This essay appears to have been written for one of the English courses Frye took during his second and third years at Emmanuel College. His transcript for those two years indicates only that he received firsts for “Honor English.” The present paper is filed in the Northrop Frye Fonds alongside the papers on Eliot (1937) and Chaucer (1938), so it is also possible that it was written after Frye left Emmanuel. The references to Wyndham Lewis and Ramon Lull, both of whom Frye wrote about in 1936, might be used to argue for a date of 1936 or later. Another possibility is that the paper was written for Frye’s Oxford tutor, Edmund Blunden. On 9 February 1937 Frye says in a letter to Helen Kemp, “I read my anatomy paper to Blunden last night.”1 The prose fiction essay may have been the anatomy paper, or a later version of it. In early November of 1938 Frye read a paper to Blunden on the character book,2 and the references to that genre in the present essay provide some evidence to argue for a later date. The papers Frye read to Blunden seem to have been handwritten,3 and the prose fiction paper is typed. But this does not rule out its being an Oxford paper, since Frye typed his Blake manuscript, as well as his Eliot paper (no. 21), when he was at Merton College, borrowing a typewriter from classmate Joseph Reid.4 The evidence, in short, is inconclusive, but the paper does appear to have been written between 1935 and 1939.5 The typescript is in the NFF, 1991, box 37, file 4.
Prose fiction today seems to fall into a general negative antithesis of fiction and nonfiction, the former being about things admitted not to be true, and the latter about everything else. Fiction and facts are, thus, placed in opposition, and the distinction is between the imaginary and the real, the imaginary and the imaginative being, of course, identified. With the extraordinary vulgarity of this distinction we take immediate issue, for the word fiction, like the word poetry, means etymologically something made for its own sake. We, therefore, extend the term to include any form of prose writing which belongs to literature rather than to another subject. The distinction between the literary and the nonliterary is admittedly a very approximate one, but surely it does exist; and we have no hesitation in saying that the Anatomy of Melancholy, because it survives obviously in literature rather than in science or philosophy, is fiction, and that Gibbon’s Decline and Fall or Doughty’s Arabia Deserta are both fiction and nonfiction, depending on what one reads them for.
And even when one looks at the connotations of the ordinary use of the word, fiction seems to describe, not a group of art forms, but a commercial product: it is a trade name useful to booksellers, reviewers, and librarians, but quite meaningless to critics. Fiction, like books in general, rests on another antithesis of novel, which is long and has to be bound separately, and story, which is short and can go in a magazine. But length is not a very satisfactory criterion either, as fiction can obviously be of any length, and when we find, lumped together under the title of novel, works which go back to radically different literary traditions, we begin to consider the advisability of cleaning up our terms a bit. The present paper is an enquiry into the possibility of regarding modern fiction as a vast conglomerate, in which may be discerned certain structural principles, each manifesting itself in an art form, with a tradition of its own giving us examples sometimes fairly pure, sometimes mixed, sometimes only reached by a metaphor. To take an example from another field: is an epic the name of an art form, or is it simply literary jargon for a long poem? If it is an art form, we can assign certain characteristics to it, of which length will doubtless be one; and within those broad characteristics we can include the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid as classical examples, and the Divine Comedy or Paradise Lost as Christian examples. Browning’s Ring and the Book, on the other hand, has nothing whatever to do with this tradition, and if we call it an epic, we mean that an epic is simply a long poem. Similarly, it may be true that the novel is a long prose work and nothing more. But this is unsatisfactory, for surely we have an instinctive feeling which tells us that Point Counter Point is a novel and that The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is not one, and it is the duty of the critic to examine this instinct and see what is implied in it. Our initial attempt, then, will be to isolate the novel as an art form and as a literary tradition.
Let us take the literary tradition first. The novel we find developing in the eighteenth century as a middle-class literary product. Like everything else produced by bourgeois society, it is individualistic. It does not, like the drama, depend either on group production or group response, nor does it require, like music or the sermon, any personal contact between artist and connoisseur. We have to say “the novel,” while we can speak of “drama” without the definite article. Apart from this, however, the novel more nearly resembles the drama than any other major art form, for it is, like the drama, composed of plot or narrative, character and setting, with a strong bias toward objectivity. Historically, therefore, it descends from the drama, rising as the drama declines, and is bound up with the fortunes of a middle-class society.
The bourgeois revolt against the aristocracy, which reached the height of its power under Elizabeth, came in two waves, the first the religious assault of Puritan against Anglican, the second the political attack of Whig mercantilism on Tory conservatism, waves which to some extent overlap. With the former we have a long-sustained attempt to dethrone the two greatest Elizabethan art forms, music and drama, trying to transform an instinctive dislike into a moral principle. The Puritans fought the theatres from start to finish, closing them whenever they had power; they fought music until they permanently weakened its prestige in England. Shakespeare adds his final touch to the portrait of Cassius, the ruthless Puritan revolutionary, when he makes Caesar say of him:
He loves no plays
As thou dost, Antony; he hears no music.
[Antony and Cleopatra, 1.2.203–4]
The political attack, after the Restoration had brought back a revived drama, and Purcell in music, was renewed after 1688, reinforced by the attack of Collier on the stage. The Puritans themselves did not produce the novel, though their one great prose artist, Bunyan, is well on the way to it; but the Whigs undoubtedly did. Defoe, the Whig, is the ancestor of the novel; Swift, the Tory, ignored it. In the de Coverley papers a novelist’s interest is at work breaking down and disrupting the essay. As the novel rose with the middle classes, the drama declined. Congreve abandoned the stage at the height of his powers; Fielding, running foul of Whig censorship, turned to the novel. With the rise of the eighteenth-century weeping comedy, the drama became extinct as an art form, and with the fresh impetus given the middle classes by the Industrial Revolution, Jane Austen established the form of the modern novel, and the drama disappeared even as entertainment, surviving only as literature.
It is apparent that, while the drama uses the well-worn apparatus of plot, character, and setting, the more artistic the drama becomes, the more completely do plot and setting follow as implications of character. In other words, we shall not be far wrong if we define the drama as an objective study of character, and, if we examine the novel, we find that the same definition holds. This is why we say that the novel historically descends from the drama rather than simply that it replaces it. But a study of character, which, like the drama, depends on the limitations of time and performance and, therefore, on speed and on the ability of actors, is bound to make a use of convention which is not necessary to the novel. When Iago works on Othello, the development is inevitable enough, but we are given that development summarized: it is presented in the form of a convention the audience is prepared to accept. The novelist, if he is equally aware of the possibilities of his art form, avoids taking anything of the sort for granted: his approach is analytic rather than synthetic, and he expands his material to the limit. When Roger Chillingworth works on the hero of the Scarlet Letter, we get a sense, not of a swift piling up to a climax, as in Othello, but of an immense accretion of details, extending over a long period of time. In practice this means that the drama is, like music, a time-art, depending on rhythm in a way in which the novel does not. It also means the psychological analysis of character in the drama is presented in a summarized form, while in the novel all the implications are worked out. Thus, in the nineteenth century Browning, the one poet who thought of his poetry dramatically and in whom, alone of Victorian poets, speed and rhythm become positive factors in the writing, fails on the stage through overdetailed analysis and then develops the one dramatic concession to psychology, the soliloquy, into the monologue, and the monologue into the scheme of The Ring and the Book, fundamentally a drama turned inside out. The action in the drama means that the form is held together dynamically, and the world of the stage becomes a replica of the actual world, that is, a sphere, where the analysis of Browning’s poem, being two-dimensional, is best symbolized by a ring.
This is what happens to the drama in poetry; we are at present concerned with prose. When we speak of the tradition of the English novel and of those who have been most conscious of the novel as an art form, we think instinctively of Fielding, Jane Austen, Thackeray, Henry James, and perhaps Meredith. Now if one generalization about these various artists is safe, it is surely that their genius is more at home in the sphere of comedy than of tragedy. Hardy and Conrad being obvious exceptions, there are few novelists who have treated the novel as a vehicle of tragedy, and in considering the transition from Restoration drama to the eighteenth-century novel, it is apparent that the latter owes, as an art form, more to the comedy of manners in the former than to the tragedies of Dryden or Otway. The tendency of tragedy to verse and of comedy, particularly the comedy of manners, to prose, should not be overlooked either. The novel, being a bourgeois art form, tends to focus interest on the domestic, the concrete, and the immediate, the criteria of action being moral rather than religious, and the approach realistic, which fits in with Aristotle’s definition of comedy as a study of ignoble characters.
Now, is this association of the novel with the comedy of manners purely accidental, or does it lead us a step further in our quest for the isolation of the art form? Tragedy surely entails the striking down of a hero by some external force he cannot control. We say external, because, although in most tragedies the external situation coincides with a defect in the character of the hero, still the emphasis in tragedy is on the misfortune of the hero, so that such studies of decadence as Volpone in drama or Emma Bovary in the novel have too satiric an undercurrent in them to be called tragedies. Therefore, the development of an external force in tragedy carries with it the development of an emphasis on narrative, of a sense of linear movement which sweeps the characters along in its progress. This development of narrative is not the same thing as the complication of plot, for plot, in the sense of intrigue, is more of a uniform pattern than the wider term narrative needs to be. And if we are to establish a distinction in fiction paralleling that of tragedy and comedy in drama, we should restrict the term novel to the extended, analytic development of the comedy of manners, the art form of the study of character followed by Jane Austen and Henry James, and distinguish it from prose fiction in which a narrative takes an active part in bringing tragedy to the characters, a form which we here call the tale.
This difference is only an emphasis difference, of course; but the distinction is there, just as there is real distinction between tragedy and comedy even when we find them inextricable in the same play, in Troilus and Cressida, for instance. The association of the tale with tragedy is evidenced by the way in which tragedy in its most concentrated forms tends to require a narrator and a responding chorus, as in Greek tragedy and in the St. Matthew Passion. Again, the necessity for a swiftly moving tale to depend on rhythm makes it a good form for poetry as well as prose, and the intense conservatism of tragic formulae, as opposed to those of comedy, which change with every new order of society, gives an extended meaning and tradition to the word tale lacking in the word novel.
The tale, therefore, we here treat as an art form of prose fiction distinct from the novel, with a bias toward tragedy rather than comedy, and with a tendency to make the narrative carry along the characters rather than the characters work out the narrative. It has other characteristics as well. In the first place, as it deals with forces external to the central characters which are, as far as they are concerned, irresistible, it is in far closer contact with the nonhuman and superhuman worlds than anything connected with the comedy of manners could be. In the second place, depending as it does on narrative, it also depends on speed and compression of events in a way the more agglutinative novel does not, so that an obvious advantage is gained, as compared with the novel, through brevity. The novel gains where the tale loses by the accretion of detail. The tale is not, of course, the short story; that is another commercial product, a hybrid consisting of a tale-form inherited from Poe, an anecdote-form inherited from O. Henry, and a sketch-form inherited from de Maupassant.
In the eighteenth century the realistic psychological analysis of Richardson, which is obviously part of the tradition of the novel, is at the opposite pole from the tales of the Gothic horror school, an antithesis which later developed into the antithesis of Scott’s treatment of the tale and Jane Austen’s treatment of the novel. Scott was obviously much less conscious of his art form than Jane Austen was of hers, but it is significant that the most tragic of his stories, The Bride of Lammermoor, is admittedly the one which shows him most conscious of it. In Dickens, where the interaction of character is so skilful and the alleged “plots,” such as the long subterfuges of old Martin Chuzzlewit and the Boffins, so irritatingly stupid, the only book more narrative than character study, A Tale of Two Cities, is the one tragedy. Later on we have Jekyll and Hyde, The Prussian Officer, Heart of Darkness, and The Turn of the Screw as varying examples of the pure tale. The tragic tone of Conrad and Hardy, as opposed to the comedy of manners tradition in Meredith, James, and Galsworthy, is largely owing to their use of various characteristics of the tale; the association with nonhuman and superhuman worlds previously mentioned, and the careful planning of events so that the destinies of the characters appear to hang on them rather than the reverse. It was no doubt the association of the tale with a narrator which accounts for Conrad’s use of Marlow, whose introduction on grounds of technical expedience is surely a mistake. The tragedy of Tess is presented, like the tragedy of Othello, in the framework of a convention to be accepted by the reader, which gives evidence of the influence of other traditions than the novel at work.
But, of course, tale and novel together, with all their ramifications, do not exhaust the concept of fiction as we have defined it above. Gulliver’s Travels, for instance, is certainly fiction, but it is just as certainly not a novel. It is, ostensibly, a development of the traveller’s tale, and the connection of A Tale of a Tub with the form is indicated in the title. But this particular adoption of the tale form is in both cases a pretext; the tale itself is parodied, in one case by the unexpected application made of its machinery, in the other by the digressions which smother it. The satire twists everything into another shape, and that other shape must be a third form of prose fiction, unless we are prepared to say that the satire is incidental, which is a complete absurdity with Swift.
There are, of course, two great periods of bourgeois dominance in Western culture: the one commencing with the movement represented by the Renaissance and Reformation and the other with the development of mercantilism and the Industrial Revolution. The former is the period of the highest culture in our tradition, extending over the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, the period of “great masters” in all the arts. In it prose fiction will, of course, take on different forms. There would hardly be much place for the novel and the prose fiction form of the tale with a flourishing drama, and prose fiction would tend to avoid both the study of character and the development of narrative in search of more distinctive forms. Now owing to our ordinary restricted use of the term fiction, most histories of English fiction are faced with a prodigious hiatus when they arrive at the seventeenth century. Deloney, Nashe, and the rest are, perhaps, canonical; but the seventeenth century, although it is the age of Browne and Burton and Earle and Fuller and Bunyan and many other fine artists who wrote highly entertaining prose solely for its own sake, becomes, for these historians, the age of translations of Madame de Scudéry. If we can establish an art form for prose fiction between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, we might arrive at a better perspective.
Two forms closely allied to fiction in the restricted sense of the word are, of course, the picaresque novel and the character book. The latter, which is in most of its manifestations closely connected with the theory of humours, is frankly an attempt to study character through other units than those of the individual: in the Microcosmography, for example, the individuals exist only insofar as they are types. In the picaresque novel, too, the emphasis is directed, not toward the analysis of character, but to the building up of an attitude, almost invariably satiric, toward society: it is, like the drama, a synthetic rather than an analytic form. Now if we consider both of these forms as different species of one genus, we arrive at a prose fiction which is, like the novel, individualistic so far as the author is concerned, but inclined to leave the study of character and the telling of stories to the drama, to generalize both characters and narrative, and to direct the form toward the building up of a certain argument or attitude the author wishes to present. It is more subjective in presentation than the novel and is more obviously selective; but it deals with equally objective material. In short, it is essentially, in the broadest sense of the word, a thesis, a working out or ordered arrangement of a subject or point of view. This art form of prose fiction, which dominated its field in English literature from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, we here call the anatomy. Its relation to the essay, if the latter term be restricted to the literary art form which develops from Montaigne and Bacon, parallels the relation of the novel or tale to the short story; the anatomy is a synthesis or interweaving of ideas where the essay develops one.
The word anatomy is, of course, a literary term, but logically it can be applied to any presentation of history, philosophy, religion, economics, etc., which survives through its literary value. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall could be regarded as an anatomy from the point of view of English literature, and Locke’s Essay or Hume’s Enquiry are examples of the carrying over of the machinery of the anatomy form into another field, just as the philosophical dialogue carries over the machinery of the drama. The Compleat Angler is an anatomy of angling; Berkeley’s Siris is an example of a philosophical treatise in which the material is arranged, not so much in accordance with the demands of the subject called philosophy as in accordance with the interests and outlook of its author, and, therefore, ranks as a philosophical anatomy. These are examples of an objective interest of the author treated from a literary standpoint. But the author may be interested in building up his own attitude to a given question, in which case we have such anatomies as Religio Medici or Areopagitica. Or he may be interested in working out his attitude to society, which may result in a generalized satire, such as the Anatomy of Abuses, or in a Utopia such as that of More or Campanella: the Utopia, and the satire on the Utopia, belonging essentially to this form. The archetypal anatomy is, of course, the Bible, and the issuance of the Authorized Version greatly influenced the seventeenth-century development of the form and helped to colour its tone.6 One essential characteristic of all these anatomies is the display of erudition, which is necessitated by the demands of the form.
Coming back to the picaresque novel, we find that that, too, is on the whole a development of the anatomy. Some picaresque novels are, of course, wholly irresponsible, devoid of the more intellectual interest necessary for such a classification, but the greater ones preserve the quality of presenting a certain attitude on the part of the author. Don Quixote is only incidentally a study of character: the whole point about Don Quixote’s character is surely that it is not all there. He forms a focus for the author’s satiric attitude to certain carefully selected aspects of contemporary Spanish life. The same satiric attitude is usually responsible for the choice of the picaro: certainly in Lesage and in Quevedo, and hardly less so in our own tradition from Jacke Wilton to Jonathan Wild. The essential point about any anatomy which does deal with human character is, we have seen, that it generalizes personality to a greater extent than would be possible to a novel; but, of course, the extent to which it does so in any particular book may be a matter of opinion. However, Arcadia and Euphues, which latter incidentally is subtitled The Anatomy of Wit, are surely anatomies, as they manifest much more obviously the author’s generalized attitude to society than they do any profound objective psychological analysis. The character book more evidently comes under the head of anatomy; the very choice of such a title as Microcosmography shows the anatomist’s conceptual and abstract approach to human personality. But the character books are rather sketchy designs; the genuine anatomy does not stop with summarizing people as types or humours; it regards those types as representative of the larger thesis it is putting across. So that on those very rare occasions when the extended allegory enters prose fiction, it, too, becomes a phase of the anatomy.
The anatomy began with the Renaissance. The most important forms of prose fiction in the Middle Ages were the romance and the novella or summarized tale established by Boccaccio. Both forms survived the sixteenth century, but the anatomy can hardly be said to have existed long before 1500, though it was well on the way in such occasional precocious developments as Ramon Lull’s Blanquerna. The reason may be that in the Middle Ages erudition had a primarily objective value, and the theses advanced were judged by their relationship to the system of thought prevalent at the time. With the abandonment of the scholastic synthesis, this objective criterion disappeared, and learning became an aspect of self-culture. The books written which expressed the ideas germinated by that learning, thus, tended to become individualistic theses. The anatomy led the attack on scholasticism; one of the earliest and finest anatomies was Cornelius Agrippa’s Vanity of the Arts and Sciences. Erasmus’s Encomium Moriae, More’s Utopia, Castiglione’s anatomy of a courtier follow in quick succession, and in the vast anatomy of Rabelais we have perhaps the highest Renaissance development of the form. Rabelais has everything: the presentation of an unmistakably coherent attitude, immense erudition, a Utopian scheme—are all included. Gigantism, again, as a technique for summarizing human character, is as important as the theory of humours or any other form of allegory.
There should be no necessity now to say that the anatomy in England reached its culmination with Burton. The Anatomy of Melancholy is not a book of Burton: it is Burton’s book; the complete expression of his personality. Needless to say, all the characteristics of the anatomy we have noted are in it: Utopian scheme, erudition, view of mankind through the generalized technique provided by the theory of humours, ordered presentation of a subject, and the rest, except that what we find partial in other anatomists we find complete in him. It is perhaps noteworthy that the anatomy in its largest and most highly developed and concentrated forms tends to become the book of its author rather than one of many; Burton, Rabelais, perhaps Sterne, being examples. The Anatomy of Melancholy is divided like a prelude and fugue; the prelude, the introduction of Democritus to the reader, being free in style, and the anatomy being capable of exhaustive analysis on a general threefold scheme. The metaphor is not altogether an irresponsible one, for both the anatomy and the contemporary fugue in music are, in different arts, the working out of the implications of a given subject and the organizing of them into a rhythmic unit.
With the rise of middle-class culture the anatomy began to merge into the novel. Bunyan is the first obvious transitional figure. Grace Abounding, as contrasted with Religio Medici, leans far over not only toward the picaresque novel, but to the complete psychological observation of character we get later in Richardson. Badman, again, is a type, and a very highly generalized one, but the fact that his career is narrated brings his life and death towards the tale form, and the fact that events and setting arise out of and take their form from his character makes it essentially the first English novel. The Pilgrim’s Progress is still an allegory, but Talkative, Faithful, Ignorance, Greatheart, are extremely wide awake humours, straining toward the complete independence they would have in a novel. The rigorous common sense of Defoe, Fielding, and Smollett anchored and localized the picaresque novel, and Richardson’s epistolary scheme, half narration and half revelation, provided a matrix for the development of tale and novel. The epistolary form is one which can be pressed into the service of the novel, as with Pamela, or the tale, as with Redgauntlet, or the anatomy, as with Howell’s Familiar Letters, and, therefore, does not exist as an independent form. The tale and novel reached, as we have seen, comparative dissociation in Scott and Jane Austen.
The advantage the English lost by giving birth to Jane Austen lay in the exploitation of the anatomy in the interests of the novel. We have seen that the anatomy attempts the intellectual completion of its subject, either through immense accretions of prodigious erudition, as in Burton, or through the selection of data on an objective body of material, as in The Compleat Angler, or through the revelation of the personality of the writer, as in Religio Medici, or through the rounding off of the form by an allegory, as in The Pilgrim’s Progress. Seldom do we find this in the nineteenth-century novel. We have one superb anatomy, Sartor Resartus (perhaps two if we count the Biographia Literaria), and occasional workings over of traditional forms—Landor’s Imaginary Conversations and Newman’s Apologia. But these remain apart from the novel. The more intellectualized novelists, Peacock, Disraeli, even Meredith, are by the very nature of their approach committed to the anatomic novel, but the first two hardly achieve masterpieces, and it is only in Sir Willoughby Patterne that we get a real fusion of analysis of character with an anatomy of egoism. The one really important anatomic novel of the century, Moby Dick, belongs to another development. George Borrow is an interesting figure: Lavengro and The Romany Rye are novels definitely aiming to present a coherent attitude to society on the part of the author, and The Bible in Spain and Wild Wales are early sketches of the geographical, even the cultural anatomy which will meet us in a moment. But he is an isolated and minor writer. Eliot speaks of England as a country that has produced many men of genius and few works of art,7 and nothing in the literature deserves that stricture better than the novel. It has remained an incomplete, abstract form, at its best narrow, localized, and class-conscious, at its worst chaotic. Nowhere does it give us the completeness of outlook of a Dostoevsky or a Balzac; and the purer as an art form it becomes, the less able is it to deal with the dynamic organizing forces of life, the more it shrinks away from the unsafe, from the unconventional, from the destructive impact of passion and the sex instinct on the safeguards on an established order.
In our discussion of the relation of the drama to the novel we stated that in the drama, which has to be over in two hours, speed is a positive artistic quality, and that as speed does not evidence itself in the novel, the drama depends on rhythm in a way that the novel does not. Now the anatomy, though it is as much a written art form as the novel, depends far more on rhythmic integration; it is essentially a synthetic form of art, as the emphasis is thrown on construction rather than analysis. This is a difficult point to establish, but it is obvious that when we are reading the anatomies of Burton or Browne we are conscious of a style in a way that we are not conscious of style when we are reading George Eliot or Dickens, and this difference is ultimately a difference between a work that is rhythmically organized and a work that is not. Style is always essentially a question of rhythm. Rabelais is immortal chiefly because he comes off rhythmically: the Anatomy of Melancholy is a living book and not a monstrosity of genial pedantry because of the breathless speed of the writing: Euphues and Arcadia were beached because they moved with more dignity and deliberation. In Tristram Shandy, the most perfect fusion of anatomy and novel we possess in English, and one of our few completely successful works of art, the continuous easy lilt and swing of the rhythm almost suggests a deliberate musical program. The counterpoint of my Uncle Toby’s ground bass, symbolized by Lillabulero, and Walter Shandy’s florid ornamentation over it, the amazingly skilful devices to avoid a full close anywhere in the work, the digressive episodes, the stretto climax of the Widow Wadman affair: all this elusive and subtle material is arranged with the most hair-splitting delicacy.
Paul Valéry says that the essence of a classical period in literature is to come after, to consolidate and regulate an impulse that has preceded it.8 But classicism does more than consolidate: when carried far enough, it exhausts the possibilities inherent in the impulse. Thus, in the classical backwater at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries we feel that Pope has not only matured the heroic couplet, but destroyed it; poets who come after Pope cannot handle it further, but must do something else. Swift lived at a time when anatomy and novel were merging, and being a Tory, he ignored the novel and concentrated on the anatomy—and destroyed it in the same way. His attitude to it is contemporary with Congreve’s attitude to the drama. The same sense of the inward destruction and exhaustion of possibilities of the form I find in The Way of the World, and it seems to me that Congreve’s retirement from the stage and his retreat into the frigid pedantry of his Pindaric odes manifest a pessimism in regard to a changing cultural order far more corrosive than Swift’s. For Swift’s attack on the anatomy was sustained and energetic, like Beethoven’s on the sonata, and left the way more open for newer developments.
Practically everything in the anatomy tradition was dissolved in the acid bath of Swift’s satire. First, there is the annihilation of the allegory in A Tale of a Tub. In Laputa, even in The Battle of the Books, the anatomy of erudition descending from Rabelais and Burton receives the same treatment. With the Houyhnhnms the target of the Utopia is set up only to be riddled the more completely. And the whole of the satiric anatomy form which comes down from the Romans is swept up, along with the picaresque tradition, in Lilliput and Brobdingnag. The individual contemplating society disapprovingly and remaining himself invulnerable: this is the scheme of the satiric anatomy. In Swift both individual and society become unbearably ridiculous, but all the endless variety and distortion of perspective in caricature, the whole system of Rabelaisian gigantism, has been rigidly conventionalized to a scale of one to twelve, neatly balanced by another of twelve to one. Satire on satire could hardly go further.
As for the rhythmic organization of the anatomy, the analogy between Swift’s attack on it and Beethoven’s attack on the sonata is suggested again. The difference between the rhythm of Burton and the rhythm of Swift is similar in some ways to the difference in rhythm between Mozart and Beethoven. The actual words in Burton may be read faster, but Swift gives an effect of greater speed, because the rhythmic basis of Burton is an easygoing, good-humoured lilt, and that of Swift is a pounding, driving burst of directed energy. With Swift it might be permissible to say that le style, c’est le nom.9 In A Tale of a Tub, for instance, the breaking up of the allegory by episodic digressions, as though the work were a rondo, would destroy the unity of any literary work which did not travel at the speed of music. As for Gulliver’s Travels, it is surely obvious that the ferocity and vigour of the satire require a style of great compression and swiftness, and that, on the other hand, such a style demands that sharp and pungent things be said. I am not concerned to attempt to prove that Swift’s choice of subject matter was conditioned by the demands of his form, but I am anxious to disprove the sloppy assumption that the breathless ecstasy of repulsion and horror in Gulliver’s Travels can be explained purely on subjective grounds. If Swift were a completely disillusioned pessimist, his work would surely be sluggish, lazy, and despondent, if it got itself written at all. When a great man writes a great book, there are no causal connections between matter and manner in either direction, but a focusing of all the factors involved: the author’s character, the requirements of his forms, and the stage to which literary history has developed those forms. To speak of any acknowledged masterpiece as the work of a man out of touch with his time defines the speaker as an incompetent critic.
A corollary of this principle is that art forms are organic growths: they go through certain well-defined stages of development, maturity, decline, and exhaustion. Elizabethan drama is an excellent example of this: the collapse of blank verse into loose rhetorical prose, the gradual distillation and thinning out of tragic themes in Brome and Shirley, the continued probing of the borderlands of consciousness in search of novelty, the Puritanic advance and the closing of the theatres all coincide at the end. The novel is drawing to a close in precisely the same way, as the society which produced it changes into a new social order, and it is going through the same stages of decadence and winding up of its inherent possibilities. If we get a new organization of society, we shall assuredly get a new form of prose fiction. The analysis of individual character will give place to something else. If our new social regime depends on cooperation rather than competition, and it looks as though it will be compelled to do so, we shall probably see a new growth of the communal art form of the drama, which will no doubt absorb much of the study of character. It would appear, then, that we are developing a prose fiction opposed to the Jane Austen tradition and more in sympathy with the seventeenth-century anatomy. It will not be a revival of the anatomy: nothing ever revives in art; but possibly an expansion of the novel to include anatomic features and provide us with the synthesis of the two forms we found lacking in the preceding century.
In general, the novel does show a gradual process of expansion as it develops into something that is not quite the novel. We have noted the merging of tale and novel in Conrad and Hardy, and around the turn of the century the exhaustion of possibilities in the character-analysis novel coincided, of course, with a growing sense of larger intellectual problems in human situations requiring more explicit treatment and with an increased sense of flux in the social order. Thus, the study of character steadily tends to expand its perspective until it sees individuals as types again, this time as types of a class, or civilization, or culture. Samuel Butler, typical of Victorian self-distrust, reverts to the anatomy, Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited belonging to the satiric side of the Utopian tradition—the Utopia positive reviving as well, of course, with Morris, Wells, Bellamy, and so on. The autobiographical novel was a further step in trying to gain for the dramatic novel the generalized social perspective of the picaresque novel, a movement completed in the stream of consciousness tradition, which has a seventeenth-century ancestor in Pepys’s diary. This pull toward the anatomy has influenced even those temperamentally unsuited to the form: H.G. Wells is a good blackboard example of a growth from first-rate tale to second-rate novel, and from second-rate novel to third-rate anatomy.
The rise of class-consciousness and the habit of thinking of people in terms of class labels necessarily plays its part in the development of a literary form to anatomize the capitalist system in its various aspects, simple examples being the popularized technicalities of Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell, and that in its turn expands to what might be called the cultural anatomy, the treatment of character as the product of a certain cultural consciousness. Galsworthy’s Forsyte studies tend toward this: even The Ambassadors, the ripest work of the most conscious artist among English novelists, expands into a study of the impact of two civilizations and cultural modes of thought of which the characters become symbolic. In our own day Briffault’s Europa and the Men of Good Will series are random examples of what is likely to become the central medium of twentieth-century prose. The more exotic cultural anatomy will probably gain more ground as the Spenglerian dialectic begins to penetrate into English consciousness: at present Arabia Deserta is the most conspicuous example. In the novels of D.H. Lawrence there is a gradual progression toward the cultural anatomy of which The Plumed Serpent is the best instance; in those of Aldous Huxley, a similar culmination in the Utopian satire of Brave New World, which continues the tradition of Swift and Samuel Butler into the contemporary cultural anatomy period.
As individuals continue to be increasingly regarded as cultural products, there will necessarily follow a new emphasis on symbolism. In this connection the importance and influence of one of the greatest anatomies in the English language, Frazer’s Golden Bough, in revealing as it does the symbolic basis of unconscious activity, will be difficult to overestimate. The treatment of symbolism by contemporary psychologists, Jung for example, will no doubt merge with this, but it has at present fewer purely literary connotations. Joseph and His Brethren is perhaps the leading descendant of Frazer at present. The stream of consciousness tradition, following out the subjective side of the contemporary anatomic development, is rapidly moving into symbolism, and in Ulysses the imposition of the Odyssey pattern on the characters brings in a double focus which provides endless opportunities for treating the symbolic implications of human thoughts and actions. Ulysses, again, is, if we except Blake’s abortive, unfinished, and unpublished Island in the Moon, the first rhythmically organized novel since Tristram Shandy. The general tightening up of rhythm in novels influenced by Joyce and Proust and the awakening sense that style, which is a sense of rhythm, is the essential element in the writing of prose, and not simply something to be ladled into a purple passage (if I am not mixing metaphors), are also factors in bringing us nearer to twentieth-century prose fiction.
There remains a further question. Much of the material we have been dealing with is satiric, and satire in prose is obviously not an art form but the expression of an attitude. But does not the satire in prose, i.e., a work permeated by the satiric attitude, tend to approach some such form as the anatomy? For the pure novel is rather too objective a form for the satirist to make sure that his points are striking home: in spite of its association with the comedy of manners, surely the most artistic novels, those of Jane Austen or Henry James, are satires only by implication. The satire demands some form which permits of more subjective arrangement of material, however objective the material itself may be: in the novel the expression of direct satire brings the author on the stage, as we can see in Thackeray. The material of the satirist is human society, quidquid agunt homines,10 which implies that the prose art form we are evolving now, which is to incorporate the subjective arrangement and systematized outlook of the anatomy with the character study of the novel, will establish the satire as an art form. Wyndham Lewis propounds somewhat similar principles in his Men without Art, and The Apes of God is both an anatomy of charlatanism and a satire, though Lewis is far too proud of the fact that he possesses no sense of rhythm to supply a complete example.
There is hardly space here to examine the influence of the anatomy form on poetry, as distinct from the epic. Religio Laici corresponds to Religio Medici, of course; and, in various periods, the very literal anatomy of The Purple Island, the Essays of Pope, The Pleasures of the Imagination, are random examples. To recapitulate: the conglomerate of contemporary fiction consists on the whole of varying admixtures of three main elements, anatomy, tale, and novel, using these words as names of art forms. The novel and the tale are bourgeois developments of an objective treatment of the interaction of narrative and character which in an earlier age was on the whole associated with the drama, and they bear to one another somewhat the relationship of comedy to tragedy. In the novel proper the characters tend to act out the events; in the tale the events tend actively to influence the characters, so that we get more sense of nonhuman or superhuman activity. The tale tends to be briefer than the novel and to depend more on factors of concentration, such as speed of narrative or rhythm of style. Heart of Darkness and The Turn of the Screw are fairly pure examples of the tale: Pride and Prejudice and Portrait of a Lady, fairly pure examples of the novel: Lord Jim and Tess of the D’Urbervilles represent a fairly complete merging of both elements. The tale continually recalls the idea of a narrator and tends to isolate the rhythmic side of drama; the novel approaches drama more by its objectivity. The anatomy is the art form which dominated prose fiction between Utopia and Gulliver’s Travels, reaching its culmination in Burton, merging with the novel in Tristram Shandy, existing beside a novelistic tradition in Sartor Resartus and Erewhon, and tending to merge with both tale and novel as those forms become exhausted with the breakdown of middle-class society. It is essentially a thesis or ordered presentation of a subject, either to reveal a certain attitude on the part of the author, as with Religio Medici, or to present one of his objective interests, as in The Compleat Angler. When it deals with human character, it views it as consisting of general types rather than personalities, as in the character books or the Anatomy of Melancholy, or else the focus is on the author’s attitude to society as represented by certain individuals, as in the more consciously artistic picaresque novels, in the generalized anatomic satire, or in the Utopia form. The treatment of character in the anatomy, thus, is closer to the allegorical or stereotyped than in the novel proper. The anatomy depends on the completion of a certain outlook, both intellectually and rhythmically, and is, therefore, at its best more integrated than the novel and is a form in which style is a positive quality. It is not being revived now, but the novel is expanding into a new development of it, owing chiefly to the rise of class and cultural consciousness and to the impending renaissance of drama. Marx’s anatomy of capitalism may influence the growth of a class-conscious anatomy-novel; Spengler’s anatomy of Western culture, the growth of a culturally conscious one. At present anatomy and novel, though merging, are not completely fused: The Golden Bough and Arabia Deserta are not novels, and The Forsyte Saga, Jean Christophe, Europa, and Men of Good Will are not anatomies. But the central lines of twentieth-century prose fiction run through a form which will consider individuals in relation to the cultural or class entities they spring from, and may, therefore, among other things, establish an art form for satire. The closest nineteenth-century approach to this form in the novel is perhaps The Brothers Karamazov. It is possible that the new anatomy of civilization may be divisible, like the seventeenth-century anatomy, into subjective and objective presentations of the author’s attitude, in which case the Bergsonian stream of consciousness tradition culminating in Proust might represent the furthest development of the subjective side we have yet achieved. In conclusion, may I throw out the tentative suggestion that the culturally conscious novel, such as The Plumed Serpent or Joseph and His Brethren, is associated with a study of the working of religious impulses in society, and that the class-conscious novel, such as Europa, is associated with a study of class struggle, and that if we eventually see a class struggle transforming itself into a religion, as with Christianity in the Roman Empire, we will also see a merging of these two traditions into the great prose art form of the future?