by Philip Child
Long since borne down with days and dropping dust:
The singing has not made me less alone
Nor will it you.
(From Quentin’s Notebook)
Appendix I
“The Pessimistic Novel: Re-Discover the Normal Man”
By Philip Child
The Canadian Author
Vol. XV, No. 1
September 1937
Pages 22–23
Philip A. Child, in a paper modestly called “Some Remarks on the Pessimistic Novel,” said:
I shall not rashly attempt to “dispose of” the pessimistic novel, since obviously the sway between the optimistic and the pessimistic mood is too characteristic of the flux of experience not to be the very heart-beat of the novel. According to our temperaments we may view as greatest those writers who feel that life is essentially tragic yet strangely mingled with good, or vice versa. But sheer optimism in a book, or undiluted pessimism we should find strangely flat.
For my part I simply suggest a distinction — not in the least original — between the pessimism that is bracing and fruitful and that, on the other hand, of the spoilt ego-maniac full of gall who “can’t take it,” as we say, and who gets his revenge on the public.… Purposely I have stated the extreme case.
Since the war, for reasons obvious to us all, the novel has grown more pessimistic. The Edwardian novel was critical, the post-war novel is inclined to be not only critical but skeptical. The change is only partly due to the war. Other elements which everyone is aware of have entered into the picture: the “discovery of the subconscious,” the crowding into cities and the rootlessness and instability of city life, universal education and consequent mediocrity of ideals — to name a few. Property is no longer the axiomatic fundamental of society. Virginia Woolf expresses this change with intentional exaggeration. “About December 1910,” she writes, “human character changed.… All human relations have shifted — those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature.”
Exploring Consciousness
Now I venture to believe it is not human character that has changed, but our view of the significance of human character. Even the proud certainty of science has descended to a theory called “relativity”; and it has been suggested that our doubt of the nature of knowledge itself is more serious than the loss of faith in the supernatural, which marked the nineteenth century.
It is not surprising in these circumstances to find the writer turning from what is known to that which knows — to the individual consciousness; to find him turning inward in his pursuit of reality to explore consciousness with his own mind as the main object as well as the measure of experiment.
That this turning inward has been fruitful, that it has permanently enlarged the scope of the novel no sensible person will deny. But the movement has had the defects of its qualities. Too narrow a light, however strong, has been thrown on the single individual atom of humanity. The movement has led too often to the pessimism of myopia. Since the war we have had from gifted persons strange and exciting jungle growths of personality, twisted, titanic Marlowesque — but exotic. Where are the characters, Tom, Dick, and Harry, whom we agree to like or dislike at their face value and who make us feel at home in a novel as they do in life?
Life Under a Microscope
The total impression is somehow distorted. Why? Is it not because here we are seeing life not with normal eyes, but under a microscope? And life is not lived with the eye glued to a microscope. As every psychologist knows, the best mental cure for a consciousness locked up in introspective pessimism is a turning outward of the eyes of the mind.
Those powerful but star-crossed novels about the war pose in an acute form this pessimistic question (and it is our question!): “In a world where men hate one another, and where the gods seem to laugh at our puny idealisms out of the mouths of big guns — is a spiritual view of life possible?” That is the question of the war and in a less acute form of peace time too. These war books pose the question, but with a few exceptions they do not attempt, however desperate the effort, to answer it. To cope with the question, to attempt an answer, however inadequate, has become the social responsibility of the writer.
For many years now it has been a fashionable theory that the novelist’s job is to describe life without attempting more than a tacit interpretation of it. Now, I venture to assert that more and more the novelist must become a philosopher: yet always with the proviso that he must somehow or other manage to translate philosophy into fictional terms. And I do not need to remind you that that is the most difficult technical feat of all.…
Find the Normal Man
The modern novelist must rediscover the normal man in the modern world. Who is he? He is the man who manages somehow in spite of everything to live creditably, to preserve his sanity, his humour, and his sense of proportion. He is the good husband and the good father, and he is the man who makes the world go round. He is Mr. Chips (a little sentimentalized: and why not?) and in grimmer mode, he is the hero of Hans Fallada’s book Little Man, What Now? (there he is the good and normal man under misfortune). And (for of course he belongs to both sexes) he is Mrs. Dalloway in Virginia Woolf’s fine novel. He is not the heroes of D. H. Lawrence’s novels, who are sex-ridden egotists. Nor is he the hero of Joyce’s Ulysses , a man whose egotistical pride grows like a cancer on his soul.
For my part, I find one great lack in our contemporary pessimists. What I would suggest is that authors and perhaps the public whom they represent are far too serious about their own little, individual selves, and too little serious about that larger self, of which to be sure we are a part, and which is called humanity.
Sad Lack of Humour
It is alarming that the most significant modern novels, those which delve deepest, have too little of humour in the broad human sense that Chaucer and Shakespeare and Fielding and Dickens had it.
Now humour is doubtless many things, but whatever else it may be it is a way of looking at life. It contains an element of humility, in the true and not the degrading sense of the word, combined with a sudden flash of understanding that the burden of the universe is not after all on one’s own shoulders.
Satire there is in plenty, but, as I see it, satire is wit of the mind, not of the heart. The urge behind satire is dislike of humanity (think of Swift), the urge behind humour is love for one’s fellows.
Dickens, the great Victorian humorist, could be angry at a social abuse (and in those days Dickens’ anger was a powerful weapon for good), yet at the same time he could laugh at Charles Dickens the individual. The character of David Copperfield, as you all know, is drawn from Dickens himself. And with what gentle humour does Dickens smile at the youthful mistakes, tragedies even, of David. Dickens seems always to be saying: “Yes, as a man, I too have suffered the common lot, — but everything I or you suffer, dear reader, is worth the paying merely to be alive. Around me, after all, is that grand, full, salty world of men and women, in which merely to live, move, and have our being is enough.”
I ought not to end on too solemn a note. Let me then repeat a story once told by Sir Gilbert Murray to illustrate the fact that an artist ought to view with a certain objectivity not only his creations but also himself.
The story concerns on the one hand a celebrated teacher of art in a London school who was a witty Frenchman; and on the other, a very young lady who was his pupil and would not do what she was told. In vain did he attempt to drill her in the fundamentals of drawing, she persisted in following her own aberrant notions of what a work of art should be. Finally, in desperation, he told her that unless she obeyed his instructions he would teach her no longer. “But,” she objected, “my mother wanted me to draw so that I could express my personality.” Her instructor shrugged as only a Frenchman can shrug.
“Mademoiselle’s personality interests only her mamma.”
Appendix II
Philip Child wrote the following war poems in 1924 while he was a lecturer at Trinity College, University of Toronto. These are some of the earliest examples of Child’s war writing, and though both were unpublished, Child included them in a handwritten collection of his poems he presented to his parents for Christmas in 1927, titled Heaven in Hell’s Despite: Verses by Philip Child . This manuscript contains eighteen poems, including “Brother Newt to Brother Fly” and “The Apple,” which both appear in God’s Sparrows .
Battle Scene
Yonder by broken wire and twisted tree, a
frozen face
Lies quiet as the sleeping stars, and wan
As the scant moon it gazes on.
The hand of night upon the marble brow is
sweet and cool
And flowing seas of silence steal upon the
spellbound place
The whole world lies, as it were dead within
an ice-filmed pool.
Here slumber those who rest from torment, and
wake to sorrow;
Sweet rest! the utter peace unmans the soul.
But now the moon stoops down and bears the
spell away:
Upon the rack another day is bound; -another
day!
Whose turn to lie forever in peace of moon and
stars tomorrow?
(1924)
An Eight-Inch Howitzer
“Old dodder-shanks, you’ve reached a sorry pass,
Squat on your muddy haunches, brooding still,
A baleful snout yet poised to hurl a mass
Of hissing iron, at your master’s will.
What now old spitting toad, had you a voice
You could unfold of men and war a story choice.”
“Be quiet, friend, respect an aged soul
Who lately served you and your kindred well
E’er war, receding, left him in this hold,
Who fired many a round of goodly shell
E’er time, remorseless, trod him under heel,
Rusted his age bore, and stooped his creaking wheel.
“Good friend, respect in me the works of man;
Despise me not, I was his paragon,
The very acme of the sculptor’s plan,
Worthy to place beside the Parthenon.
They made cantatas for their souls to sing,
Then forged my thunder — knowing that a worthier thing.
“I helped their ‘Evolution,’ too, of course,
Destroyed the fit, to let the weak survive;
I was their greatest joke, their tour de force ,
I served to keep their irony alive.
Some power, too, I had beyond man’s will —
By God, my breezy friend, you should have seen me kill.”
(1924)
Copyright © Dundurn Press, 2017
Originally Published by Thornton Butterworth, London, 1937
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Child, Philip, 1898-1978, author
God's sparrows / Philip Child ; introduction by James R. Calhoun.
(Voyageur classics)
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4597-3643-6 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-4597-3644-3 (PDF).--
ISBN 978-1-4597-3645-0 (EPUB)
I. Title. II. Series: Voyageur classics
PS8505.H52G63 2017 C813'.52 C2016-907642-3
C2016-907643-1
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