Chapter I: Prudence the Novelist's Highest Morality

20. The novel, then, as being a work of art, must fail to teach the lesson of life in its completeness: as an inferior work of art, it has peculiar weaknesses of its own. However extensive the influence of the literature of fiction may have been, its intensity has been in inverse proportion. A great poem, once made our own, abides with us for ever.

"Amid the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,"[18]

the spirit, returning to it, may gain a fresh assurance of its _own_ birthright, and purify itself, as in a river of Lethe, for an ideal transition to its proper home. The novel, itself the reflex of "the fretful stir unprofitable," can exercise no such power. It can but make us more at home in the region from which a great poem transports us. The value of that experience of the world, which it is its object to impart, is commonly overrated in our day. In the form in which it is imparted by the novelist, we have perhaps had too much of it without his aid. Our external environment is quite enough in our thoughts: we are not too reluctant to admit that we are what we seem to be, dependent for good or evil on circumstances which we do not make for ourselves. This dependence is in itself, no doubt, a fact; but it ceases to be so for us when we contemplate it in forgetfulness of that spring of potential freedom which underlies it, and of the law of duty correlative to freedom. To the exclusive consideration of it we owe those profitless recipes for eliciting moral health from circumstances which are the plague of modern literature, and which one of our ablest writers has lately condescended to dispense, in an essay on "organisation in daily life." This circumstantial view of life, if we may use the term, being the only one that the novelist can convey, prudence is his highest morality. But it may be doubted whether prudence is what any one has great need to learn. The plain man, who fronting circumstances boldly on the one hand, looks reverently to the stern face of duty on the other, can dispense with its maxims. For the moral valetudinarian small benefit is to be gained from a doctor who will

"Read each wound, each weakness clear,
Will strike his finger on the place
And say, 'Thou ailest here and here'."[19]

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 constitution of God'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 God'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 fictitious 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 passion 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 fictitious 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 God'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 spaces 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 coxcomb nowadays will answer him not merely with a grin, but with a joke which he has still in lavender from Dickens 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.'