The Facts of Fiction

by Norman Collins

  He became a novelist for quite the wrong reason. It was not because he even wanted to tell a story, or to paint a picture of human affairs, that he wrote. It was simply that he had evolved a theory of Life. And since it was one of those theories that fit life only about as well as the Procrustean bed fitted its occupant, he had to invent a world in which he could perform his choppings and loppings to his, and his theory’s, satisfaction.

  Mercifully, he was an optimist; and he was that far rarer thing, an intellectual optimist. He believed in Nature as ardently as men an age or two before him had believed in God, and he evoked Man where they had called upon the Son of Man. In other words, he was a passionately, even fanatically, religious man, though in a fierce, free, irreligious fashion. His theory, however, was always getting under his feet. It was a theory of comedy, and therefore of laughter. The one illogical thing that remains in a natural world is laughter. And to theorise about it is perhaps the most dangerous thing that a humorist can do.

  Mankind is one, said Meredith, and anyone acting selfishly, is a subject for huge and brooding merriment. Looked at through such a pair of philosopher’s spectacles, life is a perpetual contortion in which the nose is being cut off to spite the face. It is a theoretical, spiritless laughter that Meredith’s high comedy provokes; but once a mind has enjoyed the amusement that his books offer, the rest of fiction, for a time, at least, seems a little sodden to the taste.

  The unique thing about Meredith is the way in which he contained within himself the vital parts of both a propagandist and a poet. At that very moment when his theory seems to drag his comedy down from the level of Olympian laughter, there is the beat of wings in the air; and Meredith, the poet and the lover, is there doing his djinn’s work, and carrying his creation back into the clouds where it belongs.

  It may seem a perfectly fruitless occupation discovering what it is that destroys Meredith’s novels, when they are there before us glittering with competence. But with Meredith we have always a feeling that his brilliance is consuming him; that his speaking voice might be more pleasant if he had not sung so much.

  If Meredith’s genius (to change the metaphor) could have been fitted with some anti-dazzle device before it set out, he would have had twice as many admirers to-day, and there would not have been one hundredth of those casualties that he left strewed behind him in the ditch. He did not even have the sense, or the modesty, to start dimly. He had the headlights of his mind blazing before he had left the drive. Thus, The Egoist opens with a Prelude, good enough in its way as a piece of pranked-out philosophy that is about as inviting to the timid reader as the notice to tramps that there are man-traps set. It is not even as though the author were content with drawing a moral from his story. He is at the other game of writing a parable to fit a moral.

  Meredith is an example of the dangers of longevity in literature. Charles Reade said that a writer of any magnitude would become great merely by growing old. But Meredith shrank with age. He accumulated a big, rambling reputation at the cost of himself. He became simply a wan crusader, wrapped in perpetual evening, dreaming war.

  To understand the real Meredith, it is necessary to re-inflate the Sage of Box Hill, and restore him to the original size of the Surrey Strong Man, tossing iron bars about for pleasure like a navvy at a country fair, hirsute and heroic like a buccaneering Christ. He was a man with the storm-wind behind him; a man in a rage with the rest of the world. He was a far greater figure than the attenuated philosopher, the stiffened athlete, acidly complaining that the reviewers had been against him all his life.

  The conviction that the small world of men was on its own side and not on his, led to that quite unnatural tautening of muscle and arching of neck that Meredith adopted to shoulder his way through the crowd. If a reason has to be found for every peculiarity of a writer, we can lay our fingers on the exposed nerve of Meredith without undue hesitation.

  Meredith was born the son of a naval outfitter in Southampton—Marryat mentions the firm—and he had an almost morbid sensitiveness about his parenthood. His family moved in that uncertain social twilight between the petty tradesman and the petty gentry. Probably he was never quite sure whether an advance of his would be met by a salute, or a snub. His aloofness earned him the name of “Gentleman Georgie.” And the whole early years of his life—the death of his mother, his father’s dislike of him, the distaste for his fellows—are the period of painful transformation of the obscure tradesman into the famous writer.

  Mr. Priestley has suggested that in later years Meredith was “ashamed not of the tailor’s shop, but of his shame of the tailor’s shop.” Certainly the figure of a tailor’s son feverishly trying to escape the abhorréd shears is one on which the spirit of comedy could play to advantage. It would have been very difficult for the sage to confess the snob. And once he ascended the public pedestal he left the snob behind for the literary historian to discover. Thus in Evan Harrington he laughed at the colossal accident of his birth. And in Henry Richmond he obscured the fact that there had been any accident at all.

  This manipulation of things in his mind, his habit of flicking a fact about like a ball in a fives court, is like that of no other writer so much as it is like that of Laurence Sterne. Both writers had their theory of comedy. And both writers took a mischievous delight in arriving at the comic situation by the roundabout route of letting their comic spirit bounce from the four sides of their mind on its way.

  In ornament as well as in structure there is a great deal of Laurence Sterne in George Meredith. That fantastic passage about a leg in The Egoist could have been written only by one of two writers:

  Mrs. Mountstuart touched a thrilling cord. “In spite of men’s hateful modern costume, you see he has a leg.”

  That is, the leg of the born cavalier is before you: and obscure it as you will, dress degenerately, there it is for ladies who have eyes. You see it: or, you see he has it. Miss Isabel and Miss Eleanor disputed the incidence of the emphasis, but surely, though a slight difference of meaning may be heard, either will do: many, with a good show of reason, throw the accent upon leg. And the ladies knew for a fact that Willoughby’s leg was exquisite; he had a cavalier court-suit in his wardrobe. Mrs. Mountstuart signified that the leg was to be seen because it was a burning leg. There it is, and it will shine through! He has the leg of Rochester, Buckingham, Dorset, Suckling; the leg that smiles, that winks, is obsequious to you, yet perforce of beauty self-satisfied; that twinkles to a tender midway between imperiousness and seductiveness, audacity and discretion; between “you shall worship me,” and “I am devoted to you”; is your lord, your slave, alternately, and in one. It is a leg of ebb and flow and high-tide ripples. Such a leg, when it has done with pretending to retire, will walk straight into the hearts of women. Nothing so fatal to them …

  Indeed, the more one reads about that remarkable leg the more one expects to find that it is attached to the same body as that which sprouted the amazing nose in Tristram Shandy.

  In both writers there is the habit of stopping the clock of narrative when their mind becomes more than usually interested in anything; though before the end of the passage it is usually apparent that they have ceased to be interested in the thing and have merely become fixedly, even fatally, interested in their own interest.

  But Meredith did not grow great because of his reckless originalities of style. He grew great despite them. His greatness came from the beautiful optimism of his mind. There is a passage in The Egoist in which Sir Willoughby Patterne describes a girl by saying that, “she has now what was missing before, a ripe intelligence in addition to her happy disposition—romantic, you would say.” That phrase glows with all the peculiar lamps of Meredith’s brain. If a reader understands it he is more than half way to understanding the whole of Meredith. It is one of those sudden phrases in which an author sets out merely to direct his lens upon a sympathetic character, and ends by photographing himself. Ripe Intelligence and Happy Disposition are the two rarest
bedfellows in literature. It is one of the shortcomings of modern fiction that the ripest intelligences seem all to have been wedded to atrabilious dispositions.

  Before Meredith there had been no author who had combined them as the two partners of his mind; and there was certainly no author who would have thought of suggesting that the first child of intelligence and optimism was romance.

  Meredith was romantic from intellectual conviction. Rapture of the heart is common enough; rapture of the head is a far rarer thing. And being of the head it can survive criticism more easily. This rapturous, romantic vision of Meredith had most important effects on fiction.

  In the first place, it gave birth to a new heroine, mother of a new line of heroines. In an age that was being shocked to its foundations by the theory, incorrectly reported, that men were descended from monkeys, Meredith was on the other side making his heroines more like angels than they ever had been before.

  Of course, there had been angelic-looking heroines already; creatures whose beauty left all men, and apparently themselves as well, dumb with wonder. And there had been heroines like Fielding’s Amelia who had grown wise with sorrow. But to Meredith was left the creation, or rather the re-creation, of the heroine in fiction whose beauty dwelt not so much in her face as in the mind of those—including the reader—who met her. Diana Warwick was a heroine whose brain balanced her beauty. She would have been charming even by letter. There is never the least doubt that Meredith was in love with her mind and not with her body. All Meredith’s heroines, indeed, are starry souls that tread on the peaks of this world knowing sex only as a kind of warm sunrise flush across the pale snows of the mind.

  It may have been this habit of dwelling within the minds of his Dianas and Lucys that led Meredith on to his habit of flitting from one mind to another as he wrote. It was a bad habit inasmuch as it meant that the narrative had to plunge about like a game of follow-my-leader after a butterfly. But it meant also that every incident in the story glowed with the light of emotion. That there was nothing on which someone was not shedding rays of feeling.

  This subjective method of story-telling is so well known to-day that it may now seem almost to be the natural and eternal method of the narrator. In reality there is the same chasm of difference between the method of, say, Richard Feverel and Robinson Crusoe as there is between a parliamentary report in Hansard and the sketch from a special correspondent in the Gallery. Hansard will certainly contain more facts: they will proceed in a perfectly logical and natural sequence and they appear to present the entire essentials of the scene. Yet to the average reader the words in Hansard are as unsatisfying as an echo of which the original is missing. The special correspondent, on the other hand, will inevitably lose nine-tenths of the facts; all the essentials may be missing and only the luxuries of the scene may be left. Yet the account bears the signature of humanity.

  Robinson Crusoe, for instance, is as enchanting as a magiccarpet simply because desert islands in themselves are enchanting and Defoe wrote as though he believed in this one. The figure of the solitary man on a desert island is a fascinating object, for the simple and adequate reason that he is the figure of a solitary man on a desert island. If the island became fully inhabited no one would give him a second thought. In short, Robinson Crusoe interests us; and Robinson Crusoe does not. But Richard Feverel is as great a creation as Richard Feverel. Every character in Meredith’s novels is infused with a lot of life and a little of Meredith. And dull scenes become delightful when viewed through eyes that are alight with other interests.

  The “Diversion Played on a Penny Whistle ” in Richard Feverel is one of the happiest of all the scenes in fiction. In it Meredith did perfectly a thing that had never been done so well before, and has never been done so well since. Love-scenes are in the province of poetry rather than of prose and Meredith brought to literature a mind that moved in the moods of a poet.

  “Lucy! my beloved! ”

  “O Richard! ”

  Out in the world there, in the skirts of the woodland a shepherd boy pipes to meditative eve on a penny whistle.

  Love’s musical instrument is so old, and so poor: it has but two stops; and yet, you see the cunning musician does so much with it!

  One has only to compare that with the stupid, clumsy antics of Fielding’s Tom and Sophia and Smollett’s Roderick and Narcissa and Thackeray’s Pendennis and Laura and Dickens’s Copperfield and Dora, or for that matter anyone else’s someone and somebody else, to realise that Meredith, like an Olympian was looking on love from above.

  Like an Olympian, with winds and lightnings perpetually about his head and his feet caught in a long trailing jumble of words, epithets, ellipses.

  * * *

  Thomas Hardy was considerably less kind to Fate in his books than Fate was to him in his life. It was a piece of irony that none would have appreciated better than Hardy himself. But irony it remained. And before kicking God, with Hardy’s compliments, for being cruel, it is well to remember the penniless, studious architect’s apprentice who enjoyed as sensational a measure of success as though Providence had been reading the novelettes.

  Hardy like Meredith is a writer who lingered on, an intelligent, shrinking shell of himself, too long after he had done the work that made him precious.

  To understand him it is necessary to forget the closely guarded Grand Old Man in the old house of Max Gate, and extend all our lines of thought backwards until we arrive at the Wild Young Man in the new house of Max Gate.

  Once that is done his proverbial pessimism ceases to be a kind of individual melancholia, and becomes merely one of the most interesting cases in an historic epidemic of doubt. For Hardy was living and working in the world of Darwin and Huxley, and he accepted the defeat of Protestantism with equanimity.

  It was another of those little ironies of which he was so fond—feeling that clumsy and chance creation had produced them and that he had spotted them—that Hardy should have spent his early life building and rebuilding churches and his more mature life in emptying them.

  Hardy, I said intentionally, accepted the defeat of Protestantism. Apostates from the Roman Catholic Faith are usually men of a more militant and pugnacious heresy. Hardy merely accepted the new theory that life was without a benevolent supervision from above. But in his first plunge of enthusiasm he plunged too far and began to believe that life was planned by a Euripidean malevolent supervisor. Which is as religious as the other view, even though it happens to be Satanism and not Christianity.

  To understand Hardy’s agnosticism it is necessary to see him not merely as an independent member recording a solitary note against the President of the Immortals, but rather as one of the official Opposition passing into a rigidly prepared division. It was an opposition with John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold and Meredith in its shadow Cabinet. The Prime Minister in power was Newman. Meanwhile God had pulled his robes around him and retired into Brompton.

  When Hardy came to London as a young man he treated religion as a sort of subsidiary subject in the examination of life; something in which he could get honours by eagerness and application. Thus he solemnly recorded in his notebook: “Worked at J. H. Newman’s Apologia, which we have all been talking about lately. A great desire to be convinced by him … style charming, and his logic really human, being based not on syllogisms but on converging probabilities. Only—and here comes the fatal catastrophe—there is no first link to his excellent chain of reasoning, and down you came headlong.…”

  Those notebooks which Hardy kept between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-seven reveal a mind already morbidly mature. In the entries there is a great deal of dismal Dorset turned melancholy Dane. “The world does not despise us; it only neglects us,” he wrote on the eve of a career during which people were very soon to stop neglecting him—he was talked about by the time he was thirty-three—and shortly after was to cease despising him.

  The remark, no matter how regarded, is some comfort. Probably it was written i
n one of those false flashes of optimism that strike across the placid world of the pessimist, like a shooting star in a thick mist. When Hardy wrote those words he was doubtless feeling more conscious of the world’s contempt than usual. Few men, indeed, who have any depth of belief in themselves, have ever been left neglected for long without searching for a cause outside themselves.

  Hardy’s bleak belief was certainly not that Providence sometimes failed to help human beings but that it actually hindered. He saw Fate as something that was as remorseless as a steam-roller, and as dogged as a bloodhound; as something that would flatten and follow. Thus if you were innocent and impetuous, like Tess, you suffered. If you were deliberate and resolved, like Jude, you suffered just as badly. His epic novels, indeed, are a kind of prose Hound of Heaven in which “the strong feet that followed, followed after,” are the feet of diabolical Fate and not of divine friendship.

  The division of Hardy’s fiction into dramatic novels and epic novels is an obvious and, if there are examiners about, a useful separation. Between 1871, when Hardy published Desperate Remedies, and 1891 when Tess of the D’Urbervilles appeared, he had written thirteen novels of which not more than four are really important. These are the dramatic novels, Far From the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge and The Woodlanders. During that period he had risen from grey anxiousness about the future to a roseate serenity in his own affairs. Yet during the same length of time he had changed from a suspicious uncertainty as to the future of the lives of human beings to a calm certainty of failure. Fate might have anything from a farmyard to a churchyard in store for Elfrida or Bathsheba, or any of the earlier heroines. But nothing but tragedy could be the lot of Tess.

  In 1893 Hardy moved into a new study facing east. Thereafter the east wind blew about his soul. He was naturally a man who could not have lived for a moment in the warm, boisterous Meredithian south-west wind. He was always re-orientalising himself towards the east—after sunrise. In that bleak study Hardy wrote Jude the Obscure. And turning his back on the sun was a gesture that was repeated in his book. He set Jude on a hopeful pilgrimage across the earth, and followed him, snuffing out the stars one by one over his head as he went.