Art, indeed, is the dispossessed deity. For these novels are not works of art, they are social documents, imaginary history, biology, or natural science. If our knight-errants of fiction were to observe a man waving his handkerchief from a bus, they would immediately set to work constructing his past history and relating it to his present action, or declaring how many times he waved it, or describing why and in what circumstances he waved it, or the colour of the handkerchief, or even the other occupiers of the bus, more probably the whole blessed log-all out of their own preoccupations; but never the significance, the total impression of the occasion or its kinship with the movements of objective life. So this fiction becomes more and more sectional, and less and less charged with the common purpose of universal ideas. It lives, not in the world, but in enclosures; it tends to be psychological only within definite limits, and like certain parthenogenetic insects, to draw sustenance only from itself. It has nothing of the international appeal of Conrad, Hardy, Hudson (" Green Mansions," etc.), Mrs. Wharton in America, of Dostoievsky in Russia, or of Jules Romains, the author of that suggestive book " Mort de Quelqu'un," in France. It lives, to use the Bergsonian phrase, on a group-consciousness and not on a worldconsciousness. It has very little of the passionate, vital, and epic inspiration generated by a broad, true, and objective attitude to life, and it is deplorably without any sense of self-criticism.

Of course these terminologies and logomachies of "realist" and "romanticist" mean very little. Too often they are the narcotics of criticism. A work of art is not bad because it is realist and good because it is

romantic. Still more futile is it to shuffle and sort literary epochs into this heading and that heading. As frequently as not, realism and romance co-exist in one period. But I fancy it is permissible to dub these novelists "realists," because theirs is the scientific method and the scientific method alone. And, inasmuch as their work is a kind of soft clay which, being pressed hard against the age, receives an impression of it, of its outside, the whole of its outside; so the characteristics of that work do reflect with a singular minuteness the two ostensible peculiarities of our generation to which I have, with fell intent, more than once called your attention-system on the one hand and confusion on the other. On the plane where passion and hatred meet, there are shamefully matched the extreme of system and the extreme of confusion. And not only does realism contain these two apparent contradictions within itself, but it is, in the same way and in its scientific aspect, to be placed in contrast with and in juxtaposition to the pseudo-picturesque.

You may think this a severe indictment, but fiction, if it is to become literature, must not be content to be examined merely by higher-certificate standards. It has, too, plenty of promise. Its earnestness and sincerity are unqualified. It has, more often than one would expect, something to say, and is very anxious to say it. And if I seem to be querulous about its defects it is because I love our English (not British) literature so deeply that I detest to see it floundering and being surpassed by that of nations who once could not hold a candle to it.

Continuing these rather ponderous notes about the novel, I want in this letter to discuss Charles Marriott because his work represents so profound a reaction against the realistic novel, against fetching and carrying into print what our good realists would call things as they jolly well are. The realists won't let you keep this present at arm's length. Like the unfortunate Nun in "The Ingoldsby Legends," you are walled up in it.

Let us see to what extent Marriott's novels (his name you will not see in the pontifical announcements of literary dinners and ceremonies) are a protest against realism. There are two definite types of novel being written to-day in England-the popular type and the more ambitious type of the younger generation. Outside of these groups, there are a number of novelists who refuse to be classified and are inclined to look at the Here and Now with their heads on one side-Conrad and Belloc of course-Chesterton, Rose Macaulay (who has a bright eye), Miss Delafield, William Caine (for whom I have a large partiality), May Sinclair, Lord Dunsany, James Stephens, E. M. Forster (a very fine, subtle, profound,

66

" for

and shamefully neglected novelist), and a few others I can't remember at the moment, work with paint and not a camera. But they will serve only to distract me. I do not mean that Marriott says "yea and nay Yes and No, like Maurice Hewlett, and kicks the moderns into the medieval melting-pot like Belloc and Chesterton. He is one with the realists, in prospecting in the soil of his own period. But, whereas they wield the hearty spade (and take vehement pains to call it so) in digging over the whole, and nothing less than the whole, of their particular little plots, he uses a divining-rod, not so much to discover what his own age looks like, as what it is going to look like. He paints, that is to say, not its face, but the expression of its face, and it is this expression which suggests its welcome to the future. He uses his diviningrod to discover to this generation those organic underground springs of its own soul, which will reveal the direction of its voyage into posterity.

One must be careful here of crystallizing his relation to the present into a formula. There is nothing whatever doctrinaire or propagandist in his work. What he does is to disintegrate the age into its component parts of nitrogen and oxygen, and to say to his audience, "Now, if you want life, which will you choose?" His purpose is the true artistic one of selecting, refining, and balancing the qualitative values of contemporary life. His remoteness from the Realists is explicit in this attitude alone. They absorb the territory that is nearest to them and most amenable to their purpose; he draws up a map of the relations between territories. Their conceptions being projected from their own personalities are only provincial; his, by interpreting contemporary life and

throwing it into perspective with abstract values, do embrace a synthesis, indicate a unified artistic purpose, and illustrate a coherent philosophy. They, by not discriminating between the surfaces and depths of things, between the external and the intimate, only express the surfaces and externals; he, by realizing that the vital process is not to observe but to see, distinguishes between the realism of and the reality behind the appearance. Between them (with all respect to the realists) lies all the difference between the glutton and the epicure. Indeed how subtle, how unobtrusive he is in suggestion! He does not plead or denounce or ratiocinate or even bear witness. He just, with a needle so delicate that few have seen it and so sharp it pierces without wound, pricks the bubble. The needle strikes, the bubble is pierced, and the great world rolls on. Everything and nothing are the same. The panes of the "dome of many-coloured glass " have slid open, but so silent that nobody has heard it, nobody felt the hot white rays on his head. But they have come through.

To get to the bottom of his art one must try and unravel his metaphysic. The way this metaphysic is worked out is by the objective presentment of a conflict. There is nothing novel about such a method; it is as old as literature. He deals not so much with a psychological conflict as with a conflict of forces, or rather he closely implicates the two. To understand what this conflict means, what these forces represent, and, of greater artistic moment, how his characters react upon the forces and the forces upon his characters, the novels which reflect this tendency must be glanced at more or less in the order of their evolution. For Marriott did not by any means