You can put anything you like in a novel. So why do people always go on putting the same thing? Why is the vol au vent always chicken! Chicken vol au vents may be the rage. But who sickens first shouts first for something else.
The novel is a great discovery: far greater than Galileo’s telescope or somebody else’s wireless. The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute.
In a novel, everything is relative to everything else, if that novel is art at all. There may be didactic bits, but they aren’t the novel. And the author may have a didactic “purpose” up his sleeve. Indeed most great novelists have, as Tolstoi had his Christian-socialism, and Hardy his pessimism, and Flaubert his intellectual desperation. But even a didactic purpose so wicked as Tolstoi’s or Flaubert’s cannot put to death the novel.
You can tell me, Flaubert had a “philosophy”, not a “purpose”. But what is a novelist’s philosophy but a purpose on a rather higher level? And since every novelist who amounts to anything has a philosophy—even Balzac—any novel of importance has a purpose. If only the “purpose” be large enough, and not at outs with the passional inspiration.
Vronsky sinned, did he? But also the sinning was a consummation devoutly to be wished. The novel makes that obvious: in spite of old Leo Tolstoi. And the would-be-pious Prince in Resurrection is a muff, with his piety that nobody wants or believes in.
There you have the greatness of the novel itself. It won’t let you tell didactic lies, and put them over. Nobody in the world is anything but delighted when Vronsky gets Anna Karénina. Then what about the sin?—Why, when you look at it, all the tragedy comes from Vronsky’s and Anna’s fear of society. The monster was social, not phallic at all. They couldn’t live in the pride of their sincere passion, and spit in Mother Grundy’s eye. And that, that cowardice, was the real “sin”. The novel makes it obvious, and knocks all old Leo’s teeth out. “As an officer I am still useful. But as a man, I am a ruin,” says Vronsky—or words to that effect. Well what a skunk, collapsing as a man and a male, and remaining merely as a social instrument; an “officer”, God love us!—merely because people at the opera turn backs on him! As if people’s backs weren’t preferable to their faces, anyhow!
And old Leo tries to make out, it was all because of the phallic sin. Old liar! Because where would any of Leo’s books be, without the phallic splendour? And then to blame the column of blood, which really gave him all his life riches! The Judas! Cringe to a mangy, bloodless Society, and try to dress up that dirty old Mother Grundy in a new bonnet and face-powder of Christian-Socialism. Brothers indeed! Sons of a castrated Father!
The novel itself gives Vronsky a kick in the behind, and knocks old Leo’s teeth out, and leaves us to learn.
It is such a bore that nearly all great novelists have a didactic purpose, otherwise a philosophy, directly opposite to their passional inspiration. In their passional inspiration, they are all phallic worshippers. From Balzac to Hardy, it is so. Nay, from Apuleius to E. M. Forster. Yet all of them, when it comes to their philosophy, or what they think-they-are, they are all crucified Jesuses. What a bore! And what a burden for the novel to carry!
But the novel has carried it. Several thousands of thousands of lamentable crucifixions of self-heroes and self-heroines. Even the silly duplicity of Resurrection, and the wickeder duplicity of Salammbô, with that flayed phallic Matho, tortured upon the Cross of a gilt Princess.