An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times | Page 9

new enlightenment; but it was an enlightenment which gave them insight into things as they are, not as they are to be. "The proper study of mankind," they held was "man;" man, however, not in his boundless promise, but in the mean performance with which they proclaimed themselves satisfied. The poetry of the time was, at best, merely common-sense with ornamentation. It was neither lyrical nor tragic, though it may have tried to be both. It represented man neither as withdrawn into himself, nor as transported into an ideal world of action, but as observing and reasoning on his present affairs. The satire and moral essay were its characteristic forms.

B. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SPECTATOR
12. The most pleasing expression of this self-satisfaction of the age is found in the Spectator, the first and best representative of that special style of literature--the only really popular literature of our time--which consists in talking to the public about itself. Humanity is taken as reflected in the ordinary life of men; and, as thus reflected, it is copied with the most minute fidelity. No attempt is made either to suppress the baser elements of man's nature, or to transfigure them by a stronger light than that of the common understanding. No deeper laws are recognised than those which vindicate themselves to the eye of daily observation, no motives purer than the "mixed" ones which the practical philosopher delights to analyse, no life higher than that which is qualified by animal wants. The reader never finds himself carried into a region where it requires an effort to travel, or which is above the existing level of opinion and morality. It is from this levelness with life that the Spectator derives its interest--an interest so nearly the same, barring the absence of plot, with that of the novel, as to lead Macaulay to pronounce Addison "the forerunner of the great English novelists."[11] The elements of the novel, indeed, already existed in Addison's time, and only required combination. Fictitious biography, which may be regarded as its raw material, had been written by Defoe with a life-like reality which has never since been equalled; and the popular drama furnished plots, in the shape of love stories drawn from present life. Let the adventures of the fictitious biography, instead of being merely external to the man, as in Defoe, be made subservient to that display of character in which Addison had shown himself a master, and let them become steps in the development of a love-plot, and the novel--the novel of the last century, at any rate--is fully formed. As was the self-contented, and therefore uncreative and prosaic, thought of the age, which produced the novel, such the novel itself continued to be. Man, comfortable and acquiescent, wished to amuse himself by a reflex of the life which he no longer aspired to transcend. He wanted to enjoy himself twice over--in act and in fancy; or, if the former were denied him, at least to explore in fancy the world of pleasure and excitement, of which circumstances abridged or disturbed his enjoyment in fact. In "the smooth tale, generally of love,"[12] the novelist supplied the want.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] "We have not the least doubt that, if Addison had written a novel, on an extensive plan, it would have been superior to any that we possess. As it is, he is entitled to be considered, not only as the greatest of the English essayists, but as the forerunner of the great English novelists."--Macaulay, 'Life and writings of Addison.'
[12] "A small tale, generally of love."--Johnson's Dictionary.

C. THE MODERN NOVEL A REFLECTION OF ORDINARY LIFE
13. This Johnsonian definition may be objected to as merely accidental, and as inconsistent with the romantic character which the novel assumed in the hands of Sir Walter Scott. It expresses, however, adequately enough the view which the popular novelists prior to Scott took of their own productions. Cervantes, though in his own great work attaining that rhapsody of grotesqueness which lies on the edge of poetry, had yet established the idea of the novel as the antithesis of romance. These novelists, accordingly, if they are not always telling the reader (like Fielding), seem yet to be always thinking to themselves, how perfectly natural their stories are. It is on this naturalness they pride themselves; and naturalness, in their sense, meant conformity to nature as it is commonly seen. This is the characteristic feature of the class. Whether, like Richardson, they analyse character from within, or, like Miss Austen, develop it in the outward particularities of an unruffled life--whether they describe, like Fielding, the buoyancy of a generous animalism, or, like Miss Edgeworth and Miss Burney, the precise decencies of conventional morality--they deal simply with eighteenth-century life as seen by eighteenth-century eyesight. All romantic virtue, all idealised passion, they rigorously eschew.