novelistsonnovel00allo

THE NATURE OF PROSE FICTION
Romance'. 'What a duce,' writes Richardson in 1762, 'do you
think I am writing a Romance? Don't you see that I am copying
Nature?' ^ More than a century later, James still recognizes
this difference, although he is more acutely conscious of the
difficulties of definition. In his view, the romance deals with
'experience liberated, so to speak, experience disengaged, disembroiled,
disencumbered, exempt from the conditions that we
usually know to attach to it'.^ The novelist knows that 'the
balloon of experience is in fact tied to the earth' and he keeps
it that way, however long his cable may be: but 'the art of the
necromancer is, "for the fun of it", insidiously to cut the cable'.
It says much for the natural imaginative gifts of our earlier
novelists that they kept the cable as long as possible, and sometimes
cut it, in spite of a certain amount of confusion about the
real nature of their 'new species of writing'.
In fact their attempts to understand their new kind, and to
relate it, however mistakenly, to earUer forms of fiction, may
have done much to keep their sense of wonder alive. As long
as they were occupied in sorting out the complicated relationships
connecting their own art to classical epic and heroic or
pastoral romance, they were unlikely to remain completely
insulated from the imaginative appeal of these narratives.
Brooding over the old stories, the eighteenth-century novelist
could however be certain of one thing; whatever the degree of
his personal response to 'the marvellous', his finished work was
concerned, as little previous fiction had been, with 'natural'
behaviour and 'real' people. Sometimes he explained his preference
for this realism on moral grounds. Characters who are
a convincingly natural mixture of good and bad, he argued,
are more likely to provide useful examples than those who are
extraordinarily wicked or virtuous; moreover extravagance of
any kind misleads the reader and unfits him for ordinary life.
Since he was happier with classical support he sometimes tried
to claim a precedent in Greek and Roman epic, but this did
not really fortify his position. For one thing, the behaviour of
the characters in the classical epic did not accord with the
notions which a polite age entertained about the ideal way to
conduct oneself in society. In The History of Sir Charles Grandison
(1754), Richardson makes Lady Charlotte expand his own
^ See below, p. 41. * See below, p. 56.
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