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
B. AN EXPANDER OF SYMPATHIES
23. The novelist not only works on more various elements, he appeals to
more ordinary minds than the poet. This indeed is the strongest
practical proof of his essential inferiority as an artist. All who are
capable of an interest in incidents of life which do not affect
themselves, may feel the same interest more keenly in a novel; but to
those only who can lift the curtain does a poem speak intelligibly. It
is the twofold characteristic, of universal intelligibility and
indiscriminate adoption of materials, that gives the novel its place as
the great reformer and leveller of our time. Reforming and levelling are
indeed more closely allied than we are commonly disposed to admit.
Social abuses are nearly always the result of defective organisation.
The demarcations of family, of territory, or of class, prevent the
proper fusion of parts into the whole. The work of the reformer
progresses as the social force is brought to bear more and more fully on
classes and individuals, merging distinctions of privilege and position
in the one social organism. The novel is one of the main agencies
through which this force acts. It gathers up manifold experiences,
corresponding to manifold situations of life; and subordinating each to
the whole, gives to every particular situation a new character, as
qualified by all the rest. Every good novel, therefore, does something
to check what may be called the despotism of situations; to prevent that
ossification into prejudices arising from situation, to which all feel a
tendency. The general novel literature of any age may be regarded as an
assertion by mankind at large, in its then development, of its claims,
as against the influence of class and position; whether that influence
appear in the form of positive social injustice, of oppressive custom,
or simply of deficient sympathy.
24. To be what he is, the novelist must be a man with large powers of
sympathetic observation. He must have an eye for the "humanities" which
underlie the estranging barriers of social demarcation, and in relation
to which the influence of those barriers can alone be rightly
appreciated. We have already spoken of that acquiescence in the dominion
of circumstance, to which we are all too ready to give way, and which
exclusive novel-reading tends to foster. The circumstances, however,
whose rule we recognise, are apt to be merely our own or those of our
class. We are blind to other "idola" than those of our own cave; we do
not understand that the feelings which betray us into "indiscretions"
may, when differently modified by a different situation, lead others to
game-stealing or trade-outrages. From this narrowness of view the
novelist may do much to deliver us. The variations of feeling and
action with those of circumstance, and the essential human identity
which these variations cannot touch, are his special province. He shows
us that crime does not always imply sin, that a social heresy may be the
assertion of a native right, that an offence which leads to conventional
outlawry may be merely the rebellion of a generous nature against
conventional tyranny. Thus, if he does not do everything, he does much.
Though he cannot reveal to us the inner side of life, he at least gives
a more adequate conception of its surface. Though he cannot raise us to
a point of view from which circumstances appear subordinate to spiritual
laws, he yet saves us from being blinded, if not from being influenced,
by the circumstances of our own position. Though he cannot show the
prisoners the way of escape from their earthly confinement, yet by
breaking down the partitions between the cells he enables them to
combine their strength for a better arrangement of the prison-house. The
most wounding social wrongs more often arise from ignorance than from
malice, from acquiescence in the opinion of a class rather than from
deliberate selfishness. The master cannot enter into the feelings of the
servant, nor the servant into those of his master. The master cannot
understand how any good quality can lead one to "forget his station"; to
the servant the spirit of management in the master seems mere
"driving." This is only a sample of what is going on all society over.
The relation between the higher and lower classes becomes irritating,
and therefore injurious, not from any conscious unfairness on either
side, but simply from the want of a common understanding; while at the
same time every class suffers within its own limits from the prevalence
of habits and ideas, under the authority of class-convention, which
could not long maintain themselves if once placed in the light of
general opinion. Against this twofold oppression, the novel, from its
first establishment as a substantive branch of literature, has made
vigorous war. From Defoe to Kingsley its history boasts of a noble army
of social reformers; yet the work which these writers have achieved has
had little to do with the morals--commonly valueless, if not false and
sentimental--which they have severally believed themselves to convey.
Defoe's notion of a moral seems to have been the vulgar one that vice
must be palpably punished and virtue rewarded; he recommends his "Moll
Flanders" to the reader on the ground that "there is not a wicked action
in any part of it but is first or last rendered unhappy and[22]
unfortunate." The moral of Fielding's novels, if moral it can be called,
is simply the importance of that prudence which his heroes might have
dispensed with, but for the wildness of their animal license. Yet both
Defoe and Fielding had a real lesson to teach mankind. The thieves and
harlots whom Defoe prides himself on punishing, but whose adventures he
describes with the minuteness of affection, are what we ourselves might
have been; and in their histories we hear, if not the "music," yet the
"harsh and grating cry" of suffering humanity. Fielding's merit is of
the same kind; but the sympathies which he excites are more general, as
his scenes are more varied, than those of Defoe. His coarseness is
everywhere redeemed by a genuine feeling for the contumelious buffets to
which weakness is exposed. He has the practical insight of Dickens and
Thackeray, without their infusion of sentiment. He does not moralise
over the contrast between the rich man's law and the poor man's, over
the "indifference" of rural justice, over the lying and adultery of
fashionable life. He simply makes us see the facts, which are everywhere
under our eyes, but too close to us for discernment. He shows society
where its sores lie, appealing from the judgment of the diseased class
itself to that public intelligence which, in spite of the cynic's sneer
on the task of "producing an honesty from the combined action of
knaves," has really power to over-ride private selfishness. The same
sermon has found many preachers since, the unconscious missionaries
being perhaps the greatest. Scott was a Tory of the purest water. His
mind was busy with the revival of a pseudo-feudalism: no thought of
reforming abuses probably ever entered it. Yet his genial human insight
made him a reformer against his will. He who makes man better known to
man takes the first steps toward healing the wounds which man inflicts
on man. The permanent value of Scott's novels lies in his pictures of
the Scotch peasantry. He popularised the work which the Lake poets had
begun, of re-opening the primary springs of human passion. "Love he had
found in huts where poor men lie," and he announced the discovery;
teaching the "world" of English gentry what for a century and a half
they had seemed to forget, that the human soul, in its strength no less
than in its weakness, is independent of the accessories of fortune. He
left no equals, but the combined force of his successors has been
constantly growing in practical effect. They have probably done more
than the journalists to produce that improvement in the organisation of
modern life which leads to the notion that, because social grievances
are less obvious, they have ceased to exist. The novelist catches the
cry of suffering before it has obtained the strength, or general
recognition, which are pre-supposed when the newspaper becomes its
mouthpiece. The miseries of the marriage-market had been told by
Thackeray, with almost wearisome iteration, many years before they found
utterance in the columns of the "Times."
FOOTNOTE:
[22] "Or" in Green's text.
C. A CREATOR OF PUBLIC SENTIMENT
25. It may indeed be truly said that, after all, human selfishness is
much the same as it ever was; that luxury still drowns sympathy; that
riches and poverty have still their old estranging influence. The novel,
as has been shown, cannot give a new birth to the spirit, or initiate
the effort to transcend the separations of place and circumstance; but
it is no small thing that it should remove the barriers of ignorance and
antipathy which would otherwise render the effort unavailing. It at
least brings man nearer to his neighbor, and enables each class to see
itself as others see it. And from the fusion of opinions and sympathies
thus produced, a general sentiment is elicited, to which oppression of
any kind, whether of one class by another, or of individuals by the
tyranny of sectarian custom, seldom appeals in vain.
D. A LEVELLER OF INTELLECTS
26. The novelist is a leveller also in another sense than that of which
we have already spoken. He helps to level intellects as well as
situations. He supplies a kind of literary food which the weakest
natures can assimilate as well as the strongest, and by the consumption
of which the former sort lose much of their weakness and the latter
much of their strength. While minds of the lower order acquire from
novel-reading a cultivation which they previously lacked, the higher
seem proportionately to sink. They lose that aspiring pride which arises
from the sense of walking in intellect on the necks of a subject crowd;
they no longer feel the bracing influence of living solely among the
highest forms of art; they become conformed insensibly, to the general
opinion which the new literature of the people creates. A similar change
is going on in every department of man's activity. The history of
thought in its artistic form is parallel to its history in its other
manifestations. The spirit descends, that it may rise again; it
penetrates more and more widely into matter, that it may make the world
more completely its own. Political life seems no longer attractive, now
that political ideas and power are disseminated among the mass, and the
reason is recognised as belonging not to a ruling caste merely, but to
all. A statesman in a political society resting on a substratum of
slavery, and admitting no limits to the province of government, was a
very different person from the modern servant of "a nation of
shopkeepers," whose best work is to save the pockets of the poor. It
would seem as if man lost his nobleness when he ceased to govern, and as
if the equal rule of all was equivalent to the rule of none. Yet we
hold fast to the faith that the "cultivation of the masses," which has
for the present superseded the development of the individual, will in
its maturity produce some higher type even of individual manhood than
any which the old world has known. We may rest on the same faith in
tracing the history of literature. In the novel we must admit that the
creative faculty has taken a lower form than it held in the epic and the
tragedy. But since in this form it acts on more extensive material and
reaches more men, we may well believe that this temporary declension is
preparatory to some higher development, when the poet shall idealise
life without making abstraction of any of its elements, and when the
secret of existence, which he now speaks to the inward ear of a few, may
be proclaimed on the house-tops to the common intelligence of mankind.
APPENDIX
A. AN APPRECIATION OF GREEN'S ESSAY
It is interesting to see how the leading ideas in his [Green's] mind
governed the treatment of an apparently alien material in his last piece
of academic work, the essay on novels, which gained the Chancellor's
prize in 1862. The essay has also the additional interest of being
almost the only record of his views on art and its relation to life. The
fundamental conception upon which it is based is one with which we have
already met. The world in its truth is a unity, governed by a single
law, animated by an undivided life, a whole in every part. But to human
apprehension it is fragmentary and mechanical, a chaos of elements of
which each is external to the other and all are external to our minds,
and in which chance tempered by familiarity seems to be the only law. To
exceptional men, or at exceptional crises in life, in the moments of
intense insight or emotion which philosophy calls knowledge and religion
faith, the weight of custom falls away, the truth breaks through the
veil, and the most trivial object or accident comes to reflect in
itself the whole system of nature or the whole providence of God. At
such moments man realises that in order to live he must die, that in
order to be free he must obey, and that only by surrendering his fancied
independence can he enter into the divine unity. To this liberation of
the self from its own bondage art contributes its share. The poetic
genius, like the speculative and the religious, penetrates the
monotonous disorder of everyday life, and lays bare "the impassioned
expression" which is there for those who can read it. The dramatist, for
instance, with whom the novelist is here compared, shows us some
elemental force of humanity, stripped of the accidents of time and
place, working itself out in free conflict with other forces, and
finally breaking itself against the eternal fact that no man can gain
the world without first losing himself. It is this catastrophe which
makes the real tragedy of life; it is this which the tragic poet has the
eye to see and the words to portray; and in proportion as we can follow
him in imagination, we come away from the spectacle with our own hearts
broken and purged, but strengthened to face the fact and obey the law.
The novelist does with inferior means, and for minds at a lower level,
what the dramatist may do for a mind at its highest. He idealises enough
to make us feel pleasure or pain, not enough to make us forget
ourselves. He excites curiosity or suspense, not awe or hope. If the
novel ends well, it flatters our complacency with the feeling that the
world as it is is not such a bad place after all; if it ends badly, it
strengthens the indolent conviction that aimless misery is the law of
the universe. There are however two ways in which novels may be of real
service and value. If they cannot teach men how to live, they may,
through the wide range of their subjects, enable those who have already
found a principle of life to give it a freer application than their
limited circumstances would otherwise allow; the "fictitious experience"
may "give expansion to the personal," while the personal gives reality
to the fictitious, and thus may be mitigated that "sacrifice of the
individual to society" which the modern division of labor tends to bring
about. And secondly, by appealing to such various classes and
capacities, and exhibiting the identity of human nature under such
various circumstances, novels supply a vehicle through which the force
of public opinion may work, fusing differences, breaking down
prejudices, and checking the "despotism of situations." The essay
concludes characteristically with the refusal to believe that democracy
is necessarily unpoetic. As "we hold fast to the faith that the
'cultivation of the masses,' which has for the present superseded the
development of the individual, will in its maturity produce some higher
type of individual manhood than any which the old world has known," so,
though in the novel "the creative faculty has taken a lower form than it
held in the epic and the tragedy," "we may well believe that this
temporary declension is preparatory to some higher development, when the
poet shall idealise life without making abstraction of any of its
elements, and when the secret of existence, which he now speaks to the
inward ear of a few, may be proclaimed on the housetops to the common
intelligence of mankind."
Readers of the essay who are also novel-readers will be inclined to say
that the writer was not much in sympathy with his subject; and he
himself, on getting the prize, remarks that "it is curious that I should
have been successful in an essay on novels, about which I know and care
little, and should have failed in both my efforts in theology, for which
I care considerably." At the same time it is probably true, as he once
said, that he had read more novels than his friends gave him credit for,
and it is certainly true that what his reading lacked in extent it made
up in intensity. As might be supposed, his taste in fiction was for
forcible delineation and robust humor. The flavor of strong, healthy
individuality was what attracted him; for rarities, niceties, and
abnormalities of mental organisation he cared nothing. He liked things
which he could take hold of with his mind, not things which merely gave
him sensations, pleasant or painful. Both in his deepest and his
lightest moods he was absolutely simple and "above board," and this
simplicity made him keenly alive to the proximity of the sublime to the
ridiculous or the exquisite to the grotesque. Though he had little of
the animal in him, and was never troubled by his appetites, he was quite
free from prudery. If obscenity moved him at all, it was to frank
laughter or to grim contempt; he never dwelt upon it, either in the way
of enjoyment or loathing. "For rules of ascetic discipline," says a
friend, "he had no need. The view of life suggested by so much of the
best French literature, that thinking men are generally in a practical
dilemma between the extremes of sensual excess and of spiritual
exaltation, did not commend itself to him in the least." The only forms
of art to which he was keenly susceptible were those of oratory and
poetry. He had no ear for music, though he seemed to get a certain
exaltation from listening to it. In regard to painting and sculpture he
always professed himself incompetent, but he was not without decided
tastes. On his first visit to the Continent he was more attracted by
Rembrandt, Holbein, and Duerer than by the Italians; "these men," he
said, "grasped the idea of Christianity." Of Durer's four saints at
Munich he writes, "I could contemplate them with interest for hours; he
has contrived to give St. John an almost perfect expression of 'divine
philosophy'." In later years when he went to Italy he spent a good deal
of time in looking at early Italian pictures, and admitted that they
would soon have got a great hold upon him. But on the whole his attitude
to the arts (excluding those of language) was one of deferential
ignorance. He had not himself any artistic gifts; he did not even write
verses. Yet to his friends, as one of them says, "he never represented
the prose of existence. With all his gravity, with all his firm grip on
fact and material interests, he had the enthusiastic movement of the
world's poetry in him."--From the Memoir by R. L. Nettleship, Green's
'Works,' Vol. 3, pp. xxx-xxxiii.
B. HEGEL ON THE NOVEL
Among the mongrel forms of epic should be included the half descriptive,
half lyric poems which were popular among the English, dealing chiefly
with nature, the seasons of the year, etc. There belong also to this
division numerous didactic poems in which a prosaic content is dressed
up in poetic form, such as compendiums of physics, astronomy, and
medicine, and treatises on chess, fishing, hunting, and the conduct of
life. Poems of this sort were most artfully elaborated by the later
Greeks, by the Romans, and, in modern times, especially by the French.
Despite their general epic tone, they lend themselves readily to lyric
treatment.
More poetical, but still without the characteristics necessary for
definite classification, are romances and ballads. Being epic in content
but lyric in treatment, these products of the Middle Ages and of modern
times may be assigned to either class indifferently.
The case of the novel, the modern popular epic, is very different. Here
we find the same wealth and variety of interests, circumstances,
characters, and human relationships, the same world-background, and the
same handling of events, that characterize the true epic. But there is
lacking to it the primitive poetic state of the world, in which the true
epic took its rise. The novel, in the modern acceptation of the term,
presupposes a prosaically ordered reality. But working from the basis of
this reality, and moving within its own circle, the novel, both as
regards picturesqueness of incident and as regards characters and their
fate, retrieves for poetry (so far as the above presupposition permits)
her lost prerogatives.[23]
Thus it happens that the struggle between the poetry of the heart and
the opposing prose of outward circumstances is for the novel one of the
commonest and most suitable conflicts. This struggle may end comically,
or tragically, or in a reconciliation of the opposing forces. In the
last case the characters who at first oppose the ordinary world-order
may, by learning to recognize the true and abiding elements in it,
become reconciled to the existing circumstances, and take an active part
in them; or, on the other hand, they may strip off the prosaic hull from
deed and accomplishment, and thus put in the place of the original prose
a reality which is on intimate and friendly terms with beauty and art.
As far as the range of representation is concerned, the true novel, like
the epic, requires a complete world and a complete view of life, the
many-sided materials and relationships of which exhibit themselves in
the particular action that is the nucleus of the whole. As to details of
conception and development, however, the author must be allowed great
liberty, for it is difficult to bring the prose of real life into the
representation without sticking fast in the prosaic and
commonplace.--Hegel, 'Aesthetik.' 3. Thl., Kap. III. Abt. 3., S.
394-396.
FOOTNOTE:
[23] In simpler terms: The novel, being a form of epic, should have all
the characteristics of poetry. But this is impossible because it is
compelled to work in the humble field of prose. Nevertheless, by a
skilful use of description, narration, and dramatic situation, it causes
a poetic oasis to spring up in the desert of prose, and so wins back
some of its poetical rights.