Personality in Literature

by R. A. Scott-James

If, then, we find that there is much in modern popular literature that we dislike, this is a very different thing from saying that we prefer the technical banalities dear to the pedant, or would set up the standard of a barren culture. The popular taste is something not to be scoffed at, but to be accounted for. To complain of it is wasted effort; to explain it would be something to the purpose. And this we can only do by keeping in mind that vital ideal which in spite of every set-back the world has contrived to preserve, and endeavouring to discover what it is—short of that ideal, or remote from it—that the modern public wants: what taste it is that hundreds of modern authors are trying to satisfy.

It is evidently a very various taste, for it is the taste of the whole people. Everyone in the modern civilised state has been taught to read, and almost everyone has had the written word thrust upon him; so that reading has become a habit. At every turn the eye falls upon the printed advertisement, the printed leaflet, the hand-written letter; and the habit which is developed by the necessities of life has intertwined itself also in the amenities. Newspapers, and weekly and monthly periodicals, adapt themselves to the tastes of every class in the community. The time is still far distant when books will be universally and systematically read; but the number of volumes annually distributed has increased at least tenfold in the last generation; and a large proportion of this literature must find its way to strata of society which fifty years ago read nothing at all.

It would be too much to expect that these millions of recruits to the reading public would be drawn to that literature which can be classed with the fine arts. One would no more expect them to admire it than one would expect a child of five to admire Hamlet. The astonishing thing is, not that so few people appreciate the best literature, as that so many—under direction—are open to its influence, as we may see from the immense sales of those popular volumes which Mr. Ernest Rhys and others guarantee to be genuine "classics." Unfortunately, in the case of recently written books, Mr. Rhys is not always at hand. In such cases there is little direction for docile disciples of culture excepting such as is given in newspaper reviews, and reviews are as likely to misdirect and confuse as to encourage and guide.

But although this considerable and growing public of ambitious readers already exists, and may some day come to the support of original literature, it is at present easily swamped by that heterogeneous public for which the largest number of books are provided. That majority, in the nature of things, is unable to give the concentrated attention, still less the selective appreciation, which literature of the higher order requires. There is nothing to encourage them to concentrate. The newspaper, the popular magazine, the theatre, the moving-picture show, and the whole shifting, rapid panorama of modern life discourage concentration. There are readers who can only give the odds and ends of their time to reading. Most of them are devoting the best efforts of their brain and attention to their business, household duties, their social and domestic affairs, and they turn to books only when their minds are fatigued and in need of repose. That is to say, they read not for a renewal of activity, but for distraction. With them, books satisfy the desire, not for an enhancement of life, but for the forgetting of it. Their literature is at the most a stimulant which excites without giving active play to their faculties; it presents nothing which connects with life or ideas, nothing even to call forth the effort demanded by their practical affairs.

There are others, for the most part women not of the working class, who support with apparent earnestness the purveyors of popular fiction and biography, and even patronise poetry and genteel social philosophy. Amongst them are to be found those to whom the sterner actualities of life are unfamiliar and repugnant, for whom the practice of trifling with books is rather an ornament than an occupation, a mode of killing time rather than using it. They, too, read to be distracted, choosing an emasculate literature which panders to their essential dilettantism.

Now those who regard literature as an important thing, playing a significant part in the life of a nation, must, as I have already indicated, seek in it something more positive than a distraction from life; for them it must be an addition to life. It must provide experience compounded of the same stuff as other experience; but not having the vividness which the direct impact of life carries with it, it must gain its vividness by an intensity, a fineness, an interest of its own—by a distinctive quality distilled into it from the personality of the writer. It is imagination which achieves this, the faculty so apprehensive of life that it can fashion life into images which are projections of the artist, his own stamp upon the stuff of life. To such an author literature cannot be a mere amusement or profession. It deals with what he conceives to be the most essential things in the world; it is his rendering of the world, his perspective; and it is just in so far as he has made this, his ideal and real world, appreciable also to us, that he has succeeded in his art. Such imaginative reconstruction of the facts of life, such impregnation of life with fineness, calls for alertness of faculty in the reader, demands from him something of that eagerness to perceive which characterises the artist himself. But how can the tired worker seeking distraction, or the idle dilettante seeking only a drug or a stimulant, muster that alertness of faculty and that eagerness to perceive which are needed for the appreciation of art? It is not to be expected. A coarser appeal will produce all that such minds are able to assimilate. For good reading, like good writing, requires the energy of men not robbed of leisure, men who can enjoy some respite from the commonplace.

And yet it often happens, as we shall see, that those who have succeeded in distracting the many have put into their work some fineness which commends it also to the few. It is only in theory that there is a fixed boundary between works of art and the works which Philistines enjoy. In practice, merit and demerit exist side by side; works crude in conception reveal a hundred finenesses, and works fine in conception reveal crudenesses of execution. And just as there are authors who mingle good and bad in their books, so too there are readers who enjoy certain kinds of excellence though they can be vulgarly excited by the cruder devices. And again there are persons who appreciate to some extent genuine works of art, who in moments of fatigue or jaded appetite can be diverted by the mere appeal to sensation.

The clever publisher knows well that the public for whose distraction he caters is divided into many classes, and that these classes must be attracted each in a special way. For the purposes of my argument I group these under five different heads, which are probably not exhaustive and certainly not mutually exclusive, but correspond, I think, to the five chief means of exciting and distracting the multitude. The two largest classes constantly overlap, consisting: firstly, of those whose love of sensation is satisfied by violent incident; and secondly, of those who are especially susceptible to the sentimental appeal. To a third class belong those who take pleasure in the agitations of sex feeling; and to a fourth, those whose sense of humour is tickled by the sallies of the literary clown. The fifth class—a very large one—consists of those who are of a habit of mind to be excited by sensations which can be associated with religion and morality. It is useless to name as a sixth class those who are moved by intellectual ideas, for so small a class is not the objective of the popular author.

I. All novels must to some extent depend upon incident and arrangement of incident, but there is a kind of novel which only interests through the excitement of events in their nature fictitious, even when accidentally true. Any really good book which may be spoken of as a "novel of incident" will invariably prove to be very much more. To take the case of Fielding's Tom Jones, one observes that it is an imitation of life which is neither a slavish copying nor a make-believe, but a vivid representation of eighteenth-century England as Fielding saw it; it is a book which presents characters, and itself has a character. Its atmosphere is quite unmistakable. It is not a "slice" out of the eighteenth century—there can be no real "slice out of life" excepting in life itself. It is Fielding's rendering of the eighteenth century, in particular it is his assertion of the physicality (if I may use the term) of life, a direct assertion of the boisterous physical vitality which, as Fielding presents it and as Marlowe presented it, acquires value for the spirit and is acceptable to the imagination. It is the original pagan assertion of life, which finds its opposite in Euripides' conception of the ascetic Hippolytus; an assertion which Propertius repeated in the language of mockery when he speaks of a lena as

"Docta vel Hippolytum Veneri mollire negantem."