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contending tempests blowing round his head, he is yet at a comfortable altitude which enables him pleasantly to realize that there are others less fortunate than he. He is not lonely, for the great majority are like himself. His one real trouble is that there are his betters; to their existence he is not quite stupid enough to be blind. It is the one thing which mars his equanimity, for it compels him to have an idea, the idea of reducing these superior beings to his own level. That becomes the average man's life work from age to age, and slowly he succeeds. Not because of his own ability; but from time to time, amongst the more than average men, one arises base enough to buy the commonplace man's support by assisting him with his superior ability to pull down the nobler sort to the average level. Such traitors abound in this day.

But apart from that perennial disturbance, the average man is a slow animal; he can comprehend nothing but himself and wants only to meet himself. His particular aversion is the clever man. In the first place it is an insult that there should be any one so unlike himself; in the second place the clever man troubles him by the suggestion, not successfully stifled, that his fixed persuasion that the clever man is of no account compared with the average

man may not be quite sound. Similarly, a book or a journal which requires thought to be understood is an offence to him. Of course if he cannot understand it, it is a worthless book, but still there it is, there is something he can't understand. It has ruffled the stagnant waters of his mind; his brain has almost been put in motion, and he is annoyed. What he likes is his halfpenny daily and his weekly Moralizer. This is the average man's rule of life. Eat well, drink well, sleep well; don't work if you can help it, but if you must, do it regularly and make it

square with your habits. Outside your daily work never do anything but amuse yourself, and never let amusement have any connection with mind. Perhaps the supreme moment of satisfaction to the average man of the settled time of life comes about three o'clock on Saturday afternoons. Having lunched solidly, with the prospect of thirty-six hours' inaction before him, he takes up The Moralizer. There he finds himself faithfully reflected week by week; he can read and understand without even an attempt at thought. There he finds every one of his worldly ambitions recommended on the most moral grounds, so that his conscience is soothed and yet not a desire forbidden. He reads: "Let it be remembered that if the world were flat it would not be round." He pauses for a moment to ponder the striking generalization. "Yes," he says, "it is true, if the world were flat, it would not be round. What a wonderful paper the Moralizer is!" He reads on: "Depend upon it, if the world were made flat to morrow, extraordinary things would happen." Then follows bold speculation and description exactly suited to the average man's capacity, being in its improbable and absolutely irresponsible adventure just broad farce told in solemn language, suggestive of much wisdom. Finally, the reader sinks to sleep a happy and wholly self-satisfied man.

So far from the average man being neglected or made little of, it is just he who calls the tune to which the world hastens to dance. It is the average man who makes good drama well nigh impossible on the stage; who makes the path of a Marie Corelli broad and easy, of a George Meredith steep and narrow; who makes "Answers" and "Comic Cuts," "Tit-Bits" and "Snapshots" the royal road to fortune; who crowds the Academy and thinks Sir William Richmond has improved S. Paul's; who rejoices when а prima

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THE LIVING AGE:

A Weekly Magazine of Contemporary Literature and Thought.

(FOUNDED BY E. LITTELL IN 1844.)

SEVENTH SERIES. NO. 2933. SEPT. 22, 1900.

VOLUME VIII.

FROM BEGINNING Vol. CCXXVI.

SOME RECENT NOVELS OF MANNERS.*

the

There is nothing more vexing and misleading than an arbitrary classification; but, after all, names are a necessity, and it is impossible to talk about the modern novel with any chance of distinctness unless one specifies class of novel that is referred to. And, since prose fiction began to stand alone as a separate art, there have always been two main types of story-the novel of incident and the novel of obNaturally the types have servation. overlapped; human intelligence more than anything else in the world refuses to be shut into watertight compartments; but still there exists a broad distinction between the story told as a traveller may tell his adventures in Abyssinia or Peru, and the story concerned from start to finish with circumstances familiar to the audience in their own daily life.

And-broadly

speaking again-the novel of incident commends itself to men, the novel of observation to women. Our curiosity is limited by our imagination, and the bulk of us care most for the recital of such actions as we can see ourselves

1. The Danvers Jewels. By Mary Cholmondeley. London: Bentley, 1887.

2. Sir Charles Danvers. By Mary Cholmondeley. London: Bentley, 1889.

3. Diana Tempest. By Mary Cholmondeley. London: Bentley, 1893.

4. Red Pottage, By Mary Cholmondeley. London: Arnold, 1899.

take part in. In the secret chambers of our mind we still play, as we played when we were children, at being heroes and heroines, though we select the precise type of heroism (or villany) with a little more discrimination. We do not aspire after the entirely incongruous; if our flesh has succumbed under the ordeal of a Channel crossing, we avoid the identification of ourselves with the young rescuer of the shipwrecked. But still, there is scarcely a man so tied by custom in soul as well as body to his office-stool that he does not conceive it possible, and even desirable, that he too might take a hand in bloodshed and feel the lust of combat rise in his veins. The battle instinct survives in the sex that did the fighting long after there had ceased to be any fighting for it to do. But woman, who in the old times readily identified her emotions with those of the valiant knight, and who listened or so one may suppose from the old forms of literature-with more interest to the recital of innumerable tourneyings than to any love song

5. Concerning Isabel Carnaby. By Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler. London; Hodder & Stoughton, 1898.

6. The Double Thread. By Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler. London: Hutchinson, 1899.

7. The Farringdons. By Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler. London: Hutchinson, 1900.

she has greatly lost touch with these fiercer emotions; and among novelreaders women make the majority.

That is why in every novel the love interest is obligatory. When you have that, you have something that appeals to every woman-something that she can compare, not, perhaps, with her actual experiences, but with those infinite capabilities of which she alone is aware; and therefore, to win her approbation, if the story be one of risks and adventures, they must at least be risked and adventured for the sake of a woman. If the novelist neglects this interest he does so at his peril; women have hardly yet become reconciled to Stevenson, because in the books by which he became famous there was no love-story. Still, in Stevenson there was always that charm which is not proper to the novel as a novel-the fascination of romance; the sense everywhere, at every turn of the narrative, that there is something waiting always just beyond the corner; and this touch of mystery is felt less by women than by men, yet it is felt by all human beings who have a susceptibility to the influences of literature. But give to the average educated lady a book like Mr. Morley Roberts's "Sea Comedy," which is simply an admirable yarn of rough-and-tumble adventure, with the grimmest issues taken in a jesting spirit, and the book will have no interest for her. She has no possible concern in the scenes that pass on board a ship homeward bound from Australia with a crew of broken miners, half of them "Shanghaied" or trepanned, and every mother's son with a revolver in his pocket. But, on the other hand, every man will enter at once into the spirit of the adventure, and he will have a man's admiration for a man, the hard-fisted ruffian who first of all sharks up the crew out of hospitals and gambling dens, and then manages to keep such a make-shift for

discipline as lands the ship safe in port without throat-cutting. If he had been laboring for the blue eyes of a fairhaired lass, discreetly suggested in the first chapter, hinted at in moments of high emotion throughout, and introduced with a pink halo on the last page, the book might have been a novel in the orthodox form, and women might have read it; as it was, it remained a yarn, and one of the best of its kind, but Mudie's, probably, had very little call for copies.

A book of this sort is a saga, and a saga of the old Icelandic type; it appeals to man, the aboriginal fighting animal, who is more concerned with the fight than the motive of the fighter. But the pleasure of recognition, of identifying our own latent instincts translated into act, is, in a book like this, only for men, whereas the successful novel easily eschews such a limitation of the potential audience. The superficial interests of men and of women are to-day widely similar, and a novel that deals with the ordinary life of civilized society gives this pleasure to both sexes, but chiefly to the sex which is par excellence the sex of novelreaders. Hence, in spite of the vogue which the historical novel has recently attained, there arises the domination of the novel of manners; yet it must not be supposed that here the novelist has to move checked and fettered by the laws of common probability. The most popular novel of manners is that based mainly on imagination. It contrives to pay a double debt, gratifying the human interest in a story, and tickling the human curiosity where that curiosity is most sensitive. Mr. Hall Caine, in "The Christian," revealed to a palpitating public the monstrous wickedness that goes on in London hospitals, and showed how patients generally owe their lives to the sagacity and resolution of a raw probationer. The information was vouched for as ac

curate by the author, and it was just the information that the general public desired. Accuracy was a matter of slight importance; to have a picture of the life lived by people whom one met in the street, but not elsewhere, to see the true inwardness of what was only vaguely recorded in the newspapersthis the average novel-reader, the person in whose hands lie pecuniary success and failure, demanded of the popular instructor. For novels of manners resolve themselves into two classes-those which are based on knowledge and those which rear a fabric on imagination. And for solid success it is to the latter we should look. The power to gratify a popular curiosity accounts for the stupefying fact that Miss Marie Corelli is read by tens of thousands. She describes society-the haunt of wicked peers and abandoned peeresses-not exactly as it is, but exactly as her audience wishes to hear it described. Her books are to her audience "as good as a sermon," and much better too, because they are more detailed. A work like Ouida's powerful piece of rhetoric, "The Massarenes," does not rest on direct observation but it rests on facts; it is not life but it comes as near life as satire is bound to do. A book like "The Murder of Delicia" is true to nothing in heaven and earth but Miss Corelli's imagination. And yet Miss Corelli has been so successful that it is impossible, in an essay of this kind, to omit at least so much reference to her as is contained in saying that her work is entirely undeserving of any consideration.

Miss Corelli ranks as a novelist of manners by intention rather than by result, but it is plainly her intention to depict not SO much individuals as classes; to render not a single charac'ter but the character of a society. The distinction is important for our present purpose, and it may be well to dwell

The

upon it. A novelist who sets out to tell us what men and women may be like uses imagination for the purposes of psychology; one who tells us what they are like uses observation. stronger the emotional interest, whether roused by violent and exciting incident or by the suggestion of some great spiritual crisis, the more difficult it is to avoid concentrating all attention on the principal figure, unless, like Scott, the writer fixes our minds on the events themselves rather than on the persons affected by them. But in the day of small things interest is diffused, and we observe all the actors, we note their individual peculiarities, we listen to general comment, every accessory has a value in its own right, we see things and people as they are in themselves, not in relation to some tragic personage. The room where a murderer sits takes a shadow from the murder, but the room where three old ladies combine to talk gossip has a physiognomy of its own. Where there is no overmastering central preoccupation the novelist may atone for its absence by the great significance given to detail, and a catholicity of con

cern.

Let us illustrate by examples. In "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" Mr. Hardy's object is to portray character, but individual character, to show us the nature of Tess shaking off alien accretions and shooting up into the final glory of its tragic blossom. Every other actor affects us in a way through Tess; we judge them by their dealings with her, by their contrast to her figure or their harmony with it. So true an artist as Mr. Hardy is indifferent to no form of human life, but he depicts the surroundings for the sake of Tess. On the other hand the novelist of manners is concerned to combine and to contrast in the picture groups rather than individuals. There is no character in Miss Austen's works who so dominates

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