?Come on, I’ll give you a fortune. Come on! “ Then a great deal of snivelling and mistakenness would have been spared us all, and we might never have produced a Marx and a Lenin. If only Jesus had accepted the fortune!
Yes, it’s a pity of pities that Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John didn’t write straight novels. They did write nove.’s; but a bit crooked. The Evangels are wonderful novels, by authors “ with a purpose. “Pity there’ s so much Sermon-on-the-Mounting.
“Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John Went to bed with their breeches on!” —
as every child knows. Ah, if only they’d taken them off!
Greater novels, to my mind, are the books of the Old Testament, Genesis, Exodus, Samuel, Kings, by authors whose purpose was so big, it didn’t quarrel with their passionate inspiration. The purpose and the inspiration were almost one. Why, in the name of everything bad, the two ever should have got separated, is a mystery! But in the modern novel they are hopelessly divorced. When there is any inspiration there, to be divorced from.
This, then, is what is the matter with the modern novel. The modern novelist is possessed, hag-ridden, by such a stale old “purpose”, or idea-of-himself, that his inspiration succumbs. Of course he denies having any didactic purpose at all: because a purpose is supposed to be like catarrh, something to be ashamed of. But he’s got it. They’ve all got it: the same snivelling purpose.
They’re all little Jesuses in their own eyes, and their “purpose” is to prove it. Oh Lord! — Lord Jim! Sylvestre Bonnard! If Winter Comes! Main Street! Ulysses! Pan! They are all pathetic or sympathetic or antipathetic little Jesuses accomplis or manquis. And there is a heroine who is always “pure”, usually, nowadays, on the muck-heap! Like the Green Hatted Woman. She is all the time at the feet of Jesus, though her behaviour there may be misleading. Heaven knows what the Saviour really makes of it: whether she’ s a Green Hat or a Constant Nymph (eighteen months of constancy, and her heart failed), or any of the rest of ‘em. They are all, heroes and heroines, novelists and she-novelists, little Jesuses or Jesusesses. They may be wallowing in the mire: but then didn’t Jesus harrow Hell! A la bonne heure!
Oh, they are all novelists with an idea of themselves! Which is a “purpose’’, with a vengeance! For what a weary, false, sickening idea it is nowadays! The novel gives them a way. They can’ t fool the novel.
Now really, it’s time we left off insulting the novel any further. If your purpose is to prove your own Jesus qualifications, and the thin stream of your inspiration is “sin”, then dry up, for the interest is dead. Life as it is! What’s the good of pretending that the lives of a set of tuppenny Green Hats and Constant Nymphs is Life-as-it-is, when the novel itself proves that all it amounts to is life as it is isn’t life, but a sort of everlasting and intricate and boring habit: of Jesus peccant and Jesusa peccante.
These wearisome sickening little personal novels! After all, they aren’t novels at all. In every great novel, who is the hero all the time? Not any of the characters, but some unnamed and nameless flame behind them all. Just as God is the pivotal interest in the books of the Old Testament. But just a trifle too intimate, too frere et cochon, there. In the great novel, the felt but unknown flame stands behind all the characters, and in their words and gestures there is a flicker of the presence. If you are too personal, too human, the flicker fades out, leaving you with something awfully lifelike, and as lifeless as most people are.
We have to choose between the quick and the dead. The quick is God-flame, in everything. And the dead is dead. In this room where I write, there is a little table that is dead: it doesn’t even weakly exist. And there is a ridiculous little iron stove, which for some unknown reason is quick. And there is an iron wardrobe trunk, which for some still more mysterious reason is quick. And there are several books, whose mere corpus is dead, utterly dead and non-existent. And there is a sleeping cat, very quick. And a glass lamp, that, alas, is dead.
What makes the difference? Quien sabe! But difference there is. And I know it.
And the sum and source of all quickness, we will call God. And the sum and total of all deadness we may call human.
And if one tries to find out, wherein the quickness of the quick lies, it is in a certain weird relationship between that which is quick and — I don’t know; perhaps all the rest of things. It seems to consist in an odd sort of fluid, changing, grotesque or beautiful relatedness. That silly iron stove somehow belongs.
Whereas this thin-shanked table doesn’t belong. It is a mere disconnected lump, like a cut-off finger.
And now we see the great, great merits of the novel. It can’t exist without being “quick”. The ordinary unquick novel, even if it be a best seller, disappears into absolute nothingness, the dead burying their dead with surprising speed. For even the dead like to be tickled. But the next minute, they’ve forgotten both the tickling and the tickler.
Secondly, thenovel contains nodidactiveabsolute. All that is quick, and all that is said and done by the quick, is, in some way godly. So that Vronsky’s taking Anna Karenina we must count godly, since it is quick. And that Prince in Resurrection, following the convict girl, we must count dead. The convict train is quick and alive. But that would-be-expiatory Prince is as dead as lumber.
The novel itself lays down these laws for us, and we spend our time evading them. The man in the novel must be “quick”. And this means one thing, among a host of unknown meaning: it means he must ha-we a quick relatedness to all the other things in the novel: snow, bed-bugs, sunshine, the phallus, trains, silk-hats, cats, sorrow, people, food, diphtheria, fuchsias, stars, ideas, God, tooth-paste, lightning, and toilet-paper. He must be in quick relation to all these things. What he says and does must be relative to them all.
And this is why Pierre, for example, in War and Peace, is more dull and less quick than Prince Andre. Pierre is quite nicely related to ideas, tooth-paste, God, people, foods, trains, silk-hats, sorrow, diphtheria, stars. But his relation to snow and sunshine, cats, lightning and the phallus, fuchsias and toilet- paper, is sluggish and mussy. He’s not quick enough.
The really quick, Tolstoi loved to kill them off or muss them over. Like a true Bolshevist. One can’t help feeling Natasha is rather mussy and unfresh, married to that Pierre.
Pierre was what we call, “so human”. Which means, “so limited”. Men clotting together into social masses in order to limit their individual liabilities: this is humanity. And this is Pierre. And this is Tolstoi, the philosopher with a very nauseating Christian-brotherhood idea of himself. Why limit man to a Christian-brotherhood? I myself, I could belong to the sweetest Christian-brotherhood one day, and ride after Attila with a raw beefsteak for my saddle-cloth, to see the red cock crow in flame over all Christendom, next day.
And that is man! That, really, was Tolstoi. That, even, was Lenin, God in the machine of Christian- brotherhood, that hashes men up into social sausage- meat.
Damn all absolutes. Oh damn, damn, damn all absolutes! I tell you, no absolute is going to make the lion lie down with the lamb: unless, like the limerick, the lamb is inside.
“They returned from the ride With lamb Leo inside And a smile on the face of the tiger!
Sing fol-di-lol-lol!
Fol-di-lol-lol!
Fol-di-lol-ol-di-lol-olly!”
For man, there is neither absolute nor absolution. Such things should be left to monsters like the right- angled triangle, which does only exist in the ideal consciousness. A man can’t have a square on his hypotenuse, let him try as he may.
Ay! Ay! Ay! — Man handing out absolutes to man, as if we were all books of geometry with axioms, postulates and definitions in front. God with a pair of compasses! Moses with a set square! Man a geometric bifurcation, not even a radish!
Holy Moses!
“Honour thy father and thy mother!” That’s awfully cute! But supposing they are not honorable? How then, Moses?
Voice of thunder from Sinai: “Pretend to honour them!”
“Love thy
neighbour as thyself.”
Alas, my neighbour happens to be mean and detestable.
Voice of the lambent Dove, cooing: Put it over him, that you love him.”
Talk about the cunning of serpents! I never saw even a serpent kissing his instinctive enemy.
Pfui! I wouldn’t blacken my mouth, kissing my neighbour, who, I repeat, to me is mean and detestable.
Dove, go home!
The Goat and Compasses, indeed!
Everything is relative. Every Commandment that ever issued out of the mouth of God or man, is strictly relative: adhering to the particular time, place and circumstance.
And this is the beauty of the novel; everything is true in its own relationship, and no further.
For the relatedness and interrelatedness of all things flows and changes and trembles like a stream, and like a fish in the stream the characters in the novel swim and drift and float and turn belly-up when they’re dead.
So, if a character in a novel wants two wives — or three — or thirty: well, that is true of that man, at that time, in that circumstance. It may be true of other men, elsewhere and elsewhen. But to infer that all men at all times want two, three, or thirty wives; or that the novelist himself is advocating furious polygamy; is just imbecility.
It has been just as imbecile to infer that, because Dante worshipped a remote Beatrice, every man, all men, should go worshipping remote Beatrices.
And that wouldn’t have been so bad, if Dante had put the thing in its true light. Why do we slur over the actual fact that Dante had a cosy bifurcated wife in his bed, and a family of lusty little Dantinos? Petrarch, with his Laura in the distance, had twelve little legitimate Petrarchs of his own, between his knees. Yet all we hear is Laura! Laura! Beatrice! Beatrice! Distance! Distance!
What bunk! Why didn’t Dante and Petrarch chant in chorus:
Oh be my spiritual concubine Beatrice!
Laura!
My old girl’s got several babies that are mine, But thou be my spiritual concubine, Beatrice!
Laura!
Then there would have been an honest relation between all the bunch. Nobody grudges the gents their spiritual concubines. But keeping a wife and family — twelve children — up one’s sleeve, has always been recognised as a dirty trick.
Which reveals how immoral the absolute is! Invariably keeping some vital fact dark! Dishonorable!
Here we come upon the third essential quality of the novel. Unlike the essay, the poem, the drama, the book of philosophy, or the scientific treatise: all of which may beg the question, when they don’t downright filch it; the novel inherently is and must be:
1. Quick.
2. Interrelated in all its parts, vitally, organically.
3. Honorable.
I call Dante’s Commedia slightly dishonorable, with never a mention of the cosy bifurcated wife, and the kids. And War and Peace I call downright dishonorable, with that fat, diluted Pierre for a hero, stuck up as preferable and desirable, when everybody knows that he wasn’t attractive, even to Tolstoi.
Of course Tolstoi, being a great creative artist, was true to his characters. But being a man with a philosophy, he wasn’t true to his own character.
Character is a curious thing. It is the flame of a man, which burns brighter or dimmer, bluer or yellower or redder, rising or sinking or flaring according to the draughts of circumstance and the changing air of life, changing itself continually, yet remaining one single, separate flame, flickering in a strange world: unless it be blown out at last by too much adversity.
If Tolstoi had looked into the flame of his own belly, he would have seen that he didn’t really like the fat, fuzzy Pierre, who was a poor tool, after all. But Tolstoi was a personality even more than a character. And a personality is a self-conscious I am: being all that is left in us of a once-almighty Personal God. So being a personality and an almighty I am, Leo proceeded deliberately to lionise that Pierre, who was a domestic sort of house-dog.
Doesn’t anybody call that dishonorable on Leo’s part? He might just as well have been true to himself! But no! His self-conscious personality was superior to his own belly and knees, so he thought he’d improve on himself, by creeping inside the skin of a lamb; the doddering old lion that he was! Leo! Leon!
Secretly, Leo worshipped the human male, man as a column of rapacious and living blood. He could hardly meet three lusty, roisterous young guardsmen in the street, without crying with envy: and ten minutes later, fulminating on them black oblivion and annihilation, utmost moral thunder-bolts.
How boring, in a great man! And how boring, in a great nation like Russia, to let its old-Adam manhood be so improved upon by these reformers, who all feel themselves short of something, and therefore live by spite, that at last there’s nothing left but a lot of shells of men, improving themselves steadily emptier and emptier, till they rattle with words and formulae, as if they’d swallowed the whole encyclopaedia of socialism.
But wait! There is life in the Russians. Something new and strange will emerge out of their weird transmogrification into Bolshevists.
When the lion swallows the lamb, fluff and all, he usually gets a pain, and there’s a rumpus. But when the lion tries to force himself down the throat of the huge and popular lamb — a nasty old sheep, really — then it’s a phenomenon. Old Leo did it: wedged himself bit by bit down the throat of wooly Russia. And now out of the mouth of the bolshevist lambkin still waves an angry,mistaken, tufted leonine tail,like an agitated exclamation mark.
Meanwhile it’s a deadlock.
But what a dishonorable thing for that claw-biting little Leo to do! And in his novels you see him at it. So that the papery lips of Resurrection whisper: ‘‘Alas! I would have been a novel. But Leo spoiled me.”
Count Tolstoi had that last weakness of a great man: he wanted the absolute: the absolute of love, if you like to call it that. Talk about the “last infirmity of noble minds”! It’s a perfect epidemic of senility. He wanted to be absolute: a universal brother. Leo was too tight for Tolstoi. He wanted to puff, and puff, and puff, till he became Universal Brotherhood itself, the great gooseberry of our globe.
Then pop went Leo! And from the bits sprang up bolshevists.
It’s all bunk. No man can be absolute. No man can be absolutely good or absolutely right, nor absolutely lovable, nor absolutely beloved, nor absolutely loving. Even Jesus, the paragon, was only relatively good and relatively right. Judas could take him by the nose.
No god, that men can conceive of, could possibly be absolute or absolutely right. All the gods that men ever discovered are still God: and they contradict one another and fly down one another’s throats, marvellously. Yet they are all God: the incalculable Pan.
It is rather nice, to know what a lot of gods there are, and have been, and will be, and that they are all of them God all the while. Each of them utters an absolute: which, in the ears of all the rest of them, falls flat. This makes even eternity lively.
But man, poor man, bobbing like a cork in the stream of time, must hitch himself to some absolute star of righteousness overhead. So he throws out his line, and hooks on. Only to find, after a while, that his star is slowly falling: till it drops into the stream of time with a fizzle, and there’s another absolute star gone out.
Then we scan the heavens afresh.
As for the babe of love, we’re simply tired of changing its napkins. Put the brat down, and let it learn to run about, and manage its own little breeches.
But it’s nice to think that all the gods are God all the while. And if a god only genuinely feels to you like God, then it is God. But if it doesn’t feel quite, quite altogether like God to you, then wait awhile, and you’ll hear him fizzle.
The novel knows all this, irrevocably. ‘ ‘My dear,” it kindly says, “one God is relative to another god, until he gets into a machine; and then it’s a case for the traffic cop!”
“But what am I to do!” cries the despairing novelist. “From Amon and Ra to Mrs
. Eddy, from Ash- taroth and Jupiter to Annie Besant, I don’t know where I am.”
“Oh yes you do, my dear!” replies the novel. “You are where you are, so you needn’t hitch yourself on to the skirts either of Ashtaroth or Eddy. If you meet them, say how-do-you-do! to them quite courteously. But don’t hook on, or I shall turn you down.
“Refrain from hooking on!” says the novel.
“But be honorable among the host!” he adds.
Honour! Why, the gods are like the rainbow, all colours and shades. Since light itself is invisible, a manifestation has got to be pink or black or blue or white or yellow or vermilion, or “tinted”.
You may be a theosophist, and then you will cry: Avaunt! Thou dark-red aura! Away!!! — Oh come! Thou pale-blue or thou primrose aura, come!
This you may cry if you are a theosophist. And if you put a theosophist in a novel, he or she may cry avaunt! to the heart’s content.
But a theosophist cannot be a novelist, as a trumpet cannot be a regimental band. A theosophist, or a Christian, or a Holy Roller, may be contained in a novelist. But a novelist may not put up a fence. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and auras will be red when they want to.
As a matter of fact, only the Holy Ghost knows truly what righteousness is. And heaven only knows what the Holy Ghost is! But it sounds all right. So the Holy Ghost hovers among the flames, from the red to the blue and the black to the yellow, putting brand to brand and flame to flame, as the wind changes, and life travels in flame from the unseen to the unseen, men will never know how or why. Only travel it must, and not die down in nasty fumes.
And the honour, which the novel demands of you, is only that you shall be true to the flame that leaps in you. When that Prince in Resurrection so cruelly betrayed and abandoned the girl, at the beginning of her life, he betrayed and wetted on the flame of his own manhood. When, later, he bullied her with his repentant benevolence, he again betrayed and slobbered upon the flame of his waning manhood, till in the end his manhood is extinct, and he’s just a lump of half-alive elderly meat.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 972