Chapter 10. The Novel to 1900. Fin de Siecle Literature

In the previous chapters we discussed the appearance and development of the novel as a genre of English literature. The novel got a new dimension through the Victorian period and took its dominating power over the other literary genres. Novels are fiction - they are in prose or in poetry - and they usually, but not always, have a degree of realism. The realistic and critical approach to reality was especially trendy in the nineteenth century and was gradually superceded by other forms of realism. Although, very conventionally, it was given different literary names, the approach has for long been realistic. The sources of the English novel are multitudinous and vague. There are Italian prose romances, adapted or imitated by the Elizabethans. The Spanish and French picaresque tradition is still more important - Cervantes was much imitated in England. Another strand is provided by the fable (or parable), which sources are both Biblical and Greek. This develops in the eighteenth century into the novel of ideas.

Nobody could explain why prose fiction became for the first time in the eighteenth century a major concern of some of the best writers, or why this tendency increased in the nineteenth century until Heny James could eventually claim for the novel the status of the greatest and subtlest of literary forms. Just a few explanations can be noted. There was a large and rapid increase in literacy, and a tendency for life to be lived more privately. Long, solitary communion with a book began to fit more easily than in the past into the pattern of many lives. The novel is domestic, minute, and psychological rather than public, masculine, and heroic. Not only did the number of women readers increase sharply, but in the late seventeenth century (for the first time) writers had a female audience consciously in mind. The 'Spectator' of Addison and Steele anticipates Richardson in being concerned with a feminine point of view. women novelists began to appear. we may divide the novels written before Scott and austen into the following types: 1)general studies, where the hero and the plot are loosely designed to show varieties of district, class and human type (this would include most of Defoe (except Robinson Crusoe), Fielding, and Smollett); 2) the novel of sensibility and moral instruction, of which Richardson is the great classic exponent and Sterne is a follower; 3) the novel of ideas, which includes Gullivers Travels, Johnson's Rasselas and works by Peacock; 4) the novel of fantasy and excitement (works by Walpole, Radcliffe and Lewis).

Inevitably the types overlap. There is an element of fantasy in Smollett which is absent in Fielding, who, however, in his works wrote something like a moral fable. Richardson (similar to Fielding) wrote about the eighteenth century family structure and inheritance customs. so, he is in a way a novelist of manners. Radcliffe had a serious, satirical side. Defoe is admittedly the chief initiator of the novel of manners. He was qualified by a unique combination of minute power of observation and moral obtuseness. Robinson Crusoe is successful because the solitary hero is so literal, so limited, so brave, so resourceful, so utterly unimaginative. James Joyce was later to say that he represented the English character better than any other literary character. In Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, and Roxana, he gives a minutely detailed but impressionistic view of the seamy side of London and the provinces, with some excursions abroad. the heroes and heroines are curiously sensitive in one sense and curiously insensitive in another. defoe will always appeal most to those who seek in the novel vivd impressions and sharply drawn social pictures. He disappoints the more questing and curious readers.

Tom Jones, Fielding's most celebrated work is an overlong and morally simplistic celebration of the 'natural goodness' of its very self-satisfied and self-centred hero. But it is strong, in the traditional picaresque way, as a study of English social types encountered on many roads and in numerous inns. Richardson's first and least satisfactory novel, Pamela, grew out of his habit of writing model letters suitable for youing girls who lacked the education to write for themselves. In the novel he gave only a single point of view, that of a virtuous servant-girl threatened by a licentious master and several venal and treacherous allies. Although Richardson had a wonderful, unprecedented gift of conveying minute feminine observations and sensations, there is inevitably a certain monotony. In Clarissa, which is perhaps the only novel of the eighteenth century that fully deserves the classic status, the weak side of Richardson's writing was overcome. Clarissa, faced by an avaricious and unfeeling family with a command to marry a man she detests, runs away with lovelace. Though she knows him to be a notorious seducer, she is convinced that she can either marry him or retain her virginity and independence under his protection. Eventually, he rapes her when she is in a drugged condition, thinking of making amends by marriage. His idea failed - she astonished him by refusing to marry him.

The great Augustans, especially Pope, Swift, and Johnson, were constantly appealing to reason and good sense and classical traditions. But they were all men of intense feelings. Whether or not we classify Gulliver's Travels as a novel, it is at any rate a piece of fiction; and it proved that a profound enquiry into fundamental ideas can be conducted by means of a fiction. Instead of trying to excite wonder by recounting improbable adventures, Swift recounts totally impossible things in quiet common-sense tones. In a certain very special sense the book could even be called picaresque (where hero, a rogue, goes through a series of episodic adventures). Swift may be fantastic in the events he describes, but he is always a sober Augustan realist about the limitations of human nature.

The great age of the novel is inaugurated by two very different geniuses, Walter Scott (1771-1832) and Jane Austen (1775-1817). Scott's great achievement in the imaginative recreation of the past. He was a man of wide learning and deep romantic enthusiasm, tempered by a shrewd and judicious knowledge of men and affairs. some of his most dignified and impressive characters are beggars, outcasts, gypsies and loose women. Scott was fond of introducing kings in disguise into his novels, but really, in Scott, every man is a king in disguise. Scott was the first novelist in English who could convey an impression of God's plenty, of inexhaustible inventiveness and variety, as Chaucer and Shakespeare had done long before him in other forms.

Jane Austen never in her life had an original idea. Some of her most conventional characters, worshippers at the shrines of the great world, are treated with a comprehensive and intelligent satirical bitterness which equals the greatest of the Augustan poets in wit and sharpness, and excels them in richness of effect and telling details. Marriage, the immemorially traditional theme of comedy, becomes at last as serious and important a thing in literature as it is in life, without ceasing to be delightfully comic. The different purposes of marriage, its complex relation to love, to prudence, to security, to ambition, to social cohesion, provide her with an inexhaustible series of dilemmas, subtle discriminations and fine shades. Austen is a supreme realist, not only in her portrayal of society, but also in the more important sense that true self-knowledge, the ruthless destruction of an illusion, is the goal of her heroines. The process of education for them is painful, for us both comic and impressive, as well as being full of surprises. It would be an insensitive reader who did not have twinges of self-criticism in reading Austen; and we see why Henry James said that in reading her he always thought of a bright spring day with a cold east wind.

The 1820's and early 1830's are a slack period in the history of the novel. The novel comes back to life again with Dickens, who became famous about 1836, with the Sketches by Boz and Pickwick Papers. He was immensely popular, he was vulgar, opinionated and ignorant, self-centred and vain. He wrote uproarious farce at times, and at times one-sided satire. Dickens's work can be loosely divided into two periods, before and after Dombey and Son (1848). In the early period we have the reckless exuberance of a genius, fantastic in comedy, intensely melodramatic in serious passages. Plot may either be neglected altogether, as in Pickwick Papers, or simplistically over-insistent, as in Oliver Twist. One is startled, overwhelmed by the sheer vitality, variety, and abundance. We know more about Dickens's characters than about many of the leading characters of ordinary novelists. Dickens's personal feelings and prejudices mingle freely with the creative flow. The early books give a curiously mixed impression of unique creative genius and childish petulance.

In the later period, Dickens has grown up. For the first time the books seem to have a single continuing theme despite the undiminished variety. The later books are often just as funny but the humorous and serious passages no longer seem to be placed together at random. the profusion of Dickens is such that even on what is to him a subordinate topic, such as education, he can provide a variety of impressions which specialists would work in vain to rival.

Meanwhile, some other female novelists of prominence were Bronte sisters who take us back to the 1840's, and to a remote rural world, which makes it an effort of imagination to see them as contemporaries with the bustling urban life of Dickens's Dombey and Son. The three sisters were writing novels in the same household near a bleak and lonely moorland. In reality, only one of the Brontes - Emily - is a major figure in British literature, and she is the most purely original and irreplaceable, though not the greatest of all English novelists. In her only novel she achieved an extraordinary combined triumph of genius and craftsmanship. She had learnt little in her short life but wrote a book that still reads like the work of an experienced professional. For its readers, considerations of craft soon become secondary in the excitement of a story, which is the perfect artistic equivalent of a weird but strong, coherent, and in a way appealing view of life. Bronte does nothing less than challenge the whole traditional view of the nature of love previously accepted both in literature and in life. The love of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw is far stronger than any normal human bond, marital, sexual, or filial. For the first time since Shakespeare ghosts are used with the maximum of serious literary effect and the minimum of cheap thrills. The book is a true novel, not a fantastic poetic drama for its has the true novelistic quality of pursuing the logic of events to their end in a real social setting. Aftre Heathcliff's death the normal workaday world, normal love and marriage, are still there and the representatives of the next generation inherit a world not in the end much altered by the cataclysms previously endured.

With Disraeli we are back in the novel of ideas. Disraeli was as much an amateur novelist as he was a professional politician. He wrote with ease and zest: 'When I want to read a novel, I write one'. Novel readers, mostly middle-class, and often living in the south of England, became aware of a new, exciting, and terrible world, of hunger and violence and technological change in which a new industrial world was being forged. Disraeli's books, Kingsley's Alton Locke, Dickens's Hard Times, and Gaskell's Mary Barton and North and South, led many sober citizens to the question of the style of life at the period of Queen Victoria. Although these books and their authors differed in many ways, they were at one in their refusal to accept a mechanical system as the last word on a human question. Gaskell was the only one of these writers who lived in the industrial north, and her picture has fine shadows that the others lack.

The Victorian novel, in general, has a strongly realistic tone; and there is only one major figure, after Disraeli, who proceeds without regard to the cause and effect of the workaday world. This is Lewis Carroll. In his power of creating an entire world of fantasy with its own logic he rivals Swift. But where Swift implies a comment on the human world as it is, Carroll is concerned more with abstract ideas. At the same time his two Alice books have deep psychological roots. He shares with Swift the rare distinction of having composed children's and adult classic in the same work, and his puns have a crazy charm which suggests that they too have deep roots.

Another novelist of the period - Thackeray - was often compared to and contrasted with Dickens. Much of Thackeray's best work is occasional, and many chapters in his novels are those of an agreeable though often prolix essayist rather than of a creative artist. He wrote fluent, attractive English prose, rising occasionally to true eloquence. Thackeray is more often a student of manners, rather than life. His amateurishness is less attractive than that of Disraeli. He often lacks the creative power, the inventiveness, and the piercing wisdom of the great artist. His finest book, which towers above all his other work, is Vanity Fair. It is notable especially for its subtle and moving treatment of time. He allows himself a whole generation so that the consequences of passions and hatreds, of sudden impulses and crazy quarrels, can have time to work to their distant unforseen conclusions. And he has new things to say about the well-worn theme of the relation between an aristocracy and a merchant class hungry for social respect.

George Eliot is a novelist who never ceased to develop and experiment. She came to fiction only when she was approaching forty and already had a reputation from her periodical writings of a woman of formidable intellectual attainments. She possessed unusually clear and poignant memories of childhood and adolescence, intensified no doubt by a bitter and lasting quarrel with her brother. Her early novels - Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss, have a kind of realistic-pastoral quality, that is, the celebration of an idyllic country landscape does not inhibit sharp realism about human motives. Fine, original, and, at times, moving as they are, they have two weaknesses: an over-literal acceptance of the superficial religious philosophy of Feuerbach, and, in the second book, a hurried melodramatic ending.

Anthony Trollope was the most prolific, and in some ways the most surprising and elusive, of the Victorian realists. He was devoted to facts, to the reality both of characters and events, and he was not, on the whole, much concerned with ideas. He is remarkable for his extraordinary fairness, an amazing breadth of sympathy, in which he has only one equal or superior - Walter Scott. He was very far from being what he has sometimes been hastily proclaimed 'the voice of an epoch'. He was remarkable for the strength of his feelings and meditations, but his opinions were one-sided.

With the death of George Eliot in 1880 and Trollope in 1882, the high Victorian novel is over, and a new phase begins, in which the novel is less concerned simply with society and character, but becomes more philosophically questing, more symbolical, more poetical even. The great names here are Meredith, Hardy, and Henry James. With Stevenson and Gissing the English novel shows the nearest approach to the world of French naturalism but they both do not sound convincing. With Henry James we are in a different, cosmopolitan world, the world of the highly cultivated American, to whom all Europe is an endlessly subtle and fascinating imaginary museum. His predecessors in the novel had been, for the most part, thoroughly English, and some of the greatest of them thoroughly insular. They dispised or ignored literary theories. James not only knew personally the great conte,porary figures of the continental novel, such as Turgenev and Flaubert, but he was convinced that the novel was a great literary form that would repay the most detailed critical and theoretical study.

Henry James's voluminous works constitute a lengthy and profound meditation on the 'international theme' - the relation of America to Europe. He was influenced by the New England puritanism, which surrounded him in childhood. But he was very conscious of being influenced by the treasures of European culture and by the casual self-assurance of an English upper-class in the years when the social order afforded them an intelligible. He often wrote about the rich. James's style, light and easy in early works like Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady, becomes more and more intense, syntactically idiosyncratic, and, eventually, highly obscure. Meanwhile, he wrote the more difficult and symbolic works at the turn of the century, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl. In each the theme of betrayal invades the super-civilised high social world. The emphasis is on the spiritual effects of betrayal on the traitor and on the generosity of those who can forgive treachery and keep their love unimpaired. Aesthetic subtlety does not tempt James to blur moral categories. In James, the old, often conflicting aims of the novel, instruction, suspense, and aesthetic delight are finely reconciled.

Novels are fiction, they are in prose (or very rarely in poetry), and they usually, but not always, have a degree of realism. The realistic and critical approach to reality was especially trendy in the nineteenth century. A novel is a kind of written narrative, the recounting of a series of events. It is a lengthy fictitious prose narrative portraying characters and presenting an organised series of events and settings. Every novel is an account of life and it involves a conflict, characters and actions, settings, a plot and a theme (themes). From a Latin word meaning 'to make', 'to mold', fiction is imagined and invented literary composition. Fiction may not be based on history or fact, but its distinguishing characteristic is that it is fashioned to entertain and to instruct. Narration is a form of discourse the principal purpose of which is to relate an event or series of events. Narration, from a Latin word meaning 'tell', is also called narrative. The primary and basic appeal of narration is to the emotions of the reader or hearer. The combination of fiction and narration produces a novel as a kind of literary prose.

The novel - extended prose fiction - has no repertoire of characteristic features. There is a wide range of novel types. For the novel has ramifying roots in earlier fiction and non-fiction: epic, romance, picaresque, biography, history, journal, letter, novella, to name only the most obvious. These filiations have persisted in the developed novel, giving rise to distinct subgenres. The subgenres have been acknowledged on purely formal or rhetorical aspects. In the nineteenth century Henry James, R. L. Stevenson suggested purely formal dichotomy - the division into subgenres of novel and romance (the first genre is realistic and detailed like its nonfictional formal modes; the second - more poetic, less minute, freer; external society and character were realised in the former; in the latter - deep emotional experience). Now we should distinguish other subgenres besides the romance and the verisimilar or 'central' novel. There is the picaresque novel, the multiplot novel, the stream-of-consciousness novel or novel of lyrical impressionism, the antinovel, the faction of the documentary novel, the historical novel, the satirical novel, the psychological novel, and the novel with philosophical content (the philosophical novel).

The central novel in its turn has been divided into a great number of subgenres by specifying additional subject matter. Setting is also decisive - it provides the basis of typology. So we have the factory novel, the school novel, the rustic novel, the city novel, the provincial novel (regional novel), the Indian novel, and the like. Another typology is based on plot or mythos. Hence: the adventure novel, war novel, crime novel, espionage novel, political novel, novel of faith and doubt, 'Frauenroman' ('Familienroman') or domestic novel, nature novel, 'Bildungsroman', etc. The other possibility may be seen in the novel about writing - the work-in-progress, the 'poioumenon' (called by steven Kellman), or the self-begetting novel.

Novels can be categorised both historically and technically, and in practice these two elements tend to overlap as particular types of novel often flourish within defined historical boundaries. These categorisations should be used as a guide rather than a straight-jacket as art is not precise: no novel is just a picaresque or a bildungsroman. Every novel has something creative and unique in itself, every novel challenges expectations and assumptions of readers to a certain extent. As this world changes, so too will the novel change, both in terms of its form and its content. Prose works of the picaresque type are considered to be a progenitor of the modern novel that appeared in Britain in the eighteenth century.