The Facts of Fiction (30 page)

The truth is that Mr. Wells is a marvellously competent artist who enjoys writing for its own sake and who extracts from his words all that they have to offer. He has the virtuosity of the expert performer—a thing that would have been noticed immediately on a smaller stage—and obviously rather fancies himself as the writer who can hit
off a scene in a few lines just as a ready lecturer can hit off a problem in the few lines of a diagram on the blackboard.

The description of a specimen minute in the early amorous life of Kipps is a little gem carved in the shape of inanity. Kipps is sitting on a secluded seat half way down the front of the Leas:

There is a quite perceptible down on his upper lip, and his costume is just as tremendous a “mash ” as lies within his means. His collar is so high that it scars his inaggressive jaw-bone, and his hat has a curly brim, his tie shows taste, his trousers are moderately brilliant, and his boots have light cloth uppers and button at the side. He jabs at the gravel before him with a cheap cane and glances sideways at Flo Bates, the young lady from the cash desk. She is wearing a brilliant blouse and a gaily trimmed hat. There is an air of fashion about her that might disappear under the analysis of a woman of the world, but which is quite sufficient to make Kipps very proud to be distinguished as her particular “feller,” and to be allowed at temperate intervals to use her Christian name.

The conversation is light and gay in the modern style, and Flo keeps on smiling, good-temper being her special charm.

“You see, you don't mean what I mean,” he is saying.

“Well, what
do
you mean?”

“Not what you mean!”

“Well, tell me.”

“Ah!
That's another story.”

Pause. They look meaningly at each other.

“You are a one for being round about,” says the lady.

“Well you're not so plain you know.”

“Not plain?”

“No.”

“You don't mean to say that I'm round about?”

“No. I mean to say—though-” Pause.

“Well? ”

“You're not a bit plain—you're” (his voice jumps up to a squeak) “pretty, see? ”

“Oh, get
out
! ” Her voice lifts also—with pleasure.

She strikes him with her glove.

That is about thirty seconds of Kipps's private minute. No one can read of it without realising that those sharp, sure sentences were written by a man whose mind strips every scene down to its bare bones. No one, that is, who is in the least interested in the mechanics of authorship.

Mr. Wells's books, indeed, are full of vivid, urgent writing in which the idea moves forward with splendid insistency. Even in short passages such as this from
The War of the Worlds
we can feel the quick impulse of the energetic mind of a vigorous man:

It was sweeping round swiftly and steadily, this flaming death, this invisible, inevitable sword of heat. I perceived it coming towards me by the flashing bushes it touched, and was too astounded and stupefied to stir. I heard the crackle of fire in the sand-pits and the sudden squeal of a horse that was as suddenly stilled. Then it was as if an invisible yet intensely heated finger were drawn through the heather between me and the Martians, and all along a curving line beyond the sand-pits the dark ground smoked and crackled.

No two pieces of writing could be more unlike. But together they are very like Mr. Wells. For Mr. Wells lived
two lives. One a poor shabby, miserable little life between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. And another from fifteen onwards, during which his busy brain has been buzzing all the time like a dynamo. During those two early years he served behind a counter in a draper's shop. And the manner of a shop-assistant bringing down box upon box of things to sell—even though they should happen to be theories of education and pacifist treatises and not cottons and tapes—has never entirely left him.

Neither has he altogether lost the manner he acquired at the Royal College of Science in the 'eighties. He has remained ever since the educated, almost over-educated, student in the vanguard of scientific progress; the young man with an eye on creation.

His scientific romances of the kind of
The Time Machine
and
The War of the Worlds
are really fairy-tales designed to satisfy the modern credulity. They are the product of the alert, scholarship-winning brain of a B.Sc. Lond., and of the dreamy, roaming mind of a small draper's apprentice who would sneak off for a quiet thought or two; a combination of a trained intelligence and a natural imagination.

If Mr. Wells had not written anything but these works we should still have reason to congratulate ourselves on the scholarship system. But it is those novels of the type of
Love and Mr. Lewisham, Kipps
and
Mr. Polly
which are our main concern. These works are romances of success; pilgrimages from the Third-Class in life to the First. And it is the inevitable cosmic progress of nature towards perfection that Mr. Wells is showing us as it manifests itself in the social betterment of an awkward little tradesman.

It is such closely observed, and humorously imagined, and patiently recorded novels as these and
Ann Veronica
that are really self-supporting in the world of fiction. The
others of the kind of
The World of William Clissold
and
Meanwhile
are the work of a man who is a journalist before he is a novelist, a man whose thoughts present themselves with the ephemeral emphasis of headlines.

If Mr. Wells had been just a little less perfect as a thinking machine he would have appeared a far larger figure in fiction. Books have poured out from him by the bushel; and somewhere beneath that bushel his light of fiction has become hidden.

* * *

It is a strange thing that if one were to attempt a portrait of Mr. Galsworthy the dramatist, one would have to draw one man, and if one were to attempt the portrait of Mr. Galsworthy the novelist, one would have to draw a totally different man.

The first portrait would be that of a humanitarian who is so humane that he is almost a humaniac; a man with a wet handkerchief on his blotting pad. The second would be that of a country gentleman of culture; a man with a spaniel in the library. Of the two, the first is possibly the more interesting figure, the man who takes the part of the fox against the hounds, of the prisoner against the gaoler, of the rabbit against the sportsman, and of the prostitute against the policeman. It is the more interesting because it is the more startling.

At Mr. Galsworthy's cradle one might with no more than averagely good luck have been able to take a shot at the future and predict that this son of a barrister and a company director would one day become an elegant, respectable author. And if one remembers him as the author only of
The Forsyte Saga
and
A Modern Comedy,
the most magnificent social history of our time, one would have been perfectly right.

But there is always the other Mr. Galsworthy, the gentleman gone rogue, and gone rogue in a gentlemanly angelic fashion. There is something at once savage and benign about this other Mr. Galsworthy. He is the sort of man who might walk out of Tattersall's Ring and give his tail-coat to a beggar. It is because he is this St. Francis with an Oxford accent that he is so puzzling to us. A creature has got only to be hurt or be hunted to have Mr. Galsworthy on its side for ever.

Actually this common sympathy for all things occasionally almost destroys his common sense for some things. Thus, one of his later plays,
Escape,
is not only mawkish but muddled. The play opens with one of those persuasive, eloquent, clergyman's-daughter type of prostitute who might be first cousin to Clare in
The Fugitive,
sitting on a seat in Hyde Park on the look-out for a customer. She sees a possible client, one of those easy, chatting, manicured Galsworthian males, and speaks to him. After a light exchange of persiflage about the oldest profession and the horrors of a life of vice, the impatient male manages to break away, and a plain-clothes man quite naturally arrests the woman for accosting. At once the elegant male returns, tells a thin story about an evening chat, advises the prostitute to run away, hits the detective on the jaw and kills him, and then stands up in the spotlight for us to admire him as the defender of the weak against the bully; of Woman against her oppressor, Man; of the victim of stupid legislation against persecuting Justice.

We are uncomfortably aware that it is less than half the truth that Mr. Galsworthy is showing us. The prostitute is a lurking spider, with envenomed blood waiting for the innocent male fly to destroy him. The plain-clothes man is there courageously performing his distasteful and
apparently dangerous work of preserving the fly from the spider. He dies a martyr to service, and to a public school code of manners that cannot distinguish between a damsel in distress and a danger in the streets.

I am not pretending that all men who cross Hyde Park by night are innocent, or that all plain-clothes men are gentle philanthropic creatures supported through their doubts and difficulties by the beautiful thought of male chastity. But I am suggesting that it is at least as near the truth as Mr. Galsworthy's view.

That sort of hæmorrhage of the compassionate heart dries up outside the plays. The novels are sentimental as well as sensitive; but they deal with hearts and not with causes. They never become propaganda in the cause of convincing God that he has been behaving like the very Devil. The only sacrifice on the altar of compassion in the whole extent of the Forsyte tapestry is Miss Collins's selling her sense of shame to save her unemployed husband and consenting to be painted in the nude.

Mr. Galsworthy as a writer of any sort was unfortunate in the accident of his birth. Harrow and New College are all wrong for a novelist. Hoxton Elementary School and the Free Library are immeasurably to be preferred. The shortcomings of understanding that resulted from Mr. Galsworthy's education are to be seen in the instant he leaves the silver spoon and clockwise port atmosphere of the Forsytes for the poor. Then he is like Thackeray imagining a new race with expressions like those of the figures on an illustrated charity appeal.

The Forsyte Saga
is the book that we might have expected Mr. Galsworthy to write. It is the novel of Success that begins a generation after the Kipps period in the family has closed. It is the unique record of a world whose members are usually mute, the most accurate
account in our national fiction of respectable English acquisitiveness.

Mr. Galsworthy's singular genius for capturing the forms and expressions of thought of a class that are loved by none so much as they love themselves—the upper middle class that moves in the limbo between tenant and title—has led to a great injustice having been paid to him. Mr. Galsworthy has been represented as a Deity in a college blazer telling the world that so long as it plays a straight bat, is courteous to women, and produces he-ancients of the calibre of Normal McKinnell all will be well.

In reality this is not a representation but a misrepresentation. The whole business of showing Mr. Galsworthy as an articulate prisoner in one little social cell has been absurdly overdone. A man has to be outside a thing before he can draw it. A complete prisoner, like a life-sentence man, or the Pope, would be a poor sort of person to draw an elevation of Wormwood Scrubs or the Vatican. And the Forsytes are the most perfect elevation in our literature of a family who are interesting not only because of what they are but because of what they happen to be. The inevitable accident of their birth is as fascinating and important as the avoidable accidents of their lives.

But
The Forsyte Saga
is a great deal more than an account of property and of the changes in the values than mankind has placed upon different kinds of it. Otherwise it wquld be no more interesting than an estate-agent's ledger. The characters that appear in the passing pageant of the Forsyte generations are really actors in a Morality play. And it is a new Morality that they represent. It is a Morality in which Divorce is a deliverance and not a damnation. Soames and Irene break apart not as two sinners in defiance of divine law but as an electric magnet
and its keeper when the essential current is turned off. “The very simple truth that underlies the whole story,” the author has uncompromisingly declared, “is that where sex attraction is utterly and definitely lacking in one partner to a union, no amount of pity, or reason, or duty, or what not, can overcome a repulsion implicit in Nature.” That Soames remarries for the Forsytish reason that he wants an heir is really not so important as that he remarries for the ordinary male reason that he meets an unusually pretty girl.

Mr. Galsworthy created Soames in the shape of a Malvolio who is perpetually wondering why the world does not love him more than it does; and he conceived Irene in the shape of Olivia equally puzzled as to why Soames should imagine that she loves him at all. There is no more hopeless tragedy in life than the breakdown of relationship and the break-up of a home when two mature, intelligent people, both in the right and both fully aware of it, simply sicken of each other. And there is nothing harder to describe than the collapse of conjugality, without making one party appear a monster and the other a martyr.

The measure of Mr. Galsworthy's honesty of purpose and open-eyed sincerity of vision may be gauged from the way in which he exhibits Soames as being “unlovable without quite thick enough skin to be thoroughly unconscious of the fact,” and not only within his rights but absolutely right in asking Irene for what she is not prepared to give; and shows us also Irene “a concretion of disturbing Beauty impinging on a possessive world,” out to save her soul by saving herself from Soames.

What has earned Mr. Galsworthy a reputation for sentiment as a novelist is his habit of looking at life as it recedes from him. He is like a lonely man on a crowded platform who watches a departing train. An uninvited, SF
undismissible, irrational sadness invades the mind. There are many passages in
The Forsyte Saga
written in the mood that hangs over the lonely man before the porter comes along to clear the platform: