REALISM AND THE NOVEL
203
Auto-da-Fe, Wuthering Heights
and
Huckleberry Finn, The Rain–
bow
and
The Magic Mountain)
is indeed, as I have said, more like
a whole literature. In drawing attention to what seems to me now a
formal gap, I of course do not mean that this whole vast form should
be directed to filling it. But because it is like a whole literature, any
formal gap in the novel seems particularly important.
When I think of the realist tradition in fiction, I think of the kind
of novel which creates and judges the quality of a whole way of
life in terms of the qualities of persons. The balance involved in
this achievement is perhaps the most important thing about it.
It
looks at first sight so general a thing, the sort of thing most novels
do. It is what
War and Peace
does; what
Middlemarch
does; what
The Rainbow
does. Yet the distinction of this kind is that it offers a
valuing of a whole way of life, a society that is larger than any of the
individuals composing it, and at the same time valuing creations of
human beings who, while belonging to and affected by and helping
to define this way of life, are also, in their own terms, absolute ends
in themselves. Neither element, neither the society nor the individual,
is there as a priority. The society is not a background against which
the personal relationships are studied, nor are the individuals merely
illustrations of aspects of the way of life. Every aspect of personal life
is radically affected by the quality of the general life, yet the general
life is seen at its most important in completely personal terms. We
attend with our whole senses to every aspect of the general life, yet
the center of value is always in the individual human person - not
anyone isolated person, but the many persons who are the reality of
the general life. Tolstoy and George Eliot, in particular, often said,
in much these terms, that it was this view they were trying to realize.
Within this realist tradition, there are of course wide variations
of degree of success, but such a viewpoint, a particular apprehension
of a relation between individuals and society, may be seen throughout,
as a mode. And when it is put to me that the realist tradition has
broken down, it is this viewpoint that I see as having been lost, and
it is the relative absence of this viewpoint that I see as the formal
gap in the modern novel. I do not mean that this apprehension is, or
should be, tied to any particular style. The kind of realistic (or as we
now say, naturalistic) description that "went out with the hansom
cab" is in no way essential to it; it was even, perhaps, in writers like
