Nevertheless many novels now written use these most grave issues for mere dramatic effect, or to confound morality; and, to these ends, offer a falsely attractive picture of emotional adventure. In his terrible Bed of Roses, on the other hand, Mr. W. L. George
treats his theme with the definite object of exposing the tragedy of a young woman with no training, suddenly forced to earn her living; and of expressing his righteous anger against the conditions of civilization. Because, he declares, "a woman can scratch up a living but not a future; and the only job she's really fit for is to be a man's keep, legal or illegal, permanent or temporary." The narrative itself is most emphatically not free from offence, but the motive is honest and sincere.
Mr. Gilbert Cannan, again, with less earnest intention but still legitimately, seems to have written Pink Roses to illustrate the demoralizing effects of the war on a quite decent, average young man, who was "left out" of things—through a weak heart. He drifts into an experiment of lust, but is not finally destroyed, because he recognized from the first that he had only sought the adventure—to fill the blank years.
The frail "Cora" of Mr. Snaith's Sailor merely stands for temptation, which no novelist can omit. The episode is not shirked, but it is treated with all the traditional reticence, which puts it outside our discussion here.
In these examples the motive may be
acknowledged towards justification; but such books as Mr. W. L. George's Confessions of Ursula Trent only respond to a morbid preference for melodramatic atmosphere: they assume, and encourage, our interest in the unclean.
To heighten the effect, they are—almost inevitably—untrue. The attractions and drama are exaggerated, giving a false glamour to the gravest tragedy of human nature. There is here obvious adventure, and far greater variety or colour than we can, most of us, reach in ordinary respectable life. There is even some real liberty for the individual (though far less than these superficial narratives suggest), in dramatic contrast to the slaving drudgery and imprisoned minds—of underpaid long hours of toil and drab unloving homes.
The hopeless tragedy, the bitter knowledge, the utter weariness and the slavery of the soul do not provide the novelist with dramatic material, and are—to a large extent—left out of the picture. He slurs over, or altogether ignores, the blunting of moral sense, the coarsening of moral fibre, the lowering of all ideals: the gradual loss of power over oneself, loss of will, loss of freedom, loss—even—of
desire. He may use the more obvious foulness and brutality as an occasion for drama—naturally not wishing to be transparently unreal. The moral tragedy is not there.
But by his own art standard, that demands the exact truth, he is condemned; and he is guilty of just that falsehood which he set out to expose and revile—of treating his characters as a class apart, rather types than individuals. As the Victorians assumed, without charity, they were always lower than the "respectable"; he almost conveys the impression that they are necessarily higher—as careless, and far more dangerous, an assumption.