Thomas Hill Green

“ The farther the artist rises above the stage of imitation, the higher is his art, the more elevating its influence on those who can enter into its spirit. If the landscape-painter does nothing more than represent nature as seen by the outward eye, the vulgar objection against looking at pictures—"I can see as fine a view as this any day"—is unquestionably valid. But if the painter is anything better than a photographer, he does far more than this. He brings nature before us, as we have seen it, perhaps, only once or twice in our lives, under the influence of some strong emotion. ”

“ As we follow in sympathy the story of his hero, we find ourselves lifted up and cast down as fortune changes, our life brightening as the clouds break above, and darkening as they close again. If the author chooses to disappoint us with "a bad ending," he leaves us, not as we are left at the conclusion of a tragedy, purified from personal desires, but vexed and sorrowful, sadder but not wiser men. ”

“ The man who seeks his entire culture in art of any kind will soon find the old antagonism between speculation and action begin to appear. There will be a chasm, which he cannot fill, between his life in the closet and his life in the world; his impotence to carry his thought into act will limit and weaken the thought itself. But this ill result will equally ensue, whether the art in which he finds his nurture be that of the novelist or that of the poet. The novel-reader sees human action pass before him like a panorama, but he feels none of its pains and penalties ”

“ There is no need to do violence to historical probability by supposing that Homer was a conscious artist, or that he imagined himself to be doing anything else than representing events as they happened. We have simply to notice that in him facts have become poetry, and to ask ourselves what constitutes the change. How is it that the epic poet, while "holding up the mirror to nature," yet shows us in the glass a glory which belongs not to nature as we see it, in its material limitations? ”

“ Nor is it merely from that weakness of effect which, in one sense, must always belong to representation as opposed to reality, that the novel suffers. The representation itself is incomplete. The novelist, like every other artist, must abridge and select. For many of the elements whose action builds up our human soul, there is no place in his canvas. A great part of the discipline of life arises simply from its slowness. ”

“ The novelist not only works on more various elements, he appeals to more ordinary minds than the poet. This indeed is the strongest practical proof of his essential inferiority as an artist. All who are capable of an interest in incidents of life which do not affect themselves, may feel the same interest more keenly in a novel; but to those only who can lift the curtain does a poem speak intelligibly. It is the twofold characteristic, of universal intelligibility and indiscriminate adoption of materials, that gives the novel its place as the great reformer and leveller of our time. ”

“ These are the epic poem, the drama, and the novel. Each purports to be, in some sort, a reflex of human life and action, as obeying certain laws and tending to a certain end. In each men are represented, not as at rest, or in contemplative isolation, but in co-operation or collision. In each there is a combination of two elements, an outer element of incident, an inner of passion and character. ”

“ He substitutes for the primary outward aspect of things a new view, in which thought already finds a resting place. Just as strong emotion tends to make all known existence the setting of a single form; just as intense meditation sees in all experience the manifestation of a single idea; so the artist, even if he be merely telling a story, or painting a common landscape, puts some of his materials in a relief, and combines all in a harmony, which the untaught eye does not find in the world as it is. ”

“ The dramatist, for instance, with whom the novelist is here compared, shows us some elemental force of humanity, stripped of the accidents of time and place, working itself out in free conflict with other forces, and finally breaking itself against the eternal fact that no man can gain the world without first losing himself. It is this catastrophe which makes the real tragedy of life; it is this which the tragic poet has the eye to see and the words to portray ”

“ Whether, like Richardson, they analyse character from within, or, like Miss Austen, develop it in the outward particularities of an unruffled life—whether they describe, like Fielding, the buoyancy of a generous animalism, or, like Miss Edgeworth and Miss Burney, the precise decencies of conventional morality—they deal simply with eighteenth-century life as seen by eighteenth-century eyesight. All romantic virtue, all idealised passion, they rigorously eschew. Prudence they make the guide, happiness the end, of life. ”

“ It is far better for him, instead of poring over a detail of the causes and symptoms of the disease which he hugs, to be stimulated to an effort in which, though it be but temporary, ecstatic, and for an end not actually attainable, he may at least forget the disease altogether. Such a stimulus a great poem may afford him; but in the whole expanse of novel-literature he merely sees his own sickly experience modified in an infinite variety of reflections, till he fancies that the "strange disease of modern life" is the proper constitution of God's universe. ”

“ The most pleasing expression of this self-satisfaction of the age is found in the Spectator, the first and best representative of that special style of literature—the only really popular literature of our time—which consists in talking to the public about itself. Humanity is taken as reflected in the ordinary life of men; and, as thus reflected, it is copied with the most minute fidelity. No attempt is made either to suppress the baser elements of man's nature, or to transfigure them by a stronger light than that of the common understanding. ”

“ Ordinary men are satisfied with this enjoyment; the highest are allured by its temptation. The "reading public" is charmed with the contemplation of its own likeness, "twice as natural" as life. Its own wisdom, its own wishes, its own vanity, are set before it in little with a completeness and finish which the deeper laws of the universe, vindicating themselves by apparent disorder and misfortune, happily prevent from being attained in real life. ”

“ The novel, itself the reflex of "the fretful stir unprofitable," can exercise no such power. It can but make us more at home in the region from which a great poem transports us. The value of that experience of the world, which it is its object to impart, is commonly overrated in our day. In the form in which it is imparted by the novelist, we have perhaps had too much of it without his aid. Our external environment is quite enough in our thoughts: we are not too reluctant to admit that we are what we seem to be, dependent for good or evil on circumstances which we do not make for ourselves. ”

“ It may indeed be truly said that, after all, human selfishness is much the same as it ever was; that luxury still drowns sympathy; that riches and poverty have still their old estranging influence. The novel, as has been shown, cannot give a new birth to the spirit, or initiate the effort to transcend the separations of place and circumstance; but it is no small thing that it should remove the barriers of ignorance and antipathy which would otherwise render the effort unavailing. It at least brings man nearer to his neighbor, and enables each class to see itself as others see it. ”

“ We may look at man and the world either from without or from within. We may observe man's actions like other phenomena, and from observation learn to ascribe them to certain general but distinct motives and faculties, which we do not refer to any higher unity; or, on the other hand, by the light of our own consciousness we may recognise that in man of which no observation of his actions could tell us—something which is in him, but yet is not his own; which combines with all his faculties, but is none of them; which gives them a unity, to which their diversity is merely relative. ”

“ Wherever human thought is free, and human character can display itself, whether in the servants' hall or the drawing-room, whether in the country mansion or the back alley, he may find his materials. He is thus a great expander of sympathies; and if he cannot help us to make the world our own by the power of ideas, he at least carries our thought into many a far country of human experience, which it could not otherwise have reached. We hear much in these days of the sacrifice of the individual to society through professional limitations. ”

“ For an hour, it may be, or a day, it raises him into a world of absolute ideality, where he may forget his wants and his vanity, and lose himself in a struggle in which the combatants are the forces of the spirit, and of which the end is that annihilation in collision with destiny which is but the blank side of reconciliation with it. ”

“ To be what he is, the novelist must be a man with large powers of sympathetic observation. He must have an eye for the "humanities" which underlie the estranging barriers of social demarcation, and in relation to which the influence of those barriers can alone be rightly appreciated. We have already spoken of that acquiescence in the dominion of circumstance, to which we are all too ready to give way, and which exclusive novel-reading tends to foster. The circumstances, however, whose rule we recognise, are apt to be merely our own or those of our class. ”

“ These considerations may explain to us why the production of a great tragedy is almost an impossibility in our own time. The age most favourable to it would seem to be one in which men stand on the edge of an old and but half-known world—as Aeschylus and Sophocles stood on the edge of the mythologic, Shakespeare on that of the feudal world—an age of sufficient culture and reflection for men to be conscious of the glory they have left behind, while yet civilisation has not reached the stage of acquiescence in things as they are, and scepticism as to all beyond them. ”

“ In the novel we must admit that the creative faculty has taken a lower form than it held in the epic and the tragedy. But since in this form it acts on more extensive material and reaches more men, we may well believe that this temporary declension is preparatory to some higher development, when the poet shall idealise life without making abstraction of any of its elements, and when the secret of existence, which he now speaks to the inward ear of a few, may be proclaimed on the house-tops to the common intelligence of mankind. ”

“ To exceptional men, or at exceptional crises in life, in the moments of intense insight or emotion which philosophy calls knowledge and religion faith, the weight of custom falls away, the truth breaks through the veil, and the [Pg 73] most trivial object or accident comes to reflect in itself the whole system of nature or the whole providence of God. At such moments man realises that in order to live he must die, that in order to be free he must obey, and that only by surrendering his fancied independence can he enter into the divine unity. ”

“ Observation shows us man not as self-determined, but as the creature of circumstances, as a phenomenon among other phenomena. As such, too, he is presented to us in the novel. We do not see him, as in tragedy, standing in the strength of his own spirit, remaking the world by its power, determined by it for good or evil, dependent on it for all that may be attractive or repellent about him. The hero of a novel attracts in part by his physiognomy, his manner, or even his dress ”

“ The novelist does with inferior means, and for minds at a lower level, what the dramatist may do for a mind at its highest. He idealises enough to make us feel pleasure or pain, not enough to make us [Pg 74] forget ourselves. He excites curiosity or suspense, not awe or hope. If the novel ends well, it flatters our complacency with the feeling that the world as it is is not such a bad place after all; if it ends badly, it strengthens the indolent conviction that aimless misery is the law of the universe. ”

“ An artist indeed the novelist is; he [Pg 43] combines events and persons with reference to ends; he concentrates into a dialogue of a few sentences an amount of feeling and character which it would take real men some hours to express; he imparts a rapidity to the stream of incident quite unlike the sluggishness of our daily experience. In this sense he does not copy what we see, but shows us what we can not see for ourselves. Our complaint against him is that the aspect of things which he shows us is merely the outward and natural, as opposed to the inner or ideal. ”