A LITERARY GLOVE-FIGHT.
WE mentioned last week that a debate was to be held on Thursday, November 25th, between Mr. Cl. K. Chester- ton and Mr. Hugh Walpole on the resolution that "The Modern Novel is a Sign of Social Decay." Though, as Mr. Goose pointed out, they did not enlighten us very much on the subject of the modern novel, they gave their auditors an extremely amusing hour and a-half. In the first place, neither Mr. Chesterton nor Mr. Walpole discussed the modern 'level at all ; an occasional reference to the works of Mr. Conrad was as far as they got. Mr. H. G. Wells, whom Mr. Chesterton selected as whipping-boy, is a law to himself, and has not got very much of a following among the younger fiction-writers. Perhaps we all came in the hopes of hearing discussed such writers as Mr. Male, Miss Sheila Kaye- Smith, Mr. Douglas Goldring, Mr. Brett Young, Miss Richardson, and Mrs. Virginia Wolfe. Mr. Hugh Walpole's own novels could obviously not be included, but not one of these writers was mentioned, even by implication.
Apparently, the antagonists had found great difficulty in framing any resolution upon which they did not hold identical views, and Mr. Chesterton was a little half-hearted in his &nun. eiations. We should have thought that the less he really agreed with the views he was to hold for the afternoon the more Mr. Chesterton would have been amused to find ingenious arguments with which to "add verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative." But here probably came in the man of letters jealous for the reputation of his contemporaries. As a novelist he refused to foul his own nest. The axiom on which he based his chief argument was, of course, a perfectly sound one—namely, that art is an act of isolation. We have no verbatim report of his words, but this is the sense of his argument. If you want to paint a landscape, you have to fix your eyes on one particular object. You cannot let them rove round the horizon, all of which you could see if you chose. You have, moreover, to choose one particular time of day and sort of light in which to represent your subject ; if there be shadows or high lights, you have to choose whether they shall be morning or evening ones. It is, of course, this act of selection that usually stumps the child novelist. The present writer well remembers the enormous paraphernalia of his own early story- telling and writing, in which all the characters had to be bathed, dressed, and given their breakfasts every day as the story went along. After all this had been described, the narrator generally had no breath or time left for the plot. Mr. Chesterton instanced the impossibility of putting many of the events which played. a leading part in human lives into the compass of a play or a lyric. Ho gave as example a long, hard day's work.' Modern novelists, Mr. Chesterton affirmed, are forgetting this primary condition of
their art. They suffer from a kind of aesthetic megalomania ; they want to put everything, the whole horizon, into their novels; and this impatience with the demarcations which any sort of Clarity demands is, Mr. Chesterton affirmed, a sign of breaking-down, of crumbling and of decadence. Mr. Walpole was down upon this immediately, flourishing Clarissa Harlowe and The Pickwick Papers in the face of Mr. Chesterton. Tristram Shandy might have been added to the collection. Was ever anything more formless or more beguiling ? No present-day writer would dare to play such tricks with his readers. It was then that we thought we were to hear the defence of Miss Richard- son and of Mr. Goldring, but it was then that Mr. HenryJames and Mr. Conrad were substituted, which was, of course, to beg the question. For what could obviously be more subtle than their sense of form ? It is indisputable. Besides, they both belong in manner, if not in matter, to the Victorian age. Yes, said Mr. Chesterton, replying to Mr. Walpole's gibe about an earlier formlessness ; it is true enough about The Pickwick Papers, and yet I can imagine some things that we should be quite certain not to find in The Pickwick Papers, and could we say the same thing of a novel by Mr. Wells—take Joan and Peter, for instance ? Although The Pickwick Papers may have wild, loose, extravagant form, it really has form. This can be proved by the greatness of the reader's surprise were he to find a description of sunrise over the sea out of one of Mr. Conrad's books, or a dissertation on proportional representation thrust into the middle of the description of the election at Eatanswill. Surely this delightful idea shows Mr. Chesterton at his best; there is no one so good at opening vistas of conjecture.
What a glorious motion this is, this testing of two books by a process of grafting or budding ! It is something like the game that was unpopular during the French Revolution of nicknaming people by moans of a double appellation ; for example, Cromwell- Grandison for Lafayette. Surely Mr. Max Beerbohm or perhaps Mr. Chesterton himself ought to give us a few examples in this style. A Disraeli-Hardy novel, Sybit the Obscure, for instance, or Barchester Towers—brightened with The Castle of Otranto; Miss Richardson's Tunnel, mingled with her illustrious name- sake's Pamela—Pointed Pamela ; a Sea-Story, half by Captain 3larryat and half by Mr. Conrad ; The Midshipman of the Narcis- sus, or a Romance by Mr. Henry James and the author of Tarzan of the Apes—Tarzan and the Golden Bowl. Mr. Walpole cited Thackeray to bear him out when he said it was not the novelists' fault if they had not formerly written on every subject under the sun. Thackeray had complained often enough of the short compass within which he had to make his compositions and the fewness of the stops 'Aria he might pull out. The present time was perhaps, he went on, one of transition, with a tendency towards something which would be rather unlike the novels to which we were accustomed. It was the commonest error in the arts to mistake immaturity for old age. Perhaps we were at the moment almost too much obsessed with form. Books had been written on the form of the novel, and further books combating these books, and alas ! yet more books collating the various combats of the commentators. The old writers were free to "nap and amble and yawn and look " as they passed along the highways of life. So many themes were worn out now, the standard was in many ways a much higher one, but at least the novelists were free now to treat every aspect of life, and there was nothing—even to Mr. Chesterton's "hard day's work "- which could not be appropriately and, if the writer was skilful enough, successfully put into a novel.
Mr. Chesterton pounced on Mr. Walpole's use of " freedom " in two different senses. Mr. Walpole had said that the modem novelist was at least " free " to treat any topic. and had then contrasted with this the " freedom " of the tieldeenthesentury novelists who had an untrodden field of fiction before them. The fact was that neither Mr. Walpole nor Le know what " freedom " was. Mr. Walpole interjected: I don't think we know what a novel is." Amid general amusement, Mr. Chesterton heartily agreed. Mr. Edmund Gorse, in his summing-up—a finished piece of oratory which, unlike the speeches of the two contestants, cannot be rendered in a summary—said that he had hoped for much more improving speeches. He wanted to hear from Mr. Chesterton that reading modern novels would be likely to make young ladles disobey their parents, and to hear Mr. Walpole defend art for art's sake." Instead of awful revelations and the lashing Of the vices of society, we had had a very amusing discussion of technique. It was a great pity that a reference to the methods used in The Dark, Forest and The Secret City had been omitted, and a great tribute to Mr. Walpole's art was the sense of incom- pleteness the omission of these two books had left with tho audience.
Mr. Chesterton, in his remarks on vagueness, seems to have forgotten his own delightful Napoleon of Notting Hill, but then perhaps Napoleon of Notting Hill is not a novel, with which supposition we come, as do all arguments on aesthetics, to the perfection of circularity—Feste's "As the old hermit of Prague, that never saw pen and ink, very wittily said to a niece of King Gorbodue,.' That that is, is.'"
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