Chapter VI: Part 6

It is amusing to listen to elderly people on this subject. Sometimes a man says in confident tones: "Human nature's the same in all ages. The primitive cave man lies deep in us all. Civilization--pooh! a mere veneer. You can't alter facts." He speaks like this when he is feeling prosperous and fat. When he is feeling depressed and is worried by the young, or is being sentimental about them on the ground that they will succeed in life when he has failed, then he will take the opposite view and say mysteriously, "Human nature is not the same. I have seen fundamental changes in my own time. You must face facts." And he goes on like this day after day, alternately facing facts and refusing to alter them.

All I will do is to state a possibility. If human nature does alter it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there people--a very few people, but a few novelists are among them--are trying to do this. Every institution and vested interest is against such a search: organized religion, the State, the family in its economic aspect, have nothing to gain, and it is only when outward prohibitions weaken that it can proceed: history conditions it to that extent. Perhaps the searchers will fail, perhaps it is impossible for the instrument of contemplation to contemplate itself, perhaps if it is possible it means the end of imaginative literature--which if I understand him rightly is the view of that acute enquirer, Mr. I. A. Richards. Anyhow--that way lies movement and even combustion for the novel, for if the novelist sees himself differently he will see his characters differently and a new system of lighting will result.

I do not know on the verge of which philosophy or what rival philosophies the above remarks are wavering, but as I look back at my own scraps of knowledge and into my own heart, I see these two movements of the human mind: the great tedious onrush known as history, and a shy crablike sideways movement. Both movements have been neglected in these lectures: history because it only carries people on, it is just a train full of passengers; and the crablike movement because it is too slow and cautious to be visible over our tiny period of two hundred years. So we laid it down as an axiom when we started that human nature is unchangeable, and that it produces in rapid succession prose fictions, which fictions, when they contain 50,000 words or more, are called novels. If we had the power or license to take a wider view, and survey all human and pre-human activity, we might not conclude like this; the crablike movement, the shiftings of the passengers, might be visible, and the phrase "the development of the novel" might cease to be a pseudo-scholarly tag or a technical triviality, and become important, because it implied the development of humanity.

INDEX OF MAIN REFERENCES

Alain, 73-74
Aristotle, 126-129
Asquith, Mr., 161
Austen, Jane, 100-101, 112-114

Beerbohm, Max, 171-175
Bennett, Arnold, 62-63
Birth, treatment of, 76-77,
81-82
Blake, William, 211
Brontë, Charlotte, 139-140
Brontë, Emily, 209-211

C. P. S., 210
Chevalley, Abel, 17
Clark, W. G., 13-15

Death, treatment of, 76, 82-83
Defoe, Daniel, 87-95
Dickens, Charles, 32-34, 104,
108-109, 119-120
Dickinson, Lowes, 177
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 188-195
Douglas, Norman, 107-108

Eliot, George, 184-188
Eliot, T. S., 41

Fantasy defined, 158-159
Fielding, Henry, 118, 124,
175-176
"Flat" characters, 103-112
Food, treatment of, 77, 83
France, Anatole, 214-215
Freeman, John, 204

Garnett, David, 161
Gide, André, 121-122, 146-153
Goldsmith, Oliver, 143

Hardy, Thomas, 140-142, 198

Inspiration, nature of, 39

James, Henry, 30-31, 218-234
Joyce, James, 177-180, 199

Lawrence, D. H., 107, 207-209
Literary tradition, 40-41
Love, treatment of, 78-80, 86-87
Lubbock, Percy, 118-119,
216-217

Matson, Norman, 166-171
Melville, Herman, 199-206
Meredith George, 106,
134-138

Novel defined, 17
"Novelist's touch," the, 107

_One Thousand and One Nights_,
47

Pattern defined, 218
Plot defined, 130
Point of view, 118-125
Prophecy defined, 182-183
Proust, Marcel, 104, 236-239
Provincialism, 19
Pseudo-scholarship, 23-28

Raleigh, Walter, 22
Rhythm, two kinds of, 240-241
Richards, I. A., 245
Richardson, Samuel, 29-30
"Round" characters, 112-118

Scott, Walter, 51-62, 104
Sleep, treatment of, 80, 84
Stein, Gertrude, 67-68
Sterne, Laurence, 35-37,
157-158
Story, definition of, 44-45; the
repository of a voice, 64-65
_Swiss Family Robinson_, 52-53

Thackeray, W. M., 118, 124
Tolstoy, Leo, 63-64, 122-123,
242
Trollope, Anthony, 82-83

Victoria, Queen, 71-72

Wells, H. G., 31-34, 109-110,
231-233
Woolf, Virginia, 34-37