Novels Nowadays

( Originally Published Early 1900's )

IT is no unusual thing to hear at any dinner table emphatically derogatory comment from those of an elder and more discretionary generation upon the somewhat embittering subject of "novels nowadays." The concomitant reminder is usually (though expressed other-wise) of the delightfully sedative qualities of the great Victorian contributions to literature. By comparison how much pleasanter, nobler, and so on.

But the novel of manners was a dynamic force in the Victorian era. Is not the elder generation looking back upon its great hey-day rather for what one H. A. Taine called "minute details and practical counsels" than for the "imagination and dreams" it furnished the audience of its own period? The vital social anger of Dickens is forgotten, perhaps, in approving the "delicacy and devotion" of his heroes—the gloomy satire of Thackeray in the "quaintness" of an Amelia Sedley. It is all so odd and pleasant and old-fashioned and far away. And then these authors were such great moralists.

Where, however, Dickens and Thackeray are loved by the younger generation it is not for any such stale virtuousness; it is rather for their living virtuosity, their wit, sincerity, and creative power. And the younger generation seeks even further.

It seeks beneath the individual consciousness, so typical of all human nature, into the unconscious, so strongly differentiated in each individual by impedimenta of early influence and training. Scientific research into human motives and behavior has added much to our knowledge since the Victorian era; all this the contemporary writer has at his disposal. Many are beginning to profit by it. A character's motives are subject to a more extended survey; the casual impressions of the individual acquire greater momentousness. A deeper sympathy on the part of the author, even for the "villain of the piece," is increasingly apparent.

But the point surely is that we live today in a more subjective age. It is an age of the individual's explanation of himself. Authority, even the conventions that the greatest of the Victorians tacitly accepted, has every-where been called into question. Mere presentation of life as a panorama above which the author sits like a god, even though a sardonic god, upholding certain tables of the law, has taken on a certain taint of superficiality. The picture of society is now presented far more through the deep reactions of one individual than as a conglomerate whole where a great variety of interesting creatures move, weaving "plots," restricted by the necessity of not stepping out of their own "characters" in the scheme.

In short, the author has descended from Olympus. Life is approached merely through the eyes of one particularly sophisticated individual in it. For a certain gain there is usually corresponding loss. But the methods of approach in novel-writing are changing, because the times have changed. It is rather futile to expect life to be static—to expect the methods of one age to be the same as that of another that is past.

If a comparison is demanded as to "greatness" perhaps Emerson's squirrel may answer for us, as he did to the mountain, "If I cannot carry forests on my back, neither can you crack a nut." Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" need hardly be damned because it is not the "Hamlet" of Shakespeare. It is an attempt to do some-thing entirely different.

Again, if the question of the "morality" of the modern novelist prove a burning one, as it ever has and ever will, a calm consideration of the great novels of the world's literature might greatly disillusionize the orthodox. And if the Anglo-Saxon novel be growing more European—a consummation we hardly dare hope for—why, after all, those novels that the European viewpoint has produced are not altogether negligible. Our idea in America of the function of the novelist can stand a little improvement.

For how does Taine deal with the "morality" of the great Victorians? "It is there-fore to ignore man, to reduce him . . . to an aggregate of virtues and vices; it is to lose sight in him of all but the exterior and social side; it is to neglect the inner and natural element. You will find the same fault in English criticism, always moral, never psychological."

Perhaps it is for this reason, neglect of that "inner and natural element," that "novels nowadays" have been tending so pronouncedly toward autobiographical analysis. More and more the psychological, among the books that matter; less and less the "moral."

And the interest of the younger generation in this trend is both healthy and hopeful. It is a sounding for greater depth. The old-style novel of manners was not enough. Even its worthiest successors in our own period pall. The seine of literature is let down deeper beneath life's apparent level, into further fathoms of the sea of motive and complex impulse. Thus peculiar things are dredged to the surface; some things, indeed, at which the elder generation shudders and from which it hastily averts its eyes. For the author does not moralize about them, he seems only to seek a more universal under-standing. Yet throughout the history of literature this has been the guiding motive of the true creator. His main problem is simply to render all human action as intelligible as possible in the light of his own time.