The Facts of Fiction

The Facts of Fiction. By Norman Collins. (Gollancz. 10s. 6d.)

MR. FORD MADOX FORD has already attempted much the same task as Mr. Norman Collins in his much briefer The English Novel. But Mr. Ford, with all his startling inaccura- cies, gave a fuller history of the novel and a less superficial one

than Mr. Collins. Mr. Collins begins for no apparent reason with Richardson. He excuses himself for not dealing with Defoe in terms so extraordinary that they demand quotation,

for they show in a few words Mr. Collins' weakness—that he seems sometimes to write with The Blue Lagoon in his mind's eye : " I do not know exactly how I can explain to anyone who does not see it at once how ' Robinson Crusoe ' remains such famous fiction, yet never quite becomes a novel as we understand the term to-day. But perhaps I can hint at my meaning by suggesting what a colossal blunder--in a modern novelist's eyes—the creation

of Man Friday really was. It would have needed the arrival of Woman Wednesday in place of Man Friday to make a modern novel of that nursery romance."

A nursery romance is a strange term to use of Defoe's spiritual autobiography.

Mr. Collins' book is less a critical history than a

record of unrelated likes and dislikes. It lacks proportion. Two pages are given up to an obscure follower of Horace Walpole called Clara Reeve, who wrote a Gothic novel called

The Old English Baron ; four pages to Bulwer Lytton, and three pages to William Godwin. On the other hand, George Eliot receives only half a page ; Walter Pater and Stevenson

no mention at all ; and Joseph Conrad is dismissed in three lines.

A certain austerity of style is needed by a critic to prove that he can keep his head ; but Mr. Collins' style is curiously

uneven. Often it is the style of a reviewer writing with one eye on a publisher's advertisement. In the chapter on Richardson, for example, we find such phrases as " unsavoury and sensational," " muckraking," " solemn old donkey,”

" absurd old buffer," and his pages are peppered with epigrams which are too often only " wise-cracks " : " Both Pamela and Clarissa are races between the Ring and the Rape, and in the better novel it is the rape that wins."

This is the worst form of journalism, but Mr. Collins' book contains also examples of the best. His brief biographies are. masterly, and as he works into his subject his style discards headlines and rises, not infrequently, to the occasion. There is wisdom in his criticism of Jane Austen :

" When once we step beyond speaking of Jane Austen's com- petence, we become uncomfortably aware that another step would take us clean off the map."

And of D. H. Lawrence :

" Lawrence was never greater than any situation in which ho found himself. He strove hard to be equal. But he remained always inferior to circumstances. And his books are essentially the expression of one rat in the trap."

GRAHAM GREENE.