An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times Part 3

It is far better for him, instead of poring over a detail of the causes and symptoms of the disease which he hugs, to be stimulated to an effort in which, though it be but temporary, ecstatic, and for an end not actually attainable, he may at least forget the disease altogether. Such a stimulus a great poem may afford him; but in the whole expanse of novel-literature he merely sees his own sickly experience modified in an infinite variety of reflections, till he fancies that the "strange disease of modern life" is the proper const.i.tution of G.o.d's universe.

FOOTNOTES:

[18]

"When the fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world Have hung upon the beatings of my heart."

--Wordsworth, 'Tintern Abbey.'

[19] Matthew Arnold's 'Memorial Verses,' lines 20-22, adapted to the context.

J. EVIL EFFECTS OF NOVEL-READING

21. Novel-reading thus aggravates two of the worst maladies of modern times, self-consciousness and want of reverence. Many a man in these days, instead of doing some sound piece of work for mankind, spends his time in explaining to himself why it is that he does not do it, and how, after all, he is superior to those who do. Even men of a higher sort never seem to forget themselves in their work. Our popular writers generally take the reader into confidence as to their private feelings as they go along; our men of action are burdened by a sense of their reputation with "intelligent circles." No one loses himself in a cause.

Scarcely understanding what is meant by a "divine indifference" as to the fate of individual existences in the evolution of G.o.d's plan, we weary heaven with complaints that we find the world contrary, or that we cannot satisfy ourselves with a theory of life. Thus "measuring ourselves by ourselves, and comparing ourselves among ourselves, we are not wise." The novel furnishes the standard for the measurement, and the data for the comparison. It presents us with a series of fict.i.tious experiences, in the light of which we read our own, and become more critically conscious of them. Instead of idealising life, if we may so express ourselves, it sentimentalises it. It does not subordinate incidents to ideas; yet it does not treat them simply as phenomena to excite curiosity, but as misfortunes or blessings to excite sentiment.

The writer of the "Mill on the Floss" reaches almost the tragic pitch towards the close of her book, and if she had been content to leave us with the death of the heroine and her brother[20] in the flood, we might have supposed that in this case, as representing the annihilation of human pa.s.sion in the struggle with destiny, the novelist had indeed attained the ideal view of life. But the novelistic instinct does not allow her to do so. At the conclusion we are shown the other chief actors standing, with appropriate emotions, over the heroine's grave, and thus find that the catastrophe has not really been the manifestation of an idea, but an occasion of sentiment. The habitual novel-reader, from thus looking sentimentally at the fict.i.tious life which is the reflex of his own, soon comes to look sentimentally at himself. He thinks his personal joys and sorrows of interest to angels and men; and instead of gazing with awe and exultation upon the world, as a theatre for the display of G.o.d's glory and the unknown might of man, he sees in it merely an organism for affecting himself with pains and pleasures.

Thus regarded, it must needs lose its claim on his reverence, for it is narrowed to the limits of his own consciousness. Conversant with present life in all its outward aspects, he forgets the infinite s.p.a.ces which lie around and above it. This confinement of view, which among the more intelligent appears merely as disbelief in the possibilities of man, takes a more offensive form in the complacent blindness of ordinary minds. We have no wish to disparage our own age in comparison with any that have preceded it. Young men have always been ignorant, and ignorance has always been conceited. There is, however, this difference.

The ignorant young men of past time, such as the five sons of Sir Hildebrand Osbaldistone,[21] knew that they were ignorant, but thought it no shame: the ignorant young men of our days, with the miscellaneous knowledge of life which they derive from the popular novelists, fancy themselves wiser than the aged. Whoever be the philosopher, the c.o.xcomb nowadays will answer him not merely with a grin, but with a joke which he has still in lavender from d.i.c.kens or his imitators. The comic aspect of life is indeed plain enough to see, nor is the merely pathetic much less obvious; but there is little good in looking at either. It is far easier to laugh or to weep than to think; to give either a ludicrous or sentimental turn to a great principle of morals or religion than to enter into its real meaning. But the vulgar reader of our comic novelists, when he has learnt from them a jest or a sentiment for every occasion of life, fancies that nothing more remains unseen and unsaid.

FOOTNOTES:

[20] "Lover" in the original text of the essay. The error does not much affect the argument.

[21] In Scott's 'Rob Roy.'

III. TRUE FUNCTION OF THE NOVEL

A. A WIDENER OF EXPERIENCE

22. But there is another side to this question which we must not allow ourselves to overlook. We have shown what the novel cannot do, and its ill effect on those who trust to it for their culture. We must not forget that it has a proper work of its own which, if modern progress be anything more than a euphemism, must be a work for good. Least of all should it be depreciated by the student, who may find in it deliverance from the necessary confinement of his actual life. For the production of poetic effect, as we have seen, large abstraction is necessary. It is with man in the purity of his inward being, with nature in its simple greatness, that the poet deals. The glory which he casts on life is far higher than any which the novelist knows, but it is only on certain of the elements of life that it can be cast at all. The novelist works on a far wider field. With choice of subject and situation he scarcely need trouble himself, except in regard to his own intellectual qualifications. Wherever human thought is free, and human character can display itself, whether in the servants' hall or the drawing-room, whether in the country mansion or the back alley, he may find his materials. He is thus a great expander of sympathies; and if he cannot help us to make the world our own by the power of ideas, he at least carries our thought into many a far country of human experience, which it could not otherwise have reached. We hear much in these days of the sacrifice of the individual to society through professional limitations.

In the progressive division of labor, while we become more useful as citizens, we seem to lose our completeness as men. The requirements of special study become more exacting, at the same time that the perfect organisation of modern society removes the excitement of adventure and the occasion for independent effort. There is less of human interest to touch us within our calling, and we have less leisure to seek it beyond.

Hence it follows that one who has made the most of his profession is apt to feel that he has not attained his full stature as a man; that he has faculties which he can never use, capacities for admiration and affection which can never meet with an adequate object. To this feeling, probably, are mainly due our lamentations over a past age of hero-wors.h.i.+p and romance, when action was more decisive and pa.s.sion a fuller stream. Its alleviation, if not its remedy, is to be found in the newspaper and the novel. Every one indeed must lay in his own experience the foundation of the imaginary world which he rears for himself. There is a primary "virtue which cannot be taught." No man can learn from another the meaning of human activity or the possibilities of human emotion. But this [Greek: pou sto] being given, even the cloistered student may find that, as his soul pa.s.ses into the strife of social forces and the complication of individual experience, which the newspaper and the novel severally represent, his sympathies break from the bondage of his personal situation and reach to the utmost confines of human life. The personal experience and the fict.i.tious act and react on each other, the personal experience giving reality to the fict.i.tious, the fict.i.tious expansion to the personal. He need no longer envy the man of action and adventure, or sigh for new regions of enterprise. The world is all before him. He may explore its recesses without being disturbed by its pa.s.sions; and if the end of experience be the knowledge of G.o.d's garment, as preliminary to that of G.o.d Himself, his eye may be as well trained for the "vision beatific," as if he had himself been an actor in the scenes to which imagination transfers him.

B. AN EXPANDER OF SYMPATHIES

23. The novelist not only works on more various elements, he appeals to more ordinary minds than the poet. This indeed is the strongest practical proof of his essential inferiority as an artist. All who are capable of an interest in incidents of life which do not affect themselves, may feel the same interest more keenly in a novel; but to those only who can lift the curtain does a poem speak intelligibly. It is the twofold characteristic, of universal intelligibility and indiscriminate adoption of materials, that gives the novel its place as the great reformer and leveller of our time. Reforming and levelling are indeed more closely allied than we are commonly disposed to admit.

Social abuses are nearly always the result of defective organisation.

The demarcations of family, of territory, or of cla.s.s, prevent the proper fusion of parts into the whole. The work of the reformer progresses as the social force is brought to bear more and more fully on cla.s.ses and individuals, merging distinctions of privilege and position in the one social organism. The novel is one of the main agencies through which this force acts. It gathers up manifold experiences, corresponding to manifold situations of life; and subordinating each to the whole, gives to every particular situation a new character, as qualified by all the rest. Every good novel, therefore, does something to check what may be called the despotism of situations; to prevent that ossification into prejudices arising from situation, to which all feel a tendency. The general novel literature of any age may be regarded as an a.s.sertion by mankind at large, in its then development, of its claims, as against the influence of cla.s.s and position; whether that influence appear in the form of positive social injustice, of oppressive custom, or simply of deficient sympathy.

24. To be what he is, the novelist must be a man with large powers of sympathetic observation. He must have an eye for the "humanities" which underlie the estranging barriers of social demarcation, and in relation to which the influence of those barriers can alone be rightly appreciated. We have already spoken of that acquiescence in the dominion of circ.u.mstance, to which we are all too ready to give way, and which exclusive novel-reading tends to foster. The circ.u.mstances, however, whose rule we recognise, are apt to be merely our own or those of our cla.s.s. We are blind to other "idola" than those of our own cave; we do not understand that the feelings which betray us into "indiscretions"

may, when differently modified by a different situation, lead others to game-stealing or trade-outrages. From this narrowness of view the novelist may do much to deliver us. The variations of feeling and action with those of circ.u.mstance, and the essential human ident.i.ty which these variations cannot touch, are his special province. He shows us that crime does not always imply sin, that a social heresy may be the a.s.sertion of a native right, that an offence which leads to conventional outlawry may be merely the rebellion of a generous nature against conventional tyranny. Thus, if he does not do everything, he does much.

Though he cannot reveal to us the inner side of life, he at least gives a more adequate conception of its surface. Though he cannot raise us to a point of view from which circ.u.mstances appear subordinate to spiritual laws, he yet saves us from being blinded, if not from being influenced, by the circ.u.mstances of our own position. Though he cannot show the prisoners the way of escape from their earthly confinement, yet by breaking down the part.i.tions between the cells he enables them to combine their strength for a better arrangement of the prison-house. The most wounding social wrongs more often arise from ignorance than from malice, from acquiescence in the opinion of a cla.s.s rather than from deliberate selfishness. The master cannot enter into the feelings of the servant, nor the servant into those of his master. The master cannot understand how any good quality can lead one to "forget his station"; to the servant the spirit of management in the master seems mere "driving." This is only a sample of what is going on all society over.

The relation between the higher and lower cla.s.ses becomes irritating, and therefore injurious, not from any conscious unfairness on either side, but simply from the want of a common understanding; while at the same time every cla.s.s suffers within its own limits from the prevalence of habits and ideas, under the authority of cla.s.s-convention, which could not long maintain themselves if once placed in the light of general opinion. Against this twofold oppression, the novel, from its first establishment as a substantive branch of literature, has made vigorous war. From Defoe to Kingsley its history boasts of a n.o.ble army of social reformers; yet the work which these writers have achieved has had little to do with the morals--commonly valueless, if not false and sentimental--which they have severally believed themselves to convey.

Defoe's notion of a moral seems to have been the vulgar one that vice must be palpably punished and virtue rewarded; he recommends his "Moll Flanders" to the reader on the ground that "there is not a wicked action in any part of it but is first or last rendered unhappy and[22]

unfortunate." The moral of Fielding's novels, if moral it can be called, is simply the importance of that prudence which his heroes might have dispensed with, but for the wildness of their animal license. Yet both Defoe and Fielding had a real lesson to teach mankind. The thieves and harlots whom Defoe prides himself on punis.h.i.+ng, but whose adventures he describes with the minuteness of affection, are what we ourselves might have been; and in their histories we hear, if not the "music," yet the "harsh and grating cry" of suffering humanity. Fielding's merit is of the same kind; but the sympathies which he excites are more general, as his scenes are more varied, than those of Defoe. His coa.r.s.eness is everywhere redeemed by a genuine feeling for the contumelious buffets to which weakness is exposed. He has the practical insight of d.i.c.kens and Thackeray, without their infusion of sentiment. He does not moralise over the contrast between the rich man's law and the poor man's, over the "indifference" of rural justice, over the lying and adultery of fas.h.i.+onable life. He simply makes us see the facts, which are everywhere under our eyes, but too close to us for discernment. He shows society where its sores lie, appealing from the judgment of the diseased cla.s.s itself to that public intelligence which, in spite of the cynic's sneer on the task of "producing an honesty from the combined action of knaves," has really power to over-ride private selfishness. The same sermon has found many preachers since, the unconscious missionaries being perhaps the greatest. Scott was a Tory of the purest water. His mind was busy with the revival of a pseudo-feudalism: no thought of reforming abuses probably ever entered it. Yet his genial human insight made him a reformer against his will. He who makes man better known to man takes the first steps toward healing the wounds which man inflicts on man. The permanent value of Scott's novels lies in his pictures of the Scotch peasantry. He popularised the work which the Lake poets had begun, of re-opening the primary springs of human pa.s.sion. "Love he had found in huts where poor men lie," and he announced the discovery; teaching the "world" of English gentry what for a century and a half they had seemed to forget, that the human soul, in its strength no less than in its weakness, is independent of the accessories of fortune. He left no equals, but the combined force of his successors has been constantly growing in practical effect. They have probably done more than the journalists to produce that improvement in the organisation of modern life which leads to the notion that, because social grievances are less obvious, they have ceased to exist. The novelist catches the cry of suffering before it has obtained the strength, or general recognition, which are pre-supposed when the newspaper becomes its mouthpiece. The miseries of the marriage-market had been told by Thackeray, with almost wearisome iteration, many years before they found utterance in the columns of the "Times."

FOOTNOTE:

[22] "Or" in Green's text.

C. A CREATOR OF PUBLIC SENTIMENT

25. It may indeed be truly said that, after all, human selfishness is much the same as it ever was; that luxury still drowns sympathy; that riches and poverty have still their old estranging influence. The novel, as has been shown, cannot give a new birth to the spirit, or initiate the effort to transcend the separations of place and circ.u.mstance; but it is no small thing that it should remove the barriers of ignorance and antipathy which would otherwise render the effort unavailing. It at least brings man nearer to his neighbor, and enables each cla.s.s to see itself as others see it. And from the fusion of opinions and sympathies thus produced, a general sentiment is elicited, to which oppression of any kind, whether of one cla.s.s by another, or of individuals by the tyranny of sectarian custom, seldom appeals in vain.

D. A LEVELLER OF INTELLECTS

26. The novelist is a leveller also in another sense than that of which we have already spoken. He helps to level intellects as well as situations. He supplies a kind of literary food which the weakest natures can a.s.similate as well as the strongest, and by the consumption of which the former sort lose much of their weakness and the latter much of their strength. While minds of the lower order acquire from novel-reading a cultivation which they previously lacked, the higher seem proportionately to sink. They lose that aspiring pride which arises from the sense of walking in intellect on the necks of a subject crowd; they no longer feel the bracing influence of living solely among the highest forms of art; they become conformed insensibly, to the general opinion which the new literature of the people creates. A similar change is going on in every department of man's activity. The history of thought in its artistic form is parallel to its history in its other manifestations. The spirit descends, that it may rise again; it penetrates more and more widely into matter, that it may make the world more completely its own. Political life seems no longer attractive, now that political ideas and power are disseminated among the ma.s.s, and the reason is recognised as belonging not to a ruling caste merely, but to all. A statesman in a political society resting on a substratum of slavery, and admitting no limits to the province of government, was a very different person from the modern servant of "a nation of shopkeepers," whose best work is to save the pockets of the poor. It would seem as if man lost his n.o.bleness when he ceased to govern, and as if the equal rule of all was equivalent to the rule of none. Yet we hold fast to the faith that the "cultivation of the ma.s.ses," which has for the present superseded the development of the individual, will in its maturity produce some higher type even of individual manhood than any which the old world has known. We may rest on the same faith in tracing the history of literature. In the novel we must admit that the creative faculty has taken a lower form than it held in the epic and the tragedy. But since in this form it acts on more extensive material and reaches more men, we may well believe that this temporary declension is preparatory to some higher development, when the poet shall idealise life without making abstraction of any of its elements, and when the secret of existence, which he now speaks to the inward ear of a few, may be proclaimed on the house-tops to the common intelligence of mankind.

APPENDIX

A. AN APPRECIATION OF GREEN'S ESSAY

It is interesting to see how the leading ideas in his [Green's] mind governed the treatment of an apparently alien material in his last piece of academic work, the essay on novels, which gained the Chancellor's prize in 1862. The essay has also the additional interest of being almost the only record of his views on art and its relation to life. The fundamental conception upon which it is based is one with which we have already met. The world in its truth is a unity, governed by a single law, animated by an undivided life, a whole in every part. But to human apprehension it is fragmentary and mechanical, a chaos of elements of which each is external to the other and all are external to our minds, and in which chance tempered by familiarity seems to be the only law. To exceptional men, or at exceptional crises in life, in the moments of intense insight or emotion which philosophy calls knowledge and religion faith, the weight of custom falls away, the truth breaks through the veil, and the most trivial object or accident comes to reflect in itself the whole system of nature or the whole providence of G.o.d. At such moments man realises that in order to live he must die, that in order to be free he must obey, and that only by surrendering his fancied independence can he enter into the divine unity. To this liberation of the self from its own bondage art contributes its share. The poetic genius, like the speculative and the religious, penetrates the monotonous disorder of everyday life, and lays bare "the impa.s.sioned expression" which is there for those who can read it. The dramatist, for instance, with whom the novelist is here compared, shows us some elemental force of humanity, stripped of the accidents of time and place, working itself out in free conflict with other forces, and finally breaking itself against the eternal fact that no man can gain the world without first losing himself. It is this catastrophe which makes the real tragedy of life; it is this which the tragic poet has the eye to see and the words to portray; and in proportion as we can follow him in imagination, we come away from the spectacle with our own hearts broken and purged, but strengthened to face the fact and obey the law.

The novelist does with inferior means, and for minds at a lower level, what the dramatist may do for a mind at its highest. He idealises enough to make us feel pleasure or pain, not enough to make us forget ourselves. He excites curiosity or suspense, not awe or hope. If the novel ends well, it flatters our complacency with the feeling that the world as it is is not such a bad place after all; if it ends badly, it strengthens the indolent conviction that aimless misery is the law of the universe. There are however two ways in which novels may be of real service and value. If they cannot teach men how to live, they may, through the wide range of their subjects, enable those who have already found a principle of life to give it a freer application than their limited circ.u.mstances would otherwise allow; the "fict.i.tious experience"

may "give expansion to the personal," while the personal gives reality to the fict.i.tious, and thus may be mitigated that "sacrifice of the individual to society" which the modern division of labor tends to bring about. And secondly, by appealing to such various cla.s.ses and capacities, and exhibiting the ident.i.ty of human nature under such various circ.u.mstances, novels supply a vehicle through which the force of public opinion may work, fusing differences, breaking down prejudices, and checking the "despotism of situations." The essay concludes characteristically with the refusal to believe that democracy is necessarily unpoetic. As "we hold fast to the faith that the 'cultivation of the ma.s.ses,' which has for the present superseded the development of the individual, will in its maturity produce some higher type of individual manhood than any which the old world has known," so, though in the novel "the creative faculty has taken a lower form than it held in the epic and the tragedy," "we may well believe that this temporary declension is preparatory to some higher development, when the poet shall idealise life without making abstraction of any of its elements, and when the secret of existence, which he now speaks to the inward ear of a few, may be proclaimed on the housetops to the common intelligence of mankind."

Readers of the essay who are also novel-readers will be inclined to say that the writer was not much in sympathy with his subject; and he himself, on getting the prize, remarks that "it is curious that I should have been successful in an essay on novels, about which I know and care little, and should have failed in both my efforts in theology, for which I care considerably." At the same time it is probably true, as he once said, that he had read more novels than his friends gave him credit for, and it is certainly true that what his reading lacked in extent it made up in intensity. As might be supposed, his taste in fiction was for forcible delineation and robust humor. The flavor of strong, healthy individuality was what attracted him; for rarities, niceties, and abnormalities of mental organisation he cared nothing. He liked things which he could take hold of with his mind, not things which merely gave him sensations, pleasant or painful. Both in his deepest and his lightest moods he was absolutely simple and "above board," and this simplicity made him keenly alive to the proximity of the sublime to the ridiculous or the exquisite to the grotesque. Though he had little of the animal in him, and was never troubled by his appet.i.tes, he was quite free from prudery. If obscenity moved him at all, it was to frank laughter or to grim contempt; he never dwelt upon it, either in the way of enjoyment or loathing. "For rules of ascetic discipline," says a friend, "he had no need. The view of life suggested by so much of the best French literature, that thinking men are generally in a practical dilemma between the extremes of sensual excess and of spiritual exaltation, did not commend itself to him in the least." The only forms of art to which he was keenly susceptible were those of oratory and poetry. He had no ear for music, though he seemed to get a certain exaltation from listening to it. In regard to painting and sculpture he always professed himself incompetent, but he was not without decided tastes. On his first visit to the Continent he was more attracted by Rembrandt, Holbein, and Durer than by the Italians; "these men," he said, "grasped the idea of Christianity." Of Durer's four saints at Munich he writes, "I could contemplate them with interest for hours; he has contrived to give St. John an almost perfect expression of 'divine philosophy'." In later years when he went to Italy he spent a good deal of time in looking at early Italian pictures, and admitted that they would soon have got a great hold upon him. But on the whole his att.i.tude to the arts (excluding those of language) was one of deferential ignorance. He had not himself any artistic gifts; he did not even write verses. Yet to his friends, as one of them says, "he never represented the prose of existence. With all his gravity, with all his firm grip on fact and material interests, he had the enthusiastic movement of the world's poetry in him."--From the Memoir by R. L. Nettles.h.i.+p, Green's 'Works,' Vol. 3, pp. x.x.x-x.x.xiii.