The Facts of Fiction (32 page)

The human mind has lately been dissected in the laboratories of Vienna and the novelist has increasingly become the more or less popular exponent of the new theories. This, of course, does not mean that he is necessarily more wise or more penetrating than his predecessors. Wisdom and understanding can never be the product of a college course. It means merely that the modern novelist uses a new language to explain himself. And inasmuch as the new language is more exact and better suited to its purpose, his novel, if he is naturally a man of discernment, may excel in its revelation of the soul the novels of those writers who had to blunder blindly along with only the traditional vocabulary to help them.

But it is a mistake to imagine this or that novelist saying to himself: “I will be modern.” Even if he does he is as likely to write like Mr. Evelyn Waugh as he is to write like Mr. James Joyce. And Mr. H. M. Tomlinson in writing
All Our Yesterdays,
which is a brilliant essay in atmospheres, is quite as much experimental as Conrad or as Mr. Faulkner, though his apparatus is not so pretentious as the latter's.

The present spate of experimental novels should not be crowned simply because they are experimental any more than they should be ridiculed simply because they look as funny as a foreigner. Experiment is-primarily the affair of the experimentalist. And if he is honest his object is to write not differently but merely better.

The reader may be wise to suspend judgment until the first novelty of method has worn off before he attempts
to say whether Mr. Bloom is finally as satisfying to the intelligence as Mr. Pickwick. And the writer should instinctively suspect a medium which is so easy that his mind can float and does not have to swim to keep in movement.

In short, the Golden Rule for readers would seem to be: “Beware of the contemporary writer: he is foolhardy,” and for writers: “ Beware of the contemporary reader: he is a fool.”

If these Rules are observed, Literature a hundred years hence will be richer, even though we meanwhile may all have had to hang ourselves with vexation.

THE END

T
o
S.H.C.

This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

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ISBN: 9781448201068
eISBN: 9781448202386

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