The Novel; what it is

by F. Marion Crawford

WHAT IS A NOVEL?

MY answer can only be a statement of opinion, which I make with much deference to the prejudices of my brethren. Whether it will be of interest to general readers I do not know; but the question I propose is in itself more or less vital as regards novel-writing. No one will deny that truism. Before going to work it is important to know what one means to do. I pretend, however, to no special gift for solving problems in general or this one in particular. To give “the result of one’s experience,” as the common phrase puts it, is by no means so easy as it sounds. An intelligent man mostly knows what he means by his own words, but it does not follow that he can convey that meaning to others. Almost all discussion and much misunderstanding may fairly be said to be based upon the difference between the definitions of common terms as understood by the two parties. In the exact sciences there is no such thing as discussion; there is the theorem and its demonstration, there is the problem and its solution, from which solution and demonstration there is no appeal. That is because, in mathematics, every word is defined before it is used and is almost meaningless until it has been defined.

It has been remarked by a very great authority concerning the affairs of men that “of making many books there is no end,” and to judge from appearances the statement is even more true to-day than when it was first made. Especially of making novels there is no end, in these times of latter-day literature. No doubt many wise and good persons and many excellent critics devoutly wish that there might be; but they are not at present strong enough to stand against us, the army of fiction-makers, because we are many, and most of us do not know how to do anything else, and have grown grey in doing this particular kind of work, and are dependent upon it for bread as well as butter; and lastly and chiefly, because we are heavily backed, as a body, by the capital of the publisher, of which we desire to obtain for ourselves as much as possible. Therefore novels will continue to be written, perhaps for a long time to come. There is a demand for them and there is profit in producing them. Who shall prevent us, authors and publishers, from continuing the production and supplying the demand?

This brings with it a first answer to the question, “What is a novel?” A novel is a marketable commodity, of the class collectively termed “luxuries,” as not contributing directly to the support of life or the maintenance of health. It is of the class “artistic luxuries” because it does not appeal to any of the three material senses—touch, taste, smell; and it is of the class “intellectual artistic luxuries,” because it is not judged by the superior senses—sight and hearing. The novel, therefore, is an intellectual artistic luxury—a definition which can be made to include a good deal, but which is, in reality, a closer one than it appears to be at first sight. No one, I think, will deny that it covers the three principal essentials of the novel as it should be, of a story or romance, which in itself and in the manner of telling it shall appeal to the intellect, shall satisfy the requirements of art, and shall be a luxury, in that it can be of no use to a man when he is at work, but may conduce to peace of mind and delectation during his hours of idleness. The point upon which people differ is the artistic one, and the fact that such differences of opinion exist makes it possible that two writers as widely separated as Mr. Henry James and Mr. Rider Haggard, for instance, find appreciative readers in the same year of the same century—a fact which the literary history of the future will find it hard to explain.

PROBABLY no one denies that the first object of the novel is to amuse and interest the reader. But it is often said that the novel should instruct as well as afford amusement, and the “novel-with-a-purpose” is the realisation of this idea. We might invent a better expression than that clumsy translation of the neat German “Tendenz-Roman.” Why not compound the words and call the odious thing a “purpose-novel”? The purpose-novel, then, proposes to serve two masters, besides procuring a reasonable amount of bread and butter for its writer and publisher. It proposes to escape from my definition of the novel in general and make itself an “intellectual moral lesson” instead of an “intellectual artistic luxury.” It constitutes a violation of the unwritten contract tacitly existing between writer and reader. So far as supply and demand are concerned, books in general and works of fiction in particular are commodities and subject to the same laws, statutory and traditional, as other articles of manufacture. A toy-dealer would not venture to sell real pistols to little boys as pop-guns, and a gun-maker who should try to sell the latter for army revolvers would get into trouble, even though he were able to prove that the toy was as expensive to manufacture as the real article, or more so, silver-mounted, chiselled, and lying in a Russia-leather case. I am not sure that the law might not support the purchaser in an action for damages if he discovered at a critical moment that his revolver was a plaything. It seems to me that there is a similar case in the matter of novels. A man buys what purports to be a work of fiction, a romance, a novel, a story of adventure, pays his money, takes his book home, prepares to enjoy it at his ease, and discovers that he has paid a dollar for somebody’s views on socialism, religion, or the divorce laws.

Such books are generally carefully suited with an attractive title. The binding is as frivolous as can be desired. The bookseller says it is “a work of great power,” and there is probably a sentimental dedication on the fly-leaf to a number of initials to which a romantic appearance is given by the introduction of a stray “St.” and a few hyphens. The buyer is possibly a conservative person, of lukewarm religious convictions, whose life is made “barren by marriage, or death, or division”—and who takes no sort of interest in the laws relating to divorce, in the invention of a new religion, or the position of the labour question. He has simply paid money, on the ordinary tacit contract between furnisher and purchaser, and he has been swindled, to use a very plain term for which a substitute does not occur to me. Or say that a man buys a seat in one of the regular theatres. He enters, takes his place, preparing to be amused, and the curtain goes up. The stage is set as a church, there is a pulpit before the prompter’s box, and the Right Reverend the Bishop of the Diocese is on the point of delivering a sermon. The man would be legally justified in demanding his money at the door, I fancy, and would probably do so, though he might admit that the Bishop was the most learned and edifying of preachers. There are indeed certain names and prefixes to names which suggest serious reading, independently of the words printed on the title-page of the book. If the Archbishop of Canterbury, or General Booth, or the Emperor William published a novel, for instance, the work might reasonably be expected to contain an exposition of personal views on some question of the day. But in ordinary cases the purpose-novel is a simple fraud, besides being a failure in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand.

What we call a novel may educate the taste and cultivate the intelligence; under the hand of genius it may purify the heart and fortify the mind; it should never under any circumstances be suffered to deprave the one nor to weaken the other; it may stand for scores of years—and a score of years is a long time in our day—as the exposition of all that is noble, heroic, honest, and true in the life of woman or man; but it has no right to tell us what its writer thinks about the relations of labour and capital, nor to set up what the author conceives to be a nice, original, easy scheme of salvation, any more than it has a right to take for its theme the relative merits of the “broomstick-car” and the “storage system,” temperance, vivisection, or the “Ideal Man” of Confucius. Lessons, lectures, discussions, sermons, and didactics generally belong to institutions set apart for especial purposes and carefully avoided, after a certain age, by the majority of those who wish to be amused. The purpose-novel is an odious attempt to lecture people who hate lectures, to preach at people who prefer their own church, and to teach people who think they know enough already. It is an ambush, a lying-in-wait for the unsuspecting public, a violation of the social contract—and as such it ought to be either mercilessly crushed or forced by law to bind itself in black and label itself “Purpose” in very big letters.

IN art of all kinds the moral lesson is a mistake. It is one thing to exhibit an ideal worthy to be imitated, though inimitable in all its perfection, but so clearly noble as to appeal directly to the sympathetic string that hangs untuned in the dullest human heart; to make man brave without arrogance, woman pure without prudishness, love enduring yet earthly, not angelic, friendship sincere but not ridiculous. It is quite another matter to write a “guide to morality” or a “hand-book for practical sinners” and call either one a novel, no matter how much fiction it may contain. Wordsworth tried the moral lesson and spoiled some of his best work with botany and the Bible. A good many smaller men than he have tried the same thing since, and have failed. Perhaps “Cain” and “Manfred” have taught the human heart more wisdom than “Matthew” or the unfortunate “idiot boy” over whom Byron was so mercilessly merry. And yet Byron probably never meant to teach any one anything in particular, and Wordsworth meant to teach everybody, including and beginning with himself.

There are, I believe, two recognised ways of looking at art: art for the public or “art for art,” to adopt the current French phrase. Might we not say, Art for the buyer and art for the seller? Or is that too practical a view to take of what is supposed to be so eminently unpractical as art itself? Has it not been said similarly, and with truth, that religion is for man, and not man for religion? Is it our province to please those who read our works, or to force them to please us by buying them? Do not these questions lie at the root of the conflict between realism and romance? Are we to take Talleyrand’s speech as our guide?—“I have furnished you with an argument; I am not bound to furnish you with an understanding.” The story is old, but the position it defines is as old as humanity. When a novelist turns prophet, it will be time enough for him to convert his readers at the point of the pen. Are we writers so vain as a class, and so proud of ourselves as men, as to be above affording amusement to our readers without attempting to comfort them, to teach or to preach to them? We are not poets, because we cannot be. We are not genuine playwriters for many reasons; chiefly, perhaps, because we are not clever enough, since a successful play is incomparably more lucrative than a successful novel. We are not preachers, and few of us would be admitted to the pulpit. We are not, as a class, teachers or professors, nor lawyers, nor men of business. We are nothing more than public amusers. Unless we choose we need not be anything less. Let us, then, accept our position cheerfully, and do the best we can to fulfil our mission, without attempting to dignify it with titles too imposing for it to bear, and without degrading it by bringing its productions down even a little way, from the lowest level of high comedy to the highest level of buffoonery. It is good to make people laugh; it is sometimes salutary to make them shed tears; it is best of all to make our readers think—not too serious thoughts, nor such as require an intimate knowledge of science and philosophy to be called thoughts at all—but to think, and, thinking, to see before them characters whom they might really like to resemble, acting in scenes in which they themselves would like to take a part. In trying to amuse, let us be consistent each in his own way, never giving our public a pretext of appealing from Philip drunk to Philip sober. If we have poetry within us, let us put such of it as is worth anything into our books, for almost all poetry which deserves the name is good. But let us keep out of our novels all that savours of preaching and teaching, for our readers’ sakes; and for our own, all such matter as is limited by modern science, present fashion, and actual taste, and which consequently imposes too wilful a limitation upon the permanence of our own work.

BUT I perceive that although this little essay is not a work of fiction, I myself am falling into one of the errors which I have wished to point out, for I am beginning to preach where I have no right to inculcate a lesson, and mean only to express a purely personal opinion in the only matter upon which a novelist is justified in expressing one at all. Moreover, I hereby disclaim all intention of setting an example, since in many points upon which I have touched I admit that I myself am the last of literary sinners; and with this admission of fallibility and confession of weakness I cry peccavi, and ask absolution of the public.