Value in The Novel Today

VALUE IN THE NOVEL TODAY M. M. KIRK.WOOD MR FRANK SWINNERTON, in an article published in the Spectator for July 10, 1942, has .as his text the bankruptcy of the modern novel. His position reminds one of that taken up by Mr Ford Madox Ford's great-aunt Eliza when she uttered the famous saying, "Sooner than be idle, I'd take up a book and read"! Himself a serious practitioner in the field of fiction, and a critic well aware of the achievements in technique among modern novelists,·he yet believes that the modern novel lacks creative power and imaginative sympathy, significance, in short-greatness. Here he puts a case popularly which has been stated in more academic ways by writers of different shades of opinion over a considerable period. Yet, in spite of the weight of the arguments advanced by attackers· of twentieth-century work, it may not prove necessary to share Mr Swinnerton's downcast mood. Certain novels have appeared, the quality of which will only be fully assessed .by time, but which bear genuine marks of power and of life beyond today. Thus significance may be emerging from those very tendencies condemned by the critics although, blinded by the light of the .established masterpiece, reader and critic alike may fail to see the beauty of its analogue as it slips from the press of today -into their hands. It is important, in attempting an estimate of one or other modern novel, to note and appreciate the chief lines of attack in connection with the theme, the Novel's Decline and Fall. One may start with the group of so-called Humanists, ch'oosing Lawrence Hyde as fairly representative. In his Prospects of Humanism (1929) he includes a considerable discussion of the modern novel, which he chooses to describe, with good ground, as predominantly naturalistic . He quotes Chekhov to .illustrate this trend: "Fiction is called artistic because it draws life as it actually is. Its aim is absolute and honest truth." Mr Hyde considers that naturalistic aims and methods are responsible for an endless catalogue of dispassionate studies of life which, although adding ~o our understanding, fail,of ultimate greatness because the life described is extended horizontally and not, so to speak, vel"tically. Modern fiction lack~ depth, he maintains, and the lack of depth is due to the failure in interpre282 VALUE IN' THE NOVEL TODAY 283 tation on the part of the writer. Chekhov is quoted again to indicate this weakness: Remember that the writers whom we call eternal or simply good and who intoxicate us have one common and very important characteristic: they get somewhere, and they summon you there, and you feel, not with your mind, but with your whole being, that they have a certain purpose and, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, do not come and excite the imagination (or nothing. . .. The best of them are realistic and paint life as it is, but every line is permeated, as with a juice, by awareness of a purpose; you feel, besides life as it is, also life as it ought to be, and this captivates you. After the Humanists come the Communists., In his Coming Struggle for Power (1932) Mr John Strachey developed the now familiar argument that the modern world is only clearly understood , and th~ fiction produced in it is only accurately judged, in relation to the economic forces which have created both. To disregard the significance of capitalism is to 'fail of statesmanship if a man is in politics; to write about society as if there were no issue to social conflicts is to be decadent. And Mr R. D. Charques sets forth the case fully in his volume" Contemporary Literature and Social Revolution (1933). He writes, "No imaginative writer, in fact, is lacking in an attitude to society; a point of view in regard to the ordering of society"; and after expounding his view of the successive c~ltures of Eurc;>pe,'all dependen t on this or that economic set-up, he goes on to criticize the novelist of the Galsworthy type. He asks whether the all-seeing eye and the all-understanding heart are...