Part 8

When the ideas of Zola were first warmly taken up, about ten years ago, by the most earnest and sympathetic writers who then were young, the theory of the experimental novel seemed unassailable, and the range within which it could be worked to advantage practically boundless. But the fallacies of practice remained to be experienced, and looking back upon what has been written by the leaders themselves, the places where the theory has broken down are patent. It may not be uninteresting to take up the leading dogmas of the naturalistic school, and to see what elements of failure, or, rather, what limitations to success, they contained. The outlook is very different in 1890 from what it was in 1880; and a vast number of exceedingly clever writers have laboured to no avail, if we are not able at the latter date to gain a wider perspective than could be obtained at the earlier one.

Ten years ago, most ardent and generous young authors, outside the frontiers of indifferent Albion, were fired with enthusiasm at the results to be achieved by naturalism in fiction. It was to be the Revealer and the Avenger. It was to display society as it is, and to wipe out all the hypocrisies of convention. It was to proceed from strength to strength. It was to place all imagination upon a scientific basis, and to open boundless vistas to sincere and courageous young novelists. We have seen with what ardent hope and confidence its principles were accepted by Mr. Howells. We have seen all the Latin races, in their coarser way, embrace and magnify the system. We have seen Zola, like a heavy father in high comedy, bless a budding generation of novel-writers, and prophesy that they will all proceed further than he along the road of truth and experiment. Yet the naturalistic school is really less advanced, less thorough, than it was ten years ago. Why is this?

It is doubtless because the strain and stress of production have brought to light those weak places in the formula which were not dreamed of. The first principle of the school was the exact reproduction of life. But life is wide, and it is elusive. All that the finest observer can do is to make a portrait of one corner of it. By the confession of the master-spirit himself, this portrait is not to be a photograph. It must be inspired by imagination, but sustained and confined by the experience of reality. It does not appear at first sight as though it should be difficult to attain this, but in point of fact it is found almost impossible to approach this species of perfection. The result of building up a long work on this principle is, I hardly know why, to produce the effect of a reflection in a convex mirror. The more accurately experimental some parts of the picture are, the more will the want of balance and proportion in other parts be felt. I will take at random two examples. No better work in the naturalistic direction has been done than is to be found in the beginning of M. Zola's _La Joie de Vivre_, or in the early part of the middle of Mr. James's _Bostonians_. The life in the melancholy Norman house upon the cliff, the life among the uncouth fanatic philanthropists in the American city, these are given with a reality, a brightness, a personal note which have an electrical effect upon the reader. But the remainder of each of these remarkable books, built up as they are with infinite toil by two of the most accomplished architects of fiction now living, leaves on the mind a sense of a strained reflection, of images blurred or malformed by a convexity of the mirror. As I have said, it is difficult to account for this, which is a feature of blight on almost every specimen of the experimental novel; but perhaps it can in a measure be accounted for by the inherent disproportion which exists between the small flat surface of a book and the vast arch of life which it undertakes to mirror, those studies being least liable to distortion which reflect the smallest section of life, and those in which ambitious masters endeavour to make us feel the mighty movements of populous cities and vast bodies of men being the most inevitably misshapen.

Another leading principle of the naturalists is the disinterested attitude of the narrator. He who tells the story must not act the part of Chorus, must not praise or blame, must have no favourites; in short, must not be a moralist but an anatomist. This excellent and theoretical law has been a snare in practice. The nations of continental Europe are not bound down by conventional laws to the same extent as we English are. The Anglo-Saxon race is now the only one that has not been touched by that pessimism of which the writings of Schopenhauer are the most prominent and popular exponent. This fact is too often overlooked when we scornfully ask why the foreign nations allow themselves so great a latitude in the discussion of moral subjects. It is partly, no doubt, because of our beautiful Protestant institutions; because we go to Sunday-schools and take a lively interest in the souls of other people; because, in short, we are all so virtuous and godly, that our novels are so prim and decent. But it is also partly because our hereditary dulness in perceiving delicate ethical distinctions has given the Anglo-Saxon race a tendency to slur over the dissonances between man and nature. This tendency does not exist among the Latin races, who run to the opposite extreme and exaggerate these discords. The consequence has been that they have, almost without exception, being betrayed by the disinterested attitude into a contemplation of crime and frailty (notoriously more interesting than innocence and virtue) which has given bystanders excuse for saying that these novelists are lovers of that which is evil. In the same way they have been tempted by the Rembrandtesque shadows of pain, dirt, and obloquy to overdash their canvases with the subfusc hues of sentiment. In a word, in trying to draw life evenly and draw it whole, they have introduced such a brutal want of tone as to render the portrait a caricature. The American realists, who were guarded by fashion from the Scylla of brutality, have not wholly escaped, on their side and for the same reason, the Charybdis of insipidity.

It would take us too far, and would require a constant reference to individual books, to trace the weaknesses of the realistic school of our own day. Human sentiment has revenged itself upon them for their rigid regulations and scientific formulas, by betraying them into faults the possibility of which they had not anticipated. But above all other causes of their limited and temporary influence, the most powerful has been the material character which their rules forced upon them, and their excess of positivism and precision. In eliminating the grotesque and the rhetorical they drove out more than they wished to lose; they pushed away with their scientific pitchfork the fantastic and intellectual elements. How utterly fatal this was may be seen, not in the leaders, who have preserved something of the reflected colour of the old romance, but in those earnest disciples who have pushed the theory to its extremity. In their sombre, grimy, and dreary studies in pathology, clinical bulletins of a soul dying of atrophy, we may see what the limits of realism are, and how impossible it is that human readers should much longer go on enjoying this sort of literary aliment.

If I have dwelt upon these limitations, however, it has not been to cast a stone at the naturalistic school. It has been rather with the object of clearing away some critical misconceptions about the future development of it. Anglo-Saxon criticism of the perambulating species might, perhaps, be persuaded to consider the realists with calmer judgment, if it looked upon them, not as a monstrous canker that was slowly spreading its mortal influence over the whole of literature, which it would presently overwhelm and destroy, but as a natural and timely growth, taking its due place in the succession of products, and bound, like other growths, to bud and blossom and decline. I venture to put forth the view that the novel of experiment has had its day; that it has been made the vehicle of some of the loftiest minds of our age; that it has produced a huge body of fiction, none of it perfect, perhaps, much of it bad, but much of it, also, exceedingly intelligent, vivid, sincere, and durable; and that it is now declining, to leave behind it a great memory, the prestige of persecution, and a library of books which every highly educated man in the future will be obliged to be familiar with.

It would be difficult, I think, for any one but a realistic novelist to overrate the good that realism in fiction has done. It has cleared the air of a thousand follies, has pricked a whole fleet of oratorical bubbles. Whatever comes next, we cannot return, in serious novels, to the inanities and impossibilities of the old "well-made" plot, to the children changed at nurse, to the madonna heroine and the god-like hero, to the impossible virtues and melodramatic vices. In future, even those who sneer at realism and misrepresent it most wilfully, will be obliged to put in their effects in ways more in accord with veritable experience. The public has eaten of the apple of knowledge, and will not be satisfied with mere marionettes. There will still be novel-writers who address the gallery, and who will keep up the gaudy old convention and the clumsy _Family Herald_ evolution, but they will no longer be distinguished people of genius. They will no longer sign themselves George Sand and Charles Dickens.

In the meantime, wherever I look I see the novel ripe for another reaction. The old leaders will not change. It is not to be expected that they will write otherwise than in the mode which has grown mature with them. But in France, among the younger men, every one is escaping from the realistic formula. The two young athletes for whom M. Zola predicted ten years ago an "experimental" career more profoundly scientific than his own, are realists no longer. M. Guy de Maupassant has become a psychologist, and M. Huysmans a mystic. M. Bourget, who set all the ladies dancing after his ingenious, musky books, never has been a realist; nor has Pierre Loti, in whom, with a fascinating freshness, the old exiled romanticism comes back with a laugh and a song. All points to a reaction in France; and in Russia, too, if what we hear is true, the next step will be one toward the mystical and the introspective. In America it would be rash for a foreigner to say what signs of change are evident. The time has hardly come when we look to America for the symptoms of literary initiative. But it is my conviction that the limits of realism have been reached; that no great writer who has not already adapted the experimental system will do so; and that we ought now to be on the outlook to welcome (and, of course, to persecute) a school of novelists with a totally new aim, part of whose formula must unquestionably be a concession to the human instinct for mystery and beauty.

_1890._

IS VERSE IN DANGER?

Is Verse in Danger?

We are passing through a period obviously unfavourable to the development of the art of poetry. A little while ago there was an outburst of popular appreciation of living verse, but this is now replaced, for the moment, by an almost ostentatious indifference. These alternations of curiosity and disdain deceive no one who looks at the history of literature with an eye which is at all philosophical. It is easy to say, as is commonly said, that they depend on the merit of the poetry which is being produced. But this is not always, or even often, the case. About twenty years ago a ferment of interest and enthusiasm was called forth, all over the English-speaking world, by the early writings of Mr. Swinburne and by those of the late Mr. Rossetti. This was deserved by the merit of those productions; but the disdain which, twenty years earlier, the verse of Mr. Robert Browning and Mr. Matthew Arnold had met with, cannot be so accounted for. It is wiser to admit that sons never look at life with their fathers' eyes, and that taste is subject to incessant and almost regular fluctuations. At the present moment, though men should sing with the voice of angels, the barbarian public would not listen, and a new Milton would probably be less warmly welcomed in 1890 than a Pomfret was two centuries ago or a Bowles was in 1790. Literary history shows that a demand for poetry does not always lead to a supply, and that a supply does not always command a market. He who doubts this fact may compare the success of Herrick with that of Erasmus Darwin.

The only reason for preluding a speculation on the future of the art of poetry with these remarks, is to clear the ground of any arguments based on the merely momentary condition of things. The eagerness or coldness of the public, the fertility or exhaustion of the poets, at this particular juncture, are elements of no real importance. If poetry is to continue to be one of the living arts of humanity, it does not matter an iota whether poetry is looked upon with contempt by the members of a single generation. If poetry is declining, and, as a matter of fact, is now moribund, the immense vogue of Tennyson at a slightly earlier period will take its place among the insignificant phenomena of a momentary reaction. The problem is a more serious one. It is this: Is poetry, in its very essence, an archaic and rudimentary form of expression, still galvanised into motion, indeed, by antiquarianism, but really obsolete and therefore to be cultivated only at the risk of affectation and insincerity; or is it an art capable of incessant renovation--a living organism which grows, on the whole, with the expansion of modern life? In other words, is the art of verse one which, like music or painting, delights and consoles us with a species of expression which can never be superseded, because it is in danger of no direct rivalry from a similar species; or was poetry merely the undeveloped, though in itself the extremely beautiful, infancy of a type which is now adult, and which has relinquished its charming puerilities for a mode of expression infinitely wider and of more practical utility? Sculptors, singers, painters must always exist; but need we have poets any longer, since the world has discovered how to say all it wants to say in prose? Will any one who has anything of importance to communicate be likely in the future to express it through the medium of metrical language?

These questions are not to be dismissed with a smile. A large number of thoughtful persons at the present time are, undoubtedly, disposed to answer them in the affirmative, although a certain decency forbids them openly to say so. Plenty of clever people secretly regard the Muse as a distinguished old lady, of good family, who has been a beauty and a wit in her day, but who really rules only by sufferance in these years of her decline. They whisper that she is sinking into second childhood, that she repeats herself when she converses, and that she has exchanged her early liberal tastes for a love of what is puerile, ingenious, and "finikin." A great Parisian critic has just told us that each poet is read only by the other poets, and he gives as the reason that the art of verse has become so refined and so elaborate that it passes over the heads of the multitude. But may it not be that this refinement is only a decrepitude--the amusement of an old age that has sunk to the playing of more and more helplessly ingenious games of patience? That is what those hint who, more insidious by far than the open enemies of literature, suggest that poetry has had its reign, its fascinating and imperial tyranny, and that it must now make way for the democracy of prose.

Probably there would have been no need to face this question, either in this generation or for many generations to come, if it had not been for a single circumstance. The great enemies of the poets of the present are the poets of the past, and the antiquarian spirit of the nineteenth century has made the cessation of the publication of fresh verse a possibility. The intellectual condition of our times differs from that of all preceding ages in no other point so much as in its attitude toward the writings of the dead. In those periods of renovation which have refreshed the literatures of the world, the tendency has always been to study some one class of deceased writers with affection. In English history, we have seen the romantic poets of Italy, the dramatists of Spain, the Latin satirists, and the German ballad-mongers, exercise, at successive moments, a vivid influence on English writers. But this study was mainly limited to those writers themselves, and did not extend to the circle of their readers; while even with the writers it never absorbed at a single moment the whole range of poetry. We may take one instance. Pope was the disciple of Horace and of the French Jesuits, of Dryden and of the conceit-creating school of Donne. But he was able to use Boileau and Crashaw so freely because he addressed a public that had never met with the first and had forgotten the second; and when he passed outside this narrow circle he was practically without a rival. To the class whom he addressed, Shakespeare and Milton were phantoms, Chaucer and Spenser not so much as names. The only doubt was whether Alexander Pope was man enough to arrest attention by the intrinsic merits of his poetry. If his verse was admitted to be good, his public were not distracted by a preference for other verse which they had known for a longer time.

This remained true until about a generation ago. The great romantic poets of the beginning of this century found the didactic and rhetorical verse-writers of the eighteenth century in possession of the field, but they found no one else there. Their action was of the nature of a revolt--a revolution so successful that it became constitutional. All that Wordsworth and Keats had to do was to prove their immediate predecessors to be unworthy of public attention, and when once they had persuaded the reading world that what they had to offer was more pleasing than what Young and Churchill and Darwin had offered, the revolution was complete. But, in order to draw attention to the merits of the proposed change, the romantic poets of the Georgian age pointed to the work of the writers of the Elizabethan age, whom they claimed as their natural predecessors--the old stock cast out at the Restoration and now reinstated. The public had entirely forgotten the works of these writers, except to some extent those of the dramatists, and it became necessary to reprint them. A whole galaxy of poetic stars was revealed when the cloud of prejudice was blown away, and a class of dangerous rivals to the modern poet was introduced.

The activity of the dead is now paramount, and threatens to paralyse original writing altogether. The revival of the old poets who were in direct sympathy with Keats and Wordsworth has extended far beyond the limits which those who inaugurated it desired to lay down. Every poetic writer of any age precedent to our own has now a chance of popularity, often a very much better chance than he possessed during his own lifetime. Scarcely a poet, from Chaucer downward, remains inedited. The imitative lyrist who, in a paroxysm of inspiration, wrote one good sonnet under the sway of James I., but was never recognised as a poet even by his friends, rejoices now in a portly quarto, and lives for the first time. The order of nature is reversed, and those who were only ghosts in the seventeenth century come back to us clothed in literary vitality.

In this great throng of resuscitated souls, all of whom have forfeited their copyright, how is the modern poet to exist? He has no longer to compete--as "his great forefathers did, from Homer down to Ben"--with the leading spirits of his own generation, but with the picked genius of the world. He writes an epic; Mr. Besant and the Society of Authors oblige him to "retain his rights," to "publish at a royalty," and to keep the rules of the game. But Milton has no rights and demands no royalty. The new poet composes lyrics and publishes them in a volume. They are sincere and ingenious; but why should the reader buy that volume, when he can get the best of Shelley and Coleridge, of Gray and Marvell, in a cheaper form in _The Golden Treasury_? At every turn the thronging company of the ghosts impedes and disheartens the modern writer, and it is no wonder if the new Orpheus throws down his lyre in despair when the road to his desire is held by such an invincible army of spectres. In the golden age of the Renaissance an enthusiast is said to have offered up a manuscript by Martial every year, as a burnt sacrifice to Catullus, an author whom he distinctly preferred. The modern poet, if he were not afraid of popular censure, might make a yearly holocaust of editions of the British classics, in honour of the Genius of Poetry. There are many enemies of the art abroad, but among them all the most powerful and insidious are those of its own household. The poets of to-day might contrive to fish the murex up, and to eat turtle, if it were not for the intolerable rivalry of "souls of poets dead and gone."

On the whole, however, it is highly unlikely that the antiquarian passion of our age will last. Already it gives signs of wearing out, and it will probably be succeeded by a spirit of unreasonable intolerance of the past. Intellectual invention will not allow itself to be pinioned for ever by these soft and universal cords of tradition, each as slight as gossamer in itself, but overwhelming in the immense mass. As for the old poets, young verse-writers may note with glee that these rivals of theirs are being caught in the butterfly net of education, where they will soon find the attractive feathers rubbed off their wings. One by one they pass into text-books and are lost. Chaucer is done for, and so is Milton; Goldsmith is annotated, Scott is prepared for "local examinations," and even Byron, the loose, the ungrammatical, is edited as a school book. The noble army of extension lecturers will scarcely pause in their onward march. We shall see Wordsworth captured, Shelley boiled down for the use of babes, and Keats elaborately annotated, with his blunders in classical mythology exposed. The schoolmaster is the only friend the poet of the future dares to look to, for he alone has the power to destroy the loveliness and mystery which are the charm of the old poets. Even a second-rate verse-writer may hope to live by the side of an Elizabethan poet edited for the Clarendon Press.

This remedy may, however, be considered fantastic, and it would scarcely be wise to trust to it. There is, nevertheless, nothing ironical in the statement that an exaggerated attention paid to historical work leaves no time and no appetite for what contemporaries produce. The neglect of poetry is so widespread that if the very small residuum of love of verse is expended lavishly on the dead, the living are likely to come off badly indeed. The other arts, which can better defend themselves, are experiencing the same sense of being starved by the old masters. The bulk of the public neither buys books nor invests in pictures, nor orders statuary according to its own taste, but according to the fashion; and if the craze is antiquarian, we may produce Raphaels in dozens and Shelleys in shoals; they will have to subsist as the bears and the pelicans do.