An Introduction To The English Novel

AN INTRODUCTION

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Introduction to
THE ENGLISH NOVEL

Kettle

VO L U M E TWO
HENRY JAMES TO THE PRESENT

HARPER TORCHBOOKS / The Academy Library

HARPER & ROW, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK AND EVANSTON

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL
Vol. II : Henry James to the Present

Printed in the United States of America

This book was first published in 1951 in the English

Literature division, edited by Basil Willey, of the

Hutchinson University Library. It is reprinted by

arrangement with Hutchinson & Company Limited., London.

First HARPER TORGHBOOK edition published 1960

CONTENTS

Preface 7

PART I: THE LAST VICTORIANS

I Introduction 9

H Henry James : The Portrait of a Lady 13

m Samuel Butler : The Way of All Flesh 35

iv Thomas Hardy : Tess of the D'Urbervilles 49

PART II: THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
THE FIRST QUARTER

I Introduction 63

ii Joseph Conrad : Nostromo 67

in Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Woolf 82

Arnold Bennett : The Old Wives' Tale 85

H. G. Wells : Tono Bungay 89

John Galsworthy: The Man of Property 95

Virginia Woolf : To the Lighthouse 100

IV D. H. Lawrence : The Rainbow 111

v James Joyce : Ulysses 135

vi E, M. Forster : A Passage to India 152

PART III: THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
THE SECOND QUARTER

I Introduction 165

n Aldous Huxley : Point Counter Point 167

in Graham Greene : The Heart of the Matter 170

6 CONTENTS

iv Joyce Gary : Mister Johnson 177

v I. Compton-Burnett : A Family and a Fortune 184

vi Henry Green : Party Going 190

Notes and References 198

Reading List 202

Index 205

PREFACE

As in the first volume of this little work, I have eschewed
comprehensiveness in favour of concentration on a few specific
books. My object has been to build a discussion of the develop
ment of the modern English novel around the study of a dozen
or so novels which have, in their different ways, a more than
casual significance. One of the problems of the student of the
novel, whether he is the individual 'reader for pleasure' or the
member of some kind of educational group, is that novels are
often rather long and the discussion of them vaguer than it
need be. By concentrating on a few books I have hoped to
provide a manageable syllabus for, say, a year or so's reading.
Books of criticism which are not read in conjunction with the
work they are discussing nearly always do more harm than
good.

In venturing to write about contemporary and near-
contemporary literature one is obviously laying oneself open to
all kinds of difficulties. I make no claim whatever to have given
each of the novels I have discussed its correct proportion of
space or its ultimate evaluation, though naturally I have tried
to concentrate on what seems to me most worth while. I have
no doubt at all that I have missed out completely a number
of books and writers more worthy of consideration than some
I have touched on. Nor do I doubt that some of my judgements
will look silly even to myself should I live another forty years.

I should like once again to thank the friends who in advice
and conversation have given me help, and to express my
gratitude to the following individuals and publishing houses
for their permission to make numerous quotations :

John Farquharson, on behalf of the estate of the late Henry
James (for passages from The Portrait of a Lady); Messrs.
Macmillan & Co. (Tess of the D'Urbervilles); The Hogarth

8 PREFACE

Press, Ltd. (quotations from Virginia Woolf's works and
Party Going); Mrs. Frieda Lawrence; Messrs. Edward Arnold
& Co. (A Passage to India); Mr. Graham Greene; Miss Ivy
Compton-Bumett and Messrs. Eyre & Spottiswoode (A Family
and a Fortune); Mr. Joyce Gary and Messrs. Michael Joseph
(Mister Johnson); and Mr. Henry Green.

A. K.

PART I
THE LAST VICTORIANS

I. INTRODUCTION

THE end of one epoch is the beginning of another. The three
novels with the examination of which this volume opens do
not look backwards. Each of these writers Henry James,
Butler, Hardy is very much of his time ; but if one calls them
the last Victorians it is not to indicate a mere obstinate clinging
to a passing world. There is more than a whiff of the future in
their work.

The late Victorian period marks the beginning of the dis
integration of the epoch ushered in a century before by the
Industrial Revolution, the epoch in which Britain became the
workshop and the banker of the world. After about 1870 the
apparently secure foundations of the world of the London and
Manchester business men began to be shaken. It was not
until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 that the full
horror became clear, but by then for nearly half a century the
process of disintegration had been going on. The late Victorian
period may still seem to us superficially, as we look back on it,
an era of stability, of the respectable elderly queen, of stuffy
clothes and heavy architecture, of comfortable middle-class
incomes from the Stock Exchange, of the English Sunday and
the gradual extension of the franchise and of free education.
But it was also an era of desperation of a hectic and bloody
imperial race against new upstart competitors, of the first
modern economic slump, of the rise of the Labour movement
as we know it, of the dock strike and Bloody Sunday, of the
impact of Darwin and T. H. Huxley, of William Morris and

10 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

Bernard Shaw (to say nothing of Ibsen and Tolstoy and Marx),
of the aesthetes and the Yellow Book, of Charles Bradlaugh
and Beatrice Webb.

In Samuel Butler and Thomas Hardy It Is quite clearly the
latter aspect of the age the opposite of stability that we find
most strikingly expressed. They are, even to a casual glance,
novelists of the disintegration, rebels and^ critics, crying out
(sometimes, It seems to the sophisticated middle-class reader, a
bit too shrilly) against the sanctities and ethics of the Victorian
bourgeois world. Butler Is very much a part of that world and
this fact, as we shall see, has Its effect on his writing. Hardy,
the countryman, soaked In the older, pre-capitalist culture^ of
peasant Wessex, Is less involved In the values he Is attacking
and achieves in his two final novels, Tess and Jude, tragedy
which f or all the limitations we shall have to examine bitterly
and poignantly captures a central truth of the era in which he
lived.

Henry James is perhaps less obviously a novelist of the
disintegration. The social aura that surrounds both the man
and his work is that of the well-to-do Victorian middle class,
leisured, well-fed, moving securely If not always elegantly
through a scene cluttered up with bric-a-brac and objets d'art.
But to see James merely as the rather snobbish sharer in such
a world is to emphasize what is least important in a great
novelist. James, it is true, was a bourgeois writer, the bourgeois
novelist, one might say, at his most exquisite, most refined
point. But his work, like that of Balzac with whom he has
more in common than a hasty estimate might allow subtly
transcends in much of its effect the ideas and the values which
appear to infect it at its roots. There is, as we shall see, some
thing wrong at the very heart of James the novelist. Yet this
does not permit us to undervalue him. No novelist has explored
with quite so fine, nor quite so disciplined an art the ramifica
tions of the complex consciousness of latter-day bourgeois man.
To read James uncritically or exclusively is, of course, fatal;
but to read him with the kind of insight he deserves is to
penetrate deep into the spiritual situation involved in the
disintegration of the bourgeois world.

That James himself was at an obscure and impressive

THE LAST VICTORIANS II

level of experience aware of this disintegration is revealed
by implication in the remarkable novel The Princess Casamas-
sima and then clearly as in a flash in the letter he wrote* at
that most symbolic of moments the outbreak of the First
World War. In the last two years of his life he drew back from
the exploration of this vision; but that he had had a glimpse of
it is a measure of the quality of his perception.

These novelists of the late Victorian age are not technically,
any more than socially, revolutionaries ; but each of them had
something new to say and therefore had to discover new
means of expression, new ways of modifying or transforming
existing techniques to meet new needs. With Butler and
Hardy technical preoccupation is on a far lower level than with
James. They are content, essentially, to stretch old forms a
little in order to receive a new content. Butler, typically, looks
back to the eighteenth century; he gets rid of the Dickensian
plot along with the Dickensian poetry and other 'literary
garbage.' His analytical method, his consistent object of
debunking humbug and pretension, together with his rather
limited positive sense of human development, lead him to
employ for his novel what is fundamentally the technique of
Joseph Andrews or Vanity Fair, though his range is narrower,
his control a good deal tighter and his view of life more incisive
than is the case with either Fielding or Thackeray.

Hardy, for his part, uses and only slightly modifies the
conventional nineteenth-century novel structure. His work is
in the tradition of the English moral fable of Hard Times and
North and South and Silas Marner.

James is, in a far more striking degree, an innovator. His
aim, as we shall see, is the exploration in terms more subtle
than any before attempted of the furthest reaches of the refined
consciousness. Hence his immense interest in presentation, his
peculiar development of prose style (the inability in his last
novels ever to resist that last, even more finely modulated,
qualification) and also his link with the immediate future
development of the novel.

It is James rather than Butler and Hardy for all their
self-conscious modernity of theme and outlook who is the

* Quoted Vol. I, p. 89.

12 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

principal signpost towards what we have come to think of as
the characteristically 'modern* experiments of the early twen
tieth-century novel, towards different as they are Proust
and Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Whether we are to regard this
historical position as a strengthening of James's claims to
greatness will depend, of course, on whether we finally assess
the trend of which his work is a part as a healthy and hopeful
one or rather as a dead end, a withered branch,* of the main
developing tradition of English fiction. It is one of the purposes
of this little book to discuss this very question.

See D. S. Savage: The Withered Branch, Six Studies in the Modern
Novel (1950).

II. HENRY JAMES: THE PORTRAIT

OF A LADY (1880-81)

COMPARED with this the English novels which precede it,
except perhaps those of Jane Austen, all seem a trifle crude.
There is a habit of perfection here, a certainty and a poise, which
is quite different from the merits and power of Oliver Twist or
Wuthenng Heights or even Middlemarch. The quality has
something to do with the full consciousness of Henry James's
art. Nothing in The Portrait of a Lady is unconscious, nothing
there by chance, no ungathered wayward strands, no clumsi
ness. No novelist is so absorbed as James in what he himself
might call his 'game. 5 But it is not an empty or superficial
concern with 'form* that gives The Portrait of a Lady its
quality. James's manner, his obsession with style, his intricate
and passionate concern with presentation, do not spring from
a narrow 'aesthetic' attitude to his art.

"James had in his style and perhaps in the life which it reflected
an idiosyncrasy so powerful, so overweening, that to many it seemed
a stultifying vice, or at least an inexcusable heresy. ... He enjoyed
an excess of intelligence and he suffered, both in life and art, from
an excessive effort to communicate it, to represent it in all its
fullness. His style grew elaborate in the degree that he rendered
shades and refinements of meaning and feeling not usually rendered
at all. ... His intention and all his labour was to represent dramati
cally intelligence at its most difficult, its most lucid, its most beautiful
point. This is the sum of his idiosyncrasy/' 1

The Portrait of a Lady is not one of James's 'difficult*
novels; but Mr. Blackmur's remarks usefully remind us of
the inadequacy of a merely formal approach to James's work.
The extraordinary richness of texture of his novels makes
such an approach tempting; but it will take us neither to
James's triumphs nor to his failures.

13

14 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

The beauty of texture derives immediately from two
qualities, which are ultimately inseparable. One Is James's
ability to make us know his characters more richly, though
not necessarily more vividly, than we know the characters
of other novelists ; the other is the subtlety of his own stand
point. Without the latter quality the former would not, of
course, be possible. You cannot control the responses of your
reader unless you are in complete control of your material.

In The Portrait of a Lady there are looking at the question
from an analytical point of view two kinds of characters:
those whom we know from straightforward, though not un-
subtle, description by the author and those who reveal them
selves in the course of the book. The latter are, obviously, the
important ones. The former Mrs. Touchett, Henrietta
Stackpole, the Countess Gemini, Pansy Osmond are interest-
Ing primarily in their relationship to the chief characters, In
their part in the pattern ; we do not follow their existence out
of their function In the book. But they are nevertheless not
"flat 5 characters. They come alive not as 'characters, 5 not as
personified 'humours,' but as complete people (Pansy, perhaps,
is the exception, but then is not the Intention that we should
see her as scarcely an independent being at all?) and if we do
not follow them out of the part of the plot which concerns
them it is because our interests are more involved elsewhere,
not because they do not have a full existence of their own.

The way Henry James introduces his characters to us
depends entirely on the kind of function they are to have In
his story. The main characters are never described as they are
(i.e. as the author knows them to be) but by and large as
Isabel Archer sees them. We know them at first only by the
first Impression that they make. We get to know better what
they are like in the way that, in life, we get to know people better
through acquaintance. And just as in life we are seldom, If
ever, quite certain what another person Is like, so in a Henry
James novel we are often pretty much at sea about particular
characters for considerable portions of the book. In The Portrait
of a Lady the person whom at first we inevitably know least about
is Madame Merle. Henry James lets us know right from the
start that there Is something sinister about her; we are made

THE LAST VICTOHIANS 15

quickly to feel that Isabel's reaction to her is less than adequate,
but the precise nature of her character is not revealed until
fairly far into the book.

It is not quite true to say that everything in The Portrait of
a Lady is revealed through Isabel's consciousness. We know,
from the start, certain things that Isabel does not know. We
know, for instance and twice Henry James explicitly reminds
us of it more about Ralph Touchett's feeling for Isabel than
she herself perceives.

Indeed, there is a sense in which the novel is revealed to us
through Ralph's consciousness, for his is the 'finest,' the fullest
intelligence in the book and therefore he sees things about
Madame Merle, about Osmond, about Isabel herself which
Isabel does not see and inevitably such perceptions are trans
mitted to the reader. Again, we are offered important scenes
between Madame Merle and Osmond, between the Countess
and Madame Merle which reveal to us not the whole truth
but enough of the truth about Madame Merle's stratagems to
put us at an advantage over Isabel.

The truth is that Henry James's purpose in this novel is
not to put Isabel between the reader and the situation (in the
way that Strether's consciousness is used in The Ambassadors)
but to reveal to the reader the full implications of Isabel's
consciousness. For this to happen we must see Isabel not
merely from the inside (i.e. know how she feels) but from the
outside too. The method is, in fact, precisely the method of
Emma, except that Jane Austen is rather more scrupulously
consistent than Henry James. The scenes 'outside' Emma
herself (like Jane Fairfax's visits to the post office) are brought
to our knowledge by being related by a third party in the
presence of Emma herself. Our only 'advantage' over Emma
herself is provided by the words which Jane Austen uses to
describe her. Henry James, as we have seen, takes greater
liberties. Yet it Is worth observing that the great scene at the
centre of The Portrait of a Lady (Chapter XIII), in which
Isabel takes stock of her situation, Is of precisely the same kind
as the scene in which (Vol. I, Chapter XVI) Emma takes
stock of her dealings with Harriet.

Since James's purpose is to render the full implications of

16 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

Isabel's situation it is necessary that we should know more
than Isabel, should see her, that is to say, from the outside.
The question remains: how much more should we know?
And James's answer is: just as much as is necessary for a fully
sympathetic understanding. Thus we are to know that Madame
Merle has drawn Isabel into a trap, but we are not to know
why. The full story is kept back, not because Henry James is
interested in suspense in the melodramatic sense, but because
if we were in on the secret the nature of Isabel's discovery
of her situation could not be so effectively revealed. It is
necessary to the novel that we should share Isabel's suspicions
and her awakening. In order to give the precise weight (not
just the logical weight but the intricate weight of feelings,
standards, loyalties) to the issues involved in her final dilemma
we must know not just what has happened to Isabel but the
way it has happened.

It is from such a consideration that there will emerge
one of Henry James's cardinal contributions to the art of the
novel. With James the question "What happened?" carries the
most subtle, the most exciting ramifications. To no previous
novelist had the answer to such a question seemed so difficult,
its implications so interminable. To a George Eliot the question
is complicated enough: to understand what happened to
Lydgate we must be made aware of innumerable issues, facets
of character, moral choices, social pressures. And yet deep in
George Eliot's novel is implicit the idea that if the reader
only knows enough facts about the situation he will know the
situation. It is the aim of Henry James to avoid the 'about' or,
at least, to alter its status, to transform quantity into quality.
His is the poet's ambition: to create an object about which we
say not "It means. . . ." but "It is. . . ." (In this he is with
Emily Bronte.) We cannot understand Isabel Archer, he implies,
unless we feel as she feels. And it is, indeed, because he succeeds
in this attempt that The Portrait of a Lady though not a greater
novel than Middlemarch is a more moving one.

As a rule when Henry James describes a character (as
opposed to allowing the person to be revealed in action) the
description is of the kind we have noticed in Emma or Middle-
m&rch.

THE LAST VICTORIANS 17

"Mrs. Touchett was certainly a person of many oddities, of
which her behaviour on returning to her husband's house after
many months was a noticeable specimen. She had her own way
of doing all that she did, and this is the simplest description of a
character which, although by no means without liberal motions,
rarely succeeded in giving an impression of suavity. Mrs. Touchett
might do a great deal of good, but she never pleased. This way of
her own, of which she was so fond, was not intrinsically offensive
it was just unmistakeably distinguished from the way of others.
The edges of her conduct were so very clear-cut that for susceptible
persons it sometimes had a knife-like effect. That hard fineness
came out in her deportment during the first hours of her return
from America, under circumstances in which it might have seemed
that her first act would have been to exchange greetings with her
husband and son. Mrs. Touchett, for reasons which she deemed
excellent, always retired on such occasions into impenetrable seclu
sion, postponing the more sentimental ceremony until she had
repaired the disorder of dress with a completeness which. had the
less reason to be of high importance as neither beauty nor vanity
were concerned in it. She was a plain-faced old woman, without
graces and without any great elegance, but with an extreme respect
for her own motives. She was usually prepared to explain these
when the explanation was asked as a favour; and in such a case
they proved totally different from those that had been attributed to
her. She was virtually separated from her husband, but she appeared
to perceive nothing irregular in the situation. It had become clear,
at an early stage of their community, that they should never desire
the same thing at the same moment, and this appearance had
prompted her to rescue disagreement from the vulgar realm of
accident. She did what she could to erect it into a law a much
more edifying aspect of it by going to live in Florence, where she
bought a house and established herself; and by leaving her husband
to take care of the English branch of his bank. This arrangement
greatly pleased her; it was so felicitously definite. It struck her
husband in the same light, in a foggy square in London, where it
was at times the most definite face he discerned; but he would have
preferred that such unnatural things should have a greater vague
ness. To agree to disagree had cost him an effort; he was ready to
agree to almost anything but that, and saw no reason why either
assent or dissent should be so terribly consistent.

Mrs. Touchett indulged in no regrets nor speculations, and
usually came once a year to spend a month with her husband, a
period during which she apparently took pains to convince him that

18 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

she had adopted the right system. She was not fond of the English
style of life, and had three or four reasons for it to which she cur
rently alluded ; they bore upon minor points of that ancient order,
but for Mrs. Touchett they amply justified non-residence. She
detested bread-sauce, which, as she said, looked like a poultice
and tasted like soap; she objected to the consumption of beer by
her maid-servants; and she affirmed that the British laundress
(Mrs. Touchett was very particular about the appearance of her
linen) was not a mistress of her art." 2

Here the description depends for its effect entirely on the
quality of the author's wit, his organized intellectual comment,
and the wit is of the sort (a penetrating delicacy of observation
within an accepted social group) achieved by Jane Austen or
George Eliot.

But some of the described characters in The Portrait of a
Lady come poetically to life. This is the description of Isabel's
first meeting with the Countess Gemini.

"The Countess Gemini simply nodded without getting up;
Isabel could see she was a woman of high fashion. She was thin
and dark and not at all pretty, having features that suggested some

tropical bird a long beak-like nose, small, quickly-moving eyes
and a mouth and chin that receded extremely. Her expression,
however, thanks to various intensities of emphasis and wonder, of
horror and joy, was not inhuman, and, as regards her appearance, it
was plain she understood herself and made the most of her points.
Her attire, voluminous and delicate, bristling with elegance, had the
look of shimmering plumage, and her attitudes were as light and
sudden as those of a creature who perched upon twigs. She had
a great deal of manner; Isabel, who had never known anyone with
so much manner, immediately classed her as the most affected of
women. She remembered that Ralph had not recommended her as
an acquaintance; but she was ready to acknowledge that to a casual
view the Countess Gemini revealed no depths. Her demonstrations
suggested the violent wavings of some flag of general truce white
silk with fluttering streamers." 3

We are never to get to know the Countess very well, but
already we see her with a peculiar vividness, the vividness
evoked by poetic imagery. The bird image has a visual force
so intense that it goes beyond surface illumination "bristling

THE LAST VICTORIANS 19

with elegance" In its context contains a world of comment
as well as vividness. So does the image of the flag of truce.

Henry James's predominant interest is, however, by no
means in character. The Portrait of a Lady, he tells us in his
Preface, has as its corner-stone "the conception of a certain
young woman affronting her destiny/' The interest, it is
already indicated, is not primarily a psychological one, not a
matter of mere personal analysis. And The Portrait of a Lady
is indeed a novel of the widest scope and relevance. Though it is
in the line of Jane Austen it has a quality which it is not mis
leading to call symbolic (already we have hinted at a link with
what would appear at first to be a wholly different novel,
Wuthering Heights). The Portrait of a Lady is a novel about
destiny. Or, to use a concept rather more in tone with the
language of the book itself, it is a novel about freedom. It
would not be outrageous, though it might be misleading, to
call it a nineteenth-century Paradise Lost.

Henry James is, of course, far too sophisticated an artist
to offer us the Subject' of his book on a platter. In his moral
interest he avoids like the plague anything approaching the
abstract.

"I might envy," he writes in his Preface, "though I couldn't
emulate, the imaginative writer so constituted as to see his fable
first and to make out its agents afterwards: I could think so little
of any fable that didn't need its agents positively to launch it; I
could think so little of any situation that didn't depend for its
interest on the nature of the persons situated, and thereby on their
way of taking it."

And again, a little later:

"There is, I think, no more nutritive or suggestive truth in this
connexion than that of the perfect dependence of the 'moral* sense
of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in producing
it."*

* I quote with some uneasiness from James's Preface (written, it will be
recalled, some quarter of a century after the novel), not because I doubt
the relevance or interest of his observations but because I am conscious of
the difficulty of assimilating out of context sentences written in his most
idiosyncratic, complex style.

20 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

James's novel Is not a moral fable ; but its moral Interest Is
nevertheless central. Only the business of "launching," of
presenting with all the necessary depth of "felt life/' that
"ado" which is the story of Isabel Archer, all this may easily
distract our attention from the central theme. Indeed there
was a time when James's novels apparently were regarded
as "comedies of manners" (cf. Trollope) and even so superbly
intelligent a reader as E. M. Forster seems to have missed
the point of them almost completely.

The launching of The Portrait of a Lady is beautifully done.
Gardencourt, the house in Albany, upper-class London: they
are called up with magnificent certainty and solidity. So too
are the people of the book: the Touchetts, Caspar Goodwood,
Henrietta Stackpole, Lord Warburton, Isabel herself. If these
characters are to contribute to a central pattern it will not be,
it is clear, in the manner of anything approaching allegory,
They are all too 'round/ too 'free' to be felt, for even a moment,
simply to be 'standing for' anything. It is one of Henry James's
achievements that he can convince us that his characters have
a life outside the pages of his novel without ever leading us
into the temptation of following them beyond his purpose.
It is because everything in these early chapters of The Portrait
of a Lady is realized with such fullness, such apparent lack of
pointed emphasis, that we are slow to recognize the basic
pattern of the novel, but it is also on this account that our
imagination is so firmly engaged.

Before the end of the first chapter, however, a subsidiary
theme has already been fairly fully stated and three of the
main themes announced or, at any rate, indicated. The sub
sidiary theme is that generally referred to in Henry James's
novels as the international situation the relation of America
to Europe. Graham Greene in a recent introduction to The
Portrait of a Lady has tried to play down the importance of
this theme. "It is true the innocent figure is nearly always
American (Roderick Hudson, Newman, Isabel and Milly,
Maggie Verver and her father), but the corrupted characters
... are also American: Mme. Merle, Gilbert Osmond, Kate
Croy, Merton Densher, Charlotte Stant. His characters are
mainly American, simply because James himself was Ameri-

THE LAST VICTORIANS 21

can/' 4 In fact, of course, neither Kate Croy nor Densher is an
American and one of the points about the other "corrupted 55
characters is that they are ail expatriates, europeanized Ameri
cans, whom It Is at least possible to see as corrupted by Europe.*
The theme of the impact of European civilization on Americans
innocent or not is not a main theme of The Portrait of a
Lady but it is nevertheless there and we shall return to it
later. And it is broached In the very first pages of the novel In
the description of the Touchett manage and in such details as
the failure of Mr. Touchett to understand (or rather, his
pretence at not understanding) Lord Warburton's jokes.

The main themes indicated In the first chapters are the
Importance of wealth, the difficulty of marriage and funda
mental to the other two the problem of freedom or indepen
dence. In each case the theme appears to be merely a casual
subject of conversation but in fact there is nothing casual
there. The vital theme of freedom Is introduced in the form of a
joke one of Mrs. Touchett's eccentric telegrams: " 'Changed
hotel, very bad, impudent clerk, address here. Taken sister's
girl, died last year, go to Europe, two sisters, quite indepen
dent 5 ." The telegram is discussed by Mr. Touchett and Ralph.

" 'There's one thing very clear in it/ said the old man; 'she has
given the hotel-clerk a dressing. 5

'I'm not sure even of that, since he has driven her from the
field. We thought at first that the sister mentioned might be the
sister of the clerk; but the subsequent mention of a niece seems to
prove that the allusion is to one of my aunts. Then there was a
question as to whose the two other sisters were; they are probably
two of my late aunt's daughters. But who's "quite independent/ 5
and in what sense is the term used? that point's not yet settled.
Does the expression apply more particularly to the young lady my
mother has adopted, or does It characterize her sisters equally?
and is it used in a moral or in a financial sense? Does it mean that
they've been left well off, or that they wish to be under no obligations?
or does it simply mean that they're fond of their own way?' " 5

Ralph's frivolous speculations do in fact state the basic prob
lems to be dealt with in the novel. The point is Indeed not yet

* For a fuller discussion of this problem see Henry James, the Major
Phase by F. O. Matthiessen and Maule's Curse by Yvor Winters.

22 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

settled: it will take the whole book to settle It. And, even
then, 'settle 5 Is not the right word. One does not, Henry James
would be quick to remind us, settle life.

The independence of Isabel is the quality about her most
often emphasized. Mrs. Touchett has taken her up, but she
is not, she assures Ralph "a candidate for adoption." " Tm
very fond of my liberty V' 6 she adds. From the very
first the ambiguous quality of this Independence is stressed.
Isabel is attractive, interesting, 'fine' ("she carried within
her a great fund of life, and her deepest enjoyment was to
feel the continuity between the movements of her own soul
and the agitations of the world" 7 ); but she is also in many
respects inexperienced, naive. " 'It occurred to me/ Mrs.
Touchett says, 'that it would be a kindness to take her about
and Introduce her to the world. She thinks she knows a great
deal of it like most American girls ; but like most American
girls she's ridiculously mistaken'." 8 Henry James does not
allow us, charming creature as she is, to idealize Isabel:

"Altogether, with her meagre knowledge, her inflated ideals, her
confidence at once innocent and dogmatic, her temper at once
exacting and Indulgent, her mixture of curiosity and fastidiousness,
of vivacity and indifference, her desire to look very well and to be
if possible even better, her determination to see, to try, to know, her
combination of the delicate desultory flame-like spirit and the eager
and personal creature of conditions: she would be an easy victim
of scientific criticism: if she were not intended to awaken on the
reader's part an Impulse more tender and more purely
expectant." 9

The Portrait of a Lady is the revelation of the inadequacy of
Isabel's view of freedom.

The revelation is so full, so concrete, that to abstract from
it the main, insistent theme must inevitably weaken the
impression of the book. But analysis involves such abstraction
and we shall not respond fully to James's novel unless we are
conscious of its theme. The theme in its earlier stages is fully
expressed in the scene in which Caspar Goodwood for the
second time asks Isabel to marry him (she has just refused
Lord Warburton).

THE LAST VICTORIANS 23

" I don't know/ she answered rather grandly. The world
with all these places so arranged and so touching each other comes
to strike one as rather small.'

'It's a sight too big forme!' Caspar exclaimed with a simplicity
our young lady might have found touching if her face had not been
set against concessions.

This attitude was part of a system, a theory, that she had
lately embraced, and to be thorough she said after a moment:
'Don't think me unkind if I say it's just that being out of your
sight that I like. If you were in the same place I should feel you
were watching me, and I don't like that I like my liberty too much.
If there's a thing in the world I'm fond of/ she went on with a
slight recurrence of grandeur, 'it's my personal independence.'
But whatever there might be of the too superior in this speech
moved Caspar Goodwood's admiration; there was nothing he winced
at in the large air of it. He had never supposed she hadn't wings
and the need of beautiful free movements he wasn't, with his own
long arms and strides, afraid of any force in her. Isabel's words, if
they had been meant to shock him, failed of the mark and only made
him smile with the sense that here was common ground. 'Who
would wish less to curtail your liberty than I? What can give me
greater pleasure than to see you perfectly independent doing
whatever you like? It's to make you independent that I want to
marry you.'

That's a beautiful sophism/ said the girl with a smile more
beautiful still.

'An unmarried woman a girl of your age isn't independent.
There are all sorts of things she can't do. She's hampered at every
step/

That's as she looks at the question/ Isabel answered with
much spirit. 'I'm not in my first youth I can do what I choose
I belong quite to the independent class. I've neither father nor
mother; I'm poor and of a serious disposition; I'm not pretty. I
therefore am not bound to be timid and conventional; indeed I
can't afford such luxuries. Besides, I try to judge things for myself;
to judge wrong, I think, is more honourable than not to judge at all.
I don't wish to be a mere sheep in the flock ; I wish to choose my fate
and know something of human affairs beyond what other people
think it compatible with propriety to tell me/ She paused a moment,
but not long enough for her companion to reply. He was apparently
on the point of doing so when she went on: 'Let me say this to you,
Mr. Goodwood. You're so kind as to speak of being afraid of my
marrying. If you should hear a rumour that I'm on the point of

24 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

doing so girls are liable to have such things said about them
remember what I have told you about my love of liberty and venture
to doubt it'." 10

The Portrait of a Lady is far from allegory yet one is
permitted to feel, in the symbolic quality of the novel, that the
characters, though unmistakably individuals, are more than
individuals. Thus, in her rejection of Caspar Goodwood, Isabel
is rejecting America, or at least that part of America that Good
wood represents, young, strong, go-ahead, uninhibited, hard.
For Goodwood (as for Henrietta, who essentially shares his
quality) the problem of freedom is simple and might be
expressed in the words of Mr. Archibald Macleish's American
Dream:

"America is promises
For those that take them."

Goodwood and it would be wrong to see him as a wholly
unsympathetic character is prepared to take them with all
that taking implies. To him and Henrietta (and they are, on
one level, the most sensible, positive people in the book)
Isabel's problem is not a problem at all. Freedom for them has
the simple quality it possessed for the nineteenth-century
liberal.

The rejection of Lord Warburton has, similarly, a symbolic
quality though, again, one must insist that this is not an
allegory. Warburton is a liberal aristocrat. He embodies the
aristocratic culture of Europe (that has so attracted Isabel at
Gardencourt) and adds his own reforming ideas a combina
tion which Henry James, had he been the kind of aesthetic
snob he is often held to be, might have found irresistible.
Ralph Touchett sums up Warburton's social position magni
ficently:

" *. . . He says I don't understand my time, I understand it
certainly better than he, who can neither abolish himself as a
nuisance nor maintain himself as an institution'.** 11

Isabel's rejection of Lord Warburton is not a light one. She
feels very deeply the attraction of the aristocratic standards.

THE LAST VICTORIANS 25

But she feels also the limitations of Warbuiton and his sisters,
the Misses Molyneux (it is worth comparing them with another
'county* family the Marchants in the wonderful Princess
Casamassima; Henry James's attitude to the British aristocracy
is by no means uncritical).

" . . . So long as I look at the Misses Molyneux they seem to
me to answer a kind of ideal. Then Henrietta presents herself, and
I'm straightway convinced by her; not so much in respect to herself
as in respect to what masses behind her'." 12

Ralph, too, (though he does not undervalue her) disposes of
Henrietta:

" 'Henrietta . . . does smell of the Future it almost knocks
one down!' " 1S

Goodwood and Warburton rejected (almost like two temp
tations), Isabel is now 'free' to affront her destiny. But she is not
free because she is poor. She has never, we are told early on,
known anything about money, and it is typical of this novel
that this fine, romantic indifference to wealth should be one
of the basic factors in Isabel's tragedy.

Henry James's characters always have to be rich and the
reason is not the obvious one. "I call people rich," says Ralph
Touchett, "when they're able to meet the requirements of their
imagination." 14 It is for this reason that he persuades his
father to leave Isabel a fortune. She must be rich in order to
be free of the material world. She must be free in order to
'live.'

It is Ralph's one supreme mistake in intelligence and it is
the mistake that ruins Isabel. For it is her wealth that arouses
Madame Merle's realization that she can use her and leads
directly to the disastrous, tragic marriage with Osmond. And
in the superb scene in which, sitting in the candlelight in the
elegant, spiritually empty house in Rome, Isabel takes stock of
her tragedy, she painfully reveals to herself the conclusion:

"But for her money, as she saw today, she would never have
done it. And then her mind wandered off to poor Mr. Touchett,

26 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

sleeping under English turf, the beneficient author of infinite woe!
For this was the fantastic fact. At bottom her money had been a
burden, had been on her mind, which was filled with the desire
to transfer the weight of it to some other conscience, to some more
prepared receptacle. What would lighten her own conscience more
effectually than to make it over to the man with the best taste in the
world? Unless she should have given it to a hospital there would
have been nothing better she could do with it; and there was no
charitable institution in which she had been as much interested
as in Gilbert Osmond. He would use her fortune in a way that
would make her think better of it and rub off a certain grossness
attaching to the good luck of an unexpected inheritance. There had
been nothing very delicate in inheriting seventy thousand pounds;
the delicacy had been all in Mr. Touchetfs leaving them to her.
But to marry Gilbert Osmond and bring him such a portion in
that there would be delicacy for her as well. There would be less
for him that was true; but that was his affair, and if he loved her
he wouldn't object to her being rich. Had he not had the courage
to say he was glad she was rich?" 15

It is at the moment when Ralph is dying that the theme is
finally stated in the form at once the most affecting and most
morally profound.

"She raised her head and her clasped hands; she seemed for a
moment to pray for him. 'Is it true is it true?' she asked.

'True that you've been stupid? Oh no,' said Ralph with a
sensible intention of wit.

'That you made me rich that all I have is yours?'

He turned away his head, and for some time said nothing. Then,
at last: *Ah, don't speak of that that was not happy.' Slowly he
moved his face toward her again, and they once more saw each
other.

'But for that but for that !' And he paused. 'I believe I

ruined you,* he wailed.

She was full of the sense that he was beyond the reach of pain;
he seemed already so little of this world. But even if she had not had
it she would still have spoken, for nothing mattered now but the
only knowledge that was not pure anguish the knowledge that
they were looking at the truth together. *He married me for the
money,' she said. She wished to say everything; she was afraid he
might die before she had done so.

THE LAST VICTORIANS 27

He gazed at her a little, and for the first time his fixed eyes
lowered their lids. But he raised them in a moment, and then, 'He
was greatly in love with you,' he answered.

*Yes, he was in love with me. But he wouldn't have married
me if I had been poor. I don't hurt you in saying that. How can I?
I only want you to understand. I always tried to keep you from
understanding; but that's all over.'

4 I always understood,' said Ralph.

*I thought you did, and I didn't like it. But now I like it.'

'You don't hurt me you make me very happy.' And as Ralph
said this there was an extraordinary gladness in his voice. She bent
her head again, and pressed her lips to the back of his hand. *I always
understood,' he continued, 'though it was so strange so pitiful.
You wanted to look at life for yourself but you were not allowed;
you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very
mill of the conventional!'

*Oh yes, I've been punished,' Isabel sobbed." 16

The necessity here of stating in its dreadful simplicity the
agonizing truth so that the relationship of the two may be
purified and deepened shows an intuition the very opposite
of sentimental.

Isabel, then, imagining herself free, has in fact delivered
herself into bondage. And the bondage has come about not
casually but out of the very force and fortune of her own
aspirations to freedom. She has sought life and because she
has sought it in this way she has found death.

Freedom, to Isabel and to Ralph (for he has been as much
concerned in the issue as she), has been an idealized freedom.
They have sought to be free not through a recognition of, but
by an escape from, necessity. And in so doing they have
delivered Isabel over to an exploitation as crude and more
corrupting than the exploitation that would have been her fate
if Mrs. Touchett had never visited Albany.

" T>o you still like Serena Merle?' " is Mrs. Touchett's
last question of Isabel.

" 'Not as I once did. But it doesn't matter, for she's going to
America.'

To America? She must have done something very bad.'
'Yes very bad/

28 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

*May I ask what it is?'
'She made a convenience of me/

'Ah/ cried Mrs. Touchett, 'so she did of me! She does of
everyone.' " 37

The Portrait of a Lady is one of the most profound expressions
in literature of the illusion that freedom is an abstract quality
inherent in the individual soul.

It is interesting to compare James's book with another
great novel written not very long before, Madame Bovary^
the story of another woman "ground in the very mill of the
conventional." It is true that Emma Bovary is, unlike Isabel
Archer, not in the least 'fine,' that she fails to escape from her
petty-bourgeois social milieu and that she is quite incapable
of the exalted moral discipline to which Isabel is dedicated,
yet we will learn something of James's novel, I think, from a
glance at Flaubert's. What is shocking in Madame Bovary is
the appalling passivity of Flaubert's characters, their inability
to fight in any effective way the bourgeois world which Flaubert
detests and which relentlessly warps and destroys all fineness
in them. The strength of the novel lies in the very ruthlessness
of its exposure of romantic attitudes ; but therein also lies its
weakness, the sense we get of something less than the human
capacity for heroism, the uneasy suspicions of a roman d th&se.
The Portrait of a Lady gives, as a matter of fact, no more
positive response to its revelation of bourgeois values than
Madame Bovary, yet we do experience a sense of human
resilience and dignity. The interesting question is how far this
sense embodied in the 'fineness' of Isabel herself is merely
romantic and illusory.

The issue can perhaps be put in this way: is not the accumu
lated effect of the novel to present human destiny as inexorably
one of suffering and despair? There are a number of tendencies
making for this effect. In the first place there is the insistent
use of dramatic irony in the construction of the book. Chapter
after chapter in the early reaches of the novel is designed to
emphasize the fatality facing Isabel's aspirations. The fifth
chapter tells us she has come to Europe to find "happiness;
the sixth that she likes unexpectedness ("I shall not have

THE LAST VICTORIANS 29

success (In Europe) If they're too stupidly conventional. I'm
not in the least stupidly conventional 55 ). The seventh chapter
ends with the following exchange:

" 'I always want to know the things one shouldn't do. 5
*So as to do them? 5 asked her aunt.
'So as to choose/ said Isabel. 55

The eighth draws to a close with

" *I shall never make anyone a martyr. 5
'You'll never be one, I hope. 5
'I hope not

This is all, it may be argued, simply Henry James at work,
extracting from every situation its maximum of point. But
the art, it seems to me, is in a subtle sense self-betraying. What
is achieved is a kind of inevitability, a sense of Isabel's never
standing a chance, which amounts not to objective irony but to
the creation of something like an external destiny. Is not martyr
dom becoming, in a sense at once insidious and with all the
associations and overtones one may care to give the word
romantic? Is there not to be here a breath & very sophisticated
and infinitely worldly breath of the emotional and moral
inadequacy involved in George Eliot's vision of those latter-day
Saint Theresas?

Our final judgement must depend on the climax the
famous ending of the book. It is from this ultimate impression
that we shall have to decide whether James indeed plays fair
with Isabel and us, whether he reveals in full profundity and
(in the least cold sense of the word) objectivity a tragic situation
or whether there is a certain sleight of hand, the putting
across not of life but of something which merely for the
moment passes for life. But before we consider this final climax
it is worth noting what would seem an odd weakness in the
novel. Is it not a little strange that of all the essential parts of
Isabel's story which are revealed to us the section of her life
most pointedly avoided is that immediately before her decision
to many Osmond? She has met him, got to know him some
what; she then goes away for a year, travelling in Europe and

30 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

the Middle East with Madame Merle. When she comes back
to Florence she has decided to marry Osmond. This is^ from
the novelist's point of view, the most difficult moment in the
book. How to convince us that a young woman like Isabel would
in fact marry a man like Osmond? And it is a moment which,
despite the revealing conversation with Ralph (which does
indeed tell us something) is, I suggest, not satisfactorily got
over. And the point is that if Isabel's marriage to Osmond is in
any sense a fraud perpetrated upon us for his own ends by the
author, the book is greatly weakened.

At the end of the novel Isabel, after Ralph's death and
another encounter with Caspar Goodwood, returns to Rome.
Is her return to Osmond irrevocable, an acceptance now and
for ever of her 'destiny,' or is it tentative, no ending, the
situation unresolved? Mr. F. O. Matthiessen, arguing in the
latter sense, has a most interesting observation:

"The end of Isabel's career is not yet in sight. That fact raises
a critical issue about James's way of rounding off his narratives. He
was keenly aware of what his method involved. As he wrote in his
notebook, upon concluding his detailed project: 'With strong hand
ling it seems to me that it may all be very true, very powerful, very
touching. The obvious criticism of course will be that it is not
finished that it has not seen the heroine to the end of her situation
that I have left her en Vair. This is both true and false. The whole
of anything is never told; you can only take what groups together,
What I have done has that unity it groups together. It is complete
in itself and the rest may be taken up or not, later'." 18

James's own evidence is of course conclusive as to his
intention, but it is not necessarily relevant as to what is in fact
achieved; and it seems to me that, although the ending of The
Portrait of a Lady does not completely and irrevocably round
off the story the possibility of Isabel's later reconsidering
her decision is not excluded yet the dominant impression
is undoubtedly that of the deliberate rejection of 'life* (as
offered by Caspar Goodwood) in favour of death, as represented
by the situation in Rome. The scene with Goodwood is indeed
very remarkable with its candid, if tortured, facing of a sexual
implication which James is apt to sheer off. On the whole the

THE LAST VICTORIANS 31

effect of this scene, though one understands completely the
quality of Isabel's reaction, is further to weight the scales
against a return to Rome. Even if Goodwood himself is im
possible, the vitality that he conveys is a force to be reckoned
with and Isabel's rejection of this vitality involves more clearly
than ever the sense that she is turning her face to the wall.

Isabel's return to Rome is certainly not a mere surrender
to the conventional force of the marriage vow. The issue as to
whether or not she should leave her husband is twice quite
frankly broached by Henrietta, as well as by Goodwood. Isabel's
first reply to Henrietta is significant:

" 'I don't know what great unhappiness might bring me to;
but it seems to me I shall always be ashamed. One must accept one's
deeds. I married him before all the world; I was perfectly free; it
was impossible to do anything more deliberate. One can't change
that way/ Isabel repeated." 19

Later, when she discovers how little free she had in fact been,
it is her obligation towards Pansy that becomes the most
important factor. But always there is the sense of some deep

inward consideration that makes the particular issues the

character of Osmond, her own mistakes, the needs of Pansy,
the importunity of Goodwood irrelevant. The recurring
image in the last pages is of a sea or torrent in which Isabel is
immersed. Goodwood becomes identified with the torrent.
Her temptation is to give herself up to it.* When she breaks
loose from him and the image she is once more Tree/ free and
in darkness. The lights now are the lights of Gardencourt and
now she knows where to turn. "There was a very straight

It seems to me inescapable that what Isabel finally chooses

is something represented by a high cold word like duty or
resignation, the duty of an empty vow, the resignation of the
defeated, and that in making her choice she is paying a final
sacrificial tribute to her own ruined conception of freedom.
For Henry James, though he sees the tragedy implicit in the

* It is at such a moment that one sees the force of Stephen Spender's

linking of James with Conrad's "in the destructive element immerse" in an
otherwise not very helpful book (The Destructive Element, 1937).

32 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

Victorian ruling-class view of freedom, is himself so deeply
Involved in that illusion that he cannot escape from it. His
books are tragedies precisely because their subject is the smash
ing of the bourgeois illusion of freedom in the consciousness
of characters who are unable to conceive of freedom in any
other way. His 'innocent* persons have therefore always the
characters of victims ; they are at the mercy of the vulgar and
the corrupt, and the more finely conscious they become of their
situation the more unable are they to cope with it in positive
terms. Hence the contradiction of a Fleda Vetch 1 * whose
superior consciousness (and conscience) leads her in effect
to reject life in favour of death. This is a favourite, almost an
archetypal situation, in James's novels. It achieves its most
striking expression in The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings
of the Dove in which another rich American girl meets, even
more powerfully and more exquisitely, the fate of Isabel
Archer.

For James in his supreme concern for living* (Milly Theale
in The Wings of the Dove, Strether in The Ambassadors have,
like Isabel, this immense, magnificent desire to live') ultimately,
in effect, turns his back on life. This is not unconnected, I
think, with the fact that his characters never do anything like
work. This description of Madame Merle is not untypical of a
day in the life of a Henry James figure:

"When Madame Merle was neither writing, nor painting, nor
touching the piano, she was usually employed upon wonderful
tasks of rich embroidery, cushions, curtains, decorations for the
chimney-piece; an art in which her bold, free invention was as
noted as the agility of her needle. She was never idle, for when
engaged in none of the ways I have mentioned she was either
reading (she appeared to Isabel to read 'everything important'),
or walking out, or playing patience with the cards, or talking with
her fellow inmates." 21

The contemplation of such a way of life is likely, after all, to
lead to idealism, for the necessities behind such an existence
are by no means obvious. It is a superficial criticism to accuse
James of snobbery or even of being limited by his social
In The Spoils of Poynton.

THE LAST VICTORIANS 33

environment (what artist is not?). But there can be no doubt
that what the bourgeois world did for James was to turn him
into a moral idealist chasing a chimera of ideal conduct divorced
from social reality.

It is not that his sense of social reality is in any way weak.
On the contrary his picture of his world has, it has already
been emphasized, a magnificent solidity, a concrete richness of
the subtlest power. Nor is he in any easy, obvious sense
taken in by that world (note his attitude to Warburton, his
description of American-French society in Chapter XX and
his total contempt for Osmond and his values); his picture of
European bourgeois life is in its objective aspect as realistic
as that of Balzac or Flaubert or Proust. No, if we are to isolate
in James's novels the quality that is ultimately their limitation,
it is to the core of his point of view, his philosophy, that we are
led. The limiting factor in The Portrait of a Lady is the failure
of James in the last analysis to dissociate himself from Isabel's
errors of understanding.

One of the central recurring themes of James's novels is
the desire to live/ to achieve a fullness of consciousness which
permits the richest yet most exquisite response to the vibrations
of life. And yet with this need to live is associated almost
invariably the sense of death. Living, he seems to be saying
again and again, involves martyrdom. The pleasure he finds in
the contemplation and description of living at its most beautiful,
most exalted point is subtly increased if the living creature is
faced with death. Ralph Touchett is not alone among the
dying swans of James's books: he is one of a line culminating in
Strether (who discovers how to live too late) and in the fabulous
Milly Theale. The attraction of this subject to James seems
to me most significant. "Very true . . . very powerful . . .
very touching ..." one can almost hear him breathing out the
words. It is a kind of apotheosis of his vision of life. And it is
intimately, inextricably, linked up with his philosophic idealism.
His 4 good ? characters, in their unswerving effort to live finely,
turn out to be in the full implication of the phrase, too good for
this world. Their sensibility becomes an end in itself, not a
response to the actual issues of life. The freedom they seek
turns out to be an Idealized freedom; its ends, therefore, can

34 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

only end, in a desire not merely to be free in this world but to
be free o/this world.

The popularity of James's novels among our intelligentsia
today is significant too. It includes, I feel certain, not merely
a genuine admiration for his extraordinary qualities, but also a
powerful element of self-indulgence. It is not only pleasanter
but easier to involve oneself in an idealized sensibility, a
conscience^ removed into realms outside the common and
often crude basis of actual living. Many besides Isabel Archer
imagine that they can buy themselves out of the crudities
through the means of a high-grade consciousness and a few
thousand pounds. And Henry James, albeit unconsciously,
offers a subtle encouragement. He expresses the fate of Isabel
Archer but expresses it in a way that suggests that it has, if not
inevitability, at least a kind of glory to it. So that when Isabel
takes her decision to return to Rome the dominant sense is not
of the waste and degradation of a splendid spirit, but of a kind
of inverted triumph. Better death than a surrender of the
illusion which the novel has so richly and magnificently and
tragically illuminated.

* It Is interesting to speculate whether Conrad, when he referred to
James as "the historian of fine consciences* 1 was using the word in its
English sense or with the French implication of 'consciousness.*

III. SAMUEL BUTLER: THE WAY
OF ALL FLESH

Written 1872-84, published 1903

" 'Well/ he continued, 'there are a lot of things that want saying
which no one dares to say, a lot of shams which want attacking, and
yet no one attacks them. It seems to me that I can say things which
not another man in England except myself will venture to say, and
yet which are crying to be said'." (The Way of All Flesh.) 1

IT was once the fashion to say of The Way of All Flesh that it
is not really a novel at all. No one, however, has attempted to
suggest what it is if it is not a novel. The truth is that any
definition of the novel that excluded Samuel Butler's book
would also exclude about a quarter of the novels at any rate,
the good novels ever written. The truth is also that the
opponents of Butler's ideas, wishing (whether consciously or
not) to discredit those ideas, have appreciated that one effective
line of attack is to deny his book the status of art; while his
supporters, realizing that much of the exhilaration they derive
from the book is not in the narrow sense an 'aesthetic'
one, have tended to take the line that if this isn't art it is some
thing better. I think it is important to insist that The Way of All
Flesh is art, that it is life-conveying fantasy and not an essay
or a sermon or a textbook. It may well be that certain elements
in the novel elements connected with Butler's propagandist
intentions do indeed weaken it as a work of art, but that is
another matter. For we shall also find, I believe, that the artistic
strength of the book its power to stimulate our imagination
is also closely connected with Butler's propagandist inten
tions. As with every novel the book and the 'message* are
inseparable. The point about The Way of All Flesh is not that

35

36 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

It has more ^message' than, say, The Portrait of a Lady but that
the 'message' is more obviously contentious and more clearly
rekted to immediate action.

The 'message 5 of The Way of All Flesh is almost purely
negative. The novel is a hymn of hate against Victorian Chris
tianity and the Victorian bourgeois family. And when these
two institutions are united in what might be regarded as their
highest form & clergyman's family the challenge is met with
a weapon of invective as devastating as Voltaire's.

*The clergyman is expected to be a kind of human Sunday.
Things must not be done in him which are venial in the week-day
classes. He is paid for this business of leading a stricter life than other
people. It is his raison d*etre. If his parishioners feel that he does
this, they approve of him, for they look upon him as their own
contribution towards what they deem a holy life. This is why the
clergyman is so often called a vicar he being the person whose
vicarious goodness is to stand for that of those entrusted to his
charge. But home is his castle as much as that of any other English
man, and with him, as with others, unnatural tension in public is
followed by exhaustion when tension is no longer necessary. His
children are the most defenceless things he can reach, and it is on
them in nine cases out of ten that he will relieve his mind." 2

Clearly a novelist who permits himself in his role of
commentator such asides is weighting the scales against
himself as an artist. For unless the fantastic world he succeeds
in creating is extraordinarily solid, extraordinarily convincing
to the reader, one will be bound to have the sense of being 'got
at. 1 There is no reason whatever why such asides should not
be made in a novel (we recall Fielding, Stendhal, Tolstoy,
George Eliot), but to be accepted by the reader, they must
always be appreciable within the total experience of the novel
as a work of art. When George Eliot, in Middlemarch, pauses to
discuss the failure of the Lydgates' marriage we are in no way
offended by her intrusion because the issues concerned have
been so fully and concretely presented to our imagination that
such discussion seems natural and necessary within the imagina
tive framework of the book. In The Way of All Flesh the problem
is more perilous. We are so constantly aware of Butler's views
(the narrator, Overton, is never seriously 'placed/ never

THE LAST VICTORIANS 37

separated from Butler himself) which are presented with such
verve and passionate wit, that there is a serious danger that the
vitality of the comment may overtop the vitality of the world
of the novel.

I do not think that this does in fact happen, at any rate in
the earlier parts of the book. In the sections dealing with the
older generations of Pontifexes and with Ernest's childhood
Butler's invective does have an "objective correlative/' The
invective is shattering "Yet when a man is very fond of his
money it is not easy for him at all times to be very fond of his
children also," "I think the Church Catechism has a good
deal to do with the unhappy relations which commonly even
now exist between parents and children" 4 but it is a real
world that is shattered, not a set of ninepins. Scene after scene
in this part of the book is superbly successful. Old Mrs. John
Pontifex refusing to take cognizance of her pregnancy; the
hikrious episode in which George Pontifex and his butler go
down to the cellar to fetch the bottle of water from the Jordan;
the incident of the hen lobster; the scene in the carriage after
Theobald's marriage to Christina; the chastisement of the
infant Ernest for his inability to say "come": these are scenes
not merely effective as anecdotes (all Butler's episodes have this
quality) but magnificently alive and solid. A world as con
vincing as in their different ways the workhouse world of
Oliver Twist or the world of Gardencourt is here evoked.

This is the description of the dinner on the eve of Ernest's
christening:

"Her father (George Pontifex), of course, was the lion of the
party, but seeing that we were all meek and quite willing to be eaten,
he roared to us rather than at us. It was a fine sight to see him tucking
his napkin under his rosy old gills, and letting it fall over his capacious
waistcoat while the high light from the chandelier danced about
the bump of benevolence on his bald old head like a star of Beth
lehem.

The soup was real turtle; the old gentleman was evidently well
pleased and he was beginning to come out. Gelstrap stood behind
his master's chair. I sat next Mrs. Theobald on her left hand, and
was thus just opposite her father-in-law, whom I had every oppor
tunity of observing.

38 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

During the first ten minutes or so, which, were taken up with the
soup and the bringing in of the fish, I should probably have thought,
if I had not long since made up my mind about him, what a fine old
man he was and how proud his children should be of him; but
suddenly as he was helping himself to lobster sauce, he flushed
crimson, a look of extreme vexation suffused his face, and he darted
two furtive but fiery glances to the two ends of the table, one for
Theobald and one for Christina. They, poor simple souls, of
course saw that something was exceedingly wrong, and so did I,
but I couldn't guess what it was till I heard the old man hiss in
Christina's ear:

'It was not made with a hen lobster. What's the use/ he
continued, 'of my calling the boy Ernest, and getting him christened
in water from the Jordan, if his own father does not know a cock
from a hen lobster?' " 6

It is worth noticing in this magnificent scene one phrase
at the beginning of the third paragraph ". . . I should
probably have thought, if I had not long since made up my
mind about him. . . ." It is a tell-tale phrase, weakening as it
does the dramatic development of the episode. Overton/Butler
is dissociating himself from the scene. He always does. He
cannot allow us to imagine, even for a moment, that he does
not know better than the Pontifexes. In this particular scene
it does not matter much. But the cumulative effect is danger
ous. For it tends to give the book a somewhat abstract quality,
to put the characters at a distance which precludes the reader's
intimate involvement and this increases the tendency for the
vitality of the narrator's comment to overtop the vitality of
the fantastic world.

The Way of All Flesh is not, in the sense I have previously
used the term, a moral fable. But the seed from which it springs
is contained in the sentence quoted at the head of this chapter.
The words are in the mouth of Ernest Pontifex but they are
Butler's own. To attack shams, to reveal horrors, to strike
(no punches pulled) at the darling sanctities of the Victorian
bourgeoisie: this is the motive-force behind the novel. It is
a propagandist novel, which means that the author is quite
consciously concerned not merely to interpret facts but to
change them.

THE LAST VICTORIANS 39

There Is today a good deal of prejudice against the Idea of
propaganda. We tend to suspect the "novel with a purpose,"
forgetting perhaps that the important thing about a book is
not its purpose but its effect. (Its purpose is relevant only in
so far as we are concerned to analyse the causes of the achieved
effect.) Now every novel, for better or for worse, achieves
some effect and it is an effect made not in a vacuum but upon
us. Every novel we read must, to some extent (be it ever so
little or ever so temporarily) change us. According to the degree
of effect which it achieves it will (nearly always without our
realizing it) influence our actions. Every novel is in this sense
propagandist and it is as well to bear that fact in mind.

What we can legitimately object to in a novel is not that it
should change us but that it should unsuccessfully attempt
to do so. What we really mean as a rule when we criticize a
novel as 'propagandist* is that the total imaginative effect of
the book is unconvincing and the author has therefore failed
in his purpose of achieving a certain effect.

The Way of All Flesh, brilliant and stimulating book as
it is, fails to be a great novel not because it is consciously
propagandist but because certain aspects of Butler's propa
ganda are not good enough. On its negative side the attack on
shams it is, broadly speaking, superb; the weakness lies in
its positive side. There fails to emerge from the novel except
at the moments when what is loathsome is being demolished
& sense of the vitality of life itself. That this criticism is,
however, less crippling than it might be is appreciated when
we recall that for more than two-thirds of the book negative
themes prevail. Up to the imprisonment of Ernest, Butler is
for the bulk of the time securely attached to his hatreds, an
attachment symbolized by the perverse insistence of Overton
in maintaining a friendship with Theobald whom he detests.

It would be an exaggeration to insist that the first two-
thirds of the novel is wholly successful. Our most serious
doubt lies in the presentation of Theobald himself. Does
Butler ever give him a chance? The doubt arises, I think, less
from any inherent improbability in the character (there must
have been parsons who out-Theobalded Theobald) than from
touches of over-eagerness on Butler's part. There he is, we

40 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

feel, pen in hand, for ever poised to pounce, and the spectacle
is not only a little undignified (we are quite ready to sacrifice
dignity on the bonfire of bourgeois pomposity) but rather
repellent, like the journalist who follows the Cabinet minister
around waiting for the chance indiscretion. There is an unholy
glee behind the unmasking of Theobald which gives the
impression, perhaps, that some of the operation is being
performed for the satisfaction of Butler rather than ourselves
and it is this suspicion, or something like it, that weakens
the effect.

I do not wish to suggest that The Way of All Flesh would
have been a better book if Butler had been, in the conventional
sense, more 'fair-minded' and less partisan. On the contrary,
it is precisely his partisanship, his bold and righteous indigna
tion against the cant of conventional bourgeois life that gives
his novel its unique and exhilarating flavour. It is worth recall
ing that scene in Wuthering Heights in which Cathy and
Heathcliff throw their pious books into the dog-kennel and
comparing it with the following description of a Sunday
evening from The Way of All Flesh:

"In the course of the evening they (the children) came into the
drawing-room, and, as an especial treat, were to sing some of their
hymns to me, instead of saying them, so that I might hear how
nicely they sang. Ernest was to choose the first hymn, and he chose
one about some people who were to come to the sunset tree. I am no
botanist, and do not know what kind of tree a sunset tree is, but the
words began, 'Come, come, come; come to the sunset tree for the
day is past and gone/

The tune was rather pretty and had taken Ernest's fancy, for he
was unusually fond of music and had a sweet little child's voice
which he liked using.

He was, however, very late in being able to sound a hard
V or *k/ and, instead of saying 'Come,' he said 'Turn, turn, turn/

'Ernest,' said Theobald, from the arm-chair in front of the
fire, where he was sitting with his hands folded before him, 'don't
you think it would be very nice if you were to say "come" like
other people, instead of "turn"?'

'I do say "turn"/ replied Ernest, meaning that he had said
*come. s

Theobald was always in a bad temper on Sunday evening.

THE LAST VICTORIANS 41

Whether It is that they are as much bored with the day as their
neighbours, or whether they are tired, or whatever the cause may be,
clergymen are seldom at their best on Sunday evening; I had already
seen signs that evening that my host was cross, and was a little
nervous at hearing Ernest say so promptly, *I do say "turn",' when
his papa had said he did not say it as he should.

Theobald noticed the fact that he was being contradicted in a
moment. He got up from his arm-chair and went to the piano,

'No, Ernest, you don't/ he said, 'you say nothing of the
kind, you say "turn," not "come." Now say "come" after me, as I
do.'

'Turn,' said Ernest, at once; 'is that better?' I have no doubt
he thought it was, but it was not.

'Now, Ernest, you are not taking pains; you are not trying
as you ought to do. It is high time you learned to say "come," why,
Joey, can say "come," can't you, Joey?'

'Yeth, I can,' replied Joey, and he said something which was
not far off 'come.'

'There, Ernest, do you hear that? There's no difficulty about
it, nor shadow of difficulty. Now, take your own time, think about
it, and say "come" after me.*

The boy remained silent a few seconds and then said 'turn'
again.

I laughed, but Theobald turned to me impatiently and said,
Tlease do not laugh, Overton; it will make the boy think it does not
matter, and it matters a great deal;' then turning to Ernest he said,
'Now, Ernest, I will give you one more chance, and if you don't say
"come," I shall know that you are self-willed and naughty.'

He looked very angry, and a shade came over Ernest's face, like
that which comes upon the face of a puppy when it is being scolded
without understanding why. The child saw well what was coming
now, was frightened, and, of course, said 'turn' once more.

'Very well, Ernest,' said his father, catching him angrily by
the shoulder. *I have done my best to save you, but if you will have
it so, you will,' and he lugged the little wretch, crying by anticipation,
out of the room. A few minutes more and we could hear screams
coming from the dining-room, across the hall which separated
the drawing-room from the dining-room, and knew that poor
Ernest was being beaten.

'I have sent him up to bed,' said Theobald, as he returned to
the drawing-room, 'and now, Christina, I think we will have the
servants in to prayers,' and he rang the bell for them, red-handed
as he was." 6

42 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

This seems to me entirely successful, the indignation
controlled and organized to supreme effect. The remark of
Theobald's to Ernest (aged four): "There's no difficulty about
it, nor shadow of difficulty . . ." not only comments perfectly
on the quality of Theobald's understanding of his son but tells
us all we need to know about his rhetorical style in the pulpit.
The use of the younger child as a stick to prod the elder
recalls an earlier remark in the book:

"The boys were of use to their father in one respect. I mean

that he played them off against each other/' 7

an example of Butler's wit at its most economical. And the
adjective "red-handed" in the last sentence is masterly,
bearing precisely the right proportions of horror and of
laughter.

But against the triumphant presentation of such a scene
as this, one must note a number which are less than con
vincing. Nothing about Alethea Pontifex quite comes to life,
nor do the theological arguments in Cambridge or London
really force their way into the book. And by now we are
beginning to feel the true weakness of the novel the lack of
any positive values which can balance emotionally the gusto
with which the negative points are made. The ultimate weak
ness of The Way of All Flesh has been indicated by Mr. V. S.
Pritchett:

"One ends with the feeling that Ernest Pontifex doesn't amount
to much. . . . One does not feel that Ernest has very deeply developed
because of suffering or fortune. He has escaped only. And he seems
rather lost without his enemy. The weakness is that Butler is doing
all the talking. There is no contradictory principle. Ultimately, the
defence of orthodoxy, even an orthodoxy as dim as Theobald's, is
the knowledge of human passions. The strange thing is that Ernest
does not give us the impression of a man who enjoys himself; he
sounds like a man whose hedonism is a prig's hygiene. He looks
like becoming the average bachelor of the room marked Residents
Only." 8

This seems to me on the whole a fair comment on the last
part of The Way of All Flesh. Ernest has come through;

THE LAST VICTORIANS 43

but what has he come to? A comfortable fortune, a con
veniently bigamous marriage, and the company of a number of
elderly gentlemen who appreciate his views on theology.
Because he is rich he is able to dispense with family life,
farming out his children on those unfortunately unable to
afford the same luxury. There is no contradictory principle.
And the truth is, of course, that Butler himself, vigorous and
ruthless as is his analysis of certain facets of the society he
lived in, is in the end a Victorian bourgeois himself, an eccentric,
not a revolutionary.

And yet that is not the whole truth either. There are
insights in The Way of All Flesh far more profound than the
term 'eccentric 5 could suggest. It is true that Alethea Pontifex's
legacy and those cosy chambers in the Temple with geraniums
in the window weaken the force of Ernest's rebellion against
his respectable family. It is true that Ernest is not much more
of a hero than Oliver Twist and that his comparative passivity
(he is in the line of Heartfree rather than Tom Jones) is one of
the reasons for the weakness of the positive elements of the
book. And it is true, too, that when he has got his freedom
Ernest does mighty little with it. All this is undeniable; yet
the fact remains that The Way of All Flesh tells more of the
truth about the Victorian age than any other novel of the
century excepting Dickens's books and Wuthering Heights.

Its secret can, I believe, be suggested by an examination
of two episodes. The first takes place when Ernest twenty-
three years old and ordained Deacon is living in Ashpit Place,
having "gone amongst the poor" (inspired, significantly
enough, by Alton Locke, Dickens's novels and other "literary
garbage' '). Ernest is at this time in the clutches alternately of
Evangelists and High Churchmen all humbugs and one
day he meets his old Cambridge friend Towneley, the young
man-about-town-cum-rowing-blue (a character in whom,
incidentally, some of the oddities of Butler's positives emerge).

"Towneley said a few words of common form to Ernest about
his profession as being what he thought would be most likely to
interest him, and Ernest, still confused and shy, gave him for lack
of something better to say his little threepenny-bit about poor

44 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

people being so very nice, Towneley took this for what it was worth
and nodded assent, whereon Ernest imprudently went further and
said, 'Don't you like poor people very much yourself?'

Towneley gave his face a comical but good-natured screw, and
said quietly, but slowly and decidedly, 4 No, no, no/ and escaped.

It was all over with Ernest from that moment. As usual he did
not know it, but he had entered none the less upon another reaction.
Towneley had just taken Ernest's threepenny-bit into his hands,,
looked at it and returned it to him as a bad one. Why did he see in a
moment that it was a bad one now, though he had been unable to
see it when he had taken it from Fryer? Of course some poor people
were very nice, and always would be so, but as though scales had
fallen suddenly from his eyes he saw that no one was nicer for
being poor, and that between the upper and lower classes there was
a gulf which amounted practically to an impassable barrier.

That evening he reflected a good deal. If Towneley was right,
and Ernest felt that the 'No* had applied not to the remark about
poor people only, but to the whole scheme and scope of his recently
adopted ideas, he and Pryer must surely be on a wrong tack.
Towneley had not argued with him; he had said one word only,
and that one of the shortest in the language, but Ernest was in a fit
state for inoculation, and the minute particle of virus set about
working immediately." 9

One might quote the passage as an example of Butler's
Disraelian realism (it is worth comparing The Way of All Flesh
with Sybil or Coningsby), but what seems to me most worth
emphasis is the nature of the psychological experience revealed.
Here we have a moment of conflict between two different
attitudes to life. Almost any other novelist concerned, like
Butler, with 'ideas/ would seize upon the situation for a
battle of wits; Towneley would state his position, Ernest his.
But instead we have no argument at all, merely an encounter,
the words "no, no, no/' some reflections on Ernest's part and
the battle is over. But it had been a battle nevertheless and one,
I would suggest, more like the intellectual battles of real life
both in form and significance than any number of well-turned
arguments could convey.

Butler, for all the first appearances to the contrary (the
hatred of the Church, the mechanical ideas of heredity, the
obsession with Darwinism) was not the typical late Victorian

THE LAST VICTORIANS 45

rationalist. His philosophical position was indeed rather that
of Hume:

"It is faith and not logic which is the supreme arbiter. They say
all roads lead to Rome, and all philosophies that I have ever seen
lead ultimately either to some gross absurdity, or else to the con
clusion already more than once insisted on in these pages, that the
just shall live by faith, that is to say that sensible people will get
through life by rale of thumb as they may interpret it most con
veniently without asking too many questions for conscience's sake.
Take any fact, and reason upon it to the bitter end, and it will ere
long lead to this as the only refuge from some palpable folly. 3 " 10418

Now this may not be a very satisfactory philosophy but at
least it represents an emotional attitude attempting to break
away from the bonds of both idealism and mechanical material
ism. Butler's 'faith' is far too vague to offer anything very
satisfactory in their place, but what does emerge is a healthy
respect for life, a deep suspicion of idealism (reflected in the
attitude to 'conscience 5 which Butler obviously associates
with the effects of religious and anti-humanist philosophies)
and a rejection (in the word 'faith') of the determinist passivity
of mechanical materialism. Just what Butler's 'faith' amounts
to can be judged by the total impression of The Way of All
Flesh. Its least satisfactory side (a comparison with Hume and
his game of backgammon is not irrelevant) is seen in his
ultimate equating of "sensible people" with enlightened
Victorian sceptics of the bourgeois class. Hence the flatness of
the last part of his novel and Mr. Pritchett's feeling that
"Ernest Pontifex doesn't amount to much." The weakness
of 'common-sense' philosophy is always that common sense
comes to be identified with the way of life and the particular
problems of the social class one happens to live in: common
sense in Ernest Pontifex's case finds its level at fifteen hundred
a year. But this is not the only or the dominant impression of
The Way of All Flesh. The most valuable and art-creating
aspects of Butler's 'faith' lie in that part of his sensibility which

* It is necessary to emphasize that this statement (in Chapter LXIX) of
Overton/Butler's philosophy is not a casual aside but the narrator's central
comment oti the central episode of the book.

46 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

is the most revolutionary. What is impressive about the scene
between Ernest and Towneley just quoted is its revelation at
one stroke both of the quality of Ernest's convictions and of
their vulnerability. What Towneley brings into Ernest's dream
world is not an intellectual argument but a quality of living.
That what he stands for turns out to be more trivial than
Butler, perhaps, is prepared to admit, is not here the point.
The excellent thing in the scene is, quite simply, its revelation
of the actual processes by which the decisions of life are in
fact taken. It is the kind of thing which Disraeli, for instance,
never, in his novels, approaches.

But the most remarkable insight in The Way of All Flesh
and one buried in the very heart of the book is Butler's revela
tion (he the intelligent Victorian bourgeois) of the final con
tradiction within the bourgeois dream. The section of the
novel it is its climax in which Ernest, ill in prison, takes
stock of his past and considers his future is too long to quote.
It is a passage remarkable not only for its lack of sentimentality
but for the profundity of its analysis of the dilemma of all
intelligent and sensitive human beings in Ernest's position, and
it reaches its climax in the following sentence:

"It was not simply because he disliked his father and mother
that he wanted to have no more to do with them; if it had been only
this he would have put up with them; but a warning voice within
told him distinctly enough that if he was clean cut away from them
he might still have a chance of success, whereas if they had anything
whatever to do with him, or even knew where he was, they would
hamper him, and in the end ruin him." 11

It is his realization a realization which, on the basis of his
past experience, we share that in order to live decently, to
achieve self-respect and avoid further degradation, he must
cut away totally from the ties and values of the bourgeois
world and his determination, on the strength of this 'warning
voice/ to learn a trade and change his class-allegiance; this is
the most striking revelation of The Way of All Flesh. It is a
revelation not spread glibly on the surface of the book (like
some of the cracks at parsons, for instance) but forced pain
fully out of it and therefore in the deepest sense moving and

THE LAST VICTORIANS 47

convincing. It is interesting to compare the sentence just
quoted with Butler's other remarks, already emphasized*
about sensible people getting through life by rule of thumb, etc.
The comparison illustrates more convincingly than any
abstract argument the difference between the artistic revelation
of a truth and the non-artistic statement of an idea. Butler,
on one level of consciousness, did no doubt sincerely believe
his Hume-like 'common-sense* philosophy which allowed him
at the same time to take pot-shots at bourgeois idiocies and
yet remain the bourgeois gentleman; but on another level of
consciousness he knew that 'rale of thumb' could not get
Ernest Pontifex out of his dilemma or fight the hated enemy.
And this second level of consciousness, emerging at the climax
of his novel, may without prejudice be called deeper than the
first. For as we read The Way of All Flesh we know that
Ernest's reactions at this moment of crisis are adequate and
necessary whereas Overton-Butler's later philosophizing is
less than that. It is the weakness of The Way of All Flesh that
Ernest's rebellion is frittered away (that is why the latter end
of the book has so much the sense of anti-climax) but it is its
strength that the decision to rebel is triumphantly reached.
And you cannot separate the artistic strengths and weaknesses
of the book from the strengths and weaknesses of Butler's
analysis. Just in so far as Butler is able to overcome the weak
nesses of his philosophical (and, in the last analysis, social)
standpoint he is able to produce a work of art.

The Way of All Flesh is not, I have suggested, a moral
fable. And yet in Butler's novel we have fairly continuously
the sense of something being imposed on the life' of the story
which somehow limits and flattens it: the something is Butler's
opinions, his way of looking at life. And while the truth and
intelligence and incisive integrity of those opinions give his
book its power to stimulate us, yet the sense we have that those
opinions are not wholly adequate, do not fully encompass the
complexities and richness of life, this sense is the limiting
factor of the book. We do not feel in The Way of All Flesh that
Butler twists life; the world he presents to us is the real world,
and it is seen with wonderful insights and yet with a certain
flatness. The effect of Butler's philosophy is to make the

48 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

texture of life in his novel less vibrant, less richly moving than
in fact life is.

The effect in The Way of All Flesh of Butler's preoccupa
tion with the moral issues of his story is to give the story this
somewhat abstract flavour. We feel that the moral issues were
there, so to speak, before the story. I do not think (to repeat a
point previously made) that this should in any way prejudice us
against the novel What is rather odd about The Way of All
Flesh y as novels go, is that the effect of its abstract conception
is not to impose too rigid a pattern on the book but to give
the book remarkably little pattern at all. In the moral fable
in The Pilgrim's Progress, in Candida, in Hard Times, in The
Power and the Glory we have something of the sense of life
being put into a strait jacket and the reason is that the moral
pattern behind these books is unduly rigid more rigid
than the pattern of life. In The Way of All Flesh we have the
opposite phenomenon: Butler's overall philosophy that of a
late- Victorian sceptical agnostic is less rigid, more un
principled, so to speak, than life itself and hence fails to impose
a total pattern on the novel. And yet this very failure produces
its own kind of rigidity. Butler's philosophy tends to reduce
life; its effect on his book is precisely the same.

One would not wish to end on a negative note. The Way of
All Flesh is a remarkable and invigorating novel and one
which, in the 1870$, it was deeply necessary to write. One has
only to compare it with, say, Adam Bede (1859) or Bar Chester
Towers (1857) to appreciate the quality not merely of Butler's
ideas but of his art. The necessities behind the book, the
insistent, fearless attacks on the shams and false values of
the Victorian bourgeoisie, are not side-issues or eccentricities
and Butler's hard, urbane, yet unadorned prose derives its
vitality from the sheer mental courage of his penetration into
the myths and complacencies of his class. His book trium
phantly carries onwards that function of the novel which the
eighteenth-century writers all emphasized the destruction
of romance.

IV. HARDY: TESS OF THE
D'URBERVILLES (1891)

THE subject of Tess of the D'Urbervilles is stated clearly by
Hardy to be the fate of a "pure woman' '; in fact it is the
destruction of the English peasantry. More than any other
nineteenth-century novel we have touched on it has the
quality of a social document. It has even, for all its high-
pitched emotional quality, the kind of impersonality that the
expression suggests. Its subject is all-pervasive, affecting and
determining the nature of every part. It is a novel with a
thesis & roman a th&se and the thesis is true.

The thesis is that in the course of the nineteenth century the
disintegration of the peasantry a process which had its roots
deep in the past had reached its final and tragic stage. With
the extension of capitalist farming (farming, that is to say,
in which the landowner farms not for sustenance but for
profit and in which the land-workers become wage-earners)
the old yeoman class of small-holders or peasants, with their
traditions of independence and their own native culture, was
bound to disappear. The developing forces of history were too
strong for them and their way of life. And because that way of
life had been proud and deep-rooted its destruction was
necessarily painful and tragic. Tess is the story and the symbol
of the destruction.

Tess Durbeyfield is a peasant girl. Her parents belong to a
class ranking above the farm-labourers, a class "including the
carpenter, the smith, the shoemaker, the huckster, together
with nondescript workers other than farm-labourers; a set of
people who owed a certain stability of aim and conduct to the
fact of their being life-holders, like Tess's father, or copy
holders, or, occasionally, small freeholders." 1 Already by the
opening of the novel the Durbeyfields have fallen on hard

49

SO AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

times, a plight by no means solely due to the lack of stability
in the characters of John and Joan. A further twist is given to
their difficulty in making ends meet by the accident in which
their horse is killed,^ It is her sense of guilt over this accident
that allows Tess to be persuaded by her mother into visiting
the Trantridge D'Urbervilles to "claim kin" with a more
prosperous branch of the family. And from this visit (itself an
attempt to solve the Durbeyfields* economic problems) the
whole tragedy derives.

In these opening chapters of the novel there is an immediate
and insistent emphasis on historical processes, so that from
the start the characters are not seen merely as individuals.
The discovery by John Durbeyfield of his ancestry is not just
an introductory comic scene, a display of quaint "character".
It states the basic theme of the novel what the Durbeyfields
have been and what they become. The landscape in the second
chapter (it is far more effective description than the famous
set-piece at the beginning of The Return of the Native) is
described and given significance almost wholly in terms of
history. The 'club-walking' scene, again, is contrasted with
the May Day dances of the past and early pagan rites are
recalled. Tess is revealed as one of a group, typical ("not
handsomer than others" 1 ), and in the comparison between her
and her mother the differences brought about by historical
changes are emphasized. Joan Durbeyfield lives in the peasant
folk-lore of the past, Tess has been to a National school. "When
they were together the Jacobean and the Victorian ages were
juxtaposed." 8

The sacrifice of Tess to D'Urberville is symbolic of the
historical process at work. D'Urberville is not, of course, a
D'Urberville at all, but the son of the nouveau riche Stoke
family, capitalists who have bought their way into the gentry,

* This very accident is a striking symbol of the struggles of the peasantry.
The mail-cart "with its two noiseless wheels, speeding along these lanes like
an arrow" runs into Tess*s slow, unlighted wagon. Anyone who happened
to be in Italy during the last war will recall the running~down of peasant
carts by army vehicles. The army drivers were not always to blame. The
peasants as often as not had no lights and were on the wrong side of the
road. But every accident represented a clash between something more
than two individual vehicles and the results in hardship or worse can well
be imagined.

THE LAST VICTORIANS 51

and Tess's cry when she sees the D'Urberville estates "I
thought we were an old family; but this is all new! 5 ' 4 carries
a^world of irony. Tess herself does not want to go to D'Urber-
ville's and when she does finally agree to go she dresses in her
working clothes. But her mother insists on her dressing up
for the occasion.

" 'Very well; I suppose you know/ replied Tess with calm
abandonment.

And to please her parent the girl put herself quite in Joan's
hands, saying serenely, 'Do what you like with me, Mother'." 5

Again the moment is symbolic. Tess, prepared to become,
since change she must, a worker, is handed over by her mother
to the life and the mercies of the ruling class.

From the moment of her seduction by D'Urberville,
Tess's story becomes a hopeless struggle, against overwhelm
ing odds, to maintain her self-respect. After the death of her
child she becomes a wage-labourer at the dairy-farm at Tal-
bothays. The social degradation is mitigated by the kindness of
the dairyman and his wife, but the work is only seasonal. Here
however she meets and falls in love with Angel Clare and
through marriage to him thinks to escape her fate. But Angel,
the intellectual, turns out to be more cruel than D'Urberville,
the sensualist. Angel, with all his emancipated ideas, is not
merely a prig and a hypocrite but a snob as well. He
understands nothing of the meaning of the decline of the
D'Urbervilles and his attitude to Tess is one of self-righteous
idealization.

" *My position is this/ he said abruptly. T thought any man
would have thought that by giving up all ambition to win a wife
with social standing, with fortune, with knowledge of the world, I
should secure rustic innocence as surely as I should secure pink
cheeks ' " 6

And when his dream of rustic innocence is shattered he can
only taunt Tess with:

" 'Don't, Tess; don't argue. Different societies, different
manners. You almost make me say you are an unapprehending

52 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

peasant woman, who have never been Initiated into the proportions
of social things. . . .' " 7

Even at the moment of her deepest humiliation Tess is stung
to the retort:

" 'Lots of families are as bad as mine in that! Retty's family
were once large landowners, and so were Dairyman Billett's. And
the Debbyhouses, who now are carters, were once the De Bayeux
family. You find such as I everywhere; 'tis a feature of the country,
and I can't help it'." 8

It is important (I shall return to this point) to give these
passages their full weight because they emphasize the kind
of novel this is. Such passages, read as 'psychological drama,'
ring queer and unconvincing. Their function in the novel
is to stress the social nature of Tess's destiny and its typicality.

After Angel has left her the social degradation of Tess
continues. At the farm at Flintcomb Ash she and the other
girls (once again it is significant that Tess's fate is shared
by Marion and Izz who have not, in the same way, 'sinned'
morally) become fully proletarianized, working for wages in
the hardest, most degrading conditions. The scene at the
threshing is here particularly important, a symbol of the
dehumanized relationships of the new capitalist farms. At
Talbothays there had at least been some possibility of pride
and interest in the labour as well as a certain kindliness in
the common kitchen at which the dairyman's wife presided,
Here there is nothing kind or satisfying and the emphasis
on Marion's bottle is not casual, not just a matter of the
individual 'character.'

The final blow to Tess's attempts to maintain her self-
respect comes with the death of her father and the con
sequent expulsion of the Durbeyfields from their cottage.
John Durbeyfield had been a life-holder.

"But as the long holdings fell in they were seldom again let to
similar tenants, and were mostly pulled down, if not absolutely
required by the fanner for his hands. Cottagers who were not
directly employed on the land were looked upon with disfavour,

THE LAST VICTORIANS 53

and the banishment of some starved the trade of others, who were
thus obliged to follow. These families, who had formed the backbone
of the village life in the past, who were the depositories of the
village traditions, had to seek refuge in the large centres; the process,
humorously designated by statisticians as 'the tendency of the rural
population towards the large towns/ being really the tendency of
water to flow uphill when forced by machinery." 9

It is the need to support her family, thus driven off the
land, that finally forces Tess back to Alec D'Urberville. And
when Angel, chastened and penitent, returns, the final sacri
fice is inevitable. Tess kills D'Urberville. The policemen take
her from the altar at Stonehenge and the black flag is run up
on Winchester jail.

It is important for a number of reasons to emphasize that
Tess of the D' Urbervilks is a moral fable, that it is the expression
of a generalized human situation in history and neither (what
it is generally assumed to be) a purely personal tragedy nor
(what Hardy appears to have intended) a philosophic comment
on Life in general and the fate of Woman in particular. If we
read the novel as a personal tragedy, the individual history of
Tess Durbeyfield, a great deal strikes us as extremely un
satisfactory.

In the first place there is (as has been noted frequently
enough) Hardy's flouting of normal probability in his insis
tence on a series of the most unlucky chances. In Tess the
most notable of these chances are the episode in which Tess 5 s
written confession, pushed under AngeFs door, goes under
the carpet and the moment when Tess, having walked from
Flintcomb Ash to Emminster, overhears AngeFs brothers
talking about her and has not the heart to visit her parents-in-
law. If either of these chance happenings had not occurred,
all might easily have been saved. Again, in the broader realm
of probability, is there really any adequate reason why Tess,
at the end, should murder D'Urberville? True, she does not
know the full extent of AngeFs forgiveness, but at least she
knows that he has basically changed. It is not perhaps any
one of these manifestations of tragic improbability that we are
likely to jib at, but rather the combination of them. Mr. J. I. M.
Stewart, in an interesting essay, has stated the problem.

54 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

"Always in Hardy It is certain that the incidence of fatality
within the general operation of chance will be higher than we are
commonly prepared to accept of its being in nature. Why does he
thus so often seem to play against his characters with loaded dice;
why does he darken the sky with his arrows when Elfride Swan-
court and her many successors are fighting for life? The universe of
his novels is one of a determinism slightly modified to meet the needs
of tragedy, the individual will being conceived as having its measure
of freedom during certain moments of equilibrium in the universal
Will, within which it is comprised (the image is Hardy's). It is thus
still a neutral universe. Why then does the screw turn so frequently
and so disastrously as it does?" 10

Now if we read the novel as a detailed particularized study of
an individual life it is clear that this turning of the screw does
constitute a serious weakness. What it amounts to in Tess is
that we must regard the -characters Tess herself in particular
as having less than normal luck and more important less
than normal human resilience in the situation in which they
find themselves. Is not Tess, after all (admitting her superiority
of sensitiveness), a good deal less shrewd and worldly-wise than
a peasant girl of her age might naturally be assumed to be? Is
not her very sensitiveness a little false? (Could she, for instance,
have afforded bearing in mind the conditions of Flintcomb
Ash to be merely hurt and unprotesting when Angel's
brothers take away her boots when they find them in the
ditch?) Such considerations are, if the novel is a realistic psycho
logical study, entirely relevant. But they seem to me, in fact,
no more relevant than the criticism which says of King Lear
that Lear's conduct in the first act is unlikely or that the
Gloucester sub-plot is ill-planned because the existence of
two such cases of filial impiety within so small a circumference
is improbable. Tess is not a novel of the kind of Emma or
Middlemarch. It does not illuminate within a detailed frame
work particular problems of human conduct and feeling.
Its sphere is the more generalized movement of human destiny.

Once we recognize that the subject of Tess is the destruction
of the peasantry many of the more casual criticisms of the
book are seen to be rather wide of the mark.

There is the question, for instance, of Alec D'Urberville.

THE LAST VICTORIANS 55

Many readers are antagonized by his presentation as what
amounts to the stock villain of Victorian melodrama, the
florid, moustache-twirling bounder who refers to the heroine
(whom he is about to seduce) as "Well, my Beauty. , . ." Is
this not a character who has stepped direct out of the tenth-
rate theatre or "She was poor but she was honest 15 ? It seems
to me that almost the whole point about D'Urberville is that
he Is indeed the archetypal Victorian villain. Far from being
weakened by the associations of crude melodrama he in fact
illuminates the whole type and we understand better why the
character of which he is a symbol did dominate a certain
grade of Victorian entertainment and was enthusiastically
hissed by the audience. It is the very typicality of D'Urberville
that serves the purposes of the novel.

The treatment of Christianity in the book has a similar
relevance. The conversion of D'Urberville is not in itself
necessary to the plot of the novel (his rediscovery of Tess
could easily have been contrived some other way). Hardy's
object here is clearly to heighten the association, implicit
throughout the book, of the Christian faith and Tess's down
fall. The man with the paint-pot who regales Tess with the
assurance that THY DAMNATION SLUMBEKETH NOT
at the moment of her betrayal turns up again with the con
verted D'Urberville. Is the comment fair to Christianity?
The question is not relevant. Hardy is not attempting an
estimate of the total validity of the Christian philosophy. His
subject is the destruction of the peasant Tess. It is the place of
religious influence in that destruction that is his concern. And
in the pattern of the novel the Christian church is seen as at
best a neutral observer, at worst an active abettor in the
process of destruction. It is not, historically considered, an
unreasonable comment.

At best a neutral observer, at worst an active abettor: the
phrase applies to a good deal more than Hardy's view of
Christianity. One of the aspects of Tess that we tend to find
peculiarly unconvincing if not repulsive is the sense of
the loaded dice to which Mr. Stewart refers. It emerges in its
least palatable form in passages of the book most obviously
intended as fundamental philosophical comment. There is

56 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

the famous episode, for Instance, in which Tess, driving the
cart to market, speaks to her little brother of the stars:

" 'Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?*

'Yes.'

'All like ours?'

'I don't know; but I think so. They sometimes seem to be
like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and
sound a few blighted.'

* Which do we live on a splendid one or a blighted one?'

'A blighted one.'

'Tis very unlucky that we didn't pitch on a sound one, when
there were so many more of 'em!'

'Yes.'

'Is it like that really, Tess?' said Abraham, turning to her
much impressed, on reconsideration of this rare information.
'How would it have been if we had pitched on a sound one?'

'Well, Father wouldn't have coughed and creeped about as he
does, and wouldn't have got too tipsy to go this journey; and Mother
wouldn't have been always washing, and never getting finished."

'And you would have been a rich lady ready-made, and not
have had to be made rich by marrying a gentleman?'

'O Aby, don't don't talk of that any more!' " n

We tend to reject such an episode on two grounds: in the first
place we are not convinced that any peasant girl would talk
like that, in the second the philosophy implied (and the whole
organization of the book makes us give it the weight of the
author's full sympathy, if not assent) is not calculated to win
our support. The world as a blighted apple is an image too
facile to satisfy us, even though we may recognize the force of
Tess's pessimism. I think it is important, however, to empha
size that even in this passage the pessimism is given a very
explicit basis in actual conditions. It is the kind of life her
parents lead that drives Tess to her feelings of despair and it is
the sentence about her mother never getting finished that in
fact saves the scene. For here is no pretentious philosophy of
fatality but a bitterly realistic recalling of the actual fate of
millions of working women.

The scene just quoted seems to me to give a most instructive
insight into the kind of book Tess of the D'Urbervilles is. It is

THE LAST VICTORIANS 57

not, it has already been emphasized, a 'psychological novel';
the presentation of Tess's actual thoughts in this episode is not
at all convincing. Nor is it a symbolic statement on the level of
Wuthering Heights \ Hardy does not penetrate to the profundity
of Emily Bronte's understanding of the processes of life and
when he goes in for philosophical generalizations the result is
often embarrassing. And yet this novel, with its queer cramped
literary 5 style* and its bogus 'Aeschylean' philosophy, gets hold
of something of life and illuminates a phase of human history
with an extraordinary compulsion and an insight of oddly
moving delicacy.

What Hardy got hold of was not, I think, quite what his
conscious ^mind believed. In the scene we have just discussed
the intention (as opposed to the total effect) is to concentrate
into the image of the blighted star a whole world of philo
sophical significance. Hardy took his philosophy of the
Immanent Will very seriously and undoubtedly saw Tess as
the victim of "the^ President of the Immortals." A pessimistic
and determinist view of the world in which man (and, even
more, woman) is at the mercy of an unyielding outside Fate is
the conscious philosophy behind the novel. The sub-title
"a pure woman" is indicative of the kind of significance
Hardy gave to his story, and there is no doubt that this con
scious philosophy affects the book, in general for the worse.
It is responsible, for instance, for the literary 5 quality which
mars the final sentence. It is responsible for our sense of
loaded dice. And it is responsible ultimately for the psycho
logical weakness such as the idealization of Tess, for the
characters are made too often to respond not to life but to
Hardy's philosophy, f

And yet Tess survives Hardy's philosophy. It survives

^ * "When (Hardy) remarked that had he known what a stir Tess was
going to create he would have made it a really good book he probably
meant that he would have gone over the grammar, and would have inserted
more of those references to mythology or painting that he believed an
important means of toning up a literary style/* Mr. Stewart's comment
seems to me fair enough.

| All three of these qualities are combined in the dreadful moment

when Angel, at the very climax of the book, after Tess's confession of her
'sin/ exclaims: "My God how can forgiveness meet such a grotesque
prestidigitation as that!" 1 *

58 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

because his imaginative understanding of the disintegration^
the peasantry is more powerful than the limiting tendencies
of his conscious outlook. As a matter of fact I do not think
we ought to sneer too securely at Hardy's philosophy. No
doubt it is, like Tolstoy's, an unsatisfactory philosophy and
yet also, like Tolstoy's (the views of history expressed in
War and Peace and The Dynasts are worth comparing) it
emerges from a passionately honest attempt to grapple with
real problems of quite overwhelming difficulty. Hardy at
least did have a philosophy (which is more than can be said
for most of his contemporaries) and there was more basis to
his pessimism the pessimism of the Wessex peasant who
sees his world and his values being destroyed than can be
laughed away with an easy gesture of contempt.

For the odd thing about this strange and moving novel is
that although so much about it has a note of falsity the mani
pulation of the plot, the character-study of Tess herself, the
inadequate, self-conscious, stilted writing the total impression
is not false at all. Part of the achievement is due undoubtedly
to the always effective and often superb evocation of the
natural background. This is a special triumph of Hardy's and
one which in the novels we have previously discussed had
hitherto scarcely been attempted. Such a description as that
of the dawn at Talbothays may perhaps best be compared with
the descriptions of London in Oliver Twist. In neither case is
the word 'descriptive,* with its cold suggestion of an objective
backcloth, adequate.

"They met continually; they could not help it. They met daily
in that strange and solemn interval, the twilight of the morning, in
the violet or pink dawn; for it was necessary to rise early, so very
early, here. Milking was done betimes; and before the milking
came the skimming, which began at a little past three. It usually
fell to the lot of some one or other of them to wake the rest, the first
being aroused by an alarm-clock; and, as Tess was the latest arrival,
and they soon discovered that she could be depended upon not to
sleep through the alarm as the others did, this task was thrust
most frequently upon her. No sooner had the hour of three struck
and whizzed, than she left her room and ran to the dairyman's door;
then up the ladder to Angel's, calling him in a loud whisper; then

THE LAST VICTORIANS 59

woke her fellow-milkmaids. By the time that Tess was dressed
Clare was downstairs and out in the humid air. The remaining
maids and the dairyman usually gave themselves another turn on
the pillow, and did not appear till a quarter of an hour later.

The grey half-tones of daybreak are not the grey half-tones of
the day's dose, though the degree of their shade may be the same.
In the twilight of the morning light seems active, darkness passive;
in the twilight of evening it is the darkness which is active and
crescent, and light which is the drowsy reverse. . .

At these non-human hours they could get quite close to the
waterfowl. Herons came, with a great bold noise as of opening doors
and shutters, out of the boughs of a plantation which they frequented
at the side of the mead ; or, if already on the spot, hardily maintained
their standing in the water as the pair walked by, watching them by
moving their heads round in a slow, horizontal, passionless wheel,
like the turn of puppets by clockwork.

They could then see the faint summer fogs in layers, woolly,
level, and apparently no thicker than counterpanes, spread about
the meadows in detached remnants of small extent. On the grey
moisture of the grass were marks where the cows had lain through
the night dark-green islands of dry herbage the size of their
carcases, in the general sea of dew. From each island proceeded a
serpentine trail, by which the cow had rambled away to feed after
getting up, at the end of which trail they found her; the snoring
puff from her nostrils, when she recognized them, making an in-
tenser little fog of her own amid the prevailing one. Then they
drove the animals back to the barton, or sat down to milk them on
the spot, as the case might require.

Or perhaps the summer fog was more general, and the meadows
lay like a white sea, out of which the scattered trees rose like danger
ous rocks. Birds would soar through it into the upper radiance, and
hang on the wing sunning themselves, or alight on the wet rails
subdividing the mead, which now shone like glass rods* Minute
diamonds of moisture from the mist hung, too, upon Tess's eyelashes
and drops upon her hair, like seed pearls. When the day grew quite
strong and commonplace these dried off her; moreover 3 Tess then
lost her strange and ethereal beauty; her teeth, lips, and eyes
scintillated in the sunbeams, and she was again the dazzingly fair
dairymaid only, who had to hold her own against the other women
of the world." 14

The atmosphere evoked in such description is not an embellish
ment to the book, but an integral part of it. We cannot think

60 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

of Tess and Angel except in the context of such scenes any
more than we can think of Sikes outside the context of the
London which has made him. We believe in Tess, just as we
believe in Sikes, because her relationship to her world is so
successfully conveyed. When Hardy begins theorizing, dis
cussing in abstract terms Tess's plight, we become uneasy;
when he presents her to us in the misty dawn at Talbothays
we feel no need to question her authenticity.^ She is a peasant
girl and she is splendid, heroic even, and we know what Hardy
means when he talks of "a pure woman." The unconvincing
moments are those when to make a 'point* Hardy allows his
own, inadequate ideas to weaken his profound instinctive
understanding. Such a moment arises when, just before Tess's
confession to Angel, he too is made to confess a sexual lapse.
Now Hardy can convince us that Angel is a prig and a hypo
crite but he simply cannot convince us that the Angel he
presents to us in the novel would be quite so morally obtuse
as to see no affinity whatever between his confession and hers.
He might well convince us that a man only slightly less morally
aware would be thus blinded (heaven knows the situation is
common enough). He might even convince us that Angel
himself would be capable of putting a youthful indiscretion
into a separate compartment of his mind and there burying
it. But to ask us to believe that the Angel we know (and one is
not claiming of course any very admirable qualities for him)
would within a few minutes of confessing such a lapse of his
own respond in quite the way he does to Tess's confession is
simply asking us to stretch our credulity beyond its limit.
And the reason for it all is obvious. Hardy is determined at
all costs to make his point (fair enough in the abstract) about
male hypocrisy on this sexual matter. He is determined

* D. H. Lawrence In his Study of Thomas Hardy wrote:
"... it is not as a metaphysician that we must consider Hardy. He
makes a poor show there. For nothing in his woik is so pitiable as his clumsy
efforts to push events into line with his theory of being, and to make calamity
fall on those who represent the principle of Love. . . .

His feeling, his instinct, his sensuous understanding is, however, apart
from his metaphysic, very great and deep, deeper than that, perhaps, of any
other English novelist. Putting aside his metaphysic, which must always
obtrude when he thinks of people, and turning to the earth, to landscape,
then he is true to himself." Phoenix (1936), p. 980.

THE LAST VICTORIANS 6!

to get in another blow on behalf of his pure woman. But,
because the moral point is unconvincingly realized in this
particular scene between these particular characters, the blow
rebounds.

It is not, of course, a fatal error (there are far graver diffi
culties in the book) but I quote it to illustrate the battle going
on throughout Tess between Hardy's ideas and his understand
ing. It is the inadequacy of his ideas that gives much of the
book its oddly thin and stilted quality and which leads, in
particular, to the unsatisfactory manipulation of chance which,
more than anything in the novel, arouses our suspicions as
to its validity. For the loading of the dice is an admission not
so much of cunning as of impotence, a desperate gesture
which attempts through artificial stimulation to achieve a
consummation otherwise unobtainable. Hardy's understand
ing, his deep instinctive comprehension of the fate of the
Wessex peasants, told him what had to be said, but his con
scious philosophy did not give him adequate means always to
say it. Hence the unduly long arm of coincidence, hence the
half-digested classical allusions, hence the psychological weak
nesses. Whereas from the social understanding emerges the
strength of the novel, the superb revelation of the relation of
men to nature, the haunting evocation of the Wessex landscape
not as backcloth but as the living challenging material of
human existence, and the profoundly moving story of the
peasant Tess.

It is easy enough to list the imperfections of this novel.
What also needs explanation is its triumph, epitomized in that
extraordinary final scene at Stonehenge. There is nothing
bogus about the achievement here, no sleight of hand, no
counterfeit notes of false emotion. The words of speech have
not quite the ring of speech nor the integral force of poetry;
the symbolism is obvious, one might almost say crude. And
yet this very clumsiness, the almost amateurish manipulation
of the mechanics of the scene, contributes something to its
force, to its expression of the pathetic and yet heroic losing
battle waged by Tess against a world she cannot successfully
fight and can only dimly apprehend. The final mood evoked
by Tess of the D* Urbervilles is not hopelessness but indignation

62 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

and the indignation is none the less profound for being in
completely intellectualized. Hardy is not a Shakespeare or an
Emily Bronte. His art does not quite achieve that sense of the
inner movement of life which transcends abstractions. He is
constantly weakening his apprehension of this movement by
inadequate attitudes and judgements. But in spite of this
weakening Tess emerges as a fine novel, a moral fable, the
most moving expression in our literature not forgetting
Wordsworth of the destruction of the peasant world.

PART II
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

THE FIRST QUARTER
I. INTRODUCTION

WITH Conrad we are In the twentieth century. It Is not
merely a question of the dates of publication: it Is a whole
historical vista that has changed. The world of Nostromo is
the world of modern imperialism, of war and violence and
concentration camps, of displaced persons and mass neurosis,
all on a scale and of a kind radically different from previous
human experience. The disintegration of Victorian bourgeois
society has reached a further stage, the stage imaginatively
envisaged in Wuihering Heights, in which the polite veils of
conduct and assumption have been removed, and tensions
and conflicts acquire the urgency and directness of mass
warfare, unimagined economic crisis and the revolutionary
clash of opposing classes.

It is not surprising to find that the prevailing tone of
twentieth-century English literature, from whatever point of
view it may be written, is one of uncertainty and tension.
Even in the gentlest novelists, the most urbane and apparently
detached, E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, there is a deep
sense of strain and insecurity.

It Is generally assumed that the great complexity of modern
life and the sense of flux and uncertainty of a revolutionary
period make writing unusually difficult. Certainly the general
condition of English culture in the last fifty years would seem
at first glance to bear out this thesis.

63

64 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

It cannot possibly be our object to analyse here or to discuss
fully so complicated and difficult a situation. Rather than
offer a number of generalized conclusions which it would be
impossible in a short space to substantiate, I would wish
merely to indicate some of the main issues involved.

1. The most striking and in some respects the most alarming
feature in the development of the novel in the twentieth century
has been the ever-increasing separation between the *good'
and the 'popular.' On the one hand the majority of the novels
most highly praised and valued by the intellectual arbiters are
almost entirely unread by the mass of the people (this was not
so in the days of Scott or Dickens); on the other hand both
the middle-brow best seller and the mass-produced reading
material of the majority of the people is despised and almost
unread by the intellectuals. The consequences of this situation,
like its causes, are numerous. Not merely has the commercial
ization of literature had a disastrous effect on the general
reading standards of the public, but the 'good* writer has come
to be a more and more lonely and isolated figure, exploring a
very limited range of experience for the benefit of a small
audience of similarly placed admirers. Among the results is
that 'good' literature is (not unfairly) associated in the minds
of millions with obscurity, affectation and all the intellectual
and social snobbery of high-browism, while popularity has
ceased to be an issue with the majority of serious writers and
is even regarded with suspicion and contempt.

2. Thus relieved from the obligation of writing literature
which is in any sense of the word popular, the tendency of
writers born into or acquiring the habits of the middle-class
intelligentsia has been to explore with an ever more obsessive
intensity small specialized areas of their peculiar, and generally
quite atypical, sensibility. The theories of both Freudian and
Jungian psychology have further encouraged this tendency,
as have certain aspects of the writings of Dostoievsky and
Proust and the remarkable and perverse achievement of
Kafka. The sense of isolation of the artist-intellectual in con
temporary society reaches its climax in Kafka's work in which
nightmare becomes reality and the individual is trapped in a
world, not merely hostile to him personally, but apparently

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 65

impervious to human action. Extremes of pessimism, neurosis,
and despair have become the accepted attitudes behind a
considerable proportion of serious literature.

3. In even the greatest writers of the age Conrad, Law
rence, Joyce the battle of the novelist with his raw material
tends to be an unequal one. None of these writers tamely
accepts the decadent aspects of the society in which they all
find themselves, yet not one of them is able to achieve a philo
sophy and hence an artistic vantage-point from which he is
able quite satisfactorily to cope with and subjugate the world
he tackles. Hence, for all the brilliance, the sense of strain, the
lack of confident rekxation (the relaxation of a Fielding or a
Tolstoy), the excessive intensity and the constant tendency
to topple over the verge of sanity into mistiness or obscurity or
hysteria.

4. Side by side with the books which we shall consider in
the following pages there have appeared during this century
a number of novels, of varying merit, written from a funda
mentally different point of view, that of the working class as
such. It is impossible in a work planned along the present
lines to give these novels the discussion they deserve ; simply to
include one or two of them alongside a totally different type of
writing would be satisfactory from no point of view. It must
suffice merely to mention Robert TressalPs The Ragged
Trousered Philanthropists (1914) and Lewis Grassic Gibbon's
A Scots Quair (1932-4) as important and moving novels which
have to be seen in their historical context as the beginning of
something new in our literature. Unlike the bulk of the novels
discussed in this volume they do not belong to the end of an
epoch.

5. In the first half of the twentieth century the long battle
of the English novel towards a full and all-inclusive realism
becomes, all too often, sidetracked. As the issues become more
violent and extreme the struggle to see life steadily and whole
becomes more and more difficult and taxing. To quote Maxim
Gorky: "Most people think and argue not in order to investigate
the phenomena of life but rather because they are in a hurry
to find a quiet haven for their thoughts and to establish all
sorts of 'undisputed truths'." 1 I would suggest that the main

66 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

problem facing the twentieth-century writer is not the nature
of his raw material but the difficulty of achieving a standpoint
from which vital experience can be defined, organized and
controlled. There is no particular reason for believing that
good art cannot emerge from a period of great social and
spiritual change. On the contrary there are historical and
common-sense grounds for supposing that such a period should
be particularly rich In artistic possibilities.

II. JOSEPH CONRAD: NOSTROMO
(1904)

THE first and Immediate impression that Nostromo makes
upon the reader comes from the strength and luxuriance of
Conrad's descriptive writing. The evocation of the Republic
of Costaguana an entire South American state whose political
and social history over a number of years is the subject of the
novel is astonishingly concrete, not merely rich and colourful
but solid in a way no mere piling up of adjectives can achieve.
It is worth emphasising right away the purpose of this evoca
tion and the means by which it is achieved.

It is essential to Conrad's intention that there should be
no dubiety about the setting of his novel. The relationship
between background and characters must be fully and un
ambiguously established. The descriptive backcloth to Nostromo
such as the opening chapter, is not a collection of purple
passages, vaguely romantic, prose equivalents of 'glorious
technicolor. 5 The very first sentence is significant:

"In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the
town of Sulaco the luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears
witness to its antiquity had never been commercially anything
more important than a coasting port with a fairly large local trade in
ox-hides and indigo."

The colour is there the orange gardens, the ox-hides and the
indigo but the body of the sentence is concerned with the
issues that are to be the main subjects of the novel: government
and trade. Conrad's purpose is to establish a solid background
because this is a solid novel, a novel about the real world,
about a particular republic in a particular part of the world
at a particular epoch in history. Without the ability to make
peculiarly concrete the scenes and settings of his story that
combination of outward clarity and inward depth which is

67

68 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

one of Conrad's characteristics would be lost. For this novelist
(and we shall have to return to the point), though he is not a
superficial writer, though his characters have an 'inwardness'
in something of the way of Dostoievsky's or James's people,
is yet concerned essentially with the real, material world.
One never gets from his books the impression that the inner
life, intensely and indeed supremely important as it is, is
more real than, or in some way quite isolated from, the physical
world. I make this point because there are two tendencies
in critical attitudes towards Conrad, both of which seem
to me disastrously wrong: on the one hand is the emphasis
on the qualities of sheer glamour and action in his books, the
view which sees him as "the Kipling of the Seas''; on the
other is the tendency to associate him with the twentieth-
century cult of isolation and despair, to make of him so to
speak a sort of archetypal 'displaced person' with all the
implications that such a status involves.

Some kind of "moral discovery," Conrad wrote, "should
be the object of every tale." 1 He was no Art-for-Arter, this
artist who, incredibly, wrote his books in a foreign language
which he learned as an adult, and wrestled with his novels in a
way reminiscent of Flaubert, the novelist whom he most
admired. And by "moral discovery" he did not mean merely
the illustration of some preconceived moral truth. It was in
the creation of the work of art that the discovery was made.
This seems to me very important. The very act of artistic
creation, that moulding into significant form of some thing or
part of life, is in itself a discovery about the nature of life and
ultimately its value will lie in the value of that discovery. It is
interesting, incidentally, that illuminating remarks about his
art come more frequently in the novels themselves than in his
prefaces which are oddly naive and unsatisfactory. The explana
tion undoubtedly lies in this word "discovery." It was in his
artistic grappling with life, not in his logical thinking about it,
that Conrad delved deepest and with best result.

What were the "moral discoveries" he made? It is not easy
to define them because he never did so himself. In fact when
he tried he is disappointing. "What is so elusive about him,"
Mr. E. M. Forster has excellently said,

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 69

"is that he is always promising to make some general philosophic
statement about the universe, and then refraining with a gruff
disclaimer. ... No creed, in fact. Only opinions, and die right to
throw them overboard when facts make them look absurd. Opinions
held under the semblance of eternity, girt with the sea, crowned
with the stars, and therefore easily mistaken for a creed." 2

That seems to get him: no creed, but an unflinching respect
for facts, the facts of the world he lived in. The moral dis
coveries are always based on facts.

The most important fact of all to Conrad is the social
nature of man. It is a fact (or, if you will, an opinion based on
fact) which permeates his books and informs, not least, that
hard and "jewelled" style, generally so concrete in its imagery,
so controlled in its movement.

Conrad began writing in the eighteen-nineties, after twenty
years as a sailor and adventurer. His early books are nearly all
about the sea or about distant lands: Malaya, Indonesia, India,
Africa. What were the "facts" he found? Not merely, as some
of his admirers would pretend, glamour, adventure, colour,
romance. There is an uglier word as well: imperialism. Conrad
doesn't use the word; clearly it wasn't part of his familiar
vocabularly. What is significant is that at this period when the
growth of imperialism was the dominant factor (or fact) in world
history, only two considerable writers of English Kipling and
Conrad looked this phenomenon in the face. From their
experience both of them gained a vitality which other writers
of their age notably lacked. But only Conrad looked at im
perialism honestly enough to become a great artist.

"There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies
Which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world/' he wrote
in Heart of Darkness, perhaps the most horrifying description
of the effects of imperialism ever written. While Kipling
celebrated the white man's burden Conrad wrote what he
saw. He is describing Stein in Lord Jim:

"There were very few places in the Archipelago he had not seen
in the original dusk of their being, before light (even electric light)
had been carried into them for the sake of better morality and and
well the greater profit, too.. , ." 3

70 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

The hesitancy will out, but so will the moral discovery. For all
his temperamental conservatism, all his loyalty to Britain and
its Empire, his honesty time and again wins through. None of
his stories is propagandist. He will not sell himself. His feeling
for the native peoples is sincere. Dain Warris in Lord Jim,
Hassim in The Rescue are presented with the greatest sympathy
and dignity, indeed they are among Conrad's few characters
(apart from the women) who can be said to be idealized. And
the truth is that these young Malayan aristocrats are conceived
as Polish rather than Malayan nationalists. They are not
among Conrad's successes because, excusably, for all his
sympathy he did not understand these people.

As he grew older the moral discoveries he drew from his
art became rather more fully rationalized. His hatred of financial
speculation (what he calls "material interests") may be an
opinion rather than a creed, but it is an opinion which permeates
several of the later novels. Chance is full of it. Marlow's des
criptions of the financial dealings of de Barral is a splendid
piece of ironic writing equalled by the scorn bestowed on the
Tropical Coal Belt Company in Victory. But to abstract single
themes from particular novels is a dangerous practice and can
easily be a misleading one. I wish merely to emphasize that
Conrad's concern with imperialism is no chance interest but is
central to his whole work which is the presentation through
his art of man as a social being.

Nostromo, a Tale of the Seaboard as it is inadequately
described by its author, is a political novel in the widest sense,
the sense in which Aristotle and Marx use the word politics.
Its background is the history of a South American republic
presented, as I have already suggested, with extraordinary
concreteness that passes through a revolution which estab
lishes a liberal parliamentarian regime, a counter-revolution led
by totally unprincipled adventurers, and a third revolution
which (in the particular province concerned) re-establishes the
liberals. The liberals bourgeois parliamentarians distinguish
able from the counter-revolutionaries principally by a greater
smoothness of manners are supported and financed by the
owners of the greatest power in the land, the San Tome silver
mine, run by an Englishman, Charles Gould, backed by

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 7!

American capital. The main theme of the novel, fundamental
to the personal themes that form the * story/ is the corrupting
power of the silver mine which changes all that touches it
dehumanizes Gould and dries up his marriage, makes a mockery
of the liberal ideals of the parliamentarians and the Christianity
of the American capitalist, corrupts the incorruptible Nostromo,
Capataz de Cargadores great man of the People, symbol of
their aspirations.

Nostromo is, from the technical point of view, an amazing
tour deforce. The method Conrad uses is of particular interest
because his problems are the characteristic problems of the
modern novelist to present a wide canvas in which essentials
are not lost in too great detail; to convey political and social
movement on various levels (conscious, unconscious, semi
conscious); to suggest the almost infinite inter-relatedness of
character and character, character and background; to give
each character a real individuality and yet see each as part of a
concrete whole: in short, to show men in society. Conrad's
method is to over-simplify somewhat individual character in
the sense of giving each individual very sharply-defined
personal characteristics, frequently reiterated, so that each
stands out clearly, not only in contrast to the others, but
against the clear, concrete, surface-objective background of
the whole. Thus the girl Antonia is invariably associated with
a fan, Nostromo with silver and the epithet "illustrious," Dr.
Monygham with a lame leg, a twisted body and scarred cheeks,
the Garibaldino with his "mane" (it is, in a sense, the old
"humours" theory developed poetically). What at first appears
a somewhat irritating insistence is seen after a time to be a
conscious and essential method. In fact, of course, the characters
are not simple at all: by the end of the book their depths and
complexities are well established; it is their presentation which
is simplified. Like the Elizabethan dramatists, Conrad employs
his own convention for the revelation of social life. Just as
Hamlet is at once a type and an individual, the melancholic,
conventionally presented in a way the audience immediately
grasps, and gradually revealed in all his complexity and signi
ficance, so is Monygham, the cynical but austere moralist,
conventionally presented to the reader with his scarred face

72 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

and twisted body and thus Immediately apprehended In
essentials plays his part in the vivid pattern of the novel,
while the full depth and significance of his character is gradually
revealed. One might contrast Conrad's method, highly con
ventionalized and dependent on a continuously controlled and
(in a wholly laudatory sense) artificial prose, with that of John
Dos Passos who, twenty years later, in an even more ambitious
political novel, U.S.A., achieves breadth only at the sacrifice
of depth and a colloquial prose style at the sacrifice of all
reasonable brevity.

I will give one example of the method of Nostromo, a
passage following a scene of great intimacy between Antonia,
the daughter of the idealist liberal leader, and Decoud, the
sceptical, unprincipled, Europeanized dilettante, who is in
love with her. It is late evening and they are standing in the
window of Antonia's house.

"She did not answer. She seemed tired. They leaned side by
side on the rail of the little balcony, very friendly, having exhausted
politics, giving themselves up to the silent feeling of their nearness,
in one of those profound pauses that fall upon the rhythm of passion.
Towards the plaza end of the street the glowing coals in the brazeros
of the market women cooking their evening meal gleamed red along
the edge of the pavement. A man appeared without a sound in the
light of a street lamp, showing the coloured inverted triangle of
his bordered poncho, square on his shoulders, hanging to a point
below his knees. From the harbour end of the Calle a horseman
walked his soft-stepping mount, gleaming silver-grey abreast each
lamp under the dark shape of the rider.

'Behold the illustrious Capataz de Cargadores/ said Decoud
gently, 'coming in all his splendour after his work is done. . . .' " 4

There are several of the essentials here of Conrad's method.
The personal relationship, intimately yet objectively suggested,
is placed, by the immediate evocation of the whole plaza,
securely within a larger social relationship, the private world
related at once to the public world. The glowing coals, with
their suggestion of after-passion, are at the same time surface-
objective, adding to the visual reality of the scene, and atmo
spherically valuable, a kind of bridge between the two worlds.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 73

The market women and the man in his poncho are not merely
picturesque (though they are that), they fill out involuntarily
the social picture; they give a warmth and significance to the
"politics" that Antonia and Decoud (all too abstractly) have
been discussing. And then, all within five sentences, the next
character is on the scene: Nostromo, heralded by his conven
tional epithet "illustrious." And already the image most often
associated with Nostromo has appeared, silver. Silver-grey is
his horse in the moonlight, gleaming like the silver buttons
which he has magnificently ripped off his tunic to give to his
admirer Morenita, and like the treasure of the San Tome mine
that will destroy him: all leading onward to the last sentence of
the book when the name of Nostromo, the dead captive of the
mine, has been cried out across the sea by his lover:

"In that true cry of undying passion that seemed to ring aloud
from Punta Mala to Azuera and away to the bright line of the
horizon, overhung by a big white cloud shining like a mass of solid
silver, the genius of the magnificent Capataz de Cargadores domi
nated the dark gulf containing his conquests of treasure and love." 5

Even more remarkable, however, than the technical achieve
ment is the moral honesty and political insight which Conrad
brings to his masterpiece.

" 'What is wanted here is law, good faith, order, security/ says
Charles Gould, the owner of the silver mine. f Anyone can declaim
about these things, but I pin my faith to material interests. Only let
the material interests once get a firm footing, and they are bound to
impose the conditions on which alone they can continue to exist.' " 6

"As against the mob the railway defended its property, but
politically the railway was neutral. 5 * 7

What a wealth of observation and understanding has gone to
create such insights. The inadequacy of liberalism is most
poignantly expressed in:

"The feeling of pity for those men (the liberals), putting their
trust into words of some sort, while murder and rapine stalked over
the land " 8

74 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

And nearly all the liberals are shown as totally incapable of
meeting the moment of danger.

A messenger from Hernandez, the notorious bandit, asks
Charles Gould:

" 'Has not the master of the mine any message to send to
Hernandez, the master of the Campo?'

The truth of the comparison struck Charles Gould heavily.
In his determined purpose he held the mine, and the indomitable
bandit held the Campo by the same precarious tenure. They were
equals before the lawlessness of the land. It was impossible to
disentangle one's activity from its debasing contacts. A close-
meshed net of crime and corruption lay upon the whole
country. . . ." 9

One tends to quote passages which show Conrad's consciously
formulated understanding of the social situation he is record
ing; but the real test of a novel lies of course in its ability to
convey artistically that understanding and for such a test the
abstracted quotation is inadequate.

Mrs. Gould's disillusionment with the effects of "material
interests" is almost complete when Dr. Monygham says:

" 'There is no peace and no rest in the development of material
interests. They have their law and their justice. But it is founded
on expediency and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the
continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral principle.
Mrs. Gould, the time approaches when all that the Gould concession
stands for shall weigh as heavily upon the people as the barbarism,
cruelty and misrule of a few years back.' " 10

and at the close of the novel her husband must leave her, at a
moment when she needs help and consolation, because there
is labour unrest in the mine. The workers are disillusioned
too. And Mrs. Gould in her sad wisdom reflects:

"It had come into her mind that for life to be large and full, it
must contain the care of the past and of the future in every passing
moment of the present." 11

The tragedy of Nostromo is that he has none of this sense at

all. He is without past and can have no future. He has no

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 75

roots, he is an expatriate Italian. His great power and influence
over the workers is exerted arbitrarily; he lives only for reputa
tion. And when this is taken from him (by the failure of the
liberal-capitalist alliance, which he has supported from no
principle) he falls a prey immediately to the power and tempta
tion of the silver of the mine. Thus Nostromo, though a
'natural 5 leader of the people and sharing their deepest hopes
and aspirations as well as their fears and superstitions, Nos
tromo is useless as a leader because he is without principle.
He is a careerist.

But if Nostromo does not understand the point of Mrs.
Gould's reflection, Conrad does; and it is in this profound
comprehension that the greatness of the book ultimately lies.
For it succeeds most wonderfully in capturing the truth of
social movement. Engels once wrote:

"History makes itself in such a way that the final result always
arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each
again has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of
life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite
series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant
the historical event. This again may itself be viewed as the product
of a power which, taken as a whole, works unconsciously and without
volition. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone
else, and what emerges is something that no one willed." 12

It is extremely improbable that Conrad had ever read Engels ;
but this process which Engels describes in terms of science is
precisely the total effect of Nostromo, achieved in terms of art
nothing less than the presentation (what George Eliot had
aimed at in Middlemarch) of society in motion, history in the
making.

Conrad succeeds moreover in the immensely difficult task
of conveying the inter-relation between the individual and
society, the one and the many. The people in Nostromo are
what they are because they are part and parcel of a social
situation; and at the same time they change and modify the
situation. You cannot abstract them from the situation or the
situation from them. When like Decoud, the dandy, or Nos
tromo, the careerist they do not accept their social obligations

76 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

and attempt to live in isolation, lonely, haunted^ without
principle, nothing is left for them but death. Betrayal and
isolation that sense of guilt so powerful in the socially and
intellectually dispossessed of our time are powerful themes
in all of Conrad's novels. In Nostromo the general stink of
corruption (cf. Graham Greene), the grovelling fear of the
terrified Hirsch (cf. Koestler) 5 Nostromo's remorse at refusing
the dying wish of his Italian foster-mother for a priest (cf.
Ulysses), all bring something to this atmosphere^ and the
character of Dr. Monygharn who has under torture betrayed
his friends (cf. Sartre) reinforces it. But the description of
Monygham's release from jail after torture and imprisonment
is well worth pausing on,

"He advanced one stick, then one maimed foot, then the other
stick; the other foot followed only a very short distance along the
ground, toilfully, as though it were almost too heavy to be moved
at all; and yet his legs under the hanging angles appeared no thicker
than the two sticks in his hands. A ceaseless trembling agitated his
bent body, all his wasted limbs, his bony head, the conical, ragged
crown of the sombrero, whose ample flat rim rested on Ms shoulders.

In such conditions of manner and attire did Dr. Monygham go
forth to take possession of his liberty. And these conditions seemed
to bind him indissolubly to the land of Costaguana like an awful
procedure of naturalization, involving him deep in the national
life, far deeper than any amount of success or honour could have
done. They did away with his Europeanism; for Dr. Monygham
had made himself an ideal conception of his disgrace. It was a
conception eminently fit and proper for an officer and a gentle
man. . . JS1S

Not merely is the sense of the social nature of man here
extremely powerfully expressed, but there is also a subtle
dissociation of the writer from the man he is describing. To
permit himself the irony of the last sentence without jeopar
dizing the compassion which informs the whole description,
Conrad needed all the artistic and moral control which most of
his successors have notably lacked. The difference between
the treatment of the dispossessed in Nostromo and in the con
temporary novels and plays of pessimistic neurosis is that
Conrad sees their problem not as a symbol of life itself but

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 77

only as a part of life. That he shares to a degree their despair
is true and he expresses that despair most powerfully. Mrs.
Gould in her disillusionment wonders for a moment whether
"there was something inherent in the nature of successful
action that carried with it the moral degradation of the idea/ 5
But though the theme is so poignantly done it retains the status
of a theme, overtopped by the prevailing vitality, the sense of
life developing.

Conrad succeeds in fact in the enormously difficult task
(which has defeated more 'politically-conscious' writers since)
of revealing imaginatively that "every man is a piece of the
continent, a part of the main/ 5 and his triumph is the more
remarkable because in his personal outlook he would seem to
have been far from clarity. This is shown particularly in
Nostromo in his inadequate attitude towards "the mob" who
never come to life as human beings. And it emerges most
significantly in a certain mistiness which, buried deep in the
language and symbolism of the book, does, we must admit,
sometimes blur the stupendous realism of the achieved work of
art. It is not easy to isolate this quality the quality that Mr.
Forster is trying to catch when he writes of "the central chasm
of his tremendous genius" and suggests that perhaps "he is
misty in the middle as well as at the edges, that the secret
casket of his genius contains a vapour rather than a jewel." 14
I do not find at the heart of Nostromo anything like a vapour.
On the contrary the quality of the imagery in the greater part
of the book is well compared to a jewel. Yet there are moments
in the novel when a sense of "the cruel futility of things" does
seem to overcome Conrad "the cruel futility of lives and
deaths thrown away in the vain endeavour to attain an enduring
solution of the problem." 15 With this sense and it impreg
nates the end of the novel: the enigmatic enquiry on Nostromo's
face before he dies, the presentation of his death as in some
romantic sense a triumph "the greatest, the most enviable,
the most sinister of all," the ambiguity of the word "dominated"
in the final sentence we may associate, I think, the failure of
Mrs. Gould (and Conrad) ever to define at all clearly the
meaning of "material interests." This recurring phrase plays
so essential a part in the moral pattern of the book that its

78 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

precise significance cannot be ignored. This is the climax of
Mrs. Gould's moral discovery in the novel, a discovery from
which Conrad never really dissociates himself:

"An immense desolation, the dread of her own continued life,
descended upon the first lady of Sulaco. With a prophetic vision
she saw herself surviving alone the degradation of her young ideal
of life, of love, of work all alone in the Treasure House of the
World. The profound, blind suffering expression of a painful dream
settled on her face with its closed eyes. In the indistinct voice of an
unlucky sleeper, lying passive in the grip of merciless nightmare,
she stammered out aimlessly the words:

'Material interest.' " 16

Objectively it is clear that "material interest" stands for
imperialism. It is the whole process and consequences of
imperialist exploitation, so richly and concretely and humanely
illuminated throughout the length of the book, that Mrs,
Gould is brought up against. Why should it matter then that
Conrad does not use the word (we are not after all reading
sociology)? It matters, I think, because it is the failure to
recognize in its full theoretical and moral significance the pro
cess of imperialism that leads to the element of mistiness in
Nostromo. Since "material interest" is not given a precise
correlative (the correlative the whole novel cries out for) it
achieves a vague and uncontrolled one. The implication
begins to creep in (again Mrs. Gould's remark about the
degrading effect of action is significant) that something in
the very nature of things, something beyond human control
(yet never defined) is responsible for the tragedy of Nostromo.

It is not of course the failure to use the word imperialism
that matters but a measure of failure to achieve artistic con-
creteness. The reason for the failure is, I believe, fairly clearly
explained in Conrad's own experience. A Polish bourgeois
nationalist, realistic and unsentimental in his liberal sym
pathies and consequently forced into exile, it was his attach
ment to Britain, his adopted country, that seems to have
clouded his objectivity. There is a significant sentence in
Heart of Darkness in which a distinction is drawn between the
British Empire and all other empires. Marlow, examining a

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 79

map of the world, remarks (there is no artistic relevance to
the statement so that it can reasonably be abstracted): " 'There
was a vast amount of red good to see at any time, because
one knows that some real work is done there 5 ". It was his
loyalty to the British Empire that prevented Conrad, despite
the immense honesty of his observation, from coming to an
objective understanding of imperialism as such, just as it was
his position as a bourgeois nationalist that gave such poignancy
to his presentation in Nostromo of Viola the Garibaldino, the
austere and noble Italian democrat who fathers Nostromo. In
this case, however, Conrad does achieve artistic objectivity,
does succeed in mastering what must have been an almost
overwhelming temptation to idealize (one recalls, too, the
extraordinary discipline of objectivity which he brings to
Under Western Eyes). For the Garibaldino, though personally
admirable, is presented as ultimately ineffective. His principles
are out of date; he cannot cope with the world of the San
Tome silver mine. And he kills Nostromo whom his daughters
love.

It is interesting that the two characters in Nostromo to the
presentation of whom a residue of idealism clings (which is in
fact responsible for the element of mistiness in the novel) are
Mrs. Gould and Nostromo himself the woman and the
worker. I believe it is not untrue to say that Conrad never fully
came to terms with either. Dr. Leavis has said (in his valuable
pages on Conrad in The Great Tradition): "About his attitude
towards women there is perceptible, all the way through his
literary career, something of the gallant, simple sailor." 17
This seems to me completely true. Almost all Conrad's women
are idealized and this idealization is a subtle form of escape
from reality. This is one aspect of the mistiness; the other lies
in the 'enigmatic* quality of the masses. Once again the back
ground of eastern Europe in the nineteenth century may be
significant. There is much of Conrad himself in the dilemma
of Razumov, the hero of Under Western Eyes:

"Between the two he was done for. Between the drunkenness
of the peasant incapable of action and the dream-intoxication of

the idealist incapable of perceiving the reason of things and the
true character of men." 18

SO AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

The wonder is, indeed, not that there should be an un
resolved element of haziness in Nostromo but that this great
writer should have triumphantly achieved, against appalling
odds, his "moral discovery" that vital sense of society
changing, developing, becoming; of men mastering, with
almost infinite difficulty, agony and error, the problems they
have to master. There is always a danger that in 'explaining'
with reference to his life and background a writer's qualities
we degrade both the writer and ourselves. It is as an artist,
not as a rather muddle-headed Polish emigre, that Conrad is of
value to us. Nevertheless a passage from his description of his
youth in A Personal Record is particularly illuminating:

"An impartial view of humanity in all its degrees of splendour
and misery together with a special regard for the rights of the
unprivileged of this earth, not on any mystic ground but on the
ground of simple fellowship and honourable reciprocity of services,
was the dominant characteristic of the mental and moral atmosphere
of the houses which sheltered my hazardous childhood: matters of
calm and deep conviction both lasting and consistent, and removed
as far as possible from that humanitarianism that seems to be
merely a matter of crazy nerves or of a morbid conscience." 19

We begin to see at such moments how it was that Conrad,

standing on the very brink of the individualist quagmire of
mysticism and neurosis, was yet able to draw back, to look
with the deepest compassion and yet not permit himself to be
drawn into the bog. Sometimes he seems almost overwhelmed
by the difficulty of

"appraising the exact shade of mere mortal man, with his many
passions and his miserable ingenuity in error, always dazzled by
the base glitter of mixed motives, everlastingly betrayed by a
short-sighted wisdom." 20

But he pulls back, always carefully dissociating himself from
"that humanitarianism that seems to be a matter of crazy
nerves or of a morbid conscience," always avoiding the seduc
tive hopelessness of Original Sin.

Conrad then has no conscious, intellectualized solution for

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 81

the problems of the society which in Nostromo he depicts with
so much truth and insight. And indeed it is foolish to talk
glibly of the 'solution' offered by a work of art; the experience
of the work of art is in itself a kind of solution, a synthesis, a
discovery of the nature of the problem. But even on the level
of immediate helpfulness this great novel holds its surprises.
By a stroke of astonishing intuition the only man who is
present with the dying Nostromo symbol to Conrad of the
People "in his mingled love and scorn of life and in the bewil
dered conviction of being betrayed, of dying betrayed he
hardly knows by what or by whom" 21 is none of the main
characters of the novel whom we already know, but an obscure
little workman, a "small, frail, bloodthirsty hater of capitalists 15
who, personally unadmirable and presented ironically, yet
speeds Nostromo to his death with the assurance that " *The
rich must be fought with their own weapons* ", sl

III. MR. BENNETT AND
MRS. WOOLF

Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives' Tale (1908)
H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay (1909)
John Galsworthy, The Man of Property (1906)
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)

IT was In the 'twenties, those years of Instability, uncertainty
and experiment after the gigantic shock of the First World War,
that Virginia Woolf wrote the famous essays in which, seeking
a theoretical basis for her own felt needs of creative experi
ment, she attacked the conventional novel of the day. It was
true, of course, that even judged by their own standards and
admirers, the novelists who were Mrs. Woolf's principal
targets had passed their prime. In her use of the word
Edwardian with reference to Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells
and Galsworthy, there is a suspicion of malice which is in
itself not quite fair. Today, that much further distant from the
targets, we can perhaps more easily forgive the Edwardian
novelists for being whatever their other faults simply
old-fashioned.

It will be the object of this chapter first to examine briefly
the terms of Virginia Woolf J s attack on the Edwardians,
secondly to enquire whether, in the light of their own best
work, the attack was justified, and finally to try to discover
precisely what problems lay behind Mrs. Woolf's discontent
and whether she herself as a novelist succeeded In solving
them.

The crux of Virginia Woolf 's objections to the novels of
Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy Is that In their books, some
how or other, despite the formidable technical equipment,
"life escapes."

82

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 83

"Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett and Mr. Galsworthy have excited so
many hopes and disappointed them so persistently that our gratitude
largely takes the form of thanking them for having shown us what
they might have done but have not done; what we certainly could
not do, but as certainly, perhaps, do not wish to do. No single
phrase will sum up the charge or grievance which we have to bring
against a mass of work so large in its volume and embodying so
many qualities, both admirable and the reverse. If we tried to
formulate our meaning in one word we should say that these three
writers are materialists. It is because they are concerned not with
the spirit but with the body that they have disappointed us, and
left us with the feeling that the sooner English fiction turns its
back upon them, as politely as may be, and marches, if only into
the desert, the better for its soul. Naturally, no single word reaches
the centre of three separate targets. In the case of Mr. Wells it falls
notably wide of the mark. And yet even with him it indicates to our
thinking the fatal alloy in his genius, the great clod of clay that has
got itself mixed up with the purity of his inspiration. But Mr.
Bennett is perhaps the worst culprit of the three, inasmuch as he is
by far the best workman. He can make a book so well constructed
and solid in its craftsmanship that it is difficult for the most exacting
of critics to see through what chink or crevice decay can creep in.
There is not so much as a draught between the frames of the
windows, or a crack in the boards. And yet if life should refuse to
live there?"

And again:

"If we fasten, then, one label on all these books, on which is
one word materialists, we mean by it that they write of unimportant
things; that they spend immense skill and immense industry making
the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring.

We have to admit that we are exacting, and, further, that we
find it difficult to justify our discontent by explaining what it is that
we exact. We frame our question differently at different times. But
it reappears most persistently as we drop the finished novel on the
crest of a sight Is it worth while? What is the point of it all? Can
it be that, owing to one of those little deviations which the human
spirit seems to make from time to time, Mr. Bennett has come
down with his magnificent apparatus for catching life just an inch
or two on the wrong side? Life escapes; and perhaps without life
nothing else is worth while." 1

84 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

It is perhaps worth emphasizing, at this point, that Virginia
Woolf was not, in the 'twenties, an isokted figure fighting
a lone battle. The "we" of her criticism is not the imperial
pronoun of the Bloomsbury monarch. What she was saying, at
any rate on its negative, critical side, would have been echoed
by a dozen other serious novelists and critics and had indeed
already been sketched, years before, by men like Hardy and
James.

"The recent school of novel-writers" Hardy wrote and he was
referring to Mrs. Woolf s own targets "forget in their insistence
on life, and nothing but life, in a plain slice, that a story must be
worth the telling, that a good deal of life is not worth any such
thing, and that they must not occupy the reader's time with what he
can get at first hand anywhere about him," 2

And Henry James, considering the novels of Arnold Bennett,
had written in 1914:

"When the author of Clayhanger has put down upon the table, in
dense unconfused array, every fact required, every fact in any way
invocable, to make the life of the Five Towns press upon us, and to
make our sense of it, so full-fed, content us, we may very well go on
for the time in the captive condition, the beguiled and bemused
condition, the acknowledgement of which is in general our highest
tribute to the temporary master of our sensibility. Nothing at such
moments or rather at the end of them, when the end begins to
threaten may be of a more curious strain than the dawning unrest
that suggests to us fairly our first critical comment: *Yes, yes but
is this altt These are the circumstances of the interest we see, we
see; but where is the interest itself, where and what is its centre,
and how are we to measure it in relation to that!" 3

The complaint is essentially the same as Virginia Woolf s:
"Life escapes. . . ."

The attack is so broad, yet so fundamental, and its con
sequences in the later history of the novel have been so
considerable that it will be worth while to look a little closer
at some of the novels held up to criticism.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 85

The Old Wives' Tale of Arnold Bennett is a spacious*
leisurely novel which tells the story of the lives of two sisters
born in the Potteries in the mid-nineteenth century. They
are contrasted, Constance and Sophia, in a way not unlike
Amelia Sedley and Becky Sharp, the one 'good/ passive,
exasperating, the other 'clever/ active, courageous;* but it is
typical of Arnold Bennett that Sophia Baines, for all her youth
ful ardour and high promise, should be unable to escape the
background of Bursley and its values despite her initial act of
rebellion. Sophia rebels against the drabness, the narrow
philistinism, the joyless puritanism of the successful drapers
shop in the Five Towns, She falls in love and runs off with her
lover to Paris, to a world the opposite of the Five Towns in all
its appearance and attraction. But the very nature of Sophia's
elopement has been predetermined by the Five Towns,
Her inexperience of life has prevented her from seeing till too
late the true character of her lover, and though her Bursley
hard-headedness enables her to look after herself, to force her
lover to marry her and finally to salvage enough money to
maintain herself when he leaves her, by this time the glory
;has gone out of her rebellion* Shrewdness, a protective in
dependence and an eye for business have replaced ardour and
generosity and love. So that, when she returns to Bursley to
live out her last years with Constance, Sophia, for all her
worldliness and experience, is seen to be as narrow, as incapable
of true and generous happiness as her sister.

It is organized in four solid blocks of roughly equal length,
this novel, the first dealing with the youth of the two girls at
Bursley, the second and third with the respective stories of
Constance and Sophia, the fourth with their reunion in late
middle age and their deaths. Arnold Bennett, as is well known,
was deeply influenced by the French naturalists of his day
Zola, the Goncourts and Maupassant; but in this novel at
least their influence should not, I think, be overstressed. Zola's

* "If only the good could be clever
And if only the clever were good
This world would be nicer than ever
We thought that it possibly could."

Miss Wordsworth's little verse might well be used as a text for a con
sideration of the main themes of nineteenth-century fiction.

86 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

chief purpose, aesthetically speaking, was to achieve 'objec
tivity'; the naturalistic novel has, above all, the quality of the
documentary. The Old Wives' Tale, on the other hand, for all
its solidity, for all the fidelity of backcloth and detail in its
setting, cannot adequately be described as a documentary. It
has within it a more profound typicality, the kind of quality
one associates rather with Dickens, which produces in the
end a significant and moving pattern.

I am inclined to agree with Arnold Bennett's French critic
M. Georges Lafourcade in seeing in The Old Wives' Tale,
despite Bennett's own statement of his desire to make his
novel an English Une Vie, the influence less of the later natural
ists than of the older, more profound realism of Balzac. But
what one may also say with confidence is that Bennett's interest
in the French novel made him very conscious of the problems
of form. "An artist must be interested primarily in present
ment, not in the thing presented," he once wrote. "He must
have a passion for technique, a deep love of form." 4 If the
Old Wives' Tale has something of Dickens in it betrayed
perhaps by the tone and frequent facetiousness of the author's
comment there is also an austerity, a conscious concern over
presentation, which is scarcely Dickensian.

The great problem of The Old Wives' Tale is why, fine and
impressive novel as it is, it is not just that shade finer. It is
almost a great novel that is agreed and yet, somehow, before
the final affirmation of complete confidence one holds back.
Why? E. M. Forster has tried his hand:

"Time is the real hero of The Old Wives' Tale. . . . Our daily
life in time is exactly this business of getting old which clogs the
arteries of Sophia and Constance, and the story that is a story and
sounded so healthy and stood no nonsense cannot sincerely lead
to any conclusion but the grave. Of course we grow old. But a great
book must rest on something more than an *of course/ and The Old
Wives* Tale is strong, sincere, sad, it misses greatness." 5

And Walter Allen, commenting on this very passage, has written:

"It is not, it may be admitted, among the greatest novels. . . .
It misses greatness if one believes there is that in man which trans
cends time. Then it must appear as a partial picture true only for

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 87

'our daily life in time/ But at the level of "our daily life in time' The
Old Wives 9 Tale, it seems to me, is in all essentials unassailable." 6

The Old Wives 9 Tale seems to me to miss ultimate greatness
because it presents a number of particular lives as Life and,
in so doing, achieves the effect of 'reducing* life. As a picture
of the life of Constance and Sophia Baines it is wonderfully
successful. The Baines's shop, the relationships of the family,
the development of the surrounding characters, are superbly
done. We come to feel every stairway and passage, to relish
every piece of furniture in that stuffy house on the corner of
the Square in Bursley. As Henry James has, inimitably, put
it: ". . . the canvas is covered, ever so closely and vividly
covered, by the exhibition of innumerable small facts and
aspects, at which we assist with the most comfortable sense
of their essential truth." 7 And Sophia's rebellion too we feel
upon our pulses. We understand precisely her discontent and
her vague but powerful aspirations; with ever-increasing
admiration for Bennett's insight and honesty we watch her
cope with her disillusionment and pay her subtle homage to
the bourgeois virtues against which, insufficiently armed, she
has once fought. We admire the remarkable lack of sentimen
tality with which Cyril Povey, Constance's 'artistic' son, is
presented. One has only to compare him with George Eliot's
Ladislaw or Galsworthy's Bosinney to grasp here the quality
of Bennett's honesty. And finally we are moved, profoundly
and bitterly, by Sophia's vision of her wasted life as she stands
over the dead body of her worthless husband.

This much, then, of The Old Wives 9 Tale is wholly success
ful. What, bound up inextricably with it, limits our surrender
is our sense that we are being asked here to contemplate the
unrolling of Life itself. "What Life Is" is the title of the fourth
and final book of Bennett's novel and there is a pretension
here which the novel for all its quality cannot fulfil. For to
present the passage of time simply in terms of bitter, wasted
aspiration, to claim for Sophia's tragedy a universal validity,
is not good enough.

The Old Wives' Tale fails, in the end, to transmit a sense
of the resilience of human experience, of the complexity of

88 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

life's processes. It is, to return to Mr. Allen's comment,
precisely "at the level of 'our daily life in time' " that Arnold
Bennett's novel is most assailable. For though it expresses,
profoundly, Sophia's and Constance's daily life, it does not
ultimately 'place' that life securely (or, rather, perilously,
for life is not certain or stable) within time. Two examples
will perhaps illuminate the point.

The historical development of the Five Towns, for instance,
though much is made of it in the latter part of the book, is
seen only from Constance's point of view. We see the changes
in the Square, the movement from the old independent trades
men to the new chain-store, from craft traditions to mass-
production, the breakdown of the old civic spirit, the gradual
encroaching from all sides of monopoly. All this is admirably
caught. But because Bennett, for all his sympathy with the
poor and the servants, conveys across to us nothing of the other
side of the coin, the beginnings of trade union organization
for instance, the total effect of his picture of the Potteries
is bound to lack something in vitality, is bound to give a
certain sense of life's running down like a worn-out spring,
which no doubt corresponds to Constance's own feelings
but which is less than adequate as an expression of "What
Life Is."

Similarly there is a weakness in the French section of the
novel. In one way this book is a very remarkable achievement.
What Bennett succeeds in creating is a world, a way of life,
emphatically not the Bursley way of life, so that when Sophia
finally comes home and then looks back upon her life in Paris
as she surveys the scene from Bursley Square, we have very
effectively the sense of colour, brightness, a world of smart
if brittle vivacity which throws into relief the grey and smoky
provincialism of the Potteries. Parisian middle-class life is,
in fact, contrasted with the middle-class life of North Stafford
shire and the contrast is brilliantly effective. The weakness is
that it is a limited contrast. Sophia's Paris remains essentially
the tourist's Paris. This does not matter (it is from the point
of view of Sophia herself quite credible) as far as Sophia's
story is concerned. But for the larger claims of the novel it is
inadequate. A great novelist who elected to deal with it would

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 89

have seen for instance in the Paris Commune something that
Arnold Bennett did not see.

These points bring us, I recognize, to the verge of a critical
abyss. The type of criticism which complains that a writer
did not write a book quite different from the one he set out to
write has little value, no more has the sort of criticism that
blames Jane Austen for leaving out the French Revolution.
I am not suggesting that The Old Wives' Tale would necessarily
have been a better novel if Bennett had included fuller de
scriptions of the Paris Commune or the rise of the Labour
Movement in the Potteries. What I am suggesting is that a
novelist must have a really rich imaginative understanding of
anything that he writes about and that if his subject involves,
as Arnold Bennett's did, a sense of broad social change and
development, the novelist's own understanding of these issues
is most relevant. He must convey somehow the sense of them
even if it is outside the scope of his novel actually to describe
them. One would not wish Sophia to understand what was
happening in Paris in 1871 it is one of her characteristics
that she could not; but Arnold Bennett should have under
stood and have conveyed across in some way that understand
ing. And if Bennett had understood or sensed something of
the significance of the Paris Commune, then The Old Wives'
Tale would have been artistically a better novel, for we should
not then have had that uneasy sense of a false pretentiousness.
The weakness of The Old Wives 9 Tale is that life itself is too
closely identified with Sophia's and Constance's vision of life,
so that when Sophia realizes that her life has been wasted we
are invited not simply to experience human pity and indigna
tion but to say "Ah, yes, Life's like that altogether" which
it isn't.

H. G. Well's Tono-Bungay is so totally different a novel
from The Old Wives' Tale that it is perhaps hard to understand
how any perceptive reader could ever have included the two
authors in the same sentence. Wells, unlike Arnold Bennett,
had little use for Turgenev, Flaubert and "the Novel as an

90 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

Art-form" In the modem, Jamesian sense. His Interest in
fiction lay not in the production of the refined, 'aesthetic*
sensation but in the stimulation of thought, the consideration
of the vast sweep and movement of human activity.

"I warn you/ 5 writes George Ponderevo, the hero and
narrator of Tono-Bungay,

"This book is going to be something of an agglomeration. I want
to trace my social trajectory (and my uncle's) as the main line of my
story, but as this is my first novel and almost certainly my last, I
want to get in too all sorts of things that struck me, things that
amused me and impressions I got even though they don't minister
directly to my narrative at all. I want to set out my own queer love
experiences, too, such as they are, for they troubled and distressed
and swayed me hugely, and they still seem to me to contain all sorts
of irrational and debatable elements that I shall be the clearer-
headed for getting on paper. And possibly I may even flow into
descriptions of people who are really no more than people seen in
transit, just because it amuses me to recall what they said and did
to us, and more particularly how they behaved in the brief but
splendid glare of Tono-Bungay and its still more glaring off-spring.
It lit some of them up, I can assure you! Indeed, I want to get in
all sorts of things. My ideas of a novel all through are comprehensive
rather than austere. . . ," 8

Wells undoubtedly thought of himself in so far as he thought
in such terms at all as a novelist in the tradition of Fielding,
Thackeray and Samuel Butler. The sort of ambition behind
Tono-Bungay might indeed well be indicated by the famous
phrase which Fielding used to describe Joseph Andrews, "a
comic epic poem in prose."

Unfortunately the phrase reveals as well the fatal chink in
Wells's armour. One cannot speak of Tono-Bungay as a poem
in prose because it is in no satisfactory sense of the word a
poem at all. Unlike Joseph Andrews or even The Way of All
Flesh, it lacks that inner artistic unity, that unifying "subject,
one and indivisible" which creates patterns out of the apparently
casual and wayward 'life' which is the raw material of Fielding's
and Butler's novels.

There ought to be a pattern to Tono-Bungay. It is, so to
speak, there for the asking. The rise and fall of Uncle Ponderevo

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 91

might have been a poem in prose, so might have been the
young manhood of George. There is, heaven knows, interest
enough in the raw material of this book and comic observation
enough and rarest of all in modern novelists an epic sense.
Wells is a writer whom one tends to under-estimate until one
actually returns to his books; then his vitality and his remark
able intelligence come as something of a surprise. It is an
intelligence more rounded, more intimate, more inclusive
than one had remembered. And this very phenomenon is
significant. One does not carry from his books a vivid memory of
Wells's many-sidedness because Wells himself achieved in
his novels no adequate artistic expression of his own vision of life.
Part of the trouble would seem to be in his incurably slap
dash, slip-shod method of composition. He does not even give
himself time to search for the right word, let alone organize
his total material. Half the time he simply doesn't bother.
For the chapter on "How I stole the Quap" pseudo-Conrad
will be good enough. It is not that he is incapable of good
writing. As has been well said: "His gift for vivid metaphor
and the word used with a delight in its texture appears in wel
come flashes amid oceans of turgid and shoddy thinking. 5 ' s
He has indeed the real novelist's gift for making vivid the
incidental scene, such as the pages which precede the death of
Edward Ponderevo.

"The stuffy little room was crowded when I reached it, and lit
by three flickering candles. I felt I was back in the eighteenth
century. There lay my poor uncle amidst indescribably tumbled
bed-clothes, weary of life beyond measure, weary and rambling,
and the little clergyman trying to hold his hand and his attention,
and repeating over and over again:

'Mr. Ponderevo, Mr. Ponderevo, it is all right. It is all right,
Only Believe! Believe on Me, and ye shall be saved!'

Close at hand was the doctor with one of those cruel and
idiotic injection needles modern science puts in the hands of these
half-educated young men, keeping my uncle flickeringly alive for
no reason whatever. The r^Jigieuse hovered sleepily in the back
ground with an overdue and neglected dose. In addition the land
lady had not only got up herself, but roused an aged crone of a
mother and a partially imbecile husband, and there was also a

92 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

fattish, stolid man in grey alpaca, with an air of importance who
he was and how he got there I don't know. I rather fancy the
doctor explained him to me in French I did not understand. And
they were all there, wearily nocturnal, hastily and carelessly dressed,
intent upon the life that flickered and sank, making a public and
curious show of its going, queer shapes of human beings lit by
three uncertain candies, and every soul of them keenly and avidly
resolved to be in at the death. The doctor stood, the others were all
sitting on chairs the landlady had brought in and arranged for them.

And my uncle spoilt the climax, and did not die.

I replaced the little clergyman on the chair by the bedside and
he hovered about the room.

'I think/ he whispered to me mysteriously, as he gave place
to me, "I believe it is well with him/ " 10

And even here he cannot resist, in the sentence about hypo
dermic needles, dragging in his opinions about the medical
profession. If only, one feels time and time again ? he hadn't
quite so many opinions, for they are always getting between
the reader and the book, dissipating the effects he is achieving,
rendering abstract whole scenes and stretches.

Tmo-Bungay has a magnificent theme the rise and fall of
a business racketeer a theme bristling with possibilities for
the novelist as aware as Wells of the social ramifications of his
subject. And he does make something of it ; there is a passion
behind Tono-Bungay, a passion of ideas which makes much
*good j modem writing seem paltry and insipid. From the
opening tirades against aristocracy at Bladesover to the final
defiant refusal to respect the "paraphernalia of dignity" of
the Parliament at Westminster issues are raised in this novel,
notes touched which penetrate deep into the central human
situations of our century. One can at least say of Tono-Bungay
what one cannot say of a single widely-read novel of the last
ten years or so, that here we have a humane, lively and morally
alert intelligence directed upon some of the real, central
public issues of the day.

But, this said, we are bound to ask why Tono-Bungay is not
what it so patently ought to be a great novel?

There are a number of directions from which one might
approach the question. One might start, for instance, with
Wells's failure to people adequately the world of his novel.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 93

There are almost no characters in Tono-Bungay who grip the
imagination of the reader. Even Uncle Ponderevo himself is
scarcely a person. He has, it is true, one or two characteristics,
but they do not amount to a character. By the end of the book
we know remarkably little about him save that he is ebullient,
feckless and means nobody any harm. And the same is true of
the only two other characters who stick in the memory at all-
Aunt Susan and George's wife Marion; we recognize them but
we know almost nothing about them. And the remainder of
the people in this novel we do not even recognize ; they are not
'there' at all, George Ponderevo included.

Wells would probably have defended Tono-Bungay against
such criticism on the grounds that he was not interested in the
novel as a mere vehicle for the presentation of character. "I
would rather be called a journalist than an artist, that is the
essence of it," he wrote in a letter to Henry James. It is not
'personal relationships' (abstracted as they tended to be in
the contemporary novel from their wider social setting) but
something different, more 'scientific,' that is his subject.

"The novelist is going to be the most potent of artists, because
he is going to present conduct, devise beautiful conduct, discuss
conduct, analyse conduct, suggest conduct, illuminate it through
and through. He will not teach, but discuss, point out, plead and
display. We are going to appeal to the young and hopeful and the
curious, against the established, the dignified and defensive. Before
we have done we will have all life within the scope of the novel." 11

Now this is all very well as an assertion of the potentialities
of the novel, but to imagine that one can discuss conduct
except in terms of actual human conflicts, or life except in
terms of living creatures is of course an illusion. It is one of
the weaknesses of Wells, both as an artist and a thinker, that
he tends to think of society as though it has some existence of
its own outside of actual personal, social relationships. More
specifically he tends to see everything in terms of his own
consciousness and his own opinions, from the outside.

This is precisely the trouble with George Poiiderevo in
Tono-Bungay. He himself the most essential character in
the book never really participates in any of the conflicts of
the novel. He simply stands by, expressing opinions (which

94 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

as often as not have no connexion whatever with his actions)
which do not change or develop in any significant way as a
result of his experiences ; indeed they cannot, for as a man, a
living character, he experiences nothing. The only passage of
personal relationship in the book that is at all convincing is
the episode of his marriage with Marion, and even there ^no
real human conflict is developed. The passages on Marion
are given a certain vitality by the painful, masochistic quality
of George's personal recollections (he is being more than
usually honest with himself) not by the setting in motion of
conflicting human forces.

Tono-Bungay as a novel is not conceived in terms of the
real clashes, personal and social, involved in its magnificent
theme, but entirely in terms of Wells's own consciousness as
an observer and teacher. That it retains, as it does, so consider
able a degree of vitality is, indeed, a tribute to the remarkable
vivacity of Wells's intelligence, the passionate seriousness of
what even Virginia Woolf rightly calls his genius. But as a
work of art Tono-Bungay is inferior, for instance, to an Ameri
can novel on a similar theme, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great
Gatsby. Fitzgerald's novel is not without a strain of senti
mentality, yet, because it reveals to us through the actual
vibrant tensions of human relationships something of the
actual, living horror of financial gangsterdom it moves us as
Tono-Bungay fails to do.

Wells's novel seems to me to have a great deal in common
with one of the most interesting and compelling of modern
American films Orson Welles's Citizen Kane, another story
of a big-business tycoon. Both works, despite glaring in
adequacies on the level of personal relationships, achieve,
through a certain rather garish rhetoric in the case of the
film 'sound effects' and the crude, powerful results of exag
gerated shadow in black-and-white photography and an
intuitive awareness of the broadest social implications of their
subject, a fine effect of topical vitality, a lively illumination of
certain highly significant themes of contemporary society.
And at the same time both works have an underlying weakness
of which the unsatisfactory personal insights are merely a
symptom. In neither case is there any real struggle at the core

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 95

of the drama. Kane, like Edward Ponderevo, flings himself
hectically, powerfully, 'significantly* against nothing.

George Ponderevo, summing up the significance of the
career of Tono-Bungay, concludes: ". . . now it was open and
manifest that I and my uncle were no more than specimens of
a modem species of brigand, wasting the savings of the public
out of a sheer wantonness of enterprise." 11 It is a self-betraying
sentence which, if one stops to analyse it, does not expose the
truth about the Ponderevos of this world but shrouds it.
"Wasting the savings of the public." How inadequate it is as
an expression of what the Ponderevos have in terms of human
exploitation and suffering actually done! And yet, almost
inevitably, it follows from George's and Wells's own
attitude to life. George Ponderevo, for all his mongrel-like
defiance of the aristocracy of birth, is more than half a snob.
He hates, it is true, the Bladesover regime which has humiliated
him, but he never really escapes from the Bladesover values:
the Honourable Beatrice Normandy will always remain his
innermost ideal. More important still, George seems incapable
of looking at the poor the workmen who build Crest Hill,
the sailors who man the Maud Mary, the dispossessed of
Chatham and Gravesend except with contempt as a species
almost sub-human. Their chief characteristic is always that
they are dirty. And in the last analysis it is this contempt of
the working class which takes the artistic life out of Tone-
Bungay, robbing it of a vital sense of human conflict, rendering
it abstract when it should be art. The statement of opinion
replaces the revelation of actual human and social tensions
in Tono-Bungay because Wells runs away from these actual
tensions and takes refuge in his ideas about them. As Caudwell
insists in his brilliant if unsympathetic study 11 Wells is ham
strung by his petty-bourgeois outlook. If life escapes his
clutches it is because he cannot bring himself or his main
characters to participate fully and sympathetically in life as it
actually is.

The Man of Property, the first volume of The Forsyte Sag,
became a 'best seller 3 and has, quite apart from its intrinsic

96 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

qualities, a sociological interest on that account. For Gals
worthy's novels were to become outstanding examples of
'middle-brow' literature, one of the most interesting literary
phenomena of our time.

'Middle-brow' literature not to beat about the bush is
inferior literature adapted to the special tastes and needs of
the middle class and of those who consciously or not adopt
the values of that class. It may be inferior for any number of
reasons every bad book has its own particular quality of
badness but to come within the category of 'middle-brow' it
must maintain, whatever its particular brand of inferiority,
certain proprieties sacred to the bulk of readers of the more
superior lending-libraries. Though permitted to titillate with
the mention and even the occasional vision of the unmention
able, it must never fundamentally shake, never stretch beyond
breaking-point, certain secure complacencies. It is worth
making this point because it would be quite wrong to see
'middle-brow' literature as merely qualitatively mediocre,
better than bad literature but worse than good. Its distinctive
feature is not its quality but its function.

It would not be fair to discuss The Man of Property simply
as 'middle-brow.' As opposed to Galsworthy's later books, this
novel has its core of seriousness, its spark of genuine insight
which is not merely incidental but central to its very conception.

This spark is the theme of property and its effect upon the
personal relationships of the Forsytes. The Man of Property
begins as satire and it is, without reaching to any marked
degree of subtlety, effective satire. What is particularly well
conveyed is the significant contradiction in the relationships
of the Forsyte clan between their dislike and suspicion of each
other and their colossal sense of solidarity before any outside
threat. The close, oppressive family ties based on no affection
or even friendliness; the obligatory 'good living' in which no
one shows the slightest talent or even much pleasure; the
unceasing pressure and pre-occupation of acquisitiveness; the
underlying assumption that human relationships are merely an
extention of property relationships (a wife as a man's proudest
possession): all this comes across effectively in the early
chapters of the book. Robert Liddell has criticized Galsworthy's

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 97

upholstery on the grounds that his method of presentation
makes for merely crude differentiation between characters:

"Each Forsyte, or group of Forsytes, is built up from the
background; we learn to know them apart by their furniture or
their food. Old Jolyon had a study 'full of green velvet and heavily
carved mahogany/ and when he gives a family dinner the saddle
of mutton, the Forsyte piece de resistance, is from Dartmoor. Swithin
has an 'elaborate group of statuary in Italian marble/ which placed
upon a lofty stand (also of marble), diffused an atmosphere of culture
throughout the room! His mutton is Southdown. . . .

This is not at all a clear way of distinguishing character. . . .
If you collected and multiplied traits of the kind Galsworthy has
here given, you might in the end arrive at some slight discrimination
of character. But it is obvious that this is an extremely laborious
way of doing things. One ought rather to deduce from the character
of any Forsyte, if he had been well drawn, what sort of furniture he
would be likely to have, and what he would be likely to offer one if
one dined with him if it is really a matter of interest to know." 14

But surely this is to miss the whole point of Galsworthy's
method. What is the character of any Forsyte abstracted from
his furniture and his saddle of mutton? It is Galsworthy's
strength, not his weakness, that he should so continuously
insist in his presentation of the Forsytes on the crude material
basis of their lives. It is nonsense to assume that behind
Timothy or Swithin Forsyte there is some mysterious, dis
embodied 'character' waiting to be expressed by some sensitive
artist like Virginia Wdolf or Ivy Compton-Bumett.

Unfortunately the satire of The Man of Property is not
sustained. It could not be, for there is insufficient sincerity,
insufficient indignation behind it. The Forsyte characters,
though credible enough, are too politely treated. Like all
pusillanimous writers Galsworthy is afraid to let his characters
develop to their own logical extremes. He is for ever drawing
back, blurring, sentimentalizing. Of the 'pure 5 Forsytes only
Soames is given anything of a free hand.

As it goes on The Man of Property becomes less and less
satisfactory and this is because Galsworthy completely blurs
the central conflict of the book the conflict between humanity

98 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

and property. The representatives of humanity Irene 5
Bosinney, young Jolyon turn out to be a poor lot; they are
not more humane than the Forsytes, only more romantic. In
the arguments between Soames and Bosinney over the house
at Robin Hill, Soames is presumably meant to represent
philistine materialism and Bosinney the artistic conscience, but
in fact Soames's actions are, compared with Bosinney's,
eminently justifiable. Bosinney's overspending in the face of
numerous perfectly reasonable undertakings betrays not fine
feelings but sheer incompetence ; yet so hazy and wishy-washy
and romantic are Galsworthy's positive values that we are
invited to identify Bosinney and Irene with Art and Beauty,
struggling against the tyranny of Property. In fact throughout
The Forsyte Saga nobody really struggles against the tyranny
of the Forsyte view of property. Young Jolyon, the humane
rebel, is quite prepared (there isn't even a moment's conflict)
to accept money from his father whose values and property-
principles he affects to despise. Galsworthy's own positive is
betrayed not as opposition to the Forsytes but as the senti
mentalizing of them. Old Jolyon is his ideal That is why his
satire which, as D. H. Lawrence remarked, had at the
beginning "a certain noble touch," soon fizzles out.

"The satire, which in The Man of Property really had a certain
noble touch, soon fizzles out, and we get that series of Galsworthian
'rebels' who are, like all the rest of the modem middle-class rebels,
not in rebellion at all. They are merely social beings behaving
in an anti-social manner. They worship their own class but they
pretend to go one better and sneer at it. They are Forsyte antis,
feeling snobbish about snobbery. Nevertheless, they want to attract
attention and make money. That's why they are anti. It is the vicious
circle of Forsytism. Money means more to them than it does to a
Soames Forsyte, so they pretend to go one better, and despise it,
but they will do anything to have it things which Soames Forsyte
would not have done.

If there is one thing more repulsive than the social being
positive, it is the social being negative, the mere anti. In the great
debacle of decency this gentleman is the most indecent. In a subtle
way Bosinney and Irene are more dishonest and more indecent than
Soames and Winifred, but they are anti, so they axe glorified. It is
pretty sickening.'* 15

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 99

Lawrence's essay, violent, passionate, cruel, is by far the
finest criticism of Galsworthy.

"The Man of Property has the elements of a very great novel, a
very great satire. It sets out to reveal the social being in all his
strength and inferiority. But the author has not the courage to carry
it through. The greatness of the book rests in its new and sincere
and amazingly profound satire. It is the ultimate satire on modern
humanity, and done from the inside, with really consummate skill
and sincere creative passion, something quite new. It seems to be
a real effort to show up the social being in all his weirdness. And then
it fizzles out.

Then, in the love affair of Irene and Bosinney, and in the
sentimentalizing of old Jolyon Forsyte, the thing is fatally blemished.
Galsworthy had not quite enough of the superb courage of his satire.
He faltered, and gave in to the Forsytes. It is a thousand pities. He
might have been the surgeon the modern soul needs so badly, to
cut away the proud flesh of our Forsytes from the living body of
men who are fully alive. Instead, he put down the knife and laid on
a soft, sentimental poultice, and helped to make the corruption
worse. . . .

The Forsytes are all parasites, and Mr. Galsworthy set out, in
a really magnificent attempt, to let us see it. They are parasites upon
the thought, the feelings, the whole body of life of really living
individuals who have gone before them and who exist alongside
with them. All they can do, having no individual life of their own, is
out of fear to rake together property, and to feed upon the life that
has been given by living men to mankind. . . .

Perhaps the overwhelming numerousness of the Forsytes
frightened Mr. Galsworthy from utterly damning them. Or perhaps
it was something else, something more serious in him- Perhaps it
was his utter failure to see what you were when you weren't a
Forsyte. What was there besides Forsytes in all the wide human
world? Mr. Galsworthy looked, and found nothing. Strictly and
truly, after his frightened search he had found nothing. But he
came back with Irene and Bosinney and offered us that. Here!
he seems to say, here is the anti- Forsyte! Here! Here you have it!
Love! Pa-assionf PASSION.

We look at this love, this PASSION, and we see nothing but a
doggish amorousness and a sort of anti-Forsytism. . . ," 16

It is true that Lawrence himself did not altogether escape
the Forsytes. By identifying bourgeois society with society as

100 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

such, by writing of "social man' 5 when he wanted to attack
bourgeois man, he himself was paying a final, fantastic tribute
to the Forsyte world. But nevertheless no one who has under
stood what Lawrence was driving at can ever return to Gals
worthy quite seriously again. The Man of Property can be read
today only as a museum-piece, not as a living work of art.

"Life escapes. . . ." Because life, says Virginia Woolf, is
not like this, not like what Bennett and Wells and Galsworthy
present.

"Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being 'like
this.* Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.
The mind receives a myriad impressions trivial, fantastic, evanes
cent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they
come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as
they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the
accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came
not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a
slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could
base Ms work upon his own feeling and not upon convention,
there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest
or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single
button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not
a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous
halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the begin
ning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist
to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit,
whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little
mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading
merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper
stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe
it" 17

To the Lighthouse is an attempt by Virginia Woolf, her finest
attempt perhaps, to write the alternative kind of novel.

It is extremely difficult to say with any sense at all of
adequacy what To the Lighthouse is about. A good many

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 101

critics have used the word 'symbolic, 5 but there seems to be
little agreement among them as to what is symbolic of what. I
do not think it is a very helpful word to use in connexion with
Virginia Woolf's novel, though her own insistence, guarded
from pretentiousness by a hundred not quite convincing
modifications, on discussing the Meaning of Life 18 invites the
term.

The trip to the lighthouse and the completion of Lily
Briscoe's picture the two principal binding themes of the
book do not 'stand for* something else. They are, rather, a
framework, an essential part of the composition of the novel's
total effect. To the Lighthouse is no more 'symbolic 5 than a
picture by C6zanne and no more casual. In neither case can a
mere paraphrase of the subject-matter convey anything of the
essence of the artistic achievement. If one is asked "What is
that picture about?" one can only reply "It is about itself; it is
what the artist has painted; it is called Mont Ste Victoire or
Still Life with Apples." Similarly To the Lighthouse is itself.
There is nothing to do with it except read it.

The mention of Cezanne is deliberate. In Mr. Bennett and
Mrs. Brown there is a curious sentence which suggests that a
sudden change took place in human character and perception
in the date is explicit December 1910. Professor Isaacs
has been, as far as I know, the first literary historian to suggest
that this curious and apparently arbitrary date refers to the
opening at the Grafton Galleries of the most famous of the
post-Impressionist exhibitions. 19 Virginia Woolf was, of
course, a member of a circle deeply, one might say passionately,
involved in this event. Her friend Roger Fry and her brother-
in-law Clive Bell were among the foremost publicists and
defenders of modern French painting. And there can be little
doubt that Virginia Woolf herself responded deeply both to
the works of art involved and to the aims behind post-Impres
sionist painting.

"Into a world where the painter was expected to be either a
photographer or an acrobat," wrote Clive Bell, "burst the post-
Impressionists, claiming that, above all things, he should be an
artist." 20

102 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

What Clive Bell is saying links up closely with Virginia Woolf s
own discontents. Photographs and acrobats: 'materialists'
absorbed in a barren technical dexterity. The complaint is
essentially the same.

So too, to a high degree, is the answer. I am not qualified
to offer an opinion as to whether Virginia Woolf 's art derives
the more from the Impressionist or the post-Impressionist
painters.* Certainly impressionism (in the literary sense at
least) seems to describe as well as any word her method, her
concern with the texture of experience, her attempts to capture
the "myriad impressions" of the individual consciousness and
to weld into a significant whole the apparently diverse and
casual elements of a particular scene.

'Stream of consciousness/ the term often applied to Mrs.
Woolf s technique, seems to me, as far as To the Lighthouse
goes, to be scarcely more satisfactory than 'symbolism.' To
Dorothy Richardson's novels, to parts of Proust's great book
or to the final section of Joyce's Ulysses, the expression is
appropriate. These writers do attempt, at least for a time, to
portray reality wholly through the stream of impressions made
on or through an individual's mind. But Virginia Woolf in this
novel (Mrs. Dalloway is a somewhat different case) has not the
same object. Whose stream of consciousness could To the
Lighthouse be said to convey? The focus point is constantly
shifting. It is not through Mrs. Ramsay's eyes that we view the
whole, nor even through Lily Briscoe's, nor indeed through
the eyes of any one character.

Virginia Woolf composes her novel very much as a painter
Lily Briscoe, for that matter composes a picture. But of
course there are differences. Time intrudes, for one thing.
The "Time Passes" section of the book seems to me its least
successful passage, self-consciously arty and rather thin. But
what is reminiscent of a painting is the overriding concern
with texture and form. A touch is added here, a line extended
there, a moment of apparently casual conversation posed against
a break in the hedge, in order to achieve not story, not conflict,

* Professor Isaacs quotes suggestively (op. cit. p. 87) from R. A. M.
Stevenson's book on Velasquez where such a phrase as "the soft irridescence
of the luminous envelope" occurs.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 103

not character-insight, though all these elements may hover
around, but the effect of the lived moment in time, the complex
of colour and shape and shadow and tone of voice and pre
judiced opinion and indigestion which is, Virginia Wool!
insists, "life. 55

The subject of To the Lighthouse, if one may properly
attempt to isolate it at all, is Mrs. Ramsay and the effect of her
presence, her very being, on the life around her. That effect
cannot be fully understood or fully conveyed within her own
lifetime, but in the final section, when she is already dead, she
is still the main figure. It is she who leads Lily Briscoe to the
sense of momentary completeness, the moment of vision which
is the climax of the book; and Mrs. Ramsay's presence is
indeed an essential part of that vision. (In the first section she
is merely a "triangular purple shape" in Lily's picture.) The
journey to the lighthouse, James's flash of triumph, is the
completion too of the first moment of the book, the triangular
relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay and James revealed
in the opening pages of the novel.

In what sense may life be said, in To the Lighthouse, not
to escape? In the sense, perhaps, that there is nothing second
hand about this novel, that the convention in which it is
written permits Virginia Woolf to convey with extraordinary
precision a certain intimate quality of felt life. The dinner
scene which is at the centre of the novel is a piece of writing
worth comparing with, say, Galsworthy's description of dinner
at Swithin Forsyte's in the early part of The Man of Property.
Galsworthy's dinner is well described; we get a sense of what
kind of room Swithin's dining-room is, of what each of the
characters sitting round the table is like, of the social interplay
going on throughout the meal and the quality of the saddle
of mutton. But the effect is, compared with Virginia Woolf 's,
a surface effect. We are not made aware of the moment-by-
moment texture of feeling, the intricate pattern of reaction, the
wispish, wayward flitting of consciousness, the queer changes
in tempo of the responses, the taste of the food, the sudden
violent swoops of emotion and the strange, enhanced signi
ficance of outside, inanimate, casual things, a shadow on the
table, the pattern of the cloth,

104 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

In the description (if it is not too intractable a word) of the
dinner in To the Lighthouse a dimension is introduced which
in Galsworthy's writing is altogether absent. And that dimen
sionlet us call it the impression of the momentary texture of
experience has the effect which Virginia Woolf was peeking
when she used the words "luminous halo'* to describe life.
There is a luminous quality in the general effect of To the
Lighthouse which is what gives the novel its particular value.
These people may not be very interesting, neither their activities
nor their mental pre-occupations may concern us very much
when we abstract and think about them; but they are alive.
They breathe the air, they catch the fragrance of the flowers or
the tang of the sea, they eat real food, they know one another.
Whatever they are they are not cardboard figures or puppets
or caricatures (we have come to the furthest point from the
comedy of humours) ; and because they are in this physical
one might almost say primitive sense alive they have a kind
of resilience which is rare in literature. Robert Liddell has said
well: "The truth is perhaps this: while we know the characters
of Miss Austen as we know our friends (if we are abnormally
observant), we know Mrs. Woolf s characters as we know
ourselves." 21 This is a reference of course to the quality and not
the quantity of knowledge involved. The effect of To the
Lighthouse is the absolute antithesis of flatness.

And yet . . . ? Having said this, having relished what is in
this novel unique and exquisite, have we not missed out what is
most important of all? Is it right to resist the temptation, after
one has finished To the Lighthouse and remained for a while
sensitive to its spell, to slam it with as vulgar a gesture as one
can muster and permit to fall the brutal words: "So what?"

The trouble with To the Lighthouse, it seems to me, is the
quite simple and quite fundamental trouble that it is, when all
is said, not about anything very interesting or important. That,
of course, is putting it too simply and leaving oneself wide
open to some obvious rejoinders. In one sense all life is, from
the writer's point of view, equally important and when a
novelist achieves an effect of expression which we feel to be
'good' that is that. The effect of To the Lighthouse is something
new in literature (and we cannot say that of the novels of

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 105

Bennett or Galsworthy); in the moments of enjoyment of the
book we experience something we have not experienced before
and our sensibility is, by that experience, refined. In this
sense Virginia Woolf may justly be regarded as a finer, more
truly artistic writer than any of the Edwardian novelists we
have discussed. But that is not the only thing to be said.
D. S. Savage, in an essay on Virginia Woolf, has written:

"The distinguishing feature of Virginia Woolf *s apprehension
of life lies ... in its passivity; and furthermore, she subscribed
unwittingly ... to a view of life which placed a primary emphasis
upon the object. One recalls the passive function ascribed to the
mind ('The mind receives a myriad impressions') and the atomistic
conception of experience ('Prom all sides they come, an incessant
shower of atoms') revealed in the essay 'Modem Fiction*. . . .
Virginia Woolf s search for 'significance* on the primitive level of
primary sensational perceptions . . . was chimerical from the
beginning. And, indeed it is a typical feature of the characters of
her novels to be altogether lacking in the capacity for discriminating
within experience. They are passively caught up in the streams of
events, of 'Life/ of their own random perceptions." 22

I think Mr. Savage underrates Virginia Woolf 's powers but he
seems to me to make here an essential point. Upon what 'is this
subtle apparatus of sensibility after all exercised? Upon what
vision of the world, what scale of human values, is it based?
What is lacking in To the Lighthouse is a basic conflict, a frame
work of human effort. What does Lily Briscoe's vision really
amount to? In what sense is the episode in the boat between
James and Mr. Ramsay really a culmination of their earlier
relationship?

Are they really the alternative possibilities, The Old Wives*
Tale and Tono-Bungay and The Man of Property on the one
hand, To the Lighthouse on the other? What are we to make,
looking back at it now after a quarter of a century, of Virginia
Woolf 's thesis?

In the first place we must insist, I think, that in lumping

106 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOYEL

together Arnold Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy* Virginia
Woolf and her allies were, from the point of view of literary
criticism, making a tactical mistake, for the three novelists are
fundamentally, not merely superficially, very different in
method and in value.

They do, of course, in contrast with Virginia Woolf herself,
have something in common. Not only does each of the three
Edwardian novels we have discussed have a plot in the sense
that To the Lighthouse can scarcely be said to have one (though
the plot of Tono-Bungay is in all conscience flimsy enough);
more important, they share the assumption, denied by Mrs.
Woolf, that a *sense of life* can be conveyed by objective
description of other people and scenes as opposed to the
subjective impressions of a number of individual conscious
nesses. And Bennett and Wells and Galsworthy are indeed, as
Virginia Woolf accuses them, 'materialists 5 in the sense that
they see their characters and stories as emerging out of, and
indeed inseparable from, a particular material situation.^

I think it is possible that in the attacks of Virginia Woolf
and Hardy and James on the Edwardians two separate issues
get muddled up. On the one hand is the feeling that "they write
of unimportant things/' that there is something essential
missing in these novels which makes them less than wholly
satisfying; on the other is the conviction that this missing
something, this ultimate failure in greatness, is intricately
connected with the upholstery of their novels, their emphasis
on material detail, their naturalistic method.

If we look back on The Old Wives' Tale and TonoBufigay
and The Man of Property (remembering that each shows the
author at his very best, does him perhaps rather more than
justice) we will agree, I think, with the general complaint that
there is indeed something wrong wi*h these novels, even with
The^ Old Wives 9 Tale which is the best of them. But if we
begin to ask just what is wrong then the answer quickly becomes

* One does not wish to become involved in philosophical distinctions
but it is worth insisting that Mrs. Woolf was of all writers the least justified
in using the word ^materialist* as a term of abuse. For her own method,
based on her view of consciousness as an "incessant shower of innumerable
atoms'* is in fact an expression of pure, crude, mechanical Lockean material

ism.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 107

not merely more complex than Virginia Woolf indicates
but also rather different in general direction.

There is, of course, something in Virginia Woolf 5 s attack on
the methods of 'naturalism. 5 When, in Mr. Bennett and Mrs.
Brown, she asked the Edwardian novelists how she should
set about describing Mrs. Brown, the woman she meets in
the train, they replied.

* 'Begin by saying that her father kept a shop in Harrogate.
Ascertain the rent. Ascertain the wages of shop assistants in the
year 1878. Discover what her mother died of. Describe cancer.
Describe calico. Describe ' " 23

It is worth comparing this with an actual statement by Zola
about the aims of the naturalist writer:

"A naturalist writer wants to write a novel about the stage.
Starting from this point without characters or data, his first concern
will be to collect material, to find out what he can about this world
he wishes to describe. He may have known a few actors and seen
a few performances. . . . Then he will talk to the people best in
formed on the subject, will collect statements, anecdotes, portraits.
But this is not all. He will also read the written documents available.
Finally he will visit the locations, spend a few days in a theatre in
order to acquaint himself with the smallest details, pass an evening
in an actress's dressing-room and absorb the atmosphere as much
as possible. When all this material has been gathered, the novel
will take shape of its own accord. All the novelist has to do is to
group the facts in a logical sequence. . . . Interest will no longer be
focussed on the peculiarities of the story on the contrary, the more
general and commonplace the story is, the more typical it will

he "24

uc *

Clearly Mrs. Woolf was not merely tilting at windmills.

But the question arises as to whether it is in fact their
'materialism' in Virginia Woolf s meaning that limits the
achievements of the writers of the 'naturalistic* order, I do not
think it is. What is ultimately unsatisfactory about Zola as a
novelist and the same applies at least in some measure to
such English novels as George Gissing's In the Year of Jubilee,
George Moore's Esther Waters and Somerset Maugham's Of

108 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

Human Bondage as well as to The Old Wives' Tale is a failure
to distinguish between surface verisimilitude and underlying
typicality. These novels are all "true to life" in the sense of
being honest descriptions of what can and does actually
happen in life, and yet they give us, in varying degrees, a feel
ing that "life escapes" because human life is at once more
resilient, less 'flat,' has so to speak more possibilities than
these books suggest.

Professor Luk&cs has made a suggestive contribution to
the question by his comparison of two kinds of 'typicality'
that naturalism which concentrates on the typical in the sense
of the average, the ordinary, the essentially casual, and that
deeper realism which gets hold of the extreme possibilities
inherent in a situation and gains a more profound typicality
through a concentration on the truly significant tensions within
that particular chunk of life.' 4 ^

A large number of honest and worthy late Victorian and
Edwardian novels are naturalistic in Lukics's limiting sense
and their limitation is linked, I think, with a deep social
pessimism. Life in Britain at the turn of the century seems to
the writers depressing and frustrating and yet, because they
can be confident of no alternative possibilities, life is like
this, like the final section of The Old Wives' Tale. Either they
discover no significant pattern at all or else they give to a
situation which may be 'true 5 but is not, in the deepest sense,
typical (or, if one prefers the word, symbolic) a significance
which it will not bear and which therefore has a limiting,
constricting effect on the total impression of their work.

It is her apprehension of at least something of this problem
which seems to me to give what force it has to Virginia Woolf s s

* Luk&cs says of Zola and the naturalists: "A mechanical average takes
the place of the dialectic unity of type and individual; description and
analysis is substituted for epic situations and epic plots. ... Average
characters whose individual traits are accidents from the artistic point of
view . . . act without a pattern, either merely side by side or else in com
pletely chaotic fashion." ** And of Tolstoy: "The hallmark of the great
realist masterpiece is precisely that its intensive totality of essential social
factors does not require, does not even tolerate, a meticulously accurate
or pedantically encyclopaedic inclusion of all the threads making up the
social tangle; in such a masterpiece (as Anna Karenina) the most essential
social factors can find total expression in the apparently accidental conjunc
tion of a few human destinies.** 26

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 109

attack on the Edwardians. The weakness of her criticism lies
in her unsatisfactory diagnosis of the causes of her discontent
and is further expressed in the limitations of her own positive
answer. The social realists of the turn of the century (and it is
only by stretching the point perhaps illegitimately that one can
include Wells among them at all*) are all vulnerable to criticism.
Even the best of them the Bennett of The Old Wives' Tale,
the Gissing of The Odd Women, Arthur Morrison in The Hole
in the Wall seem somehow overpowered by their material
and veer either towards flatness or towards a rather bogus
forced quality which can perhaps best be described as neo
Dickensian. None of them succeeded to the extent, for instance,
Gorky did in Russia in meeting the challenge of a social
situation which demanded from its realist artists not merely
subjective honesty but a radical re-examination of the very
basis of their sensibility.

And yet, whatever is the matter with these novels, it is
certainly not their firm connexion with material reality. On the
contrary, it is this very quality that gives to The Old Wives 9
Tale, when all is said and balanced, so much more life' than
To the Lighthouse. "Life escapes. . . ." But has not more life
indeed escaped from Bennett's novel than ever gets into
Virginia Woolfs? Bennett has let something essential slip
through his fingers; but what remains imposes itself on the
imagination, illuminates the broad span of human experience,
with an overall vitality which Virginia Woolf for all her insistent,
questionings about the purpose of Life and her subtle evocation
of the texture of the lived moment cannot be said to achieve.

There is again more life/ though no doubt less 'sensibility'
of the accepted, middle-class sort, even in a rather tedious
flat novel like Esther Waters than in the work of Dorothy
Richardson, in which the implications of Virginia Woolfs
theory of life as "an incessant shower of innumerable atoms"
are consistently accepted. The truth is that though the late
Victorian and Edwardian social realists were, so to speak,

* The 'social realist* side of Wells is, of course, mixed up with his propa
gandist intention and links him with those interesting Victorian propagandist
novels, Kingsley's Alton Locke and Mark Rutherford's The Revolution in
Tanner's Lane, books deeply moving in the earnest humanity of their
authors" vision but scarcely satisfying as novels.

110 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

realists manques, writers who could not see the wood for the
trees and therefore tended always to 'reduce 9 life, they were
at least working in a tradition that had some basic validity,
some possibility of expansion and development, whereas the
alternative direction of Virginia Woolf, the development of a
cult of sensibility, inadequately based on the realities of the
social situation, was likely to lead nowhere very useful at all.
What is positive in Virginia Woolf *s achievement is her
expression of discontent with the dreary flatness of so much
naturalistic writing and her reassertion of the luminousness of
life, her sense of the value and dignity and creativeness of
apparently casual experience. She writes of James Ramsay -in
the opening section of To the Lighthouse:

"Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which
cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future
prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at
hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn of
the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallize and transfix the
moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James Ramsay,
sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue
of the Army and Navy Stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator
as his mother spoke with heavenly bliss. It was fringed with joy." 27

In the method which such a passage illustrates may be seen
the direction of the emphasis Virginia Woolf brought to the
novel. That refrigerator fringed with joy had had no place in
the naturalistic tradition ; a radiance, which in one sense is life

itself, comes back. Yet its reintroduction into the picture may

have been bought, it now must seem, at too dear a price.

IV. D. H. LAWRENCE: THE
RAINBOW (1915)

I HAVE chosen The Rainbow among the novels of D. H.
Lawrence not because I am sure It is Lawrence's best book
but because It has so much, so many aspects, of the essential
Lawrence in it. And yet I want it to be clear right away that
I am not using The Rainbow to illustrate Lawrence's ideas.

With Lawrence it is particularly difficult to talk about the
novels rather than the ideas. Certainly one cannot discuss the
novels without the ideas, but that is a different proposition.
My point is that the novels, though they express as any work
of art must their author's philosophy, are greater than that
philosophy once it is abstracted or expressed in any other
terms than the novels themselves.

It is part of Lawrence's greatness as an artist that he had no
use for art for art's sake in the way the phrase is generally
understood. "The novel can help us to live, as nothing else
can," he declares in his essay Morality and the Novel. 1 He is
out to help us to live. But he adds to his sentence: ". . . as
nothing else can, no didactic scripture anyhow. . . ." The
artist-prophet is not a preacher. But neither is he a take-it-or-
leave-it mere presenter of things as they seem to be.

"I can only write what I feel pretty strongly about, and that, at
present, is the relation between men and women. After all, it is the
problem of today, the establishment of a new relation, or the
readjustment of the old one, between men and women/' 2

This sense that things as they are are a 'problem,' not
merely an occurrence, and that writing about them implies
changing them is extremely strong in Lawrence and important.

That isr one of the reasons why the temptingly simple view

Hi

112 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

of Lawrence's work that he starts well in The White Peacock
and Sons and Lovers as a great realist artist and declines in
value as his philosophy gets the upper hand is not quite
good enough, even as a simplified generalization. It is true
that Lawrence, after Sons and Lovers might have taken a
different path and that never again, even in the best parts of
The Rainbow or Women in Love or Lady Chatterly's Lover, did
he write anything so magnificent as, at any rate, the first half
of that book; but that is not the whole story.

The sentence preceding the one I have already quoted
from Morality and the Novel runs:

"The novel is a perfect medium for revealing to us the changing
rainbow of our living relationships." 8

It is a very significant sentence, both as an indication of the
scope and splendour of Lawrence's intention and as a pointer
to the meaning of the central symbol of The Rainbow. In a
later and generally under-estimated novel, Kangaroo, we
find another sentence worth attention:

"The rainbow was always a symbol to him a good symbol: of
this peace. A pledge of unbroken faith, between the universe and the
innermost." 4

This is what The Rainbow is about, the living relationships
of men and women, the struggle to achieve peace and fulfil
ment one with another within the colossal compass of the
ranged arch of the visible universe. We are reminded perhaps
of the imagery Shakespeare creates in Antony and Cleopatra,
the play in which above all others he grapples with this problem
of the relation of the personal to the public life, the innermost
and the universe. His images are less mystical than Lawrence's.
It is the arch of the ranged Roman Empire that spans the
world, and when Cleopatra gives us her final superb vision
of Antony whose "rear'd arm crested the world" we recog
nize in her words a thread of imaginative self-deception which
merits in all its ambiguity the word romantic. But the central
image of the arch, which at once rears upwards and yet contains.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 113

is the connecting element I would wish, without overstressing
the analogy, to indicate.

The rainbow is the pledge of lightness, of continuity (it
has therefore a direct sexual connotation) and adjustment.
Its appearance at the end of the novel involves the evocation
of many of the underlying fertility images of our culture,
including the whole idea of the delivery of the waste land from
the curse of sterility. But before that final image is projected
Lawrence has continuously worked on our imagination so
that the rainbow, though it retains (as we shall see) an unsatis
factory element of mysticism, has behind it a great deal of
profoundly significant concrete experience.

The novel is the revelation of a series of personal relation
ships: primarily those of Tom Brangwen and Lydia Lensky,
Will and Anna, Ursula and Skrebensky. Lawrence knows
perfectly well that no personal relationship exists in a vacuum.
None of the characters in The Rainbow is abstracted from the
situations and relationships and experiences that has made
him what he is. The characters change, develop, yet remain
unified. Anna the complacent, easy-going, rather repulsive
mother of a drawn-out family of nine children is still the same
person as the wild, self-possessed yet frightened little girl who
first comes to the Marsh with her foreign mother. Lawrence,
for all his apparent tendency to generalize about personal
relationships, is always aware of the disparate factors which go
to make up every situation. He may have written to Edward
Garnett about The Rainbow in a letter which has perhaps been
over-quoted:

". . . You mustn't look in my novel for the old stable ego of
character. There is another ego, according to whose action the
individual is unrecognizable, and passes through, as it were, allo-
tropic states which it needs a deeper sense than any we've been used
to exercise, to discover states of the same single radically unchanged
element." 5

But the fact remains that the characters in The Rainbow are,
even in the conventional sense of novel personages, individual
characters, that is to say, clearly recognizable from one another,
unique beings whose uniqueness we may come to know

114 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

through unfamiliar means but who, once apprehended, are
quite describable in alternative and more conventional terms.

The means by which the nature of the personal relation
ships is conveyed across to the reader constitutes of course the
principal originality of Lawrence as a novelist. It is insufficient
to speak of it as a technical originality because the technical
method is the expression of the originality in Lawrence's
vision. Because he saw differently from other novelists he had
to write differently.

The early chapters of The Rainbow are technically com
paratively straightforward. Occasionally, at moments of climax,
one comes upon such a sentence as "Then he burst into flame
for her, and lost himself." But the reader is likely to take such
a moment pretty much in his stride without being aware that
he is involved in any very unusual way of writing. It is with
the remarkable chapter Anna Victrix that it becomes clear
that Lawrence is using words not in a slightly eccentric but
in a radically unusual way. It is here that the remarks about
character in the letter to Edward Garnett become relevant,
for it is patent that the description of the first year or so of
Anna's marriage cannot be read as normal naturalistic descrip
tive writing.

Walter Allen has discussed the question in his essay,
D. H. Lawrence in Perspective:

"What interests him in his characters, is not the social man, the
differentiated individual, but the seven-eighths of the iceberg of
personality that is submerged and never seen, the unconscious mind,
to which he preaches something like passivity on the part of the
conscious. This accounts for the difficulty so many people find when
first reading Lawrence. His convention has to be accepted, just as
the conventions of any artist must be, if you are to read him with
pleasure and profit. It accounts, too, for so many mannerisms of
style that are usually considered blemishes: a Lawrence character
'dies,' 'swoons,' is 'fused into a hard bead/ lacerated/ 'made perfect/
time and time again. He is, if you like, fumbling for words, words
with which to describe the strictly indescribable. Yet the language
he uses is true to the rhythm of the life of the unconscious." 6

It is perhaps permissible to doubt whether Mr. Allen or

anyone else knows what constitutes the rhythm of the life of

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 115

the really unconscious. But he makes an important point in his
insistence that Lawrence's convention has to be accepted if we
are to read him at all. And what is impressive about this
curious, intense convention through which the emotional
rektionship of Will and Anna Brangwen is conveyed, is that
it does very remarkably achieve a sense of the conflict and
interplay of human personalities. Anna Victrix is the descrip
tion of a year of marriage, of the meeting, joining, breaking
and adaptation of two human beings. It is not naturalistic save
in the odd detail, the sudden imposed scene, which sets and
places the relationship, holds it to earth, makes it concrete and
not abstract. Most of the time the effect is achieved by repetition
(in no other way could he so successfully compass time,
trivialities, boredom), by rhythm, and by insistent symbolic-
seeming words like dark, burning, obliteration, destroyed, etc.,
and by images of flowers and every kind of fertility symbol.

I do not think we need to accept Lawrence's theories about
the unconscious or the fashionable tarradiddle about "the
seven-eighths of the iceberg of personality that is submerged
and never seen" to recognize either the power or the justice of
the art in Anna Victrix. That emotional relationships of the
more intense kind are likely to be more fully and deeply con
veyed in writing which encompasses and exploits rhythms
and images which are scarcely conceivable in the colder terms
of a fully rationalized prose is not a proposition which neces
sarily involves a capitulation to mystical obscurantism.

Lawrence sees human relationships essentially in terms of
a conflict out of which a synthesis is possible but by no means
inevitable. It is his ability to convey across this sense of conflict
which does indeed go deeper than a rational level which
gives his finest descriptions of personal relationships their
unique force and insight.

In each of the relationships which Lawrence examines
the image of the arch which is to find its final expression as
the rainbow is involved. The most complete and satisfactory
of the relationships is that achieved by Tom Brangwen and
his Polish wife, Lydia. It is not an easily achieved happiness.
There is a foreigness between them, he the working farmer.
she the half-aristocratic, rather intellectual Polish lady ; there is

116 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

the problem of the little Anna, the step-child; there is the
inadequacy in his whole conception of a marriage-relationship,
the sort of inadequacy wonderfully conveyed in this passage:

"The evening came on, he played with Anna, and then sat alone
with his own wife. She was sewing. He sat very still, smoking,
perturbed. He was aware of his wife's quiet figure, and quiet dark
head bent over her needle. It was too quiet for him. It was too
peaceful. He wanted to smash the walls down, and let the night in,
so that his wife should not be so secure and quiet, sitting there.
He wished the air were not so close and narrow. His wife was
obliterated from him, she was in her own world, quiet, secure,
unnoticed, unnoticing. He was shut down by her.

He rose to go out. He could not sit still any longer. He must
get out of this oppressive, shut-down, woman-haunt.

His wife lifted her head and looked at him.

'Are you going out?* she asked.

He looked down and met her eyes. They were darker than
darkness, and gave deeper space. He felt himself retreating before
her, defensive, whilst her eyes followed and tracked him down.

'I was just going up to Cossethay/ he said.

She remained watching him.

'Why do you go? 5 she said.

His heart beat fast, and he sat down, slowly.

'No reason particular/ he said, beginning to fill his pipe again,
mechanically.

'Why do you go away so often?' sh^ said.

'But you don't want me/ he replied.

She was silent for a while.

'You do not want to be with me any more/ she said.

It startled him. How did she know this truth? He thought it was
his secret.

'Yi/ he said.

'You want to find something else/ she said.

He did not answer. 'Did he?' he asked himself.

'You should not want so much attention/ she said. 'You are
not a baby.'

'I'm not grumbling/ he said. Yet he knew he was.

'You think you have not enough/ she said.

'How enough?*

'You think you have not enough in me. But how do you know
me? What do you do to make me love you?'

He was flabbergasted.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 11?

'I never said I hadn't enough in you/ he replied. 'I didn't know
you wanted making to love me. What do you want? 5

'You don't mate it good between us any more, you are not
interested. You do not make me want you.'

'And you don't make me want you, do you now? 5 There was a
silence. They were such strangers.

Would you like to have another woman?' she asked.

His eyes grew round, he did not know where he was. How
could she, his own wife, say such a thing? But she sat there, small
and foreign and separate. It dawned upon him she did not consider
herself his wife, except in so far as they agreed. She did not feel
she had married him. At any rate, she was willing to allow he might
want another woman. A gap, a space opened before him.

'No/ he said slowly. 'What other woman should I want?'

'Like your brother/ she said.

He was silent for some time, ashamed also.

'What of her?' he said. 1 didn't like the woman/

'Yes, you liked her/ she answered persistently.

He stared in wonder at his own wife as she told him his own
heart so callously. And he was indignant. What right had she to sit
there telling him these things? She was his wife, what right had
she to speak to him like this, as if she were a stranger.

'I didn't/ he said. 'I want no woman.'

'Yes, you would like to be like Alfred.'

His silence was one of angry frustration. He was astonished. He
had told her of his visit to Wirksworth, but briefly, without interest,
he thought.

As she sat with her strange dark face turned towards him, her
eyes watched him, inscrutable, casting him up. He began to oppose
her. She was again the active unknown facing him. Must he admit
her? He resisted involuntarily.

'Why should you want to find a woman who is more to you
than me?* she said.

The turbulence raged in his breast.

1 don't/ he said.

'Why do you?' she repeated. 'Why do you want to deny me?'

Suddenly, in a flash, he saw she might be lonely, isolated,
unsure. She had seemed to him the utterly certain, satisfied, absolute,
excluding him. Could she need anything?

'Why aren't you satisfied with me? I'm not satisfied with you.
Paul used to come to me and take me like a man does. You only
leave me alone or take me like your cattle, quickly, to forget me
again so that you can forget me again/

118 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

'What am I to remember about you?' said Brangwen,

*I want you to know there is somebody there besides yourself.'

'Well, don't I know it?'

'You come to me as if it was for nothing, as if I was nothing
there. When Paul came to me, I was something to him a woman,
I was. To you I am nothing it is like cattle or nothing J

'You make me feel as if J was nothing/ he said.

They were silent. She sat watching him. He could^not move, his
soul was seething and chaotic. She turned to her sewing again. But
the sight of her bent before him held him and would not let him be.
She was a strange, hostile, dominant thing. Yet not quite hostile.
As he sat he felt his limbs were strong and hard, he sat in strength.

She was silent for a long time, stitching. He was aware,
poignantly, of the round shape of her head, very intimate, compel
ling. She lifted her head and sighed. The blood burned in him, her
voice ran to him like Ere.

'Come here,' she said, unsure.

For some moments he did not move. Then he rose slowly and
went across the hearth. It required an almost deathly effort of
volition, or of acquiescence. He stood before her and looked down
at her. Her face was shining again, her eyes were shining again like
terrible laughter. It was to him terrible, how she could be trans
figured. He could not look at her, it burnt his heart.

*My love!' she said.

And she put her arms round him as he stood before her, round
his thighs, pressing him against her breast. And her hands on him
seemed to reveal to him the mould of his own nakedness, he was
passionately lovely to himself. He could not bear to look at her.

*My dear!* she said. He knew she spoke a foreign language. The
fear was like bliss in his heart. He looked down. Her face was
shining, her eyes were full of light, she was awful. He suffered from
the compulsion to her. She was the awful unknown. He bent down
to her, suffering, unable to let go, unable to let himself go, yet drawn,
driven. She was now the transfigured, she was wonderful, beyond
him. He wanted to go. But he could not as yet kiss her. He was
himself apart. Easiest he could kiss her feet. But he was too ashamed
for the actual deed, which were like an affront. She waited for him
to meet her, not to bow before her and serve her. She wanted his
active participation, not his submission. She put her fingers on
him. Aiid it was torture to him, that he must give himself to her
actively, participate in her, that he must meet and embrace and
know her, who was other than himself. There was that in him which
shrank from yielding to her, resisted the relaxing towards her s

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 119

opposed the mingling with her, even whilst he most desired it He
was afraid, he wanted to save himself.

There were a few moments of stillness. Then gradually, the
tension, the withholding relaxed in him, and he began to flow
towards her. She was beyond him, the unattainable. But he let go
his hold on himself, he relinquished himself, and knew the sub
terranean force of his desire to come to her, to be with her, to mingle
with her, losing himself to find her, to find himself in her. He began
to approach her, to draw near.

His hlood beat up in waves of desire. He wanted to come to her,
to meet her. She was there, if he could reach her. The reality of her
who was just beyond him absorbed him. Blind and destroyed, he
pressed forward, nearer, nearer, to receive the consummation of
himself, be received within the darkness which should swallow
him and yield him up to himself. If he could come really within
the blazing kernel of darkness, if really he could be destroyed,
burnt away till he lit with her in one consummation, that were
supreme, supreme." 7

This seems to me, without qualification, superior to any
previous description of the development of a marriage relation
ship in the English novel. In its sense of the dialectical nature
of love and hatred, of the contradictions and paradoxes which
are the very essence of human relationships, such a passage
is comparable only to the finest metaphysical poetry, to the
lines, for instance, which conclude Donne's Holy Sonnet
"Batter my heart, three person*d God." My immediate point,
however, is that the passage describing (or, better, conveying)
the achievement of a happy, fulfilled relationship between
Tom and Lydia ends with this sentence:

". . . Her father and her mother now met to the span of the

heavens, and she, the child, was free to play in the space beneath,
between." 8

The image of the completed arch, symbolizing a situation of
positive and fulfilled harmony in which all the factors (not
merely the sexual) of a complex whole meet creatively, this is
the culmination of the first three chapters of the novel.

They are extraordinarily rich, these opening chapters, with
their evocation of the Midlands scene, the countryside eaten
into by the new industry, the curious, very English mingling

120 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

of rural and urban. It has been well emphasized recently,
especially by Dr. Leavis and Professor Pinto that Lawrence
was far from being the rootless cosmopolitan which the wander
ings of the latter part of his life suggest. As Professor Pinto has
put it:

". . . Those who only know London and the south of England
and Oxford and Cambridge tend to think of the Midlands merely
as a grimy wilderness of ugliness and philistinism separating them
from the Lake Country and Scotland. They may remember Matthew
Arnold's remarks about provinciality and the dreariness of the
Midland towns. What they ignore is not only the beauty of much of
the Midland country, which, as we know well, is often found
alongside ugliness and dreariness of the industrial areas, but also the
existence of a great tradition of working-class and middle-class cul
ture, which is just as real, and in some ways healthier and more vital
than the gentlemanly tradition of the South. It is the tradition that
shaped the genius of that great woman who wrote under the name
of George Eliot in the nineteenth century, the old puritan tradition
of provincial England, founded on the local church or chapel, the
local elementary and secondary or grammar school and the local
university or university college." 9

This was Lawrence's background. It was ultimately the tragedy
of his life that, owing partly to his deeply emotional relation
ship with his mother who was a petty-bourgeois woman,
bitterly unsympathetic to and contemptuous of the working-
class life into which her marriage pitched her, he failed to
develop the possibility of achieving the freedom he sought
through a more full participation in the aspirations and struggles
of the people among whom he was bom.

Even in these opening chapters of The Rainbow there are
hints of that deep and treacherous snobbishness that was to
destroy Lawrence; but it would be recklessly unjust to see
these hints as the principal quality of the novel. Already the
central theme is the bringing together of the inward and
the outward life, the attempt to express and hence resolve the
paradox that each human being is at once separate and yet a
part of a whole, independent yet interdependent, a lone
individual yet a social being.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 121

^ At first It seems for a couple of pages as though Lawrence Is
going to postulate some kind of mystic union between man
and nature, but the issues quickly become more complex and
more valuable. Of the Brangwen woman he writes:

". . . She faced outwards to where men moved dominant and
creative, having turned their back on the pulsing heat of creation,
and with this behind them, were set out to discover what was
beyond, to enlarge their own scope and range and freedom; whereas

the Brangwen men faced inwards to the teeming life of creation,
which poured unresolved into their veins.'* 10

The profoundest issues are here invoked, the central problem
of the novel achieving clarification. The mere acceptance and
physical potency of the men are seen as inadequate, as holding
back the fuller human aspirations of the race.

"Looking out, as she must, from the front of her house towards
the activity of man in the world at large, whilst her husband looked
out to the back at sky and harvest and beast and land, she strained
her eyes to see what man had done in fighting outwards to know
ledge, she strained to hear how he uttered himself in his conquest,
her deepest desire hung on the battle that she heard, far off, being
waged on the edge of the unknown. She also wanted to know, and to
be of the fighting host." 11

"The activity of man in the world at large." It is presented as
the other side of the coin, the aspect of human life without
which the satisfaction of personal physical needs is meaningless
and impossible. Pounding through The Rainbow is this double
sense the sense of man as a unique individual faced with
choices upon which depend his ability to develop his
potentialities and the sense of man as a social being, a part of a
larger whole, faced with the universe and striving to master it.
The search, the passionate, desperate search of the characters
of The Rainbow is to achieve personal relationships which
make them at one with the universe, to overcome the apparent
contradiction between the individual and the social being.

There are introduced in the course of the novel a number
of unsatisfactory attempts at resolution, false arches which

122 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

fail, despite appearances, to link the innermost with the
universe. One is nature itself: the community which the early,
farming Brangwens feel with the earth's processes, the arch of
trees under which Ursula temporarily seeks shelter from the
storm in the final chapter. Another is the world of science
"the area under an arc lamp ... lit up by man's completest
consciousness 5 *" which Ursula as a student at Nottingham
for a moment submits to but soon rejects. More important is
the Church.

The Church is the most fully explored false arch in The
Rainbow. It is introduced as something very near a symbol in
the first paragraph of the novel.

"Whenever one of the Brangwens in the fields lifted his head
from his work, he saw the church-tower at Ilkeston in the empty
sky. So that as he turned again to the horizontal land, he was aware
of something standing above him and beyond him in the distance." 18

The possibility of the Church as the rainbow is here explicitly
suggested and the theme is returned to many times throughout
the novel, but particularly in the chapter The Cathedral in
which the significance of Lincoln Cathedral to Will Brangwen
is revealed.

"Away from time, always outside of time! Between east and
west, between dawn and sunset, the church lay like a seed in silence,
dark before germination, silenced after death. Containing birth
and death, potential with all the noise and translation of life, the
cathedral remained hushed, a great, involved seed, whereof the
flower would be radiant life inconceivable, but whose beginning
and whose end were the circle of silence. Spanned round with the
rainbow, the jewelled gloom folded music upon silence, light upon
darkness, fecundity upon death, as a seed folds leaf upon leaf and
silence upon the root and the flower, hushing up the secret of all
between its parts, the death out of which it fell, the life into which
it has dropped, the immortality it involves, and the death it will
embrace again. 9 ' 14

This is to Will a satisfactory consummation of his needs.
"There his soul remained, at the apex of the arch, clinched in
the timeless ecstasy, consummated." But to Anna it is an

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FlRST QUARTER 123

empty answer, though she feels for a time the force of it.
"She claimed the right to freedom above her, higher than
the roof." The Church does not embrace the whole of the
universe; its pretensions are ultimately bogus.

The final vision of the rainbow by Ursula is tentative and,
one is bound to say, mystical. It is clear, by the end of the novel,
what she had rejected, less clear what she still hopes for. She
has rejected Skrebensky beautiful, animal, but conventional,
the servant of the imperial state 15 , lacking inwardness and an
understanding of the profounder aspirations of the soul. With
less difficulty she has rejected Winifred Inger and her cynical
uncle Tom, physically and spiritually corrupt. She has turned
her back with distaste upon modem industrial society "a
dry brittle, terrible corruption spreading over the face of the
land" and the church "standing up in hideous obsoleteness."
Social service in the form of her work as a teacher she has
rejected as barren and useless. Nothing remains but a vague,
insistent conviction (Lawrence's own) that somehow or other
men will come through, achieve some kind of rebirth in which
full, potent lives and mutually satisfactory relationships will
again be possible.

This then is the 'message* of The Rainbow, the burden of
the book which Lawrence wrote, and of no writer does the
word burden hold a more thorough-going significance. It is
a common criticism of Lawrence and, I think, on the whole a
just one that the intensity of his novels is to some extent self-
destructive, that his characters live at a pitch of intensity
which is not only uncommon in experience but altogether
disproportionate. It is perhaps important therefore to insist on
the range and flow of interest invoked in The Rainbow, the
amount of life* upon which the intensity of emotion within
the book is, so to speak, exercised.

Because of the intensity, the way in which the climaxes of
individual relationships are presented, we tend to think of
Lawrence's characters and situations as almost despite the
often obsessive concern with the physical and sexual reactions
disembodied, units of vital matter whirling and clashing in a
vast dark universe in which time and place are of little relevance
or even reality. It is important to try to assess how far this

124 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

impression Is a just one and how far It comes from an un
familiarity with Lawrence's technique.

If one attempts to sum up the range of experience and
Interest Involved in The Rainbow It turns out to be very large
indeed. There is the whole question of the relationship between
work and personality; there is an examination of the social
set-up of Cossethay and Beldover, the position of the squire
and the vicar and the schoolmaster; there is the problem of
industrialization, the significance of the canal and the railway
and the pits; there is a great deal and from many points of view
about the English educational system; there is the question of
the Impact of the English Midlands on the Polish migr$;
above all there Is all that Is Implied in the phrase "the emancipa
tion of women. 5 Such Issues, abstracted as 'issues/ may seem
at first to have little enough to do with the Impact of the novel.
In fact, I believe, The Rainbow Is far more securely rooted
in reality, far more concretely based In the actual human, social
issues of twentieth-century England than many readers recognize.

It Is tempting, for instance (and Lawrence himself often
gives us excuse enough) to think of Lawrence's psychological
Interest as being rather abstract. In fact, one has only to recall
his descriptions of childhood in this novel to realize the injustice
of the impression. The extraordinary poignancy as well as the
power of the description of Anna's misery when she Is kept from
her mother who is having another child or the conveying of
the relationship between Will and the baby Ursula, such
achievements of art have nothing theoretic, nothing abstract
about them. If a technical knowledge of psychology as a 'subject 5
lies behind them It is a knowledge that has been fully absorbed
Into an ordered consciousness.

The Rainbow, I have said, Is securely rooted in reality. At
Its best It is a revelation of the nature of personal relationships
in twentieth-century England of incomparable power and
insight. Lawrence's vision of bourgeois society Is indeed so
potent, so devastating in its uncompromising horror that it was
Inevitable that the book should outrage the upholders of law
and order. 48 * The usual assessment of the novel, that it begins

*In October 1915 The Rainbow was declared obscene and the magistrates
ordered the recall and destruction of all copies.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 125

superbly and then declines, is less than true* Certainly the
opening chapters, culminating in the achievement of happiness
by Tom and Lydia, are done with great insight and richness,
but they are also, in comparison with the later reaches of the
book, uncomplex. The full significance of the coming of the
canal (serving the new collieries) has not yet become clear,
though it is by more than chance that the bursting of the
canal-bank kills Tom Brangwen. The relationship of Tom
and Lydia, though it is not conceived at all In pastoral terms, is
uncomplicated by the issues which are to prove too much for
their grandchild Ursula and the second generation Polish
Emigre, Skrebensky. Fundamentally it is a pre-capitalist
relationship between a successful working farmer and the
daughter of a feudal landowner and Its fulfilment is bound up
with a sense of oneness with nature and a simple social set-up
which is largely off the track of the developing society.
"Immune" Is significantly a word which Anna returns to
several times when she Is looking back later on her life at the
Marsh.

Compared with the world the later generations have to
face, the world of the Marsh is almost Idyllic. Will and Anna
fight out their battle in more desperate terms but with them
the Implications at stake are still muffled because fundamentally
both capitulate, losing sight of the rainbow and ending In their
modern house at Beldover, respectable and defeated, happy
only in the second-rate happiness of a dishonest compromise.
Anna Victrix will end her life as something very like a com
placent suburban matron.

It Is Ursula, from the moment she literally reaches for
the moon and then later sallies forth into the man's world,
who is brought, like Lawrence himself, up against the full
reality of the bourgeois world. The last chapters of The Rainbow
seem to me not, artistically, finer than the first but more moving,
more courageous, more folly relevant to the twentieth-century
world.

In her aspiration towards freedom Ursula faces facts which
neither Lydia nor Anna have had to face. The most important
of them though by no means all are Involved in her relation
ship with Skrebensky. Even in the early stages of their

126 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

relationship it is clear that he will, unless he can achieve a
transformation against "which the odds are stacked, fail her.

There is an important passage in the eleventh chapter
(First Love) in which the young Skrebensky discusses his life
with Ursula.

"Ursula and Anton Skrebensky walked along the ridge of the
canal between. The berries on the hedges were crimson and bright
red, above the leaves. The glow of evening and the wheeling of the
solitary pee-wit and the faint cry of the birds came to meet the
shuffling noise of the pits, the dark, fuming stress of the town
opposite, and they two walked the blue strip of water-way, the
ribbon of sky between.

He was looking, Ursula thought, very beautiful, because of a
flush of sunburn on his hands and face. He was telling her how he
had learned to shoe horses and select cattle fit for killing.

'Do you like to be a soldier?' she asked.

'I am not exactly a soldier/ he replied.

'But you only do things for wars,' she said.

'Yes.'

'Would you like to go to war?'

'I? Well, it would be exciting. If there were a war I would want
to go.'

A strange, distracted feeling came over her, a sense of potent
uniealities.

'Why would you want to go? J

'I should be doing something, it would be genuine. It's a sort
of toy-life as it is.'

*But what would you be doing if you went to war?'

'I would be making railways or bridges, working like a nigger.'

'But you'd only make them to be pulled down again when the
armies had done with them. It seems just as much a game/

'If you call war a game.'

'What is it?'

'It's about the most serious business there is, fighting/

A sense of hard separateness came over her.

*Why is fighting more serious than anything else?' she asked.

'You either kill or get killed and I suppose it is serious enough,
killing/

'But when you're dead you don't matter any more/ she said.

He was silenced for a moment.

'But the result matters/ he said. *It matters whether we settle
the Mahdi or not/

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 127

*Not to you nor me we don't care about Khartoum. 5

'You want to have room to live in: and somebody has to make
room.'

'But I don't want to live in the desert of Sahara do you? 1 she
replied, laughing with antagonism.

'I don't but we've got to back up those who do/

< Why have we?'

'Where is the nation if we don't?'

'But we aren't the nation. There are heaps of other people who
are the nation.'

'They might say they weren't either/

'Well, if everybody said it, there wouldn't be a nation. But I
should still be myself,' she asserted brilliantly.

'You wouldn't be yourself if there were no nation.'

'Why not?'

'Because you'd just be a prey to everybody and anybody.'

'How a prey?'

'They'd come and take everything you'd got.'

'Well, they couldn't take much even then. I don't care what they
take. I'd rather have a robber who carried me off than a millionaire
who gave me everything you can buy.'

'That's because you are a romanticist.'

'Yes, I am. I want to be romantic. I hate houses that never go
away, and people just living in tiie houses. It's all so stiff and stupid.
I hate soldiers, they are stiff and wooden. What do you fight for,
really?'

*I would fight for the nation.'

'For all that, you aren't the nation. What would you do for
yourself?'

'I belong to the nation and must do my duty by the nation.'

'But when it didn't need your services in particular when there
is no fighting? What would you do then?'

He was irritated.

*I would do what everybody else does.'

'What?'

'Nothing. I would be in readiness for when I was needed.'

The answer came in exasperation.

'It seems to me,' she answered, 'as if you weren't anybody as
if there weren't anybody there, where you are. Are you anybody,
really? You seem like nothing to me.' " 1$

Nothing could better convey a sense of the futility of the con
ventional middle-class young man's life, and the passage is

128 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

followed by the memorable incident in which Ursula gives
her necklace and her name to the barge-people's baby, an act
whose significance Skrebensky totally fails to understand. "The
woman had been a servant Fm sure of that" is all he can say.
Well might Ursula wince.

When later they become lovers it is still the same. Save his
physical beauty the young man has almost nothing to give
Ursula. His values are the values of the Indian army sahib and
his consolation is the same whisky. And because of his
limitations he cannot love Ursula though he wants to des
perately. To Lawrence love that is merely sexual is in the long
run valueless. It is the total human being he is concerned with
and what shocked him about contemporary society was what
it did to the total human being.

"To be alive, to be man alive, to be whole man alive: that is the
point. And at its best, the novel, and the novel supremely can help
you." 17

It Is worth recalling the recurrence of the theme of "living"
in Henry James, particularly the famous passage in The
Ambassadors in which Strether talks to little Bilham: "Live all
you can; it's a mistake not to. . . ," 18 Lawrence and James are,
superficially, extremely contrasted writers, yet we shall find,
I believe, that the value of the work of both lies ultimately In
this passionate striving after life and the sense in both that the
world into which they and their characters are pitched denies
the potentialities of living. It is this positive sense of human
aspiration which goes so far to counteract the unsatisfactory
and indeed life-denying elements In their own philosophies.

In James, as we have seen, the destructive element within
the novels may be isolated as a very sophisticated kind of
aestheticism, a particular delight in situations in which the
seeker after life is trapped and forced towards death. In
Lawrence the danger-point Is the Lawrentlan brand of mys
ticism, a mysticism which it Is difficult to define without doing
Lawrence an Injustice, but which nevertheless permeates his
writing.

It is not quite fair to saddle Lawrence with some of his

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 129

wilder statements about the superiority of the blood over the
intellect. Such statements, especially out of context, are belied
by the total impact of his work which does not have the effect
of doing down the intelligence. And yet it must be recognized
that there is something not merely unsatisfactory but posi
tively pernicious within such a novel as The Rainbow. It can
perhaps best be indicated by the attitude not simply of Ursula
Brangwen but of Lawrence himself towards ordinary working
people. The theme of The Rainbow is what bourgeois society
does to personal relationships. The pledge of The Rainbow
is that a new society will come about in which men and women
will be able to live whole and achieve vital, creative relation
ships. But the relation of tlie theme to the pledge, of the earth
to the rainbow, is shrouded in wordiness and mysticism.

The root of the problem is Lawrence's own identification
of democracy with bourgeois democracy and society with
bourgeois society. It is this identification which forces him, in
his search for a positive hope, into the swamps of mysticism.
We have already seen how, in his brilliant analysis of The
Forsyte Saga, he equates the word "social" with "acquisitive."
There is a passage towards the end of The Rainbow which is
equally significant, not merely because it throws light on
Lawrence's political views (that is not the point), but because
it contains one of the clearest indications of the unsolved
contradiction which wreaks havoc with the latter part of the
novel as a work of art. Ursula and Skrebensky are talking of
their projected marriage:

"Once she said, with heat:

C I shall be glad to leave England. Everything is so meagre and
paltry, it is so unspiritual I hate democracy.*

He became angry to hear her talk like this, he did not know
why. Somehow, he could not bear it, when she attacked things. It
was as if she were attacking him.

'What do you mean?* he asked her, hostile. 'Why do you hate
democracy?'

'Only the greedy and ugly people come to the top in a democracy,
she said, 'because they're the only people who will push themselves
there. Only degenerate races are democratic.'

'What do you want then an aristocracy?' he asked, secretly

130 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

moved. He always felt that by rights he belonged to the ruling
aristocracy. Yet to hear her speak for his class pained him with
a curious, painful pleasure. He felt he was acquiescing in something
illegal, taking to himself some wrong, reprehensible advantage.

'I do want an aristocracy/ she cried. 'And I'd far rather have
an aristocracy of birth than of money. Who are the aristocrats now
who are chosen as the best to rule? Those who have money and the
brains for money. It doesn't matter what else they have: but they
must have money-brains because they are ruling in the name of
money.*

'The people elect the government/ he said.

*I know they do. But what are the people? Each one of them is a
money interest. I hate it, that anybody is my equal who has the
same amount of money as I have. I know I am better than all of
them. I hate them. They are not my equals. I hate equality on a
money basis. It is the equality of dirt. J

Her eyes blazed at him, he felt as if she wanted to destroy him.
She had gripped him and was trying to break him. His anger sprang
up, against her. At least he would fight for his existence with her.
A hard, blind resistance possessed him.

'I don't care about money/ he said, 'neither do I want to put
my finger in the pie. I am too sensitive about my finger.'

'What is your finger to me?' she cried, in a passion. 'You with
your dainty fingers, and your going to India because you will be
one of the somebodies there! It's a mere dodge, your going to
India.*

'In what way a dodge?' he cried, white with anger and fear.

'You think the Indians are simpler than us, and so you'll enjoy
being near them and being a lord over them/ she said. 'And you'll
feel so righteous, governing them for their own good. Who are you,
to feel righteous? What are you righteous about, in your governing?
Your governing stinks. What do you govern for, but to make things
there as dead and mean as they are hero!'

'I don't feel righteous in the least/ he said.

'Then what do you feel? It's all such a nothingness, what you
feel and what you don't feel.*

'What do you feel yourself?' he asked. 'Aren't you righteous
in your own mind?'

'Yes, I am, because I'm against you, and all your old, dead
things/ she cried." 19

It is a very subtle passage. The indictment of Skrebensky

could scarcely be more shrewd or more profound from any

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 131

point of view, psychological or social. And in Ursula's anger
the whole of Lawrence's hatred and contempt of bourgeois
society comes through. Yet there is also something very deep
in Ursula's own attitude which prevents her from being able
to cope adequately with Skrebensky. Her identification of the
people with "a money interest" disarms her. That it should
disarm her as a debater doesn't of course matter (no one need
demand that Ursula must, in a theoretical sense, be 'right').
What does matter is that it disarms her as an active agent in the
novel and hands her over to an orgy of mystical clap-trap.
Since Ursula is at this point carrying on her shoulders all of
the positives of the novel it is she who is about to achieve
the vision of the rainbow it matters intensely that these
positives should be given no coherent, concrete expression.
It means, among other things, that the final image of the
rainbow, upon which almost everything, artistically, must
depend, is not a triumphant image resolving in itself the half-
clarified contradictions brought into play throughout the book,
but a misty, vague and unrealized vision which gives us no
more than the general sense that Lawrence is, after all, on the
side of life.

There are, I think, two ways in which Lawrence's un
satisfactory philosophy seriously limits the success and value
of The Rainbow as a work of art. In the first place, there is the
excessive intensity, the lack of relaxation, which gives the book
as a whole an obsessive quality, all rather high-pitched and
overwrought. In the second place not quite separable from
this first quality is the unresolved element of mysticism. In the
final pages of the book Lawrence seems to be making a des
perate effort to slough off this mysticism, to purge from his
vision its excessive individualism, to see his people not in terms
of mysterious allotropic states of being, but as men and women
born and living and struggling in twentieth-century England,
nowhere else.

Ursula's temptation to see the world as unreality is clearly
stated:

"Repeatedly, in an ache of utter weariness she repeated:

*I have no father nor mother nor lover, I have no allocated place

132 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

in the world of things, I do not belong to Beldover nor to Notting
ham nor to England nor to this world, they none of them exist, I 'am
trammelled and entangled in them, but they are unreal I ? must
break out of it, like a nut from its shell which is an unreality.' "

But the temptation is rejected and the rainbow finally appears
standing upon the earth.

"She knew that Skrebensky had never become finally reaijn
the weeks of passionate ecstasy he had been with her in her desire,
she had created him for the time being. But in the end he had failed
and broken down.

Strange, what a void separated him and her. She liked him now,
as she liked a memory, some bygone self. He was something of the
past, finite. He was that which is known. She felt a poignant affection
for him, as for that which is past. But, when she looked ahead, into
the undiscovered land before her, what was there she could recog
nize but a fresh glow of light and inscrutable trees going up from the
earth like smoke. It was the unknown, the unexplored, the jundis-
covered upon whose shore she had landed, alone, after crossing the
void, the darkness which washed the New World and the Old.

There would be no child: she was glad. If there had been a child,
it would have made little difference, however. She would have kept
the child and herself, she would not have gone to Skrebensky.
Anton belonged to the past.

There came the cablegram from Skrebensky. 'I am married.'
An old pain and anger and contempt stirred in her. Did he belong
so utterly to the cast-off past? She repudiated him. He was as he
was. It was good that he was as he was. Who was she to have a man
according to her own desire? It was not for her to create, but to
recognize a man created by God. The man should come from the
Infinite and she should hail him. She was glad she could not create
her man. She was glad that this lay within the scope of that vaster
power in which she rested at last. The man would come out of
Eternity to which she herself belonged.

As she grew better, she sat to watch a new creation. As she sat at
her window, she saw the people go by in the street below, colliers,
women, children, walking each in the husk of an old fruition, but
visible through the husk, the swelling and the heaving contour of
the new germination. In the still, silenced forms of the colliers she
saw a sort of suspense, a waiting in pain for the new liberation; she
saw the same in the false hard confidence of the women. The
confidence of the women was brittle. It would break quickly

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 133

to reveal the strength and patient effort of the new germination.

In everything she saw she grasped and groped to find the
creation of^the living God, instead of the old, hard barren form of
bygone living. Sometimes great terror possessed her. Sometimes
she lost touch, she lost her feeling, she could only know the old
horror of the husk which bound in her and all mankind. They were
ail in prison, they were all going mad.

She saw the stiffened bodies of the colliers, which seemed already
enclosed in a coffin, she saw their unchanging eyes, the eyes of those
who are buried alive: she saw the hard, cutting edges of the new
houses, which seemed to spread over the hillside in their insentient
triumph, the triumph of horrible, amorphous angles and straight
lines, the expression of corruption triumphant and unopposed,
corruption so pure that it is hard and brittle: she saw the dun
atmosphere over the blackened hills opposite, the dark blotches of
houses, slate roofed and amorphous, the old church-tower standing
up in hideous obsoleteness above raw new houses on the crest of
the hill, the amorphous, brittle, hard-edged new houses advancing
from Beldover to meet the corrupt new houses from Lethley, the
houses of Lethley advancing to mix with the houses of Hainor, a
dry, brittle, terrible corruption spreading over the face of the land,
and she was sick with a nausea so deep that she perished as she sat.
And then, in the blowing clouds, she saw a band of faint iridescence
colouring in faint colours a portion of the hill. And forgetting,
startled, she looked for the hovering colour and saw a rainbow
forming itself. In one place it gleamed fiercely, and, her heart
anguished with hope, she sought the shadow of iris where the bow
should be. Steadily the colour gathered, mysteriously, from nowhere,
it took presence upon itself, there was a faint, vast rainbow. The arc
bended and strengthened itself till it arched indomitable, making
great architecture of light and colour and the space of heaven, its
pedestals luminous in the corruption of new houses on the low hill,
its arch the top of heaven.

And the rainbow stood on the earth. She knew that the sordid
people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world's
corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their
blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast
off their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean, naked
bodies would issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to
the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven. She saw in the
rainbow the earth's new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of
houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric
of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven." 20

134 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

Reality and mysticism battle into the very last sentences of the
book. Lawrence's hatred of factories fights with his realization
of the need of them; his sense of man's separateness struggles
with his rejection of separateness, his contempt of the people
with his love of them. He cannot resolve the contradictions.

V. JAMES JOYCE: ULYSSES (1922)

JAMES JOYCE, unlike D. H. Lawrence, was an aesthete, an
artist chasing the chimera of a complete, abstracted aesthetic
experience. Stephen Dedalus, in a conversation which is one
of the central episodes in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man (1916), says:

" *. . . Beauty expressed by the artist cannot awaken in us an
emotion that is kinetic or a sensation which Is purely physical.
It awakens, or ought to awaken, or induces, or ought to induce, an
aesthetic stasis, an ideal pity or an ideal terror, a stasis called forth,
prolonged, and at last dissolved by what I call the rhythm of beauty.'

'What is that exactly?' asked Lynch.

'Rhythm, 5 said Stephen, 'is the first formal aesthetic relation of
part to part in any aesthetic whole or of an aesthetic whole to
its part or parts or of any part to the aesthetic whole of which
it is a part.*

'If that is rhythm,' said Lynch, let me hear what you call
beauty; and please remember, that though I did eat a cake of
cowdung once, that I admire only beauty.'

Stephen raised his cap as if in greeting. Then, blushing slightly,
he laid his hand on Lynch's thick tweed sleeve.

'We are right,' he said, 'and the others are wrong. To speak of
these things and to try to understand their nature and, having
understood it, to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express,
to press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from
sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul,
an image of the beauty we have come to understand that is art." 1

It is a passage relevant in a number of ways including even
the cowdung to an approach to Ulysses.

The subject of Ulysses is sometimes described in some such

135

136 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

terms as "the record of a single day, June i6th, 1904" or
"twenty-four hours In the life of a modern city." I do not think
the emphasis here is quite right. Dublin is the scene, and in a
sense the be-all of Joyce's book; yet Ulysses is not about
Dublin any more than Homer's Odyssey is about the places
Odysseus visits. The subject of Ulysses is the odyssey of Leo
pold Bloom and, since no man is an island, his relationships
with other human beings, of which the most important are,
obviously, his wife Molly and Stephen Dedalus.

Ulysses, although quite clearly a unique work and in some
respects a revolutionary development in the novel as art-form, is
in one of the main traditions of the English novel Fielding's
famous description of Joseph Andrews, "a comic epic poem in
prose," fits it better perhaps than any other twentieth-century
novel. It has the scale and scope and even despite the misty
vapour at its heart something of the objectivity of epic, and
it is at the same time, like Don Quixote, mock-epic, essentially
comic in its underlying approach. So much rather heavy
solemnity surrounds the bulk of the discussion of Ulysses that
it is perhaps worth emphasizing right away that it is a very
funny novel, including passages as uproarious as anything in
modern fiction.

Another point worth making concerns the novel's 'difficulty.'
Because of Joyce's extraordinary virtuosity, the wealth of
references and allusions that are, to most reader's intents and
purposes, untraceable, and the eccentric texture of certain
passages, this 'difficulty' has, I think, been exaggerated. Any
reader who can cope with, say, a Shakespeare play or Tristram
Shandy, will not find the bulk of Ulysses excessively difficult.
There will no doubt be points that he misses (this is true of the
most conscientious attacker) and passages he finds obscure,
but this will not prevent him from getting to the heart of the
book nor from enjoying most of the incidental felicities. Such
passages as the opening of the Siren episode, which Mr.
Levin has usefully elucidated,^ need not be grasped in their
every detail for the essential point to be taken, nor need
one have more than a vague knowledge of what is being
parodied to get the essential hang of the hospital scene. It is
probably well to read Ulysses fairly fast; much of the complex

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 137

system of cross-reference then falls more or less naturally
into place.*

How important is the relation of Ulysses to the Homeric
epic? Much has been written on this subject and a good many
parallels drawn which to the average reader must seem far
fetched and unhelpful. Although Ulysses is a mock-epic it
certainly does not stand in the kind of relation to Homer that
Don Quixote does to the chivalric romances. Joyce, particularly
while he was living in Switzerland, where much of Ulysses was
written, was soaked in the atmosphere of contemporary psycho
logical research and its resultant cults. I do not know if Joyce
should be called a Jungian, but to say that he looked upon the
Homeric epic in the light of an archetype, a symbolic expres
sion of certain patterns of human experience of universal and
almost mystical significance, seems a fair assessment of his
attitude.

It is true that in Ulysses Joyce does to some extent use the
contrast between a glamorous, heroic and integrated past and
a sordid, unheroic, disintegrating present as a source of irony
(that Bloom is not a hero is an essential point about him;
heroes do not fear piles or passively accept Penelope's in
fidelities) just as it is in T. S. Eliot's Waste Land; but the
irony is in both cases double-edged, it reduces the past as well
as the present. The chief point of the Homeric parallel is that
it provides a framework which given the authority of Homer
plus the theory of archetypes strengthens the illusion of an
underlying pattern of the deepest significance. As a matter of
fact Joyce is prepared to dabble in any kind of myth, quite
apart from the Odyssey, which will contribute to this illusion.
The Wandering Jew and the Eternal Feminine are grist to his
mill. This said, it remains true that a realization that the basic
structure of Ulysses is related to that of the Odyssey, that

*One can, for instance, appreciate the lunch-bar episode perfectly
adequately without being conscious that "the technic of this episode is
based on a process of nutrition: peristalsis, 'the automatic muscular move
ment consisting of wave-like contractions in successive circles by which
nutritive matter is propelled along the alimentary canal*. This process is
symbolized by Mr. Bloom's pauses before various places of refreshment,
the incomplete movements he makes towards the satisfaction of the pangs
of hunger which spasmodically urge him onward and their ultimate
appeasement. . . ." 3

138 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

Bloom is Odysseus, Stephen Telemachus and Molly Penelope,
is necessary to an intelligent reading of the book and not
more than a novelist is justified in demanding of his reader.
There is, emphatically, no need to make heavy weather of the
more abstruse Homeric parallels.

The first three sections, or chapters, of Ulysses are a kind of
elaborate lead-in to the book proper. They form, moreover,
a significant bridge between A Portrait of the Artist and the
infinitely more ambitious Ulysses. Stephen remains the chief
character though he is presented rather more objectively than
in the Portrait. That work, concerned above all with his
struggle to emancipate himself from the Roman Catholic
Church, had ended with his decision to become it is a key
word throughout Joyce an exile. At the climax of the very
moving conversation with Cranly his vow of non serviam (the
devil's vow) is made.

" 'Look here, Cranly/ he said. 'You have asked me what I
would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do
and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer
believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church:
and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely
as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my weapons the only
arms I allow myself to use silence, exile and cunning." 4

It is the apotheosis of individualism, a rejection of obligation
social and religious so complete that the later, somewhat shrill
pledge, "Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth
time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my
soul the uncreated conscience of my race," 5 rings false and melo
dramatic. For what's his race to Stephen or an exile to Ireland?
The Stephen of Ulysses has returned to Dublin from
Paris, summoned home for his mother's death. From the
very first pages of the book the situation in which he finds
himself he has refused the dying wish of his mother and is
haunted by his decision becomes a leading theme of the
novel, one of the recurring leit-motifs which give it its unity,
For the rejection of his mother is not merely a personal thing
but bound up with his rejection of Church and State **the
imperial British state and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 139

church." 6 Stephen's part In the book is indeed that of the Son.
He is Telemachus and Japhet, searching for a father. He is an
Irishman rejecting Britain which is associated through the sea
(the Englishman is "the seas' ruler") with the mother (the sea
is "our mighty mother"). Equally he rejects Ireland, the
milkwoman, also a mother-symbol but with "old, shrunken
paps." He is Hamlet, he is the erring son of the Church, he is,
blasphemously, through the rape of the mother by the panther
(it was, we learn, Panther the Roman centurion who violated
the Virgin Mary), Jesus.

Leopold Bloom is, equally, the Father searching for his
Son his only actual son died at the age of eleven days and is
throughout the book in some mysterious rapport with Stephen
though they do not actually meet to speak until well into the
last half of the novel. The coming-together of Bloom and
Stephen in the brothel scene, culminating in the moment when
Bloom, standing over the prostrate Stephen, has a vision of his
dead son, Is the climax of the book.

We shall have to return later to a consideration of this
framework of Ulysses^ the pattern which gives the total book
what unity it possesses; meanwhile it will be necessary to say
something about Joyce's technical methods.

A great deal of Ulysses Is written in the form of a kind of
shorthand impressionism which aims to convey the thought-
track of the characters.

"On the doorstep he felt in his hip-pocket for the latchkey. Not
there. In the trousers I left off. Must get it. Potato I have. Creaky
wardrobe. No use disturbing her. She turned over sleepily that
time. He pulled the halldoor to after him very quietly, more, till
the footleaf dropped gently over the threshold, a limp lid. Looked
shut. All right till I come back anyhow." 7

It has become almost a parlour-game among commentators
to find precedents for this method and already Shakespeare,
Richardson, Fanny Burney, Dickens, Fenimore Cooper and
Samuel Butler have been cited among the ancestors of the work
to which Joyce himself admitted his indebtedness Les Lauriers
sont coupes by Edouard Dujardin. The truth is that any writer
who has attempted to indicate in the first person something of

140 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

the thought-processes of his characters Is likely to write some
form of interior monologue and Joyce, until the final chapter
of Ulysses, is original largely in the extent to which he uses
the method. Two points should perhaps be noted. In the first
place what Joyce is doing in passages like the short one quoted
above is not to limit the point of view to that of the particular
character he is dealing with. He is not primarily concerned to
show life through the eyes of Bloom. Rather he is using Bloom's
impressions to add a dimension and enrich the texture of an
objective description of reality. Hence objective statements in
the third person ("he felt in his hip-pocket for the latchkey")
are intermingled with unspoken soliloquy ("In the trousers
I left off"). In the second place we should recognize that the
attempt to give an impression of a thought-track is indeed
impressionist and not 'scientific. 5 Joyce does not succeed
any more than any other writer in finding a precise verbal
equivalent for unformulated thoughts, as indeed, by the
nature of things, he cannot. Such a phrase as "Potato I have"
serves its purpose. The thought "I have a hole in my pocket
like a potato 95 is expressed in a way which, by its very way
wardness and obliquity, gives a certain illusion of thought-
processes, but its real value in Joyce's scheme is that it can and
will be used as a minor kit-motif, a recurring phrase associated
with the loss of Bloom's front-door key (keys themselves having
a major symbolic significance throughout Ulysses) and his
relations with his wife. Five hundred pages later Bloom will
ask one of the whores in the brothel to give him back his potato.

BLOOM:
There is a memory attached to it. I should like to have it.

STEPHEN:
To have or not to have, that is the question.

ZOE:

Here. (She hauls up a reef of her slip, revealing her bare thigh and
unrolls the potato from the top of her stocking.) Those that hides
knows where to find. 8

The tiny episode illustrates, perhaps, something of Joyce's
method and the levels of suggestion upon which he simul
taneously works. In the first place the scene is at once farcical

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 141

and sordid, trivial and significant. "There is a memory attached
to it": the phrase is at once a clich^ and a revelation. The whole
paraphernalia of cheap sentimentality ("Thanks for the
memory," etc,) of escapist entertainment is conjured up, Zoe
becoming for a second that familiar figure the can-can girl, the
predecessor of the strip-tease artiste (sic) who symbolizes
the pornographic character of such culture ("Why, strip-tease
without music ain't art"). And the psychological situation
behind the brothel-world is at the same time suggested in a
number of ways. Bloom is not wicked in an abstract sense, he
is sentimental and frustrated, "I should like to have it" refers
of course not simply to the potato but to his wife. Stephen's
parody of Hamlet makes us pause on the reiterated word
"have" and its associations. Indirectly it brings in and
because the profundity of Hamlet's soliloquy is immediately
invoked we take up the cue the complex relationships between
thought and action ("letting I dare not wait upon I will")
acquisitiveness and sex-relations. There is nothing heavy
or pompous in the method of this association. Stephen's inter
vention is ridiculous as well as relevant. Stephen-Hamlet is
no more master of the situation than Bloom or, for that
matter, Zoe, who will shortly be put in her place by the
ubiquitous madame of the brothel, Bella Cohen, simultaneously
male and female, Jew and gentile, a Circe who threatens
at the critical moment (a superb shaft of irony) to call the
police.

"Those that hides knows where to find" might well some
times be said of Joyce's own method of cross-reference and
it is worth noticing that the images and phrases especially
associated with a particular character's 'stream of conscious
ness' crop up from time to time in the interior monologue of
somebody else. "The corpse-chewer! Raw head and bloody
bones!" cries Stephen as the figure of his mother appears to
him in the brothel scene and we are taken back not only to
the long series of richly complex images surrounding Stephen's
own riddle ("a pard, a panther, got in spouse-breach, vulturing
the dead") but to the butcher's shop that Bloom has patronized
earlier in the day. What Joyce is attempting In fact is not the
mere conveying of a character's impressions but a radical

142 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

extension, exploiting all the ambiguities of language, of the
normal methods of objective description.

The intricate system of leit-motif which Joyce developed
his methods of composition apparently involved something
like a card-index system with coloured crayons to assist the
process has its own value in the achievement of a remarkable
richness and complexity of texture, as complex often as life
itself. As Mr. Levin has well put it:

"He did not bring literature any closer to life than perceptive
novelists had already done; he did evolve his private mode of
rhetorical discourse. He sought to illuminate the mystery of con
sciousness, and he ended by developing a complicated system of
literary leit-motif " m

The final chapter of Ulysses is of course in a rather different
category. Here, with the abandonment of punctuation, there
seems to be a more consistent attempt actually to reproduce
the stream of consciousness. The thoughts are now no longer
broken by objective statements in the third person, they glide
on and into each other until consciousness is finally overcome
by sleep. It must be remembered that the lack of any kind of
objective statement in this chapter is made possible only by
the peculiar moment of consciousness Joyce has here chosen
to communicate. Molly Bloom's thoughts need no punctuation
because, lying in bed, action has been eliminated. The cross-
play of thought and action is no longer a technical problem.
It is significant that the stream of consciousness method
can only come into play in its purest form when consciousness
is no longer an active apprehension of the present but a mode of
recollection and impulse divorced from actual activity. I think
a great deal too much has been made by critics of Molly Bloom's
final affirmation. What reason have we to suppose that it will
stand the test of tomorrow morning's reality? In any case it is
doubtful whether it has been induced by more than a casual
and scarcely productive recollection. I do not think there
is really any progression in Ulysses. Those who have called its
construction circular are nearer the truth.

What, then, are some of the reasons for regarding Ulysses
as something more than a virtuoso piece, an astonishing but

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 143

ultimately rather absurd phenomenon which manages para
doxically to combine the qualities of the cul-de-sac and the
endless journey?

In the first place there is Joyce's remarkable ability to
bring a scene to life. Ulysses,, despite some exasperating qualities
and passages, tingles with life, with the physical feel of exis
tence and with a sense of the vibrating reality of human
relationships. I cannot think of any finer expression of the 'feeF
of the comparatively early morning than the opening pages of
Ulysses. The kind of effect that Hardy achieves in the fields
of Talbothays Joyce gets on a far more complex scale the
scale of sophisticated urban as opposed to rural peasant life
and he gets it by immediately setting in motion the disparate
consciousnesses of Buck Mulligan, Stephen and, later, Haoies.
Mulligan's full-blooded and unscrupulous blasphemies are
rather like gong-blows picking up echoes and gathering
distortions as their vibrations encounter differing surfaces.
The early exchanges between Stephen and Mulligan and
Haines, stating as they do so many of the essential themes of
the book, get their effect not from the intrinsic interest of the
intellectual arguments involved, though this is often consider
able, but from the human situation, general and personal,
behind the arguments.

It is the same in all the best passages of the book. The
immediate physical sense we get of Molly Bloom lying drowsily
in bed, of the movement in the streets, of Davy Burne's lunch
bar, of the cabman's shelter, of the three-master gliding into
port, all is achieved with a relaxation of art, a cunning play
on rhythmical detail, a supremely subtle sense of language.

"He turned his face over a shoulder, rere regardant. Moving
through the air high spars of a three master, her sails brailed up on
the crosstxees, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship." 11

The effect is got by a number of touches. Stephen is moving,
so is the ship and that he should glance at it as he moves some
how gives it too momentum. "Rere regardant." He is looking
for someone who may be watching him; his aloneness (and
a connected sense of guilt) makes him turn and is in turning

144 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

shattered. The obsolete, chivalrlc phrase Is not pedantry
(except in so far as Stephen is a pedant) but calls in forces
that haunt Stephen, the medieval church and its philosophers.
He looks back not merely into space but into time. And he
catches sight of the ship, itself outmoded yet purposive and
beautiful (Mr. West suggests a connexion between crosstrees
and the Christian cross). And the ship isn't bound to him
in any mystic way, though they are both "homing," but is
separate from him yet of the world of which he is a part. The
superb sentence describing the movement of the ship gets its
power from the integrated sense of motion (the present parti
ciples carrying the sentence along) plus the measure of
controlled effort suggested in the words (particularly "brailed
up" and "upstream"), the Tightness of the rigging, the implica
tion of successful, co-ordinated social effort, the human
richness of "homing" (also associated with the instinctive
simplicity of a bird's movements). A contrast is made with
previous descriptions of the casual movement of the weeds in
the water "To no end gathered; vainly then released, forth
flowing, wending back . . ." and the indifferent, bobbing
corpse of the drowned man, whose inquest is a worry to Bloom's
friend McCoy.

The sense here illustrated of the interpenetration of human
activity and experience is one of the great achievements of
Ulysses. It emerges from Joyce's rejection of an individualist
style of narrative, which sees the world merely from the point
of view of the individual looking at it, and his powerful feeling
for the inter-relationships which go to make up society. As Alick
West, in what seems to me the best short essay on Ulysses,
has put it:

"In contrast to the traditional style, Joyce shows the individual
action within the totality of relations existing at the moment. The
traditional unity (of the nineteenth-century novel) is broken; in its
place is the unity of Dublin." 12

The most convenient example of this aspect of Joyce's tech
nique is of course the tenth episode of Ulysses, the chapter
which takes as its (rather obscure) Homeric parallel the
episode of the Wandering Rocks.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 145

This chapter, Mr. Gilbert remarks, may in its structure
and technique "be regarded as a small-scale model of Ulysses
as a whole." 13 I think this is somewhat misleading, for the
chapter is built on a far simpler plan than the book as a whole
and does not include, even in embryo form, many of the themes
which turn out to be the most important elements in its pattern ;
but it is nevertheless useful for the illustration of this particular
quality of inter-relatedness.

The chapter consists of eighteen episodes varying from a
page to about six pages in length which give the effect of a
cross-section of life in the Dublin streets between three and
four o'clock in the afternoon. Two of the episodes involve the
principal characters of the novel, Bloom and Stephen, the
remainder deal with the progress of other figures who take
some part in other episodes in the book, the exception being
the final section in which the Lord Lieutenant -of Ireland
makes his only appearance.

The whole of the chapter is, clearly, more significant than
the sum of its parts. The episodes are linked together in a
number of ways. Several of the people involved pass by and
are conscious of certain static phenomena the posters adver
tising the appearance in Dublin of Marie Kendall, charming
soubrette, of Mr. Eugene Stratton and of the evangelist
proclaiming the coming of Elijah. Several of the particular
characters meet one another or are conscious of the same
person: Father Conmee notes the queenly mien of Mrs.
McGuiness at whose pawnbrokers 5 establishment much of the
Dedalus home reposes ; Dilly Dedalus, having got one and two
pence out of her impossible father, meets her brother Stephen
at a bookstall: a one-legged sailor is given a blessing by Father
Conmee and money by a stout lady in the street and by Molly
Bloom who throws a penny out of the window as she makes
her toilet in preparation for Blazes Boylan's visit. The chapter
is linked with time past by the appearance not only of the main
characters but of casual unnamed individuals like the sandwich-
board-men (who wend their way right through the book) and
with time future by strands which will not of course be taken
up till later in the book: the flushed young man whom Father
Conmee sees emerging with his girl from a gap in the hedge

146 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

will turn out to be a medical student named Vincent in the
hospital scene; Stephen notices "a sailorman, rust-bearded"
who will cross his path again in the cabman's shelter late at night.

Again, in the midst of a particular episode, one comes
upon a sentence which has no apparent connexion with the
immediate scene but simply links it with another episode,
giving the effect of the simultaneous activities going on in the
city and reminding us that a character has not ceased to have
his being just because he is not at that moment being described.
In the middle of a discussion over tea about Stephen's view on
Hamlet between Mulligan and Haines we are suddenly con
fronted with an apparently stray sentence about the one-legged
sailor and the words "England expects. . . ." Here the effect
is a little more complex than a mere reminder of the continued
and apparently unrelated existence of the sailor moving down
Nelson Street. It points the way towards the Lord Lieutenant
and also serves to place Haines's views on Stephen, for Haines's
part in the pattern of Ulysses is alv r ays that of the smug and
small-souled representative of the alien imperial state.

The main purpose of the Wandering Rocks chapter is
certainly the achievement on the surface level of a sense of the
teeming life of Dublin and of a reality deeper than and in
dependent of the individual consciousness. But the chapter is,
necessarily, not merely objective documentary (and even a
documentary is of course anyway selective) ; it also contributes
continuously to the pattern of the total novel.

Thus the opening and closing episodes Father Conmee
and the Viceroy 5 besides contributing to the richness of the
Dublin scene have a symbolic importance: they represent the
Church and State which are the twin objects of Stephen's non
serviam oath. In the course of the chapter our knowledge of
both Bloom and Stephen is considerably deepened, not only
through what they do but through other people's comments.
There is, for instance, the splendid observation of Lenehan the
journalist.

" *He's a cultured all-round man, Bloom is,' he said seriously.
*He's not one of your common or garden. . . . you . . . There's a
touch of the artist about old Bloom.' " 14

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 147

And there Is the poignant and beautifully controlled
description of the encounter between Stephen and his sister
Dffly.

Each episode in the chapter has its distinguishing rhythm
and texture. The limitations of Father Conmee his smugness,
the urbane complacency of his inner heart emerge out of
every sentence of Joyce's prose. The quality of the prose of
The Sweets of Sin, the pornographic novel Bloom buys in a
bookshop, enters into the very essence of our knowledge of
Bloom himself. The sudden move, when Stephen appears, to
a more involved sentence-structure and a range of reference
more erudite (not to say perverse) takes us without ado into
Stephen's own consciousness. It is hard to say how objective
Joyce is being when he gets to Stephen. Time and again the
prose swings into a rich and luscious rhythm which one feels
to be less 'poetic' and altogether more cloudy than Is the
intention. And yet in doubting the intention one is perhaps
doing Joyce a serious injustice. By the end of Ulysses one has
felt the full force of Buck Mulligan's exasperation: "O an
Impossible person!" and I think one should rank this feeling
as one of the real achievements of Ulysses. Just as Lawrence
in Sons and Lovers succeeds despite himself in making us feel
the intolerable qualities of Paul Morel so does Joyce here
manage to 'place' Stephen. He is indeed "Kinch, the loveliest
mummer of them all." 15

Clearly it is impossible In a short chapter to discuss
adequately a work of the complexity of Ulysses. Much of the
material relevant to such a discussion has been gathered together
in Stuart Gilbert's James Joyce's c Ulysses 9 , a work of perhaps
excessive piety but of an obvious value to the more-than-casual
reader. Together with Harry Levin's lively and Incisive
James Joyce, Alick West's most perceptive essay in Crisis and
Criticism and, on a more pedestrian level, Edmund Wilson's
chapter in Axel's Castle (this essay is not really more than a
starting-point), Mr. Gilbert's book forms what might be
described as a "course of minimum reading" for the interested
but not necessarily expert enquirer. I do not suggest that it is
impossible to enjoy Ulysses without these critics any more
than it is impossible to enjoy Hamlet without having read a

148 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

word that has been written about it. But it is as foolish to
insist that every work of art should be totally intelligible at a
single reading or hearing as to make a deliberate cult of
obscurity.

It is legitimate to criticize Ulysses on the grounds not of
its complexity but of the nature of that complexity.

As has been said often enough it is an epic of disintegration,
Odysseus and Telemachus meet only to drift apart again. The
faithful Penelope lies dreaming of her illicit loves. Stephen,
exiled by his own intellectual choice, and Bloom, a self-
conscious though sociable member of an exiled race, are both
in their different ways without roots, essentially lonely and
for all their social contacts isolated. The intellectual life of
Stephen, in whom thought and action have become separated
and whose ratiocination is as sterile as it is ingenious, corres
ponds to the physical auto-erotism of the cuckold Bloom. The
point of Buck Mulligan's obscene play for the mummers is
equally relevant to all three of the principal characters.

The whole picture of Dublin which Joyce presents is of a
society in hopeless disintegration extended between two
masters Catholic Church and British Empire which exploit
and ruin it. The family unit is as far decomposed as any other:
there is a desperate weight of irony behind Dilly Dedalus's
"Our father who art not in heaven." I do not think it is an
exaggeration to say that throughout the book not one character
performs a single action that is not fundamentally sterile.
There is the odd kindness of course, the moment of com
passion, the generous gesture. Bloom himself is, heaven knows
not a bad sort of chap. But there is a complete lack not only of any
kind of human heroismbut of any productive activity of any kind.

"We see people eating, drinking, making love, arguing, they go
after money, or they drift about; the churches and pubs fill and
empty; and all this is felt happening simultaneously. But there is
no sign of the productive activity without which none of this could
happen. As a part of this organized production, there is not a worker
in the book at most an occasional cab-driver and a string of
sandwich-board-men. We walk through the world meeting our
selves and we meet our relations and so Stephen says ostlers,
but no industrial workers. . . . The reality of Joyce's social world

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 149

is numberless acts of consuming, spending, enjoying of things that
are already there. His selection of the social relations to be described
is that of the consumer." 16

The point of this criticism is not, of course, that Joyce
ought to have written a different book, but that in the book
as written there is something wrong.

"Streets intersect, shops advertise, homes have party walls and
fellow citiztns depend upon the same water supply; but there is
no co-operation between human beings. The individual stands
motionless, like Odysseus becalmed in the doldrums." 17

Joyce's failure to produce a great modern epic is closely
bound up with his theory of the aesthetic "stasis" and his
personal sense of isolation and exile. In an important sense there
is more of the essential feeling of the relationship of man to
man and man to society in a great urban centre in the public-
house ballad T belong to Glasgow' than there is in Ulysses.
Ulysses^ in its whole technical conception and in a thousand
splendid flashes and insights, goes far beyond the negative
individualism of A Portrait of the Artist. It is in many respects
the most astonishing and brilliant attempt in the history of the
novel to present man, the social being, in his full and staggering
complexity. And it will always be read with enormous pleasure
for its intimacy of insight and its phenomenal virtuosity. Yet
the attempt flounders and not even heroically. The structure
and basis of epic is replaced by a few tenuous and mystical
threads which mean in the end almost nothing. The relation
ship between Bloom and Stephen, on which the whole pattern
of the book depends, is a fraud, whose only significance is
imposed from above by a vast apparatus of what can often only
be described as verbal trickery. The tragedy of Ulysses is that
Joyce's extraordinary powers, his prodigious sense of the
possibilities of language, should be so deeply vitiated by the
sterility of his vision of life.

More perhaps than any writer of English since Shakespeare
Joyce was aware of the richness of content and significance
behind the ambiguities of language and the literary possibilities
involved in this realization. But too often his exploitation of

150 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

these ambiguities is an exploitation in the pejorative sense of
the word. The ambiguous nature of language is its glory in
so far as it expresses the actual complexity, the dialectical sense
of growth and change which are at the very core of life and
which a static, mechanistic, dead use of language cannot
capture; but when ambiguity is not such an expression of
reality but the mere artful juxtaposing of counters and the
achievement of arbitrary effects then it is of course self-
destructive. At least half the 'significances' of Ulysses are
aribtrary significances which are, through their arbitrariness,
given a kind of mystical haze. What real play is there to be
made on the fact that Bloom's employer is named Keyes?
What real significance is there in the inclusion of La ci darem
la mano in Molly Bloom's programme or in the name of
the typist Martha Clifford who is supposed via Martha and
Mary to link up in some way with the Virgin? The case against
the use of the association method run mad is not simply
that it is arbitrary and confusing and indeed often leads to
unintelligibility, but that it actually builds up a false web of
associations, a pattern which, like so many of the patterns of
modern psychology, has not the kind of basis in reality which
it is held up to have.

It would of course be quite false to say that Joyce's achieve
ment is totally vitiated by such weaknesses, important as they
are. Laughter and compassion break through, turning virtuosity
and pastiche into something far greater. Laughter is the
greatest human positive of Ulysses, the assertion of sanity
against which Stephen's isolation and Bloom's ineffectiveness
break themselves. And along with the laughter there is a deep
compassion, too, as in the passage when Stephen catches his
sister Dilly buying a grammar to teach herself French. At
such a moment Joyce's apparatus of leit-motif and cross-
reference reaches into and extends the resources of language
and we forget the jig-saws and the pedantry. Yet the total
effect is unsatisfying.

"What Joyce spends most care on is the formal side, watching
that a phrase used on one page has the right echoes with phrases
used on fifty other pages. But this sovereign importance of the

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 151

verbal phrase is In contradiction to the life of the book. For it
implies that the fabric Is stable, and that its surface can be decorated
with the most subtle intricacy, like the Book of Kells. ... It assumes
something as permanent as the church was for Its monks. Yet
Stephen and Bloom are both drawn as symbols of humanity In the
eternal flux. On the other hand the sense of change in the book is so
strong that this static formal decoration Is felt to be a mechanism
of defence against the change, and only valuable to Joyce as such
defence. Joyce seems to play with the two styles of change and
stability as he plays with his two chief characters. He plays with the
contradictions; he does not resolve them. Where in Milton there
is advancing movement, Joyce only shifts from one foot to the
other, while he sinks deeper into the sand-flats." 18

VI. E. M. FORSTER: A PASSAGE
TO INDIA (1924)

E. M. FORSTER Is not a writer of the stature of Lawrence or
Joyce, but he is a fine and enduring artist and the only living
British novelist who can be discussed without fatuity against
the highest and the broadest standards.

Everyone who writes about E. M. Forster discusses
liberalism, whether to Insist (like Rose Macaulay and D. S.
Savage) on the significance of his work as an expression of the
liberal tradition or (like Lionel Trilling and Rex Warner) to
doubt its total compatibility with that tradition. One of the
difficulties In the discussion Is that the parties to it all use the
word liberalism with variations of meaning. One would prefer
to dispense with the term altogether, yet Forster himself
makes it hard to do so:

"I belong to the fag-end of Victorian liberalism. . . ," 1

"(I am) an individualist and a liberal who has found liberalism
crumbling beneath him and at first felt ashamed. Then, looking
around, he decided there was no special reason for shame, since
other people, whatever they felt, were equally insecure. And as for
individualism there seems no way of getting off this, even if one
wanted to " 2

"I am actually what my age and my upbringing have made me
a bourgeois who adheres to the British constitution, adheres to it
rather than supports It, and the fact that this isn't dignified doesn't
worry me." 3

The interesting thing, of course, about these statements
and even more about some of the sentences which surround
them is their objectivity, their remarkable consciousness of

152

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 153

the historical Implications involved. And it is this very con
sciousness which does in fact transcend liberalism, even though
it emerges from it and might be called in a sense its most
extreme modification.

It is a dangerous game to try to pin E. M. Forster down.
And yet such words as liberal, individualist, agnostic, certainly
help, though I think they refer more usefully to his attitudes
than to a more specific, coherent philosophy.

A Passage to India seems to me Forster's most successful
novel. Where Angels Fear to Tread is perhaps not less successful,
but Is far less ambitious, while Howards End is quite as ambi
tious but the least satisfactory of the five novels.

The subject of A Passage to India is stated very clearly at
the beginning of the second chapter, the first consisting entirely,
and most economically, of backcloth. The two Moslems with
whom Aziz is dining "were discussing as to whether or not it
is possible to be friends with an Englishman/' This is precisely
what the novel Is about and It is typical of Forster to make no
bones about stating his theme.

The actual words of the statement are important. They
are down-to-earth and they are precise. This Is not to be a
book about "the problem of India" or anything so pretentious
even though in the course of the exploration of the personal
relationships at the core of the novel a great many deep, and
indeed fundamental, social, political and moral problems arise.
For Forster, despite all his emphasis on personal relationships,
is far too sensible and far too worldly to attempt to abstract
relationships from their actual contexts. A writer who can say
of himself that he is what his age and upbringing have made
him is unlikely to fall into the barren error of regarding a
human personality as outside time and place.

And yet just as there Is a subtle contradiction within
Forster's attitude to himself he who clings to a view of life
which he sees clearly is basically not satisfactory* so there is
* **. . . life has become less comfortable for the Victorian liberal, and
. . . our outlook which seems to me admirable, has lost the basis of golden
sovereigns upon which it originally rose. . . ."* How on earth can an outlook
which has lost its basis be any longer admirable? How can anyone who has
written of nineteenth-century liberalism "In came the nice fat dividends,
up rose the lofty thoughts*' 5 ever take those thoughts quite at their face
value again?

154 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

a subtle contradiction In his attitude to his characters. They
are what their world has made them, yes, and they have, like
their creator, a resilience, a down-to-earth, practical, quite
unsentimental optimism, an almost insolent power of recupera
tion from the buffets and cruelties of life; yet they never quite
manage to master life, even their odd particular corner of it,
so that there is always a certain sense in an E. M. Forster novel
of life's being rather more casual than it is, not flat, not
mechanical, certainly not dull, but arbitrary somewhere deep
down.

Up to a point this sense of the arbitrariness of existence
is one of the great virtues of A Passage to India. The sudden
shafts of violence, of horrors, of death and of the indifference
of the living to the dead, are extremely effective in the novel,
both in conveying the actual unexpectedness of life's detail and
in counteracting the urbane, high comedy tone of Forster's
narrative manner.

The central core of A Passage to India is the relationship of
Aziz the Indian and Fielding the Englishman. The con
trivances of the plot, often remarkably interesting and exciting
in themselves, are important mainly as a way of illuminating
this relationship and, so to speak, stretching it to its utmost.
Both Aziz and Fielding are subjected to a strain so profound
that their relationship can scarcely survive, even with all
arbitrariness, all casual forms of misunderstanding removed,
and the strain is the strain of the actual situation in which they
exist, the strain of imperialism which, as in Nostromo, corrupts
all it touches.

Because I have used the word casual in connexion with
A Passage to India it is necessary to stress the lack of casualness
(in the Dickensian sense) in the actual construction of the
novel. Every character, every theme and image contributes
to the central pattern of the book. The precise establishing,
for instance, of Miss Quested's character is essential not
merely to make convincing her own actions in the story but
to make clear the exact nature of the strains and problems she
imposes on the Aziz-Fielding relationship. The description
of the Hindu religious festival in the last section of the book
is there not just to add colour and variety to the scene but to

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 155

Incorporate an essential element in the problem confronting
Aziz and Fielding. Forster throughout the novel constantly
uses religious themes and symbols not in the way of intellectual
arguments but to deepen the sense of intangible forces involved.
Aziz's sense of the past, his constant harping on the Mogul
Emperors, is no mere personal idiosyncrasy but the expression of
one of the many factors working upon the actual present situation.
Forster is immensely good at achieving in his novel the
symbolic moment, the satisfying incident or episode which,
though complete in itself, trembles with the more distant, more
general repercussions which themselves thus force their way
back into the book. A beautiful example is the little scene which
ends Fielding's tea-party an occasion pregnant with half-
foreseen possibilities in his garden-house. The party con
sisting of the two English ladies, Mrs. Moore and Miss Quested,
the Moslem doctor, Aziz, and the Hindu professor, Godbole, is
rudely broken up by Miss Quested's conventional Anglo-
Indian sahib of a fianc^ Ronny Heaslop, who comes to drag
the ladies away to watch some polo.

"So the leave-taking began. Everyone was cross or wretched.
It was as if irritation exuded from the very soiL Could one have
been so petty on a Scotch moor or an Italian alp? Fielding wondered
afterwards. There seemed no reserve of tranquillity to draw upon in
India. Either none, or else tranquillity swallowed up everything, as
it appeared to do for Professor Godbole. Here was Aziz all shoddy
and odious, Mrs. Moore and Miss Quested both silly, and he him
self and Heaslop both decorous on the surface, but detestable really,
and detesting each other.

'Good-bye, Mr. Fielding, and thank you so much. . . . What
lovely College buildings!'

'Good-bye, Mrs. Moore.'

'Good-bye, Mr. Fielding. Such an interesting afternoon. . . .*

'Good-bye, Miss Quested.'

'Good-bye, Dr. Aziz.'

'Good-bye, Mrs. Moore.'

'Good-bye, Dr. Aziz.'

'Good-bye, Miss Quested.' He pumped her hand up and down
to show that he felt at ease. 'You'll jolly jolly well not forget those
caves, won't you? I'll fix the whole show up in a jiffy.'

'Thank you '

156 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

Inspired by the devil to a final effort, he added, 'What a shame
you leave India so soon! Oh, do reconsider your decision, do stay. 9

'Good-bye, Professor Godbole,' she continued, suddenly
agitated. 'It's a shame we never heard you sing/

'I may sing now/ he replied, and did.

His thin voice rose, and gave out one sound after another. At
times there seemed rhythm, at times there was the illusion of a
Western melody. But the ear, baffled repeatedly, soon lost any clue,
and wandered in a maze of noises, none harsh or unpleasant, none
intelligible. It was the song of an unknown bird. Only the servants
understood it. They began to whisper to one another. The man
who was gathering water chestnut came naked out of the tank, his
lips parted with delight, disclosing his scarlet tongue. The sounds
continued and ceased after a few moments as casually as they had
begun apparently half through a bar, and upon the sub-dominant.

'Thanks so much: what was that?' asked Fielding.

*I will explain in detail. It was a religious song. I placed myself
in the position of a milkmaiden t I say to Shri Krishna, "Come!
come to me only." The god refuses to come. I grow humble and
say: "Do not come to me only. Multiply yourself into a hundred
Krishnas, and let one go to each of my hundred companions, but
one, O Lord of the Universe, come to me." He refuses to come.
This is repeated several times. The song is composed in a raga
appropriate to the present hour, which is the evening."

'But He comes in some other song, I hope? 5 said Mrs. Moore
gently,

'Oh no, He refuses to come,* repeated Godbole, perhaps not
understanding her question. 'I say to Him, Come, come, come,
come, come, come. He neglects to come.'

Ronny's steps had died away, and there was a moment of
absolute silence. No ripple disturbed the water, no leaf stirred." 6

On the level of 'atmosphere' this is superb. With astonishing
economy scarcely anything has been in the Hardy way
^described* the room, the tank, the garden, India is put
before us, the strangeness to the Western people, Aziz's
half-comic attempts to bridge the gap (emphasized by his
false slang), the self-sufficiency of Godbole and his mythology,
beautiful and ridiculous, all are richly conveyed and the figures
of the servants in the garden, responding to the song, counteract
any danger of the scene's becoming too obviously a mere
symbolic dramatization. Yet the symbolic quality is there,

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 157

exemplified in something subtler than Ronny's failure to listen
to the song. The song itself winds its way into the texture of
the novel. "I say to Him, Come, come, come, come, come, come.
He neglects to come. 35

He neglects to come throughout the novel. The atmosphere
of A Passage to India is of a profound scepticism, tempered
by a vague confidence which achieves no artistic expression
commensurate with its importance in the overall tone of
Forster's narrative. The negative side the scepticism
comes over magnificently. Forster's refusal to be taken In by
humbug, by the comforting commonplace, by the paraphernalia
of dignity, gives to this novel Its tang, Its wonderful worldllness
(Professor Trilling's Insistent use of this word to describe
Forster seems to me exactly right), its continuous tough
delicacy of feeling.

"Sir Gilbert, though not an enlightened man, held enlightened
opinions. . . ." 7

On Aziz:

"And unlocking a drawer, he took out his wife's photograph
He gazed at It, and tears spouted from Ms eyes. He thought, 'How
unhappy I am!' But because he really was unhappy, another
emotion soon mingled with his self-pity: he desired to remember
his wife and could not. Why could he remember people whom he
did not love ? They were always so vivid to him, whereas the more
he looked at this photograph the less he saw." 8

On the Anglo-Indians' amateur dramatics:

"They had tried to reproduce their own attitude to life upon the
stage, and to dress up as the middle-class English people they
actually were. Next year they would do Quality Street or The
Yeomen of the Guard. Save for this annual incursion, they left
literature alone. The men had no time for It, the women did nothing
that they could not share with the men. Their Ignorance of the
Arts was notable, and they lost no opportunity of proclaiming it to
one another; it was the Public School attitude; flourishing more
vigorously than It can yet hope to do In England/' 9

158 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

Forster's urbane honesty, Ms infinitely sophisticated
common sense is at its very best in the precise placing of
personal relationships. When Adela Quested comes to leave
India and so must say good-bye to Fielding, at whose house
she has been staying since the trial of Aziz, their relationship
is brought not exactly to a climax, for there is no great intensity
about it, but to the moment of assessment.

" Write to me when you get to England.'

*I shall, often. You have been excessively kind. Now that I'm
going, I realize it. I wish I could do something for you in return,
but I see you've all you want.'

'I think so,' he replied after a pause. 'I have never felt more
happy and secure out here. I really do get on with Indians, and they
do trust me. It's pleasant that I haven't had to resign my job. It's
pleasant to be praised by an L.-G. Until the next earthquake I remain
as I am.'

'Of course this death has been troubling me.'

'Aziz was so fond of her, too/

'But it has made me remember that we must all die: all these
personal relations we try to live by are temporary. I used to feel
death selected people, it is a notion one gets from novels, because
some of the characters are usually left talking at the end. Now
"death spares no one" begins to be real.'

'Don't let it become too real, or you'll die yourself. That is the
objection to meditating upon death. We are subdued to what we
work in. I have felt the same temptation, and had to sheer off. I want
to go on living a bit.'

'So do I.'

A friendliness, as of dwarfs shaking hands, was in the air. Both
man and woman were at the height of their powers sensible,
honest, even subtle. They spoke the same language, and held the
same opinions, and the variety of age and sex did not divide them.
Yet they were dissatisfied. When they agreed 'I want to go on living
a bit,* or 'I don't believe in God,' the words were followed by a
curious backwash as though the universe had displaced itself to fill
up a tiny void, or as though they had seen their own gestures from
an immense height dwarfs talking, shaking hands and assuring
each other that they stood on the same footing of insight. They did
not think they were wrong, because as soon as honest people think
they are wrong instability sets up. Not for them was an infinite
goal behind the stars, and they never sought it. But wistfulness

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 159

descended on them now, as on other occasions; the shadow of a
shadow of a dream fell over their clear-cut interests, and objects
never seen again seemed messages from another world.

'And I do like you so very much, if I may say so,' he affirmed.

Tin glad, for I like you. Let's meet again.'

4 We will, in England, if I ever take home leave.'

'But I suppose you're not likely to do that yet.'

'Quite a chance. I have a scheme on now as a matter of fact.'

'Oh, that would be very nice. 5

So it petered out. . . ." 10

Relationships often peter out in Forster's novels, as they
do in life, and as they never seem to, for instance, in Lawrence.
The contrast between the two writers is an obvious yet an
interesting one: Lawrence so intense, Forster so continuously
relaxed. Is not the relaxation, the sceptical sophistication,
likely to lead to a certain passivity? In a way I think it does.
One cannot imagine one of Lawrence's characters lapsing
into wistfulness (one wishes from time to time they would);
but in Forster there is perhaps a little too much of it. The
refusal to be heroic may be very human but it is also less than
human. The relationship between Fielding and Aziz comes to
grief if that is not too strong a word in the way such a
relationship would very likely come to grief. On the personal
level that is convincing enough. The doubt in one's mind lies
in the attempt of Forster to generalize on the basis of that
relationship. If the last paragraph of the novel means anything
at all it means that the answer to Mahmoud Ali's original
question "whether or no it is possible to be friends with an
Englishman?" is "No, not yet, no, not there." Not, that is, till
the English have been driven out of India, when a friendship
based on equality rather than imperialism will be possible. But
might not friendship with Aziz have been possible had Fielding
been prepared to go a little further, to renounce rather more
than he was prepared to renounce of the imperialist attitude?

I think it is necessary to ask this question because Forster's
failure to consider its possibility does something to his book.
To attempt to sum up the final sense about life conveyed by
A Passage to India one would have, I think, to turn towards
some such phrases as "Ah yes, it's all very difficult. There

160 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

aren't any easy short cuts. Let's try and be sensible and honest
and unsentimental. Above all let's be honest. And one day
things will be a bit better no doubt." It is, heaven knows,
not an unsympathetic attitude, nor a valueless one, and it is
a thousand times better than the defeatism to which, since
A Passage to India, we have become accustomed. Yet it does,
I suggest, reveal a limitation in the assessment of the capacity
of human beings radically to change their consciousness. And
this limitation reduces the book somehow, and all Forster's
books. "Donnish" someone has called him, "spinsterish"
someone else; "soft" is the word he has used himself. In
adequate words, yet one sees what they mean.

The truth is that in his determination to avoid any kind
of humbug Forster tends to underplay certain of the underlying
issues in life which often give rise to humbug but cannot be
laughed away by its exposure. Keats's famous remark about
being sure of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections
has a relevance to Forster. (It is one of those odd chances which
one suspects to be more than chance that he should have
named his chief English character as he did another Fielding
was an urbane expounder of the values of the heart.) There
is an important episode in which Ronny Heaslop puts the
Anglo-Indian case to his mother, Mrs. Moore:

" '. . . I am out here to work, mind, to hold this wretched
country by force. I'm not a missionary or a Labour member or
a vague sentimental sympathetic literary man. I'm just a servant of
the Government; it's the profession you wanted me to choose myself,
and that's that. We're not pleasant in India, and we don't intend
to be pleasant. We've something more important to do.'

He spoke sincerely. Every day he worked hard in the court
trying to decide which of two untrue accounts was the less untrue,
trying to dispense justice fearlessly, to protect the weak against the
less weak, the incoherent against the plausible, surrounded by lies
and flattery. That morning he had convicted a railway clerk of
over-charging pilgrims for their tickets, and a Pathan of attempted
rape. He expected no gratitude, no recognition for this, and both
clerk and Pathan might appeal, bribe their witnesses more effectually
in the interval, and get their sentences reversed. It was his duty.
But he did expect sympathy from his own people, and expect from

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 161

newcomers he obtained it. He did think he ought not to be worried
about 'Bridge Parties' when the day's work was over and he wanted
to play tennis with his equals or rest his legs upon a long chair.

He spoke sincerely, but she could have wished with less gusto.
How Ronny revelled in the drawbacks of his situation! How he did
rub it in that he was not in India to behave pleasantly, and derived
positive satisfaction therefrom! He reminded her of his public-
schooldays. The traces of young-man humanitarianism had sloughed
off, and he talked like an intelligent and embittered boy. His words
without his voice might have impressed her, but when she heard
the self-satisfied lilt of them, when she saw the mouth moving so
complacently and competently beneath the little red nose, she felt,
quite illogically that this was not the last word on India. One touch
of regret not the canny substitute but the true regret from the
heart would have made him a different man, and the British
Empire a different institution." 11

It is in the final sentence that Forster lets us down and exposes
the weaknesses of his positive values. It is simply not true
that one touch of genuine regret would have made the British
Empire a different institution and it is this kind of inadequacy
which gives rise to D. S. Savage's comment (in an essay which
seems to me, by and large, very unjust) on A Passage to India.

". . . The ugly realities underlying the presence of the British
in India are not even glanced at and the issues raised are handled
as though they could be solved on the surface level of personal
intercourse and individual behaviour." 12

The reply to this is, of course, that Forster is writing a novel
about personal intercourse and not a tract about the political
situation; It is not an entirely convincing reply because Forster
by his own constant movement from the individual to the
general, so clearly recognizes that the two are subtly inter
twined. It is, for instance, a weakness of the novelist and not
merely of the social thinker, that one should constantly feel
that Forster hates the public schools more than he hates what
gives rise to them.

Another result of the unsatisfactoriness of Forster's positives
is the element of mistiness involved in his treatment of Mrs.
Moore. It is difficult to isolate precisely this element. The

162 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

presentation of Mrs. Moore bristles with 'significance.^ It is
she who first makes contact with Aziz in the mosque. It is she
who for some time appears to be bridging the gap between
East and West. Then, in the first of the Marabar caves, she
undergoes a psychic experience or vision brought about by
the dead, hostile echo of the cave which destroys her sincere
but rather tenuous Christianity but leaves her exhausted and
passive. Although she believes Aziz to be innocent she allows
herself to be sent away before she can testify on his behalf. On the
Indian Ocean she dies; it has been for her a one-way passage.

Mrs. Moore, living and dead, plays an important parkin
the novel One cannot but associate her to some degree with
Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse and that other figure who so
closely resembles Mrs. Ramsay, Mrs. Wilcox in Howards End.
These women are all envisaged as somehow deep in the flux
of things, associated with the processes of ^nature, at one in
some profound intuitive way with the mysteries of the universe.
They might be regarded, I think, as twentieth-century versions
of the archetypal Mother.

Mrs. Moore's vision is connected (partly through the image
of the wasp which is significant both to her and Professor
Godbole) with Hinduism, though it is hard to say just how.
What the Mrs. Moore-Hindu theme in A Passage to India
really amounts to, I think, is an attempt by Forster, the liberal
agnostic, to get beyond his own scepticism. There is a very
interesting passage in which Fielding and Miss Quested, both
individualists and sceptics, discuss how Mrs. Moore could
have known what happened to Miss Quested in the cave.
The girl suggests the obvious 'scientific' explanation telepathy.

"The pert, meagre word fell to the ground. Telepathy? What
an explanation! Better withdraw it, and Adela did so. She was at
the end of her spiritual tether, and so was he. Were there worlds
beyond which they could never touch, or did all that is possible
enter their consciousness? They could not tell. They only realized
that their outlook was more or less similar, and found in this a
satisfaction. Perhaps life is a mystery, not a muddle; they could not
tell Perhaps the hundred Indias which fuss and squabble so tire-
somely are one, and the universe they mirror is one. They had not
the apparatus for judging." 18

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FIRST QUARTER 163

Is there not here Forster's own voice speaking? It is as
though he is conscious at some level or other of the limitations
of his own philosophy in which there is no room for a whole
that is somehow greater than the sum of the parts and which
constantly sidetracks his attempts at generalization. The
weakness of all Forster's novels lies in a failure to dramatize
quite convincingly the positive values which he has to set
against the destroyers of the morality of the heart. In Howards
End he lapses into a rather half-hearted paean in praise of
country life and the yeoman stock in whom lies Britain's hope.
In A Passage to India the weakness lies in a certain vagueness
surrounding the Mrs. Moore-Professor Godbole material.

One might put it another way. Forster uses Mrs. Moore
and the Hindu theme to attempt to achieve a dimension of
which he feels the necessity but for which his liberal agnosticism
has no place. But because he is sceptical about the very material
he is using he fails to give it that concrete artistic force which
alone could make it play an effective part in the novel's pattern.
Such passages as the twelfth chapter of the novel in which
Hinduism is seen historically and a wonderful sense of age
and mutability is achieved by 'placing' India geologically, are
completely successful But when Forster attempts to give to
Mrs. Moore a kind of significance which his own method has
already undermined then the novel stumbles. The distinction
between mystery and muddle itself becomes uneasy. The
agnostic attempt to get the best of both worlds, to undermine
mysticism without rejecting it, lies behind the difficulty.

And yet the tentativeness, the humility of Forster's attitude
is not something to undervalue. The "perhapses" that lie at
the core of his novels, constantly pricking the facile generaliza
tion, hinting at the unpredictable element in the most fully
analysed relationship, cannot be brushed aside as mere liberal
pusillanimity. He seems to me a writer of scrupulous intelli
gence, of tough and abiding insights, who has never been
afraid of the big issues or the difficult ones and has scorned to
hide his doubts and weaknesses behind a fa9ade of wordiness
and self-protective conformity. His very vulnerability is a
kind of strength.

PART III

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
THE SECOND QUARTER

Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (1928)
Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter (1948)
Joyce Gary, Mister Johnson (1939)
I. Compton-Burnett, A Family and a Fortune (1939)

Henry Green, Party Going (1939)

THE last twenty-five years have produced, so far as one can
see at this close distance, no great new English novels nor
indeed more than a handful of books about which one feels
inclined to use the word good. There may of course be the
undiscovered work of genius waiting to be unearthed. It may
even be that future generations will discover in work which
today we class as third-rate qualities we had not noticed or
suspected. But it seems more likely that this will come to be
seen by literary historians as a barren period, the novels of
which will be read, if at all, as sociological curiosities rather
than as living art.

The two qualities which strike one most, perhaps, as one
surveys the period, are narrowness and pessimism. Both are,
of course, quite understandable in their historical context, nor
are they quite separable. The narrowness is to a considerable
degree a by-product of the pessimism. Writers who feel unable
to come to terms with the world at large tend to retreat into

165

166 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

the only comer they can feel reasonably sure of their own
spiritual predicament and that of a few people like themselves.
Hence the tendency of the twentieth-century middle-class
writer either to turn in on himself and become entirely involved
in his own neuroses or else to confine himself to an exceedingly
narrow world in which he happens to feel at home. As a recent
novel-reviewer put it:

"Looking back on English fiction in the inter-war years, it is
certainly fair to say that the best of it was almost entirely peripheral
fiction, concerned with characters who in more classic writing
would have been the 'bit players' rather than the heroes and hero
ines." 1

Narrowness and pessimism: are they not, perhaps, mere
words, expressive of what one reader happens to find unsym
pathetic? It seems to me that one cannot avoid the issue by such
arguments. That the work of, say, Aldous Huxley, George
Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh
is in its total effect pessimistic, that the picture of the human
situation that emerges from the novels of these writers is in the
last degree unhopeful and, as a result, unhelpful, is not a matter
of mere opinion but is as clearly demonstrable as any statement
of literary criticism can well be. The point is not merely that
the material with which these writers are concerned is unsym
pathetic, that they write about a society which manifests all the
classic aspects of decadence; what is significant is that the
writers themselves partake overwhelmingly in the values of
the society they depict. They are not simply writers describing
decadence, they are decadent writers.

And why not? the question will be asked, what's wrong
with pessimism and decadence? The simple answer, I think,
is that such attitudes are life-denying and in consequence
art-denying. No one, of course, wishes to ignore the existence of
misery and error, to deny that pessimism and decay are a part
of human experience, to be reckoned with, not played down.
No one wishes to deny that the experience of Macbeth is as
valid and as important as that of The Winter's Tah\ but the
point is that whereas Shakespeare in Macbeth takes us with
incomparable insight into the very toils of evil, allowing us no

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY SECOND QUARTER 167

comforting escape from its reality, never does he capitulate
to the sense that life itself is evil or meaningless, that man as a
creature is inevitably doomed by his own inadequacies. It is
Macbeth, not Scotland, that is damned.

Obviously it will not be easy to convince the reader who
thinks that life is like a Graham Greene novel that Graham
Greene is not a great novelist. The final appeal, as always, is to
the world and the people in it. It is an appeal which, stated in
so many words, tends to sound a little pretentious, like Mrs.
Ramsay's questionings about life. Yet it must lie behind all
literary criticism that is not to become arid or sectarian.

"Oh, wearisome condition of humanity . . ." begins the
passage of Fulke Greville which Aldous Huxley uses as a
prefix to his novel. And perhaps the first point to be made
about Point Counter Point is that, despite its bulk and its
pretension, it deals with extraordinarily little of humanity. Far
from offering a cross-section of English society of the late
'twenties Huxley confines himself to two groups which, signi
ficantly enough, interpenetrate in the world of the novel: the
upper-class group of titled Mayfair socialites and the literary'
clique represented principally by Burlap, Rampion (Lawrence)
and Philip Quarles (who has many of the characteristics of
Huxley himself). It is one of the obvious weaknesses of the
book that although most of the personal relationships which
bind it together are tenuous enough, the Rampions cannot be
brought into the picture at all but spend almost the entire
novel sitting in a Soho restaurant to which selected members
of the smart set repair from time to time to listen to the (not
quite convincing) voice of doom. Hence, among other reasons,
the justice of Lawrence's own complaint to Huxley that
"your Rampion is the most boring character in the book &
gas-bag." 2

None of the characters in Point Counter Point, except the
scientist Lord Edward Tantamount and his assistant Illidge,
does anything throughout the novel except talk, engage in

168 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

sexual activity, and occasionally listen to music or write.
Huxley is not interested even in the trivialities of action among
the well-to-do, and this makes the 'social* scenes of Point
Counter Point, like Lady Edward's musical soir6e, a great deal
less vital as well as less amusing than comparable scenes in
Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall. Huxley has little ability at
characterization and less at dialogue so that even a simple
comic set-piece such as the presentation of the fantastic Molly
d'Exergillod falls flat. Waugh does this kind of thing far
better.

Point Counter Point is supposed to be the ruthless, not to
say scientific, anatomizing of Huxley's world. Its fundamental
artistic weakness is that that world as a living organism never
comes into existence. It is as though Huxley is so keen to dissect
that he cannot first take the trouble to create. His novel entirely
lacks the sense of what makes the wheels go round in life. Even
more than in the novels of his spiritual (and technical) successor,
Jean-Paul Sartre, life is replaced by parasitism, a state of affairs
tolerable only if the author is himself fully aware of it.

Such vitality as Point Counter Point possesses is the vitality
of a sharp, if cynical, intelligence exercising itself on certain
situations and individuals which it has seen through rather
than seen imaginatively. The Burlap sections of the book have
this kind of 'life 5 about them. Huxley has hit off Burlap, he has
seen through the utter pretentiousness and sentimentality of
the man and presents us with a vivid, malicious caricature.
Similarly, he has seen through the Walter Bidlake-Marjorie
Carling relationship and can drag his finger nail with perfect
precision along the chipped edges of their mutual exasperation.
Most of the memorable sections of Point Counter Point are the
product either of malice or of masochism, powerful emotions
both but scarcely central enough to provide a satisfactory stand
point for a view of the world. The masochism reaches its most
painful expression in the description of the death of the
Quarles's child. " 'It was a peculiarly gratuitous horror 5 ,"
Philip Quarles says of it. But not, perhaps, gratuitous enough.
One has the embarrassing sense of a personal inner compulsion
behind this episode which can only be described as pathological.
Huxley writes of Philip's feelings:

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY SECOND QUARTER 169

"He could not bear to let anyone come near his misery. It was
prlvate s secret, sacred. It hurt him to expose it, it made him feel

ashamed." 3

It is presumably for these reasons that the episode is introduced
at all. The "gratuitous" horrors of Huxley's novels always
seem to have a double basis: in the first place they serve his own
masochistic needs, in the second they introduce a peculiarly
bogus note of dramatic irony. The death of the child in Point
Counter Point is linked with Elinor Quarles's decision to
become Webley's mistress. Why? Quite obviously Huxley
does not believe or intend us to believe that there is a divine
retribution involved. Nor is he concerned to examine the
effects of such a suspicion of retribution (rightly or wrongly
held) on Elinor Quarles herself. He is simply exploiting the
situation in a spirit of sadistic cynicism, calling in the associa
tions and ethics of East Lynne for purposes more subtle but
not less sentimental than Mrs. Henry Wood's.

A good many of the characters of Point Counter Point do
not even have the two-dimensional vitality of Burlap and
Beatrice Gilray. Spandrel!, for instance a very central figure
is without any kind of reality, a creation of abstract logic rather
than of flesh and blood. He is supposed, presumably, to re
present the ultimate in decadence, satanism minus glamour;
one has only to compare him with Dostoievsky's Kirillov in
The Possessed to reveal the shallowness of Huxley's cynicism.
For all his determination to leave no horror unstated, to reach
the extreme of inhumanity, there is something very anaemic
about Huxley's decadents. They emerge not from a vision of
the extremities of human degradation but from a conscientious
determination to exploit a particular attitude. There is neither
compassion nor indignation behind Point Counter Point, the
performance is nearer to a perverse, cerebral masturbation.

D. H. Lawrence, who liked Huxley personally (Huxley's
introduction to Lawrence's Letters is an admirable one), wrote
him a most interesting letter after he had read Point Counter
Point:

"I have read Point Counter Point with a heart sinking through
my boot-soles and a rising admiration. I do think you've shown the

170 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

truth, perhaps the last truth, about you and your generation, with
really fine courage. It seems to me it would take ten times the courage
to write P. Counter P. that it took to write Lady C.: and if the public
knew what it was reading, it would throw a hundred stones at you,
to one at me. I do think that art has to reveal the palpitating moment
or the state of man as it is. And I think you do that, terribly. But
what a moment! and what a state! if you can only palpitate to
murder, suicide, and rape, in their various degrees and you state
plainly that it is so caro, however are we going to live through the
days? Preparing still another murder, suicide, and rape? But it
becomes of a phantasmal boredom and produces ultimately inertia,
inertia, inertia and final atrophy of the feelings. Till, I suppose,
comes a final super-war, and murder, suicide, rape sweeps away
the vast bulk of mankind. It is as you say intellectual appreciation
does not amount to so much, it's what you thrill to. And if murder,
suicide, rape is what you thrill to, and nothing else, then it's your
destiny you can't change it mentally. You live by what you thrill
to, and there's the end of it. Still for all that it's a perverse courage
which makes the man accept the slow suicide of inertia and sterility:
the perverseness of a perverse child." 4

I think Lawrence grants Huxley too much (I do not find in
Point Counter Point the "palpitating moment" of art; it has not
the texture of art) and the business about destiny is something
only the out-and-out Lawrentian could accept; but the essential
truth about Huxley seems to me to be expressed here and
expressed in the most relevant terms. It is no good trying to say
what is wrong with Point Counter Point in terms of construction,
style, characterization and the technical weapons of literary
analysis because what is wrong is wrong at the very heart.
There is no respect for life in this novel and without such
fundamental respect words curdle and art cannot come into
being.

Graham Greene is a far better as well as a more sympathetic
writer than Aldous Huxley and there is a distinct sense of life
in his novels. He is extremely good at conveying an atmosphere
of unromantic corruption; "seediness" is his forte and the
colonial scene gives him a particular opportunity. He has

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY SECOND QUARTER 171

mastered most of the slick techniques of the efficient film
especially the art of montage and of the American novel of
the twenties and thirties. His novels have a spare, taut quality
which is very useful in counteracting their underlying preten
tiousness. Graham Greene is never pompous.

The chief technical achievements of the American 'social-
realist' novelists of the between-the-wars period were the
perfecting of a very effective narrative style particularly suited
to the conveying of a sense of physical action and the capturing
of a tone of conversation at once colloquial and pointed. These
writers were concerned above all to reflect the lives and
sensibility of working people, of the common man as opposed
to the refined one, to take the novel right out of the genteel
atmosphere of middle-class living. It cannot be said that they
were truly successful. What they tended to reflect was the
sensibility not of the mass of the working class but of men and
women on the periphery of that class merchant seamen on
leave, professional sportsmen, hoboes, conscripts, jailbirds,
prostitutes, gangsters, bar-tenders, declassed intellectuals,
students, bohemians, spivs and adventurers.

Graham Greene has inherited the experience of these
writers: their narrative ease which takes violence and melo
drama in its stride, their economy of construction (the complex
folklore of industrial urban life taken very much for granted), a
kind of brash sentimentality masquerading as toughness, an
eye for the sharp detail, the sordid and the grotesque.*

How much of the manner of the Americans Graham
Greene has absorbed may be seen from a snatch of dialogue
at the climax of The Heart of the Matter, the scene in which
Scobie says good-bye to his mistress, Helen Rolt (who played
netball against Roedean):

"He said, 1 came up here to say good-bye too. But there are
things I can't do/

'Don't talk, darling. I'm being good. Can't you see I'm being
good? You don't have to go away from me I'm going away from
you. You won't ever know where to. I hope I won't be too much of
a slut.'

* I am thinking in particular of Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passes,
William Faulkner, James T. Farrell and John Steinbeck.

172 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

'No,* he said, s no.*

'Be quiet, darling. You are going to be all right. You'll see.
You'll be able to clean up. You'll be a Catholic again that's what
you really want, isn't it, not a pack of women?'

'I want to stop giving pain/ he said." 5

This has precisely the tone and quality of an Ernest Hemingway
conversation in Fiesta or A Farewell to Arms. It is also not far
from the work of Michael Arlen, a now unread but once
fashionable and daring novelist of the twenties,

The Heart of the Matter is a moral fable, a novel based on
an abstract concept as to the nature of existence. The heart of
the matter is the innate sinfulness of man and his need of
divine mercy. Graham Greene's novel illustrates this concept.

The novel is set in a West African colony. In one of his
travel-books Graham Greene suggests that there is some sort
of significance in the geographical shape of Africa the shape
of a man's heart. The setting invites comparison too (perhaps
unwisely) with another story of corruption and death, Conrad's
Heart of Darkness, that extraordinary revelation of the horror
of imperialism in the Belgian Congo. But there are other less
pretentious reasons for the setting. The peculiarly sordid
corruption of the colonial scene is bound to attract writers
determined to spare no pains in the doing-down of the nobler
human aspirations. There is a stock response here worth
examining.

In a passage in Point Counter Point Elinor and Philip
Quarles are being driven through the suburbs of Bombay when
their driver runs over a dog:

"The sight of a dog running across the road just in front of the
car aroused her from her reverie. How suddenly, how startlingly it
had dashed into the narrow universe of the headlamps! It existed
for a fraction of a second, desperately running, and was gone again
into the darkness on the other side of the luminous world. Another
dog was suddenly in its place, pursuing.

'Oh!' cried Elinor. 'It'll be ' The headlights swerved and

swung straight again, there was a padded jolt, as though one of the
wheels had passed over a stone; but the stone yelped. *. . . run
over/ she concluded.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY SECOND QUARTER 173

"It has been run over/

The Indian chauffeur looked round at them, grinning. They
could see the flash of his teeth, 'Dog!' he said. He was proud of his
English.

Toor beast!' Elinor shuddered.

'It was his fault/ said Philip. 'He wasn't looking. That's what
comes of running after the females of one's species.' " 6

In Another of Huxley's novels, Eyeless in Gaza, in a well-known
episode a dog falls from an aeroplane on to the flat roof of a
building, bespattering sun-bathing lovers with its blood and
guts. In The Heart of the Matter, when the despicable Wilson
is on his way to a brothel he notes, from his car, that "A dead
pye-dog lay in the gutter with the rain running over Its white
swollen belly." 7 Previously in the novel the same image has
occurred in the midst of a key passage. Scobie, the principal
character, is considering the corruption of the colony as he
drives his car:

"It was quite true. There was a retort in this colony to every
accusation. There was always a blacker corruption elsewhere to be
pointed at. The scandal-mongers of the secretariat fulfilled a useful
purpose they kept alive the idea that no one was to be trusted.
That was better than complacence. Why, he wondered, swerving
the car to avoid a dead pye-dog, do I love this place so much? Is it
because here human nature hasn't had time to disguise itself?
Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven
remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and
on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meannesses
that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love
human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst: you
didn't love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed." 8

When Wilson actually goes into the brothel, the comment is
". . . by entering this narrow plaster passage, he had shed every
racial, social and individual trait, he had reduced himself to
human nature."

The implications here scarcely need comment. The associa
tion of "human nature" with "the worst," especially the sexual
worst, the linking of human sexual relationships with the
activities of pariah-dogs, such associations are the stock-in-

174 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

trade of a whole group of contemporary novelists. What one
would note here is the glibness, not to say triteness, of the
imagery. Men, ah yes, pariah-dogs. That will counteract any
tendency for people to talk about a heaven on earth. One might
suppose the considering of earth as heaven to be one of the
commoner human failings. It is, of course, a characteristic of a
certain kind of bad sentimental fiction. The question arises as
to whether the sentimentality involved in seeing life as better
than it really is, is necessarily more offensive than an opposite
kind of sentimentality which takes pleasure in seeing the world
as worse than it happens to be. The proverbial servant-girl for
whom romantic fiction is said to be written does at least have
understandable reasons for wishing her novels to be nicer than
the truth; the desire for a fiction nastier than reality may well
turn out on examination to have less respectable credentials.

On what grounds, beyond a general sense of disagreement
with Graham Greene's view of the world, does one see The
Heart of the Matter as a work of perverted sentimentality?
Partly, I think, from the sense one has of a bag of tricks being
brought into play. All the paraphernalia is here for a stock
twentieth-century novel of corruption including the sense of
the chief characters being caught up in a situation which they
would not dream of trying to alter. Scobie likes the stink: the
word love 7 is ostentatiously produced to make clear his attitude.
Marlow, sailing up the Congo to penetrate the heart of dark
ness, is filled not only with horror, but with human indignation.
True, Conrad somewhat muffles the horror in a certain wordi
ness which reflects the limitations of his powerful honesty,*
but his total effect is one of vigour and moral insight. The death
of Kurtz, exploited a little dishonestly by T. S. Eliot, is in no
sense a symbol of the hollowness of man's nature, but rather a
dreadful, ironic warning to his capacity to submit to evil,
concretely associated in this case with colonial robbery.

In The Heart of the Matter one has, moreover, constantly
the sense of the screw being turned, not in order to satisfy the
developing needs of the novel as a work of art but in order to
satisfy Graham Greene's abstract convictions. The whole

* See above p. 78 F. and F. R. Leavis's discussion of Heart of Darkness
in The Great Tradition.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY SECOND QUARTER 175

thing, though extraordinarily slick, is too glib to stand up
to any searching questions regarding its convincingness. Is
not trie dramatic irony altogether too insistent? That Scobie
should embark on his journey into corruption through a series
of events (starting from his need to comfort his wife for his
failure to become commissioner) which would in fact have
turned out differently from his expectations, this is convincing
and legitimate play for irony. But that every single episode and
turn of the story should have the same quality of deceptiveness
is so unlikely as to defeat the purpose of the novel; the pattern,
like that of a cheap bedroom wallpaper, becomes intolerable.

I am not arguing that a novelist should not, for the purposes
of his artistic vision, choose and emphasize particular aspects
of his material or that a literal probability is a necessary quali
fication for the eligible plot. No one would consider tht story
of Romeo and Juliet probable, but it has an inner justice and
momentum of its own that is artistically convincing, partly
because Shakespeare does not insist that his story is a symbol of
life as such. He makes no claim to lay bare the heart of the
matter. Whereas it is the pretentiousness of Greene's pattern
that leads to his trying to put life into a strait-jacket.

Two examples will have to suffice. What artistic or human
probability is there in the sacrificing of AH, Scobie 5 s servant,
at the end of the book? That Scobie should at this point, what
ever his suspicions or his corruption, hand over AH to the
mercies of Yussef , makes nonsense of the whole conception of
Scobie on which the book is hinged. Clearly the episode is
there, not from any artistic necessity, but for the sake of the
over-riding pattern of the novel. If the relationship between
Scobie and AH were not to be destroyed something positive
and humanly effective might emerge from the book and this
must at all costs be avoided.

Then there is the trickery involved in the presentation of
numerous characters, in particular Wilson, AH, Yussef, Father
Rank, the Portuguese Captain; Graham Greene does not play fair
with his readers here. It is legitimate for a novelist who reveals
his people through the consciousness of other characters to work
by means of partial revelations, mistaken apprehensions and
false tracks. The revelation of a human personality is, after all,

176 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

a matter of almost infinite complexity. What is of doubtful
legitimacy is for the novelist who takes an omniscient, God-like
means of revealing his creations to give the reader a selection
of facts which puts him at a special disadvantage. It is all very
well for Henry James to keep us in the dark for most of The
Portrait of a Lady about the facts of Madame Merle's career.
Isabel herself is in the dark, and in any case by the end of the
book the revelation is adequate for us to make our own judge
ments. In The Heart of the Matter Graham Greene deliberately
keeps most of the facts dark, even to the end. Is Ali bribed?
We don't know. Was the Portuguese captain a spy? We don't
know. What about Yussef ? Human relationships are tenuous,
intangible, in flux, human beings have many sides ; we cannot
grumble at a novelist's failure to commit himself on such
questions; it may well be the very intangibility that he is out
to convey. But though motives may be obscure and contra
dictory, actions are less intangible; there are in life facts as
well as doubts. It is Graham Greene's policy deliberately to
play down facts and actions, to keep from his reader essential
evidence which, though no doubt tricky and open to various
interpretations, is, when all is said and done, the only thing
we have to work on if we are to achieve morally responsible
decisions and attitudes.

This is not fortuitous. It is an expression of a defeatism
deep in Greene's philosophy which is in the end as life-destroy
ing as Huxley's more vulgar cynicism. The 'moral' of The
Heart of the Matter in terms of human action is that Scobie
should have saved his own soul and left the non-Catholics to
the mercy of God, which as Father Rank points out in the final
chapter is more profound than Louise Scobie's. But Greene
would obviously forestall criticisms as to the adequacy of such
a summary by pointing out that, translated into terms of human
action, an essential element of the moral discovery of the book
is lost. The implication of The Heart of the Matter is that
human action, as such, doesn't really matter much at all. The
ethics and aspirations of sinful humanity are at best but poor
things. It is the relation between man and God that is important.
Without discussing the abstract truth or falsity of this pro
position it is permissible for the reader to observe that it Is one

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY SECOND QUARTER 177

which unless discussed in terms of human action makes
objective judgement (or indeed any kind of criticism that is
not based on a supra-rational intuition) peculiarly difficult. If
deficiencies in the way a work of art deals with reality are to be
excused on the grounds that it is not, after all, reality that
counts, then it is hard to see that any one critical statement is
more relevant than another. We do not solve our problems by
postulating life as the given basis within which art is relevant,
but at least we make comprehensible statements possible.

The case against The Heart of the Matter is not that it fails
to create a coherent impression or to involve much penetrating
observation; the important criticism of it is that it reduces life
by pressing it into a narrow mould. Graham Greene talks about
Wilson in the brothel being "reduced to human nature." It is
the way in which human nature in this novel is indeed reduced
that constitutes its ultimate failure.

Mister Johnson is also about Africa. Although published
only a few years before The Heart of the Matter it belongs in
subject-matter to an earlier era of colonial administration
the period, before the critical contemporary threats to the
imperialist system as such, when Joyce Gary himself served as
an administrator in Nigeria. That the exploration of the
colonial scene should have played so important a part in the
history of the British novel in the twentieth century is an
interesting confirmation of the view* that good realist literature
achieves its valuable symbolic quality by taking to their
extreme points the underlying vital tensions of a particular
social situation. The removal of the scene from London to
Africa or India or South America does not necessarily involve
an escape from the central tensions of our own civilization, on
the contrary it may illuminate them.

Joyce Gary has played a comparatively lone game among
contemporary novelists. Although he has experimented in a
number of forms he has on the whole rejected the cults both of
'sensibility' (in the Virginia Woolf sense) and of pessimistic

* Discussed above, p. 108 ff.

178 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

decadence (expressed generally through an obsessive Introspec
tion or through a rejection of humane values and potentialities).
He is a vigorous and extravert writer, not without the kind of
sensitivity most admired by sophisticated readers one recalls
the beautiful novel of childhood, A House of Children but
capable of developing that sensitivity outward. One way of
putting the problem which faces middle-class writers today Is
to say that they have a choice between refining their sensibility
within the limits of a polite (i.e. middle-class) consciousness
and tradition the consequence of which is the production of
a literature of limited relevance and vitality, and, Incidentally,
ends as anything but polite or of moving towards a sensibility
more Inclusive, possibly less sophisticated, but more truly
sensitive because coping more adequately with a larger sphere
of the ultimately Indivisible mass of human experience. The
trouble with the middle-class sensibility Is in the last analysis
not that It Is too sensitive but that it is sensitive to too little
and therefore ultimately grossly insensitive. The inward-
turning tendency of sensitive twentieth-century writers
contrives to land them, in the long run, in a bog of false
sensitivity.

Joyce Gary Is a writer whose novels, though far from the
Hough guy* school of Inverted sentimentality, have a kind of
inner toughness most welcome and refreshing. Sometimes, as
in The Horse's Mouth (in some respects his most Important
novel) the vitality seems to become a little forced, but the
general effect is of a great and individual vigour. The attempt,
In some of his books, to return to a picaresque approach
Herself Surprised is almost a twentieth-century Moll Flanders
Is Interesting. Here is a writer striving continuously to escape
the polite tradition.

Mister Johnson has a sustained lyrical quality which arises
from a quite remarkable unity of conception. Like several of
Henry Green's novels it has something of the quality of a fairy
tale; the world presented, though unmistakably related to the
real world, has a self-consistency, a completeness, which
beguiles the reader into an almost uncritical acceptance of its
reality. When E. M. Forster writes about India we are all the
time aware of an outside observer battling with problems

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY SECOND QUARTER 179

which he may not he is quite aware fully understand:
Joyce Gary's novel works in precisely the opposite way. Cer
tainty is established. This is Nigeria, at any rate for the purposes
of the book. The opening of Mister Johnson has the flavour of
an objectivity which is almost that of the anthropologist. There
are no ifs and buts about this writing.

The theme of Mister Johnson is the effect of the imposition
of an alien code of morals and manners upon a native culture.
Mister Johnson the 'mister' is a title of social respectability
is a young African who becomes a Government clerk in an
outpost in the Nigerian bush. He is a character of unbounded
vitality, optimism and fecklessness. He is a 'big man,' a civilized
man, removed from and despising the pagan savages yet far
more deeply one of them than he is one of the elect. He is an
absurd figure with his patent shoes and total incomprehension
of the civilization he respects, deeply pathetic in his complete
vulnerability, enormously sympathetic and amusing in his
superb vitality and courage.

I do not see how within its appointed limits Mister Johnson
could be better done. Humour and compassion are blended,
not in the sentimental fashion of the following of an amusing
scene by a pathetic one, but through the conveying at the same
time of the pathos and the humour of the same situation, so
that one laughs and cries at once.

A couple of examples of Joyce Gary's method will perhaps
best indicate the nature of Mister Johnson's success. This is a
passage from near the beginning of the novel. Johnson, the
clerk, has noticed with great satisfaction the girl Bamu who
works a local ferry.

"Two days later he finds her again in the ferry with her short
cloth tucked up between her strong thighs. He gives her a three
penny piece instead of a penny; and she carefully puts it in her
mouth before taking up the pole.

'Oh, Bamu, you are a foolish girl. You don't know how a Christian
man lives. You don't know how nice it is to be a government
lady.'

The dugout touches the bank, and Bamu strikes the pole into
the mud to hold firm. Johnson gets up and balances himself awk
wardly. Bamu stretches out her small hard hand and catches his

180 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

fingers to guide him ashore. When he comes opposite her and the
dugout ceases to tremble under him, he suddenly stops, laughs
and kisses her. "You are so beautiful you make me laugh.'

Bamu pays no attention whatever. She doesn't understand the
kiss and supposes it to be some kind of foreign joke. But when
Johnson tries to put his arms round her she steps quickly ashore
and leaves him in the dugout, which drifts down the river, rocking
violently. Johnson, terrified, sits down and grasps the sides with
his hands. He shouts, 'Help! Help! I'm drowning!'

Bamu gives a loud, vibrating cry across the river; two men
come dawdling out from a hut, gaze at Johnson, leisurely descend
and launch another dugout. They pursue Johnson and bring him to
land. Bamu, hidden in the bush, explains the situation in a series
of loud, shrill cries. One of the boatmen, a tall, powerful man of
about thirty, stands over Johnson and says, "What did you want
with my sister, stranger?'

*I want to marry her, of course. I'm clerk Johnson. I'm an
important man, and rich. I'll pay you a large sum. What's your
name?*

*My name is Aliu/

The man scratches his ear and reflects deeply, frowning side
ways at Johnson. He can't make out whether the boy is mad or
only a stranger with unusual customs.

*It wouldn't do today/ he says at last.

Aliu makes no answer.

'When shall I come? How much money shall I bring? 5

'Money? H'm. She's a good girl, that one.'

'Anything you like ten pounds, twelve pounds.'

The two men are visibly startled. Their eyebrows go up. They
gaze at Johnson with deep suspicion. These are high prices for girls
in Fada.

"Fifteen pounds!' Johnson cries. 'She's worth it. I never saw such
a girl.'

The two men, as if by one impulse, turn to their boat. As they
push off, Bamu darts out of the bush and jumps amidships. Neither
look at her. She sits down and gazes at Johnson with a blank stare.
Aliu says over his shoulder, 'Another day, clerk.'

Bamu continues to stare. The two men give a powerful, impatient
thrust which carries the dugout far across the water.

Johnson goes on shouting for some time, but no one can make
out what he says. The village children come and stare. The general
opinion is that he is mad* Finally, he disappears into the bush." 10

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY SECOND QUARTER 181

The extraordinary vividness here is achieved by the absolute
certainty of Joyce Gary's approach. Not a single doubt must
creep in. We must not wonder: Would they really act like that?
Isn't he perhaps being a little condescending? There must be
no suggestion of ambiguity, except in so far as the actual
relationship between Johnson and the bush people is ambiguous.
What is aimed at is the security and confidence of a fairy
tale or a scientific statement. Hence the absence of any adjectives
which might imply a moral evaluation except from the inside
of the scene. Objectivity could scarcely go farther.

But this does not mean that Joyce Gary's novel lacks a moral
pre-occupation. Comment on the tragic situation is everywhere
implicit. When, for instance, near the end of the novel Johnson,
who has murdered the local storekeeper, is thrown into jail
he finds there Saleh, the spoiled, effeminate boy who has been
the Waziri's favourite but has now been superseded. Saleh
immediately asks him for his shoes.

" 'But, Saleh, I need my shoes.*

'Need them what good are they to you? In two days they will
hang you. Oh, Johnson, do not be so cruel. I am only a boy. I am
so unhappy, I can't bear this life. I cannot walk over the rough
ground, and when I stumble, they beat me. You will give me your
shoes now.'

Johnson is taken aback. He begins to reason with Saleh. 'But,
Saleh, they are special shoes the best English shoes.'

'Oh, how selfish you are. You are a brute.'

Johnson is moved. 'But, Saleh '

'Yes, a heart of stone. You see me suffer here and care nothing/

'But, Saleh, it is not so bad for you if you cheer up. Keep up
your heart.'

'Oh, how cruel you are, Johnson. You don't understand what
suffering is. You don't know how cruel people are. They say they
love you, and they are nice to you, but suddenly they don't care at
all. And then they betray you and beat you for nothing. You're as
bad as the rest. You see me here dying of cold and misery without
a friend.'

Tears come to Johnson's eyes from pure sympathy. 'But, Saleh,
I am your friend, I am truly sorry for you. Here is my coat then
it will serve for a pillow.' He takes off his coat.

'I see you're going to put me off with rags and lies, like all the

182 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

rest. You are cruel to me and how selfish. What^ good will those
shoes be when they hang you tomorrow. For it will be tomorrow,
I promise you.'

Well, damn it all, Saleh, here you are, then.* Johnson pulls off
the shoes. Saleh seizes them and gives them to the pagan, who,
smiling, rolls them up with the coat and puts them under his arm.
Though he acts as Saleh's slave, his expression is full of the pleased
curiosity of one who studies and enjoys new experience. Saleh then
jerks the chain sharply, 'Get up, pagan/ The pagan rises quickly,
taking care not to jerk his professor's leg-irons, and the couple
jingle rapidly back to their own corner, where their loot is carefully
rolled up in a mat.

Johnson sits looking at his bare feet for a long time, with an air
of surprise. Then he says to his nearest neighbour with a voice
inviting gossip, That boy, Saleh fancy him being here.*

The neighbours, sitting on their heels against the wall, with
their long thin arms hanging out over their knees, move only their
eyes. They are a pair of cow Fulani, thin, dry and taciturn as only
Fulani can be.

*A most surprising thing/ Johnson says in wonder. 'That boy
was a most influential person the Waziri's best friend he had
great power, and now, poor chap, well, you saw him. It makes you
think, friends.'

The cow Fulani does not even move their eyes.

'It makes you think that a chap has to look out for himself yes,
youVe got to be careful/ " n

Here the tragic irony, though not perhaps very subtle, is
extremely effective. It is not merely that Johnson's absurd
generosity, his utter inability to distinguish between friend and
enemy, is given a final illustration, the deepest irony lies in his
own philosophical conclusion (it is one of the few moments
when Johnson attempts to express his ideas about life). All
that he can get out of what has happened to him is a 'moral*
diametrically opposed to the truth.

The strength of Mister Johnson springs, I think, not only
from Joyce Gary's firm and compassionate grasp of the nature
of Johnson's tragedy but also from his remarkable insight
into the function of myth among primitive peoples. Johnson
is not merely a passive figure in this novel, the pathetic victim
of imperialism and its by-products ; he has a vitality of his own,

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY SECOND QUARTER 183

potentialities of his own, expressed partly in Ms unfailing
resourcefulness in playing the counters he does not under
stand but chiefly in his deep understanding of his own people
and one-ness with them. The tragedy of Johnson the little
clerk is pathetic enough ; that of Johnson the poet-hero is far
more profound.

This aspect of Mister Johnson recalls another remarkable
work of art of this century, J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the
Western World. The theme of The Playboy is that of the un-
heroic victim who has heroism thrust upon him through the
needs of the people for a myth to enrich their barren lives.
Christy Mahon, who murdered his da, becomes a living
myth and thereby changes the lives of the people. And when
the climax comes and he is exposed by the appearance of the
father whom he is supposed to have murdered, the myth has
done its work and changed him from a coward to a hero. The
people lose their playboy but Christy finds himself.

Joyce Gary's use of the theme is, of course, different, but
the emergence of Johnson as poet and myth-maker, organizing
and heightening the labour of the road-workers, shows an
insight akin to Synge's. The relation between art and work in
primitive society and the nature of tribal magic are brilliantly
illuminated and in the terms not of the sociological text book
but of a lyrical art.

There is, I think, an underlying weakness in Mister Johnson,
a weakness most fully emerging in the final pages of the book
when Johnson is shot by his hero the District Officer, Rudbeck.
The limitations of Rudbeck and of the colonial administrators
in general have been clearly expressed in the book. The final
episode carries, in one sense, an appalling irony for it is clear
that Rudbeck himself is totally unaware of the implications
of what he has done. In the last sentence of the novel he is
kidding himself into a day-dream version of the nightmare.
Yet there is about these final pages an incomplete dissociation
of the writer from Rudbeck's own sentimental attitudes.
Rudbeck shoots Johnson as he would shoot a suffering dog to
whom he feels a special responsibility and although the horror
of this act is conveyed it is somewhat blunted by the underlying
paternalism of Joyce Gary's own attitude. It is at this point that

184 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

the lyrical approach wavers for we are forced now to evaluate
the whole situation in terms more complex than the novel
has hitherto demanded. Some rather fundamental questions
begin to creep in. Is this an entirely just appreciation of the
African situation? Does it not leave out something essential,
that rising tide of African national consciousness and effective
ness which today one knows to be a vital element in the cultural
and political issues of West Africa? Is not the whole novel
conceived within a paternalist attitude the attitude of the
liberal imperialist inadequate to the fullest and profoundest
treatment of the subject? And is not the security, the con
fidence, the fairy-tale quality of the treatment based perhaps
on a false confidence, an over-simplification?

I do not think these questionings affect the fundamental
value and success of Joyce Gary's novel. It is a lyrical statement
of a theme, not a sociological investigation, and its artistic
vitality is in the end answer and justification enough.

Miss Compton-Burnett is an extraordinarily accomplished
and penetrating novelist of limited scope but unquestionable
quality. The limitations are so obvious as to be scarcely worth
emphasizing. The subject-matter of all her novels is as closely
related as their titles; she deals with genteel but declining
upper-middle-class families at about the turn of this century.
She has said, quite frankly, that she has not been able suffi
ciently to come to terms with the post- 19 14 world to feel that
she can write about it:

" 'I do not feel that I have any real or organic knowledge of life
later than about 1910. I should not write of later times with enough
grasp or confidence. . . . And I have a dislike, which I cannot
explain, of dealing with modern machinery and inventions. When
war casts its shadow, I find that I recoil/ " 12

The statement exemplifies excellently Miss Compton-
Bumett's limitations and also her honesty. Her position is not
unlike that of E. M. Forster, except that one feels that she has
made less effort to overcome her blind spots. There is behind

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY SECOND QUARTER 185

her bland acceptance of her class limitations an element not of
complacency but of defeat and this gets into her books.

Some contemporary critics and particularly Robert Liddell
whose essay is the best published appreciation of Miss Comp-
ton-Burnett 18 insist that this acceptance of rigid limitations is
a positive strength. It seems to me rather a retreat that may be
tactically discreet but which nevertheless prevents Ivy Comp-
ton-Burnett, like Henry Green, from being regarded as a
major novelist.

The merits of A Family and a Fortune are very remarkable.
Miss Compton-Bumett is the wittiest of living writers and her
wit, like all true wit, is not a matter of superficial smartness or
a cunning ornamentation of style. It springs from deep in her
observation of life, from her critical consideration of the
standards and values of the society she is presenting.

" 'Well, of course, people are only human/ said Dudley to his
brother. . . . 'But it really does not seem much for them to be.' " 14

The significant 'but* which throws ironically into relief the
possible contrasts in the word 'human/ at once so much and
little, the minimum and maximum of man's potentialities, is
typical of Miss Compton-Bumett's method. So is the remark
of Maria Swane:

" 'I like good people. ... I never think people realize how well
they compare with the others/ " 15

Miss Compton-Burnett is sometimes compared with Jane
Austen and the comparison is not inept. Like Jane Austen she
examines with very little illusion and from a humane and
critical basis a limited society and the quality of her novels,
like Jane Austen's, lies in their concrete revelation of human
relationships and behaviour in very precise contexts. Like
Jane Austen she is materialist and sceptical and like Jane
Austen she eschews the generalized symbol. We are not offered
a comment on the nature of life as such.

But A Family and a Fortune, as compared with Emma, is at
once more critical and less positive. Jane Austen's world may

186 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

have been, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, some
thing of a backwater but it was a society with a good deal more
future than that which a century later Miss Compton-Bumett
anatomizes. There is a confidence, a kind of radiance, in Jane
Austen's writing which may have an element of complacency
about it but also brings a vital sense of humane optimism which
could scarcely penetrate to her successor. Miss Compton-
Bumett's values, as they emerge in her novels, are humane
and decent enough but there is little room for their expression
in positive terms in the decaying country-houses from which
her characters cannot or will not escape.

The very technique which Miss Compton-Burnett has
developed is an expression of the disintegration which has taken
place within bourgeois life and values in the course of a century.
Her novels are built on dialogue they contain the very mini
mum of descriptive writing but it is dialogue of an original
and highly conventionalized kind. Although she uses very
subtly numerous voice inflexions (what a wealth of varied
significance she can get from a "Yes, dear" of Aunt Matty's!)
the conversations in A Family and a Fortune are certainly
nowhere near naturalistic, as Henry Green's are for instance,
No one ever talked like the Gavestons and Seatons any more
than anyone ever talked like Mirabell and Millament or the
Macbeths. But like Congreve's or Shakespeare's Miss Compton-
Bumett's dialogue is not so far removed from colloquial
speech that she cannot use and echo the tones and rhythms of
actual conversation. Her characters pretty obviously do not
always say (out loud in the scene which the reader builds up in
his imagination) the things they are made to "say" any more
than do the characters in Virginia Woolf's The Waves, in
which "Rhoda said" is a euphemism for "Rhoda thought to this
effect." But whereas in The Waves the 'conversations' of the
characters are undramatic, unrealized in the actual terms of a
living, vibrating 'scene, 9 in A Family and a Fortune the whole
effect is one of a succession of dramatic episodes. The scenes
are as firmly set in a particular place and time as Jane Austen's,
who also bothers very little with descriptive backcloth.

What is new in Miss Compton-Burnett's novel is the
continuous tension in the dialogue between what is actually

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY SECOND QUARTER 187

said and what Is expressed but only thought and the consequent
ruthlessness In the exposure of the underlying issues and
implications of a scene. Her conventionalized dialogue makes
possible at the same time a sharpness of conflict, verbal, moral
and psychological, of sometimes almost terrifying force and a
fundamentally down-to-earth situation, unexaggerated in Its
essential qualities, which pins the conflict to reality and
prevents the kind of abstraction which is the ruin of The Waves.
Miss Compton-Burnett's method is essentially the method of
the poetic dramatist (T. S. Eliot's dialogue in The Family Reunion
is technically not at all unlike a Compton-Burnett novel, though
not nearly so closely integrated) ; the significance and originality
of that method is still, I think, generally under-estimated.

It is not easy to quote from a book so closely woven as A
Family and a Fortune for every point depends on what has
gone before and no passage makes much sense out of context;
yet it is necessary to try to give some illustration of the texture
of Miss Compton-Bumett's novel. Dudley Gaveston, a middle-
aged bachelor who lives with his brother's family, has inherited
a fortune of two thousand a year, a fact which his brother's
wife's sister, Matty, and her long-suffering companion Miss
Griffin have just learned. Clement and Mark are Dudley's
nephews, Justine his niece.

" 'Two thousand a year!' said Miss Griffin.

'Well, It Is between a good many/ said Matty. 'It is so good
when a family is one with Itself. And you are all going to find It so.'

'To accept needs the truest generosity,' said Dudley. 'And I am
not sure that they have it. I know that people always underrate
their families, but I suspect that they only have the other kind.'

'It is that kind which is the first requirement,' said Clement.

'Clement, that remark might be misunderstood,' said Justine.

'Or understood,' said Mark.

*I don't think I should find any difficulty in accepting something
I needed, from someone I loved. But I am such a fortunate person;
I always have all I need.'

'There, what did I say?' said Dudley. 'An utter lack of true
generosity.' " 16

The little episode is set off by Miss Griffin's ingenuous
exclamation of wonder. Matty's contribution (she is a female

188 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

of the order of Goneril) immediately expresses what the
reader from his previous knowledge of her is anticipating her
determination to insinuate herself deep into the family circle
at this important moment. It also reflects some of the labyrin
thine insincerities upon which she works, for the family is in
fact one with itself scarcely at all, only perhaps in its mistrust
of her. Dudley's aphorism follows. It is both true and false,
sincere and ironical That there is a generosity involved in
acceptance Miss Compton-Burnett wittily reminds us, but it
is scarcely the principal issue in the reactions of the Gaveston
family. Dudley's remarks reveal precisely the quality of his
feeling towards the family, sincere and modest to the point of
weakness, and at the same time ironical and realistic. What is
"the other kind"? It may be the kind of generosity involved
in giving rather than receiving (the point Clement immediately
takes up) or it may be a false as opposed to a true generosity.
Both possibilities are relevant and indeed pointedly inter
connected.

Clement's remark (he is cynical and unsympathetic) again
has the double function of revealing his personality and stating
a relevant truth. Receiving is the other side of giving and
dependent on it. The paradox of action into which the situation
is moving is underlined by Mark's sardonic comment on
Justine's bland remark, innocent (tike Justine herself) in both
the good and the bad sense guiltless and unconscious. Justine
who is good and stupid, bright, brave, infuriating, quite
genuinely wants to smooth the situation, to interpret Clement's
remark generously. Mark reveals in a word both the truth about
Clement and the nature of Justine's automatic attempt to
cover unpleasantness by a conventional phrase of agreed self-
deception. We say we misunderstand when the truth is too
unpleasant. And if we are like Justine we do misunderstand.

The next remark is not specifically given to anyone, though
it is quickly apparent that it is Justine's. But I think the failure
to put her name to it is quite deliberate, for the moment of
doubt in which the reader is held has its point. Instinctively,
we begin to apply the words to their possible speakers. It might
be Aunt Matty speaking and in that case the first sentence
would have an ironical undertone, for Matty loves no one but

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY SECOND QUARTER 189

herself, and the second would be a deliberate tactic of false
humility designed to impress on the family the superior fortune
of their lot to her's. The fact that Justine's words might well
be used with a different significance by Aunt Matty throws
an immediate light on the natures of both, illuminating most
subtly their different notes. And one of the points, of course, is
that the illumination does not work wholly in Justine's favour.
She can say with sincerity that she has all she needs, but the
very posing of the statement in these trite terms leaves her
open to our criticism. A Compton-Burnett retort immediately
suggests itself: "Yes, my dear, but I never feel that that is
quite enough."

Dudley's rejoinder rounds the little exchange. It is both
true and ironical and although we know Dudley means it
kindly, taking Justine's remarks at their (and her) face value, it
has a sting to it, too. In A Family and a Fortune we are allowed
to take nothing for granted. Every easy convention, whether of
action or speech, is probed and questioned. Miss Compton-
Burnett's dialectical method, which exposes the horror as well
as the triteness of the cliche, and will never let us forget that
there are two sides to every coin, is a critical weapon of devas
tating effect.

It is hard to imagine a more uncompromising revelation
than A Family and a Fortune of the nature of the lives and
values of the declining well-to-do. Miss Compton-Burnett is
almost entirely without sentimentality, though a certain note
of it perhaps creeps into the conception of Aubrey, the back
ward child who sees more of the truth than anyone else in the
book. For all the artifice of the technique it is an extremely
worldly novel, making almost no concessions to our com
placency. The wicked are not punished in A Family and a
Fortune, nor does experience mellow the Imperceptive. Indi
viduals and their relationships are stripped of pretence and
they quickly gather about them new pretences. Dudley
Gaveston, the most intelligent and humane of the novel's
characters, is weighed and found wanting. He sees more
clearly than the rest what their world is like, not in the sense
that he makes any kind of generalized analysis of the social
situation, but in the sense that the nature of the personal

190 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

relationships (particularly with his brother) in which he is
Involved becomes through his experiences clarified. It is
Dudley's tragedy that he sees at the end that he has played his
passive role of second fiddle too long to be able now to take any
other part ; he is incapable of even trying effectively to change
the situation and capitulates in an ironic ending in which a
pretence is made, through Justine's imperceptiveness and the
imagery of the final sentence, that nothing has happened and
even that something has been gained. For her doomed charac
ters Miss Compton-Burnett has infinite understanding and a
deep sympathy but not one word of comfort. She makes us
know them for what they are.

Why, then, is the final effect of A Family and a Fortune not,
like that of Point Counter Point and The Heart of the Matter,
totally depressing and life-denying? I think there are two
essential reasons. In the first place Miss Compton-Burnett
nowhere implies that the situation she reveals is typical of all
of life. Her novel is not a moral fable, illustrating an allegedly
absolute and universal truth. Therefore we see it as an illumina
tion of a part of social life, not claiming to be more. In the
second place there is nothing unhealthy or perverse about the
positive values implied in the writer's own standpoint. She
does not offer us a vision of a decaying world as in some sense
attractive and desirable. On the contrary her controlled
intelligence and profound, deeply responsible wit increase our
critical awareness, sharpen our sensitiveness, undermine our
complacencies. The total effect therefore upon the reader who
to some extent participates in the middle-class world and its
values (and which of us does not?) is the opposite of relaxing.
There is an energy behind Miss Compton-Burnett's wit which
is exhilarating as well as destructive. Her world may be one
that is passing and indeed almost dead, but so firmly is her
experience of it grasped and defined that we are the richer
for sharing it.

Henry Green is a novelist in the tradition of Virginia
Wbolf though his subject-matter is very different from hers
and also his attitude towards it. Party Going> unlike To the

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY SECOND QUARTER 191

Lighthouse, is a comic novel, less pretentious than Mrs. Woolf 's,
lighter in tone, more critical in implication. Henry Green is
not involved in his subject-matter in the way Virginia Woolf is
involved in hers and the result is a kind of cool detachment
which does not imply lack of intimacy but permits a more
sustained working of the critical intelligence.

What is Party Going about? One answer would be that
it is about a group of rich and trivial young people who, on
their way to the south of France, get stranded for a few hours
in a large London railway terminus on account of the fog.
An uninteresting subject? The posing of the question in such
terms indicates the unsatisfactoriness of discussing a novel of
this kind in terms of what it is about as opposed to what it is.

Of course the characters of Henry Green's novel are trivial.
Of course no one cares twopence whether they go to the south
of France or not. Of course it doesn't matter that they should
be held up by fog. Of course not one of them says anything
intrinsically interesting or important from the beginning of
the book to the end. If we are out for factual information or the
abstract statement of essential issues then we shall find enough
and to spare in Point Counter Point. But if all Huxley's encyclo
paedic knowledge of facts and all his awareness on one level of
contemporary problems fail to turn his novel into a living work
of art, so does the triviality of the subject-matter when
abstracted from the novel fail to prevent Party Going from
bristling with life. The truth is that about a successful work of
art there is in an important sense nothing whatever to say.
Any discussion of what goes to make it up remains simply
a discussion of what goes to make it up. To discuss the subject-
matter of Party Going instead of discussing Party Going is
like trying to say what it is about strawberries without men
tioning their taste (about which, too, in an important sense
there is nothing whatever to say).

The four young men and five young women who finally
depart for the Riviera do not share between them a single
admirable characteristic or emotion. Their lives are of an
emptiness, of a horror of futility, which surpasses casual
description. But not Henry Green's. He catches it. Evelyn
Waugh who writes about these people, doesn't. He makes them

192 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

very different; because lie is attracted by them he makes them
glamorous and witty and because he cannot admit he is
attracted by them he throws in a line of shrill indignation
which is unconvincing.

Party Going is not a tract, it is an entertainment; but if a
tract were made out of it, it would be a tract, quite simply, on
party-going. In a way the most insistent and central character
is one who does not appear until the last few pages Embassy
Richard who gate-crashed too many parties and was found
out. But being found out is only part of the game, too, and
Richard joins the party to France. His relations with them are
no different from their relations with one another, they do not
like him less than they like each other. Only Amabel who
knows that Max is using Richard to keep her occupied so that
he can get going with Julia (with Angela Crevy in reserve), tries
to ward him off:

" 'But weren't you going anywhere?' Amabel said to Richard,
only she looked at Max.

*I can go where I was going afterwards,' he said to all of them
and smiled." 17

The illumination of the title is complete. Party going where?
Where are any of them going? And yet going is the word.
Moving somewhere and nowhere. The present participles
of Henry Green's titles are no more casual than anything else
about his books. They reflect his concern to catch things in
motion, to see nothing as static, separate, ended, granted,
abstract.

Henry Green is an extremely elusive writer. Like those
strange birds which suddenly appear in his novels, he is poised
and then swoops, touching an odd comer of experience, often
tangentially. Party Going is full of a sense of the grotesque and
casual within the highly organized and relatively rigid casing
of social reality. No word as unbending as 'symbolic* quite
fits Party Going ("Come off it," one of the servants would
rightly say colloquial tone perfectly caught); yet in this book
the railway station with its mysterious entrance-tunnels and
its "huge vault of green" above is in a sense the social fabric.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY SECOND QUARTER 193

Within it life accumulates and is organized and there is a
constant undercurrent of that productive activity which is the
motive force of society and which so many contemporary
novels lack. The absurd, dignified station-master, king of the
place yet puppet of voices at the other end of a telephone wire,
moves majestically through the crowd, prepared at a crisis, like
a competent R.S.M., to rebuke the junior officer who is letting
down his class. And within the station human life is divided.
While the people wait for their trains under the great roof, the
rich repair as a matter of course to the hotel and the richest take
suites of rooms in which to wait and drink and bathe and be in
a position to fornicate.

It would be absurd to say that Party Going is about social
struggle, but that is there too, caught in the casual, tangential
way Henry Green uses to suggest big issues. Between the rich
party, encased in the hotel, and the people in the station there
is hostility and suspicion and fear. The rumour goes round
that "they" have broken into the hotel and there is a grotesque
moment of silly panic. Very subtly Henry Green suggests the
vulnerability of these people, their queer brittle quality, the
product of their fatuous, empty, almost pathetic lives. When
we reach the passage in the book most explicit in its evaluation
of the whole situation it is given to one of the bright young
things themselves and preceded by the statement "Here he
pointed his moral/' The fairy-tale element of the novel is
stressed, the "moral" removed from sententiousness and given
a kind of absurd irrelevance. Yet the passage is not really
casual, for more than any other it weaves together the themes
and images of the book.

"Here he pointed his moral. That is what it is to be rich, he
thought, if you are held up, if you have to wait then you can do it
after a bath in your dressing-gown and if you have to die then not
as any bird tumbling dead from its branch down for the foxes, light
and stiff, but here in bed, here inside, with doctors to tell you it is
all right and with relations to ask if it hurts. Again, no standing, no
being pressed together, no worry since it did not matter if one went
or stayed, no fellow feeling, true, and once more sounds came up
from outside to make him think they were singing, no community
singing he said to himself, not that even if it did mean fellow feeling.

194 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

And In this room as always, it seemed to him there was a sort of
bond between the sexes and with these people no more than that,
only dull antagonism otherwise. But not in this room he said ^ to
himself again, not with that awful central light, that desk at^ which
no one had ever done more than pay bills or write their dentist, no,
no s not here, not thus. Never again, he swore, but not aloud, never
again in this world because it was too boring and he had done it so
many times before.

It was all the fault of these girls. It had been such fun in old
days when they had just gone and no one had minded what happened.
They had been there to enjoy themselves and they had been friends
but if you were girls and went on a party then it seemed to him you
thought only of how you were doing, of how much it looked to others
you were enjoying yourself and worse than that of how ^much
whoever might be with you could give you reasons for enjoying it.
Or, in other words, you competed with each other in how well you
were doing well and doing well was getting off with the rich man in
the party. Whoever he might be such treatment was bad for him.
Max was not what he had been. No one could have people fighting
over him and stay himself. It was not Amabel's fault, she was all
right even if she did use him, it was these desperate inexperienced
bitches, he thought, who never banded together but fought everyone
and themselves and were like camels, they could go on for days
without one sup of encouragement. Under their humps they had
tanks of self-confidence so that they could cross any desert area
of arid prickly pear without one compliment, or dewdrop as they
called it in his family, to uphold them. So bad for the desert, he said to
himself, developing his argument and this made him laugh aloud." 18

". . . if you have to die. . . ." The reference is to Miss
Fellowes the aunt of one of the party-goers who has come to
see her niece off and has been taken ill. No one is sure how ill.
but whether she is going to die or not no one will mind, even
though she has been put to bed in the hotel. Before being
taken ill Miss Fellowes has picked up a dead pigeon which has
fallen at her feet in the fog. This ambiguous bird, at once
irrelevant and significant, wends its way through the whole
novel.

The phrase "no fellow-feeling" refers back to an incident
in which one of the servants left with the luggage at the
registration place, is kissed by a girl at whom he makes a pass,
and reflects

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY SECOND QUARTER 195

" *. . . it's fellow feeling, that's what I like about It. Without
so much as a by your leave when she sees someone hankering after
a bit of comfort, God bless 'er, she gives it him, not like some little

bitches I could name,' he darkly said, looking up and over to where
their hotel room would be." 10

The contrast between the vague, incoherent, yet somehow
friendly unity of the crowd and the competitive bored antagon
ism of the party-goers who call each other "darling" but do
not share between them a generous emotion, permeates the
book and is no more accidental than the "waste land'* imagery
towards the end of Alex's ruminations.

The obvious criticism of Party Going is of the 'so what?'
type. Perhaps this novel does capture and illuminate most
brilliantly this social situation, this section of the human
scene. But who cares? Is it the function of good writing so to
dispose? What do these people matter? In what way are they
worthy of the attention either of writer or reader?

It is the old question "Why read Jane Austen?" in a rather
more extreme form and again more than one answer is possible.
The straight reply "because one enjoys it" is at once the best
answer and a question-begging one. In a sense it is the only
answer, but it avoids the two possible ramifications: "Why
do you enjoy it?" and "Is your enjoyment perhaps a criticism
of yourself?"

I would suggest that Party Going is a good novel because
the delight it evokes in the sympathetic reader comes ultimately
from an impression of life and its values which is vigorous and
responsible even though elusive and odd. The question as to
whether many people will in the long run find the novel very
invigorating is a different one. One cannot but feel that if those
who enjoy literature could discover novels whose scope and
range was wider or more important perhaps more central,
they would not have a great deal of time for Party Going.

It is not enough, in assessing the value of writers like
Henry Green and L Compton-Burnett, to sum them up in
some such phrase as "good despite their limitations." In so
far as Party Going and A Family and a Fortune are good novels,
illuminating as art the area of human existence which they

196 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL

treat, they need no apologies. In getting straight one area of
experience, however small, they help by ^implication to get
other areas straight. Life, like peace, is in the last analysis
indivisible.

What may, however, 1 think be legitimately said is that
novels of the kind of Mr. Green's and Miss Compton-Burnett's
are not a sufficient response to the reasonable demands of the
people in a democratic society for a vital and helpful literature.
They are, it has to be said bluntly, middle-class novelists
writing from a middle-class standpoint for middle-class readers.
This is not to damn them nor indeed to fail to honour them
for their integrity and talent. In a cultural situation in which
no single writer has successfully solved the problems attending
the production of a satisfactory popular fiction it would ^ be
ungenerous and unjust to criticize primarily those few novelists
who within a particular sphere are doing respectable work. But
it would be futile to pretend that the future of the English
novel can lie along the directions they have explored. And,
in the case of Henry Green, one has a sense of a certain per
versity and even affectation in the novelist's insistence upon
remaining on the fringes and in the odd corners of contem
porary experience. Once the difficulty which the modern
artist feels in coping with the central issues of a complex
world is elevated into some kind of theory that defends the
limitations of a minority culture as a positive virtue then the
danger signal is pretty close at hand.

In the Preface to his book, The Living Novel, V. S. Pritchett
excellently observes:

"The forms of the novel are various, but it has enormously
developed the field of its curiosity; new country has been subjugated
in every generation; and the masters are those who have first invaded
and liberated and added new territory. Let us admit that changes in
style, method and belief often stand between us and the immediate
enjoyment of many of the great novelists; but these barriers become
unimportant when we perceive that the great are the great not only
because of their inherent qualities, but because they were the writers
who were most sensitive to the situation of their time. They are, in
the finer sense, contemporary. I do not mean necessarily that they
explicitly responded to external events, though they often did;

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY SECOND QUARTER 197

evidently even bad writers reflect the age in which they live; I mean
that the great are sensitive to an intrinsic situation. We say today
that we are living in an age of transition, 'between two worlds* ; the
lesson of the master is that human life is always in transition; an
essential part of his excellence is that he brings this clearly out in his
work. We have only to glance at the second-rate novelists to see how
they differ in this sense from the masters. The second-rate are rarely
of their time. They are not on the tip of the wave. They are born out
of date and out of touch and are rooted not in life but in literary
convention."

The future of the English novel cannot be discussed in
terms of mere literary convention. It is a problem bound up
inextricably with the whole future, social and cultural, of the
British people. The test of the future novelist, like that of his
predecessors, will lie in the depth and sincerity of his response
to the profoundest and most perilous issues of the time.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

N.B. Owing to the great variety of editions I have normally
given chapter rather than page references in the case of novels
which are divided into chapters

PART I
INTRODUCTION

1 Maxim Gorky: Literature and Life (Hutchinson International Author?.
1946), p. 140.

THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

1 R. P. Blackmur: Introduction to H. James, The Art of the Novel (1934),

p. xii.

2 The Portrait of a Lady, Chap. III.
8 Ibid., Chap. XXIV.

4 Ibid., Introduction (World Classics, ed.), p. ix,
B Ibid., Chap. I.

6 Ibid., Chap. II.

7 Ibid., Chap. IV.

8 Ibid., Chap. V.

Ibid., Chap. VI.

10 Ibid., Chap. XVI.

11 Ibid., Chap. VIII.

12 Ibid., Chap. X.
18 Ibid., Chap. X.

14 Ibid., Chap. XVIII.

15 Ibid., Chap. XLII.

16 Ibid., Chap. LIV.

17 Ibid., Chap. LIV.

18 Henry James, The Major Phase (1946), p. 151.

19 The Portrait of a Lady, Chap. XLVIL

20 Ibid., Chap. LV.
81 Ibid., Chap. XIX.

THE WAY OF ALL FLESH

1 The Way of All Flesh, Chap. LXXXIV.

2 Ibid., Chap. XXVL
8 Ibid., Chap. V.

4 Ibid., Chap. VII.
6 Ibid., Chap. XVIII.

* Ibid., Chap. XXII.
Ibid., Chap. VII.

198

NOTES AND REFERENCES 199

8 The Living Novel (1946), p. 106.

The Way of All Flesh, Chap. LVII.

18 Ibid., Chap. LXIX.
11 Ibid., Chap. LXVIL

TBSS OF THE D'URBERVILLES

1 Tess, Chap. LI.

2 Ibid., Chap. II.
8 Ibid., Chap. III.
4 Ibid., Chap. V.

8 Ibid., Chap. VII.

6 Ibid., Chap. XXXVI.

7 Ibid., Chap. XXXV.

8 ibid.

Ibid., Chap. LI.

10 English Studies (1948), p. 19.

11 Tm, Chap. IV.

12 Op. cit., p. 6.

18 Tess 9 Chap. XXXV.
14 Ibid., Chap. XX.

PART II

NOSTROMO

1 Under Western Eyes, Pt. I, Section III.

2 Abinger Harvest (1946 ed.), p. 135.

3 Lord Jim, Chap. XXI.

4 Nostromo, Pt. II, Chap. V.
6 Ibid., Chaps. Ill, XIII.

4 Nostromo, Pt. II, Chap. V.
6 Ibid., Pt. Ill, Chap. XIII.

6 Ibid., Pt. I, Chap. VI.

7 Ibid., Pt. Ill, Chap. I.

8 Ibid., Pt. Ill, Chap. IV.

9 Ibid., Pt. Ill, Chap. III.
10 Ibid., Pt. Ill, Chap. XL
^Nostromo, Pt. Ill, Chap. XL

12 Letter to J. Bloch, 21st September, 1890.

13 Nostromo, Pt. Ill, Chap. IV.

14 Op cit., p. 135.

15 Nostromo, Pt. Ill, Chap. IV.

16 Ibid., Pt. Ill, Chap. XL

17 Op. cit., p. 183.

18 Under Western Eyes, Pt. I, Section II.

19 A Personal Record, Authors Note (1925 ed.), p. ix.

20 Under Western Eyes, Pt. IV. Section I.

21 Nostromo, Author's Note.

22 Ibid., Pt. Ill, Chap. XIII.

MR. BENNETT AND MRS. WOOLF

1 The Common Reader (First Series), (1948 ed.), p. 185 ff.

2 David Cecil: Hardy, the Novelist (1943), p. 39.
8 The Art of Fiction (1948 ed.), p. 189.

4 Walter Allen: Arnold Bennett (1948), p. 44

200 NOTES AND REFERENCES

5 Aspects of the Novel (1947 ed.), p. 56-57.

6 Op. cit., p. 65.

7 Op. cit., p. 192.

8 Tono-Bungay (Penguin ed.), p. 9.

Christopher Caudwell, Studies in a Dying Culture (1947 ed.), p. 80.

10 Op. cit., p. 350 ff.

11 Quoted by J. Isaacs: An Assessment of 20th Century Literature (1951), p. 24,

12 Op. cit., p. 358.
18 Op. cit.

14 A Treatise on the Novel (1947), p. 125.

15 Phoenix (1936), p. 547.
14 Ibid., p. 542.

17 Op. cit., p. 189.

18 E.g. opening of Section III.

19 Op. cit., p. 25.

20 Art (1914), p. 44.

21 Op. cit., p. 93.

22 The Withered Branch (1950), p. 95.

23 David Daiches: Virginia Wool/ (1945), p. 133.

24 G. Lukcs, Studies in European Realism (1950), p. 90.

25 Ibid., p. 91.
28 Ibid., p. 148.

t7 To the Lighthouse (Everyman ed.), p. 3.

THE RAINBOW

1 Phoenix, p. 532.

2 Anthony West: D. H. Lawrence (1951), p. 146.
8 Op. cit., p. 532.

4 Kangaroo (1923), p. 171.

8 Letters (1932), p. 198.

8 Penguin New Writing (Autumn, 1946), p. 112.

7 The Rainbow, Chap. III.

8 Ibid.

8 V. de S. Pinto: D. H. Lawrence, Prophet of the Midlands (A Lecture,
Nottingham), (1951).

10 The Rainbow, Chap. I.

11 Ibid.,

12 Ibid., Chap. XV.
18 Ibid., Chap. I.

14 Ibid., Chap. VII.

15 Ibid , Chap. XI.

16 Ibid.

17 Phoenix, p. 537.

18 The Ambassadors, Book V, Chap. II.

19 The Rainbow, Chap. XV.

20 Ibid., Chap. XVI.

ULYSSES

1 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Travellers Lib. ed., 1932), p. 234 ff.
a James Joyce (1944), p. 74 ff .

3 Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce's Ulysses (1952 ed.), p. 204.

4 Op. cit. p. 281.

5 Ibid., p. 288.

NOTES AND REFERENCES 201

* Ulysses (Odyssey Press ed., 1932), p. 23.

7 Ibid., p. 58.

8 Ibid., p. 560.

9 Ibid., p. 581.

10 Op. cit., p. 73.

11 Ulysses, p. 55

13 Aiick West, Crisis and Criticism (1937), p. 165.
18 Op. cit., p. 225.

14 Ulysses, p. 243.

15 Ibid, p. 7.

16 Crisis and Criticism, p. 169.

17 Harry Levin, op. cit., p. 96.

18 Crisis and Criticism, p. 178.

A PASSAGE To INDIA

1 Two Cheers for Democracy (1951), p. 67

2 Ibid., p. 85.

3 Abinger Harvest (1940 ed.), p. 63.

* Two Cheers for Democracy, p. 68.

5 Ibid.

6 A Passage to India, Chap, VII.

7 Ibid., Chap. XXIX

8 Ibid., Chap. VI.

9 Ibid., Chap. V.

10 Ibid., Chap. XXIX.

11 Ibid., Chap. V.

12 The Withered Branch, p. 47.
" Op. cit., Chap. XXIX.

PART III

1 Marghanita Laski in The Observer, 30th December, 1951.

2 Letters, p. 758.

3 Point Counter Point, Chap. XXXVI.

4 Op. cit., p. 758-9.

5 The Heart of the Matter, Book III, Part II, Chap. I.

* Point Counter Point, Chap. VI.

7 The Heart of the Matter, Book II, Pt. II, Chap. I, Section 4.

8 Ibid., Book I, Pt. I, Chap. I, Section 5. (My italics. A.K.

9 Ibid., Book II, Pt. II, Chap. I, Section 4.

10 Mister Johnson (1947 ed.), p. 8 ff.

11 Ibid., p. 197 ff.

12 Orion, a Miscellany (1945), A Conversation between I. Compton- Burnett

and M. Jourdain.

13 In A Treatise on the Novel (1947).

14 A Family and a Fortune (Eyre & Spottiswoode ; 1948 ed.), p. 54,

15 Ibid., p. 185.

16 Ibid., p. 125.

17 Party Going (1947 ed.), p. 255.
" Ibid., p. 195 ff.

lf Ibid., p. 162.

READING LIST

THERE are many books about the English Novel but comparatively
few of them are very helpful. The following suggestions for further
reading make no claim to exhaustiveness.

(i) The largest, most exhaustive, most unquestionably 'standard 9
work is:

E. A. Baker: The History of the English Novel (1924-38),
9 vols.

Up to the present century almost any piece of information will be
found here, including a long reference list; but as a critical work it is
most uneven and not many students will feel compelled to read it
through. The final volumes are the least satisfactory.

(ii) Among less portentous general works the following will be,
found the most useful (in ascending order of 'difficulty'):

V. S. Pritchett: The Living Novel (1946),

Not a 'history' but a collection of essays on novels and novelists
always sensible and at best (on Scott for instance) admirable.

E. M. Forster: Aspects of the Novel (1927).

An engaging and extremely readable book which raises more

questions than it answers but will set the reader thinking.

Percy Lubbock: The Craft of Fiction (1921).

One of the first (and in many respects still the best) of the
attempts to deal with some of the technical and artistic problems of
the novel as a serious art-form.

Q, D. Leavis: Fiction and the Reading Public (1939).

Despite its aggressive and sometimes infuriating 'highbrow 5
tone raises brilliantly a host of immensely suggestive critical and
historical problems.

202

READING LIST 203

F. R. Leavis: The Great Tradition (1948).
On George Eliot, James and Conrad this is the most serious,
thorough-going and sustained novel-criticism yet achieved. The line
of the first chapter and the general tone and underlying attitudes
are more questionable.

Henry James: The Art of Fiction (English ed., 1948). The
Art of the Novel (Collected Prefaces) ed. R. P. Blackmur
(1934).

The great value of James's criticism is the opportunity it gives to
see a highly intelligent novelist in action faced with the actual
practical problems of his art.

(iii) Other general books relevant to the period of this volume
include:

Walter Allen: The English Novel (1954).

E. B. Burgum: The Novel and the World's Dilemma (1947).
Christopher Caudwell: Studies in a Dying Culture (1938)

(Wells and Lawrence).

Richard Church: Growth of the English Novel (1951).
Alex Comfort: The Novel and Our Time (1948).
Bonamy Dobr^e: The Lamp and the Lute (1929) (Hardy,

Kipling, Forster, Lawrence).
Elizabeth Drew: The Modern Novel (1926).
Pelham Edgar: The Art of the Novel (1923).
Ralph Fox: The Novel and the People (1937).
Dorothy M. Hoare: Some Studies in the Modern Novel (1938).
J. K. Johnstone: The Bloomsbury Group (1954) (E. M. Forster,

Virginia Woolf).
D. H. Lawrence: Phoenix (1936).

F. R. Leavis: The Common Pursuit (1952) (James, Lawrence,

Forster).
Robert Liddell: A Treatise on the Novel (1947).

Some Principles of Fiction (1953).
Jack Lindsay: George Meredith (1956).
George Lukacs: Studies in European Realism (1950).
Edwin Muir: The Structure of the Novel (1928).
V. S. Pritchett: Books in General (1953).
D. S. Savage: The Withered Branch (1950).
Irene Simon: Formes du Roman anglais de Dickens a

Joyce (1949).
Enid Starkie: From Gautier to Eliot: The Influence of France

on English Literature 1851-1939 (1959)
Lionel Trilling: The Liberal Imagination (1951).

204 READING LIST

Edmund Wilson: Axel's Castle (1931).

The Triple Thinkers (new ed. 1952).
The Wound and the Bow (1943).

(iv) On particular novels and novelists mentioned in this volume
(N.B. In no case Is anything approaching a bibliography of the
particular author given, merely certain books that may be useful.
References to articles in periodicals that I have used will be found
in the Notes.):

P. W. Dupee: Henry James (American Men of Letters)
(1951).

ed. Dupee: The Question of Henry James (1947).

F. O. Matthiessen: Henry James, The Major Phase (1946).
Quentin Anderson: The American Henry James (1958).
Stephen Spender: The Destructive Element (1935).

G. D. H. Cole: Samuel Butler (1949).
P. N. Furbank: Samuel Butler (1948).

M. Muggeridge: The Earnest Atheist (1937).
Lascelles Abercrombie: Thomas Hardy (1919).
David Cecil: Hardy the Novelist (1943).
Carl J. Weber: Hardy of Wessex (1940).

E. Crankshaw: Joseph Conrad (1936).

D. Hewitt: Conrad, a Reassessment (1952).

O. Warner: Joseph Conrad (1951).

Walter Allen: Arnold Bennett (1948).

Georges Lafourcade: Arnold Bennett (1939).

Norman Nicholson: H. G. Wells (1950).

David Daiches: Virginia Woolf(1945).

Joan Bennett: Virginia Wool/ (1945).

Bernard Blackstone: Virginia Wool/ (1949).

Anthony West: D. H. Lawrence (1950).

Fr. W. Tiverton: D. If. Lawrence and Human Existence (1951).

F. R. Leavis: D. H. Lawrence, Novelist (1955).

Mark Spilka: The Love Ethic of D. H. Lawrence (1958).
Stuart Gilbert: James Joyce's 'Ulysses' (Revised ed. 1952).
Harry Levin: James Joyce (1944).

Frank Budgen: James Joyce and the Making of 'Ulysses* (1934).
L. A. G. Strong: The Sacred River (1947).
Lionel Trilling: E. M. Forster (1944).
Kenneth Allott and Miriam Farris: The Art of Graham Greene
(1951).

INDEX

Adam Bede, 48

Aeschylus, 57

Allen, Walter, 86, 88, 114 ff.
Alton Locke, 43, 109 n.
Ambassadors, The, 15, 32, 128
American novel, 171
Anna Karenina, 108 n.
Antony and Cleopatra, 112
Aristotle, 70
Arlen, Michael, 172
Arnold, Matthew, 120
Austen, Jane, 13, 15, 18, 19, 104,
185-6, 195

BALZAC, H., 10, 33
Barchester Towers, 48

Bell, Clive, 101-2

Bennett, Arnold, 82 ff., 85-9, 105 ff.

Blackmur, R. P., 13

Bloomsbury, 84

Bradlaugh, Charles, 10

Bronte, Emily, 16, 62

Bumey, Fanny, 138

Butler, Samuel, 9-12, 35-48, 90, 138

Candide, 48

Gary, Joyce, 177-84

Caudwell, C., 95

Chance, 70

Citizen Kane, 94

Clayhanger, 84

Commercialization, 64

Compton-Burnett, I., 97, 184-90,

195-6

Congreve, W., 186
Coningsby, 44
Conrad, Joseph, 31 n., 34 n., 63, 65,

67-81, 91, 172, 174
Cooper, W. Fennimore, 138

DARWIN, Charles, 9, 44

Dickens, Charles, 11, 43, 64, 86, 138

Disraeli, B., 44

Don Quixote, 136-7

Donne, John, 119
Dos Passos, John, 72, 171 n.
Dostoievsky, R, 64, 68, 169
Dujardin, E., 138
Dynasts, The, 58

EDWARDIAN novelists, 82 ff.

Eliot, George, 16, 18, 29, 36, 75, 87,

Eliot, T. S., 137, 174, 187
Emma, 15, 16, 54, 185
Engels, F., 75
Esther Waters, 107, 109
Eyeless in Gaza, 173

Family and a Fortune, A, 184-90,

Farewell to Arms, A, 172
Fielding, Henry, 11, 36, 65, 90, 136
Fiesta, 172

Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 94
Flaubert, G., 28, 33, 68, 89
Forster, E. M., 20, 63, 68, 86,

152-64, 178, 184
Forsyte Saga, The, 95 ff., 129
Freud, S., 64
Fry, Roger, 101

GALSWORTHY, John, 84 ff., 87, 95-

100, 103, 105 ff.
Gamett, Edward, 113 ff.
Gilbert, Stuart, 145, 147
Gibbon, Lewis Grassic, 65
Gissing, George, 107, 109
Goncourts, 85
Gorky, Maxim, 65, 109
Great Gatsby, The, 94
Green, Henry, 178, 185, 186, 190-6
Greene, Graham, 20, 76, 166, 167,

170-7
Greville, Fulke, 167

205

206

INDEX

Hamlet, 71, 139, 141, 146

Hard Times, 11, 48

Hardy, Thomas, 9-12, 49-62, 84,

143, 156

Heart of Darkness, 69, 78, 172
Heart of the Matter, The, 170-7, 190
Hemingway, Ernest, 171 n., 172
Herself Surprised, 178
Hole in the Wall, The, 109
Homer, 135 ff., 144
Horse's Mouth, The, 178
House of Children, A, 178
Howards End, 152, 162-3
Hume, D., 45, 47
Huxley, Aldous, 166, 167-70, 173,

176
Huxley, T. H., 9

IBSEN, H., 10

Imperialism, 9, 63, 69 ff., 138, 148,

159 ff.

Impressionism, 102
In the Year of Jubilee, 107
Industrial Revolution, 9
'Interior Monologue* 9 139 ff.
Isaacs, J., 101, 102 n.

JAMES, Henry, 9-12, 13-34, 68, 84,

87, 93, 128

Joseph Andrews, 11, 90, 136
Joyce, James, 12, 65, 102, 135-51
Jude the Obscure, 10
Jung, C. G., 64, 137

KAFKA, R, 64

Kangaroo, 112
Keats, John, 160
King Lear, 54
Kingsley, Charles, 109 n.
Kipling, Rudyard, 68, 69
Koestler, A., 76, 166

LABOUR movement, 9, 89
Lady Chatterly's Lover, 112
Lafourcade, G., 86
Lawrence, D. H., 60 n,, 65, 98 ff.,
111-34, 135, 147, 159, 167, 169 ff.
Leavis, F. R., 79, 120, 174 n.
Leit-motifs, 138 ff., 150

Levin, Harry, 136, 142, 147
Liberalism, 24, 73 ff., 152 ff.
Liddell, R., 96, 104, 185
Lord Jim, 69, 70

Lukacs, G., 108

MACAULAY, Rose, 152

Macbeth, 166

Macleish, Archibald, 24

Madame Bovary, 28

Man of Property, The, 95-100, 103,

105 ff.

Marx, K., 10, 70
Matthiessen, F. O., 21 n., 30
Maugham, W. S., 107
Maupassant, G. de, 85
'Middle-brow' novels, 64, 96
Middlemarch, 13, 16, 36, 54, 75
Mister Johnson, 177-84
Moll Flanders, 178
Moore, George, 107
Moral fable, 38, 47 ff., 53, 172, 190
Morris, William, 9 *
Morrison, Arthur, 109
Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, 101,

107
Mrs. Dalloway, 102

NATURALISM, 85 ff., 107 ff.

North and South, 11
Nostromo, 63, 67-81, 154

Odd Women, The, 109

Odyssey, The, 136-7

Of Human Bondage, 108

Old Wives' Tale, The, 85-9, 105 ff.

Oliver Twist, 13, 37, 58, 60

Orwell, George, 166

Paradise Lost, 19
Paris Commune, 89
Party Going, 190-6
Passage to India, A, 152-64
Peasantry in the novel, 49 ff.
Personal Record, A, 80
Pilgrim's Progress, The, 48
Pinto, V. de S., 120
Playboy of the Western World, The>
183

INDEX

207

Point Counter Point, 167-70, 172,

190-1

Portrait of a Lady, The, 13-34, 36
Portrait of the Artist as a Young

Man, A, 135, 138, 149
Possessed, The, 169
Post-impressionists, 101 F.
Power and the Glory, The, 48
Princess Casamassima, The, 11, 25
Pritchett, V, S,, 42, 45, 196
Propaganda, 38-9
Proust, M., 12, 33, 64, 102

Tolstoy, L., 10, 36, 58, 65, 108 n.
Tono-Bungay, 89-95, 105-10
Tressall, R., 65
Trilling, L., 152, 157
Tristram Shandy, 136
Trollope, A,, 20
Turgenev, L, 89

U.S.A., 72

Ulysses, 76, 102, 135-51

Under Western Eyes, 7<*

Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists,

The, 65

Rainbow, The, 111-34
Rescue, The, 70
Return of the Native, The, 50
Revolution in Tanner's Lane, 109 n.
Richardson, Dorothy, 102, 109
Richardson, Samuel, 138
Romeo and Juliet, 175
Rutherford, Mark, 109 n.

SARTRE, J.-P., 76, 168

Savage, D. S., 12, 105, 152, 161

Scots Quair, A 9 65

Scott, W., 64

Shakespeare, W., 62, 112, 136, 138,

149, 175, 186
Shaw, Bernard, 10
Silas Marner, 11
Sons and Lovers, 112, 147
Spender, Stephen, 31 n.
Spoils of Poynton, The, 32
Stendhal, 36

Stevenson, R. A. M., 102 n.
Stewart, J. L M., 53 ff.
'Stream of

141 ff.

conscousness,

102,

Synge, J. M., 183

Tess of the D'Urbervilles, 10, 49-62

Thackeray, W. M., 11,90

To the Lighthouse, 100-10, 162, 190

Vanity^ Fair, 11
Victorian melodrama, 55
Victory, 70
Fie, Une, 86

WANDERING Jew, The, 137

War and Peace, 58

War, First World, 9,11, 81

Warner, Rex, 152

Waste Land, The, 137

Waugh, Evelyn, 166, 168, 191

Waves, The, 186-7

Way of All Flesh, The, 35-48, 90

Webb, Beatrice, 10

Welles, Orson, 94

Wells, H. G., 84 ff., 89-95, 105 ff.

West, Alick, 144, 147

Where Angels Fear to Tread, 152

White Peacock, The, 112

Wilson, Edmund, 147

Wings of the Dove, The, 32

Winters, Yvor, 21 n.

Winter's Tale, The, 166

Woman in Love, 112

Wood, Mrs. Henry, 169

Woolf, Virginia, 12, 63, 84 ff., 94,

100-10, 177, 186-7, 190-1
Wordsworth, W., 62
Working-class novels, 65
Withering Heights, 13, 19, 40, 43,

57,63

ZOLA, E,, 85, 107, 108 n.

5121

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