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 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 BY WILSON FOLLETT
 
 BY HELEN THOMAS FOLLETT 
 and WILSON FOLLETT 
 
 SOME MODERN NOVELISTS
 
 THE 
 MODERN N OVEL 
 
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 A STUDY OF THE PURPOSE 
 AND THE MEANING OF FICTION 
 
 BY 
 
 WILSON FOLLETT 
 
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 NEW YORK ALFRED A. KNOPF MCMXVIII 
 
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 COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY 
 ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc. 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMEBICA 
 
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 PREFACE 
 
 This book is an attempt to trace the development of 
 some important principles of fictional criticism dur- 
 ing the two centuries of the novel in English, and 
 to show how the development of these principles has 
 in turn altered the shape of the modern novel. From 
 the point of view here maintained, criticism is not 
 . only effect but also cause. Its ideas are indeed 
 £> gradually evolved from what has been done, and of 
 fc course from what has been poorly done or left undone ; 
 but they are with equal certainty gradually incor- 
 porated into what is being done, and this second 
 half of the process is none the less significant for 
 aving been so largely neglected by the conventional 
 itic and historian. Criticism is a forecast as well 
 as a record, and a leverage for raising the standard 
 as well as a standard held up. This endless cycle 
 of interactions is what I have studied, in an effort to 
 show how criticism itself is creative, and especially 
 how both the critical and the creative forces of past 
 generations come to focus in the latest definable stage 
 of fiction, that of the late 19th century , and the 
 early 20th. I have tried to accomplish that pur- 
 pose with a due recognition that this, or any, latest 
 stage is itself but tentative and experimental. The 
 novel as we have it is the past crystallizing; but, 
 
 5 
 
 382993
 
 PREFACE 
 
 thanks to the force of criticism and to no other force 
 whatsoever, it is as truly the future germinating. 
 
 If the function here ascribed to criticism seem over- 
 stated, one has only to reflect how trifling a part of the 
 whole body of criticism is comprised by its special and 
 formal embodiments in reviews, essays, histories, ap- 
 preciations and estimates of individual authors or 
 periods, and books about books — including such books 
 as this. A novelist more or less consciously picks and 
 chooses among the past achievements of the art he 
 practises, reassembling them as the basis for his own 
 superstructure. His doing so is criticism. Subse- 
 quently, he is always examining the materials and 
 proportions of his own structure, to strengthen or 
 modify or discard ; and the process by which he does 
 that is criticism. He learns much from his successes 
 and failures ; something from his readers ; more from 
 the successes and failures of his contemporaries; a 
 little perhaps from the formal appraisals of the critic 
 — in short, he grows, or at least changes, and his 
 growth is a result of criticism. "Whole generations 
 and schools of novelists, in periods of international 
 diffusion such as the latter 17th century and the 
 early 20th, learn from the fiction and the criticism 
 of other countries; on a sudden, perhaps indeed 
 too suddenly, their ingrowing provincialism becomes 
 outward-reaching cosmopolitanism. That change 
 means criticism brought to bear on a still grander 
 scale. And, finally, whatever other forces fail or 
 prevail, there is always the Zeitgeist, the general 
 movement and direction of humane consciousness
 
 PREFACE 
 
 — a subtle, irresistible, ceaseless play of criticism over 
 the whole field of things dreamed, known, or done, 
 compelling all representative art, in common with all 
 other civilized manifestations, to be a response to 
 needs so inchoate that they may never have got them- 
 selves expressed or acknowledged save in their re- 
 sults, yet so universally cogent that no living indi- 
 vidual can will to refuse them his service. 
 
 Everything, properly considered, is a criticism of 
 everything else. Whenever we perceive the differ- 
 ences between one thing and another, and then com- 
 mit ourselves to a choice in the light of some felt need 
 for one thing as against the other, we perform an act 
 of criticism. It is manifestly a danger that we shall 
 underrate, rather than overrate, the momentousness 
 of the critical faculty so defined. 
 
 This book is not, then, primarily a history of the 
 English novel from Defoe to Hardy, even though it 
 includes much illustrative description of the princi- 
 pal developments between 1700 and 1900 ; and neither 
 is it a treatise on criticism or the aesthetics of fiction 
 in vacuo. It is a statement of some critical and 
 aesthetic principles in terms of their historical evolu- 
 tion in and from the English novel. I choose the 
 English novel because on the whole it developed most 
 provincially, refusing until singularly late to become 
 a matter of comparative literature, and becoming at 
 length so suddenly overwhelmed with international 
 modernness that its story seems especially determinate 
 and dramatic. It should be added that I have not 
 been ashamed to include a great deal of historical in-
 
 8 PREFACE 
 
 formation simply because I think it ought to be fa- 
 miliar to students of the novel, or to make use of the 
 obvious and the truistic when to do so helps the argu- 
 ment. 
 
 It is a graceless thing to parade one's own merits, 
 but I really cannot forbear pointing out my one small 
 claim to the gratitude of all and sundry. Except for 
 a trivial indiscretion committed by Mr. William Dean 
 Howells more than a quarter of a century ago, and 
 reproduced on page 268, you might search in vain 
 through these ten chapters for the aimless and ques- 
 tion-begging word "psychology" or any of its deri- 
 vatives. 
 
 W. F.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 I The Creative Impulse 11 
 
 II Romance 43 
 
 III Sentimentalism 71 
 
 IV Didacticism 101 
 V Satire 131 
 
 VI The Realistic Spirit 155 
 VII Tragedy and Comedy 181 
 VIII Humanism 207 
 IX Design 235 
 X "Entertainment" 263 
 Bibliography 287
 
 THE CREATIVE IMPULSE
 
 This series of discussions about the purpose and 
 the meaning of fiction does not aspire to be anything 
 half so fundamental or half so presumptuous as a 
 metaphysical justification of the novel. The meta- 
 physical justification of anything — including both fic- 
 tion, which is a "criticism of life," and life itself — 
 rests on premises dictated by the philosophy one hap- 
 pens to believe in. To the pessimist, nothing justifies 
 its existence, not even his own despair; to the opti- 
 mist, all things work together for good, even the 
 things that seem, when taken by themselves and mo- 
 mentarily, worst. The cynic sage who wrote, in a 
 burst of fretful impatience, "Of making books there 
 is no end," would have found nothing to solace him 
 in this age when, it is said, everybody who is not writ- 
 ing novels is reading them, and when (it may be 
 added) every one is talking about them, even the per- 
 sons who neither read nor write them. The optimist, 
 on the other hand, is not only not put out of coun- 
 tenance by the making and selling of many very bad 
 books, but he can even face without chagrin the sad 
 modern industry of reviewing them. 
 
 Now it is not the function of the critic to dictate 
 to his audience the philosophical opinions they should 
 hold; they would not listen to him anyway, for we 
 
 13
 
 14 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 choose our philosophies, as we do our occupations or 
 our neckties, by temperamental bias. Theologies go 
 as much by favour as kisses do. Any discussion has 
 to begin therefore with immense assumptions, — that 
 is, if it insist on getting somewhere, — and even what 
 we call "first principles" take unspeakable things for 
 granted. What we must take for granted here is a 
 certain resigned and unflinching state of the con- 
 science, an objective and impartially inquiring condi- 
 tion to which most humane intelligences come sooner 
 or later, in which all the works of both nature and 
 man seem worth an expenditure of interest or of 
 curiosity — among them not least the fine art of telling 
 stories. 
 
 It is far from my thought to say that whatever is is 
 right, — the philosophy of a shallow opportunist with- 
 out responsibility, — or that a thing is good simply 
 because it exists in great quantity, as anything must 
 to be popularly accredited. But one can say that 
 there is a very important sense in which whatever ex- 
 ists is worth considering, even if the consideration 
 amount only to a casual passing glance. The uni- 
 versality of our interest in fiction does not prove that 
 fiction has any inherent right to the space it occupies 
 in our libraries or in our lives ; but it does prove that 
 we have given fiction a sort of pragmatic claim on us 
 by giving so much of ourselves to it. In short, books, 
 and more especially novels, are worth writing and 
 buying and reading and criticizing in just about the 
 measure of our finding them so. Work of the hand, 
 work of the brain — it is all subject to the same law;
 
 THE CREATIVE IMPULSE 15 
 
 this law which, where it touches the study of the 
 classics, also a pursuit resting on vast assumptions, we 
 tritely embody in an admonition to young men who 
 are supposed not to enjoy their work: "You'll get 
 out of it exactly what you put into it." Things 
 mean what we find in them or bring out of them for 
 ourselves, by imagination, insight, the will to be in- 
 terested; books are worth whatever we make them 
 worth in terms of our own curiosity or wonder or 
 inspiration — the impersonal virtues of the mind. 
 
 Such then is the initial postulate, and the only jus- 
 tification of the novel that need be attempted here. 
 The study of fiction is a pleasurable task whose value 
 is to be measured, not in abstractions, not in any re- 
 mote philosophical or aesthetic categories, but em- 
 pirically and pragmatically, in terms of its effect on 
 our own emotions and wills. The question is not, 
 What must be our attitude toward the art of fiction? 
 It is rather, What must fiction have done to us be- 
 fore it becomes deserving of consideration as an art? 
 Fiction is a creative art in that it creates something 
 in its audience. Therein it is like friendship. He 
 who makes a friend, as Mr. Chesterton says, makes 
 a man. The novelist and his reader create and per- 
 petuate each other, by a uniquely impersonal reci- 
 procity. The ideal responsibility of fiction is to 
 make us dream nobly and disinterestedly, to give a 
 beautiful and intelligible shape to the best of our 
 desire. If it do that, it justifies itself in and through 
 us. Meanwhile it is for criticism to say whether the 
 dreaming is noble and disinterested, the shape of it a
 
 16 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 beautiful and intelligible one; to make sure that our 
 bread is not a stone — or, as Professor Saintsbury says 
 in a slightly different connection, pie-crust. 
 
 And so we begin a stage farther along than the 
 question whether the intrinsic claim of the novel is 
 such that we ought to concede anything to it ; farther 
 along, where we meet these two other questions, What 
 are the claims of the novel? and What is or may be 
 the nature of the concession we do make? 
 
 II 
 
 There is, it will appear from the form of these 
 questions, a reason for the apparent repetition in a 
 general title such as "The Purpose and the Meaning 
 of Fiction. ' ' The purpose of fiction is one thing : the 
 meaning of fiction is, or may be, quite another. We 
 can see and admit forthwith, as an axiom of good 
 sense, that high merit in fiction is likely to have some- 
 thing to do with the incidence of purpose and mean- 
 ing; the best novel, other things being equal, is that 
 in which the effect sensed by the reader is most like 
 that intended by the author, and the poorest novel, 
 other things remaining equal, is that in which the ef- 
 fect sensed is least like that intended. One does, to 
 be sure, hear music discussed by seemingly intelligent 
 persons who profess to believe that the composer 
 merely surrenders himself to inexplicable impulses and 
 emotions, creating he knows not what, and caring not 
 at all whether his impulses and emotions are repro-
 
 THE CREATIVE IMPULSE 17 
 
 duced in the listener, so long as some sufficiently in- 
 tense effects are produced. To any one who traces in 
 music primarily its design or pattern — or, let us say, 
 to whom music is unintelligible without its pattern — 
 this is an abhorrent theory of inspiration. Still, 
 many persons do hold it; and perhaps it may be ex- 
 tended without flagrant irrationality to lyric poetry, 
 and even to some kinds of plastic representation. But 
 hardly to imaginative literature as we have known it 
 in prose. We dispute now and again about what 
 Shakspere meant by certain parts of Hamlet; but 
 no one doubts that he meant something, that he was 
 deliberately trying to communicate the same meaning 
 to us all, and that either the play or the audience 
 relatively fails whenever the audience misses com- 
 munity of impression. In this discussion of the re- 
 lation between purveyor and public, it makes little 
 difference which fails : the point is all in the success or 
 failure of the relation. There is no consummation of 
 art except in the audience. 
 
 It is quite true that, in some rare instances, the 
 artist may profit by an effect not in his intention; 
 may actually, without knowing it, build better than 
 his design. Every reader of Fielding will remember 
 two gentlemen, or rather two animated and diverting 
 caricatures, by name Thwackum and Square, who had 
 charge of the upbringing of Tom Jones. Mr. Square 
 the philosopher is always talking about "the natural 
 beauty of virtue"; to Mr. Thwackum the clergyman 
 there is no power except "the divine power of grace." 
 Probably Fielding intended to represent, in these two
 
 18 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 quaint ethical theorists, simply two characteristic 
 18th century notions which he hated and wished 
 to hold up to ridicule: the notion that thinking 
 straight is the way of salvation however crooked one's 
 conduct, and the notion that straight conduct is 
 worthless unless it is inspired by a prescribed way 
 of thinking — in this instance the creed of the Church 
 of England. Both figures are incomplete as men ; 
 they remain simply walking embodiments of their 
 respective narrow doctrines, in spite of Fielding's evi- 
 dent desire to give them human nature and make 
 them humanly live. It takes a more modern detach- 
 ment than Fielding ever knew to see the fitness of 
 his failure. There is an almost symbolic appropriate- 
 ness in the hollow unreality of Messrs. Thwackum and 
 Square: how could such ideas, so held, produce actual 
 human beings? The limitations of these two as men 
 prove, as no amount of calculated satire could, the 
 limitations of their doctrines. It takes the capacity 
 for spontaneous warm-hearted action, plus the sense 
 of legitimate impersonal law imposed from without, to 
 make the rounded man ; to be complete and real is to 
 adjust the natural inward impulses to the artificial 
 codes by which we must needs partly live. How fit- 
 ting, then, that it should take Thwackum and Square 
 together to come somewhere near making up one aver- 
 age piece of human nature ! Here is an instance which 
 shows the artist gaining something through his failure 
 to carry out his intention : if the characters were com- 
 plete as men, they would be pointless and inconsistent 
 as doctrinaires. And I have sometimes thought that
 
 THE CREATIVE IMPULSE 19 
 
 so great an artist as Jane Austen gains as a social 
 comedist by revealing in the world of her persons a 
 moral poverty and narrowness which she hardly saw 
 there herself. 
 
 Such examples are, however, not frequent. In gen- 
 eral the novelist loses by missing his design. Jane 
 Eyre is weakened, however far from crucially, be- 
 cause Rochester, who was intended for a gentleman, is 
 so obviously a cad. The history of fiction is full of 
 writers who lost much through the illusion that they 
 could portray types they did not know and manage 
 scenes they had never caught the spirit of. 
 
 We want fiction, then, to understand what it is 
 about and plan the effect which it can produce. But 
 this is not to say that the plan and the effect are the 
 same thing. The given effect may follow from the 
 given cause, but cause is still one thing and effect an- 
 other. In considering fiction, it happens to be of 
 singular importance to keep this disjunction in mind, 
 to the end that we may understand something of the 
 all-important relation between subjective and objec- 
 tive. That is why I have made the first group of 
 these discussions deal with fiction as I suppose it to be 
 conceived and written, the second group with fiction as 
 it is read and understood. I want to analyse first, as 
 well as I can, what writers put into their stories and. 
 the processes by which they put it in ; and then, what 
 readers get out of those stories and the re-creative 
 processes by which they get it out. 
 
 And naturally I begin with the mainspring of all 
 poetic effort, the initial creative impulse, asking some
 
 20 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 very plain and elemental questions: What is the 
 force which urges the story-teller to take up the pen 
 and drive it forward? Whence comes that special 
 desire of his to tell a story for the delight or the profit 
 of those whom he has never seen, and what is the 
 nature of that desire? It will be understood that 
 there is here no speaking officially or pro domo, no 
 claim of special divination: we proceed by deduction 
 and inference, trying if we can to descry the intention 
 in the performance, as Mr. Kipling's Builder, com- 
 ing on the ruined work of a predecessor, reads 
 
 "The form of the dream he had followed in the face of the 
 thing he had planned." 
 
 Ill 
 
 I have spoken of fiction as having something to do 
 with dreaming: let me distinguish it at once from 
 that idle and irresponsible day-dreaming in which, at 
 odd times, we all lose ourselves with a certain vision- 
 ary of modern fiction, "forgetting the bitterness of toil 
 and strife in the vision of a great and splendid re- 
 ward. ' ' x We all lie awake at night and plan for 
 ourselves impossible golden futures in which we are 
 the impossible heroes and heroines, achieving the 
 prodigious with hardly the effort which in real life 
 we must give to the commonplace, getting our ene- 
 
 i Almayer, in Almayer's Folly. By Joseph Conrad. New 
 York: Doubleday, Page & Co,
 
 THE CREATIVE IMPULSE 21 
 
 mies humbled and our supreme deserts acknowledged 
 and rewarded, and having our own way generally. 
 There is a superstition abroad that the genetic im- 
 pulse of fiction is like this, and fiction itself the 
 writer's dream, his escape from burdensome actuali- 
 ties. And certainly many readers take their fiction 
 as an escape, a drug or anodyne — a kind of vicarious 
 day-dreaming. 
 
 Not so, I believe, the artist. The only day-dreams 
 really worth while are those in which we lose our- 
 selves, transcending reality as on wings, breathing 
 upper airs of impossible rarity; but the only novels 
 really worth while are those in which the novelist 
 never for an instant loses his complete sense of self- 
 possession, the perfect awareness of what he is about. 
 His dreaming is purposed and controlled ; it differs in 
 a dozen sharp and unequivocal ways from the purely 
 subjective dreams through which the best of us at 
 times let ourselves beautifully drift. Our dreams are 
 exceptional and lawless, we conjure up delights that 
 never were on land or sea; the novelist's dream is 
 typical and regulated. Our dreams are very likely to 
 be patched copies of other dreams heard or read, as 
 every cheap popular song is a mosaic of all other 
 cheap popular songs; whereas the novelist's dream 
 must be, in its central nature, an original thing, or it 
 would better not be at all. What we distort, he re- 
 duces to shape and balance ; what we leave to its own 
 unobstructed play on our charitable credulity, he 
 cannot leave until it is presentable to the uncharitable 
 incredulity of mankind in general. Our day-dream is
 
 22 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 a result of inhibitions broken down and swept away : 
 we let ourselves go. The novelist, however like his 
 creative instinct may be to ours, cannot do that; half 
 the worth of his dream is in the checks and inhibi- 
 tions which govern the unfolding of it. 
 
 All these differences reduce themselves on inspec- 
 tion to a single inclusive difference: we dream day- 
 dreams for pure self -delight, using the gift of fancy 
 to glut ourselves; whereas the novelist writes stories 
 in order to give himself, for the delight of readers 
 whom he has never seen and cannot know. The con- 
 ditions of his work are determined by the fact that 
 it is work and not play; by the fact that he has an 
 audience with a receptivity subservient to a set of 
 laws which he must master ; a set of exceedingly subtle 
 and elusive laws whose working is of a nicety almost 
 past finding out. The one faculty upon which he 
 cannot play at will is that self-love which is in every 
 one of us, and which is alone sufficient to give our 
 day-dreams the temporary illusion of reality. We 
 can believe in anything so long as it is ours, part of 
 us. But the novelist asks us to enter into something 
 which is not ours at all, something to which our self- 
 interest can give no hue of reality, since no self-inter- 
 est is at hazard. The artist is always trying to ap- 
 peal to an attention outside and other than his own. 
 Without this will to appeal there is no art. 
 
 It is some such set of considerations which we forget 
 when we define art as "self -expression" — an unintel- 
 ligible definition, confusing as it does this ordered and 
 self-possessed visioning of the artist with the un-
 
 THE CREATIVE IMPULSE 23 
 
 bridled self -gratification of our most selfish moments. 
 Of course we express ourselves in whatever we do ; all 
 activity is self-expression, so that the term really de- 
 fines nothing because it covers everything. Walking 
 is self-expression, if you like, and the gait an index 
 of character. So is lying: it is possible that we are 
 never more truly ourselves than when we think we 
 are concealing ourselves. But we walk to get some- 
 where; we lie to accomplish something. A novel too 
 is a measure of its writer ; but he writes it in order to 
 get something communicated. He cannot help ex- 
 pressing himself : a man under an anaesthetic, or inco- 
 herently drunk, or suffocating in thick smoke where 
 he must shout for help, does that. But the whole 
 crux of the novelist's difficulty is to get himself 
 communicated; and it is a sentimental mistake of 
 some popular theorists to suppose that he can do that 
 by pure ''inspiration," or pure self-communion apart 
 from his audience in the penetralia of his own con- 
 sciousness. The lyric poet may sometimes, not other- 
 wise than by happiest accident, speak to us intelligibly 
 from those hidden recesses. Not so the novelist. He 
 deals with a truth which cannot be breathed out of 
 himself: he must seek it through the world with pain 
 and effort, win it for his own by living it — 
 
 "For truth needs doing; beauty seems 
 A dream till we awake from dreams" — 
 
 and shape and re-clothe it, not for himself, but for us. 
 
 He will do well to remember, if the struggle for bare 
 
 existence has not already made it impossible to forget,
 
 24 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 Stevenson's comparison of the artist to the fille de 
 joie, the obscure and draggled woman of the streets; 
 for he too is taking pay for his laughter, his com- 
 panionship, the gift of himself, nor can anything hide 
 or change the elemental fact which is the material 
 excuse for his trade — the fact that he lives by it. 
 "An author," says Fielding at the beginning of Tom 
 Jones, "ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman 
 who gives a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather 
 as one who keeps a public ordinary, at which all per- 
 sons are welcome for their money. . . . Men who pay 
 for what they eat will insist on gratifying their pal- 
 ates, however nice and whimsical these may prove; 
 and if everything is not agreeable to their taste, will 
 challenge a right to censure, to abuse, and to damn 
 their dinner without control." The best instincts 
 in us may lament the fact: Mr. Howells says, in 
 writing of "The Man of Letters as a Man of Busi- 
 ness, " x "I do not think any man ought to live by 
 an art. . . . There is an instinctive sense of this, even 
 in the midst of the grotesque confusion of our eco- 
 nomic being; people feel that there is something pro- 
 fane, something impious, in taking money for a pic- 
 ture, or a poem, or a statue. . . . The instinctive 
 sense of the dishonour which money-purchase does to 
 art is so strong that sometimes a man of letters who 
 can pay his way otherwise refuses pay for his work, 
 as Lord Byron did, for a while, from a noble pride, 
 and as Count Tolstoy has tried to do, from a noble 
 
 i In Literature and Life. By William Dean Howells. New 
 York: Harper & Bros.
 
 THE CREATIVE IMPULSE 25 
 
 conscience." But even such personal independence 
 only shifts the evil: "Byron's publisher profited by 
 a generosity which did not reach his readers ; and the 
 Countess Tolstoy collects the copyright which her 
 husband foregoes [this was published in 1902] ; so 
 that these two eminent instances of protest against 
 business in literature may be said not to have shaken 
 its money basis. ' ' And even if writer, publisher, and 
 public could all completely escape buying and selling, 
 the writer would still have no hold upon his public ex- 
 cept by pleasing it. His appeal as an artist is de- 
 pendent on the arbitrary taste of a multitude, even if 
 his living cease to be — so that if he can make up his 
 mind to the greater limitation, it is hardly worth his 
 while to boggle at the lesser. 
 
 We need no Fielding, no Stevenson, no Howells 
 come to tell us such things : they are matters of plain- 
 est hardest common sense. But they are too often 
 forgotten. The argument has sometimes been used to 
 justify giving the buying and reading public the poor- 
 est thing it can be brought to accept, instead of the 
 best thing it, perhaps unconsciously, wants; but al- 
 most any argument can be prostituted to a low ex- 
 pediency. We say that the artist must serve, if he 
 is to discharge his office at all : this is not to say that he 
 ought to pander. If he choose to pander, we should 
 let him ; our safeguard against him is the public right 
 to find him out in the long run and have no more of 
 him: it is not in the destruction of his right to be 
 what he chooses. But in either event, whether he 
 panders or truly serves, he has fully as much to gain
 
 26 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 through self-suppression as through self-expression. 
 He must be true to himself; but that fidelity will avail 
 him nothing unless he is also true to his audience, to 
 his subject, and to the obscure principles of his appeal 
 to thousands of intelligences as unlike his own as they 
 are unlike each other. 
 
 Let us see, if we can, what some of the chief of 
 these principles are, and how they operate; what 
 kinds of provision the novelist must make for his 
 audience that the mere dreamer of dreams takes no 
 thought of. 
 
 IV 
 
 One thinks pretty readily of four special ways in 
 which the novelist must take thought and thoroughly 
 know what he is about ; four provisions which he must 
 thoroughly accomplish if his work is completely to 
 justify itself in our eyes. They are, to name them 
 only: (1) Realism of Circumstance; (2) Truth by 
 Representation; (3) Freshness or Originality; and 
 (4) Fusion of these three and of all the other ele- 
 ments that enter into his subject. Realism, Repre- 
 sentation, Originality, and Fusion. Let us see what 
 ought to be meant by these labels. 
 
 The first, Realism of Circumstance, explains itself. 
 Of the realistic spirit I shall have, later on, much 
 more to say: I speak here, not of a spirit, but of a 
 process. It is obvious enough that the sound master 
 of fiction, knowing that he can successfully impart no 
 dream of his through credulity based on self-love,
 
 THE CREATIVE IMPULSE 27 
 
 must take infinite precaution that it shall seem true; 
 and that the more romantic it is in essence the more 
 realistic he must make it in detail. There is no bet- 
 ter exemplification of this truism than that Daniel 
 Defoe- — a master, Professor Sir Walter Raleigh calls 
 him, of "grave imperturbable lying" — who wrote a 
 lengthy account of the London plague of 1665 with 
 such vividness that many unlearned readers still ac- 
 cept it as the account of an eye-witness, though Defoe 
 was but four years old in the Plague Year; who con- 
 trived a recital of a certain great November storm 
 from hearsay and imagination, recounting casualties 
 by land and sea, and including wholly fictitious letters 
 from eye-witnesses who never existed ; who gave many 
 preposterous events in all parts of the world the 
 immediacy and the ring of truth, simply by giving 
 them a latitude and a longitude ; and who, as the sum- 
 mit of his achievement, took the most utterly romantic 
 figure of all, the lonely hermit of Juan Fernandez, 
 and made him easily the most real of all, by diary, by 
 dialogue, by inventory, by all the little fine arts of 
 persuasion. "There never was such a man or such 
 an island," you say (it makes no difference that, 
 historically speaking, there was) ; "there never was 
 a Crusoe, or a hut with a hedge of stakes round it, 
 or a boat hollowed labouriously out of a tree and then 
 found to be immovably heavy." To which credulity 
 answers: "Ah, but you forget: all these things were, 
 because a man wrote a diary about them! They 
 might, in an ordinary sea-tale, seem rather a large 
 order ; but — why, we have the man 's own diary ! ' '
 
 28 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 And there is an image of what the artist's quest 
 for actuality must be, in a certain "scowered" silk 
 dress worn by a lady some twenty-four hours dead, 
 and used by Defoe to help sell a seventh-rate and un- 
 salable clerical work, Drelincourt 's Book of Consola- 
 tions Against the Fears of Death, with which the Lon- 
 don book trade appears to have been overstocked in 
 1705. The estimable Mrs. Bargrave, living at Can- 
 terbury, receives one morning a call from her old 
 friend and neighbour Mrs. Veal, whom she has not 
 seen for a long time, and who announces now that she 
 has come to say good-bye before taking a journey. 
 The two gossip together in a most natural and familiar 
 vein, about head-aches, and husbands, and friend- 
 ship, and the degeneracy of the times, and other re- 
 liable subjects, taking pains to allude several times 
 to the great comfort and inspiration they have re- 
 ceived from that incomparable work, the Book of 
 Consolations. All is most natural; the talk proceeds 
 like a stenographic report of things actually said by 
 two such middle-class, prosy, and sentimental per- 
 sons. " 'Do not you think I am mightily impaired 
 by my fits?'" asks Mrs. Veal. " 'No,' says Mrs. 
 Bargrave, 'I think you look as well as ever I knew 
 you.' " And again: "Says Mrs. Bargrave: 'It is 
 hard indeed to find a true friend in these days.' 
 Says Mrs. Veal, 'Mr. Norris has a fine copy of verses, 
 called Friendship in Perfection, which I wonderfully 
 admire. Have you seen the book?' 'No,' says Mrs. 
 Bargrave, 'but I have the verses of my own writing
 
 THE CREATIVE IMPULSE 29 
 
 out.' 'Have you?' says Mrs. Veal, 'then fetch them.' 
 Which she did from above-stairs, and offered them to 
 Mrs. Veal to read, who refused, and waived the thing, 
 saying, holding down her head would make it ache ; 
 and then desiring Mrs. Bargrave to read them to her, 
 which she did. ... In these verses there is twice 
 used the word 'Elysian.' 'Ah!' says Mrs. Veal, 
 'these poets have such names for heaven.' " In 
 short, the whole tale is inimitably and incontestably 
 true, up to the point where it transpires that at the 
 time of this conversation Mrs. Veal was also incon- 
 testably dead. Everything in the story is true except 
 the whole of it. And mark how difficult Defoe makes 
 it to question even that whole. The tale is told by 
 a third woman of exactly the same stamp as the other 
 two, a life-long friend of Mrs. Bargrave, ready to 
 heap scorn on the husband and neighbours of Mrs. 
 Veal, who deny the story and impeach the character 
 of Mrs. Bargrave. Why, Mrs. Bargrave is "of a 
 cheerful disposition, notwithstanding the ill-usage of 
 a very wicked husband"; of course, then, the story 
 is true. Besides, this third woman's story has been 
 taken down by a lawyer, who believes it himself; 
 clearly, then, it must be true! Moreover, Mrs. Bar- 
 grave had described in considerable detail the 
 "scowered" silk dress which Mrs. Veal actually 
 wore on the day of her death, the day of the alleged 
 visit, though Mrs. Bargrave had never seen that dress 
 or known of its existence: what do you say to that? 
 well, if Mrs. Bargrave really described the dress,
 
 30 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 there 's nothing more to be said ; the story is true, 
 and the Book of Consolations is a fine book, and let's 
 all go and see if there is a copy to be had. 
 
 Observe, incidentally, the advertising logic of the 
 appeal: Drelincourt must be a book to buy, because 
 a ghost said so. We shall not be far amiss if we 
 think of Defoe as having been, among other things 
 variously important, the father of modern advertis- 
 ing. What it is most desirable to point out here is 
 that he mastered to perfection the art of making a 
 little extraneous and unimportant fact go as far as 
 possible toward establishing his central fiction. The 
 more outrageous his fundamental demand on the 
 credulity, the more care must he take to weave that 
 demand out of a tissue of the commonplace, the daily 
 homespun actual. And so it is ever with the worker 
 in fiction. He must do for a high impersonal end 
 what Defoe did, on more than one occasion, to serve 
 a rather low commercial or political expediency. 
 
 This first kind of care, for Realism of Circumstance, 
 makes a target of the credulity ; its purpose is to make 
 one see and, through seeing, believe. Fiction has 
 been much likened, of late, to journalism ; but in this 
 respect at least it differs from journalism. We have 
 a presumption in favour of the truth of what the 
 newspaper reporter tells us; at least we do unless 
 we make a serious matter of the trite popular joke
 
 THE CREATIVE IMPULSE 31 
 
 about reporters. But our presumption is all against 
 the truth of what the novelist tells us. Of the two, 
 it is he who must take pains to make his story seem 
 true; and when he makes it seem truer than truth, 
 we believe him. 
 
 But his truth to fact, though one of the conditions 
 of his usefulness, is far from being his prime value. 
 Fiction begins to accomplish its real purpose when it 
 attains what I have called Truth by Representation. 
 It must first make us believe ; it must then evoke from 
 us a response to that which we have accepted as truth. 
 And it does this through implied reference to larger 
 realities than are explicitly presented; such realities 
 as the common truths of all life, the mysteries of 
 birth and death, the invincible ambitions and terrors 
 of the mind, the moral law, the general nature of 
 things. Fiction must have its facts ; but it must also 
 have its "meaning of things beyond the facts." For 
 it is in the linking of subordinate trivial details and 
 episodes with the trend of a whole individual life, 
 and in the linking of the individual life with the whole 
 collective mass of human lives, that the novel wins 
 its place as a "criticism of life." 
 
 I can think of no better example of a story that 
 has this kind of reference in large and satisfying 
 measure than one very familiar story notably lack- 
 ing in our lesser and lower kind of realism: Dr. 
 Johnson's wholly pleasing and still strangely beauti- 
 ful story of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia. I am 
 aware that a good many critics have described Ras- 
 selas as a romantic expression of pessimism, and also
 
 32 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 that Professor William Lyon Phelps has lately taken 
 the trouble to pronounce a curt little requiescat 1 
 over what he considers a corpse past resuscitating. 
 But how can Rasselas be, or become, a dead story 
 when it contains so much wisdom about life, garbed 
 in so beautiful a vesture of imagery and symbolism? 
 And how can it be called a pessimistic story,' when it 
 contains, not a philosophical interpretation of a fact, 
 but the bare and simple fact alone? "The Vanity of 
 Human Wishes" — that is the theme of Rasselas, the 
 large general fact about life which it represents. 
 Well, human wishes are vain, aren't they? which is 
 all that Dr. Johnson says. He bases his tale on the 
 fact, hardly open to dispute, that whatever we get 
 out of life we do not get what we are looking for. 
 He does not say that we ought to get what we are 
 looking for; he does not say, as a pessimist would, 
 that our failure to get it proves the evil organization 
 of the world. Johnson draws his indictment, not 
 against the sorry scheme of things which cheats hu- 
 man nature out of its fond hopes, but against the 
 sorry scheme of human nature itself, which hopes 
 unreasonably, vaunts itself, overestimates its own de- 
 serts, and claims more than it is in the nature of 
 things to grant. Rasselas is a plea for classical or 
 stoic discipline of the will. At the best, it says, 
 
 "Man has but little here below, 
 Nor has that little long": 
 
 then it is the part of wisdom for him to curb his ex- 
 
 i Tn The Advance of the English Novel. By William Lyon 
 Phelps. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co.
 
 THE CREATIVE IMPULSE 33 
 
 pectations, make the most of his little, and turn from 
 following illusive phantoms of happiness and free- 
 dom which the collective wisdom of mankind has 
 never been able to capture. Rasselas and his sister 
 leave their Happy Valley to fare through the world 
 in search of contentment. They find many strange 
 things, and some sad ones; they find wisdom and 
 folly, work and idleness, pleasure of the voluptuary 
 and asceticism of the hermit, all strivings and all 
 miseries — but not contentment. In the end they go 
 back to the Happy Valley, dedicating themselves to 
 the idea of service to their own people, a beneficent 
 rule. Johnson never says that idleness is better than 
 work, that folly is as good as wisdom: he says only 
 that life is for every one of us something other than 
 we expect it to be, and that we have not learned the 
 secret of what life is until we stop abusing it for not 
 living up to our misconception of it. This is not 
 pessimistic doctrine : it is wise counsel, based on one of 
 the eternal verities, deriving its sweetness from a 
 pervasive mild melancholy far removed from cyni- 
 cism, and its strength from the universal applicabil- 
 ity of its one central truth about life. 
 
 This kind of appeal through a large general truth, of 
 which Rasselas is one of the purest examples, makes 
 the least possible demand on our third care, for 
 Originality. One can indeed distort, but one can 
 hardly invent, the eternal verities; and for this rea- 
 son the one element of the novel that would best not 
 undertake to be new is its philosophy. But there is 
 another, and probably more important, kind of
 
 34 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 Truth by Representation, which does interlock with 
 the necessity of being original. The novelist makes 
 use, whether he mean to or not, of general truths 
 about the world and about man's life therein; but 
 this fact is not so arresting as his citizenship in the 
 largest, most universal state that has ever existed, 
 the state of our common Human Nature. The novel- 
 ist must provide something new in human character 
 and personality, at the same time that he observes 
 the universally experienced laws of animal behaviour, 
 the common stock of motive and impulse, passion and 
 sentiment. He must be master of similarity in dif- 
 ference; he must acquaint us with new beings, the 
 elements so mixed in them that we feel them as 
 definite additions to our world, and yet he must weave 
 them out of the old, old substances, the desires we 
 have all known, the contradictions and incongruities 
 that are parts of all of us — the human nature that 
 we all partake of. The folk we meet in his pages 
 must be themselves, yet like ourselves ; their hearts 
 must beat in echo to the common heart of mankind, 
 yet somehow in a different, an individual and per- 
 sonal rhythm. 
 
 This achievement alone can be called "creative" 
 in the most elemental sense known to literary art. 
 The creation of a new character is akin to the stroke 
 of cosmic creation which brings something out of 
 nothing, substance out of the void and the breath of 
 life out of the inert substance. If we consider the 
 pre-eminence in our English imaginative literature 
 of three names, Chaucer, Shakspere, Dickens, we
 
 THE CREATIVE IMPULSE 35 
 
 shall find its secret in the host of complete, rounded, 
 and original pieces of human nature which throng to 
 our memory at the mention of those names. Their 
 human creations represent the world, our world of 
 action and emotion, all complete ; and they represent 
 themselves too, they are creatures that were never in 
 the world before. 
 
 For this elemental creative power there is no rival 
 and no substitute. Ingenuity and experience can ac- 
 count for originality of setting, the preparation of 
 new hues and blends of local colour; ingenuity and 
 labour can devise plots whose sequences shall seem 
 new. But only the most impersonal and selfless 
 genius can create a Pardoner, a Falstaff, a Mr. Sapsea, 
 or — to add one other novelist who lives principally in 
 his fewer created personalities — an Uncle Toby. 
 Having this power, a great novelist can almost afford 
 to lack everything else. It has been said of Dickens 
 that his characters were good "so long as he could 
 keep them out of his stories." His minor characters 
 are more alive than the major characters of most 
 writers ; and we care little whether they carry on the 
 story or not, so long as they consent to live on before 
 us in that "perpetual summer of being themselves." 
 Some critics have said that Laurence Sterne's prin- 
 cipal stock-in-trade was his whimsical nicety in sala- 
 cious innuendo. Not so: for his name would long 
 since have been forgotten had he not affixed it to 
 Uncle Toby, the real immortal. 
 
 Shall we let Fielding speak for us once more, on 
 this subject of Human Nature?
 
 36 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 "The provision, then, which we have here [i. e., in 
 Tom Jones] made is no other than Human Nature. 
 Nor do I fear that my sensible reader, though most 
 luxurious in his taste, will start, cavil, or be offended, 
 because I have named but one article. The tortoise — 
 as the alderman of Bristol, well learned in eating, 
 knows by much experience — besides the delicious cali- 
 pash and calipee, contains many different kinds of 
 food ; nor can the learned reader be ignorant, that in 
 human nature, though here collected under one gen- 
 eral name, is such prodigious variety, that a cook will 
 have sooner gone through all the several species of 
 animal and vegetable food in the world, than an au- 
 thor will be able to exhaust so extensive a subject. 
 
 "An objection may perhaps be apprehended from 
 the more delicate, that this dish is too common and 
 vulgar; for what else is the subject of all the ro- 
 mances, novels, plays, and poems, with which the 
 stalls abound? Many exquisite viands might be re- 
 jected by the epicure, if it was a sufficient cause for 
 his contemning of them as common and vulgar, that 
 something was to be found in the most paltry alleys 
 under the same name. In reality, true nature is as 
 difficult to be met with in authors, as the Bayonne 
 ham, or Bologna sausage, is to be found in the shops." 
 
 VI 
 
 And now, the fourth and final matter, Artistic Fu- 
 sion. There will be more to say about unity in the
 
 THE CREATIVE IMPULSE 37 
 
 work of fiction when we come to some of the inter- 
 esting problems of design; but at least I may throw 
 out here, as obvious and self-explanatory, the sugges- 
 tion that a skilfully written novel, however complex 
 and various its elements, must be in some sense single, 
 of a piece; that the various elements must be woven 
 somehow into a texture. Character, action, and scene 
 must be parts of each other; at the least they must 
 hold an interdependent relation, strike their several 
 notes in a larger harmony. When I said a moment 
 ago that we could almost concede Dickens his place 
 on the strength and living originality of his charac- 
 ters alone, I was trusting a good deal to the "almost." 
 The art of fiction, when really a fine art, cannot di- 
 vorce character from action, any more than Thwackum 
 and Square could divorce real ideas from conduct. 
 And if, in addition to its scene and action and char- 
 acter, the novel contain general truisms about life, 
 those too must come legitimately — that is, logically 
 and inevitably — out of the action, at once governing 
 and explaining it ; they must not be simply the gratu- 
 itous plastered-on opinions of the author. His af- 
 fair is to create his puppets and then let them seem 
 to manage their own destinies: let him not jerk them 
 this way and that on wires palpably of his own con- 
 triving. 
 
 Of course really strong and persuasive action is 
 that which seems to come out of the characters' own 
 wills, or out of their own weaknesses. An action 
 which we all recognize as the only one open to the given 
 person in the given situation has artistic inevitability. 
 
 38299 
 
 K>
 
 38 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 An act which divides our opinions and starts argu- 
 ments among critics may be dubiously contrived, an 
 artistic shortcoming; or the character may be ex- 
 ceedingly complex or vacillating, so that inevitability 
 is less determinate. An act which stamps its own pre- 
 posterousness on our minds means that the artist has 
 suffered a lapse of co-operation between his persons 
 and his plot. These considerations are self-evident: 
 one can do no more, and no less, than state them. 
 But the obviousness of the principle does not lessen 
 the difficulty of the practice; and the perfect fusion, 
 on a grand scale, of action and character is an ob- 
 jective attained by only a few supreme books in Eng- 
 lish, and by only a handful of authors in the whole 
 history of fiction. 
 
 There is another relation which can be, though it 
 usually is not, as intimate as that between action and 
 character: that of scene or setting on one hand to 
 action and character on the other. In the novel up 
 to about 1860, we find comparatively little subtlety 
 in the reported effects of the place upon the person. 
 In Fielding, in Scott even, places are depicted only 
 as a stage is set: that the drama may have a local 
 habitation and not proceed in vacuo. At least such 
 authors as these two are safe from the modern craze 
 for local colour as a thing of independent interest, 
 however irrelevant; that craze, now happily on the 
 wane, is the ultimate debasement of background. 
 Most of the local colourists of a decade ago ought to 
 have written travelogues, not novels; one laughs with 
 Mr. Ellis Parker Butler through the few pages of his
 
 THE CREATIVE IMPULSE 39 
 
 skit, ' ' The Scenic Novel, ' ' x written at their expense, 
 and suspects meanwhile that most of them are laugh- 
 ing at themselves by this time. Mere local colour, 
 most often painted on so thick that it scales, is de- 
 cidedly not enough; nor did Mr. Kipling, who unin- 
 tentionally set the vogue, ever pretend in his own 
 practice that it was enough. One should either be a 
 scientific explorer of the impalpable effects of region 
 and clime, or else content one's self with the simple 
 old fashion that treats scene-shifting as merely a 
 necessary evil. 
 
 But scene as mere background, for reality's sake 
 or adornment's, is not the ultimate fusion of fine 
 craftsmanship. Through the romantic revival, with 
 its sudden interest in the external world of nature, 
 and on through the period of humanitarianism, one 
 finds a steadily increasing sense of the rapport be- 
 tween man and man's habitat. Gray had this sense 
 in the Elegy; Goldsmith had more than a smattering 
 of it in The Deserted Village. It first crept into the 
 novel, I believe, through the "School of Terror"; 
 Mrs. Radcliffe among others used it for cunning, if 
 somewhat tawdry, effects of mystery and horror. In 
 the Irish novels of Miss Edgeworth, in the Scottish 
 novels of Scott, the scene becomes, however uncon- 
 sciously, something a little more than the picturesque 
 frame it was meant to be ; and when we come to 
 Dickens we come to a host of characters who are the 
 creatures of their environment. After this, the way 
 is made straight to such pieces of atmosphere as the 
 
 i The Kccnic Novel. By Ellis Parker Butler. Atlantic 
 Monthly, March, 1911.
 
 40 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 Wuthering Heights of Emily Bronte and The Return 
 of the Native of Hardy — to name perhaps the most 
 significant developments in this kind on either side 
 of George Eliot's earlier novels. The hither end of 
 the tendency is to be found in those highly specialized 
 stories of the Five Towns in which Mr. Arnold Ben- 
 nett works out to great elaboration the theory that 
 people derive their habits, their ideas, the texture 
 of their personalities, from the source of their liveli- 
 hood. Farther than this the novel can hardly go in 
 interpreting character as suffused and permeated with 
 the "spirit of place." 
 
 From these few scattered historical items it will ap- 
 pear that mere novelty of setting, or even mere schol- 
 arly fulness of reproduction, is not an important end 
 in itself — 'that is, for the novel. A skilful harmony 
 between the simplest folk and the simplest environ- 
 ment will communicate more, and endure longer, than 
 the greatest elaboration without that harmony, as 
 may be seen in the contrast between Silas Marner, 
 the least pretentious of George Eliot's "novels of 
 memory," and Romola, the most pretentious of her 
 novels of scholarship. In Romola she does all that 
 scholarship can do for the Florence of the Cinque- 
 cento; she marshals it before us, a tremendous his- 
 torical pageant. But through it walks Romola her- 
 self, a great woman indeed, but rather a womanly 
 British maiden of mid- Victorian time than a girl of 
 Florence and the Renaissance. The incongruity de 
 feats both the largeness of the design and the scholar- 
 ship of the details. Similarly, the tales of Captain
 
 THE CREATIVE IMPULSE 41 
 
 Marryatt are full of sea parlance, the rigging and 
 maneuvering of ships; Captain Marryatt knows the 
 sea, as a trade, as well as any one who has ever written 
 of it. But he does not know the sea as a spell, as a 
 creator of men in its own mysterious image; and to 
 this day there is more authentic salt in one of Smol- 
 lett's sailor men roaring out strange oaths in the 
 tap-room of some quiet village ale-house many miles 
 from the sea, than there is in all the ship's companies 
 on all the decks of Captain Marryatt 's fiction.
 
 II 
 
 ROMANCE
 
 Whoever talks with any consecutiveness about the 
 history of fiction, or the ideals and processes of fic- 
 tion, drops sooner or later into the terminology of a 
 traditional classification, that represented by the two 
 words "realism" and "romance." Already we have 
 stumbled upon these two intrusive and irrepressible 
 words, and heard them put in their claim to definition. 
 I said, perhaps too debonairly, that the more roman- 
 tic a novelist's theme inherently is, the more realistic 
 must be his dealing with it, if his result is to do suc- 
 cessful traffic with the reader's credulity. 1 need 
 not bother to defend the statement, which will doubt- 
 less commend itself to the intelligence as true in gen- 
 eral within the meaning of its context, though open, 
 like all general principles, to exception and modifica- 
 tion. Nor need I recur again to realism of that 
 lower order which governs the choice and transcrip- 
 tion of authentic details and circumstances from life, 
 and which we may call the realistic technique as dis- 
 tinguished from the realistic spirit. But we are still 
 very much in the challenging presence of the prob- 
 lem in definition propounded by the word ' ' romance, ' ' 
 without some solution of which there is no rational 
 approach to a tenable ground of interpretation and 
 criticism. 
 
 For my part, I confess that I name the romantic 
 
 45
 
 46 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 spirit with misgiving, and study it, or what I may 
 provisionally speak of as being it, with bafflement. 
 As a youngster of fifteen, devouring Fenimore 
 Cooper as, I fancy, youngsters of fifteen still do, I was 
 quite confident of my own ability to draw the tight 
 straight line between one kind of fiction that is ro- 
 mantic and nothing else, and another kind that is 
 realistic and nothing else. But the slightly older 
 youngster begins to see that there is a misty mid- 
 region between romance and realism, and that the 
 boundaries of the two are indefinable rather than 
 precise, movable rather than fixed. And eventually 
 he sees pure romance and pure realism as being like 
 nothing so much as the invisible extremes, the infra- 
 red and the ultra-violet, of the colour spectrum, which, 
 being invisible to so coarse an organ as the sensual 
 eye, may be said for rough pragmatic purposes not 
 to exist. The million gradations and mixtures in 
 between, they exist. And so do the million grada- 
 tions and mixtures of romance and realism ; but the 
 more one reads and thinks about what one has read, 
 the more one suspects that pure romance and pure 
 realism are as the infra-red and the ultra-violet of 
 the spectrum — concepts of the mind, practically at- 
 tainable it may be in that consummation where the 
 artist in words shall 
 
 ". . . splash at a seven-league canvas, with brushes of com- 
 ets' hair," 
 
 but seen in their purity thus far on no canvas of the 
 finite and mortal novelist, nor in the transient flame
 
 ROMANCE 47 
 
 of any one of those beacons which the young adven- 
 turing' minds are for ever setting up on the changing 
 shore-line of art. The poet and teller of tales whose 
 line I have just quoted, himself a more than ordin- 
 arily puzzling example of realism and romance min- 
 gled, addresses himself to the True Eomance as to a 
 goddess and guide; but in the very phrases which 
 pledge him to the True Romance he says, with one of 
 the fine despairs of faith — 
 
 "Thy face is far from this our war, 
 
 Our call and counter-cry ; 
 I shall not find Thee quick and kind, 
 
 Nor know Thee till I die. 
 Enough for me in dreams to see 
 
 And touch Thy garment's hem: 
 Thy feet have trod so near to God 
 
 I may not follow tliem." 
 
 Herein he is like a mystic devotee groping after the 
 unknowable, and half realizing the while that all the 
 virtue is in the groping, not in the knowing. 
 
 And so, as 1 talk about romance, I confess it is with 
 growing doubts — not merely whether there is any ro- 
 mance, but also, supposing romance to exist definably, 
 whether the distinction between it and realism is as 
 valuable as we sometimes try to make it out. A one- 
 time President of Dartmouth College who made the 
 opening prayer at a gathering of college presidents 
 met to consider problems of academic administration 
 (also, in its way, a difficult and indeterminate sub- 
 ject) closed his invocation with these words, the sly 
 humour of which could not, I think, have been wholly
 
 48 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 lost on the Almighty: "0 Lord, preside over our 
 deliberations; and may our conclusions be wise ones 
 — so far as we come to any conclusions." There is 
 room for the same attitude of intellectual humility 
 in the consideration of romance. And at the end of 
 all our discussing and defining, we need not feel 
 wholly cheated if we discover that what we have dis- 
 cussed and defined is not after all the romance we 
 seek, but another, perhaps the highest, kind of real- 
 ism. For if romance does not exist with all the im- 
 portance we attach to it in our thought, if the spirit 
 that animates creative effort in fiction is one and one 
 only, then it is something to have discovered the limi- 
 tations of our common categories and to have found 
 the point at which our terminology breaks down. 
 
 II 
 
 So far, the argument goes along on a rather high 
 plane. To descend: "We may doubt the sway of 
 romance as a spirit, but we hardly question the exist- 
 ence or the prestige of romances. These we have in 
 infinite bulk, subject to a hundred changing modes 
 and conventions, 
 
 "Part good, part bad ; of bad the longer scroll." 
 
 It is romance as a spirit, the ruling element common 
 to all the works which we call romances, that needs 
 investigating; a goal or ideal that has something to 
 do with the purpose and the meaning of fiction. Ro-
 
 ROMANCE 49 
 
 mance as a school or a fashion is traceable enough in 
 literary history, if only one have the knowledge or the 
 patience. It concerns the technique and the subjects 
 of fiction, rather than its purpose and meaning; and 
 for that reason we go at it cavalierly, knowing it for 
 a counterfeit of the thing we seek, and not the thing 
 itself. 
 
 Even at these lower and lowest levels, romance is 
 a complex thing to define, because the word is so vari- 
 ously used, and made the half of so many antitheses. 
 We know what the Romantic Movement was: it was 
 a movement in revolt against classicism, authority, re- 
 straint, formalism, and the ancient past, and toward 
 individualism, socialism, humanitarianism, imagina- 
 tion, nature, mysticism, and the mediaeval past ; — 
 and only incidentally was it a movement toward ro- 
 mances. But we call a detective story a romance, lit- 
 tle though it has to do with any of the crucial things 
 of the Romantic Movement ; and every one of these 
 crucial things has as much to do with realism as with 
 romance. When we say that Byron was a romantic 
 poet, we use a word of known values, referable as it 
 were to a sort of gold standard of meaning ; but when 
 we say that Mrs. Radeliffe or Maturin or Scott was 
 a romantic novelist, we do not know what system of 
 currency we are handling, or what rates of exchange 
 apply to it. We may mean something profoundly 
 important ; or we may mean only that Mrs. Radeliffe 
 invented her scenery instead of observing it, that 
 Maturin tried to make you shiver instead of trying 
 to make you laugh, that Scott wrote about Crusaders
 
 50 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 and Cavaliers instead of about green-grocers and poli- 
 ticians. It is easy enough to say and, on this lower 
 plane of mere fashions, true enough that Scott and, 
 after him, Stevenson were romantic ; Jane Austen and 
 Thackeray and George Eliot realistic ; Bulwer-Lytton 
 romantic when he wrote Kienzi aud realistic when he 
 wrote My Novel. It is easy enough to say this; but 
 it is much less easy to be sure just what we mean by 
 it. All the common labels have their truth if we 
 affix them suggestively enough, but they sometimes 
 palpably refuse to stick ; they turn up at the corners. 
 To exemplify: We say that romance has its inter- 
 est more in actions than in persons; but that is true 
 only of melodrama. We say that romance arbitrarily 
 suppresses many common facts, whereas realism wel- 
 comes all facts that are true ; but the basis of all art, 
 realistic or romantic, is selection, and therefore ex- 
 clusion. We say that romance is idealistic; but all 
 great literature is idealistic with it — and moreover 
 where is the idealism in the average detective "ro- 
 mance"? We say that realism deals with the usual, 
 romance with the unusual ; but the usual of today 
 is the unusual of tomorrow — and has Addison become 
 a romantic because the coffee-house no longer exists, 
 or can Stephen Crane's extraordinarily realistic 
 story The Red Badge of Courage be turned into a 
 romance by the sunrise of that remote day which shall 
 see war archaic, obsolete? Clearly the technical di- 
 visions of realistic and romantic do not stand or fall 
 by such factitious matters. Similarly, most of the 
 other common distinctions of text-book and class-
 
 ROMANCE 51 
 
 room can be reduced to absurdity. Nor will it help 
 us much to say that romance colours life whereas real- 
 ism simply copies it ; for good realism is not primarily 
 photographic, and both romance and realism invent 
 life. You can hardly copy what you have invented; 
 you can only copy what some one else has invented — 
 which is plagiarism. 
 
 No : one cannot define even the mechanical traits 
 and tendencies of romance by any such makeshift 
 formula?. Nor will all one's inquiries be likely to 
 bring a more substantially paying answer than this : 
 — Every age has its dominant qualities, and wearies 
 of them. Those qualities may be actually the virtues 
 of the age, but it wearies of them just the same: 
 nothing bores an age more inexorably than its own 
 virtues in excess, become static and in-growing. 
 Thereupon arises the need, or at least the demand, 
 for a counter-irritant, taking the form of whatever, 
 being most remote and therefore most seductive, re- 
 minds the age of what it would like to be and makes 
 it forget what it is — or at least what it seems to itself, 
 which may be a very different thing. That remote 
 and seductive ideal is the romance of the age, and 
 the works dominated by that ideal are its romances. 
 The supreme charm for us all is in something which is 
 somewhere else— in the clouds, or on the inaccessible 
 horizon, or in the past, or behind the veil of the fu- 
 ture. You have to have only a fairly large number 
 of people all wanting the same thing which they have 
 not got, to create the conventions of a school of ro- 
 mance. Those conventions will change as soon as the
 
 52 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 people have got what they wanted or, more probably, 
 ceased to want it ; and then their romances, so far as 
 they referred to that want and nothing else, will cease 
 to be, or will remain to later ages as the property of 
 immature or restless minds who know not what they 
 want. That is why the romances of Mrs. Radcliffe 
 ceased to be everybody's romances and became the 
 romances of boarding-school girls. That is why Mr. 
 W. L. George says 1 that Scott — in whom Mr. George 
 sees only the trappings and conventions — is "reduced 
 to a juvenile circulation." 
 
 This, then, is the kernel of our notion of romance 
 according to the popular classifications: It is the 
 product of a set of conventions based on a popular 
 demand, the reaction of an epoch against that in itself 
 with which familiarity has bred contempt. We call 
 this work realism, and that romance, first, last, and 
 always by purely mechanical, transient, and often 
 flimsy conventions. 
 
 To illustrate: The 17th century, without hav- 
 ing undergone any real change of conscience, sub- 
 mitted itself to a set of suppressions, political, social, 
 and religious, which became more and more distaste- 
 ful. There was presently to be a wide-spreading 
 revolt against the Puritan spirit, the puritanical life ; 
 it was to take such forms as the Restoration, the licen- 
 tious Restoration drama, the satires of Butler, and the 
 pseudo-classicism of Dryden. But before the time was 
 ripe for these, there came a sort of false dawn of 
 
 i In Anatole France (Writers of the Day) . By W. L. George. 
 New York: Henry Holt and Co.
 
 ROMANCE 53 
 
 emancipation, of which false dawn one of the very 
 first rays was the so-called "heroic romance," first 
 imported from Paris in free translation, later closely 
 imitated in London. The Grand Cyrus of the Scud- 
 erys is the best known of the importations ; the 
 Aretina, a juvenile work of Sir George Mackenzie, 
 famous jurist and founder of the Advocates' Library 
 of Edinburgh, is selected by Professor Sir Walter 
 Raleigh to represent the native crop. In all the works 
 of this school, the 17th century protests against 
 its own life of bourgeois stuffiness by imagining for 
 itself characters of impossible grandeur and magnilo- 
 quence, heavily brocaded kings, queens, and nobles 
 who strut and bombast their way through scenes 
 neither ancient nor modern, speaking a language never 
 spoken by man — no, nor woman neither — and pat- 
 terned of conceits more affected than those of Euphues 
 himself. Congreve, a born realist, said in the Preface 
 to his Incognita: "Romances are generally composed 
 of the constant Loves and invincible Courages of 
 Hero's and Heroines, Kings and Queens, Mortals of 
 the first Rank, and so forth: where lofty Language 
 miraculous Contingencies and impossible Perform- 
 ances, elevate and surprise the Reader into a giddy 
 Delight, which leaves him flat upon the Ground, when- 
 ever he gives off, and vexes him to think how he has 
 suffer 'd himself to be pleased and transported, con- 
 eern'd and afflicted at the several passages he has 
 read." Thus even Congreve, separated by only a few 
 years from this effeminate school — the Aretina was 
 dedicated, as Professor Raleigh notes, "to all the
 
 54 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 Ladies of this Nation" — could see what we see more 
 plainly still, that the "heroic romance" was really 
 most unheroic bombast, a thing consisting exclusively 
 of conventions wrought out of a momentary desire, 
 and as ephemeral as the desire itself. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The history of literature seems to show that ro- 
 mance based on conventions always does one of two 
 things, both of which prove the infirmity of romance 
 so bred and so nourished. It either sinks into the 
 ground, leaving hardly any trace, as this "heroic 
 romance" of the 17th century did, or else it finds its 
 way to some renewal of which the most important in- 
 gredient is not the romantic convention but the realis- 
 tic feeling and purpose. The 18th century "School 
 of Terror," the novel's contribution to the Romantic 
 Revival, illustrates this second possible destiny. 
 
 The Romantic Revival sought after the mediaeval 
 spirit — often, it must be admitted, seeking it where it 
 was not. The first or pseudo-classical part of the 
 century used the word "Gothic" to signify whatever 
 was repellently bizarre, grotesque, and medievally 
 ugly; the second or romanticist part of the century 
 used the same word to denote the seductiveness, the 
 mystery, and the glamour of the mediaeval past. 
 Gothicism came to be a fad about the time that 
 Horace Walpole, brilliant politician and man of wit, 
 built his famous country house in imitation of a
 
 ROMANCE 55 
 
 feudal castle (a very bad piece of architecture, by 
 Ruskin's standard of beauty-in-utility). Walpole 
 also wrote The Castle of Otranto, and so became the 
 first to lend fashionable countenance to the tribe of 
 ghosts and apparitions that "squeaked and gib- 
 bered" and groaned in musty vaults and dim wind- 
 swept corridors until the time when Jane Austen's 
 Northanger Abbey let in the sunlight of common 
 sense upon them and proved them pasteboard and 
 phosphorus. We wonder now how the poet Gray 
 could have shivered all night over the ghostly mock- 
 heroics of Otranto, and especially how he could have 
 owned up to it; we wonder how The Old E7iglish 
 Baron of Clara Reeve and The Mysteries of Udolpho 
 of Mrs. Radcliffe could have set a generation of teeth 
 chattering. To us, these and the other works of their 
 sort mean simply the discontent of the 18th century 
 with its own curtailed imaginative life, its materialis- 
 tic and rather grossly hearty physical life; it wanted 
 to get out of itself into the past, and any readiest 
 naive misconception of the past would do. 
 
 Nevertheless, the School of Terror, unlike the heroic 
 romance, did lead to something. It left a double leg- 
 acy, the first and most important half of which was 
 the rationally and nationally historical fiction of 
 Scott. It was but a step from the unreal past peopled 
 with ghosts to the real past peopled with people. 
 Scott, who was very genuinely and painstakingly an 
 antiquarian and archaeologist before he was a novel- 
 ist or even a poet, turned the convention of mediaeval- 
 ism into something other and greater than a conven-
 
 56 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 tion. He kept the glamour of the past but not its 
 ghosts; he let that glamour clothe and surround folk 
 who are as real as you or I, and when he wrote about 
 a ghost he was likeliest to do it as a joke — as in 
 Wandering Willie 's Tale. 1 In short, Scott saved some 
 of the conventions of romance by the amount and kind 
 of faithful realism which he put with them. We give 
 his tales their label of "historical romance" because 
 of the superficial convention by which it is easiest to 
 identify them — very much as it is easiest to identify 
 one's partner at a dance by her clothes. But one 
 enjoys one's partner, at least one does if one is lucky, 
 for her wit or grace or good sense; and we read the 
 tales of Scott because they give us the Crusades, 
 Feudalism, Cavalier and Roundhead, the Covenanters, 
 Scotland, a whole pageant of diversified human na- 
 ture — in a word, life. "Whether it is being lived or 
 has been lived makes little difference : underneath the 
 trappings and the shifting attendant circumstances, 
 it is all of the same stuff. It is the revelation of 
 sameness, not the difference of dress, that counts — and 
 that revelation is, in the profoundest sense, realism. 
 
 No need to debate the more minute problem of 
 whether the Middle Ages were actually as Scott por- 
 trayed them. They are real enough so that he takes 
 us into them for the sake of what he can show us there ; 
 whereas Walpole merely takes us out of the present 
 for the sake of what he cannot show us there. Scott 
 means the rich sufficiency of the historic past; the 
 
 1 In Redgauntlet, Letter Eleventh of the Introduction.
 
 EOMANCE 57 
 
 School of Terror means the unsatisfying emptiness of 
 the present. 
 
 We classify Scott, then, as a romancer, but value 
 and cling to him for his fundamental realism. It is 
 not a thoroughgoing realism ; but what there is of it 
 is truth. 
 
 This discrepancy in our treatment of Scott brings 
 us to the very important question: How can 
 the accoutrements and the machinery of romance be 
 made to serve a purpose and a meaning essentially re- 
 alistic ? What objective of the great realists do Scott 
 and other romancers find it easier to reach through the 
 convention of their chosen medium, romance? The 
 answer brings us very near to the point where the 
 duality of realism and romance disappears and the 
 two merge. 
 
 All great art deals somehow with the strangeness of 
 things. Under the most striking portrait, the most 
 impressionistic interpretation of a landscape, the most 
 fantastic piece of humour, the most intimate and faith- 
 ful transcription of man's individual or social life, 
 there lies a sense that any aspect of reality has only 
 to be known through and through, or from the right 
 angle, to become seductively mysterious, obscurely 
 wonderful. The better we know things, the more 
 amazing they are. Of this part of the credo of all 
 good imaginative art, there is a consummate expres- 
 sion in the following words by one of America's great- 
 est, and least known, tellers of strange tales : 
 
 "It is to him of widest knowledge, of deepest feel-
 
 58 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 ing, of sharpest observation and insight, that life is 
 most crowded with figures of heroic stature, with 
 spirits of dream, with demons of the pit, with graves 
 that yawn in pathways leading to the light, with ex- 
 istences not of earth, both malign and benign — min- 
 isters of grace and ministers of doom. The truest 
 eye is that which discerns the shadow and the por- 
 tent, the dead hands reaching, the light that is the 
 heart of the darkness, the sky 'with dreadful faces 
 thronged and fiery arms.' The truest ear is that 
 which hears 
 
 'Celestial voices to the midnight air, 
 Sole, or responsive each to the other's note, 
 Singing — ' 
 
 not 'their great Creator,' but not a negro melody, 
 either; no, nor the latest favourite of the drawing- 
 room. In short, he to whom life is not picturesque, 
 enchanting, astonishing, terrible, is denied the gift 
 and faculty divine, and being no poet can write no 
 prose. ' ' x 
 
 All the great effects of literature depend on some 
 sort of paradox, surprise, redistribution of emphasis, 
 or re-reading of the obvious and superficial meanings 
 of things. The general message of art is that things 
 are not what they seem; and the temporary formulae 
 of art are simply this or that man's convenient way 
 of expressing this truth. Realism is the fashionable 
 formula of this hour, romance has been that of some 
 other hours. 
 
 1 The Opinionator, pp. 244-5. New York and Washington: 
 The ISTeale Publishing Co., 1911.
 
 ROMANCE 59 
 
 Now, it is obvious that the historical romancer 
 finds ready and at his disposal an extraordinary 
 measure of this paradox or inverted emphasis. He 
 finds it in the one most typical and traditional arti- 
 fice of the historical novel : the subordination of great 
 folk whom we distantly know in history, and the 
 emergence of other folk whom we have never heard 
 of. Richard the Lion-Hearted exists not for Saladin 
 and Limoges, but for Ivanhoe ; Savonarola is brought 
 into being, not as revivalist, politician, and martyr, 
 but as a decisive factor in the moral history of Ro- 
 mola; Erasmus the great humanist becomes a little 
 child that we may read the love story of his parents. 
 Great things that we think of ordinarily as having 
 wrought certain great ends exist now for other and 
 lesser ends. And if the revised version in the ro- 
 mance is less true to fact, we know in our hearts that 
 it is much more true to life. 
 
 The effect is as that of sudden personal knowledge 
 of a famous man. You idealize him or denounce him, 
 follow his career, vote for him, vote against him, read 
 his books or review them, see him through a mist of 
 his importance and inaccessibility: then you spend 
 a week-end in the same house with him, and find that 
 your personage is after all a person. He reads the 
 Barchester novels once a year, likes to whittle out 
 toys for children with his jack-knife, and thinks your 
 father's old teacher of Roman History was the great- 
 est man he ever met. Your personage has suddenly 
 conferred a mysterious greatness upon ordinary things 
 through their association with him, and humanity upon
 
 60 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 himself through his interest in them. Proportion is 
 restored ; he is part of the life you know ; and for the 
 first time you begin to see him somewhat as he sees 
 himself, and to know what are his real realities. 
 
 Some such effect as this comes out of historical 
 novels in which the heroes are other than the heroes 
 of history. Great events and great personages win a 
 sudden new glamour by coming near to us ; and little 
 events and persons are magnified by being brought 
 near to them. The pulse quickens as the novelist puts 
 us suddenly face to face, by a twist of romantic arti- 
 fice, with the one strangest yet most familiar thing 
 in the world, the miracle of our common humanity. 
 That swift raising of a veil or an iron mask, the chief 
 trick of our romancer's entire bagful, is accomplished 
 then for a purpose altogether realistic — the revelation 
 of things as they are, and of the strangeness of their 
 being so. 
 
 IV 
 
 In the face of such considerations, I find it possible 
 to answer in but one way the question whether we 
 value "romantic" fiction most for the romance in it 
 or for the realism. Romance is only a system of con- 
 ventions; and if only those conventions are present, 
 we do not permanently value the product at all. 
 Great or enduring romance makes use of those con- 
 ventions for precisely such ends as belong to the 
 realist. Romance concerns, then, the medium, the 
 means and technique, of fiction, and has the least
 
 ROMANCE 61 
 
 possible to do with its purpose and meaning. For 
 the sake of convenient categories, we say that the 
 realistic use of remote and unfamiliar material is 
 romance, and that the realistic use of near 
 and familiar material is realism. But this simply 
 means that one writer knows best, as Scott did, the 
 remote and unfamiliar; another, as his contemporary 
 Jane Austen did, the near and familiar. Each trav- 
 els where he knows the trails; but there is only one 
 destination worth talking about. Speak of "ro- 
 mance" as you will in discussing the how and 
 whence of fiction, you are necessarily talking about 
 realism when you discuss its why, its purpose and 
 meaning. Romance is only a specialized technique ; 
 that is, a somewhat circuitous way of getting to a 
 destination. All fiction is truly great in so far as it 
 is realistic in spirit, other things being equal; and 
 there are no true artists but those who are at bottom 
 realists. 
 
 So at least we seem to make out when we consult 
 that side of the School of Terror which leads to the 
 historical novel as written by Scott. When we in- 
 spect its other legacy, of horror and "spinal shiver," 
 the psychic and the phantasmal, we find again that 
 the mere conventions of romance, in order to save 
 their lives at all, had to be translated into terms of 
 realism. The mediaevalism of the School of Terror 
 leads to Scott ; the psychic abnormality of the School 
 of Terror leads to Poe and Hawthorne. We shall 
 have traced in our minds the symmetrical curve of 
 the modern ghost story if we see that it had its life
 
 62 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 in the realism of The Apparition of Mrs. Veal, its 
 romantic death, in Walpole and the other Terrorists, 
 and its complete resurrection in such things as The 
 Turn of the Screw of Henry James and Ambrose 
 Bierce's tales of the ghostly and the ghastly. This is 
 the complete cycle in outline. The renewal of the 
 psychic begins in England with Charles Robert 
 Maturin, whose Melmoth the Wanderer is perhaps 
 oftener referred to than read, though it is still pos- 
 sible to read it with interest. On the Continent, de 
 la Mott-Fouque and Jean Paul Richter are the names 
 which correspond ; that is, the names which imply Poe 
 and Hawthorne a little later. These two American 
 masters are midway of the upward curve. Using in- 
 deed the old bottles of supernaturalism and terror, 
 they fill them nevertheless with the new wine of some- 
 thing akin to scientific interpretation. They are half- 
 way back to realism; and it is the infiltration of 
 realism into their romance which makes them live. 
 
 It may seem a loose and rather wild classification 
 which puts Poe and Hawthorne together, antithetical 
 as they are at many points — the one a Puritan in in- 
 heritance and temperament if not in code, the other 
 as nearly unmoral as human nature can be, and with- 
 out any moorings in either place or time. But let us 
 see. In their separate ways they are both most ab- 
 sorbed, the one intensely, the other deeply, in the 
 meaning and the results of sin in the individual life, 
 and most preoccupied with the stress and mystery of 
 man's relation with his own heart. The message of 
 both comes to something like the inexorable hounding
 
 ROMANCE 63 
 
 of conscience — 'though Hawthorne is interested in con- 
 science as an agent of the moral law, Poe only as an 
 agent of torture, a screw to be applied to human will 
 until it cracks. One is a moral judge, the other a 
 moral anatomist ; but the art of either finds its centre 
 in human sin, its nature and its inevasible conse- 
 quences. In The Scarlet Letter, as Professor Wood- 
 berry has said, ' ' sin now staining the soul ... is the 
 theme; and the course of the story concerns man's 
 dealing with sin, in his own breast or the breasts of 
 others." 1 In The House of the Seven Gables the 
 burden of past misdoings presses down upon the life 
 of the present, to render it sinister and futile. 
 ' ' ' Shall we never, never get rid of this law ? ' ' cries 
 Holgrave. " 'It lies upon the Present like a giant's 
 dead body.' " In the earlier of these stories man 
 struggles pettily to evade the consequences of his own 
 sin ; in the later, he is foredoomed by ancestral wrongs 
 which are beyond righting. 
 
 With Poe, this sense of the omnipresence of evil 
 takes two special forms : first, a tireless interest in that 
 evil perversity of human nature which makes each 
 man, as Oscar Wilde said, "kill the thing he loves" in 
 order to torture his own soul; and, second, a vivid 
 appreciation of the disintegrating effect of remorse 
 upon the sanity. Poe trying to create pure fantasy, 
 as in The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, is too jejune 
 for interest ; but we remember the Poe who understood 
 the paradox that there is a perverse pleasure in self- 
 
 i 'Nathaniel Hawthorne (American Men of Letters Series), p. 
 193. By George E. Woodberry. Boston and New York: 
 Houghton Mifflin Co., 1902.
 
 64 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 inflicted pain, and the truism that no man can long 
 live sanely with the darkest elements of his own na- 
 ture. And this is Poe the realist. 
 
 Both writers falsify the truth of life by suppression 
 of part. Hawthorne expresses the moral rigour of 
 cisatlantic Puritanism, but not its hope of forgiveness 
 and redemption; Poe expresses the soul's capacity for 
 evil and for remorse, but not its capacity for 
 renunciation, noble endeavour, and self-discipline. 
 In both, the abnormal predominates ; but so far as 
 they continue to be read on their merits as authors, 
 not merely for their prestige as classics, they are read 
 because the abnormality which they portrayed is ac- 
 tually there, a pervasive and inescapable part of life. 
 Their artificial suppressions and their lack of actual 
 knowledge of what life is may together cost them 
 length of literary life ; but while they live at all, they 
 live because they traced human impulse and motive 
 inward to dark secret sources. 
 
 Starting then with the two chiefly romantic impulses 
 of the School of Terror, medievalism and psychic 
 horror, we find that each saves itself by becoming 
 transmuted into something else which is not ulti- 
 mately romantic at all ; and that the amount of sal- 
 vation is just about in proportion to the amount of 
 realism acquired. The vague Gothicism of the 18th 
 century becomes the true historical sense of Scott ; its 
 monsters become the balanced human beings of Scott; 
 its apparitions turn into the spectres of old sins come 
 back to prey on the soul ; its re-echoing ghostly voices 
 become conscience. The historical novel explores
 
 ROMANCE 65 
 
 widely and freely among outward realities of space 
 and past time; the fiction of Poe and Hawthorne ex- 
 plores deeply within, subjecting the heart and the 
 brain to analysis of whatever is most corrosive there. 
 Still other strata of our fiction have demonstrably this 
 same romantic foundation ; but they all alike abandon 
 more and more the strangeness of life as it is not for 
 the still greater strangeness of life as it is. 
 
 V 
 
 Perhaps we have come too long a way round for so 
 simple a result. It is obvious enough a priori that 
 all fiction is based on life, and that the worth of the 
 fiction is contingent on the fulness and truth of the 
 vision of life. Fulness and truth in the vision, these 
 are the chief tests of a great realism ; and if great 
 realism happen to fall in a romantic school or vogue, 
 that makes ultimately but little difference. The 
 realist loves life, as his own eye sees it, too well to miss 
 any of the savour of its actuality ; he whom we call a 
 romancer loves life too well not to array it in fine ves- 
 tures, shape it to the mould of a heroic tradition, and 
 make it trail clouds of glory. This is the unimportant 
 and passing difference. But they both love life. 
 That is the essential similarity; and it is more im- 
 portant than any difference. 
 
 If then we come upon a piece of literature which 
 distorts the nature of life, we shall have to call it bad 
 literature; that is, non-realistic literature. For the
 
 66 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 test of realism, which is the test of excellence, is fidel- 
 ity to the nature of life. Romance is a kind of real- 
 ism which undertakes to reveal the nature of life 
 while claiming, perhaps, some licence in its handling 
 of the mere facts of life. Realism undertakes to be 
 faithful both to the nature and the facts of life, and 
 needs, as we have seen, to discharge both of its re- 
 sponsibilities. If what we call romance distort both 
 the facts and the nature of life, it fails and dies ; and 
 the meaning of its failure is not that it was bad ro- 
 mance, recreant to facts, but that it was bad realism, 
 recreant to the truth which is above the facts. 
 
 I have meant not so much to deny the difference 
 between realism and romance as to belittle its signifi- 
 cance. There is a difference; and it is of some in- 
 cidental importance to the novelist that he shall be in 
 the vogue of his generation, for the fashion is prodigi- 
 ously important to the commerce between producer 
 and public, and many a romancer has missed his mark 
 by using a sort of ammunition which went with older 
 firearms, long superseded. But we are speaking of 
 the target ; and here, we insist, the white is one thing 
 and one only — the truth and the meaning of life as 
 men and women live it. 
 
 Consider, for an illustration and a test, a page of 
 Scott, from A Legend of Montrose. Angus M'Aulay 
 has dined in London at the house of Sir Miles Mus- 
 grave, where were put on the table six candlesticks 
 of solid silver; and Angus, touched in his Scotsman's 
 local pride, has sworn that he has "mair candlesticks, 
 and better candlesticks, in his ain castle at hame, than
 
 ROMANCE 67 
 
 were ever lighted in a hall in Cumberland," and has 
 backed up his oath by the wager of a sum which he 
 does not possess. Behold the outcome, in the Scottish 
 halls of M'Aulay:— 
 
 ' ' Donald, as they were speaking, entered, with rather 
 a blither face than he might have been expected to 
 wear, considering the impending fate of his master's 
 purse and credit. 'Gentlemens, her dinner is ready, 
 and her candles are lighted too,' said Donald, with a 
 strong guttural emphasis on the last clause of his 
 speech. 
 
 " 'What the devil can he mean?' said Musgrave, 
 looking to his countryman. 
 
 "Lord Menteith put the same question with his 
 eyes to the Laird, which M'Aulay answered by shak- 
 ing his head. 
 
 "A short dispute about precedence somewhat de- 
 layed their leaving the apartment. Lord Menteith 
 insisted upon yielding up that which belonged to his 
 rank, on consideration of his being in his own country, 
 and of his near connection with the family in which 
 they found themselves. The two English strangers, 
 therefore, were first ushered into the hall, where an 
 unexpected display awaited them. The large oaken 
 table was spread with substantial joints of meat, and 
 seats were placed in order for the guests. Behind 
 every seat stood a gigantic Highlander, completely 
 dressed, and armed after the fashion of his country, 
 holding in his right hand his drawn sword, with the 
 point turned downwards, and in the left a blazing 
 torch made of the bog-pine. This wood, found in the
 
 68 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 morasses, is so full of turpentine, that when split 
 and dried, it is frequently used in the Highlands in- 
 stead of candles. The unexpected and somewhat 
 startling apparition was seen by the red glare of the 
 torches, which displayed the wild features, unusual 
 dress, and glittering [swords?] of those who bore 
 them, while the smoke, eddying up to the roof of the 
 hall, overcanopied them with a volume of vapour. 
 Ere the strangers had recovered from their surprise, 
 Allan stepped forward, and pointing with his 
 sheathed broadsword to the torch-bearers, said, in a 
 deep and stern tone of voice, 'Behold, gentlemen caval- 
 iers, the chandeliers of my brother 's house, the ancient 
 fashion of our ancient name ; not one of these men 
 knows any law but their chief's command — Would 
 you dare to compare to them in value the richest 
 ore that ever was dug out of the mine? How say 
 you, cavaliers ? — is your wager won or lost ? ' 
 
 ' ' ' Lost, lost, ' said Musgrave gayly — ' my own silver 
 candlesticks are all melted and riding on horseback by 
 this time, and I wish the fellows that enlisted were 
 half as trusty as these. — Here, sir,' he added to the 
 chief, 'is your money; it impairs Hall's finances and 
 mine somewhat, but debts of honour must be settled.' 
 
 " 'My father's curse upon my father's son,' said 
 Allan, interrupting him, 'if he receives from you one 
 penny! It is enough that you claim no right to ex- 
 act from him what is his own.' 
 
 "Lord Menteith eagerly supported Allan's opinion, 
 and the elder M'Aulay readily joined, declaring the 
 whole to be a fool's business, and not worth speaking
 
 ROMANCE 69 
 
 more about. The Englishmen, after some courteous 
 opposition, were persuaded to regard the whole as a 
 joke. 
 
 " 'And now, Allan,' said the Laird, 'please to re- 
 move your candles; for, since the Saxon gentlemen 
 have seen them, they will eat their dinner as com- 
 fortably by the light of the old tin sconces, without 
 scornfishing them with so much smoke.' 
 
 "Accordingly, at a sign from Allan, the living chan- 
 deliers, recovering their broadswords, and holding 
 the point erect, marched out of the hall, and left the 
 guests to enjoy their refreshments. ' ' x 
 
 There are all the trappings of the romantic, in- 
 cluding the deliberate effort to work the scene up to 
 a heightened intensity which is to fiction what elo- 
 quence is to speech. But in what is the chief effect? 
 Is it in the picturesqueness, the ornate and martial 
 machinery of the episode, the stage fittings, or even 
 in the triumph of the character who enlists our sym- 
 pathy — this last one of the major conventions of ro- 
 mance? Or is it in the loyalty of the brother who 
 has contrived the ruse, the most human joy of the 
 aged servitor in his master's triumph and the op- 
 ponent's discomfiture, the debonair and courtly grace 
 of the good loser, and above all the ringing truth be- 
 hind the whole affair, that metals are dross when 
 weighed in the balance against men? In these latter 
 things, to be sure; and so always in such scenes in- 
 volving artificially heightened effects, if they are suc- 
 cessful. 
 
 i A Legend of Montrose, Chapter Fourth.
 
 70 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 The novelist's loyalty to life varies (shall we say?) 
 as man's love for woman. The realist is the indulgent 
 lover who would have his mistress as she is, who 
 feels that any change would be a loss, because it would 
 interfere with her identity, make her less completely 
 herself. Your romancer is the passionate lover who 
 cannot bear that his mistress should be in any wise 
 less than his thought of her ; he covets for her all good 
 things, sees in her all possibilities ; he wants her to be, 
 not exactly someone else, but as it were more in- 
 tensely and exclusively herself. He is like a man who 
 exaggerates the truth for sheer love of the truth. 
 To borrow and adapt a phrase, the romancer exag- 
 gerates life in the direction of itself. But both 
 realist and romancer must be impersonal: they must 
 love life, and not merely themselves. The historical 
 novel must take us out of the present because there 
 is so much for us in the past — not simply to take us 
 out of the present. If what the romancer provides be 
 only an easy way of emotional escape, then he is serv- 
 ing, not the True Romance, but only a shallow, vain, 
 and egoistic spirit which we call by another and less 
 honourable name. Between that lesser spirit and 
 clean romance, or clean realism either, there is, as we 
 shall see, implacable war. But there is no war be- 
 tween romance and realism, any more than there is 
 between true science and true religion.
 
 Ill 
 
 SENTIMENTALISM
 
 On some sort of love for the nature of life rests, 
 then, all sound romance, all sound realism. There 
 are many kinds of love. The novelist may love life as 
 a mistress "uncertain, coy, and hard to please," but 
 worth the knowing and the serving for all that, and 
 on her own terms; he may be in two minds whether 
 to idealize her at a distance or to defy disenchantment 
 in the nearest intimacy, like Meredith's lover who 
 
 "Fain would fling the net, and fain have her free" ; 
 
 or he may trust and give himself completely up to 
 her, in the sure knowledge that, though she may both 
 "bruise and bless," he can have the full blessing only 
 as he accepts the bruises. There are many kinds of 
 love: but, for the novelist, only this one mistress. 
 And his fundamental loyalty to life is the same 
 whether he tend to interpret life realistically or to 
 exalt it romantically. 
 
 Now, it happens, as I have just hinted, that the 
 romantic novelist is the more subject to a certain 
 grave temptation or danger : the danger of substi- 
 tuting self-love for love of life, and of interpreting 
 the world exclusively as a ministry to self-delight. 
 Professor Irving Babbitt characterizes the romantic 
 lover in poetry by comparing him, in the terms of a 
 
 not too celebrated mot, to the domestic cat which 
 
 73
 
 74 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 rubs its body against your leg: the cat does not love 
 you, it "loves itself on you." So the romantic lover 
 may prize his mistress, not for what she is, but for 
 her reflection of him, her subtle and unanalysable 
 appeal to his own vanity — or to his own humility, 
 which may be only his vanity inverted. And so the 
 novelist may, if there be too little of the impersonal in 
 his fibre, love himself on life, and give us, for all his 
 and our pains, not so much a reading of what life is 
 or may be as an exhibition of his own private needs 
 and greeds, predilections and aversions, prides and 
 shames. He may part company with the realist, who 
 says: "This is beauty, because it is truth," and with 
 the romancer, who says : ' ' This is truth, because it is 
 beauty"; — he may part company with both, and say 
 tacitly no more than "This is what I enjoy." In 
 short, he may let himself be animated by that shallow, 
 vain, and egoistic spirit which we call sentimental ism ; 
 the spirit which produces a counterfeit idealism, a 
 spurious realism, compound of self plus emotion. 
 Because the romancer has a freer hand with the cir- 
 cumstances, and is less rigidly bound by what he sees 
 before his eyes, he is the more likely to stumble into 
 this pitfall of self; and that is why we may call the 
 spirit of sentimental ism an underbred country cousin 
 of romance. 
 
 Sentimentalism, a sickly and corrosive thing, is 
 enormously important in the history of literature, and 
 especially of British literature; so important that al- 
 most any episode of the development of our fiction 
 might be recounted as a struggle of sentimentalism
 
 SENTIMENTALISM 75 
 
 against its counter-agents. He who should undertake 
 to tell the history of sentimentalisni in the novel 
 would stand committed to a complete history of the 
 novel ; for in each generation the sentimental spirit is 
 so enlaced with the general evolution of fiction that 
 there is no story left to tell except that of the senti- 
 mental spirit in its struggle to survive against strong 
 opposition. Everything that is not for sentimental- 
 ism is against it, and has been so ever since, in the 
 tremendous decade which gave the English novel its 
 modern shape, Richardson sentimentalized his way 
 into the popular heart and Fielding took up the pen 
 of satire to drive him out. The clash between Pamela 
 and Joseph Andrews recurs, in one way or another, 
 from decade to decade— not so spectacularly perhaps, 
 because hardly ever again with so near an approach 
 to equality between the contenders, but nevertheless 
 demonstrably and implacably. The man of feeling 
 and the man of reflection have their truces ; hardly, as 
 yet, a permanent peace. 
 
 Sentimentalism is, however, somewhat more than 
 feeling. If it had to do merely with displays of 
 sensibility, the exhibition of tender and often neurotic 
 emotions inadequately grounded in ideas, the story of 
 it might be a long one, but it could hardly be a very 
 subtle one. The anatomist of the sentimental cultus 
 beholds his real difficulty when he notes that senti- 
 mentalism is interpenetrated with other substances, 
 many of them the most respectable, and that some of 
 its manifestations are of a sort to counterfeit what- 
 ever we most prize in motive and conduct. Senti-
 
 76 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 mentalism is, indeed, to begin with, a saturation with 
 sensibility, the very dew-point of the emotional. But 
 that is only the beginning of it. After we have taken 
 sufficient account of sentimentalism as hyperesthesia, 
 we find other expressions of it past numbering. 
 
 Of these others, I may single out four, as being 
 perhaps the most important here, through their 
 prevalence in literature. — 
 
 First, the spirit of self-righteousness. The self- 
 righteous man may indeed love good conduct; but it 
 is his own good conduct that he loves, and more be- 
 cause it is his own than because it is good. This is 
 the spirit that pities the sinful because they are so 
 far beneath us who pity them — we think how wretched 
 we should be in their place. It is also the spirit 
 that philanthropizes and confers benefits through self- 
 love. To give material succour is to bask in the glow 
 of one's own goodness — and it is so easy to purchase 
 merit thus ! 
 
 Secondly, the spirit of vanity or grandiloquence or 
 bombast. Mr. Chesterton has arraigned one of its 
 modern tricks in a little essay called Demagogues and 
 Mystagogues. 1 This is the spirit that identifies one's 
 self in a proprietary way with one's profession or 
 one's special interests. Fielding's doctors quarrel 
 learnedly together about how the arm should be set, 
 while the patient lies in torture, and dispute over the 
 corpse to settle which killed him, because their own 
 dignity must be upheld whatever becomes of the sci- 
 
 i In All Things Considered. By G. K. Chesterton. New 
 York: John Lane Co. MCMIX.
 
 SENTIMENTALISM 77 
 
 ence of medicine ; lawyers deliver their paid opinions 
 in a jargon which none can understand, because their 
 own majesty comes above that of the law ; the school- 
 master talks about education as though he were its 
 patron saint, the dilettante about art as though it 
 were a helpless orphan committed to his care, and the 
 clergyman about God as though he were a benevolent 
 and rather more responsible elderly relative of God — 
 say, a maiden aunt. An inflated, puffed-up spirit 
 this, that tries to dignify itself by ownership of that 
 which is beyond any personal ownership. 
 
 Thirdly, the self-deception which we call hypocrisy. 
 For probably any consistent hypocrite is essentially a 
 self-deceiver. No man can dispense in the long run 
 with belief in himself; and hence he misreads his 
 own motives, forgets whatever would confute him if 
 he remembered it, and invents the most plausibly un- 
 selfish motives for his self-seeking. The young lady 
 continues to enjoy her roast lamb and be horrified at 
 the trade of butchering, and thinks quite well of her- 
 self in both connections; Theobald and Christina — I 
 am referring here to Samuel Butler's posthumous 
 classic The Way of All Flesh — continue to torture 
 their son, out of a dubious mixture of self-righteous- 
 ness, innate love of cruelty, and the sense of their 
 own power and authority, and persuade themselves 
 that they are doing it all for the good of the son. 
 
 Fourthly, the spirit of shallow optimism, that sees 
 everything in a beautiful mist of "rose-pink" (Mere- 
 dith's word) ; that is always talking about "the sordid 
 things of life" (meaning things which are not pretty) ;
 
 78 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 that creates all the scores of sugar-plum-angel men, 
 women, and children — especially children, the Sand- 
 fords and Little Evas and Pollyannas of sentimental 
 fiction, precocious infants with a diseased passion for 
 making you cheerful and good : — the spirit that says 
 tacitly, "This is the world / made: see how much 
 nicer it is than that dismal real world of obstinate 
 facts and problems without solutions! If you don't 
 like my world better than that, it must be that you 
 have an evil, sordid mind." 
 
 These four spirits — self-righteousness, vanity, hy- 
 pocrisy, and the fashionable optimism — are all senti- 
 mental : they all set up the first person singular as 
 above the impersonal law of life, and study the world, 
 if they study it at all, only to project themselves into 
 it for the self-satisfied thrill of rediscovering them- 
 selves there. The sentimentalist will actually inflict 
 pain on himself for the pleasure of seeing himself 
 bear it heroically; he will tempt others into despite- 
 fully using and persecuting him, in order to anoint 
 himself with the soothing oils of righteous indignation 
 and self-pity. The peculiar insidiousness of this sen- 
 timentalism is, in fact, that it nearly always concerns 
 itself with well-meaning and well-doing, and by its 
 fruits it is at times well-nigh indistinguishable from 
 the most self-disciplined and impersonal rule of life. 
 
 II 
 
 It will be seen that these subtler manifestations of 
 sentimentalism are here defined as simply effects of
 
 SENTIMENTALISM 79 
 
 the egoism inherent in man, and with little or no 
 reference to the goodness or badness of the actual 
 conduct involved or advocated. And the definition 
 will, I think, do all that may be asked of it. Senti- 
 mentalism is primarily not a sort of conduct, but a 
 sort of spirit behind conduct; and the same acts may 
 be prompted now by a sentimental attitude, again by 
 a really humane or social spirit. Emerson's precept, 
 "Love and you shall be loved: all love is as mathe- 
 matically just as the two sides of an algebraic equa- 
 tion," is a most unsentimental argument for loving 
 much, but a most whiningly sentimental argument for 
 - demanding to be loved. The shilling may be dropped 
 into a beggar's hat to afford the giver enjoyment of 
 his own munificence, or to do penance for a previous 
 sin of greed, or to avoid the self-accusation of stingi- 
 ness (all sentimental motives), or to express one's 
 understanding sympathy for another life that thus 
 becomes, if only for an instant and a shilling's worth, 
 one's own. It is the same shilling in any case — but 
 it does not mean the same thing. And of course 
 fiction is bound to be concerned above all with what 
 it means. 
 
 At this point some close analyst of motive takes the 
 floor to ask whether there is not, behind all these dis- 
 tinctions, a fundamental sameness. Whatever we do, 
 and whyever we do it, does not every motive originate 
 in self, and does not every act proceed out of the in- 
 dividual's instinct for self-fulfilment? One man de- 
 spoils the poor to increase his own wealth : another 
 gives out of what he has, ostensibly to help the poor :
 
 80 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 but is not this merely a more refined and sensitive 
 selfishness, the very quintessence in fact of self -grati- 
 fication? To which we must return, for all answer: 
 "Yes, we do indeed at every turn that which we have 
 the most and the strongest reasons for wanting to do. 
 There is no unselfishness in the sense of acts which 
 profit us nothing, materially or morally. But that 
 fact does not abolish the infinite gradations in the 
 rewards of our conduct. It is precisely of those" 
 gradations that the novelist, if he be worthy, must 
 take most account. All conduct does originate in 
 self; but it does not all end there. Let the novelist 
 look to it that he express his own will in conduct which 
 takes the self outward into other lives ; which identi- 
 fies the ego with other egos, and reaches across the 
 barriers of selfhood to some sort of community." In 
 short, there is a self that expresses itself in terms of 
 self, with reference always inward; there is another 
 self that has the outward reference, expressing itself 
 by instinct and habit in terms of other things — and 
 this second self is an entity much better worth ex- 
 pressing. It is the non-sentimental ego. Let the 
 novelist understand it, and be it, we say; else his 
 appeal to us is of the shallowest. A. murders B. ; 
 C. gives his life trying to save B. from A. Call both 
 acts self-fulfilment, as ultimately they are : all we 
 need point out is that it makes a great deal of differ- 
 ence what kind of self you have to fulfil, and that the 
 novelist does well to choose discriminatingly which he 
 shall hold up to our esteem.
 
 SENTIMENTALISM 81 
 
 Or, to illustrate the same matter in historical 
 terms : — 
 
 Eichardson was the sentimentalist incarnate. 
 Fielding was the satirist. In Pamela Richardson por- 
 trayed a somewhat prudish servant girl resisting the 
 attempts of her libertine master to seduce her, and at 
 last, by having the good sense to keep herself inac- 
 cessible, winning his hand in marriage. Her conduct 
 is right; her motive a rather low expediency — the 
 virtue, not of brave and thoughtful idealism, but of 
 convention added to fear. That the element of ex- 
 pediency figures largely in her conduct is proved by 
 her slavish adulation of Mr. B. when he offers her 
 marriage. He has behaved monstrously to her, made 
 himself loathsome to the sense of decency — and yet 
 when his offers cease to be "illicit" Pamela can only 
 cry out in melting gratitude at his angelic condescen- 
 sion. One is reminded of John Tanner's sarcastic re- 
 tort to Octavius: "So we are to marry your sister 
 to a damned scoundrel by way of reforming her char- 
 acter!" — both Octavius and Richardson being victims 
 of the old sentimental confusion of "character" with 
 "reputation." Pamela shares with them a tawdry 
 superstition that it is vile for a coward and sneak to 
 possess a noble woman in one way, but eminently 
 praiseworthy and satisfactory for him to possess her 
 in another. John Tanner and Fielding share the 
 somewhat different notion that it is detestable for a 
 coward and sneak to possess a noble woman at all, 
 and that if she is really noble she will see him for
 
 82 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 what he is, and despise him as much when he grovels 
 before her as when he tries to dominate her by trick- 
 ery or force. Fielding took Richardson's theme and 
 turned it into ridicule by inversion. He portrayed a 
 young serving-man who resists the advances of his 
 wanton mistress — not in order to advocate laxity of 
 conduct against Richardson's narrow rigidity, but to 
 extinguish with burlesque a moralist who advocated 
 the narrowest rigidity for the most dubious reasons. 
 Both novelists would have Pamela guard herself well : 
 but one of them would have her do it for reasons 
 which prove her a sensible creature with a taint of 
 canny self-righteousness, the other for reasons which 
 prove her a noble woman of some capacity to think for 
 herself. The really dramatic crux of living is not in 
 conduct but in motive. 
 
 Now, it is true that Fielding savours his own satire 
 just as much as Richardson does his own sentimental- 
 ism, and that both are equally far from philosophical 
 disinterestedness. But one finds his delight in a 
 philosophy which makes human nature out a pretty 
 small and mean affair, even when it is doing right; 
 the other, in a philosophy which shows human nature 
 as having an infinite capacity for constructive good, 
 even when it is doing wrong. Pamela is "Virtue 
 Rewarded," with the insistence on the reward; Jo- 
 seph Andrews is "Virtue Rewarded," with the in- 
 sistence on the virtue. If the conventional code is to 
 recommend itself to the most humane minds, it must 
 do so on some such basis as Fielding's, not on egoistic, 
 self-seeking, and sentimental grounds. Safety and
 
 SENTIMENTALISM 83 
 
 profit are sentimental motives for behaving well : good 
 behaviour finds its true level only in a defiant Tight- 
 ness of the mind to which self-violation is the unbear- 
 able wrong. 
 
 This difference of motive—the difference, let us call 
 it, between sentimentalism and fine taste — is, I repeat, 
 all-important to the worker in fiction. He will have 
 expressed, when all the words are written down and 
 all the situations resolved, only himself: let him not 
 think he can escape himself utterly, for all the words 
 and all the situations will be of his choice, charged 
 with the meanings which he alone has given them, in- 
 dicative of his purposes and ideals. But let him ex- 
 press himself in terms of other things, of ideals which 
 touch more than his self-interest; let him be like the 
 bank-note that changes hands only to reappear as its 
 own worth of food or clothing or firewood, not like 
 the coin in a miser's hoard, which can only draw to 
 itself more and more other precisely similar coins, 
 endless vain repetitions of itself, to be gloated over in 
 moments of sterile ecstasy. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Of course I should not wish to be understood as 
 trying to read Samuel Richardson, by bell and book, 
 out of his importance to the history of the novel. 
 If I undertook that, I should expect no better reward 
 than laughter. The literature which makes up the 
 whole body of a tradition and an art, and which is
 
 84 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 therefore greater than individuals and their books, 
 has never required that flawlessness which the most 
 exactingly critical readers think it well to demand of 
 their book before they will consent to be much inter- 
 ested in it. No: literature has never been above 
 teaching itself by poor beginnings, the half-suggestion 
 of merit here, even the downright failure there ; and in 
 the long run the worth of most things is found to 
 survive, or at least to be rediscovered, in order that 
 art may learn every important lesson that exists to 
 be learned. Richardson is very far indeed from such 
 feeble and half-profitless beginnings, matter merely 
 for instruction to the form of the novel after his ac- 
 tual substance has been found wanting and cast away. 
 Indeed, he stands much nearer to the full success, the 
 triumphant achievement of his own kind of greatness. 
 
 That greatness lies, so far as a sentence will describe 
 it, in his having done for the inner world of the heart 
 what Defoe did for the outer world of material cir- 
 cumstance : subjected it to the analysis of a minute 
 and painstaking realism, anatomized it at once more 
 truly and more vividly than any before him had done. 
 Richardson is the first in the novel to prove that moral 
 or mental history can be truly dramatic, and that any 
 life, even the most commonplace, can be made, if only 
 it is understood, to yield the reader finer thrills than 
 had hitherto come from even the most exciting stories 
 of event. 
 
 There is a sense too in which Richardson is imper- 
 sonal like the dramatist, and therefore escapes direct 
 responsibility for the opinions which his characters
 
 SENTIMENTALISM 85 
 
 hold and express; for his stories are told in letters 
 exchanged by the characters participating in them, 
 and no one questions that in the main the letters ex- 
 press genuine and natural reactions of folk who are 
 real, permanent, and very much themselves. But the 
 novelist and the dramatist cannot escape indirect re- 
 sponsibility: after all, they are undertaking to repre- 
 sent life for us, and if their characters represent it 
 only, or primarily, at and below a certain moral alti- 
 tude, we shall properly say that their conception of 
 life is insufficient. The artist chooses his puppets be- 
 cause they are interesting to him ; and we have the 
 right to say, if we find it so, that he is relatively too 
 much interested in the wrong ones, the ones who are 
 beneath the best that we know. Richardson speaks in 
 the long run through Pamela just as intelligibly as 
 though she were empowered to speak directly for 
 him ; and we hardly need the various prefaces and 
 conclusions by the "Editor" to tell us that he was 
 exactly the sentimentalist his choice and treatment 
 of Pamela as a heroine would imply. It was a tre- 
 mendous achievement, and an influential one, to have 
 read the hearts of others, and those not of his sex, so 
 minutely as Richardson did: nevertheless, we cannot 
 acquit him of having sentimentally taken those hearts 
 at more than their true relative worth, or of having 
 sentimentally preached a dubious ethic — superior con- 
 duct for inferior reasons. 
 
 How certainly the novel can be trusted in the end 
 to perpetuate its best and discard its worst is shown 
 by an odd fact in the history of appreciation of Rich-
 
 86 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 ardson. His reputation waxed and waned and waxed 
 again, and has now, it seems to me as I gather the 
 consensus of recent judgments, all but regained its 
 old prestige — and that in spite of our unanimous 
 hatred of his sentimentalism. First he was valued 
 for this quality, then he was despised for it, and now 
 he is valued in spite of it, and beeause of his sympa- 
 thetic and minute analysis. Our least sentimental 
 age has vindicated Richardson, one of the most senti- 
 mental of novelists, thus proving abundantly that 
 there is more in him than the sentimentalism, and 
 that the composite intelligence of criticism over any 
 great stretch of time has a sure and single eye for 
 merit, with whatever defects that merit is accompa- 
 nied. 
 
 But it was the sentimentalism that came uppermost 
 at the beginning ; and if the author of Clarissa had a 
 beneficial effect on the novel as an instrument of con- 
 stantly increasing scope, I do not see how we can 
 blink the fact that he had a disastrous effect on it as 
 a revelation and criticism of the true values of life. 
 I cannot give up my distrust of sentimentalism merely 
 because Richardson, the chief of sentimentalists, hap- 
 pened also to be an incomparable anatomist of motive 
 and feeling; and I see him as one of the chief im- 
 pulses in the debilitating 18th century cult of "sensi- 
 bility." 
 
 As we have noted before, half of the aesthetic his- 
 tory of the two generations after Richardson is im- 
 plied in the word "Gothic" and the changes its mean- 
 ing underwent. The other half is contained in this
 
 SENTIMENTALISM 87 
 
 other word "sensibility," which points to whatever in 
 emotion is overwrought, hypersesthetic, neurasthenic, 
 and at the same time super-refined and faddling. 
 The School of Terror is simply Gothicism plus sensi- 
 bility ; and Richardson, a realist of the realists, is thus, 
 through his emotionalism, a powerful impulse toward 
 one of the most extravagant romantic traditions ever 
 evolved. The cult of sensibility means always the 
 maximum of feeling for the minimum of cause; and 
 when we see the Terrorists displaying the last ex- 
 tremities of feeling for no cause that we can do better 
 than laugh at, we see them reaping the natural harvest 
 of Richardson the specialist in self-pity and tears. 
 He set a whole age weeping, not for sorrow, not even 
 for romantic Weltschmerz, but for simple enjoyment 
 of its own shallow and rather maudlin wretchedness. 
 It was an age comparable in this respect to the board- 
 ing-school miss who feels herself cheated and taken 
 advantage of if she is not made to cry at the matinee. 
 She goes in order to cry ; and the latter 18th century 
 sometimes strikes us as having existed primarily in 
 order to feel, over anything or nothing, the extremes 
 of emotion. 
 
 Not since that time, happily, have we seen senti- 
 mentalism in anything like the same repute. The 
 prolonged battle between the man of feeling and the 
 man of reflection seems at last on the verge of decision 
 in favour of the man of reflection. One of the great- 
 est of living novelists, himself anything but a disciple 
 of Richardson and sensibility, alludes quite naturally 
 to "the unofficial sentimentalism, which, like the poor,
 
 88 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 is exceedingly difficult to get rid of." 1 A century ago 
 he would have had to call sentimentalism official in- 
 stead of unofficial. It has never died: it has simply 
 receded farther and farther into the underworld of 
 the unsanctioned in art. From time to time it puts 
 forth powerful reminders of its hold on the popular 
 imagination: Uncle Tom's Cabin is one of those re- 
 minders, All Sorts and Conditions of Men another. 
 Mrs. Stowe and Sir Walter Besant, in other stories 
 the most guileless and innocuous of sentimentalists, 
 attain in these two books the special prestige of suc- 
 cessful reformers. But elsewhere we see the sentimen- 
 tal religion disintegrate into a dozen specialized and 
 disunited rituals — let them be illustrated by the ju- 
 venile fiction of "Oliver Optic" and the not so con- 
 sciously juvenile formulae of E.-P.-Roe-ism. In gen- 
 eral, it may be said that, the sentimental novel had 
 pretty well given up its claim to official status when it 
 went into paper covers about the year 1875 ; and there 
 it was contentedly to stay until Mrs. Florence Barclay 
 and Mrs. Alice Hegan Rice and half a dozen other 
 purveyors of blessedness, mostly feminine, brought it 
 back for a moment to the factitious dignity of cloth. 
 
 IV 
 
 The official death of sentimentalism is of course 
 very different from its extermination — which is even 
 
 i Preface to The Nigger of the "Narcissus." By Joseph 
 Conrad. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co. 1914. P. xii.
 
 SENTIMENTALISM 89 
 
 now only a possibility. If one had to fix a date for its 
 official death, I suppose that date might well be 1814, 
 the year of Wauerley. But the edict of execution had 
 been already signed, in the work of an inconspicuous 
 young woman of twenty-three — the most precocious 
 genius in our fiction, for she had written at twenty- 
 one a novel all but perfect in both the form and the 
 substance of its contribution to the human comedy. 
 In 1798, the year of the Lyrical Poems and Ballads 
 and a great milestone in romanticism, Jane Austen 
 was writing her third novel, Northanger Abbey, in 
 which she took the spurious romanticism of the School 
 of Terror and made it ridiculous. For her sunny com- 
 mon sense, perhaps neither public nor publisher was 
 ready: at all events Northanger Abbey lay neglected 
 for twenty years, wasting its diffusion of light on the 
 proverbial bottom drawer, like priceless radium in the 
 heart of the earth waiting to be discovered. Writ- 
 ten sixteen years before the publication of Waverley, 
 it appeared four years after, and two after Jane Aus- 
 ten's death — the first of her stories to bear her name 
 on its title-page. 
 
 In all six of those stories Miss Austen made merry 
 with sentimentalism ; witness the title Sense and Sen- 
 sibility (i.e., Sense versus Sensibility). But no- 
 where is her kindly and indulgent ridicule more tell- 
 ing than in an early episode of Northanger Abbey. 
 The heroine, a girl potentially sensible but saturated 
 with romances of the School of Radcliffe, goes in a 
 properly sentimental mood to visit friends at North- 
 anger Abbey. She is eager in her anticipation of the
 
 90 THE MODERN. NOVEL 
 
 ghostly, the grisly ; her visit will be a complete fiasco 
 unless she is treated to at least an apparition or two. 
 Everything goes promisingly. She is shown on the 
 first night to a room in a wing of the Abbey; her 
 imagination makes it baronially large, gloomy; the 
 wind howling at the casements and down the chimney 
 does what it can to make up for the footsteps of the 
 ancient servitor which should reverberate down the 
 long corridor; and — yes, actually there is the one in- 
 dispensable appurtenance of such situations, a dark 
 and formidable cabinet of immemorial age. It is 
 there, of course, that she is to find the time-yellowed 
 manuscript which is to unlock some horrifying secret 
 of the past. And, tucked away in a recess, is indeed 
 the roll of papers. She seizes it with tremors of ex- 
 pectancy; in another instant she will have begun to 
 unravel the secret. Then, a clumsy attempt to snuff 
 her candle puts it out and leaves her in utter dark- 
 ness. Better and better! She lies shivering in the 
 great bed, a prey to nameless delicious terrors until 
 sleep comes. With the morning light that awakens 
 her, she is up to consummate her discovery. Let Jane 
 Austen tell it: — 
 
 "Her greedy eye glanced rapidly over a page. She 
 started at its import. Could it be possible, or did 
 not her senses play her false? An inventory of 
 linen, in coarse and modern characters, seemed all 
 that was before her ! If the evidence of sight might 
 be trusted, she held a washing-bill in her hand. She 
 seized another sheet, and saw the same articles with 
 little variation; a third, a fourth, and a fifth pre-
 
 SBNTIMENTALISM 91 
 
 sented nothing new. Shirts, stockings, cravats, and 
 waistcoats faced her in each. Two others, penned by 
 the same hand, marked an expenditure scarcely more 
 interesting, in letters, hair-powder, shoe-string, and 
 breeches-ball. And the larger sheet, which had en- 
 closed the rest, seemed by its first cramp line, 'To 
 poultice chestnut mare,' a farrier's bill! Such was 
 the collection of papers (left, perhaps, as she could 
 then suppose, by the negligence of a servant in the 
 place whence she had taken them), which had filled 
 her with expectation and alarm, and robbed her of 
 half her night's rest! She felt humbled to the dust. 
 Could not the adventure of the chest have taught her 
 wisdom ? A corner of it catching her eye as she lay, 
 seemed to rise up in judgment against her. Nothing 
 could now be clearer than the absurdity of her recent 
 fancies. To suppose that a manuscript of many gen- 
 erations back could have remained undiscovered in a 
 room such as that, so modern, so habitable! or that 
 she should be the first to possess the skill of unlock- 
 ing a cabinet, the key of which was open to all ! " x 
 
 No example could show more clearly the war be- 
 tween sensibility and the sense of humour. Comedy 
 is in fact the chief weapon against sentimentalism, 
 and the one against which sentimentalism is least 
 likely to prevail. There is more than accidental fit- 
 ness in this simple fact: that Richardson, the most 
 sentimental of all the great English writers of fiction, 
 is the only one of them who is not a humourist. 
 Name them over: Defoe, a master of both rough 
 
 iNorthanger Abbey, Chapter XXII.
 
 92 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 farce and droll characterization • Fielding and Thack- 
 eray, master ironists; Dickens, a supreme creator of 
 comic individuals — a master capable indeed of maud- 
 lin sentimentality, but only in moments of conspicu- 
 ous lapse; Scott, George Eliot, and Hardy, masters 
 of regional humour, the deep unconscious drollery of 
 peasant folk; Smollett, a dealer in coarse rough rol- 
 licking fun; Meredith, who looked on the face of the 
 Truly Comic Muse, seen of few men; — all belong in 
 the list, except Richardson the lugubrious. Senti- 
 mentalism cannot stand in the presence of "clean 
 mirth." 
 
 Neither, if we are to judge by Sterne, can it stand 
 in the presence of mirth sometimes unclean. For the 
 invariable process of Sterne, as I understand it, is 
 to take the materials of sensibility and turn them, 
 by a subtle infusion of burlesque, into infectious and 
 sometimes obscene drollery. The very familiar epi- 
 sode of Uncle Toby and the fly is sometimes seriously 
 quoted as a piece of sensibility expressive of the age 
 and identifying Sterne with the Richardsonian cult 
 in its reduction to absurdity. But surely with 
 Sterne it was a conscious reduction to absurdity: 
 surely, in this very passage, he deliberately bur- 
 lesques, making sensibility poke fun at itself: — 
 
 "My uncle Toby was a man patient of injuries; — 
 not from want of courage, — I have told you in a 
 former chapter, 'that he was a man of courage': — 
 And will add here, that where just occasion presented, 
 or called it forth, — I know no man under whose arm 
 I would have sooner taken shelter ; — nor did this arise
 
 SENTIMENTALISM 93 
 
 from any insensibility or obtuseness of his intellec- 
 tual parts; — for he felt this insult of my father's 
 as feelingly as a man could do; — but he was of a 
 peaceful, placid nature, — no jarring element in it, — 
 all was mixed up so kindly within him; my uncle 
 Toby had scarce a heart to retaliate upon a fly. 
 
 " — Go — says he, one day at dinner, to an over- 
 grown one which had buzzed about his nose, and tor- 
 mented him cruelly all dinner-time, — and which after 
 infinite attempts, he had caught at last, as it flew by 
 him; — I'll not hurt thee, says my uncle Toby, rising 
 from his chair, and going across the room, with the 
 fly in his hand, — I'll not hurt a hair of thy head: — 
 Go, says he, lifting up the sash, and opening his hand 
 as he spoke, to let it escape ; — go, poor devil, get thee 
 gone, why should I hurt thee?— This world surely is 
 wide enough to hold both thee and me. 
 
 "I was but ten years old when this happened: but 
 whether it was, that the action itself was more in 
 unison to my nerves at that age of pity, which in- 
 stantly set my whole frame into one vibration of 
 most pleasurable sensation ; — or how far the manner 
 and expression of it might go towards it ; — or in what 
 degree, or by what secret magiek, — a tone of voice 
 and harmony of movement, attuned by mercy, might 
 find a passage to my heart, I know not; — this I know, 
 that the lesson of universal good-will then taught and 
 imprinted by my uncle Toby, has never since been 
 worn out of my mind: And tho' I would not de- 
 preciate what the study of the Literce humaniores, at 
 the university, have done for me in that respect, or
 
 94 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 discredit the other helps of an expensive education 
 bestowed upon me, both at home aud abroad since; 
 — yet I often think that I owe one half of my philan- 
 thropy to that one accidental impression. 
 
 "Eir 3 This is to serve for parents and governors 
 instead of a whole volume upon the subject." ' 
 
 Here, as throughout Tristram Shandy and, for that 
 matter, A Sentimental Journey, one sees the spirit of 
 comedy as the great infallible corrective of hysteria, 
 the dismally emotional side of that sentimentalism 
 which takes itself so seriously. It needs but to be 
 taken with a grain of mirth, to dissolve away into the 
 empty pretentiousness it is. 
 
 These few sketchy data will serve well enough to 
 show what sentimentalism is, and how its arch-enemy 
 the spirit of laughter puts it out of countenance. 
 Sentimentalism is a solemn spirit, and flourishes only 
 in places not reached by the light of mirth. So much 
 at least is clear if we speak in terms of the sharpest 
 contrast available: that between the obvious 18th 
 century sentimentalism of extreme sensibility and 
 the equally obvious forms of comedy which under- 
 took to destroy it. The sensibility is as abnormal and 
 perverted as the laughter is hearty, genuine, side- 
 splitting, or gross. One is like the odor of musk, the 
 other like the sound of a drinking song. 
 
 i The Life and Opinions of Tristram tihandy, Book II, Chap- 
 ter XII.
 
 S E N T I M E N T A L I S M 95 
 
 But there remain the more subtle and complicated 
 manifestations of sentimentalism : and for these, only 
 a more subtle weapon of Comedy will serve. Because 
 it fell to Meredith to create in English that subtler in- 
 strument and its first triumphant applications in story, 
 and because he made the first nice and permanent defi- 
 nition of such Comedy, our doctrine here can best be 
 reproduced from his Essay on the Idea of Comedy and 
 of the Uses of the Comic Spirit. 
 
 Comedy means to Meredith the "laughter of the 
 mind." "The laughter of Comedy is impersonal and 
 unrivalled politeness, nearer a smile [i. e., than Satire, 
 which is "a blow in the back or the face"] ; often no 
 more than a smile. It laughs through the mind, for 
 the mind directs it ; and it might be called the humour 
 of the mind." Meredith draws his distinctions with 
 the greatest possible nicety among Satire, Irony, Hu- 
 mour, and Comedy — overlapping elements, of course, 
 but differently centred. And of Comedy he makes 
 two most important generalizations : — 
 
 First, it is inherently and essentially social. "The 
 Comic poet is in the narrow field, or enclosed square, 
 of the society he depicts; and he addresses the still 
 narrower enclosure of men's intellects, with reference 
 to the operation of the social world upon their char- 
 acters. He is not concerned with beginnings or end- 
 ings or surroundings, but with what you are now 
 weaving. To understand his work and value it, you 
 must have a sober liking of your own kind and a sober 
 estimate of our civilized qualities." One remembers 
 at this point that the self -righteousness, the vanity, the
 
 96 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 hypocrisy, and the frivolous optimism which I named 
 as belonging in the calendar of sentimentalism, are 
 all intensely egoistic or anti-social failings. Thus this 
 Comedy of Meredith is just the heaven-inspired 
 scourge for them. 
 
 Second, since Comedy is a social implement, it is 
 practicable only iu some approximation of a real so- 
 ciety. Only the rougher tools of irony and satire 
 will do where a society is struggling into existence, 
 or going through the period of muddle. "There are 
 plain reasons why the Comic poet is not a frequent 
 apparition ; and why the great Comic poet remains 
 without a fellow. A society of cultivated men and 
 women is required, wherein ideas are current and the 
 perceptions quick, that he may be supplied with mat- 
 ter and an audience. The semi-barbarism of merely 
 giddy communities, and feverish emotional periods, 
 repel him ; and also a state of marked social inequality 
 of the sexes ; nor can he whose business is to address 
 the mind be understood where there is not a moderate 
 degree of intellectual activity." 
 
 This second prerequisite of true Comedy, a real so- 
 ciety, explains several traits in the Meredith who form- 
 ulates it. It explains, first, his tendency toward femi- 
 nism, his faith in the illimitable capacity of woman to 
 take her place as equal of the greatest — a belief which 
 he constantly enforces in his novels by showing the 
 triumph of noble womanhood over what is weakest, 
 most sentimental in man. "Where the veil is thrown 
 over women's faces, you cannot have society, without 
 which the senses are barbarous and the Comic spirit is
 
 SENTIMENTALISM 97 
 
 driven to the gutters of grossness to slake its thirst" 
 — as, for example, in our excellent and indispensable 
 18th century. It is for "cultivated women to recog- 
 nize that the Comic Muse is one of their best friends. 
 They are blind to their interests in swelling the ranks 
 of the sentimentalists." 
 
 Also, does not this same prerequisite of an urbane 
 and matured society explain the smallness of Mere- 
 dith's public, and the more and more specialized nar- 
 rowness of the scenes in which he elected to work? 
 It is pretty clear from his general doctrine that he 
 had visions of a time, perhaps remote, when comedy 
 should have become a national institution, as accessible 
 and as democratic as any form of national art has ever 
 been; a time when the reciprocity of comic poet and 
 audience should become all that the most sanguine 
 imagination could conceive, using Aristophanes, Con- 
 greve, Moliere, and their several publics as points of 
 departure. We misconceive Meredith entirely if we 
 doubt that in such a state of reciprocity he would 
 have been most at home, ideally self-fulfilled. His 
 idea of creativeness was not to be eccentric, mannered, 
 aristocratic : it was to work in a democratic tradition, 
 a school, and what he most laments is the unreadiness 
 of the existing public for a democratic tradition that 
 should be at the same time fine, stimulating, and brac- 
 ing as well as democratic. As it was, the conditions 
 gave him neither the society for audience nor the so- 
 ciety for subject. He believed sufficiently in his vi- 
 sion to write for the few readers who had something of 
 his own comic intuition — not because he prized his
 
 98 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 own rarity, but because he wanted to help leaven the 
 whole mass. He wrote about the few small social 
 groups which met his definition of real intercourse, not 
 because he wanted to idealize an aristocracy, but 
 because he wanted to democratize an ideal. Presently 
 he realized, at first with dismay, the smallness of his 
 public. It was then that his style became so special- 
 ized : only a few could follow him, but those few could 
 follow him anywhere, and he saw it as his peculiar 
 office to do the most that he could for them. Better 
 the success of perfect intimacy with a few than the 
 flat failure to win the many — as he could only have 
 done by setting the clock of social evolution far 
 ahead, farther than any one man can, even a major 
 prophet. If Meredith had not chosen the fullest pos- 
 sible possession of his own public, he would probably 
 have fallen between two publics, missing both. His 
 actual choice is what he tacitly expresses to us as we 
 see him moving most often in the restricted area of a 
 single ancient house, a single aristocratic family and 
 its connections, choosing a background so remote and 
 personse so specially bred that our own democratic 
 experience may fail to furnish their counterparts. 
 
 These points are worth jotting here, against the 
 popular conception of Meredith as one who framed a 
 cult of exclusiveness for an aesthetic inner circle. He 
 believes in Comedy as democratizer and sweetener of 
 civilization ; but finding no audience and, on the nec- 
 essary democratic scale, no subject, he turns where he 
 can. This resignation he saw as his personal part, 
 the only one possible to him, toward the fulfilment of
 
 SENTIMENTALISM 99 
 
 his ideal in the future. He is never more truly him- 
 self, more Meredithian, than when he says : "I think 
 that all right use of life, and the one secret of life, is 
 to pave ways for the firmer footing of those who suc- 
 ceed us; as to my works, I know them faulty, think 
 them of worth only when they point and aid to that 
 end." 1 
 
 1T0 G. P. Baker. Pp. 398-09, Vol. 29, Works of George 
 Meredith, Memorial Edition. New York: Charles Scribner's 
 Sons. 1909-12.
 
 IV 
 
 DIDACTICISM
 
 In nearly everything said thus far about the nature 
 of fiction and of the criteria by which we should judge 
 it, it is assumed that all great and good fiction has a 
 purpose, and that that purpose is the impersonal and 
 disinterested expression of imaginative insight into 
 human nature and life. It appeared, or seemed to, 
 that romance and realism are simply different ways of 
 getting at this central thing, and that the differences 
 between them are of means rather than of meaning, of 
 process rather than of purpose. From the perception 
 of this relation, we fell to considering one of the prin- 
 cipal obstacles to the impersonal and disinterested 
 expression of truth: the feeling which we call "senti- 
 mentalism," an egotistical and interested spirit that 
 will not have truth on truth's own arduous and aus- 
 tere terms, but is always pampering itself with 
 thought of the rewards of truth, or of the superiority 
 conferred by the possession of truth, or of the obnox- 
 iousness of truth which it happens to dislike. Against 
 this enemy of unselfish truth there is, we saw, one 
 spirit which is sure to prevail: the spirit of Chaucer 
 and Rabelais, of Shakspere and Moliere, of Jane Aus- 
 ten, of Fielding, of Meredith — the sweetening and 
 chastening influence of Comedy. 
 
 We come now to a second and on the whole less 
 formidable enemy of disinterested truth. We as a 
 
 103
 
 
 104 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 generation of readers have come to the conclusion that 
 the novel at its best cannot be primarily a display of 
 the author's personal emotions, the reactions of his 
 own sensibility ; and we have as certainly come to the 
 conclusion that neither can it be primarily a display 
 of his private opinions, his ethical sense striking atti- 
 tudes in the presence of his subject-matter. In short, 
 there has grown up among us a feeling amounting to 
 conviction, and nearly always assumed by critics as a 
 truism, that the novelist must not preach to us. Be- 
 tween the spirit that sentimentalizes and the spirit 
 that preaches, there may be and often is a kinship. 
 Some examples already named in speaking of senti- 
 mentalism— Uncle Tom's Cabin, All Sorts and Condi- 
 tions of Men, the juvenile fiction of "Oliver Optic" — 
 are not only sentimental fiction, they are sentimental 
 pulpiteering. They might equally well have been 
 saved for illustration of this second enemy of sound 
 worth in fiction: the pulpiteering spirit, or didacti- 
 cism. 
 
 Our temperamental objection to this particular 
 breach of artistic discipline seems to us deeply 
 grounded, and so much a part of the nature of artistic 
 strategy that we are prone to assume our Tightness 
 without argument or investigation. We readily take 
 for granted, unless we have some reading, that the pre- 
 ceptorial tone could never have been a very reputable 
 element in fiction, or have seemed palatable to any 
 great fraction of even the most naive generation of 
 readers. But does this assumption tally with the fact ? 
 Enphues and His England, which set a record of
 
 DIDACTICISM 105 
 
 progress in fiction for its own day, is practically a 
 manual of polite usage, a discussion of social and 
 moral codes; the ethical strain is one of the most 
 prominent elements of Sidney's Arcadia (his Pamela, 
 by the way, gives all of her name but its accent to 
 Richardson's Pamela) ; and, as everybody knows, 
 Richardson conceived Pamela in the process of creat- 
 ing a sort of manual of letter-writing, a book of mod- 
 els of polite sentimental correspondence for the un- 
 tutored. From Lyly to the early 19th century 
 in England, and from the middle 17th century 
 to the middle 19th in America, the moral story, or 
 novel written as practical advice and guide to con- 
 duct, was exceedingly popular. It is still not a rare 
 genre in Sunday School libraries. The Aretina of 
 Sir George Mackenzie, that most exquisite example of 
 the effete "heroic romance," was written on this 
 theory, quoted with intense relish by Sir Walter Ra- 
 leigh in his admirable little book The English Novel: 
 "Albeit Essays be the choicest pearls in the jewel 
 house of Moral Philosophy, yet I ever thought that 
 they were set off to the best advantage, and appeared 
 with the greatest lustre, when they were laced upon a 
 Romance." And the youthful essayist follows his 
 own prescription by interspersing his tale with Eu- 
 phuistic moralizing essays. Note how matter-of- 
 course is his assumption, the very opposite of ours, 
 that the only tenable purpose of fiction, its one pre- 
 sentable self-justification, is its service as engine of 
 "Moral Philosophy." 
 
 There were many decades when all the licentious-
 
 106 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 ness in fiction masqueraded as moral instruction by 
 horrible example. The novel could allow itself the 
 most excessive licence in portrayal of vice and scandal, 
 so long as it included the sanctimonious rebuke of evil- 
 doing. The work of Aphra Behn, Mrs. Eliza Hay- 
 wood, and the once notorious Mrs. Mary de la Riviere 
 Mauley survived, at least for a time, the disapproval of 
 good taste largely by virtue of its factitious and hypo- 
 critical acceptance of the popular moral judgment. 
 It is sometimes hard for us to remember that the novel 
 as we like it to be has had only a little more than a 
 generation of unchallenged respectability; indeed 
 there are those still living who count it an insidious 
 agency of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Before 
 that very recent attainment of repute, the novel was 
 prone to purchase any cheapest sanction, if only 
 that it might succeed in the struggle to survive at all ; 
 and no sanction could be more inexpensive, or more 
 certain to undermine objection on moral grounds, than 
 that of the commonly received theology, the popular 
 ethics. The novelist circumvents the hostility of the 
 pulpit by making his novel a sermon. 
 
 The existence of the former prejudice, and the 
 anxiety of even the most innocent teller of tales to 
 protect himself from the suspicion of having taught 
 no moral lesson, may be illustrated by the Preface of 
 Alonzo and Melissa: or The Unfeeling Father, an 
 "American tale" signed "Daniel Jackson, Jr.," and 
 published at Exeter in 1831. I quote the whole Pref- 
 ace : if its general quaintness fail to please, none can 
 resist one long and strangely inconclusive sentence
 
 DIDACTICISM 107 
 
 which suggests that even in 1831 the incorrigible type- 
 setter was a sore trial to helpless authorship. — 
 
 ' ' Whether the story of Alonzo and Melissa will gen- 
 erally please, the writer knows not ; if, however, he is 
 not mistaken, it is not unfriendly to religion and vir- 
 tue. — One thing was aimed to be shown, that a firm 
 reliance on Providence, however the affections might 
 be at war with its dispensations, is the only source of 
 consolation in the gloomy hours of affliction ; and that 
 generally such dependence, though crossed by difficul- 
 ties and perplexities, will be crowned with victory at 
 last. 
 
 "It is also believed that the story contains no inde- 
 corous stimulants ; nor is it filled with unmeaning and 
 inexplicated incidents sounding upon the sense, but 
 imperceptible to the understanding. When anxie- 
 ties ' have been excited by involved and doubtful 
 events, they are afterwards elucidated by the conse- 
 quences. 
 
 "The writer believes that generally he has copied 
 nature. In the ardent prospects raised in youthful 
 bosoms, the almost consummation of their wishes, their 
 sudden and unexpected disappointment, the sorrows 
 of separation, the joyous and unlooked for meeting — 
 in the poignant feelings of Alonzo, when at the grave 
 of Melissa, he poured the feelings of his anguished 
 soul over her niniature [sic] by the 'moon's pale ray;' 
 — when Melissa, sinking on her knees before her fa- 
 ther, was received to his bosom as a beloved daughter 
 risen from the dead. 
 
 "If these scenes are not imperfectly drawn, they
 
 108 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 will not fail to interest the refined sensibilities of the 
 reader." 
 
 Nor was it only in the ' ' unofficial sentimentalism, ' ' 
 the outlaw fiction of the underworld of letters, that 
 the moral purport of art became a very momentous arid 
 pressing problem. Dr. Johnson, of whose official 
 status there could certainly be no question, worried 
 himself, in what seems to us a most naive and archaic 
 way, over the morality of Shakspere. Shakspere, says 
 Johnson in the introduction to his edition of the plays, 
 "sacrifices virtue to convenience," and is "more care- 
 ful to please than to instruct." Not only does he 
 make "no just distribution of good or evil," but he is 
 not "always careful to show in the virtuous a disap- 
 probation of the wicked." It is quite clear that Dr. 
 Johnson would have considered Othello a more moral 
 play if Othello had been made to upbraid lago in 
 sanctimonious platitudes. When Johnson says that 
 Shakspere "carries his persons indifferently through 
 right and wrong" — that is, tells the truth of life — 
 "and, at the close, dismisses them without further 
 care, and leaves their example to operate by chance," 
 he utters what is from the modern angle the ultimate 
 praise of Shakspere 's objectivity, but what is, from 
 his entirely typical 18th century point of view, the 
 gravest censure of a defect which "the barbarity of 
 the age cannot extenuate; for it is always a writer's 
 duty to make the world better, and justice is a virtue 
 independent on time and place." 
 
 From such representative data it clearly transpires, 
 and is indeed the fact, that throughout most of the
 
 D I D A C T I C I SM 109 
 
 history of modern fiction the novelist's relation to the 
 preacher has been a most real problem, with the ten- 
 dency all for valuing the story-teller in proportion as 
 he is homilist and sermonizer. Judged as a mere mat- 
 ter of aesthetic taste, our modern predilection may be 
 simply another of the shifting fashions of art, a swing 
 of the pendulum. By the mere counting of heads, 
 either among novelists since Defoe or among their 
 readers, we should undoubtedly find our objection to 
 didacticism overruled ; and indeed there is nothing in 
 actual history to tell us that we are right, or that the 
 great novelists of the future may not transmit their 
 meaning or message to us in a gospel of practical con- 
 duct, with the strongest emphasis on what we ought to 
 do and why we ought to do it. 
 
 II 
 
 On the other hand, there is nothing to confine us to 
 the purely historical counting of heads. 
 
 Perhaps this is as fitting a context as any for the 
 declaration of a personal faith that the novel as a form 
 and as a possibility, regardless of any individual nov- 
 elist and his achievement, is always becoming better. 
 It is always learning from itself, its successes and its 
 failures ; it is always learning something too, in a less 
 important way, from its critics formal and informal ; 
 and as a person is said to "better his condition" by 
 marrying above his class, so the novel is always better- 
 ing its condition by marriage with new and important
 
 110 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 ideas. We may have no Dickens, no individual crea- 
 tive genius of the first order, but if we did have one 
 he would write better novels than Dickens wrote. It 
 is possible to-day for a very inferior novelist to com- 
 pose novels better than those of Dickens in every way 
 that acquired knowledge and intelligent workmanship 
 control; indeed it would be difficult for him not to 
 write novels better in such ways than Dickens's. 
 There is an elemental gift of creativeness, and it is 
 more important than anything else ; but this is not 
 to say that nothing else is important — and that ele- 
 mental gift may be hampered and curtailed by tempo- 
 rary conditions of various sorts. The number of such 
 impeding conditions grows, I think, constantly less as 
 the novel learns its lessons of form and taste ; genius, 
 supposing it to occur, has more and more certainty of 
 getting itself fulfilled. 
 
 So the lesson of history is not just that what has 
 happened may happen again. The very fact that a 
 thing has happened in an organic evolution, like that 
 of a form of art, is almost the strongest guarantee 
 against its happening again; or, if it happen again, 
 against its regaining the elder prestige. How pallid, 
 spurious, and altogether inadequate seems, for ex- 
 ample, after even this brief time, the fin de siecle at- 
 tempt by Stevenson and his popular imitators to re- 
 vive the costume romance of Scott! And if we find 
 history giving a sort of sanction to didactic elements 
 in the novel, such elements as our intuition abhors, we 
 need only reflect that perhaps the change was a real 
 growth ; in a word, that our intuition is fundamentally
 
 DIDACTICISM 111 
 
 right, and that the history of fiction in prose is only a 
 series of gropings toward an ideal which is at last 
 found, or approximated. Especially shall we be safe 
 in deploring the didactic fashion if we find our pres- 
 ent bias supported by a variety of considerations more 
 fundamental than even the majority vote of history — 
 considerations in reason, in logic, in the whole ration- 
 ale of taste. 
 
 When we approach the question non-historically, 
 we find a decisive argument against the didactic em- 
 ployment of fiction in one simple fact, still too often 
 overlooked : the fact that the novelist creates his evi- 
 dence, his characters and scenes and situations, his 
 story, and that they are infinitely more his than his 
 opinions are. Nothing about life can be proved by 
 imagined evidence, simply because anything about 
 life can be proved by it. It is a truism of logic that 
 nothing can be proved by an analogy, because an 
 analogy can be found in fact that seems to prove any 
 proposition. How much more, then, is the principle 
 true of fiction, which is free to manufacture even its 
 analogy. You can write a story to prove that slavery 
 is an inhuman institution or that it is a humane insti- 
 tution ; you can write a novel against monogamy, 
 and another one equally persuasive against polygamy 
 or polyandry or free love. Didactic novels are always 
 concerned to prove something: that one course of 
 conduct is right and the alternative course wrong, that 
 one vice is less vicious than another or one virtue more 
 virtuous than another, that some particular thing 
 ought to be done or not done, that this or that problem
 
 112 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 should be solved thus and so, and no otherwise. But 
 the didactic novel is always a self-destroying victim 
 to this betraying fact: that it was created expressly 
 to prove its chosen didactic point, and, being so 
 created, can prove nothing except the existence of 
 its own purpose — that is, its author's private view of 
 something. You cannot get behind or around this 
 fact. It is one of the few non-debatable things — not 
 because, like a matter of taste, it admits of differences 
 outside reason, but because, being purely a matter 
 of reason, it admits of no differences at all. The 
 didactic novelist's imagined evidence is at most simply 
 one vote for one opinion ; and on a point open to con- 
 troversy no opinion is worth anything unless it results 
 from all the votes for that opinion balanced against 
 all the votes for all the other possible opinions. 
 
 Even if we were to take the novelist's evidence as 
 unquestioned actual fact instead of fancy, it would 
 fail, then, to do more than illustrate an opinion by a 
 more or less apt analogue. Of the difficulty of can- 
 celling out all the factors in any given human prob- 
 lem of justice so as to get an ultimate and valid solu- 
 tion, John Stuart Mill has this to say : 
 
 "To take another example from a subject already 
 once referred to. In a co-operative industrial associa- 
 tion, is it just or not that talent or skill should give a 
 title to superior remuneration? On the negative side 
 of the question it is argued, that whoever does the best 
 he can deserves equally well, and ought not in justice 
 to be put in a position of inferiority for no fault of 
 his own; that superior abilities have already advan-
 
 DIDACTICISM 113 
 
 tages more than enough, in the admiration they excite, 
 the personal influence they command, and the internal 
 sources of satisfaction attending them, without adding 
 to these a superior share of the world's goods; and 
 that society is bound in justice rather to make com- 
 pensation to the less favoured, for this unmerited in- 
 equality of advantages, than to aggravate it. On the 
 contrary side it is contended, that society receives more 
 from the more efficient labourer ; that, his services be- 
 ing more useful, society owes him a larger return for 
 them; that a greater share of the joint result is actu- 
 ally his work, and not to allow his claim to it is a kind 
 of robbery; that, if he is only to receive as much as 
 others, he can only be justly required to produce as 
 much, and to give a smaller amount of time and exer- 
 tion, proportioned to his superior efficiency. Who 
 shall decide between these appeals to conflicting prin- 
 ciples of justice? Justice has in this case two sides 
 to it, which it is impossible to bring into harmony; 
 and the two disputants have chosen opposite sides: 
 the one looks to what it is just that the individual 
 should receive; the other, to what it is just that the 
 community should give. Each, from his own point of 
 view, is unanswerable; and any choice between them, 
 on grounds of justice, must be perfectly arbitrary. 
 Social utility alone can decide the preference. ' ' 1 
 
 When, in ordinary practical living, the sum of wis- 
 dom can go no farther than to find what it seems best 
 
 i From the Essay on Liberty. Utilitarianism, Liberty, and 
 Representative Government. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. 
 (Everyman's Library.)
 
 114 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 to do in the present given conditions, how presump- 
 tuous and how hollow it is for the novelist to pretend 
 that he has found a law which is universally true, a 
 precept which will lead no one into error ! How vain 
 and, in the last analysis, how silly to expect a fabri- 
 cation of the inventive faculty to do for all mankind 
 that which the best conscience of the individual man 
 can hardly achieve for that one person, when he has all 
 the terms of his problem spread out tangibly and 
 visibly before him ! Looked at in this light, the novel 
 which undertakes to tell us how to live — whom to 
 marry, how to spend our money, how to choose our 
 occupation, what God to believe in — seems at best a 
 poor and shabby pretence, a well-meant insult to the 
 intelligence, as the greater part of human advice in 
 general proverbially is. 
 
 Ill 
 
 No: it is not the novelist's province to recommend 
 special points or types of conduct to us, or to instruct 
 us how to take sides in great partisan issues. It is 
 his business to show us what tilings are and how they 
 work, when looked at in the light of a humanely 
 searching comprehension. The great issues that he 
 tests, he test's in terms of action ; for actions, with their 
 results, are his crucible for ideas. He may indeed 
 treat certain ideals and notions of obligation in con- 
 duct: but only as things that exist, as the forces be- 
 hind character and action, as things that have, for
 
 DIDACTICISM 115 
 
 his chosen characters in their given set of conditions, 
 certain results. He is not a special pleader for any- 
 thing. 
 
 In these days when novels, as men, are popularly 
 measured by their loyalties and their rancours, most 
 novels written about the international situation take 
 sides heatedly. They are interested in scientific or- 
 ganization when that scientific organization is German, 
 or in heroism when that heroism is French, in the 
 struggle for national solidarity when that struggle is 
 British or American ; and especially they are interested 
 in the moral culpability of the enemy. The novelist 
 is not to be despised as a man when he takes sides in 
 such great issues ; indeed, we as men should have to 
 despise him if he did not. But as a novelist he has 
 in the long run more to lose by confining himself to 
 one side of a sharp issue than he can possibly gain by 
 it. He may be doing the only thing possible to him in 
 the circumstances ; but that only proves that the con- 
 science of life is sometimes a more instant and over- 
 mastering thing than the conscience of art, which is 
 patient, far-seeing, and more willing to wait for certi- 
 fied truth than to act on even a noble impulse. The 
 best novels about the great war have been written 
 about its effects on typical individuals or communi- 
 ties, by writers who seem to be saying: "Here is 
 what war is and does in the lives of a certain few per- 
 sons chosen because they are like thousands of others, 
 only perhaps more interesting." And we know that 
 the great war novels of the future must be about war 
 itself, its heroism and cowardice, its justices and in-
 
 116 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 justices, its splendour and its horror. Those great 
 novels will deal with things which are seen of all men 
 as humanly important, wherever and by whomever 
 exhibited, as truly after as before all the present prob- 
 lems are solved and superseded. The only spirit 
 which has any chance of making itself felt in enduring 
 art is that open-minded spirit revealed by an Ameri- 
 can man of letters, himself one of the most valiant 
 fighters in our Civil War, when, long years after the 
 struggle which had both given and cost him so much, 
 he wrote : 
 
 "I know what uniform I wore — 
 
 0, that I knew which side I fought for !" 1 
 
 When we take this austere view of the artist's de- 
 tachment from the press of immediate practical is- 
 sues, on whatever scale propounded, we see not only 
 that it is impossible for his manufactured evidence to 
 prove the rightness of this or that course of conduct, 
 but that if it were possible it would still be undesir- 
 able. He has a greater thing to do ; and his only hope 
 of being practically useful in the long run lies in his 
 doing it without fear or favour — especially without 
 fear of the consequences if he renounce the popular ex- 
 pediency of the passing moment, and without favour 
 of one character against another because of either 's 
 theories of conduct. 
 
 Some famous words of Matthew Arnold serve to re- 
 mind us of what disaster to truth follows the writer 's 
 
 i The Hesitating Veteran in Shapes of Clay. By Ambrose 
 Bierce. New York and Washington: The Neale Publishing Co, 
 1910.
 
 DIDACTICISM 117 
 
 dedication of himself to a partisan bias, or to any one 
 of the various self-interests of creed and class. Those 
 words were written, to be sure, to preach a high ideal 
 of criticism ; but if they apply to criticism, in one 
 sense a secondary and derived art, how much more 
 emphatically must they apply to literature of the 
 primary and creative orders, in terms of which criti- 
 cism exists ! — 
 
 "It is of the last importance that English criticism 
 should clearly discern what ride for its course, in order 
 to avail itself of the field now opening to it, and to 
 produce fruit to the future, it ought to take. The 
 rule may be summed up in one word,— disinterested- 
 ness. And how is criticism to show disinterestedness ? 
 By keeping aloof from practice : by resolutely follow- 
 ing the law of its own nature, which is to be a free 
 play of the mind on all subjects which it touches ; by 
 steadily refusing to lend itself to any of those ulterior, 
 political, practical considerations about ideas which 
 plenty of people will be sure to attach to them, which 
 perhaps ought often to be attached to them, which in 
 this country at any rate are certain to be attached to 
 them quite sufficiently, but which criticism has really 
 nothing to do with. Its business is, as I have said, 
 simply to know the best that is known and thought in 
 the world, and, by in its turn making this known, to 
 create a current of true and fresh ideas. Its business 
 is to do this with inflexible honesty, with due ability; 
 but its business is to do no more, and to leave alone all 
 questions of practical consequences and applications, 
 questions which will never fail to have due prominence
 
 118 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 given to them. Else criticism, besides being really 
 false to its own nature, merely continues in the old 
 rut which it has hitherto followed in this country, and 
 will certainly miss the chance now given to it. For 
 what is at present the bane of criticism in this coun- 
 try? It is that practical considerations cling to it and 
 stifle it ; it subserves interests not its own ; our organs 
 of criticism are organs of men and parties having prac- 
 tical ends to serve, and with them those practical ends 
 are the first thing, and the play of mind the second; so 
 much play of mind as is compatible with the prosecu- 
 tion of those practical ends is all that is wanted. . . . 
 It must needs be that men should act in sects and 
 parties, that each of these sects and parties should 
 have its organ, and should make this organ subserve 
 the interests of its action ; but it would be well, too, 
 that there should be a criticism, not the minister of 
 these interests, not their enemy, but absolutely and 
 entirely independent of them. No other criticism will 
 ever attain any real authority or make any real way 
 towards its end, — the creating a current of true and 
 fresh ideas. 
 
 "It is because criticism has so little kept in the pure 
 intellectual sphere, has so little detached itself from 
 practice, has been so directly polemical and controver- 
 sial, that it has so ill accomplished, in this country, 
 its best spiritual work ; which is to keep man from a 
 self-satisfaction which is retarding and vulgarizing, to 
 lead him towards perfection, by making his mind 
 dwell upon what is excellent in itself, and the absolute 
 beauty and fitness of things. A polemical practical
 
 DIDACTICISM 119 
 
 criticism makes men blind even to the ideal imperfec- 
 tion of their practice, makes them willingly assert its 
 ideal perfection, in order the better to secure it 
 against attack; and clearly this is narrowing and 
 baneful for them. If they were reassured on the prac- 
 tical side, speculative considerations of ideal perfec- 
 tion they might be brought to entertain, and their 
 spiritual horizon would thus gradually widen. . . . 
 
 "It will be said that it is a very subtle and indirect 
 action which I am thus prescribing for criticism, and 
 that, by embracing in this manner the Indian virtue 
 of detachment and abandoning the sphere of practical 
 life, it condemns itself to a slow and obscure work. 
 Slow and obscure it may be, but it is the only proper 
 work of criticism. The mass of mankind will never 
 have any ardent zeal for seeing things as they are; 
 very inadequate ideas will always satisfy them. On 
 these inadequate ideas reposes, and must repose, the 
 general practice of the world. That is as much as 
 saying that whoever sets himself to see things as they 
 are will find himself one of a very small circle; but 
 it is only by this small circle resolutely doing its own 
 work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all. 
 The rush and roar of practical life will always have 
 a dizzying and attracting effect upon the most col- 
 lected spectator, and tend to draw him into its vortex ; 
 most of all will this be the case where that life is so 
 powerful as it is in England. But it is only by re- 
 maining collected, and refusing to lend himself to the 
 point of view of the practical man, that the critic can 
 do the practical man any service; and it is only by the
 
 120 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 greatest sincerity in pursuing his own course, and by 
 at last convincing even the practical man of his sin- 
 cerity, that he can escape misunderstandings which 
 perpetually threaten him." 1 
 
 Substitute, here, "fiction" and "novelist" for "crit- 
 icism" and "critic," and "English-speaking coun- 
 tries" for "England," and Arnold serves our purpose 
 not less well than he did his own. The passage cited 
 identifies a partisan criticism, as I wish to identify a 
 partisan fiction, with the sentimental Pharisaism of 
 those who have interests to serve. From our two 
 general objections to the partisan fiction — first, that it 
 is invented expressly to prove something and can 
 therefore prove nothing; second, that the novel has a 
 greater privilege than to prove any controversial point 
 — it will be evident that the preacher in fiction is in an 
 altogether different category from that of the preacher 
 in the pulpit. The point of the difference is not 
 always seen, to be sure : one sometimes hears it urged : 
 "But why should you not listen to the novelist's ser- 
 mon as well as to the preacher's? Why should you 
 not let the novelist, if he be also a moralist, lay down 
 prescriptions of conduct? Why listen to the ethicist 
 and the priest of religion, and not to him ? Is not the 
 counsel of these other two a valuable guide?" To 
 which the answer is, Only if they too be disinterested. 
 The priest does not decide by political interest whom 
 he wishes elected, and then derive his religious prin- 
 ciples from his political interest; the sociologist does 
 not divide his world into those whom it would profit 
 
 i The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.
 
 DIDACTICISM 121 
 
 him to put into office and those whom it would profit 
 him to put into jail, and then frame his prescription 
 for society accordingly. At least, if he did we should 
 do very well to distrust him also. Neither properly 
 chooses his evidence to demonstrate a point : the point 
 is considered as existing elsewhere and independently, 
 for the one as part of a law which altereth not, for 
 the other in the nature of society as it is constituted. 
 It is obvious that the partisan novelist cannot be, in 
 this sense, disinterested at all. Whether he chooses 
 the facts and finds a principle to embrace them, or 
 chooses the principle and finds the facts to illustrate 
 it, he is serving an interest other than that with 
 which he has his proper concern — the truth of life, 
 how things are and how they work together for good 
 and for evil. 
 
 IV 
 
 It is the intention of the argument thus far, not 
 exactly to show that didactic art is bad art, but to 
 show that art is likely to be bad in so far as it is 
 didactic — that is, the didactic element in it is a handi- 
 cap, one more thing for it to succeed in spite of. Art 
 that is nothing but didactic flatly fails; but in mod- 
 ern conditions it is wholly unlikely that a writing man 
 will turn to the novel if his sole equipment is a set of 
 moral precepts which he holds for ultimate truths. 
 The evangelical novel, despite a few transient vogues 
 such as that of the Reverend Charles M. Sheldon, — 
 In His Steps will serve, for those who remember it,
 
 122 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 to represent the whole school, — is pretty nearly de- 
 funct; and the didactic novel when its propagandizing 
 is secular is always written by an author who has in 
 him something, however obnubilated, of the artist. 
 
 That a novel may compete with some success against 
 its own didacticism is shown in the rather illustrious 
 history of protest in the novel. We might go back 
 and retrace this from the indictment of debtors' 
 prisons in The Vicar of Wakefield; or we might begin 
 with such protests against institutions as those of 
 Dickens against a certain type of private school in 
 Nicholas Nickleby and of Reade against a certain type 
 of private asylum for the insane, and against the 
 laws relating to insanity, in Hard Cash. But, for one 
 sufficiently coherent and centralized illustration, we 
 need go no farther than the so-called "novel of pro- 
 test" of the '50 's and '60 's. 
 
 The novels of this school are the fictional counter- 
 part of the Chartist movement. The protest was 
 against the industrial system of Great Britain — the 
 exploitation of the labouring class, absentee landlord- 
 ism, child labour, the fearful housing conditions of 
 manufacturing districts, the long hours and unsani- 
 tary surroundings of work, merciless competition, and 
 all the political applications of Benthamism and the 
 Utilitarian philosophy as interpreted by those who 
 liked the liberalism of Mill less than his rigour ; in 
 short, against the political and economic facts which, 
 helped out by the lean crops of famine years, created 
 all that was most unbearable in the "hungry '40 's. " 
 Fiction, in its protest against these facts, sounds often
 
 DIDACTICISM 123 
 
 like the sincere but ranting, inflammatory, and head- 
 long utterances of the most modern socialistic dema- 
 gogue of a violent type. 
 
 It is my present point that these novels were saved, 
 not by the remedies proposed or the argument ad- 
 vanced, but solely by the amount of life they ob- 
 jectively depicted and by the open-eyed sympathy 
 which they displayed for it. Disraeli attacked the 
 intolerable conditions in his Sybil, — also entitled The 
 Two Nations, i. e., the exploiter and the exploited, — 
 and he saw the remedy in the infusion of a new sin- 
 cerity and courage into the legislative system of 
 England. Kingsley attacked them in Yeast and 
 Alton Locke, his two burning indictments of the agri- 
 cultural labourer's life in the country and of the 
 artisan's in the city, and he saw the remedy in that 
 "muscular Christianity" with which his name is 
 commonly joined in some other connections. Mrs. 
 Gaskell attacked them in Mary Barton, to my mind by 
 all odds the most powerful book and still one of the 
 most readable books of this whole school and period ; 
 and the remedy that she proposed was simply Chris- 
 tian sympathy, exhibited by the employe in forgiving 
 his employer for wrongs done, and by the employer 
 in so far unbending as to see the common humanity 
 in his employe. It is significant that Mrs. Gaskell, 
 when she wrote North and South a few years later, 
 saw the burden of guilt as being somewhat differently 
 distributed, and blamed the employe more, the em- 
 ployer less. The remedy was still to understand and 
 forgive, but the need of forgiveness was no longer
 
 124 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 confined to one side of the contention. Thus a great 
 authoress, somewhat unfortunately known best by her 
 most flawless novel, Cranford, and not by her most 
 striking, saw the impermanence of part of her own 
 didacticism, and made its insufficiency a matter of 
 record. 
 
 In all these stories of rebellious protest, the 
 value lies, I say, not in the accusations or the proposed 
 remedies, but in the truthful depiction of what con- 
 ditions were, and what they did to human men and 
 women and children. The truth revealed and the 
 compassion evoked are enough, in the best of these 
 stories, to carry the burden of theories that pass, solu- 
 tions that do not solve, and economic doctrines that 
 grow laughably archaic. 
 
 And the best of evangelical fiction shows the work- 
 ing of the same law. We value the Quo Vadis of the 
 lamented Henry Sienkiewicz, not as a piece of Chris- 
 tian apologetics, not as a sort of sublimated muck- 
 raking of paganism, but as a delineation of what 
 Christianity and Christian heroism and martyrdom 
 were, and as an analysis of the chemical reaction that 
 necessarily followed when Christianity and paganism 
 were bottled up together in a part of the world too 
 small to hold both. And if Kingsley's Hypatia may 
 be said to live still, it lives only in so far as it did 
 for Alexandria what Quo Vadis did for Rome. Mrs. 
 Humphry Ward's Robert Elsmere, a quasi-didactic 
 anti-evangelical novel, is still impressive, not because 
 it tries to prove that the modern man, if truly 
 courageous and thoughtful, can no longer believe the
 
 DIDACTICISM 125 
 
 literal teachings of the Church, but because it shows, 
 at once intensely and typically, the ferment of some 
 modern doubts in the mind which will have truth at 
 whatever cost. In all stories of which the contro- 
 versial element is a part, whatever lasting value there 
 is resides in the authenticity of the characters, the 
 importance of the amount and kind of life faithfully 
 portrayed, and the author's success in subordinating 
 his own crotchets and private views to the complex 
 actualities of the struggle which he undertakes to 
 stage. A story is not necessarily bad if it contain a 
 temporal issue didactically resolved and brought to 
 some specious finality. But it is certainly harder for 
 such a story to be good. Didacticism is not the death- 
 warrant of a novel, but it is assuredly not the way of 
 life for it either. 
 
 On the whole it is safe to say, then, that didacticism 
 is essentially an inartistic spirit. It is among the 
 conceivable possibilities that a novel written primarily 
 for a didactic purpose might turn out to be a good 
 story in all the necessary artistic ways; but the ex- 
 cellence of such a novel would be in the last degree 
 accidental, and it is quite certain that a finely conscien- 
 tious artist would not project a story in the sermoniz- 
 ing spirit. There are trick pictures which in certain 
 lights reveal hidden faces or, inverted, become other 
 pictures entirely; and it is always possible that one of 
 them might turn out to be a good picture. But a real
 
 126 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 painter is concerned with something better than the 
 production of such curiosities. The didactic strain 
 in an otherwise good novel is like the concealed trick 
 of the picture: it is no more important to the good- 
 ness of the novel than the Baconian cryptograms, sup- 
 posing them to exist, are to the goodness of the 
 Shakspere plays. A moral precept hampers the 
 work of fiction ; and the question for criticism to ask 
 of the didactic novel is, How much else is there to 
 offset the serious fault? The trouble with the "prob- 
 lem ' ' play or novel, if the problem is really important, 
 is the substitution of a false and arbitrary selective 
 principle for the only valid principle. The material 
 is assembled to prove a contentious opinion, not to 
 represent life by facts chosen for their interest. 
 
 Are we then obliged, on these or similar grounds, 
 to deny an allegory, such as Pilgrim's Progress, its 
 acknowledged claim to a place among works of art? 
 Indeed no : whether self -evidently or not, this form is 
 an exception to the general indictment. Didactic it 
 is, and partisan, but in a special way, and within a 
 special realm of its own. I can express the matter no 
 more pointedly than by saying that the allegory is 
 nothing but didacticism. There is no other purpose 
 than to clothe in striking and ingenious garb the moral 
 precepts in which the allegory has its origin. In other 
 words, an allegory is simply an extended figure of 
 speech, a self-propagating metaphor; and the only 
 artistic questions it raises are, first, whether it is an 
 effective expression of its meaning and, second, 
 whether it has in itself force and beauty. The di-
 
 DIDACTICISM 127 
 
 dactic novel pretends to be doing one thing while 
 really doing something else that is incompatible with 
 the first thing; it makes an interested argument and 
 offers it as a disinterested story. In allegory, the 
 moral argument is the world in which the whole work 
 is conceived, lives, moves, and has its being. It is in 
 essence a set of convictions given shape as dramatis 
 persona?, just as a proper pageant is tradition or geog- 
 raphy or history come alive to teach us through the 
 eye and the ear. There is no clash in allegory be- 
 tween a moral purpose and an ostensibly disinter- 
 ested reading of life, simply because there is no os- 
 tensibly disinterested reading of life. 
 
 Are we then to fall back on art that is "unmoral" 
 — i.e., without any moral signification whatever? Is 
 the rejection of didacticism the acceptance of aestheti- 
 cism, art for art? By no means. Art can never be 
 "unmoral" so long as either he who makes it or he 
 who enjoys remains a moral being — and whatever art 
 exists for, it is certainly not for itself. "We are pro- 
 foundly and eternally right when we assert that all 
 fiction has some sort of moral basis, sound or unsound, 
 and that, other things being equal, the excellence of 
 the fiction will be in proportion to the soundness of 
 its moral basis. What then do we mean by such state- 
 ments, and how are they to be reconciled with our 
 objections to the fiction which is preachment? 
 
 It is useful at this point to recall our preliminary 
 distinction between the novelist's purpose in writing 
 his book, and the meaning we get out of that book after 
 it is written. The novelist's purpose, I asserted, is 

 
 128 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 reducible always to a disinterested search for the na- 
 ture of life, what life is; his meaning, I may now 
 assert, is his character — what he is. He may not 
 wilfully intrude himself into the spectacle; but he is 
 there none the less, by the very nature of the relation 
 between the creator and the thing created. He may 
 not have uttered a single sentiment avowedly his own ; 
 but he is in the whole composition, the whole com- 
 position is in the truest, most inescapable sense him- 
 self. Certain characters have been shown, certain 
 issues proposed and fought out with some sort of 
 spiritual or material triumph, sympathies have been 
 attracted by some things in the spectacle and repelled 
 by others — and all these matters are the artist's own 
 moral choice, his character objectified. The persons 
 he chooses to depict, the issues that are in his eyes 
 important enough to be struggled over, the kind of 
 triumph won, the direction taken by the reader's sym- 
 pathy, even the very omissions and suppressions — all 
 these things are the measure of the novelist's will, of 
 the deep unconscious self which he can no more help 
 expressing than the phenomena of nature can help 
 expressing natural law. 
 
 It is that deep unconscious self that must, we say, be 
 morally sound. The reader's sympathy must be made 
 to take right directions ; the interest must be drawn to 
 things that over-top mere differences of opinion ; the 
 set of values implied in the given story must be those 
 to which the moral judgment of mankind instinctively 
 responds. Think what you will about property rights, 
 democracy and autocracy, marriage, slavery, socialism,
 
 DIDACTICISM 129 
 
 revealed religion, you are never in any serious doubt 
 about what is admirable and what detestable in men 
 and women so long as your self-interest is not touched. 
 And you say that a novel is morally sound when it 
 makes you feel, without necessarily bothering to think, 
 that the novelist is a person who admires and detests 
 the same fundamental things that everybody else 
 worth hearing admires and detests. 
 
 We have heard Dr. Samuel Johnson censure our 
 English Shakspere for his objectivity: Shakspere 
 "carries his persons indifferently through right and 
 wrong, and, at the close, dismisses them without fur- 
 ther care, and leaves their example to operate by 
 chance." But does it operate by chance? Does it 
 not operate about the same way on every one of us? 
 Professor Stuart Sherman, in a recent essay, The 
 Humanism of Shakspere, 1 points out that after all no 
 one of us can possibly be in doubt whom of the 
 Shakspere characters we were meant to admire, whom 
 to love, whom to regard indulgently despite their 
 shortcomings, whom to laugh at, whom to loathe. The 
 character may not receive justice on the stage, — in 
 tragedy he seldom does, — -but he always receives it in 
 the audience, says Professor Sherman. And that is 
 the only moral effect that counts at all in art. The 
 moral basis of art is the moral consciousness of the 
 race. 
 
 "To make the world better" may be, as John- 
 son says, a writer's duty; but it is hardly a duty that 
 
 i Reprinted in Main Tendencies in Contemporary Literature. 
 By Stuart P. Sherman. New York: Henry Holt and Com- 
 pany.
 
 130 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 
 
 he can perform the better for being aware of it. He 
 must have his eye outward upon the world ; and if he 
 succeed in making the world better, it will be because 
 his eye is such that he cannot help seeing the right 
 things with the right relative values. His purpose 
 must be only the truth. His moral meaning to us will 
 be exactly what he is. "Whatever a novel is or is not, 
 it is inevitably a close and full revelation of the moral 
 .sensibilities of the man who wrote it. It must, 
 whether he will it to or not, express his ethical ac- 
 ceptance of life. In this sense the most "objective" 
 piece of art ever penned on paper, painted on canvas, 
 or carved in stone is as subjective as the most de- 
 liberately intimate self-revelation.
 
 V 
 SATIRE
 
 We have now come, I think, to the point where this 
 argument about the purpose and the meaning of 
 iiction begins to have a shape and a recognizable di- 
 rection. I have proposed, as the purpose and highest 
 general end of fiction, the attainment of disinterested- 
 ness or impersonality. Leaving aside for the moment 
 the hundred technical questions of method and de- 
 sign, we begin to see that whatever furthers and en- 
 forces this quality is theoretically to be desired, and 
 whatever impedes or befogs it to be deplored. The 
 sentimental spirit and the didactic or preaching spirit, 
 two influences of a close cousinship, fall into their 
 places in the argument as two of the principal forces 
 which defeat impersonality or disinterestedness. The 
 relation between these two is that of a greater and a 
 lesser — or, if we must have a distinction, let didacti- 
 cism be the cant of the mind, sentimentalism the more 
 fundamental cant of the soul. The two are one at 
 least in the egotism which gives them breath and be- 
 ing ; the didactic feeling is sentimental egotism with a 
 specialized twist. We have seen also that Comedy, 
 "the laughter of the mind," is the mortal enemy of 
 sentimentalists in general. Here is the basic conflict, 
 that between impartial and partisan, between disinter- 
 ested and egotistical. We shall have enlarged the 
 argument and deepened its foundation still further on 
 
 133
 
 134 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 this other side, the constructive, as soon as we have 
 seen that, just as didacticism is the sentimental spirit 
 specialized, so Comedy is only a specialized and con- 
 centrated mode of the spirit which always opposes the 
 egotism in fiction — the spirit which we may broadly 
 and loosely name Satire. 
 
 For the sake, then, of generalizing the historical 
 conflict between two tendencies, I take our two im- 
 portant and familiar words and do some apparent 
 violence to them by giving each the largest, least tech- 
 nical definition possible. Sentimentalism is the spirit 
 that enjoys; in fiction, it is a preponderance of the 
 emotional element. Satire is the spirit that protests ; 
 and nearly always so far it has constituted the intel- 
 lectual element in fiction. The sentimentalist feels 
 more than he thinks; we measure him by his enjoy- 
 ments. The satirist thinks more than he feels, and 
 we measure him by his aversions. Unreflective sym- 
 pathy and reflective hatred, these are the two great 
 opposed spirits of fiction, the self-interest and the dis- 
 interestedness of the novel as we know it in history. 
 
 There can be no great difficulty about the use of 
 our two words in this somewhat lax way : we use words 
 as we will, so long as it is kept before us exactly how 
 we are using them. But there is a seeming paradox 
 in the assertion that the hatred in fiction is more 
 intellectual than the sympathy. Enjoyment is a 
 purely personal predilection, indeed : but is not hate 
 a personal predilection inverted? Is there anything 
 more intellectual in choosing arbitrarily against a 
 thing than in choosing arbitrarily for it? Why
 
 SATIRE 135 
 
 are not both matters of caprice, of temperamental ac- 
 cident merely? In ethics, perhaps they are; not, I 
 think, in literature. Our retort may well be that, in 
 the novel, enjoyment remains as arbitrary as in per- 
 sonal experience, whereas aversion ceases to be purely 
 arbitrary by the very fact of its successful transfer- 
 ence to literature. You may love with no argument 
 beyond the wholly personal one of your own quick- 
 ened intuitions and sympathies. And so, in practical 
 life, you may hate, with no argument except that of 
 the nerves. But put your hatred into a book, and 
 you have to make some show of impersonal justifi- 
 cation for it; you have to imply categories, dis- 
 criminations, and find other than merely personal 
 excuses for them. In short, you have to adduce 
 plenty of sound logical reasons why other persons, 
 your readers among them, should hate as you do. In 
 actual practice, then, hate turns out to be the more 
 impersonal feeling — the more reasoned, the more in- 
 tellectual, the more disinterested, and by all odds the 
 more social. 
 
 Theorizing, it will have appeared, lends some col- 
 our of probability to the contrast as I have just stated 
 it. Now, to come from theory to history. It hap- 
 pens that we can observe the workings of these two 
 forces, the self-asserting love and the self-forgetting 
 hate, especially well in English fiction, because in 
 English fiction rather more than elsewhere the novel 
 has achieved greatness rather through splendid par- 
 ticular excesses than through the balance and match- 
 ing of all qualities. Whenever the novel has not had
 
 136 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 the heart-ache of sensibility, it has had the head-ache 
 of ratiocination. 
 
 We see the duel between the man of feeling and 
 the man of reflection, not begun, indeed, but mo- 
 mentously represented, in Richardson and Fielding. 
 We can follow it through their descendants to the 
 edge of our own generation. The novel has grown, 
 as Dean Briggs says colts and young boys do, "one 
 end at a time," and its major prophets are those who 
 have obviously thought more than they felt or felt 
 more than they thought. I do not of course mean to 
 blame Richardson and Fielding for all, or most, that 
 clutters our modern field, though they do seem proto- 
 typical of a great deal of it. But one must insist on 
 what they broadly represent: the general contest be- 
 tween thinking and feeling, the everlasting tug-of-war 
 between temperaments, which in each generation has 
 pulled at fiction and stretched it more or less out of 
 shape, giving it here a decided bulge toward the emo- 
 tional, there the opposite bulge toward the intellectual, 
 as sentimentalism or satire has predominated. And 
 it oddly appears everywhere, in confirmation of my 
 present point, that the intellectualist is a person whom 
 we remember by his dislikes, and describe in terms of 
 the things he makes war on. So far in the history 
 of fiction, there is a link between emotionalism and 
 irresponsibility, between intellect and responsibility. 
 The personal aversions are more closely reasoned than 
 the personal predilections. Richardson loved, with all 
 his sensibilities, some things that do not commend
 
 SATIRE 137 
 
 themselves to the intelligence; and Fielding — to put 
 the matter shortly — hated Richardson. The ' ' Gothic ' ' 
 romance loved spookery and neurasthenia for their 
 own sakes; Jane Austen hated those things for the 
 sake of common sense. It would make a long story 
 if one were to recount the hatreds of Dickens — for 
 brutal schools and brutal prisons, for the injustice 
 and incompetence of the law, for the pretentiousness 
 and coxcombry of church and press and forum. We 
 can summarize Dickens in this context by saying that 
 even the characters whom he loves are presented to 
 us in terms of the things they rationally hate, as the 
 elder Weller in terms of his most rational hatred of 
 Stiggins. 
 
 If one had, then, to affix a single label to the evo- 
 lution of fiction in the last hundred and fifty years, 
 that label would be the search for impersonality, for 
 a larger way of looking at things than the way of 
 merely capricious preference. From Lyly to Rich- 
 ardson fiction gropes for realism of method and of 
 detail — for verisimilitude. From Richardson to 
 Thomas Hardy, the period when the novel was attain- 
 ing its majority as a formal art, it groped for disinter- 
 estedness, intellectual strength, a social point of view. 
 Sensibility could not supply these, because it was not 
 critical enough ; reasoned antipathies, oftenest sharp- 
 ened with scorn, supplied or tended to supply them in 
 terms of adverse criticism — or, as I have put it in a 
 roughly summarizing term, Satire.
 
 138 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 II 
 
 AVe ought perhaps to retrace enough steps to find 
 the distinction between this general spirit of protest, 
 or Satire, and didacticism. Both of them take a 
 stand, both are designed to instruct; but the stand 
 taken by satire is against rather than for something, 
 and it instructs us in what to avoid, not in what to do. 
 The difference is that between affirmative and nega- 
 tive. What to do can be one of the most difficult of 
 human problems, soluble after all more in terms of 
 motives than in terms of actions themselves — a point 
 which didactic writers nearly always miss. But what 
 to reject, what to loathe — this is oftenest a much 
 easier problem. The socializing influence of hatred 
 is a subject hardly done justice to in the theorizing 
 of moral economists, who will have perhaps somewhat 
 to learn from the vast and terrific exhibitions of that 
 very principle among great modern nations at war. 
 
 Most persons, even those of extremely divergent 
 positive tastes, can finding footing of solidarity in 
 endless common aversions. Henry James gave, in 
 The American, a sentence of proof how he under- 
 stood this potentiality in the unlovely side of human 
 nature. Christopher Newman, outraged and humili- 
 ated, sees, as he reflects upon the family which has done 
 him a calculated wrong, that their conjoint will to in- 
 jure was after all, in its way, an aspiration above in- 
 dividual self-seeking: ". . . it was a link for them, 
 perhaps, their having so hurt him. ' ' * This is not an 
 
 i The American, Chapter XXVI.
 
 SATIRE 139 
 
 achievement of community on the highest possible 
 plane, this solidarity of hatred in a nation, a class, or 
 a family ; but it is at least not all evil. We shall find 
 perhaps that neither is the hatred in fiction the ulti- 
 mate moral achievement; but it is at least a moral 
 achievement, as the merely basking and irresponsible 
 enjoyment quite fails to be. Satire, like didacticism, 
 does then affirm something, but only a negative some- 
 thing — a denial. The novel cannot recommend a 
 cause without preaching; but it can riddle a cause, 
 it can point the scornful finger, without so prejudi- 
 cially committing itself. 
 
 I have said that satire is clearly negative instead 
 of affirmative ; but this does not mean that it is neces- 
 sarily destructive instead of constructive. It is an 
 axiom of literature, whatever may be said of politics 
 and religion, that some sort of destruction is often the 
 only possible kind of construction. Satire has at dif- 
 ferent times — notably in verse of the second third 
 of the 18th century — fallen to the low estate of a 
 convention ; the accent of Juvenal has become the ac- 
 cent of fashion. But at its best satire is the gesture 
 of idealism and of righteous human indignation in 
 the presence of abuses not to be borne ; the natural re- 
 sponse of the moral sense to the various affronts by 
 injustice and corruption in a world out of joint, or 
 seen by the satirist as being out of joint. "When there 
 is so much for ordinary decency to loathe, how idle to 
 give one's self up to tender dreaming! this is the 
 mood underlying really noble satire. The method 
 may be destructive, but the spirit is something more.
 
 140 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 The best satire of Swift, of Goldsmith, of Dickens, 
 even of Smollett — is it not at once both humanistic 
 and humanitarian in its effect ? To denounce a wrong 
 is to enforce some alternative right; when the heart 
 is made to burn most hotly against obvious injustices, 
 then it is nearest to melting in that pity and fear 
 which, according to Aristotle, are the purifying emo- 
 tions of tragedy. And even when the satire is cold, 
 as it commonly is when given the inflection known as 
 irony, it still makes us hate in a greater cause than 
 self-interest, and encourages us to want noble things 
 while resenting ignoble ones. Any one can verify for 
 himself this constructive and humanizing power of 
 rightly directed aversion, by considering for a mo- 
 ment Fielding's picture of hypocrisy in Blifil, George 
 Eliot's of weak infidelity in Tito Melema, Hardy's of 
 narrow self-righteous goodness in Angel Clare, or any 
 of a hundred other portraits of characters whom we 
 were meant to admire as inventions but to detest as 
 personal embodiments of certain traits. 
 
 Satire makes hatred impressive and valid, in short, 
 whenever it makes it most nearly universal. If it be 
 asked whether the satirist is not in some danger of 
 tumbling into the pitfall of sentimentalism and of 
 missing a just breadth of appeal by stressing aversions 
 not belonging to our common human idealism, we may 
 indeed concede the point. And for illustration of it 
 we have to look no farther than to Swift as he wrote 
 in the hours when, carried along on the force of his 
 own invective and lashing himself into a misanthropic 
 fury, he ceased to make the good hate the evil in man
 
 SATIRE 141 
 
 and portrayed all humankind as evil utterly. In the 
 last book of Gulliver's Travels, where man is exclu- 
 sively a Yahoo and all his character is in "the teeth 
 and the claws," pity recoils upon the author himself, 
 and fear shrivels us more than it purifies. Satire is 
 purging only when it points to aversions which we can 
 all be made to share ; when it denounces inhumanity 
 for the sake of humanity. It is beside the point to de- 
 nounce humanity, for to do that is to reject everything. 
 Satire must keep its categories and discriminations; 
 and they must be founded on principles which go 
 deeper than argument, principles which we are bound 
 to hold to by virtue of our existence as social human 
 beings of a common origin, common interests, and a 
 common destiny. 
 
 Ill 
 
 This paradox, the constructive potentiality of a 
 method purely negative, appears in the most elab- 
 orate examples of satire of the type voyage imaginaire, 
 all the way from The Ultimate Things Beyond Thule 
 by Antonius Diogenes [ ?] to M. Anatole France's 
 L'lle des Pingouins, and, in classic English, from De- 
 foe's Memoirs of Sundry Transactions in the World of 
 the Moon and Swift's Gulliver to the late Samuel But- 
 ler's Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited. All of these 
 are the Utopian romance more or less inverted. I pass 
 over this form, with but this incidental note, in order 
 to come to a still more refined and specialized applica- 
 tion of satire which has rather more to do with the
 
 142 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 realistic novel ; a genre of satire reduced to a formal, 
 calculated, and sustained system of irony, of which we 
 have two illustrious examples in English, separated 
 by almost exactly a century: Fielding's Jonathan 
 Wild the Great and Thackeray's Barry Lyndon, the 
 second of these in dehnite and unmistakable imitation 
 of the first. 
 
 These are the old picaresque novel in an elaborate 
 mask. Their subject matter is unscrupulous but pic- 
 turesque roguery ; their method is to hold that roguery 
 up to mock admiration, very much as Swift, in such 
 essays as A Modest Proposal, affects a mock admira- 
 tion for the ruthless inhumanity of oppressors of the 
 poor. Jonathan Wild is a personage of undeviating 
 criminality; the beautiful consistency of his life is 
 marred by scarce a single generous deed or decent 
 impulse. From the time of his youthful captaincy 
 over a gang of orchard robbers, when he was invari- 
 ably ' ' treasurer of the booty, some little part of which 
 he would now and then, with wonderful generosity, 
 bestow on those who took it, ' ' until his consummation 
 on the scaffold or "tree of glory," when he found 
 breath to deliver "a hearty curse" upon the as- 
 sembled crowd, he showed himself to be "not re- 
 strained by any of those weaknesses which disappoint 
 the views of mean and vulgar souls, and which are 
 comprehended in one general term of honesty, which 
 is a corruption of HONOSTY, a word derived from 
 what the Greeks call an ass." From the title-page to 
 the closing sentence there is an incessant harping on 
 the word "greatness," used in this scheme of irony
 
 SATIRE 143 
 
 to mean material success without moral goodness. 
 And when, near the end, Fielding reduces the career 
 of his infamous protagonist to a list of elementary 
 principles of ' ' greatness, ' ' behold ! that list exactly 
 defines and delineates the practices by which Fielding 
 saw eminence achieved in the most respected careers 
 of his own 18th century world. His purpose is 
 to show how a boot-licking society worshipped pres- 
 tige no matter how gained; his method is to draw a 
 grotesque parallel between the successful man of the 
 great world and the successful criminal of the under- 
 world, and to signify that the one is as little worthy 
 of admiration as the other. This catalogue of prin- 
 ciples, as applicable to a Robert Walpole as to a Jona- 
 than Wild, seems to me to be among the most ingenious 
 and pointed uses of savage irony in English: 
 
 "1. Never to do more mischief to another than was nec- 
 essary to the effecting of his purpose; for that mis- 
 chief was too precious a thing to be thrown away. 
 
 "2. To know no distinction of men from affection ; but to 
 sacrifice all with equal readiness to his interest. 
 
 "3. Never to communicate more of an affair than was 
 necessary to the person who was to execute it. 
 
 "4. Not to trust him who hath deceived you, nor who 
 knows he hath been deceived by you. 
 
 "5. To forgive no enemy; but to be cautious and often 
 dilatory in revenge. 
 
 "6. To shun poverty and distress, but to ally himself as 
 close as possible to power and riches. 
 
 "7. To maintain a constant gravity in his countenance and 
 behaviour, and to affect wisdom on all occasions. 
 
 "8. To foment eternal jealousies in his gang, one of an- 
 another.
 
 144 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 "9. Never to reward any one equal to his merit; but al- 
 ways to insinuate that the reward was above it. 
 
 "10. That all men were knaves or fools, and much the 
 greater number a composition of both. 
 
 "11. That a good name, like money, must be parted with, 
 or at least greatly risked, in order to bring the owner 
 any advantage. 
 
 "12. That virtues, like precious stones, were easily coun- 
 terfeited; that the counterfeits in both cases adorned 
 the wearer equally, and that very few had knowledge 
 or discernment sufficient to distinguish the counter- 
 feit jewel from the real. 
 
 "13. That many men were undone by not going deep 
 enough in roguery; as in gaming any man may be a 
 loser who doth not play the whole game. 
 
 "14. That men proclaim their own virtues, as shopkeepers 
 expose their goods, in order to profit by them. 
 
 "15. That the heart was the proper seat of hatred, and the 
 countenance of affection and friendship." : 
 
 This extraordinary satire of Fielding, and Thack- 
 eray's more sprightly imitation of it, serve well 
 enough to introduce us to one of the great questions 
 of artistic economy in the novel: To what extent 
 is it expedient, and to what extent right, for fiction 
 to specialize in the vicious, the criminal, the de- 
 cadent, the morbid? Is it good taste, and is it ethical, 
 for art to deal extensively with what is inherently 
 forbidding or repulsive? Of course these two pieces 
 of irony do not actually help us answer the question, 
 because they mean the opposite of what they say ; but 
 they do interestingly suggest the question. And we 
 have to face that question squarely in such stories as 
 deal literally with evil character and action. 
 
 i Jonathan Wild the Great, Book IV, Chapter XII.
 
 SATIRE 145 
 
 Theoretically and a priori, we should have to say 
 that art ought to encourage and inspirit us, not de- 
 press. But instantly there arises another question: 
 May not it truly hearten and inspirit us, by indirec- 
 tion, through display of things to be shunned, and 
 through the moral recoil provoked by such dis- 
 play? And there is obviously something to be said 
 in the affirmative. Mr. Chesterton, speaking particu- 
 larly of Fielding and Tom Jones, says : ' ' We have 
 grown to associate morality in a book with a kind of 
 optimism and prettiness; according to us, a moral 
 book is a book about moral people. But the old idea 
 was almost exactly the opposite; a moral book was a 
 book about immoral people. A moral book was full 
 of pictures like Hogarth's Gin Lane or Stages of 
 Cruelty, or it recorded, like the popular broadsheet, 
 God's Dreadful Judgment against some blasphemer 
 or murderer. . . . Telling the truth about the terrible 
 struggle of the human soul is surely a very elemen- 
 tary part of the ethics of honesty. If the characters 
 are not wicked, the book is. " 1 
 
 As a matter of fact, though, it is not very helpful 
 to try to answer such questions theoretically and a 
 priori. They have to be answered historically, with 
 reference to that which has proved itself excellent. 
 And we find, whether we begin with Euripides or 
 with Chaucer or with Shakspere or with Fielding, 
 that no very enduring writer has tried to shirk the 
 problem of evil. Some of the characters who are 
 
 * All Things Considered. By G. K. Chesterton. New York: 
 John Lane Co. MCMIX. Pp. 264-66.
 
 146 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 greatest as creations are least great as moral beings; 
 some of the books which most develop and crystallize 
 our moral ideas do so through the presentation of 
 guilt. To summarize, still measuring by this same 
 very handy yardstick of what has proved itself of en- 
 during merit, we can make out at least these few ten- 
 able principles: 
 
 First, the artist's business is with the whole of life ; 
 and there is no department or phase of it into which 
 he may not go, granted only enough conscience and 
 enough skill. 
 
 Secondly, he must have that conscience and that 
 skill : we must feel the soundness of his purpose, and 
 there must be no blurring of moral values, no false 
 glamour to make us forget that we are supposed to be 
 reading a criticism of life performed under certain 
 standards. Evil when shown in books can serve no 
 self -justifying purpose unless it is known as evil. We 
 see an infringement of this law in a modern fashion 
 of sentimentalizing crime and criminals, and in a cur- 
 rent fashion of looking so indulgently upon the 
 tawdry philanderings of sexually irresponsible per- 
 sons as to carry indulgence over into a sort of per- 
 verted evangelism of the fleshly lusts. 
 
 Thirdly, if the artist lack critical sense, if he tacitly 
 accept evil as normal, or as indistinguishable from 
 good, he is convicted by his own handiwork; he has 
 palpably made the worse appear the better reason — 
 in which event he pays, as history abundantly proves, 
 the penalty of a speedy oblivion. The dogma of "Art 
 for Art's sake" is eminently productive of this danger
 
 SATIRE 147 
 
 — Art being unintelligible except as a ministration to 
 the highest pleasures of man, and the pleasures of the 
 gratified moral sense being surely among those 
 highest. 
 
 All of life, then, is open to the artist ; and we may 
 say that the quintessence of art is some sort of strug- 
 gle, on a higher or lower plane, between something 
 which ought to enlist the moral sympathies of the 
 reader and something else which ought to repel them. 
 But the artist is responsible for the meaning of that 
 struggle and for the plane on which it takes place; 
 and if the meaning be perverted or the plane a low one, 
 there is no excusing the artist on the ground of his 
 invisible good intention or his honest error or in- 
 capacity. 
 
 IV 
 
 It was through the study of evil in character that 
 satire achieved the most important development of its 
 whole history on the non-technical side — a develop- 
 ment which involved something amounting to the de- 
 struction of satire as such, and the transmutation of 
 it into something still more disinterested and imper- 
 sonal. I can state this development succinctly by say- 
 ing that, before the 19th century was far advanced, 
 the villain passed out of literature. 
 
 The passing of the villain is one of the most inter- 
 esting phases of literary history since Jane Austen. 
 With the assimilation of the romantic blend of hu- 
 manitarianism and individualism, the villain found
 
 148 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 two possible destinies awaiting him. He could become 
 the Byronic hero, a superman full of sin and Welt- 
 schmerz and glamour, a dark fallen angel, an attitud- 
 inizing rebel hero ; or he could become a human being 
 just a little on the lower side of the median of average 
 human goodness — the victim of accidents in heredity 
 or circumstance, a weaker brother but not a com- 
 pendium of all possible malice and unscrupulousness. 
 "Where the romantic individualism triumphed, as in the 
 earlier Bulwer-Lytton, the villain became the Byronic 
 hero ; where the romantic humanitarianism triumphed, 
 as in Dickens, the villain became a human being — 
 with a sentimental proclivity, it must be added, for 
 becoming in the last chapter an unnaturally good one. 
 This epoch, the late Romantic and early Victorian, is 
 the epoch of the desperate criminal presented as a 
 creature of good impulses misdirected, an ogre who 
 might as easily have been an angel if he had had bet- 
 ter luck with his parents and his education. The 
 Byronic superman we may profitably discard: his 
 existence in letters becomes more and more precarious, 
 until he passes into juvenile fiction and melodrama— 
 for example, the astonishingly ornate and intricate 
 melodrama of Wilkie Collins. 
 
 But the other type of converted villain, the type 
 which evolves toward average manhood, and not to- 
 ward the fallen angels, is of genuine importance. 
 Sentimentalized as was the treatment of him before 
 1845, illogical and shallow as was the sympathy lav- 
 ished upon him in some quarters, notably in parts of 
 Dickens, the human villain was to live on and wax
 
 SATIRE 149 
 
 great, not only overcoming the propensity of his cre- 
 ators to weep and sigh over him, but actually over- 
 coming in the end the whole practice of satire as an 
 unequivocal issue between black and white, evil and 
 good. The villain was originated in sentimentalism, 
 but he was continued in the scientific spirit. When 
 it was once seen that any really interesting villain 
 was made up of a great deal of humanity plus a 
 certain admixture of evil inclination, it was sure 
 to be seen next that any really interesting person 
 was a quite similar compound. In other words, as 
 soon as the humanitarian feeling and the sense of 
 brotherhood became assimilated and rationalized, the 
 struggle of fiction became transferred from the stage 
 where hero contends against villain to the other stage 
 where he contends against the unheroic in himself. 
 The issue is just as sharp, just as definitive; the di- 
 rection of our moral aversion is no more ambiguous 
 than before ; but its object is now only part of a char- 
 acter, the weakness or failing of an individual with 
 whom on the whole we identify ourselves in sympathy. 
 Mankind is no longer classifiable into devils to hate 
 and angels to love: 
 
 "Some are fine fellows, some right scurvy; 
 Most, a dash between the two" — 
 
 and the task of the novelist and his reader is neither 
 to hate nor to love, but to understand. 
 
 Fielding, of course, showed a considerable mastery 
 of this mingled affair, human nature, but came too 
 early to discard the machinery of the superficial vil-
 
 150 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 lain. He gives us, roughly, a heroine who is perfect 
 angel, a villain who is perfect devil except that he is 
 not a gentleman, and a hero who is indeed ' ' a dash be- 
 tween the two, ' ' a creature near to the human average. 
 Jane Austen, whose genius is throughout one of rare 
 and almost miraculous anticipations, is most of all in 
 advance of the novel of her day in this respect, the com- 
 plete human credibility of practically all her puppets. 
 Historically, the full fruition of the modern scientific 
 and impersonal interest in evil occurs in George Eliot. 
 The first of great English novelists to come to her 
 proper work from philosophy and the abstract sci- 
 ences, she is before all else the analyst of that sin 
 which is omission, and the cause of which is weak- 
 ness. She studies, in one crucial instance after an- 
 other, the balance of power between opposed forces 
 in the single character ; and she never makes the mis- 
 take of alienating her character from our sympathy 
 by creating him a prodigy of either moral extreme. 
 Even when we study her weaklings, such as Tito 
 Melema and Geoffrey Cass, aversion is mollified by un- 
 derstanding; and in her more balanced characters, 
 such as Maggie Tulliver and Romola — they are most 
 often women — the presence of tragic limitations is 
 precisely what wrings out the last drop of our sym- 
 pathy. If we hated the weakness more we should 
 understand it less; and if the human imperfections 
 were absent the struggle would lose all its moral 
 poignancy. In George Eliot's work we see satire be- 
 ginning to turn into something else.
 
 SATIRE 151 
 
 V 
 
 This symptom, the dissolution of the personal vil- 
 lain and his re-emergence as the seed of evil or of 
 weakness in average human nature, points, then, to 
 the development which superseded satire. Sentimen- 
 talism came first, with its intuitional and unrenective 
 enjoyment ; its limitation was that it got itself valued 
 by the intensity of the enjoyment and not by the in- 
 herent worth of the things to be enjoyed. Satire fol- 
 lowed; a reaction against sentimentalism, and an ap- 
 plication of the theory that you could save yourself 
 by hating hateful things. Satire is at least, for this 
 reason, more disinterested than sentimentalism. But 
 the time came, with the decay of dogmatic theology 
 and the less authoritative, more experimental inter- 
 pretation of moral law, when hatred was seen to be 
 anachronistic and not enough. It was better, of course, 
 to hate the right things responsibly than to love the 
 wrong things, or even the right ones, irresponsibly ; but 
 the sincere part of the Victorian humanitarian feeling 
 had somewhat changed the emphasis of human affec- 
 tions generally. It will be fairly accurate to say that 
 after a certain point the 19th century was moved to see 
 how many things it could love humanity in spite of; 
 that is, how much it could understandingly forgive. 
 And its forgiveness was based, not as of old on sensibil- 
 ity, on emotional charity, but on the analytical charity 
 of comprehension. The world of fiction had a sudden 
 vision of how much alike, ultimately, we all are.
 
 152 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 The patient anatomizing which George Eliot per- 
 formed upon the conscience and the feeling of per- 
 sonal guilt was, as I suggested, the purely rational 
 fruit of this new feeling. On. the purely tempera- 
 mental side, we find its fruit in Thackeray and in 
 Anthony Trollope, taking there the shape of their 
 rare and unprecedented tolerance for their charac- 
 ters. This indulgent and benignant irony of the cre- 
 ator toward his creatures is a new strain in the novel. 
 Jane Austen, serene in spirit as she was, quietly 
 modulated as was her criticism, would have no non- 
 sense from her persons ; let Miss Bennet in her preju- 
 dice, or Darcy in his unregenerate pride, betray an 
 insincerity, and she is always ready with a tart little 
 rebuke. She will love them so long as they are hon- 
 estly wrong; but let them be guilty of posturing or 
 deceiving themselves, and she wastes no sympathy on 
 them. Thackeray and Trollope perform the miracle, 
 almost lost since Shakspere, of keeping their charac- 
 ters vivid and whole in two quite separate provinces : 
 one of moral common sense, where we know their 
 vices exactly and will tolerate no illusions about their 
 worth, and another of pure artistic appreciation, 
 where they perpetually divert us by being them- 
 selves. Thackeray sustains his and our admiration 
 for such designing adventuresses as Becky Sharp and 
 Blanche Amory, without ever pretending that they 
 are better than they are ; he has at once the personal 
 enjoyment of their rarity, and the impersonal esti- 
 mate of their moral deficiencies. And one wonders 
 whether Trollope could ever possibly have given any
 
 SATIRE 153 
 
 reader the joy in Mrs. Proudie that he found in her 
 himself. She richly merited death; there are many 
 chapters which make the reader want to lay violent 
 hands on her; yet Trollope long plotted in vain to 
 kill her, and when, under the spur of a conversation 
 about her overheard in a library, he nerved himself 
 to the deed and went home and committed it, he felt 
 as though lie had actually done murder. This was 
 not in the least because he was addicted to inventing 
 sentimental extenuations of Mrs. Proudie 's general 
 hatefulness and hypocrisy: it was because he had 
 known her long and intimately enough to see that she 
 could no more help being what she was than Mr. 
 Harding could help being what he was. This toler- 
 ance, of the intellect alone in some modern persons, 
 of the temperament alone in others, is perhaps the 
 ultimate human wisdom. At all events, in literature 
 it is the end of satire as a formula of methodical 
 scorn or ridicule. 
 
 Since Trollope the indulgent view of human nature 
 has had its way more and more. The passing of dog- 
 matic theology weakens the feeling of a hard-and-fast 
 moral law, before which all men are classifiable as 
 saints or sinners; the rapid rise and triumph of the 
 cosmic sciences make an organic unit of the world 
 with all its living creatures, intensifying the percep- 
 tion that all are knit together by a common origin 
 and a common destiny, the social sciences have their 
 birth in this feeling; and it becomes an impossible 
 anachronism to hate again in the old unequivocating 
 way. One must either renounce the violent antipa-
 
 154 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 thies altogether and replace them by a universal tol- 
 erance, or else one must find something larger to hate. 
 Not unnaturally, both possibilities come to pass in a 
 single generation. Zola in France and Gissing in 
 England turned the novel into a sort of laboratory ex- 
 periment, impersonally conducted and carefully mea- 
 sured; man is analysed in certain of his crucial re- 
 lations to his fellowmen. At the same time, Samuel 
 Butler was declaiming against man's slavery to his 
 heritage from past generations, hating thus a part of 
 the general constitution of the world. And before 
 long Hardy was to personify all the injustice in the 
 world as a malignant God, and set up that God as the 
 object of man's puny and ineffectual curses. This is 
 as far as satire can go toward the impersonal and 
 still be satire. When hatred has turned from actual 
 men and women and their actions in order to expend 
 itself on an evil principle, it is hatred quite deperson- 
 alized. Since 1895 and Jude the Obscure, there is in 
 fact hardly a good hater left in British fiction.
 
 VI 
 
 THE REALISTIC SPIRIT
 
 In describing the history of English fiction since 
 1740 as a war between sentimentalism and satire, 
 which I roughly identified respectively with the emo- 
 tional and the intellectual elements in fiction, I had 
 in mind a certain great change which has but lately 
 come over the spirit of the novel; a change which 
 amounts to nothing less than a pact of peace a;ter 
 this long feud, and which is so important that it 
 seems to promise sweeping changes in the novel of the 
 future, a quite different direction and set of intellec- 
 tual ideals. I have already mentioned several middle 
 and late Victorian symptoms of the struggle of the 
 modern novel toward intellectual disinterestedness: 
 such symptoms as Thackeray's indulgence toward the 
 foibles of his personae, George Eliot's philosophical 
 interest in the nature and significance of evil, Samuel 
 Butler's analysis of heredity, Hardy's indictment of 
 the whole world-purpose as a cruel irresponsibleness, 
 and Gissing's researches in sociology; to which we 
 may add, of course, Meredith's re-creation of Comedy 
 as "the laughter of the mind." All these point to 
 the one fact : the passing of the old violent and arbi- 
 trary antipathies. Hatred becomes an anachronism 
 and contempt an impertinence. A broader interpre- 
 tation of what the world-organism is, and of how cause 
 interlocks with effect, helps the novelist see that all of 
 
 157
 
 158 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 us equally are what we were made, what we cannot 
 help being ; and more and more the ideal goal of fiction 
 becomes this elemental truth of cause and effect, the 
 truth of what life and character are without reference 
 to what the novelist personally would like them to be. 
 The old intellectualisrn of satire was a criticism of 
 life in the adverse sense of being a denunciation of 
 what it ought uot to be. The new intellectualism is a 
 criticism of life in the sense of being simply an inter- 
 pretation of what life is, beyond our power to help or 
 prevent. The temperamental indulgence of Thack- 
 eray becomes the philosophical tolerance, the rooted 
 conviction, of the present age ; the spirit of satire be- 
 comes what I shall call, to distinguish it from the 
 realistic technique or method, the new Realistic Spirit. 
 I have said that this recent triumph of the realistic 
 spirit, the triumph of intellectualism in the novel, 
 marks the end of the old war of satirist and sentimen- 
 talist; and indeed that is a fact which we need to 
 perceive if we are to understand what the fiction of 
 the present is about, and what the fiction of the future 
 is most likely to be about. Sentimental ism was sym- 
 pathy, capriciously and arbitrarily exerted : the realis- 
 tic spirit is universal sympathy, an attempt to under- 
 stand everything from its own point of view. Satire 
 was a half-impersonal attempt to define something 
 that everybody ought to hate: the realistic spirit is 
 a much more impersonal attempt to show that there 
 is nothing human which a really enlightened mind 
 ought to hate. The old novel was intellectual about in 
 proportion as it was polemical : it thought and fought,
 
 THE REALISTIC SPIRIT 159 
 
 or it felt and waxed irresponsible. The new spirit 
 makes it at once less polemical and more intellectual. 
 The new sympathy is more analytical than the old 
 satire — besides being far more inclusive than the old 
 sympathy. The realist — I speak of him still as the 
 child of his time, the present, peering as far as I can 
 through the dust raised by lesser conflicts of fashions 
 and personalities — the realist is the legitimate child 
 of satirist and sentimentalist. He thinks with his 
 sensibilities, feels with his intellect ; criticism and en- 
 joyment fuse. Sentimentalism dealt with the egocen- 
 tric life, the emotional seemings of things to suscepti- 
 ble folk; satire dealt with the ethical life, the possi- 
 bilities of things. Our realist records the possibilities 
 and the seemings, but not to identify himself with 
 either; for he sees them as incidental to the more 
 probing queston of what life inscrutably is. 
 
 We may leave aside for the moment the question 
 of whether this sweeping change in fiction is a change 
 for the better, a growth. I think we can see pretty 
 readily that it is inevitable, and that its inevitability 
 lifts it above the rank of the mere fashions, the flux 
 and reflux, that in every age exert a transient effect 
 on the shape and composition of the novel. I can 
 best state the importance of this change if I say that 
 it is the response of the novel to the corresponding 
 change which has come over everything else. Any one 
 who will take the trouble to read the polemical and 
 controversial writings of such a man as Huxley will 
 see how man's conception of the world changed its 
 center of gravity in the thirty-five years after the
 
 160 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. The 
 world as an organization, a product of will, became 
 the world as an organism, the product of natural 
 law ; the province of faith appeared to shrink and that 
 of sight to expand ; the higher criticism had its way, 
 first with Moses, then with the four gospels; and be- 
 fore 1890, before the end of Huxley 's long controversy 
 with Gladstone over The Impregnable Rock of Holy 
 Scripture, it was possible for Mrs. Humphry Ward, 
 whom it is moderately difficult to think of as a violent 
 iconoclast, to write an important novel, Robert Els- 
 mere, about the difficulty which any modern man of 
 both intelligence and courage must experience in be- 
 lieving the dogmas of Christian theology. For good or 
 evil, the world had to consider its own meaning and in- 
 terpret its own natural history more broadly, less arbi- 
 trarily. The natural outcome of this new vision of 
 man in relation to all things was the rise of the social 
 sciences ; the perception that social problems are often 
 perhaps insoluble, that at any rate there is no panacea. 
 And fiction, partly anticipating and partly following 
 the tendency visible everywhere else, acquired this 
 open-mindedness, became impersonal and disinterested 
 to the last degree. 
 
 Both sentimentalism and satire are very comfortable 
 postures in an orthodox universe, governed by divine 
 law and dedicated to some ultimate enforcement of 
 order. The sentimentalist feels that everything is al- 
 ready settled without his connivance, and that he may 
 as well enjoy what appeals to him ; the satirist thinks 
 he knows just how everything is settled, and, under-
 
 THE REALISTIC SPIRIT 161 
 
 standing the law, can do no less than lay it down. 
 But either attitude seems childish when the decay of 
 faith turns the universe into an overwhelming riddle, 
 its truths into antiquated speculations, its fixed moral 
 laws into mere truisms about animal behaviour. The 
 mature man then is he who senses the relative, pro- 
 visional, and impermanent status of all that is thought 
 or known — the man without prejudices. Our realist 
 escapes all prejudices by respecting all opinions, and 
 rejecting all. He has the open inquiring mind, the 
 steeled heart. He believes in everything as an evi- 
 dence, but in nothing as a proof. His mind is a 
 sympathetic and submissive recording instrument for 
 the actual; for every experience, thought, memory, 
 impression, or dream. He sympathizes with all, be- 
 cause his philosophical conscience tells him that 
 whatever exists is worthy of sympathetic understand- 
 ing. In short, his unremitting effort is to get outside 
 himself, his own likes and dislikes, and finally to get 
 outside the world, outside everything. For it is only 
 from that impersonal point of vantage, he tells him- 
 self, that it is possible to see through everything. 
 Likes and dislikes become relatively meaningless in a 
 world conceived as an evolutionary unit, in which we 
 are all necessarily parts of each other. 
 
 II 
 
 This new mood that has come over the practice of 
 fiction can be summarized as a selfless and pervasive
 
 162 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 curiosity. The old hatreds have passed, irrecover- 
 ably, it would seem. Even so vigorous a fighting man 
 as JIuxley, defending himself from the charge of 
 having gone out of his way to assail things commonly 
 held sacred, says: "I . . . steadfastly deny that 
 'hatred of Christianity' is a feeling with which I have 
 any acquaintance. There are very few things which 
 I find it permissible to hate ; and though, it may be, 
 that some of the organizations, which arrogate to them- 
 selves the Christian name, have richly earned a place 
 in the category of hateful things, that ought to have 
 nothing to do with one's estimation of the religion, 
 which they have perverted and disfigured out of all 
 likeness to the original." 1 Thus, in the chief con- 
 troversialist of his age, a scientific impartiality takes 
 the place of bias; and presently that mood of the 
 laboratory, the mood of research, has conquered the 
 novel and annexed it as an invaluable province. 
 
 When we look for illustrations through fiction of 
 the last twenty years, we do not have to go unre- 
 warded. If we examine the only literary career since 
 George Eliot's that can compare in length, in dignity, 
 and in originality with the careers of Hardy and 
 Meredith, — that of Henry James,— we shall find it 
 animated from the earliest years by this very impulse 
 of curiosity. Henry James won his first distinction as 
 a student of international situations, with special ref- 
 erence to the American abroad ; and of all the writers 
 in his generation who dealt with such themes, he alone 
 
 i Science and Christian Tradition, p. vii. New York: D. 
 Appleton and Co., 1894.
 
 THE REALISTIC SPIRIT 163 
 
 portrayed Americans and Europeans who were wise 
 enough to learn much from each other, too wise to try 
 to teach each other anything. He creates the best 
 elements discoverable in modern characters who are 
 products of quite separate places and traditions of 
 breeding, and then simply throws those contrasting ele- 
 ments together in crucial situations to see what will 
 happen. He takes his spoil, his trophy, and gives 
 us our reward, not in the triumph of one set of char- 
 acters or interests over another, but simply in the tri- 
 umph of understanding all round. And, late in his 
 life when his work of fiction was almost over and he 
 sat down to make the Prefaces to the definitive New 
 York edition of it, — a series of the most valuable docu- 
 ments ever produced in constructive criticism of fic- 
 tion as an art, — his constant emphasis was upon the 
 unflagging ingenuity and patience with which he had 
 drawn his clues from life and extricated them 
 from the mass of interfering attendant circum- 
 stances. The exertion of selfless curiosity is to him a 
 good in itself; curiosity is the only one of his emo- 
 tions to which the baffling element in life makes any 
 challenge worth accepting; a problematical character 
 or situation is an importunate plea addressed to his 
 intuition ; and in him this essentially modern disin- 
 terested emotion of curiosity enlarges its scope until it 
 includes compassion, chivalry, self-renunciation, the 
 uttermost extension of delicacy, and what Professor 
 Wendell has called, in a fine commemorative tribute, 
 his "exquisite solicitude." Henry James made of 
 curiosity nothing less than a whole philosophy of art
 
 164 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 and life. The emotion extends its scope from Roder- 
 ick Hudson and The American, books of his first fame, 
 to The Wings of the Dove and T7ie Golden Bowl, his 
 crowning attempts to tell "the story that cannot be 
 told." And The Sacred Fount, the one novel into 
 which he deliberately put a partial portrait of himself, 
 is nothing more than a dramatization of enlightened 
 curiosity, of a sort of sublimated appetite for benevo- 
 lent gossip, at work in a tangled social situation where 
 all the clues are not material but spiritual and intui- 
 tional. 
 
 This spirit of curiosity, as exhibited quintessentially 
 in the novels and tales of Henry James, strangely ful- 
 fils the commandment to love one's neighbour as one's 
 self; the realist's effort is precisely to get outside him- 
 self and inside his neighbour, to see others as they see 
 themselves. This self-suppression is conceived, not as 
 a moral duty, but as an intellectual privilege ; but the 
 result is largely the same. Why blame things for be- 
 ing what they are, when everything is what it cannot 
 help being? "To understand is to forgive." Mr. 
 John Galsworthy expresses the modern spirit, in one 
 of his brave if slightly discouraged sketches, The Inn 
 of Tranquillity, 1 when he says that it is wrong for 
 one of us to despise another, because "we are all little 
 bits of continuity." "To despise one another is to 
 deny continuity; and to deny continuity is to deny 
 eternity." Each of us is only a drop in the same 
 ocean of being. And Mr. Joseph Conrad, who is 
 
 i The Inn of Tranquillity. By John Galsworthy. New 
 York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
 
 THE REALISTIC SPIRIT 165 
 
 hardly less illuminating in discussion of his art than in 
 the practice of it, says in a memorable passage: "... 
 the unwearied self-forgetful attention to every phase of 
 the living universe reflected in our consciousness may 
 be our appointed task on this earth." 1 "The de- 
 tached curiosity of a subtle mind" is the faculty which 
 he dramatizes in Chance — in fact, in all the stories re- 
 lated by Marlow — and his whole philosophy is implied 
 in the statement that "Resignation, not mystic, not 
 detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious, and 
 informed by love, is the only one of our feelings for 
 which it is impossible to become a sham." 
 
 It would be easy to find plenty of other testimony to 
 this same effect, but none more authoritative than that 
 of these three artists who happen also to be critics of 
 their art. Impersonal curiosity, in that ultimate de- 
 velopment where it becomes almost a synonym of 
 Christian charity, has entered the novel to the exclu- 
 sion of the old prides, prejudices, and hates ; and it is 
 impossible for us to imagine what can ever drive it out 
 again. Science has created a new world and de- 
 stroyed the old world behind us; we cannot, if we 
 would, retreat into that old world of fixed standards 
 where we were commanded to love some things and 
 hate others. Our generation has seen the literature of 
 sentimentalism become more "unofficial" than ever, 
 and sink its appeal to the lowest intelligences. Mean- 
 while, the literature of satire has descended to mere 
 muck-raking. The falling to pieces of these tradi- 
 
 M Personal Record, p. 151. New York: Harper & Bros. 
 MCMXH.
 
 166 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 tional extremes and the emergence between them of 
 the present official literature of curiosity, of investiga- 
 tion under the realistic spirit, constitute the final evi- 
 dence of the change that has come over things, and 
 of its general irrevocableness. 
 
 Ill 
 
 So far I find myself sufficiently occupied with 
 merely describing and reporting the tendency which 
 I have called by this name of the realistic spirit. But 
 to describe is not necessarily to approve; nor do I 
 mean to let the discussion become wholly uncritical. 
 The realistic tendency may be inevitable, yet at the 
 same time deplorable ; and if we, necessarily the chil- 
 dren of our time, see inherent weaknesses and short- 
 comings in the mood that rules us, we must not be 
 afraid to state them squarely, and to ask, in a spirit 
 of fearless comparison, where that mood is likely to 
 bring us out. 
 
 Any one can see, I think, that the realistic spirit is 
 not without its defects and dangers, and that the first 
 among these is the danger of losing the sense of criti- 
 cism of life. That fiction, to deserve its place, must 
 be in some sense a critical test of values in reality, in 
 character and in conduct, I must hold as a first postu- 
 late. Fiction is criticism when it takes sides, as satire 
 does ; fiction is criticism when it fearlessly and impar- 
 tially investigates the nature of life and society, as 
 modern realism does. But the spirit which makes
 
 THE REALISTIC SPIRIT 167 
 
 everything in the world seem worth investigation, this 
 indefatigable modern curiosity, may result in the sub- 
 stitution of a lesser faculty for interpretative criti- 
 cism — the lesser faculty, I mean, which contents itself 
 with reporting the existence and the unnumbered as- 
 pects of reality, quite forgetting the while that the 
 tremendous question is what we want, what we need. 
 The patient scrutiny of everything in the field of 
 vision may result at length in a curious optical de- 
 fect; not exactly a blurring of the sight, for our re- 
 alist is nearly always a clear-eyed person, but a loss 
 of proportion and perspective. In short, he who is 
 interested in everything and intolerant of nothing 
 tends to become equally interested in everything; to 
 make actuality, and not worth, his test of values. 
 Some of us, if we read critically, think we have lately 
 seen the love of reality for its own sake pushed to 
 that excess where it defeats the meaning of reality. 
 One can see a crowd only by being out of it; and one 
 can evaluate the masses of facts in a novel only when 
 one knows through what philosophical window one 
 is looking at them. The ' ' documenting, ' ' note-taking, 
 data-gathering novelist who says to us simply: 
 "These things are so, my word for it: make what you 
 choose of them, ' ' is giving us no philosophical window 
 through which to see his crowd; and if our critical 
 sense is numbed and the spectacle becomes for us a 
 meaningless pageant of the real, that outcome is hardly 
 to be wondered at. 
 
 This loss of criticism is the destiny which has ob- 
 viously overtaken some of the current reputations de-
 
 168 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 rived simply from an enormous industry in observ- 
 ing, an enormous skill in reporting. And I see a con- 
 sequence of this loss, a consequence as natural as it 
 is lamentable, in the relative disappearance from fic- 
 tion of great and likable characters, and the substi- 
 tution of weak, unreal, and tawdry characters. Ed- 
 itors of literary columns have developed a habit of 
 reminding us that British fiction for several decades 
 past has created only three or four characters who 
 are welcomed into the common stock available for 
 popular allusion — say, Hardy's Tess, Kipling's Mul- 
 vaney, and Sherlock Holmes. I am far from sure 
 that this is an intelligent selection, depending as it 
 does on the mere counting of heads over a very short 
 period of time ; but the prevalence of the elegiac tone 
 in present editorial comments on the characters of 
 fiction is at least evidence that the novel has lost some 
 power in what ought to be its chief province. There 
 is no predicting an illustrious or even a safe future 
 for the novel if it is losing the art of criticism 
 through the positive and unmistakable bestness of its 
 persona?. 
 
 I am not forgetting that I previously claimed 
 for the novelist his privilege of treating human 
 weakness and degeneration ; but to yield any palpa- 
 ble reward the weakness he treats should be the 
 weakness of the strong, and the character who de- 
 generates should not be a degenerate character. Let 
 us by all odds have intellectual analysis; but first of 
 all let us have something worth analysing. Too often 
 of late fiction has lost its sense of differences, and has
 
 THE REALISTIC SPIRIT 169 
 
 not only treated persons who are infirm, morbid, or 
 vicious, but has treated them as though they were ad- 
 mirable and lovable. The novelist has become so ob- 
 sessed by the vision of our common humanity that he 
 has lost sight of all those differences and superiorities 
 which alone make humanity deserve consideration in 
 art. The biologist in the laboratory may get as much 
 out of a polyp as out of a monkey ; but the novelist 
 cannot get as much out of a monkey as out of a man. 
 The difference is that the scientist is working, in each 
 experiment, for all time, adding grain of sand to grain 
 of sand in his task of building out the shore of 
 knowledge into the sea of ignorance; whereas the 
 novelist is working in terms of books which are them- 
 selves complete wholes, and must separately stand or 
 be swept away. The ideal of research, without reward 
 in the present, is not for him ; every time he signs his 
 name he must have given us something positive, or we 
 find no meaning in his work. Let him recognize the 
 temporary and limited conditions of his craft, and 
 remember that fiction, under whatever philosophy or 
 lack of philosophy, is truly constructive only so long 
 as it criticizes life through great persons, ideals made 
 liesh. We have seen, I think, that the realistic equa- 
 nimity is on the whole less likely to create great char- 
 acters than was the older philosophy which found 
 room for intense predilections and fierce aversions. 
 
 IV 
 
 The only intelligible reason for criticism is to get 
 things improved or somehow changed ; and behind my
 
 170 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 general assumption that literature is criticism of life 
 is an implication that literature has something to do 
 with making life better. I raised a moment ago, and 
 now raise again, the question of what we modern 
 people want. I suppose that, being modern people, 
 we want, as Mr. Galsworthy does, more of the feeling 
 of continuity — the sense of universal human kinship 
 as we look upon our fellow men and their affairs, the 
 sense of cosmic unity as we contemplate the whole of 
 nature. Mr. Galsworthy has said that, to gain the 
 feeling of continuity, we must deny ourselves con- 
 tempt, which is the destruction of continuity. "Well, 
 then, we must rejoice at whatever tends to lessen the 
 number of things which evoke contempt from the 
 natural human heart — for it remains wholly improb- 
 able that the human heart can ever be reconstituted 
 through the intellect. Contempt grows by what it 
 finds to feed on; and the one chance of purging the 
 soul of hate seems to be through destroying hateful 
 things — intolerance, for example — and making a bet- 
 ter world. And to destroy hateful things, it is prob- 
 ably necessary to hate them, or at least to see that 
 they are hateful. 
 
 Now, here we come to still another implied weak- 
 ness in the realistic spirit, if it be true that that 
 spirit means loss of the critical sense. The realist 
 would destroy hateful things by persuading himself 
 that they are not hateful. He does not want to de- 
 stroy ugliness in order to beautify the world ; he wants 
 to teach the soul to find beauty even in ugliness, in 
 order to beautify the soul. And, however little we
 
 THE REALISTIC SPIRIT 171 
 
 may like to admit it, we must see that this surrender 
 of standards and aversions is essentially weak, sterile, 
 and static ; at least it is and must be so over any 
 stretch of social history that we can comprehend in 
 one glimpse. Our coldly intellectual and serene mod- 
 ern charity simply does not and cannot get anything 
 done. It is the fiction of satire which has brought 
 things to pass. Why, even the "unofficial sentimen- 
 talism," with all its ignorance and bias, has done more 
 than impartial realism — witness Uncle Tom's Cabin 
 and All Sorts and Conditions of Men. 
 
 The truth seems to be that only violent likes and dis- 
 likes are really dynamic. It may be disheartening, 
 but it is certainly probable, that animal matter reacts 
 most readily and decisively to antipathies pointed with 
 scorn. So it has been, and is, in politics and re- 
 ligion : we do well to entertain the thought that it 
 may be so in literature. It may be one of the strange 
 ironies of evolution that modern man, swayed by a 
 passion to get things done, has grown up to an in- 
 tellectual contempt for the only possible means of 
 getting anything done. Having the desire, we de- 
 spise the means — and then try to hide our impotence 
 by belittling the desire. These may be the facts ; and 
 from this point of view the extreme development of 
 the impersonal outlook may be our modern nemesis — 
 the tragedy of indifferentism. 
 
 Two of the three modern artists named a moment 
 ago furnish some evidence of the lack of dynamic 
 force in the modern gospel. Mr. Conrad is put to 
 some pains to explain that his resignation is not in-
 
 172 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 difference; that he wills "what the gods will" just as 
 fervently as though he were in the secret of what 
 their will is. And Henry James was frequently 
 charged — very authoritatively by Mr. W. C. Brown- 
 ell, 1 for example— with having no interest whatever 
 in his characters except as specimens, or in life except 
 as a quarry wherein to dig specimens. Nostromo and 
 Under Western Eyes are not indifferent ; nor is The 
 Golden Bowl aridly aesthetic. But the modern de- 
 tachment which is so patently necessary to these nov- 
 els has too much the effect of making both writers 
 over to a very specialized part of the public. 
 
 Still more interesting is the test which the scientific 
 posture received in the career of George Gissing, the 
 first British novelist of considerable eminence to turn 
 fiction into sociology. Gissing wrote about cities, 
 slums, socialism, conditions of labour, the problem of 
 illegitimacy, economic independence for women, the 
 education of the poor, and a host of other such mat- 
 ters, and wrote about them from first-hand knowl- 
 edge gained through the enforced privations of his 
 own thwarted life. Gissing wrote about these themes, 
 not because he had them at heart, and certainly not 
 because he loved or believed in the folk whom these 
 themes embraced, but because the facts were there 
 and he knew them. Himself by instinct a classicist 
 and something of a hedonist, both sensitive to beauty 
 and aloof from the democratic instincts and ideals, 
 he portrayed the sordid surroundings into which ac- 
 
 i Essay on Henry James, in American Prose Masters. By 
 W. C. Brownell. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1909.
 
 THE REALISTIC SPIRIT 173 
 
 cideut had forced him, and wrote one novel after an- 
 other, in all conscience to be sure, but without love 
 and without hope, saying again and again, in effect, 
 "I show you things that are." His pseudo-biogra- 
 pher says: "The essence of his best work was that 
 it was founded on deep and accurate knowledge and 
 keen observation. Its power lay in a bent, in a mood 
 of mind, not by any means in any subject, even 
 though his satiric discussion of what he called the 
 'ignobly decent' showed his strength, and indirectly 
 his inner character. His very repugnance to his 
 early subjects led him to choose them." 1 
 
 Gissing is a disciple, almost an apostle, of the 
 realistic spirit. Mr. Chesterton, in his life of Dickens, 
 draws the obvious comparison between the effect of 
 the underworld as Dickens coloured it with his own 
 fierce hates and loves, and the effect of that same 
 underworld as Gissing portrayed it with a resignation 
 akin to despair. Gissing was a brave enough man to 
 "look on with undimmed eyes," but not a brave 
 enough man to hope against hope. He was much too 
 scientific for that. And the result is that his children 
 of apathy and of futility hardly move us at all, hardly 
 stir the heart to those impulses of compassion which 
 result in disinterested action ; whereas the poor of 
 Dickens's London are a perpetual delight and a per- 
 petual lesson in brotherhood. It is Mr. Chesterton's 
 view that we long to be succouring brothers to Dick- 
 ens's poor precisely because they do not need us so 
 
 ' The Private Life of Henry Maitland, A Record Dictated by 
 J. H. Revised and edited bv Morley Roberts. New York: 
 fieorge H. Doran Co. 1912 " P 309.
 
 L74 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 much as we need them ; whereas we are left cold and 
 benumbed by Gissing's outcasts because their need 
 is so much greater than our capacity to give. In the 
 unscientific optimism of Dickens, the difference be- 
 tween joy and despair turns on a smile or a joke ; in 
 the scientific pessimism of Gissing, there is nothing 
 that can make any difference. That very impartiality 
 chills us, atrophies the will, and dries at their source 
 the springs of pity. Hardly any parallel could show 
 more succinctly the penalty which fiction has to pay 
 for intellectual poise, when that poise is so sustained 
 as to resemble indifference. 
 
 I am aware that there are many readers, and some 
 critics, to whom it is offensive to think of fiction as 
 having any such function as I have here ascribed to 
 it, and who see in any insistence that fiction ought to 
 direct the will and inspire it nothing more than a 
 plea for crass cloddish didacticism. Nor do I recede 
 by a step from my own position in relation to didacti- 
 cism. I maintain, as before, that fiction must be dis- 
 interested in the sense of telling valuable truth, let 
 what will come of it, and that a novel which stands 
 or falls by a special plea for or against something is 
 incurably weak-kneed. But this is not to say that a 
 novel is bad because it rouses a burning moral in- 
 dignation against things which are unquestionably 
 wrong, or a moral passion for things which are un-
 
 THE REALISTIC SPIRIT 175 
 
 questionably right. If any member of "the ineffable 
 company of pure aesthetes" condemns Nicholas Nick- 
 leby because it had a reformatory effect on English 
 private schools, or against Hard Cash because it 
 called attention to the need for reform in English 
 private asylums for the insane, he is a person for 
 whom one is not obliged to throw away one's own 
 conscience. It is something to the credit of the 
 novel if it can show why vice is vicious, and do justice 
 to the virtue of vicious characters ; but I do not think 
 this achievement is comparable to that of the novel 
 which fortifies our instinct to place virtue above vice, 
 kindness above cruelty, and discipline above lawless- 
 ness. And if realism must go on seeing primarily the 
 sameness in things and persons, to the exclusion of 
 the invaluable differences, then it were a thousand 
 times better to make the best of the old determined 
 and inflexible dogmas of satire at its most dogmatic. 
 But all this is in criticism of the realistic spirit as 
 it most commonly is, not as it might be. I have 
 named some of the defects and dangers which realism 
 is heir to, and of which we have seen it the frequent 
 victim during the past two decades. But there is 
 nothing in the nature of realism that need commit it 
 irrevocably to a deadening resignation, lack of a criti- 
 cal interpretation of things, and weak or insignificant 
 characters. Interest in all sides of life is in itself a 
 great good; the attempt to interpret all persons as 
 they seem to themselves, and to bring all reality within 
 the radiated warmth of the social emotions of sym- 
 pathy and compassion, that too is in itself a great
 
 176 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 good. The man who is interested in everything does 
 not have to part with his scale of values ; great genius 
 can go into the murky places of life without living 
 there perpetually, and without forgetting that they 
 are murky. And when the realistic spirit produces 
 its great individual genius, we shall see the great 
 character once more crowned in fiction; for the crea- 
 tion of great characters, more than any other aspect 
 of fiction, is the function of original genius, and has 
 next to nothing to do with an author's philosophy. 
 Meredith's doctrine of comedy may be a product of 
 Meredith's social philosophy, but Meredith's Roy Rich- 
 mond is the product simply of Meredith. And when 
 fiction has another Meredith it will have other Roy 
 Richmonds, other Sandras and Dianas and Clara 
 Middletons — and it will have them just the same, 
 though their creator be a theosophist or a Mormon. 
 
 It was not my intention then to prove that realism 
 can never escape the difficulties which beset even 
 realists so great as Henry James and Conrad. It is 
 well to state roundly and emphatically the case against 
 realism, and to name the worst possible eventuality. 
 But the temptations of realism are not necessarily its 
 downfall — and besides, there remains the important 
 question whether the realistic spirit has not inherent 
 potentialities which belong to the creative impulse 
 in no other form. 
 
 This question I can answer in but one way. The 
 realist does have, in his feeling of harmony with the 
 world-purpose, his sense of oneness with all creation,
 
 THE REALISTIC SPIRIT 177 
 
 a solid philosophical and emotional foundation for his 
 art. And it is a sort of foundation which, because 
 it implies a naturalistic and self-perpetuating world, 
 leaves the artist most free for those facts and phases 
 of reality which mean most in art ; that is, he 
 has no longer to be the conscious servant or the un- 
 conscious slave of a preordained and everlasting law, 
 and all his care may be for the artist's proper task, to 
 present the immediate and tangible as it is in itself 
 and for his temperament. 
 
 Moreover — and this second consideration is still 
 more important — the naturalistic world confers upon 
 the artist the dignity of some added importance. In 
 the world of orthodox conception, the whole was un- 
 changeable whatever became of the parts; the great 
 facts of destiny were established once for all. In the 
 world of naturalism, it was manifest that whatever 
 came to pass must come through man's own efforts ; if 
 he wanted a better world, he must make it. The decay 
 of faith means the rise of the social sciences. The fa- 
 therhood of God meant that no one of us was his 
 brother's keeper; but the brotherhood of man makes 
 each of us the keeper of all. And the novelist has felt 
 this new responsibility. He has turned from excep- 
 tional and unique individuals to the laws of society, 
 the individual in his relation to his age and his group, 
 the intricate problems of our common welfare. 
 Something of this is what Meredith means when he 
 says that "all right use of life ... is to pave ways 
 for the firmer footing of those who succeed us," and
 
 178 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 that "the novel, exposing and illustrating the natural 
 history of man, may help us to such sustaining road- 
 side gifts." 
 
 Something must indeed come of so much striving 
 and groping and piercing of the veils of the elder 
 reticence. It is unthinkable that all this conscience, 
 this selfless and unwearying devotion to truth, should 
 come to naught. The means may be slow, but the end 
 may also be sure. Perhaps the imperceptible increase 
 in understanding, in appreciation of what life is and 
 calls for, may result in great and sv r eeping changes, 
 in which fiction shall have played its creditable part. 
 So changes do come about: so came, for example, a 
 long sequence of developments in the social history 
 of woman, in which perhaps the novel has not been 
 entirely negligible. The realistic spirit has done 
 more than any of its ancestors for the diffusion of 
 high merit throughout fiction ; even without the re- 
 currence of first-rate individual genius, the novel is 
 a more natural instrument for the propagation of ideas 
 than it has ever been, simply because it has put so 
 many skilled pens to work. 
 
 We shall know more about the realistic spirit at the 
 end of another decade ; for, as a world-spirit in the 
 broadest sense, and not merely as an agency in art, it 
 is now going through its ordeal by fire. In the 
 warring countries we see it becoming an intellectual 
 majority in such men as Romain Rolland and Ber- 
 trand Russell, the seers of a new and greater interna- 
 tionalism, even now called upon to bear great bur- 
 dens of hatred, and bear them with equanimity and
 
 THE REALISTIC SPIRIT 179 
 
 self-possession When the curtain of smoke rises 
 from the battlefields of this war, will such men have 
 shown the road that leads away from the hatreds of 
 the past? or will the thing that has proved itself 
 strong enough to conquer art be, for some generations 
 yet, too weak to conquer the lives of nations and 
 enforce a new gospel of goodwill through the sense of 
 brotherhood ?
 
 VII 
 
 TRAGEDY AND COMEDY
 
 In speaking of tragedy and comedy as elements 
 which have something to do with the purpose and 
 meaning of the novel, and which play a part in its 
 evolution, I am going to assume the common distinc- 
 tions and differences of elementary definition. Any 
 piece of fiction, we know to begin with, is a record 
 of struggle between opposed forces — the more nearly 
 equal the forces, the more intense the struggle, and 
 therefore the more appropriate for treatment in a 
 work of art. The struggle may take place on 
 a high moral plane or a low physical plane; be- 
 tween separate persons or sets of persons, or be- 
 tween different elements in the same person ; with 
 or without the motive of hatred; in fact, either 
 consciously or Unconsciously. But some sort of 
 struggle there must be. And we call the result 
 tragedy if the forces with which we sympathize are 
 defeated, comedy if those forces triumph. Tragedy 
 is essentially disaster to the deserving, comedy essen- 
 tially the reward of the deserving, whether through the 
 fulfilment of their desires or otherwise. Tragedy, to 
 be completely successful, must make a strong appeal to 
 the emotions of fear and sorrow. But the converse is 
 not true : comedy need not be comic in the sense of 
 moving one to laughter. 
 
 183
 
 184 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 In some such way as this we may state the simplest 
 set of postulates that makes any adequate intellectual 
 (distinction between these two types of composition. 
 But once we have laid down the set of postulates and 
 got the distinction made, we are instantly struck by 
 the fact that the conventions which distinguish abso- 
 lute comedy from absolute tragedy have never been 
 so marked in the novel, or so important, as they have 
 in the play. The novel, we know, learned its tech- 
 nique from the drama; the principal Elizabethan 
 novels are the work of men who were, with the ex- 
 ception of Lyly, dramatists primarily ; and Fielding, 
 who learned a great deal of fictional style and struc- 
 ture from Cervantes, and helped make the novel epic, 
 learned perhaps still more from his long and prolific 
 apprenticeship to dramaturgy, and may be said to 
 have made the novel dramatically epic. Yet it is 
 true that most great plays up to 1800 are quite 
 squarely either tragedies or comedies, whereas most 
 great novels of the same period tend to be not so 
 definitively either one or the other. Or if this is an 
 overstatement of the fact, at least it is true that there 
 are more exceptions to the technical difference in 
 fiction than in drama. And after 1837 the sharpness 
 of the distinction quite disappears from the novel; 
 plays, what plays there are, remain one thing or the 
 other, but novels tend to become a mingling of both. 
 Why is it, one is prompted to ask, that the novel, 
 which learned its rudiments from the play, should 
 have gone farther than the play toward abolishing 
 the hard-and-fast distinctions? Why especially
 
 TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 185 
 
 should there have been so few pure tragedies in fic- 
 tion? 
 
 I find a tentative answer to the second of these 
 questions in the fact that the novelist's audience al- 
 most necessarily consists of one person at a time, or at 
 least of one person in a place, whereas the dramatist's 
 audience consists of many persons simultaneously in 
 one place. The physical process of novel-reading is 
 solitary; that of enjoying a play is social. And it 
 seems on the whole to be true that, although every ex- 
 treme of emotion is intensified when we share it, so that 
 all emotion is potentially socializing, still we can bear 
 to laugh in solitude more easily than to cry in solitude. 
 We can feel happy alone ; but when we sorrow, we 
 instinctively crave the support of a whole social 
 fabric made up of sorrow, of which our grief is only 
 one thread. It is quite possible that if novels were 
 habitually enjoyed as works to be read aloud to vast 
 numbers of hearers, they might have a quite different 
 emotional tradition. It may be so ; the conjecture 
 is at least of some passing interest. 
 
 But this is only a tentative explanation of some 
 things in the past ; it is certainly inadequate to explain 
 the breaking down of the distinction between tragedy 
 and comedy in modern drama itself. I think perhaps 
 the habit of reading in solitude did produce originally 
 the well-recognized demand for "happy endings" in 
 stories ; but that explanation certainly cannot reach 
 beyond the date at which the drama begins to choose 
 other endings than the flatly tragic and flatly comic. 
 Nor do I think this phenomenon in the drama results
 
 186 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 from the fact that the drama, after a long period of 
 insignificance, begins for the first time to learn from 
 the novel, thus reversing the former process. 
 
 No: the disappearance of tragedy and comedy in 
 their pure state, both on and off the stage, is a symp- 
 tom of some larger tendency at work in everything — 
 in life as well as art. If the question were of art 
 alone, we might conjecture that the novel, as the 
 longer and more leisured of the two forms, is auto- 
 matically freer to present the mingled good and evil, 
 sadness and joy, of life; and that the play, as the 
 more compact and selective form, has to go farther 
 toward artificial exclusion and emotional unity. But, 
 as I say, all such explanations show themselves inade- 
 quate when drama begins to follow the same tendency. 
 The fact is, there is a general loss of emotional finality 
 all through art; poetry and painting, as well as fic- 
 tion and drama, try much less hard than formerly to 
 produce the pure extremes of emotion, and much 
 harder to produce the complex intermediate emotions. 
 I have already pointed out that, generally speaking, 
 emotion becomes proportionately less important in 
 literature and intellectual analysis more important. 
 The loss of pure tragedy and comedy is part of this 
 tendency — for the deeper analysis goes, the less con- 
 tent can it be with emotional finality of any sort ; the 
 more it sees that any pretence of finality is counter 
 to the nature of reality. 
 
 The important point about both the tragic ending 
 and the comic ending is that they are endings, full 
 stops; whereas in life there is no "finis" at the foot
 
 TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 187 
 
 of the page — even death is a full cadence for but one 
 person, and all the interests and issues of which he 
 was a part go on practically without interruption. 
 Life is always re-creating itself out of the past, per- 
 petuating the residua of old things in new shapes, 
 and denying the beholder any sort of conclusiveness 
 whatever. And art, if it is to suggest the nature of 
 life so analysed, must attach less and less importance 
 to beginnings and endings, more and more importance 
 to what comes between them. Indeed, everything 
 does come between them: the only real beginning is 
 the beginning of the world, the only real ending is the 
 end of time. Since the conditions under which the 
 artist works prevent these from being "copy," he 
 gets along with a segment cut out from somewhere 
 between, and frankly recognizes that it is a segment, 
 and not a whole. 
 
 II 
 
 Suppose we undertake first to look with some par- 
 ticularity into the reasons for the disappearance of 
 absolute tragedy in the novel. 
 
 It is obvious that the analytic mood which I have 
 called the realistic spirit is more interested in the 
 reasons for human failure than in the mere fact of 
 failure; for the realistic spirit is essentially the in- 
 quiring spirit that wants to understand the nature 
 and hidden significance of acts and their obscure con- 
 sequences. Now, this fact imposes upon the realistic 
 procedure, at the outset, a limitation which denies
 
 188 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 the very nature of tragedy and comedy. You can 
 give your undivided emotional sympathy to a person 
 engaged in an effort to attain a certain object or 
 ideal : you can joy in his success or sorrow in his fail- 
 ure, as comedy and tragedy call upon you to do. But 
 you cannot give your emotional sympathy, or any 
 part of it, to a reason for anything. A reason is just 
 something that is so; it has no more emotional im- 
 plications in it than the binomial theorem. Fiction 
 written in the scientific spirit, then, transfers the 
 appeal very largely from the heart to the head ; the 
 emotional elements may be present, but the accent is 
 not at all on their emotionality. Most of the emo- 
 tions present in fiction of the last quarter century 
 exist as facts to be understood, — that is, as experi- 
 ences of the characters, — not as effects to be felt. 
 This would remain true even if scientific fiction dealt 
 in absolutely sharp beginnings and conclusive end- 
 ings; the endings would still not be tragic or comic, 
 because they would not be resorted to for the sake of 
 making us feel deeply about them. Fiction parts 
 company with tragedy and comedy just in so far as 
 it transfers its province from feeling to thought. 
 
 But of course modern realistic fiction does not keep 
 the finality either, any more than it does the emotion. 
 It cuts out its segment of life in such a way that as 
 much as possible of the whole may be represented, 
 and makes its intensive analysis of that segment for 
 the sake of its bearing on the whole. It is hardly 
 necessary to remind ourselves again that the realistic 
 spirit is the outcome of seeing life as an organic and
 
 TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 189 
 
 evolutionary unit, or that the modern sense of things 
 is the sense of "living in the whole," as John Ad- 
 dington Symonds finely phrased it. Now, it is ob- 
 vious that there can be no tragedy for the whole. 
 The novelists of an elder generation tried, often 
 with immense success, to rouse the feeling that the 
 world revolved for their few chosen men and women ; 
 when the book was over, the world stopped. On lay- 
 ing down the book, one walked about for hours in a 
 daze, until life could assert itself and make things 
 real again. One was made to feel temporarily that 
 the fortunes of those few men and women were 
 everything ; they were given to us for their own sake. 
 No one experiences anything of that sensation on read- 
 ing the characteristic modern novels. They fortify in 
 us the feeling that life goes on just the same — the life 
 of which the characters make a part, and for the sake 
 of which they are called upon to exist. Whatever 
 happens to them, nothing much happens to the world : 
 it is the same world, except that, if the novelist has 
 served us well in his own chosen way, we know it a 
 little better. You cannot get the sense of complete 
 tragedy out of a contemplation of lives presented as 
 part of human society, whatever happens to those 
 lives ; because society is safe, and beyond the reach of 
 ultimate tragedy. Society is, to all human intents 
 and purposes, immortal. 
 
 Really, then, there can hardly be any such thing 
 as a tragedy written from the modern point of view, 
 with the emphasis on society, unless it is written by 
 a pessimist. The pessimist, who sees the good in man
 
 190 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 as mortal, the evil in the world as immortal, can 
 represent the good as extinguished, decisively and 
 irretrievably, by the evil, as Mr. Hardy does in his 
 almost insupportable last novel, Jude the Obscure. 
 But mark: even that is not quite bona fide tragedy: 
 for authentic tragedy always tacitly appeals to 
 our feeling that the triumph of evil over good is an 
 abnormality, a monstrous perversion; it evokes a re- 
 bellious grief. And pessimism makes that abnormal- 
 ity normal, an expression of the world-principle as 
 the pessimist interprets it; and the properly tragic 
 emotion shrivels from rebellion to a numbed and help- 
 less grief. Pessimism in modern art invariably de- 
 feats itself, as a point of view available to art, by 
 turning thus into morbidity. It gives us nothing of 
 the equality which is essential to the tragic struggle; 
 the disaster is predestined. 
 
 On the whole the modern spirit, except when pessi- 
 mistic, is much too broadly analytical to see any in- 
 dividual human failure as unrelieved and hopeless, or 
 any evil without its interpenetration of good. And 
 most of the characters who fail in modern fiction 
 achieve in doing so some kind of success which out- 
 weighs the failure — if not for themselves, then for 
 others. The best modern novels follow Dr. Johnson's 
 philosophy of the vanity of human wishes: we may 
 not get out of life exactly what we are trying for, 
 and we certainly do not get what we first began by 
 wishing, but we may get something potentially worth 
 much more. Silas Lapham, the pivotal character of
 
 TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 191 
 
 the great American novel (which, like many things 
 we are always anticipating, is to be sought in the 
 past), fails in his business, sees his new house burn 
 down, and knows that his own short-sighted folly is 
 chargeable with the whole sum of disaster; he is a 
 broken and disappointed man, who will never be 
 whole again. But at the same time he has recovered 
 the faith of his wife, the love of his daughters, and a 
 kind of self-respect which he had begun to lose in the 
 intricate chicaneries of high finance ; and Mr. Howells 
 shows him to us at the last making the best of being 
 on simplified terms with life and with himself — at 
 least knowing his own heart as he had not done, and 
 willing to believe that "nothing can be thrown quite 
 away ; and it can 't be that our sins only weaken us. ' ' 
 The partial success brought out by the partial fail- 
 ure, the moral or spiritual gain wrested from the ma- 
 terial or physical loss — this is the objective of most 
 modern fiction that is worth discussing. No disaster 
 is complete so long as there is this to be got out of it. 
 "Living in the whole" and seeing the remoter im- 
 plications of one's acts means that failures in them- 
 selves desperate and, by the older philosophy, irre- 
 trievable are to be read as prefaces to hope — the 
 travail of our collective life as it struggles to bring 
 forth some community of good, or the growing pains 
 of rebellious youth in its slow and painful discovery 
 of what life is.
 
 192 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 III 
 
 The conventions of comedy have remained on the 
 whole stronger in the novel than those of tragedy, 
 just as comedies have remained more numerous than 
 tragedies; but those conventions too have declined as 
 the sense of finality weakened in our contemplation of 
 life, and they may be said now to have vanished al- 
 together. The Victorian novel tended to conclude, as 
 Professor Winchester has put it, with "sugared mari- 
 tal felicity, with 'God bless you, my children,' and 
 ten thousand a year" ; x but more and more there grew 
 upon the novelist a perception that life is disillusion, 
 and books like David Copper field and Bleak House, 
 Vanity Fair and Pendennis show us in the last chap- 
 ter persons who have both gained and lost something 
 as they tried to cope with life; persons who have 
 known defeat and futility, who have renounced and 
 outgrown, and who can see that life has been on the 
 whole good. But the comedy of manners does cling 
 until astonishingly late to its pretence that the story 
 is all told when the last page is turned. The end of 
 the book is the end of the character. 
 
 Partly, of course, this effect is produced by the 
 old convention that success in love, crudely denoted 
 by an engagement ring or a marriage license, is the 
 triumphal apex of any life, and that after the hero 
 has "won" the heroine their careers cease to be of 
 interest. This convention has pretty well clisap- 
 
 i/Sorae Principles of Literary Criticism, p. 299. By C. T. 
 Winchester. New York: The Macmillan Co. 1899.
 
 TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 193 
 
 peared now; success in getting married no longer is 
 assumed to mean success in marriage; and success in 
 marriage is our modern definition of success in love. 
 The disappearance of this romantic illusion about 
 love has been exceedingly good for fiction in one way : 
 it has increased the age, hence the maturity, hence 
 the interest, of the characters, and by so doing has 
 made its picture of life less overbalanced by the 
 sentimental. But, as I say, the convention of the 
 sentimental ending, with its absolute finality, did 
 persist surprisingly long; and to this day one can 
 find new novels in which the last two pages line all the 
 characters up, just before the ultimate curtain falls, 
 in a neat semi-circle across the stage, each ready with 
 a tabloid version of his whole future life before he 
 takes his leave of the reader with a bow. So long as 
 the novel kept to this meticulous habit of accounting 
 for everybody and all his relations, and exhausting 
 the subject of what happened to whom, the charac- 
 ters necessarily assumed the relation of entertainers, 
 not that of fellow-men. Any one can see the superi- 
 ority, if only on grounds of verisimilitude, of the 
 custom which lets a character, when he has served his 
 purpose to the story, simply drop out of it, as persons 
 drop out of our lives; and which allows us to leave 
 the major personages as folk who may still live on and 
 go about their business— folk whom, for all we know 
 to the contrary, we may meet again somewhere, as we 
 so often meet the characters of Trollope. 
 
 Whatever the persistence of the comic conventions, 
 one can see, I think, that they are gradually forced
 
 194 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 downward into the popular sentimentalisni, out of 
 artistically conscientious fiction; for the same set of 
 logical considerations which applies to tragedy governs 
 comedy as well, and the realistic view of life is the 
 death of either. If life is a mingled affair of profit 
 and loss, why should its counterfeit presentment strike 
 a balance all on one side of the ledger ? The form of 
 comedy is too symmetrical, too neat in its efficient 
 disposal of everything, to mirror that life in which 
 nothing is independently so, in which all things are 
 interdependent. The democratic feeling of solidarity, 
 the vision of a common destiny and an indefeasible 
 community of interest, forbids us lightly to compute 
 reality in terms of individual successes. The same 
 logic which refuses to see anything as absolute failure 
 in relation to the whole, refuses to see anything as 
 absolute success. And as life intensifies and rein- 
 forces in us, through experience and observation, the 
 sense of its own inconclusiveness, comedy tends to de- 
 generate into pure farce, which, having little or no 
 representative value, may be dismissed as purely 
 decorative, and therefore as having nothing to do with 
 this discussion of purposes and meanings. 
 
 On the whole, I think we may say that the hope of 
 a school of really sufficient modern comedy is so 
 fantastically remote as to rank among the impossibili- 
 ties. For only one thinkable condition of things could 
 produce such a comedy : a practically perfect society, 
 such as Meredith foresaw. In such a society, there 
 would be no loss and no waste ; the good of one would 
 be the good of all, and every defeat of something by
 
 TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 195 
 
 something else would be equally a victory for both. 
 Of such community of interest, we have now only the 
 vision. The crucial happenings take the form of 
 contests between things and interests so different that 
 every gain somewhere means loss somewhere else, — 
 contests of class, of race, of power,— and in all these 
 there is at least an undercurrent of the tragic. This 
 the modern observer of life must feel and see, if he is 
 truly to communicate anything to us. Not for him, 
 not for us ever again, perhaps, the old artificial sim- 
 plifications of unmitigated tragedy and comedy. 
 
 IV 
 
 The new fashion in endings makes all fiction stop, 
 as the short story is recommended to begin, in medias 
 res. To appreciate the difference of fashions through 
 one of its trivial manifestations, compare the clos- 
 ing paragraphs of half a dozen novels by Dickens 
 with those of half a dozen by Mr. Hardy. And 
 the point, small though it is when taken by itself, 
 is indicative of the real change which has come over 
 the artist's attitude toward life. "Begin at the be- 
 ginning, set everything in order, and end when you 
 are through"— thus the old rationale of composition, 
 a sacrosanct formula. But the modern artist de- 
 spairs of beginnings and endings; to him everything 
 is middle; he is quite without the sense that every 
 drama can be played up to the ultimate curtain, and 
 that to stage it is an easy thing ; and this is the rea-
 
 196 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 son for his abandonment of the old conclusive end- 
 ings which make tragedy and comedy, and for his 
 adoption of the novel or play as being, in the words 
 of an overworked phrase, a "slice of life." 
 
 Now, it is a very simple affair to say that a piece 
 of fiction should be a piece of life, and that it should 
 pretend to no completeness which life does not pos- 
 sess ; but it is another and much more involved thing 
 to make it fulfil these conditions. To begin with, 
 it implies that impersonality in the contemplation of 
 life can actually be carried to that pitch where the 
 artist understands things as they are, absolutely with- 
 out any personal bias for one kind of thing as against 
 another, and without colouring anything with the 
 tones of his own temperament. The realist's effort 
 is, of course, to suppress himself and let life speak 
 for itself; his technique is indeed objective. But, 
 in this utter and abysmal philosophical sense, it is 
 exceedingly doubtful whether there is any such thing 
 as objectivity. Professor Warner Fife has some 
 profitable remarks on this point: 
 
 "As I prefer to put it, realism stands for denatured 
 human experience. For without denying that some- 
 thing is meant by an unvarnished fact, it strikes me 
 that the phrase as it stands expresses a contradiction 
 in terms. I may distinguish the fact as presented in 
 your varnish from the fact as it appears to me, and 
 thus, by allowing for your varnish and for mine, 
 procure for the fact some measure of independence. 
 But a fact without any varnish whatever seems to 
 me, if facts are to be related to perception, to be no
 
 TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 197 
 
 i 
 
 fact at all ; and how the world is to be described from 
 nobody's point of view, I cannot imagine. When I 
 try to state facts in this fashion I find myself in dif- 
 ficulty. The chair, for example, is the favourite 
 philosophical illustration of a very solid fact. Yet 
 when I attempt to describe the chair, I am confronted 
 at once by arms, legs, seat, and back — terms that ex- 
 press a human prejudice ; and when I try to dehuman- 
 ize my description, I seem to find no terms that would 
 make the chair recognizable, none that do not seem 
 to transform a familiar human fact into something 
 rather 'metaphysical.' 
 
 "And if it be objected that my way of knowing, 
 or of describing, the chair leaves the real chair un- 
 touched, then I am compelled to wonder what that 
 particular reality would be in a world that knew noth- 
 ing of chairs — in a primitive world, for example, 
 where every one squatted. Something real, I do not 
 doubt ; yet still something intelligible, intelligible now 
 from the standpoint of primitive life. If an automo- 
 bile would cease to be an automobile in a world with- 
 out carburetors, I cannot see how it could remain an 
 automobile in a world without chauffeurs. When I 
 try to conceive what that reality would be which is 
 wholly unaltered by being known — to distinguish 
 what the chair is in itself from what it becomes when 
 known to be a chair, the cold fact from the humanly 
 familiar and effective fact — I seem to find nothing 
 but that metaphysical, atomic chair — the chair as 
 varnished by the scientific point of view — which is 
 not 'really' a chair and is only doubtfully known.
 
 198 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 "It seems, then, that to be a realist is not so simple 
 a task as it appears. We live in a world which we 
 have surely not originated, a real and not a merely 
 imaginary world; and, on the other hand, we live in 
 a world which, just in being real, is more or less fa- 
 miliar and (strangely) more or less responsive to 
 our efforts, and which, in its familiarity and respon- 
 siveness, reflects at every point our human point of 
 view. In a word, the real world, for philosophy as 
 well as for literature, is the fruit of a transaction 
 between two parties; and a realism in which either 
 of the parties is ignored is a mere pseudo-realism." 1 
 
 So that when the artist looks at what he calls "the 
 facts of life," he is looking at a congeries of facts 
 as seen by him; and, having seen them at all, he can 
 no more keep himself out of them than he can see the 
 back of his own head without a mirror. The relations 
 between and among them, those relations which are 
 all-important to art, are the relations which he sees. 
 We do well to keep these facts in mind when we talk 
 about "pure" realism, absolute "objectivity." 
 
 But if realism in this fundamental sense is impos- 
 sible, it does not follow that it is impossible for the 
 artist to try for it. As a matter of fact, the channel 
 of fiction in the last thirty years is given a quite new 
 turn by his persistent ingenuity in trying for it ; and 
 in the process the novelist, unless he has the clearest 
 notion of his own limitations as an observer of life, 
 is especially subject to two dangers arising through 
 
 i The Rejection of Consciousness, New York Nation, Vol. 
 101, No. 2635, p. 773.
 
 TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 199 
 
 the inability of mere observation to do what is asked 
 of it. 
 
 To begin with, there is always the danger that a 
 piece of art which purports to be a slice of life merely, 
 will quite miss achieving a design in the artistic 
 sense; will have no pattern except a single observer's 
 experience. And that is assuredly not enough unity 
 for the work of art; otherwise, a stroll up Forty- 
 Second Street in the crowded hours, if one kept one's 
 eyes open, would be a work of art. Many novels, and 
 more and more plays, of the last two decades seem to 
 work toward the ideal of replacing subject-matter by 
 mere matter; the ideal of summing up life one fact 
 after another, as science sums up the world of matter 
 and force, instead of representing life by facts 
 chosen for their representative value. And the re- 
 sult is inevitably inartistic shapelessness. There can 
 be no art without some form other than that arising 
 from the mere juxtaposition of facts and events in 
 real life; because art is, almost by definition and cer- 
 tainly by the nature of its appeal, a selecting and 
 sifting process. 
 
 But this is not so serious as one of its implications, 
 the second danger of which I spoke. If art be with- 
 out a pattern, and remain shapeless except in so far 
 as it gives the artist's report of things which oc- 
 curred together in factuality, then it will quite have 
 failed to be a criticism of life; that is, to have any 
 centre of purpose or meaning at all. It will be simply 
 life beheld at one remove, and not illumined. The 
 novelist will be supplying material which he himself
 
 200 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 does not know how to interpret. If he is baffled by 
 his own copy, — we can hardly call it a creation, for 
 the creator knows what his creatures exist for, — 
 wherewithal shall we be enlightened? 
 
 For these two reasons primarily, I am afraid we 
 shall have to admit that the "slice-of-life" method 
 is greater in its claims than in its fulfilment; espe- 
 cially when we remind ourselves again that the novel- 
 ist, whatever his intention, cannot possibly give us a 
 story which is a slice of life and nothing else. The 
 net result of this ideal is to suppress the elements of 
 choice and accent which are the postulates of art, and 
 to blur and perhaps defeat the purpose which the 
 artist, by virtue of his being a conscious entity at all, 
 cannot help having, even if he does not know that 
 he has it. In undertaking to suppress his own philo- 
 sophy, he undertakes what no one can perform; be- 
 cause our philosophy is the window through which 
 we have to see everything. Moreover, if he undertake 
 to do that, he will deprive his work of what does most 
 to justify its existence; for it is his province to re- 
 create life in shapes which will show his considered 
 interpretation of it. To say that he has no opinion, 
 or that his opinion means nothing, is to confess mere 
 disintegration and failure. 
 
 Among the perplexities and dilemmas which attend 
 realism, it is not altogether to be wondered at if the
 
 TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 201 
 
 novelist flounders, uncertain of his way. It is easy 
 enough to adjure him to have faith; it is easy enough 
 to point out to him that in the spiritual history of 
 mankind faith has accomplished more than knowl- 
 edge; it is easy enough to say that what we need is 
 a renascence of the "will to believe." And it is un- 
 doubtedly true that there are many invaluable lessons 
 for the modern practitioner of fiction in the sharply 
 tragic or comic versions of life which make up the 
 history of the novel. But every such plea fails to 
 recognize the difficulty of the modern situation in its 
 play on the modern mind. The modern mind knows 
 too much to throw away what it knows merely in 
 order to believe something that it would like to be- 
 lieve. 
 
 Moreover — and this is an incomparably more im- 
 portant point — we are developing a temperament that 
 loves reality, that finds it sufficient and swims and 
 floats in it and is buoyed up by it as by faith. It 
 seems to me unthinkable — though "unthinkable" is a 
 very large word, and many unthinkable things have 
 come to pass — that the modern artist can experience 
 any change of heart or of mind which shall result in 
 his picturing life as a thing that comes out even, with 
 so much happiness dealt out there, and so much retri- 
 bution here, to every man according to his desert. 
 I do not see what hope we dare cherish of a future 
 in which the outcome of things shall be determinate 
 instead of indeterminate; and until that future comes 
 I do not see how we can ask the realist so far to 
 abandon reality as to depict things as happening the
 
 202 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 way he would like them to, not the way they do hap- 
 pen. It seems from this angle preposterous to ask 
 the novelist to invoke any forces except those intri- 
 cate ones which he sees humanly operative in the 
 naturalistic world about him ; forces which, so far as 
 he can study them, achieve first of all the perpetuation 
 of life and consciousness, and then the evolution of 
 certain social ideals of conduct and of organization, 
 but never by any chance a degree of progress which 
 does not point beyond to something else still unat- 
 tained. Life seems to be simply a preface to more life, 
 a perpetual preparing for something that we get no 
 nearer to, a march in a dream, in which we exhaust 
 ourselves with marching and come out where we 
 started. And the only happy man is he who learns to 
 love marching itself, with all its fatigue and its uncer- 
 tainty of a destination. The old tragic and comic 
 forms reflect the belief in some kind of destination, — 
 except indeed when they are mere profitless fable, 
 — but the new realism must continue, seemingly, to 
 record the march. 
 
 The question is, then, whether love of life and of 
 those who live it is in itself enough for a faith. For 
 after all this is the choice: between the temper that 
 loves life and finds it sufficient, and the temper that 
 loves life but finds it insufficient until it is explained 
 and exalted by faith in something outside it. I say 
 nothing about the realist who does not love life at all, 
 who writes about it in distrust or contempt or stupor. 
 Realism has found room for him too, with his several 
 kinds of morbidity and fleshliness and insistence on
 
 TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 203 
 
 the primal brute in man. If he were a factor in the 
 choice, we should have less, not more, to hope for. 
 But the man who does honestly love human nature 
 as it is, and does find the sight of humanity good, 
 so that he really does not want any leverage to be 
 exerted on the world from without ; to put the matter 
 quite bluntly, the man who does not want a God, 
 and would regard the existence of one as an unwar- 
 rantable and meaningless intrusion into a scheme 
 which means enough just by virtue of its own exist- 
 ence — has that man, in democracy, solidarity, and 
 the sense of kinship with his fellows, enough to hold 
 to, and to build a great art upon ? 
 
 It is a very important question, because that man is 
 the artist of the present and, in all likelihood, of the 
 future. Meanwhile, it is useful for us to see that his 
 philosophy of life does not cut him off from criticism 
 of life. He is still free to choose what he likes, what 
 he wants, and to express his choice in a shape which 
 shall have consistency and symmetry. If he distrust 
 life, he can only express himself in comedies which 
 turn into farce, and in tragedies which show the 
 ascendancy of the brute over the man. But if he trust 
 life, he is free to single out the elements which in- 
 spire his confidence, and to make of them his message ; 
 he is free, as Miss Margaret Sherwood says in a finely 
 idealistic essay, 1 for the "enduring realism" of 
 "helping to make greater things real." 
 
 After all, it is only in one generation, the present, 
 
 i The Timidity of Our Boldness, Atlantic Monthly, Janu- 
 ary, 1917, pp. 64-70.
 
 204 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 that realism has become apathetic; and three of the 
 greatest men of the literary generation before it, all 
 of them essentially moderns and realists, preached a 
 fine idealism. Meredith had a vision of something 
 amounting to human perfectibility through purely 
 human agencies; Henry James proved that human na- 
 ture is even now, in those of its aspects which he loved, 
 rarer and finer than it commonly knows itself to be; 
 and William Dean Howells, a generation ahead of 
 even these two in discovering the religion of place, 
 was preaching the most homespun realities and the 
 "wise provincialism" of Royce at a time when patriot- 
 ism was shame-faced and the intellectual ideal of the 
 Western world was a shallow aesthetic cosmopolitan- 
 ism. I can explain this paradox, the sluggishness of 
 faith in life in our second generation of realists, only 
 by the enervating weariness which comes upon any 
 movement after it has outlived the inspiration of 
 newness. The older realists welcomed as a challenge 
 the dawn of a world in which man must do all for 
 himself. They took up the defiance with the spirit 
 of youth, always sanguine of its own powers and keen 
 for the fight. Realism is older now, and begins to 
 wonder, to think twice. But one generation is too 
 short a time to be discouraged about. 
 
 Meanwhile, we speculate about the new tragi-comedy 
 of the real which must save imaginative fiction from 
 purposeless realism, just as realism saved it from 
 tragedy and comedy in which the purpose was too 
 shallow and too false; and we find a clue to that 
 renewing spirit of fiction, the spirit of idealistic
 
 TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 205 
 
 realism, in such words as these of Mr. Howells, writ- 
 ten long ago in answer to Matthew Arnold's comment 
 that there was no "distinction" in our national 
 life :— 
 
 "... I would gladly persuade all artists intending 
 greatness in any kind among us that the recognition 
 of the fact pointed out by Mr. Arnold ought to be a 
 source of inspiration to them, and not discouragement. 
 We have been now some hundred years building up a 
 state on the affirmation of the essential equality of 
 men in their rights and duties, and whether we have 
 been right or been wrong the gods have taken us at 
 our word, and have responded to us with a civiliza- 
 tion in which there is no 'distinction' perceptible to 
 the eye that loves and values it. Such beauty and 
 such grandeur as we have is common beauty, common 
 grandeur, or the beauty and grandeur in which the 
 quality of solidarity so prevails that neither distin- 
 guishes itself to the disadvantage of anything else. 
 It seems to me that these conditions invite the artist 
 to the study and the appreciation of the common, and 
 to the portrayal in every art of those finer and higher 
 aspects which unite rather than sever humanity, if he 
 would thrive in our new order of things. The talent 
 that is robust enough to front the every-day world 
 and catch the charm of its work-worn, care-worn, 
 brave, kindly face, need not fear the encounter, though 
 it seems terrible to the sort nurtured in the supersti- 
 tion of the romantic, the bizarre, the heroic, the dis- 
 tinguished, as the things alone worthy of painting or 
 carving or writing. The arts must become demo-
 
 206 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 cratic, and then we shall have the expression of Amer- 
 ica in art; and the reproach which Mr. Arnold was 
 half right in making us shall have no justice in it any 
 longer ; we shall be ' distinguished. ' " x 
 
 i Criticism and Fiction, pp. 138-40. New York: Harper 
 and Bros. MDCCCXCI1I.
 
 VIII 
 
 HUMANISM
 
 In discussing the elements of tragedy and comedy 
 in fiction, I hope I succeeded in showing that those 
 elements, if they now existed in anything like the 
 former measure, would derive an entirely changed sig- 
 nificance from our changed conception of the whole 
 world, and would in fact have lost a great part of 
 their legitimate appeal to our emotions through our 
 intellect. I implied a connection between those ele- 
 ments as they once existed, and the artist's general 
 philosophy. His comedy denoted a belief, conscious 
 or unconscious, that everything was fundamentally 
 right and would come out right; his tragedy, which 
 showed evil as for the moment regnant over good, 
 drew its compensation from the fact that the triumph 
 of evil was only for the moment, an exceptional 
 thing. Thus comedy and tragedy were both expres- 
 sions, one positive, the other negative, of an absolute 
 and unquestioning faith in the goodness of life. 
 Comedy expressed that faith directly; tragedy 
 showed how many and how severe were the temporary 
 checks it could persist in spite of. 
 
 But with the disappearance of that older philosophy 
 and the rise of a new philosophy in which the appear- 
 ances are the reality and the sum of the appearances 
 is the sum of the realty, absolute tragedy and comedy 
 become virtually impossible. Either, being an ex- 
 
 209
 
 210 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 treme, would connote a view of the world which no one 
 can hold, so long as he derives his view from the world 
 itself. And either becomes, therefore, an inartistic 
 misrepresentation of life, a travesty and something 
 like a lie. In brief, tragedy and comedy were, 
 in one way or another, outgrowths of general ideas 
 about fate and life ; and it is the change in general 
 ideas that has forced tragedy and comedy out of all 
 fiction which subordinates every ideal to the quest 
 and the study of truth. 
 
 There can be not much doubt, I suppose, about the 
 second half of this account. The change in our gen- 
 eral attitude has beyond question the effect of forcing 
 out of fiction the old assumptions and definite conclu- 
 sions and of replacing them by questions and hesita- 
 tions, research among things knowable and demonstra- 
 ble. Modern thinking can hardly coexist in art with 
 the unrelieved tragic or comic outcome. 
 
 But am I right in the first half of my account? Is 
 it true that the general ideas in fiction have changed, 
 or is it simply that they have just begun to make 
 their way into fiction? Is not the chief mark of the 
 older novel its entire freedom from philosophy of 
 whatever sort, and is not the chief distinction of the 
 older novelists their absolute divorce from every re- 
 sponsibility except the study and mastery of human 
 nature seen through imagination ? Is not the present 
 concern of the novel with large general truths a new 
 thing, and may it not mean simply the decadence of 
 the novel because of the lack of great individual artists 
 with their inspired knowledge of the specific? May
 
 PI U MAN ISM 211 
 
 not the philosophy in our fiction be our feeble attempt 
 to replace the particular, which means too little to us, 
 with the general, which has not. so secure a place in 
 art? Ought not the particular, rather than the gen- 
 eral, to be the prime concern of the artist, his inspira- 
 tion and his home ? Or, to narrow the question down 
 to a pocketable and arguable form: Historically 
 speaking, does philosophy belong in the novel at all? 
 Is it either necessary or desirable ? 
 
 The modern artist answers, of course, that the 
 worker in fiction must have at his command both the 
 general and the particular, that his task is to repre- 
 sent the general through the particular, to master both 
 the facts and their meanings. In the technical jar- 
 gon, art is both presentative and representative. But 
 this is only his answer, a certain kind of opinion ; and 
 it leaves the question where it was, to be squarely 
 faced as an issue on which hangs our acceptance or 
 rejection of a good deal that has happened since 1860, 
 the date when, roughly speaking, the modern novel 
 began to pay tribute to modern rationalism and ac- 
 quire thereby an intellect and a social conscience. 
 
 Need I emphasize the momentousness of the ques- 
 tion? Its vast import becomes at once self-evident 
 if we ask it about Shakspere, by whom the Western 
 part of the world has pretty well agreed to let a good 
 share of its theories of creative art stand or fall. 
 Shakspere was not, to be sure, a novelist, even of the 
 Elizabethan school ; but our question is large enough 
 to bear on the drama equally, and any one's imagina- 
 tion can bridge the gap between the sort of plays
 
 212 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 Shakspere wrote and the sort of novels he would have 
 written if he had lived in the age of Fielding. I 
 choose Shakspere, first because no other one figure is 
 grand enough to provide so crucial a test of any- 
 sweeping generalization about art, and secondly be- 
 cause in him it is harder than in any other to trace 
 the existence and the importance of any general theo- 
 ries whatsoever, so that if we find them in him we 
 shall hardly be able to overlook their importance else- 
 where. 
 
 Let us not be put off with assumptions, such as that 
 any artist, whether he wishes to or not, whether he is 
 prophet and seer or mere entertainer, must, as a 
 first condition of greatness, reflect the principal opin- 
 ions of his age. Let us assume nothing whatever 
 about Shakspere. Let us recognize two facts: first, 
 that if Shakspere can be shown to have gained as 
 a dramatist through believing something about the 
 soul and its immortality and about the ethical organi- 
 zation of man's life by a will outside man, then the 
 presence of philosophy in imaginative literature has 
 the highest thinkable historical sanction and a greatly 
 lengthened ancestry in modern times ; secondly, that, 
 if Shakspere can be shown pagan, conscience-free, and 
 careless of all except the reality in the life and char- 
 acter which he portrayed, then we are entitled to say 
 that an artist's theories of the world, so far from being 
 important, may be only disguises for his insufficiency 
 as an artist. If Shakspere means more when we con- 
 sider him at bottom a philosopher, then philosophy is 
 certainly at home in art. If, on the other hand, he
 
 HUMANISM 213 
 
 means more when regarded, in Emerson's phrase, as 
 "only master of the revels," then philosophy in art 
 may be only an interloper, a skeleton in the closet 
 or a spectre at the feast. In which way are we to 
 accept Shakspere, and how can we make up our 
 minds ? 
 
 II 
 
 Not, I think, by trying to go where so many genera- 
 tions of scholars have failed to find quite what they 
 sought — that is, into the intricacies of textual criti- 
 cism. Not by trying to prove out of Shakspere 's own 
 written words that he believed any particular doc- 
 trine that could be construed as a cosmic philosophy. 
 We do not need, in this connection and for this pur- 
 pose, to convict him of having been orthodox or hereti- 
 cal, Christian or pagan, ascetic or voluptuary, philos- 
 opher or fool. Let us fix in our minds the question 
 and its purpose. The question is not what Shak- 
 spere believed, or even, exactly, whether he be- 
 lieved anything in particular; it is whether the 
 plays as we have them mean more, or less, if we 
 suppose their author to have had some definite 
 theory of human life in its relation to eternity and 
 to fate. And the purpose of the question is that 
 we may find out, in this one crucial instance, whether 
 philosophy has or has not a place in imaginative art. 
 The only method necessary to such an inquiry is the 
 broadly pragmatic one of weighing what Shakspere 
 means to us, as we speculate upon his whole purpose
 
 214 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 and significance ; and in order that we may escape so 
 far as possible the bias of our own time, and avoid 
 making Shakspere mean simply what we wish him to 
 mean, we ought to look at him through the eyes of the 
 generations of criticism, trying if we can. find the 
 key that unlocks the most secrets — not accepting this 
 or that critic's view, however stoutly defended, but 
 setting off one thing against another and seeing what 
 it all comes to when applied to the essential Shakspere, 
 the Shakspere of the sonnets, the narrative poems, and 
 the plays. 
 
 Now, as soon as we are ready to give up trying to 
 prove that Shakspere believed or did not believe this 
 or that; as soon as we make it our affair to get the 
 richest available composite view of him and base our 
 judgment on it instead of on any individual interpre- 
 tation; as soon as we cease to care very much what 
 unexpressed faith he held, and begin to care exceed- 
 ingly what faith does most for the meaning of his 
 work — what faith, artistically speaking, he ought to 
 have held — then we shall be on the verge of a strik- 
 ing revelation. This method, pursued in this attitude, 
 will tell us what we ask, and more. It will answer 
 the question about philosophy, — that is, whether it has 
 eternal fitness in art, — and it will answer with all but 
 the most absolute certainty the question I have care- 
 fully refrained thus far from asking, — that is, What 
 was Shakspere 's philosophy? 
 
 The answer contains everything that the textual 
 critics, being not pragmatists but scientists, have 
 sought and must seek in vain, the dramatist's im-
 
 HUMANISM 215 
 
 personal aloofness from his material defeating and 
 eluding them at every turn. It is an answer that 
 not only makes the plays cry out to us to be read 
 in a certain way and seen through the window 
 of certain fundamental beliefs, but actually tells 
 us with almost unerring precision what those beliefs 
 must be. At least we can reach, through the answer, 
 this point : we can say with complete assurance either 
 that Shakspere believed steadfastly those doctrines in 
 the light of which the plays crave to be interpreted, 
 or else that he was the lightest, most irresponsible of 
 mortals, with not a shred of consistency to identify 
 Shakspere the artist with Shakspere the man. It is 
 easier for me to believe that those two are one than it 
 is to believe that Shakspere was only a facile pres- 
 tidigitator, admitting no connection between the words 
 he wrote and the man he was, and achieving by some 
 queer accident forty complete works which merely hap- 
 pened to focus themselves on an interpretation of life 
 that he had never thought of and on a belief that he 
 had never held. This alternative seems precluded by 
 the very nature of the relation between the creator 
 and the creation, in art and everywhere else; and 
 therefore I say, The doctrines which make the plays 
 mean most to us and, so far as we can judge, to all 
 time, are the doctrines which Shakspere believed. If, 
 however, any one likes to believe that the doctrines 
 which do most for the plays are the doctrines which 
 Shakspere did not believe, he is welcome to that self- 
 indulgence. For all I need to insist on at this mo- 
 ment is the extreme fitness and justice of our letting
 
 216 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 the plays read themselves in the light of certain truths 
 which greatly intensify their meaning, even if we 
 doubt whether Shakspere saw those truths. 
 
 The central revelation of the plays to us is this : that 
 they are the work of a man who understood — whether 
 with his intellect or only with his intuition makes no 
 difference — that eternity, fate, God, the immortality 
 of the soul, eventual punishment and reward are in 
 one sense simply not man's affair at all; that they are 
 fundamentally unintelligible to his finite mind, the 
 most irrelevant, even if the most enthralling, of his 
 concerns. These things are in the lap of the gods; 
 and man's affair, to state it in some very modern- 
 sounding words, is to "will what the gods will with- 
 out, perhaps, being certain what their will is — or even 
 if they have a will of their own." x We do not in the 
 least know whether Shakspere believed in the exist- 
 ence of God ; but we do know that, if he so believed, the 
 meaning of God was in man's need of him. We do 
 not know whether he believed in the immortality of 
 the self-conscious soul ; but we do know that, if he 
 so believed, it was the will to immortality that inter- 
 ested him, and not the immortality itself as a hypothe- 
 sis. In every way he accepts, faithfully and joyously, 
 the finite conditions of man's life here and now, the im- 
 passable bounds beyond which reason and knowledge 
 cannot penetrate. We cannot imagine him as being 
 indifferent to anything that was human; but neither 
 can we imagine him as being interested in anything 
 
 1 A Personal Record. By Joseph Conrad. Harper & Bros. 
 MCMXU. P. 13.
 
 HUMANISM 217 
 
 except because it was human. And when he listens 
 to man's "Fables of the Above," it makes little differ- 
 ence whether he takes them as fables or as truths: 
 either way, what touches him most nearly is that 
 they are man's, wrought out of man's own desire or 
 need. 
 
 It may indeed be so; this may indeed be the lost 
 or mislaid truth of our Shakspere. I spoke of his 
 critics, the history of appreciation of him. What I 
 had in mind was this : Every attempt to identify the 
 message and the meaning of Shakspere with the tenets 
 of any individual or of any age has resulted simply in 
 the belittling of Shakspere. 1 Assume him Anglican, 
 and you have cut off a part of him that we should 
 all like to keep; assume him Catholic, and you have 
 made him only part of what he seems to us. He is 
 not atheist, he is not theist; that is, he is not primarily 
 either one or the other. In his pragmatism, the ques- 
 tion of whether God made man or man made God 
 makes no conceivable difference to anything that can 
 be known or experienced; and every critic who has 
 attempted to define Shakspere by a definite formula 
 of faith or of doubt has subjected Shakspere to a limi- 
 tation to which nothing in Shakspere gives any suffi- 
 cient sanction. 
 
 Now, when you scan one after another these 
 special and restricting interpretations of the master 
 and pick out the weakness in each; and when, 
 
 i For an accessible summary of such attempts, see Shake- 
 speare Criticism (Heminge and Condell to Carlyle). Intro- 
 duction by D. Nichol Smith. Oxford University Press. 1916.
 
 218 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 having done that, you search for the formula which 
 escapes all the weaknesses and leaves Shakspere mean- 
 ing the utmost that he can mean when left free to in- 
 terpret himself, you find that the only theory which 
 robs him of no glory, the only one which leaves him 
 in full possession of all that we actually find in him, is 
 this theory of his humanism. The Shakspere we know 
 through the plays and poems was a man who could 
 have made the epigram, "If God had not existed, it 
 would have been necessary to invent him"; for Shak- 
 spere had the supreme revelation that, whether God 
 did exist or whether man did invent him, the effect on 
 man's conscious life in the knowable world is pre- 
 cisely one and the same. This is the revelation that 
 makes our Shakspere, not Anglican, not Catholic, not 
 demonstrably pagan or Christian, Epicurean or Stoic, 
 but pragmatist by temper, and by intuition humanist. 
 
 Ill 
 
 When, in talk with a sharp-witted young student 
 of literature, I ventured to broach this theory that, 
 for Shakspere, man's conscious life was the focal 
 point of all reality, that everything in the universe, 
 real or fancied, was valuable to Shakspere only in 
 so far as it touched man, and that all attempts to 
 confine the meaning of Shakspere by any other form- 
 ula resulted in a belittlement of him to the critic's 
 own preconception, I was met, expecting indeed noth- 
 ing less, by this rejoinder: "But how do you know 
 that this humanistic interpretation of Shakspere is not
 
 HUMANISM 219 
 
 also a belittlement of him? Why isn't it just as 
 narrow for the 20th century to find him humanist 
 as it was for the 18th to find him Anglican or atheist ? 
 Aren't you simply proposing that every age shall 
 find Shakspere to be whatever it happens to prefer? 
 And can you ever have a unified Shakspere short of 
 a unifying philosophy that shall reconcile all the dis- 
 crepancies and all the prejudices?" 
 
 It is of course true that we have no more right to 
 interpret Shakspere in our way than Dr. Johnson had 
 to interpret him in his. But there are some points to 
 be urged in favour of our interpretation against the 
 sum of all the others. 
 
 First, it seems to me important that our interpreta- 
 tion leaves room for what is essential in the others. 
 There is nothing whatever in Shakspere to prohibit my 
 identifying him with any religion I happen person- 
 ally to believe in, provided I see that, whatever the 
 religion be, his emphasis is upon its meaning to some- 
 body, to man. Shakspere may have believed that 
 death is the end of consciousness, or he may have be- 
 lieved that it is the transition to eternal life ; but in 
 either case it is the end of the temporal life, which 
 has, in either case, to be lived in the same way. He 
 may have believed that God was one or that God was 
 three, that God is love or that God is vengeance ; but 
 none of these differences has anything whatever to 
 do with his conception of godliness. Humanism, the 
 creed in which all the religions and all the philosophies 
 meet at a common point, the sum of the elements 
 common to them all, is at once reconcilable with each
 
 220 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 and greater than any. It is the one philosophy which 
 uses every other to the glorification of life — of life, 
 which alone means anything to art. A sceptical age 
 will understand Shakspere as portraying the courage 
 of man living on his mote of dust in empty space, 
 serenely unafraid of the dark out into which he must 
 presently go, and heartening himself with his fables 
 of light beyond the darkness. A believing age will 
 understand him as portraying the courage of man liv- 
 ing by the evidence of things not seen, the substance 
 of things hoped for. But what they must both under- 
 stand, if they are to have what Shakspere gives, is his 
 mastery of the one thing — the courage of man. Man 
 is the genesis of all things accessible to art; and the 
 task of Shakspere is to tell all the truth, not about the 
 religions and philosophies as facts, but about their 
 meaning to man and their effect upon him — the effect, 
 I mean, which they have upon him whether they be 
 true or false, historical or apocryphal. This is the 
 only reading of Shakspere which exalts him as in- 
 terpreter of what is quintessential in our tangled life 
 — as which, nearly all criticism admits him to be 
 supreme. 
 
 Secondly, a historical consideration. The Renais- 
 sance came late to England, but with intensity. And 
 when it came it put England almost at once in 
 possession, not only of the classical learning, but of 
 all the modern humanistic embroidery upon it of a 
 century of continental Renaissance. Everybody who 
 has studied even superficially the Cinquecento in Italy 
 knows how merely nominal was the subservience of
 
 HUMANISM 221 
 
 philosophy to religion, and how orthodoxy was subtly 
 corroded by speculative doctrines preached from 
 within the very Church, and calculated to deceive the 
 very elect. The Church was largely given over to 
 materialism ; and, so long as its temporal power was 
 not endangered, it was not above housing and feeding 
 the philosophers who gave it intellectual prestige even 
 while they undermined its doctrinal foundations. The 
 Church was cannily making to itself friends of the 
 Mammon of unrighteousness; and it was an age when 
 one could hear atheism and the mortality of the soul 
 preached in high places, in discourse which paid to the 
 Church no other tribute than the use of its ritual and 
 its vocabulary. It was an age of humanism and 
 free-thinking; and one of its chief symptoms is 
 the delight of intellectual men in metaphysical specula- 
 tion for its own sake — that is, for the training of the 
 mind in subtlety and agility and poise, and for the 
 sense that the human intellect could get beyond and 
 outside everything. In short, it was an age when 
 philosophy and scholasticism were nothing if not 
 humanistic ; and from a thousand references in the 
 plays and sonnets, and from the general delight of 
 Shakspere in metaphysical hair-splitting, sometimes 
 purely verbal, one can trace his profound kinship with 
 these developments, his triumphant joy in the intel- 
 lect as an instrument giving man sway over space 
 and time. 
 
 I urge this point against the suggestion that the 
 humanistic interpretation is only our 20th century 
 way of circumscribing Shakspere, of outfitting him
 
 222 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 with our parochial philosophy. As a fact, our 
 philosophy comes much nearer to naturalism. But 
 then humanism was in the air; he would have 
 been more than man, or less than artist, if he had 
 wholly escaped it. His humanism can be accounted 
 for historically without going farther back than his 
 own 16th century. With time, we could extend 
 the ancestry of humanism to classical Greece and 
 Rome — to the great harbours of ancient cultivation in 
 which all that is most precious in the Middle Ages has 
 its origins, and in which, as Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch 
 points out in his book On the Art of Writing, 1 the 
 moral and spiritual life of our own time has its im- 
 movable anchorage. 
 
 IV 
 
 Both philosophically and historically, then, the 
 humanistic reading of Shakspere has justification, a 
 most persuasive reasonableness. And when, finally, 
 we come to the supreme works themselves, we find al- 
 most everything to corroborate, almost nothing to 
 deny. I pass over all but a hint or two of the strong 
 tendency which Shakspere everywhere shows to let his 
 vivid realization of man 's temporal life take the form 
 of a complete and untroubled agnosticism about 
 everything else. There is plenty of evidence that he 
 conceived death as a sweet oblivion, a surcease from 
 that of which life is full enough ; and the sweet finality 
 of that repose, the profound immobility of that sleep 
 
 i New York : G. P. Putnam's Sons.
 
 HUMANISM 223 
 
 immune from even the fear of dreams which should 
 prove life not utterly extinguished, are lyrical notes 
 sounded always with a tenderness which must have 
 had something to do with Shakspere's own desire. 
 Death is to him "death's dateless night"; and again 
 and again he expresses the purely humanistic concep- 
 tion of immortality in contexts where, if he had be- 
 lieved in any other conception, he must have given 
 some hint. All, his sonnets of the love of men and 
 women are haunted by this note, of beauty in the very 
 finiteness of the experience ; and in the sonnets of re- 
 membered love, there is nowhere expressed the hope of 
 reunion after death, or of any renewal except that of 
 memory re-creating out of its need the desired shape, 
 the lost presence. 
 
 And all of the phrases which, isolated, bear some 
 seeming hint of orthodox faith, seem in their contexts 
 to crave another interpretation. The exquisite an- 
 tiphonal dirge in Cymbeline speaks of a task done, a 
 home reached, wages ta'en; but that home, it at once 
 appears, is the grave's "cpiiet consummation," and 
 the wages are oblivion for the consciousness and re- 
 nown in the memories of others. ' ' Thou hast finished 
 joy and moan," "To thee the reed is as the oak." 
 
 "No exorciser harm thee! 
 Nor.no witchcraft charm thee! 
 Ghost unlaid forbear thee ! 
 Nothing ill come near thee!" 
 
 *6 
 
 — such negative immortality is the reward, and the 
 only suggestion of a positive immortality is that thor-
 
 224 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 oughly humanistic faith that the living can confer 
 perpetual life upon the dead by not forgetting their 
 lives. 
 
 Even the famous and controverted Sonnet CXLVI, 
 with its cry of triumph over death, 
 
 "And Death once dead, there's no more dying then," 
 
 seems on analysis to be a plea for intensifying the in- 
 ward life of the soul by something very like a re- 
 ligious ascetic's mortification of the body. This son- 
 net is one of many records of the duality of Shak- 
 spere, of the perpetual conflict in his life and mind 
 between a starry poet, dreamer, and idealist, and an 
 earth-bound respectable citizen who took thought for 
 the morrow, both tenants of the same clay. 
 
 "Why so large cost, having so short a lease, 
 Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?" 
 
 Rather, let the soul live on the loss of its servant, the 
 body; let the soul, renewed in its own ardent extra- 
 physical life, glory in the body's failure and decay; do 
 not devote the powers that are at best short-lived to 
 making costly provision for the worms which are " in- 
 heritors of this excess." Instead, "feed on Death, 
 that feeds on men"; that is, 
 
 "Within be fed, without be rich no more." 
 
 The sonnet comes down, then, to a simple assertion 
 that when we live most imaginatively and least mate- 
 rially we rob death by leaving so much less for pal- 
 pable dissolution, and so much more for the cherishing 
 memories of other men to seize on; we kill death by
 
 HUMANISM 225 
 
 starvation. And this idealistic humanism seems to be 
 everywhere Shakspere's principal thought about 
 eternity. 
 
 When we come to the ghosts, we find in them only 
 confirmation of this same idealistic humanism. Now, 
 it is true enough that Shakspere may have accepted 
 unthinkingly — or, for that matter, thinkingly — the 
 superstition of his time. He may easily have be- 
 lieved in the reality, even in the corporeality, of 
 spirits of the dead. But it is to be noted, first of all, 
 that that was essentially a pagan, not a Christian, 
 superstition; a belief, not in immortal spirits, but 
 simply in the unlaid ghost. Oblivion was coming; 
 but there was some debt left unpaid in the flesh, some 
 wrong unrighted, which stood between the tortured 
 spirit and the longed-for "quiet consummation" of the 
 grave. The failure to have achieved oblivion was 
 always in itself a tragedy; ^and the ghost's one con- 
 cern was to shake off those evil dreams of reality 
 which had persisted even beyond the body's corrup- 
 tion, in order that it might lie down to an eternity 
 of rest. 
 
 Whether or not Shakspere did accept this supersti- 
 tion is a matter of little consequence. His plays 
 neither gain nor lose anything of great importance, 
 whether the ghosts in them are staged as visible appa- 
 ritions or as ideal and symbolical perceptions in the 
 minds of the actors. For, whatever Shakspere's own 
 attitude toward the pagan concept of the unlaid ghost, 
 he found the only way to cheat it of its grossness. 
 The ghost always exists, not to show something
 
 226 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 about a life other than that which our senses 
 know, but to show something- purely spiritual and 
 moral about this life. Its revelation is of guilt 
 or of duty here and now, not of a promised here- 
 after. The ghost of Hamlet's father exists for 
 Hamlet, the ghost of Banquo for Macbeth ; they exert 
 a further pressure, the one upon a feeling of responsi- 
 bility, the other upon a feeling of guilt — which feel- 
 ings exist already as products of causes not supernat- 
 ural. And so it is everywhere in the plays : the mean- 
 ing is the same whether the ghost be understood by the 
 audience as having an objective or a- subjective exist- 
 ence. 
 
 In this point of fundamental meaning, as in so 
 many other points, Shakspere is our exact contempo- 
 rary. His evident sense of the grossness of using 
 ghostly apparitions to prove the hereafter is like, for 
 example, Mr. Howells's sense of the same fact as Mr. 
 Howells expresses it in The Undiscovered Country 
 and, later, in The Leatherwood God. The Undiscov- 
 ered Country is a novel about the phenomena of 
 "spiritualism" which, like all wise novels about that 
 theme, comes to the conclusion that such phenomena, 
 regardless of their authenticity, are in their nature 
 and significance wholly irreligious. Intelligence 
 lapses from faith in it, Dr. Boynton explains, be- 
 cause "it is not spiritualism at all, but materialism, — 
 a grosser materialism than that which denies; a ma- 
 terialism that asserts and affirms, and appeals for 
 proof to purely physical phenomena. All other sys- 
 tems of belief, all other revelations of the unseen
 
 HUMANISM 227 
 
 world, have supplied a rule of life, have been given 
 for our use here. But this offers nothing but the bar- 
 ren fact that we live again. If it has had any effect 
 upon morals, it has been to corrupt them. I cannot 
 see how it is better in its effect upon this world than 
 sheer atheism. It is as thoroughly godless as atheism 
 itself, and no man can accept it upon any other man's 
 word, because it has not yet shown its truth in the 
 ameliorated life of men. It leaves them where it 
 found them, or else a little worse for the conceit with 
 which it fills them." 1 And again: ". . . as long 
 as it is used merely to establish the fact of a future 
 life it will remain sterile. It will continue to be 
 doubted, like a conjurer's trick, by all who have not 
 seen it; and those who see it will afterwards come to 
 discredit their own senses. The world has been 
 mocked with something of the kind from the be- 
 ginning; it's no new thing. Perhaps the hope of 
 absolute assurance is given us only to be broken for 
 our rebuke. Life is not so long at the longest that 
 we need be impatient. If we wake, we shall know ; if 
 we do not wake, we shall not even know that we have 
 not awakened. . . . 'The undiscovered country from 
 whose bourn no traveller returns.' . . . and Hamlet 
 says no traveller returns, when he believes that he 
 has just seen his father's spirit! The ghost that 
 comes back to prove itself can't hold him to a belief 
 in its presence after the heated moment of vision is 
 past ! We must doubt it ; we are better with no proof. 
 Yes; yes! The undiscovered country — thank God, it 
 
 1 The Undiscovered Country, Chapter XXIV.
 
 228 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 can be what these babblers say! The undiscovered: 
 country — what a weight of doom is in the words — 
 and hope ! " 1 
 
 Dr. Boyuton's modern humanistic notion of religion 
 and of its meaning in no wise shifts the accent of 
 Shakspere. How could there be a more sweeping 
 illustration of Shakspere 's success in making his 
 works embody a philosophy which is all things to all 
 men, in which all the creeds and all the doubts forget 
 their differences and meet at a common centre ? This 
 alone, of all possible interpretations, abolishes the 
 question whether he was orthodox or heretical, and 
 places its accent on the one indubitable reality be- 
 longing to universal ideas: the reality derived, not 
 from their source or their absolute truth, but from 
 their knowable effects on human imagination and wif. 
 
 Some such things I believe that Shakspere believed. 
 At all events the plays, so interpreted, contain the 
 most utter truth with the least arguable matter. 
 And if that be true, we cannot doubt the right to its 
 place of the philosophy which so interprets them. 
 This humanism, putting in abeyance all the questions 
 to which there is no final answer, and content to dwell 
 in the realm of knowable things, is the perfect philos- 
 ophy for art; for it alone can range widely, as art 
 must do, among such actualities as imagination and 
 
 i The Undiscovered Country, Chapter XXIV.
 
 HUMANISM 229 
 
 faith, — in a word, all the more spiritual parts of our 
 human organization, — and at the same time refrain, 
 as art must do, from postulating an objective existence 
 for the other-worldly creations of imagination and 
 faith. Humanism makes room for every dream, 
 every hope ; yet it leaves humanity and the human 
 struggle illustrious enough to enthrall us for their 
 own sakes, as they cannot do under a creed which 
 makes man a mere footnote to the rest of creation or 
 a caprice of the will of God. 
 
 In the glare of light which this reading of Shak- 
 spere throws upon the nature and the history of im- 
 aginative fiction we can decipher, it seems to me, a 
 broadly complete rationale for the philosophy therein. 
 Humanism — a philosophy, if one insist, made out of 
 the rejection of philosophies, the refusal to consider 
 any cosmic doctrine except as a force in human life — 
 humanism is almost a synonym of the artistic temper 
 itself; because, like the artistic temper, it exalts the 
 self-sufficiency of the real without limiting its bound- 
 aries. By the same logic, the other possible philo- 
 sophies, supernaturalism and naturalism, are made 
 to fall into their places in relation to art. They clash 
 with it precisely where humanism re-enforces it ; and 
 their centre is elsewhere than its centre. Super- 
 naturalism undermines the significance of that reality 
 which is necessarily the subject-matter of art by re- 
 ducing our temporal life to an infinitesimal fraction of 
 the cosmic scheme ; and all art produced under it has 
 tacitly the nature of mere diversion or beguilement, 
 meet for hours of "moral holiday" perhaps, but in-
 
 230 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 herently lacking in moral dignity, and almost frankly 
 contravening the laws of the universe in which it is 
 conceived. In a word, supernaturalism is an infirm 
 motive power for art because it reduces to a hollow 
 pretence the necessary assumption of art that the 
 temporal is important ; only the eternal really counts. 
 And naturalism, to which man is only a "disease of 
 the dust," has also, in a somewhat different way, the 
 defect that it reduces man to too puny a stature to 
 be greatly tragic or comic. But still more it has the 
 fault of belittling the spiritual in man and exalting 
 proportionately the physical, the material. And, just 
 as supernaturalism either stifles art altogether or else 
 treats it as something to be tolerated along with other 
 concessions to mortal frailty, so naturalism tends to 
 circumscribe art by confining it to "realism" — either 
 the foul realism of those who are panegyrists of the 
 brute in man, or the sterile literalism of those who 
 report what is, exhausting the material facts of crea- 
 tion and ignoring our questions about the possible 
 sense of it. Supernaturalism refuses to take art 
 seriously enough to justify it ; and naturalism refuses 
 to take the higher faculties of man seriously enough 
 to let art justify itself. 
 
 In actual practice, the best fiction produced under 
 each of these two philosophies has been saved by the 
 failure of the artist to take his philosophy with en- 
 tire seriousness. In a completely naturalistic world, 
 probably no art could be produced at all ; for natural- 
 ism is interested in the results which are most logically 
 and visibly the effects of natural law, and least in-
 
 HUMANISM 231 
 
 terested in civilization, which humanism calls "an 
 organized revolt against nature." A large body of 
 naturalistic fiction is written to belittle those very 
 art-producing faculties to which it is indebted for 
 its own existence. And as for supernaturalism, I 
 suppose it obvious that of the century of novelists 
 from Fielding to Thackeray very few applied their 
 faiths more seriously to the business of writing novels 
 than the average nominal Christian of the same period 
 applied his Christianity to the business of daily liv- 
 ing; and both Fielding and Thackeray, theoretically 
 sound moralists though they are, derive from the 
 contemplation of human naughtiness an impish de- 
 light which must greatly have perturbed them if their 
 theories had really come first. 
 
 The fact seems to be, then, that writers who were 
 not humanists with their whole minds have profited 
 by the extent to which they were unconscious human- 
 ists in their tastes — the extent, that is, to which their 
 temperaments failed to square with their consciences. 
 No one supposes that the exquisite high comedy of 
 Jane Austen is invalidated by the failure of its world 
 to show any particular correspondence with the ortho- 
 doxy of her ultimate beliefs; or that Dickens's 
 democratic vaudeville is seriously interfered with by 
 his Trinitarianism ; or that Meredith's criticism of 
 society as it is constituted seems less momentous be- 
 cause he was in part a mystical optimist, working 
 from a belief in human perfectibility toward no less 
 an end than human perfection. These facts, examples 
 of the clash between great art and an underlying
 
 232 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 philosophy which does not help explain its greatness, 
 are sometimes alleged as proofs that philosophy has 
 nothing to say to art. What they really prove is that 
 no other philosophy than humanism is tenable in the 
 work of fiction. They reaffirm concretely the points 
 here asserted theoretically : the failure of naturalism 
 and of supernaturalism to locate their centres of 
 interest where fiction must locate its centre, and the 
 coincidence at every point of the humanistic doctrine 
 with the artistic feeling. It is inevitable that some- 
 thing should be withdrawn from the sanction and the 
 dignity of art in conditions where it cannot exist in 
 whole-hearted fidelity to the belief which nominally 
 engenders it; and this withdrawal is one meaning of 
 our ancestors' prolonged distrust of the novel on 
 moral and religious grounds, and of an odd parallel 
 to that distrust in the patronizing condescension to- 
 ward the arts in our modern world of naturalistic 
 belief used to enthrone material competition. 
 
 A point to close on, for re-enforcement of the argu- 
 ment about the inclusiveness of humanism, is this: 
 However sceptically one may regard the utter self- 
 identification of art with a particular way of thinking 
 about the sense of creation, at least one can see the 
 legitimacy of ideas in fiction as objects, as material. 
 Even the unmoralist in aesthetics has only to be in- 
 terested in seeing fiction enlarge its province and its 
 powers, in order to perceive that the novel must treat 
 any and all ideas as soon as it becomes interested in 
 protagonists who hold them. Four names will serve 
 roughly to show the acquisitiveness of fiction. Defoe
 
 HUMANISM 233 
 
 investigated the physical life, actions; Richardson 
 added the emotional life, sensibilities ; George Eliot 
 the moral life, conscience ; and Meredith, our modern 
 of moderns in this particular among others, the in- 
 tellectual life — ideas. Meredith identifies himself un- 
 reservedly with certain general ideas : a kind of pagan 
 optimism, a kind of nobly unfaddish feminism, a set of 
 prerequisites to the existence of a perfect society, 
 a faithful acceptance of the evolutionary and biologi- 
 cal unity of all things. He would have been glad to 
 stand or fall by the validity of those ideas. Yet en- 
 sues the paradox that Meredith stands though the 
 ideas fall, simply because he made his novels so search- 
 ing a record of how some distinguished and unique 
 minds did actually think. The novels remain as 
 humanistic embodiments of important realities, even 
 if they pass as an apologia for Meredith's own mysti- 
 cal optimism. 
 
 At this point of his achievement Meredith reaches 
 the stature of the grandest humanists, including 
 Shakspere. For he had a comprehensive enough mind 
 to make his works last for what is in them, no matter 
 what should become of the reasons behind them. This 
 greatest triumph of the artist is also the logical con- 
 summation of the humanist.
 
 IX 
 
 DESIGN
 
 If I have succeeded in making a just account of 
 the place which properly belongs to philosophy in 
 fiction, I have brought out at the same time the most 
 cogent of the reasons why the shape of fiction as an 
 art has undergone certain marked changes during the 
 past half century. Up to 1859 roughly — the year of 
 the first novel of George Eliot, and a date which has 
 in the history of fiction something of the momentous- 
 ness which we ascribe to it in that of science — the 
 philosophy in fiction is felt either as an intruder or 
 as a guest whose presence is hardly suspected at all; 
 though, as I tried to show, that unsuspected presence 
 is more advantage than disadvantage. Probably all 
 of us do, whether we know it or not, have a philosophy, 
 even if only a philosophy of negations ; and, having it, 
 we perforce look at the world through it. This un- 
 awareness is the attitude of the drama and of the 
 novel before George Eliot — except, of course, in 
 homiletic, allegorical, or symbolistic pieces such as 
 The Life and Death of Mr. B adman or Kasselas. 
 But from the time of George Eliot the philosophy in 
 fiction is intensely aware of itself, determined to make 
 the most of itself as an opportunity, not merely put 
 up with itself as a necessity. And from the moment 
 of this conscious acceptance and welcome of phil- 
 osophy, an entirely new set of considerations begins 
 
 237
 
 238 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 to govern the shape of fiction. The novel, whenever 
 it deserved its hold on us, has always combined truth 
 with pleasure; but when the emphasis shifted from- 
 pleasure to truth, there appeared a new determining 
 principle of inclusion and exclusion, a new standard 
 of criticism for the devices and expedients which 
 fiction had evolved during its vassalage to pleasure. 
 I can best state the change as an enormous decrease 
 of the accidental and arbitrary, and a corresponding 
 increase of the causal. The shortest name for the 
 transition is George Eliot, who was doing perhaps her 
 best work during the life of Thackeray, and nearly 
 all of her work during the life of Dickens, but who 
 is animated by a more modern spirit than either. 
 George Eliot represents the universe naturally con- 
 ceived as an organism ; man as a subordinated unit of 
 its evolution and not, philosophically, the pivot of the 
 whole; the intricate dovetailing of cause and effect 
 everywhere ; the facts of good and evil as products of 
 remote and invisible causes in heredity and environ- 
 ment; the ungovernable sway of chance in human 
 lives, reducing them, whether it destroy or fulfil, to 
 mere pawns in an inscrutable game; — in fine, the 
 character which is fate and the fate which is above 
 character. To express with any fulness this duality 
 of the world and the individual, she must abandon 
 the worn machinery of coincidence and mystery, the 
 various wires and levers by which the novelist himself 
 remains palpably in control of his spectacle ; she must 
 substitute for these the machinery of human will and 
 natural forces. To begin with, she must have a nar-
 
 DESIGN 239 
 
 row scene, where nature itself reduces life to a man- 
 ageable simplicity; and hence she follows the pro- 
 vincial ideal by which Jane Austen so unconsciously 
 profited — how wondrously we know when we stop to 
 think that we are now only just learning how high, 
 even if how small, is the place rightfully hers. Then, 
 she must study not merely the actions of men and 
 women : she must study the directions of their lives, 
 the corrosion of character by its worst or weakest, 
 all the implications of her accustomed theme, "the 
 idealist in search of a vocation"; and hence she must 
 reduce the number of events until none remain ex- 
 cept those which have profound importance as illus- 
 trating the direction of the lives concerned — the 
 episodes are reduced in number, and mean individu- 
 ally more. Finally, she must investigate not only the 
 physical realities of actions and the emotions that 
 underlie them, but the moral principles that underlie 
 emotion and choice; she must go more deeply than 
 the novel has been wont to go into the moral and in- 
 tellectual life of her protagonists, in order to bring 
 forth by reflection and analysis those realities which 
 can be expressed but imperfectly, or not at all, in 
 action ; whence Savonarola in his cell, Bulstrode on 
 his knees. This patient and fruitful search for the 
 causality in life is the distinguishing contribution of 
 George Eliot to the novel. 
 
 In her we see, then, at least three significant 
 changes in the shape of the novel, changes which it 
 has mostly retained and intensified since the con- 
 clusion of her work : first, the narrow scene, appointed
 
 240 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 for rigorous specialization in a few persona?; sec- 
 ondly, the elimination of deliberate artifice in the 
 manufacture of plots, and the attempt instead to 
 bring the action out of the persona? and the clash of 
 their wills and personalities ; thirdly, enlargement of 
 the scope and importance of analysis of motives and 
 feelings. 
 
 That such are indeed the chief traits of George 
 Eliot as a novelist is shown by our instinctive 
 objection to her few lapses into the factitious and the 
 accidental. Sir Leslie Stephen says of a certain 
 episode in Romola: "Poor Romola, in her despair, 
 gets into a miscellaneous boat lying ashore; and the 
 boat drifts away in a manner rarely practised by boats 
 in real life, and spontaneously lands her in a place 
 where everybody is dying of the plague, and she can 
 therefore make herself useful to her fellow-creatures. 
 She clearly ought to have been drowned, like Maggie, 
 and we feel that Providence is made to interfere 
 rather awkwardly." 1 We all share the feeling; but 
 it is a feeling which we should never experience with 
 the same force in connection with Dickens or Thack- 
 eray — writers from whom we expect a full measure 
 of everything that can by any possibility be put into 
 the work of fiction. That we should have the feeling 
 in connection with such palpable contrivances in 
 George Eliot as this extraordinary boat of Romola 's, 
 shows in itself how essentially the novel had altered 
 its shape by 1864 — how unmistakably the philosophi- 
 
 i George Eliot (English Men of Letters Series). By Leslie 
 Stephen. New York: The Macmillan Company. P. 138.
 
 DESIGN 241 
 
 cal point of view had even then brought about the 
 modern change from the casual to the causal. 
 
 II 
 
 This general change that has come over the form of 
 the novel is, then, the substitution of a higher unity 
 for a lower. The effect of naturalistic philosophy in 
 the novel is to re-open the whole question of the de- 
 vices and subterfuges of the novel in their relation 
 to the integrity of the whole ; to re-open it as a sub- 
 ordinate phase of our other inclusive question, the 
 relation of art to life. Only with the ascendancy of 
 naturalism did the novel attain any philosophy of 
 art to speak of; and it is only with the attainment of 
 a philosophy of art that the novel makes its transition 
 from artifice to truth — stops asking "What will be 
 effective, how can the attention be won and stimu- 
 lated?" and begins to ask "How best can truth be 
 served, the nature of things unravelled?" I do not 
 mean of course that the matter of pure strategy in the 
 novel can be ignored, for if the story does not capture 
 our interest it can certainly do nothing to us at all: 
 but the emphasis becomes transferred from one of 
 these questions to the other, and the question of 
 technique in the novel is being elevated along with 
 the purpose and meaning of the novel as a whole. 
 
 In one way it may even be said that questions of 
 technique become all the while more important and 
 more exacting ; for the modern notion of truth-telling
 
 242 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 cuts off all those resources of palpable contrivance in 
 technique upon which so much of the plot-interest 
 depends in Fielding and Dickens. And the result is 
 that the modern practitioner must have, in one par- 
 ticular at least, a fuller equipment than these; for 
 he must know how to win and hold the interest with- 
 out such aids through the historical, the conventional, 
 and simply by the amount and value of the truth he 
 finds to tell. This elevation of the whole problem 
 of expedients and devices in the novel means, as I 
 have said, the substitution of a higher unity for a 
 lower. Unity of purpose takes the place once held by 
 the unity of trickery and elaborate organization. It 
 would hardly be an exaggeration to say that natural- 
 ism makes the same difference in the novel as in our 
 conception of the world : it replaces arbitrary crea- 
 tion by the organic evolution of a thing which grows 
 into certain forms by its own inward nature, as it 
 were by a kind of self-compulsion. 
 
 It would be interesting but futile to speculate how 
 far and with what consistency these changes could 
 have been followed out in the novel without Con- 
 tinental influences. The history of these changes 
 since George Eliot is, as a fact, largely an affair of 
 comparative literature ; for it. is evident that the novel 
 in France and, presently, the novel in Russia did 
 incalculably much to furnish both the ideal and the 
 means. 
 
 So far as I can express the difference between these 
 two influences, it lies in the more fundamental sim- 
 plicity and naivete of the Russian masters, the more
 
 DESIGN 243 
 
 sophisticated and more technical proficiency of the 
 French. It is as though the French had achieved 
 unity as a purely artistic triumph, because of a com- 
 pulsion to exhaust the possibilities of order, sym- 
 metry, and austere perfection as things desirable and 
 matchless in themselves; whereas the Russians 
 achieved it through a compelling need of reducing 
 everything to an elemental simplicity, for the sake 
 of getting outside it, mastering it: one feels the Rus- 
 sian temperament as less various and more strong, 
 more tenacious and less nimble. While Flaubert and 
 Maupassant were achieving unity by whittling down 
 their subject to essentials, ruling out all that failed to 
 contribute to its predetermined harmony, Turgenev 
 and Dostoevski were achieving unity by relating their 
 larger masses of data to some central and magnetic 
 principle of truth. The French temper is to pick and 
 choose, and then weave carefully the chosen elements 
 together into a pattern; the Russian temper is to 
 take everything there is to take, and put it into a 
 .single basket large and strong enough to carry it all. 
 And so, while the 70 's and '80 's saw British novel- 
 ists learning something of their technique in France, 
 it also saw them learning perhaps even more of the 
 rationale of technique in Russia. Mr. Howells and 
 Henry James, greatly as they were soon to differ in 
 their use of what they learned, did beyond question 
 learn much, and derive a permanent impetus in cer- 
 tain modern directions, first from Balzac, and then 
 from Turgenev — to name only the most representa- 
 tive of influences,
 
 244 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 The distinction between French and Russian art 
 is perhaps not so absolute as I have made it sound: 
 what distinction ever is so absolute as one's account 
 of it? But there is, I think, a measurable truth in 
 my general point, that the Russian character has the 
 greater capacity for obsession, the greater need to see 
 all reality for the time being through a single pair 
 of spectacles, the greater capacity to be interested in 
 everything. And what I wish mainly to point out 
 is this: that by the middle '90 's, when one of these 
 Continental influences was at its culmination and the 
 other was at least beginning to exert its leverage, 
 then, in the decade when the names now most ac- 
 credited were just beginning to appear on title-pages, 
 the modern novel in English had pretty well deter- 
 mined its present bent toward the Russian largeness, 
 the Russian inclusiveness. Our younger novelists had 
 learned from France certain of the line fitnesses of 
 treatment, of order; they had learned from Russia, 
 through France, to practise these upon larger and 
 more specialized pieces of subject matter than the 
 French masters since Victor Hugo have commonly 
 treated. 
 
 That, on the whole, this choice of emphasis between 
 two influences has resulted to the advantage of the 
 novel, I may perhaps suggest by bare statement of 
 two considerations: first, that the Russian inclusive- 
 ness of matter and of event is most like the Victorian 
 inclusiveness which is our chief tradition in the novel, 
 so that full adoption of the French method and ideal 
 might have meant, relatively, the impoverishment of
 
 DESIGN 245 
 
 the novel; secondly, that the largest possible inter- 
 pretation of what is relevant to the subject of a novel 
 best serves our modern notion of life's complexity, 
 and gives the novelist his best chance of seeing life 
 steadily and whole. In 1895 British fiction had its 
 choice of whether it should see highly specialized 
 specimens of life and make of each a perfect picture, 
 or consider highly representative and typical speci- 
 mens of life and see them with a single eye. The 
 problem was unity by selection versus unity by in- 
 terpretation. Our novelists mainly chose to interpret 
 large segments of the typical ; and on the whole the 
 developments in the form of the novel during the 
 twenty years since that choice crystallized have shown 
 that they did well. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Suppose we consider separately, for a moment, these 
 two lessons which the English novel was trying to 
 learn in the last quarter-century of Victoria 's reign — 
 the French lesson of unity through internal fitness or 
 congruity, the Russian lesson of unity through the 
 insistence upon a centralizing and directing purpose. 
 Of the details of that first lesson learned in Paris, 
 we can name and illustrate three of some technical 
 importance. 
 
 The first is oneness of tone or pitch— the necessity 
 of keying all the parts of a given subject within an 
 emotional gamut which does no violence to the read- 
 er's sensibilities. If we desire an interesting example
 
 246 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 of work performed under the most conscientious and 
 single-minded zeal for such oneness, we have it in 
 Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's completion of Stevenson's 
 unfinished St, Ives — a task executed with such loving 
 circumspection that one can not tell, by internal evi- 
 dence, where the break occurs. That Stevenson would 
 have appreciated this beautiful competence shown in 
 imitation of his style is proved by his sensitiveness 
 to every one of his own failures adequately to imitate 
 himself. Speaking of an earlier and slighter work, 
 Prince Otto, he says in a letter to C. W. Stoddard: 
 
 "How does your class get along? If you like to 
 touch on Otto, any day in a by-hour, you may tell 
 them — as the author's last dying confession — that it 
 is a strange example of the difficulty of being ideal 
 in an age of realism; that the unpleasant giddy- 
 mindedness, which spoils the book and often gives it 
 a wanton air of unreality and juggling with air- 
 bells, comes from unsteadiness of key; from the too 
 great realism of some chapters and passages — some 
 of which I have now spotted, others I dare say I 
 shall never spot — which disprepares the imagination 
 for the cast of the remainder. 
 
 "Any story can be made true in its own key; any 
 story can be made false by the choice of a wrong key 
 of detail or style : Otto is made to reel like a drunken 
 — I was going to say man, but let us substitute 
 cipher — by the variations of the key." 1 
 
 In this informal comment Stevenson, a Scott with 
 
 i The Letters of Robert Louis Htevenson, Vol. II, p. 321. 
 New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1911.
 
 DESIGN 247 
 
 a French artistic conscience, proves how unquestion- 
 ing he assumed that the modern sense for unity of 
 texture is necessary, not only to realism, but also to 
 work done in a romantic tradition. There is a kind 
 of story which, if it is to exist at all, demands that 
 the hero shall be invulnerable; there is a kind of 
 modern costume romance in which it is strictly proper 
 that the last chapter shall show the hero converted to 
 the religion of the majority. Perhaps one does better 
 not to write that kind of romance; but if one does 
 write it one must keep it in tune with itself, even at 
 the cost of admitting conventions which are in them- 
 selves silly. In their own irresponsible realm, the 
 coincidences and mystifications of Wilkie Collins are 
 not only justifiable but inevitable; The Woman in 
 White and The Moonstone may not be fiction of a 
 high order, but they are at least consistent with them- 
 selves, and works of art in so far as they are of their 
 own kind. In short, there is no art without form ; 
 and, for modern purposes, form is fusion. 
 
 This general truth becomes still more manifest as I 
 approach a second and more specific agent of unity, 
 the single point of view. It is not enough that the 
 material reported upon be consonant with itself: it 
 must harmonize with the person who reports it, 
 whether that person be the author himself reporting 
 omnisciently, — a method which obviously suffers from 
 lack of verisimilitude, since no one can reasonably be 
 expected to know all the facts or be everywhere at 
 once, — or an observer created by the author expressly 
 to observe, or a character in the story. The omniscient
 
 248 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 method tends to disappear, as we should expect it to 
 in a period when the novelist finds his reward in the 
 meanings of facts rather than in knowledge of the 
 facts themselves. We no longer see the novelist 
 "stand about in his scene, talking it over with his 
 hands in his pockets, interrupting the action, and 
 spoiling the illusion in which alone the truth of art 
 resides, " 1 as Mr. Howells says of Thackeray 's and 
 Trollope's habit of personally conducting the story. 
 The novelist who can be in all places at once and fol- 
 low simultaneous actions going on apart from each 
 other is too palpably the inventor of his facts; and, 
 as a result of this feeling about him, we see the sub- 
 plot practically disappear from modern fiction, and 
 the action reduce itself to so much as can be compre- 
 hended from a single human point of view working 
 under the ordinary human limitations. We are in- 
 terested, not in the mechanism of complex actions, but 
 in the moral causes and effects of actions as shown in 
 a life or a few lives followed continuously. The cul- 
 mination of this interest thus far appears in the later 
 novels and tales of Henry James, all of which are 
 interpreted for us through the observing consciousness 
 of some person, not the author, who is present in the 
 story. To these we may add the more recent prac- 
 tice of the direct colloquial method in some of the 
 best work of Mr. Joseph Conrad. 
 
 Thirdly, the modern craftsman has learned that 
 there must be fusion among the various agents of the 
 
 i Criticism, and Fiction, p. 76. New York: Harper & Bros. 
 MDCCCXCII1.
 
 DESIGN 249 
 
 narrative process — the talk and action, the portrait- 
 painting and characterization, which go to make up 
 the actual written story. We have learned that the 
 one of these elements which predominated in the 
 earlier Victorians and in Scott, and which has latterly- 
 threatened to reduce our magazine fiction to a bare 
 skeleton of dialogue — we have learned that the ele- 
 ment of talk is the thinnest, most meagre of all in real 
 and lasting communicativeness. Even when talk is 
 sifted down to the printable economy and compact- 
 ness, we require a bushel of it to convey what the 
 novelist's own interpretation of his facts can give us 
 in a tenth of the room; and the narrator whose 
 dialogue is his principal stock-in -trade is not only 
 copying the merits of the drama in conditions where 
 they become positive defects, but he is also crowding 
 out "the golden blocks themselves of the structure" — 
 his own weighed, condensed, and reflective analysis. 
 This complaint is one that Henry James, whose sense 
 for such things was of the most subtly critical, had 
 often to urge as his principal criticism of Mr. 
 Howells's technique; and in one of his London Notes 1 
 he urged it with even more force against the decidedly 
 inferior dialogue of Gissing. 
 
 This third point is interestingly argued by Scott 
 in his Preface to The Bride of Lammermoor, in an 
 imaginary conversation between Pattieson the novel- 
 ist and Dick Tinto the painter. Scott inclined on the 
 whole to Pattieson 's view of talk as against descrip- 
 
 i Notes on Novelists, pp. 441-43. New York: Charles 
 Scribner's Sons. 1914.
 
 250 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 tion ; but the modern artist, who has more reasons 
 than Scott had for wishing to weave a firm pattern, 
 and no reasons for wishing to weave one of loose ends, 
 agrees almost completely with Tinto. — 
 
 " 'Your characters,' he said, 'my dear Pattieson, 
 make too much use of the gob box; they patter too 
 much' — an elegant phraseology, which Dick had 
 learned while painting the scenes of an itinerant com- 
 pany of players — 'there is nothing in whole pages but 
 mere chat and dialogue.' 
 
 " 'The ancient philosopher,' said I in reply, 'was 
 wont to say, ' ' Speak, that I may know thee ' ' ; and how 
 is it possible for an author to introduce his personce 
 dramatis to his readers in a more interesting and ef- 
 fectual manner, than by the dialogue in which each 
 is represented as supporting his own appropriate char- 
 acter ? ' 
 
 " 'It is a false conclusion,' said Tinto ; 'I hate it, 
 Peter, as I hate an unfilled cann. I will grant you, 
 indeed, that speech is a faculty of some value in the 
 intercourse of human affairs, and I will not even 
 insist on the doctrine of that Pythagorean toper, who 
 was of opinion that, over a bottle, speaking spoiled 
 conversation. But I will not allow that a professor 
 of the fine arts has occasion to embody the idea of his 
 scene in language, in order to impress upon the 
 reader its reality and its effect. On the contrary, I 
 will be judged by most of your readers, Peter, should 
 these tales ever become public, whether you have not 
 given us a page of talk for every single idea which
 
 DESIGN 251 
 
 two words might have communicated, while the pos- 
 ture, and manner, and incident, accurately drawn, 
 and brought out by appropriate colouring, would have 
 preserved all that was worthy of preservation, and 
 saved these everlasting said he's and said she's, with 
 which it has been your pleasure to encumber your 
 pages.' 
 
 "I replied, 'That he confounded the operations of 
 the pencil and the pen ; that the serene and silent art, 
 as painting has been called by one of our first living 
 poets, necessarily appealed to the eye, because it had 
 not the organs for addressing the ear; whereas poetry, 
 or that species of composition which approached to 
 it, lay under the necessity of doing absolutely the 
 reverse, and addressed itself to the ear, for the pur- 
 pose of exciting that interest which it could not at- 
 tain through the medium of the eye.' 
 
 "Dick was not a whit staggered by my argument, 
 which he contended was founded on misrepresenta- 
 tion. 'Description,' he said, 'was to the author of a 
 romance exactly what drawing and tinting were to 
 a painter; words were his colours, and, if properly 
 employed, they could not fail to place the scene, 
 which he wished to conjure up, as effectually before 
 the mind's eye, as the tablet or canvas presents it to 
 the bodily organ. The same rules,' he contended, 
 'applied to both, and an exuberance of dialogue, in 
 the former case, was a verbose and laborious mode of 
 composition which went to confound the proper art of 
 fictitious narrative with that of the drama, a widely
 
 252 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 different species of composition, of which dialogue 
 was the very essence, because all, excepting the 
 language to be made use of, was presented to the eye 
 by the dresses, and persons, and actions of the per- 
 formers upon the stage. But as nothing,' said Dick, 
 'can be more dull than a long narrative written upon 
 the plan of a drama, so where you have approached 
 most near to that species of composition, by indulging 
 in prolonged scenes of mere conversation, the course 
 of your story has become chill and constrained, and 
 you have lost the power of arresting the attention 
 and exciting the imagination, in which upon other 
 occasions you ma} 7 be considered as having succeeded 
 tolerably well.' 
 
 "I made my bow in requital of the compliment, 
 which was probably thrown in by way of placebo, and 
 expressed myself willing at least to make one trial 
 of a more straightforward style of composition, in 
 which my actors should do more, and say less, than 
 in my former attempts of this kind. . . ." x 
 
 Scott's use of this last concession in The Bride of 
 Lammermoor, where he seems really to make a con- 
 scious attempt at repairing the proportions of his 
 earlier work, may go farther than is commonly per- 
 ceived toward accounting for the peculiar distinction 
 of this most lyrical of his tales; though it still re- 
 mains odd that Scott could be on the whole so in- 
 different a practitioner of that which he so shrewdly 
 perceived and argued. 
 
 i From the "Preliminary" of the Introduction to The Bride 
 of Lammermoor.
 
 DESIGN 253 
 
 IV 
 
 So far I speak of a general ideal of craftsmanship 
 which is more French than English, and of some of 
 its practical effects on English fiction. Now let us 
 see what was the general effect of the Russians. We 
 shall find it to have been sweeping; for it resulted 
 in the creation of a strikingly new form in fiction, a 
 form which we may take the risk of calling the novel 
 of the future. At all events it is the novel of the 
 present, and decidedly not the novel of the past. It 
 is a form which has evolved, not from the novel alone, 
 but from the novel and the short story — both assimi- 
 lated in a certain way under the mediation of some 
 modern ideas, and under the intervention, as it seems 
 to me, of direct influences from Russia. 
 
 The novel of the past, as we know, formed itself by 
 an ideal of dramatic structure, with a crisis at or 
 after the middle — at all events far enough from the 
 end so that there could be a definite change of direc- 
 tion in the plot. That is, the crisis served as a new 
 initial impulse, from which the action proceeded un- 
 der changed conditions to its end. Romola, which I 
 have named already in a different connection, is an 
 orthodox example of the dramatic structure carried 
 out on a vast scale. Romola 's life of struggle pro- 
 ceeds in a certain direction and toward certain ends 
 until the events which involve the deaths of her hus- 
 band and her god-father and her flight from the 
 city; then it proceeds in an entirely different direc-
 
 254 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 tion through the stages of her effort to re-plan her 
 life and make a new place for herself. This is the 
 general contour of the older conventional novel, as of 
 the drama; and the short story differs from it chiefly 
 in that it has no change of direction, but follows its 
 theme straightforwardly to a crisis which is also the 
 end. The older novel was two stories, or a story and 
 its sequel ; the short story is one story, cumulative in 
 its effect. 
 
 The new novel is a sublimated short story. It avails 
 itself of the novel 's fulness of treatment ; it may run 
 to any length, even the inordinate length of the Vic- 
 torian novels; but its theme is single, and it aims at 
 rigid unity of effect — the unity which comes of one 
 direction inexorably followed, and the use of all the 
 material to illustrate a single principle. It replaces 
 contrast and suspense with intensive thoroughness and 
 the strict logic of causal succession. It is the short 
 story under a microscope, the short story on a vastty 
 enlarged scale. Henry James, an avowed disciple of 
 Turgenev, was the first to practise this form in Eng- 
 lish; Mrs. Wharton, his disciple, has continued it; 
 Conrad, whose literary kinships are of the Continent, 
 has given it enlargement and several new character- 
 istics; and our bookshelves are being filled with new 
 works of extraordinary formal merit, and in length 
 from 40,000 to 200,000 words, which prove on analysis 
 to be, not novels of the older dramatic figuration, but 
 short stories or novelle of the most rigid specializa- 
 tion in a single phase of life or character. The ma- 
 terial of a novel may be present ; but the purpose is
 
 DESIGN 255 
 
 to exhaust the meaning of a single issue, not to range 
 freely over the whole complexity of life. 
 
 Mr. Howells, whose mind has always turned with 
 interest toward the arts as they are practised in 
 Europe, despite the strong and sane provincialism of 
 his own creative work, recognized these tendencies 
 more than a quarter of a century ago, and was pretty 
 directly writing of them when he said : 
 
 "... each man is a microcosm, and the writer 
 who is able to acquaint us intimately with half a 
 dozen people, or the conditions of a neighbourhood 
 or a class, has done something which cannot in any 
 bad sense be called narrow ; his breadth is vertical in- 
 stead of lateral, that is all; and this depth is more 
 desirable than horizontal expansion in a civilization 
 like ours, where the differences are not of classes, but 
 of types, and not of types either so much as of char- 
 acters. A new method was necessary in dealing with 
 the new conditions, and the new method is world- 
 wide, because the whole world is more or less Ameri- 
 canized. Tolstoi is exceptionally voluminous among 
 modern writers, even Russian writers; and it might 
 be said that the forte of Tolstoi himself is not in his 
 breadth sidewise, but in his breadth upward and 
 downward. The Death of Ivan Illitch leaves as vast 
 an impression on the reader's soul as any episode of 
 War and Peace, which, indeed, can be recalled only 
 in episodes, and not as a whole. I think that our 
 writers may be safely counselled to continue their 
 work in the modern way, because it is the best way 
 yet known. If they make it true, it will be large, no
 
 256 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 matter what its superficies are; and it would be the 
 greatest mistake to try to make it big. A big book 
 is necessarily a group of episodes more or less loosely 
 connected by a thread of narrative, and there seems 
 no reason why this thread must always be supplied. 
 Each episode may be quite distinct, or it may be one 
 of a connected group ; the final effect will be from the 
 truth of each episode, not from the size of the 
 group." 1 
 
 The effect of this kind of intensive specialization 
 is a singular and most amazing rebirth in imaginative 
 literature of something very like the classical unities 
 of time, place, and action. The unities as they were 
 observed in classic drama and in neo-classic imitations 
 justified themselves in aesthetics and were employed 
 primarily for aesthetic reasons; they served the work 
 which obeyed them, not as agents of a closer contact 
 with the real life of men and women, but as agents 
 of an inward and self-sufficient harmony in the work 
 itself. Marlowe and Shakspere, when they cast aside 
 the unities in order to get nearer to life, were freeing 
 art from the shackles of convention. But the modern 
 artist has got round to the beginning of the cycle; 
 we see in him the unities recovered and reconstituted, 
 though for different reasons and in a new spirit. He 
 tells one story and one only because he wants to get 
 to the bottom of something, not because of any 
 fancied ideal of artistic symmetry; he takes a short 
 and continuous stretch of time because he wants to 
 
 i Criticism and Fiction, 142-43. New York: Harper & Bros. 
 MDCCCXCIII.
 
 DESIGN 257 
 
 preserve unbroken the chain of causality in his ac- 
 tion, not because he thinks the flight of time in the 
 work of art should match the flight of time in real 
 events; he keeps his scene narrowed and single be- 
 cause he wants to correlate man causally with his 
 environment, not because he considers a change of 
 scene inherently inartistic. The reasons are different ; 
 but the result, in concentration, in focus, is strikingly 
 the same. This change in the shape of the novel, a 
 change brought about by new ideas and a new pur- 
 pose, constitutes the superiority of the modern novel 
 as a form over any other large unit of imaginative 
 expression whatever; and it is one of the principal 
 reasons for hoping that genius of the future will find 
 more to facilitate, and less to impede, its utterance 
 than it has ever found. 
 
 Have I seemed thus far to be slighting the purpose 
 and meaning of fiction in favour of its subordinate 
 means and methods? To do so has been far from 
 my intention : I have wanted to speak of these lesser 
 things just in so far as they are governed by the 
 greater, and to treat the form of the novel only as it 
 is ruled by the spirit. If I have not succeeded 
 before this point in showing that our modern way 
 of writing novels is a natural outcome of our 
 modern way of looking at life, I shall have done so 
 when I have noted once more that the service of de-
 
 258 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 sign or technique is to help fiction represent life — 
 not to copy it, or idealize it, or prove something about 
 it, or make a substitute for it, but to represent it. 
 Just as the details of an artist's subject are chosen to 
 represent the whole subject, to stand for more than 
 they are, so the whole subject is chosen to represent 
 as much as may be of life. Other things equal, the 
 worth of a piece of fiction is proportioned to its wide- 
 ness or wealth of reference. The more it stands for, 
 the more it is, even though it be slight in itself. And 
 shall we not say that the purpose of modern technique, 
 which has on the whole the effect of curtailing the 
 subject-matter of the individual story, is to extend and 
 amplify the meaning of the story, and, through thor- 
 oughness of treatment, to make the artist's little stand 
 for more than ever? That economy of means and 
 material should have led to enlargement of the repre- 
 sentational power of the novel seems to me to be the 
 most significant of recent general results in fiction. 
 It is worth while, I think, to make room here for 
 three examples of that result. Let the first be Mr. 
 Hardy's Return of the Native, one of the most power- 
 ful novels of localized "atmosphere" in any language. 
 The motif is set in an opening chapter, "A Face on 
 which Time makes but Little Impression," a descrip- 
 tion of Egdon Heath, the barren waste in which the 
 action takes place. This motif dominates the whole 
 tale. As on the heath, so in the souls of the char- 
 acters, and especially in the soul of the heroine, 
 Eustacia Vye Yeobright, night and day wrestle to- 
 gether in a sort of interminable twilight. The in-
 
 DESIGN 259 
 
 scrutable face of nature throughout the book is ilsed 
 to symbolize Mr. Hardy 's view of the inscrutable way 
 of the cosmos with the whole human species; man's 
 daily life in a natural scene which is and must remain 
 a riddle to him is subtly suggestive of our common life 
 in an immensity which we can neither understand nor 
 change; and the changelessness of that indifferent and 
 mocking face of nature, which neither smiles nor 
 frowns while men and women play for a moment 
 their puny parts under its fixed gaze before they are 
 swallowed into it, is an image of the eternal futility 
 which Hardy saw as perhaps the one unifying reality 
 of our common life. This is not symbolism, and it is 
 not allegory : it is suggestion used to the end of repre- 
 sentation on the grandest scale. It weaves a phil- 
 osophy of the whole into the patterned history of a 
 handful of lives. 
 
 My other two examples, both pre-eminent novels of 
 the first decade of this century, bring us to the 
 threshold of the present. As unlike as possible from 
 each other in substance and in minor points of tech- 
 nique, they are alike in that the masses of subject- 
 matter of each are invoked by a single principle and 
 dedicated to its illustration. In each instance, the 
 principle is a large truth about life. Mr. Arnold Ben- 
 nett's Old Wives' Tale has on the surface as defiant 
 a breach of unity as a novel could well contain ; for 
 there are two heroines of widely different and widely 
 sundered lives, in large part separately observed and 
 recorded. But there is a unity which comes out of 
 this disjunction, and it is this; the life of Constance
 
 260 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 and the life of Sophia, separate and unlike as they 
 are, arrive ultimately at an equal and a similar un- 
 derstanding of what life is. Life is something that 
 we never understand until we have lived it ; and when 
 we have lived it we see that it is something which we 
 could never have lived at all if we had understood 
 it first. That, says Mr. Bennett, is our common lot 
 and the ultimate wisdom ; and it is a triumphant illus- 
 tration of the modern kind of unity in purpose and 
 effect that he should have brought so large a sense of 
 community out of material inherently so scattered, so 
 little subjected to the other and lesser modern prac- 
 tices of economy. 
 
 Mr. Conrad's Nostromo is likewise a vindication of 
 unity through principle and purpose, in defiance of 
 technical regulations which are useful in their place. 
 Here is a story of which, materially speaking, the very 
 mainspring is romance — a story of a misgoverned 
 tropical republic of the New World, with a silver- 
 mine and a horde of pirates, with revolution and coun- 
 ter-revolution and any number of violent deeds and 
 thrilling rescues, as its principal machinery. It is the 
 representational use of all this that turns it into 
 realism. For the country of the tale, Costaguana, 
 is the modern world in symbolic miniature; and the 
 triumph of the mine of silver over a group of in- 
 dividuals, some of whom loathe it and some covet, some 
 of whom it drives to perjury, to treason, to murder, 
 others of whom it despoils through its tragic effects 
 on those whom they love — this triumph of the precious 
 metal is the ascendancy of material interests in mod-
 
 DESIGN 261 
 
 ern life, the tyranny of the economic, the corrosion 
 of greed, the downfall of the idealist through his per- 
 sonal dependence on those whom material interests 
 can corrupt or destroy. Nostromo is a pageant and 
 an epic of a civilization founded on commerce ; and 
 if half its greatness is in its mastery of the immediate 
 facts, at least we may say that the other half is in the 
 sweep and clarity of its synthetic representation of a 
 good share of modern existence in a world whose most 
 cherished precept is to buy in the cheapest and sell 
 in the dearest market.
 
 ENTERTAINMENT 
 
 >>
 
 Throughout this series of discussions of the pur- 
 pose and the meaning of fiction I have had a great deal 
 to say about such things as the author's attitude toward 
 his work, the status of fiction in this generation and 
 that, and the general evolution of the novel upward; 
 but I have taken hardly any notice of the correspond- 
 ing changes which must have occurred in the reader 
 of fiction, if the novel has achieved anything of its 
 real purpose. I have dealt with the more and more 
 truth, the higher and higher kind of truth, which the 
 novelist is always putting into his writing: now let 
 me deal with the amount and kind of truth which the 
 reader must, in justice, get out of his reading. 
 
 We have seen, if my account has attained any 
 coherence, that the evolution of the novel has been an 
 affair of struggle between opposed forces, and that 
 the struggle has constantly been shifted to a higher 
 and higher plane, every bit of ground won represent- 
 ing a new ideal for the shape or the spirit of the 
 novel, or for both. First came the struggle between 
 the method of extravagant fancy and the method of 
 realism of circumstance; and the novel won truth to 
 fact. Then came the struggle between satire and the 
 scientific attitude; and the novel achieved its present 
 realism of spirit, its truth to the nature of things. 
 The whole trend throughout these stages is from ir- 
 
 265
 
 266 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 responsibility toward responsibility, or, as I said, from 
 a lower and more personal conception of truth to a 
 higher and more impersonal. 
 
 Now, it is my present point that this brief history 
 of what has happened to the novel is also a brief 
 implied history of what must have happened to the 
 reader. If we leave out the baser demands of the 
 commercial market, which always remain about the 
 same except for superficial vogues, and which almost 
 automatically create the supplies they desire, it re- 
 mains pretty true — at least truer than in almost any 
 other kind of transaction— that the supply of fiction 
 creates the demand. The novelist not only serves his 
 public: to a large extent he makes it, and makes it 
 after his own kind. And it seems on the whole a true 
 generalization that the less responsible fiction of the 
 time, roughly, before 1860 sought and found a less 
 responsible reader, the more responsible fiction since 
 that time a more responsible reader. We know that 
 only within forty years or thereabout has the reading 
 of fiction become completely respectable; and that 
 means that the aim of the novel has become elevated, 
 which means in turn that it finds its mark in a better 
 and better part of the reading population. The sort 
 of person who read history, biography, and memoirs 
 a half century ago, and by no means novels, reads 
 novels now as a quite natural recourse. I am not at 
 this moment debating whether the change is good for 
 him : but it is certainly a good thing for the novel, and 
 indicative of its gradual self-improvement, that the 
 reader who had nothing to do with it in the last
 
 "ENTERTAINMENT" 267 
 
 generation could hardly do without it in this. The 
 change means, to put it shortly, that once upon a 
 time the truth-loving person read fiction, if at all, 
 without reference to his love of truth, in order to 
 forget, to take "a moral holiday," to be "taken out 
 of himself"; whereas now he can read fiction precisely 
 to intensify and reward his love of truth, however 
 exacting that may be. Fiction once offered, princi- 
 pally, amusement or diversion through escape from 
 responsibility; now it offers, at least the best of it 
 does, the pleasure of responsibility understood, ac- 
 cepted, and welcomed. 
 
 Naturally I do not mean that the great novelists of 
 the past failed on the whole to tell truth, or that their 
 readers failed to find truth in them. A great artist 
 is, almost by definition, a person who sees that on the 
 whole truth is more entertaining than falsification. 
 But they worked, those great novelists, quite frankly 
 under the ideal of entertainment, as we see by the 
 places where their work does not ring true. Those 
 are invariably the places where they thought they 
 saw a clash between truth to human nature and di- 
 version for the reader. Where they thought a pretty 
 lie would please the reader better than the restraint 
 of sober verity, there is no conflict at all — they tell 
 the pretty lie. Whereas now they would tell the 
 sober verity; and the reader — this is the important 
 point of difference — would accept it as conveying more 
 and better pleasure than the pretty lie. The modern 
 reader who is worth writing for does not readily 
 pardon his realist for turning sentimentalist.
 
 268 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 This change in the novel-writer, and in the reader's 
 requirement, was expressed inimitably by Mr. Howells 
 a quarter of a century ago in some passages about the 
 tradition of the holiday story as written by Dickens 
 and others. There is no doubting the genuineness of 
 Dickens's literary conscience, judging it by the high- 
 est standards extant in his time: yet any common 
 reader of 1918 can see the tinsel in what Dickens's 
 public took for gold. Says Mr. Howells, after noting 
 that it was Dickens who "rescued Christmas from 
 Puritan distrust, and humanized it and consecrated 
 it to the hearts and homes of all": 
 
 "Very rough magic, as it now seems, he used in 
 working his miracle, but there is no doubt about his 
 working it. One opens his Christmas stories in this 
 later day — The Carol, The Chimes, The Haunted 
 Man, The Cricket on the Hearth, and all the rest — 
 and with 'a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,' asks 
 himself for the preternatural virtue that they once 
 had. The pathos appears false and strained; the 
 humour largely horse-play; the character theatrical; 
 the joviality pumped ; the psychology commonplace ; 
 the sociology alone funny. It is a world of real 
 clothes, earth, air, water, and the rest ; the people 
 often speak the language of life, but their motives 
 are as disproportioned and improbable, and their pas- 
 sions and purposes as overcharged, as those of the 
 worst of Balzac's people." And again, in droll and 
 specific irony on some particular ingredients of the 
 Christmas tradition in stories: —
 
 "ENTERTAINMENT" 269 
 
 "... the Christmas season is meteorologically . . . 
 favourable to the effective return of persons long 
 supposed lost at sea, or from a prodigal life, or from 
 a darkened mind. The longer, denser, and colder 
 nights are better adapted to the apparition of ghosts, 
 and to all manner of signs and portents; while they 
 seem to present a wider field for the active interven- 
 tion of angels in behalf of orphans and outcasts. 
 The dreams of elderly sleepers at this time are apt 
 to be such as will effect a lasting change in them 
 when they awake, turning them from the hard, cruel, 
 and grasping habits of a life-time, and reconciling 
 them to their sons, daughters, and nephews, who have 
 thwarted them in marriage ; or softening them to their 
 meek, uncomplaining wives, whose hearts they have 
 trampled upon in their reckless pursuit of wealth ; 
 and generally disposing them to a distribution of 
 hampers among the sick and poor, and to a friendly 
 reception of chubby gentlemen with charity subscrip- 
 tion papers. Ships readily drive upon rocks in the 
 early twilight, and offer exciting difficulties of sal- 
 vage; and the heavy snows gather thickly round the 
 steps of wanderers who lie down to die in them pre- 
 paratory to their discovery and rescue by immediate 
 relatives. The midnight weather is also very suit- 
 able to encounter with murderers and burglars; and 
 the contrast of its freezing gloom with the light and 
 cheer indoors promotes the gaieties which merge, at 
 all well regulated country-houses, in love and mar- 
 riage. In the region of pure character no moment
 
 270 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 could be so available for flinging off the mask of 
 frivolity, or imbecility, or savagery, which one has 
 worn for ten or twenty long years, say, for the purpose 
 of foiling some villain, and surprising the reader, and 
 helping the author out with his plot. Persons abroad 
 in the Alps, or Apennines, or Pyrenees, or anywhere 
 seeking shelter in the huts of shepherds or the dens 
 of smugglers, find no time like it for lying in a feigned 
 slumber, and listening to the whispered machinations 
 of their suspicious-looking entertainers, and then sud- 
 denly starting up and fighting their way out ; or else 
 springing from the real sleep into which they have 
 sunk exhausted, and finding it broad day and the 
 good peasants whom they had so unjustly doubted, 
 waiting breakfast for them. We need not point out 
 the superior advantages of the Christmas season for 
 anything one has a mind to do with the French Revolu- 
 tion, or the Arctic explorations, or the Indian Mutiny, 
 or the horrors of Siberian exile ; there is no time so 
 good for the use of this material ; and ghosts on 
 shipboard are notoriously fond of Christmas Eve. In 
 our own logging camps the man who has gone into the 
 woods for the winter, after quarrelling with his wife, 
 then hears her sad appealing voice, and is moved to 
 good resolutions as at no other period of the year; 
 and in the mining regions, first in California and 
 later in Colorado, the hardened reprobate, dying in 
 his boots, smells his mother's doughnuts, and breathes 
 his last in a soliloquized vision of the old home, and 
 the little brother, or sister, or the old father coming 
 to meet him from heaven ; while his rude companions
 
 "ENTERTAINMENT" 271 
 
 listen round him, and dry their eyes on the butts of 
 their revolvers. ' ' 1 
 
 This material and this spirit hardly please the least 
 critical of us now. Do not such facts prove that the 
 conscience of art has changed for the better, and with 
 it the conscience of the reader, and that both have 
 become more like the conscience of ordinary self- 
 respecting intercourse ? 
 
 II 
 
 "Intercourse" is, I think, a happy word for the 
 newer relation between the writer of stories and his 
 public — especially if one recall the high sense given 
 that word by Stevenson in his essay on "Truth of 
 Intercourse." We conceive the artist as a fellow- 
 citizen with the gift of profitable utterance, instead of 
 as a hired public performer for hours of relaxation. 
 We elevate him, in short, to the rank of a fellow- 
 worker. 
 
 It is perhaps worth while to note that this new atti- 
 tude, which gives the artist a more natural place 
 among us and stresses his likeness to ourselves instead 
 of his differences, is a return part way to what must 
 have been the original idea of his function. The 
 primitive artist was a spokesman of many, their 
 voice and expression ; his task it was to interpret them 
 to themselves, as they drew together for battle or 
 celebration, mourning or festival. He was the com- 
 
 1 Criticism and Fiction, pp. 175-76; 163-66. New York: 
 Harper & Broa. MDCCCXCIII.
 
 272 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 posite consciousness of the people given an articulate 
 voice. When national or racial unity declined, his 
 function became non-integral; and his continued ex- 
 istence became dependent on the favour of some in- 
 dividual patron who supported him. In the second 
 stage the artist was owned by an individual, as a 
 sort of rare exhibit whose existence conferred distinc- 
 tion on the owner. About the time of Dr. Samuel 
 Johnson's famous declaration of independence, this 
 long stage of patronage and fulsome dedications gave 
 way to a third, much more difficult to describe, much 
 more tenable for a self-respecting workman, but still 
 of limited and imperfect dignity. In this third stage 
 the relation of patronage continued, only the whole 
 book-buying public took the place of the individual 
 benefactor. This conjoint ownership of a writer by 
 a whole people — one sees it in the mid-Victorian Eng- 
 lish attitude toward Dickens — involves the idea that 
 the artist is a queer being with an incomprehensible 
 knack of giving people something they want; an 
 amazing prodigy of nature whom the public takes 
 pride in owning and exhibiting, but whom it does 
 not feel in the least obliged to understand provided it 
 pays him, and whom it would not greatly care to 
 resemble. The artist of this period is like a freak in 
 a circus, whom people pay to stare at, or like an ex- 
 pensive entertainer who can be "had in" for the 
 evening, but whom no one would dream of having as 
 a guest. 
 
 To a certain extent it is true that we are still in 
 this third stage ; one sees a relic of it in the popular
 
 "ENTERTAINMENT" 273 
 
 feeling that an author must continue to emulate his 
 first successes. We felt abused and taken advantage 
 of when the late "William De Morgan, who had pleased 
 us with four striking novels in what we chose to call 
 "his own vein," suddenly betrayed us into buying 
 his fifth novel, An Affair of Dishonor, written in an 
 entirely different vein ; we begrudged him his techni- 
 cal and legal right to be something more or something 
 less than himself, to be the part of himself that we 
 were not paying for. 
 
 But, despite this instinctive tyranny of the public 
 toward authors who have identified themselves with 
 a particular sort of fiction, — or, as we put it in our 
 crude commercial vernacular, a particular "line of 
 goods," — one sees some hopeful signs of a fourth 
 stage, more like the first, in which the artist shall be a 
 self-respecting fellow-worker with the rest of us, 
 judged by the much or little value of his intercourse 
 with us, and willing, since it is necessary, to take the 
 pay that comes from the social value of his work. 
 This view of the artist, the only one which brings truth 
 of intercourse to the front, is of course a product of 
 our socialized view of everything. It is bound to be 
 given an enormous impetus in a time like this, when 
 unity of conscience is so quickened and intensified 
 among great masses of men; for at such times, not 
 only does the artist express what we want, interpret 
 us to ourselves, and read for us the meaning of life 
 and struggle and death better than the politician or 
 the inarticulate soldier can do, but he also dies for 
 us and with us. The young poets whose names this
 
 274 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 war has added to the roll made illustrious by Sir 
 Philip Sidney have done something for the place of 
 the artist in our civilization; and Rupert Brooke 
 buried in foreign soil on the hilltop of his ^Egean isle 
 is perhaps doing as much for the reader of the future 
 as Rupert Brooke writing: 
 
 "If I should die, think only this of me : 
 That there's some corner of a foreign field 
 That is for ever England." 
 
 Hardly ever again, after the artist has shown himself 
 as real in his living and dying as in his writing, can 
 we go back to the patronizing system which sets him 
 apart as a matinee idol — an impersonator and not a 
 person. 
 
 Ill 
 
 All this change of attitude is the flat rejection of 
 art as diversion merely, of art for escape. What we 
 must ban and debar and obliterate is the wholly false 
 notion that life and literature are two largely separate 
 things that have least to do with each other. The 
 man who writes a book- is living most fully while he 
 does it ; it is a wholly false classification that says he 
 is dealing in life at second-hand, while the man who 
 penetrates the Arctic Circle or the sources of the 
 Amazon is dealing in it at first-hand. A story is 
 probably not worth writing unless it represents the 
 writer's closest contact with living reality; and it is 
 certainly not worth reading if it merely takes the 
 reader divertingly ''out of himself." We speak of
 
 "ENTERTAINMENT" 275 
 
 "the world of books." It seems to me an uncon- 
 sciously cynical phrase, a tacit sneer — as though read- 
 ing a book were an interlude in living, a gap in reality, 
 while travelling seventy miles an hour or over-eating 
 rich foods were ' ' real " ! A worthy book was writ- 
 ten by somebody who was living more fully when he 
 wrote it than nine-tenths of us ever live; and if we 
 cannot read it in fulness of life, if we read it because 
 we have "nothing to do," then, heaven help us, we 
 are doddering in the wrong generation. 
 
 What, then, is meant by the saying that "The pur- 
 pose of all art is to give pleasure?" Why, simply 
 that we must give "pleasure" a large enough defini- 
 tion. We must make it mean the pleasure of the 
 right person, and the right person taken at the right 
 time. Mr. Brownell speaks 1 of the readers who rest 
 the whole justification of Edgar Allan Poe on his 
 success in making their flesh creep. Doesn't he make 
 one's flesh creep? they ask. Well, says Mr. Brownell, 
 that depends entirely on whose flesh they are referring 
 to. There are all sorts of pleasures; and the sort of 
 person who reacts decisively to the best is ordinarily 
 left untouched by the less good. Sociologically, we 
 are all agreed that the highest pleasures are not those 
 which "take us out of ourselves," but those which take 
 us more deeply into ourselves and into each other ; not 
 those which make us forget, but those which quicken 
 and inspire remembrance. In other words, the high- 
 est pleasures are the social emotions which come from 
 
 i Essay on Edgar Allan Poe, in American Prose Masters. 
 By W. C. Brownell. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 
 1909.
 
 276 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 a rational and truthful view of our status as fellow- 
 mortals — pity, compassion, fellow-feeling, fraternity, 
 solidarity; the pleasures of "truth of intercourse." 
 It is well to remind ourselves that the highest develop- 
 ment of civilization is two or three men sitting in a 
 room talking. 
 
 This sense of community on which the great joys 
 depend is recognized in all great art, and especially in 
 the moral compensations of great tragedy. The social 
 emotions of which I am speaking may often be merged 
 with pain : every one of them demands at least a per- 
 son with the capacity for generous pain. Most of 
 them are compound of pain and pleasure. Pater 
 speaks of "living at the point where all the highest 
 sensations meet ' ' ; the fully pleasured life is what it is 
 because the pleasure is full, not because the pleasure 
 is all of one kind. Any sort of self-discipline or re- 
 nunciation converts a lower pleasure into a higher. 
 The prototype of all such truisms is in David's words, 
 ' ' Can I drink the blood of my friends ? " as he pours 
 the water on the ground, renouncing a sensual pleas- 
 ure for a spiritual ; or in the words of a greater than 
 David, "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground 
 and die, it abideth alone : but if it die, it bringeth forth 
 much fruit." 
 
 And— if I may be trivial again after being perhaps 
 unduly serious — it is quite as true that the person 
 who renounces the reading of silly books, or the read- 
 ing of serious books in a silly frame of mind, is re- 
 nouncing a low pleasure of self -gratification for a 
 higher pleasure of self-development, and getting rid of
 
 "ENTERTAINMENT" 277 
 
 a chocolate-cream philosophy for the sake of a sense 
 of what life is really made of — which is the thing that 
 real books are made of too. 
 
 IV 
 
 Of course no one means to deny fiction a reasonable 
 self-indulgence in the matter of moral holidays. The 
 Pipe-Smoker in one of Mr. Kenneth Grahame 's Pagan 
 Papers speaks of cigarettes as being all very well 
 "when you're not smoking"; and books there be too, 
 ranging from those of Thomas Love Peacock to those 
 of Mr. W. W. Jacobs, which are all very well when 
 you're not reading. Every member of every one of 
 the learned professions, and all writers and lecturers 
 especially, must have many intervals of looking for- 
 ward with intense relish to the blessed relief of having 
 for a time no opinions to express, or even to hold ; and 
 it is a notorious fact that every teacher of the young 
 spends the month of May reviling his occupation and 
 threatening to buy a farm. Was it Belfast in The 
 Nigger of the "Narcissus" who, in the revulsion of 
 feeling produced by such an accumulation of hard- 
 ships as was the lot of seamen in ships that sailed, 
 threatened to "chuck going to sea for ever and go in a 
 steamer"? Anything, done hard enough and long 
 enough, proves the advantage of doing it no more for 
 a season, and of doing anything else whatever; but 
 the implicit meaning of all vacations is that temporary 
 irresponsibility is one kind of preparation for being
 
 278 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 permanently responsible. It is work that gives a 
 vacation all the meaning it can ever have. And the 
 literature of pure diversion, likewise, derives its sense 
 from its relation to the literature of interpretation. 
 We read the literature of escape — often with a feeling 
 that the function of the mere entertainer is in some 
 sort a sacred one, a ministry— precisely because of 
 everything that it is not; thus tacitly admitting that 
 it is an exception and not the norm. 
 
 A book from which I have already quoted, Criticism 
 and Fiction, puts the concession to irresponsibility 
 into terms partly historical when it says: "I am not 
 saying that what may be called the fantastic romance 
 — the romance that descends from Frankenstein 
 rather than The Scarlet Letter — ought not to be. On 
 the contrary, I should grieve to lose it, as I should 
 grieve to lose the pantomime or the comic opera, or 
 many other graceful things that amuse the passing 
 hour, and help us to live agreeably in a world where 
 men actually sin, suffer, and die. ' ' 1 Note, though, 
 how Mr. Howells goes on: "But it belongs to the 
 decorative arts, and though it has a high place among 
 them, it cannot be ranked with the works of the 
 imagination — the works that represent and body forth 
 human experience. Its ingenuity can always afford 
 a refined pleasure, and it can often, at some risk to 
 itself, convey a valuable truth." 1 
 
 It is the higher of these two implied kinds of pleas- 
 ure that art must more and more steadfastly hold for 
 
 i Criticism and Fiction, p. 116. By W. D. Howells. New 
 York: Harper & Bros. MDCCCXCIII.
 
 "ENTERTAINMENT" 279 
 
 its ideal. To be art at all, it must of course minister 
 to pleasure; but there always remains the difference 
 between getting out of life to seek pleasure and seek- 
 ing to bring pleasure into life. One of the most dis- 
 tinguished surgeons in America, and at eighty years 
 one of the hardest- working men, objects to the the- 
 oretically ideal day of eight hours to work, eight to 
 play, and eight to sleep, on the ground that himself 
 requires at least sixteen hours to play. No one sup- 
 poses that work of any kind is all beer and skittles; 
 at least no one does who has worked ; and some there 
 are who make a sad and labourious business even of do- 
 ing nothing at all. But work must be done, somehow, 
 on a basis of indomitable joy in it, and as our only 
 possible means of self-expression in terms of life. 
 And so must be done the work of the novelist. 
 
 It is one of the distressing anomalies of the writ- 
 er's life, and in fact one of the chief drawbacks to 
 it, that the work which he does with joy is not re- 
 ceived by the public, whatever the joy it gives them, 
 as work. The sober business of his life is the excep- 
 tion, the interlude, in theirs. The irony and the 
 incongruity of this clash between the purpose of 
 fiction and its meaning are expressed by a gifted 
 contemporary writer in these terms: "The automo- 
 bile and the telephone, the accomplishments of Mr. 
 Edison and Mr. Burbank, and it would be permis- 
 sible to add of Mr. Rockefeller, influence nowadays, 
 in one fashion or another, every moment of every 
 living American's existence; whereas had America 
 produced, instead, a second Milton or a Dante, it
 
 280 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 would at most have caused a few of us to spend a few 
 spare evenings rather differently. ' ' x Such a con- 
 sideration is felt as belittling; even a writer who af- 
 fects to despise the public which gives him his living 
 must feel its interference with a kind of plain human 
 dignity which we all like to have. It is a much more 
 serious consideration than that raised by Stevenson 
 in his famous "Letter to a Young Gentleman Propos- 
 ing to Embrace the Career of Art." To win one's 
 living by pleasure given to others is indeed a difficult 
 sentence to accept, unless one have illimitable faith 
 in the quality and the effectual value of the pleasure. 
 But even the professional athlete is better off, in this 
 one respect, than the professional story-teller: at 
 least, what his public accepts from him is the same 
 thing which he is paid to offer, and such dignity as 
 he has does not suffer the affront of seeing his work 
 daily misconstrued, taken for something else alto- 
 gether. 
 
 The general acceptance of fiction as a part of real 
 life is a high and remote possibility, not an impos- 
 sibility; and its very remoteness is a reinforcement 
 of every reason why the novelist must hope and strive 
 for it. There can certainly be no hope of a public 
 better than the artist himself conceives and works 
 for; and, as a fact, the changes already produced in 
 the reader by the writer's greater and greater de- 
 mands upon him are noteworthy enough to justify 
 the hope that in this fundamental matter also the 
 
 i The Certain Hour. By James Branch Cabell. New York : 
 Robert M. McBride & Co. Auctorial Induction, p. 32.
 
 "ENTERTAINMENT" 281 
 
 artist can, by being creative enough, make whatever 
 kind of reader he needs. For example: Time was 
 when work did not enter into the subject-matter of 
 fiction. The characters lived exclusively to make the 
 story; and if they were not leisured folk, then they 
 were working folk taken in their hours of leisure. 
 But for a generation past, the novel, except as written 
 by Henry James, has dealt with busy folk in their 
 hours of busyness. Its characters, instead of existing 
 to live the story that the novelist wants to tell, re- 
 quire him to write the story about them because they 
 are really living. This one change in the make-up of 
 fiction shows how our conception of pleasure has 
 changed, from escape to voluntary self-immersion in 
 the affairs of our fellows. And if this change could 
 come about in our attitude toward the work about 
 which the novelist writes, why can it not come about 
 in our attitude toward the work which he himself 
 does? 
 
 All art looks forward, consciously or uncon- 
 sciously, to the breaking-down of the distinctions be- 
 tween work and play through the elevation of play 
 to the worth and the usefulness of labour. While we 
 work and play separately, the artist is bound to re- 
 main a person of inferior dignity; but he saves his 
 self-respect by working tacitly for a public, hitherto 
 almost undreamed-of save by a few, which shall live 
 the whole, the integral, life — that is, which shall wholly 
 and exhaustively live all the time, and in which every- 
 thing that is suffered to exist at all shall be both de- 
 sirable and indispensable, both play and work. In
 
 282 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 that life of the future, blessedly free from the shallow 
 distinctions between the things we do because we have 
 to and those we do because we want to, the arts can 
 really come into their inheritance. Perhaps this is 
 only to say that there will never be any adequate ap- 
 preciation of the fine art of telling tales until a great 
 part of mankind has learned to make a fine art of 
 living. 
 
 There is one corollary of taking fiction on such 
 terms, as an incessant ministration to living reality, 
 which for my part I find it not difficult to accept — 
 the deadness at this moment of the once living works 
 which we reprint and study and call ' ' classics. ' ' To 
 begin with, most of them were produced under a 
 pretty shallow definition of pleasure; and they have 
 therefore nothing to say to our higher ideal unless 
 they far exceeded the utmost implications of their 
 lower one. Only one thing could save fiction inspired 
 by the older ideal: enough scope of vision in the 
 artist to see the picture of our common human nature 
 as it is for ever, whatever becomes of its momentary 
 conditions. Shakspere, Fielding, Jane Austen — 
 these, and very few others in English, live by their 
 creation of something true that cannot change. 
 
 But the lesser folk who had not this vision — do they 
 transmit to us any real message ? The only other pos- 
 sible achievement is the timely record of movements, 
 tendencies, beliefs, phases of civilization — facts, the
 
 "ENTERTAINMENT" 283 
 
 material of the lesser and lower realism. And the 
 appeal of these is necessarily impermanent just in 
 proportion as it is timely and intense. The least in- 
 spired realist, if he have conscience, patience, and 
 clear eye-sight, can show us in one book more about 
 our own decade than all the Maria Edgeworths and 
 Harriet Martineaus and Charles Kingsleys in litera- 
 ture can teach us about it in all their books put to- 
 gether; and unless he have something of eternity in 
 his pages, in another decade his work will be as dead 
 as most of theirs. 
 
 And why should we not be glad to let him have his 
 hour of life in his work? Recognizing or not rec- 
 ognizing its mortality, we can afford to be glad of 
 whatever vitality it has in its own time, and consent 
 to let posterity read for itself as we read for our- 
 selves. By the same logic, why should we let an- 
 tiquity read for us? A book is dead when it fails to 
 speak fruitfully to us, either of things which are ever- 
 lasting, or of things which are pressing and impera- 
 tive parts of our lives now. I do not see why we 
 should reject books which do the second thing merely 
 on the ground that they will be meaningless to the 
 future : that fact proves only the livingness of life. 
 Neither do I see why we should go out of our ways 
 to know and to preserve books merely because they 
 meant something once. Either attitude implies a 
 veneration for art as something apart from life — a 
 disjunction the passing of which this book partly 
 records and partly predicts. 
 
 Most novels treat, in one way or another, a single
 
 284 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 constantly recurring situation: that of individual 
 wealth or power in its relations with the rest of man- 
 kind. Underlying this theme, and every theme, is 
 human nature. If in treating the theme the novelist 
 can reveal true human nature as it has never been re- 
 vealed before in a similar connection, he has done the 
 greatest and the only permanent thing. If, failing to 
 do that, he reveals an important phase of our present 
 commercial civilization, he has done the next greatest. 
 His novel is pretty certain of oblivion; but why 
 should we pretend that it does not say more to us 
 than some nineteenth-century novel that makes us 
 laugh or cry, or sleep, over the fortunes of heroes and 
 heroines whose concerns are none of ours, except 
 through the vainest and most belittling kind of 
 curiosity — the instinct of gossip, pure and simple? 
 
 Nothing could have a more sanifying effect on art 
 than a ruthless sacrifice of whatever is superstitious 
 in our veneration for the writings of the past. 
 Meredith points, for the artist, the way to a noble 
 disregard of all but living realities when he disclaims 
 every thought, every desire, of immortality except on 
 the score of service rendered : "... all right use of 
 life, and the one secret of life, is to pave ways for 
 the firmer footing of those who succeed us ; as to my 
 works, I know them faulty, think them of worth only 
 when they point and aid to that end." Art is a liv- 
 ing thing to him who makes it: unless it be so to the 
 rest of us, have we really accepted it at all? And 
 while the artist of the present is content to die as 
 soon as his handiwork means nothing to us, is it not
 
 "ENTERTAINMENT" 285 
 
 strange that we should occupy ourselves with con- 
 ferring a fictitious life upon dead artists of the past, 
 and, as Professor Sir Walter Raleigh once said, pin 
 bits of coloured ribbon on each other for having the 
 intelligence to understand their works ? 
 
 I end, because I can do no better, with this eloquent 
 account x of the relation between writer and reader, by 
 a novelist whose work was beginning just as Mere- 
 dith's was ending; an account contained in an early 
 Preface which, however often quoted of late, is not 
 likely ever to become more familiar than it deserves : 
 
 "Sometimes, stretched at ease in the shade of a 
 roadside tree, we watch the motions of a labourer in 
 a distant field, and after a time, begin to wonder 
 languidly as to what the fellow may be at. We 
 watch the movements of his body, the waving of his 
 arms, we see him bend down, stand up, hesitate, begin 
 again. It may add to the charm of an idle hour to 
 be told the purpose of his exertions. If we know he 
 is trying to lift a stone, to dig a ditch, to uproot a 
 stump, we look with a more real interest at his 
 efforts; we are disposed to condone the jar of his 
 agitation upon the restfulness of the landscape; and 
 even, if in a brotherly frame of mind, we may bring 
 ourselves to forgive his failure. We understood his 
 object, and, after all, the fellow has tried, and per- 
 haps he had not the strength — and perhaps he had 
 not the knowledge. We forgive, go on our way — and 
 forget. 
 
 i The Nigger of the "Narcissus." By Joseph Conrad. New 
 York: Doubleday, Page & Co. 1914. Preface, pp. xii-xiii,
 
 286 THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 "And so it is with the workman of art. Art is 
 long and life is short, and success is very far off. 
 And thus, doubtful of strength to travel so far, we 
 talk a little about the aim — -the aim of art, which, like 
 life itself, is inspiring, difficult — obscured by mists. 
 It is not in the clear logic of a triumphant conclusion ; 
 it is not in the unveiling of one of those heartless 
 secrets which are called the Laws of Nature. It is 
 not less great, but only more difficult. 
 
 "To arrest, for the space of a breath, the hands 
 busy about the work of the earth, and compel men 
 entranced by the sight of distant goals to glance for 
 a moment at the surrounding vision of form and 
 colour, of sunshine and shadows ; to make them pause 
 for a look, for a sigh, for a smile — such is the aim, 
 difficult and evanescent, and reserved only for a very 
 few to achieve. But sometimes, by the deserving and 
 the fortunate, even that task is accomplished. And 
 when it is accomplished — behold! — all the truth of 
 life is there : a moment of vision, a sigh, a smile — and 
 the return to an eternal rest. ' '
 
 A BRIEF SELECTIVE AND SUGGESTIVE BIBLIOG- 
 RAPHY OF THE NOVEL IN ENGLISH WITH 
 HINTS FOR STUDY
 
 A BRIEF SELECTIVE AND SUGGESTIVE 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY WITH HINTS FOR 
 
 STUDY 
 
 It would be almost possible, with the aid of a great li- 
 brary, to fill the space of this reading- and reference-list 
 with a bibliography of bibliographies. The purpose of 
 the following pages is to represent, not cover, the subject ; 
 but material is supplied in excess of that reached by the 
 ordinary student, and enough, I believe, if one were to fol- 
 low it faithfully, to lead one to everything that bears im- 
 portantly on the history of the novel in English. 
 
 To save space, I have kept pretty consistently within 
 certain limitations. (1) I bear in mind primarily the 
 student and the general reader, avoiding the mention of 
 works or editions simply for their interest to bibliophile 
 and collector. (2) I almost entirely ignore first editions, 
 except of books published within twenty-five yeai*s; but 
 dates of original publication of novels are supplied in 
 brackets after the titles. (3) I name, usually, one good 
 working library edition of an author's collected writings; 
 a recent American edition, readily accessible and suitable to 
 be either owned or merely used, whenever I am acquainted 
 with one. (4) I name one comprehensive critical estimate 
 of each more important author, making a few exceptions 
 where there are different estimates which strikingly supple- 
 ment each other, or which have independently great intrinsic 
 interest. (5) I pay no attention to the short-story save 
 where its history obviously crosses and affects that of the 
 novel. 
 
 289
 
 290 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 It has seemed advisable to omit the prices of books listed, 
 because, in the conditions produced by the war, book prices 
 hardly remain constant for even the period required to see 
 a book through the press. 
 
 For convenience and coherence, I have arranged the list 
 in groups based partly on chronology and partly on a 
 sequence other than the chronological; that is, I have tried 
 to suggest the development of certain types and modes of 
 fiction, while preserving roughly the order of modern fic- 
 tional history in general. The last division, XI., is of neces- 
 sity a somewhat personal and therefore arbitrary selection ; 
 but it in no way interferes with the use of Divisions I.-X., as 
 a disinterested and catholic representation of the subject. 
 
 Titles marked with a star ( * ) are listed in the useful and 
 inexpensive Everyman's Library (London : J. M. Dent & 
 Sons, Ltd.; New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. General Edi- 
 tor, Ernest Rhys). The introductions to volumes of this 
 series are invariably helpful in suggestions for reading, as 
 well as in suggestions for critical appreciation. 
 
 I. General works of reference, to be consulted on several 
 periods or phases of the history of fiction. 
 
 The Cambridge History of English Literature. 
 Edited by A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller. New 
 York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1907-17. 14 
 vols. 
 
 The History of Fiction. By John Colin Dunlop. 
 Wilson's Edition. Bohn Library. 1896. 2 
 vols. 
 
 A History of the Novel Previous to the Seven- 
 teenth Century. By F. M. Warren. New 
 York: Henry Holt and Company. 1895. 
 
 English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 291 
 
 Century. By Leslie Stephen. New York: G. P. 
 Putnam's Sons. 1904. 
 
 The English Novel; a study in the development 
 of personality. By Sidney Lanier. New- 
 York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1900. 
 
 A Study of Prose Fiction. By Bliss Perry. 
 Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1903. 
 
 The Development of the English Novel. By Wil- 
 bur L. Cross. New York: The Macmillan Co. 
 1899. 
 
 Masters of the English Novel. By Richard Bur- 
 ton. New York: Henry Holt and Company. 
 1909. 
 
 British Novelists and Their Styles. By David 
 Masson. Boston: Willard Small. 1889. 
 
 The English Novel. By Walter Raleigh. New 
 York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1911. (Fifth 
 edition . ) 
 
 The English Novel. By George Saintsbury. 
 New York : E. P. Dutton & Co. 1913. 
 
 Two Centuries of the English Novel. By Harold 
 Williams. London : Smith, Elder. 1911. 
 
 II. On the assthetics and technique of fiction, see 
 
 The Art of Fiction. By Sir Walter Besant. Bos- 
 ton : Cupples, Upham & Co. This volume in- 
 cludes Henry James's rejoinder, of the same title 
 (also in Partial Portraits). See, in the same 
 connection, Stevenson's answer to Henry James 
 {A Humble Remonstrance, in Memories and 
 Portraits). 
 Materials and Methods of Fiction. By Clayton 
 Hamilton. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co. 
 1908.
 
 292 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Criticism and Fiction. By William Dean Howella. 
 New York: Harper Bros. & Co. 1893. (A de- 
 fense of realism. For the opposite view, con- 
 taining a criticism of Howells and his school, 
 see Ambrose Bierce's essay on The Short Story, 
 in The Opiwionator, Vol. 10 of the Collected 
 Works. New York: Neale Publishing Co. 
 1909-12.) 
 
 Notes on Novelists. By Henry James. New 
 York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1914. 
 
 The Novels and Tales of Henry James. New 
 York Edition. New York: Charles Scribner's 
 Sons. 1907-9. (The author's Prefaces.) 
 
 Creative Criticism. By J. E. Spingarn. New 
 York: Henry Holt and Company. (Essays on 
 the Unity of Genius and Taste.) 
 
 Standards. By W. C. Brownell. New York: 
 Charles Scribner's Sons. 1916. 
 
 III. For general bibliographical suggestions, see The Cam- 
 bridge History of English Literature, Cross's Develop- 
 ment of the English Novel, Perry's Study of Prose 
 Fiction, Wilson's Edition of Dunlop, and A Descrip- 
 tive Guide to the Best Fiction in English, by Ernest A. 
 Baker (New York: The Macmillan Company. 1913. 
 New Edition, enlarged and thoroughly revised. This 
 is the most useful critical and descriptive bibliography 
 of fiction in English from the mediseval romances to 
 1911). There is an exhaustive bibliography of the 
 novel of manners from 1600 to 1740 in The Rise of the 
 Novel of Manners, by Charlotte Elizabeth Morgan 
 (New York: Columbia University Press. 1911). 
 See also the catalogues of fiction published by the
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 293 
 
 public libraries of Chicago, Boston, Cincinnati, and 
 St. Louis; and Books That Count; a dictionary of 
 Standard Books (Edited by W. Forbes Gray. Lon- 
 don : Adam and Charles Black. 1912. Columns 241 - 
 92). 
 
 IV. Pre-Elizabethan forms of prose fiction : the Greek 
 romances and the romances of Chivalry. 
 
 Greek Romances. Translated by Rowland Smith. 
 Bonn's Library. (Translations from Helio- 
 dorus, Tatius, and Longus.) See also Warren 
 and Dunlop. 
 
 The Flourishing of Romance and the Age of Al- 
 legory. By George Saintsbury. New York: 
 Charles Scribner's Sons. 1897. See also War- 
 ren, Dunlop, and The Cambridge History. 
 
 V. The Elizabethan period: the novella and the novel. 
 
 The Greek Romances in Elizabethan Prose Fiction. 
 By Samuel Lee Wolff. Lancaster, Pennsylvania: 
 Press of the New Era Printing Co. 1912. 
 
 The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare. 
 By J. J. Jusserand. London: T. Fisher Un- 
 win. 1894. See also The Cambridge History. 
 
 The following will serve to represent the Elizabethan 
 practice of fiction : 
 
 The Palace of Pleasure. By William Painter. 
 
 [1566-7]. London: D. Nutt. 1890. 
 The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. By Sir 
 
 Philip Sidney. [1590]. Vols. 1-2 of Works, 
 
 London, 1725, 3 vols. Also, New York: E. P. 
 
 Dutton & Co., 1907. (Edited by E. A. Baker,
 
 294 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 with the additions of Sir William Alexander 
 and Richard Beling, a life, and an introduction.) 
 
 Euphues [1579] and Euphues and His England 
 [1580]. By John Lyly. Vols. 1 and 2 of 
 Works, Oxford : The Clarendon Press, 1902. 3 
 vols. 
 
 Rosalynde: Euphues Golden Legacie, found after 
 his death in his cell at Silexedra. By Thomas 
 Lodge. [1590]. London: Chatto & Windus. 
 1900. (Edited by W. W. Greg.) 
 
 The Unfortunate Traveller; or, the Life of Jack 
 Wilton. By Thomas Nash. [1594]. London: 
 Chiswick Press. 1892. Edited, with an essay 
 on the Life and Writings of Thomas Nash, by 
 Edmund Gosse. 
 
 VI. The Seventeenth Century; rise of the novel of man- 
 ners; precursors of realism. 
 Illustrations of the "heroic" romances: 
 
 Parthenissa; that most fam'd romance. By Roger 
 Boyle, First Earl of Orrery. First part, in 6 
 vols., 1654; complete edition in 3 vols., 1655. 
 Aretina; or, the Serious Romance. By Sir George 
 
 Mackenzie. London: 1661. 
 Pandion and Iphigenia; or, the Story of the Coy 
 Lady of Thessalia. By John Crowne. London : 
 1665. 
 
 All of these are imitations of the imported 
 (French) romances of La Calprenede and 
 the Scuderys. For an excellent brief ac- 
 count of the whole school, see Raleigh's Chap- 
 ter IV. Note that The Female Quixote; or 
 the Adventures of Arabella (by Mrs. Char-
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 295 
 
 lotte Lennox. Originally published 1752. 
 London: F. C. & J. Rivington, 1820), a be- 
 lated satire on this school, shows how long its 
 influence refused to yield to the realistic re- 
 action. The romances themselves are out of 
 print and not commonly accessible. 
 Allegorical realism: 
 
 *Pilgrim's Progress. By John Bunyan [1678]. 
 
 Oxford. 1879. Clarendon Press Series. 
 The Life and Death of Mr. Badman. By John 
 Bunyan. [1680]. London: W. Heinemann. 
 1900. 
 
 Essay on Bunyan in the Sixth Series of 
 Shelbume Essays. By Paul Elmer More. 
 New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1904-10. 
 6 vols. For the historical background of this 
 tradition, see Saintsbury's Flourishing of 
 Romance and the Age of Allegory. 
 Social realism ; novels of scandal, etc. : 
 
 Plays, Histories, and Novels. By Mrs. Aphra 
 Behn. [1698]. London. 1871. 6 vols. Vol. 
 5 contains the best of the novels, including 
 Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave and The Fair 
 Jilt. 
 Incognita. By William Congreve. London. 
 [1692]. Note especially Congreve's anti-ro- 
 manticistic Preface. Out of print since 1713. 
 For an account, see Raleigh's Chapter IV. 
 Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons 
 of Quality of Both Sexes. From the New Ata- 
 lantis, an Island in the Mediterranean. By 
 Mrs. Mary de la Riviere Manley. London. 
 1709. 2 vols. Out of print.
 
 296 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to Utopia. 
 By Mrs. Eliza Haywood. London. [1725]. 
 Note that Mrs. Haywood partly relapsed into 
 the romantic-lackadaisical tradition in Idalia; 
 or, The Unfortunate Mistress (London. 1725) 
 and Philidore and Placentia; or, L 'Amour trop 
 Delicat (London. 1727). All of these are out 
 of print. 
 Note the development of the "character" in the hands of 
 Addison and Steele (Roger de Coverley series of the 
 * Spectator Papers). For a summary of the seven- 
 teenth-century writers of "characters," including Over- 
 bury and Samuel Butler, see Raleigh, pp. 113-14. 
 Pseudo-realistic satire, voyage imaginaire, Utopian ro- 
 mance, etc. 
 
 *Travels into several remote Nations of the World, 
 by Lemuel Gulliver. By Jonathan Swift. [1726]. 
 (Gulliver's Travels and Other Works, exactly re- 
 printed from the first edition, and edited, with 
 some account of Cyrano de Bergerac and his 
 voyages to the sun and moon, by H. Morley. 
 New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. 1906.) A mod- 
 ern edition of Swift is The Prose Works of 
 Jonathan Swift. London: G. Bell & Sons. 
 1907-8. Of this edition, Gulliver is Vol. 8. 
 
 For estimates of Swift, see Swift, by Leslie 
 Stephen (New York. 1882. English Men of 
 Letters) and Essays about Men, Women, and 
 Books, by Augustine Birrell (New York: 
 Charles Scribner's Sons). 
 The Consolidator; or, Memoirs of Sundry Trans- 
 actions from the World in the Moon. By 
 Daniel Defoe. [1705]. This and Gulliver
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 297 
 
 show the eighteenth-century status of a form the 
 lineage of which includes Lueian, The Ultimate 
 Things Beyond Thule of Antonius Diogenes 
 (see Warren), More's Utopia [1516], and the 
 romances of Cyrano de Bergerac and of Vol- 
 taire. The form is perpetuated, with modi- 
 fications, in Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race 
 [1871], Samuel Butler's Erewhon and Ere- 
 whon Revisited Twenty Years Later (Post- 
 humous. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. 1910. 
 Prefaces 1901), Edward Bellamy's Looking 
 Backward, 2000-1887 (Boston: Houghton Mif- 
 flin Co., 1888), and several of the earlier me- 
 chanistic romances of H. G. Wells, as The War 
 of the Worlds ([1898]. New York: Harper 
 Bros.), When the Sleeper Wakes ([1899]. New 
 York: Harper Bros.), and In the Days of the 
 Comet ([1906]. New York: The Century 
 Co.). 
 
 Such Oriental romances as *Rasselas, Prince 
 of Abyssinia [1759] and The History of the 
 Caliph Vathek: an Arabian Tale from an un- 
 published MS. [French version, 1782] are also, 
 in part, voyages imaginaires without the pri- 
 marily satiric purpose. A more fanciful work 
 in the same tradition is Paltock's *Peter Wil- 
 kins. (Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia. By 
 Samuel Johnson. Edited by G. Birkbeck Hill. 
 Oxford: The Clarendon Press. 1887. Vathek, 
 an Arabian Tale. By William Beckford. 
 London : Routledge, 1912. The Life and Adven- 
 tures of Peter Wilkins. By Robert Paltock"? 
 [1751]. London: Reeves & Turner. 1884.
 
 298 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 This is a facsimile reprint of the first edition 
 in 2 vols., edited by A. H. Bullen.) 
 The picaresque novel ; Defoe. 
 
 *Captain Singleton [1720], Colonel Jacques 
 [1722], * Memoirs of a Cavalier [1720], Duncan 
 Campbell, etc. In The Works of Daniel De- 
 foe, edited by G. H. Maynadier. Boston: Old 
 Corner Bookstore. 16 vols. 
 
 For the ancestry of this type, see Warren's 
 account of the Spanish picaresque romance (of 
 which Cervantes' Don Quixote is a_parody) ; also 
 the account of Nash's Jack Wilton in Gosse's In- 
 troduction. The one definite Spanish proto- 
 type of the rogue-novel is now accessible in 
 English: Lazarillo de Tormes. Tr. by Louis 
 How. New York: Mitchell Kennerley. 1917. 
 
 Later developments of the picaresque novel 
 are exemplified by Fielding's History of Mr. 
 Jonathan Wild the Great [1743], Smollett's 
 Roderick Random [1748] and Peregrine Pickle 
 [1751], and Thackeray's Luck of Barry Lyn- 
 don [1844]. Dickens's * Oliver Twist [1838] 
 owes something to the same tradition; as also, 
 in another way, does Stevenson's * Treasure 
 Island [1883]. 
 
 The student should consult Romances of 
 Roguery, by Frank Chandler Wadleigh. New 
 York: The Macmillan Co. 1899. 
 The biographical novel; Defoe. 
 
 *The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. 
 By Daniel Defoe [1719]. (For edition, see 
 above.) Also, certain of the picaresque novels
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 299 
 
 of Defoe are biographic in form; notably, 
 Memoirs of a Cavalier and Duncan Campbell. 
 This development leads straight to the most 
 characteristic novels of the great school of 
 eighteenth-century realism (e. g., *Tom Jones) 
 and of the Victorian period (e. g., * David 
 Copperfield and *Pendennis). To a certain 
 slight extent, Aphra Behn is Defoe's predeces- 
 sor in the biographical novel. 
 
 On Defoe, see Daniel Defoe, by William 
 Minto. (New York: 1879. English Men of 
 Letters) ; also, the essay on Defoe in Vol. 1 of 
 Hours in a Library, by Leslie Stephen. (New 
 York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1894. 4 vols.) 
 
 For a general account of the novel of man- 
 ners in this period, and an exhaustive bibliog- 
 raphy, consult Miss Morgan's The Rise of the 
 Novel of Manners. The Cambridge History is 
 notably helpful on the seventeenth century. 
 
 VII. The realists from Richardson to Jane Austen. 
 Samuel Richardson. 
 
 * Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded [1740]. Clar- 
 issa Harlowe; or, The History of a Young Lady 
 [1748]. The History of Sir Charles Grandison 
 [1753]. By Samuel Richardson. In Richard- 
 son's Works. London: Chapman & Hall. 20 
 vols. 1902. 
 
 Samuel Richardson. By Austin Dobson. 
 New York. 1902. (English Men of Letters.) 
 Also, essays on Richardson in Letters on Litera- 
 ture, by Andrew Lang (London: Longmans,
 
 300 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 1889) ; Res Judicatae, by Augustine Birrell 
 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1897); 
 and Vol. 1 of Leslie Stephen's Hours in a Li- 
 brary. 
 Henry Fielding. 
 
 *The History of the Adventures of Joseph 
 Andrews [1742]. *The History of Tom Jones, 
 A Foundling [1749]. Amelia [1751]. (For 
 Jonathan Wild, see VI., under the picaresque 
 novel, above.) In The Works of Henry Field- 
 ing. Edited, with a biographical essay by Leslie 
 Stephen. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1882. 
 10 vols. American edition : Edited by G. H. 
 Maynadier. New York: Athenaeum Society. 
 1903. 12 vols. 
 
 Fielding. By Austin Dobson. New York. 
 1883. (English Men of Letters). Essays in 
 Andrew Lang's Letters on Literature and Vol. 2 
 of Leslie Stephen's Hours in a Library. 
 Tobias George Smollett. 
 
 Roderick Random [1748]. Peregrine Pickle 
 [1751]. Ferdinand, Count Fathom [1753]. 
 Sir Lancelot Greaves [1762]. Humphrey Clin- 
 ker [1771]. In The Works of Tobias George 
 Smollett, edited with introduction by G. H. May- 
 nadier. Boston: Old Corner Bookstore. 1902. 
 12 vols. For Roderick Random and Peregrine- 
 Pickle, see the picaresque novel, under VI, 
 above. Ferdinand, Count Fathom is an inferior 
 example of much the same type. Sir Lancelot 
 Greaves is in the mode of Cervantes; it should 
 be noted that Smollett did, with evident gusto, a 
 translation of Don Quixote. Note in Humphrey
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 301 
 
 Clinker the occurrence of the letter-form as 
 practised by Richardson. This alone of Smol- 
 lett's novels is realistic in both form and sub- 
 stance. 
 
 Life of Tobias George Smollett. By David 
 Hannay. London : Walter Scott. 1887. 
 (Great Writers Series.) 
 
 Laurence Sterne. 
 
 *The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy 
 [1759-67]. A Sentimental Journey [1768]. In 
 The Complete Works of Laurence Sterne. 
 With an introduction by W. L. Cross. New 
 York: The Colonial Society. 1904. 6 vols. 
 This edition includes the Life by Percy Fitz- 
 gerald, which see. 
 
 Sterne. By H. D. Traill. New York. 1882. 
 (English Men of Letters.) The Life and Times 
 of Laurence Sterne. By Wilbur L. Cross. 
 New York: The Macmillan Company. 1909. 
 Essays in Augustine Birrell's Men, Women, and 
 Books; Leslie Stephen's Hours in a Library, 
 Vol. 3; and Shelburne Essays, Third Series, by 
 Paul Elmer More. (New York: G. P. Put- 
 nam's Sons. 1904-10.) 
 
 Oliver Goldsmith. 
 
 *The Vicar of Wakefield [1766]. Vol. 2 of 
 The Works of Oliver Goldsmith. Edited by 
 Peter Cunningham, and including Forster's Life. 
 Boston: The Jefferson Press. 1900. 12 vols. 
 
 Frances Burney (Mme. D'Arblay). 
 
 "Evelina [1778] and Cecilia [1782]. In 
 Bohn's Novelist Library. London. 1883 and
 
 302 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 1882. Each, 2 vols. Cecilia. New York: The 
 Macmillan Co. 1904. 
 
 Fanny Burney. By Austin Dobson, New 
 York: The Macmillan Co. 1903. (English 
 Men of Letters). Essay in More's Shelhurne 
 Essays, Fourth Series. 
 Maria Edgeworth. 
 
 *Castle Rackrent [1800] and *The Absentee 
 [1801]. Both in No. 410 of Everyman's Li- 
 brary. (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.) 
 Belinda [1801]. Leonora [1806]. Helen [1834]. 
 In the Longford Edition of her Works. Lon- 
 don. 1893. 10 vols. 
 
 Maria Edgeworth. By Emily Lawless. Lon- 
 don: The Macmillan Co. 1903. (English Men 
 of Letters). For Miss Edgeworth's influence 
 on Scott, see Brander Matthews' introduction 
 to Castle Rackrent and The Absentee in Every- 
 man's Library. 
 Jane Austen. 
 
 *Pride and Prejudice [1813]. * Sense and 
 Sensibility [1811]. * Northanger Abbey [1818]. 
 * Mansfield Park [1814]. * Persuasion [1818]. 
 *Emma [1816]. In The Works of Jane Austen. 
 London : Chatto & Windus. 1908. 10 vols. 
 
 Life of Jane Austen. By Goldwin Smith. 
 London: 1890. (Great Writers Series.) 
 On the period as a whole, see, besides Cross, Raleigh, 
 Saintsbury's English Novel, and The Cambridge His- 
 tory, A History of Eighteenth Century Literature, by 
 Edmund Gosse (London. 1889) ; and English Litera- 
 ture and Society in the Eighteenth Century, by Leslie 
 Stephen (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1904).
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 303 
 
 Thackeray's Lectures on *Tlie English Humorists 
 (Vol. 5 of Works; see X., below) treats the humorous 
 realists from Congreve to Steme. 
 
 VIII. Gothic and Oriental romances; the School of Terror, 
 etc. 
 
 *The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins. By- 
 Robert Paltock [1751]. London: Reeves & Tur- 
 ner. 1884. 
 
 The Castle of Otranto. By Horace Walpole 
 [1764]. London. 1892. In CasselPs National 
 Library. Essay on Walpole in Vol. 1 of Leslie 
 Stephen's Hours in a Library. 
 
 The Old English Baron. By Clara Reeve [1777]. 
 The Castle of Otranto and The Old English 
 Baron have been reprinted together by Warne, 
 1872, and by Nimmo, 1883, and separately in 
 CasselPs National Library. 
 
 The Mysteries of Udolpho. By Anne Radcliffe 
 [1794]. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. 1903. 
 The Romance of the Forest. By the same. 
 [1791]. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. 1904. 
 A Sicilian Romance [1709] and The Italian; or, 
 the Confessional of the Black Penitent [1797], 
 the latter perhaps the best of Mrs. Radcliffe's 
 romances, are out of print. 
 
 The Monk; a Romance. By Matthew Gregory 
 ("Monk") Lewis. Also entitled Ambrosio; or, 
 The Monk. [1795]. New York: E. P. Dut- 
 ton & Co. 1907. 
 
 Caleb Williams; or, Things as They Are. By 
 William Godwin. [1795]. London : Routledge, 
 1904. St. Leon [1799] and Fleetwood [1805] 
 are out of print. See essay on Godwin's Novels
 
 304 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 iii Leslie Stephen's Studies of a Biographer 
 (London: Duckworth & Co. 4 vols. 1899- 
 1902). 
 
 Melmoth the Wanderer [1820]. By Charles Rob- 
 ert Maturin. London: Richard Bentley & Son. 
 1892. 3 vols. This edition contains a memoir 
 and a valuable bibliography of Maturin's 
 works. 
 
 * Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 
 [1818]. By Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) 
 Shelley. New York : E. P. Dutton & Co. No. 
 616 of Everyman's Library. Tales and Stories. 
 By Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley. 
 London. 1891. Introduction by Richard Gar- 
 nett. (Treasure house of tales by great au- 
 thors. ) 
 
 Crotchet Castle [1831]. By Thomas Love Pea- 
 cock. London : J. M. Dent & Co. 1891. Edited 
 by Richard Garnett. In the same edition, Gryll 
 Grange [1860], 1891, 2 vols.; *Headlong Rail 
 [1816], 1892; Maid Marian [1822], 1892; 
 Melincourt [1817], 1891; * Nightmare Abbey 
 [1817], 1892; and The Misfortunes of Elphin 
 [1829], 1891. 
 
 Essay on Peacock in Essays in English Liter- 
 ature, by George Saintsbury. (London: Per- 
 cival & Co. 1891.) 
 
 Klosterheim [1832]. The Avenger [1838]. The 
 Spanish Military Nun. By Thomas De Quincey. 
 In Vols. 12-13 of The Collected Writings of 
 Thomas De Quincey. Edited by David Masson. 
 London : A. & C. Black. 1896-97. 
 
 For Johnson's Rasselas and Beckford's Vathek,
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 305 
 
 see the Utopian romance, etc., under VI. above; 
 also The Oriental Tale in England in the Eight- 
 eenth Century, by Martha Pike Conant. 
 
 Note the influence of the School of Terror on the 
 historical romances of Harrison Ainsworth 
 (see IX. below) ; also on the Christmas stories 
 of Dickens (for whom, see X. below) and on 
 Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (see X. be- 
 low). 
 
 *Tales of Mystery, etc. [1839-]. By Edgar Al- 
 lan Poe. Vols. 1-5 of The Works of Edgar 
 Allan Poe, edited by Edmund Clarence Stedman 
 and George Edward Woodberry. New York: 
 Charles Scribner's Sons. 1894-5. 10 vols. 
 For memoir and introduction, see Vol. 1. 
 
 *The House of the Seven Gables [1851]. *The 
 Scarlet Letter [1850]. *The Marble Faun 
 [I860]. Septimius Felton [1872]. Dr. Grim- 
 shawe's Secret [1883], By Nathaniel Haw- 
 thorne. Vols. 3, 5-6, 11, 13 of the Standard 
 Library Edition of The Works of Nathaniel 
 Hawthorne. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 
 1882-96. Hawthorne. By Henry James. 
 New York. 1879. (English Men of Letters). 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne. By George E. Wood- 
 berry. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1902 
 (American Men of Letters.) 
 
 For the literary ancestry of Poe and Hawthorne, 
 see the First Series of Shelbume Essays, by 
 Paul Elmer More, essay on The Origins of 
 Hawthorne and Poe. Two excellent modern 
 estimates, in comparison and contrast of the 
 two writers, are the essays in American Prose
 
 306 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Masters, by W. C. Brownell. (New York; 
 Charles Scribner's Sons. 1909.) 
 
 Note the conversion of the novel of terror into the 
 modern pseudo-realistic novel of mystery and 
 suspense in the stories of Wilkie Collins (in 
 New Edition. London: Chatto & Windus. 
 After Dark [1856], 1891; The Haunted Hotel, 
 1892; *The Woman in White [1860], 1896; Ar- 
 madale [1866], 1897; The Moonstone [1868], 
 1897; No Name [1862], 1898; etc.); also in 
 those of A. Conan Doyle (e. g., The Hound of 
 the Baskervilles [1902]. New York: McClure, 
 1902. A Study in Scarlet [1887], and The Sign 
 of the Four [1889]. New York: Harper Bros. 
 & Co., 1904). See also, among mid-nineteenth 
 century experiments in the psychic, Bulwer's 
 Zanoni [1842] and A Strange Story [1862] 
 (for edition, see X. below). The complete as- 
 similation of the element of terror, mystery, and 
 supematuralism into the modern realistic mode 
 occurs in Henry James's Turn of the Screw and 
 some of Rudyard Kipling's stories, as The End 
 of the Passage and The Mark of the Beast. 
 
 For a general treatment and valuable biblio- 
 graphical suggestions, consult The Supernatural 
 in English Fiction, by Dorothy Scarborough 
 (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1917). 
 
 IX. Historical novels and romances. 
 
 Queenhoo-Iiall; a romance. By Joseph Strutt. 
 
 Edinburgh. [1808]. Finished and edited by 
 
 Sir Walter Scott. Out of print. 
 *The Waverley Novels. New York: Harper &
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 307 
 
 Bros. 30 vols. *Waverley [1814] (Vol. 1- 
 2) ; *Rob Roy [1817] (Vol. 5) ; *A Legend of 
 Montrose [1819] (Vol. 6) ; *The Bride of Lam- 
 mermoor [1819] (Vol. 10); *Ivanhoe [1819] 
 (Vol. 11) ; *Kenilworth [1821] (Vol. 14) ; etc. 
 
 Sir Walter Scott. By R. H. Hutton. New 
 York. 1S79. (English Men of Letters). For 
 detailed study, see A Key to the Waverley 
 Novels in chronological sequence, with index of 
 characters, by Henry Grey. (New edition. 
 London, 1899). Essay, Scotch Novels and 
 Scotch History, in the Third Series of Paul El- 
 mer More's Shelburne Essays. 
 
 Bulwer's Works. *Harold, the Last of the Saxon 
 Kings [1848]. *The Last Days of Pompeii 
 [1834]. *The Last of the Barons [1843]. 
 *Bienzi, the Last of the Roman Tribunes [1835]. 
 Leila [1838]. Devereux [1829]. By Edward 
 Bulwer-Lytton. (See also under VIII. and X.). 
 
 Historical Romances of Harrison Ainsworth. Vic- 
 torian Edition. Philadelphia: George Barrie & 
 Son. 20 vols. Especially, Jack Sheppard 
 [1839] (Vol. 2) ; Windsor Castle [1843] (Vol. 
 10) ; and *The Tower of London [1840] (Vols. 
 14-15). See VIII. above. 
 
 *Henry Esmond [1852]. *The Virginians [1858- 
 9]. Denis Duval (unfinished) [1867]. Vols. 3, 
 10, and 13 of Biographical Edition (see X.). 
 
 *The Cloister and the Hearth. By Charles Reade. 
 [1861]. Vols. 1-2 of Works. (See X.). 
 
 *Romola. By George Eliot [1863]. In Works 
 (see X.). See Chapter IX of Leslie Stephen's
 
 * 
 
 308 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 George Eliot. (New York: The Maemillan Co. 
 1902. English Men of Letters.) 
 *Westward Ho! [1855]. *Hypatia [1853]. 
 *Herexoard the Wake [1866]. By Charles 
 Kingsley. Vols. 1-2, 9-10, and 11-12 of The 
 Life and Works of Charles Kingsley. (New 
 York: The Maemillan Co. 1901-03. 19 vols.) 
 See X. below. 
 
 Essays in Vol. 3 of Leslie Stephen's Hours 
 in a Library, and Studies in Early Victorian 
 Literature, by Frederic Harrison. (London: 
 Edward Arnold. 1906.) 
 Kidnapped [1886] and David Balfour [sequel, 
 1892]. The Black Arrow [1888]. St. Ives 
 [1892]. The Weir of Hermiston [1896]. Vols. 
 3, 8, 4, 11, and 10, respectively, of The Works of 
 Robert Louis Stevenson, Biographical Edition. 
 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1906. 25 
 vols.) 
 
 Essay on Stevenson in Vol. 4 of Leslie Ste- 
 phen's Studies of a Biographer. See also 
 Stevenson's Gossip on Romance, in Memories 
 and Portraits. 
 
 Stevenson's attempt to re-create the historical 
 romance of Scott marks the end of a tradition. 
 In the hands of his successors, who may be 
 represented by Anthony Hope Hawkins (The 
 Prisoner of Zenda), Sir Gilbert Parker (Seats 
 of the Mighty), Justin Huntly McCarthy, Stan- 
 ley Weyman, Francis Marion Crawford, Mau- 
 rice Hewlett, Mary Johnston, and Winston 
 Churchill, the historical romance tends to be- 
 come sentimental melodrama. More nearly in
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 309 
 
 the vein of Scott is The White Company, b}' A. 
 Conan Doyle [1891]. (London: Smith, Elder. 
 1891.) 
 
 The most successful part of Stevenson's in- 
 fluence appears to have been exerted through 
 ^Treasure Island (Vol. 1) rather than through 
 the primarily historical romances. The most 
 Stevensonian of writers after Stevenson is Sir 
 Arthur T. Quiller-Coueh (note his skilfully 
 written concluding- chapters of Stevenson's un- 
 finished St. Ives). See Early Novels and Stor- 
 ies by " Q." New York: Charles Seribner's 
 Sons. Uniform Edition, 9 vols. 
 
 Marius the Epicurean. By Walter Horatio Pater. 
 London : Macmillan & Co. 1892. 2 vols. 
 
 The Valley of Decision. By Edith Wharton. 
 New York: Charles ScribnePs Sons. 1902. 
 2 vols. (Fifth and subsequent impressions in 
 one vol.) 
 
 Veramlda. By George Gissing. London : Con- 
 stable & Co., 1903. (Posthumous; unfinished.) 
 For a very thorough and painstaking bibliog- 
 raphy of the whole cycle of historical fiction to 
 the present time, see A Guide to Historical 
 Fiction, by Ernest A. Baker. (New York: The 
 Macmillan Co. 1914.) 
 
 X. Victorian realism and pseudo-realism. 
 A. The novelists of manners, etc. 
 Charles Dickens. 
 
 Works, Biographical Edition, with introduc- 
 tions by Arthur Waugh. (London: Chapman
 
 310 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 & Hall. 20 vols.) Works, illustrated edition. 
 (New York: The Maemillan Co. 20 vols.) 
 
 *The Pickwick Papers [1837]. * Nicholas 
 Nickleby [1839]. *Martin Chuzzlewit [1844]. 
 *Dombey and Son [1848]. * David Copperfield 
 [1850]. * Bleak House [1853]. *Hard Times 
 [1854]. * Little Dorrit [1857]. * Great Ex- 
 pectations [1859]. * Our Mutual Friend [18G5]. 
 *The Mystery of Edwin Brood [posthumous, 
 1870]. 
 
 Note that *A Tale of Two Cities [1859] and 
 *Barnaby Pudge [1840-1] are classifiable un- 
 der the historical novel (IX.). 
 
 Charles Dickens; a critical study. By G. K. 
 Chesterton. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 
 190G. Charles Dickens; a critical study. By 
 George Gissing. London: Blackie. Essays in 
 Corrected Impressions, by George Saintsbury 
 (London: W. Heinemann. 1895), Frederic 
 Harrison's Studies in Early Victorian Litera- 
 ture, and the Fifth Series of More's Shelburne 
 Essays. 
 The Brontes. 
 
 *Jane Eyre [1847]. *The Professor [1857]. 
 * Shirley [1849]. •ViUette [1853]. By Char- 
 lotte Bronte. *The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 
 [1848] By Anne Bronte. *Wuthering Heights 
 [1847]. By Emily Bronte (see also VIII, 
 above). In The Life and Works of the Sis- 
 ters Bronte. New York : Harper & Bros. 
 1899-1900. 7 vols. This edition includes Mrs. 
 Gaskell's *Life of Charlotte Bronte, which see.
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 311 
 
 An edition of Wuthering Heights published 
 by Doubleday, Page & Co. (New York. 1907) 
 contains a bibliography of the Brontes. 
 
 Essays in George Saintsbury's Corrected Im- 
 pressions, Frederic Harrison's Studies in Early 
 Victorian Literature, and Vol. 3 of Leslie Ste- 
 phen's Hours in a Library. 
 William Makepeace Thackeray. 
 
 Works, Biographical Edition. New York: 
 Harper & Bros. 1898-1903. 13 vols. See IX. 
 above; and, for Barry Lyndon, VI. * Vanity 
 Fair [1847-8]. *Pendennis [1849-50]. *The 
 Newcomes [1854-5]. 
 
 Vol. 13 contains the Life by Leslie Stephen, 
 and a bibliography. See also the Life by An- 
 thony Trollope. (New York: 1879. English 
 Men of Letters.) 
 
 Essays in Saintsbury's Corrected Impres- 
 sions, Harrison's Studies in Early Victorian 
 Literature, and Victorian Prose Masters, by W. 
 C. Brown ell. (New York: Charles Scribner's 
 Sons. 1915.) 
 Edward Bulwei'-Lytton. 
 
 The Caxtons [1849]. "My Novel," by Pisis- 
 tratus Caxton; or, Varieties in English Life 
 [1853]. What Will He Do With It? [1858]. 
 Kenelm Chillingly [1873]. In Bulwer's Works. 
 London: George Routledge & Sons. 
 
 See also VIII. and IX. above. 
 Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield. 
 
 Vivian Grey [1826]. Contarini Fleming 
 [1832]. Lothair [1870]. Endymion [1880].
 
 312 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 In The Novels and Tales of Benjamin Disraeli. 
 London. 1900. 11 vols. 
 
 See also B. below. 
 
 Essays in Harrison's Studies in Early Victo- 
 rian Literature and Vol. 2 of Stephen's Hours 
 in a Library. 
 Mrs. Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell. 
 
 Works, with introductions by A. W. Ward. 
 London : Smith, Elder & Co. ; New York : 
 Charles Scribner's Sons. 1906-11. 8 vols. 
 *Cranford [1853]; Ruth [1853]; *Sijlvia's 
 Lovers [1863]. 
 
 See also B. below. 
 
 Essay in the Fifth Series of More's Shelburne 
 Essays. 
 Charles Reade. 
 
 Works. Boston: Dana Estes. 18 vols. 
 Hard Cash [1863]. Griffith Gaunt [1866]. A 
 Terrible Temptation [1871]. Foul Play [1869]. 
 
 Perhaps more common is the "Copyright 
 Edition," Collection of British Authors (Leip- 
 zig: Tauchnitz). 
 
 See, for The Cloister and the Hearth, IX. 
 above. 
 George Eliot (Marian Evans Cross). 
 
 Works, Standard Edition, 21 vols. New 
 York: Charles Scribner's Sons. *Adam Bede 
 [1859]. *The Mill on the Floss [I860]; Mid- 
 dlemarch [1871-2]. * Silas Marner [1861]. 
 Daniel Deronda [1876]. For Romola, see IX. 
 above; for Felix Holt the Radical, B. below. 
 
 George Eliot. By Leslie Stephen. New
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 313 
 
 York: The Macmillan Co. 1902. (English 
 Men of Letters.) Essays in Saintsbury's Cor- 
 rected Impressions ; Harrison's Studies in Early 
 Victorian Literature ; Vol. 3 of Stephen's 
 Hours in a Library; and Brownell's Victorian 
 Prose Masters. 
 Anthony Trollope. 
 
 *The Barchester Novels, in order: *The War- 
 den [1855] ; * Barchester Towers [1857] ; *Doc- 
 tor Thome [1858] ; *Framley Parsonage [1861] ; 
 *The Small House at Allington [1864]; *The 
 Last Chronicle of Barset [1867]. 
 
 Other works, Parliamentary novels, etc. : 
 Can You Forgive Her? [1864-5] ; Phineas Finn, 
 the Irish Member [1866] ; Phineas Redux 
 [1874] ; The Eustace Diamonds [1872] ; The 
 Way We Live Now [1875]. 
 
 These are now most commonly seen in the 
 "Copyright Edition," Collection of British Au- 
 thors (Leipzig: Tauchnitz). Also, several of 
 the Parliamentary and Manor House novels are 
 published by Dodd, Mead and Co., New York, 
 1910-. 
 
 See also Trollope's Autobiography (New 
 York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1910.) Essays in 
 Saintsbury's Corrected Impressions and Harri- 
 son's Studies in Early Victorian Literature. 
 Margaret Oliphant Oliphant. 
 
 Passages in the Life of Mistress Margaret Mart- 
 land [1849]. Lilliesleaf [sequel, 1856]. Both 
 published by Ward and Locke, London. *Salem 
 Chapel [18*63]. The Rector [1863]; The Doc-
 
 314 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 tor's Family [1863] ; and The Perpetual Curate 
 [1864]. Published in 1 vol., Blackwood, Lon- 
 don. Miss Mar joribanks [1866]. London: 
 Blackwood. Phoebe, Junior: the Last Chronicle 
 of Carlingford [1876]. London: Hurst and 
 Blackett. 
 
 Published, under the collective title "Chron- 
 icles of Carlingford," in the "Copyright Edi- 
 tion," Collection of British Authors (Leipzig: 
 Tauchnitz). 
 George Meredith. 
 
 Works of George Meredith, Memorial Edi- 
 tion. New York: Charles Scribneris Sons. 
 1909-12. 29 vols. The Ordeal of Richard 
 Fever el [1859], 2; Sandra Belloni [1864] 
 (originally, Emilia in England), 3-4; Rhoda 
 Fleming [1865], 5; Evan Harrington [1861], 6; 
 Vittoria [1866] (sequel to Sandra Belloni), 7- 
 8; The Adventures of Harry Richmond [1871], 
 9-10; Beauchamp's Career [1876], 11-12; The 
 Egoist [1879], 13-14; The Tragic Comedians 
 [1880], 15; Diana of the Crossways [1885], 16; 
 One of Our Conquerors [1891], 17; Lord Or- 
 mont and His Aminta [1894], 18; The Amazing 
 Marriage [1895], 19; The House on the Beach 
 [1895], 22. 
 
 George Meredith; his life and art. By J. A. 
 Hammerton. New and revised edition. Edin- 
 burgh, 1911. Essays in the Second Series of 
 More's Shelburne Essays and Brownell's Vic- 
 torian Prose Masters. See also Meredith's Es- 
 say on the Idea of Comedy and of the Uses of 
 the Comic Spirit, Vol. 23.
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 315 
 
 William Black. 
 
 The Strange Adventures of a Phaeton [1872 j. 
 London : Maemillan & Co. 1878. Madcap Vio- 
 let [1877]. London: Maemillan & Co. 1880. 
 White Wings; a yachting romance [1880]. Lon- 
 don: Maemillan & Co. 1882. Shandon Bells 
 [1883]. New York: A. L. Burt (The Manhat- 
 tan Library). 
 Henry James. 
 
 Novels and Tales, New York Edition. New 
 York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1907-09. 
 24 vols. Roderick Hudson [1875], 1; The 
 American [1877], 2; Portrait of a Lady [1881], 
 3-4; The Tragic Muse [1891], 7-8; The Awk- 
 ward Age [1899], 9; What M aisie Knew [1897], 
 11; The Ambassadors [1903], 21-22; The Wings 
 of the Dove [1902], 19-20; The Golden Bowl 
 [1905], 23-24. 
 
 Uncollected: The Sacred Fount. (New 
 York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1901.) The 
 Sense of the Past and The Ivory Tower (both 
 posthumous. New York: Charles Scribner's 
 Sons. 1917). 
 
 See also, in the New York Edition, the fol- 
 lowing 1 modern novelle, illustrating the expan- 
 sion of the short-story into a modification of the 
 novel: Daisy Miller [1878], 18; A London 
 Life [1888], 10; The Spoils of Poynton [1897], 
 10; The Aspern Papers [1888], 12; The Turn 
 of the Screw [1898] (see also under VIII.), 12; 
 The Author of Beltraffio [1885], 16; and The 
 Altar of the Dead [1895], 17.
 
 316 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Henry James. By Ford Madox Hueffer. 
 London: Martin Seeker. 1913. Henry James. 
 By Rebecca West. New York : Henry Holt and 
 Company. 1916 (Writers of the Day). Essay 
 in Brownell's American Prose Masters. 
 
 See, above all, the author's prefaces to the 
 volumes of the New York Edition. 
 William Dean Howells. 
 
 Their Wedding Journey [1871]. Boston: 
 Houghton Mifflin Co. Their Silver Wedding 
 Journey [1899, sequel]. New York: Harper 
 Bros. A Foregone Conclusion [1875]. Bos- 
 ton: Houghton Mifflin Co. The Lady of the 
 "Aroostook" [1878]. Boston: Houghton Mif- 
 flin Co. The Undiscovered Country [1880]. 
 Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. Doctor Breen's 
 Practice [1881]. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 
 A Modern Instance [1883]. Boston: Hough- 
 ton Mifflin Co. The Rise of Silas Lapham 
 [1885]. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. The 
 Minister's Charge; or, the Apprenticeship of 
 Lemuel Barker [1887]. Boston: Houghton 
 Mifflin Co. Annie Kilburn [1888]. New York: 
 Harper Bros. The Quality of Mercy [1892]. 
 New York: Harper Bros. A Traveller from 
 Altruria [1894]. New York: Harper Bros. 
 The Story of a Play [1898]. New York: Har- 
 per Bros. The Kentons [1902]. New York: 
 Harper Bros. The Son of Royal Langbrith 
 [1904]. New York: Harper Bros. Fennel and 
 Rue [1908]. New York: Harper Bros. The
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 317 
 
 Leather-wood God [1916]. New York: The 
 Century Co. 
 
 William Dean Howells. By Alexander Har- 
 vey. New York: B. W. Huebsck. 1917. See 
 also My Literary Passions (by W. D. Howells. 
 New York: Harper & Bros. 1895) and Litera- 
 ture and Life (by the same. New York: Har- 
 per & Bros. 1902). 
 An interesting twentieth-century reversion to the 
 form and spirit of the Early Victorian novel 
 is the fiction of William De Morgan : Joseph 
 Vance; Alice-For-Short; It Never Can Happen 
 Again; Somehow Good; A Likely Story; When 
 Ghost Meets Ghost. New York: Henry Holt 
 and Company. 1906-14. Note that De Mor- 
 gan's choice of a technique was quite deliberate: 
 his fifth novel, An Affair of Dishonor (New 
 York: Holt. 1911), is a strictly modern piece 
 of naturalism. 
 B. Novelists of Protests; social satirists. 
 
 Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield. 
 
 *Coningsby; or, The New Generation [1844]. 
 Sybil; or, The Two Nations [1845]. Tancred; 
 or, The New Crusade [1844]. Vols. 7-9 of 
 Novels and Tales. See A. above. 
 Mrs. Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell. 
 
 *Mary Barton [1848]. *North and South 
 [1855]. Vols. 1 and 4 of Works. See A. 
 above. 
 Charles Kingsley. 
 
 * Alton Locke the Tailor [1850]. *Teast
 
 318 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 [1851]. Vols. 7-8 and 15 of Life and Works. 
 See IX. above. 
 Sir Walter Besant. 
 
 Children of Gibeon [1886]. All Sorts and 
 Conditions of Men [1882]. New York: Harper 
 & Bros. 1902. 
 George Gissing. 
 
 Demos; a story of English Socialism [1886]. 
 London: Smith, Elder & Co. Thyrza [1887]. 
 London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1907. In the 
 Year of Jubilee [1894]. New York: Appleton. 
 The New Grub Street [1891]. London: Smith, 
 Elder. Will Warburton. London : A. Con- 
 stable & Co. 1905. The Whirlpool [1897]. 
 New York: Stokes. The Private Papers of 
 Henry Ryecroft [1903]. New York: E. P. 
 Dutton & Co. 1903 (also No. 46 of Boni & 
 Liveright's Modern Library, New York, with 
 introduction by Paul Elmer More). The Odd 
 Women [1893]. New York: Macmillan. 
 
 George Gissing. By Frank Swinnerton. 
 London: Martin Seeker. The Private Life of 
 Henry Maitland; a record dictated by J. H. 
 Revised and edited by Morley Roberts. New 
 York: George H. Doran Co. 1912. (A thinly 
 disguised biography of Gissing, with a liberal 
 admixture of criticism.) 
 
 Essay in the Fifth Series of More's Shelburne 
 Essays. 
 
 See also IX. above. 
 Note that Reade's It Is Never Too Late to Mend 
 and Put Yourself in His Place, Dickens's Hard
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 319 
 
 Times, and George Eliot's *Felix Holt the Radi- 
 cal (see A. above) turn partly on economic con- 
 ditions and struggles of class. Reade's Hard 
 Cash and Foul Play, and many of Dickens's 
 novels, as Nicholas Nickleby and Oliver Twist, 
 contain strong elements of protest against par- 
 ticular isolated abuses. 
 
 George Bernard Shaw. 
 
 Love Among the Artists [1889]. The Irra- 
 tional Knot [1905]. An Unsocial Socialist 
 [1887]. Cashell Byron's Profession [1886], 
 Written 1880-. New York: Brentano's. 1909- 
 10. 
 
 Samuel Butler. 
 
 The Way of All Flesh. Written 1872-84. 
 Published 1903 (posthumous). New York: E. 
 P. Dutton & Co. 1913. Also No. 13 of Boni 
 & Liveright's Modern Library, New York. See 
 also VI. above. 
 A great deal of the most characteristic social real- 
 ism of 1903-18 shows markedly the influence of 
 Butler — notably, the work of Gilbert Cannan, 
 J. D. Beresford, Compton Mackenzie, W. L. 
 George, Elinor Mordaunt, W. B. Maxwell, and 
 St. John G. Ervine. 
 C. Novelists of Local Colour, etc. 
 
 James Fenimore Cooper (the American Indian, 
 etc.). 
 
 Collected Writings, Iroquois Edition New 
 York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1906. The 
 Leatherstocking Tales, Vols. 5, 11, 18, 20, 21. 
 (*The Deerslayer [1841]; *The Last of the
 
 320 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Mohicans [1826] ; *The Pathfinder [1840] ; 
 *The Pioneers [1823]; *The Prairie [1826].) 
 The Bravo, 2 ; The Pilot, 19 ; The Spy, 27. 
 
 Cooper shows the influence of Scott, who in 
 turn shows that of Maria Edgeworth. See VII. 
 above. 
 
 Essay on Cooper in Brownell's American 
 Prose Masters. See also Howells's My Literary 
 Passions. 
 
 Samuel Lover (Ireland and the Irish). 
 
 * Handy Andy [1842-3]. New York: The 
 Athenaeum Society. 2 vols. (Copyright, 1901, 
 Boston: Little, Brown & Co.) 
 
 Suggestions for reading and study of Irish 
 local colour may be found in Irish Life in Irish 
 Fiction, by Horatio Sheafe Krans (New York: 
 The Macmillan Co. 1903). 
 
 Charles Lever (Irish life; military life). 
 
 Military Novels (Charles O'Malley [1841], 
 etc.). New York Athemeum Society. 7 vols. 
 Novels of Adventure (*Harry Lorrequer [1839- 
 40], etc.). New York: Athemeum Society. 5 
 vols. 
 
 Frederick Marryatt (Sailors and the sea; the 
 Royal Navy). 
 
 *Masterman Ready [1841]. * Jacob Faithful 
 [1834]. The Phantom Ship [1839]. *The 
 King's Own [1830]. *Mr. Midshipman Easy 
 [1836]. *Peter Simple [1834]. In The Nov- 
 els of Capt. Marryatt. New York: E. P. Dut- 
 ton & Co. 
 
 Note that the beginning of this tradition in
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 321 
 
 the novel is in Smollett's Boderick Random and 
 Peregrine Pickle (see VII. above). 
 George Borrow (Gipsies; Vagabondia; Wales). 
 
 *Lavengro [1851]. *The Romany Rye 
 [1857]. *The Bible in Spain [1843]. *Wild 
 Wales. London : John Murray. 1896-. 
 
 George Borrow and His Circle. By Clement 
 King Shorter. Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co. 
 1913. In the Footsteps of Borrow and Fitz- 
 gerald. By Morley Adams. London : Jarrold 
 & Sons. 1915. 
 
 Essays in Birrell's Res Judicata and Saint- 
 bury' s Essays in English Literature. 
 Note, in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and in 
 the romances of Hawthorne (see VIII. and A. 
 above), the union of local colour with the ele- 
 ment of mystery or horror. 
 George Macdonald (Scotland). 
 
 *Sir Gibbie [1879]. New York: E. P. Dut- 
 ton & Co. (No. 678 of Everyman's Library.) 
 Mrs. Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (English pro- 
 vincial life). 
 
 Ruth; *Phyllis; *Cranford; etc. See A. 
 above. 
 Note that George Eliot's early "novels of memory" 
 (Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Mar- 
 ner) are also strongly provincial in their real- 
 ism. Trollope's Barchester Novels and Mrs. 
 Oliphant's Chronicles of Carlingford are al- 
 most equally regional. See A. above. Note 
 also, among reprints of the early (Irish) novels 
 of Trollope, The Macdermots of Ballycloran. 
 London : Ward, Locke & Co.
 
 322 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Richard Doddridge Blackmore (Devonshire). 
 
 *Loma Boone; a romance of Exmoor. 
 *Springhaven. New York : E. P. Dutton & Co. 
 (Nos. 304 and 350 of Everyman's Library.) 
 
 Thomas Hardy ("Wessex"). 
 
 Under the Greenwood Tree [1872]. Far 
 From the Madding Crowd [1874]. The Mayor 
 of Casterbridge [1886]. A Pair of Blue Eyes 
 [1872-3]. The Woodlanders [1887]. The Re- 
 turn of the Native [1878]. The Well-Beloved 
 [1897]. Tess of the D'Urbevilles [1891]. Jude 
 the Obscure [1895]. New York: Harper & 
 Bros. 
 
 Thomas Hardy. By Harold Child. New 
 York: Henry Holt and Co. 1916. (Writers 
 of the Day.) A Bibliography of the Works of 
 Thomas Hardy, 1865-1915. By A. P. Webb. 
 London : F. Hollings. 1916. The Wessex of Ro- 
 mance. By Wilkinson Sherren. New and re- 
 vised edition. London : Chapman & Hall. 
 1908. (Bibliography, pp. 286-95.) George 
 Eliot and Thomas Hardy. By Lina Wright 
 Berle. New York: Mitchell Kennerley. 1917. 
 
 "Mark Twain" (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) 
 (The Middle West). 
 
 Adventures of Tom Sawyer [1876]. Adven- 
 tures of Huckleberry Finn [1885]. Pudd'n- 
 head Wilson [1894]. The Writings of Mark 
 Twain, Author's National Edition. New York: 
 Harper & Bros. 1915. 
 
 Mark Twain. By Archibald Henderson. 
 London: Duckworth & Co. 1911. My Mark
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 323 
 
 Twain; reminiscences and criticisms. By W. 
 D. Howells. New York : Harper & Bros. 1910. 
 
 Note also the specialized treatments of par- 
 ticular sections of North America by innumer- 
 able novelists of various degrees of distinction, 
 including Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Wash- 
 ington Cable, Mary Noailles Murfee, Hamlin 
 Garland, Alice Brown, Gertrude Atherton, Mary 
 Austin, Norman Duncan, Owen Wister, Jack 
 London, Rex Beach, Stewart Edward White, 
 James Lane Allen, William Allen White, John 
 Fox, jr., and Gilbert Parker. A majority of 
 the novels of William Dean Howells show him 
 to be of this school of localists, as his Criticism 
 and Fiction shows him to be its chief sponsor. 
 J. M. Barrie (Scottish Life and Charaeter). 
 
 The Little Minister [1891]. Sentimental 
 Tommy [1896]. Tommy and Grizel [1900]. 
 In Works, Author's Edition. New York : 
 Charles Scribner's Sons. 1901-03. 11 vols. 
 Rudyard Kipling (India). 
 
 Kim [1901]. New York: Doubleday, Page 
 & Co. 
 
 Rudyard Kipling. By John Palmer. New 
 York: Henry Holt and Company. 1915. 
 (Writers of the Day.) 
 Joseph Conrad (Malayan Archipelago). 
 
 Almayer's Folly [1895]. An Outcast of the 
 Islands [sequel, 1896]. Lord Jim [1900]. 
 New York: Doubleday, Page & Co. (Deep 
 Sea Edition.) 
 
 See, for an accurate and nearly complete short
 
 324 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 bibliography of Conrad's principal writings as 
 published in England and America, pp. 121-24 
 of Joseph Conrad, by Hugh Walpole (New 
 York: Henry Holt and Company, 1916. 
 Writers of the Day). 
 See XI. below. 
 Of the great number of other specialized re- 
 gional novelists, the following may be men- 
 tioned: Sabine Baring-Gould (Devon) ; "Kath- 
 arine Tynan" (Mrs. Katharine Tynan Hinkson) 
 and Jane Barlow (Ireland) ; "G. A. Birming- 
 ham" (Ireland) ; William Clark Russell and 
 William Wymark Jacobs (sailors and the sea) ; 
 Israel Zangwill (the Ghetto) ; Thomas Alexan- 
 der Browne (Australia); Sir Hugh Clifford 
 (Malay Archipelago) ; and Archibald Marshall 
 (British provincial gentry). The most impor- 
 tant direct influence of Hardy's Wessex Novels 
 appears in the works of Eden Phillpotts (Chil- 
 dren of the Mist, Sons of the Morning, The 
 Harbor, The Thief of Virtue, Widecombe Fair, 
 etc.) and in those of John Trevena (see espe- 
 cially his moorland trilogy, Furze, Heather, and 
 Granite; with epilogue, Gorse. New York: 
 Moffat, Yard & Co. 1912-). See also, among 
 very recent novels, Sussex Gorse, by Sheila 
 Kaye-Smith. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 
 1916). 
 
 XI. A supplementary selection of striking developments 
 in naturalism, impressionism, sestheticism, the 
 scientific spirit, Continental influence, etc., 
 1880-1918.
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 325 
 
 William Morris. 
 
 The Roots of the Mountains [1890]. Lon- 
 don : Longman. The Story of the Glittering 
 Plain [1890]. London: Longman. The Wood 
 Beyond the World [1895]. London: Longman. 
 The Well at the World's End [1896]. London: 
 Longman. The Water of the Wondrous Isles 
 [1897]. London: Longman. The Sundering 
 Flood [1898]. London: Longman. 
 
 (Essays in Gothic and mediaeval romance; 
 prose poems characterized by sensuous beauty 
 of style and substance.) 
 
 "Fiona Macleod" (William Sharp). 
 
 Pharais: a Romance of the Isles [1894]. 
 The Mountain Lovers [1895]. Green Fire 
 [1890]. Silence Farm [1899; published under 
 his own name]. In Collected Works. London: 
 Heinemann. 7 vols. 1911. 
 
 (Fantasies akin to those of Morris, but char- 
 acterized also by a unique blend of Celtic mys- 
 ticism and quite modern realism.) 
 
 George Moore. 
 
 A Modern Lover [1883]. London: Walter 
 Scott. A Mummer's Wife [1884]. New York: 
 Brentano's. A Drama in Muslin [1888]. Lon- 
 don: Vizetelly. Out of print. Esther Waters 
 [1894]. London: Walter Scott. Evelyn 
 Innes [1898]. New York: Appleton. Sister 
 Teresa [1901]. New York: Appleton. 
 
 (A development of naturalistic realism culmi- 
 nating in Esther Waters, and tending there- 
 after to become aesthetic and debilitated.)
 
 326 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 An interesting essay on Moore is that in G. K. 
 Chesterton's Heretics (New York: Dodd, Mead 
 & Co. 1905). See also The JEstheticism of 
 George Moore in Stuart P. Sherman's Main 
 Tendencies in Contemporary Literature (New 
 York: Henry Holt and Co. 1917). 
 Oscar Wilde. 
 
 The Picture of Dorian Gray [1891]. Lon- 
 don: Ward & Locke. Also in Works, limited 
 edition, Methuen, 1907-9. 
 
 (A brilliant expression of Wilde's own tragic 
 perversity.) 
 Theodore Watts-Dunton. 
 
 Aylwin [189S; written about 1885]. New 
 York : Dodd, Mead & Co. 
 
 (The expression of an aesthete's conception of 
 immortality, and a notable embodiment of the 
 Late Victorian aesthetic movement.) 
 Mrs. J. Humphry Ward. 
 
 Robert Elsmere [1888]. New York: Mae- 
 millan. 
 
 (A study of the decay of orthodoxy within 
 the Church.) 
 Robert Louis Stevenson. 
 
 The Merry Men [1887]. The Strange Case 
 of Dr. Jehyll and Mr. Hyde [1886]. In 1 vol., 
 New York: Scribner. 
 
 (Two remarkable examples of expansion of 
 the short-story into the modern novella.) 
 Stephen Crane. 
 
 The Bed Badge of Courage [1895]. New
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 327 
 
 York: Appleton. New edition, with Preface by 
 Arthur Guy Empey, 1917. 
 
 (A great and perfect piece of realistic im- 
 pressionism, dealing with one isolated phase of 
 the American Civil War.) 
 William Hurrell Mallock. 
 
 The New Republic: Culture, Faith, and Phi- 
 losophy in an English Country House [1877]. 
 New York: Scribner. The New Paul and Vir- 
 ginia: Positivism on an Island [1878]. New 
 York: Scribner. The Individualist [1899]. 
 London : Chapman & Hall. 
 
 (Shrewd and diverting satires on contempo- 
 rary movements in science, politics, philosophy, 
 and social life.) 
 Ambrose Bierce. 
 
 The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter 
 [1911; written about 1890]. New York: Neale 
 Publishing Co. (Vol. 6 of Collected Works.) 
 
 (A romantic fantasia quite unspoiled by its 
 satiric purpose.) 
 "Mark Twain" (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). 
 
 The Mysterious Stranger. New York: Har- 
 per & Bros. 1916 [posthumous]. 
 
 (Mark Twain's one expression in fiction of the 
 misanthropic pessimism which appears to have 
 been his life-long philosophy.) 
 Frank Norris. 
 
 McTeague: a Story of San Francisco [1899]. 
 New York: Doubleday, Page & Co. The Octo- 
 pus: a Story of California [1901]. New York: 
 Doubleday, Page & Co.
 
 328 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 (Pictures of economic conditions and histories 
 of class struggles; among the first American 
 novels to show the transition to modern natural- 
 ism from the earlier sentimentalism.) 
 Olive Schreiner. 
 
 The Story of an African Farm [1883]. Bos- 
 ton: Little, Brown. Trooper Peter Halket of 
 Mashonaland [1897]. Boston: Little, Brown. 
 
 (Powerful economic and soeiologic tracts in 
 the form of fiction.) 
 W. H. Hudson. 
 
 The Purple Land [1885]. New York: E. P. 
 Dutton & Co. Green Mansions [1904]. New 
 York : Alfred A. Knopf. 1916. A Crystal Age 
 [1887]. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. 
 
 (Stories that combine richness of imagina- 
 tion with a delicate precision of style hardly 
 seen before in English. A Crystal Age is a 
 modern variation of the Utopian romance; The 
 Purple Land and Green Mansions are, in part, 
 sumptuous landscapes of South America.) 
 Leonard Merrick. 
 
 Cynthia [1896], London: Chatto & Windus. 
 The Worldlings [1900]. New York: Double- 
 day, Page & Co. Conrad in Quest of his Youth 
 [1903]. New York: Mitchell Kennerley. The 
 House of Lynch [1907]. New York: McClure. 
 The Position of Peggy Harper [1911]. New 
 York: Mitchell Kennerley. 
 
 (An artist's stories of the artistic tempera- 
 ment in various manifestations ; delicately ironic 
 realism, the method slight, but the sense prob- 
 ing.)
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 329 
 
 William Somerset Maugham. 
 
 Liza of Lambeth [1807]. London: Fisher 
 Unwin. The Hero [1901]. London: Hutchin- 
 son. The Merry-Go-R<ound [1904]. London: 
 Heinemann. 
 
 (As uncompromising an exhibition of 
 "murky" realism as can be found in English. 
 Liza of Lambeth has a noticeable resemblance 
 to Moore's Esther Waters.) 
 Jack London. 
 
 The Call of the Wild [1903]. New York: 
 Macmillan. The Sea-Wolf [1904]. New York: 
 Macmillan. 
 
 (Perhaps the best American examples of mod- 
 ern impressionistic realism in treatment of the 
 primitive straggle for survival.) 
 Joseph Conrad. 
 
 The Nigger of the "Narcissus" [1897]. New 
 York: Dodd, Mead & Co. (as "Children of the 
 Sea," without the original preface) . New York : 
 Doubleday, Page & Co. (under original title, 
 with the preface restored). 1914. Heart of 
 Darkness [1902]. New York: Doubleday, Page 
 & Co (in Youth). Typhoon [1903]. New 
 York: Doubleday, Page & Co. 
 
 ( Supreme examples of modern unity in work- 
 manship, secured by impressionistic treatment 
 in works of length approaching that of the 
 novel.) 
 
 Nostromo: a Tale of the Seaboard [1904]. 
 New York: Harper & Bros. (A tremendous 
 pageant of material interests, epitomizing mod-
 
 330 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 ern life in a romantic story of heroic dimen- 
 sions, set in a South American republic.) 
 
 Under Western Eyes [1911]. New York: 
 Harper & Bros. The Secret Agent [1907]. 
 New York: Harper & Bros. (Two novels of 
 the revolutionary and anarchistic spirit, the 
 first-named written in the spirit of Dostoevsky.) 
 
 All of Conrad's novels and tales are pub- 
 lished in a uniform edition by Doubleday, Page 
 & Co. (New York.) 
 
 See Joseph Conrad, by Hugh Walpole (New 
 York: Henry Holt and Co. Writers of the 
 Day). There is a valuable essay on Conrad in 
 A Book of Prefaces, by H. L. Mencken (New 
 York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1917). Note also 
 A Personal Record, by Joseph Conrad (New 
 York: Harper & Bros. 1912), and the Preface 
 to The Nigger of the "Narcissus." See C. 
 under X. above. 
 
 Herbert George Wells. 
 
 Tono-Bungay [1909]. New York: Duffield & 
 Co. The New Machiavelli [1910]. New York: 
 Duffield & Co. 
 
 (Expressions, the one in terms of commerce 
 and science, the other in terms of political life, 
 of a typically modern conflict between the will 
 of the individual and the will of society.) 
 
 See H. G. Wells, by J. D. Beresford (New 
 York: Henry Holt and Co. 1915. Writers of 
 the Day). 
 
 See also VI. above.
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 331 
 
 Hilaire Belloc. 
 
 Mr. Clutterbuck's Election [1908]. London: 
 Nash. A Change in the Cabinet [1909]. Lon- 
 don: Methuen. Pongo and the Bull [1910]. 
 London : Constable. 
 
 (Deft satires of political and social tend- 
 encies in contemporary life, bj' an observer 
 who distrusts both the democratic tendency as it 
 exists and the conservatism which opposes it.) 
 
 The Girondin [1911]. London: Nelson. 
 (The same attitude expressed in a powerful his- 
 torical novel.) 
 
 "Maarten Maartens." 
 
 God's Fool: a Koopstad Story [1892]. New 
 York: Appleton. 
 
 (An odd and striking study of abnormality, 
 with a sociologic and humanitarian bias.) 
 
 Edith Wharton. 
 
 Ethan Frome [1911]. New York: Charles 
 Scribner's Sons. Madame de Treymes [1907]. 
 New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 
 
 (Two noteworthy American employments of 
 the novella form as practised by Henry James; 
 cf. his Spoils of Poynton.) 
 
 The House of Mirth [1905]. New York: 
 Charles Scribner's Sons. 
 
 (A longer work witb the same unity of im- 
 pression.) 
 
 See, for The Valley of Decision, IX. above. 
 
 Edward Frederick Benson. 
 
 Dodo: a Detail of To-Day [1893]. New
 
 332 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 York: Appleton. Mammon & Go. [1899]. 
 New York: Appleton. 
 
 (Satiric descriptions of frothy smart society.) 
 
 Limitations [1896]. New York: Harper & 
 Bros. The Challoners [1904], London: Heine- 
 niann. 
 
 (More serious accounts of the creative or 
 poetic temper in its clash with the static ele- 
 ments of society.) 
 Enoch Arnold Bennett. 
 
 The Old Wives' Tale [1908]. New York: 
 Doran. New edition with Preface by author, 
 19.11. Clayhanger [1910]. New York: E. P. 
 Dutton & Co. 
 
 (Minute and exhaustive realism applied to 
 industrial life in the north of England, in a 
 successful effort to prove that nothing is com- 
 monplace. The first-named is the one great 
 piece of recent realism in English which suc- 
 cessfully combines the Early Victorian large- 
 ness with Gallic nicety of design and finish.) 
 
 See Arnold Bennett, by F. J. Harvey Darton. 
 New York : Henry Holt and Co. 1916. 
 Robert Hugh Benson. 
 
 The Sentimentalists [1906]. New York: 
 Benziger. The Necromancers [1909]. St. 
 Louis: Herder. A Winnowing [1910]. St. 
 Louis: Herder. 
 
 (Three of several novels in which the author 
 attempts to apply Roman Catholicism as a 
 solvent to a succession of intricate individual 
 problems of conduct and thought.)
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 333 
 
 John Galsworthy. 
 
 The Man of Property [1906]. New York: 
 Putnam. The Country House [1907]. New 
 York: Putnam. Fraternity [1909]. New 
 York: Putnam. The Patrician [1911]. New 
 York: Scribner. 
 
 ( Tragi-comedies of individual and class limi- 
 tations, written with an unique formal exquis- 
 iteness. Note especially the perfection of de- 
 sign in each chapter considered as a separate 
 unit.) 
 
 John Galsworthy. By Sheila Kaye-Smith. 
 New York: Henry Holt and Co. (Writers of 
 the Day.) 
 Ford Madox Hueffer. 
 
 An English Girl [1907]. London: Methuen. 
 Ladies Whose Bright Eyes [1911]. London: 
 Constable. 
 
 (Dexterous satires of modern materialism, by 
 an author to whom the restraint of art seems 
 the one possible guide to fine living.) 
 Max Beerbohm. 
 
 Zuleika Dobson; or, an Oxford Love Story 
 [1911]. New York: Lane. Also No. 50 of the 
 Modern Library, with introduction by Francis 
 Hackett (New York: Boni & Liveright). 
 Morley Roberts. 
 
 In Low Belief [1890]. New York: Appleton. 
 A Son of Empire [1899]. Philadelphia: J. B. 
 Lippincott Co. The Colossus [1899]. New 
 York: Harper & Bros. Immortal Youth 
 [1902]. London: Hutchinson. 

 
 334 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 (The first- and last-named are novels of the 
 artist; the others, novels of empire dealing with 
 elemental forces in human nature. The writer's 
 works are fairly well represented by these two 
 groups. ) 
 Theodore Dreiser. 
 
 Sister Carrie [1900]. New York: Double- 
 day, Page & Co. [Suppressed.] New edition: 
 Harper, 1912. Jennie Gerhardt [1911]. New 
 York: Harper & Bros. The Titan [1914]. 
 New York : John Lane Company. 
 
 (Embodiments of a naturalism akin to that of 
 Moore's Esther Waters. For two opposed esti- 
 mates, see Theodore Dreiser in A Book of Pref- 
 aces, by H. L. Mencken (New York: Alfred A. 
 Knopf, 1917) and The Naturalism of Theodore 
 Dreiser in Main Tendencies in Contemporary 
 Literature, by Stuart P. Sherman (New York: 
 Henry Holt and Co. 1917.) 
 Hugh Walpole. 
 
 The Dark Forest [1916]. New York: Doran. 
 
 (A sombre and profoundly imaginative treat- 
 ment of Russian character and temperament 
 interpreted through a Galician campaign of the 
 Great War.) 
 James Branch Cabell. 
 
 The Soul of Melicent [1913]. New York: 
 Stokes. 
 
 (A romance made of the authentic essence of 
 Aucassin and Nicolette, but replacing the medi- 
 aeval naivete with an extremely delicate con- 
 scious care, and illuminating realities of life 
 and love that do not change.)
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 335 
 
 The Cords of Vanity [1908]. Doubleday, 
 Page & Co. Out of print. The Rivet in Grand- 
 father's Neck [1915]. New York: McBride. 
 The Cream of the Jest [1917]. New York: 
 McBride. 
 
 (Quizzical but searching studies of the same 
 realities in their relation to modern environ- 
 ment). 
 Ethel Sidgwick. 
 
 The Accolade [1915]. Boston: Small, May- 
 nard% Hatchways [1916]. Boston: Small, 
 Maynard. 
 
 (Firm and delicate high comedy; the touch of 
 Jane Austen applied, with more than her depth 
 and sincerity, to the country aristocracy of con- 
 temporary England.) 
 Frank Swinnerton. 
 
 Nocturne [1918]. New York: Doran. 
 
 (Except for one minor flaw, this is a con- 
 summate example of the novella form of The 
 Spoils of Poynton, Ethan Frome, etc. In unity 
 and harmony, restriction of the number of 
 characters and scenes, and the disinterestedness 
 of its acceptance of life, it typifies the modern 
 crystallization of a new form of fiction, half- 
 way between the novel and the short-story, and 
 combining the formal merits of both.) 
 Joseph Hergesheimer. 
 
 The Three Black Pennys [1917]. Gold and 
 Iron [three stories; 1918]. Java Head [1919]. 
 New York : Alfred A. Knopf. 
 
 (Two novels and a volume of short stories
 
 336 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 among the few pieces of recent American or 
 English fiction which, in both thought and work- 
 manship, challenge judgment by French stand- 
 ards.)
 
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