An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times Read online

  B. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SPECTATOR

  12. The most pleasing expression of this self-satisfaction of the age isfound in the _Spectator_, the first and best representative of thatspecial style of literature--the only really popular literature of ourtime--which consists in talking to the public about itself. Humanity istaken as reflected in the ordinary life of men; and, as thus reflected,it is copied with the most minute fidelity. No attempt is made either tosuppress the baser elements of man's nature, or to transfigure them by astronger light than that of the common understanding. No deeper laws arerecognised than those which vindicate themselves to the eye of dailyobservation, no motives purer than the "mixed" ones which the practicalphilosopher delights to analyse, no life higher than that which isqualified by animal wants. The reader never finds himself carried into aregion where it requires an effort to travel, or which is above theexisting level of opinion and morality. It is from this levelness withlife that the _Spectator_ derives its interest--an interest so nearlythe same, barring the absence of plot, with that of the novel, as tolead Macaulay to pronounce Addison "the forerunner of the great Englishnovelists."[11] The elements of the novel, indeed, already existed inAddison's time, and only required combination. Fictitious biography,which may be regarded as its raw material, had been written by Defoewith a life-like reality which has never since been equalled; and thepopular drama furnished plots, in the shape of love stories drawn frompresent life. Let the adventures of the fictitious biography, instead ofbeing merely external to the man, as in Defoe, be made subservient tothat display of character in which Addison had shown himself a master,and let them become steps in the development of a love-plot, and thenovel--the novel of the last century, at any rate--is fully formed. Aswas the self-contented, and therefore uncreative and prosaic, thought ofthe age, which produced the novel, such the novel itself continued tobe. Man, comfortable and acquiescent, wished to amuse himself by areflex of the life which he no longer aspired to transcend. He wanted toenjoy himself twice over--in act and in fancy; or, if the former weredenied him, at least to explore in fancy the world of pleasure andexcitement, of which circumstances abridged or disturbed his enjoymentin fact. In "the smooth tale, generally of love,"[12] the novelistsupplied the want.

  FOOTNOTES:

  [11] "We have not the least doubt that, if Addison had written a novel,on an extensive plan, it would have been superior to any that wepossess. As it is, he is entitled to be considered, not only as thegreatest of the English essayists, but as the forerunner of the greatEnglish novelists."--Macaulay, 'Life and writings of Addison.'

  [12] "A small tale, generally of love."--Johnson's Dictionary.

  C. THE MODERN NOVEL A REFLECTION OF ORDINARY LIFE

  13. This Johnsonian definition may be objected to as merely accidental,and as inconsistent with the romantic character which the novel assumedin the hands of Sir Walter Scott. It expresses, however, adequatelyenough the view which the popular novelists prior to Scott took of theirown productions. Cervantes, though in his own great work attaining thatrhapsody of grotesqueness which lies on the edge of poetry, had yetestablished the idea of the novel as the antithesis of romance. Thesenovelists, accordingly, if they are not always telling the reader (likeFielding), seem yet to be always thinking to themselves, how perfectlynatural their stories are. It is on this naturalness they pridethemselves; and naturalness, in their sense, meant conformity to natureas it is commonly seen. This is the characteristic feature of the class.Whether, like Richardson, they analyse character from within, or, likeMiss Austen, develop it in the outward particularities of an unruffledlife--whether they describe, like Fielding, the buoyancy of a generousanimalism, or, like Miss Edgeworth and Miss Burney, the precisedecencies of conventional morality--they deal simply witheighteenth-century life as seen by eighteenth-century eyesight. Allromantic virtue, all idealised passion, they rigorously eschew. Prudencethey make the guide, happiness the end, of life. And they do well. Theyundertake to copy present life, and they do so. They have to reflectman's habitual consciousness; it is not for them to anticipate aconsciousness which has not yet been attained, or to represent man'slower nature as absorbed in a spiritual movement which, because wecannot arrest it, we habitually ignore. It is just their deficiency inthis respect which gives them their peculiar fascination. Man is notreally mere man, though he may think himself so. He is always somethingpotentially, which he is not actually; always inadequate to himself; andas such, disturbed and miserable. The novel, on the contrary, representshim as being what he vainly tries to be--adequate to himself. It offersto his imagination the full enjoyment of earthly life, unchallenged byobstinate surmises, untroubled by yearnings after the divine. Ordinarymen are satisfied with this enjoyment; the highest are allured by itstemptation. The "reading public" is charmed with the contemplation ofits own likeness, "twice as natural" as life. Its own wisdom, its ownwishes, its own vanity, are set before it in little with a completenessand finish which the deeper laws of the universe, vindicating themselvesby apparent disorder and misfortune, happily prevent from being attainedin real life.[13] It is thus pleasantly flattered into contentment withitself--a contentment not disturbed by the occasional censure ofpractices which good taste condemns as ungraceful, or prudence asprejudicial to happiness. But the man of keener insight, who, instead ofwrestling with the riddle of life, seeks for a time to forget it, andto place in its stead the rounded representation of activity which thenovelist supplies, cannot but find the vanity of hiding his face fromthe presence which he dreads. Out of heart with the world abouthim--conscious of its actual meanness, and without vigor to re-cast itin the mould of his own thought--he fancies that after a sojourn in theworld of fiction he may come back braced for his struggle with life. Inhis study, with a novel, he hopes to overlook the walls of hisprison-house, to see the beginning and the end of human strife. But hesoon finds himself in the embrace of the very power which he sought toescape. Here is the world itself brought back to him. Here is a perfectcopy of that which in actual experience he sees but partially. Themirror is but too truly held up to nature. The getting and spending, themarrying and giving in marriage, the dominion of fortune which makeslife a riddle, the prudential motives and worship of happiness whichhide its divinity, these meet him here as they meet him in life,untransmuted, unidealised. Yet the charm of art overcomes him. Theperfectness of the representation, the skill with which the incidentsare combined to result in a crowning happiness behind which no sorrowseems to lie, make him find a pleasure in the copy which he cannot findin actual life, when in personal and painful collision with it. Butmeanwhile he gains no real strength, he readies no new height ofcontemplation. He comes back to the world, as a man with a diseaseddigestion, after living for a time on spiced meats, comes back toordinary food. He has not braced the assimilative power of his thoughtby a flight into the ideal world, or learnt even for a time to turn"matter to spirit by sublimation strange." He has remained on the earth,and though his fancy has for the hour given the earth a charm, he is nobetter able than he was before to raise his eyes from its dead level, orremove the limits of its horizon.

  14. Thus, then, the old quarrel of the philosopher with the imitativearts seems to be revived in respect of the novel. But thoughnovel-writers might be banished from a new republic,[14] it would not beas artists, but for the inferiority of their art. An artist indeed thenovelist is; he combines events and persons with reference to ends; heconcentrates into a dialogue of a few sentences an amount of feeling andcharacter which it would take real men some hours to express; he impartsa rapidity to the stream of incident quite unlike the sluggishness ofour daily experience. In this sense he does not copy what we see, butshows us what we can not see for ourselves. Our complaint against him isthat the aspect of things which he shows us is merely the outward andnatural, as opposed to the inner or ideal. His answer would probably beeither that the ideal, in any sense in which it can be opposed to thenatural, must be false and delusive; or that it is merely an accident ofnovel-wri
ting, as hitherto practised, and not anything essential to thisspecies of composition, which has prevented it from exhibiting thehighest aspect of things; or, finally, that admitting the view which thenovel presents to be necessarily lower than the poetic, it yet is a moreuseful view for man to contemplate.

  FOOTNOTES:

  [13] This rather obscure phrase may be interpreted as follows: Theaverage man would like to live such a rounded and symmetrical life as isportrayed in the novel. He would like to see his wisdom justifyingitself, his vanity triumphant, his selfishness achieving its end; and hethinks that his cravings are being satisfied. But the deeper laws of theuniverse will not be balked, they are lying in wait. And presently whenhe thinks, good easy man, his little bourgeois world is rounding intothe perfect sphere, they spring up in his path, shatter his sugar-candyparadise, and ruthlessly vindicate themselves (that is, prove that theycannot be disregarded, that they must be reckoned with) by bringing intohis life disorder and misfortune.

  [14] As poets were from the republic of Plato. "When any one of thesepantomimic gentlemen, who are so clever that they can imitate anything,comes to us, and makes a proposal to exhibit himself and his poetry, wewill fall down and worship him as a sweet and holy and wonderful being;but we must also inform him that in our state such as he are notpermitted to exist; the law will not allow them. And so when we haveanointed him with myrrh, and set a garland of wool upon his head, weshall send him away to another city. For we mean to employ for oursouls' health the rougher and severer poet or story-teller, who willimitate the style of the virtuous only, and will follow those modelswhich we prescribed at first when we began the education of oursoldiers."--Plato, 'Republic,' III. 398.

  D. NATURALISM vs. IDEALISM

  15. Much fruitless controversy between naturalism and idealism in artmight have been saved by a consideration of the true character of theantithesis. It becomes unmeaning as soon as nature is expanded to thefulness of the idea. And so expanded it may be, for, according to theold formula, it is always in flux. It is never in being, always inbecoming. As has been already pointed out, it is what we see; and we seeaccording to higher and lower laws of vision. We may look at man and theworld either from without or from within. We may observe man's actionslike other phenomena, and from observation learn to ascribe them tocertain general but distinct motives and faculties, which we do notrefer to any higher unity; or, on the other hand, by the light of ourown consciousness we may recognise that in man of which no observationof his actions could tell us--something which is in him, but yet is nothis own; which combines with all his faculties, but is none of them;which gives them a unity, to which their diversity is merely relative.So again with regard to the phenomena of the world; we may look on theseeither simply as phenomena, or as manifestations of destiny or divinewill. The former view of man and the world we may conveniently call_natural_, because the only view that mere observation can give us; thelatter _ideal_, because making observation posterior to something givenin thought.

  E. TRAGEDY AND THE NOVEL

  16. The tragedian, then, idealises, because he starts from within. Hereaches, as it were, the central fire, in the heat of which everyseparate faculty, every animal want, every fortuitous incident ismelted down and lost. We never could observe in actual experiencepassion such as Lear's, or meditation such as Hamlet's, fusingeverything else into itself. Facts at every step would interfere toprevent such a possibility. But let us place ourselves, by the poet'shelp, within the soul of Lear or Hamlet, and we shall be able to followthe process by which the spiritual power, taking the form of passion inthe one, and of thought in the other, and working outwards, drawseverything into its own unity, according to the same activity of which,however impeded by the "imperfections of matter," we are conscious inourselves. The incidents of the tragedy are wholly subordinate, issuingeither from this spiritual energy of the actors on the one hand, or, onthe other, from destiny, to whose throne the poet penetrates. They thuspresent an aspect entirely different from that of events which weapproach from without. The novel, on the contrary, starts from theoutside. Its main texture is a web of incidents through which themotions of the spirit must be discerned, if discerned at all. Theseincidents must be probable, must be such as are consistent with theobserved sequences of the world. The view of man, therefore, which weattain through them, can only be that which is attainable by observationof outward actions and events; or, in other words, according to thedistinction which we have attempted to establish, it is the naturalview, not the ideal. Its character corresponds to its origin.Observation shows us man not as self-determined, but as the creature ofcircumstances, as a phenomenon among other phenomena. As such, too, heis presented to us in the novel. We do not see him, as in tragedy,standing in the strength of his own spirit, remaking the world by itspower, determined by it for good or evil, dependent on it for all thatmay be attractive or repellent about him. The hero of a novel attractsin part by his physiognomy, his manner, or even his dress; his characteris qualified by circumstances and society; his impulses vary accordingto the impressions of outward things; he is the sport of fortune,dependent for weal or woe on the acquisition of some external blessingwhich the development of the plot may or may not bestow on him. Ascircumstances make his life what it is, so the particular combination ofcircumstances, called happiness, constitutes its end. Instead of losinghis merely personal and particular self, as in the catastrophe of atragedy, he satisfies it with its appropriate pleasure. "He that lovethwife or children more than me, is not worthy of me," are the words ofthe Author of the Christian life. "Marry, enjoy domestic bliss, and thouhast attained the end of virtue"--such is the ordinary moral of theordinary novel; nay, the only consistent moral of the consistent novel.As the novelist sows, so must he reap; as his plot is, such must itsconsummation be. In the body of the work he must, from the nature of thecase, represent men as they appear in fact, and he cannot fitly round itoff by representing them as they are only in idea. He cannot step atpleasure from one sphere of art to another; by attempting to do so hedestroys the harmony without which there is no art at all, and leaves uswith a sense of dissatisfaction and unreality. The reader, who throughthe whole three volumes till close upon the end has been travelling inan atmosphere of ordinary morality and every-day aspiration, knows nothow in the last chapter to breathe the air of a higher life.

  F. THE EPIC AND THE NOVEL

  17. It may be objected to this limitation of the capabilities of thenovel, that it must stand on the same footing with the epic poem, whichis no less made up of a texture of incident, and which, therefore,according to the present argument, can only reach the springs of man'sactions from without. Such an objection has some truth with reference tothe Homeric poems. These, as we have seen, have the legendary narrativefor their primitive element, and in so far as they are merely a reflexof Greek life in the Homeric age, their interest is that of a novel, notproperly of the epic. The true epic (of which the "Paradise Lost" wouldseem to be a less mixed form than the Iliad or Odyssey), no less thantragedy, seizes the idea of a self-determined spirit on the one hand,and of destiny or divine law on the other. These are the primary springsfrom which it makes action and incident issue, with a perfectsubordination which the laws of our lower nature and of social life mustprevent from being realised in the world of experience, and which thenovelist therefore, tied down to the world of experience, only offendsus by attempting to exhibit. The essential character of the novel is notchanged by its assumption of the form of a romance. In the romanticworld of the middle ages, the great Italian poets did indeed find theirmaterials. To their eyes it was a world in which hope and wonder mightroam at large: it furnished actions which, glorified by them, becamemanifestations of the divine and heroic in man. But it is another worldas seen by the novelist, even by such a one as Walter Scott. Theromantic life which he depicts is simply the life which we see our ownneighbors live, with more picturesque situations, with more to excitecuriosity in the reader, and activity in the imaginary hero. We gainmore
from him, it is true, than from those copies of the too familiarfaces around us which are the staple commodity in novels of the day. Heat least carries us into scenes of adventure, where we may forget the"smooth tale" of our nineteenth-century life. But further he cannot go,for he approaches men from without. He does not reach, by other methodsthan observation, to any _a priori_ affection of the spirit, and to thissubordinate incident. Had he done so, he could not have uttered himselfin the language of common life. In the world of heroes or angels,_i.e._, of men idealised, to which the epic poet raises us, he sustainsus by the power of verse. The exalted action and the poetic expressionare as essentially correlative in the epic, as are the natural incidentand the prosaic expression in the novel.

  G. POETRY AND PROSE