On the art of writing fiction

by Unknown

Kingsley’s creed

But he had another lesson to teach, and there he sympathised with Thackeray. The sanctity of family life was to him a leading feature in his religion. As he writes in his dedicatory preface in Hypatia “family and national life are the two divine roots of the church, severed from which she is sure to wither away into that most godless and cruel of spectres, a religious world.” The neo-Platonism with which he was so strongly imbued introduced many strange mystic ideas into his religious and social creeds. That the human relations of husband and wife, and parent and child were eternal implied to his mind that they had existed from all time and would extend to the end of all things. They were therefore in his faith spiritual, sacramental, divine, eternal. The influence which his writings exercised on high and low, on rich and poor was great and far-reaching. He achieved, therefore, the one object he sought when he wrote Alton Locke and his other masterpieces. But it must be admitted that in the eagerness with which he preached he forgot at times the novelist’s art, and though some of the passages in which he points his morals read almost as though they were inspired, there is not one of his novels which does not suffer from his ecstatic moods.

The novel of Reform

To men and women of sympathetic temperaments and ready pens, the temptation to sermonise on the evils and wrongs of the world around them must be well nigh irresistible, and what more easy and telling way can there possibly be than by haranguing their fellow-men in fiction! To seriously minded novelists, the unbelief which they see spreading like a flood about them, suggests at once an object-lesson romance, in which the heretical young curate who has strayed into the paths of Buddhism or wandered with the lost sheep into the by-ways of Deism or Dissent shall be restored to the true fold by arguments which are urged with the full energy of conviction and are combated with weak and halting rejoinders. The unprejudiced reader may consider the method faulty, and that art has been sacrificed to exposition, but the author and his friends insist on the public swallowing the dose with all the severity of Mrs. Squeers. The English public are not altogether averse to the presence of a modicum of moral teaching, but they like to have the powder well concealed or only half revealed in the preserve of plot and interest, and have reason to complain if that which was meant to be the less proves to be equal to the whole.

The naturalistic school

Drunkenness and vice are often common themes of the ethical novelist. An older generation of writers devoted their energies to gibbeting the inequalities and maladministration of the laws; and to picturing the evils and cruelties of game preserving. Dickens, as we have seen, denounced in his novels the administration of the workhouse and the delays of the Courts of Chancery; and Charles Reade inveighed through the mouths of his characters against the Prison system and the Lunacy enactments. These motives are too abstract for the present-day novelist. He, or more commonly she, delights to descend from the general to the particular, and to follow the drunkard into the gin palace, and the most abandoned profligates into the lowest haunts of vice. These are unquestionable evils and should on all accounts be rather indicated than described in detail. What good can it do to analyse and dwell upon every disgusting feature in a drunken debauch, and every prurient phase in the downward course of sin? The naturalistic school has much to answer for in this regard. Zola and his followers, especially his followers, have brought into fashion a style of novel which has become a plague spot in our civilisation, and through their instrumentality young girls and boys are, under the guise of moral teaching, made acquainted with forms of vice of which, but for their ethical teachers, they would be entirely ignorant. Subjects are now discussed in ladies’ drawing-rooms and at dinner-tables, which were never so much as hinted at a couple of decades ago. Blasphemous views of religion, theories of creation and evolution, analyses of the passions, and strange doctrines concerning the sexual instinct, are all discussed with a freedom which leaves little to the imagination. It is true that the authors bring the unholy subjects on the stage with the professed purpose of annihilating them one after the other; but as in the process sometimes followed by vivisectionists of introducing poisons into the system of the animals experimented on, for the purpose of proving the effects of antidotes, it sometimes happens that the views of evil suggested in the sort of novel we are speaking of resist the counterbalancing influences of the moral strictures of the authors. In a recent number of the Nineteenth Century Mr. Frederick Greenwood describes a novel up to date which an authoress has been induced much against her will to write, and in which she appears in the frontispiece covering her face with her hands for very shame, and on the last page is represented kneeling at her infant’s bed praying for forgiveness. If all who wrote on the unsavoury subjects indicated by Mr. Greenwood observed the attitude of his authoress we should see little of the features of a good many ladies who are at present evidently quite unconscious of any desire to veil their countenances. Such writers are bad enough, but a lower level is reached by those who deliberately write on more than risky matters because they pay. It is difficult to exchange compliments with such mercenary providers of social garbage, and they are best left to the rebukes of such consciences as they possess.

Evils of modern fiction

Naturalism and irreverence are unquestionably the crying evils of modern fiction. And it by no means follows that they are essential to the construction of the ethical novel. Mr. Leslie Stephen has said that to be a good writer a man must be a preacher; and surely there are enough subjects to preach about without touching on unsavoury topics. Are not men and women prone to faults of character, besides those of unlawful passion and open rebellion against God; and are there not social wrongs and inequalities to be inveighed against. It is not every one who can hope to see a palace arise in response to a discourse on the evils which beset all sorts and conditions of men, but every novelist worthy of his fame can do something to warn his fellow-men of the faults and failings which lead to the downward paths of sin and misery, and to throw a light on the way of those who are fighting manfully for all that is true, honest, and of good report.

FROM THE EDITOR’S STANDPOINT

L. T. Meade