I
SHALL we ever obtain this truth which all novelists seem striving after, or have we ever obtained it—truth, subjective truth even, such as we find it, for instance, in Rousseau’s “Confessions,” or in certain veiled autobiographies, like “Werther” and “Adolphe”?
A hundred reasons prevent the novelist from working with absolute fidelity to life; and reluctance to abuse confidence, to hurt the feelings of his models, is the least important of these reasons. The strongest reason is that reality is reality, defies presentation by its complexity; that a mutilated, isolated, arranged reality, with cause and effect freely upset, is no reality at all; moreover, that it is doubtful whether any one save a professional novelist would give a thank you for real reality in a novel. Reality is valuable to us only as the raw material for something very different; the artistic sense alters it into patterns, the logical faculty reduces it to ideas. Except for individual action, the individual case, which is the only reality, has no final importance.
page: 236But the novelist continues to delude himself; he piques himself upon the quality he cannot get. Most novelists (and the more deliberately realistic the worse) treat human life and character by a system of scientific fictions, deliberately simplifying phenomena till they become abstractions, diagrams; they pretend to explain as the result of a single factor of grossly exaggerated importance what must have been the result of a dozen or a hundred factors. So, the real action copied from life is made the centre of a circle of unrealities.
Again, most novelists practise realism by explaining the unknown in one real personage by the known in another real personage, most commonly their own self. They fuse together two creatures of the same category, and think that two half organisms must necessarily make one whole, forgetting, alas! that you can unite only such parts as complete each other, but not such others as are either duplicates or substitutes; producing by such arrangements sirens and minotaurs, creatures who could not have assimilated with a bird’s gizzard or a ruminant’s stomach the food which must have passed through a human gullet or set in motion human limbs. At best they patch up centaurs, decorative animals who can trot and caper, because the artist paints them trotting and capering, but who have two stomachs and two pairs of lungs, those of the man and those of the horse, a reduplication which natural selection and Dr. Weissmann’s “Law of Panmixia” render improbable.
Is this exaggeration? Scarcely. Is not a Père Goriot, for instance, an agglomeration of the parental page: 237 quality of at least a dozen parents, something analogous to the creature on the Shield of Sicily and the Isle of Man, made of three legs without a head or arms? The day will perhaps come when biological psychology and the study of individual cases, when, above all, a scientific habit of mind, will accustom us to the notion that an individual cannot be anything except himself; that if a real Tom were fused with a real Dick, and both with a real Harry, there would be an end to the three realities without the birth of a fourth one. We may then learn, perhaps, how real people are made up of various strands; the necessary fashion in which grandfather Falstaff reacts on great‐grandfather Hamlet; and how maternal grandmother Clarissa Harlowe is modified or neutralised by paternal grandmother Becky Sharp; nay, what colour of hair and skin, what voice and gait, what physiological affinities and repulsions the various living puppets of the world’s stage can have.
Meanwhile, the psychological novelist traffics in people’s ignorance, and men like Bourget and Maupassant manufacture individuals and types much as our earliest ancestors made up bird‐women, bull‐men, and that magnificent human document, the bronze chimæra of Arezzo.
Luckily, there are still novelists without scientific pretensions, without mania for reality; or, shall we say, luckily there is among novelists a certain amount of intuition, of that synthetic and sympathetic creation which is genius. I will not even speak of Tolstoi. Far lesser men, like Björnsen and Rosny, have given us work which is intuitive and genial. page: 238 They do not make up a complete skeleton for sale out of odd bones picked out of the heap (I knew such a skeleton once, the property of a painter; it had French legs and the skull and spine of a Dutchman). They tell us about creatures not objectively real, but not subjectively unreal, who have come to exist by a spontaneous stratification of impressions, in the transmuting heat of liking and disliking; creatures who have life because born of the life, the preferences and aversions, the passionate hope and hostility of the author.
For the rest, should we regret the novelist’s incapacity to compass reality? Surely not. No book, only experience, could teach us to know the individual. Indeed, there is no individual to know; since what we take for one is merely the impression made on ourselves by the ever‐shrouded, mysterious selves of other folk. The novel cannot teach us to know the individual. But it can teach us certain general—very general—facts about classes and the surroundings of classes. It can teach us the influences to which individuals are subjected, whether of bodily crisis or of social position. Thus, all children cut their teeth and crawl on the floor; all girls gradually evolve into women; all people change; all people have material wants, social ideals, national peculiarities. What if we might have known all this without the novelist’s pseudo‐realities? We should not have found it out so efficiently, so universally; we should have known these things piecemeal, superficially, always alike too late in the day, for want of something to make it worth our while—of something to catch our attention and enlist our page: 239 sympathies. Now, the novelist makes it worth our while. By interesting us in the unreal creatures, children of his wishes or diagrams of his analysis, he accustoms us to take interest in the living mysteries who walk, act, and suffer all round us. And when he is a great novelist—not an analyst, not a copyist of the actual, but a sympathetic artist, a passionate lover of the human creature—he can do infinitely more: he can people our fancy with living phantoms whom we love, he can enrich our life by the strange power called charm.
