A Novelist on Novels. George Walter Lionel
on the boards, yet would never dream of giving four and sixpence for Miss Elinor Glyn's book. That is because theatre seats must be paid for, while books can be borrowed. It goes so far that novelists are continually asked 'where one can get their books,' meaning 'where they can be borrowed'; often they are asked to lend a copy, while no one begs a ride from a cabman.
In England, the public of the novel is almost exclusively feminine. Few men read novels, and a great many nothing at all except the newspaper. They say that they are too busy, which is absurd when one reflects how busy is the average woman. The truth is that they are slack and ignorant. They have some historic reason to despise the novel, for it is quite true that in the nineteenth century, with a few exceptions, such as Thackeray, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Dickens, Scott, George Eliot, the three volume novel was trash. It dealt, generally, with some rhetorical Polish hero, a high-born English maiden, cruel parents, and Italian skies. Right up to 1885 that sort of thing used to arrive every morning outside Mudie's in a truck, but if it still arrives at Mudie's in a truck it should not be forgotten that other novels arrive. That is what the men do not know. If they read at all you will find them solemnly taking in The Reminiscences of Mr Justice X. Y. Z. or Shooting Gazelle in Bulbulland, Political Economics, or Economic Politics, (it means much the same either way up). All that sort of thing, that frozen, dried-up, elderly waggishness, that shallow pomp, is mentally murderous. Sometimes men do read novels, mostly detective stories, sporting or very sentimental tales. When observed, they apologise and say something about resting the brain. That means that they do not respect the books they read, which is base; it is like keeping low company, where one can yawn and put one's boots on the sofa. Now, no company is low unless you think it is. As soon as you realise that and stay, you yourself grow naturalised to it. Likewise, if you read a book without fellowship and respect for its author, you are outraging it. But mankind is stupid, and it would not matter very much that a few men should read novels in that shamefaced and patronising way if they were not so open about it. If they do not apologise, they boast that they never read a novel; they imply superiority. Their feminine equivalent is the serious-minded girl, who improves her mind with a book like Vicious Viscounts of Venice; if she reads novels at all she holds that like good wine they improve with keeping, and must be at least fifty years old. By that time the frivolous author may have redeemed his sins.
It is because of all these people, the people who borrow and do not cherish, the people who skim, the people who indulge and cringe, and the people who do not indulge at all, that we have come to a corruption of literary taste, where the idea is abashed before the easy emotion, where religiosity expels religion, and the love passion turns to heroics or to maundering, that the success of the second-rate, of Mrs Barclay, of Miss Gene Stratton Porter, of Mr Hall Caine, has come about. It is a killing atmosphere. It is almost incomprehensible, for when the talk is of a political proposal, say, of land settlement in South Africa, or of a new type of oil engine, hardly a man will say: 'I am not interested.' He would be ashamed to say that. It would brand him as a retrograde person. Sometimes he will say: 'I do not like music,' but he will avoid that if he can, for music is an evidence of culture; he will very seldom confess that he does not care for pictures; he will confess without any hesitation that he does not care for any kind of book. He will be rather proud to think that he prefers a horse or a golf-stick. It will seldom occur to him that this literature of which some people talk so much can hold anything for him. It will not even occur to him to try, for literature is judged at Jedburgh. It hardly ever occurs to any one that literature has its technique, that introductions to it are necessary; a man will think it worth while to join a class if he wants to acquire scientific knowledge, but seldom that anything in the novel justifies his taking preliminary steps. It is not that literature repels him by its occasional aridity; it is not that he has stumbled upon classics, which, as Mr Arnold Bennett delightfully says, 'are not light women who turn to all men, but gracious ladies whom one must long woo.' Men do not think the lady worth wooing. This brings us back to an early conclusion in this chapter; novelists are not useful; we are pleasant, therefore despicable. Our novels do not instruct; all they can do is to delight or inflame. We can give a man a heart, but we cannot raise his bank interest. So our novels are not worthy of his respect because they do not come clad in the staid and reassuring gray of the text-book; they are not dull enough to gain the respect of men who can appreciate only the books that bore them, who shrink away from the women who charm them and turn to those who scrag their hair off their forehead, and bring their noses, possibly with a cloth, to a disarming state of brilliancy.
Sometimes, when the novelist thinks of all these things, he is overcome by a desperate mood, decides to give up literature and grow respectable. He thinks of becoming a grocer, or an attorney, and sometimes he wants to be the owner of a popular magazine, where he will exercise, not the disreputable function of writing, but the estimable one of casting pleasant balance sheets. Then the mood passes, and he is driven back to Flaubert's view that it is a dog's life, but the only one. He decides to live down the extraordinary trash that novelists produce. Incredible as truth may be, fiction is stranger still, and there is no limit to the intoxications of the popular novelist. Consider, indeed, the following account of six novels, taken from the reviews in the literary supplement of the Times, of 27th July, 1916. In the first, Seventeen, Mr Booth Tarkington depicts characters of an age indicated by the title, apparently concerned with life as understood at seventeen, who conduct baby talk with dogs. In the second, Blow the Man Down, by Mr Holman Day, an American financier causes his ship to run ashore, while the captain is amorously pursued by the daughter of the villainous financier, and cuts his way out through the bottom of a schooner. The Plunderers, by Mr Edwin Lefevre, is concerned with robbers in New York, whose intentions are philanthropic; we observe also Wingate's Wife, by Miss Violet Tweedale, where the heroine suffers 'an agony of apprehension,' and sees a man murdered; but all is well, as the victim happens to be the husband whom she had deserted twenty years before. There is also The Woman Who Lived Again, by Mr Lindsey Russell, where a cabinet, in office when the war breaks out, concerns itself with German spies and an ancient Eurasian, who with Eastern secrets revives a dead girl and sends her back to England to confound the spies. There is also Because It Was Written, by Princess Radziwill, where Russian and Belgian horrors are framed in between a prologue and epilogue entirely devoted to archangels. There is nothing extraordinary in these novels; they merely happen to be reviewed on the same day. The collection compares perfectly with another, in the Daily News of the 19th September, 1916, where are reviewed a novel by Miss C. M. Matheson, one by Mr Ranger Gull, and one by 'Richard Dehan.' They are the usual sort of thing. The first is characterised by Mr Garnett as 'a hash of trite images and sentimental meanderings.' Miss Matheson goes so far as to introduce a shadowy, gleaming figure, which, with hand high upraised over the characters' heads, describes the Sign of the Cross. Mr Ranger Gull introduces as a manservant one of the most celebrated burglars of the day, a peer poisoned with carbon disulphide, wireless apparatus, and the lost heir to a peerage. As for 'Richard Dehan,' it is enough to quote one of her character's remarks: 'I had drained my cup of shame to the dregs.'
This sort of thing is produced in great abundance, and has helped to bring the novel down. Unreality, extravagance, stage tears, offensive piety, ridiculous abductions and machinery, because of those we have 'lost face,' like outraged Chinamen. No wonder that people of common intelligence, who find at their friend's house drivel such as this, should look upon the novel as unworthy. It is natural, though it is unjust. The novel is a commodity, and if it seeks a wide public it must make for a low one: the speed of a fleet is that of its slowest ship; the sale of a novel is the capacity of the basest mind. Only it might be remembered that all histories are not accurate, all biographies not truthful, all economic text-books not readable. Likewise, it should be remembered, and we need quote only Mr Conrad, that novels are not defined by the worst of their kind… It is men's business to find out the best books; they search for the best wives, why not for the best novels? There are novels that one can love all one's life, and this cannot be said of every woman.
There are to-day in England about twenty men and women who write novels of a certain quality, and about as many who fail, but whose appeal is to the most intelligent. These people are trying to picture man, to describe their period, to pluck a feather from the wing of the fleeting time. They do not write about radium murders, or heroines clad in orchids and tiger skins. They strive to seize a little of the raw life in which