It is interesting to see how the leading ideas in his [Green's] mind
governed the treatment of an apparently alien material in his last piece
of academic work, the essay on novels, which gained the Chancellor's
prize in 1862. The essay has also the additional interest of being
almost the only record of his views on art and its relation to life. The
fundamental conception upon which it is based is one with which we have
already met. The world in its truth is a unity, governed by a single
law, animated by an undivided life, a whole in every part. But to human
apprehension it is fragmentary and mechanical, a chaos of elements of
which each is external to the other and all are external to our minds,
and in which chance tempered by familiarity seems to be the only law. To
exceptional men, or at exceptional crises in life, in the moments of
intense insight or emotion which philosophy calls knowledge and religion
faith, the weight of custom falls away, the truth breaks through the
veil, and the most trivial object or accident comes to reflect in
itself the whole system of nature or the whole providence of God. At
such moments man realises that in order to live he must die, that in
order to be free he must obey, and that only by surrendering his fancied
independence can he enter into the divine unity. To this liberation of
the self from its own bondage art contributes its share. The poetic
genius, like the speculative and the religious, penetrates the
monotonous disorder of everyday life, and lays bare "the impassioned
expression" which is there for those who can read it. The dramatist, for
instance, with whom the novelist is here compared, shows us some
elemental force of humanity, stripped of the accidents of time and
place, working itself out in free conflict with other forces, and
finally breaking itself against the eternal fact that no man can gain
the world without first losing himself. It is this catastrophe which
makes the real tragedy of life; it is this which the tragic poet has the
eye to see and the words to portray; and in proportion as we can follow
him in imagination, we come away from the spectacle with our own hearts
broken and purged, but strengthened to face the fact and obey the law.
The novelist does with inferior means, and for minds at a lower level,
what the dramatist may do for a mind at its highest. He idealises enough
to make us feel pleasure or pain, not enough to make us forget
ourselves. He excites curiosity or suspense, not awe or hope. If the
novel ends well, it flatters our complacency with the feeling that the
world as it is is not such a bad place after all; if it ends badly, it
strengthens the indolent conviction that aimless misery is the law of
the universe. There are however two ways in which novels may be of real
service and value. If they cannot teach men how to live, they may,
through the wide range of their subjects, enable those who have already
found a principle of life to give it a freer application than their
limited circumstances would otherwise allow; the "fictitious experience"
may "give expansion to the personal," while the personal gives reality
to the fictitious, and thus may be mitigated that "sacrifice of the
individual to society" which the modern division of labor tends to bring
about. And secondly, by appealing to such various classes and
capacities, and exhibiting the identity of human nature under such
various circumstances, novels supply a vehicle through which the force
of public opinion may work, fusing differences, breaking down
prejudices, and checking the "despotism of situations." The essay
concludes characteristically with the refusal to believe that democracy
is necessarily unpoetic. As "we hold fast to the faith that the
'cultivation of the masses,' which has for the present superseded the
development of the individual, will in its maturity produce some higher
type of individual manhood than any which the old world has known," so,
though in the novel "the creative faculty has taken a lower form than it
held in the epic and the tragedy," "we may well believe that this
temporary declension is preparatory to some higher development, when the
poet shall idealise life without making abstraction of any of its
elements, and when the secret of existence, which he now speaks to the
inward ear of a few, may be proclaimed on the housetops to the common
intelligence of mankind."
Readers of the essay who are also novel-readers will be inclined to say
that the writer was not much in sympathy with his subject; and he
himself, on getting the prize, remarks that "it is curious that I should
have been successful in an essay on novels, about which I know and care
little, and should have failed in both my efforts in theology, for which
I care considerably." At the same time it is probably true, as he once
said, that he had read more novels than his friends gave him credit for,
and it is certainly true that what his reading lacked in extent it made
up in intensity. As might be supposed, his taste in fiction was for
forcible delineation and robust humor. The flavor of strong, healthy
individuality was what attracted him; for rarities, niceties, and
abnormalities of mental organisation he cared nothing. He liked things
which he could take hold of with his mind, not things which merely gave
him sensations, pleasant or painful. Both in his deepest and his
lightest moods he was absolutely simple and "above board," and this
simplicity made him keenly alive to the proximity of the sublime to the
ridiculous or the exquisite to the grotesque. Though he had little of
the animal in him, and was never troubled by his appetites, he was quite
free from prudery. If obscenity moved him at all, it was to frank
laughter or to grim contempt; he never dwelt upon it, either in the way
of enjoyment or loathing. "For rules of ascetic discipline," says a
friend, "he had no need. The view of life suggested by so much of the
best French literature, that thinking men are generally in a practical
dilemma between the extremes of sensual excess and of spiritual
exaltation, did not commend itself to him in the least." The only forms
of art to which he was keenly susceptible were those of oratory and
poetry. He had no ear for music, though he seemed to get a certain
exaltation from listening to it. In regard to painting and sculpture he
always professed himself incompetent, but he was not without decided
tastes. On his first visit to the Continent he was more attracted by
Rembrandt, Holbein, and Dürer than by the Italians; "these men," he
said, "grasped the idea of Christianity." Of Durer's four saints at
Munich he writes, "I could contemplate them with interest for hours; he
has contrived to give St. John an almost perfect expression of 'divine
philosophy'." In later years when he went to Italy he spent a good deal
of time in looking at early Italian pictures, and admitted that they
would soon have got a great hold upon him. But on the whole his attitude
to the arts (excluding those of language) was one of deferential
ignorance. He had not himself any artistic gifts; he did not even write
verses. Yet to his friends, as one of them says, "he never represented
the prose of existence. With all his gravity, with all his firm grip on
fact and material interests, he had the enthusiastic movement of the
world's poetry in him."--From the Memoir by R. L. Nettleship, Green's
'Works,' Vol. 3, pp. xxx-xxxiii.