The Second Birth of the English Novel

THE SECOND BIRTH OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL LIONEL STEVENSON IN literary history the basic processes of life figure as significantly as in the biographies of individuals. The births, matings, and deaths of literary genera have the valid dramatic qualities of suspense, surprise, conflict, and sometimes irony. The onlooker can feel a morbid sympathy with the long death-agonies of such a once-noble type as the epic or the metrical romance; he can sentimentally applaud the congenial marriage of English tragedy with blank verse in 1560 and can as sentimentally deplore its seduction by a light 0' love, the heroic couplet, a century later; but perhaps more gratifying than either of these is to contemplate the birth of some promising infant which (as we are comfortably aware through the possession of hindsight) -will grow into asturdy new genus of literature. Only rarely can the last-mentioned occurrence be spied upon, for most of the principal literary types were gestated -in primitive seclusion, before written record. The most influential form of modern literature, however, -the novel-came in to the world comparatively lately; and so the slow .and fumbling process of its conception and delivery can be traced·ab DfJD. The obstetrical analogy must here be reIinquished. The early c~reer of the English novel displays a phenomenon such .as is not recorded of any individual in human history or legend, since even· the "brave infant of Saguntum" did not venture upon a second nativity after its fabulous gesture of escapism. Propit,iously born in the middle years of the eighteenth century, the English novel was ·ruthlessly exposed a few decades later to such a radical change in the atmosphere of the contemporary mind that it disintegrated into the several components from which it had so recently been created. The present-day reader, familiar with the lusty later career in the nineteenth century, is apt to assume a normal continuity from the£rst epoch to the second, and to accept evidence of that continuity in the persons of. two or three authors who were unquestionably producing good novels during the intervening fifty years. The literary histories, even Dr. Edward Wagenknecht's recent and excellent Cavalcade oj the English Novel, being preoccupied with those f~w handsome trees, fail to indicate the absence orany environing forest. As a matter of fact, those two or three authors were so exceptional that their significance was misconstrued it). their own generation, and after 1830 the novel had to be discovered all over again. In its first incarnation, the English novel was the end-product of tendencies that had prevailed during the whole neo-classical century. It can now be recognized as the greatest and most lasting achievement of that e~a, but, being unprecedented, it had to emerge slowly and unperceived. The major accepted vehicles of the Augustan age-the comedy of manners, the 366 THE SECOND BIRTH OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 367 allegorical satire in verse or prose, the scientific treatise masquerading as poetry by virtue of rhyming couplets and copious metaphor-all were traditional forms, inadequate for the new Zeitgeist. Various influences have been listed as cGlltributing to the literary mood of the Augustan age in England-revulsion from Puritan restraints, suspicion of earnestness and enthusiasm, adoption of French fashions, political partisanship; but more decisive than all these was the fact that creative literature had at last fallen under the control of scientific thinking} with its objective accuracy and its inductive insistence upon detailed evidence. In this sense, the true begetter of the English novel was Francis Bacon; and his essays, for all their abstractness, were a notebook full of psychological jottings in which lurked the rudiments of a great work of fiction. Even in Bacon's primary field, physical science, it was not until half a century later that his principles were fruitfully applied, and so it is not remarkable that more than a hundred years elapsed before his influence upon literature had its full embodiment in a suitable form. In the interval the reading public was vastly extended and the book-distributing trades were commensurately developed. The new profession of journalism familiarized both readers and writers with the virtues of clear...