Aspects of the Novel

We need a vantage post, for the novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous, no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature, irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident, and I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them. Perhaps we ought to define what a novel is before starting. This will not take a second. Monsieur Abel Chevalier has, in his brilliant little manual, provided a definition, and if a French critic cannot define the English novel, who can? It is, he says, a fiction in prose of a certain extent. Une fiction en prose d'un certain étendue. That is quite good enough for us, and we may perhaps go so far as to add that the extent should not be less than fifty thousand words. Any fictitious prose whose work over fifty thousand words will be a novel for the purposes of these lectures, and if this seems to you unphilosophic, will you think of an alternative definition, which will include The Pilgrim's Progress, Marius the Epicurean, The Adventures of a Younger Son, The Magic Flute, The Journal of the Plague, Zolica Dobson, Rasselas, Ulysses, and Green Mansions, or else will give reasons for their exclusion. Parts of our spongy tract seem more fictitious than other parts, it is true. Near the middle, on a tump of grass, stand Miss Austen, with the figure of Emma by her side, and Thackeray holding up Esmond. But no intelligent remark known to me will define the tract as a whole. All we can say of it is that it is bounded by two chains of mountains, neither of which rises very abruptly, the opposing ranges of poetry and of history, and bounded on the third side by a sea, a sea that we shall encounter when we come to Moby-Dick. Let us begin by considering the proviso English literature. English we shall, of course, interpret as written in English, not as published south of the Tweed, or east of the Atlantic, or north of the Equator. We need not attend to geographical accidents, they can be left to the politicians. Yet even with this interpretation, are we as free as we wish? Can we, while discussing English fiction, quite ignore fiction written in other languages, particularly French and Russian? As far as influence goes, we could ignore it, for our writers have never been much influenced by the Continentals. But, for reasons soon to be explained, I want to talk as little as possible about influence during these lectures. My subject is a particular kind of book, and the aspects that book has assumed in English. Can we ignore its collateral aspects on the Continent? Not entirely. An unpleasant and unpatriotic truth has here to be faced. No English novelist is as great as Tolstoy, that is to say, has given so complete a picture of man's life, both on its domestic and heroic side. No English novelist has explored man's soul as deeply as Dostoevsky. And no novelist anywhere has analysed the modern consciousness as successfully as Marcel Proust. Before these triumphs we must pause. English poetry fears no one, excels in quality as well as quantity. But English fiction is less triumphant. It does not contain the best stuff yet written. And if we deny this, we become guilty of provincialism.