As the nineteenth century drew toward its maturity, the influence of Balzac reinforced the influence of Scott; and realism began to assert its right to substitute itself for romance. The adjustment of character to its appropriate background, the closer connection of fiction with the actual facts of life, the focussing of attention on the normal and the usual rather than on the abnormal and the exceptional––all these steps in advance were more easily taken in the freer form of the novel than they could be in the more restricted formula of the drama; and for the first time in its history prose-fiction found itself a pioneer, achieving a solidity of texture which the theatre had not yet been able to attain.
The novel revealed itself at last as a fit instrument for applied psychology, for the use of those delicate artists who are interested rather in what character is than in xvii what it may chance to do. In the earliest fictions, whether in prose or verse, the hero had been merely a type, little more than a lay-figure capable of violent attitudes, a doer of deeds who, as Professor Gummere has explained, “answered the desire for poetic expression at a time when an individual is merged in the clan.” And as the realistic writers perfected their art, the more acute readers began to perceive that the hero who is a doer of deeds can represent only the earlier stages of culture which we have long outgrown. This hero came to be recognized as an anachronism, out of place in a more modern social organization based on a full appreciation of individuality. He was too much a type and too little an individual to satisfy the demands of those who looked to literature as the mirror of life itself and who had taught themselves to relish what Lowell terms the “punctilious veracity which gives to a portrait its whole worth.”
Thus it was only in the middle years of the nineteenth century, after Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert, after Thackeray and George Eliot, and Hawthorne, that the novel found out its true field. And yet it was in the middle years of the seventeenth century that the ideal to which it was aspiring had been proclaimed frankly by the forgotten Furetière in the preface to his “Roman Bourgeois.” Furetière lacked the skill and the insight needful for the satisfactory attainment of the standard he set up––indeed, the attainment of that standard is beyond the power of most novelists even now. But Furetière’s declaration of the principles which he proposed to follow is as significant now as it was in 1666, when neither the writer himself nor the reader to whom he had to appeal was ripe for the advance which he insisted upon. “I shall tell you,” said Furetière, “sincerely and faithfully, several stories or adventures which happened to persons who are neither heroes nor heroines, xviii who will raise no armies and overthrow no kingdoms, but who will be honest folk of mediocre condition, and who will quietly make their way. Some of them will be good-looking and others ugly. Some of them will be wise and others foolish; and these last, in fact, seem likely to prove the larger number.”
II
The novel had a long road to travel before it became possible for novelists to approach the ideal that Furetière proclaimed and before they had acquired the skill needed to make their readers accept it. And there had also to be a slow development of our own ideas concerning the relation of art to life. For one thing, art had been expected to emphasize a moral; there was even a demand on the drama to be overtly didactic. Less than a score of years after Furetière’s preface there was published an English translation of the Abbé d’Aubignac’s “Pratique du Théâtre” which was entitled the “Whole Art of the Stage” and in which the theory of “poetic justice” was set forth formally. “One of the chiefest, and indeed the most indispensable Rule of Drammatick Poems is that in them Virtues always ought to be rewarded, or at least commended, in spite of all the Injuries of Fortune; and that likewise Vices be always punished or at least detested with Horrour, though they triumph upon the Stage for that time.”
Doctor Johnson was so completely a man of his own century that he found fault with Shakespeare because Shakespeare did not preach, because in the great tragedies virtue is not always rewarded and vice is not always punished. Doctor Johnson and the Abbé d’Aubignac wanted the dramatist to be false to life as we all know it. Beyond all peradventure the wages of sin is death; and yet we have all seen the evil-doer dying in the midst of xix his devoted family and surrounded by all the external evidences of worldly success. To insist that virtue shall be outwardly triumphant at the end of a play or of a novel is to require the dramatist or the novelist to falsify. It is to introduce an element of unreality into fiction. It is to require the story-teller and the playmaker to prove a thesis that common sense must reject.
Any attempt to require the artist to prove anything is necessarily cramping. A true representation of life does not prove one thing only, it proves many things. Life is large, unlimited, and incessant; and the lessons of the finest art are those of life itself; they are not single but multiple. Who can declare what is the single moral contained in the “Œdipus” of Sophocles, the “Hamlet” of Shakespeare, the “Tartufe” of Molière? No two spectators of these masterpieces would agree on the special morals to be isolated; and yet none of them would deny that the masterpieces are profoundly moral because of their essential truth. Morality, a specific moral––this is what the artist cannot deliberately put into his work without destroying its veracity. But morality is also what he cannot leave out if he has striven only to handle his subject sincerely. Hegel is right when he tells us that art has its moral––but the moral depends on him who draws it. The didactic drama and the novel-with-a-purpose are necessarily unartistic and unavoidably unsatisfactory.
This is what the greater artists have always felt; this is what they have often expressed unhesitatingly. Corneille, for one, though he was a man of his time, a creature of the seventeenth century, had the courage to assert that “the utility of a play is seen in the simple depicting of vices and virtues, which never fails to be effective if it is well done and if the traits are so recognizable that they cannot be confounded or mistaken; virtue xx always gets itself loved, however unfortunate, and vice gets itself hated, even though triumphant.” Dryden, again, a contemporary of d’Aubignac and a predecessor of Johnson, had a clearer vision than either of them; and his views are far in advance of theirs. “Delight,” he said, “is the chief if not the only end of poesy,” and by poesy he meant fiction in all its forms; “instruction can be admitted but in the second place, for poetry only instructs as it delights.” And once more, when we pass from the seventeenth century of Corneille and Dryden to the nineteenth century when the novel has asserted its rivalry with the drama, we find the wise Goethe declaring to Eckermann the doctrine which is now winning acceptance everywhere. “If there is a moral in the subject it will appear, and the poet has nothing to consider but the effective and artistic treatment of his subject; if he has as high a soul as Sophocles, his influence will always be moral, let him do what he will.”
A high soul is not given to all writers of fiction, and yet there is an obligation on them all to aspire to the praise bestowed on Sophocles as one who “saw life steadily and saw it whole.” Even the humblest of story-tellers ought to feel himself bound, not to preach, not to point a moral ostentatiously, not to warp the march of events for the sake of so-called “poetic justice,” but to report life as he knows it, making it neither better nor worse, to represent it honestly, to tell the truth about it and nothing but the truth, even if he does not tell the whole truth––which is given to no man to know. This is an obligation that not a few of the foremost writers of fiction have failed to respect. Dickens, for example, is delighted to reform a character in the twinkling of an eye, transforming a bad man into a good man over night, and contradicting all that we know about the permanence of character.