M. de la Môle behind him, win place, power
and fortune. That would have been a different book, and Balzac wrote it later
in the various novels that tell of the rise of Rastignac. Julien had to die. It
may be that Balzac, with his wonderful fecundity, might have found a means to
end Le Rouge et le Noir in a way that
the reader would accept not only as plausible, but as inevitable. I don’t think
Stendhal could have ended it in any other way than he did. I believe that the
facts which had been given him exercised an hypnotic power over him from which
he was unable to break loose; he had followed the story of Antoine Berthet very
closely and he felt himself under a compulsion to pursue it, against all
credibility, to its wretched end. But God, fate, chance, whichever you like to
call the mystery that governs men’s lives, is a poor story-teller; and it is
the business, and the right, of the novelist to correct the improbabilities of
brute fact. It was not in Stendhal’s capacity to do this. It is a great pity.
But, as I have urged, no novel is perfect, owing partly to the natural
inadequacy of the medium, and partly to the deficiencies of the human being who
writes it. Notwithstanding its grave defects, Le Rouge et le Noir is a very great book, and to read it is a
unique experience.
==========================================================
[Tolstoy and War and Peace]
The
last three chapters have dealt with novels[1] which, in one
way or another, stand apart. They are atypical. Now I come to one which, for
all its complication, by its form and content takes its place in the main line
of fiction, which, as I said on a previous page, began with the pastoral
romance of Daphnis and Chloë. War and
Peace is surely the greatest of all novels. It could only have been written
by a man of high intelligence and of powerful imagination, a man with wide
experience of the world and a penetrating insight into human nature. No novel
with so grand a sweep, dealing with so momentous a period of history and with
so vast an array of characters, was ever written before; nor, I surmise, will
ever be written again. Novels as great will perhaps be written, but none quite
like it. With the mechanisation of life, with the State assuming ever greater
power over the lives of men, with the uniformity of education, the extinction
of class distinctions and the diminution of individual wealth, with the equal
opportunities which will be offered to all (if such is the world of the
future), men will still be born unequal. Some will be born with the peculiar
gift that makes them become novelists, but the world they will know, with men
and manners so conditioned, is more likely to produce a Jane Austen to write Pride and Prejudice than a Tolstoy to
write War and Peace. It has been
justly called an epic. I can think of no other work of fiction in prose that
can with truth be so described. Strakhov, a friend of Tolstoy’s and an able
critic, put his opinion in a few energetic sentences: “A complete picture of
human life. A complete picture of the Russia of that day. A complete picture of
what may be called the history and struggle of people. A complete picture of
everything in which people find their happiness and greatness, their grief and
humiliation. That is War and Peace.”
[...]
He
decided to make the experiment. After considering a number of eligible young
women and discarding them for one reason or another, he married Sonya, a girl
of eighteen and the second daughter of a Dr. Bers, who was a fashionable
physician in Moscow and an old friend of his family’s. Tolstoy was thirty-four.
The couple settled down at Yasnaya Polyana. During the first eleven years of
their marriage the Countess had eight children, and during the next fifteen
five more. Tolstoy liked horses and rode well, and he was passionately fond of
shooting. He improved his property and bought new estates east of the Volga, so
that in the end he owned some sixteen thousand acres. His life followed a
familiar pattern. There were in Russia scores of noblemen who gambled, got
drunk and wenched in their youth, who married and had a flock of children, who
settled down on their estates, looked after their property, rode and shot; and
there were not a few who shared Tolstoy’s liberal principles and, distressed at
the ignorance of the peasants, sought to ameliorate their lot. The only thing
that distinguished him from all of them was that during this time he wrote two
of the world’s greatest novels, War and
Peace and Anna Karenina.
[...]
It
was a busy, useful and contented life, and there seemed no reason why it should
not run in the pleasant groove for many years to come, with Sonya bearing
children, looking after them and the house, helping her husband in his work,
and with Tolstoy riding and shooting, superintending his estates and writing
books. He was approaching his fiftieth year. That is a dangerous period for
men. Youth is past and, looking back, they are apt to ask themselves what their
life amounts to; looking forward, with old age looming ahead, they are apt to
find the prospect chilling. And there was one fear that had haunted Tolstoy all
his life – the fear of death. Death comes to all men, and most are sensible
enough, except in moments of peril or grave illness, not to think of it. This
is how in A Confession he describes
his state of mind at that time: “Five years ago something very strange began to
happen to me. At first I experienced moments of perplexity and arrest of life,
as though I did not know how to live or what to do; and I felt lost and became
dejected. But this passed and I went on living as before. Then these moments of
perplexity recurred oftener and oftener and always in the same form. They were
always expressed by the questions: What is it for? What does it lead to? I felt
that what I had been standing on had broken down and that I had nothing left
under my feet. What I had lived on no longer existed, and I had nothing else to
live on. My life came to a standstill. I could breathe, eat, drink and sleep,
and I could not help doing these things, but there was no life, for there were
no wishes the fulfilment of which I could consider reasonable.
“And
all this befell me at a time when all around me I had what is considered
complete good fortune. I was not yet fifty; I had a good wife who loved me and
whom I loved; good children, and a large estate which without much effort on my
part improved and increased… I was praised by people, and without much
self-deception could consider that my name was famous… I enjoyed a strength of
mind and body such as I have seldom met among men of my kind: physically I
could keep pace with the peasants at mowing, and mentally I could work for
eight to ten hours at a stretch without experiencing any ill results from such
exertion.
“My
mental condition presented itself to me in this way: My life is a stupid and
spiteful joke that someone has played on me.”
The
drunkenness of youth had left him with a bad hangover. When still a boy, he had
ceased to believe in God, but his loss of faith left him unhappy and
dissatisfied, for he had no theory that enabled him to solve the riddle of life.
He asked himself: “Why do I live and how ought I to live?” He found no answer.
Now he came once more to believe in God, but, strangely enough for a man of so
emotional a temper, by a process of reasoning. “If I exist,” he wrote, “there
must be some cause of it, and a cause of causes. And that first cause of all is
what men call God.” For a while Tolstoy clung to the Russian Orthodox Church,
but he was repelled by the fact that the lives of its learned men did not tally
with their principles, and he found it impossible to believe all they required
him to believe. He was prepared to accept only what was true in a plain and
literal sense. He began to draw near to the believers among the poor and simple
and unlettered; and the more he looked into their lives, the more convinced he
became that, notwithstanding the darkness of their superstition, they had a
real faith which was necessary to them and, alone, by giving their life a
meaning, made it possible for them to live.
[...]
He
came to believe that the truth was to be found only in the words of Jesus. He
rejected as evident absurdities, and an insult to the human intelligence, the
creeds in which the tenets of Christianity are set forth. He rejected the
divinity of Christ, the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection. He rejected the
sacraments, since they were based on nothing in Christ’s teaching and served
only to obscure the truth. For a time he did not believe in life after death,
but later, when he came to think that the Self was part of the Infinite, it seemed
inconceivable to him that it should cease with the death of the body. In the
end, shortly before his death, he declared that he did not believe in a God who
created the world, but in One who lived in the consciousness of men. Such a
god, one would have thought, is no less a figment of the imagination than the
centaur or the unicorn. Tolstoy believed that the essence of Christ’s teaching
lay in the precept “Resist not evil”; the commandment “Swear not at all”, he
decided, applied not only to common expletives, but to oaths of any kind, those
taken in the witness box or by soldiers being sworn in; while the charge “Love
your enemies, bless them that curse you”, forbade men to fight their country’s
enemies or to defend themselves when attacked. But to adopt opinions with
Tolstoy was to act: if he had come to the conclusion that the substance of
Christianity was love, humility, self-denial and the returning of good for
evil, it was incumbent upon him, he felt, to renounce the pleasures of life, to
humble himself, to suffer and be merciful.
[...]
For
such a man as Tolstoy the next step was obvious: he decided to rid himself of
everything he owned; but here he came into violent conflict with his wife, who
had no wish to beggar herself or to leave her children penniless. She
threatened to appeal to the courts to have him declared incompetent to manage
his affairs, and after heaven only knows how much acrimonious argument he
offered to turn his property over to her. This she refused, and in the end he
divided it among her and the children. On more than one occasion during the
year this dispute lasted he left home to live among the peasants, but before he
had gone far was drawn back by the pain he was causing his wife. He continued
to live at Yasnaya Polyana and, though mortified by the luxury, luxury on a
very modest scale, that surrounded him, none the less profited by it. The
friction continued. He disapproved of the conventional education the Countess
was giving their children, and he could not forgive her for having prevented
him from disposing of his property as he wished.
In
this brief sketch of Tolstoy’s life I have been constrained to omit much that
is of interest, and I must deal even more summarily with the thirty years that
followed his conversion. He became a public figure, recognised as the greatest
writer in Russia, and with an immense reputation throughout the world as a
novelist, a teacher and a moralist. Colonies were founded by people who wished
to lead their lives according to his views. They came to grief when they tried
to put his principles into practice, and the story of their misadventures is
both instructive and comic. Owing to Tolstoy’s suspicious nature, his harsh
argumentativeness, his intolerance and his unconcealed conviction that if others
disagreed with him it was from unworthy motives, he retained few friends; but,
with his increasing fame, a host of students, pilgrims visiting the holy places
of Russia, journalists, sightseers, admirers and disciples, rich and poor,
nobles and commoners, came to Yasnaya Polyana.
[...]
Tolstoy
began to write War and Peace when he
was thirty-six. That is a very good age at which to set about writing a
master-piece. By then an author has presumably acquired an adequate knowledge
of the technique of his craft, he has gained a wide experience of life, he is
still in full possession of his intellectual vigour and his creative power is
at its height. The period Tolstoy chose to deal with was that of the Napoleonic
wars, and the climax is Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, the burning of Moscow
and the retreat and destruction of his armies. When he started upon his novel,
it was with the notion of writing a tale of family life among the gentry, and
the historical incidents were to serve merely as a background. The persons of
the story were to undergo a number of experiences which would profoundly affect
them spiritually, and in the end, after much suffering, they would enjoy a
quiet and happy life. It was only in the course of writing that Tolstoy placed
more and more emphasis on the titanic struggle between the opposing powers, and
conceived what is somewhat grandly called a philosophy of history. Some time
ago, Mr. Isaiah Berlin published a most interesting and instructive little
book, called The Hedgehog and the Fox, in which he showed that Tolstoy’s ideas
on the subject I must now briefly deal with were inspired by those of Joseph de
Maistre, an eminent diplomatist, in a work entitled Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg. That is not to discredit Tolstoy.
It is no more than novelist’s business to originate ideas than it is to invent
the persons who serve as his models. Ideas are there, just as are human beings,
their environment of town and country, the incidents of their lives, and in
fact everything that concerns them, for him to make use of for his private
purpose, which is to create a work of art. Having read Mr. Berlin’s book, I
felt constrained to read Les Soirées de
Saint-Pétersbourg. The ideas which Tolstoy set forth with some elaboration
in the second part of the epilogue to War
and Peace, de Maistre expounded in three pages, and the gist of them is
contained in a phrase: “C’est l’opinion
qui perd les batailles, et c’est l’opinion qui les gagne.” Tolstoy had seen
war in the Caucasus and at Sevastopol, and his own experience enabled him to
give vivid descriptions of the various battles in which sundry characters in
his novel were engaged. What he had observed concorded very well with the views
of de Maistre. But the piece he wrote is long-winded and somewhat involved, and
I think one gets a better notion of his opinions from scattered remarks in the
course of the narrative and from Prince Andrew’s reflections. In passing, I may
interject that this is the most suitable way in which a novelist can deliver
his ideas.
Tolstoy’s
idea was that owing to fortuitous circumstances, unknown forces, errors of
judgment, unforeseen accidents, there could be no such thing as an exact
science of war, and so there could be no such thing as military genius. It was
not, as commonly supposed, great men who affected the course of history, but an
obscure force that ran through the nations and drove them unconsciously to
victory or defeat. The leader of an advance was in the position of a horse
harnessed to a coach and started full-tilt downhill – at a certain point the
horse ceases to know whether he is dragging the coach or the coach is forcing
him on. It was not by his strategy or his big battalions that Napoleon won his
battles, for his orders were not obeyed, since either the situation had changed
or they were not delivered in time; but because the enemy was seized with a
conviction that the battle was lost and so abandoned the field. The result
depended on a thousand incalculable chances, any one of which might prove
decisive in an instant. “So far as their own free will was concerned, Napoleon
and Alexander contributed no more by their actions to the accomplishment of
such and such an event than the private soldier who was compelled to fight for
them as a recruit or a conscript.” “Those who are known as great men are really
labels in history, they give their name to events, often without having so much
connection with the facts as a label has.” For Tolstoy they were no more than
figure-heads, who were carried on by a momentum they could neither resist nor
control. There is surely some confusion here. I do not see how he reconciles
his conviction of the “predestined and irresistible necessity” of occurrences
with the “caprices of chance”; for when fate comes in at the door, chance flies
out of the window.
It
is hard to resist the impression that Tolstoy’s philosophy of history was, in
part at least, occasioned by his wish to depreciate Napoleon. He seldom appears
in person in the course of War and Peace,
but when he does, he is made to seem petty, gullible, silly and ridiculous.
Tolstoy calls him “that infinitesimal tool in history, who at no time, not even
in exile, showed any manly dignity”. Tolstoy is outraged that even the Russians
should look upon him as a great man. He had not even a good seat on a horse.
Here, I think, it is well to pause. The French Revolution gave rise to scores
of young men who were as ambitious, as clever, as resolute and as unscrupulous
as the son of the Corsican lawyer; and one cannot but ask oneself how it happened
that this particular young man, of insignificant appearance, with a foreign
accent, without money or influence, managed so to make his way in the world
that after winning battle after battle he made himself dictator of France, and
brought half Europe under his sway. If you see a bridge-player win an
international tournament, you may ascribe it to luck or to the excellence of
his partner; but if, no matter who his partner is, he goes on winning
tournaments through a number of years, it is surely simpler to allow that he
has a peculiar aptitude for the game, and outstanding gifts, than to claim that
his triumphs are the result of the immense, irresistible pressure of antecedent
and contingent events. I should have thought a great general needed that same
combination of qualities, knowledge, flair, boldness, the intelligence to
calculate chances and the intuition that enables him to judge his adversaries’
mentality, as are needed by the great bridge-player. Of course Napoleon was
aided by the circumstances of his time, but it is only prejudice that can deny
that he had the genius to take advantage of them.
All
this, however, does not affect the power and interest of War and Peace. The narrative carries you along with the impetuous
rush of the Rhône at Geneva as it hurries to meet the placid waters of Lake
Leman. There are said to be something like five hundred characters. They stand
firmly on their feet. This is a wonderful achievement. The interest is not
concentrated, as in most novels, on two or three person, or even on a single
group, but on the members of four families belonging to the aristocracy, the
Rostovs, the Bolkonskis, the Kuragins and the Bezukhovs. The novel, as the
title indicates, deals with war and peace, and that is the sharply contrasted background
against which their fates are presented. One of the difficulties a novelist has
to cope with when his theme requires him to deal with events violently diverse,
with more groups than one, is to make the transition from one set of events to
another, from one group to another, so plausible that the reader accepts it
with docility. If the author succeeds in doing this, the reader finds he has
been told what he needs to be told about one set of circumstances, one set of
persons, and is ready to be told about other circumstances, other persons,
whereof for a time he had heard nothing. On the whole, Tolstoy has managed to
perform this difficult feat so skilfully that you seem to be following a single
thread of narration.
Like
writers of fiction in general, he framed his characters on persons he knew, or
knew of, but it appears that he did not merely use them as models for his
imagination to work upon, but drew faithful portraits of them. The thriftless
Count Rostov is a portrait of his grandfather, Nicholas Rostov of his father,
and the pathetic, charming, ugly Princess Mary of his mother. It has sometimes
been thought that in the two men, Pierre Bezukhov and Prince Andrew Bolkonski,
Tolstoy had himself in mind; and if this is so, it is perhaps not fantastical
to suggest that, conscious of the contradictions in himself, in thus creating
two contrasted individuals on the one model of himself he sought to clarify and
understand his own character.
Both
these men, Pierre and Prince Andrew, are in love with Natasha, Count Rostov’s
younger daughter, and in her Tolstoy has created the most delightful girl in
fiction. Nothing is so difficult as to portray a young girl who is at once
charming and interesting. Generally the young girls of fiction are colourless
(Amelia in Vanity Fair), priggish
(Fanny in Mansfield Park), too clever
by half (Constantia Durham in The Egoist),
or little geese (Dora in David
Copperfield), silly flirts or innocent beyond belief. It is understandable
that they should be an awkward subject for the novelist to deal with, for at
that tender age the personality is undeveloped. Similarly, a painter can only
make a face interesting when the vicissitudes of life, thought, love and
suffering have given it character. In the portrait of a girl, the best he can
do is to represent the charm and beauty of youth. But Natasha is entirely
natural. She is sweet, sensitive and sympathetic, childish, womanly already,
idealistic, quick-tempered, warm-hearted, headstrong, capricious and in every
way enchanting. Tolstoy created many women, and they are wonderfully real, but
never another who wins the affection of the reader as does Natasha. She was
drawn from Tanya Bers, the younger sister of his wife, and he was charmed by
her as Charles Dickens was charmed by his wife’s younger sister, Mary Hogarth.
An instructive parallel!
To
both the men who loved her, to Prince Andrew and Pierre, Tolstoy attributed his
own passionate search for the meaning and purpose of life. Prince Andrew is the
more obvious. He is a product of the conditions prevalent then in Russia. A
rich man, in possession of vast estates, he owns a great number of serfs, from
whom he can exact forced labour and, if they displease him, have them stripped
and flogged, or wrest them from wife and children and send them to serve as
common soldiers in the army. And if a girl or married woman takes his fancy, he
can send for her and use her for his pleasure. Prince Andrew is handsome, with
marked features, weary eyes and an air of boredom. He is in fact the beau ténébreux of romantic fiction. A
gallant figure, proud of his race and rank, high-minded, but haughty,
dictatorial, intolerant and unreasonable. He is cold and arrogant with his
equals, patronising but kind with his inferiors. He is intelligent, and ambitious
to distinguish himself. With a nice touch, Tolstoy wrote of him: “Prince Andrew
always became specially keen when he had to guide a young man and help him to
worldly success. Under cover of obtaining help for another, which from pride he
would never accept for himself, he kept in touch with the circle which confers
success and which attracted him.”
Pierre
is a more puzzling character. He is a huge, ugly man, so short-sighted that he
has to wear spectacles, and very fat. He eats too much and drinks too much. He
is a great womaniser. He is clumsy and tactless; but he is so good-natured, so
manifestly sincere, so kindly, considerate and unselfish, that it is impossible
to know him without loving him. He is wealthy. He allows a horde of hangers-on,
however worthless, to dip freely into his purse. He is a gambler and is
unmercifully cheated by the members of the aristocratic club in Moscow to which
he belongs. He lets himself be jockeyed into an early marriage with a beautiful
woman, who marries him for his money and is impudently unfaithful to him. After
fighting a grotesque duel with her lover, he leaves her and goes to Petersburg.
On the journey he meets by chance a mysterious old man, who turns out to be a
Freemason. They converse and Pierre confesses that he does not believe in God.
“If He did not exist we could not talk about Him,” answers the Freemason, and
on these lines goes on to give Pierre an elementary version of what is known at
the ontological proof of God’s existence. This was devised by Anselm,
Archbishop of Canterbury, and runs as follows; We define God as the greatest
object of thought, but the greatest object of thought must exist, or else
another, as great but having existence, would be greater. From this it follows
that God exists. This proof was rejected by Thomas Aquinas and demolished by
Kant, but it convinced Pierre, and very shortly after his arrival in Petersburg
he was initiated into the Masonic Order. Of course, in a novel events, whether
material or spiritual, have to be telescoped, otherwise it would never end: a
long-fought battle must be described in a page or two, and everything but what
the author thinks essential has to be omitted; it is the same with a change of
heart. In this case, it seems to me that Tolstoy has gone too far; so sudden a
conversion makes Pierre uncommonly superficial. As a result of it, however,
desiring to abandon his dissipated ways, he decides to return to his estates,
liberate his serfs and devote himself to their welfare. He is hoodwinked and
cheated by his steward, just as he was by his gambling friends, and finds
himself thwarted in all his good intentions. His philanthropic schemes for the
most part come to nothing for lack of perseverance, and he returns to his old
life of idleness. His enthusiasm for the Masonic Order dwindles as he discovers
that most of the brethren see nothing in it beyond its forms and ceremonies,
while many cling to it “simply for the sake of being intimate with rich people
and getting some benefit out of the intimacy.” Disgusted and weary, he takes
once more to gambling, drink and promiscuous fornication.
Pierre
knows his faults and hates them, but he lacks the tenacity of purpose to amend
them. He is a modest, humane, good-natured creature, but strangely devoid of
common sense. His behaviour at the Battle of Borodino is of a singular
ineptitude. Though a civilian, he drives in his carriage to the field of
battle, gets in everybody’s way, makes a thorough nuisance of himself and
finally, to save his life, takes to his heels. When Moscow is evacuated, he
stays on, is arrested as an incendiary and condemned to death. The sentence is
remitted, and he is imprisoned. He is taken along with other prisoners when the
French set out on their disastrous retreat, and is eventually rescued by a band
of guerrillas.
It
is difficult to know what to make of him. He is good and modest; he has a
wonderful sweetness of disposition; he is terribly weak. I am sure he is true
to life. I suppose he should be regarded as the hero of War and Peace, since in the end he marries the charming and
desirable Natasha. I imagine that Tolstoy loved him: he writes of him with
tenderness and sympathy; but I wonder if it was necessary to make him quite so
silly.
In
so long a book as War and Peace, and
one that took so long to write, it is inevitable that the author’s verve should
sometimes fail him. Tolstoy ends his novel with an account of the retreat from
Moscow and the destruction of Napoleon’s army. But this long and, no doubt,
necessary narrative has the disadvantage of telling the reader, unless he is
abnormally ignorant of history, a great deal of what he knows already. The
result is that the quality of surprise, which makes you turn the pages of a
book eager to know what is to happen next, is lacking; and, notwithstanding the
tragic, dramatic and pathetic incidents which Tolstoy relates, you read with a
certain impatience. He used these chapters to tie up various loose ends, and to
bring upon the scene again characters of whom we have long lost sight; but I think
his main object in writing them was to introduce a fresh character who was to
have an important effect on Pierre’s spiritual development.
This
was one of his fellow-prisoners, Plato Karataev, a serf condemned to serve in
the army for stealing wood. He was a type that at this time seems to have much
occupied the Russian intelligentsia. Living, as they did, under a severe
despotism and knowing the empty, frivolous lives of the aristocracy, the
ignorance and narrowness of the merchant class, they had come to believe that
the salvation of Russia lay in the down-trodden and ill-used peasantry. Tolstoy
in A Confession tells us how,
despairing of his own class, he turned to the Old Believers for the goodness
and faith which gave meaning to life. But, of course, there were good landlords
as well as bad ones, honest tradesmen as well as dishonest ones, and bad
peasants as well as good ones. It was merely a literary illusion to suppose
that in the peasants alone was virtue.
Tolstoy’s
portrait of the simple soldier is one of the most winning of all the portraits
in War and Peace. It was natural that
Pierre should be drawn to him. Plato Karataev loves all men. He is perfectly
unselfish. He endures hardship and danger with cheerfulness. He has a sweet and
noble character, and Pierre, as susceptible as ever to every influence, seeing
the goodness in him, comes himself to believe in goodness: “the world that had
been shattered was once more stirring in his soul with a new beauty and on a
new and unshakable foundation.” From Plato Karataev, Pierre learns that
“happiness for man is only to be found within, and from the satisfaction of
simple human needs, that unhappiness arises not from privations but from
superabundance, and that there is nothing in life too difficult to face.” At
last he finds himself possessed of that serenity and peace of mind that he had
so long and so vainly sought.
If
for some readers there is a certain diminution of interest in Tolstoy’s account
of the retreat, it is richly made up for in the first part of the Epilogue. It
is a brilliant invention
The
older novelists were in the habit of telling the reader what happened to their
principal characters after the story they had to tell was finished. He was
informed that the hero and heroine lived happily, in prosperous circumstances,
and had so and so many children, while the villain, if he had not been polished
off before the end, was reduced to poverty and married a nagging wife, and so
got what he deserved. But it was done perfunctorily, in a page or two, and the
reader was left with the impression that it was a sop the author had somewhat
contemptuously thrown him. It remained for Tolstoy to make his epilogue a piece
of real importance. Seven years have passed, and we are taken to the house of
Nicholas Rostov, who has married a rich wife and has children. Prince Andrew
was mortally wounded at the Battle of Borodino. It was his sister that Nicholas
married. Pierre’s wife conveniently died during the invasion, and he was free
to marry Natasha, whom he had long loved. They too have children. They love one
another, but oh, how dull they have become, and how commonplace! After the
hazards they have run, the pain and anguish they have suffered, they have
settled down to a middle-aged complacency. Natasha, who was so sweet, so
unpredictable, so delightful, is now a fussy, exacting, shrewish housewife.
Nicholas Rostov, once so gallant and high-spirited, has become a
self-opinionated country squire; and Pierre, fatter than ever, sweet and
good-natured still, is no wiser than he was before. The happy ending is deeply
tragic. Tolstoy did not write thus, I think, in bitterness, but because he knew
that this is what it would all come to; and he had to tell the truth.
[1] Moby-Dick,
Wuthering Heights and The Brothers Karamazov. Ed.
============================================================
What is it that must be combined with the creative
instinct to make it possible for a writer to produce a work of value? Well, I
suppose it is personality. It may be a pleasant or an unpleasant one; that
doesn’t matter. What matters is that, by some idiosyncrasy of nature, the
writer is enable to see in a manner peculiar to himself. It doesn’t matter if
he sees in a way that common opinion regards neither just nor true.
They appear to have taken little interest in any art
other than their own. Jane Austen confessed that concerts bored her. Tolstoy
was fond of music and played the piano. Stendhal had a predilection for opera,
which is the form of musical entertainment which affords pleasure to people who
don’t like music. He went to the Scala every night when he was in Milan to
gossip with his friends, have supper and play cards, and, like them, gave his
attention to what was happening on the stage only when a famous singer sang a
well-known aria. He had equal admiration for Mozart, Cimarosa and Rossini.
Of course, it requires intelligence to write a good
novel, but of a peculiar, and perhaps not of a very high, order, and these great
writers were intelligent; but they were not strikingly intellectual. Their
naïveté, when they deal with general ideas, is often startling. They accept the
commonplaces of the philosophy current in their day, and when they put them in
use in their action, the result is seldom happy. The fact is, ideas are not
their affair, and their concern with them, when they are concerned with them,
is emotional.
============================================================
Genius is a word that is very loosely used nowadays.
It is ascribed to persons to whom a more sober judgement would be satisfied to
allow talent. Genius and talent are very different things. Many people have
talent; it is not rare: genius is. Talent is adroit and dexterous; it can be
cultivated; genius is innate, and too often strangely allied to grave defects.
But what is genius?
He had passed his life in the pursuit of happiness,
and had never learnt that happiness is best attained when it is not sought;
and, moreover, is only known when it is lost. It is doubtful whether anyone can
say "I am happy"; but only "I was happy". For happiness is
not well-being, content, heart's ease, pleasure, enjoyment: all these go to
make happiness, but they are not happiness.
One of the odd things about Stendhal is that though
he was always on the watch lest anyone made a fool of him, he was constantly
making a fool of himself.
Like many another member of the gentle sex, she seems
to have been ready enough to accept the perquisites of her position, but saw no
reason why she should be asked to give anything in return.
But there is all the difference between loving and
being in love. It is possible to love
without desire, but without desire impossible to be in love.
Passion may be false, trivial or unnatural, but, if
violent enough, is not without some trace of grandeur.
He would not have been the first man to find that he
loved his wife more when he was parted from her than was with her, and that the
expectation of sexual congress was more exciting than the realisation.
Is it rash to assume that when a practised writer
says a thing, he is more likely to mean what he says than what his commentators
think he means?
According to your proclivities, you may take a
snow-clad Alpine peak, as it rises to the empyrean in radiant majesty, as
symbol of man's aspiration to union with the Infinite; or since, if you like to
believe that, a mountain range may be thrown up by some violent convulsion in
the earth's depths, you may take it as a symbol of the dark and sinister
passions of man that lour to destroy him; or, if you want to be in the fashion,
you may take it as a phallic symbol.
...as we know, Christian charity has always been able
to make allowances for a lot of good honest hatred,...
She was one of those writers, far from rare in the
world of letters, who suppose that push and pull are an adequate substitute for
talent;
No novel is entirely free of improbabilities, and to
the more usual ones readers have become so accustomed that they accept them as
a matter of course. The novelist cannot give a literal transcript of life, he
draws a picture for you which, if he is a realist, he tries to make life-like;
and if you believe him he has succeeded.
The particular value attached of virginity is a
fabrication of the male, due partly to superstition, partly to masculine
vanity, and partly, of course, to a disinclination to father someone else's
child. Women, I should say, have ascribed importance to it chiefly because the
value men place on it, and also from fear of consequences. I think I am right
in saying that a man, to satisfy a need as natural as eating his dinner when he
is hungry, may have sexual intercourse without any particular feeling for the
object of his appetite; whereas with a woman sexual intercourse, without
something in the nature, if not of love, at least of sentiment, is merely a
tiresome business which she accepts as obligation, or from the wish to give
pleasure.
Nothing, I suppose, exasperates a woman more than the
sexual desire for her of a man who is physically repellent to her, and when, to
put it bluntly, he will not take no for an answer, she may very well come to
hate him.
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