Fiction and the Criticism of Fiction¹

The novel is at the present time universally recognized as one of the greater historic forms of literary art. Its resources and capacities appear to be commensurate with the realities and consciousness of the modern epoch, and its practitioners, having inherited a good many of the functions once exercised by poetry and the drama, no longer feel the slightest need to engage in the kind of apologetics that were quite common even as late as a hundred years ago, when in respectable quarters novel-writing and novel-reading were still looked upon as activities falling below the level of true cultural aspiration. But if the novel was then still widely regarded as a thing somewhat effeminate and moonshiny, fit mainly for the consumption of young ladies, it was at the same time quickly impressing itself upon the mind of the age as a newfangled form full of rude plebeian energy, unruly, unpredictable and ungovernable in its appropriation of materials from unprocessed reality—”the conscience of a blackened street impatient to assume the world.” Much of the life the novel contains is defined by these contrary reactions, one pointing to its origin in romance and the other to its revitalization through the new principle of realism.

Among the last apologies for the novel—an apology in which we fully sense, however, the surge of confidence and power generated by the phenomenal rise of this relatively new genre—is the preface that the Goncourt brothers wrote for their novel Germinie Lacerteux (1864). “Now that the novel,” they observed, “is broadening, growing, beginning to be a great, serious, impassioned living form of literary study and social research, now that by means of analysis and psychological inquiry it is turning into contemporary moral history, now that the novel has imposed upon itself the investigations and duties of science, one may again make a stand for its liberties and privileges.” This memorable formulation is in the main still acceptable to us. The one dated element in it is of course the reference to science, a reference all too patently of its period and linked to the development of the naturalistic school in French fiction. At the time not a few writers were so impressed by the triumphs of scientific method as to want to borrow some of its magic for themselves, yet at bottom it was not so much a matter of faith in science (though doubtless that played its part too) as of an intention to gain prestige for the novel by means of an honorific association. But apart from that the formulation I have cited has scarcely lost its cogency. The one question arising in connection with it is whether it is still necessary at this late date again to make a stand for the novel’s liberties and privileges. So far as the intelligent reader at large is concerned such a stand may well be redundant. But it is not in the least redundant, I think, so far as some present-day critics of fiction are concerned and the reading-practices to which they have been habituating us.