Questions at Issue

A Parisian Hebraist has been attracting a moment's attention to his paradoxical and learned self by announcing that strong-hearted and strong-brained nations do not produce novels. This gentleman's soul goes back, no doubt in longing and despair, to the heart of Babylon and the brain of Gath. But if he looks for a modern nation that does not cultivate the novel, he must, I am afraid, go far afield. Finland and Roumania are certainly tainted; Bohemia lies in the bond of naturalism. Probably Montenegro is the one European nation which this criterion would leave strong in heart and brain. The amusing absurdity of this whim of a pedant may serve to remind us how universal is now the reign of prose fiction. In Scandinavia the drama may demand an equal prominence, but no more. In all other countries the novel takes the largest place, claims and obtains the widest popular attention, is the admitted tyrant of the whole family of literature. This is so universally acknowledged now-a-days that we scarcely stop to ask ourselves whether it is a heaven-appointed condition of things, existing from the earliest times, or whether it is an innovation. As a matter of fact, the predominance of the novel is a very recent affair. Most other classes of literature are as old as the art of verbal expression: lyrical and narrative poetry, drama, history, philosophyall these have flourished since the sunrise of the world's intelligence. But the novel is a creation of the late afternoon of civilisation. In the true sense, though not in the pedantic one, the novel began in France with La Princesse de Clèves, and in England with Pamelathat is to say, in 1677 and in 1740 respectively. Compared with the dates of the beginning of philosophy and of poetry, these are as yesterday and the day before yesterday. Once started, however, the sapling of prose fiction grew and spread mightily. It took but a few generations to overshadow all the ancient oaks and cedars around it, and with its monstrous foliage to dominate the forest. It would not be uninteresting, if we had space to do so here, to mark in detail the progress of this astonishing growth. It would be found that, in England at least, it has not been by any means regularly sustained. The original magnificent outburst of the English novel lasted for exactly a quarter of a century, and closed with the publication ofHumphrey Clinker. During this period of excessive fertility in a field hitherto unworked, the novel produced one masterpiece after another, positively pushing itself to the front and securing the best attention of the public at a moment when such men as Gray, Butler, Hume, and Warburton were putting forth contributions to the old and long-established sections of literature. Nay: such was the force of the new kind of writing that the gravity of Johnson and the grace of Goldsmith were seduced into participating in its facile triumphs. But, at the very moment when the novel seemed about to sweep everything before it, the wave subsided and almost disappeared. For nearly forty years, only one novel of the very highest class was produced in England; and it might well seem as though prose fiction, after its brief victory, had exhausted its resources, and had sunken for ever into obscurity. During the close of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth, no novel, except Evelina, could pretend to disturb the laurels of Burke, of Gibbon, of Cowper, of Crabbe. The publication of Caleb Williams is a poor event to set against that of the Lyrical Ballads; even Thalaba the Destroyer seemed a more impressive phenomenon than the Monk. But the second great burgeoning of the novel was at hand. Like the tender ash, it delayed to clothe itself when all the woods of romanticism were green. But in 1811 came Sense and Sensibility, in 1814 Waverley; and the novel was once more at the head of the literary movement of the time.

Dettagli