THE ENGLISH NOVEL.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19412, 21 August 1926, Page 7 (Supplement)

THE ENGLISH NOVEL.

HOW IT WAS BUILT UP. MARK RUTHERFORD AND OTHERS. BY PROFESSOR ARNOLD WALL. No. 111. Ihe years immediately following the death of Dickens, in 1870, are comparatively barren. It is the period oi middle Meredith and early Hardy, but Meredith was never popular, and Hardy advanced slowly into great fame. The later novels, of George Eliot had yet to appear. People read Trollopo very widely, and during the 'eighties learned to be fond of Besant and Rice, Miss Braddon, and Ouida. " Hugh Conway" conquered his public most suddenly with his two famous " shockers"—" Called Back" and "Dark Days"—but, unfortunately, died quite young, after publishing a novel of great promise, " A Family Affair." Iho authors who were most freely read and discussed were probably Besant and Rice, and Ouida, until the advent of Stevenson. The work of this time is often very dull and uninspired. That of Besant and Rice is without grace or style; Rice had humour, and " Ready Money Mortiboy" is readable; but Besant alone, in spite of tho success with which ho dii'ccted public attention to the disgrace of tho London slums (" All Sorts and Conditions of Men," 1882), " wrote and wrote," as some wit said, " without being a writer." " Mark Rutherford." William Hale Whito (1830-1913), who wrote of himself as " Mark Rutherford," and also hid his identity beneath the name of " Rueben Shapcott," has never become famous at all, but has long held a very high position in the judgment of the discerning few. The " Mark Rutherbooks are not exactly novels, and Miriam's Schooling" and " Catherine Furze" have very little romance in them. Whito was a modest, retiring, rather gloomy man, with a clear and original outlook upon a certain small field of real life. It was his function to describe with minute fidelity the mind, tho conscience, tho daily life and the ethical standards of English Nonconformists of the rustic Midlands in the mid-Victorian era.

White was.no stylist, never attempted startling or sensational effects, spun a very simple plot, and produced work of a surprising beauty, in spite of all apparent drawbacks. He had, but very rarely used, a gift of quiet, dry humour. His best quality is combined truth-to-life and sympathy with the poor and the under-dog. There is a certain sweetly sad melancholy cadence in his whole works and in his individual sentences which is perfectly distinctive of the man. One feels that he is very thoroughly English; that he has done something worth while, and that no other man could ever have done this exact thing so well. Humble as most of his persons are, we feel that ho has given them a deserved immortality. Henry James.

Henry James (1843-1917) a naturalised American, spent his working life in England. He wrote almost entirely of English men and women; tho American scene was perhaps too gross and crude for so fine a spirit. Following in the footsteps of George Eliot as a psychological analyst, he developed this side of the art or fiction far beyond any previous artist. Ho deals only with men and women of culture and refinement, and always in a spirit of cool and sane detachment. Ho is never excited, nor dramatic, nor sensational, and ho does not pause to depict " Nature" or to develop social or political theories. James is the most perfectly impersonal of authors, and one gets no clear idea (or no idea at all) from his books of his personality. Ho is dispassionate, relentless, and unwearying. Action, in his most mature works, is reduced to a minimum, so that in such an extreme example as " The Sacred Fount" one feels that nothing at all has happened and that the book is merely a phantasmagoria of shifting moods and tangles of motives that produce no act; while the personages have no character and merely function as miniature stages whereon tho shadowplay proceeds. His style, meticulous, laboured and often involved, has led several authors astray, for he casts a very powerful spell and recent fiction is rich in reminiscences of his peculiar mannerism. His gift was, on tho whole, rather rare than great, but lue is a great and very influential figure. It is just to him to add that in '' The Turn of tho Screw" ho produced what is certainly the most convincing, artistic, and thrilling of all English ghost stories. Joseph Conrad.

Joseph Conrad (1857-1925), a Polo (and no Jew), paid even a greater compliment to English fiction than Henry James, for English of a sort was the birthright, of James, while to Conrad it was an acquired'language. A sailor by profession, ho knew and first disclosed to tho world in the form of English novels, all the magic and mystery, the poetry and the. magnetic pull of the sea, leaving far "behind him the Marryats. and Melvilles, thq Clark Russells and even R.L.S. himself. He became perhaps the greatest master of written English, at any rate of certain kinds, of his time. From the \days of Meredith and Stevenson the novel had progressed enormously in this respect, and had become the channel into which flowed tho best and purest English of the new ago, Conrad wrota English like a great musician performing upon his chosen instrument, as de Quincey had done. One sees at work in his fictions a serene and lofty spirit creating beauty with masterly ease, dignity and detachment. Yet his stories are good tales, though Conrad, a fine analyst, bad learned a little too much from Henry James, and sometimes allowed himself the luxury of an analysis beyond the reach of readers and checking unduly the flow of his narrative—witness the murder scene in " The Secret Agent." We owe to Conrad also, an almost infinite enlargement of the range and field of English fiction, for his persons are of all nations and travel all the seas; his best work, however, is located always in the East Indies and the Pacific. Eng-. lish fiction is immensely indebted to him, for he left the novel a finer, more delicate, and more vital work of art than it had become even in tho hands of Meredith, Stevenson and W. H. Hudson. " W. H. Hudson. W. H. Hudson (c. 1860-1922), to whom the much discussed memorial was recently erected in Kensington Gardens, was another extremely fine artist. He "rose very slowly indeed "to fame, and his early masterpiece, " Green Mansions," escaped attention for many years. Yet it is one of the most perfect things of its kind in any language, tender without sentimentality; poetic without any trend toward the melodramatic or hysterical; pathetic, delicate and flawless in the easy flow of the beautiful style. Hudson, like Kipling and Conrad, helped greatly to widen the bounds, enrich the material, and destroy tho insularity of English fiction, for all his best and most characteristic work deals with Latin America, where he was born and grew up. His works enshrine a rarely sweet and gentle personality, a great student and painter of nature, and above all a devoted lover of the birds of all lands. Tie Liberators. The restrictive and prudish conventions of which Thackeray so bitterly complained hold firm till nearly ffie end of the

century. After the death of the old Queen they rapidly gave way, and English fiction has now been for many years only too free.

But before the public had become educated up to liberty, some bold spirits had attempted, greatly daring, to break away. Among these Mrs. Humphrey Ward was onco notorious, for she had dared to treat, in the form of a novel (" Robert Ellesmero ") problems of religious faith, and had made an Agnostic, born an Athiest (dread word!) the central personage of a work of fiction. Grant Allen, a popular writer on scientific subjects and a prolific writer of saleable novels (which in his heart he despised) quite electrified the British public with " The Woman who Did"—a book at which the present generation would smile, but it made a* great commotion in 1895. The " Plays Unpleasant " of Shaw were working in the same direction at about the samo time. These writers may be honoured as courageous pioneers, though their work has no great intrinsic value, for we may be said to owe our present-day liberty partly to them, and this liberty, in spite of occassional abuses, is a fine thing.