The way the world is going

My distinguished and, I gather from a convenient autobiography, incomparably clever junior, Lord Birkenhead, has recently been abusing me in speech and book. With the deep parental bay mingles the sharp undergraduate bark of Lord Furneaux, his promising son. It seems to be a family affair. Some answer is desirable. I do not see why I should pretend to a high and mighty line with these gentlemen and affect a disregard I do not feel. What they have to say is interesting and worth discussing.

Lord Birkenhead would be impossible in America; the American lawyer at his wickedest is still a pompous concealing sort of figure, but Lord Birkenhead has displayed a disregard of personal dignity that verges on the outrageous. He is the gamin of Lord Chancellors, the bright promise of a better age when, in the midst of robes and dignities, the man will be, if anything, rather more the man for “a’ that.” No public figure in America would dare to bend and unbend like our Lord Birkenhead.

This biography I speak of (“Lord Birkenhead,” by “Ephesian”), since it contains precise details of its hero’s early earnings, anecdotes of incidents at which “no reporters were present,” and so forth, must either have been written from his direct inspiration or by some intensely familiar spirit, and it exhibits as smart a specimen of the “Card” type as the world can ever honestly wish to see. No end of a fellow he is, and we are told with immense detail and appreciation how he called Judge Willis to his face in his own court a “garrulous old county court judge,” and snapped back at a witness who had mentioned the village idiot, “I see—a relation.” Much more of such brilliance. Among the cherished testimonials—they began early, for the wet-nurse came near to foretelling the Woolsack and school governors said, “Watch him!”—I find myself on record as declaring that he is “the greatest man in England.” If I did I was unconscious at the time or talking of somebody else. But manifestly there are lots of other people who did say it. Mr. Asquith, “in the presence of Mr. Balfour,” came near it, and it will be easy to substitute a better name for mine in a later edition of this revealing book.

Lord Birkenhead, one learns, is not only a great success as a lawyer and politician, but a very important figure in literature, and by way of proof I have before me a copy of his “Law, Life and Letters,” two handsome volumes, as dignified anyhow as paper and print can make them. They are mostly what a journalist would call articles, but I suppose for a writer of Lord Birkenhead’s standing we should substitute “essays.” One or two I judge to be after-dinner speeches rather too faithfully reported. They are done in a prose of the kind that in the last century was known as Telegraphese and carried to its highest levels by Mr. George Augustus Sala, a fine fabric of ornate but familiar phrases which produces an effect of strength and dignity and makes little demand for close attention upon the reader. Occasionally, indeed, one finds an arresting sentence. For example, in discussing the murder of a girl of sixteen, he writes: “The mother of the murdered child stated that, although living with her at the time of death, the girl had been brought up by another person whom her husband on his deathbed had asked to undertake the guardianship of her child.” That pulls up the reader for a moment and makes him think. But for the most part the stuff flows without an interruption, easily and as one might expect, like the procession of a judge on circuit with the street well cleared ahead.

Much of his matter concerns the greater figures of our time, “The Truth about Margot Asquith” or “Milestones of My Life,” for example. Other of the articles deal with the practice of the law in its spicier aspects, and others again with political issues. I have heard about Lord Birkenhead from his youth up as a great controversialist, and I refresh my mind with a brilliance—“brilliant” is his peculiar adjective, and I make no apology for its frequent repetition—that middle age has scarcely dimmed. To a protest that the Bolsheviks are not all robbers and assassins, for example, he retorts in big print that has all the effect of a deafening shout, “They are.” Simply that. How warmly every one who agrees with him will agree with him on that point! In a crowded court or a public meeting I have no doubt that shout would have been decisive; only a still more energetic man with very stout lungs indeed would have had a chance against it. But the written word does not triumph and pass; it remains for further consideration. This is just one of several passages where I find the habits of the successful speaker carrying the less habituated writer beyond the recognized discretions of the writer’s art, of which he is an amateur, brilliant, of course, but an amateur. It is not for me to question the truth about the lady he calls Margot Asquith, or to comment upon the rough fun of the law courts over this or that wretched misdemeanour, but I have a certain claim to discuss a literary matter. He embarks upon criticism and lays down the law about the novel, and I find it pretty bad law. When this glittering torrent of prose comes into my own quarter and even with a certain clamour invades, so to speak, my individual courtyard, I feel that any failure to put in an appearance might be misconstrued.

Lord Birkenhead, brilliant advocate that he is, confuses the issue a little by personal invective, but it is easy to disentangle it again. The issue is whether it is permissible and desirable, in a novel of contemporary life, to name and let one’s characters discuss, as I have done in “The World of William Clissold” and “Meanwhile,” prominent living people. The irrelevant attack consists in the assumption that this was done deliberately and meanly as a whet to promote the sales of the books. He represents me as “persuading” my publisher to call attention to those personalities, out of which I “make my living.” This is evidently a naïve transference of Lord Birkenhead’s own relations with his publisher and his public to my case, and he will no doubt learn with surprise that I have practically nothing to do with the methods of the firm to whom my agents, Messrs. A. P. Watt & Son, nowadays entrust the issue of my books in Great Britain, and that in the case of the two novels in dispute my only intervention was a protest at the stress that was being put upon the matter in question. But I will not dwell upon that. The question of real names and real people in a book is of much more general interest, and since it affects the whole future of the novel, it is worth some further discussion.

The tradition of the English novel is, I admit, dead against me in this matter. The English novel as we knew it some fifty years ago was excessively pseudonymous. This extended not only to persons but places. The lovers would meet in “the little village of X.” Hardy wove a fabric of fictitious lives across Wessex, and even such respectable places as Dorchester and Winchester take on an alias, and add the excitement of identification to the natural interest of the story. I have never been able to share in that excitement. I do not see why a town exactly like Dorchester, intended to be recognized as Dorchester, and identified with Dorchester, should not be called Dorchester forthwith and have done with it, just as I do not see why Mr. Arnold Bennett, when he writes about the Five Towns, does not call Burslem, Burslem, and Newcastle, Newcastle. The older novelists so far as place names went were more downright. At all times and in all novels whatever London has remained London and Paris Paris. I recall no instance of London being masked as Georgetown, let us say, the great capital of Bingland, or Paris being thinly veiled as Seineville. Dickens varied in his practice, but his disposition was to be frank about his topography. Mr. Tulkinghorn was killed fairly and squarely in an identifiable house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and Took’s Court is hardly so much disguised as misspelt Cook’s Court.

To-day the scene of the English and American novel becomes realistic in everything but the actual foreground. There we have the parlour of No. 7, Blank Street, or the chancel of the parish church of Dashington, but the trains run fair and square into Liverpool Street or Paddington, and the eloping pair get off the afternoon boat at Boulogne and catch the train to Paris in strict accordance with the time-table. If the heroine sticks her head out of the carriage at Grosvenor Road and says “Good-bye, dirty old London,” no Lord Birkenhead hectors the author for “making a living” by an illegitimate and unjust criticism (thrust into the mouth of a character who is a mere mask for himself) of the cleanest, etc., etc. The common sense of the reading and critical public has long ago accepted the necessity of putting “real places” into fiction under their proper names and of admitting comment on and discussion of them. Why should there be any objection to the same thing being done with the cardinal figures in the contemporary social landscape?

To answer that is to realize very extensive changes that are in progress in the common texture of life to-day. In the days of Jane Austen it was possible to write a novel, giving the mental life of decent folk in England, with not a glance at political, social, or economic changes. Life and its processes had such an air of established stability upon her countryside that it was possible for her to ignore the battle of Waterloo and disregard the infinitely remote social distresses of manufacturing England. Life went on inside a frame of public events so remote that no connection was apprehended between the two. If the squire babbled politics, what he said mattered no more than the odd things said by his lady when she had a fever. And even in the great novels of the Dickens-Thackeray-George Eliot period, in Flaubert, in the chief novels of pre-revolutionary Russia, the march of large events was so remote that it could be still treated as the stars or China or the structure of the atom are still treated to-day, as irrelevant altogether. Even wars could be kept “off stage” in novels in English, at any rate until 1914. When they come in, as the war in North Italy comes into some of Meredith’s novels, they come in externally, as scenery, as an uncontrollable outer event with which the action of the novel has no connection. The common flow of human life—and therefore the normal novel—was going on right up to the opening decade of the twentieth century, with slight and negligible reactions to formal government or conspicuous personalities. To-day that is no longer true.

To-day, just as the world is growing smaller, as people say, because communications grow more rapid, so also public and collective life is growing intenser and penetrating the private individual life more and more. We ordinary people are in closer touch with the direction of affairs, and it with us. The personalities concerned are not only more clearly and fully known, but they react more upon us. And the drive of change is far more perceptible. Institutions and standards that seemed to be established altogether and completely unchallengeable in the novel of fifty years ago are now challenged and changing; and the discussion of such changes, which was once unthinkable for ordinary people, is now a determining factor in their lives. People like Lord Birkenhead complain that in my novels, instead of picturing life, I discuss it. I certainly have it discussed. It is impossible to picture contemporary life without discussion. People who are not discussing now are not alive. No doubt it is hard to report people thinking in character as well as acting in character, and I admit I do it at times atrociously, but it has to be done. I plead the pioneer’s right to be clumsy. Better be clumsy than shirk the way we have to go.

I happen to have lived as a novelist through the dawning realization of this change in the relations of private and public events, and to have felt my way before I saw it clearly towards the new methods this change has made necessary. I began, when I found that I wanted to convey the social scenery and put in some of its more characteristic peaks and prominences by the old-established method of the more or less modified real person under a false name. I have found that method out. It is an utterly rotten method. It had been practised by the masters before me; compare, for example, the Marquis of Steyne in “Vanity Fair.” Let me give quite frankly a particular case of my own. My chief character in “The New Machiavelli” was an ambitious young man who came into Parliament with the big Liberal wave in the opening decade of this century. Such a young man was bound to get into some relations with the Fabian Society and to be in touch with and meet and get points of view from Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb. They all did. The influence of that house in Grosvenor Road was immense. If that phase was to be left out the story would get so out of drawing as to be unreal. Well, I hold now that I ought to have put these two people into my novel by name, just as I put in the Speaker or Palace Yard. They were just as much a part of the scene. Then I should have treated them discreetly and properly. People in my book might have abused them, or people might have praised them; it would have been fair and square. But, under the influence of the old tradition, I put in some people in the place of the Webbs, rather like them, but not exactly them. These phantoms who were like, but yet not identified with my friends, got worked into the story. One was amused to invent things about them, and one did so because one had released oneself from direct statement. They are not the Webbs, but only Webby people. I succumbed to the temptation of making it rather a lark. But every one recognized the “originals,” so what was the good of the sham concealment? Every one said, naturally enough, that I had made a malicious caricature. (In fiction all caricature is called “malicious,” which is where Law gets the laugh of us.) Except Mr. and Mrs. Webb, who took it very cheerfully and charmingly and refused to make a quarrel of it to please their ardent friends. And there was a Balfouresque Mr. Evesham too in that novel. And these quasi-Webbs and this quasi-Balfour set all the hunters of “originals” agog to hunt identifications up and down the wretched book. Heavens! the bore that has been to me! For years I could not write a book without having half the characters identified each with a dozen different “originals.” And any figures left over at last, bless their hearts! were me.

The roman à clé is not the way to handle the political novel. But if we are not to put in prominent people under false names, we must put them in under their own names or destroy the reality of the human scenery altogether. There is nothing left for the novel nowadays but crime and adultery, if public life, economic forces, and the highly individualized personalities directing them are to be taboo. That is how the novel has gone in France. I do not believe it is the way it is going in England.

In brief, the difference between the modern novel and the novel of the last century is this, that then the drive of political and mercantile events and the acts of their directing personalities scarcely showed above the horizon of the ordinary life, and now they do. My refined contemporaries who explain to interviewers that there is nothing real in their novels are not really keeping close to simple humanity; they are merely keeping on the old course while humanity turns into the new.

So it is that when my Lord Birkenhead comes home weary to his fireside after calling some eminent fellow-lawyer an old fool, or deriding the Labour Party, or insulting Russia, or otherwise bearing the heavy burthen of imperial responsibilities, he no longer finds his former pleasure in my work. He goes through “Clissold” and finds himself mentioned, indeed, but not as “Ephesian” would do. He reads “Meanwhile” and finds himself not mentioned at all. The way I deal with Mr. Baldwin makes him indignant. I cease to be the solace of his exhausted mind. He gives me up. He casts me aside and reads other novelists. He thinks so little about me nowadays that he breaks out about it in speeches at literary dinners and drags it into these physically imposing volumes. I have become so unmentionable upon his domestic hearth that even the shrill, small voice of Lord Furneaux echoes that magnificent disregard.

I hate not to be loved. I was happier in the old days when, on every occasion of encountering Lord Birkenhead, he recited the same obvious compliments. But I do not think the development of the modern novel will be retarded very much by his aversion.

11 December, 1927.