novelistsonnovel00allo

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THE NATURE OF PROSE FICTION
Henry Brooke, much remedy matters with The Man of Feeling
(1771) and The Fool of Quality (1766-70). Signs of improvement
appear with Godwin's Caleb Williams (1795)— perhaps the most
original novel in the later
eighteenth century—and with the
books of Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth, whom Jane
Austen praised in her famous defence of the novel in the fifth
chapter of Northanger Abbey (18 18). A nice equiUbrium of all its
elements does not in fact appear in the English novel before Jane
Austen, who wins a triumph for the Augustan virtues of propriety
and proportion without in the least refusing to gratify
our 'love of the uncommon'. OfJane Austen's five novels, three
are 'Cinderella' stories in which the heroine rises through loveattachments
from some lowly or humiliating social position to
pride of place and fortune. Jane Austen transposes the pleasurably
'romantic' into the key of ordinary everyday experience,
making her transformation of fortune appear, to use Clara
Reeve's words, 'such as may happen to our friend or to ourselves'.
^
When she subjects Mrs. Radcliffe and the sensational
novelists to her ridicule, she does so because they fail to 'strike
the balance between the uncommon and the ordinary', not
because they dare to deal in the 'uncommon' itself. If it were
otherwise, she would hardly have taken to story-telling on her
own account.
But the discrimination of her art is very different in kind from
later attempts to 'strike the balance'. These are often the result
of a new tendency, quite alien to the eighteenth-century novel,
to probe the nature of this human desire for 'the uncommon'
and 'the exceptional' and its connection with 'such things as
may pass every day'. The impulse to indulge a longing for the
uncommon is of course encouraged by certain forces at work in
the nineteenth century and this indulgence is clearly evident in
George Sand's early novels and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre
(1847) and Villette (1853). Stendhal, however, is the best example
of the self-critical artist who sets out to portray in his
fictional characters what happens when this longing for 'the
exceptional' conflicts with the demands ofcontemporary society.
Stendhal, in one sense,
belongs to that long French tradition
which extends from Madame de Lafayette to Proust and favours
the minute analysis of every aspect of amitie, honnete or other-
^ See below, p. 5 1
18