LIFE AMONG THE LIARS
By ROSE MACAULAY
NOVELISTS are, it is well known, fantastic liars. Not for them to photograph life ; their function (it is all they can do, within the limits of their own more or less—too often less—illuminated
intelligence, and the peculiar experience that circumstances and temper have enabled them partially to receive), is to set down odd fragments of their conclusions and observations, divesting them (often to their detriment) of that incoherence which would leave them wild and raw, like a surrealist's dream, putting them together into some kind of shape, usually a false shape, necessarily an in- complete shape, and adding a lick of varnish to give them a specious and misleading effect of reality. This done, they get them published and circulated among their contemporaries and (if they can manage it) among posterity to deceive and mislead for so long as any copies remain. When we read them and when anthologists delve into them, as Mr. Strong has so admirably done*, for samples to illustrate some aspect of life, we do well to remember that what we are looking at is not life but a selection from the dreams of imperfect and romantic observers, warped by the needs of their strange craft, which is con- cerned primarily to enthrall, and will stick at nothing so to do. this is all as it should be. We know about life already ; those who don't won't learn from fiction. If we want to know about the life of our ancestors, we turn to memoirs, letters, diaries ; to peruse these is to realise the gulf that separates truth from fiction, that charming, flaunting, extravagant 'cheat. What we do get from fiction is a light on the minds of its composers ; we learn the way in which they possibly looked at life, more probably saw fit, for inescapable reasons in themselves, or for more calculated causes derived from knowledge of their readers, to present it.
Mr. Strong begins his anthology of English domestic life in fiction with an interview between Clarissa and her mamma, as related by that young lady in a letter. Mamma talks like this: "Why flutters my jewel so? . . . Oh my daughter! best beloved of my heart, lift up a face ever precious to me. Why these sobs? Is an apprehended duty so affecting a thing that before I can speak you can guess at what I have to say to you?"
There is much evidence to support our belief that mid-eighteenth century letters, even from young ladies, were not actually at all like this, nor the conversation of mammas either. What we are getting, and get throughout this tale of persecuted innocence, is a revelation not of the life of the period, but of the sentimental, pious and tear-drenched mind of Samuel Richardson. Fielding, Sterne, Smollett and Goldsmith, who follow, are much nearer fact, of course, and the extracts here do give glimpses of behaviour at a play, at a christening, at Vauxhall, and at a fair, though no doubt unreliable because of the peculiar twists and preoccupations of their narrators' minds, those very twists which make them lively reading. Then comes Evelina, with its sanctimonious modesty and snobbism ; and
* English Domestic Life During the Last 200 Years. An anthology selected from Novelists. By L. A. G. Strong. (Allen and Unwin. 7s. 6d.) Evelina is a good test, for we have also its author's diary and 1 in which the smug, self-gratifying fancy of her novels is rep by close (though still smug and self-gratifying) observation record of persons and conversation ; there is a wide gulf be the two ; if the diaries show the life of the time, as they surely then the novels are about something else altogether, and that thing else is, it is to be feared, Miss Burney's mind.
Jane Austen, it must be admitted, is another matter ; she w realist, and behind the scintillations of her humour and irony domestic life is to be discerned, stylised, pointed and lit up, in essence truly drawn. Peacock, no ; his mind took him bl straying along paths altogether more agreeable than normal h life ; which is merely to say that Peacock was an intelle Surtees, a wit, did the same thing, selecting other paths. No would accuse either Bulwer Lytton or Disraeli of realism. Gaskell was a realist ; though an apter piece than that about Matty in the shop might perhaps have been chosen to show a passage, for instance, from Wives and Daughters. On the o hand, her excursion into a Manchester slum convinces. Thack is a problem. So much rich detail of life, such well-drawn characters, and whenever a female appears (yes, even Becky Sh she at once carries the scene out of life into the fiction of a Vico gentleman's mind. Who ever believed in Amelia or H Pendennis? Not, I have been firmly assured, our grandmoth who found them not only insufferable but fantastic. "My de my grandmother used to tell my mother in her girlhood," are what a man likes to think a woman should be." Which dis of them as ninnies in my mother's mind, for Victorian young we had quite as much sense as we have.
Dickens is also led wildly astray by his romanticising of ye females and his partiality for virtue and for caricature. Troll was much nearer the norm ; in fact, his domestic scenes are (Jed! The Brontes, being what they were, can have had no hope objectivity or of getting outside their remarkable temperaments angles of vision ; they were much too peculiar to be realists. Geo Eliot drew, out of her experience, the Tu.11ivers and the Poysers, we do believe in them ; not, however, in the Casaubons and really in Adam Bede. Coming to Charlotte Yonge, one feels down by Mr. Strong. She has so many admirable domestic fa scenes, both amusing and even convincing (her children brilliantly and sharply characterised) ; but all we get here is A Edmonstone's wedding, all piety and tears. If there had to be uplift scene, I would rather have had Mr. Underwood, a curate poor means dying of consumption, receiving the news of the h of his thirteenth child, an idiot twin. "Ha! " he ejaculated, "Is so? It is well " ; then, after christening the idiot twin Theod Gift of God, he expired with a bright smile. But better wo have been a family scene ; the Edmonstones playing paper gala the Mays at their dinner, the young Merryfields squabbling togeth these do read true. Meek little Amy Edmonstone was not r Miss Yonge's characteristic heroine ; she preferred and undersl better the eager bookworm with hoydenish proclivities—a reputedly autobiographical. The almost incredible High Chu piety that obtains among all her nice people can never have widespread, but does appear to have flourished in pockets du the Tractarian period.
Meredith and Hardy we may discard at once as life-copiers ; were incapable of being anything so meek. Wells, in the pas here chosen from Kipps, furbishes the domestic scene with wit style, but does record it recognisably.
We are now in our own day, and can check the novelists memory. Miss E. M. Delafield, for instance, tells of a girl u (somewhere before the last war) was not encouraged to read newspapers, and had been told it was bad manners to read a unless her mother was doing so. There may, of course, have such mothers ; there may be some now ; but those of us who remember the period know that they were rare. Even Miss Yon mid-Victorian girls read books in the room with their moth otherwise employed ; and the Edwardian and early Georgian Yu woman went on pretty much, I think, as her daughters do oda All fictional manners should be checked by reference to 111
ty, or to letters and memoirs, such, for instance, as Gertrude 's, Jane Carlyle's, Henry Sidgwick's, the Amberleys', the Benson t's, or those of one's own parents and grandparents.
ingenious reviewer of this book has suggested that life copies , not fiction life. An intriguing thesis which might well be
ta I am myself loath to lay the whole responsibility for manners on beings already burdened with enough sins. But,
ii be so, what remorse must fill the novelist contemplating icy, what alarm the reader contemplating novels, present and ! And what a chance for the reformer!
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