Instigations Part 31

Vivant au dix-neuvieme siecle, dans un temps de suffrage universel, de democratie, de liberalisme, nous nous sommes demande si ce qu'on appelle "les ba.s.ses cla.s.ses" n'avait pas droit au roman; si ce monde sous un monde, le peuple, devait rester sous le coup de l'interdit litteraire et des dedains d'auteurs qui ont fait jusqu'ici le silence sur l'ame et le cur qu'il peut avoir. Nous nous sommes demande s'il y avait encore, pour l'ecrivain et pour le lecteur, en ces annees d'egalite ou nous sommes, des cla.s.ses indignes, des malheurs trop bas, des drames trop mal embouches, des catastrophes d'une terreur trop peu n.o.ble. Il nous est venu la curiosite de savoir si cette forme conventionnelle d'une litterature oubliee et lune societe disparue, la Tragedie, etait definitivement morte; si, dans un pas sans caste et sans aristocratie legale, les miseres des pet.i.ts et des pauvres parleraient a l'interet, a l'emotion, a la pitie aussi haut que les miseres des grands et des riches; si, en un mot, les larmes qu'on pleure en bas pourraient faire pleurer comme celles qu'on pleure en haut.

Ces pensees nous avaient fait oser l'humble roman de "Sur Philomene," en 1861; elles nous font publier aujourd'hui "Germinie Lacerteux."

Maintenant, que ce livre soit calomnie: peu lui importe.

Aujourd'hui que le Roman s'elargit et grandit, qu'il commence a etre la grande forme serieuse, pa.s.sionnee, vivante, de l'etude litteraire et de l'enquete sociale, qu'il devient, par l'a.n.a.lyse et par la recherche psychologique, l'Histoire morale contemporaine, aujourd'hui que le Roman s'est impose les etudes et les devoirs de la science, il peut en revendiquer les libertes et les franchises. Et qu'il cherche l'Art et la Verite; qu'il montre des miseres bonnes a ne pas laisser oublier aux heureux de Paris; qu'il fa.s.se voir aux gens du monde ce que les dames de charite ont le courage de voir, ce que les reines d'autrefois faisaient toucher de l'il a leurs enfants dans les hospices: la souffrance humaine, presente et toute vive, qui apprend la charite; que le Roman ait cette religion que le siecle pa.s.se appelait de ce large et vaste nom: _Humanite_; il lui suffit de cette conscience: son droit est la.

_E. et J. de G."_

WYNDHAM LEWIS

The signal omission from my critical papers is an adequate book on Wyndham Lewis; my excuses, apart from the limitations of time, must be that Mr. Lewis is alive and quite able to speak for himself, secondly, that one may print half-tone reproductions of sculpture, for however unsatisfactory they be, they pretend to be only half-tones, and could not show more than they do; but the reproduction of drawings and painting invites all sorts of expensive process impracticable during the years of war. When the public or the "publishers" are ready for a volume of Lewis, suitably ill.u.s.trated, I am ready to write in the letterpress, though Mr. Lewis would do it better than I could.

He will rank among the great instigators and great inventors of design; there is mastery in his use of various media (my own interest in his work centres largely in the "drawing" completed with inks, water-color, chalk, etc.). His name is constantly bracketed with that of Gaudier, Picca.s.so, Joyce, but these are fortuitous couplings. Lewis' painting is further from the public than were the carvings of Gaudier; Lewis is an older artist, maturer, fuller of greater variety and invention. His work is almost unknown to the public. His name is wholly familiar, BLAST is familiar, the "Timon" portfolio has been seen.

I had known him for seven years, known him as an artist, but I had no idea of his scope until he began making his preparations to go into the army; so careless had he been of any public or private approval. The "work" lay in piles on the floor of an attic; and from it we gathered most of the hundred or hundred and twenty drawings which now form the bases of the Quinn collection and of the Baker collection, (now in the South Kensington museum).

As very few people have seen all of these pictures very few people are in any position to contradict me. There are three of his works in this room and I can attest their wearing capacity; as I can attest the duration of my regret for the Red drawing now in the Quinn collection which hung here for some months waiting shipment; as I can attest the energy and vitality that filled this place while forty drawings of the Quinn a.s.sortment stood here waiting also; a demonstration of the difference between "cubism," _nature-morte-ism_ and the vortex of Lewis: sun, energy, sombre emotion, clean-drawing, disgust, penetrating a.n.a.lysis from the qualities finding literary expression in "Tarr" to the stasis of the Red Duet, from the metallic gleam of the "Timon" portfolio to the velvet-suavity of the later "Timon" of the Baker collection.

The animality and the animal satire, the dynamic and metallic properties, the social satire, on the one hand, the sunlight, the utter cleanness of the Red Duet, are all points in an astounding circ.u.mference; which will, until the work is adequately reproduced, have more or less to be taken on trust by the "wider" public.

The novel "Tarr" is in print and no one need bother to read my critiques of it. It contains much that Joyce's work does not contain, but differentiations between the two authors are to the detriment of neither, one tries solely to discriminate qualities: hardness, fullness, abundance, weight, finish, all terms used sometimes with derogatory and sometimes with laudative intonation, or at any rate valued by one auditor and depreciated by another. The English prose fiction of my decade is the work of this pair of authors.

"TARR," BY WYNDHAM LEWIS[5]

"Tarr" is the most vigorous and volcanic English novel of our time. Lewis is the rarest of phenomena, an Englishman who has achieved the triumph of being also a European. He is the only English writer who can be compared with Dostoievsky, and he is more rapid than Dostoievsky, his mind travels with greater celerity, with more unexpectedness, but he loses none of Dostoievsky's effect of ma.s.s and of weight.

Tarr is a man of genius surrounded by the heavy stupidities of the half-cultured latin quarter; the book delineates his explosions in this oleaginous milieu; as well as the debacle of the unintelligent emotion-dominated Kreisler. They are the two t.i.tanic characters in contemporary English fiction.

Wells's clerks, Bennett's "cards" and even Conrad's Russian villains do not "bulk up" against them.

Only in James Joyce's "Stephen Dedalus" does one find an equal intensity, and Joyce is, by comparison, cold and meticulous, where Lewis is, if uncouth, at any rate br.i.m.m.i.n.g with energy, the man with a leaping mind.

Despite its demonstrable faults I do not propose to attack this novel.[6] It is a serious work, it is definitely an attempt to express, and very largely a success in expressing, something. The "average novel," the average successful commercial proposition at 6_s_. per 300 to 600 pages is nothing of the sort; it is merely a third-rate mind's imitation of a perfectly well-known type-novel; of let us say d.i.c.kens, or Balzac, or Sir A. Conan-Doyle, or Hardy, or Mr. Wells, or Mrs. Ward, or some other and less laudable proto-or necro-type.

A certain commercial interest attaches to the sale of these mimicries and a certain purely technical or trade or clique interest may attach to the closeness or "skill" of the aping, or to the "application" of a formula. The "work," the opus, has a purely narcotic value, it serves to soothe the tired mind of the reader, to take said "mind" off its "business" (whether that business be lofty, "intellectual,"

humanitarian, sordid, acquisitive, or other). There is only one contemporary English work with which "Tarr" can be compared, namely James Joyce's utterly different "Portrait of the Artist." The appearance of either of these novels would be a recognized literary event had it occurred in any other country in Europe.

Joyce's novel is a triumph of actual writing. The actual arrangement of the words is worth any author's study. Lewis on the contrary, is, in the actual writing, faulty. His expression is as bad as that of Meredith's floppy sickliness. In place of Meredith's mincing we have something active and "disagreeable." But we have at any rate the percussions of a highly energized mind.

In both Joyce and Lewis we have the insistent utterance of men who are once for all through with the particular inanities of Shavian-Bennett, and with the particular oleosities of the Wellsian genre.

The faults of Mr. Lewis' writing can be examined in the first twenty-five pages. Kreisler is the creation of the book. He is roundly and objectively set before us. Tarr is less clearly detached from his creator. The author has evidently suspected this, for he has felt the need of disclaiming Tarr in a preface.

Tarr, like his author, is a man with an energized mind. When Tarr talks at length; when Tarr gets things off his chest, we suspect that the author also is getting them off his own chest. Herein the technique is defective. It is also defective in that it proceeds by general descriptive statements in many cases where the objective presentment of single and definite acts would be more effective, more convincing.

It differs from the general descriptiveness of cheap fiction in that these general statements are often a very profound reach for the expression of verity. In brief, the author is trying to get the truth and not merely playing baby-battledore among phrases. When Tarr talks little essays and makes aphorisms they are often of intrinsic interest, are even unforgettable. Likewise, when the author comments upon Tarr, he has the gift of phrase, vivid, biting, pregnant, full of suggestion.

The engaging if unpleasant character, Tarr, is placed in an unpleasant milieu, a milieu very vividly "done." The reader retains no doubts concerning the verity and existence of this milieu (Paris or London is no matter, though the scene is, nominally, in Paris). It is the existence where:

"Art is the smell of oil paint, Henri Murger's _Vie de Boheme_, corduroy trousers, the operatic Italian model ...

quarter given up to Art.--Letters and other things are round the corner.

"... permanent tableaux of the place, disheartening as a Tussaud's of The Flood."

Tarr's first impact is with "Hobson," whose "dastardly face attempted to portray delicacies of common sense, and gossamer-like back-slidings into the Inane, that would have puzzled a bile-specialist. He would occasionally exploit his blackguardly appearance and black-smith's muscles for a short time ... his strong piercing laugh threw A.B.C.

waitresses into confusion."

This person wonders if Tarr is a "sound bird." Tarr is not a sound bird. His conversational attack on Hobson proceeds by a brandishing of false dilemma, but neither Hobson nor his clan, nor indeed any of the critics of the novel (to date) have observed that this is Tarr's faulty weapon. Tarr's contempt for Hobson is as adequate as it is justifiable.

"Hobson, he considered, was a crowd.--You could not say he was an individual.--He was a set. He sat there a cultivated audience.--He had the aplomb and absence of self-consciousness of numbers, of the herd--of those who know they are not alone....

"For distinguishing feature Hobson possessed a distinguished absence of personality.... Hobson was an humble investor."

Tarr addresses him with some frankness on the subject:

"As an off-set for your prying, scurvy way of peeping into my affairs you must offer your own guts, such as they are....

"You have joined yourself to those who hush their voices to hear what other people are saying....

"Your plumes are not meant to fly with, but merely to slouch and skip along the surface of the earth.--You wear the livery of a ridiculous set, you are a cunning and sleek domestic. No thought can come out of your head before it has slipped on its uniform. All your instincts are drugged with a malicious languor, an arm, a respectability, invented by a set of old women and mean, cadaverous little boys."

Hobson opened his mouth, had a movement of the body to speak. But he relapsed.

"You reply, 'What is all this fuss about? I have done the best for myself.'--I am not suited for any heroic station, like yours. I live sensibly, cultivating my vegetable ideas, and also my roses and Victorian lilies.--I do no harm to anybody."

"That is not quite the case. That is a little inexact. Your proceedings possess a herdesque astuteness; in the scale against the individual weighing less than the Yellow Press, yet being a closer and meaner attack. Also you are essentially _spies_, in a scurvy, safe and well-paid service, as I told you before. You are disguised to look like the thing it is your function to betray--What is your position?--You have bought for eight hundred pounds at an aristocratic educational establishment a complete mental outfit, a program of manners. For four years you trained with other recruits. You are now a perfectly disciplined social unit, with a profound _esprit de corps_. The Cambridge set that you represent is an average specimen, a cross between a Quaker, a Pederast, and a Chelsea artist.--Your Oxford brothers, dating from the Wilde decade, are a stronger body. The Chelsea artists are much less flimsy. The Quakers are powerful rascals. You represent, my Hobson, the _dregs_ of Anglo-Saxon civilization! There is nothing softer on earth.--Your flabby potion is a mixture of the lees of Liberalism, the poor froth blown off the decadent nineties, the wardrobe-leavings of a vulgar Bohemianism with its headquarters in Chelsea!

"You are concentrated, systematic slop.--There is nothing in the universe to be said for you....

"A breed of mild pervasive cabbages, has set up a wide and creeping rot in the West of Europe.--They make it indirectly a peril and a tribulation for live things to remain in the neighborhood. You are a systematizing and vulgarizing of the individual.--You are not an individual...."

and later:

"You are libeling the Artist, by your idleness." Also, "Your pseudo-neediness is a sentimental indulgence."

All this swish and clatter of insult reminds one a little of Papa Karamazoff. Its outrageousness is more Russian than Anglo-Victorian, but Lewis is not a mere echo of Dostoievsky. He hustles his reader, jolts him, snarls at him, in contra-distinction to Dostoievsky, who merely surrounds him with an enveloping dreariness, and imparts his characters by long-drawn osmosis.

Hobson is a minor character in the book, he and Lowndes are little more than a prologue, a dusty avenue of approach to the real business of the book: Bertha, "high standard Aryan female, in good condition, superbly made; of the succulent, obedient, clear peasant type...."

Kreisler, the main character in the book, a "powerful" study in sheer obsessed emotionality, the chief foil to Tarr who has, over and above his sombre emotional sp.a.w.n-bed, a smouldering sort of intelligence, combustible into brilliant talk, and brilliant invective.

Anastasya, a sort of super-Bertha, designated by the author as "swagger s.e.x."

These four figures move, lit by the flare of restaurants and cafes, against the frowsy background of "Bourgeois Bohemia," more or less Bloomsbury. There are probably such Bloomsburys in Paris and in every large city.