A History of English Prose Fiction

by Bayard Tuckerman

I.

Fiction has absorbed so much of the literary talent of the present century, and has attained so important a place in the lives and thoughts of the reading public, that, in this chapter, we will attempt a description of its varied forms, and an inquiry into its uses and abuses, rather than an extended criticism of individual writers. Allibone's "Dictionary of Authors" contains two thousand two hundred and fifty-seven names of writers of fiction, by far the greater number of which belong to the nineteenth century, and every year adds to the list.

There is no better example of the closeness of the connection between society and its literature than is supplied by the novel. Every change in the public taste has been followed by a corresponding variety of fiction, until it is difficult to enumerate all the schools into which novelists have divided themselves. During the present century, life has become far more complex and the reading public far more exacting, varied, and extended than ever before. Steam and electricity have brought distant countries into close communion, and have awakened a feeling of fellowship among the different nations of the civilised world which has greatly widened the horizon of human interests. The spread of education, the increase and distribution of wealth, together with the cheapness of printing, have largely increased the number and variety of those who seek entertainment from works of fiction. The novel-reader is no longer content with the description of scenes and characters among which his own life is passed. He wishes to be introduced to foreign countries, to past ages, and to societies and ranks apart from his own. He wishes also to find in fiction the reflection of his own tastes and the discussion of his own interests. He seeks psychology, or study of character, or the excitement of a complicated plot, or the details and events of sea-faring, criminal, or fashionable life. All of these different tastes the novelist has undertaken to gratify.

Under the extensive head of the novel of life and manners, the habits, modes of thought, and peculiarities of language of Scotland, Ireland, England, and the United States, with many sub-divisions of provinces and cities, have been studied and described. The novelist has extended his investigations into Eastern countries, and has portrayed the customs and institutions of Oriental life. He has taken his characters from historic times, and has recommended the past for the instruction or amusement of the present. The experience of the soldier and the sailor have taken their place among the incidents of fiction; the adventures and crimes of blacklegs and convicts have been drawn upon to gratify palates sated with the weak pabulum of the fashionable novel.

Fiction has not been confined to the study of manners and character, but has been extensively used to propagate opinions and to argue causes. Novels have been written in support of religious views, Catholic, High-Church, and Low-Church; political novels have supported the interests of Tory, Whig, anti-slavery, and civil service; philosophical novels have exposed the evils of society as at present constituted, and have built up impossible utopias. Besides the novel of purpose, there has been the novel of fancy, in which the imagination has been allowed to soar unchecked in the regions of the unreal and the supernatural.

With so great a variety of works of fiction, it is not surprising to find a corresponding variety of authorship. Lords and ladies, generals and colonels have entered the lists against police court reporters and female adventurers. The novel is no longer the exclusive work of a professional author. Amateurs have attempted it to pass the time which hung heavily on their hands; to put into form their dreams or experiences; to gratify a mere literary vanity. The needy nobleman has made profitable use of his name on the title-page of a novel purporting to give information concerning fashionable life. But the most remarkable characteristic of novel-writing has been the important part taken by women. They have adopted fiction as their special department of literature, and have shown their capacity for it by the production of novels which fully equal in number and almost equal in merit the works of their masculine rivals. On her own ground, George Eliot has no superior, while the writings of Miss Austen, of Miss Edgeworth, of Miss Ferrier, of Mrs. Stowe, not to mention many others, are to be ranked among the best works of fiction in any language. But while women have contributed their full share of novels, both as regards quantity and merit, they have also contributed much more than what we think their full share of worthless and immoral writing. Bad women will have literary capacity as well as bad men, but it is doubly shocking to find that the prurient thoughts, the indecent allusions, and immoral opinions which are often met with in the novels of the day proceed from that sex which ought to be the stronghold of modesty and virtue.

And this matter becomes very important when we consider the position which works of fiction have attained in the present century. In the days of Mrs. Behn, Mrs. Heywood, Fielding, or Smollett, coarseness of thought and language was so general that it naturally had a prominent place in novels. All persons who objected to licentious scenes and gross expressions in the reading of themselves or their children excluded works of fiction. As Miss Edgeworth said, most novels were filled with vice or folly, and as Miss Burney complained, no body of literary men were so numerous, or so little respectable as novelists. But, in the hands of such writers as Sir Walter Scott, as Miss Ferrier, as Miss Austen, as Dickens, as Thackeray, as Charles Kingsley, as Mr. Anthony Trollope, the novel has achieved for itself a position of respectability and dignity which seems to remain unimpaired, notwithstanding the efforts of many authors to destroy it. Works of fiction are to be found in every home, in the hands of parents, in the hands of young boys and girls. The word novel has been given so high a signification by the great names which are associated with it, that parental censorship has almost ceased. It is impossible that a form of literature to which so many and so great minds have been devoted, and which takes so prominent a place in the favor of the reading public, should not be without a powerful influence. Let us look more closely at the works of fiction of the nineteenth century, and then endeavor to determine how far their influence has been for good, and how far for evil.

II.

It is the especial province of the novel of life and manners to be as far as possible a truthful reflection of nature. And the more it approaches to this condition, the more realistic it is said to be. But the word realism is a vague term, and is constantly employed to express different ideas. As far as it applies to the novel, it usually signifies an author's fidelity to nature. But even with this definition, the term realism has no very definite meaning unless all persons agree as to what constitutes nature. There is a great difference in men according as they are looked at with the eye of a Raphael or of a Rembrandt. There has been a strong tendency among novelists of the present century who have written since Scott, to devote themselves more to the common characters and incidents of every-day life; to describe the world as it appears to the ordinary observer, who rarely associates with either heroes or villains, and has little experience of either the sublime or the marvellous. Such was the expressed object of Thackeray, and such is the general character of the works of George Eliot and of Mr. Anthony Trollope. This tendency has been carried to an extreme by some English novelists, and above all by the Frenchman, Emile Zola, who have not only thrown aside entirely the romantic element in their fictions, but have shown their ideas of realism to consist in the base and the ignoble, and have confined their studies to the vices and degradation of the human species.

An admirer of Thackeray and an admirer of Zola would consider the works of his favorite author to be realistic, and yet nature appears under very different aspects in the pages of the two novelists. But the partisans of Thackeray and those of Zola would probably unite in the opinion that Sir Walter Scott was not realistic; they would call him romantic, and claim that he painted ideal scenes and ideal characters. But among those who read and re-read the novels of Scott, by far the greater number believe that "The Wizard of the North" was true to nature, that Jeanie Deans and Rob Roy and Meg Merrilies were not impossible characters. There are many who enter into the scenes described by Scott with as much feeling of reality as is experienced by those who follow the career of a Pendennis, of a Duke of Omnium, or of a Nana. A novelist, then, is realistic or not realistic according to the views which he and his reader entertain of nature. To the optimist, to the youthful and romantic, "The Heart of Midlothian" and "Guy Mannering" will seem a truthful representation of life. The more worldly and practical will find their idea of reality in "The Mill on the Floss," in "Vanity Fair," in "The Prime Minister." And finally those whose taste or lot has kept them "raking in the dirt of mankind" will think their view of truth best expressed by "L'Assommoir" or "Nana."