Pater to Forster, 1873-1924

Ruth Robbins

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781350317574
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire anglaise

Was the late nineteenth century 'Victorian' or 'modern'? Why did the New Woman disappear from literary history? Where did T. S. Eliot's poetics of the city come from? In this essential guide, Ruth Robbins explores an era often named an 'age of transition' which exists uneasily between the apparent certainties of the Victorians and the advent of a Modernist aesthetics of instability. Robbins considers some of the central literary categories and themes of the period (decadence, realism, nostalgia, New Woman writing, degeneration, imperialism and early modernism) in writings by both major and 'minor' writers, thereby creating a complex picture of transitions, continuities and breaks with the past. By examining this tumultuous era as an age in its own right, Pater to Forster, 1873-1924 offers the reader a rather different history of the late Victorians and Modernists, and retells that history from a new perspective.

1The Persistence of Realism

Most people in this world seem to live ‘in character’; they have a beginning, a middle and an end, and the three are congruous with one another and true to the rules of their type. You can speak of them as being this sort of people or that. They are … no more (and no less) than ‘character actors’. They have a class, they have a place, they know what is becoming in them and what is due to them. (Wells 1978, 9, my emphasis)

She would not say of any one in the world now that they were this or that. She felt very young, at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking in … She knew nothing; no language, no history … and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that. (Woolf 1992b, 8–9, my emphasis)

In the juxtaposition of the above quotations from H. G. Wells and Virginia Woolf there is an interesting point of comparison as well as one of contrast. George Ponderevo, speaker of the Wells passage, believes in the possibility of simple characterization in the first lines of the novel, though he goes on to except himself from the rule of pinning a person down in a phrase. His experience has been different from the common run of folk, and so his character and his points of view are more valuable, at least in his opinion. Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway who focalizes the second quotation is apparently more generous: she would not say of any one now that they could be summed up in a single phrase; she would not say it of Peter, and she would not say of it herself. Later in the novel, however, she would quite precisely sum up in simple phrases the characters she does not like – Miss Kilman (whose very name is a summing up of misanthropy and whose appearance is an indictment of her character), Sir William Bradshaw (‘Richard agreed with her … “didn’t like his taste, didn’t like his smell” ’ [Woolf 1992b, 201]), and Lady Bruton (also brutally defined by a name). And even Peter Walsh is caricatured in his repeated gesture of playing with his penknife, a gesture that speaks volumes for post-Freudian readers about violence and sexuality barely repressed by a veneer of civilization.

Character is often called the lifeblood of fiction. In ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ indeed, Woolf quotes Arnold Bennett to the effect that ‘The foundation of good fiction is character creating and nothing else’ (Bennett qtd in Woolf 1992a, 69). And as I have argued elsewhere, character is a term that has to do with writing and representation at least as much as with the lived experiences of real people. Character is stamped through the individual like lettering in a stick of rock. The word ‘character’ proposes a human being who is stable and consistent, and who is therefore knowable. The word is used to describe figures in literature precisely because it implies that written personalities are ‘easily read’, just as character in its meaning of the letters of the alphabet are also to be easily read (Robbins 1996, 112). The conventions for reading character inherited from the great tradition of Victorian fiction were also easily understood. You could judge character by results. Or, in a more subtle formulation from Henry James: ‘What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?’ (James 1962, 34). Characters are known by their deeds, and can be judged thereby. Or, again, characters can be known by their surroundings, their clothing, their tastes, their socio-economic positions, and other such external things. For William James, brother of novelist Henry and pre-Freudian psychologist, it was common sense that there was continuity between the external objects of a man’s life and the internal life he led (James I 1950, 291–2). And this view was commonplace in fiction too, at least until the Modernists began to question the materialist basis of human existence. The questioning, however, did not entirely do away with the fact that psychology and sociology are related disciplines and their effects are felt in related ways, whether by real people or by characters in fiction.

What I want to describe here is the persistence of the conventions and proprieties of realism from the Victorian age to the Edwardian one and beyond. In a realist world view, certain propositions are taken for granted as the basis of the fictional universe they are used to recreate – and by extension, they claim to recreate the fictional universe in the image of the real universe. At its most basic, realism involves the following claims:

1The world is a knowable place, rationally constructed along Newtonian lines of cause and effect; consequently the world – whether fictional or real – is susceptible to totalizing explanations that can be provided through the narrative process.

2Narrative therefore produces patterns (as we saw in the Introduction with Forster’s concepts of ‘pattern’ and ‘rhythm’) which enable the reader to understand the world as ‘designed’ and give us the capacity to make sense of a world which might otherwise appear purely random or contingent. Reality may be complicated, but it is not beyond explanation.

3A narrative that makes sense of the world makes it possible for readers to judge the world. In other words, the sense of patterning gives a sense of perspective, a feeling of secure ground from which we are able to form logical opinions.

4Characters within realist fictions are, like the world they inhabit, ‘knowable’. They are formed by diverse influences, including – in some versions – heredity, environment and education or upbringing, as well as whatever innate temperament or personality they have at birth. They behave therefore in broadly predictable ways. Their personalities determine what they will do in given circumstances; and by extension, circumstances will determine what a given character is able to do, or imagine doing, as in the quotation from Henry James (James 1962, 34).

5The social world matters intensely to characters in realist fictions as it does to real people. The place occupied by a character in the world is of the greatest importance in formulating what that character is and what s/he can become. Birth, education, and experience make character what it is; and since most people also believe that these things are true in real life too, continuity between reality and fiction is imaginatively constructed by realist fiction. This continuity can result in empathetic identification with characters within the fictional world: the reader is asked to consider what s/he would do in the same circumstances, for example. To this extent, although character represents individuality, it must not be extraordinarily eccentric because it also is heavily invested with the limitations of the type. If characters do not behave typically, readers can learn nothing from their representation.

6As is proper to a mode that really came to fruition in the mid-nineteenth century, the notion of clear patterning (or seeing the world clearly) is mirrored in the realist text’s form (it tells about the world ‘in a clear way’). Narrative is transparent and draws little attention to itself, requiring readers to forget that they are ‘only reading a story’.

These propositions involve the reader in a complex negotiation with the text. On the one hand, judgement is demanded by a mode that sees the world clearly and sees it whole; on the other, empathy and identification might well cloud clear vision. It is that complexity of response that anti-realist criticism perhaps dismisses. Much has been written about realism – and the pages of late-nineteenth-century journals are filled with commentaries, both negative and positive about its aesthetic value. I am not using the term here in quite the way the Victorians and Edwardians might have done because I want to use it as a neutrally descriptive term that tells us something about fiction written under its aegis, not as a term of value judgement, which was the inescapable focus of much nineteenth-century commentary. I want to reclaim the word as a useful term that properly describes some of the important writings of the transitional phase between the Victorians and the Modernists.

In The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence, Raymond Williams suggests that 1895 is a key date for British literature. Williams focuses on Thomas Hardy’s publication in that year of Jude the Obscure to a torrent of critical abuse, to the extent that Hardy gave up writing fiction in favour of poetry, and thus an era of Victorian fiction came to an end. But whilst Williams sees that there is a cut-off point in 1895, he also argues that there was a central continuity from Hardy to Lawrence, a continuity, that is, between the broadly realist tradition in which Hardy wrote, and the qualified Modernist aesthetics of Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915). Conventional literary history, however, often implies that between Hardy’s last fiction and Lawrence’s first major novel, Sons and Lovers (1913), ‘there is in effect … a missing generation’ (Williams 1984, 119). There are of course names that belong to that generation; it is the period of ‘James and Conrad; the early novels of Forster; and then of course that composite figure H. G. A. J. Wells–Bennett–Galsworthy’ (120). Williams’s point is that the privileged position given to the writers broadly understood as Modernist writers – Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Mansfield, and with heavy qualifications, Lawrence and Forster – by the mainstream of the critical academy, has tended to obliterate the other broadly realist tradition of fiction writing in the period. He identifies the central opposition between the two traditions as an emphasis on ‘ “individual” or “psychological” fiction on the one hand and “social” or “sociological” fiction on the other’ (119–20).

What this chapter seeks to suggest is that this opposition is based on a misunderstanding of how the writers in the less privileged position in that binary opposition – the realists – set out to compose their fiction. Where Woolf was sure that the future of fiction lay in excavating ‘the dark places of psychology’, and that psychology was largely an internal and individual matter, Wells–Bennett–Galsworthy amongst others understood psychology as being at least in part externally constructed, by circumstance and material conditions as much as by essence or innate personality. While Virginia Woolf had said that ‘in or about December 1910 human character changed’ (Woolf 1992a, 70), nevertheless in the same essay she takes for granted that one would naturally have servants. Change was only visible if one was privileged. Unlike Woolf, H. G. Wells was only too aware that character was constituted by material and cultural circumstances. His mother had been a housekeeper on a country estate, and Wells knew that the life of the servant class was not all sweetness and light even after the turn of the century, making great play in Kipps (1905) of the fact that even modern houses were not built for the convenience of those who did the hard labour of running them. Kipps’s wife Ann, who has been in service, announces as they hunt for their first home that they must not have a house with a basement kitchen: ‘[A basement] is a downstairs where there’s not ’arf enough light and everything has got to be carried – up and down, up and down, all day – coals and everything. And [our house has] got to ’ave a water-tap and sink and things upstairs. You’d ’ardly believe, Artie, if you ’adn’t been in service, ’ow cruel and silly some ’ouses are built’ (Wells 1993a, 246). Wells’s narrator treats Kipps and his wife with amused patronage, commenting that the home they seek exists only in ‘dreamland or 1975 A.D.’ (254). Nonetheless, he is making an important comment about the ways in which material existence significantly determines the kind of spiritual and emotional life it is possible to have. The limitations of Kipps are not simply temperamental or personal. They are a function of the limited life that has been available to him. Now, whilst I am sure that Woolf would have treated her servants well, the calm assumption that her readers have servants implies that she did not really see the life she is so blasé about, as H. G. Wells, whatever his limitations, did.

Woolf’s major fictions are all resolutely set in the very comfortable world of the upper middle classes; her characters are people who have choices because they are not involved in hard material struggles for bare subsistence. Compare and contrast the world view of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) with that of Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago (1896) looks like the kind of examination question that will never be set. Apart from the obviously galvanizing effects of the First World War for Woolf’s novel, however, these two texts came to being in wholly different worlds – and the main substance of the differences between them is not historical as such, but is to do with the sociological arenas in which they are each set: the Ramsays are privileged; the Perrotts are not. In William James’s terms, understanding personality through ownership, the Ramsays have characters that match their possessions, and the Perrotts do not. This is not to say that only brute existence is possible in the Jago. The child Dicky Perrott is capable of affection and love, nursing his baby sister to sleep in an early chapter of the novel (Morrison 1996, 15). He is willing to be a ‘good’ boy, in the right circumstances. But the right circumstances never arise. He cannot keep an honest job; he is surrounded by criminality and violence and the only moral lesson he can take from his surroundings is that the biggest villains get the biggest rewards: ‘Straight people’s fools, I reckon,’ he tells his mother. ‘Kiddo Cook says that, an’ ’e’s as wide as Broad Street. W’en I grow up I’m goin’ to git toffs’ clo’es an’ be in the ’igh mob. They does big clicks’ (16).¹ His only possible ambition is to join the aristocracy of crime (the high mob) and to participate in lucrative theft (big clicks). Dicky’s story is about a struggle against overwhelming odds, a battle with material circumstances that he cannot win. In the world of the Jago, a fictionalized version of the worst parts of the East End, casual violence is a way of life, and of death, and Dicky dies its victim, despite the potential he displays for a more fully human existence.

Casual violence also kills Andrew Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, of course. His death is announced parenthetically: ‘[A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous]’ (Woolf 1992c, 145). But the point about Andrew Ramsay’s death is that it is a long way outside his ordinary experience, rather than part of it, whereas Dicky’s death, stabbed in a Jago fight, following hard on the heels of his father’s hanging for murder, expresses a whole way of life rather than an exceptional aberration in it. The fact that Dicky is scarcely educated and fundamentally inarticulate does not mean that he has no potential or that his psychological make-up is insignificant, merely that it is clearly not the most significant thing about him.

Morrison of course deliberately sets out to invoke pathos for political ends. His writing has a palpable design on the reader, as he comments in the Preface he wrote to the third edition in 1897:

[My critics] claim that if I write of the Jago I should do so ‘even weeping’ … The cant of the charge stares all too plainly from the face of it. It is not that these good people wish me to write ‘even weeping’; for how do they know whether I weep or not? No; their wish is, not that I shall weep, but that I shall do their weeping for them … that I shall make public parade of sympathy on their behalf, so that they may keep their own sympathy for themselves, and win comfort from their belief that they are eased of their just responsibility by vicarious snivelling. (Morrison 1996, 7)

His purpose, in other words, is to insist that ‘just responsibility’ for the conditions of the Jago is everyone’s concern and their reform is every-one’s business. A Child of the Jago, like a number of the fictions produced in the late nineteenth century dealing with the Condition of England in the 1880s and 1890s,² is designed as a call to action. If Dicky and Josh provoke sympathy, they should also provoke the will to do something about the abysmal conditions which produced their wasted lives. This is a profoundly ‘Victorian’ view of the purpose of fiction – that it should teach us, or exhort us, to lead better lives. It is also one of the key motivations of realist writing. This view of the purpose of fiction was roundly rejected as a basis for literature by writers like Virginia Woolf. Commenting on D. H. Lawrence’s Letters in her diary, she wrote, ‘Art is being rid of all preaching things’ (Woolf 1997, 326), and she regarded any form of didacticism as aesthetic failure. This, though, is a world view that depends on being in a particular comfort zone; what is wrong with Woolf’s position is that it argues for a very narrow way of seeing, a way of seeing that refuses to follow through the implications of the fact that the world at large has very specific effects on the individual psyche. As Edwin Reardon, the failed novelist of George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891) puts it in conversation with his wife:

The difference … between a man with money and the man without is simply this: the one thinks, ‘How shall I use my life?’ and the other, ‘How shall I keep myself alive?’ A physiologist ought to be able to discover some curious distinction between the brain of a person who has never given a moment’s thought to the means of subsistence, and that of one who has never known a day free from such cares. (Gissing 1985, 232)

One way of thinking about divisions in serious fiction in the forty years around the turn of the twentieth century is in terms of this distinction: there is a kind of psychology available to the ‘haves’ that is not available to the ‘have-nots’. With relatively few exceptions, we could categorize almost all the writers of this period according to whether they present characters who are concerned with subsistence as opposed to those who are concerned with Spiritual Existence or Life Itself (the capitals are part of the rhetoric).

To put it another way, there is a clear class bias in the insistence that psychological fiction involving the excavation of deep motivations ...