The Press Saturday, September 14, 1929. The Fate of the Novel.

Press, Volume LXV, Issue 19724, 14 September 1929, Page 16

The Press Saturday, September 14, 1929. The Fate of the Novel.

No literary subject la more regularly debated than the modern novel; and the conclusions reached by the individual disputants are so various that, when we remember the politeness due to their authority, we can only murmur, like Mr Baldwin, our astonishment at the many-sidedness of truth. The novel hat been reported sick, but no two diagnoses of the disease have agreed, and no two prescriptions for its euro. It has been reported dead and been the subject of frequent inquests, leading to findings as many. Its marriage has been celebrated—with biography, with sociology and economies, with pathology, psychology, and psycho-analysis, and with science. Its rebirth has also been confidently announced or predicted, and its character, education, and destiny have been very dearly mapped out for it. While all this has been going on, the novel has also gone en; the writers and the publishers have not desisted for a moment from their business of congesting the bookshops and the libraries; and, while best-sellers have flared and been forgotten by the hundred, now and again a steadier light has been lit. The Old Wives Tale and Clayhanger, The Forsyte Saga, Mr Polly and Tono Bungay, Sons and Lovers, Esther Waters, Nostromo, Howard's End, Maurice Guest —such, in no sort of significant order, might be a tentative list of the most considerable and influential novels written in England during thb last twenty or thirty years. If a committee of good judges were to make lists of a score of the best modern English novels, perhaps ten or a dozen would be common to them all; and even ten great works is a large number in thirty years. Again, the popularity of the novel is enormous; and arts tend to flourish on a soil of popularity. But neither of these facts prevents Miss Storm Jameson, an accomplished novelist herself, from writing in a recent number of the Nation that " fiction is under a cloud." She admits that "never has the novel "reached so high a level of technical "perfection, never has it displayed "more subtlety and aeuteness of per"eeption, more grace of manner"; but—" never has it been so little re- " garded in the best company—except " by novelists and reviewers of novels." Her point is that readers no longer feel in novels the impress of truth—"the " truth of life, or of a life "—that they find in biography or history, say; and that novelists no longer feel that fiction enables them to obey the artist's compulsion to "tell the truth." She thinks that an "intangible feeling as- " sures every one of us, at moments or " all the time, that the very best work " of the best novelist is not in so high " a class as, say, Undertone* ofWWanr n [Mr Edmund Blunden's record of war experiences]; and this feeling, she says, " creates a scepticism regarding ' mere' "fiction." Miss Jameson perhaps exaggerates the technical advance, the grace, and the perceptive fineness of the modern novel; but she may be left unchallenged there and asked, simply, what is there new in the reader's superficial distrust of the " mere " novel that nevertheless engrosses himf Jane Austen felt this and resented it, and sharply spoke out her resentment in Northanger Abbey. What is there new in the imaginative writer's intermittent despair of his magic f Thackeray's uneasiness is manifest. Perhaps every great novelist is a Prospero who would at moments break his wand, for fear its power should be gone, or in doubt whether it ever existed. It is natural that he should look up with self-doubting envy from the figments he must conjure into substance that "hath motion, and mine "eye is not deceived," across to the historian and the biographer, working in their firm medium of fact and assured in advance of some measure of, credence. Yet confidence flows back to the creative artist it has deserted and left nerveless, and it urges him to the long endurance and contrivance of a War and Peace or a Forsyte Saga. There is nothing of "mereness" in such work to degrade it as truth below the best history of Russia or the best social history of England. If there is a difference in point of truth, it is that the fiction has the vrai veritS of impassioned art, the " breath and finer "spirit of all knowledge." But Miss Jameson is as certainly right in detect- , ing something wrong with the modern novel as she is mistaken in identifying it; and there may well exist among novelists—though she is perhaps only projecting over them all what she feels acutely herself—an uneasy consciousness of this something wrong, which she fails to relate to its true cause. Mrs Edith Wharton, a novelist who has written at least one capital book, Ethan Frome, recently said that a good novel had to have one quality above all: visibility. The characters must impress themselves, so move, so speak, that the memory retains their image, full and lively. It ia not difficult to see that many very skilful modern novels — "technically perfect, subtle, acute in "perception, graceful in manner," all that Miss Jameson would claim—fail by this standard. We remember Art Kipps and Gabriel Oak, easily; but who could describe a character out of Antie Say or Mrs DaUowayt Exquisitely articulated as the figures of some of the ablest modern novels are, they remaia skeletons or marionettei

—* term leu harsh or ridiculous is required; and they serve admirably to illustrate life without ever coming to life. They are prisoned in print and flat as the pages of it. Shut the book and they are nothing again. With this defect, inch novels miss that " truth "of life," a higher thing than formal truth to life, which Miss Jameson is in unhappy search of; but this defect is not inherent in fiction. It inheres in many novelists, competent and even brilliant, and perhaps is the penalty of some modern methods.