won. What destroys the fame of an accepted author? This, surely, is a
question not less interesting than that with which we started, and
a necessary corollary to it. Not unfavourable reviews, certainly. An
unjust review may annoy and depress the author, it may cheer a certain
number of his enemies and cool the ardour of a few of his friends,
but in the long run it is sure to be innocuous in proportion to its
injustice. I have in my mind the mode in which Mr. Browning's poems
were treated in certain quarters twenty years ago. I remember more
than one instance in which critics were permitted, in newspapers which
ought to have known better, to exemplify that charge of needless
obscurity which it was then the fashion to bring against the poet, by
the quotation of mutilated fragments, and even by the introduction
of absurd mistakes into the transcription of the text. Now, in this
case, a few persons were possibly deterred from the further perusal
of a writer who appeared, by these excerpts, to be a lunatic; but I
think far more were roused into vehement sympathy for Mr. Browning by
comparing the quotations with the originals, and so finding out that
the reviewers had lied.
It rests with the author, not the critic, to destroy his own
reputation. No one, as Bentley said, was ever written down except by
himself, and the public is quite shrewd enough to do a rough sort
of justice to the critic who accuses as well as to the author who is
arraigned. As Dangle observes, "it certainly does hurt an author of
delicate feelings to see the liberties the reviews take" with his
writings; but if he is worth his salt at all, he will comfort himself
by thinking, with Sir Fretful, that "their abuse is, after all, the
best panegyric." To an author who is smarting under a more than common
infliction of this kind of peppering, one consolatory consideration may
be hinted--namely, that not to be spoken about at all is even worse
than being maligned.
One of the most insidious perils that waylay the modern literary life
is an exaggerated success at the outset of a career. A very remarkable
instance of this has been seen in our time. Thirteen years ago a
satire was published, which, although essentially destructive, and
therefore not truly promising, was set forth with so much novelty
of execution, brightness of wit, and variety of knowledge that the
world was taken by storm. The author of that work was received with
plaudits of the most exaggerated kind, and his second book was looked
forward to with unbounded anticipation. It came, and though fresh and
witty, it had less distinction, less vitality than the first. Book
after book has marked ever a further step in steady decline, and now
that once flattered and belaureled writer's name is one no more to
conjure with. This, surely, is a pathetic fate. I can imagine no form
of failure so desperately depressing as that which comes disguised in
excessive juvenile success. In literature, at least as much as in other
professions, the race is not to the swift, although the battle must
eventually be to the strong. There is a blossoming, like that of forced
annuals, which pays for its fulness and richness by a plague of early
sterility.
What the young writer of wholesome ambition should pray for is, not
to flash like a meteor on the astonished world of fashion, but by
solid and admirable writing slowly to win a place which has a firm and
wide basis. There is such a fate as to suffer through life from the
top-heaviness of an initial success. Such a struggle as Thackeray's may
be painful at the time, and may call for the exercise of a great deal
of patience and good temper. It is, nevertheless, a better thing in the
long run to serve a novitiate in Grub Street, than, like Samuel Warren,
to be famous at thirty, and die almost forgotten at seventy. There
is a deadly tendency in the mind which too easily has found others
captivated by his effusions, to fancy that anything is good enough
for the public. A precocious favourite conceives that he has only to
whistle and the world will at any moment come back to him. The soldier
who meets with no resistance throws aside his armour and relaxes his
ambition. He forgets that, as Andrew Marvell says:
_The same art that did gain_
_A power, must it maintain._
Some danger to a partially established reputation is to be met with
from the fickleness of public taste and the easy satiety of readers.
If an imaginative writer has won the attention of the public by a
vigorous and original picture of some unhackneyed scene of life which
is thoroughly familiar to himself, he is apt to find himself on the
horns of a dilemma. If he turns to a new class of subjects, the public
which has already "placed" him as an authority on a particular subject,
will be disappointed; on the other hand, if he sticks to his last, he
runs the chance of fatiguing his readers and of exhausting his own
impressions. For such an author, ultimate success probably lies on the
side of courage. He must reject the temptation to indulge the public
with what he knows it wants, and must boldly force it to like another
and still unrecognised phase of his talent. He ought, however, to make
very sure that he is right, and not his readers, before he insists
upon a change. It is not every one who possesses the versatility of
the first Lord Lytton, and can conquer new worlds under a pseudonym
at the age of fifty. There are plenty of instances of men of letters
who, weary of being praised for what they did well, have tried to
force down the throats of the public what everybody but themselves
could see was ill-done. I remember Hans Christian Andersen, in the
last year of his life, telling me that the books he should really be
remembered by were his dramas and his novels, not the fairy-stories
that everybody persisted in making so much fuss about. He had gone
through life without gaining the least skill in gauging his own
strength or weakness. Andersen, however, was exceptionally uncritical;
and the author who is not blinded by vanity can generally tell, before
he reaches middle life, in what his real power consists.
Yet, when we sum up the whole question, we have to confess that we
know very little about the causes which lead to the distribution of
public praise. The wind of fame bloweth where it listeth, and we
hear the sound of it without knowing whence it cometh. This, however,
appears to be certain, that, except in the case of those rare authors
of exceptionally sublime genius who conquer attention by their force
of originality, a great deal more than mere cleverness in writing is
needful to make a reputation. Sagacity in selection, tact in dealing
with other people, suppleness of character, rapidity in appreciation,
and adroitness in action--all these are qualities which go to the
formation of a broad literary reputation. In these days an author must
be wide awake, and he must take a vast deal of trouble. The age is gone
by when he could sit against the wall and let the gooseberries fall
into his mouth. The increased pressure of competition tells upon the
literary career as much as upon any other branch of professional life,
and the author who wishes to continue to succeed must keep his loins
girded.
_1889._
THE LIMITS OF REALISM IN FICTION
The Limits of Realism in Fiction
In the last new Parisian farce, by M. Sarcey's clever young son-in-law,
there is a conscientious painter of the realistic school who is
preparing for the Salon a very serious and abstruse production. The
young lady of his heart says, at length: "It's rather a melancholy
subject; I wonder you don't paint a sportsman, crossing a rustic
bridge, and meeting a pretty girl." This is the climax, and the artist
breaks off his relations with Young Lady No. 1. Toward the end of the
play, while he is still at work on his picture, Young Lady No. 2 says:
"If I were you, I should take another subject. Now, for instance, why
don't you paint a pretty girl, crossing a rustic bridge, and met by a
sportsman?"
This is really an allegory, whether M. Gandillot intends it or not.
Thus have those charming, fresh, ingenuous, ignorant, and rather
stupid young ladies, the English and American publics, received the
attempts which novelists have made to introduce among them what is
called, outside the Anglo-Saxon world, the experimental novel. The
present writer is no defender of that class of fiction; least of all
is he an exclusive defender of it; but he is tired to death of the
criticism on both sides of the Atlantic, which refuses to see what the
realists are, whither they are tending, and what position they are
beginning to hold in the general evolution of imaginative literature.
He is no great lover of what they produce, and most certainly does not
delight in their excesses; but when they are advised to give up their
studies and paint pretty girls on rustic bridges, he is almost stung
into partisanship. The present essay will have no interest whatever for
persons who approve of no more stringent investigation into conduct
than Miss Yonge's, and enjoy no action nearer home than Zambeziland;
but to those who have perceived that in almost every country in the
world the novel of manners has been passing through a curious phase, it
may possibly not be uninteresting to be called upon to inquire what the
nature of that phase has been, and still more what is to be the outcome
of it.
So far as the Anglo-Saxon world is concerned, the experimental or
realistic novel is mainly to be studied in America, Russia, and France.
It exists now in all the countries of the European Continent, but
we know less about its manifestations there. It has had no direct
development in England, except in the clever but imperfect stories of
Mr. George Moore. Ten years ago the realistic novel, or at all events
the naturalist school, out of which it proceeded, was just beginning
to be talked about, and there was still a good deal of perplexity,
outside Paris, as to its scope and as to the meaning of its name.
Russia, still unexplored by the Vicomte de Vogüé and his disciples, was
represented to western readers solely by Turgéneff, who was a great
deal too romantic to be a pure naturalist. In America, where now almost
every new writer of merit seems to be a realist, there was but one, Mr.
Henry James, who, in 1877, had inaugurated the experimental novel in
the English language, with his _American_. Mr. Howells, tending more
and more in that direction, was to write on for several years before he
should produce a thoroughly realistic novel.
Ten years ago, then, the very few people who take an interest in
literary questions were looking with hope or apprehension, as the case
might be, to Paris, and chiefly to the study of M. Zola. It was from
the little villa at Médan that revelation on the subject of the coming
novel was to be awaited; and in the autumn of 1880 the long-expected
message came, in the shape of the grotesque, violent, and narrow,
but extremely able volume of destructive and constructive criticism
called _Le Roman Expérimental_. People had complained that they did
not know what M. Zola was driving at; that they could not recognise
a "naturalistic" or "realistic" book when they saw it; that the
"scientific method" in fiction, the "return to nature," "experimental
observation" as the basis of a story, were mere phrases to them, vague
and incomprehensible. The Sage of Médan determined to remove the
objection and explain everything. He put his speaking-trumpet to his
lips, and, disdaining to address the crassness of his countrymen, he
shouted his system of rules and formulas to the Russian public, that
all the world might hear.
In 1880 he had himself proceeded far. He had published the
Rougon-Macquart series of his novels, as far as _Une Page d'Amour_.
He has added since then six or seven novels to the bulk of his works,
and he has published many forcible and fascinating and many repulsive
pages. But since 1880 he has not altered his method or pushed on to any
further development. He had already displayed his main qualities--his
extraordinary mixture of versatility and monotony, his enduring force,
his plentiful lack of taste, his cynical disdain for the weaknesses
of men, his admirable constructive power, his inability to select the
salient points in a vast mass of observations. He had already shown
himself what I must take the liberty of saying that he appears to me
to be--one of the leading men of genius in the second half of the
nineteenth century, one of the strongest novelists of the world; and
that in spite of faults so serious and so eradicable that they would
have hopelessly wrecked a writer a little less overwhelming in strength
and resource.
Zola seems to me to be the Vulcan among our later gods, afflicted
with moral lameness from his birth, and coming to us sooty and brutal
from the forge, yet as indisputably divine as any Mercury-Hawthorne
or Apollo-Thackeray of the best of them. It is to Zola, and to Zola
only, that the concentration of the scattered tendencies of naturalism
is due. It is owing to him that the threads of Flaubert and Daudet,
Dostoiefsky and Tolstoi, Howells and Henry James can be drawn into
anything like a single system. It is Zola who discovered a common
measure for all these talents, and a formula wide enough and yet close
enough to distinguish them from the outside world and bind them to one
another. It is his doing that for ten years the experimental novel has
flowed in a definite channel, and has not spread itself abroad in a
thousand whimsical directions.
To a serious critic, then, who is not a partisan, but who sees how
large a body of carefully composed fiction the naturalistic school
has produced, it is of great importance to know what is the formula
of M. Zola. He has defined it, one would think, clearly enough, but
to see it intelligently repeated is rare indeed. It starts from the
negation of fancy--not of imagination, as that word is used by the
best Anglo-Saxon critics, but of fancy--the romantic and rhetorical
elements that novelists have so largely used to embroider the home-spun
fabric of experience with. It starts with the exclusion of all that
is called "ideal," all that is not firmly based on the actual life of
human beings, all, in short, that is grotesque, unreal, nebulous, or
didactic. I do not understand Zola to condemn the romantic writers of
the past; I do not think he has spoken of Dumas _pêre_ or of George
Sand as Mr. Howells has allowed himself to speak of Dickens. He has a
phrase of contempt--richly deserved, it appears to me--for the childish
evolution of Victor Hugo's plots, and in particular of that of _Notre
Dame de Paris_; but, on the whole, his aim is rather to determine the
outlines of a new school than to attack the recognised masters of the
past. If it be not so, it should be so; there is room in the Temple of
Fame for all good writers, and it does not blast the laurels of Walter
Scott that we are deeply moved by Dostoiefsky.
With Zola's theory of what the naturalistic novel should be, it seems
impossible at first sight to quarrel. It is to be contemporary; it is
to be founded on and limited by actual experience; it is to reject
all empirical modes of awakening sympathy and interest; its aim is to
place before its readers living beings, acting the comedy of life as
naturally as possible. It is to trust to principles of action and to
reject formulas of character; to cultivate the personal expression;
to be analytical rather than lyrical; to paint men as they are, not
as you think they should be. There is no harm in all this. There is
not a word here that does not apply to the chiefs of one of the two
great parallel schools of English fiction. It is hard to conceive of
a novelist whose work is more experimental than Richardson. Fielding
is personal and analytical above all things. If France counts George
Sand among its romanticists, we can point to a realist who is greater
than she, in Jane Austen. There is not a word to be found in M. Zola's
definitions of the experimental novel that is not fulfilled in the
pages of _Emma_; which is equivalent to saying that the most advanced
realism may be practised by the most innocent as well as the most
captivating of novelists. Miss Austen did not observe over a wide
area, but within the circle of her experience she disguised nothing,
neglected nothing, glossed over nothing. She is the perfection of the
realistic ideal, and there ought to be a statue of her in the vestibule
of the forthcoming Académie des Goncourts. Unfortunately, the lives of
her later brethren have not been so sequestered as hers, and they, too,
have thought it their duty to neglect nothing and to disguise nothing.
It is not necessary to repeat here the rougher charges which have been
brought against the naturalist school in France--charges which in
mitigated form have assailed their brethren in Russia and America. On
a carefully reasoned page in the copy of M. Zola's essay _Du Roman_
which lies before me, one of those idiots who write in public books has
scribbled the remark, "They see nothing in life but filth and crime."
This ignoble wielder of the pencil but repeats what more ambitious
critics have been saying in solemn terms for the last fifteen years.
Even as regards Zola himself, as the author of the delicate comedy
of _La Conquête de Plassans_, and the moving tragedy of _Une Page
d'Amour_, this charge is utterly false, and in respect of the other
leaders it is simply preposterous. None the less, there are sides
upon which the naturalistic novelists are open to serious criticism
in practice. It is with no intention of underrating their eminent
qualities that I suggest certain points at which, as it appears to me,
their armour is conspicuously weak. There are limits to realism, and
they seem to have been readily discovered by the realists themselves.
These weak points are to be seen in the jointed harness of the
strongest book that the school has yet produced in any country, _Le
Crime et le Châtiment_.
When the ideas of Zola were first warmly taken up, about ten years ago,
by the most earnest and sympathetic writers who then were young, the
theory of the experimental novel seemed unassailable, and the range
within which it could be worked to advantage practically boundless. But
the fallacies of practice remained to be experienced, and looking back
upon what has been written by the leaders themselves, the places where
the theory has broken down are patent. It may not be uninteresting to
take up the leading dogmas of the naturalistic school, and to see what
elements of failure, or, rather, what limitations to success, they
contained. The outlook is very different in 1890 from what it was in
1880; and a vast number of exceedingly clever writers have laboured
to no avail, if we are not able at the latter date to gain a wider
perspective than could be obtained at the earlier one.
Ten years ago, most ardent and generous young authors, outside the
frontiers of indifferent Albion, were fired with enthusiasm at the
results to be achieved by naturalism in fiction. It was to be the
Revealer and the Avenger. It was to display society as it is, and to
wipe out all the hypocrisies of convention. It was to proceed from
strength to strength. It was to place all imagination upon a scientific
basis, and to open boundless vistas to sincere and courageous young
novelists. We have seen with what ardent hope and confidence its
principles were accepted by Mr. Howells. We have seen all the Latin
races, in their coarser way, embrace and magnify the system. We
have seen Zola, like a heavy father in high comedy, bless a budding
generation of novel-writers, and prophesy that they will all proceed
further than he along the road of truth and experiment. Yet the
naturalistic school is really less advanced, less thorough, than it was
ten years ago. Why is this?
It is doubtless because the strain and stress of production have
brought to light those weak places in the formula which were
not dreamed of. The first principle of the school was the exact
reproduction of life. But life is wide, and it is elusive. All that
the finest observer can do is to make a portrait of one corner of it.
By the confession of the master-spirit himself, this portrait is not
to be a photograph. It must be inspired by imagination, but sustained
and confined by the experience of reality. It does not appear at first
sight as though it should be difficult to attain this, but in point
of fact it is found almost impossible to approach this species of
perfection. The result of building up a long work on this principle
is, I hardly know why, to produce the effect of a reflection in a
convex mirror. The more accurately experimental some parts of the
picture are, the more will the want of balance and proportion in other
parts be felt. I will take at random two examples. No better work in
the naturalistic direction has been done than is to be found in the
beginning of M. Zola's _La Joie de Vivre_, or in the early part of
the middle of Mr. James's _Bostonians_. The life in the melancholy
Norman house upon the cliff, the life among the uncouth fanatic
philanthropists in the American city, these are given with a reality,
a brightness, a personal note which have an electrical effect upon the
reader. But the remainder of each of these remarkable books, built
up as they are with infinite toil by two of the most accomplished
architects of fiction now living, leaves on the mind a sense of a
strained reflection, of images blurred or malformed by a convexity of
the mirror. As I have said, it is difficult to account for this, which
is a feature of blight on almost every specimen of the experimental
novel; but perhaps it can in a measure be accounted for by the inherent
disproportion which exists between the small flat surface of a book
and the vast arch of life which it undertakes to mirror, those studies
being least liable to distortion which reflect the smallest section of
life, and those in which ambitious masters endeavour to make us feel
the mighty movements of populous cities and vast bodies of men being
the most inevitably misshapen.
Another leading principle of the naturalists is the disinterested
attitude of the narrator. He who tells the story must not act the part
of Chorus, must not praise or blame, must have no favourites; in short,
must not be a moralist but an anatomist. This excellent and theoretical
law has been a snare in practice. The nations of continental Europe are
not bound down by conventional laws to the same extent as we English
are. The Anglo-Saxon race is now the only one that has not been touched
by that pessimism of which the writings of Schopenhauer are the most
prominent and popular exponent. This fact is too often overlooked when
we scornfully ask why the foreign nations allow themselves so great a
latitude in the discussion of moral subjects. It is partly, no doubt,
because of our beautiful Protestant institutions; because we go to
Sunday-schools and take a lively interest in the souls of other people;
because, in short, we are all so virtuous and godly, that our novels
are so prim and decent. But it is also partly because our hereditary
dulness in perceiving delicate ethical distinctions has given the
Anglo-Saxon race a tendency to slur over the dissonances between man
and nature. This tendency does not exist among the Latin races, who run
to the opposite extreme and exaggerate these discords. The consequence
has been that they have, almost without exception, being betrayed by
the disinterested attitude into a contemplation of crime and frailty
(notoriously more interesting than innocence and virtue) which has
given bystanders excuse for saying that these novelists are lovers
of that which is evil. In the same way they have been tempted by the
Rembrandtesque shadows of pain, dirt, and obloquy to overdash their
canvases with the subfusc hues of sentiment. In a word, in trying to
draw life evenly and draw it whole, they have introduced such a brutal
want of tone as to render the portrait a caricature. The American
realists, who were guarded by fashion from the Scylla of brutality,
have not wholly escaped, on their side and for the same reason, the
Charybdis of insipidity.