Chapter TWO: Towards Defoe

It is not part of my purpose--nor within the scope of a short manual would it be possible!--to trace the influence of the _Golden Ass_ or the _Satiricon_ on the course or development of the novel--and indeed their influences probably came into action so late that the effect was rather to give coloration to the pastiches of later writers like the late Mr. Walter Pater or the very much living Mr. Ezra Pound. It is the same, to all intents and purposes, with such mediaeval compilations of short-stories as the _Decameron_, the _Heptameron_ or the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_. The _Decameron_ must in particular have been as enormously read in the course of centuries as _Madame Bovary_, but, except for the _Heptameron_ and the rest of the works of that tradition, it can have led to no developments but merely to a few imitations such as the _Contes Drolatiques_ of Balzac.

To our immediate purpose they are germane solely as indicating the desire--the necessity--that humanity has always experienced for fiction of one kind or another, if merely as an expedient for clarifying the mind. The mediaeval European intellect seems to have been able to appreciate these crystallizing shocks only in smallish doses, and in Europe it was not until sixteenth-century Spain that humanity seems to have been able to sustain its interest for the course of a long tale--a series of rambling incidents in the life of one or of one or two central characters. And again it was not until the middle nineteenth century in France and the very late nineteenth or early twentieth that in England the mind of the public could be expected to take in the rendering--not the narrating--of a work whose central character was not an individual of slightly superhuman proportions. Still less could it take in an Affair whose participants, as befits a democratic age, if not all exactly equal in the parts they play in the Affair’s development, are at least nearly all as normally similar in aspirations, virtues and vices as is usual in one’s surrounding humanity.

Let us for a moment consider the difference--if difference there be--between the apparently artless tale and the novel that fulfils my definition of the functions of the work of fiction in the modern body politic. The artless tale, then, is nothing but a _conte_--a thing told to keep the hearers gasping or at least engrossed. Told verbally it is usually short, but professional story-tellers have been found--as in the case of the group-authors of the _Arabian Nights_--to make them very long indeed. And the habit of telling very long tales that are practically serials still persists in Eastern bazaars.

You may say that listening to tales for the mere purpose of being thrilled or engrossed has nothing to do with the gaining of vicarious experience, so that the stories of the _Decameron_ or the ordinary novels of commerce were and are of no value to the body politic, but a little reflection will show that the reverse is the case in practice. Human experience is built up by the averaging out of a great many cases--some inclining, as it were, to the extreme right, some to the extreme left, and the majority probably approaching the normal.

Personally, on the face of it, I ought to be glad if, in the interests of non-commercial literature, the novel of commerce could be suppressed, but as a matter of fact I should be the first to lament such a catastrophe. Humanity, in fact, needs care-free entertainment--and in search of it it seldom goes very far wrong. That is proved by the fact that, ever since books were books, the great public has devoured with avidity only two kinds of work--the very worst from the point of view of the literary artists, and the very best! The four most popular books the world over at any given moment since, say, eighteen-sixty have always been the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, _Madame Bovary_ and two sempiternally changing works of egregious silliness and popularity. But whereas the so-called popular books change with the turn of each year, the more serious works continue to stand at the head of the best-sellers of the world year in and year out.

That is a consideration to which we may return; the point that I wish to make here is that when _contes_ and _nouvelles_ of the type to be found in the _Decameron_ were of an almost boundless popularity, not only had the serious novel no existence but the reprehension that the Victorian moralist and industrialist expressed also found then no expression. As I am never tired of relating, my grand-aunt Eliza was the first utterer of the famous saying: “Sooner than be idle I’d take a book and read”; but that utterance, perfectly normal and applauded about 1860 when it was first presented to the world, is to-day purely risible and could not in serious earnestness be uttered in the household of any family more comfortable in its circumstances than those of the lower-paid manual labourer.

It would have been equally unthinkable at any date from the tenth century to the early nineteenth. During those nine centuries, in fact, the professional moralist was only too glad to enlist the services of the fiction-teller under the sacred banners of Faith and Good Works, and although towards the end of the eighteenth century the habits of young ladies who lay day-long on sofas reading the thousandfold novels of popular female authors from Aphra Behn to Sarah Fielding--although that habit was lightly satirized by dramatists and occasionally scourged in the sermons of nonconformist divines, these occurrences were very sporadic and altogether too infrequent to form a national habit. Indeed, until the nineteenth century was under way it might even be advanced that the writers of such works of fiction as the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, _Rasselas_, or _Robinson Crusoe_ were eagerly sought as allies by the professional, ecclesiastical, or nonconformist moralist.

And that was even more pronouncedly the case in days still earlier when in Europe a universal and all-powerful church dictated the morals of gentle and simple alike. Indeed, whatever may or may not be said of Catholicism in the way of praise or blame, it cannot be alleged that when she was all-powerful she was ever afraid of the Arts or afraid to employ them for her own purposes. The Moralities of the Nun Hrotswitha, the mystery plays and mummings of every town-guild in the Middle Ages, are alone overwhelming evidence that the church, representing the professional moralists of five or six centuries, was only too glad to avail itself of forms of art as an indispensable means of spreading her teachings. Nor indeed until the Puritan Divines of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries turned upon the art of fiction as presented on the stage did that form of art do anything other than bend itself willingly to the services of morality. For you might say that the drama of Wycherley and Killigrew was as much a protest against the oppression of the then professional moralist as any spontaneous movement for the supply of lecherous fiction to the public. The greater part of the plays of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists--by far the greater part--consisted of works of profound--and quite conventional--moral purpose; the earlier drama, and even the pace-egging and mumming of country shows, were nothing but pietistic pronouncements put as picturesquely--and as alluringly spiced with alliterations in the prosody and low comedy in the plots--as the fiction-writers of the day could contrive. Hell always yawned before the audience beneath the high trestle-boards and stages of these shows; in the flies Heaven and its denizens were always visible, whilst in what would to-day be called the wings there waited perpetually visible, on the one hand the Devil ready to pitchfork the wicked into the lower story of the stage--and Man’s Good Angel to conduct him to the Better Place. And clowns and characters called Vices were always ready to endure the drubbings that, enlivening the public, were the portion of the mildly wicked and foolish.

No, decidedly the mediaeval and early renaissance art of fiction, quite as much as Matthew Arnold, was on the side of the angels.

It might be as well here to point out that until the Restoration and its comedies brought scenery and attempts at scenic realism to the stage, the Play and the Novel were practically the same form. Or it might be better to put it that the Novel was the direct development of the play--a development made possible by the art of printing. In effect the plays of Shakespeare were novels written for recitation, and that, naturally, was still more the case with the works of Shakespeare’s predecessors. And it is significant that as reading became more common with the establishment of Edward VI’s grammar schools, the play itself became less a matter of rantings and by degrees even a medium for fine writing. _Gorboduc_ and _Ferrex and Porrex_ or _Ralph Roister Doister_ were products of either a stilted classicism or of a boisterous, native spirit of knockabout buffoonery, puns, and ribald jests. The classical motive issued presently into a mode of over-written elegance that speedily proved itself unreadable: then Lyly gave place to Shakespeare.

It has always seemed obvious to me--as a private conviction for which I have no wish to do battle and which I have no wish to force on the reader as any more than a suggestion--that Shakespeare himself regretted the literary chastity of his muse. I mean that Shakespeare, as gentleman and one wishing to sport his coat-of-arms in the very best social and scholastic circles, deprecated the passing of the Unities and of bombast and wished that the popular taste would have let him make a living by verse in the style of the _Rape of Lucrece_ and the more florid poems that decorate the last pages of editions of his works. His speeches to the players in _Hamlet_ and all his life as far as it is known would seem to indicate that. But it is not until you can bring yourself to regard not merely the plays of Shakespeare but the whole post-Lylian Elizabethan and Jacobean drama as novels written for recitation that the great mystery of Shakespeare’s life seems to become reasonably explicable. For the great mystery of Shakespeare as novelist is simply: “Why did Shakespeare never correct his proofs?”

Beside this amazing enormity all questions as to the identity of Mr. W. H. or the Dark Lady or Mary Fitton or of the motives of the sonnets become paler and more ineffectual than any ghosts. For they at least don’t matter. But that the greatest writer of all time should not have taken the trouble ever to read his own works in print, preferring to retire to Stratford, sue out his coat armour and so, on his profits as theatre owner, become titularly and legally a Gentleman--that, if you think about it and have ever known an author, is the most amazing phenomenon known to the history of Literature. Napoleon at St. Helena, renaming himself Monsieur Dupont and shuddering at the mention of Austerlitz, would not be more astonishing. For this novelist never blotted a line and never saw his work through the press!

On the face of it the plays of Shakespeare read extravagantly well but, on the modern stage, play extravagantly badly. I have never in my life been more bored and appalled than at having to sit through an uncut performance of _Hamlet_, given by the most noted performers in the world in front of a gigantic real castle. It was terrifying and it lasted from nine at night till four in the morning. There was the real castle, the real moon, real armour dating back to Shakespeare’s days, real banners of the epoch; real soldiers played the troops of Fortinbras--and to add a touch of reality of another sort, in the middle of the performance real Communist groundlings demonstrated for Saccho and Vanzetti!

But the point was that, with the real castle, pump and the rest, all Shakespeare’s descriptions became intolerable pleonasms and gave singular unreality to the characters that uttered them. For normal humanity does not talk of patines of bright gold when considering the night skies: it says “Look at the stars,” and possibly adds: “Aren’t they jolly?” The stars in fact do the rest: and in this given case the castle of Avignon, the Rhone, and the moon were admirably prepared to replace all that anyone’s descriptions could do.

On the other hand, I have never in my life been so overwhelmed as by a ranted performance given by capable actors in modern dress in a rather bare modern studio that had galleries round it--a condition pretty well reproducing that of the Shakespearean stage. Hero and heroine and subordinate characters bellowed rhetorical periods, floods of bombast; they threw their arms about, raved, fell down, and staggered to their feet. The effect, as I have said, was overwhelming; no such other utter tragedy has ever presented itself to the world for three hundred years; the grief of the heroine was so insufferable that you could not sit in your place; when the hero died you groaned aloud. Yet the play was only Kyd’s _Spanish Tragedy_, ranking as a pretty poor work and to-day very difficult to read.

Shakespeare, on the other hand, does read extravagantly well through the greater part of his work--but large portions of the plays must pay the penalty of all works intended for one medium and presented in another. The sheer silliness of many--of most of his plots except in the Chronicle Plays--their sheer silliness and negligence regarded from the point of view of the art of the novel, become technical merit when it is a matter of recitation; bareness of plot is then a necessity, the mind having no time to turn back and pick up merely suggested clues. And of course a great deal of his work must have seemed to a man of his own delicacy of temperament much more the merest writing down to the groundlings or coarse flatterings of those in authority than that caviare to the general that he hoped to provide.

So that his inattention to the printing of his plays may very conceivably have proceeded from sheer disgust at them--a frame of mind not unfamiliar to the artist when viewing his work in the light of his own ideals. Or of course it remains open to us--all things in the case of Shakespeare being open to us--to consider that he really regarded his work as commercial trivia that had much better be ignored in the later stages of his aggrandizement to the state of gentility. That frame of mind is so usual in the British novelist and ever since novels have been translated or written in England has proved so disastrous to the art itself that it is quite conceivable that the first--and the greatest--of them all may have shared in that national characteristic.

Be that as it may, the assertion that the Elizabethan and Jacobean play answered in advance the call from the public for the novel that was so soon to come may very well be regarded as fact. And indeed the same may be regarded as true of all pre-Elizabethan or rather pre-Edwardian English literature. Or it might be more just to say that, the Grammar School spreading at once the capacity and the taste for reading, the enhanced national wealth of the age of Drake and countenanced piracy in Elizabeth’s day made the purchase and dissemination of books a possibility amongst a very much wider class of the public.

We may then regard the rule of thumb definition of the novel as a printed book of some length telling one tale or relating the adventures of one single personage as reasonably acceptable. In that case you get an instance at once of supply created by demand and of that supply being rendered possible by the fact that education and material production arrived almost hand in hand. For although printing was available as a means of spreading knowledge almost a couple of centuries earlier, the exiguity of material wealth and leisure, the turmoil and the scarcity of labour of the centuries of pestilence, dynastic wars, and turmoil that preceded the firm establishment of the Tudors on the throne infinitely delayed and indeed indefinitely put back the clock of culture in these kingdoms.

Roughly speaking, we may say that Chaucer, the first English writer of sustained imaginative pieces, was also the first English writer for the Press--a writer, that is to say, for the individual reader in his closet rather than a composer of lays, ballads, roundels, or even epics, for recitation. The dictum should be accepted with caution. That it is on the whole just is nevertheless demonstrable by the comparison of the _Canterbury Tales_ or _Troilus and Cresseide_ with say the _Faerie Queene_ or Drayton’s _Polyolbion_. That the work of Chaucer is readable, whereas the epics of Spenser and Drayton practically defy perusal, is not merely a matter of difference of greatness in the respective authors. Chaucer was an infinitely greater writer than either of his successors: his character-drawing is extraordinary, his sense of beauty overwhelming, his minutely observing mind stalls off the possibility of dullness in his pages. And read to himself by an individual reader the work of Spenser is intolerably pompous, allegorical and dull, and that of Drayton all too pedestrian because of his lack of any powers of selection. But, if you will read the longer works of Chaucer aloud you will find him a little difficult to follow simply because of that very minuteness of observation and that very lack of dullness; the others, on the other hand, gain immensely by reading aloud or by recitation--both Spenser and Drayton taking on a sort of jolly robustness that is even to-day by no means disagreeable and that may well have been enormously engrossing in the mouth of a good reader reading to audiences that had little to do but listen and lacked the power of reading for themselves.

In the matter of the consumption of literature, in fact, the English world had gone back several generations between the ages of Chaucer and Spenser--if, that is to say, you regard the evolution of the printed book and the arrival of the novel as Progress, for it is quite open to you to regard the disappearance of oral poetry and the epic as retrogression. Nevertheless, it is fairly true to say that Chaucer with Caxton, the first printer, as an intimate wrote far more definitely for the Press than did any of the Elizabethan imaginative writers. Except in the internal style and the outward effect of his work there is of course no evidence that Chaucer considered definitely that the coming of the printing press called for a change in the technique of the imaginative writer--but it would not be utterly fanciful to imagine that he did at least consider himself a writer destined to have a great number of individual readers rather than vast audiences destined to listen to recitals of his work.

To what extent I am right in advancing the suggestion that Eastern and Eastern-European audiences had tougher brain-stuffs than their Anglo-Saxon contemporaries, at any rate in the matter of listening to recitals of tales in prose or verse, the reader may decide for himself. The suggestion is nevertheless handy as presenting a certain not unuseful image. We may say that the printing press killed alike the epic and all forms of metrical romance, or we may say that the epic and the metrical romance are essentially foreign to the taste of the Occidental reader--and the second statement is in effect merely a repetition in other terms of the first.

Into that I do not propose to go. It is sufficient to say that when I do make the assertion I find myself, as it were unexpectedly, in company with the academic critic of to-day and yesterday. At any rate, quite orthodox authorities have not unusually asserted that Romaunts or Romances were, in England at least, intended for the personal reading of the mediaeval courtly and clerical individual, whilst the shorter lays, virelais, ballads, and the like were aimed, as being less fatiguing, at popular and numerous audiences. This seems to be merely common sense. On the other hand, very long metrical or prose compositions did simultaneously appeal to Oriental audiences and it is not unusual in academic circles to describe the _Canterbury Tales_ themselves as “Oriental in origin,” which seems queer but may for the moment pass.

What, however, I am anxious to establish--at the risk of a certain prolixity--is the fact that an appetite for fiction amounting also to an expression of a necessity has, at least since the Dark Ages till the present day, distinguished all humanity. The reason probably is, as I have already hinted, that we need accounts of human life not so much as matter from which to draw morals for our own particular cases but rather as something that will take us outside ourselves and, as it were, to a height from which we may the better observe ourselves and our neighbours. The moral is usually thrown in by the moralist who nevertheless insists or at any rate asserts that moralizing is the sole purpose of his life and work. But the Morality Plays of the Nun Hrotswitha, the Mysteries of every English town from Salisbury to Lytham, the terrifically moralizing novels from _Guzman d’Alfarache_ to the history of _Moll Flanders_, were simply evidence of the fact that humanity did not want moralizing and did want fiction. They represent the moralist throwing up the sponge and trying to get a pinch of salt on to the tail of that difficult bird, man. It is obvious that large audiences in days of complete boredom could be found for the sermons of ranting monks and violent reformers. But even at that the appeal was largely fictional and what the audiences went to hear--as was the case with, say, Savonarola--was rather semi-hysterical and lively descriptions of the sufferings of souls in eternal flame than any doctrinal discourses on the life and teachings of Him Whose message was: “Neither do I condemn thee!”

So, gradually, fiction emerging with timidity from under the wing of the Church itself took such prentice flights in the direction of pure rendering of life as picaresque novels like _Don Quixote_. It is, however, doubtful if the adventures of the knight of la Mancha would have got past the Index had not the Church been called in in the person of the parish priest who in the end burns the poor hero’s books of romance; and from that point of view Cervantes may be regarded as simply drawing the cord of conventional morality closer round the necks of the unfortunate public. The romance of _The Seven Champions of Christendom_ had to be burned not because it was a silly book but because its morality was insufficiently puritan, the Church of Rome in the throes of the Catholic Reaction having to prove itself at least as puritan as the Anabaptists of Münster. So the body that tolerated Rabelais good-naturedly had to invent an _auto da fé_ in order to deal with Amadis de Gaul; and Cervantes, for all the world like a seventeenth-century Thackeray, had to attune his satire to the pipe of a reacting church. Fiction, in short, had to pay an always greater tribute to morality as it escaped from being the mere servant of established religion.

In effect the Church--and then the Churches--said to the novel, the play, the romance, and the ballad: “We are too busy cutting each other’s throats and inventing newer theologies, to bother any more about artistic productions. In the meantime we will remove the benefit of clergy that used to shield those who could manipulate a pen. You may write and compose what lay fictions you like, but the rack, the faggot or the pillory will attend you if you publish anything that we _don’t_ like.” And the novelist, always a timid creature and in England avid of social consideration, was quick to take the hint. So Don Quichotte de la Mancha, the only gentleman produced by the genius of Cervantes, and indeed by all the genius of that age, had to become a pitiable lunatic. Yet it is impossible that a man of the perspicacity of the writer of that work could not have seen that the Don, wiping curds from his benign and tranquil countenance, was godlike in comparison to the crooks and gross peasants--the cats and monkeys!--that surrounded him. Nevertheless the Don must go!

With those Spaniards, then, the novel approached some sort of rendering of life and that sort of rendering was soon enough to make its appearance in England. It crossed the Bay of Biscay and the Channel with a picaresque work of a prodigious popularity in its day--_Guzman d’Alfarache_ or the _Story of a Rogue_. Less picaresque in the true sense of being the strung-together life of a _picaro_ or professional thief--less picaresque than the immortal _Lazarillo de Tormes_ and less achingly tragic as a presentation of the life of the brothel and wine-shop than _Celestina_, the work of Hermann Alemannos, whose name betrays his Teutonic origin, was much more suited to the Anglo-Saxon taste than either one of the other three Spanish books that I have selected for mention.

The true Spanish genius is for us obviously too austere. Our public could, it is true, guffaw over the discomfitures of the knight of the Woeful Countenance and the manœuvre by which Lazarillo gets rid of his blind master who himself was the most ferocious of scoundrels; and the suicide from the tower in _Celestina_ may have excited disagreeable emotions in the English reader who preferred to think that punishment for sins was a matter of the hereafter. But the remorseless, essentially Spanish black and white of the greater novels was no more for the English public or the English litterateur than are _Titus Andronicus_ and _Pericles_ when they can get the _Comedy of Errors_ or the _Midsummer Night’s Dream_.

_Guzman d’Alfarache_, on the other hand, was a wilderness of enormous passages of trite morality enlivened here and there with episodes of cozening and purse-cutting and it has always been a matter of speculation to me--for I have known these works ever since I was a very small child--to what extent the seventeenth-century public really liked the moralizings, to what extent it was merely hypocrisy, and to what extent, again, readers were really tricked by the tiny ha’-pennyworth of sack into consuming the intolerable quantity of very dry bread. Obviously in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries mere length was not a deterrent, because there was an immense amount of time for vacant minds to fill in and relatively very few books. So that just as in distant colonies we will read home newspapers with all the advertisements they contain three and four times over, so the subjects of the James’s, Charles’s, and early George’s would accept almost anything that could be read or listened to and probably from being attuned to prolixities they would have disliked anything crisp if anything crisp had been to be found.

That is perhaps a vain speculation, but a short consideration of the first great English novelist, who was for a time at least nearly solely novelist, would lead one to believe that such was indeed the case. Defoe was born about the time of the restoration of Charles II--that is to say, in 1660 or 1661--and died in 1731, aged in consequence about seventy. And it is interesting to note that his novels were all produced in the last twelve years of his life--as an expedient for procuring bread and butter after bankruptcy produced by too ingenious speculations both financial and philosophical.

That gets rid of the theory we might otherwise have entertained that he was a Restoration novelist in the sense that the friends of Charles II were Restoration dramatists. Nevertheless, the active portions of Defoe’s life were so passed in the seventeenth century that it comes naturally to think of him rather as Jacobean than Georgian or eighteenth century. It is, that is to say, not in the pomposity of the eighteenth century that Captain Singleton or Colonel Jack or Moll Flanders seem to be clothed. They were rather mobile, swaggering, piratical creatures seated on barrels and smoking their yards of clay than strutters in brocades and ruffles. And probably Defoe’s ideal was the substantial London merchant, sturdily planted over his stout calves on square feet. That was his ideal because he had himself lamentably failed in attaining to it.

His financial ideas are said to have found favour in succeeding ages; his plans for increasing the national revenues, like Swift’s, it is said, would have been admirable could they have been adopted. So his moralities are practical rather than theological--it was to the respectable suffrages of the merchants that his pious passages addressed themselves. Thus his moralizings may have been less hypocritical than those of most of his contemporaries, his predecessors or descendants; but the aspiring after respectability was none the less as marked.

What, however, is in him the most interesting from our special point of view of tracing the development of the art of the novel is the fact that Defoe may be called the first English or foreign writer to strive after some sort of satisfactory convention for the novel. He aimed, that is to say, at being convincing--at convincing his reader that he was reading of real adventures set in the, as it were, official biographies of real individuals. Such fictitious documents as _The Apparition of Mrs. Veal_, the _Memoirs of a Cavalier_, or the _History of the Plague in London_ are very near to historic forgeries and ought perhaps to be regarded as fictitious journalism. For, whatever else he was or wasn’t, Defoe was the first great journalist.

His _Review of the Affairs of France_, which was a periodical news-pamphlet devoting itself to foreign affairs and what to-day we should call Town Topics, was no doubt Defoe’s introduction to fiction. When, that is to say, foreign news ran out he filled in his space with the chronicles of an invented Scandalous Club and there, a little in the style of La Bruyère and still more in the style of the later _Tatlers_, _Ramblers_, and _Spectators_, he presented the Town with slightly scandalous anecdotes of characters purely fictitious or suggested faintly by well-known living men.

From that to inventing false news as in the case of the _Mrs. Veal_ fascicule and from that again to the production of sham autobiography-like _Robinson Crusoe_ is a very obvious progression. Few journalists would make it to-day, but to-day news being more common is more easily checked. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that, whether it were his intention or no, he did evolve a convention for fiction that up to a certain point was effective enough. That he intended so to do there is not, as was on the other hand the case with his great successor Samuel Richardson, any evidence. On the contrary, there is a good deal of evidence that several of his works of fiction were really intended as mystifications or frauds on the public.

That does not interfere with the artistic merit of his work, which was very great. For whether you set out to hypnotize the public into believing for the time being that they have attended at a scene, or trick them into believing that they have read real memoirs when the memoirs are fictitious, the artistic, if not the ethical, results are nearly equal. There is, however, this difference:

If you should read _Salammbo_ and should be asked if you had ever been in Carthage before its destruction by the Romans you might almost answer in the affirmative with truth, whereas in the same scale of things if you were asked if you had been present at the Fire of London and had read Defoe’s _History_ you could not answer more than that you had read a very authentic account by an eye-witness. And inasmuch as an authentic rendering--a rendering made with extreme artistic skill--will give you more the sense of having been present at an event than if you had actually been corporeally present, whereas the reading of the most skilful of literary forgeries will only leave you with the sense that you have read a book, the artistic rendering is the more valuable to you and therefore the greater achievement. I once heard a couple of French marine engineers agreeing that although they had traversed the Indian Ocean many times and had several times passed through, or through the fringes of, typhoons, neither of them had ever been in one till they had read Conrad’s _Typhoon_. And indeed I have myself had the singular experience of looking out at dawn from a tent-flap and seeing the tents of a sleeping army running up into deep woods. And having just been reading Stephen Crane’s _Red Badge of Courage_, which opens with the description of the dawn breaking on the tents of a sleeping army, for some minutes I was confused, not being able to understand why the one or two men that I saw about were dressed in our khaki instead of in the blue of the Federal troops of the United States during the Civil War. That is what I mean by saying that one might answer with truth that one had been present at a rendered scene although one might never physically have been present there. For to me it is certain that I was at that given moment more present at the preparation of a battle somewhere near Gettysburg in the ’sixties of last century than actually amongst British troops in support at a battle that was then proceeding in the Belgian Salient in September, 1916.

To produce that or similar effects is the ambition of the novel of to-day.

Two centuries before--by, say, 1716--the novel had proceeded but a very little way. I should say that Bunyan in the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ and still more in _The Holy War_ had gone as far as any writer till that day and dying in 1688 he anticipated Defoe as novelist by at least a generation. Ostensibly the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ is an allegorical work just as the English Bible is a theological or even a doctrinal one; but just as in the Morality Plays which were produced by professionally religious writers or actors and the Mysteries which were religious spectacles produced and acted under the direction of clerics by members of the professedly lay Guilds--just as in those productions the real attraction was the imaginative presentation of realities rather than the pious aspirations of authors or producers, so it is strongly to be suspected that the realistically human appeal of the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ far outweighs the moral or religious interests. Indeed in _The Holy War_, which is an allegorical presentation of the eternal struggle between the unseen forces that make for good and evil on earth, the presentation of seventeenth-century warfare is for long passages so realistic that one might accuse Bunyan of having thrown up the moral sponge and of taking a pagan pleasure in fighting for fighting’s sake. He renders, in short, battles of the Great Rebellion in which he took part or on whose outskirts he was present. He rendered them and did not write about them.

But the moral fervour and fierce sincerity of Bunyan are so far above suspicion that the mere fact that at times he was carried away in a sheer outburst of the artist’s spirit and love of terrestrial aspects for the mere sake of those aspects--his moral fervour is so great and so deserving of respect that no slightest tang of hypocrisy can attach to him any more than it can attach to the translators of the English Bible. And, if we except Smollett and possibly Samuel Richardson who was the real great precursor of the modern novel, we cannot say as much for any other English novelist who wrote before the later years of the nineteenth century. For it is impossible to absolve such writers as Defoe, Fielding, or Thackeray from the charge of deliberately writing with their tongues in their cheeks passages of virtuous aspirations that were in no way any aspirations of theirs and that in consequence very seriously detracted from the value of their works as art.

With Bunyan that was not the case. He desired to inculcate certain moral teachings and he had the sense to see that the best way to inculcate a doctrine and to get it deep into the brain and marrow of the reader was to make him be vicariously present at scenes the contemplation of which would cause certain moral or practical ideas to arise in the mind. And the deservedly prodigious--the deservedly unrivalled popular appeal of the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ is sufficient testimony at once to the immense skill and the unparalleledly simple moral fervour of its author. For the reader attending on the episode of the Slough of Despond is actually in a bog a little way away from his native town and the man who reads of Giant Despair is in all truth confronted with either Gog or Magog of the Lord Mayor’s procession in the very flesh. At any rate, it is to be remembered that, the world over, together with the _Imitation of Christ_ and _Madame Bovary_, the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ is the most read book in Christendom. And this we must put down to the artistic skill--to the power of presentation and of rendering of the author.

For there is no other criterion of art but success, and the more lasting the success the better the art. I wish to strike that note very strongly because as soon as one begins to talk about an art misinterpretations come creeping in and one is at once suspected of at the least asserting one’s possession of superior knowledges or--let us say--of high-hatting one’s neighbour. Nothing is less true. The knowledge of the art of novel writing is open to every one who takes the trouble to like one book better than another and the literary tastes of men are fairly identical the world over and throughout time. The great art of the world is found in books that are familiar to millions, if not the world over, then, at any rate, down several ages of several continents.

The difference between Bunyan and his predecessors is one more than anything of whole-heartedness and if there is only one work of fiction--for one can hardly call the Bible a work of fiction--if there is one work of prose fiction in England that, written before the birth of Bunyan, has survived to our time it is Malory’s _Morte d’Arthur_ and that survives because Malory whole-heartedly and unassumingly collected such legends of the Arthurian cycle as he liked and wrote them down simply and without flourishes. Otherwise, none of the pre-Elizabethan prose romances could to-day be read with any other than archæological pleasure, nor could any of the prose fiction which began to be mildly abundant in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean days. I suppose you might read Deloney’s _Jack of Newbury_ with some pleasure if you were interested in Elizabethan guild or household mysteries. But I cannot imagine anyone reading for pleasure either _Euphues_ or Greene’s _Menaphon_, either Lodge’s _Rosalynde_ or even Sidney’s _Arcadia_. One may glance at them from time to time, more or less in order to keep one’s end up against the literary archæologist, but they would all, including _Amadis de Gaul_, prove intolerable as books for “reading in”--to use an old phrase which meant a long, long, engrossed perusal. Nash’s _Jack of Wilton_ has been compared to _Don Quixote_, but there is no sense in reading the Englishman’s satire of forgotten manners when one can re-read Cervantes’ satire on things that are at the root of the human heart.

The difference between Malory and the earlier romances or _Euphues_ or _Menaphon_ is simply the difference in the relative sincerities of their authors. Malory records what a simple mediaeval knight liked and to some extent how he looked at the world: it is modest and, its author being wrapped up in his subject, the work has no eye to the modes of the time--or to displaying the cleverness of the writer. You can engross yourself in the _Morte d’Arthur_ if your tastes lie in the least in Malory’s direction and, except that finally you may arrive at the conclusion that he was a modest and pleasant gentleman, you need never give the author a thought.

With _Amadis de Gaul_ or _Euphues_, on the other hand, you are for ever thinking of the cleverness of the author. And you are meant to think of the cleverness of the author, and so you are in the case of _Rosalynde_ and an enormous proportion of the Elizabethan drama. The prose and even the blank verse of that age sparkled with trope, metaphor, image, simile, plays upon words, conceits and every type of verbal felicity, so that the last thing that comes to the mind in the case of almost any work of that age is the subject treated of.

Hundreds of thousands--nay millions--of readers have read the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ and _Robinson Crusoe_ without giving a thought to or even knowing the name of Defoe or Bunyan. I asked the other day in France a child who was reading about Crusoe who had written it and she replied: “Je crois que c’est par ... par Madame de Ségur ... Ou non: peut-être, Madame d’Aulnoy. Enfin, je n’y ai jamais pensé.” And that is about the highest compliment that could be paid to Defoe. I may as well add the same child’s comment on the story itself. She did not much like _Robinson Crusoe_ because, she said, the sufferings depicted in it were true. She liked, like all children, to read of sufferings, bloodsheddings, and horrors but only as long as she could believe that they were invented, whereas she was of opinion that the prolonged loneliness and fears of Crusoe had actually occurred. Similarly she found the story of the Crucifixion insupportable. The root of all adult criticism is to be found in those revelations.

As long, that is to say, as a work remains in fashion you can be contented to read it in order to remain in the fashion yourself. It matters very little to you that whereas _Robinson Crusoe_ is just _Robinson Crusoe_, or _Othello_ just _Othello_, _Euphues_ is Lyly’s _Euphues_, the _Groat’s Worth of Wit_ Greene’s _Groat’s Worth_ or the _Spanish Tragedy_ Kyd’s _Spanish Tragedy_. For it is impossible to talk of almost any sixteenth-century work without prefixing the author’s name, if the name is known--simply because the attraction, and even the attraction that it once had, lies and lay in the verbal juggleries of the author. I must have read _Euphues_ once at least right through and have looked into it several times--but I have not the least idea what it is all about. And even although I have read Lyly’s _Campaspe_ once or twice, I remember only that the plot is a classical plot--and the lyric:

Cupid and my Campaspe played
At cards for kisses, Cupid paid....

The fact is that with Elizabeth English became a supple and easily employable language and, making the discovery that words could be played with as if they were oranges or gilt balls to be tossed half a dozen together in the air, mankind rushed upon it as colts will dash into suddenly opened rich and easy pastures. So it was, for the rich and cultured, much more a matter of who could kick heels the higher and most flourish tail and mane than any ambition of carrying burdens or drawing loads.

In the end, however, what humanity needs is that burdens should be carried, and provided that things get from place to place the name of carter or horse is of very secondary importance. If it is in the fashion we will go down to the meadow and watch the colts cavorting: but all the while we are aware that the business of words as of colts or of the arts is to carry things and we tire reasonably soon of watching horse-play! For if I say: “I am hungry,” the business of those words is to carry that information to you, and if you read the _Iliad_ it is that the art of that epic may make Hecuba significant to you. Consider the prose of Cranmer!