Aspects of the Novel

run through his list. In the first place the weather can be “decorative,” as in Pierre Loti; then “utilitarian,” as in The Mill on the Floss (no Floss, no Mill; no Mill, no Tullivers); “illustrative,” as in The Egoist; “planned in pre-established harmony,” as by Fiona MacLeod; “in emotional contrast,” as in The Master of Ballantrae; “determinative of action,” as in a certain Kipling story, where a man proposes to the wrong girl on account of a mud storm; “a controlling influence,” Richard Feverel; “itself a hero,” like Vesuvius in The Days of Pompeii; and ninethly, it can be “nonexistent,” as in a nursery tale. I liked him flinging in nonexistence. It made everything so scientific and trim. But he himself remained a little dissatisfied, and having finished his classification he said yes, of course there was one more thing, and that was genius; it was useless for a novelist to know that there are nine sorts of weather, unless he has genius also. Cheered by this reflection, he classified novels by their tones. There are only two tones, personal and impersonal, and having given examples of each he grew pensive again and said, “Yes, but you must have genius too, or neither tone will profit.”

This constant reference to genius is another characteristic of the pseudo-scholar. He loves mentioning genius, because the sound of the word exempts him from trying to discover its meaning. Literature is written by geniuses. Novelists are geniuses. There we are; now let us classify them. Which he does. Everything he says may be accurate but all is useless because he is moving round books instead of through them, he either has not read them or cannot read them properly. Books have to be read (worse luck, for it takes a long time); it is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the west. The reader must sit down alone and struggle with the writer, and this the pseudo-scholar will not do. He would rather relate a book to the history of its time, to events in the life of its author, to the events it describes, above all to some tendency. As soon as he can use the word “tendency” his spirits rise, and though those of his audience may sink, they often pull out their pencils at this point and make a note, under the belief that a tendency is portable.

That is why, in the rather ramshackly course that lies ahead of us, we cannot consider fiction by periods, we must not contemplate the stream of time. Another image better suits our powers: that of all the novelists writing their novels at once. They come from different ages and ranks, they have different temperaments and aims, but they all hold pens in their hands, and are in the process of creation. Let us look over their shoulders for a moment and see what they are writing. It may exorcise that demon of chronology which is at present our enemy and which (we shall discover next week) is sometimes their enemy too. “Oh, what quenchless feud is this, that Time hath with the sons of men,” cries Herman Melville, and the feud goes on not only in life and death but in the byways of literary creation and criticism. Let us avoid it by imagining that all the novelists are at work together in a circular room. I shall not mention their names until we have heard their words, because a name brings associations with it, dates, gossip, all the furniture of the method we are discarding.

They have been instructed to group themselves in pairs. We approach the first pair, and read as follows:⁠—

i. I don’t know what to do⁠—not I. God forgive me, but I am very impatient! I wish⁠—but I don’t know what to wish without a sin. Yet I wish it would please God to take me to his mercy!⁠—I can meet with none here.⁠—What a world is this!⁠—What is there in it desirable? The good we hope for so strangely mixed, that one knows not what to wish for! And one half of mankind tormenting the other and being tormented themselves in tormenting.

ii. What I hate is myself⁠—when I think that one has to take so much, to be happy, out of the lives of others, and that one isn’t happy even then. One does it to cheat one’s self and to stop one’s mouth⁠—but that is only, at the best, for a little. The wretched self is always there, always making us somehow a fresh anxiety. What it comes to is that it’s not, that it’s never, a happiness, any happiness at all, to take. The only safe thing is to give. It’s what plays you least false.

It is obvious that here sit two novelists who are looking at life from much the same angle, yet the first of them is Samuel Richardson, and the second you will have already identified as Henry James. Each is an anxious rather than an ardent psychologist. Each is sensitive to suffering and appreciates self-sacrifice; each falls short of the tragic, though a close approach is made. A sort of tremulous nobility⁠—that is the spirit that dominates them⁠—and oh how well they write!⁠—not a word out of place in their copious flows. A hundred and fifty years of time divide them, but are not they close together in other ways, and may not their neighbourliness profit us? Of course as I say this I hear Henry James beginning to express his regret⁠—no, not his regret but his surprise⁠—no, not even his surprise but his awareness that neighbourliness is being postulated of him, and postulated, must he add, in relation to a shopkeeper. And I hear Richardson, equally cautious, wondering whether any writer born outside England can be chaste. But these are surface differences, are indeed no differences at all, but