It is not possible in a paper of this length to inquire into the foundations of sentimentality and romance. Practically, however, what we call a romantic life is one full of romantic incidents which come unsought, as the natural consequence and result of a man’s or a woman’s character. It is therefore necessarily an exceptional life, and as such should have exceptional interest for the majority. When our lives are not filled with emotions, they are too often crammed with insignificant details too insignificant to bear recording in a novel, but yet making up for each of us all the significance life has. The great emotions are not every-day phenomena, and it is the desire to experience them vicariously which creates the demand for fiction and thereby and at the same time a demand for emotion. This is felt more particularly nowadays than formerly.
There was a great deal of artificiality in the last century, and I believe very little real emotion or true sentiment. The evidences of the truth of this statement appear sufficiently, I think, in the current literature, the music, and the social manners of that time. Of the three the music alone has survived. Musicians constitute, in a certain sense, a caste, not unlike the Christian priesthood or the Buddhist brotherhood. Their art is more distinctly handed down from teacher to scholar, from master to pupil, than any other, and this may perhaps account for their unwillingness to break through their traditions and accepted rules. Few persons, however, can listen to an average symphony for orchestra, or sonata for piano, especially to the allegro movements, without being struck by the utter conventionality and artificiality of many parts of the production. This, it seems to me, is not due to the instinct of the musician, nor to the taste of the musical public, but is a distinct survival of a former existence, as much as the caudal appendage or the buttons on the backs of our coats. This is probably rank heresy from the musical point of view, and, like all I say here, is a mere personal opinion; but to judge by analogy from the remains of other arts cultivated a hundred years ago, there seems to be some foundation for it. Can any one see such plays acted, for instance, as Sheridan’s, without being forcibly struck by the total absence of spontaneity and the absolute submission to social routine of the average society man and woman of those days. Sheridan’s comedies are undoubtedly as true to their times on the one hand as they are to human nature on the other, but the humanity of them is thrown into vivid and strong relief by the artificiality of the elements in the midst of which the chief actors have their being. As for the literature, it is hardly necessary for me to defend the statement that it was conventional. There was an intellectual dress, as it were, put on by the man of genius of those times. It hung loosely upon Goldsmith’s irregular frame. It sat close, well-fitting and fashionable upon Addison, but Samuel Johnson’s mighty limbs almost burst its seams and betrayed at every movement the giant who wore it. On a sudden the fashion changed, and it has not done changing yet.
The French Revolution seems to have introduced an emotional phase into social history, and to it we must attribute directly or indirectly many of our present tastes and fashions. With it began the novel in France. With it the novel in the English language made a fresh start and assumed a new form. To take a very simple view of the question, I should like to hazard, as a guess, the theory that when the world had lived at a very high pressure during the French Revolution, the wars of Napoleon, and what has been called the “awakening of the peoples,” it had acquired permanently “the emotional habit,” just as a man who takes opium or morphia cannot do without the one or the other. There was a general desire felt to go on experiencing without dangerous consequences those varying conditions of hope, fear, disappointment and triumph in which the whole world’s nervous system had thrilled daily during so many years and at such fearful cost. The children of the women who had gone to the scaffold with Marie Antoinette, the sons of the men who had charged with Murat, who had stood by La Tour d’Auvergne, or who had fired their parting shot with Ney, were not satisfied to dwell in returning peace and reviving prosperity with nothing but insipid tales of shepherds and shepherdesses to amuse them. They wanted sterner, rougher stuff. They created a demand, and it was forthwith supplied, and their children and children’s children have followed their progenitors’ footsteps in war and have adopted their tastes in peace.
MODERN civilisation, too, has done what it could to stir the hearts of men. Evil communications corrupt good manners, and it is not a play upon words to say that the increased facility of actual communications has widened and deepened those channels of communication which are evil, and increased at the same time the demand for all sorts of emotion, bad or good. Not that emotion of itself is bad. It is often the contrary. Even the momentary reflection of true love is a good thing in itself. It is good that men and women should realise that a great affection is, or can be, a reality to many as well as a convenient amusement or a heart-rending drama to a few.
Modern civilisation has created modern vices, modern crimes, modern virtues, austerities, and generosities. The crimes of to-day were not dreamed of a hundred years ago, any more than the sublimity of the good deeds done in our time to remedy our time’s mistakes. And between the angel and the beast of this ending century lie great multitudes of ever-shifting, ever-changing lives, neither very bad nor very good, but in all cases very different from what lives used to be in the good old days when time meant time and not money. There, too, in that vast land of mediocrities, emotions play a part of which our grandfathers never heard, and being real, of the living, and of superior interest to those who feel them, reflect themselves in the novel of to-day, diverting the course of true love into very tortuous channels and varying the tale that is ever young with features that are often new. Within a short few months I myself have lived in a land where modern means of communication are not, and I have come to live here, where applied science is doing her best to eliminate distance as a factor from the equation of exchanges, financial and intellectual. The difference between the manifestations of human feeling in Southern Italy and North America is greater and wider than can be explained in intelligible terms. Yet it is but skin-deep. Sentiment, sentimentality, taste, fashion, daily speech, acquired science, and transmitted tradition cleanse, soil, model, or deface the changing shell of mutable mortality, and nothing which appeals to that shell alone can have permanent life; but the prime impulses of the heart are, broadly speaking, the same in all ages and almost in all races. The brave man’s beats as strongly in battle to-day, the coward’s stands as suddenly still in the face of danger, boys and girls still play with love, men and women still suffer for love, and the old still warn youth and manhood against love’s snares—all that and much more comes from depths not reached by civilisations nor changed by fashions. Those deep waters the real novel must fathom, sounding the tide-stream of passion and bringing up such treasures as lie far below and out of sight—out of reach of the individual in most cases—until the art of the story-teller makes him feel that they are or might be his. Cæsar commanded his legionaries to strike at the face. Humanity, the novelist’s master, bids him strike only at the heart.
LIST OF WORKS
BY
Mr. F. Marion Crawford.
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