CHAPTER III.

THE STUDY OF FICTION.

EVERY production of creative literature may be studied in relation to its content, structural form, diction, style and imaginative atmosphere. At the same time, the different kinds of literature vary in the relative value which they possess as enabling us to study these several aspects. Each form of literature, indeed, may be said to have its special place and function in class-instruction. Thus, while the novel, the narrative poem, the essay, the lyric, and the drama may all be used as means for the communication of certain general facts of language and style, each may also be used to do a special work which no other form can do so well.

The novel is at once the most characteristic and the most popular literary form of our time; and it is a form that is particularly well fitted to foster the interest of young pupils in the study of literature. Boys and girls are naturally fond of a story, and it is important that they should be taught to discriminate between the good and the bad in this form of writing: the prevalence of the "penny dreadful”

and the cheap novelette shows that there is need of such teaching in our schools.

of

Among the different forms of literature, prose fiction demonstrates more simply and clearly than any other the close relationship of literature to life. In the novel, the romance, and the short story, the human interest is obviously predominant: they represent character and action, and the interplay of each upon the other. The drama also, it is true, represents action and character; but for young people the study of these through the reading of drama is more difficult: for, while the novelist explains more explicitly and fully the situations and characters with which he is concerned, the dramatist affords the reader little or no assistance in the way interpretation or comment. Therefore, in class-instruction, the first study of a drama naturally comes some time after the first study of a romance or novel or short story. It is through the study of these forms that a pupil is most likely to become interested in literature generally as a means of interpreting life, and they thus possess a special and radical value in the teaching of English Literature. A passage from one of Hazlitt's critical studies, referring to the essay in its more familiar forms, may be taken as describing aptly some of the benefits to be derived from the study of fiction. “It makes familiar with the world of men and women, records their actions, assigns their motives, exhibits their whims, characterizes their pursuits in all their singular and endless variety, ridicules their absurdities, exposes their inconsistencies, holds the mirror up to nature, and shows the very age and body of the time, its form and pressure'; takes minutes of our dress, air,

looks, words, thoughts, and actions; shows us what we are, and what we are not; plays the whole game of human life over before us, and by making us enlightened spectators of its many-coloured scenes, enables us (if possible) to become tolerably reasonable agents in the one in which we have to perform a part. The art and practic part of life is thus made the mistress of this theoric.' It is the best and most natural course of study. It is in morals and manners what the experimental is in natural philosophy, as opposed to the dogmatical method. It does not deal in sweeping clauses of proscription or anathema, but in nice distinction and liberal constructions....It does not try to prove all black or all white as it wishes, but lays on the intermediate colours (and most of them not unpleasing ones), as it finds them blended with the web of our life, which is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.' It enquires what human life is and has been, to show what it ought to be. It follows it into courts and camps, into town and country, into rustic sports and learned disputations, into the various shades of prejudice or ignorance, of refinement or barbarism, into its private haunts or public pageants, into its weaknesses and littlenesses, its professions and its practices: before it pretends to distinguish right from wrong, or one thing from another. How, indeed, should it do otherwise?

Quid sit pulchrum, quid turpe, quid utile, quid non,—
Plenius et melius Chrysippo et Crantore dicit.

'It tells what is honourable, what is base, what is expedient, more amply and better than Chrysippus and Crantor1."

1 Hazlitt: "On the Periodical Essayists."

The ethical quality of fiction is indicated by a later essayist, Vernon Lee, in the following passage: "While fiction-let us say at once, the novel-falls short of absolute achievement on one side, it is able to achieve much more, something quite unknown to the rest of the arts, on the other; and while it evades some of the laws of the merely aesthetical, it becomes liable to another set of necessities, the necessities of ethics. The novel has less value in art, but more importance in life. Emotional and scientific art...trains us to feel and comprehend that is to say, to live....The novelists have, by playing upon our emotions, immensely increased the sensitiveness, the richness, of this living keyboard1.”

Considered, again, as a product of art, fiction conforms to certain canons and conventions which should be studied. In the senior classes some attention should be devoted to the structure and artistic manipulation of the story. The "complication" and "disentanglement," the weaving and the unravelling of the threads of the plot, should be followed; and the use noted of such devices as suspense, climax, and contrast. The special and characteristic value of the novel in the teaching of English Literature is not only that, as has been remarked above, from it a pupil may derive a broader and keener interest in life and literature, but also that he may learn wherein the art of telling a story consists, and the qualities that mark a story as it is told by our best writers. And as a medium whereby the art of structure in fiction may be studied, the short story possesses advantages which longer narratives

1 Vernon Lee "On Novels," in Baldwin: being Dialogues on Views and Aspirations.