19 The Modern Novel

Human nature, says Chesterton, is born of the pain of a woman; (it) earns its living and desires the other sex and dies. What the novel deals with is what women have to deal with; the differentiations, the twists and turns of this eternal river. H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy and Joseph Conrads are some of the eminent masters of modern fiction; to this list of great names may be added those of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce, Sheila Kaye-Smith and Rose Macaulay, Forster, Mackenzie, Priestley, Walpole and Wodehouse. Indeed, the modern novelists name is Legion. They all study human nature; its twists and backtwists, its thousand little subtle variations that escape the notice of a superficial observer. H. G. Wells, like Jules Verne, transports himself to distant worlds and droops his gaze on human nature and civilisation in the manner of an angel or a superman in quest of a more correct perspective of earth-bound realities. Bennett brings to bear on the story of men and women in the Five Towns in Staffordshire the methods of naturalism which he has learnt from his French masters like Maupassant and Balzac. Galsworthy in his Forsyte Saga describe in an epic vein the evolution and decay of the Victorian ideal of acquisitiveness. And Joseph Conrad reports his experience of the sea, as in Lord Jim, in terms of the picturesque but with the accents of a psychologist. The spirit of the modern novel of the post-Victorian period is, we think, better understood if it is placed alongside of the types of fiction that sprang up in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the 18th century, Fielding and Jane Austen founded between themselves the novel of manners: Richardson in his Pamela practised sentimental fiction; Smollett and Sterne wrote tales of adventure and Horace Walpole and Mrs. Radcliff introduced into their stories ghosts and spooks and hobgoblins and sent thrills of horror into the hearts of their readers. These were the four main types of novel, besides the fifth or the moral fable represented by Johnsons Rasselas. When we read at school Defoes Robinson Crusoe for the first time, we little knew that Defoe carried forward in that story the picaresque tradition to which the novels of Smollett and Sterne such as Roderick Random and A Sentimental Journey belonged. Even so when we followed the fortunes of Pickwick in our less historical moods, we little detected that Dickens was applying to his observation of London life and manners the method of the 19th century would be fair without a reference to the psychological novel that shaped in the hands of George Eliot, Meredith and Hardy. The Ordeal of Richard Feveral by Meredith or The Return of the Native by Hardy is concerned with the adventures not of the tourist but of the soul at grips with the realities of life. If George Eliot is a rationalist in fiction, Meredith is an optimist as Hardy is a pessimist.

Modern fiction is sometimes called New Fiction on the analogy of New Morality as opposed to Old Morality. A novel of H. G. Wells or D. H. Lawrence is fundamentally different from that of any of the leaders of fiction in the last two centuries as postwar morality is different ;rom the Victorian standards of conduct. First, the range of modern fiction is very wide: it embraces all spheres of life, from the thrills of the Stock Exchange to the observations from the orthodox standard of moralitySecondly, the older novelists used to represent men and women as they actually lived in the world. In their anxiety to become as vivid and lifelike as possible, they often imposed upon their parsonages a particular framework of events and tuation and worked them out in obedience to the demands of characterisation. But the modern method in fiction is just the other way about. As Priestly puts it, the present day novelists do not try to tell us what happened to torn and Mabel, but how life appeared to torn or Mabel for a season. In other words, while the modern novelists develops the largest perspective of life possible to the human eye, he delights in painting not the whole of life but a slice cX it, or life as it appears to a particular individual or group of individuals. The present age is an age of interrogation, according to Ward; according to others, it is an age of challenge. There are still others who would describe it as an age of trans-valuation of life. Whatever the phrase in which the spirit of the present era may be packed, the present day novelists owe no allegiance to any authority and, in their characterisation of men and things, they explore new hitherto untrodden nooks of the world, raising new problems and making new approaches to the abiding questions of nature and human nature. H. G. Wells in his essay on The Contemporary Novel makes, as it were, a declaration of right on behalf of the novelists of his generation. This manifesto of the New Fiction may be analysed into three fundamental principles: first, the canvas of a modern novel must have many colours and be streaked with more than one line, secondly, its form should be elastic enough to accommodate business and finance and politics and precedence and pretentiousness and decorum and undecorum, and thirdly, it should be confessional in nature and not preachy in manner. The twentieth-century into which we have by now lived far enough is an age of fiction as the age of Elizabeth was an age of drama. One can well imagine the power which a novel that fulfils the conditions of modern fiction must exercise on society. Galsworthys The Forsyte Saga to which we have already referred, is one of the most powerful novels of the present generation. Soames Forsyte, the hero, is a man of property; he is the type and symbol of the late Victorian lust for acquisition. To him the whole world is full of things that have to be possessed. Even marriage is to him neither ? sacrament nor a contract but an act of possession. Soames marrieu Irene; but she is disgusted with her husbands outlook on life. She remains to her possessive, Victorian husband an insoluble mystery. Truly, The Forsyte Saga is an onslaught on the Victorian citadel c, security and self-sufficiency in which Tennyson once upon a time sang his lyrics with peace of mind and, therefore, with much artistry. The effect of H. G. Wells Tono-Burigay\s devastating. TonoBungay is the name of a patent, medicine which is advertised as the panacea for all the ills flesh is heirto. The hero, by means of sheer stunt and claptrap, succeeds in amassing enormous wealth, Roundeyed, button-nosed Aunt Susan, as she sails into a world of affluence and casts disdainful glances at the world, is a fine target of Wells sallies of humour. No modern novel has exposed with greater effect the depth to which misuse of science can descend and the ease and certainty with which charlatans thrive on a travesty of knowledge and trafficking in popular superstitions. Ward calls it a discussion novel.

But the phrase seems to us ugly. It is, in his A History of Mr. Polly in which he attacks with reformist zeal the contemporary system of school education. Surrealism is a post-war movement in art to express the subconscious activities of the mind in terms of Freudian psychology of presenting images, without order or sequence, as in a dream. Most of the novels of D. H. Lawrence are studies in Surrealism. Creative energy that expresses itself perpetually through sex is the controlling motif of Lawrences fiction. Although he considerably underrates the ideal aspects of the attraction of opposite sexes, there is no novelist at the present day who seeks to rapture with greater zeal, through narratives of the subconscious lives of men and women, some of the primeval passion that Adam and Eve felt in the Garden of Eden. The sophisticated civilised woman is mans greatest .foe; she constantly endeavours to bring her mate under her thumb and feminise him. This is the teaching of his novels like Aarons Rod. Again, who does not feel the power of Sinclair Lewis novels like Babbitt and Main StreeP Frotn the title of the first, we have derived the word babbittery; it means the low moral and social tone | that is prevalent among average businessmen. Sinclair Lewis, the > greatest of American novelist lashes it in Babbittwith as much scon as he does the low-born conventional ideals of the creatures o fashion in Main Street Modern fiction touches life at countless. points. Even momentous questions of international politicc >ueh as

whether peace is preferable to war are discussed by the present day novelists like Remarque as in All Quiet on the Western Front or Barbusse as in Under Fire. War, says Barbusse, is frightful and unnatural weariness, water up to the belly, mud and dung and infamous filth. Such war-novels as fulfil the condition of literature bring home to us the grim aspects of war more vividly than a|l the pious resolutions passed at the League of Nations or Disarmament Conferences. Truly, the pen is mightier than the sword; and the modern novel is, to our mind, more powerful than any other instrument of literary expression.