In saying this, we are not blind to the fact that novels and romances were written long before our century dawned. Cervantes and Le Sage are old enough; the Romaunts are older still. De Foe, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Richardson, are names of a bygone century. But novelism, to use the word in a new sense, considered as a science—for such it has practically become—as the most popular branch of literature known in these days, with men and women of genius devoted to its pursuit, with an ever-increasing progeny spreading and growing, and stifling each other out of life, is an intellectual phase proper of to-day.
Philosophic historians trace the decline of peoples and periods in the decline of their literature; in its tone, its style, its subjects, and manner of treatment. If this test be applied to us, what a show should we make! But happily the test, though in the main a true one, is not an infallible one. The facility opened up by the invention of printing for writers of every shade of opinion to express their thoughts upon any given subject at any length and in any quantity, provided only they pay the printer, must weaken to some extent the theory that writers are the exact reflex of the times and peoples for and among whom they write. Still there rests the significant fact that to-day the novel, and particularly the worst form of it, is the book of the period; the most popular, widely read, best paid class of literature that we possess—a fact which tells its own tale of our intellectual and moral advance.
The ancients seem not to have conceived such a thing. And, despite the danger of such an admission in the face of what the novel has come to be among ourselves, we can only regret its loss among them. Had the Greeks and Romans caught the idea, and turned their brilliant, clear-sighted, manly, and truth-loving intellects to the portrayal of everyday life; to the picture of how the world wagged behind the scenes long ago, what a flood of light would have been let in on their history, its meaning, its philosophy, so as to render almost superfluous the works of such men as Niebuhr, Gibbon, Grote. We should have had plenty of evil undoubtedly, plenty to sicken us; but, after all, would the foulness of the pagans have been much worse than the spicy dishes cooked and served up to us every day by our own novelists; by gray-haired men; by ladies, at whose age we will not venture to guess; by smart young girls who have just bounced out of their teens? The glimpse we have had of Socrates' [pg 242] spouse makes us wish for a closer acquaintance with that dame. We are anxious to know how she received the news of his draught of hemlock, for she evidently entertained the utmost contempt for all his doctrine and philosophy, and must have been rather surprised at the state bothering itself so much about her husband. What an irreparable loss we have sustained in Diogenes, his sayings and doings, his snarls and life in that tub of his! What living pictures would have been left us of the life in the groves, the disputations, the clash of intellect with intellect where all was intellect; the great games, who betted, who lost, who won, who contended; of the mysteries and the sacrifices; of Greece at the invasions; of the party strifes; how Alcibiades pranked and ruled in turn; how Balbus built that famous wall of his that he is always building in the Delectus; how Agricola ploughed his field; how the Symposia passed off with Cicero and his friends; how Cæsar spent his youth, and how the conspiracy worked that destroyed him; what sort of companions brought Catiline's conspiracy about; the effect of the quousque tandem speech related by an eye-witness; the coming of the great Apostles; the dawn of Christianity; how the gay Greeks listened to that first strange sermon given from the altar to the Unknown God.
These things have been told us in a way. We can pick and sort them out of the brilliant works of the writers of the time. But had they been told us by a Greek or Roman novelist, a Thackeray, Dickens, or Bulwer, with the actors set living and real and palpable on the scenes, speaking the language, using all the little peculiarities, of everyday life, with all their natural surroundings and coincidents, what a lost world would have been opened up to us!
Abandoning, however, such vain and useless regrets, let us turn to the immediate subject of our own article. The title, Novel, we here use in the popular signification of the word, as comprising all works of fiction, distinct from those that are purely satirical, and history as written by such men as Mr. James Anthony Froude and Mr. John S. C. Abbott. Novelists, we know, are apt to be nice on the question of titles. No lady of third-rate society, who with time on her hands to do good devoted it to the study of the court balls and the pages of Debrett, was ever more so. Here is your romance, which looks down upon your mere story; your novelette which shrinks with awe from your psychological romance; your story of real life, a republican sort of fellow often, who hustles and bustles and shoulders them all and stands on his own legs; and a variety of others as numerous as they are, to the public at large—which is, as it should be, a poor respecter of titles—unnecessary. We purpose, in the name of the public, dealing very summarily with these titled folk, throwing them, high and low, in the same category, and designating one and all as novels pure and simple, with the single distinction, which shall appear in due time, of the sensational novel.
As we have arrived at this point, it may not be amiss to ask, What purpose do novels serve; with what object are they written?
A hard question truly. We reply to the second part of the query first. It may not be unnatural, nor dealing unfairly with their authors, to suppose that novels are written, in the first place, with the very laudable desire of earning one's bread: so that “the root of all evil” lies at the bottom of the “psychological romance,” [pg 243] as of far humbler things in this world. As to what purpose, earthly or unearthly, they serve, the answer to that depends, first of all, on the author's secondary motive in writing them; secondly, on the effect they produce on the reader—which are two very different things. We have not the slightest doubt that the French novelists, as popularly known, entertained the very loftiest ideas with regard to morality, Christianity, the laws of God and man, the conventional relations between husband and wife, and so on, before ushering into the world the representatives of their—to put it mildly—somewhat peculiar views on these questions. Well, if the world read them wrongly, mistook faith for infidelity, a deep lesson in purity for adultery, loyalty and obedience to the sovereign for rank outspoken disturbance and rebellion, who was to blame? The world was simply stupid. M. Dumas fils, for instance, has lately been good enough to enlighten us with his ideas on the vexed questions of matrimony and women in general. M. Dumas fils is undoubtedly an excellent guide on such subjects. He is an advanced man, a man of the age, of society, of the world. His testimonies on such subjects ought, therefore, to be of value. He has disposed of the whole question in, for a Dumas, a few words—a single volume. The moral of his doctrine comes to this: if your wife is faithless, kill her. We have not yet heard of any practical results arising from this new gospel, as preached by M. Dumas fils; from which, we have no doubt, he will draw the very agreeable inference that his remedy for the regeneration of society, and the nice adjustment of the marriage-knot once for all, was altogether unnecessary. If his doctrine should spread to any alarming extent, no doubt M. Dumas fils will be satisfied that at last the world is beginning a new era of advancement, that there is still hope for it; and he will hold himself answerable for all the consequences. By the bye, we believe he has omitted one little thing: the course to be adopted by the wife in the event of the husband's infidelity. But probably such a high-minded, virtuous man as M. Dumas never contemplated the possibility of such a contingency arising.
Mr. Collins, Mr. Reade, Miss Braddon, and the rest hold, doubtless, the same ideas with regard to the relative value of their productions. Whether their praiseworthy efforts have been duly appreciated; whether they have ever made man, woman, or child a whit better or sounder by the perusal of any of their works, we do not know. We are inclined to think not. If any reader would kindly come forward and show that we are wrong in this from his or her own experience, we shall only be too happy to stand corrected. At all events, the advantage derived must be in very small proportion to the quantity of literary medicine and advice administered by those social physicians to the craving multitude.
Laying aside, then, the invariably pure and lofty motives of the authors; laying aside the cloak which novels serve for at times, as in the hands of a Disraeli, to attack a policy or a system; and taking them as they affect ourselves, the readers, one may safely say that they serve mainly to amuse; to fill up those spare moments that nothing else can fill up. They constitute the play-ground of literature—a recreation and relief for the mind. We gulp them down as we are whirled along in the railway train. We take them with us on long voyages, as the Scotch patient [pg 244] took his weekly sermon at the kirk, as an opiate—thus fulfilling to the letter the traditional notion of the “Sabbath” being a day of rest. When the brain is heavy and the body worn, when to talk is labor and to think is pain, then we can seize the novel, loll on the sofa, or recline under the leafy shade by the brink of the musical river, and float away, half asleep, half awake, into dreamland. In a moment a new world, as real and living to the mind's eye as that in which we move, is conjured up before us. We are on intimate terms with a villain whose dagger is as air-drawn as Macbeth's. We can commit cold-blooded murders that will never bring us to the dock; or shocking improprieties that even the far-reaching nose of Mrs. Grundy will fail to catch scent of. Or we go over “the old, old story,” and are bumped, jerked, and jolted along the delicious course that never will run smooth; mapping it out if we have not yet had the fortune (or misfortune) to traverse it; filling it in with many a well-known form, if we have. And if the never-running-smooth theory be true of love, this much we ungrudgingly grant the novelists—they certainly hold to their tether. The labyrinth of Dædalus was nothing to it; the twistings, the windings, the sudden and unexpected meetings, the separations, the jiltings, the halts by the way, the joy, the sorrow, the ecstasy, the despair, the losings, the seekings, the findings, the torturing uncertainty, the wanderings through hopeless mazes, to end, as we knew at the outset it would and must end, according to “the eternal fitness of things,” in some man marrying some woman—the most extraordinary phenomenon that the world ever witnessed!
The novel invites us, as the noonday devil is supposed to do, at dangerous moments—those moments that come to all of us when matter holds the mastery over mind. Place in the hands of the reader at such a time a book which, while it interests, while it soothes, lulls, and gently enwraps in its kindly meshes the abstracted brain, never palls; containing at least what is harmless; and good, not very great certainly, but at least of a kind, is effected.