Delphi Collected Works of Hugh Walpole (Illustrated)

by Hugh Walpole

  This is a self-conscious age. Fielding and Walter Scott and Jane Austen would not have been at home in it. On the other hand Richardson, Sterne, De Quincey, Peacock, Borrow, would have known just where they were. A novelist especially is in these days driven to self-consciousness because the novel has become the public marketplace of the arts. Everyone walks there and brings bells there and drives his donkey cart.... It is perfectly easy for a novelist to say, “I know that I am no good as a writer. I have a knack. The public at the moment likes me. I am feathering my nest.” But there are also all the novelists whose very first written word proclaims them self-conscious artists. They are trying to do well something that a number of men and women have already done superbly well before them. “Madame Bovary”, “Rouge et Noir”, “War and Peace”, “The Brothers Karamazov”, “Wuthering Heights”, “The Return of the Native” — these compel them to self-consciousness. The trouble today is that the very popular novels are too stupid and the very superior novels too priggish. What we need is a Miss D —— —— or a Mr. A —— with better brains and more culture, and a Miss D —— — or a Mr. K —— — with a stronger narrative gift and less self-conscious satisfaction.

  I cannot, personally, see that the novel has advanced one little step since “Clarissa Harlowe”. Of course any talk about the progress of the arts is nonsense. The arts do not advance. Once in a while a star dances, genius blazes the sky, a fountain leaps, a crowd of critics are left staring skyward and volubly explaining. The arts do not advance. James Joyce can teach Laurence Sterne exactly nothing at all. As to the things that Laurence Sterne, bending down quizzically from the loftier shades, can teach James Joyce...

  Meanwhile I have my Credo. I believe that:

  1. I am a born novelist.

  2. I have a narrative gift, a sense of character, a feeling for atmosphere.

  3. My godfathers, Hawthorne and Trollope, are not bad godfathers for a man.

  4. I consider about myself continually, but no more than any human being in constant reminder of the past, the present, the future, his digestion and his friends, must consider himself.

  5. I consider the relation of the Other Life to this one so infinitely more interesting than any other question that I am surprised it is considered unimportant or even non-existent by so many of my friends.

  6. I am in love with life — not really with myself, as some of my friends and all of my enemies consider.

  7. I think it of absorbing interest that I should exist — and of nearly equally absorbing interest that everyone else should exist, so different, so persistent, so picturesque.

  8. I am too inquisitive and too deeply interested to be shocked by anything.

  9. My life is a constant struggle between selfishness and love for my friends. Those whom I do not love think me completely selfish.

  10. I like to be liked except by those whom I hate. I hate nobody.

  11. I consider myself or any other individual so deeply unimportant and at the same time so important that conceit and humility seem to me impossible qualities.

  Having made this little Credo for myself as truthfully as I can, I am of course open to the charge that to publish such trivialities is a laughable matter. In these days when so much highly intellectualized autobiography is published under the thin guise of fiction such mild and innocent statements must seem to the dram drinkers like “nursery tea”. But there are a vast number of persons in the world quite as simple as myself and simpler. And I wish these persons would make honest statements more frequently than they do.

  In fact the pause that these little fragments of autobiography have entailed upon me — this sudden realization that the Crystal Box, of late years quite forgotten by me, does somewhere still exist — has done me a positive world of good.

  I had a charming house in London, a house with amusing pictures, interesting books, a dog, five servants, visitors, and a lovely Japanese screen. It also had two telephones, and telegrams would come there. Telegrams did come, and people. I was very happy — happier than I had ever been before. From eight in the morning until midnight I enjoyed myself. I enjoyed working. I enjoyed seeing my friends and showing them my possessions. I enjoyed walking with my dog and seeing him swim the Regent’s Park Pond. I enjoyed dining out. I enjoyed hunting for old books. I enjoyed London herself, looking at her and smelling her and slipping in and out of her embrace; and life moved faster and faster, and faster and faster again. One event turned upon the heels of another. Then one event caught up with another, linked arms with it, and the two marched along together, were caught up by a third....

  Telegrams and anger! Kindness and echoing voices! Telephones and invitations!...

  I was at Andover. I was considering the sixth of these little papers. I was walking with Dr. Stearns and we climbed a hill and looked over the Massachusetts country, ruby colored, violet tinted on the horizon with a flurry of grey clouds like flocks of geese.

  Utter silence, suddenly snapped by the voices of some boys, playing football —

  “Yes. I’ll sell it. Get rid of it,” I said, turning round to Stearns.

  He didn’t understand me.

  “Sell what?” he asked.

  “Everything,” I answered. “It’s crowding me in. I am being strangled.” We walked down the hill and he pointed out the new tower that they are building at Andover for a war memorial, and I saw how proud he was of his school. I was proud too through him, and was happy, feeling suddenly free, looking up and seeing the geese clouds running across the china plate sky only to tumble helter-skelter into a crimson furnace there in the west.

  III

  I have never before been so free in my life as I am now — I was most certainly not free at school. I was not free at Cambridge, nor as a schoolmaster nor as a journalist, nor after the publication of “Fortitude” — and of course not during the war.

  The only time perhaps when I have felt as free as I do today was on that occasion in Liverpool, already narrated by me, when I looked across at the grey weltering Mersey and suddenly knew that I would be a writer, and saw books that I would write swinging like colored lanterns across the sky in front of my eyes.

  And now I am free again and at the beginning once more as I was then. I have written some dozen books and there are things in them, here and there, that are not too bad; but not one of them is a good book — there is naïveté, immaturity, sentimentality, falseness in all of them — and so I am going to begin all over again.

  Socrates, one of my wisest and ablest friends, thus talked with me not long ago:

  Socrates: Why do you consider in this way as to whether your books are good or bad? In the first place the question is not of importance. In the second, it places yourself in a false position. You know that you do not in reality consider the books bad, but you wish to appear humble because there are people who have called you vain. It should not matter to you what anyone calls you, Hippocrates or another, and if you truly think your books bad then they are the last things about which you will wish to speak.

  Myself: But, Socrates, I do not consider them altogether bad. And whether they be bad or good I have an affection for them as a father has for his children. They are part of myself. They have been with me so long. They know that I intended them to be better. And so far as that goes I am well aware, Socrates, that in the public prints and among your friends you say continually that you think nothing of your own works, that they are poor feeble things; that, were you a rich man, you would never write another line; and yet all your friends well know that there is no one so incessantly preoccupied with his own works, their histories, their plots, their adventures with others, their sicknesses and their healths, as is yourself. But this you keep secret lest you should be thought sentimental and naïve. You like to stand aloof in your irony and watch men’s antics with a superior smile. But in truth, Socrates, you are as sentimental as the rest of us and as human.

  Socrates: Thank you. There is perhaps some truth in what you say. But
quite honestly I do not consider our generation of writers to be of sufficient importance that we should concern ourselves very closely with what we are doing. Had you yourself more of an ironic spirit, were you a little more subtle and a little less openly sentimental, then I think you might write of yourself and your work with safety. As it is I fear for your self-exposure.

  Myself: That is kind of you, Socrates, but it is just this fear that is cramping yourself and your friends.

  In your determined avoidance of self-consciousness you are more highly self-conscious than I. Why should I not try and determine where I stand?

  Socrates: True. But wherefore publicly?

  Myself: Because it is an attempt at the truth. Because after writing for fifteen years I have made so little advance in my art that it is interesting to discover the reason, and I am beginning all over again. There are others in my own state. And I wish they too would speak of their difficulties.

  Socrates: Is that true? Or are you saying what you would wish others to believe?

  Myself: That is true.

  Socrates: Well, remember... et ego in Arcadia vixi....

  IV

  I think, indeed, that Socrates and some of my other friends have left Arcadia too far behind them. They are too clever and are laying altogether too heavy an emphasis upon the value of brains. Anatole France, most beloved of all living writers in any language today, is never the great artist more surely than when he is perfectly simple, forgets his irony, and is even what Socrates and his friends would name sentimental — as in “Le Lys Rouge” when the lights shine down upon the lovers from Fiesole, as in “Les Dieux Ont Soif” when the maker of dancing dolls gives shelter to the old priest and the prostitute: passages of so tender a nature that no one of the newer novelists would permit himself so dangerous an emotion.

  Indeed when I am told, as I am so frequently in this year of grace 1923, that the experiences of Mr and Mrs. Bloom are to be accepted by us as a full revelation of life, I rebel with all the vehemence in my power. Brilliant in language and in vision “Ulysses” may be. M. Valéry Larbaud and Messrs. Ezra Pound and Murry are perhaps right when they acclaim it a masterpiece of method and construction. It may be a work of intense erudition, and of such a Medusa-like novelty that English fiction having gazed upon its face never will be the same again. All this may be true. I am not qualified to speak. But this I do know — that there is not in “Ulysses” from the first word to the last one hint of nobility, of fine feeling, of unselfishness, of kindliness to others, of virtue or any restraint. Indeed, this venture of naming nobility is, in these postwar days, a dangerous business. Notts avons changé tout cela....

  Human nature is mean, bestial, furtive, preoccupied eternally with sex, discontented and deeply ironical. No one acts today from fine motives — fine motives indeed are merely erotic emanations from some buried Freudian complex. But when I look around upon my friends — and I have a very varied collection — I cannot discover this persistent sex mania, this cruelty and selfishness and preoccupation with disordered digestion. There is A —— — who is suffering from an incurable disease and nevertheless gets much amusement out of life; there is X —— named by all his friends a cynic but happy and cozy in his cynicism; there is M —— who is comfortably married but is neither stupid, stagnating, nor loathing his children; and his children, poor innocents, know nothing at all of the Œdipus complex.

  Quite frankly Bloom and Dædalus and Miss Richardson’s Miriam and the ridiculous gargoyles of Ben Hecht and even the worried sexual workers of Sherwood Anderson’s longer stories seem to me as far from real life as are the heroes of Mr. Curwood and Miss Dell, the heroines of Zane Grey and Hall Caine. I am ready to admit that much that is interesting in human psychology has been discovered by the modern psychological scientists, although the Book of Genesis I fancy covers most of it — but the novel as a form of art is another thing than the novel as a photographic recorder of surface realism.

  I am old-fashioned enough to believe in the art of narrative, in the creation of characters independent of the narrator’s personal autobiography. And, after all, this removal of inhibitions is well enough — but is there to be no restraint, no admiration for self-negation and self-sacrifice, no picture of kindliness, love that is not bestial? Are not ideals as important as realities? Is not the dream as important as the business? Are not the elements of pity and tenderness some of the craftsman’s tools? Among our younger writers have not the authors of “Jane Clegg” and “Nocturne”, of “Joanna Godden” and “The Altar Steps” shown us that modern realism can be more than realistic and modern psychology finer than psychoanalysis?

  Not long ago a number of English writers were asked to say what they thought of the future of the English novel. One of them, J. D. Beresford, who ought to have known better, actually stated it as his belief that the novel as an art form was worn out and finished.

  Does that not show to what ends the novel is being today turned? So long as there are human beings alive on this planet who wish to tell other human beings some anecdote, some adventure, some humorous history, so long will the novel exist. That may not be for a greatly extended period. But while humans remain the tale remains. From Chaucer to Joyce the distance of time is slight. And as in art there is no progress but only a procession of interpreters, let us not disturb our souls with the sense that printing was discovered yesterday nor that, having been so recently found, it should be so swiftly silenced.

  V

  I am beginning again. Mrs. Sea-grim has wiped her eyes, drunk her tea (laced with a drop of the Other), and already tramping in her large flat boots through the stubbly fields has all but forgotten the late departed. The sable plumes are nodding down the hill again.... I lick the stub of my pencil.... The Crystal Box is once again in sight.

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  Series Contents

  Series One

  Anton Chekhov

  Charles Dickens

  D.H. Lawrence

  Dickensiana Volume I

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Elizabeth Gaskell

  Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  George Eliot

  H. G. Wells

  Henry James

  Ivan Turgenev

  Jack London

  James Joyce

  Jane Austen

  Joseph Conrad

  Leo Tolstoy

  Louisa May Alcott

  Mark Twain

  Oscar Wilde

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  Sir Walter Scott

  The Brontës

  Thomas Hardy

  Virginia Woolf

  Wilkie Collins

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Series Two

  Alexander Pushkin

  Alexandre Dumas (English)

  Andrew Lang

  Anthony Trollope

  Bram Stoker

  Christopher Marlowe

  Daniel Defoe

  Edith Wharton

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  G. K. Chesterton

  Gustave Flaubert (English)

  H. Rider Haggard

  Herman Melville

  Honoré de Balzac (English)

  J. W. von Goethe (English)

  Jules Verne


  L. Frank Baum

  Lewis Carroll

  Marcel Proust (English)

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Nikolai Gogol

  O. Henry

  Rudyard Kipling

  Tobias Smollett

  Victor Hugo

  William Shakespeare

  Series Three

  Ambrose Bierce

  Ann Radcliffe

  Ben Jonson

  Charles Lever

  Émile Zola

  Ford Madox Ford

  Geoffrey Chaucer

  George Gissing

  George Orwell

  Guy de Maupassant

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Henrik Ibsen

  Henry David Thoreau

  Henry Fielding

  J. M. Barrie

  James Fenimore Cooper

  John Buchan

  John Galsworthy

  Jonathan Swift

  Kate Chopin

  Katherine Mansfield

  L. M. Montgomery

  Laurence Sterne

  Mary Shelley

  Sheridan Le Fanu

  Washington Irving

  Series Four

  Arnold Bennett

  Arthur Machen

  Beatrix Potter

  Bret Harte

  Captain Frederick Marryat

  Charles Kingsley

  Charles Reade

  G. A. Henty

  Edgar Rice Burroughs

  Edgar Wallace

  E. M. Forster

  E. Nesbit

  George Meredith

  Harriet Beecher Stowe

  Jerome K. Jerome

  John Ruskin

  Maria Edgeworth

  M. E. Braddon

  Miguel de Cervantes