The process of discovery goes on perpetually. Always more of life is being reclaimed and recognized. Therefore, to fix the character of the novel, which is the youngest and most vigorous of the arts, at this moment would be like fixing the character of poetry in the eighteenth century and saying that because Gray’s Elegy was ‘ poetry ‘ Don Juan was impossible. An art practised by hosts of people, sheltering diverse minds, is also bound to be simmering, volatile, unstable. And for some reason not here to be examined, fiction is the most hospitable of hosts; fiction to-day draws to itself writers who would even yesterday have been poets, dramatists, pamphleteers, historians. Thus ‘the novel’, as we still call it with such parsimony of language, is clearly splitting apart into books which have nothing in common but this one inadequate title. Already the novelists are so far apart that they scarcely communicate, and to one novelist the work of another is quite genuinely unintelligible or quite genuinely negligible.
The most significant proof of this fertility, however, is provided by our sense of feeling something that has not yet been said; of some desire still unsatisfied. A very general, a very elementary, view of this desire would seem to show that it points in two directions. Life — it is a commonplace — is growing more complex. Our self-consciousness is becoming far more alert and better trained. We are aware of relations and subtleties which have not yet been explored. Of this school Proust is the pioneer, and undoubtedly there are still to be born writers who will carry the analysis of Henry James still further, who will reveal and relate finer threads of feeling, stranger and more obscure imaginations.
But also we desire synthesis. The novel, it is agreed, can follow life; it can amass details. But can it also select? Can it symbolize? Can it give us an epitome as well as an inventory? It was some such function as this that poetry discharged in the past. But, whether for the moment or for some longer time, poetry with her rhythms, her poetic diction, her strong flavour of tradition, is too far from us to-day to do for us what she did for our parents. Prose perhaps is the instrument best fitted to the complexity and difficulty of modern life. And prose — we have to repeat it — is still so youthful that we scarcely know what powers it may not hold concealed within it. Thus it is possible that the novel in time to come may differ as widely from the novel of Tolstoy and Jane Austen as the poetry of Browning and Byron differs from the poetry of Lydgate and Spenser. In time to come — but time to come lies far beyond our province.
PART II: THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
The New Biography
‘THE aim of biography,’ said Sir Sydney Lee, who had A perhaps read and written more lives than any man of his time, ‘is the truthful transmission of personality’, and no single sentence could more neatly split up into two parts the whole problem of biography as it presents itself to us to-day. On the one hand there is truth; on the other there is personality. And if we think of truth as something of granitelike solidity and of personality as something of rainbow-like intangibility and reflect that the aim of biography is to weld these two into one seamless whole, we shall admit that the problem is a stiff one and that we need not wonder if biographers have for the most part failed to solve it.
For the truth of which Sir Sidney speaks, the truth which biography demands, is truth in its hardest, most obdurate form; it is truth as truth is to be found in the British Museum; it is truth out of which all vapour of falsehood has been pressed by the weight of research. Only when truth had been thus established did Sir Sidney Lee use it in the building of his monument; and no one can be so foolish as to deny that the piles be raised of such hard facts, whether one is called Shakespeare or King Edward the Seventh, are worthy of all our respect. For there is a virtue in truth; it has an almost mystic power. Like radium, it seems able to give off forever and ever grains of energy, atoms of light. It stimulates the mind, which is endowed with a curious susceptibility in this direction as no fiction, however artful or highly coloured, can stimulate it. Truth being thus efficacious and supreme, we can only explain the fact that Sir Sidney’s life of Shakespeare is dull, and that his life of Edward the Seventh is unreadable, by supposing that though both are stuffed with truth, he failed to choose those truths which transmit personality. For in order that the light of personality may shine through, facts must be manipulated; some must be brightened; others shaded; yet, in the process, they must never lose their integrity. And it is obvious that it is easier to obey these precepts by considering that the true life of your subject shows itself in action which is evident rather than in that inner life of thought and emotion which meanders darkly and obscurely through the hidden channels of the soul. Hence, in the old days, the biographer chose the easier path. A life, even when it was lived by a divine, was a series of exploits. The biographer, whether he was Izaak Walton or Mrs. Hutchinson or that unknown writer who is often so surprisingly eloquent on tombstones and memorial tablets, told a tale of battle and victory. With their stately phrasing and their deliberate artistic purpose, such records transmit personality with a formal sincerity which is perfectly satisfactory of its kind. And so, perhaps, biography might have pursued its way, draping the robes decorously over the recumbent figures of the dead, had there not arisen toward the end of the eighteenth century one of those curious men of genius who seem able to break up the stiffness into which the company has fallen by speaking in his natural voice. So Boswell spoke. So we hear booming out from Boswell’s page the voice of Samuel Johnson. ‘No, sir; stark insensibility’, we hear him say. Once we have heard those words we are aware that there is an incalculable presence among us which will go on ringing and reverberating in widening circles however times may change and ourselves. All the draperies and decencies of biography fall to the ground. We can no longer maintain that life consists in actions only or in works. It consists in personality. Something has been liberated beside which all else seems cold and colourless. We are freed from a servitude which is now seen to be intolerable. No longer need we pass solemnly and stiffly from camp to council chamber. We may sit, even with the great and good, over the table and talk.
Through the influence of Boswell, presumably, biography all through the nineteenth century concerned itself as much with the lives of the sedentary as with the lives of the active. It sought painstakingly and devotedly to express not only the outer life of work and activity but the inner life of emotion and thought. The uneventful lives of poets and painters were written out as lengthily as the lives of soldiers and statesmen. But the Victorian biography was a parti-coloured, hybrid, monstrous birth. For though truth of fact was observed as scrupulously as Boswell observed it, the personality which Boswell’s genius set free was hampered and distorted. The convention which Boswell had destroyed settled again, only in a different form, upon biographers who lacked his art. Where the Mrs. Hutchinsons and the Izaak Waltons had wished to prove that their heroes were prodigies of courage and learning the Victorian biographer was dominated by the idea of goodness. Noble, upright, chaste, severe; it is thus that the Victorian worthies are presented to us. The figure is almost always above life size in top-hat and frock-coat, and the manner of presentation becomes increasingly clumsy and laborious. For lives which no longer express themselves in action take shape in innumerable words. The conscientious biographer may not tell a fine tale with a flourish, but must toil through endless labyrinths and embarrass himself with countless documents. In the end he produces an amorphous mass, a life of Tennyson, or of Gladstone, in which we go seeking disconsolately for voice or laughter, for curse or anger, for any trace that this fossil was once a living man. Often, indeed, we bring back some invaluable trophy, for Victorian biographies are laden with truth; but always we rummage among them with a sense of the prodigious waste, of the artistic wrongheadedness of such a method.
With the twentieth century, however, a change came over biography, as it came over fiction and poetry. The first and most visible sign of it was in the difference in size. In the first twenty years of the new century biographies must hav
e lost half their weight. Mr. Strachey compressed four stout Victorians into one slim volume; M. Maurois boiled the usual two volumes of a Shelley life into one little book the size of a novel. But the diminution of size was only the outward token of an inward change. The point of view had completely altered. If we open one of the new school of biographies its bareness, its emptiness makes us at once aware that the author’s relation to his subject is different. He is no longer the serious and sympathetic companion, toiling even slavishly in the footsteps of his hero. Whether friend or enemy, admiring or critical, he is an equal. In any case, he preserves his freedom and his right to independent judgment. Moreover, he does not think himself constrained to follow every step of the way. Raised upon a little eminence which his independence has made for him, he sees his subject spread about him. He chooses; he synthesizes; in short, he has ceased to be the chronicler; he has become an artist.
Few books illustrate the new attitude to biography better than Some People, by Harold Nicolson. In his biographies of Tennyson and of Byron Mr. Nicolson followed the path which had been already trodden by Mr. Strachey and others. Here he has taken a step on his own initiative. For here he has devised a method of writing about people and about himself as though they were at once real and imaginary. He has succeeded remarkably, if not entirely, in making the best of both worlds. Some People is not fiction because it has the substance, the reality of truth. It is not biography because it has the freedom, the artistry of fiction. And if we try to discover how he has won the liberty which enables him to present us with these extremely amusing pages we must in the first place credit him with having had the courage to rid himself of a mountain of illusion. An English diplomat is offered all the bribes which usually induce people to swallow humbug in large doses with composure. If Mr. Nicolson wrote about Lord Curzon it should have been solemnly. If he mentioned the Foreign Office it should have been respectfully. His tone toward the world of Bognors and Whitehall should have been friendly but devout. But thanks to a number of influences and people, among whom one might mention Max Beerbohm and Voltaire, the attitude of the bribed and docile official has been blown to atoms. Mr. Nicolson laughs. He laughs at Lord Curzon; he laughs at the Foreign Office; he laughs at himself. And since his laughter is the laughter of the intelligence it has the effect of making us take the people he laughs at seriously. The figure of Lord Curzon concealed behind the figure of a drunken valet is touched off with merriment and irreverence; yet of all the studies of Lord Curzon which have been written since his death none makes us think more kindly of that preposterous but, it appears, extremely human man.
So it would seem as if one of the great advantages of the new school to which Mr. Nicolson belongs is the lack of pose, humbug, solemnity. They approach their bigwigs fearlessly. They have no fixed scheme of the universe, no standard of courage or morality to which they insist that he shall conform. The man himself is the supreme object of their curiosity. Further, and it is this chiefly which has so reduced the bulk of biography, they maintain that the man himself, the pith and essence of his character, shows itself to the observant eye in the tone of a voice, the turn of a head, some little phrase or anecdote picked up in passing. Thus in two subtle phrases, in one passage of brilliant description, whole chapters of the Victorian volume are synthesized and summed up. Some People is full of examples of this new phase of the biographer’s art. Mr. Nicolson wants to describe a governess and he tells us that she had a drop at the end of her nose and made him salute the quarterdeck. He wants to describe Lord Curzon, and he makes him lose his trousers and recite ‘Tears, Idle Tears’. He does not cumber himself with a single fact about them. He waits till they have said or done something characteristic, and then he pounces on it with glee. But, though he waits with an intention of pouncing which might well make his victims uneasy if they guessed it, he lays suspicion by appearing himself in his own proper person in no flattering light. He has a scrubby dinner-jacket, he tells us; a pink bumptious face, curly hair, and a curly nose. He is as much the subject of his own irony and observation as they are. He lies in wait for his own absurdities as artfully as for theirs. Indeed, by the end of the book we realize that the figure which has been most completely and most subtly displayed is that of the author. Each of the supposed subjects holds up in his or her small bright diminishing mirror a different reflection of Harold Nicolson. And though the figure thus revealed is not noble or impressive or shown in a very heroic attitude, it is for these very reasons extremely like a real human being. It is thus, he would seem to say, in the mirrors of our friends, that we chiefly live.
To have contrived this effect is a triumph not of skill only, but of those positive qualities which we are likely to treat as if they were negative — freedom from pose, from sentimentality, from illusion. And the victory is definite enough to leave us asking what territory it has won for the art of biography. Mr. Nicolson has proved that one can use many of the devices of fiction in dealing with real life. He has shown that a little fiction mixed with fact can be made to transmit personality very effectively. But some objections or qualifications suggest themselves. Undoubtedly the figures in Some People are all rather below life size. The irony with which they are treated, though it has its tenderness, stunts their growth. It dreads nothing more than that one of these little beings should grow up and becomes serious or perhaps tragic. And, again, they never occupy the stage for more than a few brief moments. They do not want to be looked at very closely. They have not a great deal to show us. Mr. Nicolson makes us feel, in short, that he is playing with very dangerous elements. An incautious movement and the book will be blown sky high. He is trying to mix the truth of real life and the truth of fiction. He can only do it by using no more than a pinch of either. For though both truths are genuine, they are antagonistic; let them meet and they destroy each other. Even here, where the imagination is not deeply engaged, when we find people whom we know to be real like Lord Oxford or Lady Colefax, mingling with Miss Plimsoll and Marstock, whose reality we doubt, the one casts suspicion upon the other. Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously.
And here we again approach the difficulty which, for all his ingenuity, the biographer still has to face. Truth of fact and truth of fiction are incompatible; yet he is now more than ever urged to combine them. For it would seem that the life which is increasingly real to us is the fictitious life; it dwells in the personality rather than in the act. Each of us is more Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, than he is John Smith of the Corn Exchange. Thus, the biographer’s imagination is always being stimulated to use the novelist’s art of arrangement, suggestion, dramatic effect to expound the private life. Yet if he carries the use of fiction too far, so that he disregards the truth, or can only introduce it with incongruity, he loses both worlds; he has neither the freedom of fiction nor the substance of fact. Boswell’s astonishing power over us is based largely upon his obstinate veracity, so that we have implicit belief in what he tells us. When Johnson says ‘No, sir; stark insensibility’, the voice has a ring in it because we have been told, soberly and prosaically, a few pages earlier, that Johnson ‘was entered a Commoner of Pembroke, on the 31st of October, 1728, being then in his nineteenth year’. We are in the world of brick and pavement; of birth, marriage, and death; of Acts of Parliament; of Pitt and Burke and Sir Joshua Reynolds. Whether this is a more real world than the world of Bohemia and Hamlet and Macbeth we doubt; but the mixture of the two is abhorrent.
Be that as it may we can assure ourselves by a very simple experiment that the days of Victorian biography are over. Consider one’s own life; pass under review a few years that one has actually lived. Conceive how Lord Morley would have expounded them; how Sir Sidney Lee would have documented them; how strangely all that has been most real in them would have slipped through their fingers. Nor can we name the biographer whose art is subtle and bold enough to present that queer amalgamation of dream and reality, that perpetual
marriage of granite and rainbow. His method still remains to be discovered. But Mr. Nicolson with his mixture of biography and autobiography, of fact and fiction, of Lord Curzon’s trousers and Miss Plimsoll’s nose, waves his hand airily in a possible direction.
A Talk about Memoirs
JUDITH: I wonder — shall I give my bird a real beak or an orange one? Whatever they may say, silks have been ruined by the war. But what are you looking behind the curtain for? Ann: There is no gentleman present? Judith: None, unless you count the oil portrait of Uncle John. Ann: Oh, then, we can talk about the Greeks! There is not a single memoir in the whole of Greek literature. There! You can’t contradict me; and so we go on to wonder how the ladies of the race spent the morning when it was wet and the hours between tea and dinner when it was dark. Judith: The mornings never are wet in Athens. Then they don’t drink tea. They drink a red sweet stuff out of glasses, and eat lumps of Turkish delight with it. Ann: Ah, that explains! A dry, hot climate, no twilight, wine, and blue sky. In England the atmosphere is naturally aqueous, and as if there weren’t enough outside, we drench ourselves with tea and coffee at least four times a day. It’s atmosphere that makes English literature unlike any other — clouds, sunsets, fogs, exhalations, miasmas. And I believe that the element of water is supplied chiefly by the memoir writers. Look what great swollen books they are! (She lifts five volumes in her hands, one after another.) Dropsical. Still, there are times — I suppose it’s the lack of wine in my blood — when the mere thought of a classic is repulsive. Judith: I agree with you. The classics — oh dear, what was I going to say? — something very wise, I know. But I can’t embroider a parrot and talk about Milton in the same breath. Ann: Whereas you could embroider a parrot and talk about Lady Georgiana Peel? Judith: Precisely. Do tell me about Lady Georgiana Peel and the rest. Those are the books I love. Ann: I do more than love them; I reverence them as the parents and begetters of our race. And if I knew Mr. Lytton Strachey, I’d tell him what I think of him for behaving disrespectfully of the great English art of biography. My dear Judith, I had a vision last night of a widow with a taper setting fire to a basketful of memoirs — half a million words — two volumes — stout — blue — with a crest — genealogical trees — family portraits — all complete. ‘Art be damned!’ I cried, and woke in a frenzy. Judith: Well, I fancy she heard you. But let’s begin on Lady Georgiana Peel. Ann: Lady Georgiana Peel was born in the year 1836, and was the daughter of Lord John Russell. The Russells are said to be descended from Thor, the God of Thunder; their more direct ancestor being one Henri de Rozel, who, in the eleventh century — Judith: We’ll take their word for it. Ann: Very well. But don’t forget it. The Russells are cold in temperament, contradictious by nature. Ahem! Lord and Lady John were resting under an oak tree in Richmond Park when Lord John remarked how pleasant it would be to live in that white house behind the palings for the rest of their lives. No sooner said than the owner falls ill and dies. The Queen, with that unfailing insight, etc., sends for Lord John, etc., and offers him the lodge for life, etc., etc., etc. I mean they lived happily ever after, though as time went by, a factory chimney somewhat spoilt the view. Judith: And Lady Georgiana? Ann: Well, there’s not much about Lady Georgiana. She saw the Queen having her hair brushed, and she went to stay at Woburn. And what d’you think they did there? They threw mutton chops out of the window ‘ for whoever cared to pick them up’. And each guest had a piece of paper by his plate ‘in which to wrap up an eatable for the people waiting outside’. Judith: Mutton chops! people waiting outside! Ann: Ah, now the charm begins to work. A snowy Christmas — imagine a fair-haired little girl at the window — early in the forties the scene is — frost on the ground — a mutton chop descending. Don’t you see all the arms going up and the poor wretches trampling the flower-beds in their struggles? But, ‘I think’, she says, ‘the custom died out.’ And then she married, and her husband’s riding was the pride of the county; and when he won a race he gave something to the village church. But I don’t know that there’s much more to be said. Judith: Please go on. The charm is working; I’m not asleep; I’m in the drawing-room at Woburn in the forties. Ann: Lady Georgiana being, as I told you, descended from the God of Thunder, is not one to take liberties with life. The scene is a little empty. There’s Charles Dickens wearing a pink shirt front embroidered with white; the Russell mausoleum in the background; sailors with icicles hanging from their whiskers; the Grosvenor boys shooting snipe in Belgrave Square; Lord John handing the Queen down to dinner — and so forth. Let’s consult Mr. Bridges. He may help us to fill it in. ‘ Our mothers were modelled as closely as might be on the example of the Great Queen.... If they were not always either beautiful or wise they gained love and respect everywhere without being either.... But, whatever happens, women will still be women and men men.’ Shall I go on skipping? Judith: I seem to gather that the wallpapers were dark and the sideboards substantial. Ann: Yes, but we’ve too much furniture already. Life is what we want. (She turns over the pages of several volumes without saying anything.) Judith: Oh, Ann; it’s fearfully dull at Woburn in the forties. Moreover, my parrot is turning into a sacred fowl. I shall be presenting him to the village church next. Is no one coming to call? Ann: Wait a moment. I fancy I see Miss Dempster approaching. Judith: Quick; let me look at her picture. A devout, confidential lady — Bedchamber woman to Queen Victoria, I should guess. I can fancy her murmuring: ‘Poor, poor Princess’; or, ‘Dearest Lady Charlotte has had a sad loss in the death of her favourite gillie’, as she extracts from the Royal Head a sleek tortoiseshell pin and lays it reverently in the golden tray. By the way, can you imagine Queen Victoria’s hair? I can’t. Ann: Lady Georgiana says it was ‘long and fair’. Be that as it may, Miss Dempster had nothing to do with her hair-pins — save that, I think it likely her daydreams took that direction. She was a penniless lass with a long pedigree; Scotch, of course, moving in the best society— ‘one of the Shropshire Corbets who (through the Leycesters) is a cousin of Dean Stanley’ — that’s her way of describing people; and for my part I find it very descriptive. But wait — here’s a scene that promises well. Imagine the terrace of the Blythswoods’ villa at Cannes. An eclipse of the moon is taking place; the Emperor Dom Pedro of Portugal has his eye fixed to the telescope; it is chilly, and a copper-coloured haze suffuses the sky. Meanwhile, Miss Dempster and the Prince of Hohenzollern walk up and down talking. What d’ye think they talk about?... ‘we agreed that it had never occurred to us before that somewhere our Earth’s shadow must be ever falling.... Speaking of the dark and shadowed days of human life I quoted Mrs. Browning’s lines: “Think, the passing of a trail, To the nature most undone, Like the shadow on the dial, Proves the presence of the sun.’” You don’t want to hear about the death of the Duke of Albany and his appearance in his coffin or the Emperor of Germany and his cancer? Judith: For Heaven’s sake, no! Ann: Well, then, we must shut up Miss Dempster. But isn’t it queer how Lady Georgiana and the rest have made us feel like naughty, dirty, mischievous children? I don’t altogether enjoy the feeling, and yet there is something august in their unyielding authority. They have fronts of brass; not a doubt or a desire disturbs them outwardly; and so they proceed over a world which for us is alternately a desert or a flowering wilderness stuck about with burning bushes and mocking macaws, as if it were Piccadilly or the Cromwell Road at three o’clock in the afternoon. I detect passions and pieties and convictions all dumb and deep sunk which serve them for a kind of spiritual petrol. What, my dear Judith, have we got in its place? Judith: If, like me, you’d been sitting in the drawing-room at Woburn for the past fifty years, you would be feeling a little stiff. Did they never amuse themselves? Was death their only amusement, and rank their sole romance? Ann:
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