M. G. Lewis, The Monk (1813) Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813) Fanny Burney, Evelina (1778) Tobias Smollett, Humphrey Clinker (1771) Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) Sir Thomas Malory, La Morte d'Arthur (1485) BOOKS ABOUT THE NOVEL Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction Henry James, The Art of the Novel (ed. R. P. Blackmur) 3 FICTION v. TRUTH i IT IS QUITE POSSIBLE TO READ ONLY NOVELS AND READ FOR PROFIT. But the profit which can accrue to us from our reading novels is likely to be greater if we read literature of other kinds as well. Furthermore, from reading books of each of these other kinds there is obtainable of course other profit, and we who enjoy reading will want to seek, once we have become conscious of the possibility of profit, all of it we can. On that account I shall resist the temptation to go on discussing the symptoms of literature as they may be discerned in novels, and shall pass now to other writing. It is true that novels deal with life. I am not going to enter into the rival merits of realism and romance. Here they are irrelevant. Whether a novel appears to mirror the lives of some human beings faithfully or whether it tends to fantasy, or even engenders for the unfolding of its action a world of its own, human life must be its ultimate subject. There is nothing else for narrative to be about. Life is what novels cannot possibly escape from. That is why our reading of novels would seem to influence and modify-often very considerably-our attitude towards the situations and events, the trials and encounters, of our subsequent daily existence. All our reading is likely to impart to us something for which there is no definite name, which indeed is itself not to be circumscribed and defined, and this something is absorbed into the body of our experience in general and becomes a part of it. In some untraceable way, what I may call our sense of direction in life is given more assurance. Even though to read, for instance, of somebody falling in love is an experience very different from falling in love oneself, he would be rash who denied that our notions, and even our manner, of falling in love may be colored-how deeply we cannot tell-by whatever we shall have read about this vexatious and delightful business. Hence, in order to ensure that there may be profit from the reading of a novel, it is well that we should hold up the general picture presented in it, or at least some of the incidents, not only to pictures which we recollect having been given by other novels, but also to our own personal experience of how events occur and people behave. སྐ Yet if we were to read nothing but novels that process of contrast and comparison would never be altogether satisfactory. For, while novels are invariably and unavoidably concerned with life, not even the most starkly realistic novel ever portrays life as it is. To claim that it does is rather like what Whistler described as telling the pianist that he is sitting on the piano. No doubt reading is as much a part of experience as making a fortune or being betrayed by one's best friend. But it is different experience. The effects which our reading has upon us are unique, unlike anything else. The experience of happenings obtained in reading has less resemblance than a dream to living experience. It is not even experience of the experience of others. For the imaginative writer does not describe his own experience. Neither does he simply invent an anecdote that shall illustrate and exemplify what he takes to be the teaching of his experience. What he may be said to do is to distill from his experience something new, something peculiar to narrative or to poetic expression, and even this, before it reaches the reader, is made false to the writer's experience in being submitted to the pressure of dramatic and literary requirements. There are rules-laws would not be too strong a term-to which a novel, for instance, has to conform. Once a novel has begun in a certain way, it has to end correspondingly, or the reader's sense of fitness-a sense he is usually unaware of possessing, but one that always asserts itself-will be outraged. We may see for ourselves how far a novel departs from life if we compare an autobiographical novel with the corresponding biography, when there happens to be one; say, David Copperfield with John Forster's Life of Dickens, or Typee and White Jacket with Raymond Weaver's Herman Melville. We shall then understand that if a novelist wishes to record fact as he interprets it, he writes an autobiography, and that when, instead, he has written a novel, it is because he has wished to liberate himself from fact. A book of a peculiar kind which it will be instructive for us to examine for enlightenment on this point is The Private Papers of Henry Maitland by Morley Roberts. For this is a biography disguised as a novel; it is most readable, but it does not succeed in being a novel at all. To be convinced of that we need only read it. Since, then, life is distorted in novels, it will obviously assist us to decide how far any particular novel is significant as regards life if we can refer the picture which it leaves with us to the presentation of life in writings which have been composed, not without imagination—for imagination is required in the production of the most matter-of-fact narrative or even argumentbut with imagination more strictly subordinated to fact. That is to say, we have also to read writings of other kinds. In particular, it is desirable that we should read biographies, memoirs, diaries, letters, and autobiographies. For in these life, ostensibly at least, is reflected more directly than through the prism of fiction. Primarily writings of all these kinds are to be read for their own sake-for the sake of the profit with which each may be read. In order that this profit should be available to us, we need to be able to distinguish among them, as among novels, what is not literature from the genuine article. In this chapter we are still on the lookout for the symptoms of literature. Biography is a form of writing in which it is especially desirable to recognize the presence or absence of the symptoms. On the one hand, biography readily produces the illusion that it is dealing with actual life. On the other hand, biography has become in this century widely popular reading. More biographies are published than ever before. There has even been talk of the discovery or invention of a new art of biography. That is due chiefly to one man. In the middle of the first war there appeared a book called Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey. It consists of brief sketches of the careers of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Arnold of Rugby, and General Gordon. Probably many of us have read the book, for on its publication it attracted much notice. Moreover, it came to have a wide influence. It was the forerunner of all the popular biographies that appeared in England and America in the second quarter of the century. Strachey himself did not fail to claim that he was making a new departure-new, at least, in English. In a short preface, he declared that the art of biography seems to have fallen on evil times in England. . . . The most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing has been relegated to the journeyman of letters. . . Those two fat volumes, with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead, . . . are as familiar as the cortège of the undertaker, and wear the same air of slow, funereal barbarism. He claimed instead to preserve dom of spirit, ... a becoming brevity, . . . to maintain his own free. . to lay bare the facts of some cases, as I understand them, dispassionately, impartially, and without ulterior intentions. The claim had an agreeable speciousness. On turning from the preface to the narratives that followed, the reader found the expectations which had been raised in him not entirely disappointed. Indisputably, the narratives were brief. That they were also dispassionate and impartial was not so evident. Strachey, in maintaining, as he doubtless imagined, his own freedom of spirit, adopted an ironical and skeptical tone, the tone of the pseudo man-of-the-world, that is, of the man who mistakes the high table and the college quadrangle for the world, of the man who has Not met with fortune other than at feasts, |