The Novelist's Dilemma

A GOOD many years ago I put into the mouth of a certain character of mine the following definition of an artist: It is the man who has the power of doing up his soul in whitey-brown paper parcels and selling them at three halfpence apiece.’ He said it with a touch of cynicism, a touch of bitterness; but I am not quite so sure whether he was not simply right. Something of the artist’s soul must go to the making of the created thing; and as the artist, like any other workingman, has to earn his living, he sells the created thing for what it will fetch in the open market. The rates of such soul-stuff vary according to many circumstances. The stuff may be poor, or it may be rich. Poor stuff may have such peculiar quality as to make a wide appeal to the spiritually adolescent; on the other hand, rich stuff may be so transcendental as to command the rapture only of the adept. But always, the artist, in launching a new work on the world, does offer for sale a part of that within him which we are bound to call his soul.

I hold that there is only one Art: that the picture, the poem, the sonata, the statue, the cathedral, are expressions of the same spiritual ideals through different media. And therefore I claim for the novelist the title of artist, namely, that of the man who offers his soul for sale. Therefore, henceforward I will deal with the novelist alone; and what I say about the novelist applies equally to his brother, the dramatist.

If the novelist offers for sale work that is inspired by all the soul that is in him, he fully earns his reward, whatever it may be. If he stifles spiritual impulses, produces craftsman’s mechanical work in which the soul has no part, he is committing the unforgivable sin — the sin against the Holy Spirit of Art, whereby alone he has a right to live. His temporary earnings are dishonest. I say temporary, for his sin is bound to find him out. With his soul in it, his book is a thing of life. His soul not in it, his book is an inanimate simulacrum, and his judges, his paymasters, the public, are not such fools that they cannot appreciate the difference between the quick and the dead.

Now, novelists and dramatists, on both sides of the Atlantic, are confronted with one of the greatest problems that have ever dismayed an artist. Wherever we turn for the disposal of our wares, — those things we have wrought in agony of spirit, — we are met with the barring hands of publishers, editors, managers, cinema people, holding up the placard: ‘No War.’ They are the authorities between us and the public. From the nature of things, we cannot make our appeal to the public except through their agency. They claim to have their finger on the public pulse. Heaven forbid that I should quarrel with any of them; for they have their living to earn just like ourselves

— and so far as my long experience goes, they earn it as honorably and as conscientiously as men can. They say, however, rightly or wrongly, that the public is tired of war; that the public wishes to forget the war; in effect, that, if we wish to continue to earn our living, we must do so on the amazing postulate that there has been no war.

Possibly the reading public is satiated with pictures of actual warfare, with the blood and mud and misery of old, unhappy far-off things and battles of a couple of years ago — although the success of that fine picture of the war, Peter Jackson, Cigar Merchant, seems to prove a continuance of popular interest. Possibly résumés of European war-conditions may weary because of their reiterated insistence on things known. I can understand any reader pishing and pshawing over a description of England on August 2, 1914, or of London on Armistice night. But between an avoidance of these overdescribed actualities and a negation of the fact of the war lies a great gulf.

The war has been. It has convulsed human society from dregs to froth. It has had its incalculable influences on the soul of mankind. It has, incidentally, entered into the soul of the artist. The man of business, the scientist, the mechanic, although living in an equal state of spiritual unrest, have no occasion for expressing it in the pursuance of their daily avocations. But this same expression is the very mission of the novelist. His soul, his stock in trade, is all a-quiver with these last six years of upheaval. There are thousands and thousands of manifestations of human character revealed by the war. There is the whole of the social universe in the remaking—in Europe and in America. We cannot write a novel of 1920 without reference to what the men and the women did in the war. To put it crudely, if the hero did not fight, he was either a cripple or a conscientious objector. If he did fight, the war had an influence on his character, which it is the business of the novelist to describe; for no man or woman on this earth has passed unaffected through the ordeal.

The novelist has, therefore, to chose one of three courses.

(1) To beg the question and write costume-romance — 1713, 1813, 1913, all equally remote.

(2) To pretend there has been no war, and to do up sham bits of soul in whitey-brown paper and sell them, and thereby earn his own self-contempt and that of his brother man.

(3) To offer his inmost soul for sale, — as heretofore, — and starve.

I put the proposition before the intermediaries between us and the public, in England and America, whom I have above enumerated. Also before the public, whose keenness on having its pulse felt so tenderly I do not altogether take for granted.