His influence upon nineteenth century English fiction was both direct and indirect. It was direct in its effect upon several of the major novelists, as will be noted in studying them; the indirect influence is perhaps still more important, because it was so all-pervasive, like an emanation that expressed the Time. It became impossible, after Balzac had lived and wrought, for any artist who took his art seriously to write fiction as if the great Frenchman had not come first. He set his seal upon that form of literature, as Ibsen, a generation later, was to set his seal upon the drama, revolutionizing its technique. To the student therefore he is a factor of potent power in explaining the modern fictional development. Nor should he be a negligible quantity to the cultivated reader seeking to come genially into acquaintance with the best that European letters has accomplished. While upon the lover of the Novel as a form of literature—which means the mass of all readers to-day—Balzac cannot fail to exercise a personal fascination.—Life widens before us at his touch, and that glamour which is the imperishable gift of great art, returns again as one turns the pages of the little library of yellow books which contain the Human Comedy.
Balzac died in 1850, when in the prime of his powers. Seven years later was published the "Madame Bovary" of Flaubert, one of the most remarkable novels of the nineteenth century and the most unrelenting depiction of the devolution of a woman's soul in all fiction: certainly it deserved that description up to the hour of its appearance, if not now, when so much has been done in the realm of female pathology. Flaubert is the most noteworthy intermediate figure between Balzac and Zola. He seems personally of our own day, for, living to be an old man, he was friend and fellow-worker with the brothers Goncourt (whom we associate with Zola) and extended a fatherly hand to the young Maupassant at the beginning of the latter's career,—so brilliant, brief, tragic. The influence of this one novel (overlooking that of "Salambo," in its way also of influence in the modern growth) has been especially great upon a kind of fiction most characteristic of the present generation: in which, in fact, it has assumed a "bad preeminence." I mean the Novel of sexual relations in their irregular aspects. The stormy artist of the Goncourt dinners has much to answer for, if we regard him only as the creator of such a creature as Madame Bovary. Many later books were to surpass this in license, in coarseness, or in the effect of evoking a libidinous taste; but none in its unrelenting gloom, the cold detachment of the artist-scientist obsessed with the idea of truthfully reflecting certain sinister facets of the many-faced gem called life! It is hardly too much to say, in the light of the facts, that "Madame Bovary" was epochal. It paved the way for Zola. It justified a new aim for the modern fiction of so-called unflinching realism. The saddest thing about the book is its lack of pity, of love. Emma Bovary is a weak woman, not a bad woman; she goes downhill through the force of circumstances coupled with a want of backbone. And she is not responsible for her flabby moral muscles. Behind the story is an absolutely fatalistic philosophy; given a certain environment, any woman (especially if assisted a bit by her ancestors) will go to hell,—such seems the lesson. Now there is nothing just like this in Balzac, We hear in it a new note, the latter-day note of quiescence, and despair. And if we compare Flaubert's indifference to his heroine's fate with the tenderness of Dumas fils, or of Daudet, or the English Reade and Dickens—we shall realize that we have here a mixture of a personal and a coming general interpretation: Flaubert having by nature a kind of aloof determinism, yet feeling, like the first puffs of a cold chilling wind, the oncoming of an age of Doubt.
III.
These three French writers then, Stendhal, Balzac and Flaubert, molded the Novel before 1860 into such a shape as to make it plastic to the hand of Zola a decade later. Zola's influence upon our present generation of English fiction has been great, as it has upon all novel-making since 1870. Before explaining this further, it will be best to return to the study of the mid-century English novelists who were too early to be affected by him to any perceptible degree.
CHAPTER VIII
DICKENS
By the year 1850, in England, the so-called Novel of realism had conquered. Scott in an earlier generation had by his wonderful gift made the romance fashionable. But, as we said, it was the romance with a difference: the romance with its feet firmly planted on mother-earth, not ballooning in cloudland; the romance depicting men and women of the past but yet men and women, not creatures existing only in the fancy of the romance-maker. In short, Scott, romancer though he was, helped modern realism along, because he handled his material more truthfully than it had been handled before. And his great contemporary, Jane Austen, with her strict adherence to the present and to her own locale, threw all her influence in the same direction, justifying Mr. Howell's assertion that she leads all English novelists in that same truthful handling.
Moreover, that occult but imperative thing, the spirit of the Time, was on the side of Realism: and all bend to its dictation. Then, in the mid-century, Dickens and Thackeray, with George Eliot a little later on their heels, and Trollope too, came to give a deeper set to the current which was to flow in similar channels for the remainder of the period. In brief, this is the story, whatever modifications of the main current are to be noted: the work of Bulwer and Disraeli, of Reade, Kingsley and Collins.
A decade before Thackeray got a general hearing Dickens had fame and mighty influence. It was in the eighteen thirties that the self-made son of an impecunious navy clerk, who did not live in vain since he sat for a portrait of Micawber and the father of the Marshalsea, turned from journalism to that higher reporting which means the fiction of manners and humors. All the gods had prepared him for his destiny. Sympathy he had for the poor, the oppressed, the physically and morally unfit, for he had suffered in his own person, or in his imagination, for them all. His gift of observation had been sharpened in the grim school of necessity: he had learned to write by writing under the pressure of newspaper needs. And he had in his blood, while still hardly more than a lad, a feeling for idiomatic English which, so far as it was not a boon straight from heaven, had been fostered when the very young Charles had battened, as we saw, upon the eighteenth century worthies.
It is now generally acknowledged that Dickens is not a temporary phenomenon in Victorian letters, but a very solid major fact in the native literature, too large a creative force to be circumscribed by a generation. Looked back upon across the gap of time, he looms up all the more impressively because the years have removed the clutter about the base of the statue. The temporary loss of critical regard (a loss affecting his hold on the general reading public little, if any) has given way to an almost violent critical reaction in his favor. We are widening the esthetic canvas to admit of the test of life, and are coming to realize that, obsessed for a time by the attraction of that lower truth which makes so much of external realities, realism lost sight of the larger demands of art which include selection, adaptation, and that enlargement of effect marking the distinction between art and so-called reality. No critic is now timid about saying a good word for the author of "Pickwick" and "Copperfield." A few years ago it was otherwise. Present-day critics such as Henley, Lang, and Chesterton have assured the luke-warm that there is room in English literature for both Thackeray and Dickens.