传记艺术

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传记艺术,虽然这样说——但是我们会立刻提出一个问题,传记是一门艺术吗?考虑到传记家曾带给我们的那些愉悦,这个问题显得有点愚蠢和狭隘。但是被如此频繁提及的问题背后肯定有些什么。不管何时打开一本崭新的传记,这个问题总会出现在书的每一页;难怪看上去有点死气沉沉,毕竟,传记里提到的人,有几个还尚在人世?

但是传记家认为,人们认为传记总是死气沉沉的原因在于传记与诗歌和小说这样的艺术相比还很稚嫩。对自己和别人感兴趣是人类头脑的最新拓展。在英国,直到18世纪,有关私人生活的描写才开始满足人们的好奇。直到19世纪,传记才发展成熟,所获颇丰。如果真的只有三位伟大的传记家——约翰逊、伯斯威尔和洛克哈特——是因为时间太短;传记艺术建立发展的时间相对较短的说法已被教科书认可。不过究其原因——为什么散文作家的出现晚于诗人若干世纪,为什么乔叟在亨利·詹姆斯之前出现——最好先把这些无人问津的难题放到一边,让我们去研究传记为什么缺乏杰作。原因是在所有艺术中,传记艺术所受的限制最多。对此有现成的证据。史密斯曾经给琼斯写过传记,他在书的扉页上向曾借给他信件的老朋友和“最后也是最重要的”遗孀琼斯夫人表示感谢。因为如果“少了她的”帮助,他这样写道,“这本传记将无法完成。”他在前言中简单指出,现在的小说家,“书中的每个角色都是虚构的”。也就是说小说家可以自由发挥;传记家却被限制禁锢。

如果是这样,我们就进一步接近了那个不仅难以回答而且可能无法解决的问题:将传记归类为艺术作品意味着什么?无论如何,传记和小说相互区别——组成内容的不同可以证明这点。一个是借助朋友的帮忙完成的作品,来源于事实;另一个是不受限制的自由创作,艺术家酌情选择有利于自己的内容去发挥。因此区别是存在的;我们有充分理由相信过去的传记家也发现了这一点。因为这不仅是区别而且是非常重大的区别。

对于传记写作来说,遗孀和朋友其实是非常严厉的监工。试想,比如,那个聪明男人的道德败坏,脾气暴躁到把靴子扔到女仆的脸上。他的遗孀会说:“尽管这样我还是爱他——他是我孩子的父亲;决不能让热爱他作品的广大读者理想破灭。要不换个说法,要不就干脆不说。”传记家只能屈从。因此维多利亚时期传记中的大部分形象都非常僵硬刻板,像被殡葬队伍搬运然后保存在西敏寺的蜡像一样——只是和棺材里的死者外形极为相似而已。

之后,19世纪末期传记艺术发生了转变。原因迄今不明,但是遗孀的思想变得更加开放,而大众的目光变得更加敏锐;蜡像一样的人物形象不再能够让人信服或满足人的好奇。自然而然地,传记家获得了相当的创作自由,表现在他至少可以暗示死者还有缺点和不足。弗洛德笔下的卡莱尔绝不是戴着玫瑰红色面具的刻板形象。弗洛德之后是埃德蒙高赛,他敢于承认他父亲也会犯错。然后紧接着埃德蒙高赛,就是在20世纪初叶出现的利顿·斯特雷奇。

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利顿·斯特雷奇作为传记史上非常重要的人物,值得我们稍作停顿仔细研究。他的三本名著——《伟大的维多利亚时代》《维多利亚女王》和《伊丽莎白女王》,高水平地展示了传记的取舍。同时也回答了一些问题,如传记是否是艺术,如果不是,为什么。

利顿·斯特雷奇作为一位作家实在是生逢其时。1918年,他出版了第一本传记,灵活自由的风格备受关注。对于像他这样对自己创作诗歌或剧本的能力存在怀疑的作家来说,传记写作似乎是一个大有前途的选择。因为归根结底,传记是记录逝者的生平。维多利亚时期盛产如同石膏雕塑一般的光辉形象,实际情况被严重扭曲。为了重现事实,呈现他们真实的模样,正需要和诗人或小说家同样的艺术天赋,而不是他自认缺少的原创能力。

事实证明传记写作非常值得一试。在《伟大的维多利亚时代》的创作过程中,他既饱受煎熬又兴致勃勃;这本书的成功可以证明他的笔触足以让曼宁、弗洛伦斯·南丁格尔、戈登和其他人重生,因为他们本就有血有肉。这些人多次成为舆论焦点。戈登酗酒是真事,或不过是杜撰而已?弗洛伦斯·南丁格尔是在卧室里还是客厅里接受勋章?尽管当时欧洲正处于硝烟战火之中,纷乱复杂,他依然激起大众的热情,去探寻名人生活的细枝末节。书中的描写痛苦和欢乐交织,十分精彩,因此他的书一版再版。

但是他也创作了一些着重人物形象刻画的短小文章。在描写伊丽莎白和维多利亚两位伟大女王的生活时进行了更为大胆的尝试。这是传记从未有过的展现其作为的好机会,可以充分表现自己。现在机会就在眼前,他用所有自由灵活的创作赢得了这个机会。他的表现十分无畏,因为他已经证明了自己的才能非常卓越,完全能够胜任这项工作。结果是,传记的本性变得更加明显。有人在几次阅读之后还会质疑,难道两者相比,《维多利亚女王》获得巨大成功,而《伊丽莎白女王》则是惨败吗?其实如果我们这样比较,并不是利顿·斯特雷奇的失败,而是传记艺术的失败。在《维多利亚女王》中,他把传记当作一种技巧,甘受限制。在《伊丽莎白女王》中,他把传记当作一门艺术,打破束缚。

然而我们还要质疑这个结论的来源,有何依据。首先,对于传记家来说,为两位女王写传的难点明显不同。维多利亚女王的一切都为人所知。她的所作所为,甚至她的所思所想都人尽皆知。没有人能和维多利亚女王接受过的仔细验证和确切核实相比。传记家无法进行原创,因为每时每刻手边的资料都会提醒他的写作和历史不同。因此,创作《维多利亚女王》的时候,利顿·斯特雷奇妥协了。他将传记家甄选和关联资料的能力发挥到极限,但是严格控制在事实范围内。保证每句话都有依据;每个事实都有来源。事实证明他对老女王的生活描述,就像伯斯威尔对字典创始人的描述一样。利顿·斯特雷奇笔下的维多利亚女王是为众人认可的维多利亚女王,正如伯斯威尔笔下的约翰逊是现在普遍接受的约翰逊博士一样。其他版本终会消失不见。无疑,在此之前他已经取得了巨大的成就,不过他渴望更进一步。所以才创作出这样真实可信有血有肉的维多利亚女王。然而不容置疑的是她的形象仍然存在局限。传记难道无法拥有诗歌一般的热烈,戏剧一般的激情?传记的特点难道只能是尊重事实和实际取材吗?

伊丽莎白女王似乎是一个非常适合进行大胆尝试的题材对象。人们对她的事迹不甚了解。她所生活的年代久远,那个时代人们的风俗、想法甚至行为十分奇特。“我们运用哪种艺术才能进入这些奇怪的思想,或是潜入更奇怪的部分中?我们越清楚这点,那个奇特的世界就变得越遥远。”利顿·斯特雷奇在首页上写下这样的话。但是很明显,《伊丽莎白女王》是一段具有可塑性的悲剧历史,鲜为人知,所以惹人遐思。一切都非常适合写进书中,两个世界的优势集合在一起,赋予了艺术家极大的创作自由,并为创作提供事实依据——这本书不仅仅是一本传记,还是一部艺术作品。

尽管作家费尽心思,一切只是徒劳,因为事实和杜撰无法完美结合。伊丽莎白女王既不像维多利亚女王的形象那样真实,也不像克里奥佩特拉或孚斯塔夫那样富有戏剧性。原因似乎是,无人知晓——虽然他勇于创新,但是变得小有名气之后——他的创新却遇到了阻碍。因此女王身处一个位于事实和杜撰之间的模棱两可的世界。在那个既不抽象也不具体的世界,读者能感受到作家的茫然和努力,然而女王的形象十分中庸,毫不出彩,虽然没有任何批评,仍然算是失败。

如果判断正确,我们必须要承认传记自身存在问题:总是强加条件,条件就是必须要建立在事实基础上。我们说的传记里的事实是非艺术家也会认可的事实。如果像艺术家一样创作——不存在佐证无法对比的原创——并且试图将原创和事实结合起来,结果就是两败俱伤。

在《维多利亚女王》一书中,利顿·斯特雷奇似乎非常清楚地意识到这种条件的必要性,并且本能地屈从了。“女王的前四十二年,”他这样写道,“因为大量分门别类的官方信息而变得光辉夺目,直到阿尔伯特逝世,她才褪去面纱。”随着阿尔伯特逝世,面纱褪去,官方信息派不上用场,他意识到传记家必须依照前例。“我们乐于进行简短概括,”他这样写道,最后的几年被概括介绍。但是伊丽莎白女王的一生远比维多利亚女王的最后几年更为神秘。因此,他不再进行简短概括,而是开始写一本书,这本书包含了奇怪想法和由于可靠信息的缺失而变得更为奇怪的部分。以他当时的能力来说,这种大胆的尝试注定失败。

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因此,每当传记家抱怨,说自己被朋友、信件和文件束缚时,其实不过是指出了传记创作不可避免的因素,当然也是不可避免的限制。因为原创人物生活在一个只有作家自己了解的世界里。在那个世界里,事实的真伪完全取决于作家的想法。和由其他人提供的真实信息创造出的世界相比,在作家自己想法支配下创造出的世界更为珍贵、热情和和谐。因为这样的差距,两个世界里的事实无法融合,如果妄图结合就会造成两败俱伤。我们似乎可以得出这样的结论:没有谁能同时在两个世界称雄;你必须做出选择,然后接受自己的选择。

尽管如此,《伊丽莎白女王》这本书并非毫无价值,它的失败开启了新的成功,因为这是传记家倾尽全力完成的大胆试验。利顿·斯特雷奇如果还在人世,也会十分确信是自己拓展了传记原创这条道路。事实也是这样,他为我们指出了后人前进的方向。传记家服从事实——应该这样。但是,即便如此,他也有权利支配所有可供挑选的事实。如果琼斯的确把靴子扔在女仆脸上,有一个情妇住在伊斯林顿,或是一夜风流之后醉倒在水沟里,那么传记家就有权利将这些事实写进书里——只要诽谤法和人类情感允许的话。

但是这类事实和科学事实不同——科学事实一经发现,就保持不变。这类事实随想法变化而变化,想法则随时间变化而变化。现如今,通过心理学家举例说明,我们都知道关于罪恶的思考可能是种不幸;或是种好奇;或两者皆非,不过是不值一提毫不重要的琐碎之事。人们对性的想法也不断变化。这些变化使得大量消亡事物的毁灭模糊了人们的真实特征。过去经常出现的一些标题——大学生活、婚姻、事业——变得模棱两可,区别不大。很有可能的是英雄的存在方式改变了。

因此传记家要走在我们这些人的前面,像矿工肩上的金丝雀一样,检测气氛,探寻虚伪、不真实和过时习惯的存在。传记家必须能活跃而谨慎地感受周围的事实。必须重申的是,因为我们生活的时代有众多来自报纸、信件和日记的摄像头,从不同角度关注每一个方面,传记家必须准备好认识同一张脸孔的矛盾两面。传记家的视线会对准奇怪的角落,从而扩大观察范围。如果事实的来源广泛,传记的内容就会十分丰富,不会杂乱无章令人困惑。因为很多不为人知的事情现在为人们所了解,我们不禁扪心自问,是否只有伟大人物的人生才应该被记录?难道不是每一个曾经活过,并留下生活记录的人都值得写传记吗——不管他是失败还是成功,卑微还是显赫?此外,究竟什么是伟大?什么是渺小?传记家必须修正我们关于美德的标准,树立新的值得崇拜的英雄形象。

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因此,传记的发展刚刚起步。我们可以肯定的是它还要面临漫长的积极的发展道路——途中会遇到困难,危险和艰苦。不管怎样,我们还可以肯定的是和诗歌小说的发展道路不同——传记的更为紧张刺激。因此传记作品注定不会不朽,尽管每位作家都希望自己的作品永垂不朽。

已有事实证明传记的发展不会如作家所愿。伯斯威尔笔下的约翰逊博士不会像莎士比亚笔下的孚斯塔夫一样长久。我们也几乎可以确定米考伯 [1] 和贝茨小姐 [2] 会远远胜过沃尔特·斯科特爵士笔下的洛克哈特先生和利顿·斯特雷奇笔下的维多利亚女王。因为原创人物的创作更为久远。丰富的想象力剥夺了易逝的事实的光彩;作家的创作素材本就优越,传记家却只能在字里行间写出这些终将消失的事实。几乎一切都要消失,只有个别得到留存。因此我们可以得出结论,传记家是工匠,不是艺术家;他的作品不是艺术品,而是模棱两可的中间产物。

如果浅谈传记,传记家的作品其实是无价之宝,虽然我们无法给予相同的感谢。我们无法生活在尽是丰富想象的世界里。想象很快就会疲倦,需要休息和提神。但是,对疲倦的想象力来说,最好的补给不是劣俗的诗歌或不入流的小说——这些会让想象力变得迟钝和堕落——而是“严肃的事实”,正如利顿·斯特雷奇在优秀的传记作品中向我们展示的那样。一个真实的人生活过的时代和地方,他如何观察,他如何打扮,他的日常生活如何,他的亲戚朋友怎样,他的爱人怎样,他何时去世,去世时是不是像一个基督教徒一样躺在床上,等等。

传记家告诉我们这些真正的事实,从大事中发现细微,进行概括总结,这样我们就了解了全部。其实传记家比任何诗人或小说家更能启发想象力。因为很少有诗人和小说家可以承受向我们提供事实的巨大压力。但是几乎每一个传记家,如果他尊重事实,都能提供给我们很多事实,丰富我们的知识储备。传记家告诉我们一些事实,这些事实可以创新,可以发挥作用,可以提示和发展。对此有确切证据。就像读诗或读小说会产生共鸣一样,我们读完传记后将它搁置一旁,会发现一些场景还是非常鲜明,人物形象还在脑海深处栩栩如生,就好像我们回忆起往事。


[1] 狄更斯《大卫·科波菲尔》中的人物。——译者注

[2] 简·奥斯汀《爱玛》中的人物。——译者注

对当代文学的印象

当代读者一定会对此印象深刻:同一时刻两位评论家坐在同一张桌子旁边,却对同一本书产生了截然相反的态度。一方面,这本书被认为是一本英文散文杰作;同时另一方面,如果有助于燃烧,它就是一厚叠理应被扔入火中的废纸。然而这两位评论家对弥尔顿和济慈持相同观点。他们如此表现是因为自身的敏锐感受和毋庸置疑的由衷热忱。只有当他们讨论当代作家的作品时,才会不可避免地起争执。引起他们争论的这本书不过出版了两个月左右,一位评论家认为它对英国文学的影响不仅立竿见影,而且很可能长期持续;另一位评论家则认为这本书不过是胡乱拼凑的无稽之谈。下面会解释为什么两者得出的结论不同。

此解释让人费解。读者和作家都一样为难;读者想在混乱的当代文学中找到方向;作家则自然而然地想了解自己在几乎一片漆黑中费尽心思创作出的作品是否有可能在英国文学的名家中崭露头角,还是正相反,被人置之不理付之一炬。但是如果先将自己定义为读者,去探讨读者的困境,我们就不会感到这样迷惑。类似的事之前也经常发生。甚至从罗伯特·埃尔斯米尔 [1] 开始,平均一年两次的春秋时分,我们都能听到学者们对新书的反对和对旧书的赞同。斯蒂芬·菲利普斯的书随处可见,然而即便这样,仍然有很多人并不喜欢。不过如果两位绅士观点一致,都认为布朗克的书是一本无可争议的杰作,我们就不得不面对一个抉择,是否要花上十先令六便士的书费去支持他们的观点,这的确更让人惊讶和心烦。这两位都是著名的评论家,哪怕是脱口而出甚至是不假思索的意见,都会作为对英美地区文学的评论,被收录进严肃的散文专栏。

固有的愤世嫉俗会让我们对当代的天才人物产生狭隘的不信任感,我们会不知不觉说出这样的话:如果评论家观点一致,那只是说明他们无事可做。当代文学根本不值得花钱,一张图书馆借书卡足矣。因为问题依然没有解决,让我们直接向评论家提问。如今的读者对已去世的作家毫无敬意,却被一个问题困扰,尊敬已去世的作家是否与理解在世的作家息息相关,与此难道没有任何相关指导吗?快速调查后发现两位评论家都遗憾地表示并没有这样的人。他们的评价为什么和新书相关呢?当然不是因为那十先令六便士的书费。他们丰富的经验告诉我们一些过去因鲁莽行为而造成严重后果的例子;如果他们评论去世的作家,却对在世的作家大加赞赏,就犯了评论界的众怒,会丢掉工作,毁掉声誉。他们提出的唯一建议就是尊重并无畏地追随自己的直觉,不要受任何在世的评论家或书评作者的影响,更不要反复阅读过去的著作质疑自己的直觉。

正是因为这些人,我们不得不表明事情不总是如此。尽管具体内容不为人知,我们相信曾有一条定律或规律约束着广大的读者群众。并不是说杰出的评论家——德莱顿、约翰逊、柯尔雷基和阿诺德——一定会对当代作品作出完美的判断,尽管他们的评语不会永久地印在书上,也不会省去读者自省的问题。但至少他们的存在会产生集中影响。他们随意给出一些书评,不难想象仅仅这样就能压制餐桌上人们的意见分歧,却让现在的学术权威费尽心机也不得其解。不同的学派会一如既往地热烈讨论,但是每个读者心里都会有这样的想法,至少有一个人会接近文学的主旨:如果你允许他有瞬间反常,他会凭一己之力与永恒接轨,无视赞美和责备,逆风向前。但是说到成为一个评论家,性格要大方,时机要成熟。当代社会分散的餐桌,构成社会的种种思潮的追逐和漩涡,范围极大。值得我们期待的那个伟人到底在哪里?我们有书评作者但是没有评论家;我们有百万个能干正直的警察但是没有法官。有品位、有学识、有本领的人都在给年轻人讲学,都在为过去歌功颂德。但是他们灵活多产的笔触却总是让鲜活的文学组织干燥脱水变成小巧的骨骼。我们感受不到德莱顿那样的激情,也感受不到济慈那样温和天然的性情,或是他那样深远的洞察力和清晰的理智,或是柯尔雷基对诗歌的全身心投入,尤其是他作品中最常被人引用的伟大言论会在阅读时散发光热,正如书的灵魂一般。

对这一切,评论界也都慷慨大方地表示赞同。他们认为伟大的评论家极罕见。但是一旦他奇迹般地出现,我们如何支持,或者我们提供些什么?如果伟大的评论家本身不是伟大的诗人,那么他们一定得到了时代的哺育。有一些伟人已被平反,有一些学派被创立或毁灭,但是我们的时代已经到了贫乏的边缘,还没有谁一枝独秀技压群雄。没有什么大师,能够让年轻人骄傲自豪地成为他的学徒。很久之前哈代就淡出文坛;康拉德的才能带着一丝异国情调,这让他无法具有偶像般的影响力,虽然也被尊敬爱戴,但却有几分淡泊疏离。就其他人来说,尽管为数众多,极富热情,作品层出不穷,至今无人能对同时期的人产生影响,或是透过今天我们这个时代到达并不十分遥远的将来,成为我们津津乐道的不朽。如果我们进行一个世纪测试,看看现在英国出版的书一百年后有多少还会存在,必须要说我们不光在哪本书这个问题上存在分歧,更令人质疑的是是否会有这么一本书。这是一个支离破碎的时代。几节诗,几页书,到处都是的章节,这部小说的开头,那部小说的结尾,对最好的时代或者作家来说都是一样的。但是我们能留给后代几打零散的书页,或让那时的读者从所有摆在他们面前的文学里大海捞针一般挑出少得可怜的华彩篇章吗?这些就是评论家可以堂堂正正放在桌面上,和作为同伴的小说家和诗人一起讨论的问题。

开始时,悲观主义似乎足以克服所有阻力占到上风。是的,我们再重复一遍,这是一个贫乏的时代,诸多方面都可以证实它的穷困潦倒;但是,坦白地说,如果将两个世纪作比较,结果十分明显,我们被狠狠压倒。《韦弗利》、《远游》、《忽必烈汗》、《唐璜》、赫兹里特的散文、《傲慢与偏见》、《海伯利安》和《自由的普罗米修斯》都出版于1800到1821年间。我们这个世纪不缺乏工业;但是如果说到杰作,不得不承认悲观主义者是正确的。正如努力的时代一定会继承天才的时代;宁静和刻苦的时代也一定会继承喧嚣和奢靡的时代。当然,这些牺牲了自己不朽的机会而建筑井然有序的房屋的人们理应得到荣誉。但是如果我们说到杰作,何处可寻?我们知道有一些诗可以长存;济慈、戴维斯、德拉梅尔、劳伦斯,他们的诗当然拥有辉煌的瞬间,但是和长存不同。毕尔勃姆在他的领域是完美的,但那不是一个很大的领域。《遥远的过往》中的篇章无疑将会流芳百世。《尤利西斯》带来了值得纪念的伟大变动——十分大胆,剧烈变动。于是,我们挑挑选选,这样那样地摘出一些,拿出来展示,却感到被排斥或嘲笑,最后不得不同意评论家的反对意见,这的确是一个缺乏一贯努力的时代,到处都是凌乱的碎片,根本无法与之前的那个时代相提并论。

这些说法盛行一时,我们也屈从于说话者的权威,然而却非常清楚有些时候我们连自己也无法相信。再重复一遍,这是一个贫乏枯竭的时代。我们不得不满怀嫉妒地回顾从前。但是同时,这也是初春晴朗的一天。生活总是不乏色彩。就连电话,总是打断严肃对话缩短重要观察的电话,也别有一番情趣。虽然人们不经意的对话很难永垂不朽,但是在一个有灯,有街,有房子,有人们,或美丽或奇异的背景下倾吐心声,这一切交织在一起本就成为永恒。但这是生活;而我们谈论的是文学。我们必须试图将两者分开,反对悲观主义的优越合理,支持乐观主义的鲁莽叛乱。

我们的乐观大体上说来自本能,来自晴朗的天气、美酒和畅谈,来自生活每日赐予的财富和最健谈的人也表达不出的启示。尽管我们尊敬爱戴死者,我们还是更喜欢生活本来的样子。就算我们可以选择生活在过去的任何时代,眼下也总有一些东西是我们不愿意交换的。当代文学尽管有不足和缺点,却还是那么富有魅力,那么吸引我们,就像一个我们每天都批评斥责却无法失去的亲人。它具有一种和蔼可亲的品质,这一点和我们自己,我们的作品以及我们生活的地方很相似。它并不居高临下,与我们保持距离,从外部审视,也没有像我们这代人如此强烈地怀念同时代。我们和先人被生生割裂开来。规模上的变化——几世纪以来一直在适当位置的群体突然下跌——从上到下动摇了组织结构,把我们和过去割裂开来,可能使我们太过清楚地意识到自身所处的现在。每天我们发现自己忙着,说着,或者想着对父辈来说不可能的事情。我们感觉到比起已经被完美诠释的相同点,不同点还没有引起相当多的关注。新书吸引我们去阅读,有几分希望它们能够反映我们重新变化的态度——这些场景、想法以及明显不和谐的偶然组合用一种强烈的新奇感影响了我们——并且,就像文学一样,回到我们的管辖范围,完整且便于理解。这的确是乐观主义的所有理由。我们这个时代拥有许多愿意表达将他们和过去割裂的不同点的作家,他们不愿表达将他们和过去连接的相同点,这些作家比任何其他时代的都更多。提起任何一位的名字都可能会惹人不快,但是即便是最肤浅的读者,只要对诗歌、小说或是传记稍有留意,就一定会对我们这个时代的勇气、真诚,简单地说,其广泛的原创性印象深刻。但是我们的快乐被莫名其妙地剥夺了。很多书都给我们一种承诺无法实现、知识贫乏、生活里被攫取的光彩却没有转化为文学的感觉。当代作品中的佼佼者往往来自压力下的记录或潦草的速记,当人物在场景里出现,他们的行为和表情就会被以惊人的才华保留下来。但这些场景总是一闪而过,对此我们非常不满。快乐有多深,烦恼就有多重。

无论如何,我们回到了起点,在两端之间摇摆不定,这一刻还是狂热,下一刻就变成悲观,无法得出任何有关我们当代文学的结论。我们曾向评论家寻求帮助,但是他们觉得这件事不值一提。现在,正是通过咨询过去的杰作,接受他们的建议,修正这些极端的时候。我们感觉自己不得不这样做,不是被冷静的判断驱使,而是急切需要把我们的不稳定寄托在他们的稳定上。但是,说实话,今昔对比带来的震撼一开始令人不知所措。毋庸置疑,名著多少有些沉闷。华兹华斯、斯科特和奥斯汀的书中满是无所谓的平静,平静到让人想睡觉。他们忽略出现的机会,无视积聚的色彩和细节。他们看上去十分从容,不去满足被当代人快速累积的感官:视觉、听觉、触觉——尤其是,人类自身的感觉,他的深度,想法的多样性,他的复杂性,他的困扰等等,简言之,人本身。华兹华斯、斯科特和奥斯汀的书中对这些表现得很少。让我们逐步产生并愉快彻底地征服我们的安全感从何而来呢?这力量来自他们的信仰——加在我们身上的他们的信念。这一点在哲学诗人华兹华斯的身上体现得非常明显。闲适的斯科特也是一样,他总是在早餐之前草草几笔写出惊世之作。至于那位内向的未婚女士,则是在安静中单纯为了愉悦自己悄悄进行写作。这两位身上有一点相似,那就是都相信生活是平稳的。他们具有自己的行为判断。他们了解人和人之间以及人和世界之间的关系。他们可能都不会说出非常绝对的话,但是一切都依附其上。我们发现我们只是在表达信念,其他的一切都从它而来。只有信念,举个简单的例子,我想起最近出版的《沃森一家》,一个美丽的女孩出于本能想去安慰一个在舞会上被冷落的男孩,即使你觉得这样绝对合理,你也可能不会让一百年后的人们有同样的感觉,但是你会让他们感觉到文学。因为那种确定性是创作作品的条件。相信你的感觉能抓住一些对别人有益的东西,就可以从个人的限制束缚中解脱出来,像斯科特一样自由,充满热情地去发掘迷住我们的这个新奇浪漫的世界。这也是简·奥斯汀作为一个伟大作家所擅长的神秘加工过程的第一步。选择曾经的经历,深信不疑,置之事外,然后准确地安排好位置;她非常自如地把这一切完成,使之成为文学的完整状态,整个过程不会向分析家泄露任何秘密。

当代作家让我们苦恼,因为他们没有信念。即使他们中最真诚的作家也只会告诉我们他自己身上发生了什么。他们无法创造一个世界,因为他们不能自如面对其他人。他们不会讲故事因为他们不相信故事是真实的。他们不会归纳。他们只依靠自己的感官和情感,尽管的确非常真实,而不愿依靠提供模糊信息的知识。他们被迫不去使用最具威力和技艺最精巧的武器。尽管坐拥英国文学的全部财富,他们却只是快速翻过一本又一本书。他们匆匆写下从外部观点选定的一个新鲜角度,热情地记下一闪而过的光芒,这点亮了什么?瞬息的光彩可能什么也不是。但是评论家在其中干涉,带着几分正义感。

如果这个描述站得住脚,如他们所言,并且不像可能的那样,完全依赖我们在桌边的位置和相当单纯像芥末瓶和花瓶一样的个人关系,那么评判当代文学的风险要比从前更大。如果他们远离目标也是情有可原的。就如马修·阿诺德建议的那样,从当今燃烧的区域退回到过去安全的平静更好。“我们进入一片燃烧的区域,”马修·阿诺德写道,“就在我们走近距离不远的那个时代的诗歌,拜伦、雪莱和华兹华斯的诗歌里面的价值评判不只是个人的,还是满怀热情的个人。”他们让我们想起,这些话写于1880年。他们提醒我们,注意观察放在显微镜下的丝带,尽管它如此短小,却看起来绵延不绝;如果我们毫无作为,事物就自己分类;节制和研究经典得到推崇。不仅如此,人生短暂;不久即将庆祝拜伦百年诞辰。此刻迫在眉睫的问题是,他到底有没有和他的妹妹结婚?总结一下,就是——如果的确任何一个结论都有可能的话,当每个人现在都说话,时间在不断流逝——对如今的作家而言,放弃创作杰作的希望似乎较为明智。他们的诗歌、喜剧、传记和小说不是书而是笔记。时间,好比一位优秀的老师,会手把手地教导,指出他们的缺点、草率和不足,把作品全都撕碎;但是他不会扔进废纸篓中。他会一直保留,因为别的学生会发现非常有用。未来的杰作出自今天的笔记。正如评论家刚才所说的,文学历史悠久,历经变革。尽管一些小争端可能搅得海面波涛汹涌,让小船不得安宁,但过分夸张它们的重要则显得目光短浅心胸狭隘。狂风暴雨不过是表面现象,平和隽永才是本质。

对于评论家来说,他们的任务是评价当代的新书,我们承认这些评价会有几分艰涩难懂,常常令人心生不快。我们希望评论家们给当代文学予以鼓励,对那些将要偏离正道或消失的作品则要谨慎颁发花环和桂冠,免得让它们在半年后就显得荒谬。让评论家们更加自由,更加客观地对待当代文学和作者,置身其中,共同努力完成当代文学这座伟大的建筑,尽管可能个别工人的名字不详。希望他们重重关上门,尽管门的那一边温馨和谐,可以享受无数物美价廉的食物,哪怕只有一次,不再讨论那个令人兴奋的话题——拜伦是否和他的妹妹结婚——然后,离开我们坐着闲谈的桌子,哪怕离开一点,聊一些和文学本身有关的话题。如果他们要离去,我们要尽一切努力挽留,让他们想起那位瘦削的贵族女士,赫斯特·斯坦霍普夫人。她在马棚养了一匹乳白色的马,为的是有一天救世主能够骑上她的马在山顶鸟瞰世界,一览美景。虽然她等得心急如焚,但一直相信救世主总会出现,因此她从未放弃等待。评论家应该向她学习;认真感受现在,观察过去和未来之间的联系,为即将到来的杰作做好准备。


[1] 《罗伯特·埃尔斯密尔》是英国小说家汉弗莱·沃德夫人创作的著名小说。——译者注

为什么

《吕西斯特拉忒》的第一期出版了,我承认对它十分失望。它纸张华丽,印刷精美,看上去十分成功,尽善尽美。我一页页地翻着,感觉好像财富突然降临到萨默维尔。我本打算以消极的态度回应编辑的约稿请求,但值得欣慰的是,当我读到其中一位作者衣着简陋,另一位女作者毕业于实力和威望均很弱的大学时,我开始打起精神,许许多多迫切求解的问题涌上心头:“终于轮到我们了。”

和今天很多人一样,我也总是被许多问题困扰。我发现在街上很难不走走停停,有时可能就站在路中间,问为什么。教堂、酒吧、议会、商店、喇叭、汽车、空中飞机的嗡嗡声,和男男女女全都让我发问。然而,只向自己发问有什么意义呢?这些问题应该在公共场合公开提出。但是财富让公开提问变得非常困难。每个问题结尾处那个小小的弯曲的符号能让有钱人变得苦恼;权力和声望强烈反对它。因此,如果问题敏感、冲动或是有点可笑,则一定要仔细选择提问的场合。这样那样的问题被权力、荣华富贵和陈词滥调包围着慢慢枯萎。它们还没进入有影响力的新闻办公室,就在门口一批批死去。它们溜到了令人讨厌的不发达地区,那里的人们贫困潦倒,什么也给不了,无权无势,因此没什么可失去。一直困扰我让我想发问的问题,无论是对是错,如今都应该在《吕西斯特拉忒》中提出。它们说:“我们从没指望你会在……提出我们这些问题,”这里它们说出了一些最体面的日报和周报的名字;“也不是……”这里它们说出了一些最受人崇拜的机构的名字。“但是,感谢上帝!”它们大声说,“女子大学的学生不是又穷又年轻吗?她们不是热爱创新勇于冒险吗?她们不是正要创造一个新的……”

“编辑不准写女性主义。”我严肃地打断它们。

“女性主义是什么?”它们异口同声地喊出来,因为我没有立刻回答,它们又抛给我一个新问题:“你不觉得是时候创造新的……”

但是我打断了它们的话,提醒它们我只能写两千字。如果字数超过了,文章就会被退回来,重新修改。最后我提出了一个请求,我可以采用它们中最简单、温和和明显的一两个问题。比如,每当社团开始活动,或大学开学时频繁出现的问题——为什么讲课,为什么听讲?

为了好好提出这个问题,我会这样陈述,记忆会留住画面的鲜活,但正如伊丽莎白女王说过的那样,总有那么一个机会,虽然不常见但是永远不用过分悲伤,鉴于友情,或为获取法国大革命的相关信息,去听课是必要的。开始的时候,教室看上去让人摸不清头绪——既不让人坐下,也不让吃东西。墙上可能挂着一张地图。当然讲台上会有一张桌子,还有几排又矮又硬很不舒服的小椅子。椅子上面陆陆续续坐满了人,有男有女。不光椅子看上去有点勉强,听课的人也是这样。有些人拿着笔记本,轻轻敲着钢笔;有些人空手而来瞪着牛蛙般的大眼沉默地望着天花板。大钟无精打采;时间一到,一个满脸无奈的男人大步走进教室。他脸上没有常人的表情,取而代之的是紧张、虚荣,还看得出沮丧和不自信。这时教室内一阵骚动。因为他写过书,而观察写过书的人是非常有趣的,所以每个人都盯着看他。他头顶光秃秃的,没有一根头发,嘴唇和下巴也与常人无异;总之,就算他写过书,也看不出和别人有什么不同。他清了清嗓子开始讲课。人的声音具有多种功能:它可以使人着迷让人得到安抚,也可以勾起怒火让人感到沮丧;但是在讲课过程中,它只是让人心烦。他教授的内容其实非常合理,有学识,有论据,有推论,但是听着听着,注意力就涣散了。大钟看起来满脸惨白,指针也虚弱无力。莫非它们得了痛风,或是水肿?缓慢移动的动作让人想起一只三条腿的苍蝇痛苦地在冬天存活。平均有多少只苍蝇能在英国的冬天存活?如果发现自己出现在讲授法国大革命的课堂上,这样一只昆虫会怎么想?这么想完全是白费功夫。已经溜号了——那一段已经讲过去了,没必要让老师重复。他讲得非常吃力但却很坚持自我。要找到法国大革命的源头——苍蝇的想法也要找到。千里以外也能运筹帷幄是这门课程的目的之一。“略过这段吧!”我们向他提出请求——没用;他没有略过。这简直就是一个笑话。然后老师的声音再次响起,窗户好像需要清洗,有女人打了一个喷嚏;老师的声音开始变快,马上到结论了,然后——感谢上帝!——终于下课了。

生命如此短暂,为什么要浪费时间来上课?好几世纪前就发明了印刷,为什么他不打印讲义非要自己讲课呢?这样,在冬天的炉火边,或是夏天的苹果树下,我们都可以阅读,反复思考,并且讨论讲义;我们还可以斟酌疑难问题,彼此争论。我们会学得更好更深刻。如果讲课的话,老师不得不降低难度,时不时活跃气氛,以便吸引各种各样听众的注意,否则他们很容易去研究鼻子啊下巴啊,要不就是打喷嚏的女人还有苍蝇的寿命,讲义则无须这样的内容重复和难度降低。

我要说的是,外行可能不清楚,大学里设置讲课是大学规章制度的重要组成部分。但是为什么——另一个问题冲上前线——如果讲课是教育的必要形式之一,能不能取消它的娱乐作用呢?总是等到每年春天,迎春花盛开,山榉树变红,英格兰、苏格兰和爱尔兰的所有大学里焦急的秘书才贴出如泉涌般的告示邀请这样那样的人莅临,讲授有关艺术、文学、政治或者伦理方面的课程——这是为什么呢?

过去,报纸稀缺,一份报纸要在办公大楼和教区住宅间小心地传阅。这种情况下努力复习和传播思想无疑是非常必要的。但是现在,桌子上每天都散落着文章和小册子,里面的思想各种各样,比口口相传更为简洁,为什么还要坚持过时的传统?不但浪费时间和力气,还助长了人性的阴暗面——自负、虚荣、逞强和改变宗教信仰的意愿。如果你的长辈们是再普通不过的男男女女,为什么非要让他们变成道学先生和先知?如果你只关注他们头发的颜色和苍蝇的寿命,为什么要让他们在讲台站上四十分钟?为什么不让他们和你平起平坐,亲切愉快地对话,或者倾听?为什么不创造一个建立在贫穷和平等基础上的新型社会?为什么不把人们都聚集在一起,不论年龄和性别,也不论名人还是平民,这样大家可以不用走上讲台,不用朗读论文,不用非得穿昂贵的衣服或是吃昂贵的食物,只是单纯的交谈?难道这样一个社会,这样一种教育模式,不比过去读过的所有艺术和文学的相关论文更为优越?为什么不消灭道学先生和先知?为什么不让人们心灵相通?为什么不试试?

我已经说够了“为什么”这个词,我要纵容自己想想过去、现在和将来的社会大体特征。突然看到特里尔夫人取悦约翰逊博士、荷兰夫人和马考雷勋爵开玩笑的有趣画面,一阵喧哗甚嚣尘上,我几乎听不到自己思考的声音。然后喧哗的原因渐渐清晰。因为愚蠢的我不小心用了“文学”这个词。如果说只有一个词能让人发问并造成混乱,这个词一定是“文学”。他们叫喊着,提出有关诗歌小说和批评的问题,每个都希望自己被听到,每个都觉得自己的问题才是那个唯一值得回答的问题。最后,他们破坏了我脑海中所有关于荷兰夫人和约翰逊博士的美好画面。其中一个坚持认为就算他有点愚蠢鲁莽也要胜于他人,所以他应该优先。他的问题是,如果能自己读书,为什么要在大学里学习英国文学?我要说的是,提出一个已经得到回答的问题是非常愚蠢的——我相信,大学已经在教授英国文学了。不仅如此,如果我们要开始就此进行讨论,我们至少要写二十本书,但是我们只剩下大概七百字了。鉴于他十分急切,我想我还是会问这个问题,尽我所能,在下面这个对话片段里插入这个问题,并且不夹杂任何我自己的观点。

有一天我去拜访我的一位朋友,她的工作是审稿。当我走进房间的时候,觉得有点暗。但是,窗户开着,正是春天里的好天气,那么应该是精神上有点暗淡——我内心的恐惧和忧伤影响了我。不过在那之后,她说的第一句话让我更加害怕:

“哎,可怜的孩子!”她大声说,绝望地把正读着的手稿扔在地上。我问,她的亲友是不是在驾驶或登山途中发生了什么意外?

“如果你觉得以伊丽莎白时期十四行诗发展为主题的三百页手稿是个意外,那么就是了。”她这样说道。

“这就是全部吗?”我如释重负地回答。

“全部?”她反问,“这还不够吗?”然后,她一边在房间里走来走去一边大声说,“他从前是个聪明的男孩,值得一谈;从前他热爱英国文学。但是现在——”她耸耸肩好像无法用语言表达,悲愤和谩骂接踵而来。想到她每天读手稿的生活有多艰难,我就原谅了她,但是我没法和她一起讨论,我只知道这是一篇关于英国文学的文章。“如果你想教他们读英文,”她突然说,“教他们读希腊语”——如果要通过英国文学考试,就要对英国文学进行相关写作,而这一切注定了埋葬英国文学的毁灭性结局。“这个墓碑,”她继续说,“一定是一本……”这时我打断了她的话,让她不要再说类似的废话。“那你告诉我,”她一边说着一边紧握拳头站在那儿看我,“他们写的更好了吗?是诗歌变好了,小说变好了,还是批评理论比他们曾经讲授如何阅读英国文学时更好了?”好像为了回答自己的问题,她拿起被扔在地上的手稿读出其中的一段。“和其他段落一模一样!”她低声抱怨,厌恶地把手中的和其他手稿一起放在架子上。

“但是想想他们必须知道的一切,”我尝试着反驳。

“知道?”她重复我的话。“知道?你说知道是什么意思?”要立刻回答这个问题有点难度,所以我把它放在一边,然后说:“好吧,无论如何他们能以此谋生,并且教育他人。”听我这样说,她生气了,抓起写着伊丽莎白时期十四行诗的作品,把它们扔到了房间另一边。然后,这次拜访的其他时间都用于捡拾茶壶碎片了;那茶壶本是她外婆的东西。

当然现在还有很多其他问题叫嚷着要被提出;关于教堂、议会、酒吧、商店、喇叭和街上的男男女女;但是万幸的是时间到了,一切归于宁静。

读者和报春花

年轻人开始写作的时候,一般会得到看似有理有据其实完全不切实际的建议,比如必须尽可能写得简短清楚,摒除杂念,只表达脑中的想法。但却没有人在此之上补充一条必要信息:“一定要选择正确的读者。”这是一切问题的本质,因为书总是写给读者阅读的。读者不仅是衣食父母,还在不知不觉间,十分微妙地引导作家,激发写作灵感,因此读者是否合意非常重要。

但是即使找出了理想人选,他们难道不会花言巧语榨干作家大脑的精华,让作家写出最为强大多变的作品?时代不同,回答不同。大体上讲,伊丽莎白时期的作品供贵族和剧场大众阅读。18世纪的读者包括咖啡店智者和穷人街书商。19世纪,著名作家为半克朗杂志和有闲阶级写作。回顾并赞叹这些不同组合的伟大结果,和我们所处的困境对比,看上去一清二楚,简单得令人羡慕——我们应该为谁写作?因为现如今市场空前繁荣,读者种类繁多,令人迷惘,包括日报、周报、月报的读者,英国大众和美国大众,喜欢热销书的大众和偏爱冷门书的大众,品位高雅的大众和思维活跃的大众。现在的读者自我意识强烈,才能显著,愿意通过不同的渠道表达他们的需求和喜好。因此当作家看到肯辛顿公园里开放的第一朵报春花,他就要在落笔之前从众多读者中选择最适合他的读者。“不管谁来读,只考虑描写报春花”这样的话毫无意义,因为写作本身就是一种沟通方式;如果没人分享报春花的美,它就不过是一株不完美的报春花。第一个或者最后一个人可能会为自己而写作,不过那只是一个值得羡慕的特例。如果海鸥懂文学,我们也欢迎海鸥去读。

因此每个作家都应该为大众服务,高傲的人可能会说所谓的服务不过是向大众妥协,乖乖地接受别人的安排。道理似乎如此,却还是有很大风险。因为如果作家考虑到自己的读者,但却凌驾其上——这样的关系十分麻烦并不和谐,塞缪尔·巴特勒、乔治·梅瑞迪斯和亨利·詹姆斯的作品就是证明。作家既不屑大众,又想讨好他们;如果自己的作品没有赢得一致的好评,他就把自己的失败归咎于大众;他越想越气,觉得他的读者既没有品位也不友好,一定要让他们为自己的卑微和矫饰付出代价。而真正的代价就是报春花备受折磨,虽然还是明艳照人,但却变得有点畸形,一面萎缩另一面狂长。接触一点阳光可能会让它们好起来。我们应该跑到相反的极端(如果只是假设)接受《泰晤士报》和《每日新闻报》编辑故意提出的谄媚提案吗——“只需花二十磅即可订购专属你的报纸,它将于早上九点之前送达大不列颠的每个角落,并随刊附赠作者签名,像报春花一样在您的餐桌上准时绽放”?

但是单单一朵报春花就可以吗?它真的有可能美得如此炫目,以至于价格昂贵甚至还附带名字吗?显然媒体就是报春花的放大版。每年三月初黄色或紫色的报春花会在肯辛顿公园草坪中开放;如果我们仔细观察,不会觉得报纸上的文章和这些小巧的花朵有什么联系。但是正因为截然不同,在报纸上绽放的报春花更让人惊奇。它们充分利用空间,散发出金色的夺目光彩,不仅精致优美,还十分平易近人,令人如沐春风。没人会认为《泰晤士报》里“我们神奇的批评家”或《每日新闻报》的林德先生可以轻而易举写出众人喜爱的文字。也没有人会觉得让一百万人早上九点开动脑筋写出让两百万人感到身心愉快的文章是件卑鄙的事情。但是当夜幕降临,花朵全部枯萎;就像离开了大海的玻璃不再光辉闪烁,离开了舞台被困在电话亭中的女歌唱家的歌声也不再优美;只要失去了要素,再华丽的文章也不过如此。总而言之,如果内容陈旧迂腐,文章就会变得味如嚼蜡。

理想的读者群体能够帮助作家不让写作之花枯萎。然而,随着年龄变化,读者自身也产生变化;他既不能被浮夸的表面迷惑,也不能被花言巧语哄骗,而这需要绝对的正直和强烈的信念。真正的作家才能找到真正的读者;确定读者其实是在考验作家的判断力。因为知道为谁而写,才能明白怎么写。但是很多现代读者资质平庸。而现在,作家需要的明显是阅读习惯良好、不会三心二意的读者。同时,作家还要了解其他时代、其他民族的文学。不仅如此,我们所特有的劣势和当今的发展趋势还要求作家具备其他品质。比如,和伊丽莎白时期相比,当今文学的粗俗化更为严重,让我们十分苦恼。不过二十世纪的读者应该已经对此见怪不怪。读者应该能够正确判断,哪些是真正有好处的养料,哪些不过是虚张声势。他还要成为法官,不仅能够判断出对当代文学产生巨大影响的社会因素,还能区分有益的成熟观点和毫无用处的限制束缚。就算读者思绪万千情绪高涨,他往往只能一边强烈支持作家的多愁善感,一边害怕表白自己的想法。读者可能觉得不敢去想比想得太多还要糟糕。他也许还会进一步讨论语言,指出莎士比亚使用了多少词,或违反了多少语法。尽管我们故作优雅地翻阅钢琴上的黑色琴谱,依然无法改进《安东尼和克里奥佩特拉》。读者会说,如果你能连性别一起忘掉就更好了;作家没有性别之分。但是一切不过如此——简单却值得讨论。读者最大的优点就是和作家不同,他们运用简单的语言表达复杂的事物——气氛。读者要营造一种气氛,让报春花身处其中,备感重要;在这种情况下,对作品的误解是不可原谅的行为。读者要让作家产生这样的感觉:单单一朵真实的报春花就能让他感到满足;除了看书,他根本不想去听课,提升水平或了解自我;虽然有些歉意,他的要求还是让卡莱尔激动愤怒,让丁尼生悠闲自得,让罗斯金几近疯狂;他已经准备好接受作家的安排,隐姓埋名或是大出风头;作家和读者群体之间不只存在一种母性联结;他们其实是双胞胎,一损俱损,一荣俱荣;文学的命运取决于他们之间恰当的联盟,因为读者和作家的结合如此的完美——一切都会证明,正如我们在文章开始所提到的,选择读者最为重要。但是如何正确选择?怎么提高写作?这些都还是问题。

现代小说

在对现代小说的任何研究中,包括最自由灵活的研究,都会轻易得出现代艺术优于过去这样理所当然的结论。人们可能会说,虽然过去的工具简单,材料原始,菲尔丁也获得了成功,简·奥斯汀则更为成功,但是和我们的机会比比!他们著作中的简洁确实不可思议。然而,举个例子来说,文学和汽车制造毫无相似之处。人们怀疑,在过去的几个世纪中,尽管我们对机器制造了解很多,但是对于文学创作却知之甚少。我们的写作能力没有进步;我们所做的只能说是不断摸索,一会儿往这边,一会儿往那边;我们应该从制高点充分观察整个变化过程,找出其中的规律和趋势。不过没有必要立刻觉得我们失去了优势。平地之上,人群之中,我们泪眼迷蒙,心中满是羡慕,回望那些战士;他们更为兴高采烈,因为战争的胜利,他们取得了令人欣慰的成就;我们情不自禁地低语,相比起来,我们的战争更为激烈。文学史家为所有一切下结论,他们来判断现在是否是一个伟大的散文小说时代的开端,结尾还是过程,一般人则无法说清。我们只知道有些感谢和敌意会激发我们;有些道路通向肥沃的土壤,有些则通向灰烬和沙漠;无论如何,这一切都值得一试。

我们不会和古典作家起争执。如果我们说到威尔斯、贝内特和高尔斯华绥,在一定程度上他们本人存在的事实赋予他们的作品一些生活化的瑕疵,我们可以随意挑错。尽管他们的存在十分必要,我们还是更为看重哈代和康拉德,以及稍为逊色的著有《紫土》《绿色寓所》和《遥远的过往》的赫德逊。威尔斯、贝内特和高尔斯华绥曾经让许多满怀希望的人兴奋不已,却又让他们不断失望。因此我们的感谢主要是因为他们曾经让我们看到一种可能,虽然是他们并没完成的事情;然而这些事我们既做不来,也不想做。单独一个词不能表达我们对大量工作的控诉和不满,这些工作不仅数量浩大而且种类繁多,既让人赞叹又让人厌恶。如果我们试图用一个词来表达我们的想法,我们应该说这三位作家都是唯物论者。因为他们都不关注精神,而是关注物质,正是这一点让我们失望。我们觉得如果英国小说摒弃他们,哪怕走入沙漠也好,走得越快,对它的灵魂越有好处。自然,没有哪个词能直中三个独立目标的靶心。威尔斯明显没有射中靶心。他的例子暴露了他自身才能的缺点,那就是致命的想法和纯粹的创作激情混杂在一起。但是贝内特先生大概是三个里最过分的一个,因为迄今为止,他的写作手法最为娴熟。他的小说结构良好,有理有据,好像没有缝隙的窗框和没有裂痕的木板,就连最苛刻的批评家也挑不出什么缺点和纰漏。然而——如果生活不愿如此完美呢?这就是《老妇人的故事》的作者、乔治·卡农、埃德温·克雷汉格,以及其他一些人克服的难题。贝内特笔下的人物形象栩栩如生,种类丰富难以想象。但我们还是禁不住要问他们如何生活,他们为什么而活?这些人离开富人区豪华的别墅,在头等火车车厢里打发时间,那里有柔软的坐席,数不清的铃铛和按钮,触手可及十分方便。毫无疑问,这是一场奢侈的出行,就像在布莱顿那样的高级酒店寻欢作乐。我们说威尔斯是唯物论者不是因为他的作品结构精巧。他总想引起读者的心灵共鸣,以至于无法专注素材整合和结构架构。他之所以被称为唯物论者,纯粹是因为美好的心灵;他担负起本应由政府官员承担的责任,进行大量思考和构造,却没有时间去实现,或忽略了其重要性,使得人物形象十分粗糙。他笔下的琼和彼得会一直住在他造出的人间和天堂,有什么批评比这更糟糕呢?难道他们的人性缺点会让威尔斯特意描绘出的理想制度黯然失色吗?尽管我们对高尔斯华绥的正直和慈悲表示尊敬,我们能从他的书中找到我们的追求吗?

即使作家花费大量技巧和工程让转瞬即逝的细枝末节看起来真实持久,我们还是要为这些书别上唯物论者的标签,也就是说,这些书的内容并不重要。

我们不得不承认,我们非常苛刻挑剔,或者说,我们很难勉强解释或表达不满。每次我们都提出不同的问题。但每次读完一本书好像总是不断出现同样的深深叹气的画面——这本书值得读吗?有意思吗?人性不过偶尔出现小小偏差,贝尔特就全副武装,誓要捕捉生活里细微的错误,这样值得吗?这样的生活是不值得的,可能所有一切都不值得这样做。我承认用这样一个意象来说明自己的想法很模糊不清,但是像批评家那样只评判现实是无法改善情况的。既然承认思想的模糊性会干扰小说批评,我们就可以大胆猜测:此刻对于我们来说,小说形式更容易在流行潮流中迷失而非坚持自我追求。不管我们将之称为生活或精神,真理或事实,它已经开始消失或变化,不愿在我们的定义下继续发展。然而,我们却冥顽不灵,死不悔改,在完成越来越背离我们真正想法的计划之后,又继续构想了三十二章。花费如此大的精力来提高故事的合理性使之接近生活,不仅仅是白费工夫,更是南辕北辙。在错误的方向上即使再努力,写出的故事也不合理,毫无想法,看上去黯淡无光。作家不能随心所欲自我发挥,反而被一些权贵肆无忌惮地抑制,迫不得已构思一些情节,包括喜剧、悲剧、爱情故事,还有一种感觉——要让所有人将如此的完美铭记在心。如果他笔下的所有人物都活过来,他们会发现自己穿着当时的流行服饰,一个扣子也不系。作家开始妥协,导致小说写作出现了变化。但是,随着时间流逝,每当我们进行习惯性的写作,偶尔会对此怀疑或是突然产生叛逆心理。生活是这样的吗?小说必须这样吗?

经过深入洞察,生活似乎并不是“这样的”。仔细观察一下普通日子里普通人的大脑。大脑接收的无数印象——不管平凡普通,还是与众不同,都渐渐消失;有些则如钢铁般深深铭刻在心。它们像来自四面八方由无数原子构成的连绵不断的原子雨,无穷无尽连续不断地放射光芒;当它们接触地面,变成具体的星期一或星期二,重点也变得和从前不同;重要时刻既不是此刻也不是彼刻;因此,如果一位作家是自由人而非奴隶,如果他对创作具有选择权而非履行义务,如果他能将作品建立在自己的情感而非惯例之上,不再会有什么情节、喜剧、悲剧、爱情故事或是一般意义上的灾难性结局,大概也不会像庞德街的裁缝那样循规蹈矩地缝上每一个纽扣。生活不是一排被安排好的左右对称的马车车灯;生活是一圈闪耀的光晕,朦朦胧胧,从意识觉醒起就笼罩着我们,直到一切结束。不管生活表现出怎样的错综复杂,小说家的责任难道不就是用尽量熟悉的语言表达出时刻变化的既无法了解也无法限制的精神吗?我们不只是在为勇敢和真诚辩护;我们想表达的是,和惯例相比,小说的合适取材更能让人信服。

无论如何,我们寻求类似方式来定义区分几位年轻作家的作品性质,从前辈作家的角度来看,詹姆斯·乔伊斯最为出众。这些年轻作家试图接近生活,更为诚实准确地保留生活中吸引和驱使他们的东西。为了达到目的,他们不惜摒弃小说家习以为常的惯例。无数的原子光束在他们的脑海里迸发,看上去可能有些支离破碎毫无逻辑。让我们按照先后顺序记录下来,描绘出它们的形态,这样每个场景或时间的记录都是意识的记录。我们不要理所当然地认为生活在大事上比在小事上体现得更充分。《青年艺术家的画像》和《尤利西斯》是乔伊斯的两部作品,后者更为小型文艺批评杂志称道。如果有人读过这两本书,可能会随意揣测乔伊斯的内心世界和想法。就我们来说,摆在面前的一份残稿,比起已经完结的小说更为充满刺激。不论作家的想法怎样,作为读者我们可能会认为艰涩难懂或不甚乐观,然而毫无疑问的是他满怀真诚,这才是最重要的。和我们称为唯物论者的人们相比,乔伊斯是精神化的;他关注大脑深处传递信息的噼啪作响的火焰,为了让它持续不断地燃烧,他鼓起全部勇气无视对他产生威胁的一切:这一切可能是统一集合,或是在摸不到也看不到的情况下,很多作家借助过的用来帮助读者进行想象的标志物,比如,坟墓的景象、灿烂、肃穆、混乱和突然意味深长地闪烁的光亮。毋庸置疑,无论如何我们都在初次阅读时被触动了,必须承认他的作品是杰作。如果我们探寻生活的本质,我们就一定会产生共鸣。的确,如果我们试图表达其他的想法,我们会发现自己的摸索十分笨拙。如果我们非要举有名的例子,因为某种原因,这样富有原创性的作品却无法与《青春》和《卡斯特桥市长》相提并论。失败的原因是作家相对贫瘠的思维,我们本可以这样简单概括,然后结束这个话题。但是我们还可以更深入一点,试想我们是否不应该把存在的感觉比作明亮却狭窄的房间,因为如果这样就意味着思想被关着,被限制着,并不是开阔自由的。这样想会抑制创新能力吗?这样想难道不会让我们感受不到快乐或宽容,从而只专注自身,不接受或创造自身以外或超过自身的事物吗?也许这样说有点说教意味,但是说教能影响乖僻孤立的事物吗?抑或是对现代人来说,无论怎样努力创新,比起指出已拥有的,感受所缺乏的更为简单?无论如何,不仔细观察“想法”是错误行为。如果我们是作家,所有的想法都是合理的,因为每一种想法都会正确表达出我们想要表达的思想;如果我们是读者,每一种想法都引领我们更靠近小说家。这样做的好处就是离我们口中的生活越来越近。阅读《尤利西斯》不意味着排斥或忽视了生活的主流,翻开《斯坦恩项狄传》或《潘丹尼斯》也不会感到冲击,这些书让人感到生活多种多样,丰富多彩。

然而,现在摆在小说家面前的问题是,我们假设这个问题过去也存在,创造可以自由取舍的氛围。他必须有勇气说出吸引他的不是“这个”而是“那个”,他必须只用“那个”完成自己的作品。现代人看来“那个”,也就是兴趣点,非常可能隐藏在心底深处。因此,一旦重音变得略微不同,附加在某些事物上的强调就被忽视了。不同的形式纲要变得必要,而我们很难去把握,我们的前辈无法理解。现代人中,大概只有俄罗斯人,会觉得柴科夫写出的《古谢夫》的故事很有趣。故事描写一些俄国士兵乘轮船回国,在船上生病。我们通过他们的对话和内心活动的只字片语了解剧情:他们中间的某人死去并被运走;其他人的继续对话让我们知道古谢夫死了,他看起来“像胡萝卜或红萝卜”,然后被扔到船外。这部小说的重点在于出乎意料的场景。首先整个故事看起来好像没有重点,然后,就像当眼睛适应房间里微弱的光亮并认出物体的形状一样,我们逐渐意识到这个故事是多么的完整,伟大和真实,那正是柴科夫想要表达并描述的。把这样,那样,和其他的想法一起排列组成新的东西。但是我们不能说“这是喜剧”,或“那是悲剧”,我们也无法确定,因为我们知道的是短篇故事应该简洁,结局应该明确,如果不是这样,如果情节含糊不清,结局不明确,根本不能称之为短篇故事。

即使对现代英语小说做简单的评论,也无法跳过俄罗斯小说的影响。如果提到俄罗斯人,有人会觉得想要胜过他们完全是浪费时间。如果我们想理解灵魂和心灵,还有什么地方具有同样的深度呢?如果我们厌倦了自身的现实主义,俄罗斯最普通的小说家也对人文精神有着与生俱来的自然而然的敬意。“学着深入群众……但是别让这种同情留在脑中——尽管这样做很容易——留在心中,满怀爱意。”我们在每一位伟大的俄罗斯作家身上都可以找到圣人的特征,比如对他人苦难的同情,给予别人的爱,尽全力达到一些对道德要求极为苛刻的目标。他们中的圣人让我们对自身不虔诚的平庸感到惊慌,我们的著名小说也显得华而不实,故作玄虚。因此,俄罗斯作家的想法不可避免地成为对悲伤的极大理解和同情。的确,更确切地说,我们可以说是俄罗斯小说的未决性。这种感觉没有答案,如果被检视的生活变成一个又一个必须搁置从而不断发出回响的问题,故事以绝望的疑问结束,我们深深感受到令人厌恶的沮丧。也许他们才是正确的;毫无疑问,他们比我们看得更远,也没有我们严重的视力障碍。但是也有一种可能,我们会看到他们看不到的东西,不然为什么抗议的声音中夹杂着我们的忧郁?抗议的声音是另外一种来自远古文明的声音。远古文明赋予我们本能,去享受并且抗争,不去苦恼或理解。从史特恩到麦勒迪斯的英国小说都见证了我们与生俱来的才能,不管是幽默和喜剧,还是地球的美好,不管是智慧的活跃,还是身体的光彩。但是我们从两本小说的比较中得出的所有推论都远远比不上或胜过他们对我们造成的艺术影响。我们知道世界上没有限制,没有什么——没有“方法”,没有试验,甚至最为狂野的试验——会被禁止,除了虚伪和做作。“小说的合适选材”并不存在;一切都适合写成小说,每个感觉,每个想法,大脑的每项特质和振作的精神,任何知觉都不会出错。如果我们发挥自己的想象力,想到小说中的艺术人物有了生命,站在我们中间,毫无疑问的是她既会被我们损害欺凌,也会被我们推崇热爱,因为只有这样才能让她焕发生命力,才能让她拥有真正的自己。

应该如何阅读

首先,我想强调一下题目中的问题。即使我能回答这个问题,答案也是针对我而不是你。能给予他人的读书建议就是不要采纳任何建议,听从自己的直觉,运用自己的判断力,得出自己的结论。如果我们就此达成一致,我才能随心所欲提出一些观点和想法,因为你不会盲从或是束缚自己的独立思想。而独立思想对读者来说是最重要的品质。到底有什么条例可以规范书籍呢?滑铁卢战役的发生日期是可以确定的一天;但是作为一出戏剧,《哈姆莱特》好过《李尔王》吗?没有人可以下这样的结论。人人都必须自己回答这个问题。把穿着华贵毛皮外套和长袍的权威请到图书馆,让他们告诉我们如何阅读,阅读什么,如何评价我们所阅读的内容,就是在破坏作为这些圣洁场所活力的自由精神。在其他任何地方我们可能会被法律法规所限制——但在图书馆我们没有任何规定。

如果容许我老生常谈,我会说为了享受自由,我们当然不得不约束自己。我们不能无可奈何又不知不觉地滥用权力,就像不能喷湿了半个房子只为了浇灌一丛玫瑰花。我们必须在这个地方准确有力地训练权力。这应该是我们在图书馆首先遇到的难题之一。“这个地方”是哪里?看起来好像没什么,其实充满了困惑。诗歌和小说,历史和回忆,字典和蓝皮书,这些书的作者来自不同语言的男男女女,他们性格不同,种族不同,年龄不同。但是所有书都在书架上挤成一团。外面有阵阵驴叫,女人们在抽水机旁叽叽喳喳,小马驹在田野上飞驰而过。我们该从何开始?我们如何在众多繁杂混乱中建立秩序?如何从我们的阅读中获得最有深度、最广泛的快乐呢?

简单地说因为书可以按种类划分——小说、传记、诗歌——我们应该就此进行区分,以便可以分门别类获取它能给予我们的正确的东西。然而没有人会问书能给予我们什么。我们对于书总是迷迷糊糊懵懵懂懂,觉得小说真实,诗歌虚伪,传记阿谀谄媚,而历史书总是强化我们的偏见。如果我们能在阅读时消除这样的成见,将会是一个美妙的开始。不要指挥作者,试着变成他们,或成为他的同事和伙伴。如果你开始犹豫畏缩,发表批评,你就失去了从阅读中获取可能最完整价值的机会。但是如果你尽可能地敞开心胸,首句的起承转合里那些几乎无法察觉的敏锐的标志和线索,会让你变得与众不同。沉浸其中,熟悉这些,很快你会发现作者在告诉你,或者正试图告诉你一些更确定的事情。一部小说里的三十章节——如果我们先考虑如何阅读一本小说——试图形成一些东西,这些东西像建筑一样被组合和限定,但是词语比砖块更为玄妙,阅读比观看的过程更为漫长,更为复杂。理解小说家工作要素的最快方法也许不是阅读,而是写作;自己做实验,了解词语的危险和困难。然后回想出一些给你留下深远印象的事情——可能在某个街角,你如何经过正在聊天的两个人。树枝轻摇,灯影晃动,步伐轻快,却也悲伤;整个场景,全部的概念,似乎都包含在那么一个瞬间。

但是当你试图用词语重建,会发现这个场景破碎成无数片相互矛盾的印象。一些含蓄温和,一些突出强调,在这个过程中你必须舍弃一些,可能是全部,去攫取感情本身。然后从自己含糊分散的书转向一些优秀小说家的率直的作品中——笛福、简·奥斯汀、哈代。现在你就会更好地欣赏他们的写作技巧。我们不只在别人面前——笛福、简·奥斯汀或托马斯·哈代——我们还生活在另一个世界。在《鲁宾逊漂流记》中,我们在普通公路上跋涉,事情接踵而来,事实和其顺序令人应接不暇。但是如果户外和冒险对笛福很重要的话,它们对简·奥斯汀毫无价值。对她来说重要的是在会客厅里,人们谈天说地,他们的对话如镜子一般反映出各自的性格。当我们适应了会客厅和人们的反映,转头回去看哈代,就会立刻变得头晕目眩。周围是荒凉的原野,星星在头顶上闪闪发光。思想的另一面暴露出来——在孤独中浮现出的黑暗面,而不是在人群中表现出的阳光面。我们和其他人没有关系,而是和自然命运相关。然而尽管这些世界个个不同,每一个都坚持自我。每一个世界的创造者都从自己的角度仔细观察规律,不管他们对我们施加多大的压力,也不会像少数作家经常做的那样,在同一本书中引出两个不同类型的现实,让我们感到混乱。因此从一位杰出的小说家到另一位——从简·奥斯汀到哈代,从皮科尔到特洛勒普,从斯科特到米勒迪斯——不仅是断绝和背离,还陷入各式各样的困惑。阅读小说是困难复杂的艺术,你必须既有强烈的感受力,还有大胆的想象力,如果你要充分利用小说家——伟大的艺术家——所给予你的东西。

书架上的书种类繁多,稍微瞥一眼就知道没有几位“伟大的艺术家”;甚至书也根本不是艺术作品。比如,这些传记和自传,描述伟大的与世长辞并被人遗忘的人物的生平,放在小说和诗歌的旁边,我们能因为他们不是“艺术”就不去读吗?或者我们可以用别的方式,抱着别的目的去读吗?有时在晚上,我们徘徊在房门前,那里灯火通明,盲人不会注意,每一扇房门都向我们展示了人生的不同阶段,我们应该先为了满足心中的好奇去阅读吗?然后我们内心充满了对这些人生活的好奇——窃窃私语的仆侍、用餐的绅士、盛装打扮赶赴聚会的女孩,在窗边织个不停的老妇人。他们是谁,他们做什么,他们的名字、工作、想法和经历是什么?

传记和自传会回答这样的问题,点亮无数这样的房屋;他们向我们展示人们的日常生活,有辛苦,有失败,有成功,有吃喝,有爱有恨,直到死亡。有时我们看着,房屋渐渐消失,铁轨突然不见,我们变得一片茫然;我们打猎,航海,战斗;我们周围都是野蛮人和战士;我们参加伟大的游行。或者如果我们喜欢待在英国,就在伦敦这儿,场景还是会不断变化:街道变得狭窄;房屋变小,变窄,镶满了钻石却散发着臭气。我们看到一位诗人,多恩,从这样一栋房屋里被赶出来,墙壁太薄,孩子们的哭声穿过墙壁传了出来。我们跟着他穿过书页中的小径,到了崔肯南;到了贝德福夫人公园,那里是著名的贵族和诗人的汇集之处;然后我们移步到威尔顿,丘陵地下方的大房子,听西德尼为他的姐姐阅读《阿卡狄亚》;在沼泽附近徘徊,在那著名的浪漫之地欣赏苍鹭的英姿;然后偕同彭布鲁克夫人和安妮·克利福德,再次向北行,到达荒凉的野地,或繁华的城市,当看到加布里奥·哈维穿着黑色的天鹅绒套装和斯宾塞讨论诗歌时,暂停了我们的快乐。没什么比在伊丽莎白时期伦敦的黑暗和光彩的交替中摸索探寻更为刺激。但是我们没有停留在那里。坦普尔一家和斯威夫特一家,哈利一家和圣约翰一家都在召唤。我们花了好长时间才从他们的争吵中解脱出来,从而解读他们的性格。当我们厌倦了这些,可以继续漫步,路过一位佩戴钻石的黑衣女士,去找塞缪尔·约翰逊和高登·斯密以及加里克;如果我们愿意,可以穿过海峡,去见伏尔泰、狄德罗和杜·德芳侯爵夫人;然后回到英国崔肯南——此地的一处公园曾归贝德福夫人所有,之后成为教皇的住所。然后去草莓山,到华尔波尔府上拜访。但是华尔波尔把好多新朋友介绍给我们,那里有太多的房屋可供参观,太多钟声敲响,我们可能要好好地在贝利小姐的门阶等上一会儿,比如,当萨克雷到来的时候;他是华尔波尔喜欢的女人的朋友。所以只是朋友到朋友,花园到花园,房屋到房屋的走访,我们就从英国文学的一端到另一端,突然发现自己现在在此,如果我们能够区分此刻和之前过去的那些片段。那么,这就是我们可以阅读这些生活和信件的一个方法;我们可以让他们点亮过去的窗户;我们可以从熟悉的住所和爱好观察故去的名人,有时我们离得非常近,会因为他们的秘密感到惊讶,有时我们拿出他们写过的一部戏剧或一首诗,看看它们是否和现在不同。但是这又引起了新的问题。我们必须自问,作者的生活到底能对他的书产生多大的影响呢?透过书中人物如何解读作家比较安全呢?我们应该如何坚持或放弃书中人物引起的同情和厌恶(词语如此敏感,作者的性格感受力如此强烈)?这些是阅读生活和信件时困扰我们的问题,我们必须问自己,因为没什么比被他人的偏好引导更糟糕了。

但是我们也可以带着其他目的阅读这样的书,不为了阐明文学,也不为了结识名人,只是为了恢复和运用我们的创造力。书架右手边没有打开的窗户吗?暂停阅读看看窗外的风景让人多么愉快!风景的无意识、疏离、永恒的运动——小马驹在原野上飞驰而过,妇人从井里提上满满一桶水,驴子摇头晃脑,发出悠长尖锐的声音——这一切多么鼓舞人心!图书馆更大的作用不是别的,正是这些对于男人、女人和驴子生命里转瞬即逝时刻的记录。每一段文学,随着慢慢变老,积攒了无数的废纸;这些废纸上记录着不复存在的瞬间和被人遗忘的生活,用一种已经消失的结巴微弱的口音讲述着。但是如果去阅读这些所谓的废纸,你会十分惊喜,可以说会被那些曾被遗弃而变得腐朽的人类生活遗迹所征服。可能是一封信——但是它展现了多么完整的画面!可能是几句话——但是它们暗示了多么美妙的景致!有时一个完整的故事和它美妙的幽默,哀伤完整结合在一起,就像一位伟大的小说家在工作,但它不过是一位老演员,泰特·威尔金森,想起了琼斯船长的诡异故事;不过是阿瑟·威尔斯利手下工作的年轻中尉,他爱上了里斯本的一个可爱女孩;不过是玛利亚·艾伦,她把针线活儿丢在了无人的客厅,自怨自艾,真希望她自己当时听从伯尼大夫的好建议,没有和她的利时私奔。这一切毫无价值,极其微不足道;然而当小马驹在原野上飞驰而过,妇人从井里提上满满一桶水,驴子高声大叫的时候,经常穿过废纸堆,在浩繁的过去中重新找到曾经被掩埋的指环、剪刀和撞坏的鼻子,将它们缝到一起是多么有趣的事情啊!

但是我们终究还是厌倦了毫无意义的阅读。我们厌倦了不断寻找,以便能够使威尔金森、邦波利和玛利亚·艾伦写出的半成品变得完整真实。他们没有艺术家的控制力和淘汰力。他们甚至无法讲述关于他们自己生活的真实;他们将原本可能非常美好的故事扭曲变形。他们能提供给我们的只有事实,但是事实只是小说非常低级的形式。因此我们心中产生了一个想法,希望能够去处理应对那些半真半假和似是而非;不用再去找出人类性格的细微形状,反而去享受更复杂的抽象,对于小说来说更纯粹的真实。因此我们创造出一种体式,集中概括,不拘泥于细节,但是在一些有规律反复出现的节拍上加重,这种体式一般被称为诗歌;当我们差不多可以写诗时,就是我们该读诗的时候了。



西风啊,您什么时候开始吹刮,

绵绵的细雨什么时候降下来?

啊,但愿我的爱人在我怀里,

让我们同床共枕重相爱!



诗歌的影响如此强烈直接,以至于现在除了诗本身之外,其他感觉都不存在。那么我们要探访多深——我们的沉溺是那么的突然和完全!没有什么可以被掌握,飞行中没有什么可以支撑我们。小说的幻想是逐步的,它的影响蓄势待发;但是当他们读这四行诗时,谁会问这诗是谁写的,或是脑海中浮现出道恩的房子或西德尼的秘书;或把他们和过去的复杂以及世代更替纠缠在一起?诗人总是我们同时代的人。我们此刻的存在既得到重视也得到压抑,正如个人情感的任何一次剧烈波动。然后,感观也的确开始大面积占领我们的思想,我们感受了更遥远的感觉,它们开始发声说话,我们听到了回音和反响。诗歌的集中性覆盖了大面积情感。我们不得不去进行比较,欣赏这几句诗的力量和直接:



我应该像树一样倒下,找到我的坟墓,

心中满是悲伤。



这几句诗的婉转音韵:



时光如沙,分分秒秒在沙漏中溜走,

我们虚掷光阴,不知不觉迈向死亡,却无能为力;

恣意纵情的时刻总是在遗憾中结束,回归平静;

但是生活,已经厌倦了动荡,数着滑落的每一粒沙,

自怨自艾,直到最后的时刻来临,

草草了事,郁郁而终。



或是感受一下这几句诗的冷静思考:



不论年轻或年老,

我们的命运,我们的心和归属,

不受限制,就在那里,

只要有希望,只要希望不灭,

所有的努力,期待和心愿,

努力永远都会。



还有这几句诗的无与伦比的美感:



月亮慢慢升上天空,

一刻不停,

她轻轻地,轻轻地,变得越来越高,

周围闪烁着一两颗星——



或是这几句诗的自由奔放的想象力:



经常出没于森林,

他将会一直徘徊,

在那遥远的林中空地,

即使整个世界在燃烧,

火焰越来越高,

在他看来,

却像极了绽放中的报春花。



让我们想起诗人的丰富多彩的艺术;他能让我们立刻成为演员和观众;他能亲手为人物注入活力,就好像一只手套,戴上就成了孚斯塔夫或李尔王;他能一直简化,夸大,或陈述事实。

“我们只能进行比较”——和那些已经公开的诗进行比较,阅读真正的复杂性得到了承认。第一阶段尽全力理解并获得印象,这只是整个阅读过程的一半而已;如果我们想从一本书中获得全部的快乐,我们需要完成另一半。我们要对众多印象进行评判;我们要为这些转瞬即逝的印象营造一个坚硬持久的形状。但是并不直接。等到阅读的尘埃落定,等到争执疑问渐渐消失,一边走一边聊,从玫瑰花上摘下枯萎的花瓣,或者沉入梦乡。然后突然地,不经我们命令,因为自然操作了这些转换,书回来了,变得有点不同。它会整个飘到思想的顶端。这本书被当作一个整体,和当时以不同的用语理解的书截然不同。现在细节都找到了合适的位置。我们看着那形状从开始到结束;可能是马厩,可能是猪圈,也可能是大教堂。现在我们能够像比较建筑那样比较书。但是这种比较的行为意味着我们的态度发生了变化;我们不再是作家的朋友,而是评审;正如作为朋友我们不能太过同情,作为评审我们也不能太过严厉。如果他们写出的书浪费我们的时间和同情,他们难道不是罪犯?如果他们写虚伪的充满腐朽堕落气息的书,他们难道不是全社会最狡猾的敌人,贪污腐败的人,亵渎神灵的人?那么让我们严格评判,让我们用每本书和同类最优秀的书作比较。他们萦绕在脑海中,读过的书因为我们下的评判而变得有形——《鲁宾逊漂流记》《爱玛》《野性的呼唤》。把小说和这些书作比较——当节奏不再令人陶醉,词语也不再绚丽多彩,幻想的形状就会出现,它应该和《李尔王》《菲德拉》《序曲》作比较;如果不和这些比较,也要和同类里最好的或者对我们来说最好的相比较。我们大概可以确定新诗和小说的新颖是它们最大的优势,我们只需要稍微修改一下,不必改写我们用以评判旧书的标准。

认为阅读的第二阶段,即评判和比较,和第一阶段一样简单——打开心胸,接受无数一转而过的印象——简直就是太愚蠢了。在你手头没有书的情况下继续阅读,以一个幻影反对其他的,广泛阅读,充分理解,进行生动富有启发性的比较——是非常困难的;“这本书既是这一类的,也是那一类的;这里失败了;那里成功了;这里不好;那里好。”说出这样的话更难。担负起读者这部分义务需要这样的想象力,洞察力,还要意识到有效接受任何想法都是非常难的;对最有自信的人来说,也不可能在自己身上发现更多这样的力量的根源。那么,放缓脚步阅读,让批评家,让图书馆里穿着华丽衣裳的权威人士为我们确定书籍的绝对价值吗?多么不可思议!我们可以强调同情的重要;阅读时我们可以试着忘记自我。但是我们知道我们不能完全地同情或者完全地投入;我们心中总有一个声音,低声说“我憎恶,我热爱”,我们无法让他安静下来。事实上,我们的确是既憎恶又热爱,我们与诗人、小说家的关系如此密切以至于我们无法容忍其他人的存在。即使结果相悖判断失误,我们的品位,在体内传达阵阵战栗的感官神经也仍然是我们的主要光源。我们通过感觉学习,不彻彻底底地感觉我们就无法表达自己的特质。但随着时间流逝,也许我们可以培养我们的品位;也许我们可以让它符合一些限制。当它贪婪奢侈地从各种书中吸取养分——诗歌、小说、历史、传记——然后不再继续阅读,寻找不同种类中间的巨大差异,人世间的不和谐,我们会发现它正一点点开始变化;它不再那么贪婪,它的想法更加成熟。它将带给我们的不只是对于书的评判,它还要告诉我们特定的一类书所共有的性质。听,它会这样说,我们管这个叫什么?它可能会给我们读李尔王或是阿伽门农,用来引出提到的共性。因此,品位带领着我们,越过单独的一本书,去寻找一类书的共性;我们会给它们命名,然后制定规则,让我们的想法变得条条有理。我们将从这种差异中获得更深层次更珍贵的快乐。规则总是在和书籍的关联中被不断打破推翻——没有比在真空中制定脱离事实的规则更简单愚蠢的事情了——终于现在,为了让自己在这项艰难的尝试中心神安宁,我们可能要向那些极少的将文学作为一种艺术启发人们的作家求助。柯尔雷基、德莱顿和约翰逊,这些诗人和小说家深思熟虑的批评和不假思索的发言总是有着惊人的联系;有些模糊的想法在我们的脑海迷雾中蹒跚而行,他们让这些想法变得清晰坚定。但是如果我们带着许多问题和意见去找他们,他们只能帮助我们在阅读过程中真实地面对自己。如果我们像躲在篱笆下的绵羊一样,屈服于他们的权威,那么他们对我们其实无能为力。只有当我们自己和他们有了不同,并且战胜了他们,我们才能理解他们的做法。

如果是这样,如果阅读需要想象力、洞察力和判断力这些珍贵的品质,你可能会得出这样的结论:文学是一种非常复杂的艺术,究其一生,我们可能也无法对文学批评作出任何贡献。我们只能做读者;我们无法得到那些少数能作出贡献的批评家能得到的荣誉。但是作为读者我们也有自己的责任和重要性。我们提出的标准和我们通过的评判不知不觉成为空气,成为作家工作时呼吸的一部分。即使这影响无法出版印刷,也仍然存在。如果这种影响被塑造成热情的、个人的、真诚的,可能在批评中止时产生巨大作用;接受审查的书籍就好像打靶场列队的动物,批评家只有一秒钟时间去装弹、瞄准、射击,如果他误把兔子当成老虎,把鹰当成家禽,或错过所有目标,把子弹浪费在远处田野上吃草的温顺奶牛身上,他们都会得到原谅。在出版社的枪林弹雨背后,作者感到有另外一种批评,人们因为喜欢阅读而去读书,阅读速度缓慢而且不太专业,心怀极大的同情和严厉的想法去评判,这样难道不能改进他的作品吗?如果通过我们的努力,书可能变得更强大、更丰富、更多元,那也是值得努力的。

然而谁会带着这个想法去阅读?是不是太理想了?难道没有我们实践的追求是因为它们本身就很好,从头到尾都很有乐趣吗?阅读不是其中之一吗?至少,有时我会幻想当世界末日来临,杰出的领袖、律师和政治家去领取他们的桂冠,并把他们的名字永久地刻在不朽的大理石上;上帝看到我们胳膊下夹着书向他走来,脸色平静,毫无羡慕嫉妒之情,他会对天使彼得说:“看,这些人不需要回报。我们什么也给不了他们,因为他们喜欢阅读。”

Virginia Woolf

Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid

















PENGUIN BOOKS —— GREAT JDEAS

Table of Contents

Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid

Street Haunting

Oxford Street Tide

Craftsmanship

The Art of Biography

How It Strikes a Contemporary

Why?

The Patron and the Crocus

Modern Fiction

How Should One Read a Book?

返回分册总目录

Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid

The Germans were over this house last night and the night before that. Here they are again. It is a queer experience, lying in the dark and listening to the zoom of a hornet, which may at any moment sting you to death. It is a sound that interrupts cool and consecutive thinking about peace. Yet it is a sound-far more than prayers and anthems-that should compel one to think about peace. Unless we can think peace into existence we-not this one body in this one bed but millions of bodies yet to be born will lie in the same darkness and hear the same death rattle overhead. Let us think what we can do to create the only efficient air-raid shelter while the guns on the hill go pop pop pop and the searchlights finger the clouds and now and then, sometimes close at hand, sometimes far away, a bomb drops.

Up there in the sky young Englishmen and young German men are fighting each other. The defenders are men, the attackers are men. Arms are not given to Englishwomen either to fight the enemy or to defend herself. She must lie weaponless tonight. Yet if she believes that the fight going on up in the sky is a fight by the English to protect freedom, by the Germans to destroy freedom, she must fight, so far as she can, on the side of the English. How far can she fight for freedom without firearms? By making arms, or clothes or food. But there is another way of fighting for freedom without arms; we can fight with the mind. We can make ideas that will help the young Englishman who is fighting up in the sky to defeat the enemy.

But to make ideas effective, we must be able to fire them off. We must put them into action. And the hornet in the sky rouses another hornet in the mind. There was one zooming in The Times this morning-a woman's voice saying, 'Women have not a word to say in politics.' There is no woman in the Cabinet; nor in any responsible post. All the idea makers who are in a position to make ideas effective are men. That is a thought that damps thinking, and encourages irresponsibility. Why not bury the head in the pillow, plug the ears, and cease this futile activity of idea-making? Because there are other tables besides officer tables and conference tables. Are we not leaving the young Englishman without a weapon that might be of value to him if we give up private thinking, tea-table thinking, because it seems useless? Are we not stressing our disability because our ability exposes us perhaps to abuse, perhaps to contempt? 'I will not cease from mental fight,' Blake wrote. Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it.

That current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the politicians. Every day they tell us that we are a free people, fighting to defend freedom. That is the current that has whirled the young airman up into the sky and keeps him circling there among the clouds. Down here, with a roof to cover us and a gas mask handy, it is our business to puncture gas bags and discover seeds of truth. It is not true that we are free. We are both prisoners tonight-he boxed up in his machine with a gun handy; we lying in the dark with a gas mask handy. If we were free we should be out in the open, dancing, at the play, or sitting at the window talking together. What is it that prevents us? 'Hitler!' the loudspeakers cry with one voice. Who is Hitler? What is he? Aggressiveness, tyranny, the insane love of power made manifest, they reply. Destroy that, and you will be free.

The drone of the planes is now like the sawing of a branch overhead. Round and round it goes, sawing and sawing at a branch directly above the house. Another sound begins sawing its way in the brain. 'Women of ability'-it was Lady Astor speaking in The Times this morning 'are held down because of a subconscious Hitlerism in the hearts of men.' Certainly we are held down. We are equally prisoners tonight-the Englishmen in their planes, the Englishwomen in their beds. But if he stops to think he may be killed; and we too. So let us think for him. Let us try to drag up into consciousness the subconscious Hitlerism that holds us down. It is the desire for aggression; the desire to dominate and enslave. Even in the darkness we can see that made visible. We can see shop windows blazing; and women gazing; painted women; dressed-up women; women with crimson lips and crimson fingernails. They are slaves who are trying to enslave. If we could free ourselves from slavery we should free men from tyranny. Hitlers are bred by slaves.

A bomb drops. All the windows rattle. The anti-aircraft guns are getting active. Up there on the hill under a net tagged with strips of green and brown stuff to imitate the hues of autumn leaves guns are concealed. Now they all fire at once. On the nine o'clock radio we shall be told 'Forty-four enemy planes were shot down during the night, ten of them by anti-aircraft fire.' And one of the terms of peace, the loudspeakers say, is to be disarmament. There are to be no more guns, no army, no navy, no air force in the future. No more young men will be trained to fight with arms. That rouses another mind-hornet in the chambers of the brain-another quotation. 'To fight against a real enemy, to carn undying honour and glory by shooting total strangers, and to come home with my breast covered with medals and decorations, that was the summit of my hope . . . It was for this that my whole life so far had been dedicated, my education, training, everything . . .'

Those were the words of a young Englishman who fought in the last war. In the face of them, do the current thinkers honestly believe that by writing 'Disarmament' on a sheet of paper at a conference table they will have done all that is needful? Othello's occupation will be gone; but he will remain Othello. The young airman up in the sky is driven not only by the voices of loudspeakers; he is driven by voices in himself-ancient instincts, instincts fostered and cherished by education and tradition. Is he to be blamed for those instincts? Could we switch off the maternal instinct at the command of a table full of politicians? Suppose that imperative among the peace terms was: 'Child-bearing is to be restricted to a very small class of specially selected women,' would we submit? Should we not say, 'The maternal instinct is a woman's glory. It was for this that my whole life has been dedicated, my education, training, everything . . .' But if it were necessary, for the sake of humanity, for the peace of the world, that childbearing should be restricted, the maternal instinct subdued, women would attempt it. Men would help them. They would honour them for their refusal to bear children. They would give them other openings for their creative power. That too must make part of our fight for freedom. We must help the young Englishmen to root out from themselves the love of medals and decorations. We must create more honourable activities for those who try to conquer in themselves their fighting instinct, their subconscious Hitlerism. We must compensate the man for the loss of his gun.

The sound of sawing overhead has increased. All the searchlights are erect. They point at a spot exactly above this roof. At any moment a bomb may fall on this very room. One, two, three, four, five, six . . . the seconds pass. The bomb did not fall. But during those seconds of suspense all thinking stopped. All feeling, save one dull dread, ceased. A nail fixed the whole being to one hard board. The emotion of fear and of hate is therefore sterile, unfertile. Directly that fear passes, the mind reaches out and instinctively revives itself by trying to create. Since the room is dark it can create only from memory. It reaches out to the memory of other Augusts-in Bayreuth, listening to Wagner; in Rome, walking over the Campagna; in London. Friends' voices come back. Scraps of poetry return. Each of those thoughts, even in memory, was far more positive, reviving, healing and creative than the dull dread made of fear and hate. Therefore if we are to compensate the young man for the loss of his glory and of his gun, we must give him access to the creative feelings. We must make happiness. We must free him from the machine. We must bring him out of his prison into the open air. But what is the use of freeing the young Englishman if the young German and the young Italian remain slaves?

The searchlights, wavering across the flat, have picked up the plane now. From this window one can see a little silver insect turning and twisting in the light. The guns go pop pop pop. Then they cease. Probably the raider was brought down behind the hill. One of the pilots landed safe in a field near here the other day. He said to his captors, speaking fairly good English, 'How glad I am that the fight is over!' Then an Englishman gave him a cigarette, and an Englishwoman made him a cup of tea. That would seem to show that if you can free the man from the machine, the seed does not fall upon altogether stony ground. The seed may be fertile.

At last all the guns have stopped firing. All the searchlights have been extinguished. The natural darkness of a summer's night returns. The innocent sounds of the country are heard again. An apple thuds to the ground. An owl hoots, winging its way from tree to tree. And some half-forgotten words of an old English writer come to mind: 'The huntsmen are up in America . . .' Let us send these fragmentary notes to the huntsmen who are up in America, to the men and women whose sleep has not yet been broken by machine-gun fire, in the belief that they will rethink them generously and charitably, perhaps shape them into something serviceable. And now, in the shadowed half of the world, to sleep.

Street Haunting

A London Adventure

No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil. But there are circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner. As the foxhunter hunts in order to preserve the breed of foxes, and the golfer plays in order that open spaces may be preserved from the builders, so when the desire comes upon us to go street rambling the pencil does for a pretext, and getting up we say: 'Really I must buy a pencil,' as if under cover of this excuse we could indulge safely in the greatest pleasure of town life in winter-rambling the streets of London.

The hour should be the evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful. We are not then taunted as in the summer by the longing for shade and solitude and sweet airs from the hayfields. The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow. We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one's own room. For there we sit surrounded by objects which perpetually express the oddity of our own temperaments and enforce the memories of our own experience. That bowl on the mantelpiece, for instance, was bought at Mantua on a windy day. We were leaving the shop when the sinister old woman plucked at our skirts and said she would find herself starving one of these days, but, 'Take it!' she cried, and thrust the blue and white china bowl into our hands as if she never wanted to be reminded of her quixotic generosity. So, guiltily, but suspecting nevertheless how badly we had been fleeced, we carried it back to the little hotel where, in the middle of the night, the innkeeper quarrelled so violently with his wife that we all leant out into the courtyard to look, and saw the vines laced about among the pillars and the stars white in the sky. The moment was stabilized, stamped like a coin indelibly among a million that slipped by imperceptibly. There, too, was the melancholy Englishman, who rose among the coffee cups and the little iron tables and revealed the secrets of his soul-as travellers do. All this-Italy, the windy morning, the vines laced about the pillars, the Englishman and the secrets of his soul-rise up in a cloud from the china bowl on the mantelpiece. And there, as our eyes fall to the floor, is that brown stain on the carpet. Mr Lloyd George made that. 'The man's a devil!' said Mr Cummings, putting the kettle down with which he was about to fill the teapot so that it burnt a brown ring on the carpet.

But when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. How beautiful a street is in winter! It is at once revealed and obscured. Here vaguely one can trace symmetrical straight avenues of doors and windows; here under the lamps are floating islands of pale light through which pass quickly bright men and women, who, for all their poverty and shabbiness, wear a certain look of unreality, an air of triumph, as if they had given life the slip, so that life, deceived of her prey, blunders on without them. But, after all, we are only gliding smoothly on the surface. The eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure. It floats us smoothly down a stream; resting, pausing, the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks.

How beautiful a London street is then, with its islands of light, and its long groves of darkness, and on one side of it perhaps some tree-sprinkled, grass-grown space where night is folding herself to sleep naturally and, as one passes the iron railing, one hears those little cracklings and stirrings of leaf and twig which seem to suppose the silence of fields all round them, an owl hooting, and far away the rattle of a train in the valley. But this is London, we are reminded; high among the bare trees are hung oblong frames of reddish yellow light-windows; there are points of brilliance burning steadily like low stars-lamps; this empty ground, which holds the country in it and its peace, is only a London square, set about by offices and houses where at this hour fierce lights burn over maps, over documents, over desks where clerks sit turning with wetted forefinger the files of endless correspondences; or more suffusedly the firelight wavers and the lamplight falls upon the privacy of some drawing-room, its easy chairs, its papers, its china, its inlaid table, and the figure of a woman, accurately measuring out the precise number of spoons of tea which-She looks at the door as if she heard a ring downstairs and somebody asking, is she in?

But here we must stop peremptorily. We are in danger of digging deeper than the eye approves; we are impeding our passage down the smooth stream by catching at some branch or root. At any moment, the sleeping army may stir itself and wake in us a thousand violins and trumpets in response; the army of human beings may rouse itself and assert all its oddities and sufferings and sordidities. Let us dally a little longer, be content still with surfaces only-the glossy brilliance of the motor omnibuses; the carnal splendour of the butchers' shops with their yellow flanks and purple steaks; the blue and red bunches of flowers burning so bravely through the plate glass of the florists' windows.

For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty; like a butterfly it seeks colour and basks in warmth. On a winter's night like this, when nature has been at pains to polish and preen herself, it brings back the prettiest trophies, breaks off little lumps of emerald and coral as if the whole earth were made of precious stone. The thing it cannot do (one is speaking of the average unprofessional eye) is to compose these trophies in such a way as to bring out the more obscure angles and relationships. Hence after a prolonged diet of this simple, sugary fare, of beauty pure and uncomposed, we become conscious of satiety. We halt at the door of the boot shop and make some little excuse, which has nothing to do with the real reason, for folding up the bright paraphernalia of the streets and withdrawing to some duskier chamber of the being where we may ask, as we raise our left foot obediently upon the stand: 'What, then, is it like to be a dwarf?'

She came in escorted by two women who, being of normal size, looked like benevolent giants beside her. Smiling at the shop girls, they seemed to be disclaiming any lot in her deformity and assuring her of their protection. She wore the peevish yet apologetic expression usual on the faces of the deformed. She needed their kindness, yet she resented it. But when the shop girl had been summoned and the giantesses, smiling indulgently, had asked for shoes for 'this Lady' and the girl had pushed the little stand in front of her, the dwarf stuck her foot out with an impetuosity which seemed to claim all our attention. Look at that! Look at that! she seemed to demand of us all, as she thrust her foot out, for behold it was the shapely, perfectly proportioned foot of a well-grown woman. It was arched; it was aristocratic. Her whole manner changed as she looked at it resting on the stand. She looked soothed and satisfied. Her manner became full of self-confidence. She sent for shoe after shoe; she tried on pair after pair. She got up and pirouetted before a glass which reflected the foot only in yellow shoes, in fawn shoes, in shoes of lizard skin. She raised her little skirts and displayed her little legs. She was thinking that, after all, feet are the most important part of the whole person; women, she said to herself, have been loved for their feet alone. Seeing nothing but her feet, she imagined perhaps that the rest of her body was of a piece with those beautiful feet. She was shabbily dressed, but she was ready to lavish any money upon her shoes. And as this was the only occasion upon which she was not afraid of being looked at but positively craved attention, she was ready to use any device to prolong the choosing and fitting. Look at my feet, she seemed to be saying, as she took a step this way and then a step that way. The shop girl good-humouredly must have said something flattering, for suddenly her face lit up in ecstasy. But, after all, the giantesses, benevolent though they were, had their own affairs to see to; she must make up her mind; she must decide which to choose. At length, the pair was chosen and, as she walked out between her guardians, with the parcel swinging from her finger, the ecstasy faded, knowledge returned, the old peevishness, the old apology came back, and by the time she had reached the street again she had become a dwarf only.

But she had changed the mood; she had called into being an atmosphere which, as we followed her out into the street, seemed actually to create the humped, the twisted, the deformed. Two bearded men, brothers, apparently, stone-blind, supporting themselves by resting a hand on the head of a small boy between them, marched down the street. On they came with the unyielding yet tremulous tread of the blind, which seems to lend to their approach something of the terror and inevitability of the fate that has overtaken them. As they passed, holding straight on, the little convoy seemed to cleave asunder the passers-by with the momentum of its silence, its directness, its disaster. Indeed, the dwarf had started a hobbling grotesque dance to which everybody in the street had now conformed; the stout lady tightly swathed in shiny sealskin; the feeble-minded boy sucking the silver knob of his stick; the old man squatted on a doorstep as if, suddenly overcome by the absurdity of the human spectacle, he had sat down to look at it-all joined in the hobble and tap of the dwarf's dance.

In what crevices and crannies, one might ask, did they lodge, this maimed company of the halt and the blind? Here, perhaps, in the top rooms of these narrow old houses between Holborn and Soho, where people have such queer names, and pursue so many curious trades, are gold beaters, accordion pleaters, cover buttons, or support life, with even greater fantasticality, upon a traffic in cups without saucers, china umbrella handles, and highly coloured pictures of martyred saints. There they lodge, and it seems as if the lady in the sealskin jacket must find life tolerable, passing the time of day with the accordion pleater, or the man who covers buttons; life which is so fantastic cannot be altogether tragic. They do not grudge us, we are musing, our prosperity; when, suddenly, turning the corner, we come upon a bearded Jew, wild, hunger-bitten, glaring out of his misery; or pass the humped body of an old woman flung abandoned on the step of a public building with a cloak over her like the hasty covering thrown over a dead horse or donkey. At such sights the nerves of the spine seem to stand erect; a sudden flare is brandished in our eyes; a question is asked which is never answered. Often enough these derelicts choose to lie not a stone's throw from theatres, within hearing of barrel organs, almost, as night draws on, within touch of the sequined cloaks and bright legs of diners and dancers. They lie close to those shop windows where commerce offers to a world of old women laid on doorsteps, of blind men, of hobbling dwarfs, sofas which are supported by the gilt necks of proud swans; tables inlaid with baskets of many coloured fruit; sideboards paved with green marble the better to support the weight of boars' heads; and carpets so softened with age that their carnations have almost vanished in a pale green sea.

Passing, glimpsing, everything seems accidentally but miraculously sprinkled with beauty, as if the tide of trade which deposits its burden so punctually and prosaically upon the shores of Oxford Street had this night cast up nothing but treasure. With no thought of buying, the eye is sportive and generous; it creates; it adorns; it enhances. Standing out in the street, one may build up all the chambers of an imaginary house and furnish them at one's will with sofa, table, carpet. That rug will do for the hall. That alabaster bowl shall stand on a carved table in the window. Our merrymaking shall be reflected in that thick round mirror. But, having built and furnished the house, one is happily under no obligation to possess it; one can dismantle it in the twinkling of an eye, and build and furnish another house with other chairs and other glasses. Or let us indulge ourselves at the antique jewellers, among the trays of rings and the hanging necklaces. Let us choose those pearls, for example, and then imagine how, if we put them on, life would be changed. It becomes instantly between two and three in the morning; the lamps are burning very white in the deserted streets of Mayfair. Only motor-cars are abroad at this hour, and one has a sense of emptiness, of airiness, of secluded gaiety. Wearing pearls, wearing silk, one steps out on to a balcony which overlooks the gardens of sleeping Mayfair. There are a few lights in the bedrooms of great peers returned from Court, of silk-stockinged footmen, of dowagers who have pressed the hands of statesmen. A cat creeps along the garden wall. Love-making is going on sibilantly, seductively in the darker places of the room behind thick green curtains. Strolling sedately as if he were promenading a terrace beneath which the shires and counties of England lie sun-bathed, the aged Prime Minister recounts to Lady So-and-So with the curls and the emeralds the true history of some great crisis in the affairs of the land. We seem to be riding on the top of the highest mast of the tallest ship; and yet at the same time we know that nothing of this sort matters; love is not proved thus, nor great achievements completed thus; so that we sport with the moment and preen our feathers in it lightly, as we stand on the balcony watching the moonlit cat creep along Princess Mary's garden wall.

But what could be more absurd? It is, in fact, on the stroke of six; it is a winter's evening; we are walking to the Strand to buy a pencil. How, then, are we also on a balcony, wearing pearls in June? What could be more absurd? Yet it is nature's folly, not ours. When she set about her chief masterpiece, the making of man, she should have thought of one thing only. Instead, turning her head, looking over her shoulder, into each one of us she let creep instincts and desires which are utterly at variance with his main being, so that we are streaked, variegated, all of a mixture; the colours have run. Is the true self this which stands on the pavement in January, or that which bends over the balcony in June? Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves? Circumstances compel unity; for convenience sake a man must be a whole. The good citizen when he opens his door in the evening must be banker, golfer, husband, father; not a nomad wandering the desert, a mystic staring at the sky, a debauchee in the slums of San Francisco, a soldier heading a revolution, a pariah howling with scepticism and solitude. When he opens his door, he must run his fingers through his hair and put his umbrella in the stand like the rest.

But here, none too soon, are the second-hand bookshops. Here we find anchorage in these thwarting currents of being; here we balance ourselves after the splendours and miseries of the streets. The very sight of the bookseller's wife with her foot on the fender, sitting beside a good coal fire, screened from the door, is sobering and cheerful. She is never reading, or only the newspaper; her talk, when it leaves bookselling, which it does so gladly, is about hats; she likes a hat to be practical, she says, as well as pretty. Oh no, they don't live at the shop; they live in Brixton; she must have a bit of green to look at. In summer a jar of flowers grown in her own garden is stood on the top of some dusty pile to enliven the shop. Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world. There is always a hope, as we reach down some greyish-white book from an upper shelf, directed by its air of shabbiness and desertion, of meeting here with a man who set out on horseback over a hundred years ago to explore the woollen market in the Midlands and Wales; an unknown traveller, who stayed at inns, drank his pint, noted pretty girls and serious customs, wrote it all down stiffly, laboriously for sheer love of it (the book was published at his own expense); was infinitely prosy, busy, and matter-of-fact, and so let flow in without his knowing it the very scent of hollyhocks and the hay together with such a portrait of himself as gives him forever a seat in the warm corner of the mind's inglenook. One may buy him for eighteen pence now. He is marked three and sixpence, but the bookseller's wife, seeing how shabby the covers are and how long the book has stood there since it was bought at some sale of a gentleman's library in Suffolk, will let it go at that.

Thus, glancing round the bookshop, we make other such sudden capricious friendships with the unknown and the vanished whose only record is, for example, this little book of poems, so fairly printed, so finely engraved, too, with a portrait of the author. For he was a poet and drowned untimely, and his verse, mild as it is and formal and sententious, sends forth still a frail fluty sound like that of a piano organ played in some back street resignedly by an old Italian organ-grinder in a corduroy jacket. There are travellers, too, row upon row of them, still testifying, indomitable spinsters that they were, to the discomforts that they endured and the sunsets they admired in Greece when Queen Victoria was a girl. A tour in Cornwall with a visit to the tin mines was thought worthy of voluminous record. People went slowly up the Rhine and did portraits of each other in Indian ink, sitting reading on deck beside a coil of rope; they measured the pyramids; were lost to civilization for years; converted negroes in pestilential swamps. This packing up and going off, exploring deserts and catching fevers, settling in India for a lifetime, penetrating even to China and then returning to lead a parochial life at Edmonton, tumbles and tosses upon the dusty floor like an uneasy sea, so restless the English are, with the waves at their very door. The waters of travel and adventure seem to break upon little islands of serious effort and lifelong industry stood in jagged column upon the floor. In these piles of puce-bound volumes with gilt monograms on the back, thoughtful clergymen expound the gospels; scholars are to be heard with their hammers and their chisels chipping clear the ancient texts of Euripides and Aeschylus. Thinking, annotating, expounding goes on at a prodigious rate all around us and over everything, like a punctual, everlasting tide, washes the ancient sea of fiction. Innumerable volumes tell how Arthur loved Laura and they were separated and they were unhappy and then they met and they were happy ever after, as was the way when Victoria ruled these islands.

The number of books in the world is infinite, and one is forced to glimpse and nod and move on after a moment of talk, a flash of understanding, as, in the street outside, one catches a word in passing and from a chance phrase fabricates a lifetime. It is about a woman called Kate that they are talking, how 'I said to her quite straight last night . . . if you don't think I'm worth a penny stamp, I said . . .' But who Kate is, and to what crisis in their friendship that penny stamp refers, we shall never know; for Kate sinks under the warmth of their volubility; and here, at the street comer, another page of the volume of life is laid open by the sight of two men consulting under the lamp-post. They are spelling out the latest wire from Newmarket in the stop press news. Do they think, then, that fortune will ever convert their rags into fur and broadcloth, sling them with watch-chains, and plant diamond pins where there is now a ragged open shirt? But the main stream of walkers at this hour sweeps too fast to let us ask such questions. They are wrapt, in this short passage from work to home, in some narcotic dream, now that they are free from the desk, and have the fresh air on their cheeks. They put on those bright clothes which they must hang up and lock the key upon all the rest of the day, and are great cricketers, famous actresses, soldiers who have saved their country at the hour of need. Dreaming, gesticulating, often muttering a few words aloud, they sweep over the Strand and across Waterloo Bridge whence they will be slung in long rattling trains, to some prim little villa in Barnes or Surbiton where the sight of the clock in the hall and the smell of the supper in the basement puncture the dream.

But we are come to the Strand now, and as we hesitate on the kerb, a little rod about the length of one's finger begins to lay its bar across the velocity and abundance of life. 'Really I must-really I must'-that is it. Without investigating the demand, the mind cringes to the accustomed tyrant. One must, one always must, do something or other; it is not allowed one simply to enjoy oneself. Was it not for this reason that, some time ago, we fabricated the excuse, and invented the necessity of buying something? But what was it? Ah, we remember, it was a pencil. Let us go then and buy this pencil. But just as we are turning to obey the command, another self disputes the right of the tyrant to insist. The usual conflict comes about. Spread out behind the rod of duty we see the whole breadth of the river Thames-wide, mournful, peaceful. And we see it through the eyes of somebody who is leaning over the Embankment on a summer evening, without a care in the world. Let us put off buying the pencil; let us go in search of this person-and soon it becomes apparent that this person is ourselves. For if we could stand there where we stood six months ago, should we not be again as we were then-calm, aloof, content? Let us try then. But the river is rougher and greyer than we remembered. The tide is running out to sea. It brings down with it a tug and two barges, whose load of straw is tightly bound down beneath tarpaulin covers. There is, too, close by us, a couple leaning over the balustrade with the curious lack of self-consciousness lovers have, as if the importance of the affair they are engaged on claims without question the indulgence of the human race. The sights we see and the sounds we hear now have none of the quality of the past; nor have we any share in the serenity of the person who, six months ago, stood precisely where we stand now. His is the happiness of death; ours the insecurity of life. He has no future; the future is even now invading our peace. It is only when we look at the past and take from it the element of uncertainty that we can enjoy perfect peace. As it is, we must turn, we must cross the Strand again, we must find a shop where, even at this hour, they will be ready to sell us a pencil.

It is always an adventure to enter a new room; for the lives and characters of its owners have distilled their atmosphere into it, and directly we enter it we breast some new wave of emotion. Here, without a doubt, in the stationer's shop, people had been quarrelling. Their anger shot through the air. They both stopped; the old woman-they were husband and wife evidently-retired to a back room; the old man whose rounded forehead and globular eyes would have looked well on the frontispiece of some Elizabethan folio, stayed to serve us. 'A pencil, a pencil,' he repeated, 'certainly, certainly.' He spoke with the distraction yet effusiveness of one whose emotions have been roused and checked in full flood. He began opening box after box and shutting them again. He said that it was very difficult to find things when they kept so many different articles. He launched into a story about some legal gentleman who had got into deep waters owing to the conduct of his wife. He had known him for years; he had been connected with the Temple for half a century, he said, as if he wished his wife in the back room to overhear him. He upset a box of rubber bands. At last, exasperated by his incompetence, he pushed the swing door open and called out roughly: 'Where d'you keep the pencils?' as if his wife had hidden them. The old lady came in. Looking at nobody, she put her hand with a fine air of righteous severity upon the right box. There were pencils. How then could he do without her? Was she not indispensable to him? In order to keep them there, standing side by side in forced neutrality, one had to be particular in one's choice of pencils; this was too soft, that too hard. They stood silently looking on. The longer they stood there, the calmer they grew; their heat was going down, their anger disappearing. Now, without a word said on either side, the quarrel was made up. The old man, who would not have disgraced Ben Jonson's title-page, reached the box back to its proper place, bowed profoundly his good night to us, and they disappeared. She would get out her sewing; he would read his newspaper; the canary would scatter them impartially with seed. The quarrel was over.

In these minutes in which a ghost has been sought for, a quarrel composed, and a pencil bought, the streets had become completely empty. Life had withdrawn to the top floor, and lamps were lit. The pavement was dry and hard; the road was of hammered silver. Walking home through the desolation one could tell oneself the story of the dwarf, of the blind men, of the party in the Mayfair mansion, of the quarrel in the stationer's shop. Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others. One could become a washerwoman, a publican, a street singer. And what greater delight and wonder can there be than to leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into those footpaths that lead beneath brambles and thick tree trunks into the heart of the forest where live those wild beasts, our fellow men?

That is true: to escape is the greatest of pleasures; street haunting in winter the greatest of adventures. Still as we approach our own doorstep again, it is comforting to feel the old possessions, the old prejudices, fold us round; and the self, which has been blown about at so many street corners, which has battered like a moth at the flame of so many inaccessible lanterns, sheltered and enclosed. Here again is the usual door; here the chair turned as we left it and the china bowl and the brown ring on the carpet. And here-let us examine it tenderly, let us touch it with reverence-is the only spoil we have retrieved from all the treasures of the city, a lead pencil.

Oxford Street Tide

Down in the docks one sees things in their crudity, their bulk, their enormity. Here in Oxford Street they have been refined and transformed. The huge barrels of damp tobacco have been rolled into innumerable neat cigarettes laid in silver paper. The corpulent bales of wool have been spun into thin vests and soft stockings. The grease of sheep's thick wool has become scented cream for delicate skins. And those who buy and those who sell have suffered the same city change. Tripping, mincing, in black coats, in satin dresses, the human form has adapted itself no less than the animal product. Instead of hauling and heaving, it deftly opens drawers, rolls out silk on counters, measures and snips with yard sticks and scissors.

Oxford Street, it goes without saying, is not London's most distinguished thoroughfare. Moralists have been known to point the finger of scorn at those who buy there, and they have the support of the dandies. Fashion has secret crannies off Hanover Square, round about Bond Street, to which it withdraws discreetly to perform its more sublime rites. In Oxford Street there are too many bargains, too many sales, too many goods marked down to one and eleven three that only last week cost two and six. The buying and selling is too blatant and raucous. But as one saunters towards the sunset and what with artificial light and mounds of silk and gleaming omnibuses, a perpetual sunset seems to brood over the Marble Arch the garishness and gaudiness of the great rolling ribbon of Oxford Street has its fascination. It is like the pebbly bed of a river whose stones are for ever washed by a bright stream. Everything glitters and twinkles. The first spring day brings out barrows frilled with tulips, violets, daffodils in brilliant layers. The frail vessels eddy vaguely across the stream of the traffic. At one corner seedy magicians are making slips of coloured paper expand in magic tumblers into bristling forests of splendidly tinted flora-a subaqueous flower garden. At another, tortoises repose on litters of grass. The slowest and most contemplative of creatures display their mild activities on a foot or two of pavement, jealously guarded from passing feet. One infers that the desire of man for the tortoise, like the desire of the moth for the star, is a constant element in human nature. Nevertheless, to see a woman stop and add a tortoise to her string of parcels is perhaps the rarest sight that human eyes can look upon.

Taking all this into account-the auctions, the barrows, the cheapness, the glitter-it cannot be said that the character of Oxford Street is refined. It is a breeding ground, a forcing house of sensation. The pavement seems to sprout horrid tragedies; the divorces of actresses, the suicides of millionaires occur here with a frequency that is unknown in the more austere pavements of the residential districts. News changes quicker than in any other part of London. The press of people passing seems to lick the ink off the placards and to consume more of them and to demand fresh supplies of later editions faster than elsewhere. The mind becomes a glutinous slab that takes impressions and Oxford Street rolls off upon it a perpetual ribbon of changing sights, sounds and movement. Parcels slap and hit; motor omnibuses graze the kerb; the blare of a whole brass band in full tongue dwindles to a thin reed of sound. Buses, vans, cars, barrows stream past like the fragments of a picture puzzle; a white arm rises; the puzzle runs thick, coagulates, stops; the white arm sinks, and away it streams again, streaked, twisted, higgledy-piggledy, in perpetual race and disorder. The puzzle never fits itself together, however long we look.

On the banks of this river of turning wheels our modern aristocrats have built palaces just as in ancient days the Dukes of Somerset and Northumberland, the Earls of Dorset and Salisbury lined the Strand with their stately mansions. The different houses of the great firms testify to the courage, initiative, the audacity of their creators much as the great houses of Cavendish and Percy testify to such qualities in some faraway shire. From the loins of our merchants will spring the Cavendishes and Percys of the future. Indeed, the great Lords of Oxford Street are as magnanimous as any Duke or Earl who scattered gold or doled out loaves to the poor at his gates. Only their largesse takes a different form. It takes the form of excitement, of display, of entertainment, of windows lit up by night, of banners flaunting by day. They give us the latest news for nothing. Music streams from their banqueting rooms free. You need not spend more than one and eleven three to enjoy all the shelter that high and airy halls provide; and the soft pile of carpets, and the luxury of lifts, and the glow of fabrics, and carpets and silver. Percy and Cavendish could give no more. These gifts of course have an object to entice the shilling and eleven pennies as freely from our pockets as possible; but the Percys and the Cavendishes were not munificent either without hope of some return, whether it was a dedication from a poet or a vote from a farmer. And both the old lords and the new added considerably to the decoration and entertainment of human life.

But it cannot be denied that these Oxford Street palaces are rather flimsy abodes-perhaps grounds rather than dwelling places. One is conscious that one is walking on a strip of wood laid upon steel girders, and that the outer wall, for all its florid stone ornamentation, is only thick enough to withstand the force of the wind. A vigorous prod with an umbrella point might well inflict irreparable damage upon the fabric. Many a country cottage built to house farmer or miller when Queen Elizabeth was on the throne will live to see these palaces fall into the dust. The old cottage walls, with their oak beams and their layers of honest brick soundly cemented together still put up a stout resistance to the drills and bores that attempt to introduce the modern blessing of electricity. But any day of the week one may sec Oxford Street vanishing at the tap of a workman's pick as he stands perilously balanced on a dusty pinnacle knocking down walls and facades as lightly as if they were made of yellow cardboard and sugar icing.

And again the moralists point the finger of scorn. For such thinness, such papery stone and powdery brick reflect, they say, the levity, the ostentation, the haste and irresponsibility of our age. Yet perhaps they are as much out in their scorn as we should be if we asked of the lily that it should be cast in bronze, or of the daisy that it should have petals of imperishable enamel. The charm of modern London is that it is not built to last; it is built to pass. Its glassiness, its transparency, its surging waves of coloured plaster give a different pleasure and achieve a different end from that which was desired and attempted by the old builders and their patrons, the nobility of England. Their pride required the illusion of permanence. Ours, on the contrary, seems to delight in proving that we can make stone and brick as transitory as our own desires. We do not build for our descendants, who may live up in the clouds or down in the earth, but for ourselves and our own needs. We knock down and rebuild as we expect to be knocked down and rebuilt. It is an impulse that makes for creation and fertility. Discovery is stimulated and invention on the alert.

The palaces of Oxford Street ignore what seemed good to the Greeks, to the Elizabethan, to the eighteenthcentury nobleman; they are overwhelmingly conscious that unless they can devise an architecture that shows off the dressing-case, the Paris frock, the cheap stockings, and the jar of bath salts to perfection, their palaces, their mansions and motor-cars and the little villas out at Croydon and Surbiton where their shop assistants live, not so badly after all, with a gramophone and wireless, and money to spend at the movies-all this will be swept to ruin. Hence they stretch stone fantastically; crush together in one wild confusion the styles of Greece, Egypt, Italy, America; and boldly attempt an air of lavishness, opulence, in their effort to persuade the multitude that here unending beauty, ever fresh, ever new, very cheap and within the reach of everybody, bubbles up every day of the week from an inexhaustible well. The mere thought of age, of solidity, of lasting for ever is abhorrent to Oxford Street.

Therefore if the moralist chooses to take his afternoon walk along this particular thoroughfare, he must tune his strain so that it receives into it some queer, incongruous voices. Above the racket of van and omnibus we can hear them crying. God knows, says the man who sells tortoises, that my arm aches; my chance of selling a tortoise is small; but courage! there may come along a buyer; my bed tonight depends on it; so on I must go, as slowly as the police allow, wheeling tortoises down Oxford Street from dawn till dusk. True, says the great merchant, I am not thinking of educating the mass to a higher standard of æsthetic sensibility. It taxes all my wits to think how I can display my goods with the minimum of waste and the maximum of effectiveness. Green dragons on the top of Corinthian columns may help; let us try. I grant, says the middle-class woman, that I linger and look and barter and cheapen and turn over basket after basket of remnants hour by hour. My eyes glisten unseemily I know, and I grab and pounce with disgusting greed. But my husband is a small clerk in a bank; I have only fifteen pounds a year to dress on; so here I come, to linger and loiter and look, if I can, as well dressed as my neighbours. I am a thief, says a woman of that persuasion, and a lady of easy virtue into the bargain. But it takes a good deal of pluck to snatch a bag from a counter when a customer is not looking; and it may contain only spectacles and old bus tickets after all. So here goes!

A thousand such voices are always crying aloud in Oxford Street. All are tense, all are real, all are urged out of their speakers by the pressure of making a living, finding a bed, somehow keeping afloat on the bounding, careless, remorseless tide of the street. And even a moralist, who is, one must suppose, since he can spend the afternoon dreaming, a man with a balance in the bank-even a moralist must allow that this gaudy, bustling, vulgar street reminds us that life is a struggle; that all building is perishable; that all display is vanity; from which we may conclude-but until some adroit shopkeeper has caught on to the idea and opened cells for solitary thinkers hung with green plush and provided with automatic glowworms and a sprinkling of genuine death's-head moths to induce thought and reflection, it is vain to try to come to a conclusion in Oxford Street.

Craftsmanship

The title of this series is 'Words Fail Me', and this particular talk is called 'Craftsmanship'. We must suppose, therefore, that the talker is meant to discuss the craft of words-the craftsmanship of the writer. But there is something incongruous, unfitting, about the term 'craftsmanship' when applied to words. The English dictionary, to which we always turn in moments of dilemma, confirms us in our doubts. It says that the word 'craft' has two meanings; it means in the first place making useful objects out of solid matter for example, a pot, a chair, a table. In the second place, the word 'craft' means cajolery, cunning, deceit. Now we know little that is certain about words, but this we do know-words never make anything that is useful; and words are the only things that tell the truth and nothing but the truth. Therefore, to talk of craft in connexion with words is to bring together two incongruous ideas, which if they mate can only give birth to some monster fit for a glass case in a museum. Instantly, therefore, the title of the talk must be changed, and for it substituted another-A Ramble round Words, perhaps. For when you cut off the head of a talk it behaves like a hen that has been decapitated. It runs round in a circle till it drops dead-so people say who have killed hens. And that must be the course, or circle, of this decapitated talk. Let us then take for our starting point the statement that words are not useful. This happily needs little proving, for we are all aware of it. When we travel on the Tube, for example, when we wait on the platform for a train, there, hung up in front of us, on an illuminated signboard, are the words 'Passing Russell Square'. We look at those words; we repeat them; we try to impress that useful fact upon our minds; the next train will pass Russell Square. We say over and over again as we pace 'Passing Russell Square, passing Russell Square'. And then as we say them, the words shuffle and change, and we find ourselves saying 'Passing away saith the world, passing away . . . The leaves decay and fall, the vapours weep their burthen to the ground. Man comes . . .' And then we wake up and find ourselves at King's Cross.

Take another example. Written up opposite us in the railway carriage are the words: 'Do not lean out of the window'. At the first reading the useful meaning, the surface meaning, is conveyed; but soon, as we sit looking at the words, they shuffle, they change; and we begin saying, 'Windows, yes windows-casements opening on the foam of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.' And before we know what we are doing, we have leant out of the window; we are looking for Ruth in tears amid the alien corn. The penalty for that is twenty pounds or a broken neck.

This proves, if it needs proving, how very little natural gift words have for being useful. If we insist on forcing them against their nature to be useful, we see to our cost how they mislead us, how they fool us, how they land us a crack on the head. We have been so often fooled in this way by words, they have so often proved that they hate being useful, that it is their nature not to express one simple statement but a thousand possibilities they have done this so often that at last, happily, we are beginning to face the fact. We are beginning to invent another language-a language perfectly and beautifully adapted to express useful statements, a language of signs. There is one great living master of this language to whom we are all indebted, that anonymous writer-whether man, woman or disembodied spirit nobody knows-who describes hotels in the Michelin Guide. He wants to tell us that one hotel is moderate, another good, and a third the best in the place. How does he do it? Not with words; words would at once bring into being shrubberies and billiard tables, men and women, the moon rising and the long splash of the summer sea all good things, but all here beside the point. He sticks to signs; one gable; two gables; three gables. That is all he says and all he needs to say. Baedeker carries the sign language still further into the sublime realms of art. When he wishes to say that a picture is good, he uses one star; if very good, two stars; when, in his opinion, it is a work of transcendent genius, three black stars shine on the page, and that is all. So with a handful of stars and daggers the whole of art criticism, the whole of literary criticism could be reduced to the size of a six-penny bit-there are moments when one could wish it. But this suggests that in time to come writers will have two languages at their service; one for fact, one for fiction. When the biographer has to convey a useful and necessary fact, as, for example, that Oliver Smith went to college and took a third in the year 1892, he will say so with a hollow O on top of the figure five. When the novelist is forced to inform us that John rang the bell; after a pause the door was opened by a parlourmaid who said, 'Mrs Jones is not at home,' he will to our great gain and his own comfort convey that repulsive statement not in words, but in signs-say, a capital H on top of the figure three. Thus we may look forward to the day when our biographies and novels will be slim and muscular; and a railway company that says: 'Do not lean out of the window' in words will be fined a penalty not exceeding five pounds for the improper use of language.

Words, then, are not useful. Let us now inquire into their other quality, their positive quality, that is, their power to tell the truth. According once more to the dictionary there are at least three kinds of truth: God's or gospel truth; literary truth; and home truth (generally unflattering). But to consider each separately would take too long. Let us then simplify and assert that since the only test of truth is length of life, and since words survive the chops and changes of time longer than any other substance, therefore they are the truest. Buildings fall; even the earth perishes. What was yesterday a cornfield is today a bungalow. But words, if properly used, seem able to live for ever. What, then, we may ask next, is the proper use of words? Not, so we have said, to make a useful statement; for a useful statement is a statement that can mean only one thing. And it is the nature of words to mean many things. Take the simple sentence 'Passing Russell Square'. That proved useless because besides the surface meaning it contained so many sunken meanings. The word 'passing' suggested the transiency of things, the passing of time and the changes of human life. Then the word 'Russell' suggested the rustling of leaves and the skirt on a polished floor: also the ducal house of Bedford and half the history of England. Finally the word 'Square' brings in the sight, the shape of an actual square combined with some visual suggestion of the stark angularity of stucco. Thus one sentence of the simplest kind rouses the imagination, the memory, the eye and the ear-all combine in reading it.

But they combine-they combine unconsciously together. The moment we single out and emphasize the suggestions as we have done here they become unreal; and we, too, become unreal-specialists, word mongers, phrase finders, not readers. In reading we have to allow the sunken meanings to remain sunken, suggested, not stated; lapsing and flowing into each other like reeds on the bed of a river. But the words in that sentence-Passing Russell Square-are of course very rudimentary words. They show no trace of the strange, of the diabolical power which words possess when they are not tapped out by a typewriter but come fresh from a human brain-the power that is to suggest the writer; his character, his appearance, his wife, his family, his house-even the cat on the hearthrug. Why words do this, how they do it, how to prevent them from doing it nobody knows. They do it without the writer's will; often against his will. No writer presumably wishes to impose his own miserable character, his own private secrets and vices upon the reader. But has any writer, who is not a typewriter, succeeded in being wholly impersonal? Always, inevitably, we know them as well as their books. Such is the suggestive power of words that they will often make a bad book into a very lovable human being, and a good book into a man whom we can hardly tolerate in the room. Even words that are hundreds of years old have this power; when they are new they have it so strongly that they deafen us to the writer's meaning-it is them we see, them we hear. That is one reason why our judgements of living writers are so wildly erratic. Only after the writer is dead do his words to some extent become disinfected, purified of the accidents of the living body.

Now, this power of suggestion is one of the most mysterious properties of words. Everyone who has ever written a sentence must be conscious or half-conscious of it. Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations naturally. They have been out and about, on people's lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today-that they are so stored with meanings, with memories, that they have contracted so many famous marriages. The splendid word 'incarnadine', for example-who can use it without remembering also 'multitudinous seas'? In the old days, of course, when English was a new language, writers could invent new words and use them. Nowadays it is easy enough to invent new words-they spring to the lips whenever we see a new sight or feel a new sensation-but we cannot use them because the language is old. You cannot use a brand new word in an old language because of the very obvious yet mysterious fact that a word is not a single and separate entity, but part of other words. It is not a word indeed until it is part of a sentence. Words belong to each other, although, of course, only a great writer knows that the word 'incarnadine' belongs to 'multitudinous seas'. To combine new words with old words is fatal to the constitution of the sentence. In order to use new words properly you would have to invent a new language; and that, though no doubt we shall come to it, is not at the moment our business. Our business is to see what we can do with the English language as it is. How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth? That is the question.

And the person who could answer that question would deserve whatever crown of glory the world has to offer. Think what it would mean if you could teach, if you could learn, the art of writing. Why, every book, every newspaper would tell the truth, would create beauty. But there is, it would appear, some obstacle in the way, some hindrance to the teaching of words. For though at this moment at least a hundred professors are lecturing upon the literature of the past, at least a thousand critics are reviewing the literature of the present, and hundreds upon hundreds of young men and women are passing examinations in English literature with the utmost credit, still-do we write better, do we read better than we read and wrote four hundred years ago when we were unlectured, uncriticized, untaught? Is our Georgian literature a patch on the Elizabethan? Where then are we to lay the blame? Not on our professors; not on our reviewers; not on our writers; but on words. It is words that are to blame. They are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all things. Of course, you can catch them and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries. But words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. If you want proof of this, consider how often in moments of emotion when we most need words we find none. Yet there is the dictionary; there at our disposal are some half-a-million words all in alphabetical order. But can we use them? No, because words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind. Look again at the dictionary. There beyond a doubt lie plays more splendid that Antony and Cleopatra; poems more lovely than the Ode to a Nightingale ; novels beside which Pride and Prejudice or David Copperfield are the crude bunglings of amateurs. It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order. But we cannot do it because they do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. And how do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely, much as human beings live, by ranging hither and thither, by falling in love, and mating together. It is true that they are much less bound by ceremony and convention than we are. Royal words mate with commoners. English words marry French words, German words, Indian words, Negro words, if they have a fancy. Indeed, the less we inquire into the past of our dear Mother English the better it will be for that lady's reputation. For she has gone a-roving, a-roving fair maid.

Thus to lay down any laws for such irreclaimable vagabonds is worse than useless, A few trifling rules of grammar and spelling are all the constraint we can put on them. All we can say about them, as we peer at them over the edge of that deep, dark and fitfully illuminated cavern in which they live the mind all we can say about them is that they seem to like people to think and to feel before they use them, but to think and to feel not about them, but about something different. They are highly sensitive, easily made self-conscious. They do not like to have their purity or their impurity discussed. If you start a Society for Pure English, they will show their resentment by starting another for impure English-hence the unnatural violence of much modern speech; it is a protest against the puritans. They are highly democratic, too; they believe that one word is as good as another; uneducated words are as good as educated words, uncultivated words as cultivated words, there are no ranks or titles in their society. Nor do they like being lifted out on the point of a pen and examined separately. They hang together, in sentences, in paragraphs, sometimes for whole pages at a time. They hate being useful; they hate making money; they hate being lectured about in public. In short, they hate anything that stamps them with one meaning or confines them to one attitude, for it is their nature to change.

Perhaps that is their most striking peculiarity-their need of change. It is because the truth they try to catch is many-sided, and they convey it by being themselves many-sided, flashing this way, then that. Thus they mean one thing to one person, another thing to another person; they are unintelligible to one generation, plain as a pike-staff to the next. And it is because of this complexity that they survive. Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning, the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination. And when words are pinned down they fold their wings and die. Finally, and most emphatically, words, like ourselves, in order to live at their ease, need privacy. Undoubtedly they like us to think, and they like us to feel, before we use them; but they also like us to pause; to become unconscious. Our unconsciousness is their privacy; our darkness is their light . . . That pause was made, that veil of darkness was dropped, to tempt words to come together in one of those swift marriages which are perfect images and create everlasting beauty. But no nothing of that sort is going to happen tonight. The little wretches are out of temper; disobliging; disobedient; dumb. What is it that they are muttering? 'Time's up! Silence!'

The Art of Biography

1

The art of biography, we say-but at once we go on to ask, Is biography an art? The question is foolish perhaps, and ungenerous certainly, considering the keen pleasure that biographers have given us. But the question asks itself so often that there must be something behind it. There it is, whenever a new biography is opened, casting its shadow on the page; and there would seem to be something deadly in that shadow, for after all, of the multitude of lives that are written, how few survive!

But the reason for this high death rate, the biographer might argue, is that biography, compared with the arts of poetry and fiction, is a young art. Interest in our selves and in other people's selves is a late development of the human mind. Not until the eighteenth century in England did that curiosity express itself in writing the lives of private people. Only in the nineteenth century was biography fully grown and hugely prolific. If it is true that there have been only three great biographers-Johnson, Boswell, and Lockhart-the reason, he argues, is that the time was short; and his plea, that the art of biography has had but little time to establish itself and develop itself, is certainly borne out by the textbooks. Tempting as it is to explore the reason why, that is, the self that writes a book of prose came into being so many centuries after the self that writes a poem, why Chaucer preceded Henry James it is better to leave that insoluble question unasked, and so pass to his next reason for the lack of masterpieces. It is that the art of biography is the most restricted of all the arts. He has his proof ready to hand. Here it is in the preface in which Smith, who has written the life of Jones, takes this opportunity of thanking old friends who have lent letters, and 'last but not least' Mrs Jones, the widow, for that help 'without which', as he puts it, 'this biography could not have been written.' Now the novelist, he points out, simply says in his foreword, 'Every character in this book is fictitious.' The novelist is free; the biographer is tied.

There, perhaps, we come within hailing distance of that very difficult, again perhaps insoluble, question: What do we mean by calling a book a work of art? At any rate, here is a distinction between biography and fiction-a proof that they differ in the very stuff of which they are made. One is made with the help of friends, of facts; the other is created without any restrictions save those that the artist, for reasons that seem good to him, chooses to obey. That is a distinction; and there is good reason to think that in the past biographers have found it not only a distinction but a very cruel distinction.

The widow and the friends were hard taskmasters. Suppose, for example, that the man of genius was immoral, ill-tempered, and threw the boots at the maid's head. The widow would say, 'Still I loved him-he was the father of my children; and the public, who love his books, must on no account be disillusioned. Cover up; omit.' The biographer obeyed. And thus the majority of Victorian biographies are like the wax figures now preserved in Westminster Abbey, that were carried in funeral processions through the street effigies that have only a smooth superficial likeness to the body in the coffin.

Then, towards the end of the nineteenth century, there was a change. Again for reasons not easy to discover, widows became broader-minded, the public keener-sighted; the effigy no longer carried conviction or satisfied curiosity. The biographer certainly won a measure of freedom. At least he could hint that there were scars and furrows on the dead man's face. Froude's Carlyle is by no means a wax mask painted rosy red. And following Froude there was Sir Edmund Gosse, who dared to say that his own father was a fallible human being. And following Edmund Gosse in the early years of the present century came Lytton Strachey,

2

The figure of Lytton Strachey is so important a figure in the history of biography that it compels a pause. For his three famous books, Eminent Victorians, Queen Victoria, and Elizabeth and Essex, are of a stature to show both what biography can do and what biography cannot do. Thus they suggest many possible answers to the question whether biography is an art, and if not, why it fails.

Lytton Strachey came to birth as an author at a lucky moment. In 1918, when he made his first attempt, biography, with its new liberties, was a form that offered great attractions. To a writer like himself, who had wished to write poetry or plays but was doubtful of his creative power, biography seemed to offer a promising alternative. For at last it was possible to tell the truth about the dead; and the Victorian age was rich in remarkable figures many of whom had been grossly deformed by the effigies that had been plastered over them. To recreate them, to show them as they really were, was a task that called for gifts analogous to the poet's or the novelist's, yet did not ask for that inventive power in which he found himself lacking.

It was well worth trying. And the anger and the interest that his short studies of Eminent Victorians aroused showed that he was able to make Manning, Florence Nightingale, Gordon, and the rest live as they had not lived since they were actually in the flesh. Once more they were the centre of a buzz of discussion. Did Gordon really drink, or was that an invention? Had Florence Nightingale received the Order of Merit in her bedroom or in her sitting-room? He stirred the public, even though a European war was raging, to an astonishing interest in such minute matters. Anger and laughter mixed; and editions multiplied.

But these were short studies with something of the over-emphasis and the foreshortening of caricatures. In the lives of the two great Queens, Elizabeth and Victoria, he attempted a far more ambitious task. Biography had never had a fairer chance of showing what it could do. For it was now being put to the test by a writer who was capable of making use of all the liberties that biography had won: he was fearless; he had proved his brilliance; and he had learned his job. The result throws great light upon the nature of biography. For who can doubt that after reading the two books again, one after the other, that the Victoria is a triumphant success, and that the Elizabeth by comparison is a failure? But it seems too, as we compare them, that it was not Lytton Strachey who failed; it was the art of biography. In the Victoria he treated biography as a craft; he submitted to its limitations. In the Elizabeth he treated biography as an art; he flouted its limitations.

But we must go on to ask how we have come to this conclusion and what reasons support it. In the first place it is clear that the two Queens present very different problems to their biographer. About Queen Victoria everything was known. Everything she did, almost everything she thought, was a matter of common knowledge. No one has ever been more closely verified and exactly authenticated than Queen Victoria. The biographer could not invent her, because at every moment some document was at hand to check his invention. And, in writing of Victoria, Lytton Strachey submitted to the conditions. He used to the full the biographer's power of selection and relation, but he kept strictly within the world of fact. Every statement was verified; every fact was authenticated. And the result is a life which, very possibly, will do for the old Queen what Boswell did for the old dictionary maker. In time to come Lytton Strachey's Queen Victoria will be Queen Victoria, just as Boswell's Johnson is now Dr Johnson. The other versions will fade and disappear. It was a prodigious feat, and no doubt, having accomplished it, the author was anxious to press further. There was Queen Victoria, solid, real, palpable. But undoubtedly she was limited. Could not biography produce something of the intensity of poetry, something of the excitement of drama, and yet keep also the peculiar virtue that belongs to fact-its suggestive reality, its own, proper creativeness?

Queen Elizabeth seemed to lend herself perfectly to the experiment. Very little was known about her. The society in which she lived was so remote that the habits, the motives, and even the actions of the people of that age were full of strangeness and obscurity. 'By what art are we to worm our way into those strange spirits? those even stranger bodies? The more clearly we perceive it, the more remote that singular universe becomes,' Lytton Strachey remarked on one of the first pages. Yet there was evidently a 'tragic history' lying dormant, half-revealed, half-concealed, in the story of the Queen and Essex. Everything seemed to lend itself to the making of a book that combined the advantages of both worlds, that gave the artist freedom to invent, but helped his invention with the support of facts-a book that was not only a biography but also a work of art.

Nevertheless, the combination proved unworkable; fact and fiction refused to mix. Elizabeth never became real in the sense that Queen Victoria had been real, yet she never became fictitious in the sense that Cleopatra or Falstaff is fictitious. The reason would seem to be that very little was known he was urged to invent; yet something was known his invention was checked. The Queen thus moves in an ambiguous world, between fact and fiction, neither embodied nor disembodied. There is a sense of vacancy and effort, of a tragedy that has no crisis, of characters that meet but do not clash.

If this diagnosis is true we are forced to say that the trouble lies with biography itself. It imposes conditions, and those conditions are that it must be based upon fact. And by fact in biography we mean facts that can be verified by other people besides the artist. If he invents facts as an artist invents them-facts that no one else can verify-and tries to combine them with facts of the other sort, they destroy each other.

Lytton Strachey himself seems in the Queen Victoria to have realized the necessity of this condition, and to have yielded to it instinctively. 'The first forty-two years of the Queen's life', he wrote, 'are illuminated by a great and varied quantity of authentic information. With Albert's death a veil descends.' And when with Albert's death the veil descended and authentic information failed, he knew that the biographer must follow suit. 'We must be content with a brief and summary relation,' he wrote and the last years are briefly disposed of. But the whole of Elizabeth's life was lived behind a far thicker veil than the last years of Victoria. And yet, ignoring his own admission, he went on to write, not a brief and summary relation, but a whole book about those strange spirits and even stranger bodies of whom authentic information was lacking. On his own showing, the attempt was doomed to failure.

3

It seems, then, that when the biographer complained that he was tied by friends, letters, and documents he was laying his finger upon a necessary element in biography; and that it is also a necessary limitation. For the invented character lives in a free world where the facts are verified by one person only-the artist himself. Their authenticity lies in the truth of his own vision. The world created by that vision is rarer, intenser, and more wholly of a piece than the world that is largely made of authentic information supplied by other people. And because of this difference the two kinds of fact will not mix; if they touch they destroy each other. No one, the conclusion seems to be, can make the best of both worlds; you must choose, and you must abide by your choice.

But though the failure of Elizabeth and Essex leads to this conclusion, that failure, because it was the result of a daring experiment carried out with magnificent skill, leads the way to further discoveries. Had he lived, Lytton Strachey would no doubt himself have explored the vein that he had opened. As it is, he has shown us the way in which others may advance. The biographer is bound by facts-that is so; but, if it is so, he has the right to all the facts that are available. If Jones threw boots at the maid's head, had a mistress in Islington, or was found drunk in a ditch after a night's debauch, he must be free to say so-so far at least as the law of libel and human sentiment allow.

But these facts are not like the facts of science once they are discovered, always the same. They are subject to changes of opinion; opinions change as the times change. What was thought a sin is now known, by the light of facts won for us by the psychologists, to be perhaps a misfortune; perhaps a curiosity; perhaps neither one nor the other, but a trifling foible of no great importance one way or the other. The accent on sex has changed within living memory. This leads to the destruction of a great deal of dead matter still obscuring the true features of the human face. Many of the old chapter headings-life at college, marriage, career-are shown to be very arbitrary and artificial distinctions. The real current of the hero's existence took, very likely, a different course.

Thus the biographer must go ahead of the rest of us, like the miner's canary, testing the atmosphere, detecting falsity, unreality, and the presence of obsolete conventions. His sense of truth must be alive and on tiptoe. Then again, since we live in an age when a thousand cameras are pointed, by newspapers, letters, and diaries, at every character from every angle, he must be prepared to admit contradictory versions of the same face. Biography will enlarge its scope by hanging up looking glasses at odd comers. And yet from all this diversity it will bring out, not a riot of confusion, but a richer unity. And again, since so much is known that used to be unknown, the question now inevitably asks itself, whether the lives of great men only should be recorded. Is not anyone who has lived a life, and left a record of that life, worthy of biography the failures as well as the successes, the humble as well as the illustrious? And what is greatness? And what smallness? He must revise our standards of merit and set up new heroes for our admiration.

4

Biography thus is only at the beginning of its career; it has a long and active life before it, we may be sure-a life full of difficulty, danger, and hard work. Nevertheless, we can also be sure that it is a different life from the life of poetry and fiction-a life lived at a lower degree of tension. And for that reason its creations are not destined for the immortality which the artist now and then achieves for his creations.

There would seem to be certain proof of that already. Even Dr Johnson as created by Boswell will not live as long as Falstaff as created by Shakespeare. Micawber and Miss Bates we may be certain will survive Lockhart's Sir Walter Scott and Lytton Strachey's Queen Victoria. For they are made of more enduring matter. The artist's imagination at its most intense fires out what is perishable in fact; he builds with what is durable; but the biographer must accept the perishable, build with it, imbed it in the very fabric of his work. Much will perish; little will live. And thus we come to the conclusion, that he is a craftsman, not an artist; and his work is not a work of art, but something betwixt and between.

Yet on that lower level the work of the biographer is invaluable; we cannot thank him sufficiently for what he does for us. For we are incapable of living wholly in the intense world of the imagination. The imagination is a faculty that soon tires and needs rest and refreshment. But for a tired imagination the proper food is not inferior poetry or minor fiction indeed they blunt and debauch it but sober fact, that 'authentic information' from which, as Lytton Strachey has shown us, good biography is made. When and where did the real man live; how did he look; did he wear laced boots or elastic-sided; who were his aunts, and his friends; how did he blow his nose; whom did he love, and how; and when he came to die did he die in his bed like a Christian, or . . .

By telling us the true facts, by sifting the little from the big, and shaping the whole so that we perceive the outline, the biographer does more to stimulate the imagination than any poet or novelist save the very greatest. For few poets and novelists are capable of that high degree of tension which gives us reality. But almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders. Of this, too, there is certain proof. For how often, when a biography is read and tossed aside, some scene remains bright, some figure lives on in the depths of the mind, and causes us, when we read a poem or a novel, to feel a start of recognition, as if we remembered something that we had known before.

How It Strikes a Contemporary

In the first place a contemporary can scarcely fail to be struck by the fact that two critics at the same table at the same moment will pronounce completely different opinions about the same book. Here, on the right, it is declared a masterpiece of English prose; on the left, simultaneously, a mere mass of waste-paper which, if the fire could survive it, should be thrown upon the flames. Yet both critics are in agreement about Milton and about Keats. They display an exquisite sensibility and have undoubtedly a genuine enthusiasm. It is only when they discuss the work of contemporary writers that they inevitably come to blows. The book in question, which is at once a lasting contribution to English literature and a mere farrago of pretentious mediocrity, was published about two months ago. That is the explanation; that is why they differ.

The explanation is a strange one. It is equally disconcerting to the reader who wishes to take his bearings in the chaos of contemporary literature and to the writer who has a natural desire to know whether his own work, produced with infinite pains and in almost utter darkness, is likely to burn for ever among the fixed luminaries of English letters or, on the contrary, to put out the fire. But if we identify ourselves with the reader and explore his dilemma first, our bewilderment is short-lived enough. The same thing has happened so often before. We have heard the doctors disagreeing about the new and agreeing about the old twice a year on the average, in spring and autumn, ever since Robert Elsmere, or was it Stephen Phillips, somehow pervaded the atmosphere, and there was the same disagreement among grown-up people about these books too. It would be much more marvellous, and indeed much more upsetting, if, for a wonder, both gentlemen agreed, pronounced Blank's book an undoubted masterpiece, and thus faced us with the necessity of deciding whether we should back their judgement to the extent of ten and sixpence. Both are critics of reputation; the opinions tumbled out so spontaneously here will be starched and stiffened into columns of sober prose which will uphold the dignity of letters in England and America.

It must be some innate cynicism, then, some ungenerous distrust of contemporary genius, which determines us automatically as the talk goes on that, were they to agree-which they show no signs of doing-half a guinea is altogether too large a sum to squander upon contemporary enthusiasms, and the case will be met quite adequately by a card to the library. Still the question remains, and let us put it boldly to the critics themselves. Is there no guidance nowadays for a reader who yields to none in reverence for the dead, but is tormented by the suspicion that reverence for the dead is vitally connected with understanding of the living? After a rapid survey both critics are agreed that there is unfortunately no such person. For what is their own judgement worth where new books are concerned? Certainly not ten and sixpence. And from the stores of their experience they proceed to bring forth terrible examples of past blunders; crimes of criticism which, if they had been committed against the dead and not against the living, would have lost them their jobs and imperilled their reputations. The only advice they can offer is to respect one's own instincts, to follow them fearlessly and, rather than submit them to the control of any critic or reviewer alive, to check them by reading and reading again the masterpieces of the past.

Thanking them humbly, we cannot help reflecting that it was not always so. Once upon a time, we must believe, there was a rule, a discipline, which controlled the great republic of readers in a way which is now unknown. That is not to say that the great critic-the Dryden, the Johnson, the Coleridge, the Arnold was an impeccable judge of contemporary work, whose verdicts stamped the book indelibly and saved the reader the trouble of reckoning the value for himself. The mistakes of these great men about their own contemporaries are too notorious to be worth recording. But the mere fact of their existence had a centralizing influence. That alone, it is not fantastic to suppose, would have controlled the disagreements of the dinner-table and given to random chatter about some book just out an authority now entirely to seek. The diverse schools would have debated as hotly as ever, but at the back of every reader's mind would have been the consciousness that there was at least one man who kept the main principles of literature closely in view: who, if you had taken to him some eccentricity of the moment, would have brought it into touch with permanence and tethered it by his own authority in the contrary blasts of praise and blame. But when it comes to the making of a critic, nature must be generous and society ripe. The scattered dinner-tables of the modem world, the chase and eddy of the various currents which compose the society of our time, could only be dominated by a giant of fabulous dimensions. And where is even the very tall man whom we have the right to expect? Reviewers we have but no critic; a million competent and incorruptible policemen but no judge. Men of taste and learning and ability are for ever lecturing the young and celebrating the dead. But the too frequent result of their able and industrious pens is a desiccation of the living tissues of literature into a network of little bones. Nowhere shall we find the downright vigour of a Dryden, or Keats with his fine and natural bearing, his profound insight and sanity, or Flaubert and the tremendous power of his fanaticism, or Coleridge, above all, brewing in his head the whole of poetry and letting issue now and then one of those profound general statements which are caught up by the mind when hot with the friction of reading as if they were of the soul of the book itself.

And to all this, too, the critics generously agree. A great critic, they say, is the rarest of beings. But should one miraculously appear, how should we maintain him, on what should we feed him? Great critics, if they are not themselves great poets, are bred from the profusion of the age. There is some great man to be vindicated, some school to be founded or destroyed. But our age is meagre to the verge of destitution. There is no name which dominates the rest. There is no master in whose workshop the young are proud to serve apprenticeship. Mr Hardy has long since withdrawn from the arena, and there is something exotic about the genius of Mr Conrad which makes him not so much an influence as an idol, honoured and admired, but aloof and apart. As for the rest, though they are many and vigorous and in the full flood of creative activity, there is none whose influence can seriously affect his contemporaries, or penetrate beyond our day to that not very distant future which it pleases us to call immortality. If we make a century our test, and ask how much of the work produced in these days in England will be in existence then, we shall have to answer not merely that we cannot agree upon the same book, but that we are more than doubtful whether such a book there is. It is an age of fragments. A few stanzas, a few pages, a chapter here and there, the beginning of this novel, the end of that, are equal to the best of any age or author. But can we go to posterity with a sheaf of loose pages, or ask the readers of those days, with the whole of literature before them, to sift our enormous rubbish heaps for our tiny pearls? Such are the questions which the critics might lawfully put to their companions at table, the novelists and poets.

At first the weight of pessimism seems sufficient to bear down all opposition. Yes, it is a lean age, we repeat, with much to justify its poverty; but, frankly, if we pit one century against another the comparison seems overwhelmingly against us. Waverley, The Excursion, Kubla Khan, Don Juan, Hazlitt's Essays, Pride and Prejudice, Hyperion, and Prometheus Unbound were all published between 1800 and 1821. Our century has not lacked industry; but if we ask for masterpieces it appears on the face of it that the pessimists are right. It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work. All honour, of course, to those who have sacrificed their immortality to set the house in order. But if we ask for masterpieces, where are we to look? A little poetry, we may feel sure, will survive; a few poems by Mr Yeats, by Mr Davies, by Mr de la Mare. Mr Lawrence, of course, has moments of greatness, but hours of something very different. Mr Beerbohm, in his way, is perfect, but it is not a big way. Passages in Far Away and Long Ago will undoubtedly go to posterity entire. Ulysses was a memorable catastrophe-immense in daring, terrific in disaster. And so, picking and choosing, we select now this, now that, hold it up for display, hear it defended or derided, and finally have to meet the objection that even so we are only agreeing with the critics that it is an age incapable of sustained effort, littered with fragments, and not seriously to be compared with the age that went before.

But it is just when opinions universally prevail and we have added lip service to their authority that we become sometimes most keenly conscious that we do not believe a word that we are saying. It is a barren and exhausted age, we repeat; we must look back with envy to the past. Meanwhile it is one of the first fine days of spring. Life is not altogether lacking in colour. The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own. And the random talk of people who have no chance of immortality and thus can speak their minds out has a setting, often, of lights, streets, houses, human beings, beautiful or grotesque, which will weave itself into the moment for ever. But this is life; the talk is about literature. We must try to disentangle the two, and justify the rash revolt of optimism against the superior plausibility, the finer distinction, of pessimism.

Our optimism, then, is largely instinctive. It springs from the fine day and the wine and the talk; it springs from the fact that when life throws up such treasures daily, daily suggests more than the most voluble can express, much though we admire the dead, we prefer life as it is. There is something about the present which we would not exchange, though we were offered a choice of all past ages to live in. And modern literature, with all its imperfections, has the same hold on us and the same fascination. It is like a relation whom we snub and scarify daily, but, after all, cannot do without. It has the same endearing quality of being that which we are, that which we have made, that in which we live, instead of being something, however august, alien to ourselves and beheld from the outside. Nor has any generation more need than ours to cherish its contemporaries. We are sharply cut off from our predecessors. A shift in the scale-the sudden slip of masses held in position for ages-has shaken the fabric from top to bottom, alienated us from the past and made us perhaps too vividly conscious of the present. Every day we find ourselves doing, saying, or thinking things that would have been impossible to our fathers. And we feel the differences which have not been noted far more keenly than the resemblances which have been very perfectly expressed. New books lure us to read them partly in the hope that they will reflect this re-arrangement of our attitude these scenes, thoughts, and apparently fortuitous groupings of incongruous things which impinge upon us with so keen a sense of novelty-and, as literature does, give it back into our keeping, whole and comprehended. Here indeed there is every reason for optimism. No age can have been more rich than ours in writers determined to give expression to the differences which separate them from the past and not to the resemblances which connect them with it. It would be invidious to mention names, but the most casual reader dipping into poetry, into fiction, into biography can hardly fail to be impressed by the courage, the sincerity, in a word, by the widespread originality of our time. But our exhilaration is strangely curtailed. Book after book leaves us with the same sense of promise unachieved, of intellectual poverty, of brilliance which has been snatched from life but not transmuted into literature. Much of what is best in contemporary work has the appearance of being noted under pressure, taken down in a bleak shorthand which preserves with astonishing brilliance the movements and expressions of the figures as they pass across the screen. But the flash is soon over, and there remains with us a profound dissatisfaction. The irritation is as acute as the pleasure was intense.

After all, then, we are back at the beginning, vacillating from extreme to extreme, at one moment enthusiastic, at the next pessimistic, unable to come to any conclusion about our contemporaries. We have asked the critics to help us, but they have deprecated the task. Now, then, is the time to accept their advice and correct these extremes by consulting the masterpieces of the past. We feel ourselves indeed driven to them, impelled not by calm judgement but by some imperious need to anchor our instability upon their security. But, honestly, the shock of the comparison between past and present is at first disconcerting. Undoubtedly there is a dullness in great books. There is an unabashed tranquillity in page after page of Wordsworth and Scott and Miss Austen which is sedative to the verge of somnolence. Opportunities occur and they neglect them. Shades and subtleties accumulate and they ignore them. They seem deliberately to refuse to gratify those senses which are stimulated so briskly by the moderns; the senses of sight, of sound, of touch above all, the sense of the human being, his depth and the variety of his perceptions, his complexity, his confusion, his self, in short. There is little of all this in the works of Wordsworth and Scott and Jane Austen. From what, then, arises that sense of security which gradually, delightfully, and completely overcomes us? It is the power of their belief-their conviction, that imposes itself upon us. In Wordsworth, the philosophic poet, this is obvious enough. But it is equally true of the careless Scott, who scribbled masterpieces to build castles before breakfast, and of the modest maiden lady who wrote furtively and quietly simply to give pleasure. In both there is the same natural conviction that life is of a certain quality. They have their judgement of conduct. They know the relations of human beings towards each other and towards the universe. Neither of them probably has a word to say about the matter outright, but everything depends on it. Only believe, we find ourselves saying, and all the rest will come of itself. Only believe, to take a very simple instance which the recent publication of The Walsons brings to mind, that a nice girl will instinctively try to soothe the feelings of a boy who has been snubbed at a dance, and then, if you believe it implicitly and unquestioningly, you will not only make people a hundred years later feel the same thing, but you will make them feel it as literature. For certainty of that kind is the condition which makes it possible to write. To believe that your impressions hold good for others is to be released from the cramp and confinement of personality. It is to be free, as Scott was free, to explore with a vigour which still holds us spellbound the whole world of adventure and romance. It is also the first step in that mysterious process in which Jane Austen was so great an adept. The little grain of experience once selected, believed in, and set outside herself, could he put precisely in its place, and she was then free to make it, by a process which never yields its secrets to the analyst, into that complete statement which is literature.

So then our contemporaries afflict us because they have ceased to believe. The most sincere of them will only tell us what it is that happens to himself. They cannot make a world, because they are not free of other human beings. They cannot tell stories because they do not believe that stories are true. They cannot generalise. They depend on their senses and emotions, whose testimony is trustworthy, rather than on their intellects whose message is obscure. And they have perforce to deny themselves the use of some of the most powerful and some of the most exquisite of the weapons of their craft. With the whole wealth of the English language at the back of them, they timidly pass about from hand to hand and book to book only the meanest copper coins. Set down at a fresh angle of the eternal prospect they can only whip out their notebooks and record with agonised intensity the flying gleams, which light on what? And the transitory splendours, which may, perhaps, compose nothing whatever. But here the critics interpose, and with some show of justice.

If this description holds good, they say, and is not, as it may well be, entirely dependent upon our position at the table and certain purely personal relationships to mustard pots and flower vases, then the risks of judging contemporary work are greater than ever before. There is every excuse for them if they are wide of the mark; and no doubt it would be better to retreat, as Matthew Arnold advised, from the burning ground of the present to the safe tranquillity of the past. 'We enter on burning ground,' wrote Matthew Arnold, 'as we approach the poetry of times so near to us, poetry like that of Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth, of which the estimates are so often not only personal, but personal with passion,' and this, they remind us, was written in the year 1880. Beware, they say, of putting under the microscope one inch of a ribbon which runs many miles; things sort themselves out if you wait; moderation, and a study of the classics are to be recommended. Moreover, life is short; the Byron centenary is at hand; and the burning question of the moment is, did he, or did he not, marry his sister? To sum up, then-if indeed any conclusion is possible when everybody is talking at once and it is time to be going it seems that it would be wise for the writers of the present to renounce the hope of creating masterpieces, Their poems, plays, biographies, novels are not books but notebooks, and Time, like a good schoolmaster, will take them in his hands, point to their blots and scrawls and erasions, and tear them across; but he will not throw them into the waste-paper basket. He will keep them because other students will find them very useful. It is from the notebooks of the present that the masterpieces of the future are made. Literature, as the critics were saying just now, has lasted long, has undergone many changes, and it is only a short sight and a parochial mind that will exaggerate the importance of these squalls, however they may agitate the little boats now tossing out at sea. The storm and the drenching are on the surface; continuity and calm are in the depths.

As for the critics whose task it is to pass judgement upon the books of the moment, whose work, let us admit, is difficult, dangerous, and often distasteful, let us ask them to be generous of encouragement, but sparing of those wreaths and coronets which are so apt to get awry, and fade, and make the wearers, in six months time, look a little ridiculous. Let them take a wider, a less personal view of modern literature, and look indeed upon the writers as if they were engaged upon some vast building, which being built by common effort, the separate workmen may well remain anonymous. Let them slam the door upon the cosy company where sugar is cheap and butter plentiful, give over, for a time at least, the discussion of that fascinating topic-whether Byron married his sister and, withdrawing, perhaps, a handsbreadth from the table where we sit chattering, say something interesting about literature itself. Let us buttonhole them as they leave, and recall to their memory that gaunt aristocrat, Lady Hester Stanhope, who kept a milk-white horse in her stable in readiness for the Messiah and was for ever scanning the mountain tops, impatiently but with confidence, for signs of his approach, and ask them to follow her example; scan the horizon; see the past in relation to the future; and so prepare the way for masterpieces to come.

Why?

When the first number of Lysistrata appeared, I confess that I was deeply disappointed. It was so well printed, on such good paper. It looked established, prosperous. As I turned the pages it seemed to me that wealth must have descended upon Somerville, and I was about to answer the request of the editor for an article with a negative, when I read, greatly to my relief, that one of the writers was badly dressed, and gathered from another that the women's colleges still lack power and prestige. At this I plucked up heart, and a crowd of questions that have been pressing to be asked rushed to my lips saying: 'Here is our chance.'

I should explain that like so many people nowadays I am pestered with questions. I find it impossible to walk down the street without stopping, it may be in the middle of the road, to ask: Why? Churches, public houses, parliaments, shops, loud speakers, motor-cars, the drone of an aeroplane in the clouds, and men and women all inspire questions. Yet what is the point of asking questions of oneself? They should be asked openly in public. But the great obstacle to asking questions openly in public is, of course, wealth. The little twisted sign that comes at the end of a question has a way of making the rich writhe; power and prestige come down upon it with all their weight. Questions, therefore, being sensitive, impulsive and often foolish, have a way of picking their asking place with care. They shrivel up in an atmosphere of power, prosperity, and time-worn stone. They die by the dozen on the threshold of great newspaper offices. They slink away to less favoured, less flourishing quarters where people are poor and therefore have nothing to give, where they have no power and therefore have nothing to lose. Now the questions that have been pestering me to ask them decided, whether rightly or wrongly, that they could be asked in Lysistrata. They said: 'We do not expect you to ask us in-,' here they named some of our most respectable dailies and weeklies; 'nor in-,' here they named some of our most venerable institutions. 'But, thank I leaven!' they exclaimed, 'are not women's colleges poor and young? Are they not inventive, adventurous? Are they not out to create a new'

'The editor forbids feminism,' I interposed severely.

'What is feminism?' they screamed with one accord, and as I did not answer at once, a new question was flung at me: 'Don't you think it high time that a new-'

But I stopped them by reminding them that they had only two thousand words at their disposal. Upon that, they withdrew, consulted together, and finally put forward the request that I should introduce one or two of them of the simplest, tamest, and most obvious. For example, there is the question that always bobs up at the beginning of term when societies issue their invitations and universities open their doors-why lecture, why be lectured?

In order to place this question fairly before you, I will describe, for memory has kept the picture bright, one of those rare but, as Queen Victoria would have put it, never-to-be-sufficiently-lamented occasions when in deference to friendship, or in a desperate attempt to acquire information about, perhaps, the French Revolution, it seemed necessary to attend a lecture. The room to begin with had a hybrid look-it was not for sitting in, nor yet for eating in. Perhaps there was a map on the wall; certainly there was a table on a platform, and several rows of rather small, rather hard, comfortless little chairs. These were occupied intermittently, as if they shunned each other's company, by people of both sexes, and some had note-books and were tapping their fountain pens, and some had none and gazed with the vacancy and placidity of bull frogs at the ceiling. A large clock displayed its cheerless face, and when the hour struck in strode a harried-looking man, a man from whose face nervousness, vanity, or perhaps the depressing and impossible nature of his task had removed all traces of ordinary humanity. There was a momentary stir. He had written a book, and for a moment it is interesting to see people who have written books. Everybody gazed at him. He was bald and not hairy; had a mouth and a chin; in short he was a man like another, although he had written a book. He cleared his throat and the lecture began. Now the human voice is an instrument of varied power; it can enchant and it can soothe; it can rage and it can despair; but when it lectures it almost always bores. What he said was sensible enough; there was learning in it and argument and reason; but as the voice went on attention wandered. The face of the clock seemed abnormally pale; the hands too suffered from some infirmity. I lad they the gout? Were they swollen? They moved so slowly. They reminded one of the painful progress of a three-legged fly that has survived the winter. How many flies on an average survive the English winter, and what would be the thoughts of such an insect on waking to find itself being lectured on the French Revolution? The inquiry was fatal. A link had been lost-a paragraph dropped. It was useless to ask the lecturer to repeat his words; on he plodded with dogged pertinacity. The origin of the French Revolution was being sought for-also the thoughts of flies. Now there came one of those flat stretches of discourse when minute objects can be seen coming for two or three miles ahead. 'Skip!' we entreated him vainly. He did not skip. There was a joke. Then the voice went on again; then it seemed that the windows wanted washing; then a woman sneezed; then the voice quickened; then there was a peroration; and then-thank Heaven!-the lecture was over.

Why, since life holds only so many hours, waste one of them on being lectured? Why, since printing presses have been invented these many centuries, should he not have printed his lecture instead of speaking it? Then, by the fire in winter, or under an apple tree in summer, it could have been read, thought over, discussed; the difficult ideas pondered, the argument debated. It could have been thickened and stiffened. There would have been no need of those repetitions and dilutions with which lectures have to be watered down and brightened up, so as to attract the attention of a miscellaneous audience too apt to think about noses and chins, women sneezing and the longevity of flies.

It may be, I told these questions, that there is some reason, imperceptible to outsiders, which makes lectures an essential part of university discipline. But why here another rushed to the forefront-why, if lectures are necessary as a form of education, should they not be abolished as a form of entertainment? Never does the crocus flower or the beech tree redden but there issues simultaneously from all the universities of England, Scotland, and Ireland a shower of notes from desperate secretaries entreating So-and-so and So-and-so and So-and-so to come down and address them upon art or literature or politics or morality-and why?

In the old days when newspapers were scarce and carefully lent about from hall to rectory, such laboured methods of rubbing up minds and imparting ideas were no doubt essential. But now, when every day of the week scatters our tables with articles and pamphlets in which every shade of opinion is expressed, far more tersely than by word of mouth, why continue an obsolete custom which not merely wastes time and temper, but incites the most debased of human passions-vanity, ostentation, self-assertion, and the desire to convert? Why encourage your elders to turn themselves into prigs and prophets, when they are ordinary men and women? Why force them to stand on a platform for forty minutes while you reflect upon the colour of their hair and the longevity of flies? Why not let them talk to you and listen to you, naturally and happily, on the floor? Why not create a new form of society founded on poverty and equality? Why not bring together people of all ages and both sexes and all shades of fame and obscurity so that they can talk, without mounting platforms or reading papers or wearing expensive clothes or eating expensive food? Would not such a society be worth, even as a form of education, all the papers on art and literature that have ever been read since the world began? Why not abolish prigs and prophets? Why not invent human intercourse? Why not try?

Here, being sick of the word 'why', I was about to indulge myself with a few reflections of a general nature upon society as it was, as it is, as it might be, with a few fancy pictures of Mrs Thrale entertaining Dr Johnson, Lady Holland amusing Lord Macaulay thrown in, when such a clamour arose among the questions that I could hardly hear myself think. The cause of the clamour was soon apparent. I had incautiously and foolishly used the word 'literature'. Now if there is one word that excites questions and puts them in a fury it is this word 'literature'. There they were, screaming and crying, asking questions about poetry and fiction and criticism, each demanding to be heard, each certain that his was the only question that deserved an answer. At last, when they had destroyed all my fancy pictures of Lady Holland and Dr Johnson, one insisted, for he said that foolish and rash as he might be he was less so than the others, that he should be asked. And his question was, why learn English literature at universities when you can read it for yourselves in books? But I said that it is foolish to ask a question that has already been answered English literature is, I believe, already taught at the universities. Besides, if we arc going to start an argument about it, we should need at least twenty volumes, whereas we have only about seven hundred words remaining. Still, as he was importunate, I said I would ask the question and introduce it to the best of my ability, without expressing any opinion of my own, by copying down the following fragment of dialogue.

The other day I went to call upon a friend of mine who earns her living as a publisher's reader. The room was a little dark, it seemed to me, when I went in. Yet, as the window was open and it was a fine spring day, the darkness must have been spiritual-the effect of some private sorrow I feared. Her first words as I came in confirmed my fears:

'Alas, poor boy!' she exclaimed, tossing the manuscript she was reading to the ground with a gesture of despair. Had some accident happened to one of her relations, I asked, motoring or climbing?

'If you call three hundred pages on the evolution of the Elizabethan sonnet an accident,' she said.

'Is that all?' I replied with relief.

'All?' she retaliated, 'isn't it enough?' And, beginning to pace up and down the room she exclaimed: 'Once he was a clever boy; once he was worth talking to; once he cared about English literature. But now-' She threw out her hands as if words failed her-but not at all. There followed such a flood of lamentation and vituperation-but reflecting how hard her life was, reading manuscripts day in, day out, I excused her-that I could not follow the argument. All I could gather was that this lecturing about English literature 'if you want to teach them to read English,' she threw in, 'teach them to read Greek'-all this passing of examinations in English literature, which led to all this writing about English literature, was bound in the end to be the death and burial of English literature. 'The tombstone', she was proceeding, 'will be a bound volume of-' when I stopped her and told her not to talk such nonsense, 'Then tell me,' she said, standing over me with her fists clenched, 'do they write any better for it? Is poetry better, is fiction better, is criticism better now that they have been taught how to read English literature?' As if to answer her own question she read a passage from the manuscript on the floor. 'And each the spit and image of the other!' she groaned, lifting it wearily to its place with the manuscripts on the shelf.

'But think of all they must know,' I tried to argue.

'Know?' she echoed me. 'Know? What d'you mean by "know"?' As that was a difficult question to answer offhand. I passed it over by saying: 'Well, at any rate they'll he able to make their livings and teach other people.' Whereupon she lost her temper and, seizing the unfortunate work upon the Elizabethan sonnet, whizzed it across the room. The rest of the visit passed in picking up the fragments of a teapot that had belonged to her grandmother.

Now of course a dozen other questions clamour to be asked; about churches and parliaments and public houses and shops and loudspeakers and men and women; but mercifully time is up; silence falls.

The Patron and the Crocus

Young men and women beginning to write are generally given the plausible but utterly impracticable advice to write what they have to write as shortly as possible, as clearly as possible, and without other thought in their minds except to say exactly what is in them. Nobody ever adds on these occasions the one thing needful: 'And be sure you choose your patron wisely', though that is the gist of the whole matter. For a book is always written for somebody to read, and, since the patron is not merely the paymaster, but also in a very subtle and insidious way the instigator and inspirer of what is written, it is of the utmost importance that he should be a desirable man.

But who, then, is the desirable man-the patron who will cajole the best out of the writer's brain and bring to birth the most varied and vigorous progeny of which he is capable? Different ages have answered the question differently. The Elizabethans, to speak roughly, chose the aristocracy to write for and the playhouse public. The eighteenth-century patron was a combination of coffee-house wit and Grub Street bookseller. In the nineteenth century the great writers wrote for the halfcrown magazines and the leisured classes. And looking back and applauding the splendid results of these different alliances, it all seems enviably simple, and plain as a pikestaff compared with our own predicament-for whom should we write? For the present supply of patrons is of unexampled and bewildering variety. There is the daily Press, the weekly Press, the monthly Press; the English public and the American public; the bestseller public and the worst-seller public; the high-brow public and the red-blood public; all now organized self-conscious entities capable through their various mouthpieces of making their needs known and their approval or displeasure felt. Thus the writer who has been moved by the sight of the first crocus in Kensington Gardens has, before he sets pen to paper, to choose from a crowd of competitors the particular patron who suits him best. It is futile to say, 'Dismiss them all; think only of your crocus', because writing is a method of communication; and the crocus is an imperfect crocus until it has been shared. The first man or the last may write for himself alone, but he is an exception and an unenviable one at that, and the gulls are welcome to his works if the gulls can read them.

Granted, then, that every writer has some public or other at the end of his pen, the high-minded will say that it should be a submissive public, accepting obediently whatever he likes to give it. Plausible as the theory stands, great risks are attached to it. For in that case the writer remains conscious of his public, yet is superior to it-an uncomfortable and unfortunate combination, as the works of Samuel Butler, George Meredith, and Henry James may be taken to prove. Each despised the public; each desired a public; each failed to attain a public; and each wreaked his failure upon the public by a succession, gradually increasing in intensity, of angularities, obscurities, and affectations which no writer whose patron was his equal and friend would have thought it necessary to inflict. Their crocuses, in consequence, are tortured plants, beautiful and bright, but with something wry-necked about them, malformed, shrivelled on the one side, overblown on the other. A touch of the sun would have done them a world of good. Shall we then rush to the opposite extreme and accept (if in fancy alone) the flattering proposals which the editors of The Times and the Daily News may be supposed to make us-'Twenty pounds down for your crocus in precisely fifteen hundred words, which shall blossom upon every breakfast table from John o' Groats to the Land's End before nine o'clock to-morrow morning with the writer's name attached'?

But will one crocus be enough, and must it not be a very brilliant yellow to shine so far, to cost so much, and to have one's name attached to it? The Press is undoubtedly a great multiplier of crocuses. But if we look at some of these plants, we shall find that they are only very distantly related to the original little yellow or purple flower which pokes up through the grass in Kensington Gardens early in March every year. The newspaper crocus is an amazing but still a very different plant. It fills precisely the space allotted to it. It radiates a golden glow. It is genial, affable, warm-hearted. It is beautifully finished, too, for let nobody think that the art of'our dramatic critic' of The Times or of Mr Lynd of the Daily News is an easy one. It is no despicable feat to start a million brains running at nine o'clock in the morning, to give two million eyes something bright and brisk and amusing to look at. But the night comes and these flowers fade. So little bits of glass lose their lustre if you take them out of the sea; great prima donnas howl like hyenas if you shut them up in telephone boxes; and the most brilliant of articles when removed from its element is dust and sand and the husks of straw. Journalism embalmed in a book is unreadable.

The patron we want, then, is one who will help us to preserve our flowers from decay. But as his qualities change from age to age, and it needs considerable integrity and conviction not to be dazzled by the pretensions or bamboozled by the persuasions of the competing crowd, this business of patron-finding is one of the tests and trials of authorship. To know whom to write for is to know how to write. Some of the modern patron's qualities are, however, fairly plain. The writer will require at this moment, it is obvious, a patron with the book-reading habit rather than the play-going habit. Nowadays, too, he must be instructed in the literature of other times and races. But there are other qualities which our special weaknesses and tendencies demand in him. There is the question of indecency, for instance, which plagues us and puzzles us much more than it did the Elizabethans. The twentieth-century patron must be immune from shock. He must distinguish infallibly between the little clod of manure which sticks to the crocus of necessity, and that which is plastered to it out of bravado. He must be a judge, too, of those social influences which inevitably play so large a part in modern literature, and able to say which matures and fortifies, which inhibits and makes sterile. Further, there is emotion for him to pronounce on, and in no department can he do more useful work than in bracing a writer against sentimentality on the one hand and a craven fear of expressing his feeling on the other. It is worse, he will say, and perhaps more common, to be afraid of feeling than to feel too much. He will add, perhaps, something about language, and point out how many words Shakespeare used and how much grammar Shakespeare violated, while we, though we keep our fingers so demurely to the black notes on the piano, have not appreciably improved upon Antony and Cleopatra. And if you can forget your sex altogether, he will say, so much the better; a writer has none. But all this is by the way-elementary and disputable. The patron's prime quality is something different, only to be expressed perhaps by the use of that convenient word which cloaks so much-atmosphere. It is necessary that the patron should shed and envelop the crocus in an atmosphere which makes it appear a plant of the very highest importance, so that to misrepresent it is the one outrage not to be forgiven this side of the grave. He must make us feel that a single crocus, if it be a real crocus, is enough for him; that he does not want to be lectured, elevated, instructed, or improved; that he is sorry that he bullied Carlyle into vociferation, Tennyson into idyllics, and Ruskin into insanity; that he is now ready to efface himself or assert himself as his writers require; that he is bound to them by a more than maternal tie; that they are twins indeed, one dying if the other dies, one flourishing if the other flourishes; that the fate of literature depends upon their happy alliance-all of which proves, as we began by saying, that the choice of a patron is of the highest importance. But how to choose rightly? How to write well? Those are the questions.

Modern Fiction

In making any survey, even the freest and loosest, of modern fiction, it is difficult not to take it for granted that the modern practice of the art is somehow an improvement upon the old. With their simple tools and primitive materials, it might be said, Fielding did well and Jane Austen even better, but compare their opportunities with ours! Their masterpieces certainly have a strange air of simplicity. And yet the analogy between literature and the process, to choose an example, of making motor cars scarcely holds good beyond the first glance. It is doubtful whether in the course of the centuries, though we have learnt much about making machines, we have learnt anything about making literature. We do not come to write better; all that we can be said to do is to keep moving, now a little in this direction, now in that, but with a circular tendency should the whole course of the track be viewed from a sufficiently lofty pinnacle. It need scarcely be said that we make no claim to stand, even momentarily, upon that vantage ground. On the flat, in the crowd, half blind with dust, we look back with envy to those happier warriors, whose battle is won and whose achievements wear so serene an air of accomplishment that we can scarcely refrain from whispering that the fight was not so fierce for them as for us. It is for the historian of literature to decide; for him to say if we are now beginning or ending or standing in the middle of a great period of prose fiction, for down in the plain little is visible. We only know that certain gratitudes and hostilities inspire us; that certain paths seem to lead to fertile land, others to the dust and the desert; and of this perhaps it may be worth while to attempt some account.

Our quarrel, then, is not with the classics, and if we speak of quarrelling with Mr Wells, Mr Bennett, and Mr Galsworthy, it is partly that by the mere fact of their existence in the flesh their work has a living, breathing, everyday imperfection which bids us to take what liberties with it we choose. But it is also true that, while we thank them for a thousand gifts, we reserve our unconditional gratitude for Mr I lardy, for Mr Conrad, and in a much lesser degree for the Mr Hudson of The Purple Land, Green Mansions , and Far Away and Long Ago. Mr Wells, Mr Bennett, and Mr Galsworthy have excited so many hopes and disappointed them so persistently that our gratitude largely takes the form of thanking them for having shown us what they might have done but have not done; what we certainly could not do, but as certainly, perhaps, do not wish to do. No single phrase will sum up the charge or grievance which we have to bring against a mass of work so large in its volume and embodying so many qualities, both admirable and the reverse. If we tried to formulate our meaning in one word we should say that these three writers are materialists. It is because they are concerned not with the spirit but with the body that they have disappointed us, and left us with the feeling that the sooner English fiction turns its back upon them, as politely as may be, and marches, if only into the desert, the better for its soul. Naturally, no single word reaches the centre of three separate targets. In the case of Mr Wells it falls notably wide of the mark. And yet even with him it indicates to our thinking the fatal alloy in his genius, the great clod of clay that has got itself mixed up with the purity of his inspiration. But Mr Bennett is perhaps the worst culprit of the three, inasmuch as he is by far the best workman. He can make a book so well constructed and solid in its craftsmanship that it is difficult for the most exacting of critics to see through what chink or crevice decay can creep in. There is not so much as a draught between the frames of the windows, or a crack in the boards. And yet-if life should refuse to live there? That is a risk which the creator of The Old Wives' Talc, George Cannon, Edwin Clayhanger, and hosts of other figures, may well claim to have surmounted. His characters live abundantly, even unexpectedly, but it remains to ask how do they live, and what do they live for? More and more they seem to us, deserting even the well-built villa in the Five Towns, to spend their time in some softly padded first-class railway carriage, pressing bells and buttons innumerable; and the destiny to which they travel so luxuriously becomes more and more unquestionably an eternity of bliss spent in the very best hotel in Brighton. It can scarcely be said of Mr Wells that he is a materialist in the sense that he takes too much delight in the solidity of his fabric. His mind is too generous in its sympathies to allow him to spend much time in making things shipshape and substantial. He is a materialist from sheer goodness of heart, taking upon his shoulders the work that ought to have been discharged by Government officials, and in the plethora of his ideas and facts scarcely having leisure to realise, or forgetting to think important, the crudity and coarseness of his human beings. Yet what more damaging criticism can there be both of his earth and of his Heaven than that they are to be inhabited here and hereafter by his Joans and his Peters? Does not the inferiority of their natures tarnish whatever institutions and ideals may be provided for them by the generosity of their creator? Nor, profoundly though we respect the integrity and humanity of Mr Galsworthy, shall we find what we seek in his pages.

If we fasten, then, one label on all these books, on which is one word materialists, we mean by it that they write of unimportant things; that they spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and enduring.

We have to admit that we are exacting, and, further, that we find it difficult to justify our discontent by explaining what it is that we exact. We frame our question differently at different times. But it reappears most persistently as we drop the finished novel on the crest of a sigh-Is it worth while? What is the point of it all? Can it be that, owing to one of those little deviations which the human spirit seems to make from time to time, Mr Bennett has come down with his magnificent apparatus for catching life just an inch or two on the wrong side? Life escapes; and perhaps without life nothing else is worth while. It is a confession of vagueness to have to make use of such a figure as this, but we scarcely better the matter by speaking, as critics are prone to do, of reality. Admitting the vagueness which afflicts all criticism of novels, let us hazard the opinion that for us at this moment the form of fiction most in vogue more often misses than secures the thing we seek. Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide. Nevertheless, we go on perseveringly, conscientiously, constructing our two and thirty chapters after a design which more and more ceases to resemble the vision of our minds. So much of the enormous labour of proving the solidity, the likeness to life, of the story is not merely labour thrown away but labour misplaced to the extent of obscuring and blotting out the light of the conception. The writer seems constrained, not by his own free will but by some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall, to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole so impeccable that if all his figures were to come to life they would find themselves dressed down to the last button of their coats in the fashion of the hour. The tyrant is obeyed; the novel is done to a turn. But sometimes, more and more often as time goes by, we suspect a momentary doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as the pages fill themselves in the customary way. Is life like this? Must novels be like this?

Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being 'like this'. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions-trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.

It is, at any rate, in some such fashion as this that we seek to define the quality which distinguishes the work of several young writers, among whom Mr James Joyce is the most notable, from that of their predecessors. They attempt to come closer to life, and to preserve more sincerely and exactly what interests and moves them, even if to do so they must discard most of the conventions which are commonly observed by the novelist. Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small. Any one who has read The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or, what promises to be a far more interesting work, Ulysses now appearing in the Little Review, will have hazarded some theory of this nature as to Mr Joyce's intention. On our part, with such a fragment before us, it is hazarded rather than affirmed; but whatever the intention of the whole, there can be no question but that it is of the utmost sincerity and that the result, difficult or unpleasant as we may judge it, is undeniably important. In contrast with those whom we have called materialists. Mr Joyce is spiritual; he is concerned at all costs to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain, and in order to preserve it he disregards with complete courage whatever seems to him adventitious, whether it he probability, or coherence, or any other of these signposts which for generations have served to support the imagination of a reader when called upon to imagine what he can neither touch nor see. The scene in the cemetery, for instance, with its brilliancy, its sordidity, its incoherence, its sudden lightning flashes of significance, does undoubtedly come so close to the quick of the mind that, on a first reading at any rate, it is difficult not to acclaim a masterpiece. If we want life itself, here surely we have it. Indeed, we find ourselves fumbling rather awkwardly if we try to say what else we wish, and for what reason a work of such originality yet fails to compare, for we must take high examples, with Youth or The Mayor of Castcrbridge. It fails because of the comparative poverty of the writer's mind, we might say simply and have done with it. But it is possible to press a little further and wonder whether we may not refer our sense of being in a bright yet narrow room, confined and shut in, rather than enlarged and set free, to some limitation imposed by the method as well as by the mind. Is it the method that inhibits the creative power? Is it due to the method that we feel neither jovial nor magnanimous, but centred in a self which, in spite of its tremor of susceptibility, never embraces or creates what is outside itself and beyond? Does the emphasis laid, perhaps didactically, upon indecency, contribute to the effect of something angular and isolated? Or is it merely that in any effort of such originality it is much easier, for contemporaries especially, to feel what it lacks than to name what it gives? In any case it is a mistake to stand outside examining 'methods'. Any method is right, every method is right, that expresses what we wish to express, if we are writers; that brings us closer to the novelist's intention if we are readers. This method has the merit of bringing us closer to what we were prepared to call life itself; did not the reading of Ulysses suggest how much of life is excluded or ignored, and did it not come with a shock to open Tristram Shandy or even Pendennis and be by them convinced that there are not only other aspects of life, but more important ones into the bargain.

However this may be, the problem before the novelist at present, as we suppose it to have been in the past, is to contrive means of being free to set down what he chooses. He has to have the courage to say that what interests him is no longer 'this' but 'that': out of 'that' alone must he construct his work. For the moderns 'that', the point of interest, lies very likely in the dark places of psychology. At once, therefore, the accent falls a little differently; the emphasis is upon something hitherto ignored; at once a different outline of form becomes necessary, difficult for us to grasp, incompre-hensible to our predecessors. No one but a modern, no one perhaps but a Russian, would have felt the interest of the situation which Chekhov has made into the short story which he calls 'Cusev'. Some Russian soldiers lie ill on board a ship which is taking them back to Russia. We are given a few scraps of their talk and some of their thoughts; then one of them dies and is carried away; the talk goes on among the others for a time, until Gusev himself dies, and looking 'like a carrot or a radish' is thrown overboard. The emphasis is laid upon such unexpected places that at first it seems as if there were no emphasis at all; and then, as the eyes accustom themselves to twilight and discern the shapes of things in a room, we see how complete the story is, how profound, and how truly in obedience to his vision Chekhov has chosen this, that, and the other, and placed them together to compose something new. But it is impossible to say 'this is comic', or 'that is tragic', nor are we certain, since short stories, we have been taught, should be brief and conclusive, whether this, which is vague and inconclusive, should be called a short story at all.

The most elementary remarks upon modem English fiction can hardly avoid some mention of the Russian influence, and if the Russians are mentioned one runs the risk of feeling that to write of any fiction save theirs is a waste of time. If we want understanding of the soul and heart where else shall we find it of comparable profundity? If we are sick of our own materialism the least considerable of their novelists has by right of birth a natural reverence for the human spirit. 'Learn to make yourself akin to people . . . But let this sympathy be not with the mind-for it is easy with the mind-but with the heart, with love towards them.' In every great Russian writer we seem to discern the features of a saint, if sympathy for the sufferings of others, love towards them, endeavour to reach some goal worthy of the most exacting demands of the spirit constitute saintliness. It is the saint in them which confounds us with a feeling of our own irreligious triviality, and turns so many of our famous novels to tinsel and trickery. The conclusions of the Russian mind, thus comprehensive and compassionate, are inevitably, perhaps, of the utmost sadness. More accurately indeed we might speak of the inconclusiveness of the Russian mind. It is the sense that there is no answer, that if honestly examined life presents question after question which must be left to sound on and on after the story is over in hopeless interrogation that fills us with a deep, and finally it may be with a resentful, despair. They are right perhaps; unquestionably they see further than we do and without our gross impediments of vision. But perhaps we see something that escapes them, or why should this voice of protest mix itself with our gloom? The voice of protest is the voice of another and an ancient civilization which seems to have bred in us the instinct to enjoy and fight rather than to suffer and understand. English fiction from Sterne to Meredith bears witness to our natural delight in humour and comedy, in the beauty of earth, in the activities of the intellect, and in the splendour of the body. But any deductions that we may draw from the comparison of two fictions so immeasurably far apart are futile save indeed as they flood us with a view of the infinite possibilities of the art and remind us that there is no limit to the horizon, and that nothing-no 'method', no experiment, even of the wildest-is forbidden, but only falsity and pretence. 'The proper stuff of fiction' does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss. And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.