THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT
By
ARNOLD BENNETT
[pg i]
WORKS BY ARNOLD BENNETT
-
NOVELS
-
- A Man from the North
- Anna of the Five Towns
- Leonora
- A Great Man
- Sacred and Profane Love
- Whom God hath Joined
- Buried Alive
- The Old Wives' Tale
- The Glimpse
- Helen with the High Hand
- Clayhanger
- The Card
- Hilda Lessways
- The Regent
-
FANTASIAS
-
- The Grand Babylon Hotel
- The Gates of Wrath
- Teresa of Watling Street
- The Loot of Cities
- Hugo
- The Ghost
- The City of Pleasure
-
SHORT STORIES
-
- Tales of the Five Towns
- The Grim Smile of the Five Towns
- The Matador of the Five Towns
-
BELLES-LETTRES
-
- Journalism for Women
- Fame and Fiction
- How to become an Author
- The Reasonable Life
- How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day
- The Human Machine
- Literary Taste
- The Feast of St Friend
- Those United States
- The Plain Man and His Wife
- Paris Nights
-
DRAMA
-
- Polite Farces
- Cupid and Common Sense
- What the Public Wants
- The Honeymoon
- The Great Adventure
-
(
In Collaboration with EDEN PHILLPOTTS
) -
- The Sinews of War: A Romance
- The Statue: A Romance
-
(
In Collaboration with EDWARD KNOBLAUCH
) -
THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT
[pg ii]
By
ARNOLD BENNETT
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO
[pg iii]
Printed in 1914
[pg iv]
CONTENTS
[pg 1]
PART I
SEEING LIFE
[pg 2]
[pg 3]
I
A young dog, inexperienced, sadly lacking in even primary
education, ambles and frisks along the footpath of Fulham Road,
near the mysterious gates of a Marist convent. He is a large
puppy, on the way to be a dog of much dignity, but at present
he has little to recommend him but that gawky elegance, and
that bounding gratitude for the gift of life, which distinguish
the normal puppy. He is an ignorant fool. He might have entered
the convent of nuns and had a fine time, but instead he steps
off the pavement into the road, the road being a vast and
interesting continent imperfectly explored. His confidence in
his nose, in his agility, and in the goodness of God is
touching, absolutely painful to witness. He glances casually at
a huge, towering vermilion construction that is
[pg 4]
whizzing towards him on four wheels, preceded by a glint of
brass and a wisp of steam; and then with disdain he ignores it
as less important than a mere speck of odorous matter in the
mud. The next instant he is lying inert in the mud. His
confidence in the goodness of God had been misplaced. Since the
beginning of time God had ordained him a victim.
An impressive thing happens. The motor-bus reluctantly
slackens and stops. Not the differential brake, nor the
foot-brake, has arrested the motor-bus, but the invisible brake
of public opinion, acting by administrative transmission. There
is not a policeman in sight. Theoretically, the motor-'bus is
free to whiz onward in its flight to the paradise of
Shoreditch, but in practice it is paralysed by dread. A man in
brass buttons and a stylish cap leaps down from it, and the
blackened demon who sits on its neck also leaps down from it,
and they move gingerly towards the puppy. A little while ago
[pg 5]
the motor-bus might have overturned a human cyclist or so, and
proceeded nonchalant on its way. But now even a puppy requires
a post-mortem: such is the force of public opinion aroused. Two
policemen appear in the distance.
"A street accident" is now in being, and a crowd gathers
with calm joy and stares, passive and determined. The puppy
offers no sign whatever; just lies in the road. Then a boy,
destined probably to a great future by reason of his singular
faculty of initiative, goes to the puppy and carries him by the
scruff of the neck, to the shelter of the gutter. Relinquished
by the boy, the lithe puppy falls into an easy horizontal
attitude, and seems bent upon repose. The boy lifts the puppy's
head to examine it, and the head drops back wearily. The puppy
is dead. No cry, no blood, no disfigurement! Even no
perceptible jolt of the wheel as it climbed over the obstacle
of the puppy's body! A wonderfully clean and perfect
accident!
[pg 6]
The increasing crowd stares with beatific placidity. People
emerge impatiently from the bowels of the throbbing motor-bus
and slip down from its back, and either join the crowd or
vanish. The two policemen and the crew of the motor-bus have
now met in parley. The conductor and the driver have an air at
once nervous and resigned; their gestures are quick and
vivacious. The policemen, on the other hand, indicate by their
slow and huge movements that eternity is theirs. And they could
not be more sure of the conductor and the driver if they had
them manacled and leashed. The conductor and the driver admit
the absolute dominion of the elephantine policemen; they admit
that before the simple will of the policemen inconvenience,
lost minutes, shortened leisure, docked wages, count as less
than naught. And the policemen are carelessly sublime, well
knowing that magistrates, jails, and the very Home Secretary on
his throne—yes, and a whole system of conspiracy
[pg 7]
and perjury and brutality—are at their beck in case of
need. And yet occasionally in the demeanour of the policemen
towards the conductor and the driver there is a silent message
that says: "After all, we, too, are working men like you,
over-worked and under-paid and bursting with grievances in the
service of the pitiless and dishonest public. We, too, have
wives and children and privations and frightful apprehensions.
We, too, have to struggle desperately. Only the awful magic of
these garments and of the garter which we wear on our wrists
sets an abyss between us and you." And the conductor writes and
one of the policemen writes, and they keep on writing, while
the traffic makes beautiful curves to avoid them.
The still increasing crowd continues to stare in the pure
blankness of pleasure. A close-shaved, well-dressed,
middle-aged man, with a copy of
The Sportsman
in his podgy hand, who has descended from the motor-bus, starts
stamping his feet. "I was knocked down by a taxi last year," he
[pg 8]
says fiercely. "But nobody took no notice of
that
! Are they going to stop here all the blank morning for a blank
tyke?" And for all his respectable appearance, his features
become debased, and he emits a jet of disgusting profanity and
brings most of the Trinity into the thunderous assertion that
he has paid his fare. Then a man passes wheeling a muck-cart.
And he stops and talks a long time with the other uniforms,
because he, too, wears vestiges of a uniform. And the crowd
never moves nor ceases to stare. Then the new arrival stoops
and picks up the unclaimed, masterless puppy, and flings it,
all soft and yielding, into the horrid mess of the cart, and
passes on. And only that which is immortal and divine of the
puppy remains behind, floating perhaps like an invisible vapour
over the scene of the tragedy.
The crowd is tireless, all eyes. The four principals still
converse and write. Nobody in the crowd comprehends what they
are about. At length the driver
[pg 9]
separates himself, but is drawn back, and a new parley is
commenced. But everything ends. The policemen turn on their
immense heels. The driver and conductor race towards the
motor-bus. The bell rings, the motor-bus, quite empty,
disappears snorting round the corner into Walham Green. The
crowd is now lessening. But it separates with reluctance, many
of its members continuing to stare with intense absorption at
the place where the puppy lay or the place where the policemen
stood. An appreciable interval elapses before the "street
accident" has entirely ceased to exist as a phenomenon.
The members of the crowd follow their noses, and during the
course of the day remark to acquaintances:
"Saw a dog run over by a motor-bus in the Fulham Road this
morning! Killed dead!"
And that is all they do remark. That is all they have
witnessed. They will not, and could not, give intelligible and
in
[pg 10]
teresting particulars of the affair (unless it were as to the
breed of the dog or the number of the bus-service). They have
watched a dog run over. They analyse neither their sensations
nor the phenomenon. They have witnessed it whole, as a bad
writer uses a
cliché
. They have observed—that is to say, they have really
seen—nothing.
[pg 11]
II
It will be well for us not to assume an attitude of
condescension towards the crowd. Because in the matter of
looking without seeing we are all about equal. We all go to and
fro in a state of the observing faculties which somewhat
resembles coma. We are all content to look and not see.
And if and when, having comprehended that the
rôle
of observer is not passive but active, we determine by an
effort to rouse ourselves from the coma and really to see the
spectacle of the world (a spectacle surpassing circuses and
even street accidents in sustained dramatic interest), we shall
discover, slowly in the course of time, that the act of seeing,
which seems so easy, is not so easy as it seems. Let a man
resolve: "I will keep my eyes open on the way to the office of
a morning,"
[pg 12]
and the probability if that for many mornings he will see
naught that is not trivial, and that his system of perspective
will be absurdly distorted. The unusual, the unaccustomed, will
infallibly attract him, to the exclusion of what is fundamental
and universal. Travel makes observers of us all, but the things
which as travellers we observe generally show how unskilled we
are in the new activity.
A man went to Paris for the first time, and observed right
off that the carriages of suburban trains had seats on the roof
like a tramcar. He was so thrilled by the remarkable discovery
that he observed almost nothing else. This enormous fact
occupied the whole foreground of his perspective. He returned
home and announced that Paris was a place where people rode on
the tops of trains. A Frenchwoman came to London for the first
time—and no English person would ever guess the
phenomenon which vanquished all others in her mind on the
[pg 13]
opening day. She saw a cat walking across a street. The vision
excited her. For in Paris cats do not roam in thoroughfares,
because there are practically no houses with gardens or
"areas"; the flat system is unfavourable to the enlargement of
cats. I remember once, in the days when observation had first
presented itself to me as a beautiful pastime, getting up very
early and making the circuit of inner London before summer dawn
in quest of interesting material. And the one note I gathered
was that the ground in front of the all-night coffee-stalls was
white with egg-shells! What I needed then was an operation for
cataract. I also remember taking a man to the opera who had
never seen an opera. The work was
Lohengrin
. When we came out he said: "That swan's neck was rather
stiff." And it was all he did say. We went and had a drink. He
was not mistaken. His observation was most just; but his
perspective was that of those literary critics who give ten
lines to point
[pg 14]
ing out three slips of syntax, and three lines to an
ungrammatical admission that the novel under survey is not
wholly tedious.
But a man may acquire the ability to observe even a large
number of facts, and still remain in the infantile stage of
observation. I have read, in some work of literary criticism,
that Dickens could walk up one side of a long, busy street and
down the other, and then tell you in their order the names on
all the shop-signs; the fact was alleged as an illustration of
his great powers of observation. Dickens was a great observer,
but he would assuredly have been a still greater observer had
he been a little less pre-occupied with trivial and
unco-ordinated details. Good observation consists not in
multiplicity of detail, but in co-ordination of detail
according to a true perspective of relative importance, so that
a finally just general impression may be reached in the
shortest possible time. The skilled observer is he who does not
have to change
[pg 15]
his mind. One has only to compare one's present adjusted
impression of an intimate friend with one's first impression of
him to perceive the astounding inadequacy of one's powers of
observation. The man as one has learnt to see him is simply not
the same man who walked into one's drawing-room on the day of
introduction.
There are, by the way, three sorts of created beings who are
sentimentally supposed to be able to judge individuals at the
first glance: women, children, and dogs. By virtue of a mystic
gift with which rumour credits them, they are never mistaken.
It is merely not true. Women are constantly quite wrong in the
estimates based on their "feminine instinct"; they sometimes
even admit it; and the matrimonial courts prove it
passim
. Children are more often wrong than women. And as for dogs, it
is notorious that they are for ever being taken in by plausible
scoundrels; the perspective of dogs is grotesque. Not
[pg 16]
seldom have I grimly watched the gradual disillusion of
deceived dogs. Nevertheless, the sentimental legend of the
infallibility of women, children, and dogs, will persist in
Anglo-Saxon countries.
[pg 17]
III
One is curious about one's fellow-creatures: therefore one
watches them. And generally the more intelligent one is, the
more curious one is, and the more one observes. The mere
satisfaction of this curiosity is in itself a worthy end, and
would alone justify the business of systematised observation.
But the aim of observation may, and should, be expressed in
terms more grandiose. Human curiosity counts among the highest
social virtues (as indifference counts among the basest
defects), because it leads to the disclosure of the causes of
character and temperament and thereby to a better understanding
of the springs of human conduct. Observation is not practised
directly with this high end in view (save by prigs and other
futile souls); nevertheless it is a moral act and must
inevitably
[pg 18]
promote kindliness—whether we like it or not. It also
sharpens the sense of beauty. An ugly deed—such as a deed
of cruelty—takes on artistic beauty when its origin and
hence its fitness in the general scheme begin to be
comprehended. In the perspective of history we can derive an
æsthetic pleasure from the tranquil scrutiny of all kinds
of conduct—as well, for example, of a Renaissance Pope as
of a Savonarola. Observation endows our day and our street with
the romantic charm of history, and stimulates charity—not
the charity which signs cheques, but the more precious charity
which puts itself to the trouble of understanding. The one
condition is that the observer must never lose sight of the
fact that what he is trying to see is life, is the woman next
door, is the man in the train—and not a concourse of
abstractions. To appreciate all this is the first inspiring
preliminary to sound observation.
[pg 19]
IV
The second preliminary is to realise that all physical
phenomena are interrelated, that there is nothing which does
not bear on everything else. The whole spectacular and sensual
show—what the eye sees, the ear hears, the nose scents,
the tongue tastes and the skin touches—is a cause or an
effect of human conduct. Naught can be ruled out as negligible,
as not forming part of the equation. Hence he who would beyond
all others see life for himself—I naturally mean the
novelist and playwright—ought to embrace all phenomena in
his curiosity. Being finite, he cannot. Of course he cannot!
But he can, by obtaining a broad notion of the whole, determine
with some accuracy the position and relative importance of the
particular series of phenomena to which his instinct draws him.
If he
[pg 20]
does not thus envisage the immense background of his special
interests, he will lose the most precious feeling for interplay
and proportion without which all specialism becomes distorted
and positively darkened.
Now, the main factor in life on this planet is the planet
itself. Any logically conceived survey of existence must begin
with geographical and climatic phenomena. This is surely
obvious. If you say that you are not interested in meteorology
or the configurations of the earth, I say that you deceive
yourself. You are. For an east wind may upset your liver and
cause you to insult your wife. Beyond question the most
important fact about, for example, Great Britain is that it is
an island. We sail amid the Hebrides, and then talk of the fine
qualities and the distressing limitations of those islanders;
it ought to occur to us English that we are talking of
ourselves in little. In moments of journalistic vainglory we
are apt to refer to the "sturdy island race," meaning us. But
that we are
[pg 21]
insular in the full significance of the horrid word is certain.
Why not? A genuine observation of the supreme phenomenon that
Great Britain is surrounded by water—an effort to keep it
always at the back of the consciousness—will help to
explain all the minor phenomena of British existence.
Geographical knowledge is the mother of discernment, for the
varying physical characteristics of the earth are the sole
direct terrestrial influence determining the evolution of
original vital energy.
All other influences are secondary, and have been effects of
character and temperament before becoming causes. Perhaps the
greatest of them are roads and architecture. Nothing could be
more English than English roads, or more French than French
roads. Enter England from France, let us say through the gate
of Folkestone, and the architectural illustration which greets
you (if you can look and see) is absolutely dramatic in its
spectacular force. You say that there is no architecture in
Folke
[pg 22]
stone. But Folkestone, like other towns, is just as full of
architecture as a wood is full of trees. As the train winds on
its causeway over the sloping town you perceive below you
thousands of squat little homes, neat, tended, respectable,
comfortable, prim, at once unostentatious and conceited. Each a
separate, clearly-defined entity! Each saying to the others:
"Don't look over my wall, and I won't look over yours!" Each
with a ferocious jealousy bent on guarding its own
individuality! Each a stronghold—an island! And all
careless of the general effect, but making a very impressive
general effect. The English race is below you. Your own son is
below you insisting on the inviolability of his own den of a
bedroom! ... And contrast all that with the immense communistic
and splendid façades of a French town, and work out the
implications. If you really intend to see life you cannot
afford to be blind to such thrilling phenomena.
[pg 23]
Yet an inexperienced, unguided curiosity would be capable of
walking through a French street and through an English street,
and noting chiefly that whereas English lamp-posts spring from
the kerb, French lamp-posts cling to the side of the house! Not
that that detail is not worth noting. It is—in its place.
French lamp-posts are part of what we call the "interesting
character" of a French street. We say of a French street that
it is "full of character." As if an English street was not!
Such is blindness—to be cured by travel and the exercise
of the logical faculty, most properly termed common sense. If
one is struck by the magnificence of the great towns of the
Continent, one should ratiocinate, and conclude that a major
characteristic of the great towns of England is their shabby
and higgledy-piggledy slovenliness. It is so. But there are
people who have lived fifty years in Manchester, Leeds, Hull
and Hanley without noticing it. The English idiosyncrasy is in
that
[pg 24]
awful external slovenliness too, causing it, and being caused
by it. Every street is a mirror, an illustration, an
exposition, an explanation, of the human beings who live in it.
Nothing in it is to be neglected. Everything in it is valuable,
if the perspective is maintained. Nevertheless, in the narrow
individualistic novels of English literature—and in some
of the best—you will find a domestic organism described
as though it existed in a vacuum, or in the Sahara, or between
Heaven and earth; as though it reacted on nothing and was
reacted on by nothing; and as though it could be adequately
rendered without reference to anything exterior to itself. How
can such novels satisfy a reader who has acquired or wants to
acquire the faculty of seeing life?
[pg 25]
V
The net result of the interplay of instincts and influences
which determine the existence of a community is shown in the
general expression on the faces of the people. This is an index
which cannot lie and cannot be gainsaid. It is fairly easy, and
extremely interesting, to decipher. It is so open, shameless,
and universal, that not to look at it is impossible. Yet the
majority of persons fail to see it. We hear of inquirers
standing on London Bridge and counting the number of
motor-buses, foot-passengers, lorries, and white horses that
pass over the bridge in an hour. But we never hear of anybody
counting the number of faces happy or unhappy, honest or
rascally, shrewd or ingenuous, kind or cruel, that pass over
the bridge. Perhaps the public may be surprised to hear that
the general ex
[pg 26]
pression on the faces of Londoners of all ranks varies from the
sad to the morose; and that their general mien is one of haste
and gloomy preoccupation. Such a staring fact is paramount in
sociological evidence. And the observer of it would be
justified in summoning Heaven, the legislature, the county
council, the churches, and the ruling classes, and saying to
them: "Glance at these faces, and don't boast too much about
what you have accomplished. The climate and the industrial
system have so far triumphed over you all."
[pg 27]
VI
When we come to the observing of the individual—to
which all human observing does finally come if there is any
right reason in it—the aforesaid general considerations
ought to be ever present in the hinterland of the
consciousness, aiding and influencing, perhaps vaguely, perhaps
almost imperceptibly, the formation of judgments. If they do
nothing else, they will at any rate accustom the observer to
the highly important idea of the correlation of all phenomena.
Especially in England a haphazard particularity is the chief
vitiating element in the operations of the mind.
In estimating the individual we are apt not only to forget
his environment, but—really strange!—to ignore much
of the evidence visible in the individual himself. The
inexperienced and ardent observer,
[pg 28]
will, for example, be astonishingly blind to everything in an
individual except his face. Telling himself that the face must
be the reflection of the soul, and that every thought and
emotion leaves inevitably its mark there, he will concentrate
on the face, singling it out as a phenomenon apart and
self-complete. Were he a god and infallible, he could no doubt
learn the whole truth from the face. But he is bound to fall
into errors, and by limiting the field of vision he minimises
the opportunity for correction. The face is, after all, quite a
small part of the individual's physical organism. An Englishman
will look at a woman's face and say she is a beautiful woman or
a plain woman. But a woman may have a plain face, and yet by
her form be entitled to be called beautiful, and (perhaps)
vice versâ
. It is true that the face is the reflexion of the soul. It is
equally true that the carriage and gestures are the reflection
of the soul. Had one eyes, the tying of a bootlace is the
reflection of the
[pg 29]
soul. One piece of evidence can be used to correct every other
piece of evidence. A refined face may be refuted by clumsy
finger-ends; the eyes may contradict the voice; the gait may
nullify the smile. None of the phenomena which every individual
carelessly and brazenly displays in every motor-bus terrorising
the streets of London is meaningless or negligible.
Again, in observing we are generally guilty of that
particularity which results from sluggishness of the
imagination. We may see the phenomenon at the moment of looking
at it, but we particularise in that moment, making no effort to
conceive what the phenomenon is likely to be at other
moments.
For example, a male human creature wakes up in the morning
and rises with reluctance. Being a big man, and existing with
his wife and children in a very confined space, he has to adapt
himself to his environment as he goes through the various
functions incident to preparing for his day's work. He is just
like you
[pg 30]
or me. He wants his breakfast, he very much wants to know where
his boots are, and he has the usually sinister preoccupations
about health and finance. Whatever the force of his egoism, he
must more or less harmonise his individuality with those of his
wife and children. Having laid down the law, or accepted it, he
sets forth to his daily duties, just a fraction of a minute
late. He arrives at his office, resumes life with his
colleagues sympathetic and antipathetic, and then leaves the
office for an expedition extending over several hours. In the
course of his expedition he encounters the corpse of a young
dog run down by a motor-bus. Now you also have encountered that
corpse and are gazing at it; and what do you say to yourself
when he comes along? You say: "Oh! Here's a policeman." For he
happens to be a policeman. You stare at him, and you never see
anything but a policeman—an indivisible phenomenon of
blue cloth, steel buttons, flesh resembling a face, and a
helmet; "
[pg 31]
a stalwart guardian of the law"; to you little more human than
an algebraic symbol: in a word—a policeman.
Only, that word actually conveys almost nothing to you of
the reality which it stands for. You are satisfied with it as
you are satisfied with the description of a disease. A friend
tells you his eyesight is failing. You sympathise. "What is
it?" you ask. "Glaucoma." "Ah! Glaucoma!" You don't know what
glaucoma is. You are no wiser than you were before. But you are
content. A name has contented you. Similarly the name of
policeman contents you, seems to absolve you from further
curiosity as to the phenomenon. You have looked at tens of
thousands of policemen, and perhaps never seen the hundredth
part of the reality of a single one. Your imagination has not
truly worked on the phenomenon.
There may be some excuse for not seeing the reality of a
policeman, because a uniform is always a thick veil. But you
—
[pg 32]
I mean you, I, any of us—are oddly dim-sighted also in
regard to the civil population. For instance, we get into the
empty motor-bus as it leaves the scene of the street accident,
and examine the men and women who gradually fill it. Probably
we vaunt ourselves as being interested in the spectacle of
life. All the persons in the motor-bus have come out of a past
and are moving towards a future. But how often does our
imagination put itself to the trouble of realising this? We may
observe with some care, yet owing to a fundamental defect of
attitude we are observing not the human individuals, but a
peculiar race of beings who pass their whole lives in
motor-buses, who exist only in motor-buses and only in the
present! No human phenomenon is adequately seen until the
imagination has placed it back into its past and forward into
its future. And this is the final process of observation of the
individual.
[pg 33]
VII
Seeing life, as I have tried to show, does not begin with
seeing the individual. Neither does it end with seeing the
individual. Particular and unsystematised observation cannot go
on for ever, aimless, formless. Just as individuals are singled
out from systems, in the earlier process of observation, so in
the later processes individuals will be formed into new groups,
which formation will depend upon the personal bent of the
observer. The predominant interests of the observer will
ultimately direct his observing activities to their own
advantage. If he is excited by the phenomena of
organisation—as I happen to be—he will see
individuals in new groups that are the result of organisation,
and will insist on the variations from type due to that
grouping. If he is convinced—as numbers of people appear
[pg 34]
to be—that society is just now in an extremely critical
pass, and that if something mysterious is not forthwith done
the structure of it will crumble to atoms—he will see
mankind grouped under the different reforms which, according to
him, the human dilemma demands. And so on! These tendencies,
while they should not be resisted too much, since they give
character to observation and redeem it from the frigidity of
mechanics, should be resisted to a certain extent. For,
whatever they may be, they favour the growth of sentimentality,
the protean and indescribably subtle enemy of common sense.
[pg 35]
PART II
WRITING NOVELS
[pg 36]
[pg 37]
I
The novelist is he who, having seen life, and being so
excited by it that he absolutely must transmit the vision to
others, chooses narrative fiction as the liveliest vehicle for
the relief of his feelings. He is like other artists—he
cannot remain silent; he cannot keep himself to himself, he is
bursting with the news; he is bound to tell—the affair is
too thrilling! Only he differs from most artists in
this—that what most chiefly strikes him is the
indefinable humanness of human nature, the large general manner
of existing. Of course, he is the result of evolution from the
primitive. And you can see primitive novelists to this day
transmitting to acquaintances their fragmentary and crude
visions of life in the café or the club, or on the
kerbstone. They belong to the lowest circle of artists;
[pg 38]
but they are artists; and the form that they adopt is the very
basis of the novel. By innumerable entertaining steps from them
you may ascend to the major artist whose vision of life,
inclusive, intricate and intense, requires for its due
transmission the great traditional form of the novel as
perfected by the masters of a long age which has temporarily
set the novel higher than any other art-form.
I would not argue that the novel should be counted supreme
among the great traditional forms of art. Even if there is a
greatest form, I do not much care which it is. I have in turn
been convinced that Chartres Cathedral, certain Greek
sculpture, Mozart's
Don Juan
, and the juggling of Paul Cinquevalli, was the finest thing in
the world—not to mention the achievements of Shakspere or
Nijinsky. But there is something to be said for the real
pre-eminence of prose fiction as a literary form. (Even the
modern epic has learnt almost all it knows from prose-fiction.)
The novel has, and always will have, the
[pg 39]
advantage of its comprehensive bigness. St Peter's at Rome is a
trifle compared with Tolstoi's
War and Peace
; and it is as certain as anything can be that, during the
present geological epoch at any rate, no epic half as long as
War and Peace
will ever be read, even if written.
Notoriously the novelist (including the playwright, who is a
sub-novelist) has been taking the bread out of the mouths of
other artists. In the matter of poaching, the painter has done
a lot, and the composer has done more, but what the painter and
the composer have done is as naught compared to the grasping
deeds of the novelist. And whereas the painter and the composer
have got into difficulties with their audacious schemes, the
novelist has poached, colonised, and annexed with a success
that is not denied. There is scarcely any aspect of the
interestingness of life which is not now rendered in prose
fiction—from landscape-painting to sociology—and
none which might not be. Unnecessary to go back to the
ante-Scott
[pg 40]
age in order to perceive how the novel has aggrandised itself!
It has conquered enormous territories even since
Germinal
. Within the last fifteen years it has gained. Were it to adopt
the hue of the British Empire, the entire map of the universe
would soon be coloured red. Wherever it ought to stand in the
hierarchy of forms, it has, actually, no rival at the present
day as a means for transmitting the impassioned vision of life.
It is, and will be for some time to come, the form to which the
artist with the most inclusive vision instinctively turns,
because it is the most inclusive form, and the most adaptable.
Indeed, before we are much older, if its present rate of
progress continues, it will have reoccupied the dazzling
position to which the mighty Balzac lifted it, and in which he
left it in 1850. So much, by the way, for the rank of the
novel.
[pg 41]
II
In considering the equipment of the novelist there are two
attributes which may always be taken for granted. The first is
the sense of beauty—indispensable to the creative artist.
Every creative artist has it, in his degree. He is an artist
because he has it. An artist works under the stress of
instinct. No man's instinct can draw him towards material which
repels him—the fact is obvious. Obviously, whatever kind
of life the novelist writes about, he has been charmed and
seduced by it, he is under its spell—that is, he has seen
beauty in it. He could have no other reason for writing about
it. He may see a strange sort of beauty; he may—indeed he
does—see a sort of beauty that nobody has quite seen
before; he may see a sort of beauty that none save a few odd
spirits ever will or can be made
[pg 42]
to see. But he does see beauty. To say, after reading a novel
which has held you, that the author has no sense of beauty, is
inept. (The mere fact that you turned over his pages with
interest is an answer to the criticism—a criticism,
indeed, which is not more sagacious than that of the reviewer
who remarks: "Mr Blank has produced a thrilling novel, but
unfortunately he cannot write." Mr Blank has written; and he
could, anyhow, write enough to thrill the reviewer.) All that a
wise person will assert is that an artist's sense of beauty is
different for the time being from his own.
The reproach of the lack of a sense of beauty has been
brought against nearly all original novelists; it is seldom
brought against a mediocre novelist. Even in the extreme cases
it is untrue; perhaps it is most untrue in the extreme cases. I
do not mean such a case as that of Zola, who never went to
extremes. I mean, for example, Gissing, a real extremist, who,
it is now admitted, saw a
[pg 43]
clear and undiscovered beauty in forms of existence which
hitherto no artist had deigned seriously to examine. And I mean
Huysmans, a case even more extreme. Possibly no works have been
more abused for ugliness than Huysman's novel
En Ménage
and his book of descriptive essays
De Tout
. Both reproduce with exasperation what is generally regarded
as the sordid ugliness of commonplace daily life. Yet both
exercise a unique charm (and will surely be read when
La Cathédrale
is forgotten). And it is inconceivable that
Huysmans—whatever he may have said—was not ravished
by the secret beauty of his subjects and did not exult in
it.
The other attribute which may be taken for granted in the
novelist, as in every artist, is passionate intensity of
vision. Unless the vision is passionately intense the artist
will not be moved to transmit it. He will not be inconvenienced
by it; and the motive to pass it on will thus not exist. Every
fine emotion produced in
[pg 44]
the reader has been, and must have been, previously felt by the
writer, but in a far greater degree. It is not altogether
uncommon to hear a reader whose heart has been desolated by the
poignancy of a narrative complain that the writer is
unemotional. Such people have no notion at all of the processes
of artistic creation.
[pg 45]
III
A sense of beauty and a passionate intensity of vision being
taken for granted, the one other important attribute in the
equipment of the novelist—the attribute which indeed by
itself practically suffices, and whose absence renders futile
all the rest—is fineness of mind. A great novelist must
have great qualities of mind. His mind must be sympathetic,
quickly responsive, courageous, honest, humorous, tender, just,
merciful. He must be able to conceive the ideal without losing
sight of the fact that it is a human world we live in. Above
all, his mind must be permeated and controlled by common sense.
His mind, in a word, must have the quality of being noble.
Unless his mind is all this, he will never, at the ultimate
bar, be reckoned supreme. That which counts, on every page, and
[pg 46]
all the time, is the very texture of his mind—the glass
through which he sees things. Every other attribute is
secondary, and is dispensable. Fielding lives unequalled among
English novelists because the broad nobility of his mind is
unequalled. He is read with unreserved enthusiasm because the
reader feels himself at each paragraph to be in close contact
with a glorious personality. And no advance in technique among
later novelists can possibly imperil his position. He will take
second place when a more noble mind, a more superb common
sense, happens to wield the narrative pen, and not before. What
undermines the renown of Dickens is the growing conviction that
the texture of his mind was common, that he fell short in
courageous facing of the truth, and in certain delicacies of
perception. As much may be said of Thackeray, whose mind was
somewhat incomplete for so grandiose a figure, and not free
from defects which are inimical to immortality.
It is a hard saying for me, and full of
[pg 47]
danger in any country whose artists have shown contempt for
form, yet I am obliged to say that, as the years pass, I attach
less and less importance to good technique in fiction. I love
it, and I have fought for a better recognition of its
importance in England, but I now have to admit that the modern
history of fiction will not support me. With the single
exception of Turgenev, the great novelists of the world,
according to my own standards, have either ignored technique or
have failed to understand it. What an error to suppose that the
finest foreign novels show a better sense of form than the
finest English novels! Balzac was a prodigious blunderer. He
could not even manage a sentence, not to speak of the general
form of a book. And as for a greater than
Balzac—Stendhal—his scorn of technique was
notorious. Stendhal was capable of writing, in a masterpiece:
"By the way I ought to have told you earlier that the
Duchess—!" And as for a greater
[pg 48]
than either Balzac or Stendhal—Dostoievsky—what a
hasty, amorphous lump of gold is the sublime, the
unapproachable
Brothers Karamazov
! Any tutor in a college for teaching the whole art of fiction
by post in twelve lessons could show where Dostoievsky was
clumsy and careless. What would have been Flaubert's detailed
criticism of that book? And what would it matter? And, to take
a minor example, witness the comically amateurish technique of
the late "Mark Rutherford"—nevertheless a novelist whom
one can deeply admire.
And when we come to consider the great technicians, Guy de
Maupassant and Flaubert, can we say that their technique will
save them, or atone in the slightest degree for the defects of
their minds? Exceptional artists both, they are both now
inevitably falling in esteem to the level of the second-rate.
Human nature being what it is, and de Maupassant being tinged
with eroticism, his work is sure to be read with interest by
[pg 49]
mankind; but he is already classed. Nobody, now, despite all
his brilliant excellences, would dream of putting de Maupassant
with the first magnitudes. And the declension of Flaubert is
one of the outstanding phenomena of modern French criticism. It
is being discovered that Flaubert's mind was not quite noble
enough—that, indeed, it was a cruel mind, and a little
anæmic.
Bouvard et Pécuchet
was the crowning proof that Flaubert had lost sight of the
humanness of the world, and suffered from the delusion that he
had been born on the wrong planet. The glitter of his technique
is dulled now, and fools even count it against him. In regard
to one section of human activity only did his mind seem
noble—namely, literary technique. His correspondence,
written, of course, currently, was largely occupied with the
question of literary technique, and his correspondence stands
forth to-day as his best work—a marvellous fount of
inspiration to his fellow artists. So I
[pg 50]
return to the point that the novelist's one important attribute
(beyond the two postulated) is fundamental quality of mind. It
and nothing else makes both the friends and the enemies which
he has; while the influence of technique is slight and
transitory. And I repeat that it is a hard saying.
I begin to think that great writers of fiction are by the
mysterious nature of their art ordained to be "amateurs." There
may be something of the amateur in all great artists. I do not
know why it should be so, unless because, in the exuberance of
their sense of power, they are impatient of the exactitudes of
systematic study and the mere bother of repeated attempts to
arrive at a minor perfection. Assuredly no great artist was
ever a profound scholar. The great artist has other ends to
achieve. And every artist, major and minor, is aware in his
conscience that art is full of artifice, and that the desire to
proceed rapidly with the affair of creation, and an excus
[pg 51]
able dislike of re-creating anything twice, thrice, or ten
times over—unnatural task!—are responsible for much
of that artifice. We can all point in excuse to Shakspere, who
was a very rough-and-ready person, and whose methods would
shock Flaubert. Indeed, the amateurishness of Shakspere has
been mightily exposed of late years. But nobody seems to care.
If Flaubert had been a greater artist he might have been more
of an amateur.
[pg 52]
IV
Of this poor neglected matter of technique the more
important branch is design—or construction. It is the
branch of the art—of all arts—which comes next
after "inspiration"—a capacious word meant to include
everything that the artist must be born with and cannot
acquire. The less important branch of technique—far less
important—may be described as an ornamentation.
There are very few rules of design in the novel; but the few
are capital. Nevertheless, great novelists have often flouted
or ignored them—to the detriment of their work. In my
opinion the first rule is that the interest must be
centralised; it must not be diffused equally over various parts
of the canvas. To compare one art with another may be perilous,
but really the convenience of
[pg 53]
describing a novel as a canvas is extreme. In a well-designed
picture the eye is drawn chiefly to one particular spot. If the
eye is drawn with equal force to several different spots, then
we reproach the painter for having "scattered" the interest of
the picture. Similarly with the novel. A novel must have one,
two, or three figures that easily overtop the rest. These
figures must be in the foreground, and the rest in the
middle-distance or in the back-ground.
Moreover, these figures—whether they are saints or
sinners—must somehow be presented more sympathetically
than the others. If this cannot be done, then the inspiration
is at fault. The single motive that should govern the choice of
a principal figure is the motive of love for that figure. What
else could the motive be? The race of heroes is essential to
art. But what makes a hero is less the deeds of the figure
chosen than the understanding sympathy of the artist with the
figure. To say that the hero has disappeared from
[pg 54]
modern fiction is absurd. All that has happened is that the
characteristics of the hero have changed, naturally, with the
times. When Thackeray wrote "a novel without a hero," he wrote
a novel with a first-class hero, and nobody knew this better
than Thackeray. What he meant was that he was sick of the
conventional bundle of characteristics styled a hero in his
day, and that he had changed the type. Since then we have grown
sick of Dobbins, and the type has been changed again more than
once. The fateful hour will arrive when we shall be sick of
Ponderevos.
The temptation of the great novelist, overflowing with
creative force, is to scatter the interest. In both his major
works Tolstoi found the temptation too strong for him.
Anna Karenina
is not one novel, but two, and suffers accordingly. As for
War and Peace
, the reader wanders about in it as in a forest, for days,
lost, deprived of a sense of direction, and with no vestige of
a sign-post; at
[pg 55]
intervals encountering mysterious faces whose identity he in
vain tries to recall. On a much smaller scale Meredith
committed the same error. Who could assert positively which of
the sisters Fleming is the heroine of
Rhoda Fleming
? For nearly two hundred pages at a stretch Rhoda scarcely
appears. And more than once the author seems quite to forget
that the little knave Algernon is not, after all, the hero of
the story.
The second rule of design—perhaps in the main merely a
different view of the first—is that the interest must be
maintained. It may increase, but it must never diminish. Here
is that special aspect of design which we call construction, or
plot. By interest I mean the interest of the story itself, and
not the interest of the continual play of the author's mind on
his material. In proportion as the interest of the story is
maintained, the plot is a good one. In so far as it lapses, the
plot is a bad one. There is no other criterion of good con
[pg 56]
struction. Readers of a certain class are apt to call good the
plot of that story in which "you can't tell what is going to
happen next." But in some of the most tedious novels ever
written you can't tell what is going to happen next—and
you don't care a fig what is going to happen next. It would be
nearer the mark to say that the plot is good when "you want to
make sure what will happen next"! Good plots set you anxiously
guessing what will happen next.
When the reader is misled—not intentionally in order
to get an effect, but clumsily through
amateurishness—then the construction is bad. This
calamity does not often occur in fine novels, but in really
good work another calamity does occur with far too much
frequency—namely, the tantalising of the reader at a
critical point by a purposeless, wanton, or negligent shifting
of the interest from the major to the minor theme. A sad
example of this infantile trick is to be found in the
thirty-first chapter of
Rhoda
[pg 57]
Fleming
, wherein, well knowing that the reader is tingling for the
interview between Roberts and Rhoda, the author, unable to
control his own capricious and monstrous fancy for Algernon,
devotes some sixteen pages to the young knave's vagaries with
an illicit thousand pounds. That the sixteen pages are
excessively brilliant does not a bit excuse the wilful
unshapeliness of the book's design.
The Edwardian and Georgian out-and-out defenders of
Victorian fiction are wont to argue that though the event-plot
in sundry great novels may be loose and casual (that is to say,
simply careless), the "idea-plot" is usually close-knit,
coherent, and logical. I have never yet been able to comprehend
how an idea-plot can exist independently of an event-plot (any
more than how spirit can be conceived apart from matter); but
assuming that an idea-plot can exist independently, and that
the mysterious thing is superior in form to its coarse fellow,
the event-plot (which I positively
[pg 58]
do not believe),—even then I still hold that sloppiness
in the fabrication of the event-plot amounts to a grave
iniquity. In this connection I have in mind, among English
novels, chiefly the work of "Mark Rutherford," George Eliot,
the Brontës, and Anthony Trollope.
The one other important rule in construction is that the
plot should be kept throughout within the same convention. All
plots—even those of our most sacred naturalistic
contemporaries—are and must be a conventionalisation of
life. We imagine we have arrived at a convention which is
nearer to the truth of life than that of our forerunners.
Perhaps we have—but so little nearer that the difference
is scarcely appreciable! An aviator at midday may be nearer the
sun than the motorist, but regarded as a portion of the entire
journey to the sun, the aviator's progress upward can safely be
ignored. No novelist has yet, or ever will, come within a
hundred million miles of life itself. It is impossible for us
to
[pg 59]
see how far we still are from life. The defects of a new
convention disclose themselves late in its career. The notion
that "naturalists" have at last lighted on a final formula
which ensures truth to life is ridiculous. "Naturalist" is
merely an epithet expressing self-satisfaction.
Similarly, the habit of deriding as "conventional" plots
constructed in an earlier convention, is ridiculous. Under this
head Dickens in particular has been assaulted; I have assaulted
him myself. But within their convention, the plots of Dickens
are excellent, and show little trace of amateurishness, and
every sign of skilled accomplishment. And Dickens did not
blunder out of one convention into another, as certain of
ourselves undeniably do. Thomas Hardy, too, has been arraigned
for the conventionalism of his plots. And yet Hardy happens to
be one of the rare novelists who have evolved a new convention
to suit their idiosyncrasy. Hardy's idiosyncrasy is a
[pg 60]
deep conviction of the whimsicality of the divine power, and
again and again he has expressed this with a virtuosity of
skill which ought to have put humility into the hearts of
naturalists, but which has not done so. The plot of
The Woodlanders
is one of the most exquisite examples of subtle symbolic
illustration of an idea that a writer of fiction ever achieved;
it makes the symbolism of Ibsen seem crude. You may say that
The Woodlanders
could not have occurred in real life. No novel could have
occurred in real life. The balance of probabilities is
incalculably against any novel whatsoever; and rightly so. A
convention is essential, and the duty of a novelist is to be
true within his chosen convention, and not further. Most
novelists still fail in this duty. Is there any reason, indeed,
why we should be so vastly cleverer than our fathers? I do not
think we are.
[pg 61]
V
Leaving the seductive minor question of ornamentation, I
come lastly to the question of getting the semblance of life on
to the page before the eyes of the reader—the daily and
hourly texture of existence. The novelist has selected his
subject; he has drenched himself in his subject. He has laid
down the main features of the design. The living embryo is
there, and waits to be developed into full organic structure.
Whence and how does the novelist obtain the vital tissue which
must be his material? The answer is that he digs it out of
himself. First-class fiction is, and must be, in the final
resort autobiographical. What else should it be? The novelist
may take notes of phenomena likely to be of use to him. And he
may acquire the skill to invent very apposite illustrative inci
[pg 62]
dent. But he cannot invent psychology. Upon occasion some human
being may entrust him with confidences extremely precious for
his craft. But such windfalls are so rare as to be negligible.
From outward symptoms he can guess something of the psychology
of others. He can use a real person as the unrecognisable but
helpful basis for each of his characters.... And all that is
nothing. And all special research is nothing. When the real
intimate work of creation has to be done—and it has to be
done on every page—the novelist can only look within for
effective aid. Almost solely by arranging and modifying what he
has felt and seen, and scarcely at all by inventing, can he
accomplish his end. An inquiry into the career of any
first-class novelist invariably reveals that his novels are
full of autobiography. But, as a fact, every good novel
contains far more autobiography than any inquiry could reveal.
Episodes, moods, characters of autobiography can be detected
and traced
[pg 63]
to their origin by critical acumen, but the intimate
autobiography that runs through each page, vitalising it, may
not be detected. In dealing with each character in each episode
the novelist must for a thousand convincing details interrogate
that part of his own individuality which corresponds to the
particular character. The foundation of his equipment is
universal sympathy. And the result of this (or the
cause—I don't know which) is that in his own
individuality there is something of everybody. If he is a born
novelist he is safe in asking himself, when in doubt as to the
behaviour of a given personage at a given point: "Now, what
should
I
have done?" And incorporating the answer! And this in practice
is what he does. Good fiction is autobiography dressed in the
colours of all mankind.
The necessarily autobiographical nature of fiction accounts
for the creative repetition to which all
novelists—including the most powerful—are reduced.
They
[pg 64]
monotonously yield again and again to the strongest
predilections of their own individuality. Again and again they
think they are creating, by observation, a quite new
character—and lo! when finished it is an old
one—autobiographical psychology has triumphed! A novelist
may achieve a reputation with only a single type, created and
re-created in varying forms. And the very greatest do not
contrive to create more than half a score genuine separate
types. In Cerfberr and Christophe's biographical dictionary of
the characters of Balzac, a tall volume of six hundred pages,
there are some two thousand entries of different individuals,
but probably fewer than a dozen genuine distinctive types. No
creative artist ever repeated himself more brazenly or more
successfully than Balzac. His miser, his vicious delightful
actress, his vicious delightful duchess, his young
man-about-town, his virtuous young man, his heroic weeping
virgin, his angelic wife and mother, his poor relation, and his
[pg 65]
faithful stupid servant—each is continually popping up
with a new name in the Human Comedy. A similar phenomenon, as
Frank Harris has proved, is to be observed in Shakspere. Hamlet
of Denmark was only the last and greatest of a series of
Shaksperean Hamlets.
It may be asked, finally: What of the actual process of
handling the raw material dug out of existence and of the
artist's self—the process of transmuting life into art?
There is no process. That is to say, there is no conscious
process. The convention chosen by an artist is his illusion of
the truth. Consciously, the artist only omits, selects,
arranges. But let him beware of being false to his illusion,
for then the process becomes conscious, and bad. This is
sentimentality, which is the seed of death in his work. Every
artist is tempted to sentimentalise, or to be
cynical—practically the same thing. And when he falls to
the temptation, the reader whispers in his heart, be it only
for one instant: "That
[pg 66]
is not true to life." And in turn the reader's illusion of
reality is impaired. Readers are divided into two
classes—the enemies and the friends of the artist. The
former, a legion, admire for a fortnight or a year. They hate
an uncompromising struggle for the truth. They positively like
the artist to fall to temptation. If he falls, they exclaim,
"How sweet!" The latter are capable of savouring the fine
unpleasantness of the struggle for truth. And when they whisper
in their hearts: "That is not true to life," they are ashamed
for the artist. They are few, very few; but a vigorous clan. It
is they who confer immortality.
[pg 67]
PART III
WRITING PLAYS
[pg 68]
[pg 69]
I
There is an idea abroad, assiduously fostered as a rule by
critics who happen to have written neither novels nor plays,
that it is more difficult to write a play than a novel. I do
not think so. I have written or collaborated in about twenty
novels and about twenty plays, and I am convinced that it is
easier to write a play than a novel. Personally, I would sooner
write
two plays than one novel; less expenditure of nervous force and
mere brains would be required for two plays than for one novel.
(I emphasise the word "write," because if the whole weariness
between the first conception and the first performance of a
play is compared with the whole weariness between the first
conception and the first publication of a novel, then the play
has it. I would sooner get seventy-and-seven novels produced
than one play. But my
[pg 70]
immediate object is to compare only writing with writing.) It
seems to me that the sole persons entitled to judge of the
comparative difficulty of writing plays and writing novels are
those authors who have succeeded or failed equally well in both
departments. And in this limited band I imagine that the
differences of opinion on the point could not be marked. I
would like to note in passing, for the support of my
proposition, that whereas established novelists not
infrequently venture into the theatre with audacity,
established dramatists are very cautious indeed about quitting
the theatre. An established dramatist usually takes good care
to write plays and naught else; he will not affront the risks
of coming out into the open; and therein his instinct is quite
properly that of self-preservation. Of many established
dramatists all over the world it may be affirmed that if they
were so indiscreet as to publish a novel, the result would be a
great shattering and a great awakening.
[pg 71]
II
An enormous amount of vague reverential nonsense is talked
about the technique of the stage, the assumption being that in
difficulty it far surpasses any other literary technique, and
that until it is acquired a respectable play cannot be written.
One hears also that it can only be acquired behind the scenes.
A famous actor-manager once kindly gave me the benefit of his
experience, and what he said was that a dramatist who wished to
learn his business must live behind the scenes—and study
the works of Dion Boucicault! The truth is that no technique is
so crude and so simple as the technique of the stage, and that
the proper place to learn it is not behind the scenes but in
the pit. Managers, being the most conservative people on earth,
except compositors, will honestly try to
[pg 72]
convince the naïve dramatist that effects can only be
obtained in the precise way in which effects have always been
obtained, and that this and that rule must not be broken on
pain of outraging the public.
And indeed it is natural that managers should talk thus,
seeing the low state of the drama, because in any art rules and
reaction always flourish when creative energy is sick. The
mandarins have ever said and will ever say that a technique
which does not correspond with their own is no technique, but
simple clumsiness. There are some seven situations in the
customary drama, and a play which does not contain at least one
of those situations in each act will be condemned as
"undramatic," or "thin," or as being "all talk." It may contain
half a hundred other situations, but for the mandarin a
situation which is not one of the seven is not a situation.
Similarly there are some dozen character types in the customary
drama, and all original
[pg 73]
that is, truthful—characterisation will be dismissed as a
total absence of characterisation because it does not reproduce
any of these dozen types. Thus every truly original play is
bound to be indicted for bad technique. The author is bound to
be told that what he has written may be marvellously clever,
but that it is not a play. I remember the day—and it is
not long ago—when even so experienced and sincere a
critic as William Archer used to argue that if the
"intellectual" drama did not succeed with the general public,
it was because its technique was not up to the level of the
technique of the commercial drama! Perhaps he has changed his
opinion since then. Heaven knows that the so-called
"intellectual" drama is amateurish enough, but nearly all
literary art is amateurish, and assuredly no intellectual drama
could hope to compete in clumsiness with some of the most
successful commercial plays of modern times. I tremble to think
what the mandarins and William Archer would
[pg 74]
say to the technique of
Hamlet
, could it by some miracle be brought forward as a new piece by
a Mr Shakspere. They would probably recommend Mr Shakspere to
consider the ways of Sardou, Henri Bernstein, and Sir Herbert
Tree, and be wise. Most positively they would assert that
Hamlet
was not a play. And their pupils of the daily press would point
out—what surely Mr Shakspere ought to have perceived for
himself—that the second, third, or fourth act might be
cut wholesale without the slightest loss to the piece.
In the sense in which mandarins understand the word
technique, there is no technique special to the stage except
that which concerns the moving of solid human bodies to and
fro, and the limitations of the human senses. The dramatist
must not expect his audience to be able to see or hear two
things at once, nor to be incapable of fatigue. And he must not
expect his interpreters to stroll round or come on or go off in
a satisfactory manner unless he provides
[pg 75]
them with satisfactory reasons for strolling round, coming on,
or going off. Lastly, he must not expect his interpreters to
achieve physical impossibilities. The dramatist who sends a
pretty woman off in street attire and seeks to bring her on
again in thirty seconds fully dressed for a court ball may fail
in stage technique, but he has not proved that stage technique
is tremendously difficult; he has proved something quite
else.
[pg 76]
III
One reason why a play is easier to write than a novel is
that a play is shorter than a novel. On the average, one may
say that it takes six plays to make the matter of a novel.
Other things being equal, a short work of art presents fewer
difficulties than a longer one. The contrary is held true by
the majority, but then the majority, having never attempted to
produce a long work of art, are unqualified to offer an
opinion. It is said that the most difficult form of poetry is
the sonnet. But the most difficult form of poetry is the epic.
The proof that the sonnet is the most difficult form is alleged
to be in the fewness of perfect sonnets. There are, however,
far more perfect sonnets than perfect epics. A perfect sonnet
may be a heavenly accident. But such accidents can never happen
to writers of
[pg 77]
epics. Some years ago we had an enormous palaver about the "art
of the short story," which numerous persons who had omitted to
write novels pronounced to be more difficult than the novel.
But the fact remains that there are scores of perfect short
stories, whereas it is doubtful whether anybody but Turgenev
ever did write a perfect novel. A short form is easier to
manipulate than a long form, because its construction is less
complicated, because the balance of its proportions can be more
easily corrected by means of a rapid survey, because it is
lawful and even necessary in it to leave undone many things
which are very hard to do, and because the emotional strain is
less prolonged. The most difficult thing in all art is to
maintain the imaginative tension unslackened throughout a
considerable period.
Then, not only does a play contain less matter than a
novel—it is further simplified by the fact that it
contains fewer kinds of matter, and less subtle kinds of
[pg 78]
matter. There are numerous delicate and difficult affairs of
craft that the dramatist need not think about at all. If he
attempts to go beyond a certain very mild degree of subtlety,
he is merely wasting his time. What passes for subtle on the
stage would have a very obvious air in a novel, as some
dramatists have unhappily discovered. Thus whole continents of
danger may be shunned by the dramatist, and instead of being
scorned for his cowardice he will be very rightly applauded for
his artistic discretion. Fortunate predicament! Again, he need
not—indeed, he must not—save in a primitive and
hinting manner, concern himself with "atmosphere." He may
roughly suggest one, but if he begins on the feat of "creating"
an atmosphere (as it is called), the last suburban train will
have departed before he has reached the crisis of the play. The
last suburban train is the best friend of the dramatist, though
the fellow seldom has the sense to see it. Further, he is saved
all de
[pg 79]
scriptive work. See a novelist harassing himself into his grave
over the description of a landscape, a room, a
gesture—while the dramatist grins. The dramatist may have
to imagine a landscape, a room, or a gesture; but he has not
got to write it—and it is the writing which hastens
death. If a dramatist and a novelist set out to portray a
clever woman, they are almost equally matched, because each has
to make the creature say things and do things. But if they set
out to portray a charming woman, the dramatist can recline in
an easy chair and smoke while the novelist is ruining temper,
digestion and eyesight, and spreading terror in his household
by his moodiness and unapproachability. The electric light
burns in the novelist's study at three a.m.,—the novelist
is still endeavouring to convey by means of words the
extraordinary fascination that his heroine could exercise over
mankind by the mere act of walking into a room; and he never
has really succeeded and never will. The dramatist
[pg 80]
writes curtly, "Enter Millicent." All are anxious to do the
dramatist's job for him. Is the play being read at
home—the reader eagerly and with brilliant success puts
his imagination to work and completes a charming Millicent
after his own secret desires. (Whereas he would coldly decline
to add one touch to Millicent were she the heroine of a novel.)
Is the play being performed on the stage—an experienced,
conscientious, and perhaps lovely actress will strive her
hardest to prove that the dramatist was right about Millicent's
astounding fascination. And if she fails, nobody will blame the
dramatist; the dramatist will receive naught but sympathy.
And there is still another region of superlative difficulty
which is narrowly circumscribed for the spoilt dramatist: I
mean the whole business of persuading the public that the
improbable is probable. Every work of art is and must be
crammed with improbabilities and artifice; and the greater
portion of the artifice is employed
[pg 81]
in just this trickery of persuasion. Only, the public of the
dramatist needs far less persuading than the public of the
novelist. The novelist announces that Millicent accepted the
hand of the wrong man, and in spite of all the novelist's
corroborative and exegetical detail the insulted reader
declines to credit the statement and condemns the incident as
unconvincing. The dramatist decides that Millicent must accept
the hand of the wrong man, and there she is on the stage in
flesh and blood, veritably doing it! Not easy for even the
critical beholder to maintain that Millicent could not and did
not do such a silly thing when he has actually with his eyes
seen her in the very act! The dramatist, as usual, having done
less, is more richly rewarded by results.
Of course it will be argued, as it has always been argued,
by those who have not written novels, that it is precisely the
"doing less"—the leaving out—that constitutes the
unique and fearful difficulty of dramatic art. "The
[pg 82]
skill to leave out"—lo! the master faculty of the
dramatist! But, in the first place, I do not believe that,
having regard to the relative scope of the play and of the
novel, the necessity for leaving out is more acute in the one
than in the other. The adjective "photographic" is as absurd
applied to the novel as to the play. And, in the second place,
other factors being equal, it is less exhausting, and it
requires less skill, to refrain from doing than to do. To know
when to refrain from doing may be hard, but positively to do is
even harder. Sometimes, listening to partisans of the drama, I
have been moved to suggest that, if the art of omission is so
wondrously difficult, a dramatist who practised the habit of
omitting to write anything whatever ought to be hailed as the
supreme craftsman.
[pg 83]
IV
The more closely one examines the subject, the more clear
and certain becomes the fact that there is only one fundamental
artistic difference between the novel and the play, and that
difference (to which I shall come later) is not the difference
which would be generally named as distinguishing the play from
the novel. The apparent differences are superficial, and are
due chiefly to considerations of convenience.
Whether in a play or in a novel the creative artist has to
tell a story—using the word story in a very wide sense.
Just as a novel is divided into chapters, and for a similar
reason, a play is divided into acts. But neither chapters nor
acts are necessary. Some of Balzac's chief novels have no
chapter-divisions, and it has been proved that a theatre
audience
[pg 84]
can and will listen for two hours to "talk," and even
recitative singing, on the stage, without a pause. Indeed,
audiences, under the compulsion of an artist strong and
imperious enough, could, I am sure, be trained to marvellous
feats of prolonged receptivity. However, chapters and acts are
usual, and they involve the same constructional processes on
the part of the artist. The entire play or novel must tell a
complete story—that is, arouse a curiosity and reasonably
satisfy it, raise a main question and then settle it. And each
act or other chief division must tell a definite portion of the
story, satisfy part of the curiosity, settle part of the
question. And each scene or other minor division must do the
same according to its scale. Everything basic that applies to
the technique of the novel applies equally to the technique of
the play.
In particular, I would urge that a play, any more than a
novel, need not be dramatic, employing the term as it is
[pg 85]
usually employed. In so far as it suspends the listener's
interest, every tale, however told, may be said to be dramatic.
In this sense
The Golden Bowl
is dramatic; so are
Dominique
and
Persuasion
. A play need not be more dramatic than that. Very emphatically
a play need not be dramatic in the stage sense. It need never
induce interest to the degree of excitement. It need have
nothing that resembles what would be recognisable in the
theatre as a situation. It may amble on—and it will still
be a play, and it may succeed in pleasing either the fastidious
hundreds or the unfastidious hundreds of thousands, according
to the talent of the author. Without doubt mandarins will
continue for about a century yet to excommunicate certain plays
from the category of plays. But nobody will be any the worse.
And dramatists will go on proving that whatever else divides a
play from a book, "dramatic quality" does not. Some
arch-Mandarin may launch at me one of those mandarinic epigram
[pg 86]
matic questions which are supposed to overthrow the adversary
at one dart. "Do you seriously mean to argue, sir, that drama
need not be dramatic?" I do, if the word dramatic is to be used
in the mandarinic signification. I mean to state that some of
the finest plays of the modern age differ from a psychological
novel in nothing but the superficial form of telling. Example,
Henri Becque's
La Parisienne
, than which there is no better. If I am asked to give my own
definition of the adjective "dramatic," I would say that that
story is dramatic which is told in dialogue imagined to be
spoken by actors and actresses on the stage, and that any
narrower definition is bound to exclude some genuine plays
universally accepted as such—even by mandarins. For be it
noted that the mandarin is never consistent.
My definition brings me to the sole technical difference
between a play and a novel—in the play the story is told
by means of a dialogue. It is a difference
[pg 87]
less important than it seems, and not invariably even a sure
point of distinction between the two kinds of narrative. For a
novel may consist exclusively of dialogue. And plays may
contain other matter than dialogue. The classic chorus is not
dialogue. But nowadays we should consider the device of the
chorus to be clumsy, as, nowadays, it indeed would be. We have
grown very ingenious and clever at the trickery of making
characters talk to the audience and explain themselves and
their past history while seemingly innocent of any such
intention. And here, I admit, the dramatist has to face a
difficulty special to himself, which the novelist can avoid. I
believe it to be the sole difficulty which is peculiar to the
drama, and that it is not acute is proved by the ease with
which third-rate dramatists have generally vanquished it.
Mandarins are wont to assert that the dramatist is also
handicapped by the necessity for rigid economy in the use of
material. This is not so. Rigid economy
[pg 88]
in the use of material is equally advisable in every form of
art. If it is a necessity, it is a necessity which all artists
flout from time to time, and occasionally with gorgeous
results, and the successful dramatist has hitherto not been
less guilty of flouting it than the novelist or any other
artist.
[pg 89]
V
And now, having shown that some alleged differences between
the play and the novel are illusory, and that a certain
technical difference, though possibly real, is superficial and
slight, I come to the fundamental difference between
them—a difference which the laity does not suspect, which
is seldom insisted upon and never sufficiently, but which
nobody who is well versed in the making of both plays and
novels can fail to feel profoundly. The emotional strain of
writing a play is not merely less prolonged than that of
writing a novel, it is less severe even while it lasts, lower
in degree and of a less purely creative character. And herein
is the chief of all the reasons why a play is easier to write
than a novel. The drama does not belong exclusively to
literature, because its effect
[pg 90]
depends on something more than the composition of words. The
dramatist is the sole author of a play, but he is not the sole
creator of it. Without him nothing can be done, but, on the
other hand, he cannot do everything himself. He begins the work
of creation, which is finished either by creative interpreters
on the stage, or by the creative imagination of the reader in
the study. It is as if he carried an immense weight to the
landing at the turn of a flight of stairs, and that thence
upward the lifting had to be done by other people. Consider the
affair as a pyramidal structure, and the dramatist is the
base—but he is not the apex. A play is a collaboration of
creative faculties. The egotism of the dramatist resents this
uncomfortable fact, but the fact exists. And further, the
creative faculties are not only those of the author, the
stage-director ("producer") and the actors—the audience
itself is unconsciously part of the collaboration.
[pg 91]
Hence a dramatist who attempts to do the whole work of creation
before the acting begins is an inartistic usurper of the
functions of others, and will fail of proper accomplishment at
the end. The dramatist must deliberately, in performing his
share of the work, leave scope for a multitude of alien
faculties whose operations he can neither precisely foresee nor
completely control. The point is not that in the writing of a
play there are various sorts of matters—as we have
already seen—-which the dramatist must ignore; the point
is that even in the region proper to him he must not push the
creative act to its final limit. He must ever remember those
who are to come after him. For instance, though he must
visualise a scene as he writes it, he should not visualise it
completely, as a novelist should. The novelist may perceive
vividly the faces of his personages, but if the playwright
insists on seeing faces, either he will see the faces of real
actors and hamper himself by moulding the scene to suit such
[pg 92]
real actors, or he will perceive imaginary faces, and the
ultimate interpretation will perforce falsify his work and
nullify his intentions. This aspect of the subject might well
be much amplified, but only for a public of practising
dramatists.
[pg 93]
VI
When the play is "finished," the processes of collaboration
have yet to begin. The serious work of the dramatist is over,
but the most desolating part of his toil awaits him. I do not
refer to the business of arranging with a theatrical manager
for the production of the play. For, though that generally
partakes of the nature of tragedy, it also partakes of the
nature of amusing burlesque, owing to the fact that theatrical
managers are—no doubt inevitably—theatrical.
Nevertheless, even the theatrical manager, while disclaiming
the slightest interest in anything more vital to the stage than
the box-office, is himself in some degree a collaborator, and
is the first to show to the dramatist that a play is not a play
till it is performed. The manager reads the play, and, to the
dramatist's astonishment,
[pg 94]
reads quite a different play from that which the dramatist
imagines he wrote. In particular the manager reads a play which
can scarcely hope to succeed—indeed, a play against whose
chances of success ten thousand powerful reasons can be
adduced. It is remarkable that a manager nearly always foresees
failure in a manuscript, and very seldom success. The manager's
profoundest instinct—self-preservation again!—is to
refuse a play; if he accepts, it is against the grain, against
his judgment—and out of a mad spirit of adventure. Some
of the most glittering successes have been rehearsed in an
atmosphere of settled despair. The dramatist naturally feels an
immense contempt for the opinions artistic and otherwise of the
manager, and he is therein justified. The manager's vocation is
not to write plays, nor (let us hope) to act in them, nor to
direct the rehearsals of them, and even his knowledge of the
vagaries of his own box-office has often proved to be pitiably
delusive. The
[pg 95]
manager's true and only vocation is to refrain from producing
plays. Despite all this, however, the manager has already
collaborated in the play. The dramatist sees it differently
now. All sorts of new considerations have been presented to
him. Not a word has been altered; but it is noticeably another
play. Which is merely to say that the creative work on it which
still remains to be done has been more accurately envisaged.
This strange experience could not happen to a novel, because
when a novel is written it is finished.
And when the director of rehearsals, or producer, has been
chosen, and this priceless and mysterious person has his first
serious confabulation with the author, then at once the play
begins to assume new shapes—contours undreamt of by the
author till that startling moment. And even if the author has
the temerity to conduct his own rehearsals, similar
disconcerting phenomena will occur; for the author as a
producer is a different
[pg 96]
fellow from the author as author. The producer is up against
realities. He, first, renders the play concrete, gradually
condenses its filmy vapours into a solid element.... He
suggests the casting. "What do you think of X. for the old
man?" asks the producer. The author is staggered. Is it
conceivable that so renowned a producer can have so misread and
misunderstood the play? X. would be preposterous as the old
man. But the producer goes on talking. And suddenly the author
sees possibilities in X. But at the same time he sees a
different play from what he wrote. And quite probably he sees a
more glorious play. Quite probably he had not suspected how
great a dramatist he is.... Before the first rehearsal is
called, the play, still without a word altered, has gone
through astounding creative transmutations; the author
recognises in it some likeness to his beloved child, but it is
the likeness of a first cousin.
At the first rehearsal, and for many
[pg 97]
rehearsals, to an extent perhaps increasing, perhaps
decreasing, the dramatist is forced into an apologetic and
self-conscious mood; and his mien is something between that of
a criminal who has committed a horrid offence and that of a
father over the crude body of a new-born child. Now in truth he
deeply realises that the play is a collaboration. In extreme
cases he may be brought to see that he himself is one of the
less important factors in the collaboration. The first
preoccupation of the interpreters is not with his play at all,
but—quite rightly—with their own careers; if they
were not honestly convinced that their own careers were the
chief genuine excuse for the existence of the theatre and the
play they would not act very well. But, more than that, they do
not regard his play as a sufficient vehicle for the furtherance
of their careers. At the most favourable, what they secretly
think is that if they are permitted to exercise their talents
on his play there is a chance that they may be
[pg 98]
able to turn it into a sufficient vehicle for the furtherance
of their careers. The attitude of every actor towards his part
is: "My part is not much of a part as it stands, but if my
individuality is allowed to get into free contact with it, I
may make something brilliant out of it." Which attitude is a
proper attitude, and an attitude in my opinion justified by the
facts of the case. The actor's phrase is that he
creates
a part, and he is right. He completes the labour of creation
begun by the author and continued by the producer, and if
reasonable liberty is not accorded to him—if either the
author or the producer attempts to do too much of the creative
work—the result cannot be satisfactory.
As the rehearsals proceed the play changes from day to day.
However autocratic the producer, however obstinate the
dramatist, the play will vary at each rehearsal like a large
cloud in a gentle wind. It is never the same play for two days
together. Nor is this surprising,
[pg 99]
seeing that every day and night a dozen, or it may be two
dozen, human beings endowed with the creative gift are
creatively working on it. Every dramatist who is candid with
himself—I do not suggest that he should be candid to the
theatrical world—well knows that though his play is often
worsened by his collaborators it is also often
improved,—and improved in the most mysterious and
dazzling manner—without a word being altered. Producer
and actors do not merely suggest possibilities, they execute
them. And the author is confronted by artistic phenomena for
which lawfully he may not claim credit. On the other hand, he
may be confronted by inartistic phenomena in respect to which
lawfully he is blameless, but which he cannot prevent; a
rehearsal is like a battle,—certain persons are
theoretically in control, but in fact the thing principally
fights itself. And thus the creation goes on until the
dress-rehearsal, when it seems to have come to a stop. And the
[pg 100]
dramatist lying awake in the night reflects, stoically,
fatalistically: "Well, that is the play that they have made of
my
play!" And he may be pleased or he may be disgusted. But if he
attends the first performance he cannot fail to notice, after
the first few minutes of it, that he was quite mistaken, and
that what the actors are performing is still another play. The
audience is collaborating.
[pg 101]
PART IV
THE ARTIST AND THE PUBLIC
[pg 102]
[pg 103]
I
I can divide all the imaginative writers I have ever met
into two classes—those who admitted and sometimes
proclaimed loudly that they desired popularity; and those who
expressed a noble scorn or a gentle contempt for popularity.
The latter, however, always failed to conceal their envy of
popular authors, and this envy was a phenomenon whose truculent
bitterness could not be surpassed even in political or
religious life. And indeed, since (as I have held in a previous
chapter) the object of the artist is to share his emotions with
others, it would be strange if the normal artist spurned
popularity in order to keep his emotions as much as possible to
himself. An enormous amount of dishonest nonsense has been and
will be written by uncreative critics, of course in the higher
interests of crea
[pg 104]
tive authors, about popularity and the proper attitude of the
artist thereto. But possibly the attitude of a first-class
artist himself may prove a more valuable guide.
The
Letters of George Meredith
(of which the first volume is a magnificent unfolding of the
character of a great man) are full of references to popularity,
references overt and covert. Meredith could never—and
quite naturally—get away from the idea of popularity. He
was a student of the English public, and could occasionally be
unjust to it. Writing to M. André Raffalovich (who had
sent him a letter of appreciation) in November, 1881, he said:
"I venture to judge by your name that you are at most but half
English. I can consequently believe in the feeling you express
for the work of an unpopular writer. Otherwise one would
incline to be sceptical, for the English are given to practical
jokes, and to stir up the vanity of authors who are supposed to
languish in the shade amuses
[pg 105]
them." A remark curiously unfair to the small, faithful band of
admirers which Meredith then had. The whole letter, while
warmly and touchingly grateful, is gloomy. Further on in it he
says: "Good work has a fair chance to be recognised in the end,
and if not, what does it matter?" But there is constant proof
that it did matter very much. In a letter to William Hardman,
written when he was well and hopeful, he says: "Never mind: if
we do but get the public ear, oh, my dear old boy!" To Captain
Maxse, in reference to a vast sum of £8,000 paid by the
Cornhill
people to George Eliot (for an unreadable novel), he exclaims:
"Bon Dieu! Will aught like this ever happen to me?"
And to his son he was very explicit about the extent to
which unpopularity "mattered": "As I am unpopular I am
ill-paid, and therefore bound to work double tides, hardly ever
able to lay down the pen. This affects my
[pg 106]
weakened stomach, and so the round of the vicious circle is
looped." (Vol. I., p. 322.) And in another letter to Arthur
Meredith about the same time he sums up his career thus: "As
for me, I have failed, and I find little to make the end
undesirable." (Vol. I., p. 318.) This letter is dated June
23rd, 1881. Meredith was then fifty-three years of age. He had
written
Modern Love
,
The Shaving of Shagpat
,
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
,
Rhoda Fleming
,
The Egoist
and other masterpieces. He knew that he had done his best and
that his best was very fine. It would be difficult to credit
that he did not privately deem himself one of the masters of
English literature and destined to what we call immortality. He
had the enthusiastic appreciation of some of the finest minds
of the epoch. And yet, "As for me, I have failed, and I find
little to make the end undesirable." But he had not failed in
his industry, nor in the quality
[pg 107]
of his work, nor in achieving self-respect and the respect of
his friends. He had failed only in one thing—immediate
popularity.
[pg 108]
II
Assuming then that an author is justified in desiring
immediate popularity, instead of being content with poverty and
the unheard plaudits of posterity, another point presents
itself. Ought he to limit himself to a mere desire for
popularity, or ought he actually to do something, or to refrain
from doing something, to the special end of obtaining
popularity? Ought he to say: "I shall write exactly what and
how I like, without any regard for the public; I shall consider
nothing but my own individuality and powers; I shall be guided
solely by my own personal conception of what the public ought
to like"? Or ought he to say: "Let me examine this public, and
let me see whether some compromise between us is not
possible"?
Certain authors are never under the
[pg 109]
necessity of facing the alternative. Occasionally, by chance, a
genius may be so fortunately constituted and so brilliantly
endowed that he captures the public at once, prestige being
established, and the question of compromise never arises. But
this is exceedingly rare. On the other hand, many mediocre
authors, exercising the most complete sincerity, find ample
appreciation in the vast mediocrity of the public, and are
never troubled by any problem worse than the vagaries of their
fountain-pens. Such authors enjoy in plenty the gewgaw known as
happiness. Of nearly all really original artists, however, it
may be said that they are at loggerheads with the
public—as an almost inevitable consequence of their
originality; and for them the problem of compromise or
no-compromise acutely exists.
George Meredith was such an artist. George Meredith before
anything else was a poet. He would have been a better poet than
a novelist, and I believe that
[pg 110]
he thought so. The public did not care for his poetry. If he
had belonged to the no-compromise school, whose adherents
usually have the effrontery to claim him, he would have said:
"I shall keep on writing poetry, even if I have to become a
stockbroker in order to do it." But when he was only
thirty-three—a boy, as authors go—he had already
tired of no-compromise. He wrote to Augustus Jessopp: "It may
be that in a year or two I shall find time for a full sustained
Song.... The worst is that having taken to prose delineations
of character and life, one's affections are divided.... And in
truth, being a servant of the public,
I must wait till my master commands before I take seriously
to singing
." (Vol. I., p. 45.) Here is as good an example as one is
likely to find of a first-class artist openly admitting the
futility of writing what will not be immediately read, when he
can write something else, less to his taste, that will be read.
The same sentiment has actuated an immense number
[pg 111]
of first-class creative artists, including Shakspere, who would
have been a rare client for a literary agent.... So much for
refraining from doing the precise sort of work one would prefer
to do because it is not appreciated by the public.
There remains the doing of a sort of work against the grain
because the public appreciates it—otherwise the
pot-boiler. In 1861 Meredith wrote to Mrs Ross: "I am engaged
in extra potboiling work which enables me to do this," i.e., to
write an occasional long poem. (Vol. I., p. 52.) Oh, base
compromise! Seventeen years later he wrote to R.L. Stevenson:
"Of potboilers let none speak. Jove hangs them upon necks that
could soar above his heights but for the accursed weight."
(Vol. I., p. 291.) It may be said that Meredith was forced to
write potboilers. He was no more forced to write potboilers
than any other author. Sooner than wallow in that shame, he
might have earned money in more difficult ways. Or he might
have indulged in
[pg 112]
that starvation so heartily prescribed for authors by a
plutocratic noble who occasionally deigns to employ the English
tongue in prose. Meredith subdued his muse, and Meredith wrote
potboilers, because he was a first-class artist and a man of
profound common sense. Being extremely creative, he had to
arrive somehow, and he remembered that the earth is the earth,
and the world the world, and men men, and he arrived as best he
could. The great majority of his peers have acted
similarly.
The truth is that an artist who demands appreciation from
the public on his own terms, and on none but his own terms, is
either a god or a conceited and impractical fool. And he is
somewhat more likely to be the latter than the former. He wants
too much. There are two sides to every bargain, including the
artistic. The most fertile and the most powerful artists are
the readiest to recognise this, because their sense of
proportion, which is the sense of order, is well developed. The
[pg 113]
lack of the sense of proportion is the mark of the
petit maître
. The sagacious artist, while respecting himself, will respect
the idiosyncrasies of his public. To do both simultaneously is
quite possible. In particular, the sagacious artist will
respect basic national prejudices. For example, no first-class
English novelist or dramatist would dream of allowing to his
pen the freedom in treating sexual phenomena which Continental
writers enjoy as a matter of course. The British public is
admittedly wrong on this important point—hypocritical,
illogical and absurd. But what would you? You cannot defy it;
you literally cannot. If you tried, you would not even get as
far as print, to say nothing of library counters. You can only
get round it by ingenuity and guile. You can only go a very
little further than is quite safe. You can only do one man's
modest share in the education of the public.
In Valery Larbaud's latest novel,
A.O. Barnabooth,
occurs a phrase of deep
[pg 114]
wisdom about women: "
La femme est une grande realite, comme la guerre
." It might be applied to the public. The public is a great
actuality, like war. If you are a creative and creating artist,
you cannot ignore it, though it can ignore you. There it is!
You can do something with it, but not much. And what you do not
do with it, it must do with you, if there is to be the contact
which is essential to the artistic function. This contact may
be closened and completed by the artist's cleverness—the
mere cleverness of adaptability which most first-class artists
have exhibited. You can wear the fashions of the day. You can
tickle the ingenuous beast's ear in order to distract his
attention while you stab him in the chest. You can cajole money
out of him by one kind of work in order to gain leisure in
which to force him to accept later on something that he would
prefer to refuse. You can use a thousand devices on the
excellent simpleton.... And in the process you may degrade your
[pg 115]
self to a mere popularity-hunter! Of course you may; as you may
become a drunkard through drinking a glass of beer. Only, if
you have anything to say worth saying, you usually don't
succumb to this danger. If you have anything to say worth
saying, you usually manage somehow to get it said, and read.
The artist of genuine vocation is apt to be a wily person. He
knows how to sacrifice inessentials so that he may retain
essentials. And he can mysteriously put himself even into a
potboiler.
Clarissa Harlowe
, which influenced fiction throughout Europe, was the direct
result of potboiling. If the artist has not the wit and the
strength of mind to keep his own soul amid the collisions of
life, he is the inferior of a plain, honest merchant in
stamina, and ought to retire to the upper branches of the Civil
Service.
[pg 116]
III
When the author has finished the composition of a work, when
he has put into the trappings of the time as much of his
eternal self as they will safely hold, having regard to the
best welfare of his creative career as a whole, when, in short,
he has done all that he can to ensure the fullest public
appreciation of the essential in him—there still remains
to be accomplished something which is not unimportant in the
entire affair of obtaining contact with the public. He has to
see that the work is placed before the public as advantageously
as possible. In other words, he has to dispose of the work as
advantageously as possible. In other words, when he lays down
the pen he ought to become a merchant, for the mere reason that
he has an article to sell, and
[pg 117]
the more skilfully he sells it the better will be the result,
not only for the public appreciation of his message, but for
himself as a private individual and as an artist with further
activities in front of him.
Now this absolutely logical attitude of a merchant towards
one's finished work infuriates the dilettanti of the literary
world, to whom the very word "royalties" is anathema. They
apparently would prefer to treat literature as they imagine
Byron treated it, although as a fact no poet in a short life
ever contrived to make as many pounds sterling out of verse as
Byron made. Or perhaps they would like to return to the golden
days when the author had to be "patronised" in order to exist;
or even to the mid-nineteenth century, when practically all
authors save the most successful—and not a few of the
successful also—failed to obtain the fair reward of their
work. The dilettanti's snobbishness and sentimentality prevent
them from admitting
[pg 118]
that, in a democratic age, when an author is genuinely
appreciated, either he makes money or he is the foolish victim
of a scoundrel. They are fond of saying that agreements and
royalties have nothing to do with literature. But agreements
and royalties have a very great deal to do with literature.
Full contact between artist and public depends largely upon
publisher or manager being compelled to be efficient and just.
And upon the publisher's or manager's efficiency and justice
depend also the dignity, the leisure, the easy flow of coin,
the freedom, and the pride which are helpful to the full
fruition of any artist. No artist was ever assisted in his
career by the yoke, by servitude, by enforced monotony, by
overwork, by economic inferiority. See Meredith's
correspondence everywhere.
Nor can there be any satisfaction in doing badly that which
might be done well. If an artist writes a fine poem, shows it
to his dearest friend, and
[pg 119]
burns it—I can respect him. But if an artist writes a
fine poem, and then by sloppiness and snobbishness allows it to
be inefficiently published, and fails to secure his own
interests in the transaction, on the plea that he is an artist
and not a merchant, then I refuse to respect him. A man cannot
fulfil, and has no right to fulfil, one function only in this
complex world. Some, indeed many, of the greatest creative
artists have managed to be very good merchants also, and have
not been ashamed of the double
rôle
. To read the correspondence and memoirs of certain supreme
artists one might be excused for thinking, indeed, that they
were more interested in the
rôle
of merchant than in the other
rôle
; and yet their work in no wise suffered. In the distribution
of energy between the two
rôles
common sense is naturally needed. But the artist who has enough
common sense—or, otherwise expressed, enough sense of
reality—not to disdain the
rôle
of
[pg 120]
merchant will probably have enough not to exaggerate it. He may
be reassured on one point—namely, that success in the
rôle
of merchant will never impair any self-satisfaction he may feel
in the
rôle
of artist. The late discovery of a large public in America
delighted Meredith and had a tonic effect on his whole system.
It is often hinted, even if it is not often said, that great
popularity ought to disturb the conscience of the artist. I do
not believe it. If the conscience of the artist is not
disturbed during the actual work itself, no subsequent
phenomenon will or should disturb it. Once the artist is
convinced of his artistic honesty, no public can be too large
for his peace of mind. On the other hand, failure in the
rôle
of merchant will emphatically impair his self-satisfaction in
the
rôle
of artist and his courage in the further pursuance of that
rôle
.
But many artists have admittedly no aptitude for merchantry.
Not only is their sense of the bindingness of a bargain
[pg 121]
imperfect, but they are apt in business to behave in a puerile
manner, to close an arrangement out of mere impatience, to be
grossly undiplomatic, to be victimised by their vanity, to
believe what they ought not to believe, to discredit what is
patently true, to worry over negligible trifles, and generally
to make a clumsy mess of their affairs. An artist may say: "I
cannot work unless I have a free mind, and I cannot have a free
mind if I am to be bothered all the time by details of
business."
Apart from the fact that no artist who pretends also to be a
man can in this world hope for a free mind, and that if he
seeks it by neglecting his debtors he will be deprived of it by
his creditors—apart from that, the artist's demand for a
free mind is reasonable. Moreover, it is always a distressing
sight to see a man trying to do what nature has not fitted him
to do, and so doing it ill. Such artists, however—and
they form possibly the majority—can always employ an
[pg 122]
expert to do their business for them, to cope on their behalf
with the necessary middleman. Not that I deem the publisher or
the theatrical manager to be by nature less upright than any
other class of merchant. But the publisher and the theatrical
manager have been subjected for centuries to a special and
grave temptation. The ordinary merchant deals with other
merchants—his equals in business skill. The publisher and
the theatrical manager deal with what amounts to a race of
children, of whom even arch-angels could not refrain from
taking advantage.
When the democratisation of literature seriously set in, it
inevitably grew plain that the publisher and the theatrical
manager had very humanly been giving way to the temptation with
which heaven in her infinite wisdom had pleased to afflict
them,—and the Society of Authors came into being. A
natural consequence of the general awakening was the
self-invention of the literary agent. The
[pg 123]
Society of Authors, against immense obstacles, has performed
wonders in the economic education of the creative artist, and
therefore in the improvement of letters. The literary agent,
against obstacles still more immense, has carried out the
details of the revolution. The outcry—partly sentimental,
partly snobbish, but mainly interested—was at first
tremendous against these meddlers who would destroy the
charming personal relations that used to exist between, for
example, the author and the publisher. (The less said about
those charming personal relations the better. Documents exist.)
But the main battle is now over, and everyone concerned is
beautifully aware who holds the field. Though much remains to
be done, much has been done; and today the creative artist who,
conscious of inability to transact his own affairs efficiently,
does not obtain efficient advice and help therein, stands in
his own light both as an artist and as a man, and is a
[pg 124]
reactionary force. He owes the practice of elementary common
sense to himself, to his work, and to his profession at
large.
[pg 125]
IV
The same dilettante spirit which refuses to see the
connection between art and money has also a tendency to
repudiate the world of men at large, as being unfit for the
habitation of artists. This is a still more serious error of
attitude—especially in a storyteller. No artist is likely
to be entirely admirable who is not a man before he is an
artist. The notion that art is first and the rest of the
universe nowhere is bound to lead to preciosity and futility in
art. The artist who is too sensitive for contacts with the
non-artistic world is thereby too sensitive for his vocation,
and fit only to fall into gentle ecstasies over the work of
artists less sensitive than himself.
The classic modern example of the tragedy of the artist who
repudiates the world is Flaubert. At an early age
[pg 126]
Flaubert convinced himself that he had no use for the world of
men. He demanded to be left in solitude and tranquillity. The
morbid streak in his constitution grew rapidly under the
fostering influences of peace and tranquillity. He was
brilliantly peculiar as a schoolboy. As an old man of
twenty-two, mourning over the vanished brio of youth, he
carried morbidity to perfection. Only when he was travelling
(as, for example, in Egypt) do his letters lose for a time
their distemper. His love-letters are often ignobly inept, and
nearly always spoilt by the crass provincialism of the refined
and cultivated hermit. His mistress was a woman difficult to
handle and indeed a Tartar in egotism, but as the recipient of
Flaubert's love-letters she must win universal sympathy.
Full of a grievance against the whole modern planet,
Flaubert turned passionately to ancient times (in which he
would have been equally unhappy had he lived in them), and
hoped to resurrect beauty
[pg 127]
when he had failed to see it round about him. Whether or not he
did resurrect beauty is a point which the present age is now
deciding. His fictions of modern life undoubtedly suffer from
his detestation of the material; but considering his manner of
existence it is marvellous that he should have been able to
accomplish any of them, except
Un Coeur Simple
. The final one,
Bouvard et Pécuchet
, shows the lack of the sense of reality which must be the
inevitable sequel of divorce from mankind. It is realism
without conviction. No such characters as Bouvard and Pecuchet
could ever have existed outside Flaubert's brain, and the
reader's resultant impression is that the author has ruined a
central idea which was well suited for a grand larkish
extravaganza in the hands of a French Swift. But the spectacle
of Flaubert writing in
mots justes
a grand larkish extravaganza cannot be conjured up by
fancy.
There are many sub-Flauberts rife in London. They are
usually more critical
[pg 128]
than creative, but their influence upon creators, and
especially the younger creators, is not negligible. Their aim
in preciosity would seem to be to keep themselves unspotted
from the world. They are for ever being surprised and hurt by
the crudity and coarseness of human nature, and for ever
bracing themselves to be not as others are. They would have
incurred the anger of Dr. Johnson, and a just discipline for
them would be that they should be cross-examined by the great
bully in presence of a jury of butchers and sentenced
accordingly. The morbid Flaubertian shrinking from reality is
to be found to-day even in relatively robust minds. I was
recently at a provincial cinema, and witnessed on the screen
with a friend a wondrously ingenuous drama entitled "Gold is
not All." My friend, who combines the callings of engineer and
general adventurer with that of serving his country, leaned
over to me in the darkness amid the violent applause, and said:
"You know, this
[pg 129]
kind of thing always makes me ashamed of human nature." I
answered him as Johnsonially as the circumstances would allow.
Had he lived to the age of fifty so blind that it needed a
cinema audience to show him what the general level of human
nature really is? Nobody has any right to be ashamed of human
nature. Is one ashamed of one's mother? Is one ashamed of the
cosmic process of evolution? Human nature
is
. And the more deeply the creative artist, by frank contacts,
absorbs that supreme fact into his brain, the better for his
work.
There is a numerous band of persons in London—and the
novelist and dramatist are not infrequently drawn into their
circle—who spend so much time and emotion in practising
the rites of the religion of art that they become incapable of
real existence. Each is a Stylites on a pillar. Their opinion
on Leon Bakst, Francis Thompson, Augustus John, Cyril Scott,
Maurice Ravel, Vuillard, James
[pg 130]
Stephens, E.A. Rickards, Richard Strauss, Eugen d'Albert, etc.,
may not be without value, and their genuine feverish morbid
interest in art has its usefulness; but they know no more about
reality than a Pekinese dog on a cushion. They never approach
normal life. They scorn it. They have a horror of it. They
class politics with the differential calculus. They have heard
of Lloyd George, the rise in the price of commodities, and the
eternal enigma, what is a sardine; but only because they must
open a newspaper to look at the advertisements and
announcements relating to the arts. The occasional frequenting
of this circle may not be disadvantageous to the creative
artist. But let him keep himself inoculated against its disease
by constant steady plunges into the cold sea of the general
national life. Let him mingle with the public, for God's sake!
No phenomenon on this wretched planet, which after all is ours,
is meet for the artist's shrinking scorn. And the average man,
as to
[pg 131]
whom the artist's ignorance is often astounding, must for ever
constitute the main part of the material in which he works.
Above all, let not the creative artist suppose that the
antidote to the circle of dilettantism is the circle of social
reform. It is not. I referred in the first chapter to the
prevalent illusion that the republic has just now arrived at a
crisis, and that if something is not immediately done disaster
will soon be upon us. This is the illusion to which the circle
of social reforms is naturally prone, and it is an illusion
against which the common sense of the creative artist must
mightily protest. The world is, without doubt, a very bad
world; but it is also a very good world. The function of the
artist is certainly concerned more with what is than with what
ought to be. When all necessary reform has been accomplished
our perfected planet will be stone-cold. Until then the
artist's affair is to keep his balance amid warring points of
view,
[pg 132]
and in the main to record and enjoy what is.... But is not the
Minimum Wage Bill urgent? But when the minimum wage is as trite
as the jury-system, the urgency of reform will still be
tempting the artist too far out of his true path. And the
artist who yields is lost.
