PODSNAPPERY (Charles Dickens: "Our Mutual THE DUEL BY CANDLELIGHT (R. L. Stevenson: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS FOR permission to use copyright matter acknowledg- INTRODUCTION It is the aim of this little book to form an introduction to the riches of the English novel. If some of its readers are moved to pursue further the doings of Cuddie Headrigg or Lucy Snowe or Emma Woodhouse or Sir Roger de Coverley, and to make of them friends unchanging as only people in books can be, one part at least of the compiler's purpose will have been achieved. But each extract is also intended to illustrate a moment in the development of a great literature, to represent, however inadequately, one author whose method and spirit may be compared with those of others who came before or after him. This anthology pretends to nothing more than to be a guide-book to the reading of great novels; unless, indeed, it served to lead the reader to the complete works themselves, there would be no justification for a collection of this kind, which must be, at the best, hazardous of success. Of all literary forms the novel is the most difficult to illustrate by one short passage; still more difficult is it to define. If we say that the novel is a fictitious narrative in prose, with human characters, of sufficient length to be divided into chapters, that at least part of the plot is probably a love story, we shall be safer with such a rough formula of its elements than with a definition. As early as 1485, in the preface to Malory's Morte Darthur which he printed in that year, William Caxton gives a formula, which, intended to describe the contents of that collection of romances, would serve equally well for many a novel. The readers of the Morte Darthur, writes Caxton," shall find many joyous and pleasant histories, and noble and renowned acts of humanity, gentleness, and chivalry. For herein may be seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, hardiness, love, friendship, cowardice, murder, hate, virtue, and sin. Do after the good and leave the evil, and it shall bring you to good fame and renommee.' The last words introduce an element which is present in the work of the best English novelists: they have not always been avowedly didactic, but their achievement has ever been that which, in the words of Fulke Greville, his biographer, was the purpose of Sidney in the Arcadia " to guide every man through the confused labyrinth of his own desires and life." Whether or not the novelist is conscious of giving moral guidance, the very fact that he paints the labyrinth of life and shows us how the characters of his creation emerge from it, forces him on to the ground of the philosopher and moralist. It is there that he who penetrates towards the springs of human conduct will find himself at last. The history of the English novel is one with the growth of man's power to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature," human nature, and to portray what he sees there. The sight of this gazer has become ever keener. At first he saw only action and external gesture; gradually his vision pierced beyond, to the innermost motives prompting speech and behaviour. In the growth of the novel we can see character gradually overshadowing plot in interest and importance. As in all evolution, however, the course has been by no means direct or regular; the gradual preponderance of character over plot would be difficult to prove by reference to chapter and verse. For instance, seldom has the privacy of the heart been laid so bare as by Richardson in Clarissa Harlowe (1748); modern novelists have but learnt methods better and less artificial than interminable letter-writing. Even Malory, the earliest author to figure in the following pages, gives us, perhaps unconsciously, in the midst of stereotyped conversation, flashes of drama and sudden blinding glimpses of the passions and sorrows of men and women. His very reticence is often a revelation, to be compared only with the artless method of the ballad writers. His characters are, however, all the same kind of people: knights and ladies of the court of King Arthur, behaving on the whole very much in the same kind of way. If we look onward at those whose works form milestones in the novel's history, we shall see a fairly regular widening in the variety of characters and in the range of subjects treated. The Elizabethans, amid the lords and ladies of prose romances like Euphues and the Arcadia, admit shepherds and shepherdesses. Realism, stark and unadorned, appears in the work of Nash, Dekker, Deloney, and Greene, who portray, sometimes tenderly, sometimes brutally, the life of thieves and outcasts in London, the varied fortunes of tradesmen and apprentices. These two distinct kinds of stories-novels but for the absence of a central theme to unite their various episodes are the well-springs of the two streams in which the novels of every age seem to have flowed. These may be briefly called Romance and Realism: containing stories, the one of adventures splendid and stirring and outside our humdrum experience, the other of simple lives often as outwardly uneventful as our own. Thus Scott and Jane Austen were writing at the same time; to-day Mr. Joseph Conrad* and Mr. Arnold Bennett are representing the same two types, and sometimes the spirits of both Romance and Realism are found together in one author. * Joseph Conrad died while this book was in preparation. Simple, homely realism finds an exponent in Bunyan, who, though the thought would have horrified him, plays an important part in the long procession of English novelists. The very nature of an allegory centres interest upon the characters, plot takes second place. The nature of each allegorical person is fixed and lets him act only in one way; events must needs happen as he dictates, he weaves the skein of his own destiny. The same value attaches to seventeenth-century "character" literature, in which not only moral types as in allegory-are delineated, but types drawn from professions and temperaments as well. In the work of Sir Thomas Overbury, Earle, and others, the story vanishes altogether; the English novel proper is checked in its development, while those who might have carried it forward practise characterdrawing. But these " characters," just because they are only collections of traits common to typical examples of the profession or way of life they describe, are devoid of real life and individuality. The These wants are supplied very soon in the numbers of the Spectator dealing with Sir Roger de Coverley and his friends, the creations of Steele and Addison. We are given glimpses of their past lives, the school-days of Mr. Spectator, the love-story of Sir Roger; we see them in the midst of various surroundings, in the coffee-houses and places of fashionable resort, in the country, at church, at the theatre. Coverley Papers only just fall short of being a novel of domestic life. That they do fall short is due to the lack of any connected plot as a framework to limit the actions of those within it in a united whole; the idea of the Spectator Club has almost as much unity as the Pickwick Club, but it is only an artificial means of bringing its members together, and beyond its pale they have no connection with each other. Interaction of characters has not yet been reflected |