ism for Henley; a fifth part of the subject hurriedly touched, which will show you how my thoughts are driving. You are now at last beginning to think upon the problems of executive, plastic art, for you are now for the first time attacking them. Hitherto you have spoken and thought of two things technique and the ars artium, or common background of all arts. Studio work is the real touch. That is the genial error of the present French teaching. Realism I regard as a mere question of method. The "brown foreground," "old mastery," and the like, ranking with villanelles, as technical sports and pastimes. Real art, whether ideal or realistic, addresses precisely the same feeling, and seeks the same qualities significance or charm. And the same very same inspiration is only methodically differentiated according as the artist is an arrant realist or an arrant idealist. Each by his own method, seeks to save and perpetuate the same significance or charm; the one by suppressing, the other by forcing, detail. All other idealism is the brown foreground over again, and hence only art in the sense of a game, like cup and ball. All other realism is not art at all but not at all. It is, then, an insincere, and showy handicraft. Were you to re-read some Balzac, as I have been doing, it would greatly help to clear your eyes. He was a man who never found his method. An inarticulate Shakespeare, smothered under forcible-feeble detail. It is astounding to the riper mind how bad he is, how feeble, how untrue, how tedious; and, of course, when he surrendered to his temperament, how good and powerful. And yet never plain nor clear. He could not consent to be dull, and thus became so. He would leave nothing undeveloped, and thus drowned out of sight of land amid the multitude of crying and incongruous details. There is but one art to omit! O if I knew how to omit, I would ask no other knowledge. A man who knew how to omit would make an Illiad of a daily paper. Your definition of seeing is quite right. It is the first part of omission to be partly blind. Artistic sight is judicious blindness. Sam Bough must have been a jolly blind old boy. He would turn a corner, look for one-half or quarter minute, and then say, "This'll do, lad." Down he sat, there and then, with whole artistic plan, scheme of colour, and the like, and began by laying a foundation of powerful and seemingly incongruous colour on the block. He saw, not the scene, but the water-colour sketch. Every artist by sixty should so behold nature. Where does he learn that? In the studio, I swear. He goes to nature for facts, relations, values — material; as a man, before writing a historical novel, reads up memoirs. But it is not by reading memoirs that he has learned the selective criterion. He has learned that in the practice of his art; and he will never learn it well, but when disengaged from the ardent struggle of immediate representation, of realistic and ex facto art. learns it in the crystallisation of daydreams; in changing, not in copying, fact; in the pursuit of the ideal, not in the study of nature. These temples of art are, as you say, inaccessible to the realistic climber. It is not by looking at the sea that you get He "The multitudinous seas incarnadine," nor by looking at Mount Blanc that you find "And visited all night by troops of stars." A kind of ardour of the blood is the mother of all this; and according as this ardour is swayed by knowledge and seconded by craft, the art expression flows clear, and significance and charm, like a moon rising, are born above the barren juggle of mere symbols. The painter must study more from nature than the man of words. But why? Because literature deals with men's business and passions which, in the game of life, we are irresistibly obliged to study; but painting with relations of light, and colour, and significances, and form, which, from the immemorial habit of the race, we pass over with an unregardful eye. Hence this crouching upon camp-stools, and these crusts. But neither one nor other is a part of art, only preliminary studies. I want you to help me to get people to understand that realism is a method, and only methodic in its consequences; when the realist is an artist, that is, and supposing the idealist with whom you com 1 Croûtes: crude studies from nature. pare him to be anything but a farceur and a dilettante. The two schools of working do, and should, lead to the choice of different subjects. But that is a consequence, not a cause. See my chaotic note, which will appear, I fancy, in November in Henley's sheet. He Poor Ferrier, it bust me horrid. was, after you, the oldest of my friends. I am now very tired, and will go to bed having prelected freely. Fanny will finish. R. L. S. THE NOVEL The novel is the chief glory of nineteenth century European literature. In no literary form has there been such complete international free trade; pretty much every country has been acutely and profitably conscious of what every other country was doing in it. Easier to read than plays (though contemporary playwrights often make their plays readable by borrowing from the novelist's art) and more susceptible of adequate translation than verse, the novel throughout the nineteenth century, and still today, is the vehicle by which the peoples of earth come closest together and report one to another of life as they have found it. 66 The novel is one of those obvious things which, having been once produced, leaves us wondering why it was not done long before. But just so far as the novel is essentially concerned with telling the truth, it represents about the last thing that people would think of doing. Many of the elements of the novel are present in romance" the love story, for example, and a curiosity about the state of mind and heart out of which a love story springs; a sense for episode, too, and a desire to illustrate attractively certain standards of conduct. But the eye of romance is upon the marvelous and the adventurous, and while these may and do appear in the novel, the latter is most itself when it is primarily concerned with social backgrounds, and with characters; both in the greatest variety, and deriving their interest from their wholeness and self-consistency, in short from their appearance of truth. In England the novel is an eighteenth century invention. Its birth was an accident and its right to live was established by the ridicule it received. A plump middle-aged bookseller and stationer, prudent and successful, and sentimental withal, by name Samuel Richardson, undertook to prepare a volume of model letters, wrote several that purported to be from a serving-girl annoyed by the advances of the son of the house; got interested in the story, and the first modern novel, Pamela, was published (1740). Most people wept copiously and happily at virtue thus distressed and rewarded such searchings of the female heart there had never been! But a few scoffed; among them Henry Fielding, playwright in an age when the theater was becoming impossible, easy man of the world, and about to begin a successful career as a magistrate. In a spirit of mockery and caricature, he began a skit about a brother of Pamela's, Joseph Andrews, as virtuous as his sister; but the kindly face of Parson Adams peered over the author's burly shoulder, got himself into the story, and the future of the English novel was assured. Richardson continued his successes with the mysteries of the female heart, and Fielding his vein of bluff good nature and hatred of sham, achieving in Tom Jones what is besides an extraordinary piece of structure. Smollett followed with his sea-dogs and Scotchmen - coarse but zestful. Sterne showed that something very like a novel could be written without a plot. Goldsmith produced a miniature of idyllic domesticity in the Vicar of Wakefield. Fannie Burney caught the very tone of fashionable society. Mystery, Gothic, and curdling, appears in Horace Walpole, Mrs. Radcliffe, and others. Finally, Maria Edgeworth captures the Irish type, at home and abroad. The nineteenth century novel, therefore, the novel of Austen and Scott, of Dickens and Thackeray, of Eliot, Meredith, and Hardy, and the many others, draws strength from much preliminary tillage of the soil. Jane Austen and Scott open the century, the first a self-amused amateur, a sensible sort of maiden aunt writing on her lap in company, yet perfect within her chosen range of English provincial society, clear-eyed in observing and limpid in speech. No crowded hour of glorious life, of course - for that one turns to Scott, already an acclaimed poet, grand seigneur of life and letters, who one rainy day, fumbling in a box of fishing-tackle, came upon an uncompleted manuscript, finished it, and published Waverley. From that day his unresting hand did, through a long succession of volumes, two things supremely well — the historical romance and the study of Scottish characters, humorous and eccentric as in countless instances, or true and touching such as Jeanie Deans in the Heart of Midlothian. Both Austen and Scott were dead when Dickens began to write, and he was already an acknowledged master of fiction when Thackeray's Vanity Fair appeared. On the side of his high spirits and his humorous characters Dickens descends from Smollett, whose works he read with delight as a boy. His strong sense for the dramatic sometimes leads him into the melodramatic and the sentimental, which should not render him unacceptable to a movie-loving generation. Dickens experienced a great deal of hardship in his youth, and in David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby, and Oliver Twist he draws largely on these experiences. He sympathized deeply with the poor and wretched and felt that much of their misery was needless. Many definite improvements in the management of prisons, alms-houses, law-courts, schools, and factories have been traced to his moving narratives of human hardship. Not the least of Dickens's contributions is the spirit of Christmas. Thackeray, on the other hand, accomplished man of the world, shouldering his way among his puppets, exposing the shams and confounding the snobs of this world, bears a likeness to Fielding. He was as much interested in the fashioning of gentlemen as Lyly or Castiglione in the sixteenth century. Like Dickens in his Tale of Two Cities, Thackeray achieved notable success in the field of historical fiction, especially in Henry Esmond. Dickens and Thackeray were followed by a pair of novelists, George Eliot and George Meredith, intellectually somewhat akin, but most unlike in their literary fortunes. With the publication of Adam Bede and the Mill on the Floss, George Eliot gained wide recognition as a great novelist, and in Romola, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda she earnestly, and by no means always unsuccessfully, strove to live up to this reputation. But Meredith received almost no recognition at all until he had been before the public some thirty years, and then only from those who have the mental agility to play with him his game of stylistic condensation, allusiveness, and whimsicality, and who can look unblinded upon his intense flashes of wit. Both Eliot and Meredith reflect the scientific and philosophic preoccupations of their time. Their characters present problems in heredity and environment; there are struggles of the spirit toward goodness and the light; failures, and searchings for the causes of failure. Thomas Hardy, the last of the great nineteenth century novelists, still lives, a distinguished poet. His novels are racy of the soil from which he sprang and where he has spent his life. For this region, in southern England lying about King Alfred's capital of Winchester, he has revived the Old English name of Wessex. In theme likewise his novels revert to a primitive concept of human life thwarted and frustrated by a cruel and inscrutable Fate. The twentieth century novel lies all about us. Where the novel of the last century maintained a certain dignity and leisure and aimed at largeness and coherence of structure, the novel to-day adopts every conceivable mode of expression and fastens avidly upon anything that can be called human experience. It is still somehow bothering, however, about the truth of things, and between covers of the novel remains the place to which one resorts if it is desired to associate with people who are really alive. JANE AUSTEN From PRIDE AND PREJUDICE It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters. "My dear Mr. Bennet," said his lady to him one day, "have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?" Mr. Bennet replied that he had not. "But it is," returned she; "for Mrs. Long has just been here and she told me all about it." Mr. Bennet made no answer. "Do not you want to know who has taken it?" cried his wife impatiently. "You want to tell me and I have no objection to hearing it." This was invitation enough. "Why, my dear, you must know, Mrs. Long says that Netherfield is taken by a young man of large fortune from the north of England; that he came down on Monday in a chaise and four to see the place, and was so much delighted with it, that he agreed with Mr. Morris immediately; that he is to take possession before Michaelmas, and some of his servants are to be in the house by the end of next week." "What is his name?" 'Is he married or single?" "Oh! single, my dear, to be sure! A single man of large fortune; four or five thousand a-year. What a fine thing for our girls!" "How so? how can it affect them?" "My dear Mr. Bennet," replied his wife, "how can you be so tiresome! you must know that I am thinking of his marrying one of them." "Is that his design in settling here?" so! But it is very likely that he may fall in love with one of them, and therefore you must visit him as soon as he comes.' "I see no occasion for that. You and the girls may go, or you may send them by themselves, which perhaps will be still better, for as you are as handsome as any of them, Mr. Bingley might like you the best of the party." "My dear, you flatter me. I certainly have had my share of beauty, but I do not pretend to be anything extraordinary now. When a woman has five grown-up daughters, she ought to give over thinking of her own beauty.' "In such cases, a woman has not often much beauty to think of." "But, my dear, you must indeed go and see Mr. Bingley when he comes into the neighbourhood. "It is more than I engage for, I assure you." "But consider your daughters. Only think what an establishment it would be for one of them. Sir William and Lady Lucas are determined to go, merely on that account, for in general, you know, they visit no Indeed you must go, for it will be impossible for us to visit him if you do not." newcomers. "You are over-scrupulous, surely. I dare say Mr. Bingley will be very glad to see you; and I will send a few lines by you to assure him of my hearty consent to his marrying whichever he chooses of the girls; though I must throw in a good word for my little Lizzy." "I desire you will do no such thing. Lizzy is not a bit better than the others; and I am sure she is not half so handsome as Jane, nor half so good-humoured as Lydia. But you are always giving her the preference." "They have none of them much to recommend them," replied he; "they are all silly and ignorant, like other girls; but Lizzy has something more of quickness than her sisters." "Mr. Bennet, how can you abuse your own children in such a way! You take delight in vexing me. You have no compassion on my poor nerves." |