And although of course it was the marvellous knowledge of human nature displayed by these two writers which placed them on the summit of their sphere, the beauty of Esmond, and the charm of Mansfield Park, are so heightened by the exquisitely picked phraseology in which even the most trifling episodes are conveyed, that after long lapses of time memory will often supply the very words, finding them incapable of alteration or of improvement. I doubt if any reader could supply half a dozen sentences on end from, we will say, Wilkie Collins, or Charles Reade, or R. D. Blackmore. Their admirable novels, full of spirit-stirring scenes, are not novels of “manners”; a precise and formal arrangement of words would be almost out of place in them, and would try the reader’s patience still more perhaps than the writer’s.
Distinguished Novelists
In penning the above do not let me be mistaken. Thackeray was not by any means a master of style—his style was often faulty; he often repeated himself; he seldom rounded off his sentences as Miss Austen did. But he was careful with a most minute and elaborate care to present every movement of his characters beneath the microscope so as to fasten upon them the attention of the “great, stupid public,” who, he averred, needed “catching by the ears to make it look!”
Of the present day no writer has more happily combined the delineation of “manners” with the narration of beautiful and pathetic stories than Mr. Thomas Hardy. One reads Far from the Madding Crowd first with hurried eagerness to learn its incidents and close, and again with delighted lingering over its homely by-waters, when rustics sit and chat. Mr. Barrie essays to follow in the same line, but in Mr. Barrie the gift of depicting rural “manners” far surpasses the gift of manipulating incident. Even The Little Minister is nothing but a string of characteristic scenes illustrative of the “manners” of the Scottish parish.
Americans succeed wonderfully with novels of “manners,” as witness Mr. Henry James and Mr. W. D. Howells. These distinguished novelists may almost be said to dispense altogether with incident, and to rest their claim on our sympathies entirely on the interest all thinking men and women take in the emotions, agitations, ambitions, and distractions of each other’s daily life.
One drawback to contend with
And at this point let me note one drawback which every delineator of “manners,” pure and simple, has to contend with. He, or she, is absolutely sure to be accused of drawing scenes and characters from personal experience. The fidelity with which such a writer seeks to depict life as it presents itself in its homely, every-day aspect, raises the inevitable outcry, which, when once set a-going, can never be silenced; until such of us as labour in this special field are literally tripped up at every turn; and people we have never seen, and whose very names are unknown to us, are asserted with the most positive authority to be our prototypes for heroes and heroines!
To such an extent has this craze for fitting on caps been carried, that before the publication of some of my own novels in “Maga” I have been reasoned with by Mr. Blackwood, the courteous and thoughtful editor, on the question of satirising certain people whom he did not for a moment doubt were the originals of my leading characters. To his almost incredulous amazement I was unaware of the very existence of those so-called “originals”!
An idea may be caught or a long train of thought may be fired by the idiosyncrasy of some one present in person before the writer; but to say that the whole character when completely developed is drawn from life because of the hint, as it were, which began it, is like saying that an animal is copied from life because a single bone has been placed in the hands of the artist, from which he has been enabled—as anatomists know can be done—to piece together the entire creature, and in his mind’s eye behold it.
Fame slow but lasting