THE POPULAR NOVEL

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 60, Issue 4235, 24 January 1940, Page 3

THE POPULAR NOVEL

IS ITS DAYS NUMBERED? Are the days of the novel numbered T Looking at the ordinarily large proportion of hovels that comes from publishing houses, and taking as a further guide analysis of demand' at libraries,-an immediate an swer to this question would be No. Most novels have a brief popularity —or vogue—-then they disappear from ken. * Few novelists survive a generation of time; fewer novels last ap*-ercentage of that time. How / readers can recall the names or authors popular a generation ago, let alone the titles of the novels that made them popular? Viewed as literature—in the sense of something that survives because of its merit—another answer to the question could well be Yes—so far as particular novels are concerned, but not in regard to novel-writing as an art. The late Ford Madox Ford, scholar, brilliant writer and literary critic, expresses the view in his monumental work “The March of Literature” (George Allen and Unwin) that the day of the novel is over. In support of this view he gives a long list of writers of forty years ago whose books to-day are not only not read, but ignored. The novel is dying, he says, in face of the romance of crime. “The fact is,” he adds, “that the reading public is more in-telligent-—and more useful to literature —than is usually asknowledged by the practitioners of the art. It is the public that from the beginning has made new art forms triumph —and it has done it in the face of the violent opposition of tho critics, professors, clergy, publishers and dilettante cognoscenti and the serious and comic papers. It knows what it wants. It upheld Shakespeare and his fellows against the classicists; the classicists of the eighteenth century when the freer art forms of the sixteenth and seventeenth had lost their impetus; the realist-naturalist-impressionists. Tomorrow we may well see a neo-rom-antic school sweep the world—but it will be at the public desire.” Mr Ford considers to-day’s craving for romance of 'crime “perfectly healthy, proper and aesthetically justifiable.” He adds that if you take up a. good, and that means a popular, detective story, you will see that its construction is admirable, its style fluid, it will of necessity employ the modern aesthetic device called the “time shift,” which “the established critics of the more pompous journals still find esoteric.” And it gives information as to J the workings of life that is certainly cf value, much as the historic romance in its heyday supplied the public with all the information as to history “that ninety per cent, of us ever had.”

| THE NOVEL ANALYSED Mr Ford says that the great novels of the world, whether of the romantic, the classical or the realist modern school, have all—and this is no paradox—been mystery stories. “ ‘Vanity Fair’ lis a mystery story, worked from the inside instead of from the out,” he says. So is ‘Madame Bovary’; so is Conrad’s ‘The Secret Agent’; so, for the matter of that, is ‘Tom Jones’ with its working up to the triumphant exposure of young Mr Blifil; so is the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’; so, substituting psychological for material values, is almost every novel of Henry James.” Therd is no attempt by Mr Ford t> deny, the popularity of the novel —“a literary form which in modern days has assumed, if not an importance, then at least a portentousness such as has been attained to by scarcely any other department of our art." For it is at least three chances to pne that if one talks of the literature of to-day of France, Spain, Russia or any other of the main literary countries, it wiH be of their nvoels that one thinks. And, of the wofully small amount of time that nine-tenths of the time—when it is not -given to text Ibooks—is devoted to ‘fiction’.”

Mr Ford regards this as a phenomenon like another—“like the increase of cold as the days grow shorter, or the fact that fruit ripens in the fall of the year. One may deplore it, one may applaud it, but since one cannot change it, one may as well investigate it with equanimity.” - The modern English language, he says, has never, at least not until the beginning of the present. century, been a very good vehicle for prose. “To put it roughly,’’ he adds, “we might say that the great periods and cadences of the

seventeenth century had, by the eighteenth, deteriorated into a sort of mechanical rhythm and that by the nineteenth century, in the avoidance of the sort of pomposity and the dry rhythm of the eighteenth century, the language that it was impossible to use it for making any definite statement. So that it was not until the nineties that English prose came alive again at the hands of W. E. Henley and his group; and later of Qonrad, Henry James, Stephen Crane, W. H. Hudson, and other writers, rather specifically American and English. In the short period between the composition of the Prayer Book and of Clarendon’s History

of the Rebellion, great English pnose writers seem relatively innumerable. Between the death of Swift in 1745 —the year which, it should be remembered, saw thei last attempt of Jateobitism to raise itself from the dust—between then, the ’45 and, say, the day of writers like Cardinal Newman and the Oxford movement, almost net imaginative prose masterpieces saw the light, and English prose exhibited almost none of that sort of super-delight that marks the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, of Walton, of Clarendon, or even of Pepys.’’

SHORT OF GREAT NOVELS English, Mr Ford claims, is “rather short in the item of great novels.” And it was not until comparatively lately that the English novelist paid any attention whatever to his prose. He says that perhaps the only one of them who could be styled, for fugitive passages, a really great prose writer was Dickens. “There are passages in Dickens,” he says, “that will stand up against some of the finest of Flaubert, Turgenev or Prosper Merrimee. But great prosateur as he was, Dickens seems to have been it almost unconsciously, and, as it were, with deprecation. For it is odd that until very lately it was regarded by English critics as a blot and presumption that the novelist should think about his ‘style’ at all, or, indeed, abouit anything connected with the technique of the art. And this writer can well remember the time when Robert Louis Stevenson was roundly styled unEnglish because he announced himself as playing the sedulous ape to Sir Thomas Browne. That was because the English critic, disliking- all the arts, was filled with, disgust at the idea that another form of art should be forced upon his attention.”

This is only one phase—briefly touched upon—of Mr Ford’s great work. In his own words it is “the book of an old man mad about writing.” It covers all literature from Confucius to the present day; it criticises, it analyses, it applauds, it condemns, it prophesies; it is a worthy last book by a man who found a place in world literature in his lifetime—it is the chronicle of a great journey down the centuries with the wrold’s great writers. “It is the book of an old man mad about writing,” Mr Ford says. “It is an attempt to induce a larger and always larger number of my fellows to taste the pleasure that comes from always more and more reading.”

“HUMANER LETTERS OF THE WORLD” Mr Ford uses as his definition of literature “the humaner letters of the world.” “The quality of literature, in short, is the quality of humanity,” he says. “It is the quality that communicates, between man and men, the secret of human hearts and the story of our vicissitudes.” A little later he says:—“Let us, then, sum up literature as that which men read and continue to read for pleasure or to obtain that imaginative culture which is necessary for civilisation. Its general characteristic is that it is the product of a poetic, an imaginative, or even merely a quaintly observant mind. Since the days of Confucius, or the earliest Egyptian writers a thousand years before h-is time, there have been written on stone, on papyrus, wax, vellum, or merely paper, an immense body iof matter—innumerable thousands of tons of it. This matter is divisible into that which is readable and that which is unreadable, except by specialists in one or other department of human knowledge. The immediate test for oneself as to what is literature and what is not literature —biblia, a-hlibli’a as the Greeks used to call this last—ds simply whether ;one does or doesn’t find a book readable. But if a book has found great readers in great numbers for two thousand or five hundred or merely eighty or ninety years, you would be rash, even though you could no tread it yourself, to declare that it was not literature —not, that is to say, a work of art. . . But for the judging of contemporary literature the only test is one’s personal taste. If you much like a new book you must call it literature, even though you find no other soul to agree with you, and if you dislike a book you must declare Ithat it is not literature, though a million voices should shout to you that you are wrong. The ultimate decision will be made by Time.”

CRAFT OF THE WRITER During all the wars and revolutions of early Egypt, and no matter who ruled her, the crhft of the writer, if not his art, was always venerated, says Mr Ford. “Whether he made his letters with the chisel on stone or painted his id iographs on the walls of temples or palaces; whether he wrote with a stylus oh tablets of wax or incised them op rolls of clay which were afterwards baked, or whether in the end he wqote much as we write with a split reed upon sheets of papyrus, which is the inner fibre of the papyrus plant—always a sort of priestly or lalwyer-like respectability attached to the man who could write at all. He recorded laws and judgments given under those laws; he set down histories from the dictation of conquerors; he kept the accounts alike for;

market people and for the granaries of the Pharaohs. He was,, in fact, the priest of the material necessities iof life.”

The image of all literature is flashed in the mirror of Mr Ford’s great book. Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek Roman, Chinese, Italian, French. German, Spanish, American; the ages-long art and practice of the writer is classified, criticised, appraised, praised or condemned, but mostly praised, for the book is an. attempt to interest us in books that should be read —and should be enjoyed—rather than a criticism of books we should avoid.