CHAPTER III
THE READING OF FICTION
Our reason for considering prose fiction before the other departments of literature is not that fiction is of greatest importance, but that it is the branch of literature most widely known and enjoyed. Pretend as we may to prefer poetry and “solid books” (as if good fiction lacked solidity!) most of us have read more novels than histories, more short stories than poems. The good old Quaker who wrote a dull history of Nantucket could not understand why the young people preferred novels to his veracious chronicle; which was the same as saying that he did not understand young people, or old people, either. Since the beginning of recorded human history the world has gathered eagerly about the knees of its story-tellers, and to the end of the race it will continue to applaud and honor the skillful inventor of fiction.
There was a time when preachers and teachers, at least those of the English-speaking nations, had a somber view of life and looked with distrust on pleasant arts; and no doubt they were right in holding that if stories take our thoughts off the great realities, we cannot afford to abandon our minds to such toys and trivial inventions. But the severe moralists never made out a good case against the arts; they could not prove that joy and laughter and light entertainment interfered with high thinking and right living; and in time they rediscovered, what other wise men had never forgotten, that art is good for the soul. In the past century the novel has taken all knowledge for its province and has allied itself to the labors of prophets, preachers, and educators. The philosopher finds that some of the great speculative minds have uttered their thoughts in the form of artistic fiction. The true scholar no longer confines himself to annotating the fictions of the Greeks and Romans and the established classics of his race. He sees in the best art of his contemporaries the same effort of the human soul to express itself which informed the ancient masterpieces.
Jane Austen, whose delicate novels inspired stronger writers than she, who by her gentleness and truth influenced creative powers greater than her own, whimsically recognized and perhaps helped to remove the pedantic prejudice against fiction. The following passage from “Northanger Abbey” will give a taste of that delicious book. It is a quiet satire on the absurdly romantic such as is still manufactured and sold by the million copies to readers who, one may suppose, have not had the good fortune to read Jane Austen.
The heroines of “Northanger Abbey,” Catherine and Isabella, “shut themselves up to read novels together. Yes, novels; for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom, so common with novel writers, of degrading, by their contemptuous censure, the very performances to the number of which they are themselves adding; joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! if the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers; and while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the ‘History of England,’ or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens, there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labor of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. ‘I am no novel reader; I seldom look into novels; do not imagine that I often read novels; it is really very well for a novel.’ Such is the common cant. ‘And what are you reading, Miss ——?’ ‘Oh, it is only a novel!’ replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. ‘It is only “Cecilia,” or “Camilla,” or “Belinda,”’ or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.”
Since that was written the novel has overridden its detractors by sheer bulk and power. The greatest man in Russia, Tolstoi, is, or was, a novelist. The greatest poet and thinker alive but yesterday in England, George Meredith, was a novelist. Of the two wisest living writers in America, one, Mr. William Dean Howells, is a novelist, and the other, Mark Twain, whom one hardly knows how to rank or label, has done a part of his best writing in the form of fiction. We no longer question the power and dignity of the novel. Our only concern is to discriminate good stories from bad and get the greatest delight and profit from the good.
To bring our discussion to a vital example, let us consider Thackeray’s “Henry Esmond,” an all but perfect fiction, in which every element of excellent narrative is present.
The first element is plot. A story must begin in an interesting set of circumstances and arrive by a series of events to a conclusion that satisfies. The plot of “Esmond” is unusually well made, and it is composed of rich matter. From the first chapter in which Henry is introduced to us as “no servant, though a dependent, no relative, though he bore the name and inherited the blood of the house”—a youth with a mystery—on through the schemes for the restoration of the Stuart King, through Esmond’s unsuccessful rivalry with the other suitors of Beatrice, to the end of the high intrigues of politics and the quiet conclusion of Esmond’s career, the story moves steadily with well-mannered leisure. It takes its own time, but it takes the right time, slow when events are preparing, rapid and flashing when events come to a crisis. The great crisis, when Esmond overtakes the prince at Castlewood, breaks his sword and renounces both allegiance to the Stuarts and his own birthright, is one of the supreme dramatic scenes in literature. There Thackeray matches, even excels, Scott and Dumas. And such is the variety of his power that on other pages he writes brilliant and witty comedy surpassed only by the lighter plays of Shakespeare, on yet other pages he gives compact lucid summary of events, the skill of which an historian might envy, and again he writes pages of comment on human character which equal the best pages of Esmond’s friend, “the famous Mr. Joseph Addison.”
The actors in these events are as distinct and memorable as any in history or as any in life. It would be impossible for a reader not well acquainted with the age of Queen Anne to tell which of the personages in the book once moved in the flesh and which Thackeray created. And readers who have a wide acquaintance with the world and have known many of its sons and daughters will find in their gallery of memories no brilliant and heartless woman whom they seem to remember with more sense of intimacy and understanding than the woman who led Mr. Esmond such an uncomfortable dance and was the means of defeating Stuart ambitions—Beatrice Esmond. How are these personages of a fiction made to seem so lifelike? Genius only can answer, and genius is often unaware by just what devices a character is made to take on its own life and to walk, as it were, independent of the author. One thing is generally true of characters that strike us as real: they talk each in a style of his own, and yet they talk “like folks.” The thing that they do may be far removed from anything in our experience, a soldier may be talking to a king, Esmond may be speaking in noble anger to the prince; we feel somehow that the words on the page have in them the sound of the human voice, that a man placed in such circumstances would think and speak as the novelist makes him speak.
In a good novel human beings, whose emotions represent and idealize our own, act and talk amid intelligible circumstances and entertaining events. These persons, since they seem real, are visible to the eye of fancy and the events happen in scenes—the divisions of a drama are called “scenes”—which strike the imagination as if they were actually striking the senses. Each person is recognizable by look and gesture; each place is distinct from all other places, as the room you sit in and the street beyond your window are different from all other rooms and all other highways in the world. Our master of story telling is a master of description. An unskillful author tries to persuade us that a woman is beautiful by merely asserting it, and his assertion makes no impression on us because it appeals to the part of our brain that collects information and not the part that sees pictures. But Thackeray paints Miss Beatrice tripping down the stairs to greet Esmond, and no eye that has seen her through Thackeray’s words but can recall the portrait at will. Further description of Beatrice accompanies the action all through the book and no one can tell, or cares to tell, where narration pauses and description begins.
No one can tell, either, where out of all this emerges that quality of writing called style. Manner of expression is not a separable shell in which the stuff is contained like a kernel. The manner is in the substance. Yet there is a charm of words felt for itself which seems to lie above and around the thing conveyed. In other books Thackeray loses his plot, and sometimes apparently forgets his characters, and yet he carries the reader on by virtue of saying things compellingly and invitingly. When, as in “Esmond,” the order of action is so satisfying and the people are so interesting to watch and be with, and in addition every page is a delight to the ear, then literary excellence is complete.
Here, united in one book, are the elements of fiction—plot, character, description and style. And from these elements, however blended, there results a total value, the measure of a book’s importance in relation to the other things in life. This value is essentially moral, not so much because literature is under peculiar obligations to preach and teach morality as because it is part of life and the fundamental things in life are moral in the large sense of the word. It is as impossible to think of a fiction which shall be neither moral nor immoral as to think of an act which shall be, in the modern meaningless word, unmoral. Even a very slight fiction, like a trivial act, weighs on one side or the other. All the best of our novelists have been fully conscious of their ethical obligations to their readers. Having thought deeply enough about life to write about it, they could not have failed to think deeply about their professional responsibility, their part in life.
I am going to quote at length a passage from Anthony Trollope’s “Life of Thackeray” in the series of biographies known as English Men of Letters. The young reader can find no better book about the novel than this account of one great novelist by another. In spite of a current idea that shop-talk is not interesting, a thoughtful craftsman talking about his work is likely to be at his best. Moreover, Trollope’s judgments on the moral obligation of the novelist are especially worthy of confidence, for he is no heavy-handed preacher, no metaphysical critic, but a broad-minded humorist, an affectionate student of human nature, a cheerful workman who regarded his own books in a modest businesslike way.
“I have said previously,” says Trollope, “that it is the business of a novel to instruct in morals and to amuse. I will go further, and will add, having been for many years a prolific writer of novels myself, that I regard him who can put himself into close communication with young people year after year without making some attempt to do them good, as a very sorry fellow indeed. However poor your matter may be, however near you may come to that ‘foolishest of existing mortals,’ as Carlyle presumes some unfortunate novelist to be, still, if there be those who read your works, they will undoubtedly be more or less influenced by what they find there. And it is because the novelist amuses that he must be influential. The sermon too often has no such effect, because it is applied with the declared intention of having it. The palpable and overt dose the child rejects; but that which is cunningly insinuated by the aid of jam or honey is accepted unconsciously, and goes on upon its curative mission. So it is with the novel. It is taken because of its jam and honey. But, unlike the honest and simple jam and honey of the household cupboard, it is never unmixed with physic. There will be the dose within it, either curative or poisonous. The girl will be taught modesty or immodesty, truth or falsehood; the lad will be taught honor or dishonor, simplicity or affectation. Without the lesson the amusement will not be there. There are novels which certainly can teach nothing; but then neither can they amuse any one.
“I should be said to insist absurdly on the power of my own fraternity if I were to declare that the bulk of the young people in the upper and middle classes receive their moral teaching chiefly from the novels they read. Mothers would no doubt think of their own sweet teaching; fathers of the examples which they set; and schoolmasters of the excellence of their instructions. Happy is the country that has such mothers, fathers, and schoolmasters! But the novelist creeps in closer than the schoolmaster, closer than the father, closer almost than the mother. He is the chosen guide, the tutor whom the young pupil chooses for herself. She retires with him, suspecting no lesson, safe against rebuke, throwing herself head and heart into the narration as she can hardly do into her task work; and there she is taught—how she shall learn to love; how she shall receive the lover when he comes; how far she should advance to meet the joy; why she should be reticent, and not throw herself at once into this new delight. It is the same with the young man, though he would be more prone even than she to reject the suspicion of such tutorship. But he, too, will learn either to speak the truth, or to lie; and will receive from his novel lessons either of real manliness, or of that affected apishness and tailor-begotten demeanor which too many professors of the craft give out as their dearest precepts.
“At any rate the close intercourse is admitted. Where is the house now from which novels are tabooed? Is it not common to allow them almost indiscriminately, so that young and old each chooses his own novel? Shall he, then, to whom this close fellowship is allowed—this inner confidence—shall he not be careful what words he uses, and what thoughts he expresses, when he sits in council with his young friend?... A novelist has two modes of teaching—by good example or bad. It is not to be supposed that because the person treated of be evil, therefore the precept will be evil. If so, some personages with whom we have been acquainted from our youth upward would have been omitted in our early lessons. It may be a question whether the teaching is not more efficacious which comes from an evil example. What story was ever more powerful in showing the beauty of feminine reticence, and the horrors of feminine evildoing, than the fate of Effie Deans [in “The Heart of Midlothian” by Scott]. The ‘Templar’ [in Scott’s “Ivanhoe”] would have betrayed a woman to his lust, but has not encouraged others by the freedom of his life. ‘Varney’ [in Scott’s “Kenilworth”] was utterly bad—but though a gay courtier, he has enticed no others to go the way he went. So has it been with Thackeray. His examples have generally been of that kind—but they have all been efficacious in their teaching on the side of modesty and manliness, truth, and simplicity.”
To return to the elements of the novel, plot, character, description, style, if we think of a score of great novels that have had many readers for many years, we shall see that some novelists are blessed with genius for one element more than for another, or that they have chosen to put their energies into one or the other. And we shall see, too, that few novels are perfect, few as nearly perfect as “Esmond,” and that we should not expect them to be. All that we need demand is that a writer give us enough of something to make the reading of his book worth while.
No rules that have so far been laid down about the requirements of fiction are final or from the reader’s point of view of great assistance. Some of us have made up our minds that the English novel is growing more shapely and well constructed: Mr. W. D. Howells, for instance, by precept and practice, and some other novelists and critics who are under the influence of French fiction, insist on construction and form and simplicity of plot. Then in spite of all “tendencies” and rules of fiction, along comes Mr. William De Morgan with three novels which might have been written fifty years ago, and wins instantaneous and deserved success as a new novelist—at the age of seventy. His plots are as wayward and leisurely as most of Thackeray’s, his people are human, and his discursive individual style is as fresh as if novelists had not been filling the world with books for two centuries. “Joseph Vance” and “Alice-for-Short” prove how inconsiderate genius is of rules made by critics and how far is the “old-fashioned” novel from having gone stale and fallen on evil days.
So long as a plot has vitality of some kind, truth to life, or ingenuity, or dramatic power, it makes no difference to the mere reader what material the novelist chooses. Twenty years ago there was a strange contest between realists and romanticists. The realists, or as they sometimes call themselves, “naturalists,” take the simpler facts of common life and weave them into stories. The romanticist selects from highly colored epochs of history, or from no-man’s land, or from the more unusual circumstances of actual life, such startling adventures, such well-joined incidents, such mysteries, surprises, and dramatic revelations as we do not meet with in ordinary times and places. Thackeray is a romanticist in “Henry Esmond,” a realist in “Pendennis” and “The Newcomes.” Scott’s novels are romantic. Those of Trollope, of Mr. Henry James, of Mr. W. D. Howells are realistic. There is no sharp line between the two. Dickens found extraordinary romance in ordinary London streets, which he knew with journalistic realism to the last brick and cobblestone. In “Bleak House,” he says, he “purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things.” But, though he may have considered this book a special quest for the romantic in real life, it does not differ in the kind or the proportion of its romanticism from a dozen others of his novels. It is no more romantic than “David Copperfield” or “The Old Curiosity Shop,” no less romantic than the historical fiction, “A Tale of Two Cities.” His imagination penetrated life, real or unreal, familiar or remote, and found it rich with plot and subplot; he touched the slums with his mythmaker’s wand, and in obedience to his touch the children of the streets and dark tenements became heroes of strange adventure, moving through mysteries as varied and wonderful as fairyland.
Because Dickens loved human beings and understood their everyday sorrow and happiness, he wrought into the great fabric of his plots a multitude of people as real, as like to us and our friends, as can be found in the work of the most thorough-going realist; he reflects, too, like the avowed realist, the social and political problems of his own times. He is both romanticist and realist. So also are his contemporaries, the Brontë sisters and Charles Reade. And their greatest successors in the English novel, Thomas Hardy and George Meredith, are equally masters of common social facts, human nature in its daily aspects, and of the highly colored, the picturesque, the mystery, the surprise, the dramatic complexity of events.
The genius of English fiction in most of its powerful exponents has this dual character of romance and realism. “Robinson Crusoe” is a romantic adventure; its scene is transported far away from human life to a solitude such as only the wanderer’s eye has looked upon; the reader is taken bodily into another world. Yet Defoe is the first great realist in English prose fiction; he piles detail upon detail, gives an exact inventory of Crusoe’s possessions, and compels belief in the story as in a chronicle of events that really happened.
Later in the eighteenth century appeared Richardson’s “Clarissa Harlowe,” a vast romantic tragedy, which held the attention of all novel readers of the time; the story was published in parts, and when it was learned before the last part was printed that the ending was to be tragic, ladies wrote to Richardson begging him to bring his heroine out of her difficulties and allow her to “live happily ever after.” The plot of this novel is imposed by the logic of character upon the facts of English society; the plot is not realistic or even probable in its relations to the known circumstances of the civilization in which it is laid; any magistrate could have rescued Clarissa. But everything stands aside to let the great romance pass by; the readers of the time, who knew better than we do the social facts surrounding an English girl, did not question the probability of the plot, because they accepted the character. The plot granted, Richardson’s method is realistic. We know Clarissa’s daily acts and circumstances; we have a bulletin of her feelings every hour. No modern psychological novelist ever analyzed the workings of a human mind more minutely, with greater fidelity and insight. The result is a voluminous diary of eighteenth-century manners and customs and sentiments hung upon as romantic a plot as was ever devised.
Midway in time between Richardson and Dickens stands the king of romantics, Scott, and he, too, is a realist in his depiction of Scottish life and character. In “The Bride of Lammermoor” so melodramatic and “stagey” that it seems to be set behind footlights and played to music—a familiar opera is based upon it—there is one character that Scott found not in legend or history, but in the life he knew, Caleb Balderstone. Like the gravedigger in “Hamlet,” he is a link between unusual, we might fairly say unnatural, events and common humanity. In many of Scott’s novels, beside the strutting heroes that startle the world in high astounding terms, walk the soldiers, servants, parsons, shepherds, who by their presence make us feel that it is the firm earth upon which the action moves.
Argument among critics as to the nature of romance and realism helps, as all questions of definition may help, to make us understand the relation of one novel to another and to see the range and purpose of fiction. But that any one should say of two novels that one is better than the other, simply because it is more realistic or more romantic, is to impose a technicality on enjoyment with which enjoyment refuses to be burdened. Who that picks up a novel for the pleasure of reading it cares whether it is romance or realism? So long as it has vitality of its own kind, and gives us enough of the many virtues which a novel may possess, we are content to plunge into it and ask no questions. A lily is not a rose; it takes no great wisdom to know that; the botanists will tell us the exact difference, and the gardener will tell us how they grow; but if botanist or horticulturist tells us which is more beautiful, we listen to his opinion and keep our own. Mr. Kipling’s “Kim,” or Mr. Howells’s “A Modern Instance”; “Far from the Madding Crowd,” by Thomas Hardy, or Scott’s “Ivanhoe”; Stevenson’s “Kidnapped,” or Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn”—which of these books is realistic and which is the other kind? Suppose you read them to find out. In the midst of any one of them you will have forgotten the question, because the novelist will have filled your whole mind with other—and more important—interests.
A good novel is a self-contained, complete world with its own laws and inhabitants. The inhabitants and laws of different novels resemble each other in some degree or we should not be able to understand them. Great books, and great men, have common qualities, and yet it is true, in large measure, that they are memorable for their difference from other books and men. This suggests why histories of literature and analytical studies of the forms of literature are so often artificial and lifeless. The critic is fond of grouping books and authors together, of finding points of resemblance, of marking genius with brands and labels. In some histories of Elizabethan drama, Shakespeare is neatly placed in the center of a rising and declining “school of playwrights.” He is laid out like the best specimen of a collection in a glass case. Shakespeare was a playwright; no doubt he was a “practical” one. But the important thing about him is that he was the greatest of poets, and he is not at ease in any school or class of literary workmen. He is inexplicably, gigantically different from all other Elizabethan dramatists, and if he is to be grouped at all, his fellows are the few greatest poets of the world, not his contemporaries in the art, or the business, of playmaking, the best of whom do not reach to his shoulder. All the supreme creative geniuses are difficult to classify. They work in conventional art forms, the drama, the epic, in which scores of lesser poets have worked; but the greatest art emerges above the form. When rules of art and sharp characterizations of schools of art fit snugly on the shoulders of a writer, that alone is sufficient to prove that he is not a writer of the highest power.
However wisely critics and philosophers may argue about fiction and other forms of art, inexperienced readers will be narrowing their outlook if they make up their minds, after one or two experiments or as a result of a critical opinion which they get at second hand, that there are certain classes of stories that they do not like. If one knows that Stevenson is a romanticist and happens to have read “David Balfour” and failed to like it, it is foolish to rule out the romantic, for perhaps Dumas will prove better. Some people are tired beyond recovery of historical novels, because so many bad ones have been urged upon the public during the last fifteen years. Some people have decided that they do not like stories that end unhappily. This seems a thoughtless decision because many of the great fictions from the “Iliad” to “The Mill on the Floss” terminate with the death of the principal characters and sadness for the characters that survive. When we hear some one say, “There is tragedy enough in real life, I want something pleasant to read,” we may suggest that the great tragedy that is told in the Gospels has brought more lasting joy and good feeling to the race than any other story. Not to make so high an argument, I feel that I could give to any person who pretends to like only “pleasant” fiction a half dozen tragic novels that would capture and delight this sad soul that has seen enough of “tragedy in real life.”
Arguments are unnecessary, for fiction itself outstrips them or defeats them and triumphs. The public is tired, we say, of historical romance, and it cannot be charmed by sad stories which end in death and disaster. Yet during the past winter one of “best sellers” was Miss Mary Johnston’s “Lewis Rand.” This is an historical romance laid in Jefferson’s Virginia. It is a tragic romance; the finest gentleman is killed, the titular hero goes to prison on the last page, a ruin of ambitious genius, and the heroine, his wife, parts from us at the end to enter, in the world that lies just beyond the covers of books, a life of inevitable sadness.
Individual vitality is what makes the good book. When the good book appears we like to classify it and examine its form and material, but its vitality defies us. You may group all your friends and acquaintances in familiar types, and in thinking of them when they are absent you may assure yourself that they fall into definite intelligible classes. But in the presence of any one of them, the most transparent and simple, you recognize the mystery of a person, a power, however slight, that is unlike other powers, a vital soul that baffles analysis. And so it is with books: each makes its effect as a living individual and it may have an entirely different effect from the book that seems nearest like it.
Somebody once expressed the idea that he did not care for Dickens because so many of his characters are low persons who would not be interesting to associate with in real life; and other readers have expressed the same idea, either sincerely or in thoughtless repetition. If they do not like Dickens, it is probably for some other reason than that Dickens portrays “common” people, for that reason is not broad enough to stand on. These same readers may like another writer whose characters are as low and uncultivated as most of the people whom Dickens loved. If such a writer is not to be found in our libraries, his first book may be still unpublished; he may walk to-morrow into the town where we live, discover the humor and pathos of our commonplace neighbors, and of the low persons whom we do not acknowledge as neighbors. And ever after our village will be a shrine for tourists. The great fiction writer is a magician; he upsets conventional values in a flash and turns lead into gold in spite of all the chemists. The true reader of fiction will be a believer in that miracle, and he will keep his mind receptive to it in every form in which it manifests itself.