Book: Masters of the English Novel

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A STUDY OF PRINCIPLES AND PERSONALITIES

BY RICHARD BURTON




PREFACE

The principle of inclusion in this book is the traditional one
which assumes that criticism is only safe when it deals with
authors who are dead. In proportion as we approach the living
or, worse, speak of those still on earth, the proper perspective
is lost and the dangers of contemporary judgment incurred. The
light-minded might add, that the dead cannot strike back; to
pass judgment upon them is not only more critical but safer.

Sometimes, however, the distinction between the living and the
dead is an invidious one. Three authors hereinafter studied are
examples: Meredith, Hardy and Stevenson. Hardy alone is now in
the land of the living, Meredith having but just passed away.
Yet to omit the former, while including the other two, is
obviously arbitrary, since his work in fiction is as truly done
as if he, like them, rested from his literary labors and the
gravestone chronicled his day of death. For reasons best known
to himself, Mr. Hardy seems to have chosen verse for the final
expression of his personality. It is more than a decade since he
published a novel. So far as age goes, he is the senior of
Stevenson: "Desperate Remedies" appeared when the latter was a
stripling at the University of Edinburgh. Hardy is therefore
included in the survey. I am fully aware that to strive to
measure the accomplishment of those practically contemporary,
whether it be Meredith and Hardy or James and Howells, is but
more or less intelligent guess-work. Nevertheless, it is
pleasant employ, the more interesting, perhaps, to the critic
and his readers because an element of uncertainty creeps into
what is said. If the critic runs the risk of Je suis, J'y reste,
he gets his reward in the thrill of prophecy; and should he turn
out a false prophet, he is consoled by the reflection that it
will place him in a large and enjoyable company.

Throughout the discussion it has been the intention to keep
steadily before the reader the two main ways of looking at life
in fiction, which have led to the so-called realistic and
romantic movements. No fear of repetition in the study of the
respective novelists has kept me from illustrating from many
points of view and taking advantage of the opportunity offered
by each author, the distinction thus set up. For back of all
stale jugglery of terms, lies a very real and permanent
difference. The words denote different types of mind as well as
of art: and express also a changed interpretation of the world
of men, resulting from the social and intellectual revolution
since 1750.

No apology would appear to be necessary for Chapter Seven, which
devotes sufficient space to the French influence to show how it
affected the realistic tendency of all modern novel-making.
The Scandinavian lands, Germany, Italy, England and Spain,
all have felt the leadership of France in this regard and hence
any attempt to sketch the history of the Novel on English soil,
would ignore causes, that did not acknowledge the Gallic debt.

It may also be remarked that the method employed in the
following pages necessarily excludes many figures of no slight
importance in the evolution of English fiction. There are books
a-plenty dealing with these secondary personalities, often
significant as links in the chain and worthy of study were the
purpose to present the complete history of the Novel. By
centering upon indubitable masters, the principles illustrated
both by the lesser and larger writers will, it is hoped, be
brought home with equal if not greater force.




CONTENTS

I. FICTION AND THE NOVEL
II. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY BEGINNINGS: RICHARDSON
III. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY BEGINNINGS: FIELDING
IV. DEVELOPMENTS: SMOLLETT, STERNE AND OTHERS
V. REALISM: JAKE AUSTEN
VI. MODERN ROMANTICISM: SCOTT
VII. FRENCH INFLUENCE
VIII. DICKENS
IX. THACKERAY
X. GEORGE ELIOT
XI. TROLLOPE AND OTHERS
XII. HARDY AND MEREDITH
XIII. STEVENSON
XIV. THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION




CHAPTER I


FICTION AND THE NOVEL

All the world loves a story as it does a lover. It is small
wonder then that stories have been told since man walked erect
and long before transmitted records. Fiction, a conveniently
broad term to cover all manner of story-telling, is a hoary
thing and within historical limits we can but get a glimpse of
its activity. Because it is so diverse a thing, it may be
regarded in various ways: as a literary form, a social
manifestation, a comment upon life. Main emphasis in this book
is placed upon its recent development on English soil under the
more restrictive name of Novel; and it is the intention, in
tracing the work of representative novel writers, to show how
the Novel has become in some sort a special modern mode of
expression and of opinion, truly reflective of the Zeitgeist.

The social and human element in a literary phenomenon is what
gives general interest and includes it as part of the
culturgeschichte of a people. This interest is as far removed
from that of the literary specialist taken up with questions of
morphology and method, as it is from the unthinking rapture of
the boarding-school Miss who finds a current book "perfectly
lovely," and skips intrepidly to the last page to see how it is
coming out. Thoughtful people are coming to feel that fiction is
only frivolous when the reader brings a frivolous mind or makes
a frivolous choice. While it will always be legitimate to turn
to fiction for innocent amusement, since the peculiar property
of all art is to give pleasure, the day has been reached when it
is recognized as part of our culture to read good fiction, to
realize the value and importance of the Novel in modern
education; and conversely, to reprimand the older, narrow notion
that the habit means self-indulgence and a waste of time. Nor
can we close our eyes to the tyrannous domination of fiction
to-day, for good or bad. It has worn seven-league boots of progress
the past generation. So early as 1862, Sainte-Beuve declared in
conversation: "Everything is being gradually merged into the
novel. There is such a vast scope and the form lends itself to
everything." Prophetic words, more than fulfilled since they
were spoken.

Of the three main ways of story-telling, by the epic poem, the
drama and prose fiction, the epic seems to be the oldest;
poetry, indeed, being the natural form of expression among
primitive peoples.

The comparative study of literature shows that so far as written
records go, we may not surely ascribe precedence in time either
to fiction or the drama. The testimony varies in different
nations. But if the name fiction be allowed for a Biblical
narrative like the Book of Ruth, which in the sense of
imaginative and literary handling of historical material it
certainly is, the great antiquity of the form may be conceded.
Long before the written or printed word, we may safely say,
stories were recited in Oriental deserts, yarns were spun as
ships heaved over the seas, and sagas spoken beside hearth fires
far in the frozen north. Prose narratives, epic in theme or of
more local import, were handed down from father to son,
transmitted from family to family, through the exercise of a
faculty of memory that now, in a day when labor-saving devices
have almost atrophied its use, seems well nigh miraculous. Prose
story-telling, which allows of ample description, elbow room for
digression, indefinite extension and variation from the original
kernel of plot, lends itself admirably to the imaginative needs
of humanity early or late.

With the English race, fiction began to take con-structural
shape and definiteness of purpose in Elizabethan days. Up to the
sixteenth century the tales were either told in verse, in the
epic form of Beowulf or in the shrunken epic of a thirteenth
century ballad like "King Horn"; in the verse narratives of
Chaucer or the poetic musings of Spenser. Or else they were a
portion of that prose romance of chivalry which was vastly
cultivated in the middle ages, especially in France and Spain,
and of which we have a doughty exemplar in the Morte D'Arthur,
which dates nearly a century before Shakspere's day. Loose
construction and no attempt to deal with the close eye of
observation, characterize these earlier romances, which were in
the main conglomerates of story using the double appeal of love
and war.

But at a time when the drama was paramount in popularity, when
the young Shakspere was writing his early comedies, fiction,
which was in the fulness of time to conquer the play form as a
popular vehicle of story-telling, began to rear its head. The
loosely constructed, rambling prose romances of Lyly of
euphuistic fame, the prose pastorals of Lodge from which model
Shakspere made his forest drama, "As You Like It," the
picaresque, harum-scarum story of adventure, "Jack Wilton," the
prototype of later books like "Gil Blas" and "Robinson Crusoe,"--these
were the early attempts to give prose narration a closer knitting,
a more organic form.

But all such tentative striving was only preparation; fiction in
the sense of more or less formless prose narration, was written
for about two centuries without the production of what may be
called the

Novel in the modern meaning of the word. The broader name
fiction may properly be applied, since, as we shall see, all
novels are fiction, but all fiction is by no means Novels. The
whole development of the Novel, indeed, is embraced within
little more than a century and a half; from the middle of the
eighteenth century to the present time. The term Novel is more
definite, more specific than the fiction out of which it
evolved; therefore, we must ask ourselves wherein lies the
essential difference. Light is thrown by the early use of the
word in critical reference in English. In reading the following
from Steele's "Tender Husband," we are made to realize that the
stark meaning of the term implies something new: social
interest, a sense of social solidarity: "Our amours can't
furnish out a Romance; they'll make a very pretty Novel."

This clearly marks a distinction: it gives a hint as to the
departure made by Richardson in 1742, when he published
"Pamela." It is not strictly the earliest discrimination between
the Novel and the older romance; for the dramatist Congreve at
the close of the seventeenth century shows his knowledge of the
distinction. And, indeed, there are hints of it in Elizabethan
criticism of such early attempts as those of Lyly, Nast, Lodge
and others. Moreover, the student of criticism as it deals with
the Novel must also expect to meet with a later confusion of
nomenclature; the word being loosely applied to any type of
prose fiction in contrast with the short story or tale. But
here, at an early date, the severance is plainly indicated
between the study of contemporary society and the elder romance
of heroism, supernaturalism, and improbability. It is a
difference not so much of theme as of view-point, method and
intention.

For underlying this attempt to come closer to humanity through
the medium of a form of fiction, is to be detected an added
interest in personality for its own sake. During the eighteenth
century, commonly described as the Teacup Times, an age of
powder and patches, of etiquette, epigram and surface polish,
there developed a keener sense of the value of the individual,
of the sanctity of the ego, a faint prelude to the note that was
to become so resonant in the nineteenth century, sounding
through all the activities of man. Various manifestations in the
civilization of Queen Anne and the first Georges illustrate the
new tendency.

One such is the coffee house, prototype of the bewildering club
life of our own day. The eighteenth century coffee house, where
the men of fashion and affairs foregathered to exchange social
news over their glasses, was an organization naturally fostering
altruism; at least, it tended to cultivate a feeling for social
relations.

Again, the birth of the newspaper with the Spectator Papers in
the early years of the century, is another such sign of the
times: the newspaper being one of the great social bonds of
humanity, for good or bad, linking man to man, race to race in
the common, well-nigh instantaneous nexus of sympathy. The
influence of the press at the time of a San Francisco or Messina
horror is apparent to all; but its effect in furnishing the
psychology of a business panic is perhaps no less potent though
not so obvious. When Addison and Steele began their genial
conversations thrice a week with their fellow citizens, they
little dreamed of the power they set a-going in the world; for
here was the genesis of modern journalism. And whatever its
abuses and degradations, the fourth estate is certainly one of
the very few widely operative educational forces to-day, and has
played an important part in spreading the idea of the
brotherhood of man.

That the essay and its branch form, the character sketch, both
found in the Spectator Papers, were contributory to the Novel's
development, is sure. The essay set a new model for easy,
colloquial speech: just the manner for fiction which was to
report the accent of contemporary society in its average of
utterance. And the sketch, seen in its delightful efflorescence
in the Sir Roger De Coverly papers series by Addison, is fiction
in a sense: differing therefrom in its slighter framework, and
the aim of the writer, which first of all is the delicate
delineation of personality, not plot and the study of the social
complex. There is the absence of plot which is the natural
outcome of such lack of story interest. A wide survey of the
English essay from its inception with Bacon in the early
seventeenth century will impress the inquirer with its fluid
nature and natural outflow into full-fledged fiction. The essay
has a way, as Taine says, of turning "spontaneously to fiction
and portraiture." And as it is difficult, in the light of
evolution, to put the finger on the line separating man from the
lower order of animal life, so is it difficult sometimes to say
just where the essay stops and the Novel begins. There is
perhaps no hard-and-fast line.

Consider Dr. Holmes' "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," for
example; is it essay or fiction? There is a definite though
slender story interest and idea, yet since the framework of
story is really for the purpose of hanging thereon the genial
essayist's dissertations on life, we may decide that the book is
primarily essay, the most charmingly personal, egoistic of
literary forms. The essay "slightly dramatized," Mr. Howells
happily characterizes it. This form then must be reckoned with
in the eighteenth century and borne in mind as contributory all
along in the subsequent development, as we try to get a clear
idea of the qualities which demark and limit the Novel.

Again, the theater was an institution doing its share to knit
social feeling; as indeed it had been in Elizabethan days:
offering a place where many might be moved by the one thought,
the one emotion, personal variations being merged in what is now
called mob psychology, a function for centuries also exercised
by the Church. Nor should the function of the playhouse as a
visiting-place be overlooked.

So too the Novel came to express most inclusively among the
literary forms this more vivid realization of meum and tuum; the
worth of me and my intricate and inevitable relations to you,
both of us caught in the coils of that organism dubbed society,
and willingly, with no Rousseau-like desire to escape and set up
for individualists. The Novel in its treatment of personality
began to teach that the stone thrown into the water makes
circles to the uttermost bounds of the lake; that the little
rift within the lute makes the whole music mute; that we are all
members of the one body. This germinal principle was at root a
profoundly true and noble one; it serves to distinguish modern
fiction philosophically from all that is earlier, and it led the
late Sidney Lanier, in the well-known book on this subject, to
base the entire development upon the working out of the idea of
personality. The Novel seems to have been the special literary
instrument in the eighteenth century for the propagation of
altruism; here lies its deepest significance. It was a baptism
which promised great things for the lusty young form.

We are now ready for a fair working definition of the modern
Novel. It means a study of contemporary society with an implied
sympathetic interest, and, it may be added, with special
reference to love as a motor force, simply because love it is
which binds together human beings in their social relations.

This aim sets off the Novel in contrast with past fiction which
exhibits a free admixture of myth and marvel, of creatures
human, demi-human and supernatural, with all time or no time for
the enactment of its events. The modern story puts its note of
emphasis upon character that is contemporary and average; and
thus makes a democratic appeal against that older appeal which,
dealing with exceptional personages--kings, leaders, allegorical
abstractions--is naturally aristocratic.

There was something, it would appear, in the English genius
which favored a form of literature--or modification of an
existing form--allowing for a more truthful representation of
society, a criticism (in the Arnoldian sense) of the passing
show. The elder romance finds its romantic effect, as a rule, in
the unusual, the strange and abnormal aspects of life, not so
much seen of the eye as imagined of the mind or fancy. Hence,
romance is historically contrasted with reality, with many
unfortunate results when we come to its modern applications. The
issue has been a Babel-like mixture of terms.

Or when the bizarre or supernatural was not the basis of appeal,
it was found in the sickly and absurd treatment of the amatory
passion, quite as far removed from the every-day experience of
normal human nature. It was this kind of literature, with the
French La Calprenede as its high priest, which my Lord
Chesterfield had in mind when he wrote to his son under date of
1752, Old Style: "It is most astonishing that there ever could
have been a people idle enough to write such endless heaps of
the same stuff. It was, however, the occupation of thousands in
the last century; and is still the private though disavowed
amusement of young girls and sentimental ladies." The chief
trait of these earlier fictions, besides their mawkishness, is
their almost incredible long-windedness; they have the long
breath, as the French say; and it may be confessed that the
great, pioneer eighteenth century novels, foremost those of
Richardson, possess a leisureliness of movement which is an
inheritance of the romantic past when men, both fiction writers
and readers, seem to have Time; they look back to Lyly, and
forward (since history repeats itself here), to Henry James. The
condensed, breathless fiction of a Kipling is the more logical
evolution.

Certainly, the English were innovators in this field, exercising
a direct and potent influence upon foreign fiction, especially
that of France and Germany; it is not too much to say, that the
novels of Richardson and Fielding, pioneers, founders of the
English Novel, offered Europe a type. If one reads the French
fictionists before Richardson--Madame de La Fayette, Le Sage,
Prevost and Rousseau--one speedily discovers that they did not
write novels in the modern sense; the last named took a cue from
Richardson, to be sure, in his handling of sentiment, but
remained an essayist, nevertheless. And the greater Goethe also
felt and acknowledged the Englishman's example. Testimonies from
the story-makers of other lands are frequent to the effect upon
them of these English pioneers of fiction. It will be seen from
this brief statement of the kind of fiction essayed by the
founders of the Novel, that their tendency was towards what has
come to be called "realism" in modern fiction literature. One
uses this sadly overworked term with a certain sinking of the
heart, yet it seems unavoidable. The very fact that the words
"realism" and "romance" have become so hackneyed in critical
parlance, makes it sure that they indicate a genuine
distinction. As the Novel has developed, ramified and taken on a
hundred guises of manifestation, and as criticism has striven to
keep pace with such a growth, it is not strange that a confusion
of nomenclature should have arisen. But underneath whatever
misunderstandings, the original distinction is clear enough and
useful to make: the modern Novel in its beginning did introduce
a more truthful representation of human life than had obtained
in the romantic fiction deriving from the medieval stories. The
term "realism" as first applied was suitably descriptive; it is
only with the subsequent evolution that so simple a word has
taken on subtler shades and esoteric implications.

It may be roundly asserted that from the first the English Novel
has stood for truth; that it has grown on the whole more
truthful with each generation, as our conception of truth in
literature has been widened and become a nobler one. The
obligation of literature to report life has been felt with
increasing sensitiveness. In the particulars of appearance,
speech, setting and action the characters of English fiction to-day
produce a semblance of life which adds tenfold to its power.
To compare the dialogue of modern masters like Hardy, Stevenson,
Kipling and Howells with the best of the earlier writers serves
to bring the assertion home; the difference is immense; it is
the difference between the idiom of life and the false-literary
tone of imitations of life which, with all their merits, are
still self-conscious and inapt And as the earlier idiom was
imperfect, so was the psychology; the study of motives in
relation to action has grown steadily broader, more penetrating;
the rich complexity of human beings has been recognized more and
more, where of old the simple assumption that all mankind falls
into the two great contrasted groups of the good and the bad,
was quite sufficient. And, as a natural outcome of such an easy-going
philosophy, the study of life was rudimentary and partial; you
could always tell how the villain would jump and were
comfortable in the assurance that the curtain should ring down
upon "and so they were married and lived happily ever
afterwards."

In contrast, to-day human nature is depicted in the Novel as a
curious compound of contradictory impulses and passions, and
instead of the clear-cut separation of the sheep and the goats,
we look forth upon a vast, indiscriminate horde of humanity
whose color, broadly surveyed, seems a very neutral
gray,--neither deep black nor shining white. The white-robed saint
is banished along with the devil incarnate; those who respect their
art would relegate such crudities to Bowery melodrama. And while
we may allow an excess of zeal in this matter, even a confusion
of values, there can be no question that an added dignity has
come to the Novel in these latter days, because it has striven
with so much seriousness of purpose to depict life in a more
interpretative way. It has seized for a motto the Veritas nos
liberavit of the ancient philosopher. The elementary psychology
of the past has been transferred to the stage drama, justifying
Mr. Shaw's description of it as "the last sanctuary of
unreality." And even in the theater, the truth demanded in
fiction for more than a century, is fast finding a place, and
play-making, sensitive to the new desire, is changing in this
respect before our eyes.

However, with the good has come evil too. In the modern seeking
for so-called truth, the nuda veritas has in some hands become
shameless as well,--a fact amply illustrated in the following
treatment of principles and personalities.

The Novel in the hands of these eighteenth century writers also
struck a note of the democratic,--a note that has sounded ever
louder until the present day, when fiction is by far the most
democratic of the literary forms (unless we now must include the
drama in such a designation). The democratic ideal has become at
once an instinct, a principle and a fashion. Richardson in his
"Pamela" did a revolutionary thing in making a kitchen wench his
heroine; English fiction had previously assumed that for its
polite audience only the fortunes of Algernon and Angelina could
be followed decorously and give fit pleasure. His innovation,
symptomatic of the time, by no means pleased an aristocratic
on-looker like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who wrote to a friend:
"The confounding of all ranks and making a jest of order has
long been growing in England; and I perceive by the books you
sent me, has made a very considerable progress. The heroes and
heroines of the age are cobblers and kitchen wenches. Perhaps
you will say, I should not take my ideas of the manners of the
times from such trifling authors; but it is more truly to be
found among them, than from any historian; as they write merely
to get money, they always fall into the notions that are most
acceptable to the present taste. It has long been the endeavor
of our English writers to represent people of quality as the
vilest and silliest part of the nation, being (generally) very
low-born themselves"--a quotation deliciously commingled of
prejudice and worldly wisdom.

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