On the Letter-bag Novel

Gil Bias or sprawling like Tristram Shandy; and other causes must be blamed i£ it does not walk or wander so elegantly as the one or sprawl so exuberantly as the other.

But there is one particular point in which I think the novel, if it does not grow merely formless, may well return to its ancient form. Novels like those of Richard-son are often hastily regarded as formless, mostly because the modern reader is often overcome by an impression that they are endless. Yet I doubt if they are really longer than the Clissold of Mr. Wells or the tremendous trilogies of Mr. Walpole. Anyhow, the Victorians left a tradition that the early Georgian volumes were very voluminous. That is perhaps because the Victorians were working up to the brief but brilliant period when stories were supposed to be brief and brilliant; as in the sharp, stylistic tales of Steven-son, or the expanded epigrams of Kipling. However that may be, romance, as Richardson began it, had the name of being at best a leisurely and at worst a laborious study. Even Macaulay, who admired or even adored Clarissa, advised his friends to throw themselves into it by beginning at the third volume, and skipping all the letters to Italians from Italians or about Italians. I am sure there are many bold and Bolshevistic novels now which would be most enjoyable if we began with the last chapter, and skipped all remarks made by Russians to Russians or about Russians. At the end as at the beginning, therefore at both extremes, there is a certain indefinable element that seems vast and dim and dizzy; something that Stevenson would have called being out of focus; or not being sufficiently sharp and short. But it is not this point, but a more particular point, that I would note touching the Richardsonian roots or origins of romance.

Everyone knows that a tale like Clarissa was told almost entirely in the form of letters. It was this that made many of the intermediate intellectual school, of direct and dramatic action, feel that this form of fiction was so very formal. It was felt to be not only stilted, but slow and sleepy; largely because the human race (in its present or recent progressive stage) was progressively forgetting how to write any letters, let alone such long letters. The boy who liked something very rapid and rattling, like Kipling or O. Henry, was also the boy who felt it an agonizing bore to write to his grandmother at Christmas. So he recoiled with horror from the huge eighteenth-century romances, regarding them as so many stacks of letters to and from other people's grandmothers. But, in fact, the boy 3yas wrong; as he sometimes is, despite the current creed, when he as-. sumes that he can teach his grandmother. The ancient novelists of the polite epoch were right; and some of the modern novelists, even of this very impolite epoch, have already begun to find it out.

The fact is that the old form of a series of letters is really an extremely good way to tell a story. It is not more conventional and constrained; it is in many ways much more unconventional and unconstrained. For the novel must either be a novel of correspondence or else a novel of conversation. And this sort of writing is really much freer than most forms of talking. It is freer for two reasons: first, that a man can talk all the time without being a bounder or a bore; and, second, that a man will confess in correspondence with one person what he would not confess in conversation with four or five persons. Also, while he is talking to them, he will not talk about them. But when he is writing a love-letter, and telling his fiancee about them, he will tell her all about them. It does not follow, however, that the lady will agree with him about them. So she will write another long letter, throwing on each person a new light from another angle or aspect; and other letters will criticize the characters from other angles or aspects. It is really remarkable how rapidly a character can thus be not only sketched but sculptured; that is, presented in the round like a real object. Whereas mere conversation in a story is rather too like conversation of the stage: there is something stagey and stiff about it, because the types are fixed, in the one attitude in which the author wants to present them or they want to present themselves.

In the witty conversational novel they are all dressed up for the footlights; in the more casual correspondence novel we get many more glimpses of them in undress, in dressing-gowns or shirt-sleeves, as seen by all sorts of accidental people at all sorts of accidental times. Therefore the old-fashioned, apparently lumbering device of the big letter-bag, with which Richardson in Clarissa created the Novel, and Scott in Redgawntlet renewed the Waverley Novels, has in fact been adopted by many fine writers of quite recent times. Mr. Maurice Baring has often used it, as a way of opening many windows upon his subject and filling the story with that white and almost colourless daylight that lies over so many of his scenes. Mr. E. V. Lucas has employed it in a lighter but equally luminous manner, in those felicitous and unclassifiable books which are a sort of happy hybrid between the essay and the novel. And it looks as if this old method of recording life by letters is likely to be applied in other departments. The detective story is supposed to demand, more than other stories, a direct attack and a dash in medias res: that is, the dagger sticking in the very middle of the millionaire.

But I recently read an extremely good detective story, told in what would be called, the slower method o£ correspondence; and it was not slower, but much more swift.

I have noted in a previous essay that modern drama, coldly contemptuous of melodrama, had solemnly banished the old fiction of the Soliloquy or the Aside; and then, equally solemnly, brought them back again, pretending they are a new futuristic technique for per-mitting people's subconsciousness to talk out loud without being heard. But the old expedient of the literary letter-bag achieves this object without either sort of oddity: without the awkward swagger of the Victorian villain, confiding to the gallery or hissing loud secrets behind his hand; and also without the much sillier swagger of the mere modernistic crank who thinks anything stark and Slavonic so long as it is incredible and crude. A man really does soliloquize in a long letter; and, since it is addressed to one person, it is really a long aside. Both in the case of the novel and of the drama, the moral is that things often renew their life by going back to their infancy.

XXIX On the Touchy Realist

NOT very long ago, men complained o£ the cynic, saying that he was hard and had no human feelings. Now they are asked rather to respect the cynic, because his feelings are so soft and sensitive. This is a curious change, but a real one, and one that has not been adequately noticed. There is a type of modern youth which is cynical not because it is thick-skinned, but because it is thin-skinned. It has exactly the same tendency to shudder at anything conventional as the Victorian spinster had to shudder at anything unconventional. Indeed, the cynical youth is in many ways very like the Victorian spinster, only not so self-controlled. There is, however, in his world of culture exactly the sarne fundamental weakness that really weakened the worst parts of the old world of convention. I mean, there is the horror of certain phrases as such, of certain allusions and associations, without any real effort to reduce them to any system recognized by the reason. The new type of sensitive is sickened by anything that he would call sentimental, just as the spinster was by anything that she would call cynical. In both cases it is a matter of