When we read a newspaper article on the conditions of life in Bermondsey our first question is: “That is all very well. But is it thus that the majority of people in Bermondsey exist?” And when we read a novel about Bermondsey we apply the same standard. “Is this,” we ask ourselves, “how the majority of Bermondsians live?” If we decide that it is not, we say that the novel “is not true to life.” We find it hard to rid ourselves of the idea that all writing must be a form of special reporting.
And, of course, for the purposes of a novel it does not in the least matter whether the lives of the majority of Bermondsians do, or do not, correspond with those of the hero and the heroine. Universality is not obtained by cataloguing the routine of a number of uninteresting persons. It is unlikely that many dairy-maids have been the victims of such a disconcerting series of adventures as befell Tess of the D’Urbevilles. But Tess is true to life. It is true to life because Thomas Hardy is a novelist and not a journalist. If he had intended his book to be an “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” if his creative impulse had been inspired by a wish to improve the lot of the Wessex farm-hand, the critics would have been justified in saying: “This is a piece of special pleading based on a particularly unusual combination of circumstances. We therefore consider it to be untrue to life.” For the journalist the word “life” implies the external conditions under which the majority of people live; for the artist, life is the reality behind livelihood, and for the revelation of that reality the choice of subject is comparatively unimportant. The same moment of reality may be presented equally effectively through the most diverse mediums.
The appreciation of the temporal quality of life, of the approach of age, the sense of weakening power, is found in the work of nearly all great writers; but it is expressed by each writer in terms of the phenomena with which he is most familiar. Anthony Trollope would find relief from such a mood in the study of a kindly, ineffectual parson. George Moore would tell the story of some butterfly of the Nouvelle Athène, some Marie Pellegrin. Neville Cardus would recall the fleeting splendour of Tom Richardson. To the journalist there would seem little in common between these three studies. But the artist would see that the subject was in each case the same. In “La Terre,” Zola told the same story that Shakespeare told in “Lear.”
It is only the best sellers nowadays who are writing stories, really writing stories, stories for their own sakes. That is why they are best sellers. They may be bad stories that they are telling, or rather they may be telling the stories badly. For there is no such thing as a new story—it is the treatment that is all-important. But they are stories; and most of their authors, if they chose, if they thought it worth the doing, could write the sort of novel with three hundred readers that would get half a column of serious consideration in the cultured weeklies.
Berta Ruck, for instance. I do not know if her books are ever reviewed in the sixpenny weeklies; I should be inclined to doubt it. But I have not the slightest doubt that her books are a great deal better than the majority of novels that are so honoured. She writes very jolly stories about very jolly people. They begin with a highly improbable situation. A woman persuades a man to become her husband in name so that she can attend to her business unbothered by the attentions of a crowd of suitors. A financier, to pacify his match-making parents, engages a secretary to act as his official fiancée. A girl dresses up as a boy and becomes a chauffeur. Highly improbable occurrences, undoubtedly. But it is permissible to open on a situation of any degree of improbability, provided the characters subsequently behave according to rule. And Berta Ruck’s characters do. They are real people. And what is more important, they are very jolly people. One has a genuine affection for them, which is more than one can say of most modern novels. How often do we come across a hero and a heroine that we really like, that we really want to see in the last chapter happily married to the right person? We do in a Berta Ruck novel, and we will pardon any stretching of coincidence if it allows that fortunate encounter on the last page. To be able to do that, to be able to write a jolly book about jolly people is very much more worth while than.... But we will be neither personal nor malicious. Let us be content to state that it would be certainly more charitable, and probably more accurate to assume that a book sells on account of its qualities rather than its defects.
One envies, sometimes, the people who were born a hundred years ago. It must have been so easy to write then, when all the plots were new and there were so few writers. To-day everyone is writing novels. One is cultivating a soil that has yielded many harvests. One begins a story: for a week, a month, a fortnight one is happy and excited, and then one loses interest suddenly. It is vieux jeu, one says. It has all been done so many times before. One is not good enough to make an old thing new. Or, again, it may be that one can find no ending to a story, an ending that has not become banal through other people’s exploitation of it. This, for instance, this scene in a Soho restaurant: a small, unobtrusive, unsensational, but very excellent foreign restaurant in Dean Street, where I used to dine occasionally, in days when I had a bungalow beneath the Downs, after a day’s football, before the last train down to Sussex, when I was tired, when I did not want to be disturbed by music and noise and laughter, when I wanted my eyes to rest on quiet wallpaper and quiet dresses, when I knew exactly what I wanted, and exactly where to find it; there: this one dramatic episode of which it has been my fortune to be a witness.
I had only just taken my seat and begun my examination of the menu when the double-doors of the restaurant swung open and a young girl paused there in the doorway, looking round her with the expression of perplexed embarrassment that the faces of young people assume in a strange place. She made a pretty picture as she stood there, a fur cap fitting tightly over the head, pressing the brown hair into a thick wave about her ears; a small hand raised towards the throat, keeping in its place the woollen scarf that was flung across the shoulder; a slim ankle protruding beneath her skirt, a “tweazy” looking little thing; and if her features were not beautiful, she had the prettiness of all young girls whose figures are slim and graceful—the charm of the green leaf and the bud, that fascinates a man more than beauty does, but that passes quickly and lasts rarely into womanhood.
She stood there, looking round her for a moment, then the perplexed expression left her; she smiled and walked down the centre of the room.
A man rose from a table in the corner and came to meet her. He was one of those men whom it is almost impossible to describe, so much did he resemble the rest of his sex in his dress, his manner, and the general carriage of his person. He looked, and probably was, a gentleman; he was about thirty years old; he had a small dark moustache, and he showed no signs of baldness. Beyond that I could tell nothing. He was hidden in complete security behind the technique of an upbringing.
I could not hear how they greeted each other, but in the way in which he helped her off with her coat there was implied, I fancied, a suggestion of uneasiness. “They do not know each other very well,” I said to myself, and, moving my chair a little further to the right, I arranged myself so that I should be able to watch them without turning my head.