It does not appear that in the thirties any one understood what was happening. The stuff produced by the novelists was so ridiculous and ignoble that "the nonsinse of that divil of a Bullwig" seemed absolutely unrivalled in its comparative sublimity, although these were the days of Ernest Maltravers. It never occurred to the authors when the public suddenly declined to read their books (it read "Bullwig's," in the lack of anything else) that the fault was theirs. The same excuses were made that are made now,—"necessary to write down to a wide audience;" "obliged to supply the kind of article demanded;" "women the only readers to be catered for;" "mammas so solicitous for the purity of what is laid before their daughters." And the crash came.
The crash will come again, if the novelists do not take care. The same silly piping of the loves of the drawing-room, the same obsequious attitude towards a supposititious public clamouring for the commonplace, inspire the majority of the novel-writers of to-day. Happily, we have, what our fathers in 1835 had not, half a dozen careful and vigorous men of letters who write, not what the foolish publishers ask for, but what they themselves choose to give. The future rests with these few recognised masters of fiction, and with their successors, the vigorous younger men who are preparing to take their place. What are these novelists going to do? They were set down to farm the one hundred acres of an estate called Life, and because one corner of it—the two or three acres hedged about, and called the kitchen-garden of Love—offered peculiar attractions, and was very easy to cultivate, they have neglected the other ninety-seven acres. The result is that by over-pressing their garden, and forcing crop after crop out of it, it is well-nigh exhausted, and will soon refuse to respond to the incessant hoe and spade; while, all the time, the rest of the estate, rich and almost virgin soil, is left to cover itself with the weeds of newspaper police-reports.
It is supposed that to describe one of the positive employments of life,—a business or a profession, for example,—would alienate the tender reader, and check that circulation about which novelists talk as nervously as if they were delicate invalids. But what evidence is there to show that an attention to real things does frighten away the novel reader? The experiments which have been made in this country to widen the field of fiction in one direction, that of religious and moral speculation, have not proved unfortunate. What was the source of the great popular success of John Inglesant and then of Robert Elsmere, if not the intense delight of readers in being admitted, in a story, to a wider analysis of the interior workings of the mind than is compatible with the mere record of the billing and cooing of the callow young? We are afraid of words and titles. We are afraid of the word "psychology," and, indeed, we have seen follies committed in its name. But the success of the books I have just mentioned was due to their psychology, to their analysis of the effect of associations and sentiments on a growing mind. To make such studies of the soul even partially interesting, a great deal of knowledge, intuition, and workmanlike care must be expended. The novelist must himself be acquainted with something of the general life of man.
But the interior life of the soul is, after all, a very much less interesting study to an ordinarily healthy person than the exterior. It is surprising how little our recent novelists have taken this into consideration. One reason, I cannot doubt, is that they write too early and they write too fast. Fielding began with Joseph Andrews, when he was thirty-five; seven years later he published Tom Jones; during the remainder of his life, which closed when he was forty-seven, he composed one more novel. The consequence is that into these three books he was able to pour the ripe knowledge of an all-accomplished student of human nature. But our successful novelist of to-day begins when he is two- or three-and-twenty. He "catches on," as they say, and he becomes a laborious professional writer. He toils at his novels as if he were the manager of a bank or the captain of an ocean steamer. In one narrow groove he slides up and down, up and down, growing infinitely skilful at his task of making bricks out of straw. He finishes the last page of "The Writhing Victim" in the morning, lunches at his club, has a nap; and, after dinner, writes the first page of "The Swart Sombrero." He cannot describe a trade or a profession, for he knows none but his own. He has no time to look at life, and he goes on weaving fancies out of the ever-dwindling stores of his childish and boyish memories. As these grow exhausted, his works get more and more shadowy, till at last even the long-suffering public that once loved his merits, and then grew tolerant of his tricks, can endure him no longer.
The one living novelist who has striven to give a large, competent, and profound view of the movement of life is M. Zola. When we have said the worst of the Rougon-Macquart series, when we have admitted the obvious faults of these books—their romantic fallacies on the one hand, their cold brutalities on the other—it must be admitted that they present the results of a most laudable attempt to cultivate the estate outside the kitchen-garden. Hardly one of the main interests of the modern man has been neglected by M. Zola, and there is no doubt at all that to the future student of nineteenth-century manners his books will have an interest outweighing that of all other contemporary novels. An astonishing series of panoramas he has unrolled before us. Here is Le Ventre de Paris, describing the whole system by which a vast modern city is daily supplied with food; here is Au Bonheur des Dames, the romance of a shop, which is pushed upwards and outwards by the energy of a single ambitious tradesman, until it swamps all its neighbours, and governs the trade of a district; here is L'Argent, in which, with infinite pains and on a colossal scale, the passions which move in la haute finance are analysed, and a great battle of the money-world chronicled; here, above all, is Germinal, that unapproachable picture of the agony and stress of life in a great mining community, with a description of the processes so minute and so technical that this novel is quoted by experts as the best existing record of conditions which are already obsolete.
In these books of M. Zola's, as everyone knows, successive members of a certain family stand out against a background of human masses in incessant movement. The peculiar characteristic of this novelist is that he enables us to see why these masses are moved, and in what direction. Other writers vaguely tell us that the hero "proceeded to his daily occupation," if, indeed, they deign to allow that he had an occupation. M. Zola tells us what that occupation was, and describes the nature of it carefully and minutely. More than this: he shows us how it affected the hero's character, how it brought him into contact with others, in what way it represented his share of the universal struggle for existence. So far from the employment being a thing to be slurred over or dimly alluded to, M. Zola loves to make that the very hero of his piece, a blind and vast commercial monster, a huge all-embracing machine, in whose progress the human persons are hurried helplessly along, in whose iron wheels their passions and their hopes are crushed. He is enabled to do this by the exceptional character of his genius, which is realistic to excess in its power of retaining and repeating details, and romantic, also to an extreme, in its power of massing these details on a huge scale, in vast and harmoniously-balanced compositions.
I would not be misunderstood, even by the most hasty reader, to recommend an imitation of M. Zola. What suits his peculiarly-constituted genius might ill accord with the characteristics of another. Nor do I mean to say that we are entirely without something analogous in the writings of the more intelligent of our later novelists. The study of the Dorsetshire dairy-farms in Mr. Hardy's superb Tess of the D'Urbervilles is of the highest value, and more thorough and intelligible than what we enjoyed in The Woodlanders, the details of the apple-culture in the same county. To turn to a totally different school: Mr. Hall Caine's Scapegoat is a very interesting experiment in fresh fields of thought and experience, more happily conceived, if I may be permitted to say so, than fortunately executed, though even in execution far above the ruck of popular novels. A new Cornish story, called Inconsequent Lives, by that very promising young story-teller, Mr. Pearce, seemed, when it opened, to be about to give us just the vivid information we want about the Newlyn pilchard-fishery; but the novelist grew timid, and forebore to fill in his sketch. The experiments of Mr. George Gissing and of Mr. George Moore deserve sympathetic acknowledgment. These are instances in which, occasionally, or fantastically, or imperfectly, the real facts of life have been dwelt upon in recent fiction. But when we have mentioned or thought of a few exceptions, to what inanities do we not presently descend!
If we could suddenly arrive from another planet, and read a cluster of novels from Mudie's, without any previous knowledge of the class, we should be astonished at the conventionality, the narrowness, the monotony. All I ask for is a larger study of life. Have the stress and turmoil of a successful political career no charm? Why, if novels of the shop and the counting-house be considered sordid, can our novelists not describe the life of a sailor, of a gamekeeper, of a railway-porter, of a civil engineer? What capital central figures for a story would be the whip of a leading hunt, the foreman of a colliery, the master of a fishing smack, or a speculator on the Stock Exchange! It will be suggested that persons engaged in one or other of these professions are commonly introduced into current fiction, and that I am proposing as a novelty what is amply done already. My reply is that our novelists may indeed present to us a personage who is called a stoker or a groom, a secretary of state or a pin-maker, but that, practically, they merely write these denominations clearly on the breasts of lay-figures. For all the enlightenment we get into the habits of action and habits of thought entailed by the occupation of each, the fisherman might be the groom and the pin-maker the stock-broker. It is more than this that I ask for. I want to see the man in his life. I am tired of the novelist's portrait of a gentleman, with gloves and hat, leaning against a pillar, upon a vague landscape background. I want the gentleman as he appears in a snap-shot photograph, with his every-day expression on his face, and the localities in which he spends his days accurately visible around him. I cannot think that the commercial and professional aspects of life are unworthy of the careful attention of the novelist, or that he would fail to be rewarded by a larger and more interested audience for his courage in dealing closely with them. At all events, if it is too late to ask our accepted tyrants of the novel to enlarge their borders, may we not, at all events, entreat their heirs-apparent to do so?
1892