[Sidenote: Romance ancient and modern]
The ethical novel is a natural product of modern times. In the days
when the world was young, men gave vent to their fancies in poetical
romances, in which the deeds of gods, goddesses, and heroes formed
the staple themes. Homer’s inspired verses and Eastern romances, in
which gods in the intervals of their amours battle with demons for
the possession of mankind, exist to remind us of the kind of heroic
pageants which interested and entranced the warlike Greek and the
swarthy warriors of Asia. As civilisation advanced, doubts crept in as
to the very existence of the heroes in which earlier generations had
delighted, and minstrels and writers descended from the clouds, and
tuned their harps and guided their pens to record the doughty deeds of
their leaders on the hard-fought fields of their nations’ records. At
such a time men desired rather to be startled and thrilled than to be
taught to reflect and discriminate, and the old blood-and-thunder novel
exactly suited their taste.
[Sidenote: Painting]
The history of painting runs a nearly parallel course with that of
literature. Like fiction, the painter’s art received its first glowing
inspirations from the current legends of celestial beings, and passed
through successive stages until the comparatively modern phase was
reached in which striking effects and startling situations became
the principal stocks-in-trade. As in literature, this intermediate
condition gave way to the expression of ideas rather than of physical
force, and artists, like novelists, were led to aim at representing
carefully drawn characters and suggestive surroundings. In the novels
of the last century we see a gradual development of this stage of the
novelist’s art. Any one who takes the trouble to compare Richardson’s
_Pamela_ with Fielding’s _Joseph Andrews_ and Smollett’s _Peregrine
Pickle_, will recognise the advance which took its rise when Queen Anne
sat on the throne, and which has continued in obedience to the law of
progress unchecked to the present day.
[Sidenote: Early writers of ethical romance]
[Sidenote: Scott]
A wide gulf, however, separates these writers from the novelists of
the beginning of the nineteenth century. The whole method of Miss
Edgeworth and Jane Austen, for example, is different from that employed
by the earlier generation of authors. Instead of exciting interest
by indelicacies and maintaining it by ribaldry, they sought to win
attention by careful delineation of character and genuine humour.
It was this new development of romance which made the ethical novel
possible. Amid the hurly-burly of strife and the warlike deeds of
gods and men, there was no room for philosophical musings or ethical
teachings. But when the scenes were changed to ladies’ drawing-rooms,
the parsonage-house, and the course of daily life, it became easy to
point a moral while adorning a tale. Miss Edgeworth may claim to be
the first writer of ethical romance, and in her quiet and humorous
pages she succeeds in levelling many a home-thrust against the evils
which beset her time. In her _Castle Rackrent_ she lays bare the
mischief of Irish extravagance and absenteeism, while in her _Tales
from Fashionable Life_ she holds up to ridicule and scorn the empty
frivolities and the manifest absurdities which pervaded the higher
ranks of society. Jane Austen in a less obtrusive way succeeds in
adding equally effective morals to her delightful stories. The
bitter consequences which follow evil doings are plainly set out
in her pages, and the needless misery inflicted by the indulgence
of the mean passions is portrayed with singular felicity. It is,
however, impossible not to recognise that both Miss Austen’s and Miss
Edgeworth’s novels suffer, as works of art, by the prominent motives
which guided the pens of their authors. It is not every one who is able
so to subordinate the intended moral to the due working out of the
story as in no way to interfere with the plot. The greatest novelists
have unquestionably been those who set themselves directly to describe
men and women as nature has made them, without any undue regard to the
goal to which the instincts and actions of the characters may lead
them. Sir Walter Scott is an instance in point. No one will deny the
extent of the influence which he has exercised in all four continents
of the world, and yet it is difficult to point to a single passage
in his works in which he expressed any direct ethical teaching Only
once, so far as we recollect, he chose to tack a moral on to one of
his novels, and that was when at the end of _The Heart of Midlothian_
he addressed these words to the reader. “This tale will not be told
in vain, if it shall be found to illustrate the great truth, that
guilt, though it may attain temporal splendour can never confer real
happiness; that the evil consequences of our crimes long survive their
commission, and, like the ghosts of the murdered, forever haunt the
steps of the malefactor; and that the paths of virtue, though seldom
those of worldly greatness are always those of pleasantness and peace.”
[Sidenote: Dickens]
It perhaps may be advanced in opposition to what has been said that
Dickens, one of the greatest novelists of the century, wrote several
of his novels with an ethical intention. But he was one of a happy
few who wrote fiction, as Hogarth painted and drew moral lessons on
his canvas, with a skill which excites the admiration of all those
who rightly understand the difficulty of the task. Many artists have
attempted to follow in Hogarth’s steps, and have failed ignominiously,
just as writers without end have attempted to imitate the methods of
Dickens and have fallen lamentably short of their great exemplar. Who
but Dickens could have drawn the pathetic picture of Oliver Twist,
and the bumptious and ignorant tyranny of Bumble and the guardians
without losing the perspective of the story which is so well maintained
throughout. After all, however, his best novels are those which are
written without any distinctly ethical motive. _Pickwick Papers_ and
_Martin Chuzzlewit_ are unquestionably his masterpieces; and though
_Nicholas Nickleby_ dealt an effective blow at Yorkshire schools, and
_Bleak House_ pilloried the evils of the Court of Chancery, and _Hard
Times_ showed up the fallacies of the Manchester School, they all, as
literary works of art, pay the penalty of the good that is in them.
[Sidenote: Thackeray]
Like his great contemporary, though in a very different style,
Thackeray throughout his writings strove to enforce a sound ethical
teaching as Mr. Leslie Stephen writes of him:—“In short his writings
mean if they mean anything, that the love of a wife and child and
friend is the one sacred element in our nature, of infinitely higher
price than anything that can come into competition with it; and
that “Vanity Fair” is what it is precisely because it stimulates the
pursuit of objects frivolous and unsatisfying just so far as they imply
indifference to these emotions.
As every reader of Thackeray knows his pages are full of moralisings
on the failings and faults of mankind. But only in one passage does he
treat his subject in a directly ethical way. At the close of a long
conversation between Warrington and Arthur, the latter is convicted of
being an apostle of general scepticism and sneering acquiescence in the
world as it is. “And to what does this easy and sceptical life lead a
man?” adds the novelist. “Friend Arthur was a Sadducee, and the Baptist
might be in the wilderness shouting to the poor, who were listening
with all their might and faith to the preacher’s awful accents and
denunciation of wrath or woe or salvation; and our friend the Sadducee
would turn his sleek mule with a shrug and a smile from the crowd
and go home to the shade of his terrace, and muse over preacher and
audience, and turn to his roll of Plato or his pleasant Greek song-book
babbling of honey and Hybla, and nymphs and fountains and love. To
what we say does this scepticism lead? It leads a man to a shameful
loneliness and selfishness, so to speak—the more shameful because
it is so good-humoured and conscienceless and serene. Conscience!
What is Conscience? Why accept remorse? What is public or private
faith? Mythuses alike enveloped in enormous tradition. If seeing
and acknowledging the lives of the world, Arthur, as see them you
can, with only too fatal a clearness, you submit to them without any
protest farther than a laugh: if plunged yourself in easy sensuality,
you allow the wretched world to pass groaning by you unmoved: if the
fight for the truth is taking place, and all men of honour are on the
ground armed on the one side or the other, and you alone are to lie on
your balcony and smoke your pipe out of the noise and the danger, you
had better have died, or never have been at all, than such a sensual
coward.”
But for the most part Thackeray rather allows his ethical teachings
to be implied than directly enforced. For every kind of meanness
he has nothing but words of scathing scorn and all wrong doers and
wrong doings he castigates with merciless indignation. He exposes all
that is untrue with quiet and bitter sarcasm, and in the inimitable
pictures which he draws of life and character, indicates an honest and
wholesome moral for all of those who care to discover it.
[Sidenote: Charles Kingsley]
Of a very different temper and disposition was that great ethical
novelist Charles Kingsley. A devoted apostle of humanity he preached
and spoke and wrote incessantly on the wrongs which he saw being
inflicted on the weakest and least helpful of his fellow-men. The
sight of contractors and manufacturers sweating their employés, and
of starving their vital force by crowding them into unwholesome and
insufficient rooms; of farmers beating their labourers down to the
very lowest wages and of housing them in insanitary and in indecent
cottages, roused his indignation to the full. In burning eloquence
whether in the pulpit or on the platform or at his study table he
denounced the oppression of the weak and the wrongs which were being
inflicted on those who were least able to help themselves. His novels
were, as his sermons, mainly directed to this great object. In them he
tried to impress upon landlords and employers that their dependants
were men and brothers, and with exquisite tenderness and sympathy he
described over and over again the horrors of those slums of which we
hear so much now; of the evils of those door-posts which stand sentry
over those squalid alleys, the gin palace and the pawnbroker’s shop.
[Sidenote: Kingsley’s creed]
But he had another lesson to teach, and there he sympathised with
Thackeray. The sanctity of family life was to him a leading feature
in his religion. As he writes in his dedicatory preface in _Hypatia_
“family and national life are the two divine roots of the church,
severed from which she is sure to wither away into that most godless
and cruel of spectres, a religious world.” The neo-Platonism with which
he was so strongly imbued introduced many strange mystic ideas into his
religious and social creeds. That the human relations of husband and
wife, and parent and child were eternal implied to his mind that they
had existed from all time and would extend to the end of all things.
They were therefore in his faith spiritual, sacramental, divine,
eternal. The influence which his writings exercised on high and low,
on rich and poor was great and far-reaching. He achieved, therefore,
the one object he sought when he wrote _Alton Locke_ and his other
masterpieces. But it must be admitted that in the eagerness with which
he preached he forgot at times the novelist’s art, and though some of
the passages in which he points his morals read almost as though they
were inspired, there is not one of his novels which does not suffer
from his ecstatic moods.
[Sidenote: The novel of Reform]
To men and women of sympathetic temperaments and ready pens, the
temptation to sermonise on the evils and wrongs of the world around
them must be well nigh irresistible, and what more easy and telling way
can there possibly be than by haranguing their fellow-men in fiction!
To seriously minded novelists, the unbelief which they see spreading
like a flood about them, suggests at once an object-lesson romance,
in which the heretical young curate who has strayed into the paths of
Buddhism or wandered with the lost sheep into the by-ways of Deism
or Dissent shall be restored to the true fold by arguments which are
urged with the full energy of conviction and are combated with weak and
halting rejoinders. The unprejudiced reader may consider the method
faulty, and that art has been sacrificed to exposition, but the author
and his friends insist on the public swallowing the dose with all the
severity of Mrs. Squeers. The English public are not altogether averse
to the presence of a modicum of moral teaching, but they like to have
the powder well concealed or only half revealed in the preserve of plot
and interest, and have reason to complain if that which was meant to be
the less proves to be equal to the whole.
[Sidenote: The naturalistic school]
Drunkenness and vice are often common themes of the ethical novelist.
An older generation of writers devoted their energies to gibbeting
the inequalities and maladministration of the laws; and to picturing
the evils and cruelties of game preserving. Dickens, as we have seen,
denounced in his novels the administration of the workhouse and the
delays of the Courts of Chancery; and Charles Reade inveighed through
the mouths of his characters against the Prison system and the Lunacy
enactments. These motives are too abstract for the present-day
novelist. He, or more commonly she, delights to descend from the
general to the particular, and to follow the drunkard into the gin
palace, and the most abandoned profligates into the lowest haunts
of vice. These are unquestionable evils and should on all accounts
be rather indicated than described in detail. What good can it do
to analyse and dwell upon every disgusting feature in a drunken
debauch, and every prurient phase in the downward course of sin? The
naturalistic school has much to answer for in this regard. Zola and
his followers, especially his followers, have brought into fashion a
style of novel which has become a plague spot in our civilisation, and
through their instrumentality young girls and boys are, under the guise
of moral teaching, made acquainted with forms of vice of which, but
for their ethical teachers, they would be entirely ignorant. Subjects
are now discussed in ladies’ drawing-rooms and at dinner-tables, which
were never so much as hinted at a couple of decades ago. Blasphemous
views of religion, theories of creation and evolution, analyses of the
passions, and strange doctrines concerning the sexual instinct, are all
discussed with a freedom which leaves little to the imagination. It
is true that the authors bring the unholy subjects on the stage with
the professed purpose of annihilating them one after the other; but as
in the process sometimes followed by vivisectionists of introducing
poisons into the system of the animals experimented on, for the purpose
of proving the effects of antidotes, it sometimes happens that the
views of evil suggested in the sort of novel we are speaking of resist
the counterbalancing influences of the moral strictures of the authors.
In a recent number of the _Nineteenth Century_ Mr. Frederick Greenwood
describes a novel up to date which an authoress has been induced much
against her will to write, and in which she appears in the frontispiece
covering her face with her hands for very shame, and on the last page
is represented kneeling at her infant’s bed praying for forgiveness.
If all who wrote on the unsavoury subjects indicated by Mr. Greenwood
observed the attitude of his authoress we should see little of the
features of a good many ladies who are at present evidently quite
unconscious of any desire to veil their countenances. Such writers are
bad enough, but a lower level is reached by those who deliberately
write on more than risky matters because they pay. It is difficult to
exchange compliments with such mercenary providers of social garbage,
and they are best left to the rebukes of such consciences as they
possess.
[Sidenote: Evils of modern fiction]
Naturalism and irreverence are unquestionably the crying evils of
modern fiction. And it by no means follows that they are essential to
the construction of the ethical novel. Mr. Leslie Stephen has said
that to be a good writer a man must be a preacher; and surely there
are enough subjects to preach about without touching on unsavoury
topics. Are not men and women prone to faults of character, besides
those of unlawful passion and open rebellion against God; and are there
not social wrongs and inequalities to be inveighed against. It is not
every one who can hope to see a palace arise in response to a discourse
on the evils which beset all sorts and conditions of men, but every
novelist worthy of his fame can do something to warn his fellow-men
of the faults and failings which lead to the downward paths of sin
and misery, and to throw a light on the way of those who are fighting
manfully for all that is true, honest, and of good report.