THE RURAL NOVEL
By R. C. CHURCHILL N that recent admirable book The English People, D. W. Brogan I refers to the " sin of English fiction " in persuading Americans and foreigners (to adopt the Prime Minister's happy differentiation) to think that English life is predominantly rural, whereas for the past hundred years or so the majority of English people have lived in towns. This remark leads to some reflections on the rural tradition of the English novel, and the lack so far of an equivalent urban one, that were outside the scope of Professor Brogan's witty and interesting book.
That there is this rural tradition in the English novel will not,
I think, be questioned. Henry Fielding was perhaps the first to notice it. In one of his " crusts for the critics " chapters of Toni Jones he speaks of the better opportunity for the novelist in dealing with country life than with the life of the towns, as well as with "low life " than with the " strange monsters in lace and embroidery " that so delighted the apprentices in the theatre. Fielding followed, as he said himself, the tradition of Don Quixote, the adventures of the-two main characters (Andrews and Adams, Jones and Partridge) affording him an excellent opportunity for comic treatment of the English rural scene ; the squires, parsons, magistrates, innkeepers, soldiers, highwaymen, damsels in distress made up the novelist's comic (and also his moral) preoccupation.
This tradition was kept up by Smollett and in part by Dickens, while the more serious among nineteenth-century novelists (leaving out of account the mainly historical work of Scott and Thackeray) gave us a predominantly rural setting for upper middle-class characters, as in Jane Austlk and Trollope, or lower middle-class, as in the Brontës, or rangin over a wide area, as in George Eliot and Mrs. Gaskell. The ordinary peasant was perhaps rather dis- regarded between Bunyan and Hardy, but he was always there in the background, forming the indispensable foundation upon which the structure of the fiction was built.
There was, however, comparatively little of urban life, and par- ticularly urban life among the poor, in English fiction before Dickens. This is a remarkable fact when we consider, for instance, the pre- Restoration drama which embraced all classes in the city, whether it was called London, in fact, or whether the dramatist put his London into the fictitious form of Venice, Florence or Madrid. There were, of course, Nashe and Delaney in Ben Jonson's time, and later on Defoe and Richardson bore out to some extent the preference of the urban life over the rural among such coffee-house men as Dryden, Addison, Swift, Johnson and Boswell. But it was Bunyan and Fieldlg, in their widely different ways, who had most influence upon the course of English fiction. Fielding, indeed, who was an authority on the novel and who mentioned nearly all of his predecessors, does not mention Defoe at all. I do not know the reason of that indifference to Defoe, who might have been expected to appeal to Fielding strongly, but it is significant when we take into consideration Fielding's influence on his successors.
We see the immense importance of Dickens. He was the first
novelist to combine the influence of Fielding with the urban feeling, the receptiveness to the charm and power of the big city. His intensely original genius was &et against the background of London. Although he used to great effect the Cervantes-Fielding-Smollett scheme in his early novels (Pickwick and Weller, Nell and her grandfather, Nickleby and Smike), the .pttraction of London and his capacity for breathing life into its grimmest haunts enabled him to set his characters increasingly against the background of the city street. David Copperfield, Bleak House, Dombey and Son, Little Dcrrrit and Our Mutual Friend increasingly use the foggy, fascinating mid-Victorian London as the dimly-lit stage on which his dramatic and melodramatic genius found full play.
But did Dickens create an urban tradition in the English novel at 'all comparable with the rural one? I don't think he did. Mr. Sean O'Faolain has given us one reason : Dickens's characters are not drawn from life. " Dickens's characters," says another critic, Mr. T. S. Eliot, " are real because there is no one like them." The influence of the stage counted for too much ; with the exception of his social criticism, which was largly successful through his devastating genius for the comic, there was nothing in Dickens for a lesser man to work on. George Gissing, who was an ardent admirer of Dickens and wrote one of the best introductions to his work, was not influenced by him at all (as Mr. Swinnerton has shown convincingly) in his own novels. And, however high we estimate the achievement of Gissing, he is obviously a lesser artist than the author of the Wessex novels.
Whether we agree with Mr. Eliot, writing in the Criterion a few years ago, that " the real and spontaneous country life is the right life for the great majority in any nation," or with Professor Brogan that it is a weakness in English fiction that it should so turn its back upon the towns, we are faced with the question: can there be an urban tradition ; is it possible for one to exist as yet?
Professor Brogan cites Arnold Bennett and Mr. J. B. Priestley as being the only writers in our time who have consistently shown the " foreigner " the true state of affairs in England. He might have mentioned as well Joyce, the early Maugham, the non-scientific Wells and much of Galsworthy. Bennett, while he kept to the Five Towns, is certainly a sound and impressive case ; but, as Virginia Woolf put it, " the destiny to which his characters travel so luxuri- ously becomes more and more unquestionably an eternity of bliss spent in the very best hotel in Brighton." Mr. Priestley is not, indeed, given to hotels, but his genial talent lends itself more easily than an artist's should to the creation of stock figures, in the Dickens tradition certainly, but without Dickens's gigantic comedy, which relieves his puppets of their boredom and transports them into the region of Aristophanes and Shakespeare. The prosaic nature of Mr. Priestley's characters is a weakness also in the characters of Mr. Graham Greene, perhaps the most distinguished novelist in the under-forty generation. Mr. Greene's world is. mainly London (which he knows as intimately as any writer since Dickens) or the big cities on the Continent ; but his knowledge of urban life is, unlike Dickens's, a journalistic. knowledge ; he has many virtues, but his recurring weakness is a tendency to over-simplify the complexities of life in some such phrase as the following from The Confidential Agent (1939):
She had bad teeth and mouse-coloured hair—she carried with her a background of blackboards and chalk and children asking permission to leave the room—and Sunday walks in ruined fields with dogs. . . .
—an over-simplification he shares with our " proletarian " novel, the competent but slightly dull works of Naomi Mitchison, Edward Upward, Rex Warner and the rest. It would not be too much to say that these novels are only interesting to the Marxist reader, whereas the corresponding American novels of John dos Passos and James Farrell have, by these writers' sense of proportion, a much wider appeal.
But I think that the question goes far deeper than Professor Brogan implies when, praising the superiority of the American urban novel over our own, he says the fault lies in our opinion of ourselves as pre-eminently a rural nation, whereas the majority of our population live in big cities. It is a complicated matter, too complicated perhaps for such a short article as this ; but we can at any rate say this with certainty : it is no more an accident that since the Industrial Revolution England has produced novelists like Emily Bronte, Mrs. Gaskell, George Eliot, Trollope, Borrow, Meredith, Hardy, Lawrence and T. F. Powys, the background of whose novels is still largely rural, than it is an accident that so many people in big cities cultivate allotments. (Professor Brogan jibes good-naturedly at the English for being a nation of rose- fanciers ; more important is that we are a nation of allotment- holders.) It is not a question of sentiment. We still feel the rhythm of the seasons ; the soil, so to speak, is in our blood. Our popular fiction, too, has mainly a rural setting ; our age has seen a steady crop of " regional novels ": the Devonshire of Eden Phill- potts, the Shropshire of Mary Webb, the Essex of S. L. Bensusan, the Sussex of Sheila Kaye-Smith. And the fact that so many of our novelists have gone overseas for their material (we think of the later Lawrence, of E. M. Forster, of Somerset Maugham, of Norman Douglas) shows not merely the artists' desire to explore new ground but their dissatisfaction with an England still in a transitional stage.
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