The modern novel; a study of the purpose and the meaning of fiction

Preface

This book is an attempt to trace the development of some important principles of fictional criticism during the two centuries of the novel in English, and to show how the development of these principles has in turn altered the shape of the modern novel. From the point of view here maintained, criticism is not only effect but also cause. Its ideas are indeed gradually evolved from what has been done, and of course from what has been poorly done or left undone ; but they are with equal certainty gradually incorporated into what is being done, and this second half of the process is none the less significant for having been so largely neglected by the conventional critic and historian. Criticism is a forecast as well as a record, and a leverage for raising the standard as well as a standard held up. This endless cycle of interactions is what I have studied, in an effort to show how criticism itself is creative, and especially how both the critical and the creative forces of past generations come to focus in the latest definable stage of fiction, that of the late 19th century and the early 20th. I have tried to accomplish that purpose with a due recognition that this, or any, latest stage is itself but tentative and experimental. The novel as we have it is the past crystallizing; but,

PREFACE thanks to the force of criticism and to no other force whatsoever, it is as truly the future germinating.

If the function here ascribed to criticism seem overstated, one has only to reflect how trifling a part of the whole body of criticism is comprised by its special and formal embodiments in reviews, essays, histories, appreciations and estimates of individual authors or periods, and books about books — including such books as this. A novelist more or less consciously picks and chooses among the past achievements of the art he practises, reassembling them as the basis for his own superstructure. His doing so is criticism. Subsequently, he is always examining the materials and proportions of his own structure, to strengthen or modify or discard ; and the process by which he does that is criticism. He learns much from his successes and failures ; something from his readers ; more from the successes and failures of his contemporaries; a little perhaps from the formal appraisals of the critic — in short, he grows, or at least changes, and his growth is a result of criticism. Whole generations and schools of novelists, in periods of international diffusion such as the latter 17th century and the early 20th, learn from the fiction and the criticism of other countries; on a sudden, perhaps indeed too suddenly, their ingrowing provincialism becomes outward-reaching cosmopolitanism. That change means criticism brought to bear on a still grander scale. And, finally, whatever other forces fail or prevail, there is always the Zeitgeist, the general movement and direction of humane consciousness

PREFACE

— a subtle, irresistible, ceaseless play of criticism over the whole field of things dreamed, known, or done, compelling all representative art, in common with all other civilized manifestations, to be a response to needs so inchoate that they may never have got themselves expressed or acknowledged save in their results, yet so universally cogent that no living individual can will to refuse them his service.

Everything, properly considered, is a criticism of everything else. "Whenever we perceive the differences between one thing and another, and then commit ourselves to a choice in the light of some felt need for one thing as against the other, we perform an act of criticism. It is manifestly a danger that we shall underrate, rather than overrate, the momentousness of the critical faculty so defined.

This book is not, then, primarily a history of the English novel from Defoe to Hardy, even though it includes much illustrative description of the principal developments between 1700 and 1900 ; and neither is it a treatise on criticism or the aesthetics of fiction in vacuo. It is a statement of some critical and aesthetic principles in terms of their historical evolution in and from the English novel. I choose the English novel because on the whole it developed most provincially, refusing until singularly late to become a matter of comparative literature, and becoming at length so suddenly overwhelmed with international modernness that its story seems especially determinate and dramatic. It should be added that I have not been ashamed to include a great deal of historical in-

8 PREFACE formation simply because I think it ought to be familiar to students of the novel, or to make use of the obvious and the truistic when to do so helps the argument.

It is a graceless thing to parade one's own merits, but I really cannot forbear pointing out my one small claim to the gratitude of all and sundry. Except for a trivial indiscretion committed by Mr. William Dean PTowells more than a quarter of a century ago, and reproduced on page 268, you might search in vain through these ten chapters for the aimless and question-begging word "psychology" or any of its derivatives.

W. F.

Contents

I The Creative Impulse 11

II Romance 43

III Sentimentalism 71

II

There is, it will appear from the form of these questions, a reason for the apparent repetition in a general title such as "The Purpose and the Meaning of Fiction. ' ' The purpose of fiction is one thing : the meaning of fiction is, or may be, quite another. We can see and admit forthwith, as an axiom of good sense, that high merit in fiction is likely to have something to do with the incidence of purpose and meaning; the best novel, other things being equal, is that in which the effect sensed by the reader is most like that intended by the author, and the poorest novel, other things remaining equal, is that in which the effect sensed is least like that intended. One does, to be sure, hear music discussed by seemingly intelligent persons who profess to believe that the composer merely surrenders himself to inexplicable impulses and emotions, creating he knows not what, and caring not at all whether his impulses and emotions are reproduced in the listener, so long as some sufficiently intense effects are produced. To any one who traces in music primarily its design or pattern — or, let us say, to whom music is unintelligible without its pattern — this is an abhorrent theory of inspiration. Still, many persons do hold it; and perhaps it may be extended without flagrant irrationality to lyric poetry, and even to some kinds of plastic representation. But hardly to imaginative literature as we have known it in prose. We dispute now and again about what Shakspere meant by certain parts of Hamlet; but no one doubts that he meant something, that he was deliberately trying to communicate the same meaning to us all, and that either the play or the audience relatively fails whenever the audience misses community of impression. In this discussion of the relation between purveyor and public, it makes little difference which fails : the point is all in the success or failure of the relation. There is no consummation of art except in the audience.

It is quite true that, in some rare instances, the artist may profit by an effect not in his intention; may actually, without knowing it, build better than his design. Every reader of Fielding will remember two gentlemen, or rather two animated and diverting caricatures, by name Thwackum and Square, who had charge of the upbringing of Tom Jones. Mr. Square the philosopher is always talking about "the natural beauty of virtue"; to Mr. Thwackum the clergyman there is no power except "the divine power of grace." Probably Fielding intended to represent, in these two quaint ethical theorists, simply two characteristic 18th century notions which he hated and wished to hold up to ridicule: the notion that thinking straight is the way of salvation however crooked one 's conduct, and the notion that straight conduct is worthless unless it is inspired by a prescribed way of thinking — in this instance the creed of the Church of England. Both figures are incomplete as men; they remain simply walking embodiments of their respective narrow doctrines, in spite of Fielding's evident desire to give them human nature and make them humanly live. It takes a more modern detachment than Fielding ever knew to see the fitness of his failure. There is an almost symbolic appropriateness in the hollow unreality of Messrs. Thwackum and Square : how could such ideas, so held, produce actual human beings? The limitations of these two as men prove, as no amount of calculated satire could, the limitations of their doctrines. It takes the capacity for spontaneous warm-hearted action, plus the sense of legitimate impersonal law imposed from without, to make the rounded man ; to be complete and real is to adjust the natural inward impulses to the artificial codes by which we must needs partly live. How fitting, then, that it should take Thwackum and Square together to come somewhere near making up one average piece of human nature ! Here is an instance which shows the artist gaining something through his failure to carry out his intention : if the characters were complete as men, they would be pointless and inconsistent as doctrinaires. And I have sometimes thought that so great an artist as Jane Austen gains as a social comedist by revealing in the world of her persons a moral poverty and narrowness which she hardly saw there herself.

Such examples are, however, not frequent. In general the novelist loses by missing his design. Jane Eyre is weakened, however far from crucially, because Rochester, who was intended for a gentleman, is so obviously a cad. The history of fiction is full of writers who lost much through the illusion that they could portray types they did not know and manage scenes they had never caught the spirit of.

We want fiction, then, to understand what it is about and plan the effect which it can produce. But this is not to say that the plan and the effect are the same thing. The given effect may follow from the given cause, but cause is still one thing and effect another. In considering fiction, it happens to be of singular importance to keep this disjunction in mind, to the end that we may understand something of the all-important relation between subjective and objective. That is why I have made the first group of these discussions deal with fiction as I suppose it to be conceived and written, the second group with fiction as it is read and understood. I want to analyse first, as well as I can, what writers put into their stories and the processes by which they put it in ; and then, what readers get out of those stories and the re-creative processes by which they get it out.

And naturally I begin with the mainspring of all poetic effort, the initial creative impulse, asking some very plain and elemental questions: What is the force which urges the story-teller to take up the pen and drive it forward? Whence comes that special desire of his to tell a story for the delight or the profit of those whom he has never seen, and what is the nature of that desire? It will be understood that there is here no speaking officially or pro domo, no claim of special divination: we proceed by deduction and inference, trying if we can to descry the intention in the performance, as Mr. Kipling's Builder, coming on the ruined work of a predecessor, reads

"The form of the dream he had followed in the face of the thing he had planned."

Ill

I have spoken of fiction as having something to do with dreaming: let me distinguish it at once from that idle and irresponsible day-dreaming in which, at odd times, we all lose ourselves with a certain visionary of modern fiction, "forgetting the bitterness of toil and strife in the vision of a great and splendid reward." 1 We all lie awake at night and plan for ourselves impossible golden futures in which we are the impossible heroes and heroines, achieving the prodigious with hardly the effort which in real life we must give to the commonplace, getting our ene-

i Almayer, in Almayer's Folly. By Joseph Conrad. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co.

mies humbled and our supreme deserts acknowledged and rewarded, and having our own way generally. There is a superstition abroad that the genetic impulse of fiction is like this, and fiction itself the writer's dream, his escape from burdensome actualities. And certainly many readers take their fiction as an escape, a drug or anodyne — a kind of vicarious day-dreaming.

Not so, I believe, the artist. The only day-dreams really worth while are those in which we lose ourselves, transcending reality as on wings, breathing upper airs of impossible rarity; but the only novels really worth while are those in which the novelist never for an instant loses his complete sense of self-possession, the perfect awareness of what he is about. His dreaming is purposed and controlled ; it differs in a dozen sharp and unequivocal ways from the purely subjective dreams through which the best of us at times let ourselves beautifully drift. Our dreams are exceptional and lawless, we conjure up delights that never were on land or sea; the novelist's dream is typical and regulated. Our dreams are very likely to be patched copies of other dreams heard or read, as every cheap popular song is a mosaic of all other cheap popular songs; whereas the novelist's dream must be, in its central nature, an original thing, or it would better not be at all. What we distort, he reduces to shape and balance ; what we leave to its own unobstructed play on our charitable credulity, he cannot leave until it is presentable to the uncharitable incredulity of mankind in general. Our day-dream is a result of inhibitions broken down and swept away : we let ourselves go. The novelist, however like his creative instinct may be to ours, cannot do that; half the worth of his dream is in the checks and inhibitions which govern the unfolding of it.

All these differences reduce themselves on inspection to a single inclusive difference: we dream day-dreams for pure self -delight, using the gift of fancy to glut ourselves; whereas the novelist writes stories in order to give himself, for the delight of readers whom he has never seen and cannot know. The conditions of his work are determined by the fact that it is work and not play; by the fact that he has an audience with a receptivity subservient to a set of laws which he must master ; a set of exceedingly subtle and elusive laws whose working is of a nicety almost past finding out. The one faculty upon which he cannot play at will is that self-love which is in every one of us, and which is alone sufficient to give our day-dreams the temporary illusion of reality. We can believe in anything so long as it is ours, part of us. But the novelist asks us to enter into something which is not ours at all, something to which our self-interest can give no hue of reality, since no self-interest is at hazard. The artist is always trying to appeal to an attention outside and other than his own. Without this will to appeal there is no art.

It is some such set of considerations which we forget when we define art as " self -expression " — an unintelligible definition, confusing as it does this ordered and self-possessed visioning of the artist with the unbridled self-gratification of our most selfish moments. Of course we express ourselves in whatever we do ; all activity is self-expression, so that the term really defines nothing because it covers everything. Walking is self-expression, if you like, and the gait an index of character. So is lying: it is possible that we are never more truly ourselves than when we think we are concealing ourselves. But we walk to get somewhere; we lie to accomplish something. A novel too is a measure of its writer ; but he writes it in order to get something communicated. He cannot help expressing himself : a man under an anaesthetic, or incoherently drunk, or suffocating in thick smoke where he must shout for help, does that. But the whole crux of the novelist's difficulty is to get himself communicated; and it is a sentimental mistake of some popular theorists to suppose that he can do that by pure "inspiration," or pure self-communion apart from his audience in the penetralia of his own consciousness. The lyric poet may sometimes, not otherwise than by happiest accident, speak to us intelligibly from those hidden recesses. Not so the novelist. He deals with a truth which cannot be breathed out of himself : he must seek it through the world with pain and effort, win it for his own by living it —

"For truth needs doing; beauty seems A dream till we awake from dreams" —

and shape and re-clothe it, not for himself, but for us.

He will do well to remember, if the struggle for bare

existence has not already made it impossible to forget,

Stevenson's comparison of the artist to the file de joie, the obscure and draggled woman of the streets; for he too is taking pay for his laughter, his companionship, the gift of himself, nor can anything hide or change the elemental fact which is the material excuse for his trade — the fact that he lives by it. ''An author," says Fielding at the beginning of Tom Jones, "ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their money. . . . Men who pay for what they eat will insist on gratifying their palates, however nice and whimsical these may prove; and if everything is not agreeable to their taste, will challenge a right to censure, to abuse, and to damn their dinner without control." The best instincts in us may lament the fact: Mr. Howells says, in writing of "The Man of Letters as a Man of Business, " 1 "I do not think any man ought to live by an art. . . . There is an instinctive sense of this, even in the midst of the grotesque confusion of our economic being; people feel that there is something profane, something impious, in taking money for a picture, or a poem, or a statue. . . . The instinctive sense of the dishonour which money-purchase does to art is so strong that sometimes a man of letters who can pay his way otherwise refuses pay for his work, as Lord Byron did, for a while, from a noble pride, and as Count Tolstoy has tried to do, from a noble

i In Literature and Life. By William Dean Howells. New York: Harper & Bros.

But even such personal independence only shifts the evil: "Byron's publisher profited by a generosity which did not reach his readers ; and the Countess Tolstoy collects the copyright which her husband foregoes [this was published in 1902] ; so that these two eminent instances of protest against business in literature may be said not to have shaken its money basis. ' ' And even if writer, publisher, and public could all completely escape buying and selling, the writer would still have no hold upon his public except by pleasing it. His appeal as an artist is dependent on the arbitrary taste of a multitude, even if his living cease to be — so that if he can make up his mind to the greater limitation, it is hardly worth his while to boggle at the lesser.

We need no Fielding, no Stevenson, no Howells come to tell us such things : they are matters of plainest hardest common sense. But they are too often forgotten. The argument has sometimes been used to justify giving the buying and reading public the poorest thing it can be brought to accept, instead of the best thing it, perhaps unconsciously, wants; but almost any argument can be prostituted to a low expediency. We say that the artist must serve, if he is to discharge his office at all : this is not to say that he ought to pander. If he choose to pander, we should let him ; our safeguard against him is the public right to find him out in the long run and have no more of him; it is not in the destruction of his right to be what he chooses. But in either event, whether he panders or truly serves, he has fully as much to gain through self-suppression as through self-expression. He must be true to himself ; but that fidelity will avail him nothing unless he is also true to his audience, to his subject, and to the obscure principles of his appeal to thousands of intelligences as unlike his own as they are unlike each other.

Let us see, if we can, what some of the chief of these principles are, and how they operate; what kinds of provision the novelist must make for his audience that the mere dreamer of dreams takes no thought of.

IV

One thinks pretty readily of four special ways in which the novelist must take thought and thoroughly know what he is about ; four provisions which he must thoroughly accomplish if his work is completely to justify itself in our eyes. They are, to name them only: (1) Realism of Circumstance; (2) Truth by Representation; (3) Freshness or Originality; and (4) Fusion of these three and of all the other elements that enter into his subject. Realism, Representation, Originality, and Fusion. Let us see what ought to be meant by these labels.

The first, Realism of Circumstance, explains itself. Of the realistic spirit I shall have, later on, much more to say: I speak here, not of a spirit, but of a process. It is obvious enough that the sound master of fiction, knowing that he can successfully impart no dream of his through credulity based on self-love, must take infinite precaution that it shall seem true; and that the more romantic it is in essence the more realistic he must make it in detail. There is no better exemplification of this truism than that Daniel Defoe — a master, Professor Sir Walter Raleigh calls him, of "grave imperturbable lying" — who wrote a lengthy account of the London plague of 1665 with such vividness that many unlearned readers still accept it as the account of an eye-witness, though Defoe was but four years old in the Plague Year; who contrived a recital of a certain great November storm from hearsay and imagination, recounting casualties by land and sea, and including wholly fictitious letters from eye-witnesses who never existed ; who gave many preposterous events in all parts of the world the immediacy and the ring of truth, simply by giving them a latitude and a longitude ; and who, as the summit of his achievement, took the most utterly romantic figure of all, the lonely hermit of Juan Fernandez, and made him easily the most real of all, by diary, by dialogue, by inventory, by all the little fine arts of persuasion. "There never was such a man or such an island," you say (it makes no difference that, historically speaking, there was) ; "there never was a Crusoe, or a hut with a hedge of stakes round it, or a boat hollowed labouriously out of a tree and then found to be immovably heavy." To which credulity answers: "Ah, but you forget: all these things were, because a man wrote a diary about them! They might, in an ordinary sea-tale, seem rather a large order; but — why, we have the man's own diary!"

And there is an image of what the artist's quest for actuality must be, in a certain "scowered" silk dress worn by a lady some twenty-four hours dead, and used by Defoe to help sell a seventh-rate and unsalable clerical work, Drelincourt's Book of Consolations Against the Fears of Death, with which the London book trade appears to have been overstocked in 1705. The estimable Mrs. Bargrave, living at Canterbury, receives one morning a call from her old friend and neighbour Mrs. Veal, whom she has not seen for a long time, and who announces now that she has come to say good-bye before taking a journey. The two gossip together in a most natural and familiar vein, about head-aches, and husbands, and friendship, and the degeneracy of the times, and other reliable subjects, taking pains to allude several times to the great comfort and inspiration they have received from that incomparable work, the Book of Consolations. All is most natural; the talk proceeds like a stenographic report of things actually said by two such middle-class, prosy, and sentimental persons. " 'Do not you think I am mightily impaired by my fits?' " asks Mrs. Veal. " 'No,' says Mrs. Bargrave, 'I think you look as well as ever I knew you.' " And again: "Says Mrs. Bargrave: 'It is hard indeed to find a true friend in these days.' Says Mrs. Veal, 'Mr. Norris has a fine copy of verses, called Friendship in Perfection, which I wonderfully admire. Have you seen the book?' 'No,' says Mrs. Bargrave, 'but I have the verses of my own writing out.' 'Have you?' says Mrs.

Veal, 'then fetch them.' Which she did from above-stairs, and offered them to Mrs. Veal to read, who refused, and waived the thing, saying, holding down her head would make it ache; and then desiring Mrs. Bargrave to read them to her, which she did. ... In these verses there is twice used the word 'Elysian.' 'Ah!' says Mrs. Veal, 'these poets have such names for heaven.' " In short, the whole tale is inimitably and incontestably true, up to the point where it transpires that at the time of this conversation Mrs. Veal was also incontestably dead. Everything in the story is true except the whole of it. And mark how difficult Defoe makes it to question even that whole. The tale is told by a third woman of exactly the same stamp as the other two, a life-long friend of Mrs. Bargrave, ready to heap scorn on the husband and neighbours of Mrs. Veal, who deny the story and impeach the character of Mrs. Bargrave. Why, Mrs. Bargrave is "of a cheerful disposition, notwithstanding the ill-usage of a very wicked husband"; of course, then, the story is true. Besides, this third woman's story has been taken down by a lawyer, who believes it himself; clearly, then, it must be true! Moreover, Mrs. Bargrave had described in considerable detail the "scowered" silk dress which Mrs. Veal actually wore on the day of her death, the day of the alleged visit, though Mrs. Bargrave had never seen that dress or known of its existence: what do you say to that? O well, if Mrs. Bargrave really described the dress, there's nothing more to be said; the story is true, and the Book of Consolations is a fine book, and let's all go and see if there is a copy to be had.

Observe, incidentally, the advertising logic of the appeal: Drelincourt must be a book to buy, because a ghost said so. We shall not be far amiss if we think of Defoe as having been, among other things variously important, the father of modern advertising. What it is most desirable to point out here is that he mastered to perfection the art of making a little extraneous and unimportant fact go as far as possible toward establishing his central fiction. The more outrageous his fundamental demand on the credulity, the more care must he take to weave that demand out of a tissue of the commonplace, the daily homespun actual. And so it is ever with the worker in fiction. He must do for a high impersonal end what Defoe did, on more than one occasion, to serve a rather low commercial or political expediency.

This first kind of care, for Realism of Circumstance, makes a target of the credulity ; its purpose is to make one see and, through seeing, believe. Fiction has been much likened, of late, to journalism ; but in this respect at least it differs from journalism. We have a presumption in favour of the truth of what the newspaper reporter tells us; at least we do unless we make a serious matter of the trite popular joke about reporters. But our presumption is all against the truth of what the novelist tells us. Of the two, it is he who nlust take pains to make his story seem true; and when he makes it seem truer than truth, we believe him.

But his truth to fact, though one of the conditions of his usefulness, is far from being his prime value. Fiction begins to accomplish its real purpose when it attains what I have called Truth by Representation. It must first make us believe ; it must then evoke from us a response to that which we have accepted as truth. And it does this through implied reference to larger realities than are explicitly presented; such realities as the common truths of all life, the mysteries of birth and death, the invincible ambitions and terrors of the mind, the moral law, the general nature of things. Fiction must have its facts ; but it must also have its "meaning of things beyond the facts." For it is in the linking of subordinate trivial details and episodes with the trend of a whole individual life, and in the linking of the individual life with the whole collective mass of human lives, that the novel wins its place as a " criticism of life. ' '