Chapter C: The Modern Novel a Reflection of Ordinary Life

13. This Johnsonian definition may be objected to as merely accidental, and as inconsistent with the romantic character which the novel assumed in the hands of Sir Walter Scott. It expresses, however, adequately enough the view which the popular novelists prior to Scott took of their own productions. Cervantes, though in his own great work attaining that rhapsody of grotesqueness which lies on the edge of poetry, had yet established the idea of the novel as the antithesis of romance. These novelists, accordingly, if they are not always telling the reader (like Fielding), seem yet to be always thinking to themselves, how perfectly natural their stories are. It is on this naturalness they pride themselves; and naturalness, in their sense, meant conformity to nature as it is commonly seen. This is the characteristic feature of the class. Whether, like Richardson, they analyse character from within, or, like Miss Austen, develop it in the outward particularities of an unruffled life--whether they describe, like Fielding, the buoyancy of a generous animalism, or, like Miss Edgeworth and Miss Burney, the precise decencies of conventional morality--they deal simply with eighteenth-century life as seen by eighteenth-century eyesight. All romantic virtue, all idealised passion, they rigorously eschew. Prudence they make the guide, happiness the end, of life. And they do well. They undertake to copy present life, and they do so. They have to reflect man's habitual consciousness; it is not for them to anticipate a consciousness which has not yet been attained, or to represent man's lower nature as absorbed in a spiritual movement which, because we cannot arrest it, we habitually ignore. It is just their deficiency in this respect which gives them their peculiar fascination. Man is not really mere man, though he may think himself so. He is always something potentially, which he is not actually; always inadequate to himself; and as such, disturbed and miserable. The novel, on the contrary, represents him as being what he vainly tries to be--adequate to himself. It offers to his imagination the full enjoyment of earthly life, unchallenged by obstinate surmises, untroubled by yearnings after the divine. Ordinary men are satisfied with this enjoyment; the highest are allured by its temptation. The "reading public" is charmed with the contemplation of its own likeness, "twice as natural" as life. Its own wisdom, its own wishes, its own vanity, are set before it in little with a completeness and finish which the deeper laws of the universe, vindicating themselves by apparent disorder and misfortune, happily prevent from being attained in real life.[13] It is thus pleasantly flattered into contentment with itself--a contentment not disturbed by the occasional censure of practices which good taste condemns as ungraceful, or prudence as prejudicial to happiness. But the man of keener insight, who, instead of wrestling with the riddle of life, seeks for a time to forget it, and to place in its stead the rounded representation of activity which the novelist supplies, cannot but find the vanity of hiding his face from the presence which he dreads. Out of heart with the world about him--conscious of its actual meanness, and without vigor to re-cast it in the mould of his own thought--he fancies that after a sojourn in the world of fiction he may come back braced for his struggle with life. In his study, with a novel, he hopes to overlook the walls of his prison-house, to see the beginning and the end of human strife. But he soon finds himself in the embrace of the very power which he sought to escape. Here is the world itself brought back to him. Here is a perfect copy of that which in actual experience he sees but partially. The mirror is but too truly held up to nature. The getting and spending, the marrying and giving in marriage, the dominion of fortune which makes life a riddle, the prudential motives and worship of happiness which hide its divinity, these meet him here as they meet him in life, untransmuted, unidealised. Yet the charm of art overcomes him. The perfectness of the representation, the skill with which the incidents are combined to result in a crowning happiness behind which no sorrow seems to lie, make him find a pleasure in the copy which he cannot find in actual life, when in personal and painful collision with it. But meanwhile he gains no real strength, he readies no new height of contemplation. He comes back to the world, as a man with a diseased digestion, after living for a time on spiced meats, comes back to ordinary food. He has not braced the assimilative power of his thought by a flight into the ideal world, or learnt even for a time to turn "matter to spirit by sublimation strange." He has remained on the earth, and though his fancy has for the hour given the earth a charm, he is no better able than he was before to raise his eyes from its dead level, or remove the limits of its horizon.

14. Thus, then, the old quarrel of the philosopher with the imitative arts seems to be revived in respect of the novel. But though novel-writers might be banished from a new republic,[14] it would not be as artists, but for the inferiority of their art. An artist indeed the novelist is; he combines events and persons with reference to ends; he concentrates into a dialogue of a few sentences an amount of feeling and character which it would take real men some hours to express; he imparts a rapidity to the stream of incident quite unlike the sluggishness of our daily experience. In this sense he does not copy what we see, but shows us what we can not see for ourselves. Our complaint against him is that the aspect of things which he shows us is merely the outward and natural, as opposed to the inner or ideal. His answer would probably be either that the ideal, in any sense in which it can be opposed to the natural, must be false and delusive; or that it is merely an accident of novel-writing, as hitherto practised, and not anything essential to this species of composition, which has prevented it from exhibiting the highest aspect of things; or, finally, that admitting the view which the novel presents to be necessarily lower than the poetic, it yet is a more useful view for man to contemplate.

FOOTNOTES:

[13] This rather obscure phrase may be interpreted as follows: The average man would like to live such a rounded and symmetrical life as is portrayed in the novel. He would like to see his wisdom justifying itself, his vanity triumphant, his selfishness achieving its end; and he thinks that his cravings are being satisfied. But the deeper laws of the universe will not be balked, they are lying in wait. And presently when he thinks, good easy man, his little bourgeois world is rounding into the perfect sphere, they spring up in his path, shatter his sugar-candy paradise, and ruthlessly vindicate themselves (that is, prove that they cannot be disregarded, that they must be reckoned with) by bringing into his life disorder and misfortune.

[14] As poets were from the republic of Plato. "When any one of these pantomimic gentlemen, who are so clever that they can imitate anything, comes to us, and makes a proposal to exhibit himself and his poetry, we will fall down and worship him as a sweet and holy and wonderful being; but we must also inform him that in our state such as he are not permitted to exist; the law will not allow them. And so when we have anointed him with myrrh, and set a garland of wool upon his head, we shall send him away to another city. For we mean to employ for our souls' health the rougher and severer poet or story-teller, who will imitate the style of the virtuous only, and will follow those models which we prescribed at first when we began the education of our soldiers."--Plato, 'Republic,' III. 398.