A Novelist on Novels

Our novelists openly discuss every feature of social life, politics, religion, but they cast over sex a thick veil of ellipse and metaphor. Thus Mr Onions suggests, but dares not name, the disease a character contracts; Mr Lawrence leaves in some doubt the actual deeds of his Trespasser, while 'H. H. Richardson' leaves to our conjectures the habits of Schilsky. (So do I, you see; if I were to say exactly what I mean it would never do.)

It may be said that all this is not insincerity, and that there is no need to dwell upon what the respectable call the unwholesome, the unhealthy, the unnecessary, but I think we must accept that the bowdlerising to which a novelist subjects his own work results in lopsidedness. If a novelist were to develop his characters evenly the three hundred page novel might extend to five hundred; the additional two hundred pages would be made up entirely of the sex preoccupations of the characters, their adventures and attempts at satisfaction. There would be as many scenes in the bedroom as in the drawing-room, probably more, given that human beings spend more time in the former than in the latter apartment. There would be abundant detail, detail that would bring out an intimacy of contact, a completeness of mutual understanding which does not generally come about when characters meet at breakfast or on the golf course. The additional pages would offer pictures of the sex side of the characters, and thus would compel them to come alive; at present they often fail to come alive because they develop only on, say, five sides out of six.

No character in a modern English novel has been fully developed. Sometimes, as in the case of Mendel, of Jude the Obscure, of Mark Lennan, of Gyp Fiörsen, one has the impression that they are fully developed because the book mainly describes their sex adventures, but one could write a thousand pages about sex adventures and have done nothing but produce sentimental atmosphere. A hundred kisses do not make one kiss, and there is more truth in one page of Madame Bovary, than in the shackled works of Mr Hardy. It is not his fault, it is a case of … if England but knew … and, therefore, if Hardy but could. Our literary characters are lopsided because their ordinary traits are fully portrayed, analysed with extraordinary minuteness, while their sex life is cloaked, minimised, or left out. Therefore, as the ordinary man does indulge his sexual proclivities, as a large proportion of his thoughts run on sex, if he is a live man, the characters in modern novels are false. They are megacephalous and emasculate. If their religious views, their political opinions, their sporting tastes were whittled down as cruelly as their sexual tendencies, then the characters would become balanced; they would be dwarfs, but they would be true; if all the characteristics of men were as faintly suggested in them as their sexual traits, the persons that figure in novels would simulate reality.

They would not be reality, but they would be less untrue than they are to-day. This, however, is merely theory, for it is impossible to apply to the novel the paradox that insincerity in everything being better than insincerity in one thing it is desirable to be insincere throughout. The paradox cannot be applied, because then a novel of ideas could not be written; shrouded religious doubt, shy socialism, suggested anarchism, would reduce the length by nine tenths, make of the novel a short story. It would be perfectly balanced and perfectly insincere; aesthetically sound, it would satisfy nobody. We should be compelled to pad it out with murder, theft, and arson, which, as everybody knows, are perfectly moral things to write about.

It is a cruel position for the English novel. The novelist may discuss anything but the main pre-occupation of life. If he describes the City clerk he may dilate upon City swindles, but he must select warily from among the City clerk's loves. The novelist knows these loves, records them in his mind, speaks of them freely, but he does not write them down. If he did, his publisher would go to jail. For this reason there is no completely sincere writing. The novelist is put into the witness box, but he is not sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth; he is sworn to tell the truth, but not the whole truth. He is not perjured, but he is muzzled.

Obviously this is an unhealthy state, for the spirit of a people is in its books, and I suspect that it does a people no good if its preoccupation find no outlet; it develops inhibitions, while its Puritan masters develop phobias. The cloaking of the truth makes neither modesty nor mock modesty; it makes impurity. There is no market for pornography, for pornography makes no converts who were not already converted. I believe that the purity propaganda creates much of the evil that lives; I charge advertising reformers with minds full of hate, bishops full of wind, and bourgeois full of fear, with having exercised through the pulpit and the platform a more stimulating effect upon youth, and with having given it more unhealthy information about white slavery, secret cinemas, and disorderly houses than it could ever have gained from all the books that were ever printed in Amsterdam. I once went to a meeting for men only, and came out with two entirely new brands of vice; a bishop held up to me the luridities of secret cinemas, and did everything for me except to give me the address. But he filled my mind with cinemas. One could multiply these instances indefinitely. I do not think that we should cover things up; we had enough of that during the mid-Victorian period, when respectability was at its height, and when women, in bodice and bustle, did their best to make respectability difficult; no, we do not want things covered up, but we do want them advertised. I believe that as good coin drives out bad the Puritans would find a greater safety and the world a greater freedom in allowing good literature to vie with evil; the good would inevitably win; no immoral literature is good; all bad literature dies. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England and France produced the vilest pornography we know. Those centuries also produced Molière and Fielding. Well, to-day, you can buy Molière and Fielding everywhere, but the pornography of those centuries is dead, and you can find it nowhere except in a really good West End club.

It may be argued that the English are not, as a nation, interested in sex, that they do not discuss it and that they do not think about it. If this were true, then a novelist would be sincere if he devoted nine tenths of his novel to business and play and no more than a tenth to sex. But it is not true. The English, particularly English women, speak a great deal about sex and, as they are certainly shy of the subject, they must devote to it a great deal of thought which they never put into words. If anybody doubts this, let him play eavesdropper in a club, a public house, or an office, listen to men, their views, their stories; let him especially discover how many 'humorous' tales are based on sex. And let him discreetly ascertain the topics young women discuss when no men are present; some, like Elsie Lindtner, are frank enough to tell.

In their private lives the English do not talk of sex as they would like to, but they do talk, and more openly every day. Yet their sex preoccupations are not reflected in the novels which purport to reflect their lives; conversation is over-sexed, the novel is under-sexed, therefore untrue, therefore insincere. For this there is no immediate remedy. Neither the Society of Authors, nor a combine of publishers, nor a 'Liberty Library' can shake the combination of fears which actuates persecution. The law should certainly be tested, just as it was tested in France by the prosecution of Flaubert in 1857, but we know perfectly well that even a victory for sincerity would do no more than carry us a little nearer to our goal. The law is a trifle compared with public feeling, and public feeling is a trifle beside the emotions the public is told it ought to feel. We had best reconcile ourselves to the inevitable, admit that we cannot be sincere because the police dare not allow it, and acquit the libraries of this one sin, that they killed in English literature a sincerity which was not there.

Three Comic Giants

1. TARTARIN

It is not every country and every period gives birth to a comic giant. Tragic and sentimental heroes are common, and make upon the history of literature a mark of sorts; we have Achilles and Werther, William Tell, d'Artagnan, Tristan, Sir Galahad, others, too, with equal claims to fame: but comic giants are few. The literature of the world is full of comic pigmies; it is fairly rich in half-growns such as Eulenspiegel, Mr Dooley, Tchitchikoff, and Mr Pickwick, but it does not easily produce the comic character who stands alone and massive among his fellows, like Balzac among novelists. There are not half a dozen competitors for the position, for Pantagruel and Gargantua are too philosophic, while Don Quixote does not move every reader to laughter; he is too romantic, too noble; he is hardly comic. Baron von Münchausen, Falstaff, and Tartarin alone remain face to face, all of them simple, all of them adventurous, but adventurous without literary inflation, as a kitten is adventurous when it explores a work-basket. There is no gigantic quality where there is self-consciousness or cynicism; the slightest strain causes the gigantic to vanish, the creature becomes human. The comic giant must be obvious, he must be, to himself, rebellious to analysis; he must also be obvious to the beholder, indeed transparent. That is not a paradox, it is a restatement of the fact that the comic giant's simplicity must be so great that everybody but he will realise it.

All this Tartarin fulfils. He is the creature of Alphonse Daudet, a second-rate writer who has earned for him a title maybe to immortality. There is no doubt that Daudet was a second-rate writer, and that Mr George Moore was right when he summed him up as de la bouillabaisse; his novels are sentimental, his reminiscences turgid, his verses suitable for crackers, but Daudet had an asset – his vivid feeling for the South. It was not knowledge or observation made Tartarin; it was instinct. Neither in Tartarin de Tarascon nor in Tartarin sur les Alpes was Daudet for a moment inconsistent or obscure; for him, Tartarin and his followers stood all the time in violent light. He knew not only what they had to say in given circumstances, but also what they would say in any circumstances that might arise.

It is not wonderful then, that Tartarin appears as a large character. You will figure him throughout as a French bourgeois, aged about forty in the first novel, fifty in the second, and sixty in the third. Daudet's dates being unreliable, you must assume his adventures as happening between 1861 and 1881, and bridge the gaps that exist between them with a vision of Tartarin's stormily peaceful life in the sleepy town of Tarascon. For Tartarin was too adventurous to live without dangers and storms. When he was not shooting lions in Algeria, or climbing the Alps, or colonising in Polynesia, Tartarin was still a hero: he lived in his little white house with the green shutters, surrounded with knives, revolvers, rifles, double-handed swords, crishes, and yataghans; he read, not the local paper, but Fenimore Cooper and Captain Cook; he learned how to fight and how to hunt, how to follow a trail, or he hypnotised himself with the recitals of Alpine climbs, of battles in China with the bellicose Tartar. Save under compulsion, he never did anything, partly because there was nothing to do at Tarascon, partly because his soul was turned rather towards bourgeois comfort than towards glory and blood. This, however, the fiery Southerner could not accept: if he could not do he could pretend, and thus did Daudet establish the enormous absurdity of his character.

There was nothing to shoot at Tarascon, so Tartarin and his followers went solemnly into the fields and fired at their caps; there was nothing to climb, except the neighbouring Alpilles … whose height was three hundred feet, but Tartarin bought an alpen-stock and printed upon his visiting-cards initials which meant 'President of the Alpine Club'; there was no danger in the town, but Tartarin never went out at night without a dagger and several guns. He was a bourgeois, but he was a romantic: he had to find in fiction the excitement that life refused him, to create it where it did not exist. In the rough, Tartarin was the jovial Frenchman of the South, short, fat, excitable, unable to see things as they are, unable to restrain his voice, his gestures, his imagination; he was greedy and self-deceived, he saw trifles as enormous, he placed the world under a magnifying glass.

Because of this enormous vision of life Tartarin was driven into adventure. Because he magnified his words he was compelled by popular opinion to sail to Algiers to shoot lions, though he was at heart afraid of dogs; to scale the Alps, though he shuddered when he thought of catching cold. He had to justify himself in the eyes of his fellow-citizens, or forgo for ever the halo of heroism. He did not have to abandon it, for Daudet loved his Tartarin; in Algeria he was mocked, swindled, beaten, but somehow he secured his lion's skin; and, in the Alps, he actually scaled both the Jungfrau and Mont Blanc … the first without knowing that it was dangerous, the second against his will. Tartarin won because he was vital, his vitality served him as a shield. All his qualities were of those that make a man absurd but invincible; his exaggeration, his histrionics, his mock heroics, his credulity, his mild sensuality, his sentimentality, and his bumptious cowardice – all this blended into an enormous bubbling charm which neither man nor circumstance could in the end withstand.

Daudet brings out his traits on every page. Everywhere he makes Tartarin strut and swell as a turkey-cock. Exaggeration, in other words lying, lay in every word and deed of Tartarin. He could not say: 'We were a couple of thousand at the amphitheatre yesterday,' but naturally said: 'We were fifty thousand.' And he was not exactly lying; Daudet, who loved him well, pleaded that this was not lying but mirage, mirage induced by the hot sun. He was not quite wrong: when Tartarin said that he had killed forty lions he believed it; and his fellow-climber believed the absurd story he had concocted: that Switzerland was a fraud, that there were eiderdowns at the bottom of every crevasse, and that he had himself climbed the Andes on his hands and knees. Likewise, Tartarin and the people of Tarascon were deceived by their own histrionics. The baobab (arbos gigantea) which Tartarin trained in a flower-pot stood, in their imagination, a hundred feet high.

Histrionics and mock heroics pervade the three books. It is not the fact that matters, it is the fact seen through the coloured Southern mind, and that mind turns at once away from the fact towards the trifles that attend it. Thus costume is everywhere a primary concern. Tartarin cannot land at Algiers to shoot lions unless he be dressed for the part in Arab clothes, and he must carry three rifles, drag behind him a portable camp, a pharmacy, a patent tent, patent compressed foods. Nothing is too absurd for him: he has a 'Winchester rifle with thirty-two cartridges in the magazine'; he does not shrink from a rifle with a semicircular barrel for shooting round the corner. To climb the Righi (instead of using the funicular) he must wear a jersey, ice-shoes, snow goggles. Everywhere he plays a part and plays it in costume. Nor is Tartarin alone in this; the Tarasconnais emulate their chief: Major Bravida dons black when he calls to compel Tartarin 'to redeem his honour' and sail for Algiers; when Port Tarascon, the frantic colony, is formed, costumes are designed for grandees, for the militia, for the bureaucrats. Appearances alone matter: Tarascon is not content with the French flag, but spread-eagles across it a fantastic local animal, La Tarasque, of mythical origin.

Life in Tarascon is too easy: Tartarin helps it on with a war-whoop. He creates adventure. Thus in 1870 he organises against the Germans the defence of the town; mines are laid under the marketplace, the Café de la Comédie is turned into a redoubt, volunteers drill in the street. Of course there is no fighting, the Germans do not come, nor do the prudent Tarasconnais attempt to seek them out, but in its imagination the town has been heroic. It is heroic again when it defends against the Government the monks of Pampérigouste: the convent becomes a fortress, but there is no fighting; when the supplies give out the heroic defenders march out with their weapons and their banners, in their crusaders' uniforms. The town believes. It believes anything and anybody. Because a rogue calls himself a prince, Tartarin entrusts him with his money and is deserted in the Sahara; because another calls himself a duke, thousands of Tarasconnais follow Tartarin to a non-existent colony bought by them from the pseudo-duke. Whether the matter be general or personal Tartarin believes. He falls in love with a Moorish girl, and innocently allows himself to be persuaded that a substitute is the beauty whom he glimpsed through the yashmak.

Tartarin believes because he is together romantic, sentimental, and mildly sensual: that which he likes he wants to think true. He wants to believe that sweet Baia is his true love; when again he succumbs to Sonia, the Russian exile, he wants to believe that he too is an extremist, a potential martyr in the cause of Nihilism; and again he wants to believe that Likiriki, the nigger girl, is the little creature of charm for whom his heart has been calling. His sentimentality is always ready – for women, for ideas, for beasts. He can be moved when he hears for the hundredth time the ridiculous ballads that are popular in the local drawing-rooms, weep when Bezuquet, the chemist, sings 'Oh thou, beloved white star of my soul!' For him the lion is 'a noble beast,' who must be shot, not caged; the horse 'the most glorious conquest of man.' He is always above the world, never of it unless his own safety be endangered, when he scuttles to shelter; as Daudet says, half Tartarin is Quixote, half is Sancho … but Sancho wins. It is because Tartarin is a comic coward that he will not allow the heroic crusaders of Pampérigouste to fire on the Government troops; the 'abbot' of Port Tarascon to train the carronade on the English frigate; alone, he is a greater coward than in public; he shivers under his weapons when he walks to the club in the evening; he severs the rope on Mont Blanc, sending his companion to probable death. But the burlesque does not end tragically: nobody actually dies, all return to Tarascon in time to hear their funeral orations.

It might be thought that Tartarin is repulsive: he is not; he is too young, too innocent. His great, foolish heart is too open to the woes of any damsel; his simplicity, his credulity, his muddled faith, the optimism which no misfortune can shatter – all these traits endear him to us, make him real. For Tartarin is real: he is the Frenchman of the South; in the words of a character, 'The Tarasconnais type is the Frenchman magnified, exaggerated, as seen in a convex mirror.' Tartarin and his fellows typify the South, though some typify one side of the Southern Frenchman rather than another; thus Bravida is military pride, Excourbaniès is the liar, and mild Pascalon is the imitator of imitators: when Tarascon, arrested by the British captain and brought home on board the frigate, takes up the attitude of Napoleon on the Bellerophon, Pascalon begins a memorial and tries to impersonate Las Cases. As for Tartarin, bell-wether of the flock, he has all the characteristics, he even sings all the songs. He is the South.

The three Tartarin books constitute together the most violent satire that has ever been written against the South. Gascony, Provence, and Languedoc are often made the butts of Northern French writers, while Lombards introduce in books ridiculous Neapolitans, and Catalonians paint burlesque Andalusians, but no writer has equalled Alphonse Daudet in consistent ferocity. So evident is this, that Tarascon to this day resents the publications, and that, some years ago, a commercial traveller who humorously described himself on the hotel register as 'Alphonse Daudet' was mobbed in the street, and rescued by the police from the rabble who threatened to throw him into the Rhone. Tarascon, a little junction on the way to Marseilles, has been made absurd for ever. Yet, though Daudet exaggerated, he built on the truth: there is a close connection between his preposterous figures, grown men with the tendencies of children enormously distorted, and the Frenchmen of the South. Indeed, the Southern Frenchman is the Frenchman as we picture him in England; there is between him and his compatriot from Picardy or Flanders a difference as great as exists between the Scotsman and the man of Kent. The Northern Frenchman is sober, silent, hard, reasonable, and logical; his imagination is negligible, his artistic taste as corrupt as that of an average inhabitant of the Midlands. But the Southern Frenchman is a different creature; his excitable temperament, his irresponsibility and impetuousness run through the majority of French artists and politicians. As the French saying goes, 'the South moves'; thus it is not wonderful that Le Havre and Lille should not rival Marseilles and Bordeaux.

Tartarin lives to a greater or lesser degree within every Frenchman of the plains, born South of the line which unites Lyons and Bordeaux. It is Tartarin who stands for hours at street corners in Arles or Montpellier, chattering with Tartarin and, like Tartarin, endlessly brags of the small birds he has killed, of the hearts he has won and of his extraordinary luck at cards. It is Tartarin again who still wears night-caps and flannel belts, and drinks every morning great bowls of chocolate. And it is Tartarin who, light-heartedly, joins the colonial infantry regiment and goes singing into battle because he likes the adventure and would rather die in the field than be bored in barracks. Daudet has maligned the South so far as courage is concerned: there is nothing to show that the Southerners, Tarasconnais and others, are any more cowardly than the men of the North. Courage goes in zones, and because the North has generally proved harder the South must not be indicted en bloc. Presumably Daudet felt compelled to make Tartarin a poltroon so as to throw into relief his braggadocio; that is a flaw in his work, but if it be accepted as the licence of a litterateur, it does not mar the picture of Tartarin.

It should not, therefore, be lost sight of by the reader of Tartarin de Tarascon and of Tartarin Sur Les Alpes that this is a caricature. Every line is true, but modified a little by the 'mirage' that Alphonse Daudet so deftly satirises; it is only so much distorted as irony demands. Tartarin de Tarascon is by far the best of the three books; it is the most compact, and within its hundred-odd pages the picture of Tartarin is completely painted; the sequel is merely the response of the author to the demand of a public who so loved Tartarin as to buy five hundred thousand copies of his adventures. As for Port Tarascon, the beginning of Tartarin's end, it should not have been written, for it closes on a new Tartarin who no longer believes in his own triumphs – a sober, disillusioned Tartarin, shorn of his glory, flouted by his compatriots and ready to die in a foreign town. Alphonse Daudet had probably tired of his hero, for he understood him no longer. The real Tartarin could not be depressed by misadventure, chastened by loss of prestige: to cast him to earth could only bring about once more the prodigy of Anteus. He would have risen again, more optimistic and bombastic than ever, certain that no enemy had thrown him and that he had but slipped. And if Tartarin had to die, which is not certain, for Tartarin's essence is immortal, he could not die disgraced, but must die sumptuously – like Cleopatra among her jewels, or a Tartar chief standing on his piled arms on the crest of a funeral pyre.

2. FALSTAFF

Like Hamlet, Tartuffe, Don Quixote, Falstaff has had his worshippers and his exegetists. The character Dr. Johnson dwelled on still serves to-day to exercise the critical capacity of the freshman; he is one of the stars in a crowded cast, a human, fallible, lovable creature, and it is not wonderful that so many have asked themselves whether there lurked fineness and piety within his gross frame. But, though 'his pyramid rise high unto heaven,' it is not everybody has fully realised his psychological enormity, his nationality; the tendency has been to look upon him rather as a man than as a type. I do not contend that it is desirable to magnify type at the expense of personality; far from it, for the personal quality is ever more appealing than the typical, but one should not ignore the generalities which hide in the individual, especially when they are evident. It is remarkable that Dr Johnson should have so completely avoided this side of Falstaff's character, so remarkable that I quote in full his appreciation of the fat Knight3: —