Henry MacKenzie
The Lounger #20
18 June 1785
No species of composition is more generally read by one class of readers,
or more undervalued by another, than that of the Novel. Its favourable
reception from the young and the indolent, to whom the exercise of
imagination is delightful, and the labour of thought is irksome, needs not
to be wondered at; but the contempt which it meets from the more
respectable class of literary men, it may perhaps be entitled to plead
that it does not deserve. Considered in the abstract, as containing an
interesting relation of events, illustrative of the manners and characters
of mankind, it surely merits a higher station in the world of letters than
is generally assigned to it. If it has not the dignity, it has at least
most of the difficulties, of the Epic or the Drama. The conduct of its
fable, the support of its characters, the contrivance of its incidents,
and its development of the passions, require a degree of invention,
judgment, taste, and feeling, not much, if at all, inferior to those
higher departments of writing, for the composition of which a very
uncommon portion of genius is supposed to be requisite. Those difficulties
are at the same time heightened by the circumstance, of this species of
writing being of all others the most open to the judgment of the people;
because it represents domestic scenes and situations in private life, in
the execution of which any man may detect errors and discover blemishes,
while the author has neither the pomp of poetry, nor the decoration of the
stage, to cover or to conceal them.
To this circumstance, however, may perhaps be imputed the degradation into
which it has fallen.--As few endowments were necessary to judge, so few
have been supposed necessary to compose a novel; and all whose necessities
or vanity prompted them to write, betook themselves to a field, which, as
they imagined, it required no extent of information or depth of learning
to cultivate, but in which a heated imagination, or an excursive fancy,
were alone sufficient to succeed; and men of genius and of knowledge,
despising a province in which such competitors were to be met, retired
from it in disgust, and left it in the hands of the unworthy.
The effects of this have been felt, not only in the debasement of the
Novel in point of literary merit, but in another particular still more
material, in its perversion from a moral or instructive purpose to one
directly the reverse. Ignorance and dulness are seldom long inoffensive,
but generally support their own native insignificance by an alliance with
voluptuousness and vice.
Even of those few novels which superior men have written, it cannot always
be said, that they are equally calculated to improve as to delight. Nor is
this only to be objected to some who have been professedly less scrupulous
in that particular; but I am afraid may be also imputed to those whose
works were meant to convey no bad impression, but, on the contrary, were
intended to aid the cause of virtue, and to hold out patterns of the most
exalted benevolence.
I am not, however, disposed to carry the idea of the dangerous tendency of
all novels so far as some rigid moralists have done. As promoting a
certain refinement of mind, they operate like all other works of genius
and feeling, and have indeed a more immediate tendency to produce it than
most others, from their treating of those very subjects which the reader
will find around him in the world, and their containing those very
situations in which he himself may not improbably at some time or other be
placed. Those who object to them inculcating precepts, and holding forth
examples, of a refinement which virtue does not require, and which honesty
is better without, do not perhaps sufficiently attend to the period of
society which produces them. The code of morality must necessarily be
enlarged in proportion to that state of manners to which cultivated eras
give birth. As the idea of property made a crime of theft; as the
invention of oaths made falsehood perjury; so the necessary refinement in
manners of highly-polished nations creates a variety of duties and of
offences, which men in ruder, and it may be (for I enter not into that
question), happier periods of society, could never have imagined.
The principal danger of novels, as forming a mistaken and pernicious
system of morality, seems to me to arise from that contrast between one
virtue or excellence and another, that war of duties which is to be found
in many of them, particularly in that species called the
Sentimental. These have been chiefly borrowed from our neighbours
the French, whose style of manners, and the very powers of whose language,
give them a great advantage in the delineation of that nicety, the
subtilty of feeling, those entanglements of delicacy, which are so much
interwoven with the characters and conduct of the chief personages in many
of their most celebrated novels. In this rivalship of virtues and of
duties, those are always likely to be preferred which in truth and reason
are subordinate, and those to be degraded which ought to be paramount. The
last, being of that great cardinal sort which must be common, because they
apply to the great leading relations and circumstances of life, have an
appearance less dignified and heroic than the others, which, as they come
forth only on extraordinary occasions, are more apt to attract the view
and excite the admiration of beholders. The duty to parents is contrasted
with the ties of friendship and of love; the virtues of justice, of
prudence, of economy, are put in competition with the exertions of
generosity, of benevolence, and of compassion: and even of these virtues
of sentiments there are still more refined divisions, in which the
overstrained delicacy of the persons represented always leads them to act
from the motive least obvious, and therefore generally the least
reasonable.
In the enthusiasm of sentiment there is much the same danger as in the
enthusiasm of religion, of substituting certain impulses and feelings of
what may be called a visionary kind, in the place of real practical
duties, which, in morals, as in theology, we might not improperly
denominate good works. In morals, as in religion, there are not wanting
instances of refined sentimentalists, who are contented with talking of
virtues which they never practise, who pay in words what they owe in
actions; or perhaps what is fully as dangerous, who open their minds to
impressions which never have any effect upon their conduct, but are
considered as something foreign to, and distinct from, it. This separation
of conscience from feeling is a depravity of the most pernicious sort; it
eludes the strongest obligation to rectitude, it blunts the strongest
incitement to virtue; when the ties of the first bind the sentiment and
not the will, and the rewards of the latter crown not the heart but the
imagination.
That creation of refined and subtile feeling, reared by the authors of the
works to which I allude, has an ill effect, not only on our ideas of
virtue, but also on our estimate of happiness. That sickly sort of
refinement creates imaginary evils and distresses, and imaginary blessings
and enjoyments, which imbitter the common disappointments, and depreciate
the common attainments of life. This affects the temper doubly, both with
respect to ourselves and others: with respect to ourselves, from what we
think ought to be our lot; with regard to others, from that we think ought
to be their sentiments. It inspires a certain childish pride of our own
superior delicacy, and an unfortunate contempt of the plain worth, the
ordinary but useful occupations and ideas of those around us.
The reproach which has been sometimes made to novels, of exhibiting "such
faultless monsters as the world ne'er saw," may be just on the score of
entertainment to their readers, to whom the delineation of uniform virtue,
except when it is called into striking situations, will no doubt be
insipid. But in point of moral tendency, the opposite character is much
more reprehensible; I mean that character of mingled virtue and vice which
is to be found in some of the best of our novels. Instances will readily
occur to every reader, where the hero of the perforamnce has violated, in
one page, the most sacred laws of society, to whom, by the mere turning of
the leaf, we are to be reconciled, whom we are to be made to love and
admire, for the beauty of some humane, or the brilliancy of some heroic,
action. It is, dangerous thus to bring us into the society of Vice, though
introduced or accompanied by Virtue. In the application to ourselves, in
which the moral tendency of all imaginary characters must be supposed to
consist, this nourishes and supports a very common kind of self-deception,
by which men are apt to balance their faults by the consideration of their
good qualities; an account which, besides the fallacy of its principle,
can scarcely fail to be erroneous, from our natural propensity to state
our faults at the lowest, and our good qualities at their highest rate.
I have purposely pointed my observations, not to that common herd of
novels (the wretched offspring of circulating libraries) which are
despised for their insignificance, or proscribed for their immorality; but
to the errors, as they appear to me, of those admired ones which are
frequently put into the hands of youth for imitation as well as amusement.
Of youth it is essential to preserve the imagination sound as well as
pure, and not to allow them to forget, amidst the intricacies of
Sentiment, or the dreams of Sensibility, the truths of Reason, or the laws
of Principle. --Z.