REALISM AND THE NOVEL
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guise, but as a simple backcloth, of shopping and the outbreak of
war and busses and odd minor characters from another social class.
Society is outside the people, though at times, even violently, it breaks
in on them. Now of course, where there is deliberate selection, delib–
erate concentration, such personal novels are valuable, since there
is a vast field of significant experience, of a directly personal kind,
which can be excitingly explored. But it seems to me that for every
case of conscious selection (as in Proust, say, where the concentration
is entirely justified and yet produces, obliquely, a master-portrait of a
general way of life) there are perhaps a thousand cases where the
restriction is simply a failure of consciousness, a failure to realize the
extent to which the substance of a general way of life actively affects
the closest personal experience. Of course if, to these writers, society
has become the dull abstract thing of the social novel at its worst, it
is not surprising that they do not see why it should concern them.
They insist on the people as people first, and not as social units, and
they are quite right to do so. What is missing, however, is that element
of common substance which again and again the great realists seemed
able to apprehend. Within the small group, personality is valued, but
outside the group it is nothing. Weare people, one sometimes hears
between the lines; to
us
these things .are important; but the strange
case of the Virginia Woolf charwoman or village woman, with the
sudden icy drop in the normally warm sensibility, symbolizes a com–
mon limitation. And this is not only social exclusiveness or snobbery,
though it can be diagnosed in such ways, but also a failure to realize
the nature of the general social element in
their own lives.
We are
people (such novels say), people, just like that; the rest is the world
or society or politics or something, dull things that are written about in
the newspapers. But in fact we .are people and people within a society:
that whole view was at the center of the realist novel.
In
spite of its limitations, the personal-descriptive novel is often
a substantial achievement, but the tendencies evident in it seem in–
creasingly to be breaking it down, into the other personal kind, the
novel of the personal formula. Here, as in the novel of social formula,
a particular pattern is abstracted from the sum of experience, and not
now a society, but human individuals, are created from the pattern.
This has been the method of powerful, and in its own terms, valid
fiction, but it seems to me to be rapidly creating a new mode, the
