Part 14

Now we come to our syndicate. With which shall we begin? It is hard to choose. Indeed, can you deal with them separately? For the outstanding fact is that they all write alike; that they deal in the same characters, the same backgrounds, and the same situations; and that they have the same point of view. They are like the Pléïade or the seven New Realists. Only they do not know it. At least, they give no sign of intending to be several peas in one pod. Yet you would almost say that none of them had ever read anything but the works of the others. Is there some master-mind behind them, some literary Lloyd George or Dr. Fu-Manchu, who assigns their tasks; who says that Mr. Beresford, not Mr. Walpole, shall write of Jacob Stahl, and that Mr. Mackenzie, not Mr. W. L. George, shall deal with Michael Fane? And does Mr. Walpole sneak off o’ nights to Mr. Beresford and offer to do some _Jacob Stahl_ if Mr. Beresford will take a few chapters of _Fortitude_ off his hands? Does Mr. Mackenzie write a page of _A Prelude to Adventure_ while Mr. Walpole takes a turn at _Sinister Street_? Who does the murders? Is it Mr. Walpole or Mr. Onions? Which one of them has been appointed to frequent the Empire? Does Mr. George investigate female psychology for the group? And what (but this I cannot even guess) does Mr. D. H. Lawrence “cover”?

This may seem to be mere petulance, but it is not. The chief value of fiction is, I take it, to provide us with vicarious experience. A great novelist who sticks to the truth is, above all, informing. We enlarge our own world by reading him. No one, in his own person, can investigate all social _milieux_ in all civilized lands; and the big novels and the big plays are text-books to the humanist. How much intimate knowledge of France should we lose if we lost Balzac; how much intimate knowledge of England if we lost the great Victorians! Did we really, before the war, know anything about the Russian soul and temperament except what we got from the Russian novelists? Most of us get our India from Kipling. There are not wanting people to quarrel with Kipling’s interpretation, even with his description; but the fact remains that a vast number of people know a few simple facts about Indian and Anglo-Indian life that they would never have known without him.

So that it is really not only the monotony, but the wilful extravagance, of the British syndicate that we complain of. Why waste half a dozen authors and a round score of novels to tell us the same thing in the same way? They do not even react differently to the same facts: they react precisely alike. Perhaps that is valuable as reinforcing and emphasizing the stated or implied opinion. But one has the sense that one is never going to learn anything more from any of them; and that is discouraging to the humanist, on vicarious experience bent. Perhaps one should except Mr. Walpole from that charge, to this extent: he gave us something new in _The Dark Forest_. In that book, at least, he made the Russians pleasanter than any of their own novelists (except possibly Turgenev) have succeeded in making them. But even so, if someone should tell us that Mr. Walpole, in the flesh, went to Russia to work with an ambulance corps, and that Mr. Beresford or Mr. Mackenzie wrote _The Dark Forest_ from Mr. Walpole’s notes, who could, from any internal evidence, deny it? If they were all Elizabethans, the scholars would still be wrangling over problems of their collaboration. Their novels would be like the Beaumont-Fletcher-Middleton-Rowley plays.

To begin with, there is always the same young man. Sometimes he has a university education, and then he is the hero of _Sinister Street_ or _The Stranger’s Wedding_; sometimes he has omitted the university, and then he is the hero of _Jacob Stahl_ or _Fortitude_. He has usually decided, when we meet him, that there is nothing in religion; he is usually anxious to do something noble and unconventional; and sooner or later he nearly always encounters very seriously a young woman of, actually or potentially, light morals. Sometimes he is rich and meets her at the Empire; sometimes he is poor and meets her in the slums. Sometimes it is an accident, but usually he might fairly be said to be looking for her. For he is humanitarian, always; either by his gentle nature, or because socialistic arguments have got hold of him; and a good deal of space is always given up to sheer intellectual worrying. It _is_ worrying--it seldom “gets” anywhere; and though Mr. Wells’s people “worry” similarly, and do not always get anywhere, still, with Mr. Wells, you feel as if those men would, perhaps, sometime win through to a philosophy of their own. They go at it in a more mature fashion; and they possess themselves of information. There is something of the hard scientific temper in his men. They are more apt to have got their humanitarianism out of a laboratory than out of their first sight of Piccadilly Circus at night. Mr. Wells’s men, when they are likable at all, are likable for some intellectual quality in them, for their attitude to ideas. When the syndicate’s men are likable, it is for sheer pity, because they are such helpless young fools.

One expects every one in fiction, nowadays, to be an egotist; but one does sometimes sigh for the old days when an egotist knew enough to be polite. No one, I think, could feel any affection for Jacob Stahl; but it is possible to feel affection for Michael Fane, though it is perfectly impossible to feel him important, except as a householder always is important. Perhaps the most charming thing one remembers in any of these novels (they do not abound in charm) is the description of Oxford undergraduate life in _Sinister Street_. And it leads to--what? Michael’s conscientious and pathetic progress among prostitutes and ruffians. Luckily, he does not, in the end, marry Lily; but he is saved from it by mere accident. There was no reason to suppose that destiny would play on his side.

This excursion into the underworld has become, in English fiction, almost as much _de rigueur_ for a young gentleman as the grand tour used to be. Sometimes it is curiosity that urges him; but it is more apt to be a kind of humanitarian sympathy. The adventure is not new: one remembers, after all, Richard Feverel. But the temper in which it is taken is new. Richard was a chivalrous young fool; but then Mrs. Mount was something out of the ordinary. He did not, at first, dream what she was; and when he found out, she was able to lure him to think well of her. These young gentlemen we are considering do not have to be lured to think well of the young women they altruistically encounter. They know before they meet them what they are going to be. They cultivate them because they are that, or are obviously going to be that. They prefer the girl of the lower classes; prefer marriage with her or free love with her, as the case may be. They find her more interesting, just as a settlement-worker finds the slums more interesting. The difference between them and the settlement-worker is that they are not out to convert her to religion or even to better manners. They are perfectly naïve in their refusal to perceive differences. They have a preconceived notion to the effect that there are no differences; and to that notion they often sacrifice themselves. Sometimes they sacrifice the girl.

You see, they do not think much of marriage, these young men. Jacob Stahl insists on going off to a solitary cottage with Betty Gale, unblessed. (Of course, he does have a wife in the background.) He never quite forgives her for wanting to be a legal wife. Though, characteristically enough, by the time she has reconciled herself to the irregularity (as any decent woman would have somehow to do, if she were going to endure it) his wife dies, and he insists on Betty’s marrying him so that they can have children. Ann Veronica over again! But, indeed, Mr. Beresford has it in for marriage anyhow. I know of nothing more pathetic in modern fiction than the way Dick Lynneker, brought up among gentle-folk, successful in his own career, in love with a girl of his own class, has to cast about in his mind for some way of squaring that conventional situation with his radicalism. Up to that time, his only chance has been in approving of his sister’s elopement with the village carpenter. Now he is in love himself, and there is no obstacle, social or financial, to his happiness. But he has not protested against convention all his young life, only to sit down and be comfortable now in a conventional situation. Listen:

“‘I never tried to fight against my love for you, dear, after that first day at Oakstone,’ he went on. ‘I hadn’t ever cared before for anyone like this. I’ve never had any sort of love-affair. And now, I want....’”

“She clung to him eagerly.” ‘What do you want, darling?’ she asked, and then added inconsequently, ‘I feel such a little thing.’

“He drew her down to her knees and knelt before her in the darkness.” ‘I want our love to be all our own. I don’t want it talked about and stared at. If we get married, it must be as quietly as possible--and it must be afterwards, if you know what I mean, dear? That legal business isn’t for us at all; it’s only a kind of registration. Our love hasn’t anything to do with anyone else. We must make our vows without witnesses. Do you know what I mean, dear? Don’t you feel like that, too?’

“He felt her heart throbbing violently against his; and they clung to each other like two frightened children.” There, in the stillness and the darkness, the world had vanished and they were alone; and afraid; and yet passionately desirous to draw closer together.

“‘Oh! Dickie, I do love you so,’ she whispered, as she put her lips to his.”

Mr. Beresford never tells us whether or not Dick put his idea through. Sybil was the niece of a bishop. But then, Mr. Beresford made her. Perhaps Dick succeeded. The implication certainly is that he was going to succeed.

Now, I honestly think that pathetic. Not nearly so shocking as it is pathetic. For the author is looking for the realities of life in the wrong place. Every lover knows the sense of shrinking from a public ceremony. I doubt if any two people deeply in love with each other would choose, for their own sakes, a “wedding.” Dick Lynneker need not think that his great idea is new. But look at the mad egotism of it! Take it that the legal or the ecclesiastical ceremony is merely a heavy price that one has to pay. Is that happiness not worth paying for? Generations of lovers have thought that it was. Suppose, even, that you think it not so much too heavy as the wrong kind of payment--something unjustly, shamelessly exacted of you, that should never have been exacted at all; a sort of Oriental “squeeze.” Other lovers, in other times, have had a kindred sense of desecration; but they have realized that society, from its point of view, had a right to demand of them this public acknowledgment. They have realized, too, that no public act of this kind could really touch or affect their private sense of their private sacrament.

These modern folk are neither unselfish enough to make their little salute to organized society cheerfully, nor strong enough to realize that the merely conventional tribute cannot hurt their private sanctities. There is no such unselfishness or strength possible to a person like Dick Lynneker. If we must face free love, we must face it, I suppose. But nothing in heaven or earth need make us face a compromise like Dick’s. Defy all ritual and symbolism if you must. But, for sheer topsy-turviness, commend me to his notion of insisting on the consummation’s preceding, instead of following, the ceremony! There is quite as much superstition in one order of things as in the other. Dick Lynneker is bound, quite as much as his family, by prejudices. After all, the black mass is only the real mass reversed.

I have dwelt on this instance because it seems to me typical, in its way, of the work of the whole group of English novelists. Except for Mr. Arnold Bennett, who seems to be satisfied with the mean and low-minded people of whom he feels that the world consists, they are all protesting. But they have nothing to suggest. When their own fitful attempts to set things straight result in failure or disaster, they blame the _status quo_. It never occurs to them to blame their own way of going about the business of changing things. A little study of history or even of sociology would teach them what not to waste their time on. But their only use for the past is to “curse it out.” “Les grands-pères ont toujours tort.” Yet they themselves go down like ninepins, knocked over by the same forces that, for a few thousand years at least, have been antagonizing the idealism and altruism of men. As I said before, one has some sympathy with Mr. Wells; for his people (his men, at least, since he does not think much better of women than does Arnold Bennett) are trying to inform themselves, trying to think it all out in terms of reason. The syndicate is not trying to think anything out. It rests content with replying to every affirmation of history: “You lie.” That is not argument: it is the mere sticking out of tongues. The conventionally accepted thing _must_ be wrong; and that is all there is to it.

Take the matter of their whole attitude to sex--which is, by and large, the question they are most pre-occupied with. A certain person, a scholar and a gentleman, was pointing out to me, the other day, the accuracy of Chaucer’s treatment of Troilus. Troilus lets Cressida go, not because he does not love her passionately, but because the chivalrous Code demands it of him, demands that he should protect her reputation. Pandar cannot move him from his knightly duty. If ever a hero loved exuberantly, it was Troilus. Yet the inhibition works. Chaucer knew what he was talking about. Whereas, as my interlocutor went on to say, with these contemporary authors, the lack of inhibition seems to be the index of emotion. They ask you to take lawlessness for depth of feeling. The decorously behaved, according to them, are only the passionless. That is plain bad psychology. For if love is the real thing, it takes perpetually into account the duty to the beloved. Love will bring out the scruples of a comparatively unscrupulous person. No real lover wants to put the beloved “up against” anything disagreeable. And this being brave for someone else is not a natural expression of love. You may be brave to the rack and the gridiron for yourself; but being vicariously brave to the rack and the gridiron is a mean, modern kind of courage. Suppose you do not believe in the social order: the social order, none the less, is powerful enough to make a decent man want its approval for the woman he loves. He does not wish to have her inconvenienced--not if he loves her.

But the woman who does not wish to run up against the social order gets scant sympathy from the modern British hero. She ought to want to run counter to it; and if he has anything to say about it, she will jolly well have to. I do not know how other people feel about Betty Gale, but I am exceedingly sorry for her. I am sufficiently sorry for the girl who married Mr. Onions’s murderer, the hero of _The Debit Account_ and _In Accordance with the Evidence_. I am even sorry for Pauline in _Plashers Mead_; though, frankly, I think Mr. Mackenzie is fairer to his characters than any of the others. These young women (I am speaking, you see, at the moment, of the respectable ones) have such selfish, cantankerous, and muddle-headed gentlemen to deal with!

Our authors do succeed in making their conventional folk disagreeable. That is, they make the hero acutely perceptive of the conventional vices. But if ever there was a case of the beam and the mote! Look at a fair list of them: the hero of _The Invisible Event_, of _The Strangers’ Wedding_, of _Round the Corner_, of _Plashers Mead_, of _The Debit Account_. Was there ever a more vaporing bunch of egotists anywhere? A great deal of fun has been poked at the heroes of the romantic period: the Manfreds and Laras, the Heathcliffs and Rochesters. Their revolts against society have been jests for the critics to split their sides over, these fifty years. But they were dignified creatures in comparison, and they had far more sense of fact. They knew, for example, when they bucked society, what they were bucking. They knew the process was not going to be entirely comfortable, and they did not complain of discomfort, because they saw a reason why it should be made hot for them. They simply felt that they had a _quid pro quo_. They had, as I have said elsewhere, the Satanic charm; they had also some of the Satanic logic. These heroes have been, for many decades, considered the wildest travesties of humanity. But, indeed, they are far more comprehensible than the young men in the modern British novels. A young woman in love with Lara might well expect the worst; but at least she would know what to expect. Lara would never have shilly-shallied about among the conventions like Dick Lynneker, or Capes, or Jacob Stahl, changing his mind from chapter to chapter, and never knowing precisely what he did want, anyhow. Lara would have known what he wanted and why. He would not even have hesitated to attribute to himself an evil motive, if he had one. But none of these young men would attribute to himself an evil motive. Whatever they want must be right; and if eventually they want the exact opposite, then that must be right, too. The bewildered woman follows in their wake.

That is why, by and large, they are so corrupting. Yes, more corrupting than the effervescent geniuses of the nineties. You might be shocked by Dorian Gray, or by Aubrey Beardsley’s gentlemen and ladies; but you were never tricked into imagining that it was “up to you” to look like an Aubrey Beardsley drawing or to behave like Dorian Gray. The shining lights of the nineties lived to _épater le bourgeois_--and they did it. On the whole, that was greatly to the credit of _le bourgeois_. People who would rather die than show themselves _épatés_ (there are always a lot of such folk) were very entertained. I dare say some of these authors and poets did harm in their day. But they did not do it by deluding the public into thinking that they were virtuous: they did it by being witty at the expense of virtue. Our novelists are not witty at the expense of virtue (or at the expense of anything else, be it said in passing). They perform all their antics in the very name of virtue. They are right, and everyone else is wrong.

Now the _révolté_ with a programme we can endure, for we have often, during the muddled history of civilization, had to endure him. Sometimes he does a lot of damage; sometimes he does a lot of good. The point is that, in either case, his emotional force has been at the service of his programme. The trouble with these people is that they have no programme. They are _révoltés_ because they are dissatisfied or in hard luck, and they hit wildly. They have not the brains to think anything out. Our friends of the nineties thought that nothing was sacred--except, perhaps, beauty. These folk know nothing about beauty--even Mr. Galsworthy, who may set you down on a hillside to look at a lovely landscape, and leave you there for several pages, but who spends his time during those pages in infecting that natural loveliness with notions of agrarian reform. The only thing that is sacred to these young folk is their own impulses; which makes them about as satisfactory to deal with as the wild gun in _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_. Since their own impulses chop and change--and are always sacred--you can do nothing except express perfect confidence in their temperaments. You are not to know them by their fruits; you are to judge them by their good intentions--for which you must take their own word.

Nor are they “ineffectual angels.” If they only were! They are guilty of a lot of very ignoble impulses, and proceed often to gratify them. So did the romantic hero-villains, you may say. Ah, but here is the difference. The romantic hero-villains were proud, sometimes, of their sin; but they called it sin, even while they boasted of it. So did the æsthetes of the nineties. If it had not been sin, there would have been no fun in it. A very lamentable point of view, doubtless; but less dangerous to society than the contemporary mode. For while you still call it sin, you are accepting the categories, if not the judgments, of society. You will not hurt society much while you accept its categories. What these young men and young women do is to call anything virtuous that they happen to want to do. They have not even the logic of Satanists, perceiving evil and preferring it. The thing that is evil is the thing that makes them suffer; the thing that is good is the thing that pleases them. When free love is convenient, free love, only, is virtuous; marriage becomes virtuous the moment marriage becomes convenient. As you never know when obstacles are going to appear or disappear--as convenience is often in the hands of mere fortuitous fate--there is no test left. You must, I repeat, have blind faith in their temperaments. I do not think this is too hard a saying.

As for the women who match and mate with the men: they do not give us much more hope. They are, to speak plainly, an unlovely lot. You may be as sorry as you like for them, but pity is not praise. Mr. Wells’s women are too apt to be selfish and treacherous; Mr. Bennett’s opinion is evidently that no woman can be decent unless she is a fool--like Constance, say, in _The Old Wives’ Tale_. (I know there is Alice Challis; but I fancy Alice is only a symbol of what every man wants and never gets.) And look, for a moment, at the women described by the syndicate. They are cheap: hard without being strong; cold without being pure; sentimental without being kind. There is the sensual type--Madeline Paignton, the aristocratic wanton, or Lily Haden, who cannot be continent for a few weeks, even for the sake of wealth and a husband; there is all the crew of light women among whom the heroes make their humanitarian progress. There is the intellectual (God save the mark!) type: the heroine of _Gray Youth_, or even Rachel Beaminster, whose mental energy all goes into revolt. If Mr. Walpole had made the Duchess of Wrexe a human being, in whose reality we could believe, we might have more sympathy with Rachel’s spiteful traffickings with the family ne’er-do-well. But we should have to be far sunk in fetishism to believe in the Duchess; she is a mere Mumbo-Jumbo; and her family seems about as intelligent as the first circles of Dahomey. Compare her, for an instant, with Lady Kew. No, a tyranny like that is an invented tyranny; it has nothing to do with life. The Duchess of Wrexe (to borrow a term from the anthropologists) has no _mana_ at all. Rachel’s revolt is absurd; and simply shows up Rachel as a very disagreeable and headstrong person. True, there is always something to make their revolts absurd. They seem not to be dealing with facts at all, these young people; probably because they are all sentimentalists, and for a sentimentalist a delusion is as good as a fact, any day. A wicked giant is, by definition, anything you happen to be tilting at--even if in real life he is a windmill.