THE NOVEL THEN AND NOW
By H. C. A. GAUNT
THE novels of Anthony Trollope have become best-sellers. His characters and their sayings are becoming household words, and not only in the marble hall of the Athenaeum. Mrs. Proudie, the Duke of Omnium, Mr. Harding and the de Courcy family are enjoying art Indian summer ; they have reappeared as stars on the stage of the world of fiction. Why this is so is no mystery. The truth is that not only Trollope but a great many of the Victorian novelists are now capable of rousing a response in us, and of exercising a benign influence which they have not exercised for many years. The novels of Dickens and Scott and Thackeray and George Eliot are today read with zest and enjoyment, whereas for the last fifty years they have aroused only respectful scorn or downright boredom. And it is noteworthy that the novels of Hardy and Conrad (mistakenly, I think) fail to satisfy the ordinary reader. This is particularly true of Hardy.
Now to attribute this change in popular taste either to the inevitable cycle of literary appreciation, or to the influence of educational practice, is a mistake. When a particular author of marked character- istics as Trollope, or when an epoch of literature, as decisive as was the Victorian age, first dwindles in stature and then swells to sub- stantial proportions in popular estimation, it is a sure sign of two things: first, that there is in that literature some lasting and memorable quality ; and, second, that the popular reader of the second epoch shares the spiritual experience of the popular reader of the first. The episodes which excite, the characters which live, the phrases which stir us to laughter or tears, the very pace and rhythm by which the story moves along, all these must be echoes of the conscious experience of the reader.
Although Barchester has now been bombed, and the London County Council plans with popular approval to sweep away the squalor of the Dock area, and much of Dickens' London with it ; though the craftsmanship of country towns gives way to the miraculous contrivances of Radar and atomic energy ; yet the spirit which stimulated the Victorian novelists and the experiences which guided their readers are in many ways paralleled today. What are these experiences, and what are the salient features of life and literature which are demanding expression and satisfaction?
First, the fact and experience of action rather than thought. If there is one thing which distinguishes the novels of 185o from recent works it is that they are novels of action. When a chapter of Thackeray or Dickens is ended, the question is " What is going to happen next? " When a chapter of Huxley or Proust is ended, the question is " What are we to think about next? " In twentieth- Century novels the yolk of the egg is speculation and idea ; the plot is the shell which contains these. In Victorian novels the meat is in the story ; what happens is the luscious and satisfying part of the meal. We appreciate this the more because we have lived, and are
still living, in a world where action rather than thought has assumed dominating proportions. The immediate task which we demand of ourselves and of our rulers is that of doing something. In the face of perils and uncertainties this has always been the reaction of English people, once they are aware of the perils and uncertainties ; and it is so today just as much as it was ninety years ago, and in proportion as this determination was dormant in the years between the two wars.
The second characteristic feature of Victorian novels which finds a very deep response today is the sense of justice and righteousness which pervades nearly all of them. Whatever villainies or shady transactions are perpetrated in the pages of Dickens, whatever niceties of Pharisaism or snobberies of aristocratic society occur in the Barchester novels, whatever deeds of treachery and bloodshed carry along the stories of Sir Walter Scott, the reader is never for a moment left in any doubt what the mind of the writer is on these matters. This is a distinction which marks the great Victorian novelists off from their successors of the twentieth century. No doubt the psychological acumen and the imaginative insight of later writers surpass the more usual and dogmatic delineation of the nineteenth century ; and in some ways the revelation of the secret, mysterious, and not always pleasant, places of the human mind and of human behaviour serves to remind us that the voyage of life is often perilous and dark, as well as illuminating and adventurous. But the escape which the present generation of readers has discovered in the Victorian novels is an escape in the best sense—into a kindlier and sunnier landscape, where we can recapture a sense of man's greatness, and not only of his limitations.
But the escape has also its perils. It is no accident that Thomas Hardy, the greatest English tragedian since Shakespeare, has fallen out of taste. For the keynote of tragedy is the frailty of man, and the frailty of man, in the sense of Aristotle, is something in which we no longer believe. We believe in the wickedness of man, the cruelty and greed of man, in his nobility and his skill, in his courage and kindliness ; we believe in his virtues and his vices, and are quite prepared to acknowledge them side by side in the pages of fiction and the experience of real life. But what the tragedian does for us is to illustrate a profounder truth—that men are by themselves neither good nor bad, but are capable of good or bad actions according as they are beset by circumstances and controlled by spiritual forces. Man, in fact, is frail, and it is his frailty which lives in the works of Sophocles and Shakespeare and Hardy. Perhaps the early twentieth- century attitude may be roughly summed up in the words.
" As flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods: They kill us for their sport."
From this hopeless outlook we have returned to a saner view : " Think that the clearest gods, who make them honours Of men's impossibilities, have preserved thee."
Neither of these is, however, the tragic perception. That is indicated more nearly in a third quotation from King Lear :
" The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices Make instruments to plague us."
We do not yet believe in the tragic frailty of man. We refuse to see that left to himself he is rudderless and erring on an ocean more boisterous and dangerous than ever before. When once again we appreciate the great tragic writers, it will be a sign that we have mastered in a new generation the profoundest truth of all—man's need of redemption.
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