13. This Johnsonian definition may be objected to as merely accidental,
and as inconsistent with the romantic character which the novel assumed
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 antithesis 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 class.
Whether, like Richardson, they analyse 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 passion, 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 anticipate 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 worship of happiness which
hide its divinity, these meet him here as they meet him in life,
untransmuted, 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 assimilative 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 hitherto 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.