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FICTION.The years 1912 to 1930 were the Heroic Age of the modern novel, the age of Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and E. M. Forster. One can trace three major influences on the changes in attitude and technique in the fiction of this period. The first is the novelists' realization that the general background of belief that united them with their public in a common sense of what was significant in experience had disappeared. The public values of the Victorian novel in which major crises of plot could lie shown through changes in the social or financial or marital status of the chief characters, gave way to more personally conceived notions of value, dependent on the novelists' own intuitions and sensibilities rather than on public agreement.They needed to find ways of convincing readers that their own sense of what was significant in experience was truly valid.

The second influence on the changes in attitude and technique in the modern novel was a new view of time; time was not a series of chronological moments to be presented by the novelist in sequence with an occasional deliberate retrospect ("this reminded him of," "she recalled that") but a continuous flow in the consciousness of the individual, with the "already" continuously merging into the "not yet" and retrospect merging into anticipation.

This influence is closely bound up with a third: the new notions of the nature of consciousness, which derived in a general way from the pioneer explorations of the subconscious by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and Carl Jung (1875-1961.The view that we are our memories, that our present is the sum of our past, that if we dig into the human consciousness we can tell the whole truth about people without waiting for a chronological sequence of time to take them through a series of testing circumstances, inevitably led to a technical revolution in the novel.

This view of multiple levels of consciousness existing simultaneously, coupled with the view of time as a constant flow rather than a series of separate moments, meant that novelists preferred to plunge into the consciousness of their characters in order to tell their stories rather than to provide external frameworks of chronological narrative.

Not all the novelists of the period, of course, were concerned with these themes or employed the new techniques appropriate to them. The "documentary" novelists, such as Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy (and, in at least some of his novels, H. G. Wells), presented, often with great skill, the changing social scene, showing considerable insight and sympathy in recording aspects of it through the behavior of their imagined characters.

THOMAS HARDY

1840-1928

Thomas Hardy was born near Dorchester, in that area of southwest England that he was to make the "Wessex" of his novels. He attended local schools until the age of fifteen, when he was apprenticed to a Dorchester architect with whom he worked for six years. In 1861 he went to London to continue his studies and to practice as an architect. Meanwhile he was completing his general education informally through his own erratic reading and was becoming more and more interested in both fiction and poetry. After some early attempts at writing both short stories and poems, he decided to concentrate on fiction. His first novel was rejected by the publishers in 1868 on the recommendation of George Meredith, who nevertheless advised Hardy to write another. The result was Desperate Remedies, published anonymously in 1871, followed the next year by his first real success (also published anonymously), Under the Greenwood Tree. Hardy's career as a novelist was now well launched; he gave up his architectural work and produced a series of novels that ended with Jude the Obscure in 1896. The hostile reception of this novel sent him back to poetry. His remarkable epic-drama of the Napoleonic Wars, The Dynasts, came out in three parts between 1903 and 1908; after this he wrote mostly lyric poetry.

Hardy's novels, set in a predominantly rural "Wessex," show the forces of nature outside and inside individuals combining to shape human destiny. He presents characters at the mercy of their own passions or finding temporary salvation in tlie age-old rhythms of rural work or rural recreation. Men and women in Hardy's fiction are not masters of their fates; they are at the mercy of the indifferent forces that manipulate their behavior and their relations with others, but they can achieve dignity through endurance and heroism through simple strength of character. Hardy preferred to go directly for the elemental in human behavior with a minimum of contemporary social detail. Most of Hardy's novels are tragic, although Under the Greenwood Tree has an idyllic character possessed by no other of his novels. But even here the happy ending is achieved only by ending the story with the marriage of the hero and heroine and refusing to go further; the texture of the narrative, for all its moments of gaiety and charm, has already suggested the bitter ironies of which life is capable. His later work explores those ironies with sometimes an almost malevolent staging of coincidence to emphasize the disparity between human desire and ambition on the one hand and what fate has in store for the characters on the other. But fate is not a wholly external force. Men and women arc driven by the demands of their own nature as much as by anything from outside them. Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) is the story of an intelligent and sensitive girl, daughter of a poor family, driven to murder and so to death by hanging, by a concatenation of events and circumstances so bitterly ironic that many readers find it the darkest of Hardy's novels, while others would award that distinction to Jude the Obscure, the disturbingly powerful account of an ambitious rustic trapped between his intellect and his sensuality and as a result delivered to destruction.

Hardy himself denied that he was a pessimist, calling himself a "meliorist," i.e., one who believes that the world may lie made better by human effort.

 

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (1850-94)

A return to optimism is shown in the verse and prose of Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94), but it is a rather superficial one, for Stevenson is a rather superficial writer. He is at his best in adventure stories which show the influence of his fellow-countryman, Walter Scott- -Kidnapped, I Master of Ballanfrae -and boys' books like Treasure Island, a juvenile masterpiece. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde deals with the duality of good an evil within the same man, but it is perhaps little more than a well-written thriller. The poems, especially those for children, are charming, and the essays, which have little to say, say that little very well. His short stories are good, and we may note here that the short story was becoming an accepted form—writers had to learn how to express themselves succinctly, using great compression in plot, characterization, and dialogue-heralding the approach of an age less leisurely than the Victorian, with no time for three-volume novels, and demanding its stories in quick mouthfuls.

JOHN GALSWORTHY (1867—1933)

John Galsworthy (1867—1933) is best known for his Forsyte Saga, a series of six novels which trace the story of a typically English upperclass family from Victorian days to the nineteen-twenties—presenting their reactions to great events which, in effect, spell the doom of all they stand for, including World War I, the growth of Socialism, the General Strike of 1926. The Forsyte Saga, in trying to view this dying class dispassionately —with occasional irony—nevertheless seems to develop a sympathy for the hero of Tile Man of Property, Soames Forsyte, the epitome of the money-seeking class which Galsworthy is supposed to detest. Galsworthy, in fact, is himself drawn into the family of Forsytes, becomes involved with its fortunes, and what starts off as a work of social criticism ends in acceptance of the very principles it attacks. This work is still widely read, though it is not greatly esteemed by the modern critics. It came into its own as a television serial in the 1960s.