was given for the reading of novels were very few, and from many
they were altogether banished. The high poetic genius and correct
morality of Walter Scott had not altogether succeeded in making men
and women understand that lessons which were good in poetry could
not be bad in prose. I remember that in those days an embargo was
laid upon novel-reading as a pursuit, which was to the novelist
a much heavier tax than that want of full appreciation of which I
now complain.
There is, we all know, no such embargo now. May we not say that
people of an age to read have got too much power into their own
hands to endure any very complete embargo? Novels are read right
and left, above stairs and below, in town houses and in country
parsonages, by young countesses and by farmers' daughters, by old
lawyers and by young students. It has not only come to pass that
a special provision of them has to be made for the godly, but that
the provision so made must now include books which a few years since
the godly would have thought to be profane. It was this necessity
which, a few years since, induced the editor of Good Words to apply
to me for a novel,--which, indeed, when supplied was rejected, but
which now, probably, owing to further change in the same direction,
would have been accepted.
If such be the case--if the extension of novel-reading be so wide
as I have described it--then very much good or harm must be done
by novels. The amusement of the time can hardly be the only result
of any book that is read, and certainly not so with a novel, which
appeals especially to the imagination, and solicits the sympathy of
the young. A vast proportion of the teaching of the day,--greater
probably than many of us have acknowledged to ourselves,--comes
from these books, which are in the hands of all readers. It is from
them that girls learn what is expected from them, and what they
are to expect when lovers come; and also from them that young men
unconsciously learn what are, or should be, or may be, the charms
of love,--though I fancy that few young men will think so little
of their natural instincts and powers as to believe that I am right
in saying so. Many other lessons also are taught. In these times,
when the desire to be honest is pressed so hard, is so violently
assaulted by the ambition to be great; in which riches are the
easiest road to greatness; when the temptations to which men are
subjected dull their eyes to the perfected iniquities of others;
when it is so hard for a man to decide vigorously that the pitch,
which so many are handling, will defile him if it be touched;--men's
conduct will be actuated much by that which is from day to day
depicted to them as leading to glorious or inglorious results. The
woman who is described as having obtained all that the world holds
to be precious, by lavishing her charms and her caresses unworthily
and heartlessly, will induce other women to do the same with
theirs,--as will she who is made interesting by exhibitions of
bold passion teach others to be spuriously passionate. The young
man who in a novel becomes a hero, perhaps a Member of Parliament,
and almost a Prime Minister, by trickery, falsehood, and flash
cleverness, will have many followers, whose attempts to rise in
the world ought to lie heavily on the conscience of the novelists
who create fictitious Cagliostros. There are Jack Sheppards other
than those who break into houses and out of prisons,--Macheaths,
who deserve the gallows more than Gay's hero.
Thinking of all this, as a novelist surely must do,--as I certainly
have done through my whole career,--it becomes to him a matter of
deep conscience how he shall handle those characters by whose words
and doings he hopes to interest his readers. It will very frequently
be the case that he will be tempted to sacrifice something for
effect, to say a word or two here, or to draw a picture there,
for which he feels that he has the power, and which when spoken or
drawn would be alluring. The regions of absolute vice are foul and
odious. The savour of them, till custom has hardened the palate and
are outskirts on these regions, on which sweet-smelling flowers
seem to grow; and grass to be green. It is in these border-lands
that the danger lies. The novelist may not be dull. If he commit
that fault he can do neither harm nor good. He must please, and the
flowers and the grass in these neutral territories sometimes seem
to give him so easy an opportunity of pleasing!
The writer of stories must please, or he will be nothing. And
he must teach whether he wish to teach or no. How shall he teach
lessons of virtue and at the same time make himself a delight to
his readers? That sermons are not in themselves often thought to
be agreeable we all know. Nor are disquisitions on moral philosophy
supposed to be pleasant reading for our idle hours. But the novelist,
if he have a conscience, must preach his sermons with the same
purpose as the clergyman, and must have his own system of ethics.
If he can do this efficiently, if he can make virtue alluring and
vice ugly, while he charms his readers instead of wearying them,
then I think Mr. Carlyle need not call him distressed, nor talk
of that long ear of fiction, nor question whether he be or not the
most foolish of existing mortals.
I think that many have done so; so many that we English novelists
may boast as a class that has been the general result of our own
work. Looking back to the past generation, I may say with certainty
that such was the operation of the novels of Miss Edgeworth, Miss
Austen, and Walter Scott. Coming down to my own times, I find such
to have been the teaching of Thackeray, of Dickens, and of George
Eliot. Speaking, as I shall speak to any who may read these words,
with that absence of self-personality which the dead may claim, I
will boast that such has been the result of my own writing. Can any
one by search through the works of the six great English novelists
I have named, find a scene, a passage, or a word that would teach
a girl to be immodest, or a man to be dishonest? When men in their
pages have been described as dishonest and women as immodest, have
they not ever been punished? It is not for the novelist to say,
baldly and simply: "Because you lied here, or were heartless there,
because you Lydia Bennet forgot the lessons of your honest home,
or you Earl Leicester were false through your ambition, or you
Beatrix loved too well the glitter of the world, therefore you shall
be scourged with scourges either in this world or in the next;" but
it is for him to show, as he carries on his tale, that his Lydia,
or his Leicester, or his Beatrix, will be dishonoured in the estimation
of all readers by his or her vices. Let a woman be drawn clever,
beautiful, attractive,--so as to make men love her, and women
almost envy her,--and let her be made also heartless,
unfeminine,
and ambitious of evil grandeur, as was Beatrix, what a danger is
there not in such a character! To the novelist who shall handle it,
what peril of doing harm! But if at last it have been so handled
that every girl who reads of Beatrix shall say: "Oh! not like
that;--let me not be like that!" and that every youth shall say:
"Let me not have such a one as that to press my bosom, anything
rather than that!"--then will not the novelist have preached his
sermon as perhaps no clergyman can preach it?
Very much of a novelist's work must appertain to the intercourse
between young men and young women. It is admitted that a novel
can hardly be made interesting or successful without love. Some few
might be named, but even in those the attempt breaks down, and the
softness of love is found to be necessary to complete the story.
Pickwick has been named as an exception to the rule, but even
in Pickwick there are three or four sets of lovers, whose little
amatory longings give a softness to the work. I tried it once with
Miss Mackenzie, but I had to make her fall in love at last. In this
frequent allusion to the passion which most stirs the imagination
of the young, there must be danger. Of that the writer of fiction
is probably well aware. Then the question has to be asked, whether
the danger may not be so averted that good may be the result,--and
to be answered.
respect the necessity of dealing with love is advantageous,--advantageous
from the very circumstance which has made love necessary to
all novelists. It is necessary because the passion is one which
interests or has interested all. Every one feels it, has felt it,
or expects to feel it,--or else rejects it with an eagerness which
still perpetuates the interest. If the novelist, therefore, can
so handle the subject as to do good by his handling, as to teach
wholesome lessons in regard to love, the good which he does will
be very wide. If I can teach politicians that they can do their
business better by truth than by falsehood, I do a great service;
but it is done to a limited number of persons. But if I can make
young men and women believe that truth in love will make them
happy, then, if my writings be popular, I shall have a very large
class of pupils. No doubt the cause for that fear which did exist
as to novels arose from an idea that the matter of love would be
treated in an inflammatory and generally unwholesome manner. "Madam,"
says Sir Anthony in the play, "a circulating library in a town is
an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge. It blossoms through the
year; and depend on it, Mrs. Malaprop, that they who are so fond of
handling the leaves will long for the fruit at last." Sir Anthony
was no doubt right. But he takes it for granted that the longing
for the fruit is an evil. The novelist who writes of love thinks
differently, and thinks that the honest love of an honest man is
a treasure which a good girl may fairly hope to win,--and that if
she can be taught to wish only for that, she will have been taught
to entertain only wholesome wishes.
I can easily believe that a girl should be taught to wish to love
by reading how Laura Bell loved Pendennis. Pendennis was not in
truth a very worthy man, nor did he make a very good husband; but
the girl's love was so beautiful, and the wife's love when she became
a wife so womanlike, and at the same time so sweet, so unselfish,
so wifely, so worshipful,--in the sense in which wives are told
that they ought to worship their husband,--that I cannot believe
that any girl can be injured, or even not benefited, by reading of
Laura's love.
There once used to be many who thought, and probably there still
are some, even here in England, who think that a girl should hear
nothing of love till the time come in which she is to be married.
That, no doubt, was the opinion of Sir Anthony Absolute and of Mrs.
Malaprop. But I am hardly disposed to believe that the old system
was more favourable than ours to the purity of manners. Lydia
Languish, though she was constrained by fear of her aunt to hide
the book, yet had Peregrine Pickle in her collection. While human
nature talks of love so forcibly it can hardly serve our turn
to be silent on the subject. "Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque
recurret." There are countries in which it has been in accordance
with the manners of the upper classes that the girl should be brought
to marry the man almost out of the nursery--or rather perhaps out
of the convent--without having enjoyed that freedom of thought
which the reading of novels and of poetry will certainly produce;
but I do not know that the marriages so made have been thought to
be happier than our own.
Among English novels of the present day, and among English
novelists, a great division is made. There are sensational novels
and anti-sensational, sensational novelists and anti-sensational,
sensational readers and anti-sensational. The novelists who are
considered to be anti-sensational are generally called realistic.
I am realistic. My friend Wilkie Collins is generally supposed
to be sensational. The readers who prefer the one are supposed to
take delight in the elucidation of character. Those who hold by
the other are charmed by the continuation and gradual development
of a plot. All this is, I think, a mistake,--which mistake arises
from the inability of the imperfect artist to be at the same time
realistic and sensational. A good novel should be both, and both in
the highest degree. If a novel fail in either, there is a failure
in art. Let those readers who believe that they do not like
sensational scenes in novels think of some of those passages from
our great novelists which have charmed them most:--of Rebecca in
the castle with Ivanhoe; of Burley in the cave with Morton; of the
mad lady tearing the veil of the expectant bride, in Jane Eyre; of
Lady Castlewood as, in her indignation, she explains to the Duke
of Hamilton Henry Esmond's right to be present at the marriage of
his Grace with Beatrix;--may I add of Lady Mason, as she makes her
confession at the feet of Sir Peregrine Orme? Will any one say that
the authors of these passages have sinned in being over-sensational? No
doubt, a string of horrible incidents, bound together without truth
in detail, and told as affecting personages without character,--wooden
blocks, who cannot make themselves known to the reader as men
and women, does not instruct or amuse, or even fill the mind with
awe. Horrors heaped upon horrors, and which are horrors only in
themselves, and not as touching any recognised and known person,
are not tragic, and soon cease even to horrify. And such would-be
tragic elements of a story may be increased without end, and
without difficulty. I may tell you of a woman murdered,--murdered
in the same street with you, in the next house,--that she was a
wife murdered by her husband,--a bride not yet a week a wife. I may
add to it for ever.
I may say that the murderer roasted her alive.
There is no end to it. I may declare that a former wife was treated
with equal barbarity; and may assert that, as the murderer was led
away to execution, he declared his only sorrow, his only regret
to be, that he could not live to treat a third wife after the same
fashion. There is nothing so easy as the creation and the cumulation
of fearful incidents after this fashion. If such creation and cumulation
be the beginning and the end of the novelist's work,--and novels have
been written which seem to be without other attractions,--nothing
can be more dull or more useless. But not on that account are we
averse to tragedy in prose fiction. As in poetry, so in prose, he
who can deal adequately with tragic elements is a greater artist
and reaches a higher aim than the writer whose efforts never carry
him above the mild walks of everyday life. The Bride of Lammermoor
is a tragedy throughout, in spite of its comic elements. The life
of Lady Castlewood, of whom I have spoken, is a tragedy. Rochester's
wretched thraldom to his mad wife, in Jane Eyre, is a tragedy.
But these stories charm us not simply because they are tragic, but
because we feel that men and women with flesh and blood, creatures
with whom we can sympathise, are struggling amidst their woes. It
all lies in that. No novel is anything, for the purposes either
of comedy or tragedy, unless the reader can sympathise with the
characters whose names he finds upon the pages. Let an author so
tell his tale as to touch his reader's heart and draw his tears,
and he has, so far, done his work well. Truth let there be,--truth
of description, truth of character, human truth as to men and
women. If there be such truth, I do not know that a novel can be
too sensational.
I did intend when I meditated that history of English fiction to
include within its pages some rules for the writing of novels;--or
I might perhaps say, with more modesty, to offer some advice on
the art to such tyros in it as might be willing to take advantage
of the experience of an old hand. But the matter would, I fear,
be too long for this episode, and I am not sure that I have as yet
got the rules quite settled in my own mind. I will, however, say
a few words on one or two points which my own practice has pointed
out to me.