CHAPTER II

THE REALISTIC

Realism in Victorian fiction, as we need only to be reminded, means not strictly that which is, but liberally that which might be. Its field is nominally the Actual but it encroaches unhesitatingly on the domain of the Probable, laps over into the Improbable, and barely halts at the Impossible. These expansive habits make it not incompatible with the Romantic, which indeed, in its soberer aspects, is a constant factor in the English novel up to and including this period.

Romanticism is reduced to a minimum by Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Mrs. Gaskell, and Anthony Trollope,[118] but the majority of our novelists have not been thus content to present life in its everyday garb, neat and prosperous enough, it may be, but neutral, inane, diffuse, inconclusive. They have insisted in the name of decorum and dignity on the dress costume and company manners which in civilized society are a prerequisite to public appearance and conspicuous position. Life is still life and not an impostor, even when robed in its best with some artifice of color and ornament and some evidence of decisive purposefulness in mien and bearing.

But however romantic in effect, the nineteenth-century novel was realistic in intent, and we may in a measure take the will for the deed. Of this devotion to reality we have several testimonies, from such important witnesses as Trollope, Dickens, Thackeray; but two are of especial interest as they come from two of the most undeniable romanticists, Lytton and Brontë.

In her Preface to the belated edition of _The Professor_, Charlotte Brontë declared her own preference for a depiction of a normal and unadorned existence to be thwarted by the lack of editorial enthusiasm. After stating the condition of things she adds--

“* * * the publishers in general scarcely approved of this system, but would have liked something more imaginative and poetical--something more consonant with a highly wrought fancy, with a taste for pathos, with sentiments more tender, elevated, unworldly. Indeed, until an author has tried to dispose of a manuscript of this kind he can never know what stores of romance and sensibility lie hidden in breasts he would not have suspected of casketing such treasures.”

An accurate description of Victorianism is contained in this ironic indictment, and perhaps also an explanation of the romantic trend of its realism on the ground of the law of supply and demand as well as that of natural propensity.

Lytton prided himself prodigiously on his true rendering of life, though of his two dozen novels, _The Caxtons_ alone approaches the realistic type, and pictures in one of his heroes[119] a phase at least of his artistic ideal:

“The humblest alley in a crowded town had something poetical for him; he was ever ready to mix in a crowd, if it were only gathered round a barrel-organ or a dog fight, and listen to all that was said, and notice all that was done. And this I take to be the true poetical temperament essential to every artist who aspires to be something more than a scene-painter.”

That the satirical element in this romantico-realistic form of fiction should be characterized by humor, exposure, and comparative rarity, instead of wit, exaggeration, and ubiquity, is inevitable, since the former qualities accord not only with realism but with one another.

Humor is the comic sense which is amused by things as they are, whereas wit either creates the absurdity or ferrets it out of obscurity. Hence the former is allied to the actual more than to the fanciful, and uses the method of simple disclosure rather than caricature. While therefore the imaginative energy of wit is dynamic, that of humor is more quiescent, being sufficiently exercised by its function of interpretation, of showing wherein lurks the spirit of the laughable, however grave and solemn the appearance to the unseeing eye.

Where the quality of the satire is of this realistic order, the quantity must necessarily be restricted and more or less incidental rather than dominant; subdued, not rampant. For the true satirical humorist, seeing life steadily and whole, observes that while certain parts of it are unquestionably absurd, whether flauntingly or subtly so, these ludicrous shreds and patches, absolutely integral and ineradicable as they are, are nevertheless only a portion and not so large a one, of the stupendous whole.

Neither that astigmatic visualizer, the cynic, who regards life itself as a huge joke on its victims, nor that myopic spectator, the misanthrope, who conceives humanity as an unmitigated jest on creation, was a Victorian favorite. Both are blind to certain phenomena,--beauty, power, exquisite delicacy, tremendous strength,--which also exist, which even the pessimist grants to be compensatory, and which, when genuine, are utterly beyond the reach of any ridicule that pretends to sanity or justice. Such then,--humorously truthful and suitably proportioned,--is the general character of the satiric stratum which runs, widening and narrowing, through the great vein of Victorian fiction.

In the legitimate novel there are two main devices of revealing the ludicrous; the direct, whereby the author in his own reflections and comments points it out; and the dramatic, whereby he shows it by means of incident and character. The latter method is again subdivisible into two modes, by the use of the two contrasting types of actors, humorous and humorists. The first are allowed to betray themselves, their very unconsciousness adding to the piquancy of the situation. For this the favorite technical tool is the dramatic monologue. The second are the witty protagonists. They stand _in loco scriptoris_ and express that detection of absurdity for which the humorless humorous furnish the occasion.[120]

When we consult our original list, we find the two extremes have been cut off, as Peacock and Butler belong entirely to the other department. The remaining eleven have produced about one hundred twenty novels in the stricter sense, not including short stories, tales, sketches, or burlesques. It must be noted that this restriction rules out some items important as literature, and in certain cases as satire,--_Cranford_, _Pickwick_, _Peg Woffington_, _Scenes from Clerical Life_.

Of the grand total, approximately one-quarter is eliminated as being essentially and thoroughly serious. Here again are found some notable names,--_Last Days of Pompeii_, _Mary Barton_, _Henry Esmond_, _Tale of Two Cities_, _The Cloister and the Hearth_, _Jane Eyre_, _Hypatia_. Three-fourths is a large majority, from which one might deduce that the novel of this period was prevailingly satirical. But the other extreme, those so strongly saturated as to deserve the name of satires, are far fewer than the unsatirical. _Vanity Fair_, _Martin Chuzzlewit_, _The Egoist_, possibly _Barchester Towers_, and _Beauchamp’s Career_, practically exhaust the list. This leaves about four score of novels in which the spirit of satire exists, manifesting itself showily, coyly, in wide range and diversity.

When an author uses the direct method for the conveyance of satirical ideas, he becomes for the nonce a didactic, though humor-flavored, philosopher. Over against the artistic liabilities incurred,--interruption of the narrative, intrusion of more or less irrelevant matter, may be placed the intellectual assets,--presentation of opinions and conclusions, and frank expression of personality.

Whether approved of or not, this discursive habit must be accepted as an old inheritance. From the beginning, the English novel has been a hybrid, the drama grafted on the treatise. Even the medieval mind, with its insatiable relish for the pageantry of life, had an uneasy feeling that the Merry Tale should not be entirely its own reward, and accordingly found for it a moral justification, whereby pleasure and profit were joined in a most complacent alliance. And ever since, the prevailing purpose has been not only to portray life but to exhibit this or that deduction about life.

In the eighteenth century this tendency took definite shape and substance, for then it became notably true that the division between narrative and essay was not coincident with a division between narrators and essayists. Swift, Addison, Defoe, Fielding, Sterne, were both. And it was their mantle and not that of romance writers, Gothic or Historical, that best fitted Victorian shoulders. Of the many testimonies to this, direct and indirect, the following from a characteristic Victorian pen may be cited as evidence:[121]

“The reader of a novel--who had doubtless taken the volume up simply for amusement, and who would probably lay it down did he suspect that instruction, like a snake-in-the-grass, like physic beneath the sugar, was to be imposed upon him--requires from his author chiefly this, that he shall be amused by a narrative in which elevated sentiment prevails, and gratified by being made to feel that the elevated sentiments described are exactly his own.”

He then goes on to show that this morality is best served by realism, in spite of the superior attractions of heroes and villains:[122]

“But for one Harry Esmond, there are fifty Ralph Newtons--five hundred and fifty of them; and the very youth whose bosom glows with admiration as he reads of Harry--who exults in the idea that as Harry did, so would he have done--lives as Ralph lived, is less noble, less persistent, less of a man even than was Ralph Newton.

“It is the test of a novel-writer’s art that he conceals his snake-in-the-grass; but the reader may be sure that it is always there. * * * In writing novels, we novelists preach to you from our pulpits, and are keenly anxious that our sermons shall not be inefficacious. * * * Nevertheless, the faults of a Ralph Newton, and not the vices of a Varney or a Barry Lyndon, are the evils against which men should in these days be taught to guard themselves--which women also should be made to hate. Such is the writer’s apology for his very indifferent hero, Ralph the Heir.”

In another volume[123] the same writer confesses,--

“Castles with unknown passages are not compatible with my homely muse. I would as lief have to do with a giant in my book--a real giant, such as Goliath--as with a murdering monk with a scowling eye. The age for such delights is, I think, gone. We may say historically of Mrs. Radcliffe’s time that there were mysterious sorrows in those days. They are now as much out of date as the giants.”

Victorianism of course had her own sorrows, patent and unmysterious as they were. At no time could she have been mistaken for Elizabethanism. But she grew gradually in strength and sobriety, and cast a heavier shadow in the afternoon of the century. In its mid-morning Disraeli could compliment his own _Young Duke_ with the subtitle, “a moral tale though gay.” And the chief ambition of the young writers up to the early forties seems to have been to produce tales that were gay though moral.

Of this tendency Lytton is the most conspicuous example. Innately serious and thoroughly sentimental, he nevertheless dared not be as solemn as he could. He must live up to the requirement for ironic wit and the light touch of _savior faire_, even though, lacking native exuberance and somewhat deficient in taste, he often fell into the slough of facetiousness, or at least lapsed into childish jocularity.

To quote him at his best, however, we take a few excerpts from the last of his trilogy of domestic novels. In the second of the series, _My Novel_, he had adapted the prefatory device of _Tom Jones_, using the remarks of the Caxton family as a sort of introductory (or more properly, retrospective) chorus to each book. In _What Will He Do with It_, the idea is carried out on a smaller scale, in expository paragraphs preliminary to chapters. The following will be sufficient to indicate the tone:

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