The English Novel by George Saintsbury (essential reading TXT) 📖

But it has an elopement. Emma , which has perhaps on the whole been the most general favourite, may challenge that position on one ground beyond all question, though possibly not on all. It is the absolute triumph of that reliance on the strictly ordinary which has been indicated as Miss Austen's title to pre-eminence in the history of the novel. Not an event, not a circumstance, not a detail, is carried out of "the daily round, the common task" of average English middle-class humanity, upper and lower. Yet every event, every circumstance, every detail, is put sub specie eternitatis by the sorcery of art. Few things could be more terrible--nothing more tiresome--than to hear the garrulous Miss Bates talk in actual life; few things are more delightful than to read her speeches as they occur here. An aspiring soul might feel disposed to "take and drown itself in a pail" (as one of Dickens's characters says) if it had to live the life which the inhabitants of Highbury are represented as living; to read about that life--to read about it over and over again--has been and is always likely to be one of the chosen delights of some of the best wits of our race. This is one of the paradoxes of art: and perhaps it is the most wonderful of them, exceeding even the old "pity and terror" problem. And the discovery of it, as a possible source of artistic success, is one of the greatest triumphs and one of the most inexhaustible discoveries of that art itself. For by another paradox--this time not of art but of nature--the extraordinary is exhaustible and the ordinary is not. Tragedy and the more "incidented" comedy, it is well known, run into types and reproduce situations almost inevitably. "All the stories are told." But the story of the life of Highbury never can be told, because there is really nothing in it but the telling: and here the blessed infinity of Art comes in again.

Miss Austen's last book, like her first, was published posthumously and she left nothing else but a couple of fragments. One of these, Lady Susan , does not, so far as it extends, promise much, though it is such a fragment and such an evident first draft even of this, that judgment of it is equally unfair and futile. The other, The Watsons , has some very striking touches, but is also a mere beginning. Persuasion --which appeared with Northanger Abbey and which, curiously enough, has, like its nearly twenty years elder sister, Bath for its principal scene--has also some pretensions to primacy among the books, and is universally admitted to be of its author's most delicate, most finished, and most sustained work. And this, like Emma , resolutely abstains from even the slightest infusion of startling or unusual incident, of "exciting" story, of glaring colour of any kind: relying only on congruity of speech, sufficient if subdued description, and above all a profusion of the most delicately, but the most vividly drawn character, made to unfold a plot which has interest, if no excitement, and seasoned throughout with the unfailing condiment--the author's "own sauce"--of gentle but piquant irony and satire.

It is not to be supposed or inferred that Miss Austen's methods, or her results, have appealed to everybody. Madame de Staël thought her
vulgaire --meaning, of course, not exactly our "vulgar" but "commonplace"; Charlotte Brontë was not much otherwise minded; her own Marianne Dashwood would doubtless have thought the same. Readers without some touch of letters may think her style old-fashioned: it has even been termed "stilted." Not merely may amateurs of blood and thunder, of passion and sensation, think her tame, but the more modern devotees of "analysis" may consider her superficial. On the other hand, it is notorious that, from her own day to this, she has never wanted partisans, often of superlative competence, and of the most strikingly different tempers, tastes, and opinions. The extraordinary quietness of her art is only matched by its confidence: its subtlety by its strength. She did not try many styles; she deliberately and no doubt wisely refused to try the other style which was already carrying all before it in her own later days. She seems to have confined herself (with what seems to some high-flying judges an almost ignoble caution) to the strata of society that she knew most thoroughly: and the curious have noted that she seldom goes above a baronet, and hardly even descends to a butler, in her range of personages who are not mere mutes. It is not at all unlikely--in fact it is almost certain--that she might have enlarged this range, and that of her incident, with perfect safety and to the great profit and delight of her readers. But these actual things she knew she could do consummately; and she would not risk the production of anything not consummate.

The value of her, artistically, is of course in the perfection of what she did; but the value of her historically is in the way in which she showed that, given the treatment, any material could be perfected. It was in this way, as has been pointed out, that the possibilities of the novel were shown to be practically illimitable. Tragedy is not needed: and the most ordinary transactions, the most everyday characters, develop into an infinite series of comedies with which the novelist can amuse himself and his readers. The ludicrum humani seculi on the one hand, and the artist's power of extracting and arranging it on the other--these two things supply all that is wanted. This Hampshire parson's daughter had found the philosopher's stone of the novel: and the very pots and pans, the tongs and pokers of the house, could be turned into novel-gold by it.

But even gold is not everything: and only a fanatic, and a rather foolish fanatic, would say that this style of fiction summed up and exhausted all the good that fiction could give and do. Miss Austen's art excludes (it has been said) tragedy; it does not let in much pure romance; although its variety is in a way infinite, yet it is not various in infinite ways, but rather in very finite ones. Everybody who denies its excellence is to be blamed: but nobody is to be blamed for saying that he should like some other excellences as well. The desire is innocent, nay commendable: and it was being satisfied, at practically the same time, by the work of Sir Walter Scott in a kind of novel almost as new (when we regard it in connection with its earlier examples) as Miss Austen's own. This was the Historical novel, which, in a way, not only subsumed many though not quite all varieties of Romance, but also summoned to its aid not a little--in fact a very great deal--of the methods of the pure novel itself.

It is not very long since a critic, probably not very old, sentenced the critical opinions of another critic, certainly not very young, to "go into the melting pot" because they were in favour of the historical novel: and because the historical novel had for some time past done great harm (I think the phrase was stronger) to the imaginative literature of England. Now there are several things which might be said about this judgment--I do not say "in arrest" of it, because it is of itself inoperative: as it happens you cannot put critical opinions in the melting pot. At least, they won't melt: and they come out again like the diabolic rat that Mr. Chips tried to pitch-boil. In the first place, there is the question whether the greater part by far of the imaginative and other literature of any time does not itself "go into the melting pot," and whether it much matters what sends it there. In the second, if this seems too cynical, there is the very large and grave question whether a still larger proportion of the novel of manners, in England, France, and all other countries during the same time, has not been as bad as, or worse than, the romantic division, historical or other. But the worst faults of the judgment remain. In the first place there is the fatal shortness of view. It is with the literature of two thousand, not with the literature of twenty, years that the true critic has to do: and no kind which--in two thousand, or two hundred, or twenty--has produced literature that is good or great can be even temporarily put aside because (as every kind of literature without exception has been again and again) it is for a time barren or fruitful only in weeds. And any one who does not count Scott and Dumas and Thackeray among the makers of good literature must really excuse others if they simply take no further count of him. The historical novel is a good kind, good friends, a marvellous good kind: and it has the advantage over the pure novel of manners that it is much less subject to obsolescence, if it be really well done; while it can practically annex most of the virtues of that novel of manners itself.

This excellent kind, however, had been wandering about in the wilderness--had indeed hardly got so far even as that stage, but had been a mere "bodiless childful of life in the gloom"--for more than two thousand years before Waverley . Of its earlier attempts to get into full existence we cannot say much here:[18] something on the more recent but rather abortive birth-throes has been promised, and is now due. It is not improbable that considerable assistance was rendered to the kind by the heroic romance of the seventeenth century in prose and verse, which often attempted historic, and almost always pseudo-historic, guise. As has been seen in regard to such collections as Croxall's, historical stories were freely mingled with fictitious: and it could not be for nothing that Horace Walpole, the author of the
Castle of Otranto , was a rather ardent and even to some extent scholarly student of the romance and the gossip of history. Much earlier, Fielding himself, in his salad days, had given something of an historic turn to the story of A Journey from this World to the Next . And when history itself became more common and more readable, it could not but be that this inexhaustible source of material for the new kind of literature, which was being so eagerly demanded and so busily supplied, should suggest itself. Some instances of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century experiments have been given and discussed in the last chapter: and when Scott (or "the Author of Waverley ") had achieved his astonishing success, some of the writers of these put in the usual claim of "That's my thunder." This was done in the case of the Lees, it was also done in the case of Jane Porter, the writer of the once famous and favourite Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) and Scottish Chiefs (1810): while, as we have seen, there had been historical colour enough in Godwin's novels to make suggestion of his "authorship of
Waverley " not absolutely preposterous. Even Mrs. Radcliffe had touched the style; and humbler persons like the egregious Henrietta Mosse had attempted it in the most serious spirit.

[18] Those who are curious about the matter will find it
treated in a set of Essays by the present writer, which
originally appeared in Macmillan's Magazine during the autumn
of 1894, and were reprinted among Essays in English
Literature , Second Series, London,