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THE
ENGLISH NOVEL
AND THE
PRINCIPLE OF ITS DEVELOPMENT
BY
SIDNEY LANIER
LECTURER IN JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY; AUTHOR OF "THE SCIENCE OF ENGLISH VERSE"
NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1883
GRANT, FAIRES & RODGERS, PHILADELPHIA.
* * * * *
PREFATORY NOTE.
The following chapters were originally delivered as public lectures atJohns Hopkins University, in the winter and spring of 1881. Had Mr.Lanier lived to prepare them for the press, he would probably haverecast them to some extent; but the present editor has not felt freeto make any changes from the original manuscript, beyond the omissionof a few local and occasional allusions, and the curtailment ofseveral long extracts from well-known writers.
Although each is complete in itself, this work and its foregoer, _TheScience of English Verse_, were intended to be parts of acomprehensive philosophy of formal and substantial beauty inliterature, which, unhappily, the author did not live to develop.
W. H. B.
* * * * *
THE ENGLISH NOVEL
AND THE
PRINCIPLE OF ITS DEVELOPMENT.
I.
The series of lectures which I last had the pleasure of delivering inthis hall was devoted to the exposition of what is beyond doubt themost remarkable, the most persistent, the most wide-spread, and themost noble of all those methods of arranging words and ideas indefinite relations, which have acquired currency among men--namely,the methods of verse, or Formal Poetry. That exposition began byreducing all possible phenomena of verse to terms of vibration; andhaving thus secured at once a solid physical basis for this science,and a precise nomenclature in which we could talk intelligibly uponthis century-befogged subject, we advanced gradually from the mostminute to the largest possible considerations upon the matter in hand.
Now, wishing that such courses as I might give here should preserve acertain coherence with each other, I have hoped that I could securethat end by successively treating The Great Forms of ModernLiterature; and, wishing further to gain whatever advantage ofentertainment for you may lie in contrast and variety, I have thoughtthat inasmuch as we have already studied the Verse-Form in General, wemight now profitably study some great Prose-Forms in Particular, andin still further contrast; that we might study that form not so much_analytically_--as when we developed the _Science_ of Formal Poetryfrom a single physical principle--but this time synthetically, fromthe point of view of literary _art_ rather than of literary science.
I am further led to this general plan by the consideration that so faras I know--but my reading in this direction is not wide, and I may bein error--there is no book extant in any language which gives aconspectus of all those well-marked and widely-varying literary formswhich have differentiated themselves in the course of time, and of thecurious and subtle needs of the modern civilized man which, under thestress of that imperious demand for expression which all men'semotions make, have respectively determined the modes of suchexpression to be in one case _The Novel_, in another _The Sermon_, inanother _The Newspaper Leader_, in another _The Scientific Essay_, inanother _The Popular Magazine Article_, in another _TheSemi-Scientific Lecture_, and so on: each of these prose-forms, youobserve, having its own limitations and fitnesses quite aswell-defined as the Sonnet-Form, the Ballad-Form, the Drama-Form, andthe like in verse.
And, with this general plan, a great number of considerations which Ihope will satisfactorily emerge as we go on, lead me irresistibly toselect the Novel as the particular prose-form for our study.
It happens, indeed, that over and above the purely literary interestwhich would easily give this form the first place in such a series asthe present, the question of the Novel has just at this time becomeone of the most pressing and vital of all the practical problemswhich beset our moral and social economy.
The novel,--what we call the novel--is a new invention. It iscustomary to date the first English novel with Richardson in 1740; andjust as it has been impossible to confine other great inventions tothe service of virtue--for the thief can send a telegram to his pal aseasily as the sick man to his doctor, and the locomotive spins alongno less merrily because ten car-loads of rascals may be profiting byits speed--so vice as well as virtue has availed itself of thenovel-form, and we have such spectacles as Scott, and Dickens, andEliot, and Macdonald, using this means to purify the air in one place,while Zola, in another, applies the very same means to defiling thewhole earth and slandering all humanity under the sacred names of"naturalism," of "science," of "physiology." Now I need not waste timein descanting before this audience upon the spread of the novel amongall classes of modern readers: while I have been writing this, awell-considered paper on "Fiction in our Public Libraries," hasappeared in the current _International Review_, which, among manysuggestive statements, declares that out of pretty nearly fivemillions (4,872,595) of volumes circulated in five years by the BostonPublic Library, nearly four millions (3,824,938), that is aboutfour-fifths, were classed as "Juveniles and Fiction;" and merelymentioning the strength which these figures gain when considered alongwith the fact that they represent the reading of a people supposed tobe more "solid" in literary matter than any other in the country--ifwe inquire into the proportion at Baltimore, I fancy I have only tohold up this copy of James's _The American_, which I borrowed theother day from the Mercantile Library, and which I think I may say,after considerable rummaging about the books of that institution,certainly bears more marks of "circulation" than any solid book in it.In short, as a people, the novel is educating us. Thus we cannot takeany final or secure solace in the discipline and system of our schoolsand universities until we have also learned to regulate thisfascinating universal teacher which has taken such hold upon allminds, from the gravest scholar down to the boot-black shivering onthe windy street corner over his dime-novel,--this educator whoseprinciples are fastening themselves upon your boy's mind, so that longafter he has forgotten his _amo_ and his _tupto_, they will becontrolling his relations to his fellow-man, and determining hishappiness for life.
But we can take no really effective action upon this matter until weunderstand precisely what the novel is and means; and it is,therefore, with the additional pleasure of stimulating you tosystematize and extend your views upon a living issue which demandsyour opinion, that I now invite you to enter with me, without furtherpreliminary, upon a series of studies in which it is proposed, first,to inquire what is that special relation of the novel to the modernman, by virtue of which it has become a paramount literary form; and,secondly, to illustrate this abstract inquiry, when completed, by someconcrete readings in the greatest of modern English novelists.
In the course of this inquiry I shall be called on to bring before yousome of the very largest conceptions of which the mind is capable; andinasmuch as several of the minor demonstrations will begin somewhatremotely from the Novel, it will save me many details which would beotherwise necessary, if I indicate in a dozen words the four speciallines of development along one or other of which I shall be alwaystravelling.
I shall insist with the utmost reverence that between every humanbeing and every other human being exists a radical, unaccountable,inevitable difference from birth; this sacred Difference between manand man, by virtue of which I am I, and you are you; this marvellousseparation which we express by the terms "personal identity,""self-hood," "me,"--it is the unfolding of this, I shall insist, whichsince the time of Aeschylus (say) has wrought all those stupendouschanges in the relation of man to God, to physical nature, and to hisfellow, which have culminated in the modern cultus. I can best bringupon you the length and breadth of this idea of modern personality asI conceive it, by stating it in terms which have recently been madeprominent and familiar by the discussion as to the evolution ofgenius; a phase of which appears in a very agreeable paper by Mr. JohnFiske in a recent _Atlantic Monthly_ on "Sociology and Hero Worship."Says Mr. Fiske, in a certain part of this article, "Every species ofanimals or plants consists of a great number of individuals which arenearly, but not exactly alike. Each individual varies slightly in onecharacteristic or another from a certain type which expresses theaverage among all the individuals of the species.... Now the moth withhis proboscis twice as long as the average ... is what we call aspontaneous variation; and the Darwin or the Helmholtz is what we calla 'genius'; and the analogy between the two kinds of variation isobvious enough." He proceeds in another place: "We cannot tell why agiven moth has a proboscis exactly an inch and a quarter in length,any more than we can tell why Shakspeare was a great dramatist,"there being absolutely no precedent conditions by which the mostardent evolutionist could evolve William Shakspeare, for example, fromold John Shakspeare and his wife. "The social philosopher must simplyaccept geniuses as data, just as Darwin accepts his spontaneousvariations."
But now if we reflect upon this prodigious series of spontaneousvariations which I have called the sacred difference between man andman,--this personality which every father and mother are astonished atanew every day, when out of six children they perceive that each oneof the six, from the very earliest moment of activity, has shown hisown distinct individuality, differing wholly from either parent; thechild who most resembles the parent physically, often having apersonality which crosses that of the parent at the sharpest angles;this radical, indestructible, universal personality which entitlesevery "me" to its privacy, which has in course of time made theEnglishman's house his castle, which has developed the Rights of Man,the American Republic, the supreme prerogative of the woman to saywhom she will love, what man she shall marry; this personality, soprecious that not even the miserablest wretch with no other possession_but_ his personality has ever been brought to say he would be willingto exchange it entire for that of the happiest being; this personalitywhich has brought about that, whereas in the time of Aeschylus thecommon man was simply a creation of the State, like a moderncorporation with rights and powers strictly limited by the State'scharter, now he is a genuine sovereign who makes the State, a king asto every minutest particle of his individuality so long as thatkinghood does not cross the kinghood of his fellow,--when we reflectupon _this_ awful spontaneous variation of personality, this "mysteryin us which calls itself _I_" (as Thomas Carlyle has somewhere calledit), which makes every man scientifically a human atom, yet an atomendowed above all other atoms with the power to choose its own mode ofmotion, its own combining equivalent,--when farther we reflect uponthe relation of each human atom to each other human atom, and to thegreat Giver of personalities to these atoms,--how each is indissolublybound to each, and to Him, and yet how each is discretely parted andimpassably separated from each and from Him by a gulf which is simplyno less deep than the width between the finite and the infinite,--whenwe reflect, finally, that it is this simple, indivisible, radical,indestructible, new force which each child brings into the world underthe name of its _self_; which controls the whole life of that child,so that its path is always a resultant of its own individual force onthe one hand, and of the force of its surrounding circumstances on theother,--we are bound to confess, it seems to me, that such spontaneousvariations carry us upon a plane of mystery very far above thosemerely unessential variations of the offspring from the parental typein physique, and even above those rare abnormal variations which wecall genius.
In meditating upon this matter, I found a short time ago a poem ofTennyson's floating about the newspapers, which so beautifully andreverently chants this very sense of personality, that I must read youa line or two from it. I have since observed that much fun has beenmade of this piece, and I have seen elaborate burlesques upon it. ButI think such an attitude could be possible only to one who had notpassed along this line of thought. At any rate the poem seemed to me avery noble and rapturous hymn to the great Personality above us,acknowledging the mystery of our own personalities as finitelydependent upon, and yet so infinitely divided from His Personality.
This poem is called _De Profundis--Two Greetings_, and is addressed toa new-born child. I have time to read only a line or two here andthere; you will find the whole poem much more satisfactory. Pleaseobserve, however, the ample, comforting phrases and summaries withwhich Tennyson expresses the poetic idea of that personality which Ihave just tried to express from the point of view of science, of theevolutionist:
Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep, When all that was to be in all that was Whirl'd for a million aeons thro' the vast Waste dawn of multitudinous-eddying light--
* * * * *
Thro' all this changing world of changeless law. And every phase of ever-heightening life, Thou comest.
* * * * *
O, dear Spirit, half-lost In thine own shadows and this fleshly sign That thou art thou--who wailest, being born And banish'd into mystery and the pain Of this divisible-indivisible world.
* * * * *
Our mortal veil And shatter'd phantom of that infinite One Who made thee inconceivably thyself Out of his whole world--self and all in all-- Live thou, and of the grain and husk, the grape And ivy berry choose; and still depart From death to death thro' life and life, and find--
* * * * *
This main miracle, that thou art thou, With power on thy own act and on the world. We feel we are nothing--for all is Thou and in Thee; We feel we are something--that also has come from Thee; We are nothing, O Thou--but Thou wilt help us to be; Hallowed be Thy name--Hallelujah!
I find some expressions here which give me great satisfaction: TheInfinite One who made thee inconceivably thyself; this divisible,indivisible world, this main miracle that thou art thou, etc.
Now it is with this "main miracle," that I am I, and you, you--withthis personality, that my first train of thought will busy itself; andI shall try to show by several concrete illustrations from the linesand between the lines of Aeschylus and Plato and the like writers,compared with several modern writers, how feeble the sense andinfluence of it is in their time as contrasted with ours.
In my second line of development, I shall call your attention to whatseems to me a very remarkable and suggestive fact: to-wit, thatPhysical Science, Music, and the Novel, all take their rise at thesame time; of course, I mean what we moderns call science, music, andthe novel. For example, if we select, for the sake of well-knownrepresentative names, Sir Isaac Newton (1642), John Sebastian Bach(1685), and Samuel Richardson (1689), the first standing for the riseof modern science, the second for the rise of modern music, the thirdfor the rise of the modern novel, and observe that these three men areborn within fifty years of each other, we cannot fail to findourselves in the midst of a thousand surprising suggestions andinferences. For in our sweeping arc from Aeschylus to
the present time,fifty years subtend scarcely any space; we may say then these men areborn together. And here the word accident has no meaning. Time,progress, then, have no accident.
Now in this second train of thought I shall endeavor to connect thesephenomena with the principle of personality developed in the firsttrain, and shall try to show that this science, music, and the novel,are flowerings-out of that principle in various directions; forinstance, each man in this growth of personality feeling himself indirect and personal relations with physical nature (not in relationsobscured by the vague intermediary, hamadryads and forms of the Greeksystem), a general desire to know the exact truth about nature arises;and this desire carried to a certain enthusiasm in the nature of givenmen--behold the man of science; a similar feeling of direct personalrelation to the Unknown, acting similarly upon particular men,--beholdthe musician, and the ever-increasing tendency of the modern toworship God in terms of music; likewise, a similar feeling of directpersonal relation to each individual member of humanity, high or low,rich or poor, acting similarly, gives us such a novel as the _Mill onthe Floss_, for instance, when for a long time we find ourselvesinterested in two mere children--Tom and Maggie Tulliver--or suchnovels as those of Dickens and his fellow-host who have called uponour human relation to poor, unheroic people.
In my third train of thought, I shall attempt to show that theincrease of personalities thus going on has brought about suchcomplexities of relation that the older forms of expression wereinadequate to them; and that the resulting necessity has developed thewonderfully free and elastic form of the modern novel out of the morerigid Greek drama, through the transition form of the Elizabethandrama.
And, fourthly, I shall offer copious readings from some of the mostcharacteristic modern novels, in illustration of the generalprinciples thus brought forward.
Here,--as the old preacher Hugh Latimer grimly said in closing one ofhis powerful descriptions of future punishment,--you see your fare.
Permit me, then, to begin the execution of this plan by bringingbefore you two matters which will be conveniently disposed of in theoutset, because they affect all these four lines of thought ingeneral, and because I find the very vaguest ideas prevailing aboutthem among those whose special attention happens not to have beencalled this way.
As to the first point; permit me to remind you how lately these proseforms have been developed in our literature as compared with the formsof verse. Indeed, abandoning the thought of any particular forms ofprose, consider for how long a time good English poetry was writtenbefore any good English prose appears. It is historical that as farback as the seventh century Caedmon is writing a strong English poem inan elaborate form of verse. Well-founded conjecture carries us backmuch farther than this; but without relying upon that, we have clearknowledge that all along the time when _Beowulf_ and _TheWanderer_--to me one of the most artistic and affecting of Englishpoems--and _The Battle of Maldon_ are being written, all along thetime when Caedmon and Aldhelm and the somewhat mythical Cynewulf aresinging, formal poetry or verse has reached a high stage of artisticdevelopment. But not only so; after the Norman change is consummated,and our language has fairly assimilated that tributary stock of wordsand ideas and influences; the _poetic_ advance, the development ofverse, goes steadily on.
If you examine the remains of our lyric poetry written along in thetwelfth and thirteenth centuries--short and unstudied little songs asmany of them are, songs which come upon us out of that obscure periodlike brief little bird-calls from a thick-leaved wood--if, I say, weexamine these songs, written as many of them are by nobody inparticular, it is impossible not to believe that a great mass ofpoetry, some of which must have been very beautiful, was written inthe two hundred years just before Chaucer, and that an extremely smallproportion of it can have come down to us.
But, in all this period, where is the piece of English prose thatcorresponds with _The Wanderer_, or with the daintier Cuckoo-Song ofthe early twelfth century? In point of fact, we cannot say that eventhe conception of an artistic prose has occurred to English literaryendeavor until long after Chaucer. King Alfred's Translations, theEnglish Chronicle, the Homilies of Aelfric, are simple and clearenough; and, coming down later, the English Bible set forth by Wyclifand his contemporaries. Wyclif's sermons and tracts, and Mandeville'saccount of his travels are effective enough, each to its own end. Butin all these the form is so far overridden by the direct pressingpurpose, either didactic or educational, that--with exceptions Icannot now specify in favor of the Wyclif Bible--I can find none ofthem in which the prose seems controlled by considerations of beauty.Perhaps the most curious and interesting proof I could adduce of theobliviousness of even the most artistic Englishman in this time to thepossibility of a melodious and uncloying English prose, is the prosework of Chaucer. While, so far as concerns the mere music of verse, Icannot call Chaucer a great artist, yet he was the greatest of histime; from him, therefore, we have the right to expect the bestcraftsmanship in words; for all fine prose depends as much upon itsrhythms and correlated proportions as fine verse; and, _now_, since wehave an art of prose, it is a perfect test of the real excellence ofa poet in verse to try his corresponding excellence in prose. But inChaucer's time there is no art of English prose. Listen, for example,to the first lines of that one of Chaucer's Canterbury series which hecalls _The Parson's Tale_, and which is in prose throughout. Ithappens very pertinently to my present discussion that in the prologueto this tale some conversation occurs which reveals to us quiteclearly a current idea of Chaucer's time as to the proper distinctionbetween prose and verse--or "rym"--and as to the functions andsubject-matter peculiarly belonging to each of these forms; and, forthat reason, let me preface my quotation from the _Parson's Tale_ witha bit of it. As the Canterbury Pilgrims are jogging merrily along,presently it appears that but one more tale is needed to carry out theoriginal proposition, and so the ever-important Host calls on theParson for it, as follows:
As we were entryng at a thropes ende, For while our Hoost, as he was wont to gye, As in this caas, our joly compaignye, Seyde in this wise: "Lordyngs, everichoon, Now lakketh us no tales moo than oon," etc.,
and turning to the Parson,
"Sir Prest," quod he, "artow a vicary? Or arte a persoun? Say soth, by thy fey, Be what thou be, _ne_ breke _thou_ nat oure pley; For every man, save thou, hath told his tale. Unbokele and schew us what is in thy male. Tel us a fable anoon, for cokkes boones!"
Whereupon the steadfast parson proceeds to assure the company thatwhatever he may have in his male [wallet] there is none of yourlight-minded and fictitious verse in it; nothing but grave andreverend prose.
This Persoun him answerede al at oones: Thou getest fable noon i-told for me.
(And you will presently observe that "fable" in the parson's mindmeans very much the same with verse or poetry, and that the wholebusiness of fiction--that same fiction which has now come to occupysuch a commanding place with us moderns, and which we are to studywith such reverence under its form of the novel--implies downrightlying and wickedness.)
Thou getist fable noon i-told for me; For Paul, that writeth unto Timothe, Repreveth hem that weyveth soothfastnesse. And tellen fables and such wrecchednesse, etc.,
For which I say, if that yow list to heere Moralite and virtuous mateere,
(That is--as we shall presently see--_prose_).
And thanne that ye will geve me audience, I wol ful fayne at Cristes reverence, Do you pleasaunce leful, as I can; But trusteth wel, I am a Suthern man, I can nat geste, rum, ram, ruf, by letter, Ne, God wot, rym hold I but litel better; And therfor, if yow list, I wol not glose, I wol yow telle a mery tale in prose.
Here our honest parson, (and he was honest;) I am frightfully temptedto go clean away from my path and read that heart-filling descriptionof him which Chaucer gives in the general Prologue to the _CanterburyTales_ sweeps away the whole literature of verse and of fiction wi
ththe one contemptuous word "glose"--by which he seems to mean a sort ofshame-faced lying all the more pitiful because done in verse--and setsup prose as the proper vehicle for "moralite and virtuous mateere."
With this idea of the function of prose, you will not be surprised tofind, as I read these opening sentences of the pastor's so-calledtale, that the style is rigidly sententious, and that the movement ofthe whole is like that of a long string of proverbs, which, of course,presently becomes intolerably droning and wearisome. The parsonbegins:
"Many ben the weyes espirituels that leden folk to our Lord IhesuCrist, and to the regne of glorie; of whiche weyes ther is a ful noblewey, which may not faile to no man ne to womman, that thurgh synnehath mysgon fro the right wey of Jerusalem celestial; and this wey iscleped penitence. Of which men schulden gladly herken and enquere withal here herte, to wyte, what is penitence, and whens is clepedpenitence? And in what maner and in how many maneres been the accionesor workynge of penitence, and how many speces ben of penitence, andwhich thinges apperteynen and byhoven to penitence and whiche thingesdestourben penitence."
In reading page after page of this bagpipe-bass, one has to rememberstrenuously all the moral beauty of the Parson's character in order toforgive the droning ugliness of his prose. Nothing could betterrealize the description which Tennyson's _Northern Farmer_ gives of_his_ parson's manner of preaching and the effect thereof:
An' I hallus comed to t' choorch afoor my Sally wur dead, An' 'eerd un a bummin' awaay loike a buzzard-clock ower my yead; An' I niver knaw'd what a meaned, but I thowt a 'ad summut to saay, An' I thowt a said what a owt to 'a said, an' I comed awaay.
It must be said, however, in justice to Chaucer, that he writes betterprose than this when he really sets about telling a tale. What theParson calls his "tale" turns out, to the huge disgust, I suspect, ofseveral other pilgrims besides the host, to be nothing more than ahomily or sermon, in which the propositions about penitence, with manyminor heads and sub-divisions, are unsparingly developed to the bitterend. But in the _Tale of Meliboeus_ his inimitable faculty ofstory-telling comes to his aid, and determines his sentences to alittle more variety and picturesqueness, though the sententious stillpredominates. Here, for example, is a bit of dialogue betweenMeliboeus and his wife, which I selected because, over and above itsapplication here as early prose, we will find it particularlysuggestive presently when we come to compare it with some dialogue inGeorge Eliot's _Adam Bede_, where the conversation is very much uponthe same topic.
It seems that Meliboeus, being still a young man, goes away into thefields, leaving his wife Prudence and his daughter--whose name some ofthe texts give in its Greek form as Sophia, while others, quaintlyenough, call her Sapience, translating the Greek into Latin--in thehouse. Thereupon "three of his olde foos" (says Chaucer) "have itespyed, and setten laddres to the walles of his hous, and by thewyndowes ben entred, and beetyn his wyf, and wounded his daughter withfyve mortal woundes, in fyve sondry places, that is to sayn, in herefeet, in her handes, in here eres, in her nose, and in here mouth; andlafte her for deed, and went away." Meliboeus assembles a greatcounsel of his friends, and these advise him to make war, with aninterminable dull succession of sententious maxims and quotationswhich would merely have maddened a modern person to such a degree thathe would have incontinently levied war upon his friends as well as hisenemies. But after awhile Dame Prudence modestly advises against thewar. "This Meliboeus answerde unto his wyf Prudence: 'I purposenot,' quod he, 'to werke by this counseil, for many causes andresouns; for certes every wight wolde holde me thanne a fool, this isto sayn, if I for thy counseil wolde chaunge things that affirmed benby somany wise.
Secondly, I say that alle wommen be wikked, and noon good of hem alle.For of a thousand men, saith Solomon, I find oon good man; but certesof alle wommen good womman find I never noon. And also certes, if Igovernede am by thy counseil, it schulde seme that I hadde given tothe over me the maistry; and God forbid er it so were. For IhesusSyrac saith,'" etc., etc. You observe here, although this is dialoguebetween man and wife, the prose nevertheless tends to the sententious,and every remark must be supported with some dry old maxim orepigrammatic saw. Observe too, by the way,--and we shall find thispoint most suggestive in studying the modern dialogue in GeorgeEliot's novels, etc.,--that there is absolutely no individuality orpersonality in the talk; Meliboeus drones along exactly as hisfriends do, and his wife quotes old authoritative saws, just as hedoes. But Dame Prudence replies,--and all those who are acquaintedwith the pungent Mrs. Poyser in George Eliot's _Adam Bede_ willcongratulate Meliboeus that his foregoing sentiments concerningwoman were uttered five hundred years before that lady's tongue beganto wag,--"When Dame Prudence, ful debonerly and with gret pacience,hadde herd al that her housbande liked for to saye, thanne axede scheof him license for to speke, and sayde in this wise: 'My Lord,' quodsche, 'as to your firste resoun, certes it may lightly be answered;for I say it is no foly to chaunge counsel when the thing ischaungid, or elles when the thing semeth otherwise than it wasbifoore.'" This very wise position she supports with argument andauthority, and then goes on boldly to attack not exactly Solomon'swisdom, but the number of data from which he drew it. "'And thoughthat Solomon say _he_ fond never good womman, it folwith noughttherfore that alle wommen ben wicked; for though that he fonde noonegoode wommen, certes many another man hath founden many a womman fulgoode and trewe.'" (Insinuating, what is doubtless true, that thefinding of a good woman depends largely on the kind of man who islooking for her.)
After many other quite logical replies to all of Meliboeus'positions, Dame Prudence closes with the following argument: "Andmoreover, whan oure Lord hadde creat Adam oure forme fader, he saydein this wise, Hit is not goode to be a man alone; makes we to him anhelp semblable to himself. Here may ye se that, if that a womman werenot good, and hir counseil good and profytable, oure Lord God of hevenwould neither have wrought hem, ne called hem help of man, but ratherconfusion of man. And ther sayde oones a clerk in two versus, What isbetter than gold? Jasper. And what is better than jasper? Wisdom. Andwhat is better than wisdom? Womman. And what is better than a goodwomman? No thing."
When we presently come to contrast this little scene between man andwife in what may fairly be called the nearest approach to the modernnovel that can be found before the fifteenth century, we shall find asurprising number of particulars, besides the unmusical tendency torun into the sententious or proverbial form, in which the modern modeof thought differs from that of the old writers from whom Chaucer gothis Meliboeus.
This sententious monotune (if I may coin a word) of the prose, whenfalling upon a modern ear, gives almost a comical tang, even to thegravest utterances of the period. For example, here are the openinglines of a fragment of prose from a MS. in the Cambridge UniversityLibrary, reprinted by the early English Text Society in the issue for1870. It is good, pithy reading, too. It is called "The Six WiseMasters' Speech of Tribulation."
Observe that the first sentence, though purely in the way ofnarrative, is just as sententious in form as the graver proverbs ofeach master that follow.
It begins:
Here begynyth A shorte extracte, and tellyth how par ware sex masterys assemblede, ande eche one askede oper quhat thing pai sholde spek of gode, and all pei war acordet to spek of tribulacoun.
The fyrste master seyde, pat if ony thing hade bene mor better to ony man lewynge in this werlde pan tribulacoun, god wald haue gewyne it to his sone. But he sey wyell that thar was no better, and tharfor he gawe it hum, and mayde hume to soffer moste in this wrechede worlde than euer dyde ony man, or euermore shall.
The secunde master seyde, pat if par wer ony man pat mycht be wyth-out spote of sine, as god was, and mycht levyn bodely pirty yheris wyth-out mete, ande also were dewote in preyinge pat he mycht speke wyth angele in pe erth, as dyde mary magdalene, yit mycht he not deserve in pat lyffe so gret meyde as A man deservith in suffring of A lytyll tribula
coun.
The threde master seyde, pat if the moder of gode and all the halowys of hewyn preyd for a man, pei should not get so gret meyde as he should hymselfe be meknes and suffryng of tribulacoun.
Now asking you, as I pass, to remember that I have selected thisextract, like the others, with the further purpose of presentlycontrasting the _substance_ of it with modern utterances, as well asthe _form_ which we are now mainly concerned--if we cut short thissearch after artistic prose in our earlier literature, and come downat once to the very earliest sign of a true feeling for the musicalmovement of prose sentences, we are met by the fact, which I hope toshow is full of fruitful suggestions upon our present studies, thatthe art of English prose is at least eight hundred years younger thanthe art of English verse. For, in coming down our literature fromCaedmon--whom, in some conflict of dates, we can safely place at670--the very first writer I find who shows a sense of the rhythmicalflow and gracious music of which our prose is so richly capable, isSir Thomas Malory; and his one work, _The History of King Arthur andHis Knights of the Round Table_, dates 1469-70, exactly eight hundredyears after Caedmon's poetic outburst.
Recalling our extracts just read, and remembering how ungainly andawkward was the sport of their sentences, listen for a moment to a fewlines from Sir Thomas Malory. I think the most unmusical ear, the mostcursory attention, cannot fail to discern immediately how much moreflowing and smooth is the movement of this. I read from the fifthchapter of King Arthur.
"And King Arthur was passing wrath for the hurt of Sir Griflet. And by and by he commanded a man of his chamber that his best horse and armor be without the city on to-morrow-day. Right so in the morning he met with his man and his horse, and so mounted up and dressed his shield, and took his spear, and bade his chamberlain tarry there till he came again." Presently he meets Merlin and they go on together.
"So as they went thus talking, they came to the fountain and the rich pavilion by it. Then King Arthur was ware where a knight sat all armed in a chair. 'Sir Knight,' said King Arthur, 'for what cause abidest thou here? that there may no knight ride this way but if he do joust with thee?' said the King. 'I rede thee leave that custom,' said King Arthur.
'This custom,' said the knight, 'have I used and will use, maugre who saith nay; and who is grieved with my custom, let him amend it that will.'
'I will amend it,' said King Arthur, 'And I shall defend it,' said the knight." (Observe _will_ and _shall_ here).
Here, you observe not only is there musical flow of single sentences,but one sentence remembers another and proportions itself thereto--ifthe last was long, this, is shorter or longer, and if one calls for acertain tune, the most calls for a different tune--and we have notonly grace but variety. In this variety may be found an easy test ofartistic prose. If you try to read two hundred lines of Chaucer's_Meliboeus_ or his _Parson's Tale_ aloud, you are presentlyoppressed with a sense of bagpipishness in your own voice whichbecomes intolerable; but you can read Malory's _King Arthur_ aloudfrom beginning to end with a never-cloying sense of proportion andrhythmic flow.
I wish I had time to demonstrate minutely how much of the relish ofall fine prose is due to the arrangement of the sentences in such away that consecutive sentences do not call for the same tune; forexample, if one sentence is sharp antithesis--you know the well-markedspeech tune of an antithesis, "do you mean _this_ book, or do you mean_that_ book?" you must be careful in the next sentence to vary thetune from that of the antithesis.
In the prose I read you from Chaucer and from the old manuscript, alarge part of the intolerableness is due to the fact that nearly everysentence involves the tune of an aphorism or proverb, and theiteration of the same pitch-successions in the voice presently becomeswearisome. This fault--of the succession of antithetic ideas so thatthe voice becomes weary of repeating the same contrariety ofaccents--I can illustrate very strikingly in a letter which I happento remember of Queen Elizabeth, whom I have found to be a great sinneragainst good prose in this particular.
Here is part of a letter from her to King Edward VI. concerning aportrait of herself which it seems the king had desired. (Italicisedwords represent antithetic accents.)
"Like as the rich man that daily gathereth _riches_ to _riches_, and to _one_ bag of money layeth a great sort till it come to _infinite_; so methinks your majesty, not being sufficed with so many benefits and gentleness shewed to me afore this time, doth now increase them in _asking_ and _desiring_ where you may _bid_ and _command_, requiring a thing not worthy the desiring for _itself_, but _made_ worthy for your highness' _request_. My picture I mean; in which, if the _inward_ good mind toward your grace might as well be _declared_, as the _outward_ face and countenance shall be _seen_, I would not have _tarried_ the commandment but _prevented_ it, nor have been the _last_ to _grant_, but the _first_ to _offer_ it."
And so on. You observe here into what a sing-song the voice must fall;if you abstract the words, and say over the tune, it is continually;tum-ty-ty tum-ty-ty, tum-ty-ty tum-ty-ty.
I wish also that it lay within my province to pass on and show thegradual development of English prose, through Sir Thomas More, LordBerners, and Roger Ascham, whom we may assign to the earlier half ofthe 16th Century, until it reaches a great and beautiful artisticstage in the prose of Fuller, of Hooker, and of Jeremy Taylor.
But the fact which I propose to use as throwing light on the novel, issimply the lateness of English prose as compared with English verse;and we have already sufficiently seen that the rise of our prose mustbe dated at least eight centuries after that of our formal poetry.
But having established the fact that English prose is so much later indevelopment than English verse, the point that I wish to make in thisconnection now requires me to go and ask the question why is this so.
Without the time to adduce supporting facts from other literature, andindeed wholly unable to go into elaborate proof, let me say at oncethat upon examining the matter it seems probable that the wholeearlier speech of man must have been rhythmical, and that in point offact we began with verse which is much simpler in rhythm than anyprose; and that we departed from this regular rhythmic utterance intomore and more complex utterance just according as the advance ofcomplexity in language and feeling required the freer forms of prose.
To adduce a single consideration leading toward this view: reflect fora moment that the very breath of every man necessarily divides off hiswords into rhythmic periods; the average rate of a man's breath being17 to 20 respirations in a minute. Taking the faster rate as the moreprobable one in speaking, the man would, from the periodic necessityof refilling the lungs, divide his words into twenty groups, equal intime, every minute, and if these syllables were equally pronounced at,say, about the rate of 200 a minute, we should have ten syllables ineach group, each ten syllables occupying (in the aggregate at least)the same time with any other ten syllables, that is, the time of ourbreath.
But this is just the rhythm of our English blank verse, in essentialtype; ten syllables to the line or group; and our primitive talker isspeaking in the true English heroic rhythm. Thus it may be that ourdear friend M. Jourdain was not so far wrong after all in hisastonishment at finding that he had been speaking prose all his life.
The English Novel and the Principle of its Development Page 1
