Chapter 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-worship and romance, when action was more decisive and passion 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 stô] being given, even the cloistered student may find that, as his soul passes 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 fictitious act and react on each other, the personal experience giving reality to the fictitious, the fictitious 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 passions; and if the end of experience be the knowledge of God's garment, as preliminary to that of God 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 class, 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 classes 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 assertion by mankind at large, in its then development, of its claims, as against the influence of class 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 circumstance, to which we are all too ready to give way, and which exclusive novel-reading tends to foster. The circumstances, however, whose rule we recognise, are apt to be merely our own or those of our class. 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 circumstance, and the essential human identity 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 assertion 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 circumstances appear subordinate to spiritual laws, he yet saves us from being blinded, if not from being influenced, by the circumstances of our own position. Though he cannot show the prisoners the way of escape from their earthly confinement, yet by breaking down the partitions 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 class 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 classes 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 class suffers within its own limits from the prevalence of habits and ideas, under the authority of class-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 noble 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 punishing, 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 coarseness is everywhere redeemed by a genuine feeling for the contumelious buffets to which weakness is exposed. He has the practical insight of Dickens 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 fashionable 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 class 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 passion. "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.