Chapter XVI: The New Fiction

The realist movement spread among novelists and writers of fiction with even more rapidity than it invaded the dramatic realm. With epidemic suddenness writers of all kinds began to be realistic in their fiction. The reading public was not unprepared for the new tendency, for, at about the same time, a cheap edition of the novels of Zola was put upon the market and devoured eagerly without anybody appearing to be more than pleasantly shocked. The edition was expurgated somewhat, but even then passages were left untouched which only a very few years earlier would have aroused the condemnation of the Nonconformist conscience. Still, what a Frenchman might do with impunity did not go without question when repeated, even in a milder way, by native writers. There was a storm-in-a-tea-cup in certain circles, for instance, when Thomas Hardy issued _Jude the Obscure_, and George Moore, _Esther Waters_; and the storm was heightened on the appearance of Grant Allen’s _Woman Who Did_, and such realistic studies of slum life as Arthur Morrison’s _Tales of Mean Streets_ and _A Child of the Jago_. But even this blew over when the newspapers considered their readers had had enough of the subject, and no more serious damage was done than a few suppressions by the autocrats of the popular lending libraries, notably in the cases of _Jude the Obscure_ and _Esther Waters_, which prohibitions, as might have been expected, had the result of drawing more than usual attention to these remarkable books. The matter in the end was not settled one way or the other; it simply lapsed, and publishers and authors proceeded to develop from frankness to frankness without either endangering their reputations, their readers’ morals, or, ultimately, of causing surprise or sustained opposition from any quarter.

It is a curious fact, however, that, whilst the more daring of the realists aroused a new interest in the art of the novel, there were still more critics to denounce than to uphold the new method. Not only was this the fact with reference to realism, but it was the fact also with reference to the problem novel, what was called “the novel with a purpose,” and also to the still more modern fiction of temperament and psychological analysis represented by such writers as George Egerton and Sarah Grand. Discussions were lengthy and heated, and many good people of the time, looking backward at the large geniality and splendid sanity of Charles Dickens, the high moral purpose of George Eliot, and the fine culture and unimpeachable respectability of Thackeray, had grave forebodings for their own times and serious doubts as to the wisdom of the successors of the accepted masters. They forgot, of course, that the realism of _Oliver Twist_ had been criticised in its day, and that there were even people who doubted the wisdom of Thackeray’s mild frankness in _Vanity Fair_.

What the objectors did not realise, and this was perhaps the most important circumstance of all, was that the new fiction was big enough and attractive enough to be worth a fight, and that that in itself was a sign of literary health and vitality. Discussion is always a characteristic of renascent periods in art and life. “Art lives upon discussion,” avows Henry James, “upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views, and the comparison of standpoints; and there is a presumption that the times when no one has anything particular to say about it, and has no reason to give for practice or preference, though they may be times of honour, are not times of development--are times, possibly, even, a little of dullness.” There can be little doubt that the times under review were times of creative development, and above all they were far from dull in any branch of art, particularly in that of the novel.

A new impetus and a wider range of action, amounting to a new lease of life, had been given to that literary form by the abolition of the old three-volume method of publication, whose unwieldy size and exorbitant price had had the effect of chaining the novel to the circulating libraries. Many authors, notably Hall Caine, worked tirelessly for the abolition of the outmoded three-volume novel, and finally they won a victory more swiftly and more completely than their wildest hopes had anticipated. After a remarkably short fight the publishers capitulated and introduced the now familiar and, until quite recently, omnipresent six-shilling volume. The passing of the old novel format was important because it represented a great deal more than the passing of a mere form of publication. Actually it was the capitulation of a type of novel: the old sentimental lending-library novel of polite romantic atmosphere and crudely happy endings; the novel which was guaranteed to tax no brain by thought and to vex no code of morals by revolutionary suggestions, but by a determined rejection of anything approaching problem or idea, or even psychology, was calculated to produce that drowsy state of mild peacefulness which many people believe to be the end and aim of all good literature. There were few to regret its demise, and even these were ironical in the hour of regret. Chief among them was Rudyard Kipling, who gave the departed three-volume novel poetical honours in some verses called “The Three-Decker”:

“We asked no social questions--we pumped no hidden shame--
We never talked obstetrics when the Little Stranger came:
We left the Lord in Heaven, we left the fiends in Hell.
We weren’t exactly Yussufs, but--Zuleika didn’t tell.”

The new fiction did all these things, and, to its credit be it said, it did them within the limits of the art of the novel and with the ultimate result of increasing the number of novel readers beyond all bounds.

Some idea of the more reputable body of opinion aroused against the manifestation of realistic tendencies in literature may be gathered from an article, entitled “Reticence in Literature,” contributed by Arthur Waugh to the first number of _The Yellow Book_. The beginnings of the new frankness, particularly in its insistence upon sex, is traced in this article to Swinburne; but the frankness of the modern novel had descended directly from the French realists. Arthur Waugh detected two developments of modern realism; one towards excess promoted by effeminacy, “by the want of restraint which starts from enervated sensations”; and the other towards “the excess which results from a certain brutal virility, which proceeds from coarse familiarity with indulgence.” He went on to say that, “The one whispers, the other shouts; the one is the language of the courtesan, the other of the bargee. What we miss in both alike,” he continued, “is that true frankness which springs from the artistic and moral temperament; the episodes are not part of a whole in unity with itself; the impression they leave upon the reader is not the impression of Hogarth’s pictures; in one form they employ all their art to render vice attractive; in the other, with absolutely no art at all, they merely reproduce, with the fidelity of the kodak, scenes and situations the existence of which we all acknowledge, while taste prefers to forget them.” He then proceeded to stigmatise the latest development of literary frankness which he believed to be both inartistic and a danger to art. “A new school has arisen which combines the characteristics of effeminacy and brutality. In its effeminate aspect it plays with the subtler emotions of sensual pleasure, on its brutal side it has developed into that class of fiction which for want of a better word I must call chirurgical. In poetry it deals with very much the same passions as those which we have placed in the verses to which allusion has been made above[6]; but, instead of leaving these refinements of lust to the haunts to which they are fitted, it has introduced them into the domestic chamber, and permeated marriage with the ardours of promiscuous intercourse. In fiction it affects its heroines with acquired diseases of names unmentionable, and has debased the beauty of maternity by analysis of the process of gestation. Surely the inartistic temperament can scarcely abuse literature further. I own I can conceive nothing less beautiful.” Tennyson was quoted in a familiar couplet to buttress this argument, and the critic concluded by advocating reticence and humility in art as being the most necessary equipment for the production of beauty and the achievement of immortality.

The line of defence taken by the upholders of frankness in literature began by repudiating any precise desire for either immortality, beauty or even morality. The modernist was not only frank, he was frankly amoral; his one concern was to get into his work the quality of life, the sense of reality, irrespective of the presence or absence of moral ideas, leaving beauty and immortality to chance. At that period there was no very particular denial of the idea or necessity of beauty, as there is among the more “advanced” artists of to-day, nor did the writers of the time repudiate immortality. Immortality, they implied, should, like Whistler’s idea of art, happen, but as to beauty, they were convinced that what they did sincerely, truthfully and realistically, would ultimately be considered beautiful. And Hubert Crackanthorpe, in a reply to Arthur Waugh, was so convinced of the righteousness of the modern method in fiction that he was able to write: “Let our artistic objector but weary the world sufficiently with his despair concerning the permanence of the cheerlessness of modern realism, and some day a man will arise who will give us a study of human happiness as fine, as vital as anything we owe to Guy de Maupassant or to Ibsen. That man will have accomplished the infinitely difficult, and in admiration and in awe shall we bow down our heads before him.” And this youthful and accomplished realist was arrogant enough on the one hand to admit that fiction was a young art “struggling desperately to reach expression, with no great past to guide it,” and humble enough, on the other, to admit that it was matter for wonder, not that the new school stumbled into certain pitfalls, but that they did not fall headlong into a hundred more.

But what may be called the artistic defence was not the only bulwark against the attack of the old school. Fresh defences were found necessary owing to the nervousness of moralists who, weary of decrying the artistic value of realism, attacked it on ethical and even pathological lines. The new fiction, it was said, was calculated to undermine morality not only because it was immoral, but because it was “morbid,” “neurotic,” and “diseased.” Havelock Ellis defended Thomas Hardy’s _Jude the Obscure_ against this line of attack, in _The Savoy_; and, in that article, he took the war into the enemy’s camp by saying that, the more exact an artist’s powers of observation became, the more vital and profound became his art as an instrument of morality. “The fresher and more intimate his vision of Nature, the more startling his picture of morals.” And in defence of Hardy’s treatment of the passionate experiences of Jude and Sue against the charge of neurosis, he says: “Jude and Sue are represented as crushed by a civilisation to which they were not born, and though civilisation may in some respects be regarded as a disease and unnatural, in others it may be said to bring out those finer vibrations of Nature which are overlaid by rough and bucolic conditions of life. The refinement of sexual sensibility with which this book largely deals is precisely such a vibration. To treat Jude, who wavers between two women, and Sue, who finds the laws of marriage too mighty for her lightly poised organism, as shocking monstrosities, reveals a curious attitude in the critics who have committed themselves to that view. Clearly they consider human sexual relationships to be as simple as those of the farmyard. They are as shocked as a farmer would be to find that a hen had views of her own concerning the lord of the harem. If, let us say, you decide that Indian Game and Plymouth Rock make a good cross, you put your cocks and hens together, and the matter is settled, and if you decide that a man and a woman are in love with each other, you marry them and the matter is likewise settled for the whole term of their natural lives. I suppose that the farmyard view is really the view of the ordinary wholesome-minded novelist--I mean of course in England--and of his ordinary critic. Indeed, in Europe generally, a distinguished German anthropologist has lately declared, sensible and experienced men still often exhibit a knowledge of sexual matters such as we might expect from a milkmaid. But assuredly the farmyard view corresponds imperfectly to the facts of human life in our time. Such things as _Jude_ is made of are, in our time at all events, life, and life is still worthy of her muse.”

And Vincent O’Sullivan, a modern of the moderns, in a plea which made hash of the old sentimental library novel, wrote: “It is more easy--if more degrading--to write a certain kind of novel. To take a fanciful instance, it is more easy to write the history of Miss Perfect; how, upon the death of her parents, she comes to reside in the village, and lives there mildly and sedately; and how one day, in the course of her walk abroad, she is noticed by the squire’s lady, who straightway transports her to the Hall. And, of course, she soon becomes mighty well with the family, and the squire’s son becomes enamoured of her. Then the clouds must gather: and a villain lord comes on the scene to bombard her virtue with clumsy artillery. Finding after months that her virtue dwells in an impregnable citadel, he turns to, and jibes and goads the young squire to the fighting point. And, presto! there they are, hard at it with bare steel, on the Norman beach, of a drizzling morning; and the squire who is just pressing hot upon my lord, when--it’s hey! for the old love and ho! for the new--out rushes Miss Perfect to our great amazement, and falls between the swords down on the stinging sands in the sight of the toiling sea. Now I maintain, that a novel woven of these meagre threads, and set out in three volumes and a brave binding, would put up a good front at Mudie’s; would become, it too, after a while, morality packed in a box. For nowadays we seem to nourish our morals with the thinnest milk and water, with a good dose of sugar added, and not a suspicion of lemon at all.” The need of such a plea for frank record of personal impression, even though it led writers to “go out in the black night and follow their own sullen will-o’-the-wisps,” is all the more remarkable because it came at a time when realism had fought the good fight and was near upon winning.

It is not necessary at this date to defend the realism of the Nineties, for franknesses then considered shocking are now accepted as commonplaces of fiction. That does not mean that the merely silly novel of shallow romance has passed away; not even the Eighteen Nineties could bring about so complete a revolution as that. But it does mean that, since the _fin de siècle_ battle was fought between reticence and frankness, the bounds of literary expression have been so broadened as to make it possible for readers of all types, even those who can survive a considerable demand upon their thinking powers, to find fiction to suit their needs. The popular novel of the past, and to some extent of the present, ended more or less happily with the sound of wedding bells. The new novel very often began there. It was realised by the modern school of novelists that married life provided a whole realm of sensations and experiences hitherto neglected by their art or but partially exploited. Into this realm they plunged with enthusiasm, and so distinct were the results, when put into the form of fiction, that readers who had been familiar with them in real life were so amazed with this revelation of truth that, almost in self-defence, they were forced to conclude that the new fiction was scandalous when it was not morbid.

But although realistic and introspective fiction was the chief contribution of the period to this form of literary art, all kinds of fiction seemed to receive an impetus, which resulted in a general improvement in style, imagination and thoughtfulness. The influence of Meredith, Hardy and, to a lesser extent, Henry James was apparent in much of the work of the younger writers; whilst French fiction writers, such as Flaubert, Huysmans and Guy de Maupassant, were having a profound effect upon other imaginations. The realistic school produced George Moore, Hubert Crackanthorpe, Arthur Morrison, George Gissing, as more or less acknowledged disciples, and it influenced the birth of occasional novels from writers who were not definitely realistic, or specifically novelists, but who were impelled by the mood of the moment to produce works in key with the realistic mood. Among such novels may be named _The Woman Who Did_, by Grant Allen, _No. 5 John Street_, by Richard Whiteing, and _Liza of Lambeth_, by Somerset Maugham. Another important contribution to the fiction of the period was made by a group of women novelists who showed remarkable powers of psychological analysis and observation, and in several instances the faculty of expressing that modern revolt of women which found a voice in Olive Schreiner’s _Story of an African Farm_ (1881). Among these writers were Sarah Grand, “George Egerton” (Mrs Golding Bright), “John Oliver Hobbes” (Mrs Craigie), “Iota” (Mrs Mannington Caffyn), Mrs W. K. Clifford, Menie Muriel Dowie, Emma Frances Brooke, Beatrice Harraden and Elizabeth Robins. Mrs Humphry Ward must also be reckoned among the women novelists of the period, although she, as I have noted in an earlier chapter, had an established reputation as the author of _Robert Elsmere_, written in 1888. Equally characteristic of the period were the writers of comedy-fiction. Some of the early novels of H. G. Wells, such as _The Wonderful Visit_ (1895), and _The Wheels of Chance_ (1896), are in this class, as are also the witty works of John Oliver Hobbes, particularly _The Sinner’s Comedy_ (1892), _A Study in Temptations_ (1893) and _The School for Saints_ (1897). But the most characteristic writers of comedy-fiction were: Henry Harland, E. F. Benson, G. S. Street and Frederick Wedmore.

It was during the Nineties also that the use of dialect in fiction delighted an ever-growing number of novel readers. First among writers in this manner stands J. M. Barrie, whose studies in Scottish life were a revelation and a delight to a vast number of people on both sides of the Tweed, and elsewhere. The first of these, _Auld Licht Idylls_ and _A Window in Thrums_, were published respectively in 1888 and 1889. Then followed _The Little Minister_, in 1891, and _Sentimental Tommy_ and _Margaret Ogilvy_, in 1896. Inspired by the success of these works, S. R. Crockett produced many Scottish studies, beginning with _The Stickit Minister_, in 1893, and “Ian Maclaren” published the phenomenally successful _Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush_, in 1894. Jane Barlow did something of the same service for Ireland in her _Bogland Studies_ (1892); and the discovery by novelists of the value of local colour doubtless made for the success of Israel Zangwill’s fine studies of Jewish life, _Children of the Ghetto_ (1892), _Ghetto Tragedies_ (1893), and _The King of the Schnorrers_ (1894); and also to the same interest must be attributed the revival of the Cockney dialect in fiction, set to a tragic theme by realists like Arthur Morrison and Somerset Maugham, but given a delightfully humorous turn by Barry Pain, Pett Ridge and Edwin Pugh.

Romantic fiction once more became distinguished during the period, and in some of its finest results it owed its renaissance to Science which, almost a century before, Keats had said would clip the wings of Romance. This new romance produced two of the most gifted of modern writers: Rudyard Kipling and H. G. Wells. The first of that series of scientific romances which has made the name of H. G. Wells famous throughout the world, _The Time Machine_, was published in 1895, and in 1898 and 1899 he published _The War of the Worlds_ and _When the Sleeper Wakes_. But the spirit of romance not only breathed life into the facts of science; once more taking its cue from the realists it revivified the spirit of adventure in the modern world. Robert Louis Stevenson had shown the way, and during the Nineties he was writing in collaboration with his son-in-law, Lloyd Osbourne, tales, like _The Wrecker_ and _The Ebb Tide_, which made the old feel young again and the young desire to live more adventurously. But in the year 1895 came a new master with a book called _Almayer’s Folly_. He was a sailor by profession, a Pole by birth, but he wrote in English, a strange, strong and arresting English, and his name was Joseph Conrad. In 1896 he published _An Outcast of the Islands_, and in the two succeeding years _The Nigger of the Narcissus_ and _Tales of Unrest_. Conrad was not alone in his mastery of the art of turning experience into romance, for with him were Louis Becke, Frank T. Bullen, Morley Roberts, R. B. Cunninghame Graham, Henry Seton Merriman and Frank Harris, all of whom published their earliest books during the decade. The old romance found a new and subtle exponent in Maurice Hewlett, for _The Forest Lovers_ was issued in 1898, _Little Novels from Italy_ in 1899, and _Richard Yea and Nay_ in 1900, whilst in such writers as Conan Doyle, who published _The White Company_ in 1891, _Sherlock Holmes_ in 1892, and _Rodney Stone_ in 1896; Anthony Hope, who published _The Prisoner of Zenda_ in 1894; Stanley J. Weyman, E. W. Hornung and Quiller Couch, popular romance found inspired representatives. Even the romance of powerful and widespread human interest rose again into distinction with Hall Caine, whose best works, if _The Deemster_, published in 1887, be excepted, appeared during these extraordinarily productive years. And the name of Marie Corelli became still further associated with that species of sensationalism which she had already made her own.

So active was the romantic spirit of the period that it did not scruple about using many mediums for its purpose, hitherto neglected. Thus ideas both spiritual and intellectual were pressed into its service, the former finding striking expression in Harold Frederic’s _Illumination_ (1896), and in the Celtic romances of “Fiona Macleod”; and the latter in the bookish but always charming romances of Richard Le Gallienne. Type of his period, Le Gallienne infused into the old form of the Picaresque romance a great deal of the buoyant gaiety of the time as it inspired young people to prance about among books, ideas, conventions and dreams. In _The Book Bills of Narcissus_ (1891) he has caught this joyous intellectuality in full flight, with all its hopes and enthusiasms; and later, when he, greatly daring, ventured into the realm of Laurence Sterne with a new _Sentimental Journey_, called _The Quest of the Golden Girl_ (1896). The result was interesting, for with delicate indelicacy he translated the emotional unrest of the hour into a fancifully impossible romance which future generations will read for delight or for a truthful, though not impartial, picture of a certain corner of the age. In 1895 George du Maurier revived, in _Trilby_, the romance of Bohemianism as discovered by Henri Murger, and Arthur Machen, in _The Great God Pan_ (1894), took romance once more into the abode of terror in a manner as startling as it was elementally true. It is not unnatural to find that a period so bent on discovering--or rediscovering--romance in many things and experiences did not overlook the romance of childhood. This enchanted land had been discovered, as we know, by Lewis Carroll and Robert Louis Stevenson, but a new realm was explored with happy results by Kenneth Grahame, who with _The Golden Age_ (1896) and _Dream Days_ (1898) created a new delight by introducing us into a delectable kingdom whose existence we had only imagined.

Last in this long gallery of writers of fiction, but none the less valued on that account, came the humorists. Although H. D. Traill was convinced that “The New Humour” turned out to be simply the Old Buffoonery “writ small,” there was a New Humour which, in the amusing tales of Jerome K. Jerome, W. W. Jacobs, Israel Zangwill, J. M. Barrie, Pett Ridge and Barry Pain, was as much a characteristic of the Nineties as the problem novel. For it certainly made a departure from tradition, although the laughter it raised was the same as all laughter--of Eternity rather than of Time. It probably differed from the old humour in that it was more self-conscious and less capable of laughing at itself. The New Humour when it was _new_ was perhaps a little inhuman, and it reached its highest expression not in any of the works deliberately written with an eye on laughter, but in works like the plays of Bernard Shaw, which provoked laughter out of more serious business.

The novels and stories of the period, however, did not revolutionise so much as extend established methods.

It would not be easy to point to another decade in which English literature produced so many varieties of fiction, possessing the attractions of novelty or artistic distinction, or both. These works have at least one thing in common: they all represent more than ordinary ability within their own spheres. Some of them are now admitted to the first class of English fiction. And so balanced is the expression of the majority that they can be said to stand for many generations rather than for a special period. Few of these works are peculiar to their period after the manner of much of the poetry written in the decade. Oscar Wilde’s _Dorian Gray_, Richard Le Gallienne’s _Quest of the Golden Girl_ and Aubrey Beardsley’s _Under the Hill_ have each of them characteristics which would have made their appearance irrelevant before or after the decade in which they were published, and so, for the same reason, have the satires upon those authors and their works: _The Green Carnation_, _The Autobiography of a Boy_ and _The Quest of the Gilt-Edged Girl_. But for the rest, novelties of thought and utterance are sufficiently balanced by normal vision to defy many trespassing years to come. In the main, the best fiction of the decade achieved that thoughtfulness and that freedom of expression for which the upholders of the higher drama were still fighting. The native-born realistic play had yet to come, and its arrival was still a matter of anticipation and conjecture. But the realistic novel came complete with _Esther Waters_ and _Jude the Obscure_.

Nothing essentially English was added to the novel as such. What was new was the result of outside influence. But in a less popular form of fiction, the short story, a mastery was achieved hitherto unknown in this country. So successful a contributor to this class of fiction as H. G. Wells has referred[7] to the short-story harvest of the Nineties, in comparison with a later decade, in the following terms:

“The Nineties was a good and stimulating period for a short-story writer. Mr Kipling had made his astonishing advent with a series of little blue-grey books, whose covers opened like window-shutters to reveal the dusty sun-glare and blazing colours of the East; Mr Barrie had demonstrated what could be done in a little space through the panes of his _Window in Thrums_. _The National Observer_ was at the climax of its career of heroic insistence upon lyrical brevity and a vivid finish, and Mr Frank Harris was not only printing good short stories by other people, but writing still better ones himself in the dignified pages of _The Fortnightly Review_. _Longmans’ Magazine_, too, represented a _clientèle_ of appreciative short-story readers that is now scattered. Then came the generous opportunities of _The Yellow Book_, and _The National Observer_ died only to give birth to _The New Review_. No short story of the slightest distinction went for long unrecognised. The sixpenny popular magazines had still to deaden down the conception of what a short story might be to the imaginative limitation of the common reader--and a maximum length of six thousand words. Short stories broke out everywhere. Kipling was writing short stories; Barrie, Stevenson, Frank Harris; Max Beerbohm wrote at least one perfect one, _The Happy Hypocrite_; Henry James pursued his wonderful and inimitable bent; and among other names that occur to me, like a mixed handful of jewels drawn from a bag, are George Street, Morley Roberts, George Gissing, Ella D’Arcy, Murray Gilchrist, E. Nesbit, Stephen Crane, Joseph Conrad, Edwin Pugh, Jerome K. Jerome, Kenneth Grahame, Arthur Morrison, Marriott Watson, George Moore, Grant Allen, George Egerton, Henry Harland, Pett Ridge, W. W. Jacobs (who alone seems inexhaustible).... I do not think the present decade can produce any parallel to this list, or what is more remarkable, that the later achievements in this field of any of the survivors from that time, with the sole exception of Joseph Conrad, can compare with the work they did before 1900. It seems to me this outburst of short stories came not only as a phase in literary development, but also as a phase in the development of the individual writers concerned.”

In both the novel and the short story the sane tradition of English fiction by which a delicate balance was maintained between realism and romance rarely broke down. Even the traditional sentimentalism of the English novel was maintained for those who continued to desire it. However, the modernists who were caught in the impulsion towards French realism soon saw the insufficiency of the most carefully observed facts unless they were clothed with the stuff of the imagination and the soul. What happened to George Moore may be taken as symbolical of the return to romance. In one masterpiece, _Esther Waters_, he gave us reality with a frankness hitherto unknown in this country. He wrote a novel in which he revealed the pilgrimage of a human being as a physical entity. That was very well in its way, especially when that way was the way of a master. But when he came to write _Evelyn Innes_ he wrote the epic of a soul’s pilgrimage with all his experience as a realist ready to his hand. In that novel romanticism and realism met, co-ordinating much that was tentative and whimsical in the period in one finished and enduring work of art.