Growing Pains

Abstract

The novelists I have been considering in the last chapter are all realists. One hesitates to use that word, because ever since its debut in English (in an essay on Balzac in the Westminster Review in 1853), it has been employed loosely, to cover a multitude of meanings. I use it in the sense Ford used it in his novel criticism, or as Bennett used it in his reviews for the New Age. ‘The progress of every art is an apparent progress from conventionality to realism. The basis of convention remains, but as the art develops it finds more and more subtle methods of fitting life to the convention or the convention to life.’ For Bennett, Chekhov was the perfect realist: ‘He seems to have achieved absolute realism. … His climaxes are never strained; nothing is ever idealised, sentimentalised, etherealised; no part of the truth is left out, no part is exaggerated.’ In The Good Soldier, Ford made use of the subtlest method his study of James and the French and Russian realists had suggested to him. He fitted the lives of Dowell, Ashburnham, Florence and the rest to the conventions of an elaborate narrative, and by doing so he provided his readers with a sophisticated and unremitting study of at least one man’s temperament. I have emphasised Ford’s concentration on what he called an ‘affair’.

‘I am weary of my individuality, and simply nauseated by other people’s.’ D. H. Lawrence