LESSON XXXIV.

FICTION AND THE NOVEL.

Fiction is not nature, it is not character, it is not imagined history; it is fallacy, poetic fallacy, pathetic fallacy, a lie if you like, a beautiful lie, a lie that is at once false and true, false to fact, true to faith. - HALL CAINE, in the Contemporary

Review.

The perfect novel must be clean and sweet; for it must tell its tale to all mankind,to saint and sinner, pure and defiled, just and unjust. It must have the magic to fascinate, and the power to hold its reader from first to last.-F. MARION CRAWFORD.

Fiction is the narration of imaginary incidents. Works of fiction may be founded on facts, historical events constituting their general basis; but in such cases the details -the conversations, characters, and scenes are largely the inventions of the author's imagination. As has been shown (p. 105), description is constantly pressed into service to construct settings for the incidents narrated, to apparel the characters, and to delineate manners.

Fictions may be prose or verse forms. Mrs. Browning's "Aurora Leigh" is a metrical novel; and metrical romances abound in our literature, from the ballads of Edward I. to "Marmion" and "Christabel." "Christabel." Metrical fiction will be discussed in the Lessons on Epic, Lyric, and Dramatic Poetry.

The Plot of a Fiction, sometimes called the Intrigue, is the chain of incidents on which the story is founded. A plot must be natural, or adapted to the subject; consistent in all its parts; happy in its selection of incidents interesting in themselves, and calculated to bring out charac

ter, or to induce or explain consequences; and so managed as to keep the reader in suspense until an unexpected but probable dénouement is reached.

Plots are not always single. As in the history, there may be closely related concurrent streams of events, which the artistic writer causes to mingle from time to time in the progress of his story, until they finally become merged in one at the close. In Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday,” the main plot is the courtship of Rowland Lacy (nephew to the Earl of Lincoln) and “fair-cheeked Rose" (the lord mayor's daughter). But the episode of Jane, wife of Shoemaker Ralph, almost deceived into marrying a rich London merchant who falsely reports the death of her husband, is so touching as for a time to overshadow the interest of the main plot. Beside chaste Jane, the heroine in chief pales. At the crisis, the interwoven plots satisfactorily

blend.

Portraiture of Character.

- A work of fiction not only

narrates an action, but also delineates character. Next to a good plot, nothing is more necessary to success than striking and lifelike character portraiture. Ben Jonson portrayed the humors or eccentricities of his contemporaries, which were carefully studied out and constructed from keen observation developed by a long period of exercise at Smithfield and among the wherries of the Thames. His wonderful truthfulness to nature has been styled a "heavy-handed realism." But whether it be the knavish servant that is personated, or the unprincipled young master, or the swaggerer, or the simpleton, or the jealous husband whatever a given character says or does invariably harmonizes with the humor assigned by the dramatist. Individual peculiarities of disposition and manners are always carried out.

In plots like Sir Walter Scott's, that are unfolded

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largely by dialogue, the conversations of the different personages are skillfully made to exhibit their characters. George Eliot, on the other hand, depends chiefly on narrative effects.

The Legitimate End of Fiction is threefold, to please, to instruct, to ennoble. Much of it has no higher object in view than mere entertainment; but, in the hands of judicious writers who feel the responsibility of their calling, fiction becomes an important instrument of good. It furnishes one of the most popular channels for conveying instruction as to the usages, fashions, laws, creeds, and characters, of a period; for affording insight into human nature; for showing the errors into which men are betrayed by their passions; for rendering virtue attractive and vice odious, and thus influencing to good conduct. "Lessons of wisdom," wrote Sterne, "have never such power over us as when they are wrought into the heart through the groundwork of a story which engages the passions."

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It must be observed, however, that, while fiction may be an effective vehicle of ethical instruction, it is no less powerful an agent of evil when diverted from its proper use, and made to teach a false moral, or pander to the baser appetites. Says W. D. Howells: If a novel flatters the passions, and exalts them above the principles, it is poisonous; it may not kill, but it will certainly injure; and this test will alone exclude an entire class of fiction, of which eminent examples will occur to all. Then the whole spawn of so-called unmoral romances, which imagine a world where the sins of sense are unvisited by the penalties following, swift or slow, but inexorably sure, in the real world, are deadly poison: these do kill. The novels that merely tickle our prejudices, and lull our judgment, or that coddle our sensibilities, or pamper our gross appetite for the marvelous, are not so fatal; but they are innutritious, and clog the soul with unwholesome vapors of all kinds."

Fiction should teach Truth, should be loyal to the motives and impulses that sway men and women; but let it present such aspects of truth as are moral. Fiction, like all art, has its limitations. Much of the material which we would exclude for moral reasons should be

excluded for æsthetic reasons. The true artist respects the reserves of nature. When realistic novelists like Zola, in order to produce a sensation, parade material gathered in the cesspools of vice, we ask, æsthetically pained, whether all the beauty in the world has been exhausted that our imaginations must be fed with the disgusting. Many things in life that are true-too true — are excluded from art for art's sake. "Fiction," said Joubert, "has no business to exist unless it is more beautiful than reality. The monstrosities of fiction found in the booksellers' shops have no place in literature, because in literature the one aim of art is the beautiful. Once lose sight of that, and you have the mere frightful reality."

Classification. The principal forms in which fiction. appears are Novels and Tales. Tales are short, and have little depth of plot. Stories are narrations, either true or fictitious. Dialogues like those of Plato and Lucian, Lord Lyttelton's "Dialogues of the Dead," and Landor's “Imaginary Conversations," constitute a form of fiction which has been used with great success.

In the Dialogues of Plato, Socrates is represented in conversation with the quibbling Sophists. By cunningly contrived questions, which seemed to have no bearing on the point at issue, the philosopher led them on from admission to admission, until they suddenly found themselves involved in absurdities. This form of reasoning has been called Socratic. Herder's "Spirit of Hebrew Poetry" is a modern Socratic dialogue.

The Novel deals with real life, with the everyday experiences of men and women. It aims also at the delineation of social manners in the historical period to which its characters belong. Of all the fields of art, that open to the novelist is the broadest, admitting every possible phase of character, and affording the greatest scope for exciting and holding the interest of the reader by a rapid succession of events, an involvement of interests, and the unraveling of intricacies of plot. Skill in the invention and management of incidents as the machinery of the story is here a true mark of genius.

The novel addresses a wider circle of readers than any other form of prose composition. For this reason, as well as because it is so largely concerned with the reciprocal relations of human beings, it shares with the newspaper the responsibility of being the greatest educator and character former of the day.

History of the Novel. The modern novel, which at its highest Masson regards as a prose epic, represents an evolution from the narrative poem of the ancient Egyptians and Greeks. It does not begin with Richardson's chaste Pamela in 1740, nor date from the stories that cluster about that elder Pamela "of high thoughts" who graced the Arcadia of 1590. Its germ, we know, is as old as the fictions that were composed to entertain the Pharaoh of the Exodus and the remoter Egyptian fairy tales that antedate 2000 B.C. The stepping-stone to the novel of modern times is found in the Greek romances of the fourth century of our era;1 in the romances of

1 Notably the touching, pure-toned Æthiopica, which narrates the adventures of Theag'enes and Charicle'a, ending happily in the modern style; the loves of Daphnis and Chloe, ancient types of Paul and Virginia; and