Читать книгу The English Novel - Ford Madox Ford - Страница 6

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Arrived at that particular five-cornered plot in the territory of the Novel I have foreshadowed the end of this small monograph. For, having traced the gradual course of the development from Apuleius to Joseph Conrad, having followed it from the Rome of Petronius Arbiter to the Spain of Lope da Vega, to the London of Defoe and Richardson, to the Paris of Diderot, Stendhal, and Flaubert—with side glances at the Cockaigne of Thackeray and Dickens and the Russia of Turgenev, Dostoieffsky and Tchekov—and back again to the London of Conrad, Henry James, and Stephen Crane—which last two writers America will not whole-heartedly accept as American, whilst England won't accept them at all—having followed the devious course of the thin stream of development of the novel from the Mediterranean to the Bay of Biscay, from the Bay of Biscay to the Port of London and so backwards and forwards across the English Channel, I shall leave it and you with a bump and with some regret at the gateway to the Middle-West—say at about Altoona. For it is there that the Novel, throughout the Ages the poor Cinderella of the Arts, is nowadays erecting itself into the sole guide and monitor of the world.

I should like to have allowed myself to say a few words about the modern Middle-Western development, which is for the moment the final stage, of the art to whose furtherance I have obscurely devoted my half-century of existence. But I am condemned like Moses only to perceive that Promised Land. This is a monograph on the English Novel—which includes The House of the Seven Gables or What Maisie Knew, not on the Middle-Western Novel of to-day which very emphatically doesn't include—oh, say Riceynan Steps and Mr. Britling Sees it Through.

I should like to observe for the benefit of the Lay Reader, to whom I am addressing myself—for the Professional Critic will pay no attention to anything that I say, contenting himself with cutting me to pieces with whips of scorpions for having allowed my head to pop up at all—to the Lay Reader I should like to point out that what I am about to write is highly controversial and that he must take none of it too much au pied de la lettre. I don't mean to say that it will not be written with almost ferocious seriousness. But what follows are suggestions not dictates, for in perusing this sort of book the reader must be prepared to do a great deal of the work himself—within his own mind.

If I choose to write that great imaginative literature began in England with Archbishop Warham in the sixteenth century and ended with the death of Thomas Vaughan, the Silurist, in the first year of the eighteenth century, to come to life again with Joseph Conrad and the Yellow Book about 1892, and once more to disappear on the fourth of August, 1914—if I choose to write those extreme statements it is because I want the Reader mentally to object to them the names of Swift, Keats, Thackeray, Browning, Swinburne, Meredith—or even those of Messrs. Galsworthy, Bennett, Wells and, say, Virginia Woolf. I want the Lay Reader to make those mental reservations for himself. I should hate to be a professor, I should hate to be taken as dogmatizing, and I should still more hate that what dogmatizing I do perforce indulge in should be unquestioningly accepted by any poor victim.

So that if I should say—as I probably shall—that, along with all his contemporaries, as a constructive artist even of the picaresque school, Dickens was contemptible, or if I say that Meredith as a stylist in comparison with Henry James was simply detestable, or that the conception of novel-writing as an art began for Anglo-Saxondom with Joseph Conrad, or that Babbitt dealt a shrewder blow at the pre-war idealization of the industrial system and the idolatry of materialism than Don Quixote at sixteenth-century vestiges of the chivalric spirit, or that The Time of Man is the most beautiful individual piece of writing that has as yet come out of America, or that The Lighthouse is the only piece of British—as opposed to English—writing that has latterly excited my craftsman's mind—the only piece since the decline and death of Conrad...if I commit myself to all these statements the reader must at once violently object that I am a log-roller writing up my personal friends—though I never knew, or even know anyone that knew, Miss Virginia Woolf. He must object that I have forgotten not only Trollope in my aspersions on mid-Victorian novelists, but that I have also forgotten Mr. George Moore. (Alas, I always forget Mr. George Moore, who is probably the greatest and most dispassionate technician that English Literature has ever seen.)

He must make all these objections for himself as violently as possible: then, in reaction, thinking it over he will probably find that there is something in what I say. At any rate, he will have a sort of rudimentary map of the Kingdom of the Art of Letters in his mind. The old-fashioned maps had their advantages. Their cartographer left in his plans blank spaces in places where his enemies dwelt and labelled them: "Here be Crocodiles," "Here be Stenches!" or "Anthropophagi! Avoid this Land!"—and that was useful because it told you what parts of the earth were pernicious to that type of Cartographer. So, if you were of his type, you avoided territories by him miscalled. On the other hand, if you disliked the sort of fellow that that map-maker was, you adventured into the territory labelled "of the Anthropophagi" to find it inhabited solely by sirens, into the Land of Stenches to find it distinguished by the most beneficent of chalybeate springs, or amongst the Crocodiles, who were charming people, ready at any moment to shed tears over your depleted pockets, your lost loves, or your rheumatic-gout!

It is with a map of that sort that I am trying to provide you. No other sort is of the remotest value. Nor is it even possible, critics being human.

I am looking at the last page of a Manual of English Literature compiled by a critic who takes himself and is taken very seriously indeed. I read:

"His work often decadent, appealing to senses; a pessimist. Lacks restraint; small variety in mood!"

Think of that as the last word—the very last word—of a Manual of English Literature for the use of the English Classes of the most numerically attended University in the Universe! Could I at my worst do worse? Or so badly!

For that is that writer's critical estimate—that is all that thirty thousand pupils of a State University are given as an appraisal of—Algernon Charles Swinburne!