But it is a strange conflict, with long truces, and often looks like a mere family quarrel. I mean that the novelist’s effort—any artist’s effort—to impose shape and form on that mass of particulars while maintaining their distinctness has something in common with the mind’s will to absolute rule through the synthesizing process. They are similar but they are not the same. The artist’s concern (and especially, I should say, the novelist’s) must be to save the particulars at all costs, even at the sacrifice of the perfection of the design. An idea cannot have loose ends, but a novel, I almost think, needs them. Nevertheless, there is enough in common for the novelist to feel, like Dostoievsky, the attraction of ideas while taking up arms against them—most often with the weapons of mockery.
We tend to suppose that most novelists take the field against particular ideas, like Dickens in Hard Times, that only a few—say, Tolstoy and Lawrence—show an innate angry suspicion of ideas per se, as though the tender living tissue in their care needed protection from the rampaging will to abstraction. Yet even in celebrated victories over specific sets of ideas (Voltaire’s disposal of Leibnitz in the person of Dr. Pangloss—“If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?”—Orwell’s disposal of Stalinism—“All animals are equal but some are more equal than others”), there is a certain overkill, as though the work were being enjoyed for its own sake. I believe this is always the case, that the tension is always there, except where the novelist has never felt the fascination of ideas, and this, until our own time, has been rare.
I said just now that the novelist’s concern must be to save the particulars, and perhaps this needs a little explanation. Even when he shows vast social forces in motion (like Victor Hugo or Manzoni or Tolstoy), the novelist’s care is for individual destinies, and it seems to be proper to the novel that they should be small destinies. Not the kings and noble men of the tragic theatre or the witty bloods of comedy but Renzo and Lucia, Tess, Jude, Stephen Blackpool, Felix and Esther, Cosette. None of these poor sparrows “fits” into the overall social framework, and if they have a place in a larger scheme, it can only be God’s, which is unknowable. “The President of the Immortals had finished his sport with Tess.” Now this habit of concern for the small predisposes the novelist to distrust generalization, i.e., to champion Dobbin against the gramnivorous quadruped. The position, however, is not simple. As we have seen, there appears to be an affinity between Ideas and facts, both Mr. Gradgrind’s kind and the other, that is, between the lofty and the very small, as though in the novel they grew together, like the red rose and the green briar in the ballad.
Besides, in the past, if the novelist’s mission to teach and improve inclined him to Mr. Gradgrind’s side, his common sense—a highly necessary faculty for the novelist, which I have neglected to mention until now—and his powers of observation led him to despair of any recipes for improvement or else to fall back, like George Eliot, on simple housewifely stand-bys: Forget Self and Think of Others.
Today there is no longer a dilemma. Ideas are held not to belong in the novel; in the art of fiction we have progressed beyond such simplicities. The doctrine of progress in the arts is a hard doctrine, imposing itself even on those who are fervent non-believers. The artist is an imitative beast, and, being of my place and time, I cannot philosophize in a novel in the good old way, any more than I can write “We mortals.” A novel that has ideas in it stamps itself as dated; there is no escape from that law.