Questions at Issue

by Edmund Gosse

We have but to look around us at this very moment to see how complete the tyranny of the novel is. If one hundred educated and grown men—not, of course, themselves the authors of other books—were to be asked which are the three most notable works published in London during the season of 1892, would not ninety-and-nine be constrained to answer, with a parrot uniformity, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, David Grieve, The Little Minister? These are the books which have been most widely discussed, most largely bought, most vehemently praised, most venomously attacked. These are the books in which the "trade" has taken most interest, the vitality of which is most obvious and indubitable. It may be said that the conditions of the winter of 1892 were exceptional—that no books of the first class in other branches were produced. This may be true; and yet Mr. Jebb issued a volume of his Sophocles, Mr. William Morris a collection of the lyric poems of years, Mr. Froude his Divorce of Catherine of Aragon, and Mr. Tyndall his New Fragments. If the poets in chorus had blown their silver trumpets and the philosophers their bold bassoons, the result would have been the same: they would have won some respect and a little notice for their performances; but the novelists would have carried away the money and the real human curiosity. Who shall say that Mr. Freeman was not a better historian than Robertson was? yet did he make £4,500 by his History of Sicily? I wish I could believe it. To-day Mr. Swinburne may publish a new epic, Mr. Gardiner discover to us the head of Charles I. on the scaffold, Mr. Herbert Spencer explore a fresh province of sociology, or Mr. Pater analyse devils in the accents of an angel—none of these important occurrences will successfully compete, for more than a few moments, among educated people, with the publication of what is called, in publishers' advertisements, "the new popular and original novel of the hour." We are accustomed to this state of things, and we bow to it. But we may, perhaps, remind ourselves that it is a comparatively recent condition. It was not so in 1730, nor in 1800, nor even in 1835.

Momentary aberrations of fashion must not deceive us as to the general tendency of taste. Mr. Hall Caine would have us believe that the public has suddenly gone crazy for stage-plays. "Novels of great strength and originality," says the author of The Scapegoat, "occasionally appear without creating more than a flutter of interest, and, meanwhile, plays of one-tenth their power and novelty are making something like a profound impression." What plays are these? Not the Ollendorfian attitudinisings of M. Maeterlinck, surely! The fact is that two years ago it would have been impossible for any one to pen that sentence of Mr. Caine's, and it is now possible merely because a passion for the literary drama has been flogged into existence by certain able critics. With a limited class, the same class which appreciates poetry, the literary drama may find a welcome; but to suppose that it competes, or can, in this country, even pretend to compete, with the novel is a delusion, and Mr. Caine may safely abandon his locusts and wild honey.

That we see around us a great interest in the drama is, of course, a commonplace. But how much of that is literary? When the delights of the eye are removed from the sum of pleasure, what is left? Our public is interested in the actors and their art, in the scenery and the furniture, in the notion of large sums of money expended, lost, or won. When all these incidental interests are extracted from the curiosity excited by a play, not very much is left for the purely literary portion of it—not nearly so much, at all events, as is awakened by a great novel. After all that has been said about the publication of plays, I expect that the sale of dramatic contemporary literature remains small and uncertain. Mr. Pinero is read; but one swallow does not make a summer. Where are the dramatic works of Mr. Sydney Grundy, which ought—if Mr. Caine be correct—to be seen on every book-shelf beside the stories of Mr. Hawley Smart?

If, however, I venture to emphasise the fact of the tyranny of the novel in our current literature, it is without a murmur that I do so. Like the harmless bard in Lady Geraldine's Courtship, I "write no satire," and, what is more, I mean none. It appears to me natural and rational that this particular form of writing should attract more readers than any other. It is so broad and flexible, includes so vast a variety of appeals to the emotions, makes so few painful demands upon an overstrained attention, that it obviously lays itself out to please the greatest number. For the appreciation of a fine poem, of a learned critical treatise, of a contribution to exact knowledge, peculiar aptitudes are required: the novel is within everybody's range. Experience, moreover, proves that the gentle stimulus of reading about the cares, passions, and adventures of imaginary personages, and their relations to one another—a mild and irresponsible mirroring of real life on a surface undisturbed by responsibility, or memory, or personal feeling of any kind—is the most restful, the most refreshing, of all excitements which literature produces.

It is commonly said, in all countries, that women are the chief readers of novels. It may well be that they are the most numerous, and that they read more exhaustively than men, and with less selection. They have, as a rule, more time. The general notion seems to be that girls of from sixteen to twenty form the main audience of the novelist. But I am inclined to think that the real audience consists of young married women, sitting at home in the first year of their marriage. They find themselves without any constraint upon their reading: they choose what they will, and they read incessantly. The advent of the first-born baby is awaited in silent drawing-rooms, where through long hours the novelists supply the sole distraction. These young matrons form a much better audience than those timorous circles of flaxen-haired girls, watched by an Argus-eyed mamma, which the English novelist seems to consider himself doomed to cater for. I cannot believe that it is anything but a fallacy that young girls do read. They are far too busy with parties and shopping, chatting and walking, the eternal music and the eternal tennis. Middle-aged people in the country, who are cut off from much society, and elderly ladies, whose activities are past, and who like to resume the illusions of youth, are far more assiduous novel-readers than girls.

But, if we take these and all other married and unmarried women into consideration, there is still apparently an exaggeration in saying that it is they who make the novelist's reputation. Men read novels a great deal more than is supposed, and it is probably from men that the first-class novel receives its imprimatur. Men have made Mr. Thomas Hardy, who owes nothing to the fair sex; if women read him now, it is because the men have told them that they must. Occasionally we see a very original writer who decidedly owes his fame to the plaudits of the ladies. M. Paul Bourget is the most illustrious example that occurs to the memory. But such instances are rare, and it is usually to the approval of male readers that eminent novelists owe that prestige which ultimately makes them the favourites of the women. Not all men are pressed by the excessive agitations of business life which are habitually attributed to their sex. Even those who are most busy find time to read, and we were lately informed that among the most constant and assiduous students of new novels were Lord Tennyson and Mr. Gladstone. Every story-teller, I think, ought to write as though he believed himself addressing such conspicuous veterans.

As I say, I do not revolt against the supremacy of the novel. I acknowledge too heavy a debt of gratitude to my great contemporaries to assume any but a thankful attitude towards them. In my dull and weary hours each has come like the angel Israfel, and has invited me to listen to the beating of his heart, be it lyre or guitar, a solemn instrument or a gay one. I should be instantly bankrupt if I sought to repay to Mr. Meredith or Mr. Besant, Mr. Hardy or Mr. Norris, Mr. Stevenson or Mr. Kipling—to name no others—one-tenth part of the pleasure which, in varied quantity and quality, the stories of each have given me. I admit (for which I shall be torn in pieces) that the ladies please me less, with some exceptions; but that is because, since the days of the divine Mrs. Gaskell, they have been so apt to be either too serious or not serious enough. I suppose that the composition of The Daisy Chain and of Donovan serves some excellent purpose; doubtless these books are useful to great growing girls. But it is not to such stories as these that I owe any gratitude, and it is not to their authors that I address the presumptuous remarks which follow.

A question which constantly recurs to my mind is this: Having secured the practical monopoly of literature, having concentrated public attention on their wares, what do the novelists propose to do next? To what use will they put the unprecedented opportunity thrown in their way? It is quite plain that to a certain extent the material out of which the English novel has been constructed is in danger of becoming exhausted. Why do the American novelists inveigh against plots? Not, we may be sure, through any inherent tenderness of conscience, as they would have us believe; but because their eminently sane and somewhat timid natures revolt against the effort of inventing what is extravagant. But all the obvious plots, all the stories which are not in some degree extravagant, seem to have been told already, and for a writer with the temperament of Mr. Howells there is nothing left but the careful portraiture of a small portion of the limitless field of ordinary humdrum existence. So long as this is fresh, this also may amuse and please; to the practitioners of this kind of work it seems as though the infinite prairie of life might be surveyed thus for centuries, acre by acre. But that is not possible. A very little while suffices to show that in this direction also the material is promptly exhausted. Novelty, freshness, and excitement are to be sought for at all hazards, and where can they be found?

The novelists hope many things from that happy system of nature which supplies them, year by year, with fresh generations of the ingenuous young. The procession of adolescence moves on and on, and the front rank of it, for a month or a year, is duped by the novelist's report of that astonishing phenomenon, the passion of love. In a certain sense, we might expect to be tired of love-stories as soon as, and not before, we grow tired of the ever-recurring March mystery of primroses and daffodils. Each generation takes its tale of love under the hawthorn-tree as something quite new, peculiar to itself, not to be comprehended by its elders; and the novelist pipes as he will to this idyllic audience, sure of pleasing, if he adapt himself never so little to their habits and the idiosyncrasies of their time.

That theory would work well enough if the novelist held the chair of Erotics at the University of Life, and might blamelessly repeat the same (or very slightly modified) lectures to none but the students of each successive year. But, unfortunately, we who long ago took our degree, who took it, perhaps, when the Professor was himself in pinafores, also continue to attend his classes. We are hardly to be put off with the old, old commonplaces about hearts and darts. Yet our adult acquiescence is necessary for the support of the Professor. How is he to freshen up his oft-repeated course of lectures to suit our jaded appetites?