Mr. Raleigh[3] very rightly goes back to mediaeval romance for the
origins of English fiction. In all countries the metrical tale is many
generations older than the prose story; for prose writing is a
refinement of the literary art which flourishes only when reading has
become popular; while verse, being at first a kind of _memoria
technica_ used for the correct transmission of sacred texts and the
heroic tradition, strikes the ear and fixes the recollection of an
audience. The exploits of mighty warriors and the miracles of
saints--love, fighting, and theology--form the subject matter of these
stories in verse. They are, as Mr. Raleigh says, epical in spirit
though not in form: 'they carry their hero through the actions and
adventures of his life ... they display a marked preference for deeds
done, and attempt no character-drawing.... A sense of the instability
of human life, very present to the minds of men familiar with battle
and plague, is everywhere mirrored in these romances.' Then came
Chaucer, who not only wrote prose tales, but also carried far toward
perfection the art of narration in verse; and 'in the fifteenth
century both of the ancestors of the modern novel--that is, the
novella or short pithy story after the manner of the Italians, and
the romance of chivalry--appear in an English prose dress.' But the
genius of English fiction was still loaded with the chains of allegory
and pedantic moralisation; and in the _Gesta Romanorum_, the most
popular collection of English prose stories which had been translated
from the Latin at the end of the fifteenth century, 'human beings are
mere puppets, inhabiting the great fabric of mediaeval thought and
mediaeval institution.... It was the work of the Renaissance to recover
the literal and obvious sense of human life, as it was the work of the
closely-allied Reformation to recover the literal sense of the Bible.'
The playwright has always been a formidable rival to the novelist,
insomuch that in a period of dramatic activity the novel, as our
author remarks, can hardly maintain itself. But from the middle of the
seventeenth century the stage had fallen low, while the formal and
fantastic romance, the long-winded involved story, was losing its
vogue. So the heroic romances, we are told, 'availed themselves
skilfully of the opportunity to foster a new taste in the reading
public--a delight, namely, born of the fashionable leisure of a
self-conscious society, in minute introspection, and the analysis and
portraiture of emotional states.' We are inclined to suspect that
these words, which would serve well enough to describe the taste for
the analytic novel of our own day, must be taken with considerable
reserve in their application to the writings and the readers of two
centuries ago. But we may agree that certain tendencies of style and
developments of feeling which are now predominant may be traced back
to this time. And when, toward the end of the seventeenth century,
Mrs. Aphra Behn began to enlist incidents of real life into the
service of her fiction, she was making a distinct attempt, as Mr.
Raleigh points out, to bring romance into closer relation with
contemporary life, although a conventional treatment of facts and
character still overlay all her work. Mr. Raleigh holds, however, that
this attempt was abortive; that it failed at the time; and that the
great eighteenth-century school of English novelists, with Richardson
and Fielding at their head, took its rise, quite independently of
predecessors in the seventeenth century, out of the general stock of
miscellaneous literature--plays, books of travel, adventures, satires,
journals, and broadsides--which had been drawn at first hand from
observation and experience of the various forms of surrounding life.
We are quite ready to agree that the eighteenth-century Novel of
Manners belongs to a family distinct from that of the Romantic story,
or is at any rate very distantly connected with it. But when Mr.
Raleigh goes on to say that the heroic romance died in the seventeenth
century and left no issue, although it was revived again in the latter
half of the eighteenth century, to this view we are much inclined to
demur. Such complete interruptions in the transmission of species are
as rare in the intellectual as in the physical world; and we prefer to
maintain that the romance, although it was for a time eclipsed by the
brilliancy of the writers who described the manners and sentiments of
contemporary society, was never extinguished, but became transformed
gradually, by successive modifications of environment, into the modern
novel of adventure. It is true that Defoe entirely rejected the
marvellous, while Horace Walpole, fifty years later, dealt
immoderately in the elements of mystery and wonder; yet,
notwithstanding these violent oscillations of style and method, we
believe that the great historical novels of the early nineteenth
century, and the tales of stirring incident which flourish at the
present day, descend by an unbroken filiation from the fabulous
romance of elder times.
Mr. Raleigh does not carry his brief yet instructive history of the
English novel beyond the time of Walter Scott, with whom, he says,
'the wheel has come full circle,' the Romantic revival was victorious,
prose finally superseded verse as the vehicle of adventurous story,
and realism was wedded to romance. We trust that in some future work
he will carry on up to a later date his survey of the course and
currents of imaginative fiction. In the meantime, it may not be
irrelevant to follow up further and a little more closely the ruling
characteristics and the formative influences that have contributed
toward the production of English light literature as it exists at the
present day.
The novels with which our fortunate generation is so abundantly
supplied may be divided broadly into two classes, overlapping and
interlaced with each other, yet on the whole distinguishable as
separate species--the Novel of Adventure and the Novel of Manners. The
former class has a very long pedigree. The early romance writer drew
his incidents from the field of heroic action and marvellous
enterprise; he revelled in noble sentiments, astonishing feats, and
the exhibition of all the cardinal virtues in tragic situations; his
mission was to preserve and hand down to us magnified figures of
mighty men, or the pictures of great events, as they had impressed
themselves upon the popular imagination. For such material he was
obliged to travel abroad into remote countries, or backward to bygone
ages; but if his images of gallant knights and fair damsels were well
modelled, if the language was superb, and the deeds or sufferings
sufficiently astonishing, no one cared about anachronisms,
incongruities, or improbabilities.
But as the heroic romance dwindled and withered under the dry light of
precise knowledge and extending erudition, the purveyors of fiction,
accommodating themselves to a more exacting taste, applied themselves
seriously to the reproduction of famous scenes and portraits by the
aid and guidance of historic documents and antiquarian research. The
modern romantic school, of whom the master, if not the founder, is
Scott, represented a clear step forward to what is now called Realism,
and a proportionate abandonment of the classic convention, or the
method of drawing from traditional or imaginary models. To Scott may
be ascribed the authoritative introduction of descriptions of
landscape, of storms, sunsets, and picturesque effects; not the
artificial scene-painting of Mrs. Radcliffe, but artistic delineations
of the aspects of earth, sea, and sky which gave depth and atmosphere
to his dramatic situations. From this period, also, may be dated the
practice, so entirely contrary to the spirit of true romance, of
verifying by documentary evidence the details of a story. It was Scott
who, in the first years of this century, set prominently the example
of appending copious notes to his stories in verse or prose, wherein
he displayed his archaeologic lore and produced his authorities for any
striking illustration of manners or characteristic incident. This
practice, which was largely adopted by others, was at least an
improvement upon the old unregenerate system of seasoning the
conversation of warriors and peasants with uncouth phrases picked up
at random, or trusting to mere fancy or accepted formula for the
description of battles or of the ways of folk in mediaeval castles and
cottages. But the process savoured too much of the workshop. A novel
or poem that required an appendix of notes and glossaries must be of
high excellence to avoid suspicious resemblance to an elaborate
literary counterfeit, since open and avowed borrowing from
dictionaries of antiquities or volumes of travel must damage the
illusion which is the indispensable element of romance. In Moore's
fantastic metrical romance of _Lalla Rookh_ the system was carried to
an extent that now seems ridiculous, for certain passages are loaded
with outlandish phrases or metaphors that are unintelligible except by
reference to the notes. Nevertheless the English public, being then
quite ignorant of the true East, tolerated Moore's sham Orientalism,
even though Byron's fine poems were just then exposing the difference
between working up the subject in a library and wandering in Asiatic
countries. Byron's language seems in the present day turgid, and his
Greeks and Turks may have a theatrical air, but his splendid
descriptive passages were drawn by a master hand straight from nature,
while his colouring, landscape, and costume are usually excellent; so
that his work also is a distinct movement in the direction of realism.
Yet it is to be observed that after Byron and Scott the metrical
romance, that most ancient form of tale-telling, fell rapidly into
disuse. The fact that Byron's latest poem, _Don Juan_, belonged
essentially to the coming realistic school, is a significant
indication of transition; and Scott's abandonment of poetry for prose,
which was a necessary consequence of his advance toward realism, gave
its death-blow to the earlier fashion.
By this time, indeed, the conventional writer of adventures, though he
held his ground up to or even beyond the middle of the century, was in
a state of incurable decadence. He was losing the confidence of the
general reader, who had picked up some precise notions regarding
appropriate scenery, language, and costume in sundry periods and
divers places, from China to Peru; and he was persecuted by that
mortal foe of the old romancer, the well-informed critic, who trampled
even upon a commonplace book well filled with references to standard
authorities, insisting upon careful study of the whole environment,
the dexterous incorporation of details, and delicate blending of local
colours. Severe pedagogic handling of a historic novel, as if it were
a paper done at some competitive examination, was too much for the old
school, which finally subsided into cheap popular editions, making way
for a new class of writers that adapted the Novel of Adventure to the
requirements of latter-day taste, to the widening of knowledge, and
the diversified expansion of our national life. The prevailing
tendency was now to confine the range of scene and action more and
more approximately to the contemporary period, to insist on genuine
materials, and to observe a stricter canon of probabilities, wherein
the discriminating reader fancied himself to be a judge. The use of
notes was discarded as contrary to the high artistic principle that in
fiction everything must resemble reality while nothing must be
demonstrably matter of fact. The appearance of famous personages must
be occasional, after the manner of gods in an epic poem; they must not
be, as formerly, the leading characters and chief actors in the drama.
And great battles, instead of marking the grand climacteric of a
story's development, were now merely traversed, so to speak, on their
outskirts, or were only approached near enough to throw a glowing
sidelight on certain groups and situations. The gradual adoption of
these limitations may be traced back to the naval and military novels
that reflect the traditions of the great French war. No one even then
thought of writing a romance with Nelson or Bonaparte as the hero, or
of finishing off in the full blaze of Trafalgar or in the rout of
Waterloo; although with Marryat and Lever the English reader revelled
in the dashing exploits or bacchanalian revels of sailors and
soldiers. Lever did indeed give glimpses of Wellington or Napoleon;
but his business was with Connaught Rangers and French guardsmen;
while Marryat and Michael Scott gave us daring sea-captains and
reckless sailors with inimitable vigour and animation.
But as the echo of thunderous battles by sea and land died away, this
particular offshoot of modern romance ceased to flourish, and has
never had any considerable revival. The tale-teller of adventure, like
his ancestor the epic poet, requires a certain haziness of atmosphere;
he must have elbow room for his inventive faculty; and he is liable to
be stifled in the flood of lucid narrative and inflexible facts let
loose upon recent events in our day by complete histories, personal
memoirs, public documents, war correspondence, and all-pervading
journalism. This is probably the main reason why the Crimean War and
the Indian Mutiny, which broke for brief intervals the long peace of
England, have furnished no fresh material contribution of importance
to the romance of war, either in prose or poetry, to stamp the memory
of a long weary siege, or of a short and bloody struggle, upon the
popular imagination. Another reason must be, of course, the
non-appearance in England of the _vates sacer_; for Tolstoi has shown
us that within and without Sebastopol there might be found material
for work of the highest order. However this may be, it is a remarkable
fact that just about that time the novel of adventure turned back for
a moment, in Kingsley's hands, to the spacious times of great
Elizabeth, to the Armada and the legends of filibustering on the
Spanish main; and at the present time we may observe that the leading
writer of this school goes back at least a hundred years for the field
of his best stories. The eighteenth century, whose politics,
philosophy, and literature seemed to Carlyle's somewhat bookish
conception to be flat, prosaic, and comparatively uninteresting, was
in truth for Englishmen pre-eminently the age of energetic activity,
which touched the high level of romantic enterprise at two points, the
Scottish rebellions and the exploits of famous buccaneers. Mr.
Stevenson has reopened, with great skill and success, these mines of
literary ore that had been discovered but only partially worked by
Walter Scott. His rare artistic instinct divined the rich veins which
they still contained; while in other stories his intimate acquaintance
with actual life and circumstance on the coasts and islands of the
Pacific Ocean has provided him with those elements of distance and
unfamiliarity which are essential, as we have suggested, to the
composition of the novel of adventure. Other less original writers
have travelled in search of these elements to the Australian bush or
the outlying half-explored regions of South Africa.
This very cursory survey of the main influences and circumstances that
have shaped the course and set the fashion of our modern novel of
adventure may be useful in explaining its actual position at the
present moment. Scepticism and research have effectually retrenched
the very liberal credit formerly assigned to romance writing; the art
now consists in spinning a long narrative out of authentic materials
which must be disguised or kept hidden; while its leading features are
a delight in elaborate accessories and that very modern sentiment, a
horror of anachronism. A few living artists, like Mr. Shorthouse and
Mr. Stevenson, can still excel under these difficult conditions,
which have driven a crowd of second-rate novelists into the extreme of
minute realism. Into this retreat, however, they have been followed by
a host of readers; for in these days of universal instruction and flat
uneventful existence nothing satisfies the average mind like
photographic detail, which is a commodity to be had of every
industrious or studious composer. As the range of accurate information
extends, as the dust heap of old records, private as well as public,
is sifted more narrowly, as the antique habit of taking things readily
for granted disappears, the novel becomes more and more an arrangement
of genuine facts and circumstances, interleaved by such fiction as the
skill and imagination of the author can produce. It may be worth
observing that this demand for exact verification has affected the use
of the early chronicles in two contrary ways; they are relied upon
implicitly or they are arbitrarily discredited, in proportion as the
facts stated appear credible or not credible to critics or professors
who are working upon them. All the particulars of a great battle or of
some famous event that can be gleaned out of some ancient monkish
annalist, who must always have collected his information by hearsay
and often after many years, are treated as authentic so long as they
do not sound improbable; but if they offend against the canon of
probability set up by a library-hunting student, they are liable to be
summarily rejected. We may venture upon the conjecture that the true
result of this process is to assimilate the work of the critical
historian much more nearly than he would for a moment allow to that of
a skilful historic novelist. A romancer of insight and imaginative
power, who studied his period, would be quite as likely to make a
lucky selection of real incidents, motives, and characters, in a story
of the Roman Empire or of England under the Plantagenets, as an
erudite writer of history. Perhaps the best measure available to us of
what we may believe in regard to far-off times is afforded by
observation of what now happens in rough societies or remote places;
and this test the novelist is rather more apt, on the whole, to employ
than the historian.
In the novels, as upon the stage, this demand for minute accuracy of
scenic or historical details has necessarily elicited an abundant
supply; though whether the entire picture is rendered much more
natural and real by an accumulation of correct particulars may be
questioned. 'La recherche exageree du vrai peut conduire au faux.' It
is most doubtful whether laborious research can reconstruct a
life-like presentation of a vanished society, its modes of life, its
ways of thinking and acting. In vain the novelist or the painter
studies archaeology, takes a journey to the Holy Land for his local
colouring, reads up the records of the time, or works in museums. The
result may be ingenious and even instructive; but there are sure to be
great errors and anachronisms, although they may now be
undiscoverable; while the general tone, point of view, and balance of
motives are nearly certain to be obscured or distorted. For the modern
novelist, like the ancient myth-maker, is necessarily the child of his
time; his work takes the bent of his personal temperament, and is
moulded by the environment of ideas and circumstances within which he
lives. The Myth, the Romance, the Historic Novel, each in its
successive period, did at least this service to later generations:
they preserved and handed down to us the popular impressions, the
figures or pictures of great men and striking events, as they were
reflected upon the imagination of subsequent ages. It can never be
discovered, and it does not very much matter, whether these images
have any close resemblance to the lost originals; it may be that some
artists in some periods saw far more clearly than in others. The true
criterion for estimating the true value of romantic fiction, of tales
of action and adventure, must be always its artistic and intellectual
qualities, the question whether it succeeds in filling a broad canvas,
in dealing with masculine sentiment and stirring action, in striking
the deeper chords of human emotion and energy.
But the historic novel of our day strives principally after exact
reproduction, as may be seen even in a book of such incontestable
talent as _Marius the Epicurean_, and very notably in Archdeacon
Farrar's book, _Darkness and Dawn, or Scenes in the Days of Nero_
(1891), which may stand as the type and complete specimen of Erudite
Fiction. In his preface he tells us that
'those who are familiar with the literature of the first century
will recognise that even for the minutest allusions and particulars
I have contemporary authority. Expressions and incidents which to
some might seem startlingly modern, are in reality suggested by
passages in the satirists, epigrammatists, and romancers of the
(Roman) Empire, or by anecdotes preserved in the grave pages of
Seneca and the elder Pliny.'
Here we have reached, in this conscientious explanation of method, the
extreme point of remoteness from the original spirit of historic
romance. Archdeacon Farrar's figures and descriptions are worked out
upon the pattern of a mosaic, by piecing together the loose
fragmentary bits of our knowledge regarding life and society under
Nero. A glance at these books shows that they belong to the latest
school of nineteenth-century fiction, to a period when careful
scholarly accumulation of accessories and adroit adaptation of history
have taken the place, not only of convention and clumsy invention,
but also of the free untrammelled handling of types and traditions
which gave freshness and originality to the simpler forms of early
romance.
We believe, then, that these attempts at exact reproduction, this
method of the multiplication of particulars, involve a fallacy, and
are detrimental to the more enduring forms of art. But the people is
willing to be deceived; the general reader has acquired a taste that
must be gratified; with the result that the elder romancers in prose
and verse, including Scott and Byron, are falling out of fashion with
the middle classes, though Scott holds his own in the sixpenny
edition. The rule of Realism is becoming so despotic that the story of
adventure is reverting more and more to that shape which lends itself
most completely to life-like narrative, the shape of a Memoir. And it
may be pointed out accordingly that in France the Editor of Memoirs
has lately entered into substantial rivalry with the Novelist of
Adventure.
It must have been noticed by those who attend to the course of French
literature, that of late years the publication of Memoirs relating to
the period of the Revolutionary war, and especially of the First
Empire, has rather suddenly increased. The causes are undoubtedly to a
considerable degree political, connected with the reorganisation of
the French army and navy, which has revived the military ardour of the
nation, and has given an edge to the deep-seated spirit of rivalry
with Germany on land and with England at sea. Whatever immediately
interests a nation gives a sharp turn to its literature, and the
immense success of General Marbot's book, containing the extraordinary
personal experiences of one who passed through the most famous scenes
of the heroic era, exactly hit off the public taste at a moment when
various motives combined to revive the Napoleonic legend. The
historians of that era had done their harvesting; the crop had been
reaped, raked, and gleaned; the time was too near and too thoroughly
known for fiction; and yet there never was a finer field for the
production of romance. No one can doubt that if Napoleon Bonaparte had
conquered half Europe, won his tremendous battles, and founded his
empire in an illiterate prehistoric age, he would have taken
everlasting rank with Alexander the Great and Charlemagne as the
central figure of a third world-wide cycle of heroic myths; nor is it
necessary to read Archbishop Whately's _Historic Doubts_ to perceive
how readily Napoleon's real story lends itself to extravagant
myth-making. At a later period he might have been the leading
character in some prolix and pedantic romance, and still more recently
his life and deeds would have been built up into the scaffolding
within which the historic novelist used to construct his love idylls,
his tragic situations, or even his illustrations of some social
theory. All these methods and devices have become obsolete; and though
the spirit of hero-worship that animated those who listened to the
ancient tales still possesses mankind at certain seasons, Romance must
now submit to the hard conditions of modern Realism. In this
predicament it finds a new and satisfactory embodiment in the form of
Memoirs concerning the great Emperor and his companions, which
dispense copious anecdotes of his court and camp, his sayings and
doings, his domestic habits, his private manners and peccadilloes. If
these particulars can be served up as sauce to the description of
mighty events, the contrast renders them all the more savoury. But
there is now a large class of readers who care less about Jena and
Austerlitz than for such books as _Napoleon Intime, Napoleon et les
Femmes_, which have all the attraction always possessed by the
intermixture of love and war, and by the blending of arms with amours
in the conventional style of historic fiction. The lowest depth is
reached when the reminiscences of an Emperor's valet, to whom he is
still a kind of hero, are served up with that succulent dressing of
vivid particularity which is swallowed with relish because it brings
down a great man to the level of the most trivial experience.
How far these Memoirs are genuine in the sense which makes them so
attractive--that is to say, as literally authentic pictures of a great
man's interior life, of his actual words and behaviour as witnessed by
his intimates--must always remain doubtful to the sceptical mind. True
reminiscences are naturally somewhat cloudy in outline, hanging loose
together with gaps and interruptions; whereas these are all coherent,
clear-cut, and written in a style that gives superior polish and
setting to every scene and anecdote. That they are compiled upon a
solid substratum of truth need not be questioned; nevertheless some of
them seem to differ only in degree from the realistic novel of the
very latest type, such as Zola's _Debacle_, which contains a very
strong and pervading mixture of pure historical fact.
But whatever may be the exact proportion of authenticity which this
class of Memoirs can justly claim, they completely fulfil the prime
conditions of popularity prescribed for the modern novel, which must
work out minute details with the greatest possible resemblance to
actual life and circumstance. Upon this ground, indeed, the ablest
professors of fiction might despair of competing with those who
exhibit a mighty man of valour in undress, who lead us where we may
hear him talk, watch him eat or shave, and study his conjugal
relations. It is to be feared that if the multiplication of such
Reminiscences continues, they will seriously trench upon the province
of the novelist, who will be left no scope for the employment of his
craft in a field that has been thoroughly ransacked, and who must
inevitably retire before writers who have discovered the art of making
truth quite as amusing as fiction, than which it must always be more
interesting. The brilliant success of Marbot's Memoirs, which were
undoubtedly written by himself, seems to have warmed into activity and
circulation various other volumes of similar reminiscences that must
have been hibernating for one or two generations in the family
archives, or have otherwise fallen into temporary oblivion; for in
many cases one is inclined to wonder why authentic documents of such
value and interest were not sooner produced.
The latest example of this class of Memoirs, belonging to the
Revolutionary or Napoleonic cycle, is to be found in the _Adventures_
of A. Moreau de Jonnes, who died in 1870 at the age of ninety-two,
having been for fifty years a member of the Institut and a great
authority on statistics. 'We should never have supposed,' says M. Leon
Say in his preface to this book, 'that Moreau had been the hero of
warlike adventures, or that he might possibly have been placed in a
line with Marbot.' The men of M. Say's generation who knew Marbot were
quite unaware, he adds, that here was a naval and colonial Marbot,
whose fighting life was one of the strangest of stories. M. Say's
preface seems to be intended as a guarantee of this story's
authenticity, though he notices casually the remarkable fact that 'on
every occasion when Moreau is on the brink of destruction, it is his
luck to be saved by a pretty girl'; also that 'a charming
portrait-gallery might be made of the women who, between 1793 and
1805, rescued this hardy rover, who was both sailor and soldier, from
death by sword or sickness in divers parts of the world,' from the
West India Islands to the banks of the Thames. His guarantee must be
accepted; yet if this book had not been the genuine autobiography of a
known personage, there would really be nothing to distinguish it from
the historic novel, in which an imaginary person, such as Thackeray's
Esmond, describes well-known scenes of history as an eye-witness and
actor in them. Moreau was present at the great naval engagement of
June 1, 1794; at the hanging of Parker, the ringleader of the famous
mutiny at the Nore, when he was saved by Parker's widow; he was in
Bantry Bay with the ships of Hoche's unlucky expedition; he landed
with Humbert in Donegal, and saw the Race of Castlebar; he had some
marvellous experiences in the West Indies, and everywhere the devotion
of women facilitated his hairbreadth escapes. There need be no irony
in repeating that avowed fiction can have no chance at all in
competition with literature of this class.
'Times are changed,' observes M. Leon Say in his preface. 'The taste
of the public of our own day grows more and more keen for the romance
of the cloak and rapier, when the heroes relate their own adventures.
The authentic Memoirs of the d'Artagnans of our own century are now
preferred even to the works of Alexandre Dumas, so dear to our youth.'
Undoubtedly they must be preferred, for being more real than the most
realistic novel, and just as full of fascinating adventures, the
Memoir is superior precisely at those points which have given the
modern romance an advantage over its more conventional predecessors.
There may be consolation for the novelist in the reflection that the
fund from which these Memoirs are drawn must soon be running low,
whereas the resources of fiction are comparatively inexhaustible. In
the meantime one result, already perceptible, will be that the novel
will tend more and more to imitate the personal memoir, by reverting
to the autobiographical form which, since Defoe's day, has always been
fiction's most effective disguise, permitting the author to efface
himself completely, while it gives the whole composition an air of
dramatic vigour. It will have been observed that the most vivid
modern English romances, from _Barry Lyndon_ and _Esmond_ to
_John Inglesant_, _Kidnapped_, and _The Master of Ballantrae_,
are all written as the direct narratives of men who have taken a
comparatively secondary or even humble share in great transactions. On
the other hand, the famous characters who stand in the foremost line of
history, and who were the delight and ornament of the elder romances,
must now be struck out of the repertory of the modern story-teller,
since the public now will no longer tolerate ancient or mediaeval heroes,
while the great men of recent times have been too often photographed.
The only novelist of our own day who has attempted with some success to
draw thinly-veiled portraits of contemporary celebrities is Disraeli,
and his whole style and treatment show him to be a true-bred
descendant of the old romantic stock.
Our argument is, therefore, that various causes and tendencies, the
change of environment, the limitation of the average reader's
experiences, his taste for accuracy, his rejection of tradition,
convention, anachronism and improbabilities, the extension of exact
knowledge and the critical spirit, have all combined to limit the
sphere of the Novel of Adventure and to check the free sweep of its
inventive genius. To these conditions the first-class artist can
accommodate himself; but for the average writer they serve fatally to
expedite his descent into the regions of everyday life, among all the
emotions known to middle-class folk, from murders, bankruptcies, and
railway accidents down to their religious doubts and the psychology of
their love-making.
* * * * *
Against all these adverse circumstances the Novel of Adventure strives
gallantly, and, of late years, with such conspicuous success, that it
is difficult to decide whether the tide of popular inclination has not
turned against the Novel of Manners. This branch of the great
story-telling family has, as we know, a long descent and an
illustrious pedigree, although for our present purpose we need not go
back further than the eighteenth century, to _Gil Blas_ in France and
_Tom Jones_ in England. It will be found that these masterpieces
consist principally of a series of scenes and comical or semi-tragical
situations, rather loosely strung together on the thread of the
experiences undergone by the principal personages. The main object is
not so much ingenuity of plot as the presentation with much humour,
some strokes of caricature, and a touch of pathos, of morals and
manners, of public abuses and private vices, the way of living and
standard of thinking, the distinctive prejudices and ingrained
beliefs, that characterised different classes at a time when their
ideas and habits were often in sharp contrast. The sketches are
admirably done, the conversation is full of wit, the whole work may be
relied upon as a faithful though coarsely drawn picture of
contemporary society. Fielding constantly makes a halt in his
narrative to moralise and discourse ironically with the reader, in a
vein that was reopened a century later by Thackeray, and by him pretty
nearly exhausted, for at any rate it has since been closed.
Mr. Raleigh's book contains a just and discriminating appreciation of
Fielding's place in the line of great novelists, and of the strong
formative influence that his work exercised over the early development
of what is now called Naturalism. This note is struck, as he points
out, in the invocation at the beginning of the thirteenth book of _Tom
Jones_, addressed to Experience, to the inspiration which is derived
from what one has actually seen and known among all sorts and
conditions of men:
'Others before him had seen and known these things, but in
Fielding's pages they are for the first time introduced, with no
loss of reality, to subserve the ends of fiction; common life is
the material of the story, but it is handled here for the first
time with the freedom and imagination of a great artist.'[4]
And here, we may add, is the fruitful and vigorous stock out of which
has since radiated that immense growth of realistic novels which now
tends to overshadow and supersede the earlier species of romance
literature.
But Fielding's style is unblushingly masculine; his scenes are in the
street, the tavern, the sponging-house, and other places
unmentionable. By the end of his century the Novel of Manners had
fallen into very different hands, and to these it owes mainly the
shaping, both as to tone and subject, that decisively laid down its
course of future development. The electricity of that stormful period
which comprises the last years of the eighteenth and the opening of
the nineteenth century seems to have generated an efflorescence of
high original capacity in the department of imagination as well as of
action. Nevertheless nothing is more remarkable, probably nothing was
less expected, than the sudden accession of women to the first rank
of popular novelists. Miss Burney, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Austen (not to
mention Miss Ferrier), entered upon the same field from different
points and divided it among them. They may be said to have virtually
created the decent story of contemporary life, the light satirical
pictures of familiar folk, the representation of ordinary society in
the form of a delicate comedy, which rose to the pitch of racy humour
when the scenes and characters were Irish. Under the touch of this
feminine genius convention vanishes altogether; the painting is direct
from nature; the plot and incidents are saturated with probability;
the personages might be met at the corner of any street in town or
village; the very voice, gesture, and language are almost ludicrously
familiar. No heroics, not much use of the pathetic; very slight
landscape-painting and background; no psychology; there is no
systematic attempt to introduce, under the story's disguise, the
serious discussion of social, political, or polemical questions.
For an artist who deals so largely with country life, the absence of
landscape-painting in Miss Austen is very noticeable. The fine vein of
satire that pervades all her work, the constant presence of the human
element, leave her no room for expatiating on the aspects of nature;
and indeed she was manifestly impatient with enthusiasts over the
picturesque. She only touched upon such tastes in order to bring out
character:
'"It is very true," said Marianne, "that admiration of landscape
scenery is become a mere jargon. Everybody pretends to feel and
tries to describe with the taste and elegance of him who first
defined what picturesque beauty was. I detest jargon of every kind;
and sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could
find no language to describe them in but what was worn and
hackneyed out of all sense and meaning."
'"I am convinced," said Edward, "that you really feel all the
delight in a fair prospect which you profess to feel. But, in
return, your sister must allow me to feel no more than I profess. I
like a fine prospect, but not on picturesque principles; I do not
like crooked, twisted, blasted trees. I admire them much more if
they are tall, straight, and flourishing. I do not like ruined,
tattered cottages. I am not fond of nettles or thistles or heath
blossoms. I have more pleasure in a snug farm-house than a
watch-tower, and a troop of tidy happy villagers please me better
than the finest banditti in the world."'[5]
There can be no doubt, indeed, that in the novels of this period two
main features of the modern story, the word-painting of scenery and
the analysis of subjective emotions, are conspicuously absent. Yet
among the manifold causes to which may be ascribed the wide recent
expansion of the Novel of Manners, we may well reckon the decisive
impulse that it received from these famous authoresses. They were, in
fact, the founders of the dominion which women bid fair to establish
over this class of fiction, where they are already extending it to a
degree that threatens to evict the men. Various circumstances have
co-operated toward this curious literary revolution. The conventional
romance, though apparently flourishing, was in their time on the brink
of a decline; and as women have never succeeded in the Novel of
Adventure--for the obvious reason that their tastes and experiences
are opposed to success--they had no difficulty in abandoning a
decaying school, and in throwing all their freshness of mind and
subtlety of observation into the department which precisely suited
their idiosyncrasy. The spread of education among female readers and
writers has undoubtedly aided them. And thus the rise of feminine
novelists has operated as a formidable contingent of fresh troops that
has joined the camp of Manners, to which alliance it may be noticed
that, with very few exceptions, the women have faithfully adhered. For
although in the last century Mrs. Radcliffe had revived, as Mr.
Raleigh observes, the Romance proper, and Miss Jane Porter claimed in
the first years of this century the honour of having invented the
historical romance, women have been practically superseded in this
class of literature, so far as it survives, by men, George Eliot's
_Romola_ being the only notable exception. The true representatives of
female novelists are now the leaders of that school which confines
itself to minute observation, whether of outward facts or inward
feeling, and which is above all things devoted to the close
delineation of contemporary society. The analysis of character within
the range of ordinary experience, the play of civilised emotion, the
vicissitudes of grief or joy in the parsonage, the ball-room, and the
village, the troubled course of legitimate love-making, have all
contributed the congenial material whereby the Novel of Manners
treated realistically, as the phrase goes, has been moulded by the
adroit hands of women.
We do not forget that the most remarkable Mannerists that have
appeared in this century were male authors--Thackeray and Dickens. But
we are not now attempting to survey the whole field of modern English
fiction, or to assign to every star its place in that wide firmament.
Our aim is only to indicate the main lines of filiation that have
produced the prevailing novel of the day. The permanent influence of
the two great artists who have been mentioned has not been, we think,
proportionate to the rare and original value of their work. Both of
them had many imitators in their lifetime and for a little time
afterward; but before they died they were both showing symptoms of
loss of power; and one could see that the special fibre or faculty
that distinguished them was becoming overstrained; it was betraying
effort and exaggeration. In their latest productions their peculiar
qualities became mannerisms, of which readers soon began to be weary;
and this may partly account for the speedy subsequent diversion of the
popular taste into other channels. At any rate they did not found an
enduring school, like Jane Austen, of whom it may be said that a great
proportion of those novels of ordinary society which fill annually the
lists of circulating libraries may be referred to her work as their
type and forerunner. The novels of Anthony Trollope, for example,
follow very much the same range of subject, the same level of emotion
and incident; they consist mainly of satirical yet good-humoured
descriptions of middle-class life in the country, the suburbs, and
occasionally in the higher walks of society--they are always decorous
and never dull, but they never rise to the note of romance or
adventure. It may even be added, in further proof of Trollope's
literary ancestry, that the predominant quality of these very clever
but eminently commonplace stories, with their interminable flirtations
and their amusing dialogues which might have been reported by
phonograph, is essentially feminine.
Our view is, therefore, that three famous women authors accomplished
for the Novel of Manners very much what Scott at the same period did
for the Novel of Adventure; they stamped its lasting form and shaped
its subsequent development. And in both classes, in tales of adventure
as of society, we may detect clearly the rising spirit of what has
been since called Realism or Naturalism, the discarding of
convention, the abandonment of mere attitudes for action studied from
the life, the direct appropriation of material from surrounding facts
and perceptible feelings, from the familiar humours and concerns of
everyday existence. In _Le Roman Naturaliste_, by M. Brunetiere, one
chapter is allotted to English Naturalism, and the author declares
that the standard of Naturalism was raised in 1859 by the author of
_Adam Bede_, quoting certain passages in which George Eliot, he says,
has distinctly preached the fundamental doctrines of that school.
Undoubtedly George Eliot declared her purpose to be the rendering of a
faithful account of men and things as they mirrored themselves in her
mind. 'I feel as much bound,' she says, 'to tell you as precisely as I
can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box narrating
my evidence on oath'; and she set up as her ideal 'this rare precious
quality of truthfulness, for which I delight in many Dutch paintings.'
But the cardinal virtue of this fine and sombre genius lay in her
power of raising Realism to a high artistic level, of diffusing a
poetic light over humble scenes, of touching the deeper and vital
relations of common things. In Charlotte Bronte, again, we have
Naturalism throwing out a fresh shoot of great vigour and originality;
the old-fashioned masculine hero is supplanted by a heroine who
strives against adverse circumstance upon an ordinary, often an
humble, plane of society, never travelling for a moment beyond the
possibilities of everyday existence. This ominous dismissal of the
male hero from his previous position in the centre of the story's
movement may be taken as a sign that he is not of so much account in
the sphere of domestic fiction as he was erst in the arena of perilous
adventure. It is true that mankind is still glorified by Ouida, a
lady who may yet be occasionally found sitting, almost alone, by the
shores of old Romance; but with Mrs. Gaskell, Mrs. Oliphant, Miss
Broughton, and even Miss Braddon, the majority of their leading
characters may be said to be female. And the most deservedly popular
of our latest novels by women is _Marcella_.
We must not be understood to maintain that the Novel of Manners has
been, or is being, completely monopolised, as a department of light
literature, by women, for of course there are many men who are
achieving success in that field, among whom Henry James holds a high
place for distinction and delicacy of workmanship. And among certain
special branches in which women have not as yet competed at all, we
may mention the Sporting Novel, where provincial manners and the
humour of the coverside have been portrayed by Surtees with wonderful
exactitude and a kind of coarse yet irresistible comicality that
remind one of Fielding. It is true that he never moralises, as
Fielding does; but then the interjection by the author of moral
reflections went out, as we have said, with Thackeray. The description
of landscape drawn from nature occupies large and extending space in
the latter-day novel of manners, where it is used very sparingly as
subservient to character or situation, but commonly as an illustration
or pictorial background. Let us compare the two following extracts.
The first is from Jane Austen's _Mansfield Park_:
'Now we shall have no more rough road, Miss Crawford; our
difficulties are over. The rest of the way is such as it ought to
be. Mr. Rushworth has made it since he succeeded to the
estate.--Here begins the village. Those cottages are really a
disgrace. The church spire is reckoned remarkably handsome. I am
glad the church is not so close to the great House as often happens
in old places. The annoyance of the bells must be terrible. There
is the parsonage, a tidy-looking house, and I understand the
clergyman and his wife are very decent people. Those are
almshouses, built by some of the family. To the right is the
steward's house; he is a very respectable man. Now we are coming to
the lodge gates; but we have nearly a mile through the park still.
It is not ugly, you see, at this end; there is some fine timber,
but the situation of the house is dreadful. We go down hill to it
for half a mile, and it is a pity, for it would not be an
ill-looking place if it had a better approach.'
The second is from the opening pages of Mrs. Humphry Ward's
_Marcella_:
'She looked out upon a broad and level lawn, smoothed by the care
of centuries, flanked on either side by groups of old trees--some
Scotch firs, some beeches, a cedar or two--groups where the slow
selective hand of Time had been at work for generations, developing
here the delightful roundness of quiet mass and shade, and there
the bold caprice of bare fir trunks and ragged branches, standing
back against the sky. Beyond the lawn stretched a green descent
indefinitely long, carrying the eye indeed almost to the limit of
the view, and becoming from the lawn onwards a wide irregular
avenue, bordered by beeches of a splendid maturity, ending at last
in a far distant gap where a gate--and a gate of some
importance--clearly should have been, yet was not. The size of the
trees, the wide uplands of the falling valley to the left of the
avenue, now rich in the tints of harvest, the autumn sun pouring
steadily through the vanishing mists, the green breadth of the vast
lawn, the unbroken peace of wood and cultivated ground, all carried
with them a confused general impression of well-being and of
dignity. Marcella drew it in--this impression--with avidity. Yet at
the same moment she noticed involuntarily the gateless gap at the
end of the avenue, the choked condition of the garden paths on
either side of the lawn, and the unsightly tufts of grass spotting
the broad gravel terrace beneath her window.'
In the former passage, which is brimful of humorous suggestion, the
writer is exclusively intent upon setting out points of human
character in an effective light. The latter is a highly-finished piece
of word-painting, taken direct, as an artist would take a picture,
from a landscape that lay before the writer, and as such it is
excellently done; but, except for the slight indication of a neglected
estate, it stands apart from the plot or the play of character, and
might be bound up with the volume or omitted like a woodcut.
Undoubtedly the art of descriptive writing, which demands poetic
feeling and a delicate hand upon the organ of language, is practised
finely by the best of our modern novelists, and is a valuable element
of their popularity. Yet there are signs that it is already threatened
by the inexorable demands of the lower realism, which takes slight
account of the intimations that can be conveyed or the emotions that
may be roused by using language as an instrument for the
interpretation of nature, and requires to be shown the thing itself,
as it is seen in a photograph. 'The tendency of the times,' we are
told, 'seems to be to read less and less, and to depend more upon
pictorial records of events.' And the author from whom we quote[6]
proceeds to show how a few lines of sketch at once elucidate and
vivify whole pages of word-painting. He goes further, and relates how
'the fallacy of the accepted system of describing landscapes,
buildings, and the like in words,' was proved experimentally by
reading slowly a description of a castle, mountains, and a river
winding to the sea, from one of the Waverley novels, before a number
of students, three of whom proceeded to indicate on a black board the
leading lines of the mental picture produced by the words. The
drawings were all different and all wrong, as might indeed have been
confidently foretold; for the two sister arts of the pen and of the
pencil cannot possibly interpret each other reciprocally after this
fashion, or produce identical effects by their widely differing
methods.
Yet it is not impossible that the lower ranks of writers, who
exaggerate the prevailing fashion of exactly reproducing what any one
can see and hear, may find themselves outbid and overpowered on this
ground by illustration in line and colour. In this direction, indeed,
lies the danger of extreme Realism. It wages war against Romance,
which subsists upon idealistic conceptions of noble thought and
action; it pretends to hold up a true mirror to society, because it
reflects faithfully and without discrimination, like a photograph, the
street, the club, or the drawing-room, and arranges dramatically the
commonplace talk of everyday people. All this is fatal to high art, in
writing as in painting; nor can very clever dialogue, ingenious
situations, variety of style and subject, or even a high average
morality, preserve such literature from triviality and gradual
degradation.
* * * * *
It is the saying of a French writer, that the novel of to-day has
abjured both the past and the future, and lives wholly in the present.
We are so far of his opinion in regard to the past, that we doubt, for
reasons already given, whether the reading public can be induced to
travel backward into distant periods and unfamiliar scenes, even
though facts, anecdotes, costume, and other accessories be
scrupulously and historically exact. The future is a domain upon which
the novelist has rarely trespassed; but in close propinquity to it
lies theologic speculation, and we have not long ago witnessed the
fascination that can be exercised over a multitude of readers by a
novel which described the unhappiness brought upon the peaceful home
of an Anglican clergyman who was driven forth from his parsonage by
imbibing some tincture of modern Biblical criticism. The sensation,
for so it must be called, produced by _Robert Elsmere_, illustrated
the degree to which in these days popularity depends on hitting the
intellectual level of the general reader, and on touching the fancy or
the conscience of that very numerous class whose culture is of the
medium sort, neither high nor low. For while it seems certain that to
a great many people the views and arguments which overthrew Elsmere's
orthodoxy and brought him to martyrdom must have seemed profound,
daring, and novel, to others they are but too familiar and by no means
fresh. To some of us, indeed, the overpowering effect produced on
Elsmere's mind by his remarkable discoveries may be not unlike the awe
and gratitude with which an African chief receives the present of an
obsolete cannon. But the main reason why the future is no better field
than the distant past for the modern novelist, is that in both cases
there is a want of actuality, and that the positive temper of the age
requires in either case something more definite and verifiable.
It may be affirmed, moreover, as a general observation, that the
spirit of realism is hostile to the Novel with a Purpose, whether it
be that species which undertakes to argue or instruct under the cloak
of agreeable fiction, or that other species, much cultivated by
Dickens in his later works, which attacks antiquated institutions and
public abuses in a story so contrived as to expose their absurdity and
injustice. There is an air of artificiality about such compositions
which damages the artistic illusion, the photographic rendering of
actual life, upon which the author relies, because it throws over the
stage a shadow of his own personality. For one tendency of excessive
realism is to encourage an approximation between literary and
theatrical effects, since the whole interest becomes concentrated upon
figures acting and moving under a strong light in the foreground of
scenes carefully adjusted, so that anything which betrays the author's
presence interrupts the performance.
Yet although our contemporary novelist is thus subjected, in respect
of his period and his repertory, to limitations from which his
predecessors were free, there has never been a time when English
fiction has exhibited, in competent hands, greater fertility of
invention and resource, or so high an average proficiency in the art
of writing. The vastly increased demand for amusement in modern life
has stimulated the production of light literature, which is now
cultivated far more widely than heretofore, like tea, and the market
is flooded with an article of sound moderate quality. At this moment
we have in very truth a democracy of letters, for while no mighty
masters overtop the rest, the number of writers who stand on an
equality of merit, who can produce one or more excellent stories, is
very large. Their field has widened with the expansion of British
enterprise; they can draw their plots, descriptions, and characters
from the colonies, from Africa, from the South Sea Islands, or from
India; and it will be observed that not only the tale of adventure,
but also the quiet story of domestic interiors and family troubles, is
easily acclimatised, and gains something from a sparing use of variety
of dialect and landscape. As for the Novel of Adventure, it is drawing
copious sustenance from these outlying regions. For although it is
only from first favourites that the home-keeping reader will tolerate
an elaborate romance about Africa or the Pacific, he has taken a very
strong liking to short stories of scenes and actions strictly
contemporaneous, written in a rough, vigorous, and utterly
unconventional style, which convey to his mind impressions as
distinctly as a set of pictorial sketches.
We believe that this style, which retains a strong flavour of its
American origin (it can hardly be dated earlier than Bret Harte), may
be reckoned to be peculiar to the light literature of the English
language. We are not aware that it prevails to any extent in other
countries; for although the short story of love, intrigue, and manners
in general has flourished from mediaeval times, and at this moment is
almost exclusively confined to these subjects in France, the class of
works to which we are now referring differs entirely in subject and
style. In England and America the roving life of the colonies, the
backwoods, the Western States, and the Indian frontiers has created an
unique school of realistic fiction in which Mr. Kipling is at this
moment the chief professor. There is moreover a manifest affinity
between these short prose narratives and the strain of racy strenuous
versification upon the quaint unvarnished notions and hardy exploits
of the bush, the prairie, or the frontier, by which Bret Harte,
Lindsay Gordon, and again Kipling have attained celebrity. As these
poems echo the far-off ring of the ancient ballad, so we may venture
to surmise that the short prose story of adventure, which appeals to
modern taste by its vivid reality, its terseness of style, and its
picturesque outline, represents the latest form reached by Romance in
its long evolution. Such a tale will squeeze into fifty or a hundred
pages what Fenimore Cooper or G. P. R. James would have distended into
three volumes of slow-moving narrative, whereby infinite labour is
saved to the hasty and indolent reader of these railroad days.
Here, in short, we perceive the influence of that very characteristic
school of contemporary art, which we know to have always existed, but
to which men have recently given the exceedingly modern title of
Impressionist,--the school of authors who desire to strike the
imagination vividly and with a few sharp strokes, grouping their
figures in a strong light, rounding off their compact story upon a
small canvas, and rejecting every detail that is not strictly
accessory to the main purpose. Already it is beginning to be said in
France that Zola with his laborious particularism has passed his
climacteric of fashion, and that the swift impressionist is sailing in
on a fair wind of spreading popularity. Now in France, though no
longer in England, the critics still do their duty; they are not
merely, to borrow a phrase from Coleridge, the eunuchs who guard the
temple of the Muses; they are often prolific authors who exercise
great influence upon public opinion, so that their forecast of the
course and tendencies of fiction is worth bearing in mind. We
ourselves are ever a restless, bustling, far-wandering folk, great
lovers of fiction and travel, who not only carry forth the English
language into the uttermost parts of the earth, to be moulded in
strange dialects to queer uses, but also bring back fresh ideas and
incidents, and various aspects of a many-sided world-ranging life. If,
as has been often asserted, literature be the collective expression of
the ideas and aspirations, the tastes, feelings, and habits of the
generation which produces it, we may not be altogether wrong in
treating the short highly finished story, whether of adventure or
manners, as the impress and reflection of modern English society. But
no operation is more delicate than the endeavour to trace the subtle
connection between constant modifications of literary form and the
pressure of its ever-changing moral and material environment.