That is a long preamble, and perhaps an unkind one. But Mr.
Gill is so bad at the mere craft of language, that he sets a real writer’s nerves on edge all the time.
Now for the good side of the book. Mr. Gill is primarily a craftsman, a workman, and he has looked into his own soul deeply to know what he feels about work. And he has seen a truth which, in my opinion, is a great truth, an invaluable truth for humanity, and a truth of which Mr. Gill is almost the discoverer. The gist of it lies in the first two paragraphs of the first essay, “Slavery and Freedom.”
“That state is a state of Slavery in which a man does what he likes to do in his spare time and in his working time that which is required of him. This state can only exist when what a man likes to do is to please himself.
“That state is a state of Freedom in which a man does what he likes to do in his working time and in his spare time that which is required of him. This state can only exist when what a man likes to do is to please God.”
It seems to me there is more in those two paragraphs than in all Karl Marx or Professor Whitehead or a dozen other philosophers rolled together. True, we have to swallow whole the phrase “to please God,” but when we think of a man happily working away in concentration on the job he is doing, if it is only soldering a kettle, then we know what living state it refers to. “To please God” in this sense only means happily doing one’s best at the job in hand, and being livingly absorbed in an activity which makes one in touch with — with the heart of all things; call it God. It is a state which any man or woman achieves when busy and concentrated on a job which calls forth real skill and attention, or devotion. It is a state of absorption into the creative spirit, which is God.
Here, then, is a great truth which Mr. Gill has found in his living experience, and which he flings in the teeth of modern industrialism. Under present conditions, it is useless to utter such truth: and that is why none of the clever blighters do utter it. But it is only the truth that is useless which really matters.
“The test of a man’s freedom is his responsibility as a workman. Freedom is not incompatible with discipline, it is only incompatible with irresponsibility. He who is free is responsible for his work. He who is not responsible for his work is not free.”
“There is nothing to be said for freedom except that it is the will of God.
“The Service of God is perfect freedom.”
Here, again, the “service of God” is only that condition in which we feel ourselves most truly alive and vital, and the “will of God” is the inrush of pure life to which we gladly yield ourselves.
It all depends what you make of the word God. To most of us today it is a fetish-word, dead, yet useful for invocation. It is not a question of Jesus. It is a question of God, Almighty God. We have to square ourselves with the very words. And to do so, we must rid them of their maddening moral import, and give them back- Almighty God — the old vital meaning: strength and glory and honour and might and beauty and wisdom. These are the continual attributes of Almighty God, in the far past. And the same today, the god who enters us and imbues us with his strength and glory and might and honour and beauty and wisdom, this is a god we are eager to worship. And this is the god of the craftsman who makes things well, so that the presence of the god enters into the thing made. The workman making a pair of shoes with happy absorption in skill is imbued with the god of strength and honour and beauty, undeniable. Happy, intense absorption in any work, which is to be brought as near to perfection as possible, this is a state of being with God, and the men who have not known it have missed life itself.
This is what Mr. Gill means, I take it, and it is an enormously important truth. It is a truth on which a true civilization might be established. But first, you must give men back their belief in God, and then their free responsibility in work. For belief, Mr. Gill turns to the Catholic Church. Well, it is a great institution, and we all like to feel romantic about it. But the Catholic Church needs to be born again, quite as badly as the Protestant. I cannot feel there is much more belief in God in Naples or Barcelona, than there is in Liverpool or Leeds. Yet they are truly Catholic cities. No, the Catholic Church has fallen into the same disaster as the Protestant: of preaching a moral God, instead of Almighty God, the God of strength and glory and might and wisdom: a “good” God, instead of a vital and magnificent God. And we no longer any of us really believe in an exclusively “good” God. The Catholic Church in the cities is as dead as the Protestant Church. Only in the country, among peasants, where the old ritual of the seasons lives on in its beauty, is there still some living, instinctive “faith” in the God of Life.
Mr. Gill has two main themes: “work done well,” and “beauty” -or rather “Beauty.” He is almost always good, simple and profound, truly a prophet, when he is speaking of work done well. And he is nearly always tiresome about Beauty. Why, oh why, will people keep on trying to define words like Art and Beauty and God, words which represent deep emotional states in us, and are therefore incapable of definition? Why bother about it? “Beauty is absolute, loveliness is relative,” says Mr. Gill. Yes, yes, but really, what does it matter? Beauty is beauty, loveliness is loveliness, and if Mr. Gill thinks that Beauty ought really to have a subtly moral character, while loveliness is merely casual, or equivalent for prettiness — well, why not? But other people don’t care.
STUDY OF THOMAS HARDY
This non-fiction book can be found via this link.
SURGERY FOR THE NOVEL-OR A BOMB
You talk about the future of the baby, little cherub, when he’s in the cradle cooing; and it’s a romantic, glamorous subject. You also talk, with the parson, about the future of the wicked old grandfather who is at last lying on his death-bed. And there again you have a subject for much vague emotion, chiefly of fear this time.
How do we feel about the novel? Do we bounce with joy thinking of the wonderful novelistic days ahead? Or do we grimly shake our heads and hope the wicked creature will be spared a little longer? Is the novel on his death-bed, old sinner? Or is he just toddling round his cradle, sweet little thing? Let us have another look at him before we decide this rather serious case.
There he is, the monster with many faces, many branches to him, like a tree: the modern novel. And he is almost dual, like Siamese twins. On the one hand, the pale-faced, high-browed, earnest novel, which you have to take seriously; on the other, that smirking, rather plausible hussy, the popular novel.
Let us just for the moment feel the pulses of Ulysses and of Miss Dorothy Richardson and M. Marcel Proust, on the earnest side of Briareus; on the other, the throb of The Sheik and Mr. Zane Grey, and, if you will, Mr. Robert Chambers and the rest. Is Ulysses in his cradle? Oh, dear! What a grey face! And Pointed Roofs, are they a gay little toy for nice little girls? And M. Proust? Alas! You can hear the death-rattle in their throats. They can hear it themselves. They are listening to it with acute interest, trying to discover whether the intervals are minor thirds or major fourths. Which is rather infantile, really.
So there you have the “serious” novel, dying in a very long-drawn- out fourteen-volume death-agony, and absorbedly, childishly interested in the phenomenon. “Did I feel a twinge in my little toe, or didn’t I?” asks every character of Mr. Joyce or of Miss Richardson or M. Proust. Is my aura a blend of frankincense and orange pekoe and boot-blacking, or is it myrrh and bacon-fat and Shetland tweed? The audience round the death-bed gapes for the answer. And when, in a sepulchral tone, the answer comes at length, after hundreds of pages: “It is none of these, it is abysmal chloro-coryambasis,” the audience quivers all over, and murmurs: “That’s just how I feel myself.”
Which is the dismal, long-drawn-out comedy of the death-bed of the serious novel. It is self-consciousness picked into such fine bits that the bits are most of them invisible, and you have to go by smell. Through thousands and thousands of pages Mr. Joyce and Miss Richardson tear themselves to pieces, strip their smallest emotions to the finest
threads, till you feel you are sewed inside a wool mattress that is being slowly shaken up, and you are turning to wool along with the rest of the woolliness.
It’s awful. And it’s childish. It really is childish, after a certain age, to be absorbedly self-conscious. One has to be self-conscious at seventeen: still a little self-conscious at twenty-seven; but if we are going it strong at thirty-seven, then it is a sign of arrested development, nothing else. And if it is still continuing at forty-seven, it is obvious senile precocity.
And there’s the serious novel: senile-precocious. Absorbedly, childishly concerned with what I am. “I am this, I am that, I am the other. My reactions are such, and such, and such. And, oh, Lord, if I liked to watch myself closely enough, if I liked to analyse my feelings minutely, as I unbutton my gloves, instead of saying crudely I unbuttoned them, then I could go on to a million pages instead of a thousand. In fact, the more I come to think of it, it is gross, it is uncivilized bluntly to say: I unbuttoned my gloves. After all, the absorbing adventure of it! Which button did I begin with?” etc.
The people in the serious novels are so absorbedly concerned with themselves and what they feel and don’t feel, and how they react to every mortal button; and their audience as frenziedly absorbed in the application of the author’s discoveries to their own reactions: “That’s me! That’s exactly it! I’m just finding myself in this book!” Why, this is more than death-bed, it is almost post-mortem behaviour.
Some convulsion or cataclysm will have to get this serious novel out of its self-consciousness. The last great war made it worse. What’s to be done? Because, poor thing, it’s really young yet. The novel has never become fully adult. It has never quite grown to years of discretion. It has always youthfully hoped for the best, and felt rather sorry for itself on the last page. Which is just childish. The childishness has become very long-drawn-out. So very many adolescents who drag their adolescence on into their forties and their fifties and their sixties! There needs some sort of surgical operation, somewhere.
Then the popular novels — the Sheiks and Babbitts and Zane Grey novels. They are just as self-conscious, only they do have more illusions about themselves. The heroines do think they are lovelier, and more fascinating, and purer. The heroes do see themselves more heroic, braver, more chivalrous, more fetching. The mass of the populace “find themselves” in the popular novels. But nowadays it’s a funny sort of self they find. A Sheik with a whip up his sleeve, and a heroine with weals on her back, but adored in the end, adored, the whip out of sight, but the weals still faintly visible.
It’s a funny sort of self they discover in the popular novels. And the essential moral of If Winter Comes, for example, is so shaky. “The gooder you are, the worse it is for you, poor you, oh, poor you. Don’t you be so blimey good, it’s not good enough.” Or Babbitt: “Go on, you make your pile, and then pretend you’re too good for it. Put it over the rest of the grabbers that way. They’re only pleased with themselves when they’ve made their pile. You go one better.”
Always the same sort of baking-powder gas to make you rise: the soda counteracting the cream of tartar, and the tartar counteracted by the soda. Sheik heroines, duly whipped, wildly adored. Babbitts with solid fortunes, weeping from self-pity. Winter-Comes heroes as good as pie, hauled off to jail. Moral: Don’t be too good, because you’ll go to jail for it. Moral: Don’t feel sorry for yourself till you’ve made your pile and don’t need to feel sorry for yourself. Moral: Don’t let him adore you till he’s whipped you into it. Then you’ll be partners in mild crime as well as in holy matrimony.
Which again is childish. Adolescence which can’t grow up. Got into the self-conscious rut and going crazy, quite crazy in it. Carrying on their adolescence into middle age and old age, like the looney Cleopatra in Dombey and Son, murmuring “Rose-coloured curtains” with her dying breath.
The future of the novel? Poor old novel, it’s in a rather dirty, messy tight corner. And it’s either got to get over the wall or knock a hole through it. In other words, it’s got to grow up. Put away childish things like: “Do I love the girl, or don’t I?” — ”Am I pure and sweet, or am I not?” — ”Do I unbutton my right glove first, or my left?” — ”Did my mother ruin my life by refusing to drink the cocoa which my bride had boiled for her?” These questions and their answers don’t really interest me any more, though the world still goes sawing them over. I simply don’t care for any of these things now, though I used to. The purely emotional and self-analytical stunts are played out in me. I’m finished. I’m deaf to the whole band. But I’m neither blase nor cynical, for all that. I’m just interested in something else.
Supposing a bomb were put under the whole scheme of things, what would we be after? What feelings do we want to carry through into the next epoch? What feelings will carry us through? What is the underlying impulse in us that will provide the motive power for a new state of things, when this democratic-industrial-lovey- dovey-darling-take-me-to-mamma state of things is bust?
What next? That’s what interests me. “What now?” is no fun any more.
If you wish to look into the past for what-next books, you can go back to the Greek philosophers. Plato’s Dialogues are queer little novels. It seems to me it was the greatest pity in the world, when philosophy and fiction got split. They used to be one, right from the days of myth. Then they went and parted, like a nagging married couple, with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and that beastly Kant. So the novel went sloppy, and philosophy went abstract-dry. The two should come together again — in the novel.
You’ve got to find a new impulse for new things in mankind, and it’s really fatal to find it through abstraction. No, no; philosophy and religion, they’ve both gone too far on the algebraical tack: Let X stand for sheep and Y for goats: then X minus Y equals Heaven, and X plus Y equals Earth, and Y minus X equals Hell. Thank you! But what coloured shirt does X have on?
The novel has a future. It’s got to have the courage to tackle new propositions without using abstractions; it’s got to present us with new, really new feelings, a whole line of new emotion, which will get us out of the emotional rut. Instead of snivelling about what is and has been, or inventing new sensations in the old line, it’s got to break a way through, like a hole in the wall. And the public will scream and say it is sacrilege: because, of course, when you’ve been jammed for a long time in a tight corner, and you get really used to its stuffiness and its tightness, till you find it suffocatingly cozy; then, of course, you’re horrified when you see a new glaring hole in what was your cosy wall. You’re horrified. You back away from the cold stream of fresh air as if it were killing you. But gradually, first one and then another of the sheep filters through the gap, and finds a new world outside.
ART AND MORALITY
It is a part of the common claptrap that “art is immoral.” Behold, everywhere, artists running to put on jazz underwear, to demoralize themselves; or, at least, to debourgeoiser themselves.
For the bourgeois is supposed to be the fount of morality. Myself, I have found artists far more morally finicky.
Anyhow, what has a water-pitcher and six insecure apples on a crumpled tablecloth got to do with bourgeois morality? Yet I notice that most people, who have not learnt the trick of being arty, feel a real moral repugnance for a Cezanne still-life. They think it is not right.
For them, it isn’t.
Yet how can they feel, as they do, that it is subtly immoral?
The very same design, if it was humanized, and the tablecloth was a draped nude and the water-pitcher a nude semi-draped, weeping over the draped one, would instantly become highly moral. Why?
Perhaps from painting better than from any other art we can realize the subtlety of the distinction between what is dumbly felt to be moral, and what is felt to be immoral. The moral instinct in the man in the street.
But instinct is largely habit. The moral instinct of the man in the street is largely an emotional defence of an old habit.
/> Yet what can there be in a Cezanne still-life to rouse the aggressive moral instinct of the man in the street? What ancient habit in man do these six apples and a water-pitcher succeed in hindering?
A water-pitcher that isn’t so very much like a water-pitcher, apples that aren’t very appley, and a tablecloth that’s not particularly- much of a tablecloth. I could do better myself!
Probably! But then, why not dismiss the picture as a poor attempt? Whence this anger, this hostility? The derisive resentment?
Six apples, a pitcher, and a tablecloth can’t suggest improper behaviour. They don’t — not even to a Freudian. If they did, the man in the street would feel much more at home with them.
Where, then, does the immorality come in? Because come in it does.
Because of a very curious habit that civilized man has been forming down the whole course of civilization, and in which he is now hard-boiled. The slowly formed habit of seeing just as the photographic camera sees.
You may say, the object reflected on the retina is always photographic. It may be. I doubt it. But whatever the image on the retina may be, it is rarely, even now, the photographic image of the object which is actually taken in by the man who sees the object. He does not, even now, see for himself. He sees what the Kodak has taught him to see. And man, try as he may, is not a Kodak.
When a child sees a man, what does the child take in, as an impression? Two eyes, a nose, a mouth of teeth, two straight legs, two straight arms: a sort of hieroglyph which the human child has used through all the ages to represent man. At least, the old hieroglyph was still in use when I was a child.
Is this what the child actually sees If you mean by seeing, consciously registering, then this is what the child actually sees. The photographic image may be there all right, upon the retina. But there the child leaves it: outside the door, as it were.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1039