Studies in Literature and History
actor in them. Moreau was present at the great naval engagement of
June 1, 1794; at the hanging of Parker, the ringleader of the famous
mutiny at the Nore, when he was saved by Parker's widow; he was in
Bantry Bay with the ships of Hoche's unlucky expedition; he landed
with Humbert in Donegal, and saw the Race of Castlebar; he had some
marvellous experiences in the West Indies, and everywhere the devotion
of women facilitated his hairbreadth escapes. There need be no irony
in repeating that avowed fiction can have no chance at all in
competition with literature of this class.
'Times are changed,' observes M. Leon Say in his preface. 'The taste
of the public of our own day grows more and more keen for the romance
of the cloak and rapier, when the heroes relate their own adventures.
The authentic Memoirs of the d'Artagnans of our own century are now
preferred even to the works of Alexandre Dumas, so dear to our youth.'
Undoubtedly they must be preferred, for being more real than the most
realistic novel, and just as full of fascinating adventures, the
Memoir is superior precisely at those points which have given the
modern romance an advantage over its more conventional predecessors.
There may be consolation for the novelist in the reflection that the
fund from which these Memoirs are drawn must soon be running low,
whereas the resources of fiction are comparatively inexhaustible. In
the meantime one result, already perceptible, will be that the novel
will tend more and more to imitate the personal memoir, by reverting
to the autobiographical form which, since Defoe's day, has always been
fiction's most effective disguise, permitting the author to efface
himself completely, while it gives the whole composition an air of
dramatic vigour. It will have been observed that the most vivid
modern English romances, from _Barry Lyndon_ and _Esmond_ to
_John Inglesant_, _Kidnapped_, and _The Master of Ballantrae_,
are all written as the direct narratives of men who have taken a
comparatively secondary or even humble share in great transactions. On
the other hand, the famous characters who stand in the foremost line of
history, and who were the delight and ornament of the elder romances,
must now be struck out of the repertory of the modern story-teller,
since the public now will no longer tolerate ancient or mediaeval heroes,
while the great men of recent times have been too often photographed.
The only novelist of our own day who has attempted with some success to
draw thinly-veiled portraits of contemporary celebrities is Disraeli,
and his whole style and treatment show him to be a true-bred
descendant of the old romantic stock.
Our argument is, therefore, that various causes and tendencies, the
change of environment, the limitation of the average reader's
experiences, his taste for accuracy, his rejection of tradition,
convention, anachronism and improbabilities, the extension of exact
knowledge and the critical spirit, have all combined to limit the
sphere of the Novel of Adventure and to check the free sweep of its
inventive genius. To these conditions the first-class artist can
accommodate himself; but for the average writer they serve fatally to
expedite his descent into the regions of everyday life, among all the
emotions known to middle-class folk, from murders, bankruptcies, and
railway accidents down to their religious doubts and the psychology of
their love-making.
* * * * *
Against all these adverse circumstances the Novel of Adventure strives
gallantly, and, of late years, with such conspicuous success, that it
is difficult to decide whether the tide of popular inclination has not
turned against the Novel of Manners. This branch of the great
story-telling family has, as we know, a long descent and an
illustrious pedigree, although for our present purpose we need not go
back further than the eighteenth century, to _Gil Blas_ in France and
_Tom Jones_ in England. It will be found that these masterpieces
consist principally of a series of scenes and comical or semi-tragical
situations, rather loosely strung together on the thread of the
experiences undergone by the principal personages. The main object is
not so much ingenuity of plot as the presentation with much humour,
some strokes of caricature, and a touch of pathos, of morals and
manners, of public abuses and private vices, the way of living and
standard of thinking, the distinctive prejudices and ingrained
beliefs, that characterised different classes at a time when their
ideas and habits were often in sharp contrast. The sketches are
admirably done, the conversation is full of wit, the whole work may be
relied upon as a faithful though coarsely drawn picture of
contemporary society. Fielding constantly makes a halt in his
narrative to moralise and discourse ironically with the reader, in a
vein that was reopened a century later by Thackeray, and by him pretty
nearly exhausted, for at any rate it has since been closed.
Mr. Raleigh's book contains a just and discriminating appreciation of
Fielding's place in the line of great novelists, and of the strong
formative influence that his work exercised over the early development
of what is now called Naturalism. This note is struck, as he points
out, in the invocation at the beginning of the thirteenth book of _Tom
Jones_, addressed to Experience, to the inspiration which is derived
from what one has actually seen and known among all sorts and
conditions of men:
'Others before him had seen and known these things, but in
Fielding's pages they are for the first time introduced, with no
loss of reality, to subserve the ends of fiction; common life is
the material of the story, but it is handled here for the first
time with the freedom and imagination of a great artist.'[4]
And here, we may add, is the fruitful and vigorous stock out of which
has since radiated that immense growth of realistic novels which now
tends to overshadow and supersede the earlier species of romance
literature.
But Fielding's style is unblushingly masculine; his scenes are in the
street, the tavern, the sponging-house, and other places
unmentionable. By the end of his century the Novel of Manners had
fallen into very different hands, and to these it owes mainly the
shaping, both as to tone and subject, that decisively laid down its
course of future development. The electricity of that stormful period
which comprises the last years of the eighteenth and the opening of
the nineteenth century seems to have generated an efflorescence of
high original capacity in the department of imagination as well as of
action. Nevertheless nothing is more remarkable, probably nothing was
less expected, than the sudden accession of women to the first rank
of popular novelists. Miss Burney, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Austen (not to
mention Miss Ferrier), entered upon the same field from different
points and divided it among them. They may be said to have virtually
created the decent story of contemporary life, the light satirical
pictures of familiar folk, the representation of ordinary society in
the form of a delicate comedy, which rose to the pitch of racy humour
when the scenes and characters were Irish. Under the touch of this
feminine genius convention vanishes altogether; the painting is direct
from nature; the plot and incidents are saturated with probability;
the personages might be met at the corner of any street in town or
village; the very voice, gesture, and language are almost ludicrously
familiar. No heroics, not much use of the pathetic; very slight
landscape-painting and background; no psychology; there is no
systematic attempt to introduce, under the story's disguise, the
serious discussion of social, political, or polemical questions.
For an artist who deals so largely with country life, the absence of
landscape-painting in Miss Austen is very noticeable. The fine vein of
satire that pervades all her work, the constant presence of the human
element, leave her no room for expatiating on the aspects of nature;
and indeed she was manifestly impatient with enthusiasts over the
picturesque. She only touched upon such tastes in order to bring out
character:
'"It is very true," said Marianne, "that admiration of landscape
scenery is become a mere jargon. Everybody pretends to feel and
tries to describe with the taste and elegance of him who first
defined what picturesque beauty was. I detest jargon of every kind;
and sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could
find no language to describe them in but what was worn and
hackneyed out of all sense and meaning."
'"I am convinced," said Edward, "that you really feel all the
delight in a fair prospect which you profess to feel. But, in
return, your sister must allow me to feel no more than I profess. I
like a fine prospect, but not on picturesque principles; I do not
like crooked, twisted, blasted trees. I admire them much more if
they are tall, straight, and flourishing. I do not like ruined,
tattered cottages. I am not fond of nettles or thistles or heath
blossoms. I have more pleasure in a snug farm-house than a
watch-tower, and a troop of tidy happy villagers please me better
than the finest banditti in the world."'[5]
There can be no doubt, indeed, that in the novels of this period two
main features of the modern story, the word-painting of scenery and
the analysis of subjective emotions, are conspicuously absent. Yet
among the manifold causes to which may be ascribed the wide recent
expansion of the Novel of Manners, we may well reckon the decisive
impulse that it received from these famous authoresses. They were, in
fact, the founders of the dominion which women bid fair to establish
over this class of fiction, where they are already extending it to a
degree that threatens to evict the men. Various circumstances have
co-operated toward this curious literary revolution. The conventional
romance, though apparently flourishing, was in their time on the brink
of a decline; and as women have never succeeded in the Novel of
Adventure--for the obvious reason that their tastes and experiences
are opposed to success--they had no difficulty in abandoning a
decaying school, and in throwing all their freshness of mind and
subtlety of observation into the department which precisely suited
their idiosyncrasy. The spread of education among female readers and
writers has undoubtedly aided them. And thus the rise of feminine
novelists has operated as a formidable contingent of fresh troops that
has joined the camp of Manners, to which alliance it may be noticed
that, with very few exceptions, the women have faithfully adhered. For
although in the last century Mrs. Radcliffe had revived, as Mr.
Raleigh observes, the Romance proper, and Miss Jane Porter claimed in
the first years of this century the honour of having invented the
historical romance, women have been practically superseded in this
class of literature, so far as it survives, by men, George Eliot's
_Romola_ being the only notable exception. The true representatives of
female novelists are now the leaders of that school which confines
itself to minute observation, whether of outward facts or inward
feeling, and which is above all things devoted to the close
delineation of contemporary society. The analysis of character within
the range of ordinary experience, the play of civilised emotion, the
vicissitudes of grief or joy in the parsonage, the ball-room, and the
village, the troubled course of legitimate love-making, have all
contributed the congenial material whereby the Novel of Manners
treated realistically, as the phrase goes, has been moulded by the