Oh, they are all novelists with an idea of themselves! Which is a “purpose”, with a vengeance! For what a weary, false, sickening idea it is nowadays! The novel gives them away. They can’t fool the novel.
Now really, it’s time we left off insulting the novel any further. If your purpose is to prove your own Jesus qualifications, and the thin stream of your inspiration is “sin”, then dry up, for the interest is dead. Life as it is! What’s the good of pretending that the lives of a set of tuppenny Green Hats and Constant Nymphs is Life-as-it-is, when the novel itself proves that all it amounts to is life as it is isn’t life, but a sort of everlasting and intricate and boring habit: of Jesus peccant and Jesusa peccante.
These wearisome sickening little personal novels! After all, they aren’t novels at all. In every great novel, who is the hero all the time? Not any of the characters, but some unnamed and nameless flame behind them all. Just as God is the pivotal interest in the books of the Old Testament. But just a trifle too intimate, too frére et cochon, there. In the great novel, the felt but unknown flame stands behind all the characters, and in their words and gestures there is a flicker of the presence. If you are too personal, too human, the flicker fades out, leaving you with something awfully lifelike, and as lifeless as most people are.
We have to choose between the quick and the dead. The quick is God-flame, in everything. And the dead is dead. In this room where I write, there is a little table that is dead: it doesn’t even weakly exist. And there is a ridiculous little iron stove, which for some unknown reason is quick. And there is an iron wardrobe trunk, which for some still more mysterious reason is quick. And there are several books, whose mere corpus is dead, utterly dead and non-existent. And there is a sleeping cat, very quick. And a glass lamp, that, alas, is dead.
What makes the difference? Quien sabe! But difference there is. And I know it.
And the sum and source of all quickness, we will call God. And the sum and total of all deadness we may call human.
And if one tries to find out, wherein the quickness of the quick lies, it is in a certain weird relationship between that which is quick and—I don’t know; perhaps all the rest of things. It seems to consist in an odd sort of fluid, changing, grotesque or beautiful relatedness. That silly iron stove somehow belongs. Whereas this thin-shanked table doesn’t belong. It is a mere disconnected lump, like a cut-off finger.
And now we see the great, great merits of the novel. It can’t exist without being “quick”. The ordinary unquick novel, even if it be a best seller, disappears into absolute nothingness, the dead burying their dead with surprising speed. For even the dead like to be tickled. But the next minute, they’ve forgotten both the tickling and the tickler.
Secondly, the novel contains no didactive absolute. All that is quick, and all that is said and done by the quick, is, in some way godly. So that Vronsky’s taking Anna Karénina we must count godly, since it is quick. And that Prince in Resurrection, following the convict girl, we must count dead. The convict train is quick and alive. But that would-be-expiatory Prince is as dead as lumber.
The novel itself lays down these laws for us, and we spend our time evading them. The man in the novel must be “quick”. And this means one thing, among a host of unknown meaning: it means he must have a quick relatedness to all the other things in the novel: snow, bed-bugs, sunshine, the phallus, trains, silk-hats, cats, sorrow, people, food, diphtheria, fuchsias, stars, ideas, God, tooth-paste, lightning, and toilet-paper. He must be in quick relation to all these things. What he says and does must be relative to them all.