An Experiment in Criticism

  It will be noticed that most of my examples of presentational realism, though I did not select them for that purpose, occur in the telling of stories which are not themselves at all 'realistic' in the sense of being probable or even possible. This should clear up once and for all a very elementary confusion which I have sometimes detected between realism of presentation and what I call realism of content.

  A fiction is realistic in content when it is probable or 'true to life'. We see realism of content, isolated from the slightest realism of presentation and therefore 'chemically pure', in a work like Constant's Adolphe. There a passion, and the sort of passion that is not very rare in the real world, is pursued through all its windings to the death. There is no disbelief to be suspended.

  We never doubt that this is just what might happen. But while there is much to be felt and much to be analysed, there is nothing to be seen or heard or tasted or touched. There are no 'close-ups', no details. There are no minor characters and even no places worthy of the name. Except in one short passage, for a special purpose, there is no weather and no countryside. So in Racine, given the situation, all is probable, even inevitable. The realism of content is great, but there is no realism of presentation. We do not know what anyone looked like, or wore, or ate. Everyone speaks in the same style. There are almost no manners. I know very well what it would be like to be Oreste (or Adolphe); but I should not know either if I met him, as I should certainly know Pickwick or Falstaff, and probably old Karamazov or Bercilak.

  The two realisms are quite independent. You can get that of presentation without that of content, as in medieval romance: or that of content without that of presentation, as in French (and some Greek) tragedy; or both together, as in War and Peace; or neither, as in the Furioso or Rasselas or Candide.

  In this age it is important to remind ourselves that all four ways of writing are good and masterpieces can be produced in any of them. The dominant taste at present demands realism of content. [And usually realism of presentation as well. But the latter is not relevant at this point.] The great achievements of the nineteenth-century novel have trained us to appreciate and to expect it. But we should be making a disastrous mistake and creating one more false classification of books and readers if we erected this natural and historically conditioned preference into a principle.

  There is some danger of this. No one that I know of has indeed laid down in so many words that a fiction cannot be fit for adult and civilised reading unless it represents life as we have all found it to be, or probably shall find it to be, in experience. But some such assumption seems to lurk tacitly in the background of much criticism and literary discussion. We feel it in the widespread neglect or disparagement of the romantic, the idyllic, and the fantastic, and the readiness to stigmatise instances of these as 'escapism'. We feel it when books are praised for being 'comments on', or 'reflections' (or more deplorably ' slices') of Life. We notice also that 'truth to life' is held to have a claim on literature that overrides all other considerations. Authors, restrained by our laws against obscenity-rather silly laws, it may be-from using half a dozen monosyllables, felt as if they were martyrs of science, like Galileo. To the objection 'This is obscene' or 'This is depraved', or even to the more critically relevant objection 'This is uninteresting', the reply 'This occurs in real life'

  seems at times to be thought almost sufficient.

  We must first decide what sort of fictions can justly be said to have truth to life. I suppose we ought to say that a book has this property when a sensible reader, on finishing it, can feel, 'Yes. This -thus grim, or splendid, or empty, or ironic-is what our life is like. This is the sort of thing that happens.

  This is how people behave.'

  But when we say' The sort of thing that happens', do we mean the sort of thing that usually or often happens, the sort of thing that is typical of the human lot? Or do we mean 'The sort of thing that might conceivably happen or that, by a thousandth chance, may have happened once'? For there is a great difference in this respect between the Oedipus Tyrannus or Great Expectations on the one hand and Middlemarch or War and Peace on the other. In the first two we see (by and large) such events and such behaviour as would be probable and characteristic of human life, given the situation. But the situation itself is not. It is extremely unlikely that a poor boy should be suddenly enriched by an anonymous benefactor who later turns out to be a convict. The chances against anyone's being exposed as an infant, then rescued, then adopted by a king, then by one coincidence killing his father, and then by another coincidence marrying his father's widow, are overwhelming. The bad luck of Oedipus calls for as much suspension of disbelief as the good luck of Monte Cristo. [See Appendix.] In George Eliot's and Tolstoy's masterpieces, on the other hand, all is probable and typical of human life. These are the sort of things that might happen to anyone. Things like them have probably happened to thousands. These are such people as we might meet any day. We can say without reservation,' This is what life is like'.

  Fictions of both these kinds may be distinguished from literary fantasies such as the Furioso or The Ancient Mariner or Vathek, but they should also be distinguished from each other. And as soon as we distinguish them we cannot help noticing that until quite modern times nearly all stories were of the first type-belonged to the family of the Oedipus, not to that of Middlemarch. Just as all except bores relate in conversation not what is normal but what is exceptional-you mention having seen a giraffe in Petty Cury, but don't mention having seen an undergraduate-so authors told of the exceptional. Earlier audiences would not have seen the point of a story about anything else. Faced with such matters as we get in Middlemarch or Vanity Fair or The Old Wives' Tale, they would have said 'But this is all perfectly ordinary. This is what happens every day. If these people and their fortunes were so unremarkable, why are you telling us about them at all?' We can learn the world-wide and immemorial attitude of man to stories from noticing how stories are introduced in conversation. Men begin ' The strangest sight I ever saw was-', or Til tell you something queerer even than that', or 'Here's something you'll hardly believe'. Such was the spirit of nearly all stories before the nineteenth century. The deeds of Achilles or Roland were told of because they were exceptionally and improbably heroic; the matricidal burden of Orestes, because it was an exceptional and improbable burden; the saint's life, because he was exceptionally and improbably holy. The bad luck of Oedipus, or Balin, or Kullervo, was told because it was beyond all precedent.

  The Reeve's Tale was told because what happens in it is unusually and all but impossibly funny.

  Clearly, then, if we are such radical realists as to hold that all good fiction must have truth to life, we shall have to take one or other of two lines. On the one hand, we can say that the only good fictions are those which belong to the second type, the family of Middlemarch: fictions of which we can say without reservation 'Life is like this'. If we do that we shall have against us the literary practice and experience of nearly the whole human race. That is too formidable an antagonist. Securus judicat. Or else we shall have to argue that stories such as that of Oedipus, stories of the exceptional and atypical (and therefore remarkable) are also true to life.

  Well, if we are sufficiently determined, we can just-only just-brazen it out.

  We can maintain that such stories are implicitly saying ' Life is such that even this is possible. A man might conceivably be raised to affluence by a grateful convict. A man might conceivably be as unlucky as Balin. A man might conceivably get burned with a hot iron and cry out "Water" just in time to induce a silly old landlord to cut a rope because he had been previously persuaded that "Noe's flood" was coming again. A city might conceivably be taken by a wooden horse.' And we should have to maintain not only that they are saying this, but that they say it truly.

  But even if all this were granted-and the last item takes a good deal of swallowing-the position would seem to me entirely artificial; something thought up in defence of a desperate
thesis and quite out of tune with the experience we have when we receive the stories. Even if the stories permit the conclusion 'Life is such that this is possible', can anyone believe that they invite it, that they are told or heard for the sake of it, that it is anything more than a remote accident?

  For those who tell the story and those (including ourselves) who receive it are not thinking about any such generality as human life. Attention is fixed on something concrete and individual; on the more than ordinary terror, splendour, wonder, pity, or absurdity of a particular case. These, not for any light they might throw hereafter on the life of man, but for their own sake, are what matters.

  When such stories are well done we usually get what may be called hypothetical probability-what would be probable if the initial situation occurred. But the situation itself is usually treated as if it were immune from criticism. In simpler ages it is accepted on authority. Our ancestors have vouched for it; 'myn auctour' or 'thise olde wise'. It is regarded, if poets and audience raise the question at all, as we regard a historical fact. And fact, unlike fiction, if sufficiently well attested, does not need to be probable. Very often it is not. Sometimes we are even warned against drawing from the narrative any conclusion about life in general. When a hero lifts a great stone Homer tells us that no two modern men, no two men in the world of our experience, could move it. [Iliad, v, 302 sq.] Herakles, says Pindar, saw the land of the Hyperboreans; but don't imagine you'll ever get there. [Olympian iii, 31; Pythian x, 29 sq.] In more sophisticated periods, the situation is accepted rather as a postulate. 'Let it be granted' that Lear divided his kingdom; that the 'riche gnof' in the Miller's Tale was infinitely gullible; that a girl who puts on boy's clothes becomes instantly unrecognisable to everyone, including her lover; that calumnies against our nearest and dearest, even when uttered by the most suspicious characters, will be believed. Surely the author is not saying 'This is the sort of thing that happens'? Or surely, if he is, he lies? But he is not. He is saying, 'Suppose this happened, how interesting, how moving, the consequences would be! Listen. It would be like this.' To question the postulate itself would show a misunderstanding; like asking why trumps should be trumps. It is the sort of thing Mopsa does. That is not the point. The raison d'etre of the story is that we shall weep, or shudder, or wonder, or laugh as we follow it.

  The effort to force such stories into a radically realistic theory of literature seems to me perverse. They are not, in any sense that matters, representations of life as we know it, and were never valued for being so. The strange events are not clothed with hypothetical probability in order to increase our knowledge of real life by showing how it would react to this improbable test. It is the other way round. The hypothetical probability is brought in to make the strange events more fully imaginable. Hamlet is not faced with a ghost in order that his reactions may tell us more about his nature and therefore about human nature in general; he is shown reacting naturally in order that we may accept the ghost.

  The demand that all literature should have realism of content cannot be maintained.

  Most of the great literature so far produced in the world has not. But there is a quite different demand which we can properly make; not that all books should be realistic in content, but that every book should have as much of this realism as it pretends to have.

  This principle does not appear to be always understood. There are earnest people who recommend realistic reading for everyone because, they say, it prepares us for real life, and who would, if they could, forbid fairy-tales for children and romances for adults because these 'give a false picture of life' -in other words, deceive their readers.

  I trust that what has already been said about egoistic castle-building forearms us against this error. Those who wish to be deceived always demand in what they read at least a superficial or apparent realism of content. To be sure, the show of such realism which deceives the mere castle-builder would not deceive a literary reader. If he is to be deceived, a much subtler and closer resemblance to real life will be required. But without some degree of realism in content-a degree proportional to the reader's intelligence-no deception will occur at all. No one can deceive you unless he makes you think he is telling the truth.

  The un-blushingly romantic has far less power to deceive than the apparently realistic. Admitted fantasy is precisely the kind of literature which never deceives at all. Children are not deceived by fairy-tales; they are often and gravely deceived by school-stories. Adults are not deceived by science-fiction; they can be deceived by the stories in the women's magazines. None of us are deceived by the Odyssey, the Kalevala, Beowulf, or Malory. The real danger lurks in sober-faced novels where all appears to be very probable but all is in fact contrived to put across some social or ethical or religious or anti-religious 'comment on life'. For some at least of such comments must be false. To be sure, no novel will deceive the best type of reader. He never mistakes art either for life or for philosophy. He can enter, while he reads, into each author's point of view without either accepting or rejecting it, suspending when necessary his disbelief and (what is harder) his belief. But others lack this power. I must postpone a fuller consideration of their error till the next chapter.

  Finally, what shall we say about the stigma of 'escapism'?

  Now there is a clear sense in which all reading whatever is an escape. It involves a temporary transference of the mind from our actual surroundings to things merely imagined or conceived. This happens when we read history or science no less than when we read fictions. All such escape is from the same thing; immediate, concrete actuality. The important question is what we escape to. Some escape into egoistic castle-building. And this itself may be either harmless, if not very profitable, refreshment, or brutal, prurient and megalomaniac. Others escape into mere play, divertissements which may be exquisite works of art-the Midsummer Night's Dream or the Nun's Priest's Tale. Others, again, into what I call disinterested castle-building, 'conducted', by, say, the Arcadia, The Shepheards Sirena, or The Ancient Mariner. And others escape into realistic fictions. For, as Crabbe pointed out in a passage [Tales, Preface, para. 16.] not often enough quoted, a grim and distressful tale may offer a complete escape from the reader's actual distresses. Even a fiction that rivets our attention on 'life' or 'the present crisis' or 'the Age' may do this. For these, after all, are constructs, entia rationis; not facts on a level with the here and now, with my disquieting abdominal pain, the draught in this room, the pile of examination papers I have to mark, the bill I can't pay, the letter I don't know how to answer, and my bereaved or unrequited love.

  While I think of'the Age', I forget these.

  Escape, then, is common to many good and bad kinds of reading. By adding -ism to it, we suggest, I suppose, a confirmed habit of escaping too often, or for too long, or into the wrong things, or using escape as a substitute for action where action is appropriate, and thus neglecting real opportunities and evading real obligations. If so, we must judge each case on its merits. Escape is not necessarily joined to escapism. The authors who lead us furthest into impossible regions-Sidney, Spenser, and Morris-were men active and stirring in the real world. The Renaissance and our own nineteenth century, periods prolific in literary fantasy, were periods of great energy.

  Since the charge of escapism against a very unrealistic work is sometimes varied or reinforced with that of childishness or (as they now say) 'infantilism', a word on that ambiguous accusation will not be amiss. Two points need to be made.

  First, the association between fantasy (including Marcheri) and childhood, the belief that children are the proper readers for this sort of work or that it is the proper reading for children, is modern and local. Most of the great fantasies and fairy-tales were not addressed to children at all, but to everyone.

  Professor Tolkien has described the real state of the case. ['On Fairy-Stories', Essays presented to Charles Williams (1947), p. 58.]

  Certain kinds of furniture gravitated to the nursery when the
y became unfashionable among the adults; the fairy-tale has done the same. To imagine any special affinity between childhood and stories of the marvellous is like imagining a special affinity between childhood and Victorian sofas. If few but children now read such stories, that is not because children, as such, have a special predilection for them, but because children are indifferent to literary fashions. What we see in them is not a specifically childish taste, but simply a normal and perennial human taste, temporarily atrophied in their elders by a fashion. It is we, not they, whose taste needs explanation. And even to say this is to say too much.

  We ought, in strict truth, to say that some children, as well as some adults, like this genre, and that many children, like many adults, do not. For we must not be deceived by the contemporary practice of sorting books out according to the 'age-groups' for which they are supposed to be appropriate. That work is done by people who are not very curious about the real nature of literature nor very well acquainted with its history. It is a rough rule of thumb for the convenience of schoolteachers, librarians, and the publicity departments in publishers' offices. Even as such it is very fallible. Instances that contradict it (in both directions) occur daily.

  Secondly, if we are to use the words childish or infantile as terms of disapproval, we must make sure that they refer only to those characteristics of childhood which we become better and happier by outgrowing; not to those which every sane man would keep if he could and which some are fortunate for keeping. On the bodily level this is sufficiently obvious. We are glad to have outgrown the muscular weakness of childhood; but we envy those who retain.its energy, its well-thatched scalp, its easily won sleeps, and its power of rapid recuperation.

  But surely the same is true on another level? The sooner we cease to be as fickle, as boastful, as jealous, as cruel, as ignorant, and as easily frightened as most children are, the better for us and for our neighbours. But who in his senses would not keep, if he could, that tireless curiosity, that intensity of imagination, that facility of suspending disbelief, that unspoiled appetite, that readiness to wonder, to pity, and to admire? The process of growing up is to be valued for what we gain, not for what we lose. Not to acquire a taste for the realistic is childish in the bad sense; to have lost the taste for marvels and adventures is no more a matter for congratulation than losing our teeth, our hair, our palate, and finally, our hopes. Why do we hear so much about the defects of immaturity and so little about those of senility?