Aspects of the Novel quotes

We need a vantage post, for the novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous—no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah.

It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature⁠—irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp.

I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them.

Now, provincialism does not signify in a writer, and may indeed be the chief source of his strength: only a prig or a fool would complain that Defoe is cockneyfied or Thomas Hardy countrified.

But provincialism in a critic is a serious fault.

A critic has no right to the narrowness which is the frequent prerogative of the creative artist. He has to have a wide outlook or he has not anything at all.

Now, provincialism does not signify in a writer, and may indeed be the chief source of his strength: only a prig or a fool would complain that Defoe is cockneyfied or Thomas Hardy countrified. But provincialism in a critic is a serious fault.

A critic has no right to the narrowness which is the frequent prerogative of the creative artist.

He has to have a wide outlook or he has not anything at all.

They do not, as they sit there, think “I live under Queen Victoria, I under Anne, I carry on the tradition of Trollope, I am reacting against Aldous Huxley.” The fact that their pens are in their hands is far more vivid to them.

They are half mesmerized, their sorrows and joys are pouring out through the ink, they are approximated by the act of creation, and when Professor Oliver Elton says, as he does, that “after 1847 the novel of passion was never to be the same again,” none of them understand what he means.

That is to be our vision of them—an imperfect vision, but it is suited to our powers, it will preserve us from a serious danger, the danger of pseudo-scholarship.

That is to be our vision of them—an imperfect vision, but it is suited to our powers, it will preserve us from a serious danger, the danger of pseudo-scholarship.

Genuine scholarship is one of the highest successes which our race can achieve.

No one is more triumphant than the man who chooses a worthy subject and masters all its facts and the leading facts of the subjects neighbouring. He can then do what he likes.

And whether he be cynical or naïf, he is not to be blamed. As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take the examination system seriously.

If another ladder to employment was contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one be a penny the stupider.

It is when he comes to criticism—to a job like the present—that he can be so pernicious, because he follows the method of a true scholar without having his equipment. He classes books before he has understood or read them; that is his first crime.

The pseudo-scholar often does well in examination (real scholars are not much good), and even when he fails he appreciates their innate majesty. They are gateways to employment, they have power to ban and bless.

A paper on King Lear may lead somewhere, unlike the rather far-fetched play of the same name.

It may be a stepping-stone to the Local Government Board. He does not often put it to himself openly and say “That’s the use of knowing things, they help you to get on.”

Novelists are geniuses. There we are; now let us classify them. Which he does. Everything he says may be accurate but all is useless because he is moving round books instead of through them, he either has not read them or cannot read them properly.

Books have to be read (worse luck, for it takes a long time); it is the only way of discovering what they contain.

A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the west. The reader must sit down alone and struggle with the writer, and this the pseudo-scholar will not do.

Books have to be read (worse luck, for it takes a long time); it is the only way of discovering what they contain.

A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the west.

The reader must sit down alone and struggle with the writer, and this the pseudo-scholar will not do.

Books have to be read (worse luck, for it takes a long time); it is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the west.

The reader must sit down alone and struggle with the writer, and this the pseudo-scholar will not do.

He would rather relate a book to the history of its time, to events in the life of its author, to the events it describes, above all to some tendency.

This constant reference to genius is another characteristic of the pseudo-scholar.

He loves mentioning genius, because the sound of the word exempts him from trying to discover its meaning.

Literature is written by geniuses. Novelists are geniuses. There we are; now let us classify them. Which he does.

As women bettered their position the novel, they asserted, became better too. Quite wrong.

A mirror does not develop because an historical pageant passes in front of it.

It only develops when it gets a fresh coat of quicksilver—in other words, when it acquires new sensitiveness; and the novel’s success lies in its own sensitiveness, not in the success of its subject matter.

The intensely, stiflingly human quality of the novel is not to be avoided; the novel is sogged with humanity; there is no escaping the uplift or the downpour, nor can they be kept out of criticism.

We may hate humanity, but if it is exorcised or even purified the novel wilts, little is left but a bunch of words.

And I have chosen the title “Aspects” because it is unscientific and vague, because it leaves us the maximum of freedom, because it means both the different ways we can look at a novel and the different ways a novelist can look at his work.

And who is the re-examiner? Well, I am afraid it will be the human heart, it will be this man-to-man business, justly suspect in its cruder forms.

The final test of a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

Sentimentality—to some a worse demon than chronology—will lurk in the background saying, “Oh, but I like that,” “Oh, but that doesn’t appeal to me,” and all I can promise is that sentimentality shall not speak too loudly or too soon.

Sentimentality—to some a worse demon than chronology—will lurk in the background saying, “Oh, but I like that,” “Oh, but that doesn’t appeal to me,” and all I can promise is that sentimentality shall not speak too loudly or too soon.

The intensely, stiflingly human quality of the novel is not to be avoided; the novel is sogged with humanity; there is no escaping the uplift or the downpour, nor can they be kept out of criticism.

We may hate humanity, but if it is exorcised or even purified the novel wilts, little is left but a bunch of words.

And I like a story to be a story, mind, and my wife’s the same.” And a third man he says in a sort of drooping regretful voice, “

Yes⁠—oh, dear, yes⁠—the novel tells a story.

” I respect and admire the first speaker. I detest and fear the second. And the third is myself. Yes—oh, dear, yes—the novel tells a story. That is the fundamental aspect without which it could not exist.

The primitive audience was an audience of shock-heads, gaping round the campfire, fatigued with contending against the mammoth or the woolly rhinoceros, and only kept awake by suspense. What would happen next?

The novelist droned on, and as soon as the audience guessed what happened next, they either fell asleep or killed him.

We can estimate the dangers incurred when we think of the career of Scheherazade in somewhat later times. Scheherazade avoided her fate because she knew how to wield the weapon of suspense—the only literary tool that has any effect upon tyrants and savages.

“At this moment Scheherazade saw the morning appearing and, discreet, was silent.” This uninteresting little phrase is the backbone of the One Thousand and One Nights, the tapeworm by which they are tied together and the life of a most accomplished princess was preserved.

We are all like Scheherazade’s husband, in that we want to know what happens next.

That is universal and that is why the backbone of a novel has to be a story. Some of us want to know nothing else—there is nothing in us but primeval curiosity, and consequently our other literary judgments are ludicrous.

… so that when we look at our past it does not stretch back evenly but piles up into a few notable pinnacles, and when we look at the future it seems sometimes a wall, sometimes a cloud, sometimes a sun, but never a chronological chart.

Neither memory nor anticipation is much interested in Father Time, and all dreamers, artists and lovers are partially delivered from his tyranny; he can kill them, but he cannot secure their attention, and at the very moment of doom, when the clock collected in the tower its strength and struck, they may be looking the other way.

So daily life, whatever it may be really, is practically composed of two lives—the life in time and the life by values—and our conduct reveals a double allegiance. “I only saw her for five minutes, but it was worth it.”

They love him indeed for the same reason that I loved and still love The Swiss Family Robinson. I could lecture to you now on The Swiss Family Robinson and it would be a glowing lecture, because of the emotions felt in boyhood.

When my brain decays entirely I shall not bother any more over great literature.

I shall go back to the romantic shore where the “ship struck with a fearful shock,” emitting four demigods named Fritz, Ernest, Jack and little Franz, together with their father, their mother, and a cushion, which contained all the appliances necessary for a ten years’ …

Many novelists have the feeling for place—Five Towns, Auld Reekie, and so on.

Very few have the sense of space, and the possession of it ranks high in Tolstoy’s divine equipment.

Space is the lord of War and Peace, not time.

For instance, I am annoyed when people laugh at me for loving The Swiss Family Robinson, and I hope that I have annoyed some of you over Scott! You see what I mean.

Intolerance is the atmosphere stories generate.

The story is neither moral nor is it favourable to the understanding of the novel in its other aspects. If we want to do that we must come out of the cave.

She might have frowned, so that they would have deduced her state from that—looks and gestures are also historical evidence. But if she remained impassive—what would anyone know?

The hidden life is, by definition, hidden.

The hidden life that appears in external signs is hidden no longer, has entered the realm of action. And it is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source:

This is perhaps a roundabout way of saying what every British schoolboy knew, that the historian records whereas the novelist must create. Still, it is a profitable roundabout, for it brings out the fundamental difference between people in daily life and people in books.

In daily life we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists.

We know each other approximately, by external signs, and these serve well enough as a basis for society and even for intimacy. But people in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes;

Still, it is a profitable roundabout, for it brings out the fundamental difference between people in daily life and people in books. In daily life we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists.

We know each other approximately, by external signs, and these serve well enough as a basis for society and even for intimacy.

But people in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed. And this is why they often seem more definite than characters in history, or even our own friends;

We only know of them by report. We were all born, but we cannot remember what it was like. And death is coming even as birth has come, but, similarly, we do not know what it is like.

Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural.

We move between two darknesses. Certain people pretend to tell us what birth and death are like: a mother, for instance, has her point of view about birth, a doctor, a religious, have their points of view about both.

We were all born, but we cannot remember what it was like. And death is coming even as birth has come, but, similarly, we do not know what it is like. Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural.

We move between two darknesses.

Certain people pretend to tell us what birth and death are like: a mother, for instance, has her point of view about birth, a doctor, a religious, have their points of view about both.

And fourthly, sleep.

On the average, about a third of our time is not spent in society or civilization or even in what is usually called solitude.

We enter a world of which little is known and which seems to us after leaving it to have been partly oblivion, partly a caricature of this world and partly a revelation.

Others say that it is not connected at all. All I suggest is that we call the whole bundle of emotions love, and regard them as the fifth great experience through which human beings have to pass.

When human beings love they try to get something.

They also try to give something, and this double aim makes love more complicated than food or sleep. It is selfish and altruistic at the same time, and no amount of specialization in one direction quite atrophies the other. How much time does love take?

All I suggest is that we call the whole bundle of emotions love, and regard them as the fifth great experience through which human beings have to pass. When human beings love they try to get something.

They also try to give something, and this double aim makes love more complicated than food or sleep.

It is selfish and altruistic at the same time, and no amount of specialization in one direction quite atrophies the other. How much time does love take? This question sounds gross but it must be asked because it bears on our present enquiry.

In the first place, they come into the world more like parcels than human beings.

When a baby arrives in a novel it usually has the air of having been posted.

It is delivered “off”; one of the elder characters goes and picks it up and shows it to the reader, after which it is usually laid in cold storage until it can talk or otherwise assist in the action.

A second reason; which logically comes into another part of our enquiry, but it shall be noted here. Love, like death, is congenial to a novelist because it ends a book conveniently.

He can make it a permanency, and his readers easily acquiesce, because one of the illusions attached to love is that it will be permanent.

Not has been—will be. All history, all our experience, teaches us that no human relationship is constant, it is as unstable as the living beings who compose it, and they must balance like jugglers if it is to remain;

the perfect person is to come along, or the person we know already is to become perfect. There are to be no changes, no necessity for alertness. We are to be happy or even perhaps miserable forever and ever.

Any strong emotion brings with it the illusion of permanence, and the novelists have seized upon this.

They usually end their books with marriage, and we do not object because we lend them our dreams.

But he will give us the feeling that though the character has not been explained, it is explicable, and we get from this a reality of a kind we can never get in daily life.

For human intercourse, as soon as we look at it for its own sake and not as a social adjunct, is seen to be haunted by a spectre.

We cannot understand each other, except in a rough and ready way; we cannot reveal ourselves, even when we want to; what we call intimacy is only a makeshift; perfect knowledge is an illusion.

That is why Moll Flanders cannot be here, that is one of the reasons why Amelia and Emma cannot be here.

They are people whose secret lives are visible or might be visible: we are people whose secret lives are invisible.

And that is why novels, even when they are about wicked people, can solace us; they suggest a more comprehensible and thus a more manageable human race, they give us the illusion of perspicacity and of power.

For human intercourse, as soon as we look at it for its own sake and not as a social adjunct, is seen to be haunted by a spectre.

We cannot understand each other, except in a rough and ready way; we cannot reveal ourselves, even when we want to; what we call intimacy is only a makeshift; perfect knowledge is an illusion.

But in the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life.

there are ninepins about whom he might tell the story, and tell a rattling good one, but no, he prefers to tell his story about human beings; he takes over the life by values as well as the life in time.

The characters arrive when evoked, but full of the spirit of mutiny.

For they have these numerous parallels with people like ourselves, they try to live their own lives and are consequently often engaged in treason against the main scheme of the book. They “run away,” they “get out of hand”:

The characters arrive when evoked, but full of the spirit of mutiny. For they have these numerous parallels with people like ourselves, they try to live their own lives and are consequently often engaged in treason against the main scheme of the book.

They “run away,” they “get out of hand”: they are creations inside a creation, and often inharmonious towards it; if they are given complete freedom they kick the book to pieces, and if they are kept too sternly in check, they revenge themselves by dying, and destroy it by intestinal decay.

These trials beset the dramatist also, and he has yet another set of ingredients to cope with—the actors and actresses—and they appear to side sometimes with the characters they represent, sometimes with the play as a whole, and more often to be the mortal enemies …

… a single phrase, and we remember her in connection with the great scenes through which she passed and as modified by those scenes—that is to say, we do not remember her so easily because she waxes and wanes and has facets like a human being.

All of us, even the sophisticated, yearn for permanence, and to the unsophisticated permanence is the chief excuse for a work of art.

We all want books to endure, to be refuges, and their inhabitants to be always the same, and flat characters tend to justify themselves on this account.

some people in Thackeray—for instance, Becky and Beatrix; some in Fielding—Parson Adams, Tom Jones; and some in Charlotte Brontë, most particularly Lucy Snowe. (And many more—this is not a catalogue.)

The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way.

If it never surprises, it is flat. If it does not convince, it is a flat pretending to be round. It has the incalculability of life about it—life within the pages of a book.

“Let’s think of why B does that—perhaps there’s more in him than meets the eye—yes, see—he has a heart of gold—having given you this peep at it I’ll pop it back—I don’t think he’s noticed.” “And C—he always was the mystery man.”

Intimacy is gained but at the expense of illusion and nobility.

It is like standing a man a drink so that he may not criticize your opinions. With all respect to Fielding and Thackeray it is devastating, it is bar-parlour chattiness, and nothing has been more harmful to the novels of the past.

They can only be kept awake by “and then—and then—” They can only supply curiosity. But a plot demands intelligence and memory also.

Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties.

You will have noticed in daily life that when people are inquisitive they nearly always have bad memories and are usually stupid at bottom.

and more subtly in half-explained gestures and words, the true meaning of which only dawns pages ahead. Mystery is essential to a plot, and cannot be appreciated without intelligence. To the curious it is just another “and then—”

To appreciate a mystery, part of the mind must be left behind, brooding, while the other part goes marching on.

That brings us to our second qualification: memory.

That brings us to our second qualification: memory.

Memory and intelligence are closely connected, for unless we remember we cannot understand.

If by the time the queen dies we have forgotten the existence of the king we shall never make out what killed her. The plot-maker expects us to remember, we expect him to leave no loose ends. Every action or word ought to count;

beauty at which a novelist should never aim, though he fails if he does not achieve it. I will conduct beauty to her proper place later on. Meanwhile please accept her as part of a completed plot.

She looks a little surprised at being there, but beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face, as Botticelli knew when he painted her risen from the waves, between the winds and the flowers.

The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due—she reminds us too much of a prima donna.

A Meredithian plot is not a temple to the tragic or even to the comic Muse, but rather resembles a series of kiosks most artfully placed among wooded slopes, which his people reach by their own impetus, and from which they emerge with altered aspect.

Incident springs out of character, and having occurred it alters that character.

People and events are closely connected, and he does it by means of these contrivances. They are often delightful, sometimes touching, always unexpected. This shock, followed by the feeling, “Oh, that’s all right,” is a sign that all is well with the plot:

In the losing battle that the plot fights with the characters, it often takes a cowardly revenge.

Nearly all novels are feeble at the end.

This is because the plot requires to be wound up. Why is this necessary? Why is there not a convention which allows a novelist to stop as soon as he feels muddled or bored?

It was this that was worrying Gide, or rather one of the things that was worrying him, for he has an anxious mind.

When we try to translate truth out of one sphere into another, whether from life into books or from books into lectures, something happens to truth, it goes wrong, not suddenly when it might be detected, but slowly.

That long passage from Les Faux Monnayeurs already quoted, may recall the bird to its shadow. It is not possible, after it, to apply the old apparatus any more.

The bird and the shadow are too far apart. A new formula must be found: the mere fact that one can mention Tristram and Moby in a single sentence shows it.

What an impossible pair!

As far apart as the poles. Yes. And like the poles they have one thing in common, which the lands round the equator do not share: an axis. What is essential in Sterne and Melville belongs to this new aspect of fiction: the fantastic-prophetical axis.

… various directions, the earth will be given little tilts mischievous or pensive, spot lights will fall on objects that have no reason to anticipate or welcome them, and tragedy herself, though not excluded, will have a fortuitous air as if a word would disarm her.

The power of fantasy penetrates into every corner of the universe, but not into the forces that govern it⁠—the stars that are the brain of heaven, the army of unalterable law, remain untouched⁠—and novels of this type have an improvised air, which is the secret of their force and charm.

They may contain solid character-drawing, penetrating and bitter criticism of conduct and civilization;

Shandy’s bedroom, where he retired in despair after hearing the omitted details of his son’s birth, should come alive like Belinda’s toilette in The Rape of the Lock, or that Uncle Toby’s drawbridge should lead into Lilliput?

There is a charmed stagnation about the whole epic⁠—the more the characters do the less gets done, the less they have to say the more they talk, the harder they think the softer they get, facts have an unholy tendency to unwind and trip up the past instead of begetting the future, as in well-conducted books, and the obstinacy of inanimate objects, like Dr. Slop’s bag, is most suspicious.

Obviously a god is hidden in Tristram Shandy, his name is Muddle, and some readers cannot accept him. Muddle is almost incarnate—quite to reveal his awful features was not Sterne’s intention;

To have a philosophy—even a poetic and emotional philosophy like Hardy’s and Conrad’s—leads to reflections on life and things.

A prophet does not reflect.

And he does not hammer away. That is why we exclude Joyce. Joyce has many qualities akin to prophecy and he has shown (especially in the Portrait of the Artist) an imaginative grasp of evil.

Few will agree with Blake. Fewer will agree with Blake’s Newton. Most of us will be eclectics to this side or that according to our temperament.

The human mind is not a dignified organ, and I do not see how we can exercise it sincerely except through eclecticism.

And the only advice I would offer my fellow eclectics is: “Do not be proud of your inconsistency. It is a pity, it is a pity that we should be equipped like this.

And the only advice I would offer my fellow eclectics is: “Do not be proud of your inconsistency. It is a pity, it is a pity that we should be equipped like this.

It is a pity that Man cannot be at the same time impressive and truthful.

” For the first five lectures of this course we have used more or less the same set of tools. This time and last we have had to lay them down.

If it was not for this hourglass the story, the plot, and the characters of Thaïs and Paphnuce would none of them exert their full force, they would none of them breathe as they do.

“Pattern,” which seems so rigid, is connected with atmosphere, which seems so fluid.

Now for the book that is shaped like the grand chain: Roman Pictures by Percy Lubbock.