23. The novelist not only works on more various elements, he appeals to
more ordinary minds than the poet. This indeed is the strongest
practical proof of his essential inferiority as an artist. All who are
capable of an interest in incidents of life which do not affect
themselves, may feel the same interest more keenly in a novel; but to
those only who can lift the curtain does a poem speak intelligibly. It
is the twofold characteristic, of universal intelligibility and
indiscriminate adoption of materials, that gives the novel its place as
the great reformer and leveller of our time. Reforming and levelling are
indeed more closely allied than we are commonly disposed to admit.
Social abuses are nearly always the result of defective organisation.
The demarcations of family, of territory, or of class, prevent the
proper fusion of parts into the whole. The work of the reformer
progresses as the social force is brought to bear more and more fully on
classes and individuals, merging distinctions of privilege and position
in the one social organism. The novel is one of the main agencies
through which this force acts. It gathers up manifold experiences,
corresponding to manifold situations of life; and subordinating each to
the whole, gives to every particular situation a new character, as
qualified by all the rest. Every good novel, therefore, does something
to check what may be called the despotism of situations; to prevent that
ossification into prejudices arising from situation, to which all feel a
tendency. The general novel literature of any age may be regarded as an
assertion by mankind at large, in its then development, of its claims,
as against the influence of class and position; whether that influence
appear in the form of positive social injustice, of oppressive custom,
or simply of deficient sympathy.
24. To be what he is, the novelist must be a man with large powers of
sympathetic observation. He must have an eye for the "humanities" which
underlie the estranging barriers of social demarcation, and in relation
to which the influence of those barriers can alone be rightly
appreciated. We have already spoken of that acquiescence in the dominion
of circumstance, to which we are all too ready to give way, and which
exclusive novel-reading tends to foster. The circumstances, however,
whose rule we recognise, are apt to be merely our own or those of our
class. We are blind to other "idola" than those of our own cave; we do
not understand that the feelings which betray us into "indiscretions"
may, when differently modified by a different situation, lead others to
game-stealing or trade-outrages. From this narrowness of view the
novelist may do much to deliver us. The variations of feeling and
action with those of circumstance, and the essential human identity
which these variations cannot touch, are his special province. He shows
us that crime does not always imply sin, that a social heresy may be the
assertion of a native right, that an offence which leads to conventional
outlawry may be merely the rebellion of a generous nature against
conventional tyranny. Thus, if he does not do everything, he does much.
Though he cannot reveal to us the inner side of life, he at least gives
a more adequate conception of its surface. Though he cannot raise us to
a point of view from which circumstances appear subordinate to spiritual
laws, he yet saves us from being blinded, if not from being influenced,
by the circumstances of our own position. Though he cannot show the
prisoners the way of escape from their earthly confinement, yet by
breaking down the partitions between the cells he enables them to
combine their strength for a better arrangement of the prison-house. The
most wounding social wrongs more often arise from ignorance than from
malice, from acquiescence in the opinion of a class rather than from
deliberate selfishness. The master cannot enter into the feelings of the
servant, nor the servant into those of his master. The master cannot
understand how any good quality can lead one to "forget his station"; to
the servant the spirit of management in the master seems mere
"driving." This is only a sample of what is going on all society over.
The relation between the higher and lower classes becomes irritating,
and therefore injurious, not from any conscious unfairness on either
side, but simply from the want of a common understanding; while at the
same time every class suffers within its own limits from the prevalence
of habits and ideas, under the authority of class-convention, which
could not long maintain themselves if once placed in the light of
general opinion. Against this twofold oppression, the novel, from its
first establishment as a substantive branch of literature, has made
vigorous war. From Defoe to Kingsley its history boasts of a noble army
of social reformers; yet the work which these writers have achieved has
had little to do with the morals--commonly valueless, if not false and
sentimental--which they have severally believed themselves to convey.
Defoe's notion of a moral seems to have been the vulgar one that vice
must be palpably punished and virtue rewarded; he recommends his "Moll
Flanders" to the reader on the ground that "there is not a wicked action
in any part of it but is first or last rendered unhappy and[22]
unfortunate." The moral of Fielding's novels, if moral it can be called,
is simply the importance of that prudence which his heroes might have
dispensed with, but for the wildness of their animal license. Yet both
Defoe and Fielding had a real lesson to teach mankind. The thieves and
harlots whom Defoe prides himself on punishing, but whose adventures he
describes with the minuteness of affection, are what we ourselves might
have been; and in their histories we hear, if not the "music," yet the
"harsh and grating cry" of suffering humanity. Fielding's merit is of
the same kind; but the sympathies which he excites are more general, as
his scenes are more varied, than those of Defoe. His coarseness is
everywhere redeemed by a genuine feeling for the contumelious buffets to
which weakness is exposed. He has the practical insight of Dickens and
Thackeray, without their infusion of sentiment. He does not moralise
over the contrast between the rich man's law and the poor man's, over
the "indifference" of rural justice, over the lying and adultery of
fashionable life. He simply makes us see the facts, which are everywhere
under our eyes, but too close to us for discernment. He shows society
where its sores lie, appealing from the judgment of the diseased class
itself to that public intelligence which, in spite of the cynic's sneer
on the task of "producing an honesty from the combined action of
knaves," has really power to over-ride private selfishness. The same
sermon has found many preachers since, the unconscious missionaries
being perhaps the greatest. Scott was a Tory of the purest water. His
mind was busy with the revival of a pseudo-feudalism: no thought of
reforming abuses probably ever entered it. Yet his genial human insight
made him a reformer against his will. He who makes man better known to
man takes the first steps toward healing the wounds which man inflicts
on man. The permanent value of Scott's novels lies in his pictures of
the Scotch peasantry. He popularised the work which the Lake poets had
begun, of re-opening the primary springs of human passion. "Love he had
found in huts where poor men lie," and he announced the discovery;
teaching the "world" of English gentry what for a century and a half
they had seemed to forget, that the human soul, in its strength no less
than in its weakness, is independent of the accessories of fortune. He
left no equals, but the combined force of his successors has been
constantly growing in practical effect. They have probably done more
than the journalists to produce that improvement in the organisation of
modern life which leads to the notion that, because social grievances
are less obvious, they have ceased to exist. The novelist catches the
cry of suffering before it has obtained the strength, or general
recognition, which are pre-supposed when the newspaper becomes its
mouthpiece. The miseries of the marriage-market had been told by
Thackeray, with almost wearisome iteration, many years before they found
utterance in the columns of the "Times."