The Project Gutenberg eBook, Questions at Issue, by Edmund Gosse This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Title: Questions at Issue Author: Edmund Gosse Release Date: February 3, 2020 [eBook #61313] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 ***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK QUESTIONS AT ISSUE*** E-text prepared by Tim Lindell, Martin Pettit, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org) Note: Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/questionsatissue00gossuoft QUESTIONS AT ISSUE QUESTIONS AT ISSUE [Pg iii] [Pg iv] [Pg v] BY EDMUND GOSSE LONDON WILLIAM HEINEMANN 1893 [All rights reserved] TO JOSEPH HENRY SHORTHOUSE This Volume is Dedicated BY HIS AFFECTIONATE FRIEND THE AUTHOR Preface To the essays which are here collected I have given a name which at once, I hope, describes them accurately and distinguishes them from criticism of a more positive order. When a writer speaks to us of the works of the dead masters, of the literary life of the past, we demand from him the authoritative attitude. That Homer is a great poet, and that the verse of Milton is exquisite, are not Questions at Issue. In dealing with such subjects the critic must persuade himself that he is capable of forming an opinion, and must then give us his opinion definitely. But in the continent of literary criticism, where all else is imperial, there is a province which is still republican, and that is the analysis of contemporary literature, the frank examination of the literary life of to-day. In speaking of what is proceeding around us no one can be trusted to be authoritative. The wisest, clearest, and most experienced of critics have notoriously been wrong about the phenomena of their own day. Ben Jonson selected the moment when Hamlet and Othello had just been performed to talk of raising "the despised head of poetry again, and stripping her of those rotten and base rags wherewith the times have adulterated her form." Neither Hazlitt nor Sainte Beuve could be trusted to give as valuable a judgment on the work of a man younger than themselves as they could of any past production, be it what it might. To map the ground around his feet is a task that the most skilful geographer is not certain to carry out with success. The insecurity of contemporary criticism is no reason, however, why it should not be seriously and sincerely attempted. On the contrary, the critic who has been accustomed to follow paths where the laws and criteria of literature are paramount, may be glad to slip away sometimes to a freer country, where the art he tries to practise is more instinctive, more emotional, and more controversial. In the schools of antiquity, when the set discourse was over, the lecturer mingled with his audience under the portico of the Museum, and then, I suppose, it was not any longer of the ancients that they talked, but of the poet of last night, and of the rhetorician of to-morrow. The critic may enjoy the sense of having abandoned the lecturing desk or the tribune, and of mingling in easy conversation with men who are not bound to preserve any decorum in listening to his opinions. In the criticism of the floating literature of the day an opportunity is offered for sensibility, for the personal note, even for a certain indulgence in levity or irony. The questions of our own age are not yet settled by tradition, nor hedged about with logical deductions; they are still open to discussion; they are still Questions at Issue. Such are all the aspects of the literary life which I endeavour to discuss in this volume of essays. There can, nevertheless, be no reason why, although the dress and attitude be different, the critic should not be as true to his radical conceptions of right and wrong in literature, when he discusses the shifts and movements about him, as when he "bears in memory what has tamed great nations." The attention of a literary man of character may be diverted [Pg vii] [Pg ix] [Pg x] [Pg xi] to a hundred dissimilar branches of his subject, but in dealing with them all he should be the servant of the same ideas, the defender of the same principles, the protector of the same interests. The battle rages hither and thither, but none of the issues of it are immaterial to him, and his attitude towards what he regards as the enemies of his cause should never radically alter. His functions should rather become more active and more militant when he feels that his temporary position deprives him of accidental authority; and even when he admits that the questions he discusses are matters of open controversy, he should, in bringing his ideas to bear upon them, be peculiarly careful to obey the orders of fundamental principles. All this is quite compatible, I hope, with the sauntering step, the conversational tone, the absence of all pedagogic assertion, which seem to me indispensable in the treatment of contemporary themes. Of the essays here reprinted, nearly half are practically new to English readers, having been written for an American review, and having been quoted only in fragments on this side of the Atlantic. At the close of the volume I have added a Lucianic sketch, which, when it appeared anonymously in the Fortnightly Review, enjoyed the singular and embarrassing distinction of being attributed, in succession, to four amusing writers, each of whom is deservedly a greater favourite of the public than I am. I have seen this little extravaganza ticketed with such eminent names that I almost hesitate to have to claim it at last as my own. I hope there was none but very innocent fooling in it, and that not a word in it can give anybody pain. I think it was not an unfair representation of what literature in England, from a social point of view, consisted two years ago. Already death has been busy with my ideal Academy, and no dreamer of 1893 could summon together quite so admirable a company as was still citable in 1891. London, April 1893. Contents PAGE The Tyranny of the Novel 1 The Influence of Democracy on Literature 33 Has America Produced a Poet? 69 What is a Great Poet? 91 Making a Name in Literature 113 The Limits of Realism in Fiction 135 Is Verse in Danger? 155 Tennyson—and After 175 Shelley in 1892 199 Symbolism and M. Stéphane Mallarmé 217 Two Pastels:— I. Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson as a Poet 237 II. Mr. Rudyard Kipling's Short Stories 255 An Election at the English Academy 295 Appendices 323 The following Essays originally appeared in 'The Contemporary Review,' 'The Fortnightly Review,' 'The National Review,' 'The New Review,' 'The Forum,' 'The Century Magazine,' 'Longman's Magazine,' and 'The Academy.' THE TYRANNY OF THE NOVEL The Tyranny of the Novel A Parisian Hebraist has been attracting a moment's attention to his paradoxical and learned self by announcing that strong-hearted and strong-brained nations do not produce novels. This gentleman's soul goes back, no doubt in longing and despair, to the heart of Babylon and the brain of Gath. But if he looks for a modern nation that does not cultivate the novel, he must, I am afraid, go far afield. Finland and Roumania are certainly tainted; Bohemia lies in the bond of naturalism. Probably Montenegro is the one European nation which this criterion would leave strong in heart and brain. The amusing absurdity of this whim of a pedant may serve to remind us how universal is now the reign of prose fiction. [Pg xii] [Pg xiii] [Pg xv] [Pg 1] [Pg 3] In Scandinavia the drama may demand an equal prominence, but no more. In all other countries the novel takes the largest place, claims and obtains the widest popular attention, is the admitted tyrant of the whole family of literature. This is so universally acknowledged now-a-days that we scarcely stop to ask ourselves whether it is a heaven- appointed condition of things, existing from the earliest times, or whether it is an innovation. As a matter of fact, the predominance of the novel is a very recent affair. Most other classes of literature are as old as the art of verbal expression: lyrical and narrative poetry, drama, history, philosophy—all these have flourished since the sunrise of the world's intelligence. But the novel is a creation of the late afternoon of civilisation. In the true sense, though not in the pedantic one, the novel began in France with La Princesse de Clèves, and in England with Pamela—that is to say, in 1677 and in 1740 respectively. Compared with the dates of the beginning of philosophy and of poetry, these are as yesterday and the day before yesterday. Once started, however, the sapling of prose fiction grew and spread mightily. It took but a few generations to overshadow all the ancient oaks and cedars around it, and with its monstrous foliage to dominate the forest. It would not be uninteresting, if we had space to do so here, to mark in detail the progress of this astonishing growth. It would be found that, in England at least, it has not been by any means regularly sustained. The original magnificent outburst of the English novel lasted for exactly a quarter of a century, and closed with the publication of Humphrey Clinker. During this period of excessive fertility in a field hitherto unworked, the novel produced one masterpiece after another, positively pushing itself to the front and securing the best attention of the public at a moment when such men as Gray, Butler, Hume, and Warburton were putting forth contributions to the old and long-established sections of literature. Nay: such was the force of the new kind of writing that the gravity of Johnson and the grace of Goldsmith were seduced into participating in its facile triumphs. But, at the very moment when the novel seemed about to sweep everything before it, the wave subsided and almost disappeared. For nearly forty years, only one novel of the very highest class was produced in England; and it might well seem as though prose fiction, after its brief victory, had exhausted its resources, and had sunken for ever into obscurity. During the close of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth, no novel, except Evelina, could pretend to disturb the laurels of Burke, of Gibbon, of Cowper, of Crabbe. The publication of Caleb Williams is a poor event to set against that of the Lyrical Ballads; even Thalaba the Destroyer seemed a more impressive phenomenon than the Monk. But the second great burgeoning of the novel was at hand. Like the tender ash, it delayed to clothe itself when all the woods of romanticism were green. But in 1811 came Sense and Sensibility, in 1814 Waverley; and the novel was once more at the head of the literary movement of the time. It cannot be said to have stayed there very long. Miss Austen's brief and brilliant career closed in 1817. Sir Walter Scott continued to be not far below his best until about ten years later. But a period of two decades included not only the work of these two great novelists, but the best books also of Galt, of Mary Ferrier, of Maturin, of Lockhart, of Banim. It saw the publication of Hajji Baba, of Frankenstein, of Anastatius. Then, for the second time, prose fiction ceased for a while to hold a position of high predominance. But Bulwer Lytton was already at hand; and five or six years of comparative obscurity prepared the way for Dickens, Lever, and Lover. Since the memorable year 1837 the novel has reigned in English literature; and its tyranny was never more irresistible than it is to-day. The Victorian has been peculiarly the age of the triumph of fiction. In the history of France something of the same fluctuation might be perceived, although the production of novels of a certain literary pretension has been a feature of French much longer and more steadily than of English life. As Mr. Saintsbury has pointed out, "it is particularly noteworthy that every one of the eight names which have been set at the head" of the nineteenth-century literature of France "is the name of a novelist." Since the days of Flaubert—for the last thirty years, that is to say—the novel has assumed a still higher literary function than it held even in the hands of George Sand and Balzac. It has cast aside the pretence of merely amusing, and has affected the airs of guide, philosopher, and friend. M. Zola, justified to some extent by the amazing vogue of his own writings, and the vast area covered by their prestige, has said that the various classes of literary production are being merged in the novel, and are ultimately to disappear within it: Apollo, Pan, and Love, And even Olympian Jove Grow faint, for killing Truth hath glared on them; Our hills, and seas, and streams, Dispeopled of their dreams, become the mere primary material for an endless series of naturalistic stories. And even to-day, when the young David of symbolism rises to smite the Goliath Zola, the smooth stones he takes out of his scrip are works of fiction by Maurice Barrès and Edouard Rod. The schools pass and nicknames alter; but the novel rules in France as it does elsewhere. We have but to look around us at this very moment to see how complete the tyranny of the novel is. If one hundred educated and grown men—not, of course, themselves the authors of other books—were to be asked which are the three most notable works published in London during the season of 1892, would not ninety-and-nine be constrained to answer, with a parrot uniformity, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, David Grieve, The Little Minister? These are the books which have been most widely discussed, most largely bought, most vehemently praised, most venomously attacked. [Pg 4] [Pg 5] [Pg 6] [Pg 7] [Pg 8] These are the books in which the "trade" has taken most interest, the vitality of which is most obvious and indubitable. It may be said that the conditions of the winter of 1892 were exceptional—that no books of the first class in other branches were produced. This may be true; and yet Mr. Jebb issued a volume of his Sophocles, Mr. William Morris a collection of the lyric poems of years, Mr. Froude his Divorce of Catherine of Aragon, and Mr. Tyndall his New Fragments. If the poets in chorus had blown their silver trumpets and the philosophers their bold bassoons, the result would have been the same: they would have won some respect and a little notice for their performances; but the novelists would have carried away the money and the real human curiosity. Who shall say that Mr. Freeman was not a better historian than Robertson was? yet did he make £4,500 by his History of Sicily? I wish I could believe it. To-day Mr. Swinburne may publish a new epic, Mr. Gardiner discover to us the head of Charles I. on the scaffold, Mr. Herbert Spencer explore a fresh province of sociology, or Mr. Pater analyse devils in the accents of an angel—none of these important occurrences will successfully compete, for more than a few moments, among educated people, with the publication of what is called, in publishers' advertisements, "the new popular and original novel of the hour." We are accustomed to this state of things, and we bow to it. But we may, perhaps, remind ourselves that it is a comparatively recent condition. It was not so in 1730, nor in 1800, nor even in 1835. Momentary aberrations of fashion must not deceive us as to the general tendency of taste. Mr. Hall Caine would have us believe that the public has suddenly gone crazy for stage-plays. "Novels of great strength and originality," says the author of The Scapegoat, "occasionally appear without creating more than a flutter of interest, and, meanwhile, plays of one-tenth their power and novelty are making something like a profound impression." What plays are these? Not the Ollendorfian attitudinisings of M. Maeterlinck, surely! The fact is that two years ago it would have been impossible for any one to pen that sentence of Mr. Caine's, and it is now possible merely because a passion for the literary drama has been flogged into existence by certain able critics. With a limited class, the same class which appreciates poetry, the literary drama may find a welcome; but to suppose that it competes, or can, in this country, even pretend to compete, with the novel is a delusion, and Mr. Caine may safely abandon his locusts and wild honey. That we see around us a great interest in the drama is, of course, a commonplace. But how much of that is literary? When the delights of the eye are removed from the sum of pleasure, what is left? Our public is interested in the actors and their art, in the scenery and the furniture, in the notion of large sums of money expended, lost, or won. When all these incidental interests are extracted from the curiosity excited by a play, not very much is left for the purely literary portion of it—not nearly so much, at all events, as is awakened by a great novel. After all that has been said about the publication of plays, I expect that the sale of dramatic contemporary literature remains small and uncertain. Mr. Pinero is read; but one swallow does not make a summer. Where are the dramatic works of Mr. Sydney Grundy, which ought —if Mr. Caine be correct—to be seen on every book-shelf beside the stories of Mr. Hawley Smart? If, however, I venture to emphasise the fact of the tyranny of the novel in our current literature, it is without a murmur that I do so. Like the harmless bard in Lady Geraldine's Courtship, I "write no satire," and, what is more, I mean none. It appears to me natural and rational that this particular form of writing should attract more readers than any other. It is so broad and flexible, includes so vast a variety of appeals to the emotions, makes so few painful demands upon an overstrained attention, that it obviously lays itself out to please the greatest number. For the appreciation of a fine poem, of a learned critical treatise, of a contribution to exact knowledge, peculiar aptitudes are required: the novel is within everybody's range. Experience, moreover, proves that the gentle stimulus of reading about the cares, passions, and adventures of imaginary personages, and their relations to one another—a mild and irresponsible mirroring of real life on a surface undisturbed by responsibility, or memory, or personal feeling of any kind—is the most restful, the most refreshing, of all excitements which literature produces. It is commonly said, in all countries, that women are the chief readers of novels. It may well be that they are the most numerous, and that they read more exhaustively than men, and with less selection. They have, as a rule, more time. The general notion seems to be that girls of from sixteen to twenty form the main audience of the novelist. But I am inclined to think that the real audience consists of young married women, sitting at home in the first year of their marriage. They find themselves without any constraint upon their reading: they choose what they will, and they read incessantly. The advent of the first-born baby is awaited in silent drawing-rooms, where through long hours the novelists supply the sole distraction. These young matrons form a much better audience than those timorous circles of flaxen-haired girls, watched by an Argus-eyed mamma, which the English novelist seems to consider himself doomed to cater for. I cannot believe that it is anything but a fallacy that young girls do read. They are far too busy with parties and shopping, chatting and walking, the eternal music and the eternal tennis. Middle-aged people in the country, who are cut off from much society, and elderly ladies, whose activities are past, and who like to resume the illusions of youth, are far more assiduous novel-readers than girls. But, if we take these and all other married and unmarried women into consideration, there is still apparently an exaggeration in saying that it is they who make the novelist's reputation. Men read novels a great deal more than is supposed, and it is probably from men that the first-class novel receives its imprimatur. Men have made Mr. Thomas Hardy, who owes nothing to the fair sex; if women read him now, it is because the men have told them that they must. Occasionally we see a very original writer who decidedly owes his fame to the plaudits of the ladies. M. Paul Bourget is the most illustrious example that occurs to the memory. But such instances are rare, and it is usually to the approval of male readers that eminent novelists owe that prestige which ultimately makes them the favourites of the women. Not all men are pressed by the excessive agitations of business life which are habitually attributed to their sex. Even those who are most busy find time to read, and we were lately informed that among the most constant and assiduous students of [Pg 9] [Pg 10] [Pg 11] [Pg 12] [Pg 13] [Pg 14] new novels were Lord Tennyson and Mr. Gladstone. Every story-teller, I think, ought to write as though he believed himself addressing such conspicuous veterans. As I say, I do not revolt against the supremacy of the novel. I acknowledge too heavy a debt of gratitude to my great contemporaries to assume any but a thankful attitude towards them. In my dull and weary hours each has come like the angel Israfel, and has invited me to listen to the beating of his heart, be it lyre or guitar, a solemn instrument or a gay one. I should be instantly bankrupt if I sought to repay to Mr. Meredith or Mr. Besant, Mr. Hardy or Mr. Norris, Mr. Stevenson or Mr. Kipling—to name no others—one-tenth part of the pleasure which, in varied quantity and quality, the stories of each have given me. I admit (for which I shall be torn in pieces) that the ladies please me less, with some exceptions; but that is because, since the days of the divine Mrs. Gaskell, they have been so apt to be either too serious or not serious enough. I suppose that the composition of The Daisy Chain and of Donovan serves some excellent purpose; doubtless these books are useful to great growing girls. But it is not to such stories as these that I owe any gratitude, and it is not to their authors that I address the presumptuous remarks which follow. A question which constantly recurs to my mind is this: Having secured the practical monopoly of literature, having concentrated public attention on their wares, what do the novelists propose to do next? To what use will they put the unprecedented opportunity thrown in their way? It is quite plain that to a certain extent the material out of which the English novel has been constructed is in danger of becoming exhausted. Why do the American novelists inveigh against plots? Not, we may be sure, through any inherent tenderness of conscience, as they would have us believe; but because their eminently sane and somewhat timid natures revolt against the effort of inventing what is extravagant. But all the obvious plots, all the stories which are not in some degree extravagant, seem to have been told already, and for a writer with the temperament of Mr. Howells there is nothing left but the careful portraiture of a small portion of the limitless field of ordinary humdrum existence. So long as this is fresh, this also may amuse and please; to the practitioners of this kind of work it seems as though the infinite prairie of life might be surveyed thus for centuries, acre by acre. But that is not possible. A very little while suffices to show that in this direction also the material is promptly exhausted. Novelty, freshness, and excitement are to be sought for at all hazards, and where can they be found? The novelists hope many things from that happy system of nature which supplies them, year by year, with fresh generations of the ingenuous young. The procession of adolescence moves on and on, and the front rank of it, for a month or a year, is duped by the novelist's report of that astonishing phenomenon, the passion of love. In a certain sense, we might expect to be tired of love-stories as soon as, and not before, we grow tired of the ever-recurring March mystery of primroses and daffodils. Each generation takes its tale of love under the hawthorn-tree as something quite new, peculiar to itself, not to be comprehended by its elders; and the novelist pipes as he will to this idyllic audience, sure of pleasing, if he adapt himself never so little to their habits and the idiosyncrasies of their time. That theory would work well enough if the novelist held the chair of Erotics at the University of Life, and might blamelessly repeat the same (or very slightly modified) lectures to none but the students of each successive year. But, unfortunately, we who long ago took our degree, who took it, perhaps, when the Professor was himself in pinafores, also continue to attend his classes. We are hardly to be put off with the old, old commonplaces about hearts and darts. Yet our adult acquiescence is necessary for the support of the Professor. How is he to freshen up his oft-repeated course of lectures to suit our jaded appetites? It would be curious to calculate how many tales of love must have been told since the vogue of the modern story began. Three hundred novels a year is, I believe, the average product of the English press. In each of these there has been at least one pair of lovers, and generally there have been several pairs. It would be a good question to set in a mathematical examination: What is the probable number of young persons who have conducted one another to the altar in English fiction during the last hundred years? It is almost terrible to think of this multitude of fictitious love-makings: For the lovers of years meet and gather; The sound of them all grows like thunder: O into what bosom, I wonder, Is poured the whole passion of years! One would be very sorry to have the three hundred of one year poured into one's own mature bosom. But how curious is the absolute unanimity of it all! Thousands and thousands of books, every one of them, without exception, turning upon the attraction of Edwin to Angelina, exactly as though no other subject on earth interested a single human being! The novels in which love has not formed a central feature are so few that I suspect that they could be counted on the fingers of one hand. At this moment, I can but recall a single famous novel in which love has no place. This is, of course, L'Abbé Tigrane, that delightful story in which all the interest revolves around the intrigues of two priestly factions in a provincial cathedral. But, although M. Ferdinand Fabre achieved so great a success in this book, and produced an acknowledged masterpiece, he never ventured to repeat the experiment. Eros revels in the pages of all his other stories. This would be the opportunity to fight the battle of the novelists against Mrs. Grundy. But I am not inclined to waste ink on that conceded cause. After the reception of books like Tess of the D'Urbervilles and even David Grieve, it is plain that the English novelist, who cares and dares, may say almost anything he or she likes without calling flame out of heaven upon his head. There has been a great reform in this respect since the days when our family friend Mr. Punch hazarded his very existence by referring, in grimmest irony, to the sufferings of "the gay." We do not want to claim the [Pg 15] [Pg 16] [Pg 17] [Pg 18] [Pg 19] [Pg 20] right, which the French have so recklessly abused, of describing at will, and secure against all censure, the brutal, the abnormal and the horrible. No doubt a silly prudishness yet exists. There are still clergymen's wives who write up indignantly from The Vicarage, Little Pedlington. I have just received an epistle from such an one, telling me that certain poor productions I am editing "make young hearts acquainted with vice, and put hell-fire in their hearts." "Woe unto you in your evil work," says this lady, doubtless a most sincere and conscientious creature, but a little behind the times. Of her and her race individually, I wish to say nothing but what is kind; but I confess I am glad to know that the unreflecting spirit they represent is passing away. It is passing away so rapidly that there is really no need to hearten the novelists against it. I am weary to death of the gentleman who is always telling us what a splendid novel he would write, if the publishers would only allow him to be naughty. Let him be bold and naughty, and we will see. If he is so poor-spirited as to be afraid to say what he feels he ought to say because of this kind of criticism, his exposition of the verities is not likely to be of very high value. But I should like to ask our friends the leading novelists whether they do not see their way to enlarging a little the sphere of their labours. What is the use of this tyranny which they wield, if it does not enable them to treat life broadly and to treat it whole? The varieties of amatory intrigue form a fascinating subject, which is not even yet exhausted. But, surely, all life is not love-making. Even the youngest have to deal with other interests, although this may be the dominant one; while, as we advance in years, Venus ceases to be even the ruling divinity. Why should there not be novels written for middle-aged persons? Has the struggle for existence a charm only in its reproductive aspects? If every one of us regards his or her life seriously, with an absolute and unflinching frankness, it will be admitted that love, extended so as to include all its forms—its sympathetic, its imaginative, its repressed, as well as its fulfilled and acknowledged, forms— takes a place far more restricted than the formulæ of the novelist would lead the inhabitant of some other planet to conjecture. Unless the novelists do contrive to enlarge their borders, and take in more of life, that misfortune awaits them which befell their ancestors just before the death of Scott. About the year 1830 there was a sudden crash of the novel. The public found itself abandoned to Lady Blessington and Mr. Plumer Ward, and it abruptly closed its account with the novelists. The large prices which had been, for twenty years past, paid for novels were no longer offered. The book- clubs throughout the kingdom collapsed, or else excluded novels. When fiction re-appeared, after this singular epoch of eclipse, it had learned its lesson, and the new writers were men who put into their work their best observation and ripest experience. It does not appear that in the thirties any one understood what was happening. The stuff produced by the novelists was so ridiculous and ignoble that "the nonsinse of that divil of a Bullwig" seemed absolutely unrivalled in its comparative sublimity, although these were the days of Ernest Maltravers. It never occurred to the authors when the public suddenly declined to read their books (it read "Bullwig's," in the lack of anything else) that the fault was theirs. The same excuses were made that are made now,—"necessary to write down to a wide audience;" "obliged to supply the kind of article demanded;" "women the only readers to be catered for;" "mammas so solicitous for the purity of what is laid before their daughters." And the crash came. The crash will come again, if the novelists do not take care. The same silly piping of the loves of the drawing-room, the same obsequious attitude towards a supposititious public clamouring for the commonplace, inspire the majority of the novel-writers of to-day. Happily, we have, what our fathers in 1835 had not, half a dozen careful and vigorous men of letters who write, not what the foolish publishers ask for, but what they themselves choose to give. The future rests with these few recognised masters of fiction, and with their successors, the vigorous younger men who are preparing to take their place. What are these novelists going to do? They were set down to farm the one hundred acres of an estate called Life, and because one corner of it—the two or three acres hedged about, and called the kitchen-garden of Love— offered peculiar attractions, and was very easy to cultivate, they have neglected the other ninety-seven acres. The result is that by over-pressing their garden, and forcing crop after crop out of it, it is well-nigh exhausted, and will soon refuse to respond to the incessant hoe and spade; while, all the time, the rest of the estate, rich and almost virgin soil, is left to cover itself with the weeds of newspaper police-reports. It is supposed that to describe one of the positive employments of life,—a business or a profession, for example,— would alienate the tender reader, and check that circulation about which novelists talk as nervously as if they were delicate invalids. But what evidence is there to show that an attention to real things does frighten away the novel reader? The experiments which have been made in this country to widen the field of fiction in one direction, that of religious and moral speculation, have not proved unfortunate. What was the source of the great popular success of John Inglesant and then of Robert Elsmere, if not the intense delight of readers in being admitted, in a story, to a wider analysis of the interior workings of the mind than is compatible with the mere record of the billing and cooing of the callow young? We are afraid of words and titles. We are afraid of the word "psychology," and, indeed, we have seen follies committed in its name. But the success of the books I have just mentioned was due to their psychology, to their analysis of the effect of associations and sentiments on a growing mind. To make such studies of the soul even partially interesting, a great deal of knowledge, intuition, and workmanlike care must be expended. The novelist must himself be acquainted with something of the general life of man. But the interior life of the soul is, after all, a very much less interesting study to an ordinarily healthy person than the exterior. It is surprising how little our recent novelists have taken this into consideration. One reason, I cannot doubt, is that they write too early and they write too fast. Fielding began with Joseph Andrews, when he was thirty-five; seven [Pg 21] [Pg 22] [Pg 23] [Pg 24] [Pg 25] years later he published Tom Jones; during the remainder of his life, which closed when he was forty-seven, he composed one more novel. The consequence is that into these three books he was able to pour the ripe knowledge of an all-accomplished student of human nature. But our successful novelist of to-day begins when he is two- or three- and-twenty. He "catches on," as they say, and he becomes a laborious professional writer. He toils at his novels as if he were the manager of a bank or the captain of an ocean steamer. In one narrow groove he slides up and down, up and down, growing infinitely skilful at his task of making bricks out of straw. He finishes the last page of "The Writhing Victim" in the morning, lunches at his club, has a nap; and, after dinner, writes the first page of "The Swart Sombrero." He cannot describe a trade or a profession, for he knows none but his own. He has no time to look at life, and he goes on weaving fancies out of the ever-dwindling stores of his childish and boyish memories. As these grow exhausted, his works get more and more shadowy, till at last even the long-suffering public that once loved his merits, and then grew tolerant of his tricks, can endure him no longer. The one living novelist who has striven to give a large, competent, and profound view of the movement of life is M. Zola. When we have said the worst of the Rougon-Macquart series, when we have admitted the obvious faults of these books—their romantic fallacies on the one hand, their cold brutalities on the other—it must be admitted that they present the results of a most laudable attempt to cultivate the estate outside the kitchen-garden. Hardly one of the main interests of the modern man has been neglected by M. Zola, and there is no doubt at all that to the future student of nineteenth-century manners his books will have an interest outweighing that of all other contemporary novels. An astonishing series of panoramas he has unrolled before us. Here is Le Ventre de Paris, describing the whole system by which a vast modern city is daily supplied with food; here is Au Bonheur des Dames, the romance of a shop, which is pushed upwards and outwards by the energy of a single ambitious tradesman, until it swamps all its neighbours, and governs the trade of a district; here is L'Argent, in which, with infinite pains and on a colossal scale, the passions which move in la haute finance are analysed, and a great battle of the money-world chronicled; here, above all, is Germinal, that unapproachable picture of the agony and stress of life in a great mining community, with a description of the processes so minute and so technical that this novel is quoted by experts as the best existing record of conditions which are already obsolete. In these books of M. Zola's, as everyone knows, successive members of a certain family stand out against a background of human masses in incessant movement. The peculiar characteristic of this novelist is that he enables us to see why these masses are moved, and in what direction. Other writers vaguely tell us that the hero "proceeded to his daily occupation," if, indeed, they deign to allow that he had an occupation. M. Zola tells us what that occupation was, and describes the nature of it carefully and minutely. More than this: he shows us how it affected the hero's character, how it brought him into contact with others, in what way it represented his share of the universal struggle for existence. So far from the employment being a thing to be slurred over or dimly alluded to, M. Zola loves to make that the very hero of his piece, a blind and vast commercial monster, a huge all-embracing machine, in whose progress the human persons are hurried helplessly along, in whose iron wheels their passions and their hopes are crushed. He is enabled to do this by the exceptional character of his genius, which is realistic to excess in its power of retaining and repeating details, and romantic, also to an extreme, in its power of massing these details on a huge scale, in vast and harmoniously-balanced compositions. I would not be misunderstood, even by the most hasty reader, to recommend an imitation of M. Zola. What suits his peculiarly-constituted genius might ill accord with the characteristics of another. Nor do I mean to say that we are entirely without something analogous in the writings of the more intelligent of our later novelists. The study of the Dorsetshire dairy-farms in Mr. Hardy's superb Tess of the D'Urbervilles is of the highest value, and more thorough and intelligible than what we enjoyed in The Woodlanders, the details of the apple-culture in the same county. To turn to a totally different school: Mr. Hall Caine's Scapegoat is a very interesting experiment in fresh fields of thought and experience, more happily conceived, if I may be permitted to say so, than fortunately executed, though even in execution far above the ruck of popular novels. A new Cornish story, called Inconsequent Lives, by that very promising young story-teller, Mr. Pearce, seemed, when it opened, to be about to give us just the vivid information we want about the Newlyn pilchard-fishery; but the novelist grew timid, and forebore to fill in his sketch. The experiments of Mr. George Gissing and of Mr. George Moore deserve sympathetic acknowledgment. These are instances in which, occasionally, or fantastically, or imperfectly, the real facts of life have been dwelt upon in recent fiction. But when we have mentioned or thought of a few exceptions, to what inanities do we not presently descend! If we could suddenly arrive from another planet, and read a cluster of novels from Mudie's, without any previous knowledge of the class, we should be astonished at the conventionality, the narrowness, the monotony. All I ask for is a larger study of life. Have the stress and turmoil of a successful political career no charm? Why, if novels of the shop and the counting-house be considered sordid, can our novelists not describe the life of a sailor, of a gamekeeper, of a railway-porter, of a civil engineer? What capital central figures for a story would be the whip of a leading hunt, the foreman of a colliery, the master of a fishing smack, or a speculator on the Stock Exchange! It will be suggested that persons engaged in one or other of these professions are commonly introduced into current fiction, and that I am proposing as a novelty what is amply done already. My reply is that our novelists may indeed present to us a personage who is called a stoker or a groom, a secretary of state or a pin-maker, but that, practically, they merely write these denominations clearly on the breasts of lay-figures. For all the enlightenment we get into the habits of action and habits of thought entailed by the occupation of each, the fisherman might be the groom and the pin-maker the stock-broker. It is more than this that I ask for. I want to see the man in his life. I am tired of the novelist's portrait of a gentleman, with gloves and hat, leaning against a pillar, upon a vague landscape background. I want the gentleman as he appears in a [Pg 26] [Pg 27] [Pg 28] [Pg 29] [Pg 30] [Pg 31] snap-shot photograph, with his every-day expression on his face, and the localities in which he spends his days accurately visible around him. I cannot think that the commercial and professional aspects of life are unworthy of the careful attention of the novelist, or that he would fail to be rewarded by a larger and more interested audience for his courage in dealing closely with them. At all events, if it is too late to ask our accepted tyrants of the novel to enlarge their borders, may we not, at all events, entreat their heirs-apparent to do so? 1892 THE INFLUENCE OF DEMOCRACY ON LITERATURE The Influence of Democracy on Literature It is not desirable to bring the element of party politics into the world of books. But it is difficult to discuss the influence of democracy on literature without borrowing from the Radicals one of the wisest and truest of their watchwords. It is of no use, as they remind us, to be afraid of the people. We have this huge mass of individuals around us, each item in the coagulation struggling to retain and to exercise its liberty; and, while we are perfectly free to like or dislike the condition of things which has produced this phenomenon, to be alarmed, to utter shrieks of fright at it, is to resign all pretension to be listened to. We may believe that the whole concern is going to the dogs, or we may be amusing ourselves by printing Cook's tickets for a monster excursion to Boothia Felix or other provinces of Utopia; to be frightened at it, or to think that we can do any good by scolding it or binding it with chains of tow, is simply silly. It moves, and it carries the Superior Person with it and in it, like a mote of dust. In considering, therefore, the influence of democracy on literature, it seems worse than useless to exhort or persuade. All that can in any degree be interesting must be to study, without prejudice, the signs of the times, to compare notes about the weather, and cheerfully tap the intellectual barometer. This form of inquiry is rarely attempted in a perfectly open spirit, partly, no doubt, because it is unquestionably one which it is difficult to carry through. It is wonderfully easy to proclaim the advent of a literary Ragnarok, to say that poetry is dead, the novel sunken into its dotage, all good writing obsolete, and the reign of darkness begun. There are writers who do this, and who round off their periods by attributing the whole condition to the democratic spirit, like the sailor in that delightful old piece played at the Strand Theatre, who used to sum up the misfortunes of a lifetime with the recurrent refrain, "It's all on account of Eliza." The "uncreating words" of these pessimists are dispiriting for the moment, but they mean nothing. Those of the optimist do not mean much either. A little more effort is required to produce his rose-coloured picture, but we are not really persuaded that because the brown marries the blonde all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Nor is much gained by prophecy. We have been listening to a gentleman, himself a biographer and an historian, who predicts, with babe-like naïveté, that all literary persons will presently be sent by the democracy to split wood and draw water, except, perhaps, "the historian or biographer." In this universal splitting of wood, some heads, which now think themselves mighty clever, may come to be rather disastrously cracked. It was not Camille Desmoulins whom Fate selected to enter into his own Promised Land of emancipated literature. We gain little by a comparison of our modern situation with that of the ancient commonwealths. The parallel between the state of literature in our world and that in Athens or Florence is purely academic. Whatever the form of government, literature has always been aristocratic, or at least oligarchic. It has been encouraged or else tolerated; even when it has been independent, its self-congratulations on its independence have shown how temporary that liberty was, and how imminent the relapse into bondage. The peculiar protection given to the arts by enlightened commonwealths surrounded by barbaric tyrannies was often of a most valuable character, but it resembled nothing which can recur in the modern world. The stimulus it gave to the creative temperament was due in great measure to its exclusiveness, to the fact that the world was shut out, and the appeal for sympathy made within a restricted circle. The Republic was a family of highly trained intelligences, barred and bolted against the vast and stupid world outside. Never can this condition be re- established. The essence of democracy is that it knows no narrower bonds than those of the globe, and its success is marked by the destruction of those very ramparts which protected and inspirited the old intellectual free States. The purest and most elevated form of literature, the rarest and, at its best, the most valuable, is poetry. If it could be shown that the influence of the popular advance in power has been favourable to the growth of great verse, then all the rest might be taken for granted. Unfortunately, there are many circumstances which interfere with our vision, and make it exceedingly difficult to give an opinion on this point. Victor Hugo never questioned that the poetical element was needed, but he had occasional qualms about its being properly demanded. [Pg 33] [Pg 35] [Pg 36] [Pg 37] [Pg 38] [Pg 39] Peuples! écoutez, le poète, Écoutez le rêveur sacré; Dans votre nuit, sans lui complète, Lui seul a le front éclairé! he shouted, but the very energy of the exclamation suggests a doubt in his own mind as to its complete acceptability. In this country, the democracy has certainly crowded around one poet. It has always appeared to me to be one of the most singular, as it is one of the most encouraging features of our recent literary history, that Tennyson should have held the extraordinary place in the affections of our people which has now been his for nearly half a century. That it should be so delicate and so Æolian a music, so little affected by contemporary passion, so disdainful of adventitious aids to popularity, which above all others has attracted the universal ear, and held it without producing weariness or satiety; this, I confess, appears to me very marvellous. Some of the Laureate's best-loved lyrics have been before the public for more than sixty years. Cowley is one of the few English poets who have been, during their lifetime, praised as much as Tennyson has been, yet where in 1720 was the fame of Cowley? Where in the France of to-day are the Méditations and Harmonies of Lamartine? If, then, we might take Tennyson as an example of the result of the action of democracy upon literature, we might indeed congratulate ourselves. But a moment's reflection shows that to do so is to put the cart before the horse. The wide appreciation of such delicate and penetrating poetry is, indeed, an example of the influence of literature on democracy, but hardly of democracy on literature. We may examine the series of Tennyson's volumes with care, and scarcely discover a copy of verses in which he can be detected as directly urged to expression by the popular taste. This prime favourite of the educated masses never courted the public, nor strove to serve it. He wrote to please himself, to win the applause of the "little clan," and each round of salvos from the world outside seemed to startle him in his obstinate retirement. If it grew easier and easier for him to consent to please the masses, it was because he familiarised them more and more with his peculiar accent. He led literary taste, he did not dream of following it. What is true of Tennyson is true of most of our recent poets. There is one exception, however, and that a very curious one. The single English poet of high rank whose works seem to me to be distinctly affected...