Masters of the English Novel | Page 6

more interpretative way.
It has seized for a motto the Veritas nos liberavit of the ancient
philosopher. The elementary psychology of the past has been
transferred to the stage drama, justifying Mr. Shaw's description of it as
"the last sanctuary of unreality." And even in the theater, the truth
demanded in fiction for more than a century, is fast finding a place, and
play-making, sensitive to the new desire, is changing in this respect
before our eyes.
However, with the good has come evil too. In the modern seeking for
so-called truth, the nuda veritas has in some hands become shameless
as well,--a fact amply illustrated in the following treatment of
principles and personalities.
The Novel in the hands of these eighteenth century writers also struck a
note of the democratic,--a note that has sounded ever louder until the
present day, when fiction is by far the most democratic of the literary
forms (unless we now must include the drama in such a designation).
The democratic ideal has become at once an instinct, a principle and a
fashion. Richardson in his "Pamela" did a revolutionary thing in
making a kitchen wench his heroine; English fiction had previously
assumed that for its polite audience only the fortunes of Algernon and
Angelina could be followed decorously and give fit pleasure. His
innovation, symptomatic of the time, by no means pleased an
aristocratic on-looker like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who wrote to
a friend: "The confounding of all ranks and making a jest of order has
long been growing in England; and I perceive by the books you sent me,

has made a very considerable progress. The heroes and heroines of the
age are cobblers and kitchen wenches. Perhaps you will say, I should
not take my ideas of the manners of the times from such trifling authors;
but it is more truly to be found among them, than from any historian; as
they write merely to get money, they always fall into the notions that
are most acceptable to the present taste. It has long been the endeavor
of our English writers to represent people of quality as the vilest and
silliest part of the nation, being (generally) very low-born
themselves"--a quotation deliciously commingled of prejudice and
worldly wisdom.
But Richardson, who began his career by writing amatory epistles for
serving maids, realized (and showed his genius thereby), that if the hard
fortunes and eventful triumph of the humble Pamela could but be
sympathetically portrayed, the interest on the part of his aristocratic
audience was certain to follow,--as the sequel proved.
He knew that because Pamela was a human being she might therefore
be made interesting; he adopted, albeit unconsciously, the Terentian
motto that nothing human should be alien from the interests of his
readers. And as the Novel developed, this interest not only increased in
intensity, but ever spread until it depicted with truth and sympathy all
sorts and conditions of men. The typical novelist to-day prefers to leave
the beaten highway and go into the by-ways for his characters; his
interest is with the humble of the earth, the outcast and alien, the under
dog in the social struggle. It has become well-nigh a fashion, a fad, to
deal with these picturesque and once unexploited elements of the
human passion-play.
This interest does not stop even at man; influenced by modern
conceptions of life, it overleaps the line of old supposed to be
impassable, and now includes the lower order of living things: animals
have come into their own and a Kipling or a London gives us the
psychology of brutekind as it has never been drawn before--from the
view-point of the animal himself. Our little brothers of the air, the
forest and the field are depicted in such wise that the world returns to a
feeling which swelled the heart of St. Francis centuries ago, as he

looked upon the birds he loved and thus addressed them:
"And he entered the field and began to preach to the birds which were
on the ground; and suddenly those which were in the trees came to him
and as many as there were they all stood quietly until Saint Francis had
done preaching; and even then they did not depart until such time as he
had given them his blessing; and St. Francis, moving among them,
touched them with his cape, but not one moved."
It is because this modern form of fiction upon which we fix the name
Novel to indicate its new features has seized the idea of personality, has
stood for truth and grown ever more democratic, that it has attained to
the immense power which marks it at the present time. It is justified by
historical facts; it has become that literary form most closely revealing
the contours of