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 at Johns Hopkins University, in the winter and spring of 1881. Had Mr. Lanier lived to prepare them for the press, he would probably have recast them to some extent; but the present editor has not felt free to make any changes from the original manuscript, beyond the omission of a few local and occasional allusions, and the curtailment of several long extracts from well-known writers.

Although each is complete in itself, this work and its foregoer, The Science of English Verse, were intended to be parts of a comprehensive philosophy of formal and substantial beauty in literature, 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 in this hall was devoted to the exposition of what is beyond doubt the most remarkable, the most persistent, the most wide-spread, and the most noble of all those methods of arranging words and ideas in definite relations, which have acquired currency among men—namely, the methods of verse, or Formal Poetry. That exposition began by reducing all possible phenomena of verse to terms of vibration; and having thus secured at once a solid physical basis for this science, and a precise nomenclature in which we could talk intelligibly upon this century-befogged subject, we advanced gradually from the most minute to the largest possible considerations upon the matter in hand.

Now, wishing that such courses as I might give here should preserve a certain coherence with each other, I have hoped that I could secure that end by successively treating The Great Forms of Modern Literature; and, wishing further to gain whatever advantage of entertainment for you may lie in contrast and variety, I have thought that inasmuch as we have already studied the Verse-Form in General, we might now profitably study some great Prose-Forms in Particular, and in still further contrast; that we might study that form not so much analytically—as when we developed the Science of Formal Poetry from a single physical principle—but this time synthetically, from the point of view of literary art rather than of literary science.

I am further led to this general plan by the consideration that so far as I know—but my reading in this direction is not wide, and I may be in error—there is no book extant in any language which gives a conspectus of all those well-marked and widely-varying literary forms which have differentiated themselves in the course of time, and of the curious and subtle needs of the modern civilized man which, under the stress of that imperious demand for expression which all men's emotions make, have respectively determined the modes of such expression to be in one case The Novel, in another The Sermon, in another The Newspaper Leader, in another The Scientific Essay, in another The Popular Magazine Article, in another The Semi-Scientific Lecture, and so on: each of these prose-forms, you observe, having its own limitations and fitnesses quite as well-defined as the Sonnet-Form, the Ballad-Form, the Drama-Form, and the like in verse.

And, with this general plan, a great number of considerations which I hope will satisfactorily emerge as we go on, lead me irresistibly to select the Novel as the particular prose-form for our study.

It happens, indeed, that over and above the purely literary interest which would easily give this form the first place in such a series as the present, the question of the Novel has just at this time become one of the most pressing and vital of all the practical problems which beset our moral and social economy.

The novel,—what we call the novel—is a new invention. It is customary to date the first English novel with Richardson in 1740; and just as it has been impossible to confine other great inventions to the service of virtue—for the thief can send a telegram to his pal as easily as the sick man to his doctor, and the locomotive spins along no less merrily because ten car-loads of rascals may be profiting by its speed—so vice as well as virtue has availed itself of the novel-form, and we have such spectacles as Scott, and Dickens, and Eliot, and Macdonald, using this means to purify the air in one place, while Zola, in another, applies the very same means to defiling the whole earth and slandering all humanity under the sacred names of "naturalism," of "science," of "physiology." Now I need not waste time in descanting before this audience upon the spread of the novel among all classes of modern readers: while I have been writing this, a well-considered paper on "Fiction in our Public Libraries," has appeared in the current International Review, which, among many suggestive statements, declares that out of pretty nearly five millions (4,872,595) of volumes circulated in five years by the Boston Public Library, nearly four millions (3,824,938), that is about four-fifths, were classed as "Juveniles and Fiction;" and merely mentioning the strength which these figures gain when considered along with the fact that they represent the reading of a people supposed to be more "solid" in literary matter than any other in the country—if we inquire into the proportion at Baltimore, I fancy I have only to hold up this copy of James's The American, which I borrowed the other 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 take any final or secure solace in the discipline and system of our schools and universities until we have also learned to regulate this fascinating universal teacher which has taken such hold upon all minds, from the gravest scholar down to the boot-black shivering on the windy street corner over his dime-novel,—this educator whose principles are fastening themselves upon your boy's mind, so that long after he has forgotten his amo and his tupto, they will be controlling his relations to his fellow-man, and determining his happiness for life.

But we can take no really effective action upon this matter until we understand precisely what the novel is and means; and it is, therefore, with the additional pleasure of stimulating you to systematize and extend your views upon a living issue which demands your opinion, that I now invite you to enter with me, without further preliminary, upon a series of studies in which it is proposed, first, to inquire what is that special relation of the novel to the modern man, by virtue of which it has become a paramount literary form; and, secondly, to illustrate this abstract inquiry, when completed, by some concrete readings in the greatest of modern English novelists.

In the course of this inquiry I shall