Masters of the English Novel | Page 7

Richard Burton
life, most expressive of its average experience, most
sympathetic to its heart-throb. The thought should prevent us from
regarding it as merely the syllabub of the literary feast, a kind of
after-dinner condiment. It is not necessary to assume the total depravity
of current taste, in order to account for the tyranny of this latest-born
child of fiction. In the study of individual writers and developing
schools and tendencies, it will be well to keep in mind these underlying
principles of growth: personality, truth and democracy; a conception
sure to provide the story-maker with a new function, a new ideal. The
distinguished French critic Brunetiere has said: "The novelist in reality
is nothing more than a witness whose evidence should rival that of the
historian in precision and trustworthiness. We look to him to teach us
literally to see. We read his novels merely with a view to finding out in
them those aspects of existence which escape us, owing to the very
hurry and stir of life, an attitude we express by saying that for a novel
to be recognized as such, it must offer an historical or documentary
value, a value precise and determined, particular and local, and as well,
a general and lasting psychologic value or significance."
It may be added, that while in the middle eighteenth century the
novel-writing was tentative and hardly more than an avocation, at the
end of the nineteenth, it had become a fine art and a profession. It did
not occur to Richardson, serious-minded man that he was, that he was

formulating a new art canon for fiction. Indeed, the English author
takes himself less and less seriously as we go back in time. It was bad
form to be literary when Voltaire visited Congreve and found a fine
gentleman where he sought a writer of genius: complaining therefore
that fine gentlemen came cheap in Paris; what he wished to see was the
creator of the great comedies. In the same fashion, we find Horace
Walpole, who dabbled in letters all his days and made it really his chief
interest, systematically underrating the professional writers of his day,
to laud a brilliant amateur who like himself desired the plaudits of the
game without obeying its exact rules. He looked askance at the
fiction-makers Richardson and Fielding, because they did not move in
the polite circles frequented by himself.
The same key is struck by lively Fanny Burney in reporting a meeting
with a languishing lady of fashion who had perpetrated a piece of
fiction with the alarming title of "The Mausoleum of Julia": "My sister
intends, said Lady Say and Sele, to print her Mausoleum, just for her
own friends and acquaintances."
"Yes? said Lady Hawke, I have never printed yet."
And a little later, the same spirit is exhibited by Jane Austen when
Madame de Sevigne sought her: Miss Austen suppressed the
story-maker, wishing to be taken first of all for what she was: a country
gentlewoman of unexceptionable connections. Even Walter Scott and
Byron plainly exhibit this dislike to be reckoned as paid writers, men
whose support came by the pen. In short, literary professionalism
reflected on gentility. We have changed all that with a vengeance and
can hardly understand the earlier sentiment; but this change of attitude
has carried with it inevitably the artistic advancement of modern fiction.
For if anything is certain it is that only professional skill can be relied
upon to perfect an art form. The amateur may possess gift, even genius;
but we must look to the professional for technique.
One other influence, hardly less effective in molding the Novel than
those already touched upon, is found in the increasing importance of
woman as a central) factor in society; indeed, holding the key to the
social situation. The drama of our time, in so frequently making woman

the protagonist of the piece, testifies, as does fiction, to this significant
fact: woman, in the social and economic readjustment that has come to
her, or better, which she is still undergoing, has become so much more
dominant in her social relations, that any form of literature truthfully
mirroring the society of the modern world must regard her as of potent
efficiency. And this is so quite apart from the consideration that women
make up to-day the novelist's largest audience, and that, moreover, the
woman writer of fiction is in numbers and popularity a rival of men.
It would scarcely be too much to see a unifying principle in the
evolution of the modern Novel, in the fact that the first example in the
literature was Pamela, the study of a woman, while in representative
latter-day studies like "Tess of the D'Urbervilles," "The House of
Mirth," "Trilby" and "The Testing of Diana Mallory" we again have
studies of women;
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