Part 7

A wide gulf, however, separates these writers from the novelists of the beginning of the nineteenth century. The whole method of Miss Edgeworth and Jane Austen, for example, is different from that employed by the earlier generation of authors. Instead of exciting interest by indelicacies and maintaining it by ribaldry, they sought to win attention by careful delineation of character and genuine humour. It was this new development of romance which made the ethical novel possible. Amid the hurly-burly of strife and the warlike deeds of gods and men, there was no room for philosophical musings or ethical teachings. But when the scenes were changed to ladies’ drawing-rooms, the parsonage-house, and the course of daily life, it became easy to point a moral while adorning a tale. Miss Edgeworth may claim to be the first writer of ethical romance, and in her quiet and humorous pages she succeeds in levelling many a home-thrust against the evils which beset her time. In her _Castle Rackrent_ she lays bare the mischief of Irish extravagance and absenteeism, while in her _Tales from Fashionable Life_ she holds up to ridicule and scorn the empty frivolities and the manifest absurdities which pervaded the higher ranks of society. Jane Austen in a less obtrusive way succeeds in adding equally effective morals to her delightful stories. The bitter consequences which follow evil doings are plainly set out in her pages, and the needless misery inflicted by the indulgence of the mean passions is portrayed with singular felicity. It is, however, impossible not to recognise that both Miss Austen’s and Miss Edgeworth’s novels suffer, as works of art, by the prominent motives which guided the pens of their authors. It is not every one who is able so to subordinate the intended moral to the due working out of the story as in no way to interfere with the plot. The greatest novelists have unquestionably been those who set themselves directly to describe men and women as nature has made them, without any undue regard to the goal to which the instincts and actions of the characters may lead them. Sir Walter Scott is an instance in point. No one will deny the extent of the influence which he has exercised in all four continents of the world, and yet it is difficult to point to a single passage in his works in which he expressed any direct ethical teaching Only once, so far as we recollect, he chose to tack a moral on to one of his novels, and that was when at the end of _The Heart of Midlothian_ he addressed these words to the reader. “This tale will not be told in vain, if it shall be found to illustrate the great truth, that guilt, though it may attain temporal splendour can never confer real happiness; that the evil consequences of our crimes long survive their commission, and, like the ghosts of the murdered, forever haunt the steps of the malefactor; and that the paths of virtue, though seldom those of worldly greatness are always those of pleasantness and peace.”

[Sidenote: Dickens]

It perhaps may be advanced in opposition to what has been said that Dickens, one of the greatest novelists of the century, wrote several of his novels with an ethical intention. But he was one of a happy few who wrote fiction, as Hogarth painted and drew moral lessons on his canvas, with a skill which excites the admiration of all those who rightly understand the difficulty of the task. Many artists have attempted to follow in Hogarth’s steps, and have failed ignominiously, just as writers without end have attempted to imitate the methods of Dickens and have fallen lamentably short of their great exemplar. Who but Dickens could have drawn the pathetic picture of Oliver Twist, and the bumptious and ignorant tyranny of Bumble and the guardians without losing the perspective of the story which is so well maintained throughout. After all, however, his best novels are those which are written without any distinctly ethical motive. _Pickwick Papers_ and _Martin Chuzzlewit_ are unquestionably his masterpieces; and though _Nicholas Nickleby_ dealt an effective blow at Yorkshire schools, and _Bleak House_ pilloried the evils of the Court of Chancery, and _Hard Times_ showed up the fallacies of the Manchester School, they all, as literary works of art, pay the penalty of the good that is in them.

[Sidenote: Thackeray]

Like his great contemporary, though in a very different style, Thackeray throughout his writings strove to enforce a sound ethical teaching as Mr. Leslie Stephen writes of him:—“In short his writings mean if they mean anything, that the love of a wife and child and friend is the one sacred element in our nature, of infinitely higher price than anything that can come into competition with it; and that “Vanity Fair” is what it is precisely because it stimulates the pursuit of objects frivolous and unsatisfying just so far as they imply indifference to these emotions.

As every reader of Thackeray knows his pages are full of moralisings on the failings and faults of mankind. But only in one passage does he treat his subject in a directly ethical way. At the close of a long conversation between Warrington and Arthur, the latter is convicted of being an apostle of general scepticism and sneering acquiescence in the world as it is. “And to what does this easy and sceptical life lead a man?” adds the novelist. “Friend Arthur was a Sadducee, and the Baptist might be in the wilderness shouting to the poor, who were listening with all their might and faith to the preacher’s awful accents and denunciation of wrath or woe or salvation; and our friend the Sadducee would turn his sleek mule with a shrug and a smile from the crowd and go home to the shade of his terrace, and muse over preacher and audience, and turn to his roll of Plato or his pleasant Greek song-book babbling of honey and Hybla, and nymphs and fountains and love. To what we say does this scepticism lead? It leads a man to a shameful loneliness and selfishness, so to speak—the more shameful because it is so good-humoured and conscienceless and serene. Conscience! What is Conscience? Why accept remorse? What is public or private faith? Mythuses alike enveloped in enormous tradition. If seeing and acknowledging the lives of the world, Arthur, as see them you can, with only too fatal a clearness, you submit to them without any protest farther than a laugh: if plunged yourself in easy sensuality, you allow the wretched world to pass groaning by you unmoved: if the fight for the truth is taking place, and all men of honour are on the ground armed on the one side or the other, and you alone are to lie on your balcony and smoke your pipe out of the noise and the danger, you had better have died, or never have been at all, than such a sensual coward.”

But for the most part Thackeray rather allows his ethical teachings to be implied than directly enforced. For every kind of meanness he has nothing but words of scathing scorn and all wrong doers and wrong doings he castigates with merciless indignation. He exposes all that is untrue with quiet and bitter sarcasm, and in the inimitable pictures which he draws of life and character, indicates an honest and wholesome moral for all of those who care to discover it.

[Sidenote: Charles Kingsley]

Of a very different temper and disposition was that great ethical novelist Charles Kingsley. A devoted apostle of humanity he preached and spoke and wrote incessantly on the wrongs which he saw being inflicted on the weakest and least helpful of his fellow-men. The sight of contractors and manufacturers sweating their employés, and of starving their vital force by crowding them into unwholesome and insufficient rooms; of farmers beating their labourers down to the very lowest wages and of housing them in insanitary and in indecent cottages, roused his indignation to the full. In burning eloquence whether in the pulpit or on the platform or at his study table he denounced the oppression of the weak and the wrongs which were being inflicted on those who were least able to help themselves. His novels were, as his sermons, mainly directed to this great object. In them he tried to impress upon landlords and employers that their dependants were men and brothers, and with exquisite tenderness and sympathy he described over and over again the horrors of those slums of which we hear so much now; of the evils of those door-posts which stand sentry over those squalid alleys, the gin palace and the pawnbroker’s shop.

[Sidenote: Kingsley’s creed]

But he had another lesson to teach, and there he sympathised with Thackeray. The sanctity of family life was to him a leading feature in his religion. As he writes in his dedicatory preface in _Hypatia_ “family and national life are the two divine roots of the church, severed from which she is sure to wither away into that most godless and cruel of spectres, a religious world.” The neo-Platonism with which he was so strongly imbued introduced many strange mystic ideas into his religious and social creeds. That the human relations of husband and wife, and parent and child were eternal implied to his mind that they had existed from all time and would extend to the end of all things. They were therefore in his faith spiritual, sacramental, divine, eternal. The influence which his writings exercised on high and low, on rich and poor was great and far-reaching. He achieved, therefore, the one object he sought when he wrote _Alton Locke_ and his other masterpieces. But it must be admitted that in the eagerness with which he preached he forgot at times the novelist’s art, and though some of the passages in which he points his morals read almost as though they were inspired, there is not one of his novels which does not suffer from his ecstatic moods.

[Sidenote: The novel of Reform]

To men and women of sympathetic temperaments and ready pens, the temptation to sermonise on the evils and wrongs of the world around them must be well nigh irresistible, and what more easy and telling way can there possibly be than by haranguing their fellow-men in fiction! To seriously minded novelists, the unbelief which they see spreading like a flood about them, suggests at once an object-lesson romance, in which the heretical young curate who has strayed into the paths of Buddhism or wandered with the lost sheep into the by-ways of Deism or Dissent shall be restored to the true fold by arguments which are urged with the full energy of conviction and are combated with weak and halting rejoinders. The unprejudiced reader may consider the method faulty, and that art has been sacrificed to exposition, but the author and his friends insist on the public swallowing the dose with all the severity of Mrs. Squeers. The English public are not altogether averse to the presence of a modicum of moral teaching, but they like to have the powder well concealed or only half revealed in the preserve of plot and interest, and have reason to complain if that which was meant to be the less proves to be equal to the whole.

[Sidenote: The naturalistic school]

Drunkenness and vice are often common themes of the ethical novelist. An older generation of writers devoted their energies to gibbeting the inequalities and maladministration of the laws; and to picturing the evils and cruelties of game preserving. Dickens, as we have seen, denounced in his novels the administration of the workhouse and the delays of the Courts of Chancery; and Charles Reade inveighed through the mouths of his characters against the Prison system and the Lunacy enactments. These motives are too abstract for the present-day novelist. He, or more commonly she, delights to descend from the general to the particular, and to follow the drunkard into the gin palace, and the most abandoned profligates into the lowest haunts of vice. These are unquestionable evils and should on all accounts be rather indicated than described in detail. What good can it do to analyse and dwell upon every disgusting feature in a drunken debauch, and every prurient phase in the downward course of sin? The naturalistic school has much to answer for in this regard. Zola and his followers, especially his followers, have brought into fashion a style of novel which has become a plague spot in our civilisation, and through their instrumentality young girls and boys are, under the guise of moral teaching, made acquainted with forms of vice of which, but for their ethical teachers, they would be entirely ignorant. Subjects are now discussed in ladies’ drawing-rooms and at dinner-tables, which were never so much as hinted at a couple of decades ago. Blasphemous views of religion, theories of creation and evolution, analyses of the passions, and strange doctrines concerning the sexual instinct, are all discussed with a freedom which leaves little to the imagination. It is true that the authors bring the unholy subjects on the stage with the professed purpose of annihilating them one after the other; but as in the process sometimes followed by vivisectionists of introducing poisons into the system of the animals experimented on, for the purpose of proving the effects of antidotes, it sometimes happens that the views of evil suggested in the sort of novel we are speaking of resist the counterbalancing influences of the moral strictures of the authors. In a recent number of the _Nineteenth Century_ Mr. Frederick Greenwood describes a novel up to date which an authoress has been induced much against her will to write, and in which she appears in the frontispiece covering her face with her hands for very shame, and on the last page is represented kneeling at her infant’s bed praying for forgiveness. If all who wrote on the unsavoury subjects indicated by Mr. Greenwood observed the attitude of his authoress we should see little of the features of a good many ladies who are at present evidently quite unconscious of any desire to veil their countenances. Such writers are bad enough, but a lower level is reached by those who deliberately write on more than risky matters because they pay. It is difficult to exchange compliments with such mercenary providers of social garbage, and they are best left to the rebukes of such consciences as they possess.

[Sidenote: Evils of modern fiction]

Naturalism and irreverence are unquestionably the crying evils of modern fiction. And it by no means follows that they are essential to the construction of the ethical novel. Mr. Leslie Stephen has said that to be a good writer a man must be a preacher; and surely there are enough subjects to preach about without touching on unsavoury topics. Are not men and women prone to faults of character, besides those of unlawful passion and open rebellion against God; and are there not social wrongs and inequalities to be inveighed against. It is not every one who can hope to see a palace arise in response to a discourse on the evils which beset all sorts and conditions of men, but every novelist worthy of his fame can do something to warn his fellow-men of the faults and failings which lead to the downward paths of sin and misery, and to throw a light on the way of those who are fighting manfully for all that is true, honest, and of good report.

FROM THE EDITOR’S STANDPOINT

L. T. MEADE

[Sidenote: A practical point]

I feel a particular pleasure in writing this paper. In the articles which have preceded mine, valuable hints have been given for the guidance of the fictionist. Broad rules have been laid down, and some of that personal experience, far more valuable than mere empty rules, has been related for the benefit of the student. I have written stories of all sorts, and can endorse the excellence of the suggestions given. But in this paper I want to touch on a very practical point indeed, namely, how best the fiction writer, when he has produced his work, can dispose of it.

To effect this most desirable end, he has got to please either a publisher or an editor. I have had a great deal to do with publishers, and find them most kind and encouraging when they are approached in a proper business spirit. But as I am not a publisher, and have been an editor, I can perhaps best help my readers by telling them a few of my own experiences during several years.

[Sidenote: Writing for magazines]

Articles of all sorts, written by all classes of people, are offered to magazines. A comparatively small number are accepted, for the simple reason that a magazine can only hold a certain amount of letter-press; and not all the cramming and pushing and squeezing in the world will allow an extra line to be printed, if the pages of the magazine are already full.

This patent fact is quite forgotten by would-be contributors, who feel themselves aggrieved when this most truthful reason is given for the return of their articles. In exceptional cases of striking brilliancy room of course is made for the article, but brilliant articles, like brilliant people, interfere but seldom with the ordinary routine. Magazines, however, are so numerous that the chances of average work being accepted become greater day by day, and as there is no better opening for a young writer than to become a contributor to a good magazine, he ought to leave no stone unturned to effect this desirable end. By so doing, he has the opportunity of having his work immediately presented to an assured public. A book, however clever, has to find its own public, and this—except in a few cases—is a slow and laborious process. It is a mistaken idea that books are sold in thousands. This is only the case with authors who have made a very wide reputation. The magazine is, therefore, the best opening for the young writer, and the sooner he knows the right way to set to work to get his articles taken, the better.

[Sidenote: Pitfalls to avoid]

Primarily, of course, he _must_ have the necessary talent, or, at least, the knack of gauging popular taste, but, granted that he possesses this important gift, it is well for him to know certain pitfalls into which he may stumble.

To quote from my own Editorial experience may be the best method of showing some of these.

[Sidenote: Rejected contributions]

A contribution like the following was not accepted, although the author had a great deal of learning, and other valuable qualifications to recommend him. _An epic poem to run as a serial through six months of the magazine—to occupy six pages monthly, printed double column; the subject to be devoted to a description of Indian life._ For quite different reasons the following proposal was also rejected—_a series of six papers on “Rogues,” in which every type of wickedness was elaborately discussed_. Neither of these subjects was in the least suitable for the magazine to which they were offered, and the writers who sent them made the grand mistake of knowing nothing of the periodical to which they offered their contributions. Their work, however excellent it may have been, was useless to us, and a glance at our magazine would have told them this, for themselves.

[Sidenote: Different classes of contributors]

Another class of would-be contributor is the utterly silly person who thinks that it would be great fun to have something in print, and imagines that this desirable result can be attained with no labour or previous study. On a certain summer’s afternoon, my co-editor and I were startled by hearing violent giggles outside the office door. Presently two blushing, rosy-faced girls entered. The spokeswoman said she didn’t know our magazine at all—she had never written anything before in her life, but she and her friend thought they would like to make an attempt, if we would give them something to do. We were to suggest a subject, they did not mind in the least what they wrote about. I need scarcely say that the services of these accomplished ladies were not secured.

[Sidenote: The obtuse]

The obtuse, though earnest-minded aspirant is also a hopeless example. Her utter lack of perception as to what is necessary for periodical literature makes it useless to argue with her, and hopeless to advise her. I recall a case in point. I was asked to give advice on the desirability of the applicant’s resigning a good post as resident governess with a large salary, in favour of literature.

I inquired if she had had much experience as a writer, and if she had been encouraged by the success of her books.

The lady in question stared at me with round eyes.

“I have never printed a word in my life,” she said; “but I am tired of teaching, and should like to take up literature. I have brought a little article with me, which you may care to see. The subject I am sure ought to interest—it is on _Hamlet_.”

I gently begged my would-be contributor not to throw up the certainty of earning a comfortable living as a governess until she had tested her powers a little further. I promised to read her expositions on Hamlet, and she withdrew. I need scarcely say what the result of my perusal was.

An amateur’s treatment of _Hamlet_ was scarcely likely to possess anything fresh to recommend it. I was obliged to return the Paper with the mildest of hints that this subject was rather used up. Why must beginners in the great Art of Literature try to give their puny ideas on those giant problems over which the greatest minds have thought and puzzled, and thought and puzzled in vain? Nobody wants their poor little ideas, which are after all only feeble reflections of the thoughts of greater minds. Such papers are only suited for Amateur Essay Societies.

[Sidenote: Three requisites]

Equally silly are the writers who choose _hackneyed topics_ that have been discussed and worn threadbare years ago. Such is the writer who offers a series of twelve Papers on the Higher Education of Women, or Woman’s Suffrage, or the Poetry of Wordsworth. The Papers that find favour with Editors must first be fresh as regards _Subject_, second, be fresh as regards _Style_, third, fresh as regards _Idea_. The writer who possesses this triple gift, requires no further hints to tell him how and where to succeed. Success with him is a certainty.

[Sidenote: What _not_ to do]

Perhaps the best way to emphasise the above remarks is to tell my readers what to do and what _not_ to do.

Do _not_ send an article to a magazine until you have first looked through at least one of its numbers; carefully observe its tone, try to gather for yourself what its motive is, and to what sort of public it appeals. If after a short or a long perusal you discover that you and it are not in touch—that its scope is too wide for you, or your thoughts are too big for its limits, leave it alone, and try your luck somewhere else.

When you write, _don’t_ fly too high. Get a subject into your head and feel that, small as this subject may be, you have something either useful or amusing to say about it.