Ten Novels And Their Authors (43 page)

Mr. Dickens was smaller than Miss Austen liked men to be, and much too smartly dressed; but he had a pleasant face and fine eyes, and from his lively air she thought it quite possible that he had a sense of humour. It was a pity he was so vulgar. There were two Russians there, one with an unpronounceable name who looked disagreeable and common; the other, Tolstoy, had the air of a gentleman, but you could never tell with foreigners. Miss Austen could not understand why he wore that strange smock, like an artist’s, and those great clumsy boots. They said he was a Count, but she had never thought a foreign title anything but rather ridiculous. And as for the others – Monsieur Beyle, whom they called Stendhal, was fat and ugly, Monsieur Flaubert laughed much too loudly for anyone who had pretensions to elegance, and as to Monsieur de Balzac, his manners were deplorable. The fact was that the only gentleman present was Mr. Fielding, and Miss Austen wondered what he could find to interest him in that American he was talking to. It
was a Mr. Melville, a fine figure of a man, tall and upstanding, but he wore a beard, and it made him look like the captain of a merchant vessel. He was telling Mr. Fielding a story, which was evidently amusing, and Mr. Fielding laughed heartily. Mr. Fielding was a little the worse for liquor, but Miss Austen knew that gentlemen often were, and though she regretted it, it did not shock her. Mr. Fielding had a fine presence and, though something of a dissipated look, an air of good breeding, he would have held his own at Godmersham with any of her brother’s, Mr. Knight’s, friends. After all, he was a cousin of Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu, and through the Earls of Denbigh descended from the Hapsburgs. He caught her look, rose to his feet and, leaving the strange American, came over to Miss Austen, and with a bow asked if he might sit beside her. She smiled her assent and set herself to be suitably gracious. he had a pleasant flow of small-talk, and presently Miss Austen felt emboldened to tell him that she had read
Tom Jones
when she was a girl.

‘And I’m sure it did you no harm, Madam,’ he said.

‘None whatever,’ she answered. ‘Nor do I believe that it would ever do so to any young woman of sound principles and good sense.’

Then Mr. Fielding, with a smile in which there was something of gallantry, asked Miss Austen how it happened that, with her charm, wit and grace, she had never married.

‘How could I, Mr. Fielding?’ she answered gaily. ‘The only man I could ever have brought myself to marry was Darcy, and he was married to my dear Elizabeth.’

Charles Dickens had joined the group of the three eminent novelists, Stendhal, Balzac and Flaubert, but he did not feel quite at ease. Though they were cordial enough, he could not but see that they looked upon him as an amiable barbarian. They were quite plainly of opinion that nothing of literary importance could be produced out of France. That an Englishman should write novels was
an amusing performance, like the antics of trained dogs in a circus, but, of course, without any pretension to artistic merit. Stendhal admitted that England had Shakespeare, and was fond of saying every now and then: ‘To be or not to be’; and once, when Flaubert was more than usually vociferous, he gave Dickens a quizzical look and murmured: ‘The rest is silence.’ Dickens, generally the life and soul of a party, tried his best to seem amused at the conversation of those great talkers, but his laughter was forced. He was frankly shocked at the bawdy freedom with which they related their sexual adventures. Sex was not a matter that he cared to hear spoken of. When they asked him if it was not true that English women were frigid, he did not know what to answer, and he listened in pained silence to Balzac’s ribald account of his affair with the Countess Guidoboni, a member of the highest English aristocracy. They chaffed him about the English prudishness; ‘improper’ was the commonest word in the English vocabulary; this was improper, that was improper; and Stendhal stated as a fact that in England they put the legs of pianos into trousers so that the young girls who were learning to play should not be distracted from their five-finger exercises by lascivious thoughts. Dickens bore their banter with his usual good humour; but he smiled within himself when he thought how little they knew of the larks he and Wilkie Collins had when they went on their jaunts to Paris. On the last one, as they sighted the white cliffs of Dover, Wilkie had turned to him with a solemnity unusual to him: ‘Charles,’ he had said, ‘the respectability of England, thank God, is firmly established on the immorality of France.’ For a moment, Dickens was speechless, and then, as he realised the profound significance of the remark, his eyes filled with patriotic tears. ‘God save the Queen,’ he muttered in a husky voice. Wilkie, always the gentleman, gravely raised his top-hat. A memorable moment!

(2)

It is evident that these novelists were persons of marked and unusual individuality. They had the creative instinct strongly developed, and they had a passion for writing. If they are anything to go by, one may safely say that it is not much of a writer who hates writing. That is not to say that they found it easy. It is difficult to write well. But still, to write was their passion. It was not only the business of their lives, but a need as urgent as hunger or thirst. There is probably in everyone something of the creative instinct. It is natural for a child to play about with coloured pencils and paint little pictures in water-colour, and then, often enough, when it learns to read and write, to write little verses and little stories. I believe that the creative instinct reaches its height during the twenties and then, sometimes because it was merely a product of adolescence, sometimes because the affairs of life, the necessity of earning a living, leave no time for its exercise, it languishes and dies. But in many persons, in more than most of us know, it continues to burden and enchant them. They become writers because of the compulsion within them. Unfortunately, the creative instinct may be powerful and yet the capacity to create anything of merit may be lacking.

What is it that must be combined with the creative instinct to make it possible for a writer to produce a work of value? Well, I suppose it is personality. It may be a pleasant or an unpleasant one; that doesn’t matter. What matters is that, by some idiosyncrasy of nature, the writer is enabled to see in a manner peculiar to himself. It doesn’t matter if he sees in a way that common opinion regards as neither just nor true. You may not like the world he sees, the world, for instance, that Stendhal, Dostoevsky or Flaubert saw, and then his world will be distasteful to you; but you can hardly fail to be impressed by the power with which he has presented it; or you may
like his world, as you like the world of Fielding and Jane Austen, and then you will take the author to your heart. That depends on your own disposition. It has nothing to do with the merits of the work.

I have been curious to discover, if I could, what precisely were the characteristics of these novelists I have been discussing which made them able to produce books to which the consensus of qualified opinion has agreed to ascribe greatness. Little is known of Fielding, Jane Austen and Emily Brontë, but as regards the others, the material for such an enquiry is over-whelming. Stendhal and Tolstoy wrote volume after volume about themselves; Flaubert’s revealing correspondence is enormous; and of the rest, friends and relations have written reminiscences and biographers elaborate lives. Strangely enough, they do not seem to have been highly cultured. Flaubert and Tolstoy were great readers, but chiefly to obtain material for what they wanted to write; the others were no more widely read than the average persons of the class they belonged to. They appear to have taken little interest in any art other than their own. Jane Austen confessed that concerts bored her. Tolstoy was fond of music and played the piano. Stendhal had a predilection for opera, which is the form of musical entertainment which affords pleasure to people who don’t like music. he went to the Scala every night when he was in Milan to gossip with his friends, have supper and play cards, and, like them, gave his attention to what was happening on the stage only when a famous singer sang a well-known aria. he had an equal admiration for Mozart, Cimarosa and Rossini. I have not discovered that music meant anything to the rest. Nor did the plastic arts. Such references as you find in their books to painting or sculpture indicate that their taste was distressingly conventional. Tolstoy, as everyone knows, discarded all painting as worthless unless the subject provided a moral lesson. Stendhal deplored the fact that Leonardo had not had the
advantage of Guido Reni’s guidance and example, and he claimed that Canova was a greater sculptor than Michael Angelo because he had produced thirty masterpieces, whereas Michael Angelo had produced but one.

Of course, it requires intelligence to write a good novel, but of a peculiar, and perhaps not of a very high, order, and these great writers were intelligent; but they were not strikingly intellectual. Their naïveté, when they deal with general ideas, is often startling. They accept the commonplaces of the philosophy current in their day, and when they put them in use in their fiction, the result is seldom happy. The fact is, ideas are not their affair, and their concern with them, when they
are
concerned with them, is emotional. They have little gift for conceptual thought. They are not interested in the proposition, but in the example; for it is the concrete that interests them. But if intellect is not their strong point, they make up for it with gifts that are more useful to them. They feel strongly, even passionately; they have imagination, keen observation and an ability to put themselves in the shoes of the characters of their invention, to rejoice in their joys and suffer with their pains; and, finally, they have a faculty for giving with force and distinctness body and shape to what they have seen, felt and imagined.

These are great gifts, and an author is fortunate to possess them, but they will not suffice unless he has something else besides. Gavarni said of Balzac that in general information on all subjects he was completely
ignare
. One’s first impulse is to translate that by ‘ignorant’, but that is a French word too, and
ignare
means more than that. It suggests the crass ignorance of a moron. But when Balzac began to write, Gavarni went on, he had an intuition of things, so that he seemed to know everything about everything. I take intuition to be a judgment one makes on grounds which are, or which one thinks are, legitimate, but which are not present to consciousness. But this, apparently, was not the case with
Balzac. There were no grounds for the knowledge he displayed. I think Gavarni used the wrong word; I think a better one would have been inspiration. Inspiration is that something else the author needs in order to write greatly. But what is inspiration? I possess a number of books on psychology, and I have looked through them in vain to find something that would enlighten me. The only piece of writing I have come across that attempts to deal with the subject is an essay by Edmond Jaloux entitled
L’Inspiration Poétique et l’Aridité
. Edmond Jaloux was a Frenchman, and he wrote of his fellow-countrymen. It may be that their response to a spiritual state is more intense than that of the sober Anglo-Saxons. He describes, as follows, the aspect of the French poet when he is under the spell of his inspiration. He is transfigured. His countenance is calm and at the same time radiant; his features are relaxed, his eyes shine with a singular clearness, with a sort of strange desire that reaches out to nothing real. It is an indubitable physical presence. But inspiration, Edmond Jaloux goes on to say, is not permanent. It is followed by aridity, which may last a little while or may last for years. Then the author, feeling himself only half alive, is ill-humoured, afflicted with a bitterness that not only depresses him but makes him aggressive, spiteful, misanthropic and jealous, both of the works of his fellow-writers and of the power to work which he has lost. I find it curious, and even rather alarming, to perceive how like these states are to those of the mystics when, in moments of illumination, they feel themselves at one with the Infinite, and when, in those periods which they call the Dark Night of the Soul, they feel dry, empty and abandoned of God.

Edmond Jaloux wrote as though only poets had inspiration, and it is perhaps true that it is more necessary to them than to the writers of prose. Certainly the difference between the poet’s verse when he writes because he is a poet, and the verse he writes when he is inspired, is more
obvious; but the writer of prose, the novelist, has his inspiration too. It would be only prejudice that could deny that certain brief passages in
Wuthering Heights
, in
Moby Dick
, in
Anna Karenina
, are as inspired as any poem of Keats or Shelley. The novelist may consciously depend on this mysterious entity. Dostoevsky, in letters to his publisher, frequently outlined some scene he had in mind to write and said it would be masterly if, when he sat down to it, inspiration came. Inspiration pertains to youth. It seldom persists to old age, and then only sporadically. No effort of will can evoke it, but authors have found that it can often be coaxed into activity. Schiller, when he went into his study to work, smelt the rotten apples he kept in a drawer so as to awaken it. Dickens had to have certain objects on his desk, without which he could not write a line. For some reason, it was the presence of those objects that brought his inspiration into play. But it is terribly unreliable. The writer may be seized by an inspiration as genuine as that which seized Keats when he wrote his greatest ode, and yet produce something that is worthless. To this again the mystics offer a parallel: St. Theresa attached no value to the ecstasies, the visions, of her nuns unless they resulted in works. I am well aware that I have not told the reader, as I should have done, just what inspiration is. I wish I could. I do not know. It is a mysterious something that enables the author to write things that he had no idea he knew, so that, looking back, he asks himself: ‘Where on earth did I get that from?’ We know that Charlotte Brontë was puzzled by the fact that her sister Emily could write of things and people that, to her knowledge, she had no acquaintance with. When the author is seized by this welcome power, ideas, images, comparisons, even solid facts, crowd upon him and he feels himself merely an instrument, a stenographer, as it were, taking down what is dictated to him. But I have said enough on this obscure subject. I have spoken of it only to make the point that
whatever gifts an author may have, without the influence, or the power, of this mysterious something, none of them will avail.