An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times
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Thomas Hill Green >> An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times
E. TRAGEDY AND THE NOVEL
16. The tragedian, then, idealises, because he starts from within. He
reaches, as it were, the central fire, in the heat of which every
separate faculty, every animal want, every fortuitous incident is
melted down and lost. We never could observe in actual experience
passion such as Lear's, or meditation such as Hamlet's, fusing
everything else into itself. Facts at every step would interfere to
prevent such a possibility. But let us place ourselves, by the poet's
help, within the soul of Lear or Hamlet, and we shall be able to follow
the process by which the spiritual power, taking the form of passion in
the one, and of thought in the other, and working outwards, draws
everything into its own unity, according to the same activity of which,
however impeded by the "imperfections of matter," we are conscious in
ourselves. The incidents of the tragedy are wholly subordinate, issuing
either from this spiritual energy of the actors on the one hand, or, on
the other, from destiny, to whose throne the poet penetrates. They thus
present an aspect entirely different from that of events which we
approach from without. The novel, on the contrary, starts from the
outside. Its main texture is a web of incidents through which the
motions of the spirit must be discerned, if discerned at all. These
incidents must be probable, must be such as are consistent with the
observed sequences of the world. The view of man, therefore, which we
attain through them, can only be that which is attainable by observation
of outward actions and events; or, in other words, according to the
distinction which we have attempted to establish, it is the natural
view, not the ideal. Its character corresponds to its origin.
Observation shows us man not as self-determined, but as the creature of
circumstances, as a phenomenon among other phenomena. As such, too, he
is presented to us in the novel. We do not see him, as in tragedy,
standing in the strength of his own spirit, remaking the world by its
power, determined by it for good or evil, dependent on it for all that
may be attractive or repellent about him. The hero of a novel attracts
in part by his physiognomy, his manner, or even his dress; his character
is qualified by circumstances and society; his impulses vary according
to the impressions of outward things; he is the sport of fortune,
dependent for weal or woe on the acquisition of some external blessing
which the development of the plot may or may not bestow on him. As
circumstances make his life what it is, so the particular combination of
circumstances, called happiness, constitutes its end. Instead of losing
his merely personal and particular self, as in the catastrophe of a
tragedy, he satisfies it with its appropriate pleasure. "He that loveth
wife or children more than me, is not worthy of me," are the words of
the Author of the Christian life. "Marry, enjoy domestic bliss, and thou
hast attained the end of virtue"--such is the ordinary moral of the
ordinary novel; nay, the only consistent moral of the consistent novel.
As the novelist sows, so must he reap; as his plot is, such must its
consummation be. In the body of the work he must, from the nature of the
case, represent men as they appear in fact, and he cannot fitly round it
off by representing them as they are only in idea. He cannot step at
pleasure from one sphere of art to another; by attempting to do so he
destroys the harmony without which there is no art at all, and leaves us
with a sense of dissatisfaction and unreality. The reader, who through
the whole three volumes till close upon the end has been travelling in
an atmosphere of ordinary morality and every-day aspiration, knows not
how in the last chapter to breathe the air of a higher life.
F. THE EPIC AND THE NOVEL
17. It may be objected to this limitation of the capabilities of the
novel, that it must stand on the same footing with the epic poem, which
is no less made up of a texture of incident, and which, therefore,
according to the present argument, can only reach the springs of man's
actions from without. Such an objection has some truth with reference to
the Homeric poems. These, as we have seen, have the legendary narrative
for their primitive element, and in so far as they are merely a reflex
of Greek life in the Homeric age, their interest is that of a novel, not
properly of the epic. The true epic (of which the "Paradise Lost" would
seem to be a less mixed form than the Iliad or Odyssey), no less than
tragedy, seizes the idea of a self-determined spirit on the one hand,
and of destiny or divine law on the other. These are the primary springs
from which it makes action and incident issue, with a perfect
subordination which the laws of our lower nature and of social life must
prevent from being realised in the world of experience, and which the
novelist therefore, tied down to the world of experience, only offends
us by attempting to exhibit. The essential character of the novel is not
changed by its assumption of the form of a romance. In the romantic
world of the middle ages, the great Italian poets did indeed find their
materials. To their eyes it was a world in which hope and wonder might
roam at large: it furnished actions which, glorified by them, became
manifestations of the divine and heroic in man. But it is another world
as seen by the novelist, even by such a one as Walter Scott. The
romantic life which he depicts is simply the life which we see our own
neighbors live, with more picturesque situations, with more to excite
curiosity in the reader, and activity in the imaginary hero. We gain
more from him, it is true, than from those copies of the too familiar
faces around us which are the staple commodity in novels of the day. He
at least carries us into scenes of adventure, where we may forget the
"smooth tale" of our nineteenth-century life. But further he cannot go,
for he approaches men from without. He does not reach, by other methods
than observation, to any _a priori_ affection of the spirit, and to this
subordinate incident. Had he done so, he could not have uttered himself
in the language of common life. In the world of heroes or angels,
_i.e._, of men idealised, to which the epic poet raises us, he sustains
us by the power of verse. The exalted action and the poetic expression
are as essentially correlative in the epic, as are the natural incident
and the prosaic expression in the novel.
G. POETRY AND PROSE
18. The hostility of Wordsworth to the "poetic diction" of his
time rested on principles of which he scarcely seems himself to
have been conscious.[15] The poets of the last century had lost the
genuine sense of their high calling. Their productions for the most part
were, at best, practical philosophy in verse. They observed the outer
aspect of things, and to make their observations poetry they clothed
them in "poetic diction," which thus became offensive, because
artificial--because a superadded ornament, and not the natural
expression of exalted passion or the emotion which accompanies our
passage "behind the veil." Repugnance to this artificiality misled
Wordsworth into the celebrated assertion that "between the language of
prose and that of metrical composition, there neither is, nor can be,
any essential difference:" an assertion which, as prompted by a feeling
of the incompatibility of poetic language with prosaic thought, is
really a witness to the essential antithesis between poetry and prose.
Verse is simple, harmonious, and unfamiliar. It is thus the fitting
organ for that energy of thought which simplifies the phenomena of life
by referring them to a spiritual principle; which blends its shifting
colours in the light of a master-passion, and passes from the
contradictory data of the common understanding to the unity of a deeper
consciousness. Even the spiritualist philosopher, no less than the poet,
would have to speak in verse, if, instead of making statements, he
portrayed: if, besides asserting that "all things are to be seen in
God," he sought to excite in the reader the emotion appropriate to the
sight. Prose is the "oratio soluta." It is complex, irregular,
inharmonious. It thus corresponds to the natural or phenomenal view of
life; the view of it, that is, in its diversity, as qualified in
innumerable modes by animal wants and apparent accident, and not
harmonised by the action of the spirit.[16] The novelist must express
himself in prose, because this is his view of life: and this must be his
view of life, because he thus expresses himself. It is indeed a view
which may vary according to the circumstances of the case, but only
within definite limits. There is an "earnestness" about some of our
modern novelists, Miss Bronte for instance, which would have seemed out
of place to those of fifty years ago; but this is merely because the
life they see around them is more "earnest." It presents to them scenes
of sterner significance than were to be found among the coquetry and
dissipation of the fashionable world or the dull courtesies of a country
house. But that they do not transcend this outward life we have one
crucial proof. Just in so far as each of us learns to regard his own
individual being from within, and not from without, does he discard
dependence on happiness as arising from external circumstances, and
becomes already in idea, as he tends to become in reality, his own world
and his own law. No novelist attains to the assertion of this spiritual
prerogative. As we follow in sympathy the story of his hero, we find
ourselves lifted up and cast down as fortune changes, our life
brightening as the clouds break above, and darkening as they close
again. If the author chooses to disappoint us with "a bad ending," he
leaves us, not as we are left at the conclusion of a tragedy, purified
from personal desires, but vexed and sorrowful, sadder but not wiser
men.
FOOTNOTES:
[15] "Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, because in that
condition the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in
which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and
speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of
life our elementary feelings co-exist in a state of greater simplicity,
and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated, and more
forcibly communicated.... The language, too, of these men has been
adopted (purified indeed from what appear to be its real defects, from
all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust), because such men
hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of
language is originally derived; and because, from their rank in society
and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less
under the influence of social vanity, they convey their feelings and
notions in simple and unelaborated expressions. Accordingly, such a
language arising out of repeated experience and regular feeling, is a
more permanent, and a far more philosophical language, than that which
is frequently substituted for it by Poets, who think that they are
conferring honor upon themselves and their art in proportion as they
separate themselves from the sympathies of men, and indulge in arbitrary
and capricious habits of expression, in order to furnish food for fickle
tastes and fickle appetites of their own creation."--Wordsworth, Preface
to the 'Lyrical Ballads.'
[16] On the relations of prose and poetry, see Alden's 'An introduction
to Poetry,' pp. 23-28, 128-138, 160-164, and the references there given.
H. THE NOVEL AN INCOMPLETE PRESENTATION OF LIFE
19. By the mere explanation of the difference between the ideal and the
natural, the poetic and novelistic, views of the world, we may seem to
have already settled the question as to the beneficial effects of each.
The question, be it observed, is not as to the comparative influence of
the discipline of art and that of real life. The man who seeks his
entire culture in art of any kind will soon find the old antagonism
between speculation and action begin to appear. There will be a chasm,
which he cannot fill, between his life in the closet and his life in the
world; his impotence to carry his thought into act will limit and weaken
the thought itself. But this ill result will equally ensue, whether the
art in which he finds his nurture be that of the novelist or that of the
poet. The novel-reader sees human action pass before him like a
panorama, but he feels none of its pains and penalties; his fancy feeds
on its pleasures, but he has not to face the struggle of resistance to
pleasure, or the suffering which follows on indulgence. Nor is it merely
from that weakness of effect which, in one sense, must always belong to
representation as opposed to reality, that the novel suffers. The
representation itself is incomplete. The novelist, like every other
artist, must abridge and select. For many of the elements whose action
builds up our human soul, there is no place in his canvas. A great part
of the discipline of life arises simply from its slowness. The long
years of patient waiting and silent labor, the struggle with
listlessness and pain, the loss of time by illness, the hope deferred,
the doubt that lays hold on delay--these are the tests of that
pertinacity in man which is but a step below heroism. The exhibition of
them in the novel, however, is prevented by that rapidity of movement
which is essential to its fascination; and hence to one whose
acquaintance with life was derived simply from novels, its main business
would be unknown. They are perhaps more brought home to us by Defoe than
by any other writer of fiction; but this is due to that very deficiency
of artistic power which makes his agglomeration of details[17] such
heavy reading to all but school-boys.
FOOTNOTE:
[17] Modern criticism inclines to the view that Defoe's "agglomeration
of details" is the result of high and conscious art. If 'Robinson
Crusoe' were kept away from schoolboys it would doubtless be read
pleasurably by adults.
I. PRUDENCE THE NOVELIST'S HIGHEST MORALITY
20. The novel, then, as being a work of art, must fail to teach the
lesson of life in its completeness: as an inferior work of art, it has
peculiar weaknesses of its own. However extensive the influence of the
literature of fiction may have been, its intensity has been in inverse
proportion. A great poem, once made our own, abides with us for ever.
"Amid the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,"[18]
the spirit, returning to it, may gain a fresh assurance of its _own_
birthright, and purify itself, as in a river of Lethe, for an ideal
transition to its proper home. The novel, itself the reflex of "the
fretful stir unprofitable," can exercise no such power. It can but make
us more at home in the region from which a great poem transports us. The
value of that experience of the world, which it is its object to impart,
is commonly overrated in our day. In the form in which it is imparted by
the novelist, we have perhaps had too much of it without his aid. Our
external environment is quite enough in our thoughts: we are not too
reluctant to admit that we are what we seem to be, dependent for good or
evil on circumstances which we do not make for ourselves. This
dependence is in itself, no doubt, a fact; but it ceases to be so for us
when we contemplate it in forgetfulness of that spring of potential
freedom which underlies it, and of the law of duty correlative to
freedom. To the exclusive consideration of it we owe those profitless
recipes for eliciting moral health from circumstances which are the
plague of modern literature, and which one of our ablest writers has
lately condescended to dispense, in an essay on "organisation in daily
life." This circumstantial view of life, if we may use the term, being
the only one that the novelist can convey, prudence is his highest
morality. But it may be doubted whether prudence is what any one has
great need to learn. The plain man, who fronting circumstances boldly on
the one hand, looks reverently to the stern face of duty on the other,
can dispense with its maxims. For the moral valetudinarian small benefit
is to be gained from a doctor who will
"Read each wound, each weakness clear,
Will strike his finger on the place
And say, 'Thou ailest here and here'."[19]
It is far better for him, instead of poring over a detail of the causes
and symptoms of the disease which he hugs, to be stimulated to an effort
in which, though it be but temporary, ecstatic, and for an end not
actually attainable, he may at least forget the disease altogether. Such
a stimulus a great poem may afford him; but in the whole expanse of
novel-literature he merely sees his own sickly experience modified in an
infinite variety of reflections, till he fancies that the "strange
disease of modern life" is the proper constitution of God's universe.
FOOTNOTES:
[18]
"When the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart."
--Wordsworth, 'Tintern Abbey.'
[19] Matthew Arnold's 'Memorial Verses,' lines 20-22, adapted to the
context.
J. EVIL EFFECTS OF NOVEL-READING
21. Novel-reading thus aggravates two of the worst maladies of modern
times, self-consciousness and want of reverence. Many a man in these
days, instead of doing some sound piece of work for mankind, spends his
time in explaining to himself why it is that he does not do it, and how,
after all, he is superior to those who do. Even men of a higher sort
never seem to forget themselves in their work. Our popular writers
generally take the reader into confidence as to their private feelings
as they go along; our men of action are burdened by a sense of their
reputation with "intelligent circles." No one loses himself in a cause.
Scarcely understanding what is meant by a "divine indifference" as to
the fate of individual existences in the evolution of God's plan, we
weary heaven with complaints that we find the world contrary, or that we
cannot satisfy ourselves with a theory of life. Thus "measuring
ourselves by ourselves, and comparing ourselves among ourselves, we are
not wise." The novel furnishes the standard for the measurement, and the
data for the comparison. It presents us with a series of fictitious
experiences, in the light of which we read our own, and become more
critically conscious of them. Instead of idealising life, if we may so
express ourselves, it sentimentalises it. It does not subordinate
incidents to ideas; yet it does not treat them simply as phenomena to
excite curiosity, but as misfortunes or blessings to excite sentiment.
The writer of the "Mill on the Floss" reaches almost the tragic pitch
towards the close of her book, and if she had been content to leave us
with the death of the heroine and her brother[20] in the flood, we
might have supposed that in this case, as representing the annihilation
of human passion in the struggle with destiny, the novelist had indeed
attained the ideal view of life. But the novelistic instinct does not
allow her to do so. At the conclusion we are shown the other chief
actors standing, with appropriate emotions, over the heroine's grave,
and thus find that the catastrophe has not really been the manifestation
of an idea, but an occasion of sentiment. The habitual novel-reader,
from thus looking sentimentally at the fictitious life which is the
reflex of his own, soon comes to look sentimentally at himself. He
thinks his personal joys and sorrows of interest to angels and men; and
instead of gazing with awe and exultation upon the world, as a theatre
for the display of God's glory and the unknown might of man, he sees in
it merely an organism for affecting himself with pains and pleasures.
Thus regarded, it must needs lose its claim on his reverence, for it is
narrowed to the limits of his own consciousness. Conversant with present
life in all its outward aspects, he forgets the infinite spaces which
lie around and above it. This confinement of view, which among the more
intelligent appears merely as disbelief in the possibilities of man,
takes a more offensive form in the complacent blindness of ordinary
minds. We have no wish to disparage our own age in comparison with any
that have preceded it. Young men have always been ignorant, and
ignorance has always been conceited. There is, however, this difference.
The ignorant young men of past time, such as the five sons of Sir
Hildebrand Osbaldistone,[21] knew that they were ignorant, but thought
it no shame: the ignorant young men of our days, with the miscellaneous
knowledge of life which they derive from the popular novelists, fancy
themselves wiser than the aged. Whoever be the philosopher, the coxcomb
nowadays will answer him not merely with a grin, but with a joke which
he has still in lavender from Dickens or his imitators. The comic aspect
of life is indeed plain enough to see, nor is the merely pathetic much
less obvious; but there is little good in looking at either. It is far
easier to laugh or to weep than to think; to give either a ludicrous or
sentimental turn to a great principle of morals or religion than to
enter into its real meaning. But the vulgar reader of our comic
novelists, when he has learnt from them a jest or a sentiment for every
occasion of life, fancies that nothing more remains unseen and unsaid.
FOOTNOTES:
[20] "Lover" in the original text of the essay. The error does not much
affect the argument.
[21] In Scott's 'Rob Roy.'
III. TRUE FUNCTION OF THE NOVEL
A. A WIDENER OF EXPERIENCE
22. But there is another side to this question which we must not allow
ourselves to overlook. We have shown what the novel cannot do, and its
ill effect on those who trust to it for their culture. We must not
forget that it has a proper work of its own which, if modern progress be
anything more than a euphemism, must be a work for good. Least of all
should it be depreciated by the student, who may find in it deliverance
from the necessary confinement of his actual life. For the production of
poetic effect, as we have seen, large abstraction is necessary. It is
with man in the purity of his inward being, with nature in its simple
greatness, that the poet deals. The glory which he casts on life is far
higher than any which the novelist knows, but it is only on certain of
the elements of life that it can be cast at all. The novelist works on a
far wider field. With choice of subject and situation he scarcely need
trouble himself, except in regard to his own intellectual
qualifications. Wherever human thought is free, and human character can
display itself, whether in the servants' hall or the drawing-room,
whether in the country mansion or the back alley, he may find his
materials. He is thus a great expander of sympathies; and if he cannot
help us to make the world our own by the power of ideas, he at least
carries our thought into many a far country of human experience, which
it could not otherwise have reached. We hear much in these days of the
sacrifice of the individual to society through professional limitations.
In the progressive division of labor, while we become more useful as
citizens, we seem to lose our completeness as men. The requirements of
special study become more exacting, at the same time that the perfect
organisation of modern society removes the excitement of adventure and
the occasion for independent effort. There is less of human interest to
touch us within our calling, and we have less leisure to seek it beyond.
Hence it follows that one who has made the most of his profession is apt
to feel that he has not attained his full stature as a man; that he has
faculties which he can never use, capacities for admiration and
affection which can never meet with an adequate object. To this feeling,
probably, are mainly due our lamentations over a past age of
hero-worship and romance, when action was more decisive and passion a
fuller stream. Its alleviation, if not its remedy, is to be found in the
newspaper and the novel. Every one indeed must lay in his own experience
the foundation of the imaginary world which he rears for himself. There
is a primary "virtue which cannot be taught." No man can learn from
another the meaning of human activity or the possibilities of human
emotion. But this [Greek: pou sto] being given, even the cloistered
student may find that, as his soul passes into the strife of social
forces and the complication of individual experience, which the
newspaper and the novel severally represent, his sympathies break from
the bondage of his personal situation and reach to the utmost confines
of human life. The personal experience and the fictitious act and react
on each other, the personal experience giving reality to the fictitious,
the fictitious expansion to the personal. He need no longer envy the man
of action and adventure, or sigh for new regions of enterprise. The
world is all before him. He may explore its recesses without being
disturbed by its passions; and if the end of experience be the knowledge
of God's garment, as preliminary to that of God Himself, his eye may be
as well trained for the "vision beatific," as if he had himself been an
actor in the scenes to which imagination transfers him.