On the art of writing fiction

by Unknown

ETHICAL NOVELS

Prof. Robert K. Douglas

Romance ancient and modern

The ethical novel is a natural product of modern times. In the days when the world was young, men gave vent to their fancies in poetical romances, in which the deeds of gods, goddesses, and heroes formed the staple themes. Homer’s inspired verses and Eastern romances, in which gods in the intervals of their amours battle with demons for the possession of mankind, exist to remind us of the kind of heroic pageants which interested and entranced the warlike Greek and the swarthy warriors of Asia. As civilisation advanced, doubts crept in as to the very existence of the heroes in which earlier generations had delighted, and minstrels and writers descended from the clouds, and tuned their harps and guided their pens to record the doughty deeds of their leaders on the hard-fought fields of their nations’ records. At such a time men desired rather to be startled and thrilled than to be taught to reflect and discriminate, and the old blood-and-thunder novel exactly suited their taste.

Painting

The history of painting runs a nearly parallel course with that of literature. Like fiction, the painter’s art received its first glowing inspirations from the current legends of celestial beings, and passed through successive stages until the comparatively modern phase was reached in which striking effects and startling situations became the principal stocks-in-trade. As in literature, this intermediate condition gave way to the expression of ideas rather than of physical force, and artists, like novelists, were led to aim at representing carefully drawn characters and suggestive surroundings. In the novels of the last century we see a gradual development of this stage of the novelist’s art. Any one who takes the trouble to compare Richardson’s Pamela with Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle, will recognise the advance which took its rise when Queen Anne sat on the throne, and which has continued in obedience to the law of progress unchecked to the present day.

Early writers of ethical romance

Scott

A wide gulf, however, separates these writers from the novelists of the beginning of the nineteenth century. The whole method of Miss Edgeworth and Jane Austen, for example, is different from that employed by the earlier generation of authors. Instead of exciting interest by indelicacies and maintaining it by ribaldry, they sought to win attention by careful delineation of character and genuine humour. It was this new development of romance which made the ethical novel possible. Amid the hurly-burly of strife and the warlike deeds of gods and men, there was no room for philosophical musings or ethical teachings. But when the scenes were changed to ladies’ drawing-rooms, the parsonage-house, and the course of daily life, it became easy to point a moral while adorning a tale. Miss Edgeworth may claim to be the first writer of ethical romance, and in her quiet and humorous pages she succeeds in levelling many a home-thrust against the evils which beset her time. In her Castle Rackrent she lays bare the mischief of Irish extravagance and absenteeism, while in her Tales from Fashionable Life she holds up to ridicule and scorn the empty frivolities and the manifest absurdities which pervaded the higher ranks of society. Jane Austen in a less obtrusive way succeeds in adding equally effective morals to her delightful stories. The bitter consequences which follow evil doings are plainly set out in her pages, and the needless misery inflicted by the indulgence of the mean passions is portrayed with singular felicity. It is, however, impossible not to recognise that both Miss Austen’s and Miss Edgeworth’s novels suffer, as works of art, by the prominent motives which guided the pens of their authors. It is not every one who is able so to subordinate the intended moral to the due working out of the story as in no way to interfere with the plot. The greatest novelists have unquestionably been those who set themselves directly to describe men and women as nature has made them, without any undue regard to the goal to which the instincts and actions of the characters may lead them. Sir Walter Scott is an instance in point. No one will deny the extent of the influence which he has exercised in all four continents of the world, and yet it is difficult to point to a single passage in his works in which he expressed any direct ethical teaching Only once, so far as we recollect, he chose to tack a moral on to one of his novels, and that was when at the end of The Heart of Midlothian he addressed these words to the reader. “This tale will not be told in vain, if it shall be found to illustrate the great truth, that guilt, though it may attain temporal splendour can never confer real happiness; that the evil consequences of our crimes long survive their commission, and, like the ghosts of the murdered, forever haunt the steps of the malefactor; and that the paths of virtue, though seldom those of worldly greatness are always those of pleasantness and peace.”

Dickens

It perhaps may be advanced in opposition to what has been said that Dickens, one of the greatest novelists of the century, wrote several of his novels with an ethical intention. But he was one of a happy few who wrote fiction, as Hogarth painted and drew moral lessons on his canvas, with a skill which excites the admiration of all those who rightly understand the difficulty of the task. Many artists have attempted to follow in Hogarth’s steps, and have failed ignominiously, just as writers without end have attempted to imitate the methods of Dickens and have fallen lamentably short of their great exemplar. Who but Dickens could have drawn the pathetic picture of Oliver Twist, and the bumptious and ignorant tyranny of Bumble and the guardians without losing the perspective of the story which is so well maintained throughout. After all, however, his best novels are those which are written without any distinctly ethical motive. Pickwick Papers and Martin Chuzzlewit are unquestionably his masterpieces; and though Nicholas Nickleby dealt an effective blow at Yorkshire schools, and Bleak House pilloried the evils of the Court of Chancery, and Hard Times showed up the fallacies of the Manchester School, they all, as literary works of art, pay the penalty of the good that is in them.

Thackeray

Like his great contemporary, though in a very different style, Thackeray throughout his writings strove to enforce a sound ethical teaching as Mr. Leslie Stephen writes of him:—“In short his writings mean if they mean anything, that the love of a wife and child and friend is the one sacred element in our nature, of infinitely higher price than anything that can come into competition with it; and that “Vanity Fair” is what it is precisely because it stimulates the pursuit of objects frivolous and unsatisfying just so far as they imply indifference to these emotions.

As every reader of Thackeray knows his pages are full of moralisings on the failings and faults of mankind. But only in one passage does he treat his subject in a directly ethical way. At the close of a long conversation between Warrington and Arthur, the latter is convicted of being an apostle of general scepticism and sneering acquiescence in the world as it is. “And to what does this easy and sceptical life lead a man?” adds the novelist. “Friend Arthur was a Sadducee, and the Baptist might be in the wilderness shouting to the poor, who were listening with all their might and faith to the preacher’s awful accents and denunciation of wrath or woe or salvation; and our friend the Sadducee would turn his sleek mule with a shrug and a smile from the crowd and go home to the shade of his terrace, and muse over preacher and audience, and turn to his roll of Plato or his pleasant Greek song-book babbling of honey and Hybla, and nymphs and fountains and love. To what we say does this scepticism lead? It leads a man to a shameful loneliness and selfishness, so to speak—the more shameful because it is so good-humoured and conscienceless and serene. Conscience! What is Conscience? Why accept remorse? What is public or private faith? Mythuses alike enveloped in enormous tradition. If seeing and acknowledging the lives of the world, Arthur, as see them you can, with only too fatal a clearness, you submit to them without any protest farther than a laugh: if plunged yourself in easy sensuality, you allow the wretched world to pass groaning by you unmoved: if the fight for the truth is taking place, and all men of honour are on the ground armed on the one side or the other, and you alone are to lie on your balcony and smoke your pipe out of the noise and the danger, you had better have died, or never have been at all, than such a sensual coward.”

But for the most part Thackeray rather allows his ethical teachings to be implied than directly enforced. For every kind of meanness he has nothing but words of scathing scorn and all wrong doers and wrong doings he castigates with merciless indignation. He exposes all that is untrue with quiet and bitter sarcasm, and in the inimitable pictures which he draws of life and character, indicates an honest and wholesome moral for all of those who care to discover it.

Charles Kingsley

Of a very different temper and disposition was that great ethical novelist Charles Kingsley. A devoted apostle of humanity he preached and spoke and wrote incessantly on the wrongs which he saw being inflicted on the weakest and least helpful of his fellow-men. The sight of contractors and manufacturers sweating their employés, and of starving their vital force by crowding them into unwholesome and insufficient rooms; of farmers beating their labourers down to the very lowest wages and of housing them in insanitary and in indecent cottages, roused his indignation to the full. In burning eloquence whether in the pulpit or on the platform or at his study table he denounced the oppression of the weak and the wrongs which were being inflicted on those who were least able to help themselves. His novels were, as his sermons, mainly directed to this great object. In them he tried to impress upon landlords and employers that their dependants were men and brothers, and with exquisite tenderness and sympathy he described over and over again the horrors of those slums of which we hear so much now; of the evils of those door-posts which stand sentry over those squalid alleys, the gin palace and the pawnbroker’s shop.

Kingsley’s creed

But he had another lesson to teach, and there he sympathised with Thackeray. The sanctity of family life was to him a leading feature in his religion. As he writes in his dedicatory preface in Hypatia “family and national life are the two divine roots of the church, severed from which she is sure to wither away into that most godless and cruel of spectres, a religious world.” The neo-Platonism with which he was so strongly imbued introduced many strange mystic ideas into his religious and social creeds. That the human relations of husband and wife, and parent and child were eternal implied to his mind that they had existed from all time and would extend to the end of all things. They were therefore in his faith spiritual, sacramental, divine, eternal. The influence which his writings exercised on high and low, on rich and poor was great and far-reaching. He achieved, therefore, the one object he sought when he wrote Alton Locke and his other masterpieces. But it must be admitted that in the eagerness with which he preached he forgot at times the novelist’s art, and though some of the passages in which he points his morals read almost as though they were inspired, there is not one of his novels which does not suffer from his ecstatic moods.

The novel of Reform

To men and women of sympathetic temperaments and ready pens, the temptation to sermonise on the evils and wrongs of the world around them must be well nigh irresistible, and what more easy and telling way can there possibly be than by haranguing their fellow-men in fiction! To seriously minded novelists, the unbelief which they see spreading like a flood about them, suggests at once an object-lesson romance, in which the heretical young curate who has strayed into the paths of Buddhism or wandered with the lost sheep into the by-ways of Deism or Dissent shall be restored to the true fold by arguments which are urged with the full energy of conviction and are combated with weak and halting rejoinders. The unprejudiced reader may consider the method faulty, and that art has been sacrificed to exposition, but the author and his friends insist on the public swallowing the dose with all the severity of Mrs. Squeers. The English public are not altogether averse to the presence of a modicum of moral teaching, but they like to have the powder well concealed or only half revealed in the preserve of plot and interest, and have reason to complain if that which was meant to be the less proves to be equal to the whole.

The naturalistic school

Drunkenness and vice are often common themes of the ethical novelist. An older generation of writers devoted their energies to gibbeting the inequalities and maladministration of the laws; and to picturing the evils and cruelties of game preserving. Dickens, as we have seen, denounced in his novels the administration of the workhouse and the delays of the Courts of Chancery; and Charles Reade inveighed through the mouths of his characters against the Prison system and the Lunacy enactments. These motives are too abstract for the present-day novelist. He, or more commonly she, delights to descend from the general to the particular, and to follow the drunkard into the gin palace, and the most abandoned profligates into the lowest haunts of vice. These are unquestionable evils and should on all accounts be rather indicated than described in detail. What good can it do to analyse and dwell upon every disgusting feature in a drunken debauch, and every prurient phase in the downward course of sin? The naturalistic school has much to answer for in this regard. Zola and his followers, especially his followers, have brought into fashion a style of novel which has become a plague spot in our civilisation, and through their instrumentality young girls and boys are, under the guise of moral teaching, made acquainted with forms of vice of which, but for their ethical teachers, they would be entirely ignorant. Subjects are now discussed in ladies’ drawing-rooms and at dinner-tables, which were never so much as hinted at a couple of decades ago. Blasphemous views of religion, theories of creation and evolution, analyses of the passions, and strange doctrines concerning the sexual instinct, are all discussed with a freedom which leaves little to the imagination. It is true that the authors bring the unholy subjects on the stage with the professed purpose of annihilating them one after the other; but as in the process sometimes followed by vivisectionists of introducing poisons into the system of the animals experimented on, for the purpose of proving the effects of antidotes, it sometimes happens that the views of evil suggested in the sort of novel we are speaking of resist the counterbalancing influences of the moral strictures of the authors. In a recent number of the Nineteenth Century Mr. Frederick Greenwood describes a novel up to date which an authoress has been induced much against her will to write, and in which she appears in the frontispiece covering her face with her hands for very shame, and on the last page is represented kneeling at her infant’s bed praying for forgiveness. If all who wrote on the unsavoury subjects indicated by Mr. Greenwood observed the attitude of his authoress we should see little of the features of a good many ladies who are at present evidently quite unconscious of any desire to veil their countenances. Such writers are bad enough, but a lower level is reached by those who deliberately write on more than risky matters because they pay. It is difficult to exchange compliments with such mercenary providers of social garbage, and they are best left to the rebukes of such consciences as they possess.

Evils of modern fiction

Naturalism and irreverence are unquestionably the crying evils of modern fiction. And it by no means follows that they are essential to the construction of the ethical novel. Mr. Leslie Stephen has said that to be a good writer a man must be a preacher; and surely there are enough subjects to preach about without touching on unsavoury topics. Are not men and women prone to faults of character, besides those of unlawful passion and open rebellion against God; and are there not social wrongs and inequalities to be inveighed against. It is not every one who can hope to see a palace arise in response to a discourse on the evils which beset all sorts and conditions of men, but every novelist worthy of his fame can do something to warn his fellow-men of the faults and failings which lead to the downward paths of sin and misery, and to throw a light on the way of those who are fighting manfully for all that is true, honest, and of good report.