For convenience of division it may be said that the novel of psychology was born in France, the novel of manners in England, and that out of their union in the glorious brain of Balzac sprang that strange chameleon-creature, the modern novel, which changes its shape and colour with every subject on which it rests.

In the general muster the novel of manners will be found to have played the most important part; and here English influences preponderate. If innate aptitude were enough for the producing of a work of art, the flowering of the English novel of manners in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries might have surpassed in quality, and intrinsic importance, that of all other schools.

Balzac’s debt to Scott has already been touched on; that of the earlier French fiction to Richardson and Sterne is a commonplace in the history of the novel. But the true orientation of English fiction was away from the finedrawn analysis of Richardson, the desultory humours of Sterne, in the direction of an ample and powerful novel of manners. Smollett and Fielding brought fresh air and noise, the rough-and-tumble of the street, the ribaldry of the tavern, into the ceremonious drawing-rooms depicted by Richardson and later by Miss Burney. The great, the distinguishing gift of the English novelist was a homely simplicity combined with an observation at once keen and indulgent; good-humour was the atmosphere and irony the flavour of this great school of observers, from Fielding to George Eliot.

Till the day of Jane Austen it had been possible to treat without apology of the mixed affair of living; but Jane Austen’s delicate genius flourished on the very edge of a tidal wave of prudery. Already Scott was averting his eyes from facts on which the maiden novelist in her rectory parlour had looked unperturbed; when Thackeray and Dickens rose in their might the chains were forged and the statues draped. In the melancholy preface to “Pendennis” Thackeray puts the case bitterly and forcibly: “Since the author of Tom Jones was buried, no writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to his utmost power a MAN”; and the stunted conclusion of a tale so largely begun testifies to the benumbing effect of the new restrictions. The novels of Charlotte Bronte, which now seem in some respects so romantically unreal, were denounced for sensuality and immorality; and for a time English fiction was in danger of dwindling to the pale parables of Miss Mulock and Miss Yonge.

But for this reaction against truth, this sudden fear of touching on any of the real issues of the human comedy and tragedy,Thackeray’s natural endowment would have placed him with the very greatest; Trollope might conceivably have been a lesser Jane Austen; and George Eliot, perhaps born with the richest gifts of any English novelist since Thackeray, might have poured out her treasures of wit and irony and tenderness without continually pausing to denounce and exhort.

But the artist depends on atmosphere for the proper development of his gift; and all these novelists were cramped by the hazard of a social convention from which their continental contemporaries had the good fortune to escape. The artist of other races has always been not only permitted but enjoined to see life whole; and it is this, far more than any superiority of genius, that lifts Balzac, Stendhal and Tolstoy so high above even Thackeray when the universal values are to be appraised.The great continental novelists are all the avowed debtors of their English predecessors; they took the English novel of manners in its amplitude, its merriment and pathos, and in their hands “the thing became a trumpet.”

In one respect the English novelists are still supreme; and that is in the diffusion of good humour, good manners one might almost say, which envelops their comedy and tragedy. Much that is savage and acrimonious in the French, dolorous and overwrought in the Russians, is strained away through this fine English bonhomie, leaving a clear, bright draught, not very intoxicating or even stimulating, but refreshing and full of a lasting savour. Nor does this prevalent good humour hinder the full expression of tragedy; it helps rather to extract the final bitterness from certain scenes in “Pendennis” and “Vanity Fair,” in “Middlemarch” and the “Chronicles of Barsetshire.”The last years of Lydgate, the last hour of Mrs. Proudie, seem the more terrible for being muffled in a secure and decent atmosphere of fair play and plumpudding.

Since then all the restraints of prudery which hampered the English novelists of the nineteenth century have come down with a crash, and the “now-that-it-can- be-told-school” (as some one has wittily named it) has rushed to the opposite excess of dirt-for-dirt’s sake, from which no real work of art has ever sprung. Such a reaction was inevitable. No one who remembers that Butler’s great novel, “The Way of All Flesh,” remained unpublished for over twenty years because it dealt soberly but sincerely with the chief springs of human conduct can wonder that laborious monuments of schoolboy pornography are now mistaken for works of genius by a public ignorant of Rabelais and unaware of Apuleius. The balance will right itself with the habit of freedom. The new novelists will learn that it is even more necessary to see life steadily than to recount it whole; and by that time a more thoughtful public may be ripe for the enjoyment of a riper art.