Readers of the essay who are also novel-readers will be inclined to say that the writer was not much in sympathy with his subject; and he himself, on getting the prize, remarks that "it is curious that I should have been successful in an essay on novels, about which I know and care little, and should have failed in both my efforts in theology, for which I care considerably." At the same time it is probably true, as he once said, that he had read more novels than his friends gave him credit for, and it is certainly true that what his reading lacked in extent it made up in intensity. As might be supposed, his taste in fiction was for forcible delineation and robust humor. The flavor of strong, healthy individuality was what attracted him; for rarities, niceties, and abnormalities of mental organisation he cared nothing. He liked things which he could take hold of with his mind, not things which merely gave him sensations, pleasant or painful. Both in his deepest and his lightest moods he was absolutely simple and "above board," and this simplicity made him keenly alive to the proximity of the sublime to the ridiculous or the exquisite to the grotesque. Though he had little of the animal in him, and was never troubled by his appetites, he was quite free from prudery. If obscenity moved him at all, it was to frank laughter or to grim contempt; he never dwelt upon it, either in the way of enjoyment or loathing. "For rules of ascetic discipline," says a friend, "he had no need. The view of life suggested by so much of the best French literature, that thinking men are generally in a practical dilemma between the extremes of sensual excess and of spiritual exaltation, did not commend itself to him in the least." The only forms of art to which he was keenly susceptible were those of oratory and poetry. He had no ear for music, though he seemed to get a certain exaltation from listening to it. In regard to painting and sculpture he always professed himself incompetent, but he was not without decided tastes. On his first visit to the Continent he was more attracted by Rembrandt, Holbein, and Duerer than by the Italians; "these men," he said, "grasped the idea of Christianity." Of Durer's four saints at Munich he writes, "I could contemplate them with interest for hours; he has contrived to give St. John an almost perfect expression of 'divine philosophy'." In later years when he went to Italy he spent a good deal of time in looking at early Italian pictures, and admitted that they would soon have got a great hold upon him. But on the whole his attitude to the arts (excluding those of language) was one of deferential ignorance. He had not himself any artistic gifts; he did not even write verses. Yet to his friends, as one of them says, "he never represented the prose of existence. With all his gravity, with all his firm grip on fact and material interests, he had the enthusiastic movement of the world's poetry in him."—From the Memoir by R. L. Nettleship, Green's 'Works,' Vol. 3, pp. xxx-xxxiii.



B. HEGEL ON THE NOVEL

Among the mongrel forms of epic should be included the half descriptive, half lyric poems which were popular among the English, dealing chiefly with nature, the seasons of the year, etc. There belong also to this division numerous didactic poems in which a prosaic content is dressed up in poetic form, such as compendiums of physics, astronomy, and medicine, and treatises on chess, fishing, hunting, and the conduct of life. Poems of this sort were most artfully elaborated by the later Greeks, by the Romans, and, in modern times, especially by the French. Despite their general epic tone, they lend themselves readily to lyric treatment.

More poetical, but still without the characteristics necessary for definite classification, are romances and ballads. Being epic in content but lyric in treatment, these products of the Middle Ages and of modern times may be assigned to either class indifferently.

The case of the novel, the modern popular epic, is very different. Here we find the same wealth and variety of interests, circumstances, characters, and human relationships, the same world-background, and the same handling of events, that characterize the true epic. But there is lacking to it the primitive poetic state of the world, in which the true epic took its rise. The novel, in the modern acceptation of the term, presupposes a prosaically ordered reality. But working from the basis of this reality, and moving within its own circle, the novel, both as regards picturesqueness of incident and as regards characters and their fate, retrieves for poetry (so far as the above presupposition permits) her lost prerogatives.[23]

Thus it happens that the struggle between the poetry of the heart and the opposing prose of outward circumstances is for the novel one of the commonest and most suitable conflicts. This struggle may end comically, or tragically, or in a reconciliation of the opposing forces. In the last case the characters who at first oppose the ordinary world-order may, by learning to recognize the true and abiding elements in it, become reconciled to the existing circumstances, and take an active part in them; or, on the other hand, they may strip off the prosaic hull from deed and accomplishment, and thus put in the place of the original prose a reality which is on intimate and friendly terms with beauty and art.

As far as the range of representation is concerned, the true novel, like the epic, requires a complete world and a complete view of life, the many-sided materials and relationships of which exhibit themselves in the particular action that is the nucleus of the whole. As to details of conception and development, however, the author must be allowed great liberty, for it is difficult to bring the prose of real life into the representation without sticking fast in the prosaic and commonplace.—Hegel, 'Aesthetik.' 3. Thl., Kap. III. Abt. 3., S. 394-396.

FOOTNOTE:

[23] In simpler terms: The novel, being a form of epic, should have all the characteristics of poetry. But this is impossible because it is compelled to work in the humble field of prose. Nevertheless, by a skilful use of description, narration, and dramatic situation, it causes a poetic oasis to spring up in the desert of prose, and so wins back some of its poetical rights.

THE END