THE READING OF FICTION
Our reason for considering prose fiction before the other departments
of literature is not that fiction is of greatest importance, but that
it is the branch of literature most widely known and enjoyed. Pretend
as we may to prefer poetry and “solid books” (as if good fiction lacked
solidity!) most of us have read more novels than histories, more short
stories than poems. The good old Quaker who wrote a dull history of
Nantucket could not understand why the young people preferred novels to
his veracious chronicle; which was the same as saying that he did not
understand young people, or old people, either. Since the beginning of
recorded human history the world has gathered eagerly about the knees
of its story-tellers, and to the end of the race it will continue to
applaud and honor the skillful inventor of fiction.
There was a time when preachers and teachers, at least those of the
English-speaking nations, had a somber view of life and looked with
distrust on pleasant arts; and no doubt they were right in holding
that if stories take our thoughts off the great realities, we cannot
afford to abandon our minds to such toys and trivial inventions. But
the severe moralists never made out a good case against the arts;
they could not prove that joy and laughter and light entertainment
interfered with high thinking and right living; and in time they
rediscovered, what other wise men had never forgotten, that art is good
for the soul. In the past century the novel has taken all knowledge
for its province and has allied itself to the labors of prophets,
preachers, and educators. The philosopher finds that some of the great
speculative minds have uttered their thoughts in the form of artistic
fiction. The true scholar no longer confines himself to annotating
the fictions of the Greeks and Romans and the established classics
of his race. He sees in the best art of his contemporaries the same
effort of the human soul to express itself which informed the ancient
masterpieces.
Jane Austen, whose delicate novels inspired stronger writers than she,
who by her gentleness and truth influenced creative powers greater
than her own, whimsically recognized and perhaps helped to remove
the pedantic prejudice against fiction. The following passage from
“Northanger Abbey” will give a taste of that delicious book. It is a
quiet satire on the absurdly romantic such as is still manufactured and
sold by the million copies to readers who, one may suppose, have not
had the good fortune to read Jane Austen.
The heroines of “Northanger Abbey,” Catherine and Isabella, “shut
themselves up to read novels together. Yes, novels; for I will not
adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom, so common with novel
writers, of degrading, by their contemptuous censure, the very
performances to the number of which they are themselves adding; joining
with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on
such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own
heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn
over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! if the heroine of one novel
be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect
protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to
the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and
over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with
which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an
injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive
and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation
in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried.
From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our
readers; and while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of
the ‘History of England,’ or of the man who collects and publishes in
a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper
from the _Spectator_, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by
a thousand pens, there seems almost a general wish of decrying the
capacity and undervaluing the labor of the novelist, and of slighting
the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend
them. ‘I am no novel reader; I seldom look into novels; do not imagine
that _I_ often read novels; it is really very well for a novel.’ Such
is the common cant. ‘And what are you reading, Miss ----?’ ‘Oh, it is
only a novel!’ replies the young lady; while she lays down her book
with affected indifference, or momentary shame. ‘It is only “Cecilia,”
or “Camilla,” or “Belinda,”’ or, in short, only some work in which the
greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough
knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties,
the liveliest effusions of wit and humor, are conveyed to the world in
the best chosen language.”
Since that was written the novel has overridden its detractors by sheer
bulk and power. The greatest man in Russia, Tolstoi, is, or was, a
novelist. The greatest poet and thinker alive but yesterday in England,
George Meredith, was a novelist. Of the two wisest living writers in
America, one, Mr. William Dean Howells, is a novelist, and the other,
Mark Twain, whom one hardly knows how to rank or label, has done a part
of his best writing in the form of fiction. We no longer question the
power and dignity of the novel. Our only concern is to discriminate
good stories from bad and get the greatest delight and profit from the
good.
To bring our discussion to a vital example, let us consider Thackeray’s
“Henry Esmond,” an all but perfect fiction, in which every element of
excellent narrative is present.
The first element is plot. A story must begin in an interesting set
of circumstances and arrive by a series of events to a conclusion
that satisfies. The plot of “Esmond” is unusually well made, and it
is composed of rich matter. From the first chapter in which Henry is
introduced to us as “no servant, though a dependent, no relative,
though he bore the name and inherited the blood of the house”--a
youth with a mystery--on through the schemes for the restoration of
the Stuart King, through Esmond’s unsuccessful rivalry with the other
suitors of Beatrice, to the end of the high intrigues of politics and
the quiet conclusion of Esmond’s career, the story moves steadily
with well-mannered leisure. It takes its own time, but it takes the
right time, slow when events are preparing, rapid and flashing when
events come to a crisis. The great crisis, when Esmond overtakes the
prince at Castlewood, breaks his sword and renounces both allegiance
to the Stuarts and his own birthright, is one of the supreme dramatic
scenes in literature. There Thackeray matches, even excels, Scott and
Dumas. And such is the variety of his power that on other pages he
writes brilliant and witty comedy surpassed only by the lighter plays
of Shakespeare, on yet other pages he gives compact lucid summary of
events, the skill of which an historian might envy, and again he writes
pages of comment on human character which equal the best pages of
Esmond’s friend, “the famous Mr. Joseph Addison.”
The actors in these events are as distinct and memorable as any in
history or as any in life. It would be impossible for a reader not
well acquainted with the age of Queen Anne to tell which of the
personages in the book once moved in the flesh and which Thackeray
created. And readers who have a wide acquaintance with the world and
have known many of its sons and daughters will find in their gallery of
memories no brilliant and heartless woman whom they seem to remember
with more sense of intimacy and understanding than the woman who led
Mr. Esmond such an uncomfortable dance and was the means of defeating
Stuart ambitions--Beatrice Esmond. How are these personages of a
fiction made to seem so lifelike? Genius only can answer, and genius is
often unaware by just what devices a character is made to take on its
own life and to walk, as it were, independent of the author. One thing
is generally true of characters that strike us as real: they talk each
in a style of his own, and yet they talk “like folks.” The thing that
they do may be far removed from anything in our experience, a soldier
may be talking to a king, Esmond may be speaking in noble anger to the
prince; we feel somehow that the words on the page have in them the
sound of the human voice, that a man placed in such circumstances would
think and speak as the novelist makes him speak.
In a good novel human beings, whose emotions represent and idealize
our own, act and talk amid intelligible circumstances and entertaining
events. These persons, since they seem real, are visible to the eye of
fancy and the events happen in scenes--the divisions of a drama are
called “scenes”--which strike the imagination as if they were actually
striking the senses. Each person is recognizable by look and gesture;
each place is distinct from all other places, as the room you sit in
and the street beyond your window are different from all other rooms
and all other highways in the world. Our master of story telling is a
master of description. An unskillful author tries to persuade us that
a woman is beautiful by merely asserting it, and his assertion makes
no impression on us because it appeals to the part of our brain that
collects information and not the part that sees pictures. But Thackeray
paints Miss Beatrice tripping down the stairs to greet Esmond, and no
eye that has seen her through Thackeray’s words but can recall the
portrait at will. Further description of Beatrice accompanies the
action all through the book and no one can tell, or cares to tell,
where narration pauses and description begins.
No one can tell, either, where out of all this emerges that quality of
writing called style. Manner of expression is not a separable shell
in which the stuff is contained like a kernel. The manner is in the
substance. Yet there is a charm of words felt for itself which seems to
lie above and around the thing conveyed. In other books Thackeray loses
his plot, and sometimes apparently forgets his characters, and yet
he carries the reader on by virtue of saying things compellingly and
invitingly. When, as in “Esmond,” the order of action is so satisfying
and the people are so interesting to watch and be with, and in
addition every page is a delight to the ear, then literary excellence
is complete.
[Illustration: THACKERAY]
Here, united in one book, are the elements of fiction--plot, character,
description and style. And from these elements, however blended, there
results a total value, the measure of a book’s importance in relation
to the other things in life. This value is essentially moral, not so
much because literature is under peculiar obligations to preach and
teach morality as because it is part of life and the fundamental things
in life are moral in the large sense of the word. It is as impossible
to think of a fiction which shall be neither moral nor immoral as
to think of an act which shall be, in the modern meaningless word,
unmoral. Even a very slight fiction, like a trivial act, weighs on
one side or the other. All the best of our novelists have been fully
conscious of their ethical obligations to their readers. Having thought
deeply enough about life to write about it, they could not have failed
to think deeply about their professional responsibility, their part in
life.
I am going to quote at length a passage from Anthony Trollope’s “Life
of Thackeray” in the series of biographies known as _English Men of
Letters_. The young reader can find no better book about the novel than
this account of one great novelist by another. In spite of a current
idea that shop-talk is not interesting, a thoughtful craftsman talking
about his work is likely to be at his best. Moreover, Trollope’s
judgments on the moral obligation of the novelist are especially worthy
of confidence, for he is no heavy-handed preacher, no metaphysical
critic, but a broad-minded humorist, an affectionate student of human
nature, a cheerful workman who regarded his own books in a modest
businesslike way.
“I have said previously,” says Trollope, “that it is the business
of a novel to instruct in morals and to amuse. I will go further,
and will add, having been for many years a prolific writer of novels
myself, that I regard him who can put himself into close communication
with young people year after year without making some attempt to do
them good, as a very sorry fellow indeed. However poor your matter
may be, however near you may come to that ‘foolishest of existing
mortals,’ as Carlyle presumes some unfortunate novelist to be, still,
if there be those who read your works, they will undoubtedly be more
or less influenced by what they find there. And it is because the
novelist amuses that he must be influential. The sermon too often has
no such effect, because it is applied with the declared intention of
having it. The palpable and overt dose the child rejects; but that
which is cunningly insinuated by the aid of jam or honey is accepted
unconsciously, and goes on upon its curative mission. So it is with
the novel. It is taken because of its jam and honey. But, unlike the
honest and simple jam and honey of the household cupboard, it is never
unmixed with physic. There will be the dose within it, either curative
or poisonous. The girl will be taught modesty or immodesty, truth or
falsehood; the lad will be taught honor or dishonor, simplicity or
affectation. Without the lesson the amusement will not be there. There
are novels which certainly can teach nothing; but then neither can they
amuse any one.
“I should be said to insist absurdly on the power of my own fraternity
if I were to declare that the bulk of the young people in the upper and
middle classes receive their moral teaching chiefly from the novels
they read. Mothers would no doubt think of their own sweet teaching;
fathers of the examples which they set; and schoolmasters of the
excellence of their instructions. Happy is the country that has such
mothers, fathers, and schoolmasters! But the novelist creeps in closer
than the schoolmaster, closer than the father, closer almost than the
mother. He is the chosen guide, the tutor whom the young pupil chooses
for herself. She retires with him, suspecting no lesson, safe against
rebuke, throwing herself head and heart into the narration as she can
hardly do into her task work; and there she is taught--how she shall
learn to love; how she shall receive the lover when he comes; how far
she should advance to meet the joy; why she should be reticent, and not
throw herself at once into this new delight. It is the same with the
young man, though he would be more prone even than she to reject the
suspicion of such tutorship. But he, too, will learn either to speak
the truth, or to lie; and will receive from his novel lessons either
of real manliness, or of that affected apishness and tailor-begotten
demeanor which too many professors of the craft give out as their
dearest precepts.
“At any rate the close intercourse is admitted. Where is the house
now from which novels are tabooed? Is it not common to allow them
almost indiscriminately, so that young and old each chooses his own
novel? Shall he, then, to whom this close fellowship is allowed--this
inner confidence--shall he not be careful what words he uses, and
what thoughts he expresses, when he sits in council with his young
friend?... A novelist has two modes of teaching--by good example or
bad. It is not to be supposed that because the person treated of be
evil, therefore the precept will be evil. If so, some personages
with whom we have been acquainted from our youth upward would have
been omitted in our early lessons. It may be a question whether the
teaching is not more efficacious which comes from an evil example.
What story was ever more powerful in showing the beauty of feminine
reticence, and the horrors of feminine evildoing, than the fate of
Effie Deans [in “The Heart of Midlothian” by Scott]. The ‘Templar’ [in
Scott’s “Ivanhoe”] would have betrayed a woman to his lust, but has
not encouraged others by the freedom of his life. ‘Varney’ [in Scott’s
“Kenilworth”] was utterly bad--but though a gay courtier, he has
enticed no others to go the way he went. So has it been with Thackeray.
His examples have generally been of that kind--but they have all been
efficacious in their teaching on the side of modesty and manliness,
truth, and simplicity.”
To return to the elements of the novel, plot, character, description,
style, if we think of a score of great novels that have had many
readers for many years, we shall see that some novelists are blessed
with genius for one element more than for another, or that they have
chosen to put their energies into one or the other. And we shall see,
too, that few novels are perfect, few as nearly perfect as “Esmond,”
and that we should not expect them to be. All that we need demand is
that a writer give us enough of something to make the reading of his
book worth while.
No rules that have so far been laid down about the requirements
of fiction are final or from the reader’s point of view of great
assistance. Some of us have made up our minds that the English novel
is growing more shapely and well constructed: Mr. W. D. Howells, for
instance, by precept and practice, and some other novelists and critics
who are under the influence of French fiction, insist on construction
and form and simplicity of plot. Then in spite of all “tendencies” and
rules of fiction, along comes Mr. William De Morgan with three novels
which might have been written fifty years ago, and wins instantaneous
and deserved success as a new novelist--at the age of seventy. His
plots are as wayward and leisurely as most of Thackeray’s, his people
are human, and his discursive individual style is as fresh as if
novelists had not been filling the world with books for two centuries.
“Joseph Vance” and “Alice-for-Short” prove how inconsiderate genius is
of rules made by critics and how far is the “old-fashioned” novel from
having gone stale and fallen on evil days.
So long as a plot has vitality of some kind, truth to life, or
ingenuity, or dramatic power, it makes no difference to the mere
reader what material the novelist chooses. Twenty years ago there was
a strange contest between realists and romanticists. The realists, or
as they sometimes call themselves, “naturalists,” take the simpler
facts of common life and weave them into stories. The romanticist
selects from highly colored epochs of history, or from no-man’s land,
or from the more unusual circumstances of actual life, such startling
adventures, such well-joined incidents, such mysteries, surprises,
and dramatic revelations as we do not meet with in ordinary times and
places. Thackeray is a romanticist in “Henry Esmond,” a realist in
“Pendennis” and “The Newcomes.” Scott’s novels are romantic. Those
of Trollope, of Mr. Henry James, of Mr. W. D. Howells are realistic.
There is no sharp line between the two. Dickens found extraordinary
romance in ordinary London streets, which he knew with journalistic
realism to the last brick and cobblestone. In “Bleak House,” he says,
he “purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things.” But,
though he may have considered this book a special quest for the
romantic in real life, it does not differ in the kind or the proportion
of its romanticism from a dozen others of his novels. It is no more
romantic than “David Copperfield” or “The Old Curiosity Shop,” no less
romantic than the historical fiction, “A Tale of Two Cities.” His
imagination penetrated life, real or unreal, familiar or remote, and
found it rich with plot and subplot; he touched the slums with his
mythmaker’s wand, and in obedience to his touch the children of the
streets and dark tenements became heroes of strange adventure, moving
through mysteries as varied and wonderful as fairyland.
Because Dickens loved human beings and understood their everyday
sorrow and happiness, he wrought into the great fabric of his plots
a multitude of people as real, as like to us and our friends, as can
be found in the work of the most thorough-going realist; he reflects,
too, like the avowed realist, the social and political problems of
his own times. He is both romanticist and realist. So also are his
contemporaries, the Brontë sisters and Charles Reade. And their
greatest successors in the English novel, Thomas Hardy and George
Meredith, are equally masters of common social facts, human nature in
its daily aspects, and of the highly colored, the picturesque, the
mystery, the surprise, the dramatic complexity of events.
The genius of English fiction in most of its powerful exponents has
this dual character of romance and realism. “Robinson Crusoe” is a
romantic adventure; its scene is transported far away from human life
to a solitude such as only the wanderer’s eye has looked upon; the
reader is taken bodily into another world. Yet Defoe is the first great
realist in English prose fiction; he piles detail upon detail, gives
an exact inventory of Crusoe’s possessions, and compels belief in the
story as in a chronicle of events that really happened.
Later in the eighteenth century appeared Richardson’s “Clarissa
Harlowe,” a vast romantic tragedy, which held the attention of all
novel readers of the time; the story was published in parts, and when
it was learned before the last part was printed that the ending was to
be tragic, ladies wrote to Richardson begging him to bring his heroine
out of her difficulties and allow her to “live happily ever after.” The
plot of this novel is imposed by the logic of character upon the facts
of English society; the plot is not realistic or even probable in its
relations to the known circumstances of the civilization in which it is
laid; any magistrate could have rescued Clarissa. But everything stands
aside to let the great romance pass by; the readers of the time, who
knew better than we do the social facts surrounding an English girl,
did not question the probability of the plot, because they accepted
the character. The plot granted, Richardson’s method is realistic. We
know Clarissa’s daily acts and circumstances; we have a bulletin of her
feelings every hour. No modern psychological novelist ever analyzed
the workings of a human mind more minutely, with greater fidelity and
insight. The result is a voluminous diary of eighteenth-century manners
and customs and sentiments hung upon as romantic a plot as was ever
devised.
Midway in time between Richardson and Dickens stands the king
of romantics, Scott, and he, too, is a realist in his depiction
of Scottish life and character. In “The Bride of Lammermoor” so
melodramatic and “stagey” that it seems to be set behind footlights
and played to music--a familiar opera is based upon it--there is one
character that Scott found not in legend or history, but in the life
he knew, Caleb Balderstone. Like the gravedigger in “Hamlet,” he is
a link between unusual, we might fairly say unnatural, events and
common humanity. In many of Scott’s novels, beside the strutting heroes
that startle the world in high astounding terms, walk the soldiers,
servants, parsons, shepherds, who by their presence make us feel that
it is the firm earth upon which the action moves.
Argument among critics as to the nature of romance and realism helps,
as all questions of definition may help, to make us understand the
relation of one novel to another and to see the range and purpose of
fiction. But that any one should say of two novels that one is better
than the other, simply because it is more realistic or more romantic,
is to impose a technicality on enjoyment with which enjoyment refuses
to be burdened. Who that picks up a novel for the pleasure of reading
it cares whether it is romance or realism? So long as it has vitality
of its own kind, and gives us enough of the many virtues which a novel
may possess, we are content to plunge into it and ask no questions.
A lily is not a rose; it takes no great wisdom to know that; the
botanists will tell us the exact difference, and the gardener will
tell us how they grow; but if botanist or horticulturist tells us
which is more beautiful, we listen to his opinion and keep our own.
Mr. Kipling’s “Kim,” or Mr. Howells’s “A Modern Instance”; “Far from
the Madding Crowd,” by Thomas Hardy, or Scott’s “Ivanhoe”; Stevenson’s
“Kidnapped,” or Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn”--which of these books
is realistic and which is the other kind? Suppose you read them to
find out. In the midst of any one of them you will have forgotten the
question, because the novelist will have filled your whole mind with
other--and more important--interests.
A good novel is a self-contained, complete world with its own laws and
inhabitants. The inhabitants and laws of different novels resemble
each other in some degree or we should not be able to understand them.
Great books, and great men, have common qualities, and yet it is true,
in large measure, that they are memorable for their _difference_ from
other books and men. This suggests why histories of literature and
analytical studies of the forms of literature are so often artificial
and lifeless. The critic is fond of grouping books and authors
together, of finding points of resemblance, of marking genius with
brands and labels. In some histories of Elizabethan drama, Shakespeare
is neatly placed in the center of a rising and declining “school of
playwrights.” He is laid out like the best specimen of a collection
in a glass case. Shakespeare was a playwright; no doubt he was a
“practical” one. But the important thing about him is that he was the
greatest of poets, and he is not at ease in any school or class of
literary workmen. He is inexplicably, gigantically different from all
other Elizabethan dramatists, and if he is to be grouped at all, his
fellows are the few greatest poets of the world, not his contemporaries
in the art, or the business, of playmaking, the best of whom do not
reach to his shoulder. All the supreme creative geniuses are difficult
to classify. They work in conventional art forms, the drama, the epic,
in which scores of lesser poets have worked; but the greatest art
emerges above the form. When rules of art and sharp characterizations
of schools of art fit snugly on the shoulders of a writer, that alone
is sufficient to prove that he is not a writer of the highest power.
[Illustration: SCOTT]
However wisely critics and philosophers may argue about fiction and
other forms of art, inexperienced readers will be narrowing their
outlook if they make up their minds, after one or two experiments
or as a result of a critical opinion which they get at second hand,
that there are certain classes of stories that they do not like. If
one knows that Stevenson is a romanticist and happens to have read
“David Balfour” and failed to like it, it is foolish to rule out the
romantic, for perhaps Dumas will prove better. Some people are tired
beyond recovery of historical novels, because so many bad ones have
been urged upon the public during the last fifteen years. Some people
have decided that they do not like stories that end unhappily. This
seems a thoughtless decision because many of the great fictions from
the “Iliad” to “The Mill on the Floss” terminate with the death of the
principal characters and sadness for the characters that survive. When
we hear some one say, “There is tragedy enough in real life, I want
something pleasant to read,” we may suggest that the great tragedy that
is told in the Gospels has brought more lasting joy and good feeling to
the race than any other story. Not to make so high an argument, I feel
that I could give to any person who pretends to like only “pleasant”
fiction a half dozen tragic novels that would capture and delight this
sad soul that has seen enough of “tragedy in real life.”
Arguments are unnecessary, for fiction itself outstrips them or
defeats them and triumphs. The public is tired, we say, of historical
romance, and it cannot be charmed by sad stories which end in death
and disaster. Yet during the past winter one of “best sellers” was
Miss Mary Johnston’s “Lewis Rand.” This is an historical romance laid
in Jefferson’s Virginia. It is a tragic romance; the finest gentleman
is killed, the titular hero goes to prison on the last page, a ruin of
ambitious genius, and the heroine, his wife, parts from us at the end
to enter, in the world that lies just beyond the covers of books, a
life of inevitable sadness.
Individual vitality is what makes the good book. When the good book
appears we like to classify it and examine its form and material,
but its vitality defies us. You may group all your friends and
acquaintances in familiar types, and in thinking of them when they
are absent you may assure yourself that they fall into definite
intelligible classes. But in the presence of any one of them, the most
transparent and simple, you recognize the mystery of a person, a power,
however slight, that is unlike other powers, a vital soul that baffles
analysis. And so it is with books: each makes its effect as a living
individual and it may have an entirely different effect from the book
that seems nearest like it.
Somebody once expressed the idea that he did not care for Dickens
because so many of his characters are low persons who would not be
interesting to associate with in real life; and other readers have
expressed the same idea, either sincerely or in thoughtless repetition.
If they do not like Dickens, it is probably for some other reason than
that Dickens portrays “common” people, for that reason is not broad
enough to stand on. These same readers may like another writer whose
characters are as low and uncultivated as most of the people whom
Dickens loved. If such a writer is not to be found in our libraries,
his first book may be still unpublished; he may walk to-morrow into the
town where we live, discover the humor and pathos of our commonplace
neighbors, and of the low persons whom we do not acknowledge as
neighbors. And ever after our village will be a shrine for tourists.
The great fiction writer is a magician; he upsets conventional values
in a flash and turns lead into gold in spite of all the chemists. The
true reader of fiction will be a believer in that miracle, and he will
keep his mind receptive to it in every form in which it manifests
itself.