Kitabı oku: «A Novelist on Novels», sayfa 4

Mr Lawrence, who exploits his life not over much, affords us a necessary transition between those who are interested in little else and the second group, Mr Mackenzie, Mr Onions, and Mr Swinnerton, who have, with more or less success, tried to stand back as they write. Of these, Mr Compton Mackenzie is the most interesting because, in three volumes, he has made three new departures: The Passionate Elopement, a tale of powder and patches; Carnival, a romance of the meaner parts of London and of Charing Cross Road, and lastly Sinister Street, where he links up with those who exploit only their experiences. Evidently Mr Mackenzie believes that a good terrier never shakes a rat twice. Had Sinister Street been his first contribution to literature, Mr Mackenzie would have found his place indicated in the first group, but as he began by standing outside himself it must be assumed that he thought it a pity to let so much good copy go begging. He is a man difficult of assessment because of his diversity. He has many graces of style, and a capacity which may be dangerous of infusing charm into that which has no charm. He almost makes us forget that the heroine of Carnival is a vulgar little Cockney, by tempting us to believe that it might have been otherwise with her. There is a cheapness of sentiment about this Jenny, this Islington columbine, but we must not reproach Mr Mackenzie for loving his heroine over-much: too many of his rivals are not loving theirs enough. Indeed, his chief merit is that he finds the beautiful and the lovable more readily than the hideous. His figures can serve as reagents against the ugly heroine and the scamp hero who grew fashionable twenty years ago. His success, if it comes at all, will be due to his executive rather than to his artistic quality, for he often fails to sift his details. In Sinister Street, we endure a great congestion of word and interminable catalogues of facts and things. If he has a temperament at all, which I believe, it is stifled by the mantle in which he clothes it. It is not that Mr Mackenzie knows too much about his characters, for that is not possible, but he tells us too much. He does not give our imagination a chance to work. His romantic earnestness, as shown in Guy and Pauline, is unrelieved by humour and makes those details wearisome. Yet, his hat is in the ring. If he can prune his efflorescent periods and select among his details he may, by force of charm, attain much further than his fellows. He will have to include just those things and no others which can give us an illusion of the world.

V

In direct opposition to Mr Mackenzie, we find Mr Onions. While Mr Mackenzie gives us too much and allows us to give nothing, Mr Onions gives us hardly anything and expects us to write his novel for him as we read it. There are two strands in his work, one of them fantastic and critical, the other creative. Of the first class are the tales of Widdershins, and The Two Kisses, a skit on studios and boarding-houses. Even slightly more massive works, such as the love epic of advertisement, Good Boy Seldom, and the fierce revelation of disappointment which is in Little Devil Doubt do not quite come into the second class; they are not the stones on which Mr Onions is to build. They are a destructive criticism of modern life, and criticism, unless it is creative, is a thing of the day, however brilliant it may seem. Mr Oliver Onions can be judged only on his trilogy, In Accordance with the Evidence, The Debit Account, and The Story of Louie, for these are creative works, threaded and connected; they are an attempt and, on the whole, a very successful one, to take a section of life and to view it from different angles. If the attempt has not completely succeeded, it is perhaps because it was too much. It rests upon close characterisation, a sense of the iron logic of facts and upon atmospheric quality. There is not a young man, and for the matter of that an old one, more than Mr Onions, capable of anatomical psychology. There may be autobiography in some of Mr Onions's work, but there is in his trilogy no more than should colour any man's book.

Yet Mr Onions has his devil, and it takes the form of a rage against the world, of a hatred that seems to shed a bilious light over his puppets. His strong men are hard, almost brutal, inconsiderate, dominant only by dint of intellect, and arrogant in their dominance; his weak men are craven, lying, incapable of sweetness; even strong Louie is so haughty as almost to be rude. All this appears in the very style, so much so that, were it not for the cliché, I would quote Buffon. The sentences are tortured as if born in agony; the highly selected detail is reluctant, avaricious, as if Mr Onions hated giving the world anything. And yet, all this culminates in an impression of power: Mr Onions is the reticent man whose confidence, when earned, is priceless. He lays no pearls before us; he holds them in his half-extended hand for us to take if we can. Some tenderness; some belief that men can be gentle and women sweet; a little more hope and some pity, and Mr Onions will be judged more fairly.

Of Mr Swinnerton, who also stands outside his canvas, one is not so sure. He made, in The Casement, an elusive picture of the life of the well-to-do when confronted with the realities of life, but did not succeed emphatically enough in the more ponderous effort entitled The Happy Family. There he was too uniform, too mechanical, and rather too much bound by literary traditions. He was so bound also in his brilliant Nocturne, the tragedy of five creatures within a single night. But Mr Swinnerton has a point of view, an attitude toward life; I could not define it, but am conscious of its existence, and in a man of promise that is quite enough. For a man with an individual attitude will make it felt if he has the weapons of style with which to express it. Now Mr Swinnerton shows great dexterity in the use of words, felicity of phrase, a discrimination in the choice of details which will enable him to embody such ideas as he may later on conceive. He has only to fear that he may be mistaken as to the size of his ideas; like Mr Hugh de Selincourt, he may be too much inclined to take as the plot of a novel an idea and a story in themselves too slender. Under modern publishing conditions he may be compelled to spin out his work: as his tendency is to concentrate, he may find himself so much hampered as to lose the chief charm of his writing, viz., balance. He has shown charm in Nocturne, some power in The Happy Family; these two qualities need blending, so that Mr Swinnerton be no longer two men, but one.

Brief mention must be made of Mr Perceval Gibbon. Of his novels, one only, Souls in Bondage, showed remarkable promise, but his later work with the exception of a few short stories, was disappointing. In that book there was colour, atmosphere, characterisation and technique, but there was also passion. The passion was not maintained in later years. Other qualities were still there: he knows how to express the dusty glare or the dank warmth of the tropics, the languor, veiling fire, of its men and women, but the vision is a little exterior. Mr Gibbon needs to state his point of view, if he has one, to let us see more clearly how he himself stands in relation to the world. This does not apply to Mr de Selincourt, somewhat afflicted with moral superciliousness, whose point of view is one of aloof vigour. To a great charm of style he adds selectiveness; in A Daughter of the Morning, the characterisation is inwrought, just as in A Boy's Marriage it is passionate. And again there is Mr C. E. Montague, all bathed in the glamour of George Meredith and Mr Henry James. Of these Mr de Selincourt is by far the most interesting; he has elected to depict not the people who live ill, but those whom he conceives as living well, proud of their body, responsible to their instincts. In A Soldier of Life, notably, he makes almost credible the regeneration of the 'ordinary' man. Still, they are difficult to classify, these three; to reject their candidature may be too much, so fine are their qualities; and yet, to inscribe them upon the roll may be undue, for they have not the raw massiveness, the air that one wants to find in boys, about to be men; they are too particular, too much inclined to look away from the world and to concentrate on some microscopic section. To enlarge without loosening is no easy matter.

Lastly, and by himself, there is Mr E. M. Forster, who has been forgotten a little in a hurry, because he has not, since 1910, felt inclined to publish a novel; he is still one of the young men, while it is not at all certain that he is not 'the' young man. Autobiography has had its way with him, a little in A Room With a View, and very much more in that tale of schoolmasters, The Longest Journey; but it was Howard's End, that much criticised work, which achieved the distinction of being popular, though of high merit. This marks out Mr Forster and makes it likely that he can climb Parnassus if he chooses. In Howard's End Mr Forster surveyed the world in particular and also in general; he was together local and cosmic; he was conscious of the little agitations and artificialities of the cultured, of the upthrust of the untaught and of the complacent strength of those who rule. Over all, hung his own self as the wings of a roc darkening the countryside. It is because Mr Forster has seized a portion of the world and welded it with himself that the essence of him may persist and animate other worlds. His attitude is one of tolerance; he prays that we may not drift too far from the pride of body which is the pride of spirit. Mystic athleticism: that seems to be Mr Forster's message; as it is essential that the man of to-morrow should be a man of ideas as well as a man of perceptions, it is quite certain that, if Mr Forster chooses to return to the field, he will establish his claim.

One word as to women. The time has gone when we discriminated between the work of women and of men; to-day, 'Lucas Malet,' Miss May Sinclair, Mrs Sedgwick, Mrs Edith Wharton, Miss Violet Hunt, Miss Ethel Sidgwick, Mrs Belloc-Lowndes, and Mrs Dudeney, must take their chance in the rough and tumble of literary criticism, and the writer does not suggest a comparison between them and the leading men. For this there is a very good reason: the young women of to-day are promising work of an entirely new kind. They have less style than their precursors and more ideas: such women writers as Miss Amber Reeves,¹ Miss Viola Meynell, Miss Sheila Kaye-Smith,² Miss Tennyson Jesse, Miss Dorothy Richardson, Miss Katherine Gerould, Miss Bridget MacLagan have produced so far, very little; they can be indicated as candidates, but much more faintly than their masculine rivals. They write less, and less easily; they are younger at their trade, more erratic. It is enough to mention them, and to say that, so far as women are showing indications of approximating to men in literary quality, these are the women who are likely soon to bear the standards of their sex.

To sum up, I suggest that the rough classification of the seven young men must not be taken as fixed. Some are more autobiographic than evocative; some are receptive rather than personally active, and yet others have not chosen between the two roads. Yet, taking them as a whole, with the reservation of possible dark horses, these are probably the men among whom will be found the two or three who will 'somehow,' in another ten years, lead English letters. It will be an indefinable 'somehow,' a compound of intellectual dominance and emotional sway. We shall not have a Bennett for a Bennett, nor a Wells for a Wells, but equivalents of power, and equivalents of significance, who will be intimately in tune with their time and better than any will express it.

Three Young Novelists

1. MR D. H. LAWRENCE

It is not a very long time ago since Professor Osler startled America and England by proclaiming that a man was too old at forty. This is not generally held, though, I suppose, most of us will accept that one is too old to begin at forty. But that is not the end: very soon, in literature at least, it may be too late to begin at thirty, if we are to take into account the achievements of the young men, of whom Mr D. H. Lawrence is one of the youngest. Mr Lawrence is certainly one of the young men, not a member of a school, for they have no formal school, and can have none if they are of any value, but a partner in their tendencies and an exponent of their outlook. He has all the unruliness of the small group that is rising up against the threatening State, its rules and its conventions, proclaiming the right of the individual to do much more than live – namely, to live splendidly.

It is this link makes Mr Lawrence so interesting; this fact that, like them, he is so very much of his time, so hot, controversial, uneasy; that, like them, he has the sudden fury of the bird that beats against the bars of its cage. But while the young men sneer at society, at the family, at every institution, Mr Lawrence tends to accept these things; he has no plan of reform, no magic wand with which to transmute the world into fairyland: he claims only as a right to develop his individuality, and to see others develop theirs, within a system which tortures him as another Cardinal La Balue.

This it is differentiates him from so many of his rivals. He has in his mind no organisations; he is mainly passionate aspiration and passionate protest. And that is not wonderful when we consider who he is. Surprising to think, this prominent young novelist is only thirty-four. Son of a Nottinghamshire coal-miner, a Board-school boy, his early career seems to have been undistinguished: a county council scholarship made of him a school teacher, imparting knowledge in the midst of old-fashioned chaos in a room containing several classes. Then another scholarship, two years at college, and Mr Lawrence went to Croydon to teach for less than £2 a week. Then the literary life, though I extract from his record the delightful fact that at college they gave him prizes for history and chemistry, but placed him very low in the English class. (This is rather embarrassing for those who believe in the public endowment of genius.)

I have said 'then the literary life,' but I was wrong, for already at twenty-one Mr Lawrence had begun The White Peacock, of which, year by year, and he confesses often during lectures, he was laying the foundations. Mr Lawrence did not, as do so many of us, enter the literary life at a given moment: literature grew in him and with him, was always with him, even in the worst years of his delicate health. If literature was not his passion, it was to his passion what the tongue is to speech: the essential medium of his expression.

Sometimes when reading one of his works, I wonder whether Mr Lawrence has not mistaken his medium, and whether it is not a painter he ought to have been, so significant is for him the slaty opalescence of the heron's wing and so rutilant the death of the sun. When he paints the countryside, sometimes in his simplicity he is almost Virgilian, but more often he is a Virgil somehow strayed into Capua and intoxicated with its wines. All through his novels runs this passionate streak, this vision of nature in relation to himself. But it is certainly in The White Peacock that this sensation attains its apogee. It is not a story which one can condense. Strictly, it is not a story at all. It presents to us a group of well-to-do people, cultured, and yet high in emotional tone.

Mr Lawrence himself, who figures in it, is effaced; Lettice, wayward and beautiful, is the fragrance of sex, but not more so than the honeysuckle in the hedges; George, muscles rippling under his skin, insensitive to cruelty, yet curiously moved by delicacy, is the brother of the bulls he herds; and all the others, the fine gentlemen, the laughing girls, farmers, school teachers, making hay, making music, making jokes, walking in the spangled meadows, and living, and wedding, and dying, all of them come to no resolution. Their lives have no beginning and no end. Mr Lawrence looks: Pippa passes. It is almost impossible to criticise The White Peacock, and the danger in an appreciation is that one should say too much good of it, for the book yields just the quality of illusion that a novel should give us, which does not of itself justify the critic in saying that it is a great book. For the novel, equally with the picture, can never reproduce life; it can only suggest it, and when it does suggest it, however peculiarly or partially, one is inclined to exaggerate the impression one has received and to refrain from considering whether it is a true impression. It is the vividness of Mr Lawrence's nature-vision carries us away; such phrases as these deceive us: 'The earth was red and warm, pricked with the dark, succulent green of bluebell sheaths, and embroidered with gray-green clusters of spears, and many white flowerets. High above, above the light tracery of hazel, the weird oaks tangled in the sunset. Below in the first shadows drooped hosts of little white flowers, so silent and sad, it seemed like a holy communion of pure wild things, numberless, frail and folded meekly in the evening light.' They deceive us because Mr Lawrence's realisation of man is less assured than his realisation of nature. I doubt the quality of his people's culture, the spontaneity of their attitude towards the fields in which they breathe; their spontaneity seems almost artificial.

That impression Mr Lawrence always gives; he sees the world through a magnifying-glass, and perhaps more so in Sons and Lovers than in The White Peacock. In that book he gives us unabashed autobiography – the story of his early youth, of his relation to his mother, a creature of fitful, delicate charm. Mrs Morel is very Northern; she has, with the harshness of her latitude, its fine courage and its ambition; Paul Morel, the hero, is Mr Lawrence himself, the little blue flower on the clinker heap. And those other folk about him, dark Miriam, slowly brooding over him; her rival, that conquering captive of sex; the brothers, the sisters, and the friends; this intense society is vital and yet undefinably exaggerated. Perhaps not so undefinably, for I am oppressed by unbelief when I find this grouping of agriculturists and colliers responding to the verse of Swinburne and Verlaine, to Italian, to Wagner, to Bach. I cannot believe in the spinet at the pit's mouth. And yet all this, Mr Lawrence tells us, is true! Well, it is true, but it is not general, and that is what impairs the value of Mr Lawrence's visions. Because a thing is, he believes that it is; when a thing is, it may only be accidental; it may be particular. Now one might discuss at length whether a novelist should concentrate on the general or on the particular, whether he should use the microscope or the aplanetic lense, and many champions will be found in the field. I will not attempt to decide whether he should wish, as Mr Wells, to figure all the world, or as Mr Bennett, to take a section; probably the ideal is the mean. But doubtless the novelist should select among the particular that which has an application to the general, and it may safely be said that, if Mr Lawrence errs at all, it is in selecting such particular as has not invariably a universal application.

Mr Lawrence lays himself open to this criticism in a work such as Sons and Lovers, because it has a conscious general scope, but in The Trespasser his conception is of a lesser compass. The book holds a more minute psychological intention. That Sigmund should leave his wife for another love and find himself driven to his death by an intolerable conflict between his desire, the love he bears his children, and the consciousness of his outlawry, should have made a great book. But this one of Mr Lawrence's novels fails because the author needs a wide sphere within which the particular can evolve; he is clamouring within the narrow limits of his incident; Sigmund appears small and weak; unredeemed by even a flash of heroism; his discontented wife, her self-righteous child hold their own views, and not enough those of the world which contains them. An amazing charge to make against a novelist, that his persons are too much persons! But persons must partly be types, or else they become monsters.

It would be very surprising if Mr Lawrence were not a poet in verse as well as in prose, if he did not sing when addressing his love: —

 
'Coiffing up your auburn hair
In a Puritan fillet, a chaste white snare
To catch and keep me with you there
So far away.'
 

But a poet he is much more than a rebel, and that distinguishes him from the realists who have won fame by seeing the dunghill very well, and not at all the spreading chestnut-tree above. Though he select from the world, he is greedy for its beauty, so greedy that from all it has to give, flower, beast, woman, he begs more: —

 
'You, Helen, who see the stars
As mistletoe berries burning in a black tree,
You surely, seeing I am a bowl of kisses,
Should put your mouth to mine and drink of me,'
 
 
'Helen, you let my kisses steam
Wasteful into the night's black nostrils; drink
Me up, I pray; oh, you who are Night's Bacchante,
How can you from my bowl of kisses shrink!'
 

I cannot, having no faith in my power to judge poetry, proclaim Mr Lawrence to Parnassus, but I doubt whether such cries as these, where an urgent wistfulness mingles in tender neighbourhood with joy and pain together coupled, can remain unheard.

And so it seems strange to find in Mr Lawrence activities alien a little to such verses as these, to have to say that he is also an authoritative critic of German literature, and the author of a prose drama of colliery life. More gladly would I think of him always as remote from the stirrings of common men, forging and nursing his dreams. For dreams they are, and they will menace the realities of his future if he cannot 'breathe upon his star and detach its wings.' It is not only the dragon of autobiography that threatens him. It is true that so far he has written mainly of himself, of the world in intimate relation with himself, for that every writer must do a little; but he has followed his life so very closely, so often photographed his own emotions, that unless life holds for him many more adventures, and unless he can retain the power to give minor incident individual quality, he may find himself written out. For Mr Lawrence has not what is called ideas. He is stimulated by the eternal rather than by the fugitive; the fact of the day has little significance for him; thus, if he does not renew himself he may become monotonous, or he may cede to his more dangerous tendency to emphasise overmuch. He may develop his illusion of culture among the vulgar until it is incredible; he may be seduced by the love he bears nature and its throbbings into allowing his art to dominate him. Already his form is often turgid, amenable to no discipline, tends to lead him astray. He sees too much, feels significances greater than the actual; with arms that are too short, because only human, he strives to embrace the soul of man. This is exemplified in his last novel, The Rainbow, of which little need be said, partly because it has been suppressed, and mainly because it is a bad book. It is the story of several generations of people so excessive sexually as to seem repulsive. With dreadful monotony the women exhibit riotous desire, the men slow cruelty, ugly sensuality; they come together in the illusion of love and clasp hatred within their joined arms. As in Sons and Lovers, but with greater exaggeration, Mr Lawrence detects hate in love, which is not his invention, but he magnifies it into untruth. His intensity of feeling has run away with him, caused him to make particular people into monsters that mean as little to us, so sensually crude, so flimsily philosophical are they, as any Medusa, Medea, or Klytemnestra. The Rainbow, as also some of Mr Lawrence's verse, is the fruit of personal angers and hatreds; it was born in one of his bad periods from which he must soon rescue himself. If he cannot, then the early hopes he aroused cannot endure and he must sink into literary neurasthenia.

2. AMBER REEVES

'I don't agree with you at all.' As she spoke I felt that Miss Amber Reeves would have greeted as defiantly the converse of my proposition. She stood in a large garden on Campden Hill, where an at-home was proceeding, her effect heightened by Mr Ford Madox Hueffer's weary polish, and the burning twilight of Miss May Sinclair. Not far off Mr Wyndham Lewis was languid and Mr Gilbert Cannan eloquently silent. Miss Violet Hunt, rather mischievous, talked to Mr Edgar Jepson, who obviously lay in ambush, preparing to slay an idealist, presumably Sir Rabindrahath Tagore. I felt very mild near this young lady, so dark in the white frock of simplicity or artifice, with broad cheeks that recalled the rattlesnake, soft cheeks tinted rather like a tea rose, with long, dark eyes, wicked, aggressive, and yet laughing. I felt very old – well over thirty. For Miss Reeves had just come down from Newnham, and, indeed, that afternoon she was still coming down … on a toboggan. When I met her the other day she said: 'Well, perhaps you are right.' It's queer how one changes!

She was about twenty-three, and that is not so long ago; she was still the child who has been 'brought up pious,' attended Sunday School and felt a peculiar property in God. Daughter of a New Zealand Cabinet Minister and of a mother so rich in energy that she turned to suffrage the scholarly Mr Pember Reeves, Miss Amber Reeves was a spoilt child. She was also the child of a principle, had been sent to Kensington High School to learn to be democratic and meet the butcher's daughter. She had been to Newnham too, taken up socialism, climbed a drain pipe and been occasionally sought in marriage. At ten she had written poems and plays, then fortunately gave up literature and, as a sponge flung into the river of life, took in people as they were, arrived at the maxim that things do not matter but only the people who do them. A last attempt to organise her took place in the London School of Economics, where she was to write a thesis; one sometimes suspects that she never got over it.

This is not quite just, for she is changed. Not hostile now, but understanding, interested in peculiarities as a magpie collecting spoons. Without much illusion, though; her novels are the work of a faintly cynical Mark Tapley.

She is driven to mimic the ordinary people whom she cannot help loving, who are not as herself, yet whom she forgives because they amuse her. She is still the rattlesnake of gold and rose, but (zoological originality) one thinks also of an Italian greyhound with folded paws, or a furred creature of the bush that lurks and watches with eyes mischievous rather than cruel.

On reading this over again I discover that she has got over the London School of Economics, though her first two books showed heavy the brand of Clare Market. Miss Amber Reeves started out to do good, but has fortunately repented. She has not written many novels, only three in five years, an enviable record, and they were good novels, with faults that are not those of Mrs Barclay or of Mr Hall Caine. Over every chapter the Blue Book hovered. Her first novel, The Reward of Virtue, exhibited the profound hopelessness of youth. For Evelyn Baker, daughter of a mother who was glad she was a girl because 'girls are so much easier,' was doomed to lead the stupid life. Plump, handsome, fond of pink, she lived in Notting Hill, went to dances, loved the artist and married the merchant, knew she did not love the merchant and went on living with him; she took to good works, grew tired of them, and gave birth to a girl child, thanking fate because 'girls are so much easier.' The story of Evelyn is so much the story of everybody that it seems difficult to believe it is the story of anybody. But it is. The Reward of Virtue is a remarkable piece of realism, and it is evidence of taste in a first novel to choose a stupid heroine, and not one who plays Vincent d'Indy and marries somebody called Hugo.

In that book Miss Amber Reeves indicated accomplishment, but this was rather slight; only in her second novel, A Lady and Her Husband, was she to develop her highest quality: the understanding of the ordinary man. (All young women novelists understand the artist, or nobody does; the man they seldom understand is the one who spends fifty years successfully paying bills.) The ordinary man is Mr Heyham, who runs tea shops and easily controls a handsome wife of forty-five, while he fails to control Fabian daughters and a painfully educated son. He runs his tea shops for profit, while Mrs Heyham comes to the unexpected view that he should run them for the good of his girls. There is a revolution in Hampstead when she discovers that Mr Heyham does not, for the girls are sweated; worse still, she sees that to pay them better will not help much, for extra wages will not mean more food but only more hats. They are all vivid, the hard, lucid daughters, the soft and illogical Mrs Heyham, and especially Mr Heyham, kindly, loving, generous, yet capable of every beastliness while maintaining his faith in his own rectitude. Mr Heyham is a triumph, for he is just everybody; he is 'the man with whose experiences women are trained to sympathise while he is not trained to sympathise with theirs.' He is the ordinary, desirous man, the male. Listen to this analysis of man: 'He has a need to impress himself on the world he finds outside him, an impulse that drives him to achieve his ends recklessly, ruthlessly, through any depth of suffering and conflict … it is just by means of the qualities that are often so irritating, their tiresome restlessness, their curiosity, their disregard for security, for seemliness, even for life itself, that men have mastered the world and filled it with the wealth of civilisation. It is after this foolish, disorganised fashion of theirs, each of them – difficult, touchy creatures – busy with his personal ambitions, that they have armed the race with science, dignified it with art – one can take men lightly but one cannot take lightly the things that men have done.'