LITERARY ANODYNES.
ArTITHOUT a doubt, mental sedatives are craved for by
a very large and increasing number of men and women. There are moments in life when the one thing we want is a literary anodyne, and nothing else will do. The mind requires rest, and yet it cannot rest, like the body, in mere inaction. It must be patted into quietness like a restless child, and won to calm by employing it upon something which shall just occupy and yet never force it into activity. Some men find their literary anodynes in easy mathematical problems, others in records• of travel or in the discoveries of science. Such people, however, are the exceptions. To mankind in general, the novel is the only potent anodyne.
It is of such literary anodynes that Mr. Andrew Lang writes a very pleasant article in the. September number of the New Princeton Review. " A man," says Mr. Lang, " wants his novel to be an anodyne ; " and from this standpoint he proceeds to declaim against those who wish to make fiction " the last word of humanity." Modern fiction is either " the novel of the new religion, the novel of the new society that declines to have any religion, the novel of dismal commonplace, or the novel of the Divorce Court." "Are not," he con- tinues, " some fourteen hours of the day enough wherein to fight with problems and worry about faiths and rend one's heart with futile pities and powerless indignations P Leave me an hour in the day not to work in, or ponder in, or sorrow in ; but to dream in, or to wander in the dreams of others To get into fairyland, that is the aspiration of all of us whom the world oppresses." Scott, Dumas, Mr. Stevenson, Mr. Rider Haggard, Gaboriau, and plenty of others, old and new, will do this for us ; and therefore they and their kind are the 9nly true writers of fiction. Such is the line of Mr. Lang's thought. But does he not make a very notable confusion? No doubt the tellers of tales of adventure and of romance, whether they write of to-day or of long-forgotten times, are the best compounders of that sovereign nepenthe for which so many jaded brains are always craving. That, however, does not show that the novel of manners, of character, of politics, of sentiment, of reflection, of still life, and of life as men live it not on the High Veldt or in ships that go searching for treasure, but in the dull routine of the real world, has no raison d'être. Because " Treasure Island " or the " New Arabian Nights" are better to read after a hard day of brain- work than " Silas Marner," that does not make the miracle. working of the golden-haired child any the less a noble story. In his apology for anodynes, Mr. Lang has, in fact, gone much too far, and has written as if such a thing as ordinary mental meat and drink did not exist.
The apologist for the novel which aims at something more than mere story-telling has plenty of ground upon which to make his defence. The literature of a nation may no doubt reflect its manners and its life, but it also helps to mould them. The novel, as the strongest and most popular form of literature, can and does affect the national life. It can be, and often is, a great instructor,—a school of conduct and of manners A novel with a too apparent purpose is no doubt unbearable ; but for all that, those novels of Dickens and of Charles Reade which were written with an avowed social aim, not only helped to produce great and visible effects, but were in every sense good novels, not mere sermons in monthly parts.
Thackeray, too, because he was burnt up with the desire to make English people ashamed of admiring the peerage, and because his novels are often nothing but a series of reflective essays and character-studies slowly revolving round the thinnest of stories, was not therefore any the leas a writer of fiction. The novels that appeal to us by the same means as the Greek drama, and are, in fact, prose tragedies or comedies, are also not to be condemned merely because, instead of thinking only of getting on with more adventures or thickening the plot, they strive to resolve by raising and appeasing the sense of pity and terror in their readers. No ; the novel in its highest sense is as much a part of the larger life as the plays oaf Shakespeare, the sculpture of the Greeks, or the pictures of Raphael; and to abandon the nobler forms of the narrative art for mere story-telling, would be as great a sign of literary decadence as it is possible to imagine. But if we decide not to look at the matter in the large, and accept for the moment the modern definition that the end of Art is only to please, we shall still find that Mr. Lang's exclusion of everything which does not make a good literary anodyne from the ranks of novels, cannot be sustained. What does the world at large want in its novels? Mr. Lang says it does not want "realistic photographs of the life we know too well, realistic studies of the development of characters like our own petty characters, thwarted passions, unfulfilled ambitions, tarnished victories over self, over temptations, melancholy compromises, misery more or less disguised, dull dinner-parties, degraded politics," nor yet a new religion in three volumes, nor novels where the hunt for adjectives and epigrams wearies us as we read. Now, we can quite understand Mr. Lang not wanting to hear about " the world we know so well "—i.e., the big London world, made up of fashion and eminence, political, literary, and social—nor about character development, nor about dinner- parties, nor politics, nor new religions, nor the hunt for epigrams ; for this is the world in which he himself lives, and these are the subjects which he and other London men of letters are perpetually hearing discussed. In the same way, a sailor does not care about sea-novels, nor a farmer about tales of country life. In novels, we like to fly to something un- familiar. But to the greater number of readers, the subjects Mr. Lang enumerates are quite unfamiliar. They do not know how people talk at London dinner-parties, any more than they do how people talk in the forecastle of a pirate schooner. They are not in the habit of hearing their neigh- bours analysing each his friend's character; and when these things are done in the novel, it amuses them extremely. Even the new religion in three volumes, which seems so intolerable to Mr. Lang, is an intense source of interest to thousands who, though they may be steeped to the lips in the old-fashioned forms of theological discussion, are quite unused to see religion apparently reappearing in the garb of modern humani- tarianism. In truth, men want in their novels to escape from themselves, their own life, and their own indigenous ideas, into a new world. Men of letters who, through seeing life for themselves, or by an infinity of reading about life, have exhausted the actual world and its topics, like to escape into fairyland. For the ordinary reader, however, the world is still for the most part an unknown country, and so far more interesting than even fairyland. He asks, therefore, for exactly the novel which Mr. Lang most abhors. In a word, one man's irritant is another man's anodyne,—the man of letters likes to get his brain on to new ground when he is resting ; so does the country doctor or solicitor; but the ground which is new to one is deadly stale to the other. The difference between the two is natural enough, and suggests the reason why the critics often praise a novel which no one will read, and damn one which sells a dozen editions. A man praises a novel according as he finds it readable or not ; but the critics and the greater public have a perfectly different standard of interest, and accordingly their verdicts often differ totally over works of fiction.
Such seems to us the fallacy of Mr. Lang's paper. He thinks what is a change to him is a change to the rest of the world, and he fails to admit that there is something in novel- writing beyond story-telling,—and a something which places the great novels on a level with the very highest works of literature. For this latter mistake he may, however, well be pardoned, for he has evidently in his mind the latest products of the naturalistic school. It is hardly to be wondered at if a man fresh from " L'Immortel " should cry,—' Let us have an end of all this analysis of filth, brutality, and realism, and confine the novelist's art to the mere telling of a tale which may while away an hour of mental lassitude, and give without loathing the mental recreation we demand.' Thank heaven, however, the choice is not necessarily between naturalism and tales of adventure ! Romance we must have, for life would indeed be poor without it ; but we may have, too, the graver, deeper work of the novelist, which sets before us the larger life, and helps to allay those sorrows and miseries which cannot always be met by merely taking the hand of some bold adventurer and wandering with him into the land of dreams.
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