THE terms, Romance and Realism, have been used of late years very largely as a means of escape from this business of the creation of character. The purely romantic novel may now be said to be, in England at any rate, absolutely dead. Mr Frank Swinnerton, in his study of Robert Louis Stevenson, said: “Stevenson, reviving the never-very-prosperous romance of England, created a school which has brought romance to be the sweepings of an old costume-chest;... if romance is to be conventional in a double sense, if it spring not from a personal vision of life, but is only a tedious virtuosity, a pretence, a conscious toy, romance as an art is dead. The art was jaded when Reade finished his vociferous carpet-beating; but it was not dead. And if it is dead, Stevenson killed it!”
We may differ very considerably from Mr Swinnerton with regard to his estimate of Stevenson’s present and future literary value without denying that the date of the publication of St Ives was also the date of the death of the purely romantic novel.
But, surely, here, as Mr Swinnerton himself infers, the term “Romantic” is used in the limited and truncated idea that has formed, lately the popular idea of Romance. In exactly the same way the term “Realism” has, recently, been most foolishly and uncritically handicapped. Romance, in its modern use, covers everything that is removed from reality: “I like romances,” we hear the modern reader say, “because they take me away from real life, which I desire to forget.” In the same way Realism is defined by its enemies as a photographic enumeration of unimportant facts by an observant pessimist. “I like realism,” admirers of a certain order of novel exclaim, “because it is so like life. It tells me just what I myself see every day—I know where I am.”
Nevertheless, impatient though we may be of these utterly false ideas of Romance and Realism, a definition of those terms that will satisfy everyone is almost impossible. I cannot hope to achieve so exclusive an ambition—I can only say that to myself Realism is the study of life with all the rational faculties of observation, reason and reminiscence—Romance is the study of life with the faculties of imagination. I do not mean that Realism may not be emotional, poetic, even lyrical, but it is based always upon truth perceived and recorded—-it is the essence ol observation. In the same way Romance may be, indeed must be, accurate and defined in its own world, but its spirit is the spirit of imagination, working often upon observation and sometimes simply upon inspiration. It is, at any rate, understood here that the word Romance does not, for a moment, imply a necessary divorce from reality, nor does Realism imply a detailed and dusty preference for morbid and unagreeable subjects. It is possible for Romance to be as honestly and clearly perceptive as Realism, but it is not so easy for it to be so because imagination is more difficult of discipline than observation. It is possible for Realism to be as eloquent and potential as Romance, although it cannot so easily achieve eloquence because of its fear of deserting truth. Moreover, with regard to the influence of foreign literature upon the English novel, it may be suggested that the influence of the French novel, which was at its strongest between the years of 1885 and 1895, was towards Realism, and that the influence of the Russian novel, which has certainly been very strongly marked in England during the last years, is all towards Romantic-Realism. If we wished to know exactly what is meant by Romantic-Realism, such a novel as The Brothers Karamazov, such a play as The Cherry Orchard are there before us, as the best possible examples. We might say, in a word, that Karamazov has, in the England of 1915, taken the place that was occupied, in 1890, by Madame Bovary....
II
It is Joseph Conrad whose influence is chiefly responsible for this development in the English novel. Just as, in the early nineties, Mr Henry James and Mr Rudyard Kipling, the one potential, the other kinetic, influenced, beyond all contemporary novelists, the minds of their younger generation, so to-day, twenty-five years later, do Mr Joseph Conrad and Mr H. G. Wells, the one potential, the other kinetic, hold that same position.
Joseph Conrad, from the very first, influenced though he was by the French novel, showed that Realism alone was not enough for him. That is to say that, in presenting the case of Almayer, it was not enough for him merely to state as truthfully as possible the facts. Those facts, sordid as they are, make the story of Almayer’s degradation sufficiently realistic, when it is merely recorded and perceived by any observer. But upon these recorded facts Conrad’s imagination, without for a moment deserting the truth, worked, beautifying, ennobling it, giving it pity and terror, above all putting it mto relation with the whole universe, the whole history of the cycle of life and death.
As I have said, the Romantic novel, in its simplest form, was used, very often, by writers who wished to escape from the business of the creation of character. It had not been used for that purpose by Sir Walter Scott, who was, indeed, the first English Romantic-Realist, but it was so used by his successors, who found a little optimism, a little adventure, a little colour and a little tradition go a long way towards covering the required ground.
Conrad had, from the first, a poet’s—that is to say, a romantic—mind, and his determination to use that romance realistically was simply his determination to justify the full play of his romantic mind in the eyes of all honest men. In that intention he has absolutely succeeded; he has not abated one jot of his romance—Nostromo, Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness are amongst the most romantic things in all our literature—but the last charge that any critic can make against him is falsification, whether of facts, of inference or of consequences.
The whole history of his development has for its key-stone this determination to save his romance by his reality, to extend his reality by his romance. He found in English fiction little that could assist him in this development; the Russian novelists were to supply him with his clue. This whole question of Russian influence is difficult to define, but that Conrad has been influenced by TurgÉniev a little and by Dostoievsky very considerably, cannot be denied. Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov are romantic realism at the most astonishing heights that this development of the novel is ever likely to attain. We will never see again heroes of the Prince Myshkin, Dmitri Karamazov, Nicolas Stavrogin build, men so real to us that no change of time or place, age or sickness can take them from us, men so beautifully lit with the romantic passion of Dostoievsky’s love of humanity that they seem to warm the whole world, as we know it, with the fire of their charity. That power of creating figures typical as well as individual has been denied to Conrad. Captain Anthony, Nostromo, Jim do not belong to the whole world, nor do they escape the limitations and confinements that their presentation as “cases” involves on them. Moreover, Conrad does not love humanity. He feels pity, tenderness, admiration, but love, except for certain of his sea heroes, never, and even with his sea heroes it is love built on his scorn of the land. Dostoievsky scorned no one and nothing; as relentless in his pursuit of the truth as Stendhal or Flaubert, he found humanity, as he investigated it, beautiful because of its humanity—Conrad finds humanity pitiable because of its humanity.
Nevertheless he has been influenced by the Russian writer continuously and sometimes obviously. In at least one novel, Under Western Eyes, the influence has led to imitation. For that reason, perhaps, that novel is the least vital of all his books, and we feel as though Dostoievsky had given him Razumov to see what he could make of him, and had remained too overwhelmingly curious an onlooker to allow independent creation. What, however, Conrad has in common with the creator of Raskolnikov is his thrilling pursuit of the lives, the hearts, the minutest details of his characters. Conrad alone of all English novelists shares this zest with the great Russian. Dostoievsky found his romance in his love of his fellow-beings, Conrad finds his in his love of beauty, his poet’s cry for colour, but their realism they find together in the hearts of men—and they find it not as Flaubert, that they make of it a perfect work of art, not as TurgÉniev, that they may extract from it a flower of poignant beauty, not as Tolstoi, that they may, from it, found a gospel—simply they pursue their quest because the breathless interest of the pursuit is stronger than they. They have, both of them, created characters simply because characters demanded to be created. We feel that Emma Bovary was dragged, painfully, arduously, against all the strength of her determination, out of the shades where she was lurking. Myshkin, the Karamazovs, and, in their own degree, Nostromo, Almayer, M’Whirr, demanded that they should be flung upon the page.
Instead of seizing upon Romance as a means of avoiding character, he has triumphantly forced it to aid him in the creation of the lives that, through him, demand existence. This may be said to be the great thing that Conrad has done for the English novel—he has brought the zest of creation back into it; the French novelists used life to perfect their art—the Russian novelists used art to liberate their passion for life. That at this moment in Russia the novel has lost that zest, that the work of Kouprin, Artzybashev, Sologub, Merejkovsky, Andreiev, shows exhaustion and sterility means nothing; the stream will soon ran full again. Meanwhile we, in England, know once more what it is to feel, in the novel, the power behind the novelist, to be ourselves in the grip of a force that is not afraid of romance nor ashamed of realism, that cares for life as life and not as a means of proving the necessity for form, the danger of too many adjectives, the virtues of the divorce laws or the paradise of free love.
III
Finally, what will be the effect of the work of Joseph Conrad upon the English novel of the future? Does this Romantic-Realism that he has provided for us show any signs of influencing that future? I think that it does. In the work of all of the more interesting younger English novelists—in the work of Mr E. M. Forster, Mr D. H. Lawrence, Mr J. D. Beresford, Mr W. L. George, Mr Frank Swinnerton, Air Gilbert Gannan, Miss Viola Meynell, Mr Brett Young—this influence is to be detected. Even with such avowed realists as Mr Beresford, Mr George and Mr Swinnerton the realism is of a nature very different from the realism of even ten years ago, as can be seen at once by comparing so recent a novel as Mr Swinnerton’s On the Staircase with Mr Arnold Bennett’s Sacred and Profane Love, or Mr Galsworthy’s Man of Property—and Mr E. M. Forster is a romantic-realist of most curious originality, whose Longest Journey and Howard’s End may possibly provide the historian of English literature with dates as important as the publication of Almayer’s Folly in 1895. The answer to this question does not properly belong to this essay.
It is, at any rate, certain that neither the old romance nor the old realism can return. We have been shown in Nostromo something that has the colour of Treasure Island and the reality of New Grub Street. If, on the one hand, the pessimists lament that the English novel is dead, that everything that can be done has been done, there is, surely, on the other hand, some justification for the optimists who believe that at few periods in English literature has the novel shown more signs of a thrilling and original future.
For signs of the possible development of Conrad himselt one may glance for a moment at his last novel, Victory.
The conclusion of Chance and the last volume of short stories had shown that there was some danger lest romance should divorce him, ultimately, from reality. Victory, splendid tale though it is, does not entirely reassure us. The theme of the book is the pursuit of almost helpless uprightness and innocence by almost helpless evil and malignancy; that is to say that the strength and virtue of Heyst and Lena are as elemental and independent of human will and effort as the villainy and slime of Mr Jones and Ricardo. Conrad has here then returned to his old early demonstration that nature is too strong for man and I feel as though, in this book, he had intended the whole affair to be blown, finally, sky-high by some natural volcanic eruption. He prepares for that eruption and when, for some reason or another, that elemental catastrophe is prevented he consoles himself by strewing the beach of his island with the battered corpses of his characters. It is in such a wanton conclusion, following as it does immediately upon the finest, strongest and most beautiful thing in the whole of Conrad—the last conversation between Heyst and Lena—that we see this above-mentioned divorce from reality. We see it again in the more fantastic characteristics of Mr Jones and Ricardo, in the presence of the Orang Outang, and in other smaller and less important effects. At the same time his realism, when he pleases, as in the arrival of the boat of the thirst maddened trio on the island beach, is as magnificent in its austerity and truth as ever it was.
Will he allow his imagination to carry him wildly into fantasy and incredibility? He has not, during these last years, exerted the discipline and restraint that were once his law.
Nevertheless, at the last, when one looks back over twenty years, from the Almayer’s Folly of 1895 to the Victory of 1915, one realises that it was, for the English novel, no mean nor insignificant fortune that brought the author of those books to our shores to give a fresh impetus to the progress of our literature and to enrich our lives with a new world of character and high adventure.
