While I Remember

by Stephen McKenna

The happiest moment in the existence of all who live by their pens must surely be that in which they attain sufficient independence of position, temperament or pocket to write without regarding too much the jeremiads of a publisher or the cautioning of a reviewer; and this happy moment comes earlier and more often into the life of the novelist to-day than at any time since novels were first written. In spite of enhanced cost for producers and of diminished incomes for consumers, the prospects of the novel have never been more bright; the number of those who before the age of thirty enjoy an honourable reputation all over the world has never been higher; and the deference paid in private to the novelist and in public to his opinions has become so great that some may think it exaggerated and undeserved. The columns of the press lie open to him when he wishes to air an opinion of his own subject; and hardly a week passes without bringing him a prepaid telegram in which he is invited to enrich the common stock of thought on any theme from "youth" to "the future of the cinematograph industry." During the war he was the supreme court of appeal in strategy and politics; he is regarded no less seriously than was the musical-comedy actress of ten years ago; and, when his books are used as the basis of a film scenario, his name is quite frequently printed in company with those of the adapter, the producer and the chief actors.

This last is perhaps a chivalrous concession by the victor to one who continues to put up a game fight. As time and money are limited, it is probable that, when film dramas have worked through their present ingenuous crudity, they will develop at the expense of the novel and of the stage; at present they have much progress to make and, even in their highest imaginable perfection, they will only compete with that novel in which every other ingredient is subordinated to action. At present they are for many novelists a source of unearned increment.

Though the practice of their craft bring, at least to the more fortunate of story-tellers, honour, affluence and friendships more precious than either, most of them find their richest reward in the results of their creative energy. This does not mean the elation which comes to a man when he feels that he can call his work good: such gratification he shares with the painter and the sculptor, the poet and the dramatist; nor does it mean the sensation that, after working at what he loves best and perhaps winning honour and riches from it, he is possibly leaving behind him something that may endure when the tongue of the statesman is silent and when the hand of the surgeon is cold; alone in all the world of art, the novelist, working in rivalry to the first creator, fashions men and women in whosesoever image he pleases and sets them in a garden of his own planning, where with the knowledge of good and evil and with the power of life and death he controls their destinies and makes the span of their existence long or short. It is impossible for a man to love Balzac or Dickens, Thackeray or Stevenson without taking up his abode in their company: Paris becomes a city wherein he may at any moment encounter Vautrin, Nucingen and Lucien de Rubempré on one night and in one setting of streets and clothes, Pinkerton and Loudon Dodd on another; the infinite spaces of London are star-spangled with the cigar-divan in which the former prince of Bohemia led his Olympian if sedentary existence, with the Goswell Street lodgings from which Mr. Pickwick set out on his journey to Rochester and with the academy in Chiswick at which Becky Sharp, already a lost soul, hurled her copy of Dr. Johnson's "Dixonary." To the novelist of imagination these people and places are more real than the usurpers whom he finds in their stead.

Much more real, however puny the imagination, are the men and women whom he carries so long in the womb of his own fancy. Their features and their clothes, their speech and their mannerisms, the greatness and the meanness of their characters are better known to him than is the single thought of a child to its mother. In their company he withdraws from what others would call "the real world," forgetting alike its general ugliness and its occasional flashes of startling beauty; when he walks abroad and rubs shoulders with the passers-by, he is still in their company, their shadows are more potent than the clumsy substances among which he dodges in and out, their voices ring clear above the drone of traffic and the broken mutter of the street. London, if they were born there, is different from any London that other eyes have seen: an hotel in Piccadilly, crowded with officers in uniform, is for him the place where before the war the transparent shade of a girl stood at the foot of the stairs to receive the guests at her coming-out ball; a shuttered house in Curzon Street, under renovation for a rich American, is the scene in which an engagement was made or broken off; Pall Mall is overlaid, as in a palimpsest, with imaginary clubs; and the narrow, silent streets behind the Abbey are roused to life by the hoot or jingle of phantom cabs on their way to a political dinner.

It is a world complete in all its generations, all its social grades. They are born and educated, these dream-children; they love and quarrel, marry and separate, make money and lose it, live and die. Another generation presses upward to take their place; but, if, as in life, they are forgotten by the newcomers, they can never be forgotten by the parent who gave them life and who lives among them so continuously that he can shed tears of pity for their imaginary sorrows, while the "real world" of which others speak becomes shrouded in twilight unreality.

Any one who holds that a book—like a picture or a statue—should be its own explanation, grows quickly suspicious of introductions and footnotes; but a defence or even a postulate may be allowed against a school of criticism which threatens the former, late-won freedom of artistic choice. If it be granted that a story-teller may take what theme he likes, it must be granted also that he may tell the story of an epoch as freely as of an episode, the story of a class or nation as freely as of an individual; he may select as his model War and Peace, in which Tolstoi chose for subject the life of all Russia under the cloud of the Napoleonic wars; he may copy Romain Rolland in describing the intellectual history of two generations; he may bow his knee to Balzac, who with superlative genius and daring planned his human comedy to cover no less a subject than the whole of French life under the restored Bourbons. An English author is entitled, if he have the presumption, to write in ten or in fifty volumes, each linked to its predecessor, of the whole English world as it existed before the war and as the war transmuted it; if he make it unreadable, it is his fault; if no one read it, his misfortune; but, so long as ambition remain obdurate, he is unlikely to be persuaded into other paths. If he be independent of sales, he is beyond the reach of fear; if the world into which he withdraws be real to him, he needs no other than this, the story-teller's, reward.

IV

The period of demobilisation, that twelve months' interlude between war and peace, is a convenient time for pausing to take stock of English literary and artistic development since the end of 1914. The æsthetic lives of those who were born in the eighties fall naturally into three divisions; there is first the period in which the Indian summer of Victorian literature paled before the new suns of the nineties; there is then the period in which a quieter and more reasoned revolt against the self-imposed limitations of Victorianism expressed itself in a mood of universal experiment among writers and of universal receptivity among readers; before the second phase had worked to a natural end by discarding novelty for its own sake and by choosing among the new forms and methods those which yielded the most fruitful results, the third period crashed into existence at the impulse of a war which upset all orderly progress.

It may not be superfluous to recall the names of at least a few of those who occupied the forefront of the stage in 1914. Conrad, after long neglect by all but a tiny intelligenzia, had lately come into his own; Galsworthy continued to break new hearts with the exquisite tenderness and beauty of each new book; Wells, no less prolific than versatile, was pouring out an astounding profusion of challenges to religion, official politics, conventional morals, accepted economics and established education, with an occasional glorious lapse into such skylarking as Boon and into such immortal comedy as Mr. Polly; Bennett, most expert of craftsmen, was completing his great series of giant miniatures and taking an occasional holiday with The Card and The Regent. At long intervals there came a new volume of Kipling stories, more restrained than of old and lacking the early generous fire. Moore and James had foregone novel-writing for autobiography and the retouching of their earlier work.

It would not be difficult to make a longer list of men with settled and deserved reputations who at this time were continuing to produce work of first-rate technique and achievement; but in 1914, as in 1921, the public was less interested in reading catalogues of names than in looking at the men who had won chief place of honour and in asking who would reign in their stead when they were gone. In a famous article which he contributed before the war to the literary supplement of The Times, Henry James discussed the form of some half-dozen of the younger novelists; and, since that date, there has raged without intermission an informal competition to name the winners among the writers of the future. How far this usurpation of posterity's prerogative diverts a living writer from the unembarrassed prosecution of his work might be argued at length; some may feel that no critic, breathing the same intellectual atmosphere, can pass more than ephemeral judgements on the writers of his generation; the game continues, however, despite the awful example of those who, forty or fifty years ago, tried to place the fame of their own contemporaries beyond challenge, and, if it be regarded as no more than a game in which no finality is possible, it is a harmless intellectual pastime.