176
STEVEN MARCUS
Napoleonic
will
corrupted by the social values it originally set out to
overthrow-the very substance of Balzac's fiction-these can no
longer appeal with anything like the directness or relevance they
could still command even twenty-five years ago either to the personal
interests of readers or to their larger social interests. The passion
against social injustice which illuminates Dickens's novels, and which
for a hundred years made them an actual force for good in the
civilized world, is bound to leave readers less moved as the particular
institutions and abuses which he satirized disappear or change or grow
more remote. It is even a question, at least for certain groups within
our society, whether the passion against injustice is not itself an
emotion that has become anachronistic, that belongs to the unen–
lightened past-and to backward nations like the Soviet Union, for
example! Again, for more than two hundred years the English novel
may be understood as chafing under a single preoccupation: what
it means to be a gentleman. No social, moral, personal, sexual, or
political issue was irrelevant to this question or could not be brought
into focus by it. Indeed it would not be excessive to suggest that the
gentleman is the totemic figure that presides over the major phase
of the English novel. In America, the idea of the gentleman could
never, naturally, command such monolithic powers of organization;
but until recently, I should say, there was still sufficient class feeling,
and, perhaps more important, sufficient class memory, to make it
possible to discuss
this
figure without undertaking the work of his–
torical translation---of finding analogies to the past in the present–
which now seems necessary. Even in England the question has
become musty and remote, at least to the more interesting current
novelists. Nevertheless, if the gentleman has at length paid his final
tribute to nature, we may trust that-like the late Elia-he
will
continue his remarkable communications from the far side of the
grave. The humour of the thing would be missed.
Similarly, the ideological life of the nineteenth century was
dominated by the French Revolution. Under the irresistible power
of
this
cataclysm-it was as M.atthew Arnold simply put it, the
greatest, the most animating event in human history-the nineteenth
century novel was wrought into its distinctive shape and developed
its distinctive subject. That subject was the relation of individual
persons to authority, to established social and personal power-the
