I
For convenience of division it may be said that the novel of psychology
was born in France, the novel of manners in England, and that out
of their union in the glorious brain of Balzac sprang that strange
chameleon-creature, the modern novel, which changes its shape and
colour with every subject on which it rests.
In the general muster the novel of manners will be found to have played
the most important part; and here English influences preponderate.
If innate aptitude were enough for the producing of a work of art,
the flowering of the English novel of manners in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries might have surpassed in quality, and
intrinsic importance, that of all other schools.
Balzac’s debt to Scott has already been touched on; that of the earlier
French fiction to Richardson and Sterne is a commonplace in the
history of the novel. But the true orientation of English fiction was
away from the fine-drawn analysis of Richardson, the desultory humours
of Sterne, in the direction of an ample and powerful novel of manners.
Smollett and Fielding brought fresh air and noise, the rough-and-tumble
of the street, the ribaldry of the tavern, into the ceremonious
drawing-rooms depicted by Richardson and later by Miss Burney. The
great, the distinguishing gift of the English novelist was a homely
simplicity combined with an observation at once keen and indulgent;
good humour was the atmosphere and irony the flavour of this great
school of observers, from Fielding to George Eliot.
Till the day of Jane Austen it had been possible to treat without
apology of the mixed affair of living; but Jane Austen’s delicate
genius flourished on the very edge of a tidal wave of prudery. Already
Scott was averting his eyes from facts on which the maiden novelist in
her rectory parlour had looked unperturbed; when Thackeray and Dickens
rose in their might the chains were forged and the statues draped.
In the melancholy preface to “Pendennis” Thackeray puts the case
bitterly and forcibly: “Since the author of _Tom Jones_ was buried, no
writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to his utmost
power a MAN”; and the stunted conclusion of a tale so largely begun
testifies to the benumbing effect of the new restrictions. The novels
of Charlotte Brontë, which now seem in some respects so romantically
unreal, were denounced for sensuality and immorality; and for a time
English fiction was in danger of dwindling to the pale parables of Miss
Mulock and Miss Yonge.
But for this reaction against truth, this sudden fear of touching on
any of the real issues of the human comedy and tragedy, Thackeray’s
natural endowment would have placed him with the very greatest;
Trollope might conceivably have been a lesser Jane Austen; and George
Eliot, perhaps born with the richest gifts of any English novelist
since Thackeray, might have poured out her treasures of wit and irony
and tenderness without continually pausing to denounce and exhort.
But the artist depends on atmosphere for the proper development of his
gift; and all these novelists were cramped by the hazard of a social
convention from which their continental contemporaries had the good
fortune to escape. The artist of other races has always been not only
permitted but enjoined to see life whole; and it is this, far more than
any superiority of genius, that lifts Balzac, Stendhal and Tolstoy
so high above even Thackeray when the universal values are to be
appraised. The great continental novelists are all the avowed debtors
of their English predecessors; they took the English novel of manners
in its amplitude, its merriment and pathos, and in their hands “the
thing became a trumpet.”
In one respect the English novelists are still supreme; and that is in
the diffusion of good humour, good manners one might almost say, which
envelops their comedy and tragedy. Much that is savage and acrimonious
in the French, dolorous and overwrought in the Russians, is strained
away through this fine English _bonhomie_, leaving a clear, bright
draught, not very intoxicating or even stimulating, but refreshing and
full of a lasting savour. Nor does this prevalent good humour hinder
the full expression of tragedy; it helps rather to extract the final
bitterness from certain scenes in “Pendennis” and “Vanity Fair,” in
“Middlemarch” and the “Chronicles of Barsetshire.” The last years
of Lydgate, the last hour of Mrs. Proudie, seem the more terrible
for being muffled in a secure and decent atmosphere of fair play and
plum-pudding.
Since then all the restraints of prudery which hampered the English
novelists of the nineteenth century have come down with a crash, and
the “now-that-it-can-be-told-school” (as some one has wittily named it)
has rushed to the opposite excess of dirt-for-dirt’s sake, from which
no real work of art has ever sprung. Such a reaction was inevitable.
No one who remembers that Butler’s great novel, “The Way of All Flesh,”
remained unpublished for over twenty years because it dealt soberly
but sincerely with the chief springs of human conduct can wonder
that laborious monuments of school-boy pornography are now mistaken
for works of genius by a public ignorant of Rabelais and unaware of
Apuleius. The balance will right itself with the habit of freedom. The
new novelists will learn that it is even more necessary to see life
steadily than to recount it whole; and by that time a more thoughtful
public may be ripe for the enjoyment of a riper art.