as essentially feminine, or, as one critic states it, "gossip etherealized."1 The opposite quality of vagueness may be studied in the ballad and the lyric. Classicism, with its preference for type over individual, has never aided much in the development of the novel. A mind primarily interested in the abstract values of experience would not enter the field of the novel with zest, or much probability of success. Emerson moves habitually from the concrete toward the abstract. Bacon, in the Wisdom of the Ancients, changes seminovelistic material into anti-novelistic. Balzac "bodies forth" his general ideas of life in what is perhaps the greatest exhibition of individualized detail in the history of art. (The detail of a great cathedral is immeasurable, but much of it is typical.) In vocabulary, an interesting comparison may be made between Bacon's essay on Youth and Age, and the treatment of the same theme in Silas Marner. Bacon has many such expressions as settled business; conduct and manage of actions; consideration of means and degrees; powers of understanding; virtues of the will and affections, etc. In Silas Marner there are more than a score of expressions referring to Eppie in which the adjectives "little," "small," or "tiny" are used - little one; like a small mouse; little naked foot; deep little puss; etc. Note also the concreteness of many other phrases : a small boy without shoes or stockings; blond dimpled girl of eighteen; face now bordered by gray hairs; a voice that quavered a good deal; feeble old man of fourscore and six; simple old fellow, etc. In characterization, compare the heroine of an Elizabethan sonnet sequence with any novelistic heroine. In Astrophel and Stella, Stella is not directly quoted at all, is described almost entirely in conventional manner, and appears in only some half-dozen specific incidents or settings. Spielhagen expresses the relation between comprehensiveness and 1 Dallas: The Gay Science. concreteness as a "Widerspruch zwischen dem epischen Mittel der konkreten Darstellung und dem unausrottbaren Zuge der epischen Phantasie in das . . . Grenzenlose." 1 131. Complexity. The novelist cannot lose himself entirely in the outer world, like the scientist, or in the realm of personal feeling, like the lyric poet. He must combine these two regions of experience as best he may. In novelistic form, the problem of synchronization, the frequent changes from dramatic to non-dramatic structure, and from the specific to the general, are among the complicating elements. The hero of a representative novel is more complex in character and experience than the average hero of ballad or epic. In historical fiction, the twofold consciousness of the present and the past—is often highly complex. Other aspects of this quality have been suggested in the preceding chapters. The great novelists have generally been individuals of pronounced complexity, in nature or experience. This seems particularly true of some of the Russian novelistsGogol, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoi among them. The man of entirely "simple life" may possibly be a reader of novels, but it is difficult to imagine him as an habitual novel-writer. The novel has flourished most in periods of complex social life, when antagonistic currents of thought were meeting, giving rise to social, ethical, and æsthetic problems. The origin of the form was in the sophism of Greek decadence; its second birth coincides with the conflict of Renaissance and medieval spirit; its development in the eighteenth century is related to the battles of pseudo-classicism with romanticism, scepticism with a 1 Technik des Romans; Der Held im Roman. revival of faith, and monarchism with democracy; its full fruition is associated with the complicated mental and social life of our own era. In fact, the specific function of the novel, according to many critics, is the portrayal, possibly to some extent the solution, of the complexity of modern experience, material and moral. Simplesse1 has been characteristic of more than one school of novelists, but rarely if ever a true simplicité. Pastoralism, as before suggested, offers a good example of this distinction. 132. Secularity. If one considers the religious tendency in its extreme form of asceticism, the secularity of the novel is readily perceived. The priest is an important character in fictions as various as Robinson Crusoe, Mrs. Radcliffe's Italian, Romola, Barchester Towers, and Quo Vadis, but the authors' interest in him is not mainly religious, and he appears in a secular environment. The language of intensely religious life may be introduced, but it does not give dominant tone to any great novel. Even in the "religious novel," the secularity becomes clearly defined if comparison is made with such works as the Apocalypse, Saint Augustine's Confessions, or the Imitation of Christ. The Biblical fictions of Ruth and Esther are surprisingly non-religious in tone; the latter, so far as direct evidence is given, being practically atheistic. Both the cosmopolitanism and the nationalism of the novel are quite independent of ecclesiastical interest. The catholicity of fiction is that of general culture, or of modern democracy; its patriotism is political, historical, social, or æsthetic, rarely religious in any definite sense. When the novelist has given an extended consideration to the church, he has usually expressed little satisfaction in 1 See Matthew Arnold: On Translating Homer; Last Words. its concrete conditions, and has often been antagonistic to its fundamental principles and purposes. This statement does not imply that the novel is anti-religious, though this is of course true in isolated cases. The general secularity of the great novelists as individuals and of the chief periods of novelistic activity requires no discussion. Spielhagen gives a vigorous summary of the whole matter: the novelist occupies a position "auf dieser unserer Erde, der festgegründeten, dauernden, die nicht eine Vorstufe des Himmels oder der Hölle ist, sondern der Grund und Urgrund, aus dem unsere Leiden und Freuden quellen, das Rhodus, auf dem wir tanzen müssen, es tanze sich gut oder schlecht." 1 133. Humor. This quality is perhaps logically deduced from objectivity plus comprehensiveness. The tragic depends largely on concentrated intensity, and subjective attitude toward life. It is hardly possible for a normal mind to conceive the general course of society as entirely tragic, and personal tragedy becomes less emphatic by contact with broad impersonal interests. The existence of morbidly tragic fiction may be explained by temporary social or individual conditions, rather than the essential nature of the novel. Many of the great novelists have been masters of humor, and few of them have lacked a decided alloy of the quality. In the novelistic structure, the looseness of form, the trivial details in dialogue, settings, and incident, the great variety of interests and of æsthetic values, are causes or results of humor. A sharp separation of the tragic and comic is less frequent than in eighteenth century drama, and the interweaving of the two is generally less formal than in Shakespearian drama. Humor is often essential to the production of realistic illusion, and an important 1 Technik des Romans; Das Gebiet des Romans. It may agent in unifying the entire plan of a novel. appear in the characters themselves; or, as in Fielding and Thackeray, largely in the author's personal attitude. The modes of humor, in a generic sense, may vary from caricature, through wit, satire, and irony, to a general sanity of view. Its relations to pathos have been frequently studied in criticism.. Caricature is common in Smollett and his disciple Dickens; wit is characteristic of Lyly and George Meredith; satire, of a savage type at times, may be studied in Swift and Gogol; irony is characteristic of Fielding, Jane Austen, and Thackeray; sanity of view is well represented in Trollope and Howells, among the realists, and in Scott, among the romanticists. The humor that is akin to pathos is familiar in Cervantes, Sterne, and Goldsmith. 134. Ideality. —All artistic narrative must be imaginative to an appreciable degree, but the novel is ideal primarily because it is fictitious narrative. Pure observation or logical induction from observation could never produce any novel: there must be strong persistent momentum toward the creation of character and incident in order to fashion a worthy novel. Genius is the first divinity in Fielding's invocation. (Tom Jones; XIII, 1.) On the other hand, even in the wildest romance, the foundations are in reality, and the relations of the imaginative to the real offer a fascinating study in every fiction. Idealization assumes many forms — selection or re-combination of real data; creation of ideal individuals modeled upon real types; allegory, symbolism, etc. Ideality may be studied in every element of the novel, from the single effect to the plan as a whole. Perhaps the plot is the most satisfactory basis for a single general test of the imaginative power. (Compare Section 43.) |