PARTISAN REVIEW
itself has dissolved character of the traditional kind. The people in
Miss Compton Burnett's novels move like the featureless hierophants
of some tortuous ceremony. The chief character is no longer the
hero, the heroine or the villain but, in a large number of novels, is
really an impersonal shadow, a presence that we may call 'the con–
temporary situation.' Without knowing it, often by responding with
his private sensibility only, the novelist has slipped into the role of
unofficial historian. He has become the historian of the crisis in
civilization, whether he write politically (as Koestler has done), as
a religious man like Graham Greene or with the obliquity of those dis–
possessed poets, Henry Green and Miss Elizabeth Bowen. This strange
new personage has taken possession of the novel as a mist takes pos–
session of the streets and all who breathe it are transformed and, I
think, are also diminished. When we regret that there are no 'great
characters' in the modern novel, people like Squire Western, Love–
lace, Micawber, Sir Willoughby Patterne or Lord Jim, the reply must
be that 'the contemporary situation' has brought them all to a single
level.
In making this judgment, we must record the losses of the novel,
but we need not go deeply into them. From the point of life, range
has been lost; from the point of religion or ethics, spiritual and moral
conflict have been lost-we analyze and endure, we do not choose
and act- from the point of view of morals or politics, purpose has
been lost. We sum up the case against ourselves by saying that the
novel has become a diversified autobiography. The
'I',
whether he
is the reporter, the camera man, the sensibility, the split self of our
time, dominates these books. The 'they' of the Victorians-even the
'they' of Wells, Bennett, Conrad and the Lawrence of the mining
stories, has receded. Nor need we go far into the gains: the elision of
false scenery, explanatory essays, useless sub-plots, tendentious and
literary dialogue, and the great gain in narrative and psychological
alacrity. Loss of substance, gain of means, must still (I think) be the
general judgment on the condition of the contemporary novel. The
war-time novels have followed Hemingway-ese- the false tough or
fake poker faced-to the point of self parody.
The heart of the problem for the modern novelist is that he
has had a glut of new means, new manners, new styles; he has been
poor in material or passive in his use of it. He looks no subject full
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