We do not forget that the most remarkable Mannerists that have appeared in this century were male authors—Thackeray and Dickens. But we are not now attempting to survey the whole field of modern English fiction, or to assign to every star its place in that wide firmament. Our aim is only to indicate the main lines of filiation that have produced the prevailing novel of the day. The permanent influence of the two great artists who have been mentioned has not been, we think, proportionate to the rare and original value of their work. Both of them had many imitators in their lifetime and for a little time afterward; but before they died they were both showing symptoms of loss of power; and one could see that the special fibre or faculty that distinguished them was becoming overstrained; it was betraying effort and exaggeration. In their latest productions their peculiar qualities became mannerisms, of which readers soon began to be weary; and this may partly account for the speedy subsequent diversion of the popular taste into other channels. At any rate they did not found an enduring school, like Jane Austen, of whom it may be said that a great proportion of those novels of ordinary society which fill annually the lists of circulating libraries may be referred to her work as their type and forerunner. The novels of Anthony Trollope, for example, follow very much the same range of subject, the same level of emotion and incident; they consist mainly of satirical yet good-humoured descriptions of middle-class life in the country, the suburbs, and occasionally in the higher walks of society—they are always decorous and never dull, but they never rise to the note of romance or adventure. It may even be added, in further proof of Trollope's literary ancestry, that the predominant quality of these very clever but eminently commonplace stories, with their interminable flirtations and their amusing dialogues which might have been reported by phonograph, is essentially feminine.
Our view is, therefore, that three famous women authors accomplished for the Novel of Manners very much what Scott at the same period did for the Novel of Adventure; they stamped its lasting form and shaped its subsequent development. And in both classes, in tales of adventure as of society, we may detect clearly the rising spirit of what has been since called Realism or Naturalism, the discarding of convention, the abandonment of mere attitudes for action studied from the life, the direct appropriation of material from surrounding facts and perceptible feelings, from the familiar humours and concerns of everyday existence. In Le Roman Naturaliste, by M. Brunetière, one chapter is allotted to English Naturalism, and the author declares that the standard of Naturalism was raised in 1859 by the author of Adam Bede, quoting certain passages in which George Eliot, he says, has distinctly preached the fundamental doctrines of that school. Undoubtedly George Eliot declared her purpose to be the rendering of a faithful account of men and things as they mirrored themselves in her mind. 'I feel as much bound,' she says, 'to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box narrating my evidence on oath'; and she set up as her ideal 'this rare precious quality of truthfulness, for which I delight in many Dutch paintings.' But the cardinal virtue of this fine and sombre genius lay in her power of raising Realism to a high artistic level, of diffusing a poetic light over humble scenes, of touching the deeper and vital relations of common things. In Charlotte Brontë, again, we have Naturalism throwing out a fresh shoot of great vigour and originality; the old-fashioned masculine hero is supplanted by a heroine who strives against adverse circumstance upon an ordinary, often an humble, plane of society, never travelling for a moment beyond the possibilities of everyday existence. This ominous dismissal of the male hero from his previous position in the centre of the story's movement may be taken as a sign that he is not of so much account in the sphere of domestic fiction as he was erst in the arena of perilous adventure. It is true that mankind is still glorified by Ouida, a lady who may yet be occasionally found sitting, almost alone, by the shores of old Romance; but with Mrs. Gaskell, Mrs. Oliphant, Miss Broughton, and even Miss Braddon, the majority of their leading characters may be said to be female. And the most deservedly popular of our latest novels by women is Marcella.
We must not be understood to maintain that the Novel of Manners has been, or is being, completely monopolised, as a department of light literature, by women, for of course there are many men who are achieving success in that field, among whom Henry James holds a high place for distinction and delicacy of workmanship. And among certain special branches in which women have not as yet competed at all, we may mention the Sporting Novel, where provincial manners and the humour of the coverside have been portrayed by Surtees with wonderful exactitude and a kind of coarse yet irresistible comicality that remind one of Fielding. It is true that he never moralises, as Fielding does; but then the interjection by the author of moral reflections went out, as we have said, with Thackeray. The description of landscape drawn from nature occupies large and extending space in the latter-day novel of manners, where it is used very sparingly as subservient to character or situation, but commonly as an illustration or pictorial background. Let us compare the two following extracts. The first is from Jane Austen's Mansfield Park:
'Now we shall have no more rough road, Miss Crawford; our difficulties are over. The rest of the way is such as it ought to be. Mr. Rushworth has made it since he succeeded to the estate.—Here begins the village. Those cottages are really a disgrace. The church spire is reckoned remarkably handsome. I am glad the church is not so close to the great House as often happens in old places. The annoyance of the bells must be terrible. There is the parsonage, a tidy-looking house, and I understand the clergyman and his wife are very decent people. Those are almshouses, built by some of the family. To the right is the steward's house; he is a very respectable man. Now we are coming to the lodge gates; but we have nearly a mile through the park still. It is not ugly, you see, at this end; there is some fine timber, but the situation of the house is dreadful. We go down hill to it for half a mile, and it is a pity, for it would not be an ill-looking place if it had a better approach.'
The second is from the opening pages of Mrs. Humphry Ward's Marcella:
'She looked out upon a broad and level lawn, smoothed by the care of centuries, flanked on either side by groups of old trees—some Scotch firs, some beeches, a cedar or two—groups where the slow selective hand of Time had been at work for generations, developing here the delightful roundness of quiet mass and shade, and there the bold caprice of bare fir trunks and ragged branches, standing back against the sky. Beyond the lawn stretched a green descent indefinitely long, carrying the eye indeed almost to the limit of the view, and becoming from the lawn onwards a wide irregular avenue, bordered by beeches of a splendid maturity, ending at last in a far distant gap where a gate—and a gate of some importance—clearly should have been, yet was not. The size of the trees, the wide uplands of the falling valley to the left of the avenue, now rich in the tints of harvest, the autumn sun pouring steadily through the vanishing mists, the green breadth of the vast lawn, the unbroken peace of wood and cultivated ground, all carried with them a confused general impression of well-being and of dignity. Marcella drew it in—this impression—with avidity. Yet at the same moment she noticed involuntarily the gateless gap at the end of the avenue, the choked condition of the garden paths on either side of the lawn, and the unsightly tufts of grass spotting the broad gravel terrace beneath her window.'
In the former passage, which is brimful of humorous suggestion, the writer is exclusively intent upon setting out points of human character in an effective light. The latter is a highly-finished piece of word-painting, taken direct, as an artist would take a picture, from a landscape that lay before the writer, and as such it is excellently done; but, except for the slight indication of a neglected estate, it stands apart from the plot or the play of character, and might be bound up with the volume or omitted like a woodcut. Undoubtedly the art of descriptive writing, which demands poetic feeling and a delicate hand upon the organ of language, is practised finely by the best of our modern novelists, and is a valuable element of their popularity. Yet there are signs that it is already threatened by the inexorable demands of the lower realism, which takes slight account of the intimations that can be conveyed or the emotions that may be roused by using language as an instrument for the interpretation of nature, and requires to be shown the thing itself, as it is seen in a photograph. 'The tendency of the times,' we are told, 'seems to be to read less and less, and to depend more upon pictorial records of events.' And the author from whom we quote[6] proceeds to show how a few lines of sketch at once elucidate and vivify whole pages of word-painting. He goes further, and relates how 'the fallacy of the accepted system of describing landscapes, buildings, and the like in words,' was proved experimentally by reading slowly a description of a castle, mountains, and a river winding to the sea, from one of the Waverley novels, before a number of students, three of whom proceeded to indicate on a black board the leading lines of the mental picture produced by the words. The drawings were all different and all wrong, as might indeed have been confidently foretold; for the two sister arts of the pen and of the pencil cannot possibly interpret each other reciprocally after this fashion, or produce identical effects by their widely differing methods.
Yet it is not impossible that the lower ranks of writers, who exaggerate the prevailing fashion of exactly reproducing what any one can see and hear, may find themselves outbid and overpowered on this ground by illustration in line and colour. In this direction, indeed, lies the danger of extreme Realism. It wages war against Romance, which subsists upon idealistic conceptions of noble thought and action; it pretends to hold up a true mirror to society, because it reflects faithfully and without discrimination, like a photograph, the street, the club, or the drawing-room, and arranges dramatically the commonplace talk of everyday people. All this is fatal to high art, in writing as in painting; nor can very clever dialogue, ingenious situations, variety of style and subject, or even a high average morality, preserve such literature from triviality and gradual degradation.
It is the saying of a French writer, that the novel of to-day has abjured both the past and the future, and lives wholly in the present. We are so far of his opinion in regard to the past, that we doubt, for reasons already given, whether the reading public can be induced to travel backward into distant periods and unfamiliar scenes, even though facts, anecdotes, costume, and other accessories be scrupulously and historically exact. The future is a domain upon which the novelist has rarely trespassed; but in close propinquity to it lies theologic speculation, and we have not long ago witnessed the fascination that can be exercised over a multitude of readers by a novel which described the unhappiness brought upon the peaceful home of an Anglican clergyman who was driven forth from his parsonage by imbibing some tincture of modern Biblical criticism. The sensation, for so it must be called, produced by Robert Elsmere, illustrated the degree to which in these days popularity depends on hitting the intellectual level of the general reader, and on touching the fancy or the conscience of that very numerous class whose culture is of the medium sort, neither high nor low. For while it seems certain that to a great many people the views and arguments which overthrew Elsmere's orthodoxy and brought him to martyrdom must have seemed profound, daring, and novel, to others they are but too familiar and by no means fresh. To some of us, indeed, the overpowering effect produced on Elsmere's mind by his remarkable discoveries may be not unlike the awe and gratitude with which an African chief receives the present of an obsolete cannon. But the main reason why the future is no better field than the distant past for the modern novelist, is that in both cases there is a want of actuality, and that the positive temper of the age requires in either case something more definite and verifiable.