NOVELISTS SEE TOO MUCH [To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.]
SIR,—I have read and re-read Mr. O'Faolain's Novelists See TOO Much—with interested bewilderment. His classification of novelists as naturally more or naturally less religious is surely at variance with his examples. Dostoievski was more religious in fact than Turgenev. How, then; is Turgenev naturally more religious ? In what sense is the Joyce of The Work in Progress naturally more religious than the Joyce of Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist or The Dead? What does he mean by calling Turgenev romantic ?. Are not Rudin and Bazarov. types by reason of their individuality, in the same way as .Raskolnikov ?
Mr. O'Faolain places symbol before reality ; whereas the value of a symbol depends upon its reality. It is the indi- viduality of the Canterbury Pilgrims taken separately that makes them symbolic of humanity and their pilgrimage of human life. Hamlet's individuality makes him stand' for all men in doubt. This is the old paradox of literature, that only the particular can become universal. And I say .small hope for Mr. O'FaoKin if he cannot preserve his." wonder" except by wilful ignorance, and deliberate retreat to a distance. For Blake,. the wonder .existed as fully in a grain of sand as
in the whole Sahara. . .
Modem analytical .novels have. the opposite fault to that of which Mr. O'Faolain accuses. thelln. They fail not because they are psychological, but because their psychology is superficial or a priori or both. It is, in fact, not individual psychology but type psychology ; and the characters are not loving, striving, hating people, but agglomerations of neurotic symptoms, intellectualized puppets who lose whatever life they had in the generalizations of the case-books.
One of the few characters in modern fiction who by virtue of his intense individuality attains universality is Leo Donnel in The Nest of Simple Folk. If Mr. O'Faollain tells me that he created Leo Donnel only as an example of a type, I will not believe him. If he tells me that the chronological inaccuracy that mars the end of the book is a deliberate example of the
blurred detail" which he advocates, I shall have to.—I am,
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