THE RELATION OF NOVELS TO LIFE.

WE

E have discarded many of the amusements of our forefathers. Out-of-door games are almost inaccessible to the inhabitants of cities; and if they were not, people are too much tired, both in nerve and muscle, to care for them. Theatres and spectacles are less frequented than they used to be; whilst the habit of reading has become universal. These causes increase the popularity and the influence of novels, and, measured by these standards, their importance must be considered very great.

The majority of those who read for amusement, read novels. The number of young people who take from them nearly all their notions of life is very considerable. They are widely used for the diffusion of opinions. In one shape or another, they enter into the education of us all. They constitute very nearly the whole of the book-education of the unenergetic and listless.

Familiar as the word 'novel' may be, it is almost the last word in the language to suggest any formal definition; but it is impossible to estimate the influence of this species of literature, or to understand how its character is determined, unless we have some clear notion as to what is, and what is not, included in the word.

The first requisite of a novel is, that it should be a biography, an account of the life, or part of the life, of a person. When this principle is neglected or violated, the novel becomes tiresome; after a certain point it ceases to be a novel at all, and becomes a mere string of descriptions.

The Arabian Nights, perhaps, contain as slight a biographical substratum as is consistent with anything like romance. The extravagance of the incidents and scenery is their principal charm, and the different characters might be interchanged amongst the different stories, almost without notice. Who would relish the Diamond Valley and the Roc's

Novels are fictitious Biographies.

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Egg the less, if they were introduced in the History of the three Calendars, or in the Adventures of Prince Caramalzaman? and who would notice the change if either of those personages were to be substituted for Sinbad the Sailor? Who, on the other hand, could interchange the incidents, or the personages, of the Memoirs of a Cavalier, and Robinson Crusoe?

Perhaps the essentially biographical character of novels will be more fully displayed by comparing less extreme cases. In what does the superiority of Fielding over Mr. Dickens consist? Is it not in the fact that Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews are bona fide histories of those persons; whilst Nicholas Nickleby and Oliver Twist are a series of sketches, of all sorts of things and people, united by various grotesque. incidents, and interspersed with projects for setting the world to rights?

There is a class of books which wants only a biographical substratum to become novels. In so far as it is an account of Sir Roger de Coverley, and the Club, the Spectator is one of the best novels in the language; and if the original conception had been more fully carried out, that fact would have been universally recognised. It employs fictitious personages to describe manners and characters, and it sustains the interest which they excite by fictitious incidents. Yet no one would call those parts of the Spectator which are not biographical a novel.

Novels must also be expressly and intentionally fictitious. No amount of carelessness or dishonesty would convert into a novel what was meant for a real history. It would, for example, be an unjustifiable stretch of charity to consider the Histoire des Girondins, or the Histoire de la Restauration, as romances. On the other hand, a very small amount of intentional fiction, artistically introduced, will make a history into a novel. All the events related may be substantially true, and the fictitious characters may play a very subordinate part, and yet the result may be a novel, in the fullest sense of the word. In the Memoirs of a Cavalier, Gustavus Adolphus, Charles, and Fairfax occupy the most prominent places. The scenes in which they take part are generally represented with great historical fidelity. The cavalier himself, and his adventures, are only introduced as a medium for the display of the events through which he passes; but they are introduced so naturally as incidents in his life, and the gaps between them are filled with such probable and appropriate domestic occurrences, that the result is the most perfect of all historical novels.

We understand, then, by the word novel, a fictitious bio

graphy. Books written primarily for purposes of instruction, or for the sake of illustrating a theory, do not fall within this definition, because they are not, properly speaking, biographies. If we suppose the hero to have been a real person, and then consider whether the object of the book was to deduce some moral, or to illustrate some theory, by his life, or to describe the man as he was, we shall be able to say whether the book is, or is not, a novel.

Thus, we should not call Plato's Dialogues novels, though they resemble them more nearly than any other ancient books. Nor should we call the Vision,' in Tucker's Light of Nature, a novel, although it would fall expressly within the terms of our definitions, if it were not written merely to illustrate a theory. The miraculous separation of Search's body from his vehicle the inconvenience which he sustained from the rays of light-his conversation with Locke-his interview with his wife-his absorption into the mundane soul—and his re-introduction into his body, form an imaginary posthumous biography, with a beginning, middle, and end; but it cannot be called a novel, inasmuch as Search and his adventures are introduced solely in order to give life to a philosophical speculation, which is never for an instant lost sight of.

Pilgrim's Progress and the Holy War come nearer to the character of novels. The artistic bias of Bunyan's mind was so strong, that we should be inclined to think that he sacrificed the allegory to the story more frequently than the story to the allegory. The death of Faithful, for example, is an incident which, if the book is a novel, is as well conceived as executed; but it is inconsistent with the allegory, which would have required that Faithful should go to Heaven in the sense of travelling along the actual highroad till he got there. So, too, the Siege of Mansoul is much more like the Siege of Leicester than the temptations of the Devil.

There is another class of books which would be excluded from our definition by the word 'fictitious.' As fiction is sometimes used as a mere vehicle for opinions, so it is sometimes a mere embellishment of facts. There is a class of books in which the life of a real person is made to illustrate some particular time or country, and in which just so many fictitious circumstances are introduced as may be necessary to give a certain unity to the scenes described. The most perfect instance of this form of writing with which we are acquainted is M. Bungener's Trois Sermons sous Louis XV., which is partly

* Apuleius' Ass is, no doubt, strictly a novel, and Lucian's Dialogues have much of the same character.

They contribute to Knowledge of the World.

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a history of French Protestants in the eighteenth century, partly a fictitious biography of the real man Rabaut. It has the inconvenience of constantly suggesting to the reader the impression that the author considers him incapable of taking an interest in the subject unless it is baited with a certain amount of fiction.

It is commonly said that novels supply the place of comedies; and it would perhaps be hard to put into words the distinction between them, otherwise than by the definition which we have suggested. A drama is the representation of an incident—a novel is the history of a life. Thus, the plays which composed an Eschylean trilogy consisted of the representation of separate incidents in the life of some person or the fortunes of some royal house; but if they had been permitted. to run into each other, such an interference would have been a violation of the rules of dramatic art, and would have made them into a novel.

It is not always easy to say what is incident and what is biography. Shakspeare's historical plays do not fall very appropriately under either division. Some, for example, of Crabbe's tales, are miniature novels, others undramatized plays. It cannot, however, be doubted that in cases upon which no one hesitates our distinction holds good. Thus, Waverley is undeniably a novel, and Romeo and Juliet is undeniably a play. We should have been displeased if Shakspeare had introduced into his play anything not bearing upon the single subject of the love of the principal persons in it. It is, on the other hand, one of the beauties of Waverley that it incidentally illustrates a great number of subjects in which the hero of the novel had not personally much interest.

Novels, in the proper sense of the word, are used for a greater number of purposes than any other species of literature. Their influences on their readers may, however, be reduced within a very narrow compass. In early boyhood and in mature life they are read merely for amusement; and indulgence in them will be beneficial, or otherwise, according to the ordinary rules upon that subject. But at that time of life which intervenes between these two periods they exercise a far greater influence. They are then read as commentaries upon the life which is just opening before the reader, and as food for passions which are lately awakened but have not yet settled down to definite objects.

It may be questioned how far the habit of reading novels contributes to knowledge of the world. The undue prominence given to particular passions-such as love, the colouring used for artistic purposes, and a variety of other circumstances,

are so much calculated to convey false impressions, that it
may be plausibly doubted whether the impressions formed are,
in fact, better than none at all.
If a young

Such a judgment appears to us too severe.
man were, according to Mr. Carlyle's suggestion, to be shut
up in a glass case from eighteen to twenty-five, and were,
during that period, to be supplied with an unlimited number
of novels, he would no doubt issue from his confinement with
extremely false notions of the world to which he was return-
ing; but if, during such an imprisonment, he had made it a
point of conscience never to open a novel, he would, in the
absence of extraordinary powers of observation and generaliza-
tion, be strangely puzzled on re-entering life.

What we call knowledge of the world is acquired by the same means as other kinds of knowledge, and consists not in mere acquaintance with maxims about life, but in applying appropriate ideas to clear facts. This application can only be made by a proper arrangement and selection of the material parts of the facts observed; and this arrangement is effected, to a very great degree, by guesses and hypotheses. No one will be able to make any use of his experience of life, or to classify it in such a manner as to add to his real knowledge, unless he is provided in the first instance with some schemes or principles of classification, which he starts with, and which he enlarges, narrows, or otherwise modifies as he sees cause.

Discoveries, it has been said,* are not improperly described as happy guesses, and guesses, in these, as in other instances, imply various suppositions made, of which some one turns out to be the right one. We may, in such cases, conceive the discoverer as inventing and trying many conjectures, till he finds one which answers the purpose of combining the scattered facts into a single rule. The discovery of general truths from special facts is performed, commonly at least, and more commonly than at first appears, by the use of a series of suppositions, or hypotheses, which are looked at in quick succession, and of which the one which really leads to truth is rapidly detected, and when caught sight of, firmly held, verified, and followed to its consequences.

Nor does the indistinctness and incompleteness of their suggestions render them useless. The same author observes,

A maxim which it may be useful to recollect is this, that hypotheses may often be of service to science, when they involve a certain portion of incompleteness and even of errour. The object of such inventions is to bind together facts which, without them,

*Whewell, Philo. Ind. Sci., vol. ii., p. 41. The quotation is slightly modified.