Masters of the English Novel | Page 4

which is the natural outcome of such lack of story
interest. A wide survey of the English essay from its inception with
Bacon in the early seventeenth century will impress the inquirer with
its fluid nature and natural outflow into full-fledged fiction. The essay
has a way, as Taine says, of turning "spontaneously to fiction and
portraiture." And as it is difficult, in the light of evolution, to put the
finger on the line separating man from the lower order of animal life, so
is it difficult sometimes to say just where the essay stops and the Novel
begins. There is perhaps no hard-and-fast line.
Consider Dr. Holmes' "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," for example;
is it essay or fiction? There is a definite though slender story interest
and idea, yet since the framework of story is really for the purpose of
hanging thereon the genial essayist's dissertations on life, we may
decide that the book is primarily essay, the most charmingly personal,
egoistic of literary forms. The essay "slightly dramatized," Mr. Howells
happily characterizes it. This form then must be reckoned with in the
eighteenth century and borne in mind as contributory all along in the
subsequent development, as we try to get a clear idea of the qualities
which demark and limit the Novel.
Again, the theater was an institution doing its share to knit social
feeling; as indeed it had been in Elizabethan days: offering a place
where many might be moved by the one thought, the one emotion,
personal variations being merged in what is now called mob
psychology, a function for centuries also exercised by the Church. Nor
should the function of the playhouse as a visiting-place be overlooked.
So too the Novel came to express most inclusively among the literary
forms this more vivid realization of meum and tuum; the worth of me

and my intricate and inevitable relations to you, both of us caught in the
coils of that organism dubbed society, and willingly, with no
Rousseau-like desire to escape and set up for individualists. The Novel
in its treatment of personality began to teach that the stone thrown into
the water makes circles to the uttermost bounds of the lake; that the
little rift within the lute makes the whole music mute; that we are all
members of the one body. This germinal principle was at root a
profoundly true and noble one; it serves to distinguish modern fiction
philosophically from all that is earlier, and it led the late Sidney Lanier,
in the well-known book on this subject, to base the entire development
upon the working out of the idea of personality. The Novel seems to
have been the special literary instrument in the eighteenth century for
the propagation of altruism; here lies its deepest significance. It was a
baptism which promised great things for the lusty young form.
We are now ready for a fair working definition of the modern Novel. It
means a study of contemporary society with an implied sympathetic
interest, and, it may be added, with special reference to love as a motor
force, simply because love it is which binds together human beings in
their social relations.
This aim sets off the Novel in contrast with past fiction which exhibits
a free admixture of myth and marvel, of creatures human, demi-human
and supernatural, with all time or no time for the enactment of its
events. The modern story puts its note of emphasis upon character that
is contemporary and average; and thus makes a democratic appeal
against that older appeal which, dealing with exceptional
personages--kings, leaders, allegorical abstractions--is naturally
aristocratic.
There was something, it would appear, in the English genius which
favored a form of literature--or modification of an existing
form--allowing for a more truthful representation of society, a criticism
(in the Arnoldian sense) of the passing show. The elder romance finds
its romantic effect, as a rule, in the unusual, the strange and abnormal
aspects of life, not so much seen of the eye as imagined of the mind or
fancy. Hence, romance is historically contrasted with reality, with

many unfortunate results when we come to its modern applications.
The issue has been a Babel-like mixture of terms.
Or when the bizarre or supernatural was not the basis of appeal, it was
found in the sickly and absurd treatment of the amatory passion, quite
as far removed from the every-day experience of normal human nature.
It was this kind of literature, with the French La Calprenede as its high
priest, which my Lord Chesterfield had in mind when he wrote to his
son under date of 1752, Old Style: "It is most astonishing that there
ever could have been a people idle enough to write such endless heaps
of the same stuff. It was, however, the occupation