CHAPTER XX

IN WHICH A NUMBER OF CRAFTSMEN DISCUSS THEIR PRACTICES, AND MR. LACEY DEFINES THE THINGS THAT MATTER

I took Lacey to the novelists' evening at Dabney's. "We'll just sit in a corner," I said, "and listen through the smoke. Unless, of course, you want to join in: I am quite certain I shall not."

"I shall join in if anyone is talking rubbish, of course," said Lacey quite simply, "just to put him right."

How jolly to be as sure of oneself as that!

"Well," I said, "I shall be silent. In fact, I have to be; because when I argue I am always converted, and that is so humiliating; or, at any rate, I recognize the truth in the other side's position. That is one disability; and another is that I am never sure of my spoken words. Give me a pen and whatever I say I will stand by; but when I talk I get led away."

"We must each go our way," said Lacey, "but, personally, when I find a man talking nonsense I sling him up."

Dabney's room was in full buzz when we arrived. Among the big guns present were Devon, the urbane reformer, with his warm heart, passionate sense of justice, his universal pity and fastidious taste; Speyde, the uncompromising analyst of the body and mind in revolt, and the friend of freedom; Leigh, the sentimental humorist or humorous sentimentalist of middle-class London; and Sankville, who writes provincial epics with a Dutch brush, but with the expansive view and detached tolerance of an arbiter throned on a star.

These were the best known; but there were others: younger men feeling their way towards fiction, some independent, some still wondering whom it would be wisest to imitate. Twenty years ago there was no doubt, since all the manuscript babies, when at last they were born, had a way of resembling Stevenson; but to-day there are new influences. Sankville, himself, for example, is one, and a powerful one. Everyone will soon be describing provincial birthplaces with minute fidelity--and nothing else! Speyde's manner and method it is less easy to catch: he is intensely individual; he has had no predecessors and will leave no school of writers. His influence is rather upon life than upon his own craft. Devon, again, is idiosyncratic. The appeal of his work is so largely dependent upon his point of view; and points of view are the only safe thing left: imitators have to be wary in stealing them. It is when manner and matter are both straightforward that the imitators have their most profitable time. Look, for example, at _The Prisoner of Zenda_, what a progeny has that romance!

Novel-writing has become a habit. Men used to write novels to amuse their fellow-creatures--to take tired people to the islands of the blest, as one of our finest living hands has put it--but to-day novel-writing has become a habit, resorted to for many different reasons. Some men write novels because they have got into a mess with a woman and want to see how it looks on paper, or to explain their real motives, or to find a way out. Other novels are really intimate letters intended for one reader only. Others--and these are largely those written by women--create the kind of life which the writer would have lived had she ever had the chance: exercises in what may be called the Consolation School of Fiction. But the greatest number are written because someone else wrote better, and the imitative faculty is so strong in us.

Of course there is only one thing for a novelist to be, and that is himself. But one has to attain a certain age to know that. To try to write in anyone else's manner is fatal. To novelists who have not the courage or the conceit to be themselves, but who try to infuse a popular element into their work, I would give this advice, "Do what you can as well as you can, and let the others do what you can't, without envying them." And when they have succeeded I would go to them again and say, "Never have the faintest fear of a copyist."

Devon and Sankville not only were novelists but successful dramatists too; but Speyde had had no luck with the stage.

"How you can do it, I can't think," he said. "It's a new language, a new world. Everything that one has learnt has to be forgotten. The things that should be whispered have to be shouted. At least, that is what the stage-managers and producers say, and since you are in their hands you have to believe it. But no more of it for me; I have done with limelight. Of course it's all right for Devon, because he's a homilist. Anyone with a lesson to teach can disregard conventions or accept them."

"That's all very well," said Devon, "but I must decline to be isolated as the one dramatist who has a moral to enforce. All the best dramatists have."

"Of course," said Sankville, "every Englishman is a Puritan at heart, in so far as he prefers that everyone else should be virtuous. Hence when he writes a play it naturally makes for virtue. The study of our neighbour's conduct is the national profession. It also forms the material of every play and every novel."

"And every newspaper," said Leigh.

"Of course--every newspaper, and every weekly review, doesn't it, Dabney?" Sankville replied.

"I suppose so," Dabney said; "but, at any rate, newspaper men don't pretend to do more than record results. They make no claim, as you novelists and dramatists do, to be able to read the heart and discern the springs of action and all the rest of it."

"Well, and can't we?" Sankville asked.

"Of course you can't," said Dabney. "It was at once one of the kindest and cruellest things that Heaven ever did to deny to human beings all capacity for really knowing anything about other human beings. You fellows can deceive us by your art into the illusion that you know; but that's all. Nobody knows. There's only one way, I take it, to write a psychological novel, and that is to proceed from yourself outwards. Done with courage and fidelity, that might give us one character that approximated to life; but you fellows crowd a hundred characters into each book. Someone once said, as a joke, that the way to write a novel was to make all the characters behave exactly as the author would, because we're all exactly alike, except that you yourself are a shade more imaginative and sensitive than anybody else. That was intended ironically, but I don't see any fault in it as a piece of practical advice. It has been successfully enough followed. But the result is not good enough--except as saleable stuff calculated to provide you with a motor-car, or a rock-garden, or whatever else you want.

"It is because no one can really know others and can only guess at himself in imaginary situations," Dabney continued, "that I think all this recurring talk about absolute freedom for the novelist is such rot. Speyde here is always claiming for the novelist an unfettered hand. Everything, he says, must be told. We must have full-lengths; not mere heads or kit-cats any more. For too long had novelists suffered under the restrictions placed upon them by Mrs. Grundy and the circulating libraries. No story of a man's or woman's life is worth telling unless it tells all; and so on. But, in my capacity as a provocative host, let me say I don't give a row of pins for it."

"Nor I," Lacey burst in. "If that's what the new novel is to be I shall return to my Dickens with the greater pleasure."

Speyde was indignant. "We are talking about novels," he said: "documents. Not panoramas. Dickens doesn't count here. Thackeray might have counted if he'd had a chance. You remember his complaint that since Fielding no one had been allowed to draw a whole man."

"Thackeray did very well without the dispensation," said Dabney. "As a matter of fact, I doubt if he could have gone further than he did; I doubt if anyone can go further than he does go: we all do our damnedest. I have always rather suspected that remark of Thackeray's: it was one of those hasty things which great men say and forget and some little twopenny-halfpenny listener remembers and sets down for ever. Given any imagination in the reader, he knows as much about Mr. Arthur Pendennis as there is any need for him to know, and surely you will admit that a novel is the work of the reader as well as the author."

"I quite agree," said Sankville. "A novelist's duty is to do his work within the limits imposed upon him. The English don't like certain things blurted out in their stories. Very well, then, the English novelist had got to say these things between the lines. Thackeray, who was about equally interested in cause and effect, did it most admirably; Meredith, who was rather more interested in cause than effect, did it better; Dickens, who was interested only in effect, left it alone. Nowadays there is a kind of competition among novelists as to which shall be boldest."

"Yes," said Dabney, "but the bore of it is, to those of us who know anything of life, that their boldness is such childish business. There is only one thing that they want to say, and we know exactly what it is. When Speyde talks about full lengths that's all he means. Nothing else. You would all save lots of time--if you will allow a mere journalist and frivolous novel-reader to make a suggestion--if you put at the beginning of your books a warning to the effect that the hero, heroine, and villain who are to be met in the pages that follow are human beings with the ordinary emotions. That, after all, is the only thing you want us to understand."

"Reverting to that matter of saying the more critically emotional or physical thing between the lines," said the quiet voice of Devon, "it might be laid down as an axiom--might it not?--that the success of a novelist in thus conveying these impressions without printing them is largely the proof of his excellence? It seems to me that the photographic reproduction of life which Speyde asks for requires totally different gifts from those of the novelist. Something of the statistician; much of the morbid anatomist."

"There's another thing," said Dabney, "that makes this realistic stuff a mistake, and that is that the English don't want the truth about anything. They never tell it and don't want it told to them. An appearance of truth--the ghost of truth--is all you need offer them."

But Speyde wouldn't have it. "No," he said. "English fiction has got to be freed, and the only way to do it is for the novelist to tell the whole truth, extenuating and suppressing nothing."

"Granting that for a moment," said Leigh, "it does not even then follow--with all the libraries clamouring for this kind of minute revelation--that the novel will come; because before there can be a novel there must be a novelist, and the novelist required here is one of stupendous genius."

"Quite right," said Dabney, "and you can bet that when the stupendous genius comes he will do exactly as he likes, just as, in fact, Shakespeare did, and Thackeray and Dickens and Meredith did. It is the little people who lay down and obey the rules; the big ones, who use the vintage inks, go their own gait. What England wants is not franker novels but a greater novelist. A measure of frankness is the heritage of us all, although we have a way of neglecting it, but greatness comes capriciously, and you may whistle for it in vain."

"Meanwhile," said Leigh, "let's go on writing just as we always do; because, in default of greatness, that pays best. That is to say," he said, "I will go on with my London fairy tales; and Speyde will go on with his exposures of the folly of the marriage laws; and Devon will go on with his thoughtful gentlemen and ladies in perplexity; and Sankville will go on throwing details in the eyes of the public. Oh, you minutiæ men, I don't believe in you a bit," he continued; "you have us all the time. We don't know where we are. We look for an impulsive human action, and tumble over the coal-scuttle."

Sankville laughed. "You can't visualize people until you've got their surroundings," he said.

"And then there's not time," replied Leigh. "Life is short, you know. Art can be too long."

"And what do you think of all this talk?" Lacey asked me.

"It's interesting," I said, "but it's only talk."

"That's just it," he replied. "They're always at it. They go on as if novels mattered."

"What does matter?" I asked.

"There you have me," he said, "but not novels, anyway. Paying your way matters. Not letting people down matters. Keeping a hold on yourself matters. But books, bless your heart, books! Books don't help you to real life, except possibly as an anodyne to take away the thoughts from facts--from Carey Street and things like that."

"Quite right," said Dabney, who had joined us; "and I would like to make every public man publish his truthful list of the things that matter. H.G. Wells, who one feels would seek the truth even in the cannon's mouth, once wrote a book called _First and Last Things_, a kind of spiritual stock-taking. That was some time ago, and his mind is so sensitive to progress and so receptive of ideas, drawing them from the air as Franklin's key drew electricity from the thunder-cloud, that he may by now have changed his opinions in many ways. None the less it was his creed at the time, expressed with all his mastery of unambiguous prose and his desire not to be misunderstood. It was his catalogue of the things that mattered. I remember thinking as I read it what an interesting and valuable thing it would be if some such confession--some such diploma thesis of unburdenment--was demanded of every statesman and author. Such an exaction would, at any rate, help to stem the Scotch competition in public life."