Studies in Literature and History
adroit hands of women.
We do not forget that the most remarkable Mannerists that have
appeared in this century were male authors--Thackeray and Dickens. But
we are not now attempting to survey the whole field of modern English
fiction, or to assign to every star its place in that wide firmament.
Our aim is only to indicate the main lines of filiation that have
produced the prevailing novel of the day. The permanent influence of
the two great artists who have been mentioned has not been, we think,
proportionate to the rare and original value of their work. Both of
them had many imitators in their lifetime and for a little time
afterward; but before they died they were both showing symptoms of
loss of power; and one could see that the special fibre or faculty
that distinguished them was becoming overstrained; it was betraying
effort and exaggeration. In their latest productions their peculiar
qualities became mannerisms, of which readers soon began to be weary;
and this may partly account for the speedy subsequent diversion of the
popular taste into other channels. At any rate they did not found an
enduring school, like Jane Austen, of whom it may be said that a great
proportion of those novels of ordinary society which fill annually the
lists of circulating libraries may be referred to her work as their
type and forerunner. The novels of Anthony Trollope, for example,
follow very much the same range of subject, the same level of emotion
and incident; they consist mainly of satirical yet good-humoured
descriptions of middle-class life in the country, the suburbs, and
occasionally in the higher walks of society--they are always decorous
and never dull, but they never rise to the note of romance or
adventure. It may even be added, in further proof of Trollope's
literary ancestry, that the predominant quality of these very clever
but eminently commonplace stories, with their interminable flirtations
and their amusing dialogues which might have been reported by
phonograph, is essentially feminine.
Our view is, therefore, that three famous women authors accomplished
for the Novel of Manners very much what Scott at the same period did
for the Novel of Adventure; they stamped its lasting form and shaped
its subsequent development. And in both classes, in tales of adventure
as of society, we may detect clearly the rising spirit of what has
been since called Realism or Naturalism, the discarding of
convention, the abandonment of mere attitudes for action studied from
the life, the direct appropriation of material from surrounding facts
and perceptible feelings, from the familiar humours and concerns of
everyday existence. In _Le Roman Naturaliste_, by M. Brunetiere, one
chapter is allotted to English Naturalism, and the author declares
that the standard of Naturalism was raised in 1859 by the author of
_Adam Bede_, quoting certain passages in which George Eliot, he says,
has distinctly preached the fundamental doctrines of that school.
Undoubtedly George Eliot declared her purpose to be the rendering of a
faithful account of men and things as they mirrored themselves in her
mind. 'I feel as much bound,' she says, 'to tell you as precisely as I
can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box narrating
my evidence on oath'; and she set up as her ideal 'this rare precious
quality of truthfulness, for which I delight in many Dutch paintings.'
But the cardinal virtue of this fine and sombre genius lay in her
power of raising Realism to a high artistic level, of diffusing a
poetic light over humble scenes, of touching the deeper and vital
relations of common things. In Charlotte Bronte, again, we have
Naturalism throwing out a fresh shoot of great vigour and originality;
the old-fashioned masculine hero is supplanted by a heroine who
strives against adverse circumstance upon an ordinary, often an
humble, plane of society, never travelling for a moment beyond the
possibilities of everyday existence. This ominous dismissal of the
male hero from his previous position in the centre of the story's
movement may be taken as a sign that he is not of so much account in
the sphere of domestic fiction as he was erst in the arena of perilous
adventure. It is true that mankind is still glorified by Ouida, a
lady who may yet be occasionally found sitting, almost alone, by the
shores of old Romance; but with Mrs. Gaskell, Mrs. Oliphant, Miss
Broughton, and even Miss Braddon, the majority of their leading
characters may be said to be female. And the most deservedly popular
of our latest novels by women is _Marcella_.
We must not be understood to maintain that the Novel of Manners has
been, or is being, completely monopolised, as a department of light
literature, by women, for of course there are many men who are
achieving success in that field, among whom Henry James holds a high
place for distinction and delicacy of workmanship. And among certain
special branches in which women have not as yet competed at all, we
may mention the Sporting Novel, where provincial manners and the
humour of the coverside have been portrayed by Surtees with wonderful
exactitude and a kind of coarse yet irresistible comicality that
remind one of Fielding. It is true that he never moralises, as
Fielding does; but then the interjection by the author of moral
reflections went out, as we have said, with Thackeray. The description
of landscape drawn from nature occupies large and extending space in
the latter-day novel of manners, where it is used very sparingly as
subservient to character or situation, but commonly as an illustration
or pictorial background. Let us compare the two following extracts.
The first is from Jane Austen's _Mansfield Park_:
'Now we shall have no more rough road, Miss Crawford; our
difficulties are over. The rest of the way is such as it ought to
be. Mr. Rushworth has made it since he succeeded to the
estate.--Here begins the village. Those cottages are really a
disgrace. The church spire is reckoned remarkably handsome. I am
glad the church is not so close to the great House as often happens
in old places. The annoyance of the bells must be terrible. There
is the parsonage, a tidy-looking house, and I understand the
clergyman and his wife are very decent people. Those are
almshouses, built by some of the family. To the right is the
steward's house; he is a very respectable man. Now we are coming to
the lodge gates; but we have nearly a mile through the park still.
It is not ugly, you see, at this end; there is some fine timber,
but the situation of the house is dreadful. We go down hill to it
for half a mile, and it is a pity, for it would not be an
ill-looking place if it had a better approach.'
The second is from the opening pages of Mrs. Humphry Ward's
_Marcella_:
'She looked out upon a broad and level lawn, smoothed by the care
of centuries, flanked on either side by groups of old trees--some
Scotch firs, some beeches, a cedar or two--groups where the slow
selective hand of Time had been at work for generations, developing
here the delightful roundness of quiet mass and shade, and there
the bold caprice of bare fir trunks and ragged branches, standing
back against the sky. Beyond the lawn stretched a green descent
indefinitely long, carrying the eye indeed almost to the limit of
the view, and becoming from the lawn onwards a wide irregular
avenue, bordered by beeches of a splendid maturity, ending at last
in a far distant gap where a gate--and a gate of some
importance--clearly should have been, yet was not. The size of the
trees, the wide uplands of the falling valley to the left of the
avenue, now rich in the tints of harvest, the autumn sun pouring
steadily through the vanishing mists, the green breadth of the vast
lawn, the unbroken peace of wood and cultivated ground, all carried
with them a confused general impression of well-being and of
dignity. Marcella drew it in--this impression--with avidity. Yet at
the same moment she noticed involuntarily the gateless gap at the
end of the avenue, the choked condition of the garden paths on
either side of the lawn, and the unsightly tufts of grass spotting
the broad gravel terrace beneath her window.'
In the former passage, which is brimful of humorous suggestion, the
writer is exclusively intent upon setting out points of human
character in an effective light. The latter is a highly-finished piece
of word-painting, taken direct, as an artist would take a picture,
from a landscape that lay before the writer, and as such it is
excellently done; but, except for the slight indication of a neglected
estate, it stands apart from the plot or the play of character, and
might be bound up with the volume or omitted like a woodcut.
Undoubtedly the art of descriptive writing, which demands poetic
feeling and a delicate hand upon the organ of language, is practised
finely by the best of our modern novelists, and is a valuable element
of their popularity. Yet there are signs that it is already threatened
by the inexorable demands of the lower realism, which takes slight
account of the intimations that can be conveyed or the emotions that
may be roused by using language as an instrument for the
interpretation of nature, and requires to be shown the thing itself,
as it is seen in a photograph. 'The tendency of the times,' we are
told, 'seems to be to read less and less, and to depend more upon
pictorial records of events.' And the author from whom we quote[6]
proceeds to show how a few lines of sketch at once elucidate and
vivify whole pages of word-painting. He goes further, and relates how
'the fallacy of the accepted system of describing landscapes,
buildings, and the like in words,' was proved experimentally by
reading slowly a description of a castle, mountains, and a river
winding to the sea, from one of the Waverley novels, before a number
of students, three of whom proceeded to indicate on a black board the
leading lines of the mental picture produced by the words. The
drawings were all different and all wrong, as might indeed have been
confidently foretold; for the two sister arts of the pen and of the
pencil cannot possibly interpret each other reciprocally after this
fashion, or produce identical effects by their widely differing
methods.
Yet it is not impossible that the lower ranks of writers, who
exaggerate the prevailing fashion of exactly reproducing what any one
can see and hear, may find themselves outbid and overpowered on this
ground by illustration in line and colour. In this direction, indeed,
lies the danger of extreme Realism. It wages war against Romance,
which subsists upon idealistic conceptions of noble thought and
action; it pretends to hold up a true mirror to society, because it
reflects faithfully and without discrimination, like a photograph, the
street, the club, or the drawing-room, and arranges dramatically the
commonplace talk of everyday people. All this is fatal to high art, in
writing as in painting; nor can very clever dialogue, ingenious
situations, variety of style and subject, or even a high average
morality, preserve such literature from triviality and gradual
degradation.
* * * * *
It is the saying of a French writer, that the novel of to-day has
abjured both the past and the future, and lives wholly in the present.
We are so far of his opinion in regard to the past, that we doubt, for
reasons already given, whether the reading public can be induced to
travel backward into distant periods and unfamiliar scenes, even
though facts, anecdotes, costume, and other accessories be