An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times Part 2

B. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SPECTATOR

12. The most pleasing expression of this self-satisfaction of the age is found in the _Spectator_, the first and best representative of that special style of literature--the only really popular literature of our time--which consists in talking to the public about itself. Humanity is taken 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 to suppress the baser elements of man's nature, or to transfigure them by a stronger light than that of the common understanding. No deeper laws are recognised than those which vindicate themselves to the eye of daily observation, no motives purer than the "mixed" ones which the practical philosopher delights to a.n.a.lyse, no life higher than that which is qualified by animal wants. The reader never finds himself carried into a region where it requires an effort to travel, or which is above the existing level of opinion and morality. It is from this levelness with life that the _Spectator_ derives its interest--an interest so nearly the same, barring the absence of plot, with that of the novel, as to lead Macaulay to p.r.o.nounce Addison "the forerunner of the great English novelists."[11] The elements of the novel, indeed, already existed in Addison's time, and only required combination. Fict.i.tious biography, which may be regarded as its raw material, had been written by Defoe with a life-like reality which has never since been equalled; and the popular drama furnished plots, in the shape of love stories drawn from present life. Let the adventures of the fict.i.tious biography, instead of being merely external to the man, as in Defoe, be made subservient to that display of character in which Addison had shown himself a master, and let them become steps in the development of a love-plot, and the novel--the novel of the last century, at any rate--is fully formed. As was the self-contented, and therefore uncreative and prosaic, thought of the age, which produced the novel, such the novel itself continued to be. Man, comfortable and acquiescent, wished to amuse himself by a reflex of the life which he no longer aspired to transcend. He wanted to enjoy himself twice over--in act and in fancy; or, if the former were denied him, at least to explore in fancy the world of pleasure and excitement, of which circ.u.mstances abridged or disturbed his enjoyment in fact. In "the smooth tale, generally of love,"[12] the novelist supplied 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 we possess. As it is, he is ent.i.tled to be considered, not only as the greatest of the English essayists, but as the forerunner of the great English 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 a.s.sumed in the hands of Sir Walter Scott. It expresses, however, adequately enough the view which the popular novelists prior to Scott took of their own productions. Cervantes, though in his own great work attaining that rhapsody of grotesqueness which lies on the edge of poetry, had yet established the idea of the novel as the ant.i.thesis of romance. These novelists, accordingly, if they are not always telling the reader (like Fielding), seem yet to be always thinking to themselves, how perfectly natural their stories are. It is on this naturalness they pride themselves; and naturalness, in their sense, meant conformity to nature as it is commonly seen. This is the characteristic feature of the cla.s.s.

Whether, like Richardson, they a.n.a.lyse character from within, or, like Miss Austen, develop it in the outward particularities of an unruffled life--whether they describe, like Fielding, the buoyancy of a generous animalism, or, like Miss Edgeworth and Miss Burney, the precise decencies of conventional morality--they deal simply with eighteenth-century life as seen by eighteenth-century eyesight. All romantic virtue, all idealised pa.s.sion, they rigorously eschew. Prudence they make the guide, happiness the end, of life. And they do well. They undertake to copy present life, and they do so. They have to reflect man's habitual consciousness; it is not for them to antic.i.p.ate a consciousness which has not yet been attained, or to represent man's lower nature as absorbed in a spiritual movement which, because we cannot arrest it, we habitually ignore. It is just their deficiency in this respect which gives them their peculiar fascination. Man is not really mere man, though he may think himself so. He is always something potentially, which he is not actually; always inadequate to himself; and as such, disturbed and miserable. The novel, on the contrary, represents him as being what he vainly tries to be--adequate to himself. It offers to his imagination the full enjoyment of earthly life, unchallenged by obstinate surmises, untroubled by yearnings after the divine. Ordinary men are satisfied with this enjoyment; the highest are allured by its temptation. The "reading public" is charmed with the contemplation of its own likeness, "twice as natural" as life. Its own wisdom, its own wishes, its own vanity, are set before it in little with a completeness and finish which the deeper laws of the universe, vindicating themselves by apparent disorder and misfortune, happily prevent from being attained in real life.[13] It is thus pleasantly flattered into contentment with itself--a contentment not disturbed by the occasional censure of practices which good taste condemns as ungraceful, or prudence as prejudicial to happiness. But the man of keener insight, who, instead of wrestling with the riddle of life, seeks for a time to forget it, and to place in its stead the rounded representation of activity which the novelist supplies, cannot but find the vanity of hiding his face from the presence which he dreads. Out of heart with the world about him--conscious of its actual meanness, and without vigor to re-cast it in the mould of his own thought--he fancies that after a sojourn in the world of fiction he may come back braced for his struggle with life. In his study, with a novel, he hopes to overlook the walls of his prison-house, to see the beginning and the end of human strife. But he soon finds himself in the embrace of the very power which he sought to escape. Here is the world itself brought back to him. Here is a perfect copy of that which in actual experience he sees but partially. The mirror is but too truly held up to nature. The getting and spending, the marrying and giving in marriage, the dominion of fortune which makes life a riddle, the prudential motives and wors.h.i.+p of happiness which hide its divinity, these meet him here as they meet him in life, untrans.m.u.ted, unidealised. Yet the charm of art overcomes him. The perfectness of the representation, the skill with which the incidents are combined to result in a crowning happiness behind which no sorrow seems to lie, make him find a pleasure in the copy which he cannot find in actual life, when in personal and painful collision with it. But meanwhile he gains no real strength, he readies no new height of contemplation. He comes back to the world, as a man with a diseased digestion, after living for a time on spiced meats, comes back to ordinary food. He has not braced the a.s.similative power of his thought by 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 no better able than he was before to raise his eyes from its dead level, or remove the limits of its horizon.

14. Thus, then, the old quarrel of the philosopher with the imitative arts seems to be revived in respect of the novel. But though novel-writers might be banished from a new republic,[14] it would not be as artists, but for the inferiority of their art. An artist indeed the novelist is; he combines events and persons with reference to ends; he concentrates into a dialogue of a few sentences an amount of feeling and character which it would take real men some hours to express; he imparts a rapidity to the stream of incident quite unlike the sluggishness of our daily experience. In this sense he does not copy what we see, but shows us what we can not see for ourselves. Our complaint against him is that the aspect of things which he shows us is merely the outward and natural, as opposed to the inner or ideal. His answer would probably be either that the ideal, in any sense in which it can be opposed to the natural, must be false and delusive; or that it is merely an accident of novel-writing, as. .h.i.therto practised, and not anything essential to this species of composition, which has prevented it from exhibiting the highest aspect of things; or, finally, that admitting the view which the novel presents to be necessarily lower than the poetic, it yet is a more useful view for man to contemplate.

FOOTNOTES:

[13] This rather obscure phrase may be interpreted as follows: The average man would like to live such a rounded and symmetrical life as is portrayed in the novel. He would like to see his wisdom justifying itself, his vanity triumphant, his selfishness achieving its end; and he thinks that his cravings are being satisfied. But the deeper laws of the universe will not be balked, they are lying in wait. And presently when he thinks, good easy man, his little bourgeois world is rounding into the perfect sphere, they spring up in his path, shatter his sugar-candy paradise, and ruthlessly vindicate themselves (that is, prove that they cannot be disregarded, that they must be reckoned with) by bringing into his life disorder and misfortune.

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

D. NATURALISM vs. IDEALISM

15. Much fruitless controversy between naturalism and idealism in art might have been saved by a consideration of the true character of the ant.i.thesis. It becomes unmeaning as soon as nature is expanded to the fulness of the idea. And so expanded it may be, for, according to the old formula, it is always in flux. It is never in being, always in becoming. As has been already pointed out, it is what we see; and we see according to higher and lower laws of vision. We may look at man and the world either from without or from within. We may observe man's actions like other phenomena, and from observation learn to ascribe them to certain general but distinct motives and faculties, which we do not refer to any higher unity; or, on the other hand, by the light of our own consciousness we may recognise that in man of which no observation of his actions could tell us--something which is in him, but yet is not his 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 these either simply as phenomena, or as manifestations of destiny or divine will. The former view of man and the world we may conveniently call _natural_, because the only view that mere observation can give us; the latter _ideal_, because making observation posterior to something given in thought.

E. TRAGEDY AND THE NOVEL

16. The tragedian, then, idealises, because he starts from within. He reaches, as it were, the central fire, in the heat of which every separate faculty, every animal want, every fortuitous incident is melted down and lost. We never could observe in actual experience pa.s.sion such as Lear's, or meditation such as Hamlet's, fusing everything else into itself. Facts at every step would interfere to prevent such a possibility. But let us place ourselves, by the poet's help, within the soul of Lear or Hamlet, and we shall be able to follow the process by which the spiritual power, taking the form of pa.s.sion in the one, and of thought in the other, and working outwards, draws everything into its own unity, according to the same activity of which, however impeded by the "imperfections of matter," we are conscious in ourselves. The incidents of the tragedy are wholly subordinate, issuing either from this spiritual energy of the actors on the one hand, or, on the other, from destiny, to whose throne the poet penetrates. They thus present an aspect entirely different from that of events which we approach from without. The novel, on the contrary, starts from the outside. Its main texture is a web of incidents through which the motions of the spirit must be discerned, if discerned at all. These incidents must be probable, must be such as are consistent with the observed sequences of the world. The view of man, therefore, which we attain through them, can only be that which is attainable by observation of outward actions and events; or, in other words, according to the distinction which we have attempted to establish, it is the natural view, not the ideal. Its character corresponds to its origin.

Observation shows us man not as self-determined, but as the creature of circ.u.mstances, as a phenomenon among other phenomena. As such, too, he is 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 its power, determined by it for good or evil, dependent on it for all that may be attractive or repellent about him. The hero of a novel attracts in part by his physiognomy, his manner, or even his dress; his character is qualified by circ.u.mstances and society; his impulses vary according to the impressions of outward things; he is the sport of fortune, dependent for weal or woe on the acquisition of some external blessing which the development of the plot may or may not bestow on him. As circ.u.mstances make his life what it is, so the particular combination of circ.u.mstances, called happiness, const.i.tutes its end. Instead of losing his merely personal and particular self, as in the catastrophe of a tragedy, he satisfies it with its appropriate pleasure. "He that loveth wife or children more than me, is not worthy of me," are the words of the Author of the Christian life. "Marry, enjoy domestic bliss, and thou hast attained the end of virtue"--such is the ordinary moral of the ordinary novel; nay, the only consistent moral of the consistent novel.

As the novelist sows, so must he reap; as his plot is, such must its consummation be. In the body of the work he must, from the nature of the case, represent men as they appear in fact, and he cannot fitly round it off by representing them as they are only in idea. He cannot step at pleasure from one sphere of art to another; by attempting to do so he destroys the harmony without which there is no art at all, and leaves us with a sense of dissatisfaction and unreality. The reader, who through the whole three volumes till close upon the end has been travelling in an atmosphere of ordinary morality and every-day aspiration, knows not how 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 the novel, that it must stand on the same footing with the epic poem, which is no less made up of a texture of incident, and which, therefore, according to the present argument, can only reach the springs of man's actions from without. Such an objection has some truth with reference to the Homeric poems. These, as we have seen, have the legendary narrative for their primitive element, and in so far as they are merely a reflex of Greek life in the Homeric age, their interest is that of a novel, not properly of the epic. The true epic (of which the "Paradise Lost" would seem to be a less mixed form than the Iliad or Odyssey), no less than tragedy, 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 springs from which it makes action and incident issue, with a perfect subordination which the laws of our lower nature and of social life must prevent from being realised in the world of experience, and which the novelist therefore, tied down to the world of experience, only offends us by attempting to exhibit. The essential character of the novel is not changed by its a.s.sumption of the form of a romance. In the romantic world of the middle ages, the great Italian poets did indeed find their materials. To their eyes it was a world in which hope and wonder might roam at large: it furnished actions which, glorified by them, became manifestations of the divine and heroic in man. But it is another world as seen by the novelist, even by such a one as Walter Scott. The romantic life which he depicts is simply the life which we see our own neighbors live, with more picturesque situations, with more to excite curiosity in the reader, and activity in the imaginary hero. We gain more from him, it is true, than from those copies of the too familiar faces around us which are the staple commodity in novels of the day. He at 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 methods than observation, to any _a priori_ affection of the spirit, and to this subordinate incident. Had he done so, he could not have uttered himself in 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 sustains us by the power of verse. The exalted action and the poetic expression are as essentially correlative in the epic, as are the natural incident and the prosaic expression in the novel.

G. POETRY AND PROSE

18. The hostility of Wordsworth to the "poetic diction" of his time rested on principles of which he scarcely seems himself to have been conscious.[15] The poets of the last century had lost the genuine sense of their high calling. Their productions for the most part were, at best, practical philosophy in verse. They observed the outer aspect of things, and to make their observations poetry they clothed them in "poetic diction," which thus became offensive, because artificial--because a superadded ornament, and not the natural expression of exalted pa.s.sion or the emotion which accompanies our pa.s.sage "behind the veil." Repugnance to this artificiality misled Wordsworth into the celebrated a.s.sertion that "between the language of prose and that of metrical composition, there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference:" an a.s.sertion which, as prompted by a feeling of the incompatibility of poetic language with prosaic thought, is really a witness to the essential ant.i.thesis between poetry and prose.

Verse is simple, harmonious, and unfamiliar. It is thus the fitting organ for that energy of thought which simplifies the phenomena of life by referring them to a spiritual principle; which blends its s.h.i.+fting colours in the light of a master-pa.s.sion, and pa.s.ses from the contradictory data of the common understanding to the unity of a deeper consciousness. Even the spiritualist philosopher, no less than the poet, would have to speak in verse, if, instead of making statements, he portrayed: if, besides a.s.serting that "all things are to be seen in G.o.d," he sought to excite in the reader the emotion appropriate to the sight. Prose is the "oratio soluta." It is complex, irregular, inharmonious. It thus corresponds to the natural or phenomenal view of life; the view of it, that is, in its diversity, as qualified in innumerable modes by animal wants and apparent accident, and not harmonised by the action of the spirit.[16] The novelist must express himself in prose, because this is his view of life: and this must be his view of life, because he thus expresses himself. It is indeed a view which may vary according to the circ.u.mstances of the case, but only within definite limits. There is an "earnestness" about some of our modern novelists, Miss Bronte for instance, which would have seemed out of place to those of fifty years ago; but this is merely because the life they see around them is more "earnest." It presents to them scenes of sterner significance than were to be found among the coquetry and dissipation of the fas.h.i.+onable world or the dull courtesies of a country house. But that they do not transcend this outward life we have one crucial proof. Just in so far as each of us learns to regard his own individual being from within, and not from without, does he discard dependence on happiness as arising from external circ.u.mstances, and becomes already in idea, as he tends to become in reality, his own world and his own law. No novelist attains to the a.s.sertion of this spiritual prerogative. As we follow in sympathy the story of his hero, we find ourselves lifted up and cast down as fortune changes, our life brightening as the clouds break above, and darkening as they close again. If the author chooses to disappoint us with "a bad ending," he leaves us, not as we are left at the conclusion of a tragedy, purified from personal desires, but vexed and sorrowful, sadder but not wiser men.

FOOTNOTES:

[15] "Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, because in that condition the essential pa.s.sions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings co-exist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated.... The language, too, of these men has been adopted (purified indeed from what appear to be its real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust), because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived; and because, from their rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the influence of social vanity, they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions. Accordingly, such a language arising out of repeated experience and regular feeling, is a more permanent, and a far more philosophical language, than that which is frequently subst.i.tuted for it by Poets, who think that they are conferring honor upon themselves and their art in proportion as they separate themselves from the sympathies of men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression, in order to furnish food for fickle tastes and fickle appet.i.tes of their own creation."--Wordsworth, Preface to the 'Lyrical Ballads.'

[16] On the relations of prose and poetry, see Alden's 'An introduction to Poetry,' pp. 23-28, 128-138, 160-164, and the references there given.

H. THE NOVEL AN INCOMPLETE PRESENTATION OF LIFE

19. By the mere explanation of the difference between the ideal and the natural, the poetic and novelistic, views of the world, we may seem to have already settled the question as to the beneficial effects of each.

The question, be it observed, is not as to the comparative influence of the discipline of art and that of real life. The man who seeks his entire culture in art of any kind will soon find the old antagonism between speculation and action begin to appear. There will be a chasm, which he cannot fill, between his life in the closet and his life in the world; his impotence to carry his thought into act will limit and weaken the thought itself. But this ill result will equally ensue, whether the art in which he finds his nurture be that of the novelist or that of the poet. The novel-reader sees human action pa.s.s before him like a panorama, but he feels none of its pains and penalties; his fancy feeds on its pleasures, but he has not to face the struggle of resistance to pleasure, or the suffering which follows on indulgence. Nor is it merely from that weakness of effect which, in one sense, must always belong to representation as opposed to reality, that the novel suffers. The representation itself is incomplete. The novelist, like every other artist, must abridge and select. For many of the elements whose action builds up our human soul, there is no place in his canvas. A great part of the discipline of life arises simply from its slowness. The long years of patient waiting and silent labor, the struggle with listlessness and pain, the loss of time by illness, the hope deferred, the doubt that lays hold on delay--these are the tests of that pertinacity in man which is but a step below heroism. The exhibition of them in the novel, however, is prevented by that rapidity of movement which is essential to its fascination; and hence to one whose acquaintance with life was derived simply from novels, its main business would be unknown. They are perhaps more brought home to us by Defoe than by any other writer of fiction; but this is due to that very deficiency of artistic power which makes his agglomeration of details[17] such heavy reading to all but school-boys.

FOOTNOTE:

[17] Modern criticism inclines to the view that Defoe's "agglomeration of details" is the result of high and conscious art. If 'Robinson Crusoe' were kept away from schoolboys it would doubtless be read pleasurably by adults.

I. PRUDENCE THE NOVELIST'S HIGHEST MORALITY

20. The novel, then, as being a work of art, must fail to teach the lesson of life in its completeness: as an inferior work of art, it has peculiar weaknesses of its own. However extensive the influence of the literature of fiction may have been, its intensity has been in inverse proportion. A great poem, once made our own, abides with us for ever.

"Amid the fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,"[18]

the spirit, returning to it, may gain a fresh a.s.surance of its _own_ birthright, and purify itself, as in a river of Lethe, for an ideal transition to its proper home. The novel, itself the reflex of "the fretful stir unprofitable," can exercise no such power. It can but make us more at home in the region from which a great poem transports us. The value of that experience of the world, which it is its object to impart, is commonly overrated in our day. In the form in which it is imparted by the novelist, we have perhaps had too much of it without his aid. Our external environment is quite enough in our thoughts: we are not too reluctant to admit that we are what we seem to be, dependent for good or evil on circ.u.mstances which we do not make for ourselves. This dependence is in itself, no doubt, a fact; but it ceases to be so for us when we contemplate it in forgetfulness of that spring of potential freedom which underlies it, and of the law of duty correlative to freedom. To the exclusive consideration of it we owe those profitless recipes for eliciting moral health from circ.u.mstances which are the plague of modern literature, and which one of our ablest writers has lately condescended to dispense, in an essay on "organisation in daily life." This circ.u.mstantial view of life, if we may use the term, being the only one that the novelist can convey, prudence is his highest morality. But it may be doubted whether prudence is what any one has great need to learn. The plain man, who fronting circ.u.mstances boldly on the one hand, looks reverently to the stern face of duty on the other, can dispense with its maxims. For the moral valetudinarian small benefit is to be gained from a doctor who will

"Read each wound, each weakness clear, Will strike his finger on the place And say, 'Thou ailest here and here'."[19]