Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 109.djvu/15

 parison is like breakfasting in the open air on a summer morning. Nothing is irrelevant if the writer’s mood be happy; and the tapping of the thrush on the garden-path or the petal of apple-blossom that floats down into my coffee, is as irrelevant as the egg I open or the bread and butter I bite. And all sorts of things that inevitably mar the tense illusion which is the aim of the short story, the introduction, for example, of the author’s personality, any comment that seems to admit that after all fiction is fiction, a change in manner between part and part, burlesque, parody, invective, all such things are not necessarily wrong in the novel. Of course all these things may fail in their effect, they may jar, hinder, irritate, and all are difficult to do well; but there is no artistic merit in evading a difficulty any more than it is a merit in a hunter to refuse even the lowest of fences.

Nearly all the novels that have, by the lapse of time, reached an assured position of recognized greatness, are not only saturated in the personality of the author, but have in addition quite unaffected personal outbreaks. The least successful instance, the one that is made the text against all such first-personal interventions, is of course Thackeray. But I think the trouble with Thackeray is, not that he makes first-personal interventions, but that he does so with a curious touch of dishonesty. I quite agree with the late Mrs. Craigie that there was something profoundly vulgar about Thackeray. It is a sham-thoughtful, sham-gentleman, sham man-of-the-world pose that he assumes; it is an aggressive, conscious, challenging person astride before a fire, and a little distended by dinner and a sense of social and literary precedences, who uses the first person in Thackeray’s novels. It is n’t the real Thackeray; it is n’t a frank man who looks you in the eyes and bares his soul and demands your sympathy. That is a criticism of Thackeray, but it is n’t a condemnation of intervention.

I admit that for a novelist to come in person in this way before his readers involves grave risks; but when it is done without affectations, starkly as a man comes in out of the darkness to tell of perplexing things without, as, for instance, Mr. Joseph Conrad does for all practical purposes in his Lord Jim, then it gives a sort of depth, a sort of subjective reality, that no such cold, almost affectedly ironical detachment as that which distinguishes the work of Mr. John Galsworthy, for example, can ever attain. And in some cases the whole art and delight of a novel may lie in the author’s personal interventions: let such novels as ', and the same writer’s ', bear witness.

Now all this time I have been hacking away at certain hampering and limiting beliefs about the novel, letting it loose as it were in form and purpose. I have still to say just what I think the novel is; and where, if anywhere, its boundary line ought to be drawn. It is by no means an easy task to define the novel. It is not a thing premeditated. It is a thing that has grown up into modern life, and taken upon itself uses and produced results that could not have been foreseen by its originators.

Few of the important things in the collective life of man started out to be what they are. Consider, for example, all the unexpected aesthetic values, the inspiration and variety of emotional result which arise out of the cross-shaped plan of the Gothic cathedral, and the undesigned delight and wonder of white marble that has ensued, as I have been told, through the aging and whitening of the realistically colored statuary of the Greeks and Romans.