FOOTNOTE:[22]"Or" in Green's text.
[22]"Or" in Green's text.
[22]"Or" in Green's text.
25. It may indeed be truly said that, after all, human selfishness is much the same as it ever was; that luxury still drowns sympathy; that riches and poverty have still their old estranging influence. The novel, as has been shown, cannot give a new birth to the spirit, or initiate the effort to transcend the separations of place and circumstance; but it is no small thing that it should remove the barriers of ignorance and antipathy which would otherwise render the effort unavailing. It at least brings man nearer to his neighbor, and enables each class to see itself as others see it. And from the fusion of opinions and sympathies thus produced, a general sentiment is elicited, to which oppression of any kind, whether of one class by another, or of individuals by the tyranny of sectarian custom, seldom appeals in vain.
26. The novelist is a leveller also in another sense than that of which we have already spoken. He helps to level intellects as well as situations. He supplies a kind of literary food which the weakest natures can assimilate as well as the strongest, and by the consumption of which the former sort losemuch of their weakness and the latter much of their strength. While minds of the lower order acquire from novel-reading a cultivation which they previously lacked, the higher seem proportionately to sink. They lose that aspiring pride which arises from the sense of walking in intellect on the necks of a subject crowd; they no longer feel the bracing influence of living solely among the highest forms of art; they become conformed insensibly, to the general opinion which the new literature of the people creates. A similar change is going on in every department of man's activity. The history of thought in its artistic form is parallel to its history in its other manifestations. The spirit descends, that it may rise again; it penetrates more and more widely into matter, that it may make the world more completely its own. Political life seems no longer attractive, now that political ideas and power are disseminated among the mass, and the reason is recognised as belonging not to a ruling caste merely, but to all. A statesman in a political society resting on a substratum of slavery, and admitting no limits to the province of government, was a very different person from the modern servant of "a nation of shopkeepers," whose best work is to save the pockets of the poor. It would seem as if man lost his nobleness when he ceased to govern, and as if the equal rule of all was equivalent tothe rule of none. Yet we hold fast to the faith that the "cultivation of the masses," which has for the present superseded the development of the individual, will in its maturity produce some higher type even of individual manhood than any which the old world has known. We may rest on the same faith in tracing the history of literature. In the novel we must admit that the creative faculty has taken a lower form than it held in the epic and the tragedy. But since in this form it acts on more extensive material and reaches more men, we may well believe that this temporary declension is preparatory to some higher development, when the poet shall idealise life without making abstraction of any of its elements, and when the secret of existence, which he now speaks to the inward ear of a few, may be proclaimed on the house-tops to the common intelligence of mankind.
It is interesting to see how the leading ideas in his [Green's] mind governed the treatment of an apparently alien material in his last piece of academic work, the essay on novels, which gained the Chancellor's prize in 1862. The essay has also the additional interest of being almost the only record of his views on art and its relation to life. The fundamental conception upon which it is based is one with which we have already met. The world in its truth is a unity, governed by a single law, animated by an undivided life, a whole in every part. But to human apprehension it is fragmentary and mechanical, a chaos of elements of which each is external to the other and all are external to our minds, and in which chance tempered by familiarity seems to be the only law. To exceptional men, or at exceptional crises in life, in the moments of intense insight or emotion which philosophy calls knowledge and religion faith, the weight of custom falls away, the truth breaks through the veil, and themost trivial object or accident comes to reflect in itself the whole system of nature or the whole providence of God. At such moments man realises that in order to live he must die, that in order to be free he must obey, and that only by surrendering his fancied independence can he enter into the divine unity. To this liberation of the self from its own bondage art contributes its share. The poetic genius, like the speculative and the religious, penetrates the monotonous disorder of everyday life, and lays bare "the impassioned expression" which is there for those who can read it. The dramatist, for instance, with whom the novelist is here compared, shows us some elemental force of humanity, stripped of the accidents of time and place, working itself out in free conflict with other forces, and finally breaking itself against the eternal fact that no man can gain the world without first losing himself. It is this catastrophe which makes the real tragedy of life; it is this which the tragic poet has the eye to see and the words to portray; and in proportion as we can follow him in imagination, we come away from the spectacle with our own hearts broken and purged, but strengthened to face the fact and obey the law. The novelist does with inferior means, and for minds at a lower level, what the dramatist may do for a mind at its highest. He idealises enough to make us feel pleasure or pain, not enough to make usforget ourselves. He excites curiosity or suspense, not awe or hope. If the novel ends well, it flatters our complacency with the feeling that the world as it is is not such a bad place after all; if it ends badly, it strengthens the indolent conviction that aimless misery is the law of the universe. There are however two ways in which novels may be of real service and value. If they cannot teach men how to live, they may, through the wide range of their subjects, enable those who have already found a principle of life to give it a freer application than their limited circumstances would otherwise allow; the "fictitious experience" may "give expansion to the personal," while the personal gives reality to the fictitious, and thus may be mitigated that "sacrifice of the individual to society" which the modern division of labor tends to bring about. And secondly, by appealing to such various classes and capacities, and exhibiting the identity of human nature under such various circumstances, novels supply a vehicle through which the force of public opinion may work, fusing differences, breaking down prejudices, and checking the "despotism of situations." The essay concludes characteristically with the refusal to believe that democracy is necessarily unpoetic. As "we hold fast to the faith that the 'cultivation of the masses,' which has for the present superseded the development of the individual, will in its maturity produce some higher type of individual manhood than any which the old world has known," so, though in the novel "the creative faculty has taken a lower form than it held in the epic and the tragedy," "we may well believe that this temporary declension is preparatory to some higher development, when the poet shall idealise life without making abstraction of any of its elements, and when the secret of existence, which he now speaks to the inward ear of a few, may be proclaimed on the housetops to the common intelligence of mankind."
Readers of the essay who are also novel-readers will be inclined to say that the writer was not much in sympathy with his subject; and he himself, on getting the prize, remarks that "it is curious that I should have been successful in an essay on novels, about which I know and care little, and should have failed in both my efforts in theology, for which I care considerably." At the same time it is probably true, as he once said, that he had read more novels than his friends gave him credit for, and it is certainly true that what his reading lacked in extent it made up in intensity. As might be supposed, his taste in fiction was for forcible delineation and robust humor. The flavor of strong, healthy individuality was what attracted him; for rarities, niceties, and abnormalities of mental organisation he cared nothing. He liked things which he couldtake hold of with his mind, not things which merely gave him sensations, pleasant or painful. Both in his deepest and his lightest moods he was absolutely simple and "above board," and this simplicity made him keenly alive to the proximity of the sublime to the ridiculous or the exquisite to the grotesque. Though he had little of the animal in him, and was never troubled by his appetites, he was quite free from prudery. If obscenity moved him at all, it was to frank laughter or to grim contempt; he never dwelt upon it, either in the way of enjoyment or loathing. "For rules of ascetic discipline," says a friend, "he had no need. The view of life suggested by so much of the best French literature, that thinking men are generally in a practical dilemma between the extremes of sensual excess and of spiritual exaltation, did not commend itself to him in the least." The only forms of art to which he was keenly susceptible were those of oratory and poetry. He had no ear for music, though he seemed to get a certain exaltation from listening to it. In regard to painting and sculpture he always professed himself incompetent, but he was not without decided tastes. On his first visit to the Continent he was more attracted by Rembrandt, Holbein, and Dürer than by the Italians; "these men," he said, "grasped the idea of Christianity." Of Durer's four saints at Munich he writes, "I could contemplate themwith interest for hours; he has contrived to give St. John an almost perfect expression of 'divine philosophy'." In later years when he went to Italy he spent a good deal of time in looking at early Italian pictures, and admitted that they would soon have got a great hold upon him. But on the whole his attitude to the arts (excluding those of language) was one of deferential ignorance. He had not himself any artistic gifts; he did not even write verses. Yet to his friends, as one of them says, "he never represented the prose of existence. With all his gravity, with all his firm grip on fact and material interests, he had the enthusiastic movement of the world's poetry in him."—From the Memoir by R. L. Nettleship, Green's 'Works,' Vol. 3, pp. xxx-xxxiii.
Among the mongrel forms of epic should be included the half descriptive, half lyric poems which were popular among the English, dealing chiefly with nature, the seasons of the year, etc. There belong also to this division numerous didactic poems in which a prosaic content is dressed up in poetic form, such as compendiums of physics, astronomy, and medicine, and treatises on chess, fishing, hunting, and the conduct of life. Poems of this sort were most artfully elaborated by the later Greeks, by the Romans, and, in modern times, especially by the French.Despite their general epic tone, they lend themselves readily to lyric treatment.
More poetical, but still without the characteristics necessary for definite classification, are romances and ballads. Being epic in content but lyric in treatment, these products of the Middle Ages and of modern times may be assigned to either class indifferently.
The case of the novel, the modern popular epic, is very different. Here we find the same wealth and variety of interests, circumstances, characters, and human relationships, the same world-background, and the same handling of events, that characterize the true epic. But there is lacking to it the primitive poetic state of the world, in which the true epic took its rise. The novel, in the modern acceptation of the term, presupposes a prosaically ordered reality. But working from the basis of this reality, and moving within its own circle, the novel, both as regards picturesqueness of incident and as regards characters and their fate, retrieves for poetry (so far as the above presupposition permits) her lost prerogatives.[23]
Thus it happens that the struggle between the poetry of the heart and the opposing prose of outward circumstances is for the novel one of the commonest and most suitable conflicts. This struggle may end comically, or tragically, or in a reconciliation of the opposing forces. In the last case the characters who at first oppose the ordinary world-order may, by learning to recognize the true and abiding elements in it, become reconciled to the existing circumstances, and take an active part in them; or, on the other hand, they may strip off the prosaic hull from deed and accomplishment, and thus put in the place of the original prose a reality which is on intimate and friendly terms with beauty and art.
As far as the range of representation is concerned, the true novel, like the epic, requires a complete world and a complete view of life, the many-sided materials and relationships of which exhibit themselves in the particular action that is the nucleus of the whole. As to details of conception and development, however, the author must be allowed great liberty, for it is difficult to bring the prose of real life into the representation without sticking fast in the prosaic and commonplace.—Hegel, 'Aesthetik.' 3. Thl., Kap. III. Abt. 3., S. 394-396.
FOOTNOTE:[23]In simpler terms: The novel, being a form of epic, should have all the characteristics of poetry. But this is impossible because it is compelled to work in the humble field of prose. Nevertheless, by a skilful use of description, narration, and dramatic situation, it causes a poetic oasis to spring up in the desert of prose, and so wins back some of its poetical rights.
[23]In simpler terms: The novel, being a form of epic, should have all the characteristics of poetry. But this is impossible because it is compelled to work in the humble field of prose. Nevertheless, by a skilful use of description, narration, and dramatic situation, it causes a poetic oasis to spring up in the desert of prose, and so wins back some of its poetical rights.
[23]In simpler terms: The novel, being a form of epic, should have all the characteristics of poetry. But this is impossible because it is compelled to work in the humble field of prose. Nevertheless, by a skilful use of description, narration, and dramatic situation, it causes a poetic oasis to spring up in the desert of prose, and so wins back some of its poetical rights.