On the art of writing fiction

by Unknown

Scott

A wide gulf, however, separates these writers from the novelists of the beginning of the nineteenth century. The whole method of Miss Edgeworth and Jane Austen, for example, is different from that employed by the earlier generation of authors. Instead of exciting interest by indelicacies and maintaining it by ribaldry, they sought to win attention by careful delineation of character and genuine humour. It was this new development of romance which made the ethical novel possible. Amid the hurly-burly of strife and the warlike deeds of gods and men, there was no room for philosophical musings or ethical teachings. But when the scenes were changed to ladies’ drawing-rooms, the parsonage-house, and the course of daily life, it became easy to point a moral while adorning a tale. Miss Edgeworth may claim to be the first writer of ethical romance, and in her quiet and humorous pages she succeeds in levelling many a home-thrust against the evils which beset her time. In her Castle Rackrent she lays bare the mischief of Irish extravagance and absenteeism, while in her Tales from Fashionable Life she holds up to ridicule and scorn the empty frivolities and the manifest absurdities which pervaded the higher ranks of society. Jane Austen in a less obtrusive way succeeds in adding equally effective morals to her delightful stories. The bitter consequences which follow evil doings are plainly set out in her pages, and the needless misery inflicted by the indulgence of the mean passions is portrayed with singular felicity. It is, however, impossible not to recognise that both Miss Austen’s and Miss Edgeworth’s novels suffer, as works of art, by the prominent motives which guided the pens of their authors. It is not every one who is able so to subordinate the intended moral to the due working out of the story as in no way to interfere with the plot. The greatest novelists have unquestionably been those who set themselves directly to describe men and women as nature has made them, without any undue regard to the goal to which the instincts and actions of the characters may lead them. Sir Walter Scott is an instance in point. No one will deny the extent of the influence which he has exercised in all four continents of the world, and yet it is difficult to point to a single passage in his works in which he expressed any direct ethical teaching Only once, so far as we recollect, he chose to tack a moral on to one of his novels, and that was when at the end of The Heart of Midlothian he addressed these words to the reader. “This tale will not be told in vain, if it shall be found to illustrate the great truth, that guilt, though it may attain temporal splendour can never confer real happiness; that the evil consequences of our crimes long survive their commission, and, like the ghosts of the murdered, forever haunt the steps of the malefactor; and that the paths of virtue, though seldom those of worldly greatness are always those of pleasantness and peace.”

Dickens

It perhaps may be advanced in opposition to what has been said that Dickens, one of the greatest novelists of the century, wrote several of his novels with an ethical intention. But he was one of a happy few who wrote fiction, as Hogarth painted and drew moral lessons on his canvas, with a skill which excites the admiration of all those who rightly understand the difficulty of the task. Many artists have attempted to follow in Hogarth’s steps, and have failed ignominiously, just as writers without end have attempted to imitate the methods of Dickens and have fallen lamentably short of their great exemplar. Who but Dickens could have drawn the pathetic picture of Oliver Twist, and the bumptious and ignorant tyranny of Bumble and the guardians without losing the perspective of the story which is so well maintained throughout. After all, however, his best novels are those which are written without any distinctly ethical motive. Pickwick Papers and Martin Chuzzlewit are unquestionably his masterpieces; and though Nicholas Nickleby dealt an effective blow at Yorkshire schools, and Bleak House pilloried the evils of the Court of Chancery, and Hard Times showed up the fallacies of the Manchester School, they all, as literary works of art, pay the penalty of the good that is in them.

Thackeray

Like his great contemporary, though in a very different style, Thackeray throughout his writings strove to enforce a sound ethical teaching as Mr. Leslie Stephen writes of him:—“In short his writings mean if they mean anything, that the love of a wife and child and friend is the one sacred element in our nature, of infinitely higher price than anything that can come into competition with it; and that “Vanity Fair” is what it is precisely because it stimulates the pursuit of objects frivolous and unsatisfying just so far as they imply indifference to these emotions.

As every reader of Thackeray knows his pages are full of moralisings on the failings and faults of mankind. But only in one passage does he treat his subject in a directly ethical way. At the close of a long conversation between Warrington and Arthur, the latter is convicted of being an apostle of general scepticism and sneering acquiescence in the world as it is. “And to what does this easy and sceptical life lead a man?” adds the novelist. “Friend Arthur was a Sadducee, and the Baptist might be in the wilderness shouting to the poor, who were listening with all their might and faith to the preacher’s awful accents and denunciation of wrath or woe or salvation; and our friend the Sadducee would turn his sleek mule with a shrug and a smile from the crowd and go home to the shade of his terrace, and muse over preacher and audience, and turn to his roll of Plato or his pleasant Greek song-book babbling of honey and Hybla, and nymphs and fountains and love. To what we say does this scepticism lead? It leads a man to a shameful loneliness and selfishness, so to speak—the more shameful because it is so good-humoured and conscienceless and serene. Conscience! What is Conscience? Why accept remorse? What is public or private faith? Mythuses alike enveloped in enormous tradition. If seeing and acknowledging the lives of the world, Arthur, as see them you can, with only too fatal a clearness, you submit to them without any protest farther than a laugh: if plunged yourself in easy sensuality, you allow the wretched world to pass groaning by you unmoved: if the fight for the truth is taking place, and all men of honour are on the ground armed on the one side or the other, and you alone are to lie on your balcony and smoke your pipe out of the noise and the danger, you had better have died, or never have been at all, than such a sensual coward.”

But for the most part Thackeray rather allows his ethical teachings to be implied than directly enforced. For every kind of meanness he has nothing but words of scathing scorn and all wrong doers and wrong doings he castigates with merciless indignation. He exposes all that is untrue with quiet and bitter sarcasm, and in the inimitable pictures which he draws of life and character, indicates an honest and wholesome moral for all of those who care to discover it.

Charles Kingsley

Of a very different temper and disposition was that great ethical novelist Charles Kingsley. A devoted apostle of humanity he preached and spoke and wrote incessantly on the wrongs which he saw being inflicted on the weakest and least helpful of his fellow-men. The sight of contractors and manufacturers sweating their employés, and of starving their vital force by crowding them into unwholesome and insufficient rooms; of farmers beating their labourers down to the very lowest wages and of housing them in insanitary and in indecent cottages, roused his indignation to the full. In burning eloquence whether in the pulpit or on the platform or at his study table he denounced the oppression of the weak and the wrongs which were being inflicted on those who were least able to help themselves. His novels were, as his sermons, mainly directed to this great object. In them he tried to impress upon landlords and employers that their dependants were men and brothers, and with exquisite tenderness and sympathy he described over and over again the horrors of those slums of which we hear so much now; of the evils of those door-posts which stand sentry over those squalid alleys, the gin palace and the pawnbroker’s shop.