By J.B. Priestley

There is one certain characteristic of contemporary literature which everyone must have remarked, but to which it is very difficult to give a name. It is straining language to call it this or that quality; yet a name it must have, and Audacity will do as well as another. At the worst, it is more than audacity, it is downright impudence; at the best, it becomes engaging sauciness, youth pirouetting to the breakfast-table, or rises to magnificent unwisdom and shows us, once again, the bright fool darting before the van of the angels. It must not, however, be confused with stark originality, which presents us with the strange shape of some creature new to this world, and which is far above mere audacity. There are many ways in which a writer may approach his audience: he may seem to let us overhear him, may seem to meditate aloud, in the manner of Pater; he may take us into a corner and pour out a stream of confessions and confidences, in the manner of Hazlitt; or thrust us into the darkness and belabour us back again into the light, in the manner of Carlyle; there are these and a score of other ways, but the most of them are going out of fashion. It is all ‘Boot, Saddle and Away!’ with so many of our writers now, and we, as unoffending readers, are continually harassed by the sallies of these wild horsemen. No longer are we to be soothed, cajoled, fascinated or awed; unless we are shocked or irritated, the trick fails. We must be surprised by one or two great blows, or goaded into admiration by a thousand pinpricks. We must all play the part of poor, elderly, disapproving relatives, while our authors strut about as wild young nephews, who expect nothing from us but unwilling admiration and envious side-glances. Never was there such bravery at the end of a pen.

What then, one asks, are the signs and marks of audacity in literature by which it can be recognised in this place or that. They are countless. The ramifications of this fantastic growth cannot be traced; it blossoms so wantonly, drops such strange fruit, that a man has already seen it everywhere, or almost everywhere, or is by nature blind to it, having perhaps been nourished upon it, and knowing nothing else. It comes out in so many different ways that only a few can be noticed here. When a writer shows undisguised contempt for his readers, as so many writers do, then audacity is degenerating into sheer impudence. This sort of contempt is usually shown in two ways: firstly, by supreme carelessness in matter, as if to suggest that the very dregs of our author’s mind are good enough for his particular audience, and perhaps better than the best of his fellow authors’ brains; secondly, by supreme carelessness in manner, as if one were to receive callers in a greasy dressing-gown. Persistently to attack the cherished illusions of the reading public or to run athwart the accepted morals of the time, are tricks that will bring their own rewards while audacity is in the ascendant; but they are not lasting. A modern dramatist who has made much capital out of these tricks must be puzzling his brains now to know what to do with a generation that has no illusions left. Again, one of our novelists who has played the naughty young man from Paris for some thirty-odd years, now finds himself regarded as a respectable elderly man-of-letters. To many, Bernard Shaw’s Life-Force seems a sentimental crotchet, and George Moore’s earlier works seem more fatuous than disreputable. If, however, there are enough of the disillusioned to make an audience, a writer who knows the value of audacity will not hesitate to swing back the pendulum by defending the old prejudices with all the force at his command. This may be the clue to the audacity of G. K. Chesterton, who has spent his time declaiming against the only people who can understand and enjoy him. Again, the characteristic may take other unwelcome forms that bring it near to impudence, as for example in the work of men who gain the ear of the public in one capacity, and then insist upon acting in another, as when a good teller of tales turns without warning into a philosopher or prophet: it is as if M. Pachmann were to ignore the piano before him and treat his audience to a few fumbling conjuring tricks. Moreover, to pronounce judgment on matters about which one knows nothing is to carry audacity to doubtful lengths. Criticism offers, and has always offered, a good field for the audacious, but a great many of us now tend to abuse our freedom. Without knowing a word of Italian and Portuguese, a man will undertake to write twenty essays proving that Camoens was a better poet than Tasso. And of late it seems that audacity of the baser sort has invaded the realm of verse; every day, our poets are more startling, though not so startling as their friends and critics.

Looking about then, with no unfriendly eye, we shall discover that audacity, not of the worst kind, is to be found in much of the best known work of to-day. It is not everywhere: there is little or no trace of it in the work of Hardy, Bridges, Henry James, Conrad, W. H. Hudson, Galsworthy, Maurice Hewlett, to name only a few. But elsewhere, though mingled with other finer qualities, there is no lack of it. It takes many strange shapes, and can be discovered lurking under many disguises. It has proved itself no small part of Bernard Shaw’s stock-in-trade. It roars lustily through the essays and ‘histories’ of Messrs. Belloc and Chesterton, peeps slyly from Max Beerbohm’s essays, screams in the devastating contributions of H. G. Wells, leers through George Moore’s endless reminiscences. It drove Arnold Bennett to write essays, and is now urging John Drinkwater to create dramas. After being long the servant, it is now the master of Barrie. There is no end to it. Fortunately, these are not gentlemen of one characteristic alone; they do not content themselves with crying ‘ducdame,’ for they have still something to say when the circle is formed. But there are others, novelists, verse-writers, critics, and what editors call ‘publicists,’ who think to run their course with nothing to speed them but audacity alone, which makes them doubly audacious, but nothing more. The drums beat, the trumpets sound, the crowd is hushed, and then follows a cough and a splutter—and then silence.

When did it begin? In its primary form, no doubt it is a characteristic as old as literature itself. It is there, full-fledged, in Aristophanes. The Hebrew chroniclers and prophets had audacity of a sublime kind. Perhaps there were once wild young literary men in China, and no doubt many an impudent papyrus in Babylon and Ancient Egypt. But in the more questionable shape we know, audacity in literature is a thing only of yesterday and to-day. Going back, we come first to Wilde, who was nothing if not audacious, an impudent confidence-trick man-of-letters. Then, Stevenson and Henley, not without a touch, surely, though more audacious in the flesh perhaps than on paper. Again, Butler, a very clever man, perhaps a great man, but still a shockingly bad precedent for young men inclined to flippancy and petulance. There is Bagehot, whose genuine originality is not unspeckled; and further back, we see the young Disraeli, busy upon Contarini Fleming, and compounded of velveteen, macassar oil and impudence. And now we come to Blackwood’s young men, Christopher North and Company, beginning a career of literary swashbuckling with the Chaldee MS., and culprits one and all, triple-dyed in the fearful purple. And if a poetic criminal is wanted, there is Byron, who, from the sheer impertinence of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers to the magnificent audacity of Don Juan, gives us every form of impudence rhymed and rhythmed; who began the game of making the bourgeois pay for being shocked, and continuously boiled his pot with the heat of their disapproval. But can we stop here? The graves stir, and a crowd of thin ghosts press forward, waving innumerable ragged volumes. There is the lean spectre of Yorick, and, close by, the author of Jonathan Wild, while a little way behind, one catches a glimpse of Swift, and Defoe, and Buckingham, and a hundred more. But their claims must be denied, for we must not fall into the error of using our make-shift term ‘audacity’ in its widest sense, and thereby running back to the Ptolemies in search of origins; we must save something for ourselves in literature, and we have already confessed that a certain audacious trick of writing belongs to our own age; so we will take our stand upon Byron and Blackwood’s merry men, and go no further.

There is one plain reason for the existence, or rather the success, of the audacious in our letters. It is not so much that writers have changed as that the audience has changed. When all that is written goes the round of one small circle of readers, is pondered over by the same leisurely few; when a writer’s style and manner are discussed by those about him, and are matters of some moment, an ordinary man of letters will imitate what seems to him the best manner of the time, and a greater man will be simply himself, bringing something new into the world; but among greater or less there will be little mere posturing. A man addresses his equals jovially, carelessly, angrily, as the mood takes him; it is only for pennies in the market-place or at the fair ground that he continually makes faces and stands on his head. With a small, critical audience, some fashions of writing are not in place, being entirely unwelcome: we have not yet allowed the trombone and big drum into our chamber music. But when the little circle of readers begins to swell until it is enlarged beyond recognition by rush after rush of newcomers; when journals and newspapers begin to thrive, and the old groves and porticos take on the appearance of an auction mart, then it is time to change the manner. The audience is huge, with half its wits gone wandering, a great Saurian blinking at the mud, a thing to be tickled with a ten-foot spike; it plays the part of a vast, drowsy auctioneer lolling above a clamouring crowd of buyers, men-of-letters trying to catch its eye; and what avail now are the level tones and the sober argument when only a squeak or a roar or an insane gesture is likely to attract attention. And now that over a century has passed since the times began to change, since the literary man left his armchair and took to eating fire and swallowing the sword, if we choose to write we shall do well if we escape audacity, for it is woven madly into the texture of our letters, the note of it is louder than the loud bassoon. At the best, with a good will, we may abjure the more impudent tricks, but unless we are towering geniuses we cannot escape the characteristic itself: it is—alas!—the very marrow of this essay.

From Papers From Lilliput