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Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) was a journalist, and that fact itself draws
him to our own time. The development of the newspaper and the periodical is an
interesting literary sideline of the seventeenth century. The Civil War
undoubtedly stimulated a public appetite for up-to-the-minute news (such news
then was vital) and the Restoration period, with its interest in men and
affairs, its information services in the coffeehouses, was developing that
wider interest in news - home and foreign - which is so alive today. Defoe is,
in many ways, the father of the modern periodical, purveying opinion more than
news, and The Review, which he founded in 1704, is the progenitor of a
long line of 'well-informed' magazines. Defoe did not see himself primarily as
a literary artist: he had things to say to the public, and he said them as
clearly as he could, without troubling to polish and revise. There are no
stylistic tricks in his writings, no airs and graces, but there is the flavour
of colloquial speech, a 'no-nonsense', down-to-earth simplicity. He was - like
Swift - capable of irony, however, and his Shortest Way with the Dissenters states
gravely that those who do not belong to the Church of England should be hanged.
(Defoe himself was a Dissenter, of course.) This pamphlet was taken seriously
by many, but, when the authorities discovered they had been having their legs
pulled, they put Defoe into prison.
The most interesting of Defoe's 'documentary' works is
the journal of the Plague Year (one gets the impression that Defoe was
actually present in London during that disastrous time, seriously taking notes,
but a glance at his dates will show that this was impossible). But his memory
is revered still primarily for his novels, written late in life: Robinson
Crusoe,Moll Flanders, Roxana, and others. The intention of these works is
that the reader should regard them as true, not as fictions, and so Defoe deliberately
avoids all art, all fine writing, so that the reader should concentrate only
on a series of plausible events, thinking: 'This isn't a storybook, this is
autobiography.' Defoe keeps up the straight-faced pretence admirably. In Moll
Flanders we seem to be reading the real life-story of a ' bad woman',
written in the style appropriate to her. In Robinson Crusoe, whose
appeal to the young can never die, the fascination lies in the bald statement
of facts which are quite convincing-even though Defoe never had the experience
of being cast away on a desert island and having to fend for himself. The magic
of this novel never palls: frequently in England a musical comedy version of it
holds the stage during the after-Christmas 'pantomime season'.
The greatest prose-writer of the
first part-perhaps the whole-of the century is Jonathan Swift (1667-1745). A great humorist and a savage satirist, his
meat is sometimes too powerful even for a healthy stomach. He is capable of
pure fun-as in some of his poems-and even schoolboy jokes, but there is a core
of bitterness in him which revealed itself finally as a mad hatred of mankind.
On his own admission, he loved Tom, Dick,and Harry, but hated the animal, Man.
Yet he strove to do good for his fellow-men, especially the poor of Dublin,
where he was Dean of St. Patrick's. The Drapier's Letters were a series
of attacks on abuses of the currency, and the Government heeded his sharp
shafts. The monopoly of minting copper money, which had been given to a man
called Wood, was withdrawn, and Swift became a hero. In his Modest Proposal he
ironically suggested that famine in Ireland could be eased by cannibalism, and
that the starving children should be used as food. Some fools took this
seriously. His greatest books are A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's
Travels. The first of these is a satire on the two main non-conformist
religions- Catholicism and Presbyterianism. Swift tells the story of three
brothers-Jack (Calvin), Martin (Luther), and Peter (St.)-and what they do with
their inheritance (the Christian religion). The story is farcical and at times
wildly funny, but people of his day could perhaps be forgiven if they found
blasphemy in it. It certainly shocked Queen Anne so much that she would not
allow Swift to be made a bishop, and this contributed to Swift's inner
frustration and bitterness. Gulliver's Travels hides much of its satire
so cleverly that children still read it as a fairy story. It starts off by
making fun of mankind (and especially England and English politics) in a quite
gentle way: Gulliver sees in Lilliput a shrunken human race, and its
concerns-so important to Lilliput-become shrunken accordingly. But in the
second part, in the land of the giants, where tiny Gulliver sees human
deformities magnified to a feverous pitch, we have something of this mad
horror of the human body which obsesses Swift. (According to Dr. Johnson, Swift
washed himself excessively-'with Oriental scrupulosity'-but his terror of dirt
and shame at the body's functions never disappeared.) In the fourth part of the
book, where the Houyhnhnms-horses with rational souls and the highest moral
instincts-are contrasted with the filthy, depraved Yahoos, who are really human
beings, Swift's hatred of man reaches its climax. Nothing is more powerful or
horrible than the moment when Gulliver reaches home and cannot bear the touch
of his wife-her smell is the smell of a Yahoo and makes him want to vomit.
Swift
is a very great literary artist, and perhaps only in the present century is
his full stature being revealed. He is skilful in verse, as well as in prose,
and his influence continues: James Joyce-in his The Holy Office-has
written Swiftian verse; Aldous Huxley (in Ape and Essence} and George
Orwell (in Animal Farm) have produced satires which are really an act of
homage to Swift's genius. Yet Gulliver's Travels stands supreme: a fairy
story for children, a serious work for men, it has never lost either its allure
or its topicality.
The
first part of the century is also notable for a number of philosophical and religious works which reflect the new 'rational' spirit. The Deists
(powerful in France as well as in England) try to strip Christianity of its
mysteries and to establish an almost Islamic conception of God- a God in whom
the Persons of the Christian Trinity shall have no part -and to maintain that
this conception is the product of reason, not of faith. On the other hand,
there were Christian writers like William Law (1686-1761) and Isaac Watts
(1674-1748) who, the first in prose, the second in simple pious verse, tried
successfully to stress the importance of pure faith, even of mysticism, in
religion. The religious revival which was to be initiated by John Wesley
(1703-91) owes a good deal to this spirit, which kept itself alive despite the
temptations of 'rationalism'. Joseph Butler (1692-1752) used reason, not to
advance the doctrine of Deism, but to affirm the truths of established
Christianity. His Analogy of Religion is a powerfully argued book. The
most important philosopher of the early part of the century is Bishop Berkeley
(1685-175 3), whose conclusions may be stated briefly: he did not believe that
matter had any real existence apart from mind. A tree exists because we see it,
and if we are not there to see it, God is always there. Things ultimately exist
in the mind of God, not of themselves. He was answered later by David Hume
(1711-76), the Scots philosopher, who could not accept the notion of a divine
system enclosing everything. He could see little system in the universe: he
begins and ends with human nature, which links together a series of
impressions, gained by the senses, by means of 'association'. We make systems
according to our needs, but there is no system which really exists in an
absolute sense. There is no ultimate truth, and even God is an idea that man
has developed for his own needs. This is a closely argued kind of sceptical
philosophy, very different from Berkeley's somewhat mystical acceptance of
reality's being the content of the ' Mind of God'.
The
novel develops, after the death of Defoe, with Samuel Richardson
(1689-1761), a professional printer who took to novel-writing when he was
fifty. Richardson liked to help young women with the composition of their
love-letters, and was asked by a publisher to •write a volume of model letters
for use on various occasions. He was inspired to write a novel in the form of a
series of letters, a novel which should implant a moral lesson in the minds of
its readers (he thought of these readers primarily as women). This novel was Pamela,
or Virtue Rewarded, which describes the assaults made on the honour of a
virtuous housemaid by an unscrupulous young man. Pamela resists, clinging
tightly to her code of honour, and her reward is, ultimately, marriage to her
would-be seducer, a man who, despite his brutishness, has always secretly
attracted her. It is a strange sort of reward, and a strange basis for
marriage, according to our modern view, but this moral persists in cheap
novelettes and magazines even today-a girl makes herself inaccessible before
marriage, and the man who has tried to seduce her, weary of lack of success,
at last accepts her terms. Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe is about a
young lady of wealth and beauty, virtue and innocence, who, in order to avoid a
marriage which her parents are trying to arrange, seeks help from Lovelace, a
handsome but, again, unscrupulous young man. Lovelace seduces her. Repentant,
he asks her to marry him, but she will not: instead, worn out by shame, she
dies, leaving Lovelace to his remorse. This is a more remarkable novel than it
sounds: close analysis of character, perhaps for the first time in the history
of the novel, looks forward to the great French novelists, Flaubert and
Stendhal, and Lovelace has a complexity of make-up hardly to be expected in
the literature of the age. Sir Charles Grandison is Richardson's third
novel: its hero, full of the highest virtues, wondering which woman duty should
compel him to marry, is anaemic and priggish. (A hero should have something of
the devil in him.) This novel is far inferior to the other two.
The
greatest novelist of the century is Henry
Fielding (1707-54). He started his novel-writing career, like
Richardson, almost by accident. Moved to write a parody of Pamela, he
found his Joseph Andrews developing into something far bigger than a
mere skit. Joseph, dismissed from service because he will not allow his
employer, Lady Booby, to make love to him, takes the road to the village where
his sweetheart lives, meets the tremendous Parson Adams-who then becomes
virtually the hero of the book-and has many strange adventures on the road, meeting
rogues, vagabonds, tricksters of all kinds, but eventually reaching his goal
and happiness ever after. With Fielding one is inclined to use the term picaresque
(from the Spanish picaro, meaning 'rogue'), a term originally
applicable only to novels in which the leading character is a rogue (such as
the popular Gil Blas by Le Sage, published between 1715 and 1755). It is
a term which lends itself to description of all novels in which the bulk of the
action takes place on the road, on a journey, and in which eccentric and
low-life characters appear. Don Quixote is, in some ways, picaresque; so
is Priestley's The Good Companions. Fielding's Jonathan Wild is
truly-picaresque, with its boastful, vicious hero who extols the 'greatness' of
his every act of villainy (his standards of comparison are, cynically, provided
by the so-called virtuous actions of great men) until he meets his end on the
gallows or 'tree of glory'. Tom JonesK Fielding's masterpiece. It has
its picaresque elements-the theme of the journey occupies the greater part of
the book-but it would be more accurate to describe it as a mock-epic. It has
the bulk and largeness of conception we expect from an epic, and its style
sometimes parodies Homer: ‘Hushed be
every ruder breath. May the heathen ruler of the winds confine in iron chains
the boisterous limbs of noisy Boreas, and the sharp-pointed nose of
bitter-biting Eurus. Do thou, sweet Zephyrus, rising from thy fragrant bed,
mount the western sky, and lead on those delicious gales, the charms of which
call forth the lovely Flora from her chamber, perfumed with pearly dews . . .’
Scott's themes are historical. They deal with European
history-sometimes French, as mQuentin Durward, but more often English
or Scottish. The novels about Scotland's past include Waverley, Old
Mortality, Rob Roy, The Heart of Midlothian, The Bride of Lammermoor; England
in the time of the Tudors and Stuarts is the theme of The Fortunes of Nigel,
Kenilworth, Peveril of the Peak, and so on. What interests him most are the
great political and religious conflicts of the past-the Puritans and the
Jacobites (the followers of the exiled Stuarts) fascinate him especially, and
against a big tapestry of historical events he tells his stories of personal
hate, of revenge, of love, of the hard lives of the common people and their
earthy humour. Scott has a scholar's approach to history: he is accurate and,
for the most part, unbiased. His Toryism led him to choose periods when the old
values flourished-chivalry, honour, courtly manners, fealty to the king-and
this affects his attitude to his invented characters: the women are often too
good to be true, the men too honourable or chivalrous. His style is not
distinguished, and his dialogue sometimes absurdly stilted. Here is an example
from The Talisman. (The English are fighting the Saracens; it is the age
of King Richard the Lion-hearted)- 'My watch hath neither been vigilant, safe nor honourable,'
said Sir Kenneth. 'The banner of England has been carried off.'
'And
thou alive to tell it?' said Richard in a tone of derisive incredulity. ' Away,
it cannot be. There is not even a scratch on thy face. Why dost thou stand thus
mute? Speak the truth-it is ill jesting with a king-yet I will forgive thee if
thou hast lied.'
' Lied, Sir King!' returned the unfortunate knight, with
fierce emphasis, and one glance of fire in his eye, bright and transient as the
flash from the cold and stony flint. 'But this also must be endured-1 have
spoken the truth.' 'By God and by St. George!' said the King-[and so on].
This kind of prose became a standard for writers of
historical novels. The 'out on thee, false varlet' and 'speakest thou so,
sirrah?' which we now cannot take very seriously, derive from Scott. It is only
fair to say that Scott has even now many ardent admirers, especially among
people who love Scottish scenery. But his reputation generally is not what it
was.
The reputation of Jane
Austen (1775-1817), on the other hand, has
never been higher. She has not dated: her novels have a freshness and humour
sadly lacking in Scott, a delicacy we can appreciate more than his 'big bow-wow
style'. The first important woman novelist, she stands above both the classical
and romantic movements; in a sense she bridges the gap between the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, but she can be
assigned
to no group-she is unique. In her novels-Sense and Sensibility, Pride and
Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbej, and Persuasion-she
attempts no more than to show a small corner of English society as it was in
her day-the sedate little world of the moderately well-to-do county families.
This world provides her with all her material; the great historical movements
rumbling outside mean little to her, and the Napoleonic Wars are hardly
mentioned. Jane Austen's primary interest is people, not ideas, and her
achievement lies in the meticulously exact presentation of human situations,
the delineation of characters who are really living creatures, with faults and
virtues mixed as they are in real life. Her plots are straightforward; there is
little action. In this, and in her preoccupation with character as opposed to '
types' (the static hero and heroine and villain, beloved of Victorian
novelists) she shows herself closer to our own day than any other novelist of
the period. She has humour and is the creator of a gallery of richly and subtly
comic portraits -Mr. Woodhousein Emma, Mrs. Bennet in PrideandPrejudice,
Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion, to mention but a few. Her prose
flows easily and naturally, and her dialogue is admirably true to life. She is
not afraid of 'wasting words' in the interests of naturalistic dialogue, but
she can also write very concisely when she wishes. A good example of her style
can be found at the end of Persuasion (perhaps her best novel):
Anne
was tenderness itself, and she had the full worth of it in Captain Went-worth's
affection. His profession was all that could ever make her friends wish that
tenderness less; the dread of a future war all that could dim her sunshine.
She gloried in being a sailor's wife, but she must pay the tax of quick alarm
for belonging to that profession which is, if possible, more distinguished in
its domestic virtues than in its national importance.
Everybody
is aware of the faults of Dickens -his inability to
construct a convincing plot, his clumsy and sometimes ungrammatical prose, his
sentimentality, his lack of real characters in the Shakespearian sense- but he
is read still, while more finished artists are neglected. The secret of his
popularity lies in an immense vitality, comparable to Shakespeare's, which
swirls round his creations and creates a special Dickensian world which, if it
does not resemble the real world, at least has its own logic and laws and its
own special atmosphere. Dickens is a master of the grotesque (he is, as T. S.
Eliot points out, in the direct line of Marlowe and Ben Jonson) and his
characters are really ' humours'-exaggerations of one human quality to the
point of caricature. Mr. Micawber is personified optimism, Uriah Heep mere
creeping hypocrisy, Mr. Squeers a monster of ignorance and tyranny-they are
grotesques, not human beings at all. In a sense, Dickens's world is mad-most of
his characters have single obsessions which appear in practically everything
they say or do, and many of them can be identified by catch-phrases like '
Barkis is willin" or tricks of speech such as Mr. Jingle's clipped 'telegraphese'
and Sam Weller's confusion of 'v' and ' w'. (The heroes and heroines are, in
comparison with the full-blooded comic monsters, anaemic, conventional, and
dull.) The world created by Dickens is mainly a kind ofnightmare London of
chop-houses, prisons, lawyers' offices, and taverns, dark, foggy, and cold, but
very much alive. Dickens's novels are all animated by a sense of injustice and
personal wrong; he is concerned with the problems of crime and poverty, but he
does not seem to believe that matters can be improved by legislation or reform
movements-everything depends on the individual, particularly the wealthy
philanthropist (Pickwick or the
Cheeryble brothers). If he has a doctrine, it is one of love.
Dickens
is unlearned, his style grotesque, inelegant. But he has a lively ear for the
rhythms of the speech of the uneducated, and he is not afraid of either
vulgarity or sentimentality. It is his complete lack of restraint which makes
for such an atmosphere of bursting vitality and for a warmheartedness that can
run to an embarrassing tearfulness, as in the description of Little Nell's
death in The Old Curiosity Shop. His novels fall roughly into groups.
Starting with Pickwick Papers, a picaresque masterpiece in which plot
does not matter, but everything depends on humorous types and on grotesque
incidents (and, incidentally, on a large appetite for convivial fun, as in the
picnic and Christmas scenes), Dickens moved towards historical novels-Barnaby
Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities. He also concentrated on the social
conditions of his own day, as in Oliver Twist and Hard Times (an
attack on the Utilitarians), and presented, in A Christmas Carol, his
view of man's duty to man-Scrooge, the miser, miraculously becomes a
philanthropist; Christmas symbolises the only way in which the world can be
improved-by the exercise of charity. David Copperfield is
autobiographical in its essence, and, in its long parade of grotesques, it can
be associated with Nicholas Nickleby. Perhaps the finest of the novels
is Great Expectations, a long but tightly-knit work, moving, with
something like penetration of character, and full of admirably conceived
scenes. It is in this book that Dickens reveals, at its finest, his
understanding of the mind of the child, his sympathy with its fantasies and its
inability to understand the grown-up world. In some ways, Dickens remained a
child: it is the weird wonderland of ogres and fairies that one finds
perpetually recurring in his books.
This
is a convenient place to mention briefly two Victorian writers who frankly,
without any disguise, explored the world of fantasy for the benefit of children
but were perhaps themselves more at home in that world than in Victorian
Utilitarian England. These writers are very widely read- Lewis Carroll, pseudonym
of Charles Dodgson (1832-98), and Edward Lear (1812-88). CarrolPs Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Booking-Glass have a mad
Dickensian flavour with a curious undercurrent of logic (Dodgson was a
mathematician); Lear's nonsense rhymes are also mad, but far less mad than some
of the works of the sane writers. Carroll and Lear are among the literary
riches of the Victorian era; they may well be read when Carlyle and Ruskin are
forgotten.
It is customary to group with Dickens a novelist who does not resemble him in
the slightest- William Makepeace
Thackeray (1811-63). Dickens wrote of low life
and was a warm-blooded romantic; Thackeray wrote of the upper classes and was
anti-romantic. Thackeray started his career as a satirist, and wrote many
humorous articles for the comic weekly Punch, also a couple of curious
works-The Book of Snobs and the Yellowplush Papers-which made fun
of the pretensions of the upper-classes and their worshippers in the
middle-classes-and then wrote a novel in the manner of Fielding-The Luck of
Barry Lyndon, which, like Fielding's Jonathan Wild, makes a rogue
complacently recount his wicked exploits as if they were thoroughly moral and
lawful. Vanity Fair is still his most-read work: it tells of the careers
of two girls with sharply contrasted characters-Becky Sharp, unscrupulous and
clever; Amelia Sedley, pretty, moral but unintelligent-and draws
clever-wickedly clever-portraits of officers and gentlemen of the time of
Waterloo. His historical novels, such as Esmond and The Virginians, are
very different in technique from those of Scott. The first tells, in
autobiographical form, of a man who lives through the age of Queen Anne and of
the Georges who follow, and it shows a remarkable knowledge of the literature
and life of the eighteenth century. In many ways, Thackeray is closer to the
Age of Reason than to his own times. But his book for children-The Rose and
the King-is one of the best-loved of all Victorian fantasies, and a certain
tenderness that Thackeray hides in such works as Vanity Fair appears in The
Neivcomes, with its portrait of the gentle childlike old Colonel. His
deathbed scene should be contrasted with Little Nell's:' He, whose heart was as
that of a little child, had answered to his name, and stood in the presence of
the Master.' Capable of tenderness, but never of sentimentality, Thackeray is
in many ways the superior of Dickens, but he lacks that strange, mad glamour
that Dickens shares with Shakespeare.
Meanwhile,
in the isolation of a Yorkshire vicarage, three sisters, none of them destined
to live long, were writing novels and poems. Charlotte
Bronte (1816-55),
who admired Thackeray, dedicated her most un-Thackerayan novel, Jane Eyre, to
him. Here, in this story of the governess who falls in love with her master,
himself married to a madwoman, we have a passion not to be found in either
Thackeray or Dickens, a genuine love-story of great realism, full of sharp
observation and not without wit. This story, with its frank love-scenes, was
something of a bombshell. Charlotte Bronte's The Professor, later
re-written-with some quite radical changes-as Villette, tells of her own
experiences as a teacher in Brussels, and Shir ley is concerned with
industrial Yorkshire, jane Eyre, one of the really significant Victorian
novels, remains her masterpiece. Emily Bronte (1818-48) had, if anything, a
more remarkable talent than her sister. Her poems are vital and original, and
her novel Wuthering Heights is the very heart and soul of the romantic
spirit, with its story of wild passion set against the Yorkshire moors. Anne
Bronte (1820-49), with her Agnes Grey and The Tenant ofWildfellHall, is
perhaps best remembered now because of her sisters: her talent is smaller than
theirs.
Anthony Trollope
(1815-88) invented a county called Barset and a town called Barchester, and, in
novel after novel (The Warden, Earchester Towers, Dr. Thorne, Framlej
Parsonage, The Small House at Allington, and The Last Chronicle of
Barsef) he paints life in a provincial cathedral town atmosphere, with
humour and without passion. His work is a little too lacking in warmth for some
people, but he has still many devotees. Trollope, who worked in the General
Post Office and was busy there, was only able to write by forcing on himself a
mechanical routine-so many pages per day, no rest between finishing one book
and starting another. This perhaps explains a lack of inspiration in his
novels; but, in good, plain, undistinguished prose, he builds up his own world,
and this world has a remote charm.
Shaw had many things to say, all of them important, but he
should not be regarded as a mere preacher who used the stage as a platform.
Being an Irishman like Wilde and Sheridan, he had a native gift of eloquence
and wit, and - much helped by his interest in music - a sharp ear for the tones
and rhythms of contemporary speech. For the ' well-made ' play he had little
use: he constructed his dramas on rules of his own, some of them most
irregular, but he knew that, whatever tricks he played, his ability to hold the
audience's attention through sheer words would carry him through. Thus, Getting
Married is written in one huge act, lasting over two hours ; Back to
Methuselah lasts for five nights ; Man and Superman shifts the main
characters to a mythological plane right in the middle of the story, and keeps
them there for a long time arguing philosophically. Shaw deliberately uses
anachronism, making Cain in the Garden of Eden quote Tennyson, and Cleopatra
speak in the words of Shelley; early Christians sing a hymn by Sir Arthur
Sullivan, and Queen Elizabeth I use a line of Lady Macbeth's long before
Shakespeare wrote it. Strict realism is not necessary to Shaw's purpose :
speech can be, at one moment, colloquial, and, at another, biblical; history
can be distorted and probability ignored - it does not matter in the least.
Shaw was a disciple of Samuel Butler, but of other philosophers as well. His
doctrine of the Superman comes from Germany - Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844-1900)-and his theory of Creative Evolution owes something to Henri
Bergson (1859-1941). But he had his own views on practically everything.
Generally, the aim in his early plays is to make audiences (and readers)
examine their consciences and overhaul their conventional beliefs. Thus, he
attacks those people who derive their rents from slums in Widowers' Houses, faces
the question of prostitution in Mrs. Warren's Profession, subjects the
medical profession to critical scrutiny in The Doctor's Dilemma, and
deflates the glory of war in Arms and the Man. He turns the conventional
assumptions of English society upside-down, so that woman becomes the stronger
sex and man the weaker, man the dreamer, woman the realist, woman the pursuer,
man the pursued. This is an important idea in Shaw, and is the basis of Man
and Superman. Shaw conceives of a great creative will in the universe,
which is endeavouring to produce higher and higher forms of life (Creative
Evolution). As woman has the greater part to play in the making of new life, it
follows that, perhaps quite unconsciously, she will look for a man in whom the
germs of human superiority lie, pursue him, mate him, and help forward the
evolution of the Superman. The power oiwill is also the theme of Back
to Methuselah which, in five separate plays, whose action starts with Adam
and Eve and ends in the remotest possible future, presents the thesis that only
by living longer can man become wiser; longevity is a matter of will: as Adam
and Eve willed individual death but immortality for the race, so we can will
individual immortality.
Shaw was fascinated by ideas of all kinds, and he used
his outstanding dramatic skill to publicise all sorts of notions-from the
importance of the science of phonetics (Pygmalion) to the
'Protestantism' of Joan of Arc (St. Joan). He attacked everything (being
a born rebel) but, strangely, he never lays a finger on the Christian
religion-the Church, yes, but belief, no. Shaw was a great rationalist, very
like the Frenchman Voltaire, but there was a deep core of mysticism in him. At
times he sounds like an Old Testament prophet, and his finest speeches (as of
Lilith at the end of Back to Methuselah) are in the great tradition of
English biblical prose. Finally, his work will endure for its dramatic
coherence, its wit, its common sense, and a literary gift which prevented him
from ever writing a dull line.
Hedonism was the thesis of some of Oscar Wilde's witty
essays, as also of his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Wilde
(1856-1900) seems, in the latter book, however, to be concerned with showing
the dangers of asking for too much from life. The beautiful Dorian
Gray-Faustus-like -wishes that he should remain eternally young and handsome,
while his picture, painted in the finest flush of his beauty, should grow old
in his stead. The wish is granted: Dorian remains ever-young, but his portrait
shows signs of ever-increasing age and, moreover, the scars of the crimes
attendant on asking for too much (a murder, the ruining of many women,
unnameable debauchery). Dorian, repentant, tries to destroy his portrait,
symbolically quelling his sins, but-magically-it is he himself who dies,
monstrous with age and ugliness, and his portrait that reverts to its former
perfection of youthful beauty. The sense of guilt-as much mediaeval as
Victorian -- intrudes into Wilde's bright godless world unexpectedly, and this
book prepares us for those later works of his- written under the shadow and
shame of his prison-sentence-which lack the old wit and contain a sombre
seriousness-The Ballad of Reading Gaol and De Profundis.
Another
substitute for religion was Imperialism (with undertones of Freemasonry), and Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
was the great singer of Empire. Born in India, Kipling knew the British Empire
from the inside, not merely, like so many stay-at-home newspaper-readers, as a
series of red splashes on the map of the world. This concern with Empire expresses
itself in many forms-the sympathy with the soldiers who fought the frontier
wars, kept peace in the Empire, did glorious work for a mere pittance and the
reward of civilian contempt; the stress on the white man's responsibility to
his brothers who, despite difference of colour and creed, acknowledged the same
Queen; the value of an Empire as the creator of a new, rich
civilisation. Kipling's reputation as a poet has always been precarious among
the 'intellectuals': they have looked askance at his mixture of soldier's slang
and biblical idiom, his jaunty rhythms and 'open-air' subjects. Recently
Kipling was rehabilitated by T. S. Eliot, in his long essay prefacing his
selection of Kipling's verse, and George Orwell has said, in an essay on
Eliot's essay, valuable things which put Kipling firmly in his place: he is not
a great poet, but he sums up for all time a certain phase in English history;
he has the gift of stating the obvious-not, as with Pope, for the men of reason
and learning, but for the man in the street-with pithy memorableness. He is a
poet who knows the East, and certain lines of his (as in The Road to
Manda/aj) evoke the sun and the palm-trees, and the oriental nostalgia of
many a repatriated Englishman, with real power. As a prose-writer, Kipling is
known for one novel (Kirn) and a host of excellent short stories, also
for a schoolboy's classic, Stalky and Co. He has, in both verse and
prose, a vigour and an occasional vulgarity that are refreshing after men like
William Morris, Swinburne, and Rossetti.
The other side of the coin is shown in the poems of
writers like John Davidson (1 8 5 7-1909), Ernest Dowson (1867-1900) and A. E. Housman
(1859-1936), who expressed a consistent mood
of pessimism. In Hous-man's A Shropshire Lad we. have exquisite classical
verse-regular forms, great compression-devoted to the futility of life, the
certainty of death, the certainty of nothing after death. There is a certain
Stoicism: the lads of his poems maintain a ' stiff upper lip' despite
disappointment in love and their sense of an untrustworthy world about them.
Some of the poems express the beauty of nature in a clipped, restrained way
which still suggests a full-blooded Romanticism. But other poets of the same
period sought a new meaning for life in the Catholic faith-Francis Thompson
(1859-1907), who, following Coventry Patmore (1823-96),
expressed
the everyday from a ' God's eye' point of view (as in the brief In No
Strange Land) but turned to a rich, highly-coloured style in The Hound
of Heaven-a mixture of the Romantic and the Metaphysical; and Alice Meynell
(1850-1922), who wrote highly individual Christian lyrics.
Pessimism
reigned in the novel. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) produced
a whole series of books dedicated to the life of his native Dorset, full of the
sense of man's bond with nature and with the past-a past revealed in the
age-old trees, heaths, fields, and in the prehistoric remains of the Celts, the
ruined camps of the Romans. In his novels, man never seems to be free: the
weight of time and place presses heavily on him, and, above everything, there
are mysterious forces which control his life. Man is a puppet whose strings are
worked by fates which are either hostile or indifferent to him. There is no
message of hope in Tess of the D'Urbervilles (when Tess is finally
hanged we hear: '. . . And so the President of the Immortals had finished his
sport with Tess') nor in The Mayor of Casterbridge or ]ude the
Obscure. The reception of this last work, with its gloomy ' Curst be the
day in which I was born' and its occasional brutal frankness, was so hostile
that Hardy turned from the novel to verse. Today it seems that his stature as a
poet is considerable, and that both as poet and novelist he will be remembered.
His verse expresses the irony of life-man's thwarted schemes, the need for
resignation in the face of a hostile fate-but also he expresses lighter moods,
writes charming nature-poems, even love-lyrics. Hardy's skill at depicting
nature, his eye for close detail, is eminently apparent in the novels, and it
comes to full flower in the poems. His verse occasionally suffers from a
'clotted' quality-consonants cluster together in Anglo-Saxon violence
('hill-hid tides throb, throe-on throe')-but this is an aspect of his masculine
force. An ability to produce a verse-composition of epic length was shown in The
Dynasts, a vast un-actable drama meant to be presented on the stage of the
reader's own imagination, dealing with the Napoleonic Wars as seen from the
viewpoint not only of men but of the Immortal Fates, who watch, direct, and
comment.
A
return to optimism is shown in the verse and prose of Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94),
but it is a rather superficial one, for Stevenson is a rather superficial
writer. He is at his best in adventure stories which show the influence of his
fellow-countryman, Walter Scott-Kidnapped, The Master of Ballantrae-and
boys' books like Treasure Island, a juvenile masterpiece. Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde deals with the duality of good and evil within the same man,
but it is perhaps little more than a well-written thriller. The poems,
especially those for children, are charming, and the essays, which have little
to say, say that little very well. His short stories are good, and we may note
here that the short story was becoming an accepted form-writers had to learn
how to express themselves succinctly, using great compression in plot,
characterisation, and dialogue_ heralding the approach of an age less leisurely
than the Victorian, with no time for three-volume novels, and demanding its
stories in quick mouthfuls.
A
new faith, more compelling than Pater's hedonism or Kipling's Imperialism, was
still needed, and Bernard Shaw and H. G.
Wells (i 866-1946) found one in what may be
called Liberalism-the belief that man's future lies on earth, not in heaven,
and that, with scientific and social progress, an earthly paradise may
eventually be built. Wells is one of the great figures of modern literature. He
owed a lot to Dickens in such novels as Kipps and The History of Mr.
Polly-works which borrow Dickens's prose-style, his humour, and his love of
eccentrics, and which deal affectionately with working people-but he found
themes of his own in the scientific novels. The Time Machine, The First Men
in the Moon, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, When the Sleeper Awakes,
and The Food of the Gods all seem concerned not merely with telling
a strange and entertaining story but with showing that, to science, everything
is theoretically possible. The glorification of scientific discovery leads
Wells to think that time and space can easily be conquered, and so we can
travel to the moon, or Martians can attack us; we can travel forward to the
future, and back again to the present. The old Newtonian world, with its fixed
dimensions, begins to melt and dissolve in the imaginative stories of Wells:
flesh can be made as transparent as glass, human size can be increased
indefinitely, a man can sleep for a couple of centuries and wake up in the
strange Wellsian future; a man can work miracles; a newspaper from the future
can be delivered by mistake; a man can lose weight without bulk and drift like
a balloon.
Wells
sometimes described himself as a 'Utopiographer'. He was always planning worlds
in which science had achieved its last victories over religion and
superstition, in which reason reigned, in which everybody was healthy, clean,
happy, and enlightened. The Wellsian future has been, for many years, one of the furnishings of our
minds-skyscrapers, the heavens full of aircraft, men and women dressed
something like ancient Greeks, rational conversation over a rational meal of
vitamin-pills. To build Utopia, Wells wanted-like Shaw-to destroy all the
vestiges of the past which cluttered the modern world-class-distinction, relics
of feudalism, directionless education, unenlightened and self-seeking
politicians, economic inequality. In other words, both Shaw and Wells wanted a
kind of Socialism. Rejecting the doctrine of sin, they believed that man's
mistakes and crimes came from stupidity, or from an unfavourable environment,
and they set to work to blueprint the devices which would put everything right.
Wells, in book after book, tackles the major social
problems. In Ann Veronica we have the theme of woman's new equal status
with men; in Joan and Peter education is examined; in The Soul of a
bishop we hear of the new religion of the rational age; in The New
Machiavelli we have Wells's philosophy of politics. But these works remain
novels, characterised by a Dickensian richness of character and not lacking in
love-interest. Tono-Bungaj is about commerce, Mr. Blettsivorthy on
Rampole Island a satire on our ' savage' social conventions, The Dream a
story of the muddle of twentieth-century life as seen from the viewpoint of a
thousand years ahead. Wells was a prolific writer and, when he kept to a story,
always an interesting one. His preaching is now a little out of date, and his
very hope for the future, rudely shattered by the Second World War, turned to a
kind of wild despair: mankind would have to be superseded by some new species,
Homo Sapiens had had his day; ' You fools,' he said in the preface to a
reprint made just before his death, 'you damned fools.' Optimistic Liberalism
died with him.
John Galsworthy (1867-1933) is best known for his Forsyte Saga, a
series of six novels which trace the story of a typically English upper-class
family from Victorian days to the nineteen-twenties-presenting their reactions
to great events which, in effect, spell the doom of all they stand for,
including World War I, the growth of Socialism, the General Strike of 1926.
Galsworthy had shown himself, in his early The Island Pharisees, to be
critical of the old standards-the philistinism, decadence, dullness, atrophy of
feeling which characterised the so-called 'ruling class'. The Forsyte Saga, in
trying to view this dying class dispassionately -with occasional
irony-nevertheless seems to develop a sympathy for the hero of The Man of
Property, Soames Forsyte, the epitome of the money-seeking class which
Galsworthy is supposed to detest. Galsworthy, in fact, is himself drawn into
the family of Forsytes, becomes involved with its fortunes, and what starts
off as a work of social criticism ends in acceptance of the very principles it
attacks. This work is still widely read, though it is not greatly esteemed by
the modern critics. It came into its own as a television serial in the 19605.
In 1922 there appeared an important work in prose which
(inevitably sometimes sounds like verse. This was Ulysses, by the
Irishman James Joyce (1882-1941), a novel of enormous length dealing with the
event of a single day in the life of a single town-the author's native Dublin
Joyce had previously published some charming but not outstandin| verse, a
volume of short stories called Dubliners, and a striking auto
biographical novel-Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The hero o
this novel-Stephen Dedalus-appears again in Ulysses, this time sub
ordinated in a secondary role: the hero is a Hungarian Jew, long-settlec in
Dublin, called Leopold Bloom. The novel has no real plot. Like thi Greek hero
whose name provides the title, Bloom wanders from place tc place, but has very
un-heroic adventures, and finally meets Stephen, whc then takes on the role of
a sort of spiritual son. After this the book ends But the eight hundred pages
are not filled with padding; never was ; novel written in conciser prose. We
are allowed to enter the minds of thi chief characters, are presented with
their thoughts and feelings in a con tinuous stream (the technique is called
'interior monologue'). The bool is mostly a never-ending stream of Bloom's
half-articulate impression of the day, but Joyce prevents the book from being
nothing but that, b; imposing on it a very rigid form. Each chapter corresponds
to an episodi in Homer's Odyssey and has a distinct style of its own;
for instance, in thi Maternity Hospital scene the prose imitates all the
English literary style from Beowulf to Carlyle and beyond, symbolising
the growth of the foetu in the womb in its steady movement through time. The
skill of the bool is amazing, and when we pick up a novel by Arnold Bennett or
Hugh Walpole after reading Ulysses we find it hard to be impressed by
ways of writing which seem dull, unaware, half-asleep. Ulysses is the
most carefully-written novel of the twentieth century.
In Finnegans Wake Joyce tried to present the whole
of human history as a dream in the mind of a Dublin inn-keeper called H. C.
Earwicker, and here the style-on which Joyce, going blind, expended immense
labour-is appropriate to dream, the language shifting and changing, words
becoming glued together, suggesting the merging of images in a dream, and
enabling Joyce to present history and myth as a single image, with all the
characters of history becoming a few eternal types, finally identified by
Earwicker with himself, his wife, and three children. This great and difficult
work probably marks the limit of experiment in language-it would be hard for
any writer to go farther than Joyce. In both Ulysses and Finnegans
Wake Joyce shows himself to have found a positive creed: man must believe
in the City (symbolised by Dublin), the human society which must change,
being human, but which will always change in a circular fashion. Time goes
round, the river flows into the sea, but the source of the river is perpetually
refreshed by rain from the sea: nothing can be destroyed, life is always
renewed, even if the 'etym' 'abnihilises' us. The end of Ulysses is a
triumphant 'Yes'; the end of Finnegans Wake is the beginning of a
sentence whose continuation starts the book.
One reaction against the Liberalism of Wells and
Shaw was to be found in the novels and poems of the Englishman David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930), who in
effect rejected civilisation and, like Blake, wanted men to go back to the
'natural world' of instinct. Lawrence's novels-Sons and Lovers, The Plumed
Serpent, Aaron's Kod, and Lady Chat-terley's Lover, to mention a
few-are much concerned with the relationship between man and woman, and he
seems to regard this relationship as the great source of vitality and
integration (Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned until 1960 because it
too frankly glorified physical love). Lawrence will have nothing of science:
instinct is more important; even religions are too rational, and, if man wants
a faith, he must worship the 'dark gods' of primitive peoples. Nobody has ever
presented human passion, man's relationship to nature, the sense of the
presence of life in all things, like Lawrence. His poems, which express with
intimate knowledge the 'essences' of natural phenomena and of the human
instincts, are also capable of bitter satire on the 'dehumanisation' of man in
the twentieth century.
Some novelists found their subject matter in modern
political ideologies, and one of the most important of these -was George Orwell (1904-50), whose early works expressed pungently a
profound dissatisfaction with the economic inequalities, the hypocrisies, the
social anachronisms of English life in the nineteen-thirties, but whose last
and finest novels attack the Socialist panaceas which, earlier, seemed so
attractive. Orwell was a born radical, champion of the small man who is 'pushed
around' by bosses of all denominations, and something of Swift's 'savage
indignation' as well as his humanitarianism is to be found in Animal Farm and
Nineteen Eighty-Four. The former is a parable of the reaction which
supervenes on all high-minded revolutions: the animals take over the farm on
which they have been exploited for the selfish ends of the farmer, but gradually
the pigs-ostensibly in the name of democracy-create a dictatorship over the
other animals far worse than anything known in the days of human management.
The final farm-slogan- ' All animals are equal, but some are more equal than
other'-has become one of the bitter catch-phrases of our cynical age. Nineteen
Eighty-Four is a sick man's prophecy of the future (Orwell was dying of
tuberculosis when he wrote it) and with its nightmare picture of a totalitarian
world it has helped to create a new series of myths. The eternal dictator, Big
Brother, the concept of 'double-think', the notion of the mutability of the
past-these have become common furniture of our minds.
Graham Greene (1904- ), another
Catholic convert, has been obsessed with the problem of good and evil, and his
books are a curious compound of theology and stark modern realism. Greene sees
the spiritual struggle of man against a background of 'seedy' town life
(Brighton Rock) or in the
Mexican jungle (The Power and the Glory] or in wartime West Africa (The
Heart of the Matter). In this last work, and also in the moving The End
of the Affair, Greene shows a concern with the paradox of the man or woman
who, technically a sinner, is really a saint. Some of his works have conflicted
with Catholic orthodoxy (especially in Ireland). The Quiet American, dealing
with the Indo-China War, turns to a moral theme-how far are good intentions
enough? Greene's lighter novels-' Entertainments', as he calls them-are
distinguished by fine construction and admirably terse prose.
It
is hard to say how far E. M. Forster (1879-1970) fits into
any pattern. His influence on the construction of the novel has been great, but
he has no real£ message', except about the value of individual
life, the need not to take too seriously out-moded moral shibboleths (A Room
With a View, which affirms passion rather than control). Howard's End
and Where Angels Fear to Tread are distinguished by very taut
construction and the creation of suspense through incident-Forster does not
think a plot very important. A Passage to India-perhaps his finest
novel-deals with the East and West duality: can the two really meet? After a
long analysis of the differences, expressed in terms of a vividly realised
India, against which the puppets of English rulers parade, Forster comes to the
conclusion that they cannot-at least, not yet. Forster's book, Aspects of
the Novel, is admirable criticism and entertaining reading.