You can’t fool the novel. Even with man crucified upon a woman: his “dear cross”. The novel will show you how dear she was: dear at any price. And it will leave you with a bad taste of disgust against these heroes who turn their women into a “dear cross”, and ask for their own crucifixion.
You can fool pretty nearly every other medium. You can make a poem pietistic, and still it will be a poem. You can write Hamlet in drama: if you wrote him in a novel, he’d be half comic, or a trifle suspicious: a suspicious character, like Dostoevsky’s Idiot. Somehow, you sweep the ground a bit too clear in the poem or the drama, and you let the human Word fly a bit too freely. Now in a novel there’s always a tom-cat, a black tom-cat that pounces on the white dove of the Word, if the dove doesn’t watch it; and there is a banana-skin to trip on; and you know there is a water-closet on the premises. All these things help to keep the balance.
If, in Plato’s Dialogues, somebody had suddenly stood on his head and given smooth Plato a kick in the wind, and set the whole school in an uproar, then Plato would have been put into a much truer relation to the universe. Or if, in the midst of the Timaeus, Plato had only paused to say: “And now, my dear Cleon—(or whoever it was)—I have a bellyache, and must retreat to the privy: this too is part of the Eternal Idea of man”, then we never need have fallen so low as Freud.
And if, when Jesus told the rich man to take all he had and give it to the poor, the rich man had replied: “All right, old sport! You are poor, aren’t you? Come on, I’ll give you a fortune. Come on!” Then a great deal of snivelling and mistakenness would have been spared us all, and we might never have produced a Marx and a Lenin. If only Jesus had accepted the fortune!
Yes, it’s a pity of pities that Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John didn’t write straight novels. They did write novels; but a bit crooked. The Evangels are wonderful novels, by authors “with a purpose.” Pity there’s so much Sermon-on-the-Mounting.
“Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John
Went to bed with their breeches on!”—
as every child knows. Ah, if only they’d taken them off!
Greater novels, to my mind, are the books of the Old Testament, Genesis, Exodus, Samuel, Kings, by authors whose purpose was so big, it didn’t quarrel with their passionate inspiration. The purpose and the inspiration were almost one. Why, in the name of everything bad, the two ever should have got separated, is a mystery! But in the modern novel they are hopelessly divorced. When there is any inspiration there, to be divorced from.
This, then, is what is the matter with the modern novel. The modern novelist is possessed, hag-ridden, by such a stale old “purpose”, or idea-of-himself, that his inspiration succumbs. Of course he denies having any didactic purpose at all: because a purpose is supposed to be like catarrh, something to be ashamed of. But he’s got it. They’ve all got it: the same snivelling purpose.
They’re all little Jesuses in their own eyes, and their “purpose” is to prove it. Oh Lord!—Lord Jim! Sylvestre Bonnard! If Winter Comes! Main Street! Ulysses! Pan! They are all pathetic or sympathetic or antipathetic little Jesuses accomplis or manqués. And there is a heroine who is always “pure”, usually, nowadays, on the muck-heap! Like the Green Hatted Woman. She is all the time at the feet of Jesus, though her behaviour there may be misleading. Heaven knows what the Saviour really makes of it: whether she’s a Green Hat or a Constant Nymph (eighteen months of constancy, and her heart failed), or any of the rest of ’em. They are all, heroes and heroines, novelists and she-novelists, little Jesuses or Jesusesses. They may be wallowing in the mire: but then didn’t Jesus harrow Hell! A la bonne heure!