THE FUTURE O .F ENGLISH FICTION
in the face and he has accordingly been distracted by the outskirts
of it. To his enormous credit the modern English novelist-writers like
Isherwood, Elizabeth Bowen and Graham Greene-have conserved
the human fragments in an iron age when human lives, what I feel
and you feel, are considered to be shameful. Human beings are simply
archaic, ivy-covered ruins, preserved by the connoisseur, and they
stand out oddly in the new world of the masses. They are seen in
a twilight.
And yet, under the new dispensation, is it true?
Are
human
beings in fact so isolated, so free of responsibility, so passive before
fate? Is their environment merely the dwindling ground they stand
on? Obviously not. Before the war the young novelist's stock remedy
was Marxism and social realism. We were due for a working-class
novel, a political novel, a novel reconstituted l:>Y renewed contact
with society. It must be said that Marxism has inspired no novels of
the first class-at a guess, I would say, Marxism is more likely to
inspire drama-nor have there even been any English novels about
social justice or economic conditions, or even novels of plain reporting,
which arouse much interest. The decadent bourgeois formalist with
his
passion for psychology has had all the talent. Realism-ideological
and literary-has been hardly more than pedestrian. I take it that
Marxist theory was too black and white for the English scene. Marx–
ism and social realism have certainly produced no novels of the first
order in Russia either; and, to be just, one is not sure whether this
is due to the lack of amenity and excess of dynamic in the doctrine
or a lack of freedom and security in which to consider it. The valuable
work of Marxism has been in literary criticism where it has traced
literature back to one of its sources in social life; and perhaps, if
Marxism could be disentangled from the miserable manreuvres of
party politics, and be prevented from the cheerless habit of hanging
itself in the loops of the party line it might inspire the novelist. But
one must doubt whether straight doctrine of any kind ever moved the
imagination, which indeed thrives rather on mixtures.
Paradise Lost
was not written by a straight Cromwellian Puritan. The real political
subject of the last fifteen years has not been the clash of beliefs, but
the vacillations .and disillusions accompanying the wish to believe.
Another remedy offered to the novelist was the return to the
Christian tradition, the revival of the frame of original sin, the beauties
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