Tess
A great, perhaps the greatest, living English novelist is, like his lesser brothers, touched by this mysterious blight. Hence Tess has an artistically impossible climax. Mr. Hardy’s fine genius created a noble character in Tess, but his Paganism (for the blight has its origin in Paganism) blinded him to the full grandeur of his own creation. He sees clearly how the tragedy of Tess’s girlhood, the horrible cruelty of which she is the innocent victim, moulds her nature, first stunning her to a degradation from which she quickly revolts, and ultimately leading her through suffering and knowledge of good and evil to a higher purity than that of ignorant innocence, but he cannot see, perhaps because he does not believe in, the impossibility of the final actions he imputes to her, in a nature that had grown to such a height. Vainly is the ivory parasol flourished in the face of the reader, who rejects it as an unreality. But I speak under correction.
Paganism
Whatever Paganism may be to art—and the late Mr. J. A. Symonds thinks it is very good for it—there is no doubt that it is absolutely fatal to creative literature. The pure Pagan, the denying spirit, can have no ideal; it is not that he asserts there is no God, but that he says there is no good; he knows no inward vivifying spirit to produce moral progress; therefore for him character cannot grow, it can only decay, like geraniums touched by frost. This denying spirit, this Paganism, which acknowledges matter because itself is material, and which denies soul and the supernatural, sees in man a mere organism, bound in an eternal ring of sense, a being whose deepest emotions are but animal instincts, variously developed, and whose subtlest thoughts are but emanations from an organ resembling curds; therefore it has only the human animal for its subject in art and literature, and can depict nothing in moral life but its decay. It has no clue to the growth of the living organism, acknowledging not life but only death. Human character is to this Paganism as the rapidly decomposing corpse under the knife and microscope. It is this which in politics produces Nihilism, Socialism, Anarchy, in literature what is known as Zolaism, though Zola is but one of its products, and in France the poetry of the decadence, the acknowledged idolatry of corruption; and it is this which fills European fiction with unsavoury studies in morbid anatomy in place of wholesome, vivifying pictures of living and growing character. One can trace this sterilising influence in Goethe’s life as well as in his works; one sees it beginning in George Eliot, and continuing in the most ambitious English writers of the day; but not in Mr. Hall Caine, whose work, with all its shortcomings, is a protest against it, and who resolutely proclaims the soul of man and his power to rise above his passions and make a stepping-stone of his dead self to something nobler.
The art of developing character
But how acquire the art of developing character in fiction? We may as well try to acquire blue eyes and straight noses, nature having endowed us with aquiline features and black orbs. It is, like the gifts of poetry and cookery, born with us or unattainable, though, like those sources of so much solace to mankind, it may and must be cultivated when present. The means whereto are study and observation of life, and of great literary masterpieces.
That pleasant and light-hearted writer, Mr. James Payn, probably beguiled by the whisper of some tricksy demon, once, to his subsequent acknowledged sorrow, sat down and airily indited an essay in a leading periodical on fiction as a profession, in which he asserted in that gentle and joyous fashion of his that, like any other craft, that of novel-writing can be acquired by study and practice. With a thoughtlessness that Christian charity would fain assume to be devoid of guile, he even expressed an innocent wonder that a profession so easy and inexpensive to acquire, and so delightful as well as lucrative to exercise, was not more sought after by the parents of British youth, who, worthy folk, to do them strict justice, have never been backward in repressing the vice of scribbling in their offspring. It would be unkind to dwell upon the error of Mr. Payn’s ways. Nemesis, in the shape of letters during the next few days from half the parents in the three kingdoms, demanding instant instruction for sons (especially those who had failed in most other things) in the elements of novel-writing, overtook that poor man, and he did fit penance in a subsequent number of the periodical, appearing there in all the humiliation of white sheet, ashes, and taper, and duly confessing, if not his sins, at least his sorrow for their results.
Those who should write
The art of novel-writing is not to be picked up along the primrose path, even when the gift is present; nor is literature, especially in its higher walks, a lucrative profession; it is, as of old, a crutch, but not a staff. It is doubtless comparatively easy, a certain knack being inborn and skill having been acquired, to reel off story after story at the same dead level of mediocrity, but no writer has produced many good novels, or ever will. The world is flooded with fiction, chiefly worthless, but able by sheer volume to swamp the few good novels that appear from time to time. People should never write a novel or indite a poem of malice prepense. The only justification for doing either is being unable to help it. Those novel-writers who can create characters will develop them and thank heaven; those who cannot will not, and let us hope they will thank heaven too.