The objection to misery and struggle as an impetus to art is that it takes the caution out of a man. The violent surge of things to be said pushes one recklessly on, so that he has no time for questioning his aesthetics. Standards have to be taken for granted; if the house is to be erected hastily, we must grab the hammer and nails nearest at hand. By this I do not necessarily mean that the book is dashed off at top speed. Samuel Butler spent years with his Way of All Flesh, and yet whenever he came to it, he came not as an artist but as one of the immersed-in-lifers. He may have talked technique from night till morning, but his book was always bigger than he was, like life itself. There is not a single trial of skill in the whole volume. Earnest things were to be expressed adequately, and he expressed them as adequately as his earnestness could enable him. The same might be said of the author of The Mask.
The fault with this earnest adequateness shows most noticeably in the disturbing breaks of the narrative, frequent in both books. The reader is lugged ten or twenty years ahead of the story for a few pages, and then just as suddenly dumped back again. Autobiographical associations have proved stronger than the demands of the medium, so that for the sake of a full truth the author will snatch at anything. This makes it impossible to develop concomitantly with the hero of the novel. A reader's receptivity is a very frailly built mechanism which is always disrupted by such rough handling. If the opening sentence of a book prognosticates one kind of story, the reader unconsciously adapts himself to whatever kind it promises to be. But if the story does not abide by the laws of its kind, it cannot be entirely satisfactory, even though we theoretically approve of its transgressions. There are many Sorts of writing in which any kind of a break is possible—I can think of no happier example of this than Gide's Nourritures Terrestres—but if one is setting out at this late date to do something compelling, something drastically true to life, something vibrant with human interest, he must recognize that the medium is already pretty thoroughly established for that sort of thing; and that if he is after verisimilitude with heart and soul, he must have a better reason than mere convenience for breaking the steady. march of his narrative.
The embarrassing predicament of The Mask is that it is a reasonably good book. Now a reasonably good book is peculiarly
