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ART. IX.-INSULAR FICTION

1. The Guarded Flame. By W. B. MAXWELL. London: Methuen & Co. 1906.

2. Prisoners. By MARY CHOLMONDELEY. London: Hutchinson & Co. 1906.

3. The Call of the Blood. By ROBERT HICHENS. London: Methuen & Co. 1906.

4. In the Days of the Comet. By H. G. WELLS. London: Macmillan & Co. 1906.

5. The Man of Property. By JOHN GALSWORTHY. London: Heinemann. 1906.

6. The Beloved Vagabond. By WILLIAM J. LOCKE. London: John Lane. 1906.

FICTION may be regarded as at once the youngest and oldest of the arts. So old, indeed, that the first true thing said that was not true sums up still the attraction offered to its every reader.

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Ye shall be as gods,' the serpent promised, 'knowing good 'from evil'; and what else does romance proffer, crying from the corner of the streets, from the publishers' offices, but this discerning exaltation, this illusion of divinity, this knowledge a little more than mortal? The novel has all the attractive interest of that one tree of the garden, except that we are now no longer forbidden to eat of its fruit. It has become a commonplace, a necessity of existence, of an existence so depressingly predicable that it desires to distract its own pervasive certainties by the constant suspension of its solicitude in apocryphal adventures. Our measure of the world has been taken, a tailor's tape has been passed about its waist. It has all been divided up among us, even its deserts and oceans, and parcelled out in little painted maps. There are no fascinating deficiencies in our modern charts where once the navigator, in his joyous ignorance, drew demigods and monsters. The world can yield to our discovery no new sensations, no incredible Eldorados, no Islands of the Blest. Save the inviolate spaces about the poles we have sampled everything, from the crawling slime of the deepest seas to the virgin snows of unconquerable mountains, and nothing remains to inspire us but the imagination. We are, indeed, where mankind has never been before, almost at the end of its terrestrial surprises, and compelled to supply the lack of them from our wits.

The result, or one at least of the consequences, may be seen in any library. While romance remained merely a decorated chronicle of what life was, men did not need much of it; but as it became an account of what life would be, as, that is, romance crept out of life and into books, the books became swollen and very many, until this art of fiction, absorbing much that was never meant for its nourishment, and shouldering aside the more delicate brood of fancy, seems determined, by hoisting all the other little winged things out of the way, to have the nest of literature to itself. And just because it is proving itself so notable a supplanter, because, like the ten men out of all the nations who are to take hold of the skirt of the Jew, art and philosophy and psychology and sociology and religion, and a dozen other of the shapes of thought, are taking hold of the skirts of fiction and saying 'We will go with you, we will wear 'your favours, and learn your ways, and come unaware upon 'your myriad lovers '-because, indeed, romance is, once again, romance no more but grim reality, the developements of fiction have an interest for us all.

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The phrase used not long ago by one who had won repute alike as a novelist and a publicist, that he turned with pleasure from his severer studies to the realities of fiction,' was no idle paradox. Fiction is becoming what poetry was once truly said to be, and what the newspaper merely pretends to be-a criticism of life. Men imagine that they open their paper in the morning to search for facts, and dip into a novel at night to escape from them; but it is the very opposite that befalls them. If they have the good fortune to discover in either that most elusive of mysteries, the thing as it is, the chances are overwhelmingly in favour of their finding it in the novel. The daily paper deals indeed with the daily fact, but deals with it in its own way. It has leanings, social, political, financial, religious, which make it not so much a seeker after fact, as a seeker after facts of a certain colour. It does not always wilfully distort or wilfully ignore; it acquires a habit of vision, and comes only to see what and how it desires. One has but to read the interpretation of any significant event by two papers of opposite persuasions to realise that honest prejudice is as competent a concealer of truth as wilful perversion. To prejudice, of course, all men are liable, but in the choice. and use of facts, the novelist is less constrained than the journalist. He desires to put things in his own way, to make life seem to support his own contention, but his mental habit, ill-advised as it may be, is less likely to distort the truth than the journalist's slop-suit of ready-made opinions, and will

VOL. CCV. NO. CCCCXIX.

admit, as the other does not, of continual amendment and modification.

If it should then be asked, having proved the novel a closer critic of life than the newspaper, what becomes of romance as a refuge from reality for all those poor souls whose lives are mean and gray; one would reply that the very reason romance is what it is for these poor souls must be because for them romance is reality. Not their sample of it, indeed, but life as it is somewhere for some one, as it might have been, but never will be for them. The boy is not thrilled by the deathless doings of his hero, or the kitchen-maid entranced by the splendid insolence of society, because such adventures seem impossible to them. No, but because these great deeds appear possible, not only to the richly gifted, but, with favouring circumstance, possible to any one, possible to them.

That is for all the secret of the power and the secret of the mischief of romance; not that it makes men bemused with the unreal, but because it makes the unreal seem merely the unattainable. It cries to the mummer that is in each man's heart, it brings forth the glorious apparel that he longs to wear, it supplies him with the sentiments of which he feels so capable.

For the greater part of every man's life, he is not himself as his neighbours know him, but the bigger, more effective being that he feels he might be. He is a masquerader from his earliest childhood, and often dies with the mask on his face. Hence arises so much that is unexpected in a man's career : the frequent failure, for instance, of his moral brakes to act as circumstance and character seem to warrant; because, forsooth, they have been applied to a bigger wheel than appears; not to the world's conception of him, but to his heroic conception of himself.

And since he lives so much with that conception, he has a permanent need of romance. In old days, when his life was of the stuff from which we now make fables, he could play with legends or dispense with them altogether. Now that every year limits his possibilities, builds walls about him where there once were hedges, he has to live more and more on the plane of pretences, or he could not live at all. He has finished with poetry, since his dwindling feathers could not keep up with the wings of Pegasus. He expects to be flying himself to-morrow, and will succeed in making a commonplace of one wonder more, of boring himself with a fresh facility, a fresh futility; but the wings of his imagination grow weaker, the flights of poesy take him too far. Heaven and hell are too remote from him, he has long since ceased to feel at home in either. The Paradise he

has lost is the world of dreams, the Paradise he would regain is some lowly corner in the garden of romance where he can play at pretending to be himself. But the garden must be near him, the pretence not too exacting. He will go, it is true, for an occasional venture into vanished ages; he will fill the bill in that theatre of his pretensions as a centurion or as a crusader; but that is only because the romantic traditions of such characters are really easier to sustain, and demand less of his imagination, than the more exactly drawn figures of his contemporaries. They seem to him hewn in the rough of human nature; but he loves them because they have the conventions of his century and the costumes of their own. In reading of them he can feel at once domestic and splendid, the combination most dear to him. Thus, wherever he may turn for it, what he seeks in fiction is not a new heaven and earth in which to wander, but a becoming and exalting illumination of the old he wants his pulse quickened to what he conceives to be its normal pitch; he asks of romance to believe it reality.

We have been speaking of the demand on the art of fiction as it is made everywhere to-day in the Aryan world: but in considering how that demand is met one must commence at once to discriminate. It is met indeed everywhere in a different manner, and measured by different requirements and different ideals, by each subdivision of the various races in Europe -Mongol, Semitic, Caucasian, and Indo-Germanic. But the difference most interesting to us is not that between each of these; but that between us and all the rest of them; the difference between insular and continental ideas, not as to conduct, but as to our attitude towards it in art, out of which has grown in half a century what one would be disposed to christen an all-British' convention in romance.

Biology could have warned us that some such deviation was to be foreseen. It is Nature's way with islands. An island is the one fitfully effectual check which she is able to oppose to the slow inexorable impulse which drives the vital energy forward in prescribed directions. For a brief while she can use the encircling sea as a temporary stay upon developement, and thus maintain, in each isolated preserve, shapes and functions already doomed by circumstance. She can even contrive in her artificial exclusions not only to evade the tendency which is compelling developement elsewhere, but in these sheltered backwaters of being to direct it into diverse and often opposite directions. And this check, curiously enough, appears not to operate only in the material world, where it receives from locality

such obvious assistance, but in the intellectual where it receives

none.

To-day, thanks to the steamboat and the telegraph, a sea border counts for little in the way of detachment, yet in the evolution of more arts than one our insularity has had a determining influence, and in none can that influence be more sharply detected or more distractingly felt than in the art of fiction. It will be felt, moreover, at this hour more than ever before, since there seems likely to be a break in that spiritual succession which has produced in England masters of romance able to resist the disintegrating influences of insularity and to offer a standard of comparison which would not be accepted at home from continental writers. Stevenson and Pater are gone, Mr. Meredith has ceased to write, Mr. Kipling is preoccupied with children, work comes from Mr. Henry James at increasing intervals, Mr. Thomas Hardy has turned from romance to transcendental drama, and for the present their successors do not seem to be forthcoming.

Promise of fresh talent there very often is: the work of younger men with an outlook of their own, and a desire to express life in the terms of their own understanding. We could place a hand on some half-dozen books in recent years all of hopeful augury; but in each case we have seen the writer succumb in his succeeding efforts to this British convention in the manufacture of fiction. The cause may, of course, have been a lack of power, and our hopes have been stimulated merely by an instance of that imitative faculty which often, by casting the tint of his temperament over the method of his models, makes a man's first efforts in an art wear a deceptive impress of originality. Still it is curious that elsewhere the promise of the younger men goes the way of exaggeration and eccentricity, wilfully accentuates itself and wages a foolish war on the formalities before finding its own appropriate expression; whereas with us it seems anxious to escape the damning label of originality, to acquire as soon as possible the correct deportment of romance, and practise this goose-step of the mode.

On this inclination it would be easy patriotically to moralise. It is part, doubtless, of the tendency which has kept us solid as a people, the passion for uniformity, the distrust of caprice. In religion indeed we permit every man to be a law unto himself; we even break each other's heads, and go heroically to the stocks, and if need be to the stake, for the right of the individual to believe what he pleases about his soul's concern. But we atone for this laxity by compelling conformity in every other direction. A man may believe what he likes, but he may

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