'"Don't you like poor people very much yourself?"
'Towneley gave his face a comical but good-natured screw and said quietly, but slowly and decidedly, "No, no, no," and escaped.
'Of course, some poor people were very nice, and always would be so, but as though scales had fallen suddenly from his eyes he saw that no one was nicer for being poor, and that between the upper and lower classes there was a gulf which amounted practically to an impassable barrier.'
It is a great pity that Samuel Butler did not live longer and write more novels. But in regretting him, we shall do well to remember that though publication was delayed until some time after the author's death, the bulk of The Way of All Flesh was written in the '70's. The Way of All Flesh is not sympathetic to the contemporary mood; it is one of those books so much ahead of its time (except perhaps in ecclesiastical matters) that the time has not yet caught up with it. It was doomed inevitably to an interval of oblivion. The case reminds one of Richard Feverel.
Only in one way is The Way of All Flesh quite contemporary. The hero thinks so well of the prostitute that he marries her. On the other hand, to be sure, he bitterly regrets it, which is not contemporary. I do not mean that the hero's marrying her is especially in the literary fashion, but his thinking well of her is. You will notice that in our moral fever we do not leave the prostitute out of our novels—no, indeed: she must be there to give spice, as of old. Only now, instead of being entangled with her, the young gentleman preaches to her; and she loves him for it. Perhaps this is what happens nowadays in real life. I do not pretend to know; but I suspect it is true, for I fancy the only kind of person who could invent the contemporary plot is the kind who would live it. The wildest imaginings of the people who are made differently would hardly stretch to it. And not only does the hero find himself immensely touched by the tragedy of the disreputable woman,—which is, after all, in certain cases plausible enough,—he burns to introduce his fiancée to her. Now that, again, may be life,—Mr. Winston Churchill, for example, should know better than I,—but it is certainly a world with the sense of values gone wrong. And when we have lost our sense of values, we shall presently lose the values as well. The girl herself is often to blame: did not the fiancée of Simon de Gex go of her own initiative to see the animal-tamer, and come away to renounce him, convinced that the animal-tamer was the nobler woman? Which, emphatically, she was not. But then, as we know from long experience of Mr. Locke, he cannot keep his head with circus-people about; and sawdust is incense to him. Let Mr. Locke have his little foibles by all means; but even Mr. Locke should not have made the spoiled darling of society marry the animal-tamer (one side of her face having been nearly clawed off) and then go with her into city missionary work. Yet I do not believe it is really Mr. Locke's fault. The public at present loves as a sister the woman with a past; and loves city missionary work, if possible, more.
The fact is that with all our imitation of Meredith—and every one who is not imitating Tolstoï is imitating Meredith—he has failed to save us. We have taken all his prescriptions blindly—except one. We have emancipated our women and emasculated our men; we have cast down the mighty from their seats and exalted them of low degree; we have learned all the Radical shibboleths and say them for our morning prayers; and we have faced the fact of sex so squarely that we can hardly see anything else. But we have not learned his saving hatred of the sentimentalist. Miss May Sinclair has admirably pointed out in her study of the Three Brontës that Charlotte Brontë was exceedingly modern in her detestation of sentimentality. Modern she may have been—with Meredith; but not modern with the present novelists, for they are almost too sentimental to be endured. And there is the whole trouble. We think Thackeray an old fool for being sentimental over Amelia Sedley; but how does it better the case to be sentimental, instead, over the heroine of The Promised Land? Amelia Sedley was all in all a much nicer person, if not half so clever. She may have sniveled a good deal, but she was capable of loving some one else better than herself.
Of course, I have cited only a few instances—those that happened to come most easily to mind. But let any reader of fiction run over mentally a group of contemporary heroes, and see if the substitutions I have named have not pretty generally taken place. Has not pride given way to humility, reticence to glibness, class-consciousness to a wild democracy, the code of manners to an uncouth unworldliness, and honor in the old sense to a burning passion for reform—'any old' reform? Do not these men lead us into the heterogeneous company of the unclassed of both sexes—and ask us to look upon them as saints in motley? Has not the world of fiction changed in the last twenty years? The hero in old days sometimes fell foul of the law by getting into debt. But we were not supposed, therefore, to be on his side against the law. Now, the hero does not, perhaps, get into legal difficulties himself, but he is always passionately on the side of the people whom laws were devised to protect the respectable from. The scientific tendency to consider that aristocracy consists merely in freedom from certain physical taints has permeated fiction. 'Is not one man as good as another?' asked the demagogue. 'Of course he is, and a great deal better!' replied the excited Irishman in the crowd. We are in the thick of a popular mania for thinking all the undesirables 'a good deal better.' The modern hero is, to my mind, in intention, if not in execution, an admirable figure; and though one rather expects him any day to give his whole fortune for a gross of green spectacles, one will not, for that, find him any less likable. Some day he will rediscover the Dantesque hierarchy of souls implicit in humanity. And then, perhaps, he will get back his charm.
Some one is probably bursting to observe that we have a school of realists at hand; and that no one can accuse Mr. Wells and Mr. Bennett of sentimentality—also that we have Mr. Shaw and Mr. Granville Barker and Mr. Masefield as mounted auxiliaries in the field. I grant Mr. Bennett; I am not so sure about Mr. Wells. But certainly Mr. Wells is not sentimental as Mr. William de Morgan, Mr. Winston Churchill, Mr. Meredith Nicholson, Mr. Theodore Dreiser, Mr. H. S. Harrison, and Miss Ellen Glasgow are sentimental. If he is sentimental at all, it is rather over ideas than people. (Mr. Masefield, I am inclined to think, is simply catering to the special audience that Thomas Hardy, by his silence, has left gaping and empty.) Let us look into the matter a little. 'Sentimental' is one of the most difficult catchwords in the world to define; and you can get a roomful of intelligent people quarreling over it any time. Perhaps, for our purposes, it will serve merely to say that the sentimentalist is always, in one way or another, disloyal to facts. He cannot be trusted to give a straight account, because his own sense of things is more valuable to him than the truth. He has come in on the top of the pragmatic wave, and the sands of Anglo-Saxondom are strewn thick with him. He serves, in Kipling's phrase, the God of Things as They Ought to Be (according to his private feeling). His own perversion may be æsthetic, or intellectual, or moral, or sociological, but he is always recognizable by his tampering with truth.
Now, Mr. Wells does tamper with truth. He did it, for example, in the case of Ann Veronica. He wanted Ann Veronica to be a nice girl under twenty, and he wanted her, even more, to be unduly awakened to certain physical aspects of sex. It was sentimentality that made him draw her as he did: determination to prove that the girl who loved as he wanted her to love was just as conventional as any one else. You cannot have your cake and eat it too; but the sentimentalist blindly refuses to accept that. Accordingly, we get the unconvincing creature that Mr. Wells wanted to believe existed. Mr. Wells's heroes may not seem to bear out my argument so well as Mr. Galsworthy's. To be sure, Mr. Wells is not so sentimental as Mr. Galsworthy, and he has not, like the author of The Man of Property, and Fraternity, and Justice, one—just one—fixed idea. Mr. Galsworthy always deals with a man who is in love with some other man's wife; and his world is thereby narrowed. Mr. Wells is interested in a good many things, and his politics are not purely philanthropic as most of our novelists' politics are. But Mr. Wells's heroes, even when they are fairly fortunate, are preoccupied with their own notions of sociological duty, even more than they are preoccupied with passion, though their passion is 'special' enough when it comes. Would any one except a Wells hero take a trip to India and come away having seen nothing but the sweat-shops of Bombay? Always the author's sympathy is with the under dog; whether it is Kipps or Mr. Polly living out his long foredoomed existence, or George Ponderevo analyzing Bladesover with diabolic keenness and aching contempt. 'I'm a spiritual guttersnipe in love with unimaginable goddesses,' says Ponderevo in a burst of frankness. There you have the Wells hero to the life. And Mr. Bennett's people are only spiritual guttersnipes who are not in love with unimaginable goddesses.
The point is that the guttersnipe is having his turn in fiction: if our American heroes are not guttersnipes themselves, it is their sign of grace to be supremely interested in guttersnipes. In one way or the other, the guttersnipe must have his proper prominence. Of course, there are differences and degrees: a few heroes get no nearer the lower classes than a passionate desire for reform tickets and municipal sanitation. But ordinarily they must go through Ernest Pontifex's state of believing that poor people are not only more important, but in every way nicer than rich people; and few of them go back utterly on that belief, as Ernest did. Perhaps that, more than anything else, marks the change of fashion in men. For gentlemen were always, in their way, benevolent; but formerly they had not achieved the paradox that the object of benevolence is ex officio more interesting than the bestower.