From Temple Bar - August 1862 (Vol. 6, pp. 129-137)

Society’s Looking-glass.
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IN the programme put out by the Commissioners for the Great Exhibition of 1862, there was a clause which caused considerable annoyance to a number of well-meaning but ungraceful gentlemen, and which elicited some rather savage skirmishing among the members of the newspaper press. The objectionable clause alluded to stipulated, on behalf of the Commissioners, that no civilian should be permitted to take part in the opening procession unless clad in court-attire. No wonder that Society grumbled; no wonder that the poet-laureate chose to shroud himself from the gaze of the giggling crowd. The result of the arrangement was the one anticipated by most Englishmen with any sense of humour: it made a great number of husbands and fathers look ridiculous. Her Majesty’s Ministers were not privileged to escape the requirements of the clause; and it is notable that almost every official commoner in the procession, with the exception of Mr. Disraeli, looked exceedingly awkward about the lower limbs. Apart from the question of comfort or common sense, the whole affair was objectionable in a social sense, and exhibited a rancid bad taste, very unfitting so national an occasion. It was an attempt on the part of the Commissioners to individualise a class, and to give a conservative bearing to the part they themselves took in the ceremony. The Commissioners conquered; but, in conquering, they were compelled to submit to the contemptuous jeers of the general public. Further, many practical men, who had previously been active in the great movement, refused to put in an appearance at the opening. Their absence was a tacit condemnation of the absurdity, and an expression of their opinion that the Commissioners had mistaken the liberal spirit in which the Exhibition had been first suggested and conceived.
     Tyranny such as this is not at all displeasing to Mrs. Grundy. Society of late years has grown impersonal to a degree which Coleridge and Wordsworth, when they beheld the first throes of the Revolution, never contemplated; and the standard of all excellence nowadays appears to be, not individuality, but mediocrity. This is a hard truth; recognised in England by Mr. Mill, and in Germany by the late Chevalier Bunsen. Originality, in the eyes of the modern Minerva, is a rather offensive form of vagabondism; but to be mediocre is to be highly respectable. This mediocrity may consist in marrying and giving in marriage, child-bearing, tax-paying; in short, in an eminently practical view of life, seasoned with a wholesome respect for the law. With all this, Society still remains a Tory at heart. She has, it is true, in the words of Volney,  “dignified with the name of virtue the observation of certain postures;” but she has still the old personal or class pride,—the sort of pride which Jonson terms a “schism,” that of  “incivility.” Again and again does she make spasmodic dying efforts to establish the old régime. Liberal to an excess, she nevertheless cultivates the morbid mania for spirit-rapping. Commercial to the backbone, she goes into ecstasies, for five minutes, at the vagaries of a brood of subjective poetasters—“that come like shadows, so depart.” Prim and proper in the highest degree, she thinks fit to recognise the vagabond gipsy spirit in the exploits of a Du Chaillu. All this time the mob goes on buying and selling, marrying and intermarrying, tax-paying. We are all equal; provided we respect the law, we may look upon ourselves as our own lawgivers. But the great equal brotherhood of nations meet to inaugurate an Exhibition, and Society complacently approves that her votaries should make themselves exclusively ridiculous in court-dresses.
     One of the recent successful efforts of Society was to establish a republic of letters. The decree went forth that individuality, even in authorship, was scarcely tolerable; and forthwith there burst upon the world the compact sun of periodical literature. The literary man, as a type, died a lingering death in the persons of such “ancient living memories” as Leigh Hunt; but the real power, the active literary principle as operating upon politics and manners, lay in the fourth estate. The revolution has been going on ever since Johnson wrote the “Letter to Chesterfield”—that noble protest of the individual, as the representative of a class, against the tyranny of a convention rooted in money and pedigree. Slowly and surely since then has the revolution been operating. Finally, in our own day, the profession of literature has itself become impersonal—subject to all the laws, big and little, that convention chooses to place upon its shoulders.
     A practical turn of thinking being the order of the time, men no longer write for posterity. The community in which we dwell being in reality a commercial one, men estimate their work at trade-value and sell it to the bookseller. This is respectable, and, so far as a superficial independence goes, independent. The case is contained in a nutshell. Society demands that the man-of-letters should put on a common black coat, and appear respectable. After the buying and selling fashion of the time, he sells his book; and the money so procured enables him to dress, think, act, like a highly respectable member of an impersonal society. He thus compromises between the shop and the parlour; as a commercial character he is impersonal, and, being impersonal, he is of necessity respectable.
     To individualise himself at all, he would have to break some law—criminal, social, or religious. He prefers the compromise.
     Now and then, the wild erratic spirit breaks out wildly, morbidly, unhealthily. Among artists, indeed,—I mean “persons who paint,”—a vagabond gipsy exclusiveness still prevails to a considerable extent; but Mr. Ruskin preaches pre-Raphaelitism, and they are fast losing their distinctive features. Society chose to turn up her nose at professional painters—as, indeed, she had done ever since Balsac’s time; but she accepted a fair compromise in the respectable pettifogging commercial spirit of a Turner.
     As literature had so compromised with Society, it became an act of courtesy on Society’s part to be civil to men-of-letters. At a certain stage, when idealism was distasteful to her, she invented the modern novel; a form of writing in which convention has of late years chosen to express itself. The literature of fiction is the literature of Society; and there were not wanting many clever people able to regale us with inoffensive and agreeable social pictures. At this stage, literary men adopted another compromise with conscience. Instead of holding the mirror up to nature, they consulted their pockets, and held the LOOKING-GLASS up to Society.
     On taking a very brief survey of the literature of fiction, one ascertains that its tone is transient, and that it has very little passion or purity in it. It is permeated by the atmosphere of the counting-house, and it bears about the same relation to true ethics as the squabbles of a vestry do to the struggles of a nation. Indeed, the literature of fiction is transient, because it is the literature of Society, which is transient in most of its phases. It is, as has been said, Society’s Looking-glass.
     It is only the broad outlines of character which survive for all time. Tom Jones is a very ordinary scamp, one to be found in every city in every age; just as Romeo, apart from his attire and his blank verse, is the fair type of a young lover. But the social life which enabled Tom to play his pranks with some impunity had nearly passed away by the time when Fielding became a judge. Vanity Fair has its significance for all time,—although, in its narrow integrity, it is simply a photograph, from a cynical point of view, of the Vanity Fair of the nineteenth century. Ivanhoe is still radically true to the internals of life; and, in some branches of modern Society, Front-de-Bœuf might be found in the Horse Guards, Cedric the Saxon in the grocer’s shop, and Isaac, the Hebrew gentleman, among the old-clothes shops in Holywell Street. It is, after all, unquestionable that true pictures of extinct social life have their historical value; and in the close attention to detail which renders them commonplace to the Society they image, should be their meaning and beauty as seen by the inquiring intellects of after generations. It would appear, therefore, that Society’s Looking-glass must mirror innumerable commonplaces. The images pass and change: what is convention to-day, becomes precedent to-morrow, and tradition the day after. Society, or Mrs. Grundy, is a very changeable crotchety lady; sometimes beautiful, sometimes hideous; often delicate, oftener in bad taste; variable as the pageant of the clouds. Her costume changes like her temper; her manners alter like her opinions.
     Scott, great in all things, is unquestionably the greatest modern author who ever held up the looking-glass of fiction. He is true both to human types and to Society. His imagination, although healthy, was not lofty enough to induce self-absorption, and he was able to clothe the bare outline of history with a sympathy which had its root in a soil compound of common sense and poetry. Writing at a time when individualism was at its height in England, ere Whig and Tory had merged into one vacuous nonentity entitled Liberal-Conservatism, he could not fail to shadow forth those higher aspirations which are the exclusive property of individual men of genius. Yet no man ever laboured to detail trifles with a more lofty devotion to general truth. There was no finicism in the Author of Waverley. He depicted the manners and customs of ordinary or extraordinary men and women; he was a faithful aesthetic photographer. But over all his creations lies the brilliant dazzling radiance of the poetic sympathies, giving to what might have been simply a colourless photograph the marvellous beauty of a grand literary painting. His was no common looking-glass; but a magical mirror which, if it flattered sometimes, was capable of giving distinctive features to human faces—of suggesting the soul at work within, triumphant over all the vagaries of convention, and aspiring to a heaven infinitely higher than that seen by respectable people through the roof of Exeter Hall.
     When Scott wrote, Society was not averse to discriminate flattery, and the magical rose-coloured mirror pleased her. Nowadays, however, she is determined to have the looking-glass of fiction simply a looking-glass, in which she can secretly examine her own follies, flaws, beauties. She is content, therefore, with the reflection of her superficial features—the externals and “realities” of daily life. Consequently few, if any, of our novelists see farther than the domestic parlour and the drawing-room window. The cant about being practical eats into authorship like a cancer, and no Hippocrates or black doctor can lance it out. The novelists simply follow the system of Society, who sleekens the boy into a machine well-oiled, and superfinishes the girl—for sale. Theirs being an eminently respectable creed, one of the first principles of which is to make money, they sacrifice originality, and write to please the whim of Society. In the natural course of things, they find that the ideal and metaphysical element is unmarketable, and they consequently hold the looking-glass in such a manner as to catch the most trivial domestic pictures. Society does not want to see a reflection of her internal organism—in which, of course, an active ideal principle is secretly working. She chooses to interest herself in trifles light as air,—not in great social problems. She prefers millinery to metaphysics, photography to poetry, crochet to astronomy. She believes romantic affections, grand passions, to be out of date; but she will go into ecstasies in following the details of a little love-affair. She is bored by abstract doctrine, but she can appreciate the sweet lisping sermon of a pet pastor. Thus encouraged, the novelists set to work to study the minutiæ of character and incident; and the outcry they make in order to please the publisher has been characterised, falsely however, as Realism.
     The novel-consuming public has, however unconsciously, proceeded on the gratuitous assumption that whatever is poetical, or ideal in a high degree, must be false, and that whatever is mediocre must be true. Perfect heroes and heroines, idealised in an element where Cupid grows sickly and writes maudlin verses, have been very properly done away with. To so great an extent has the thing been carried, that handsome people, in books, are barely interesting. Not only is it suggested that Strephon piping as if he would never grow old, and Amaryllis singing among her flock of snowy sheep, are barely endurable; but it has been ascertained that Strephon is often an idle ill-conditioned lout, who lounges at the ale-house, and Amaryllis a broadspoken redhanded young woman with soiled stockings. On the same assumption, we must separate mind from millinery,—well-dressed women who read Greek and quote Aristotle being exceptions to ordinary experience. Muscular Christianity having been promulgated from a pulpit at Eversley, we must disbelieve in consumptive curates. To continue the catalogue of illustrations were superfluous. The fact in brief is, that Society has come to a conclusion that it is possible to depict real life agreeably and truly without idealising it; that to idealise the facts and personages of real life is to produce false social pictures, to seriously misinterpret the functions of art in general; and that, to be capable of the finest interpretation at the hands of Society, Art should be rather photographic than pictorial. While Realism, in literature, has produced a whole generation of earnest novelists, it has, in technical art, produced pre-Raphaelitism. Whatever else may be said of Realism, pro or contra, it must be acknowledged that it has recently been the guiding star of many admirable writers, and that it has encouraged many respectable people to print experiences which have proved useful to the great mass of the public.
     The novelist of a recent generation was complained of justly. Wielding a delicate and fragile quill, and attempting to be intensely pure and feminine, he succeeded in writing like an insipid spinster of fifty. There was no flesh and blood in his men and women. They were simply colourless puppets shivering on the brink of moral evangelism. Scott, and Scott only, succeeded in sounding depths which no common talent can reach; and this, as I have said, not by means of the photographic apparatus now in vogue, but by means of the poetic intuition. But the realists have put commonplace experience into language intelligible to a large portion of the general community; and, studious of that minute detail which characterises the pre-Raphaelites in Art, and which has enabled those gentlemen to become a power in the Academy, they have effected a revolution in modern literature. Society being impersonal, the novel contains no longer a hero and a heroine, but a cluster of heroes and heroines, painted from nature with attention even to the slightest peculiarity in an eyebrow.
     A careful eye to the elaboration of trifles is absolutely essential to perfection in a work of Art. The mispainting of a few leaves may mar the effect of a whole tree. It would be as well, however, if pre-Raphaelitism in literature did not affect our broader first conceptions, and if we did not illustrate Butler’s doggrel about the mouse in the telescope. Constant star-gazing is a grand mistake, but it is much more commendable than constant earth-gazing.
     It was years ago, when Society possessed a sense of the ludicrous, that a young author first essayed to hold up the looking-glass to his mistress. What magic spell was there in his method? Society came to the glass in a jocund mood, her face radiant with fun and humour; and, behold, the glass gleamed back her smiles—lending delicacy and brightness to every dimple in the happy face. This is a figurative way of saying that Charles Dickens was a master of his craft. Our most original, and by far our greatest, living novelist is not a realist in the ordinary acceptation of the term. He exhibits quaint faces, which are so unlike any made by respectable people save when at the looking-glass, that they must live for all time in strange mosaic. So admirable and lovable are these faces, that they will survive to remote generations. But of late years Dickens has suffered more or less in the estimation of a public which was accustomed to make him its idol. The realists won’t or can’t believe in him, and they have made a great outcry against him. Notwithstanding all this, he is a man of genius, a humorist of the heart—twin brother to Rabelais and Cervantes. The impersonal nature of the time has given him a host of imitators. Feeble copies of Dickens have been as common as poor imitations of Tennyson; little men have been encouraged by Society, who tolerates no individuality, to borrow or copy the quaint robe in which our Prospero of fiction weaves his spells. The result has been a tendency among critics, the applauders of mediocrity, to undervalue the sort of art in which Dickens excels. Our author has borne these slights good-humouredly, in the certainty that posterity will approve the extinct faith. A slight reaction in his favour took place on the publication of Great Expectations. In this case it was not the surpassing genius of the book which set the critical puppets dallying, and made even the obtuse Saturday Reviewer bow gracefully to the potent wand. Society was sick for a moment of realism, surfeited with the trash of some realists, and for a moment it wavered back to humour—an idealistic element in its loftier phases. Still, however, she continues to quarrel with the great master because he does not manœuvre with respectable automata. Is it nothing that Dickens is always consistent as an artist; that he lives in a world of his own, in which the atmosphere and landscape are in perfect keeping with the beings who live and breathe there, who eat, drink, live, and die there? A humorist and a poet perceives character where Goodman Dull sees only a face of skin and bone. If Dickens is true to the affections and the sympathies, let him clothe his figures in whatever quaint drapery he chooses. We can pardon him much; for he is master of that touch of nature which makes the whole world kin.
     Realism has served at least one admirable purpose—that of bringing women prominently before the public as bookwriters. The lady-novelists are the most truthful of all æsthetic photographers. Narrow as their range necessarily is, they have been encouraged to describe thoughts and emotions with which men are of necessity unfamiliar; and their style is free from the incongruities of previous authors. Disciplined in a school of sorrow, closely observant of detail, and painfully dependent on the caprice of the male sex, they essay to paint in works of art the every-day emotions of commonplace or imaginative women, and the domestic experience of sensible daughters, wives, and mothers. Greatest by far of all female novelists, and greatest by virtue of the poetic inspiration, is George Sand; after her, Miss Austin. The author of Pride and Prejudice was an artist; she depicted concisely, albeit narrowly, and her pictures were artistically true to a narrow circle. But George Sand is a woman of genius; while Miss Austin was without imagination, and full of the spirit of English parochialism. In the novels of Miss Muloch, one meets with many of those emotional views of life in which girls delight; but the record here is untrue to the male sex, because the author’s experience of men is necessarily imperfect. The author of Adam Bede was, in her last work, true to the best interests of Art. The great secret of Miss Evans’s success is her power of localisation, her capacity of presenting great social truths in a manner concisely intelligible to the narrowest experience. In Silas Marner she improved upon her previous efforts. The book, considered as a complete work of art, totus teres atque rotundus, was more fragmentary than were either Adam Bede or the Mill on the Floss; but it contained deep poetical truths, and was full of ideal character-painting. The plot was in itself sufficiently old and simple; turning on the gradual softening, by means of a little child, of a heart made morbid and bitter by an early misconception. Silas, the miserly weaver, the victim of an unjust implication and an early passion, seeks consolation in the slow accumulation of money, and is ultimately reclaimed by means of a high and holy affection. It is impossible to furnish any idea of the skill with which such comparatively slight materials were wrought into a form which, in its integrity, touches the tenderest chords of our human nature. The local atmosphere was perfect. All was in keeping with the homeliest knowledge, but the whole was tinged by a tender meaning which was almost poetry. The book belonged to a class of novels which are intensely realistic in form, expressing, however, the ideal aspect of human nature. The spirit which pervades these novels, and which gives them value, is that of the healthy feminine mind depending for its relaxation on reminiscences synonymous with a narrow and painful domestic life. The genius of the author of Silas Marner seems to have been chastened by trial, and hallowed afterwards by the pitying hand of Patience. It is noble and useful genius; but its aspirations are not lofty, and it is only ideal when dealing with commonplace emotions.
     It is seldom that a really talented woman puts forth a book with the sole view of attaining literary position; and perhaps the author of Silas Marner could explain what women in bookwriting seek besides the bubble reputation. The birth of the novel has given speech to many ladies who must otherwise have been silent. At least two-thirds of all the novels published nowadays—of all the good, bad, or indifferent stories vended to the circulating-libraries—are by feminine hands. There have been Mrs. Oliphant, Miss Jewsbury, Mrs. Henry Wood, Mrs. Marsh, Mrs. Trollope, Mrs. Gore, Mrs. Gaskell, Miss Muloch, Mrs. Stowe, Miss Sinclair, Miss Young, and a host of others; all whose works are in the highest degree feminine, and good of their kind. All these ladies had to relate experiences which would have remained unuttered had not fiction, and realism in fiction, been clamoured for at the libraries. At first, this innovation was looked upon as an encroachment, but Society soon ascertained that it would not infringe her laws of impersonality. The tone of the lady-novelists was at first Della Cruscan, and morbidly coloured by an affected sentimentality. Nowadays, however, it is quite harmless. But there are still some men who grudge to their wives and daughters a voice in literature; deluded men these, so unfortunate as to have had to deal only with strong-minded women given to spectacles. Few will deny that the lady-novelists have caught certain novel lights and shades in Society’s Looking-glass. They have revealed to us hidden chords of the female heart, together with strange suggestions relative to woman’s influence on modern society and manners; and they have given practical men some idea of the point of view from which women regard the ethics of the sterner sex. What grumbler will deny that there was sound knowledge in Miss Austin, and dangerous wisdom in Mrs. Gore? Let it be noted, also, that the lady-novelists have taught the gentlemen-novelists to look more accurately into the position of women; to pay them the high respect of perceiving the correlation of their social and intellectual positions. It having been determined, luckily for ladies who are much confined indoors, that the soft sex shall have a voice in art as well as in the household, it is hoped that no husband will be brute enough to grudge his wife permission to prove herself as competent to hold up the Looking-glass as her neighbours.
     One must observe that Realism, improperly so-called, appears under other and varied phases; but Society is continually reacting against the cant. The latest reaction against realism—one now actively exhausting itself, however—has been called “sensation.” For examples of the “sensation” novel, we have only to refer to Mr. Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White and Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer’s Strange Story. The tone of the first is morbid and realistic; the tone of the second is morbid and idealistic. It is noticeable, however, that the interpretation of the plot of the latter as given by the author himself, is that of practical philosophy. On the stage, “sensation” asserts itself in dramas like the Colleen Bawn and the Peep o’ Day. In private life, it is to be found under the guise of mesmerism and spirit-rapping. “Sensation,” it is obvious, is intensely impersonal. It merges the individual in the incident, as in the sensation novel; or it gains its object by the effective grouping of a mass, as in the sensation drama. Its object is an intensely commercial one. It appeals not to the sympathies of the educated few, but to those of the general public; and the definite purpose of its followers is to make money: quite a practical purpose this, sufficiently agreeable, and from all points of view respectable. It entails no originality. It is influential also in Art; and it has been appropriately observed, by a contributor to the Athenæum, that “we hear constantly that such-and-such a picture cost so many thousands of pounds,—a clap-trap invention, which appeals to the same order of taste that appraises the Koh-i-noor, not for its rarity and purity, but for the mere gold it cost, or is said to have cost.” Mr. Frith’s paintings are, it seems to me, at once realistic and sensational; a curious enough mixture of opposite qualities. They are true to the outward types of life; they are full of excellent photography and grouping. But they are painted on a sensational scale, and depend for their effect on the judicious arrangement of a mass of figures.
     Society’s Looking-glass is the comparatively truthful reflection of Society herself, and its present flaws and imperfections lie less in itself than in the character of the thing imaged. Let it be hoped, however, that Love, Sympathy, and Poetry still lurk in some secret corner of the great fair of vanities. Realism, properly so called, is truth, and truth is always beautiful; and Art is a copy of nature, drawn by the human hand, and coloured with the aspirations of that human soul without whose light the great face of the world would be devoid of expression. Without the lofty ideal life, the external life would be meaningless and unintelligible; they are woven together by the fine threads of poetry and religion, and each is so inextricably linked with each, that only the scythe of death can cut them asunder. What a miserable world would this be, were there no spiritual interpretation to its darkest problems!
     This is not carping at Society. Generally, her literature resolves itself into false fun, cynicism, and psychology. The philosopher is a respectable cynic, with an eye to social evils. The poet is a psychologist, navigating the storm in a tea-cup. Among novelists, particularly, there is a finicism which paralyses bold conception. Let us hope that a few bold individuals will arise, in the very teeth of convention, and assert the more than superficial power of reflection possessed, in literature, by Society’s Looking- glass.

                                                                                                                                        R. W. B.

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