I
To treat of the practice of fiction is to deal with the newest, most
fluid and least formulated of the arts. The exploration of origins is
always fascinating; but the attempt to relate the modern novel to the
tale of Joseph and his Brethren is of purely historic interest.
Modern fiction really began when the “action” of the novel was
transferred from the street to the soul; and this step was probably
first taken when Madame de La Fayette, in the seventeenth century,
wrote a little story called “La Princesse de Clèves,” a story of
hopeless love and mute renunciation in which the stately tenor of
the lives depicted is hardly ruffled by the exultations and agonies
succeeding each other below the surface.
The next advance was made when the protagonists of this new inner
drama were transformed from conventionalized puppets--the hero, the
heroine, the villain, the heavy father and so on--into breathing and
recognizable human beings. Here again a French novelist--the Abbé
Prévost--led the way with “Manon Lescaut”; but his drawing of character
seems summary and schematic when his people are compared with the first
great figure in modern fiction--the appalling “Neveu de Rameau.” It
was not till long after Diderot’s death that the author of so many
brilliant tales peopled with eighteenth century puppets was found, in
the creation of that one sordid, cynical and desolately human figure,
to have anticipated not only Balzac but Dostoievsky.
But even from “Manon Lescaut” and the “Neveu de Rameau,” even from
Lesage, Defoe, Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, and Scott, modern
fiction is differentiated by the great dividing geniuses of Balzac and
Stendhal. Save for that one amazing accident of Diderot’s, Balzac was
the first not only to see his people, physically and morally, in their
habit as they lived, with all their personal hobbies and infirmities,
and make the reader see them, but to draw his dramatic action as much
from the relation of his characters to their houses, streets, towns,
professions, inherited habits and opinions, as from their fortuitous
contacts with each other.
Balzac himself ascribed the priority in this kind of realism to Scott,
from whom the younger novelist avowedly derived his chief inspiration.
But, as Balzac observed, Scott, so keen and direct in surveying the
rest of his field of vision, became conventional and hypocritical when
he touched on love and women. In deference to the wave of prudery which
overswept England after the vulgar excesses of the Hanoverian court
he substituted sentimentality for passion, and reduced his heroines
to “Keepsake” insipidities; whereas in the firm surface of Balzac’s
realism there is hardly a flaw, and his women, the young as well as
the old, are living people, as much compact of human contradictions and
torn with human passions as his misers, his financiers, his priests or
his doctors.
Stendhal, though as indifferent as any eighteenth century writer to
atmosphere and “local colour,” is intensely modern and realistic in
the individualizing of his characters, who were never types (to the
extent even of some of Balzac’s) but always sharply differentiated and
particular human beings. More distinctively still does he represent
the new fiction by his insight into the springs of social action. No
modern novelist has ever gone nearer than Racine did in his tragedies
to the sources of personal, of individual feeling; and some of the
French novelists of the eighteenth century are still unsurpassed (save
by Racine) in the last refinements of individual soul-analysis. What
was new in both Balzac and Stendhal was the fact of their viewing each
character first of all as a product of particular material and social
conditions, as being thus or thus because of the calling he pursued
or the house he lived in (Balzac), or the society he wanted to get
into (Stendhal), or the acre of ground he coveted, or the powerful or
fashionable personage he aped or envied (both Balzac and Stendhal).
These novelists (with the solitary exception of Defoe, when he wrote
“Moll Flanders”) are the first to seem continuously aware that the
bounds of a personality are not reproducible by a sharp black line, but
that each of us flows imperceptibly into adjacent people and things.
The characterization of all the novelists who preceded these
two masters seems, in comparison, incomplete or immature. Even
Richardson’s seems so, in the most penetrating pages of “Clarissa
Harlowe,” even Goethe’s in that uncannily modern novel, the “Elective
Affinities”--because, in the case of these writers, the people
so elaborately dissected are hung in the void, unvisualized and
unconditioned (or almost) by the special outward circumstances of
their lives. They are subtly analyzed abstractions of humanity, to whom
only such things happen as might happen to almost any one in any walk
of life--the inevitable eternal human happenings.
Since Balzac and Stendhal, fiction has reached out in many new
directions, and made all sorts of experiments; but it has never ceased
to cultivate the ground they cleared for it, or gone back to the realm
of abstractions. It is still, however, an art in the making, fluent
and dirigible, and combining a past full enough for the deduction of
certain general principles with a future rich in untried possibilities.