novelistsonnovel00allo

THE NATURE OF PROSE FICTION
method, he has a tendency to the lyrical, a need to exalt, to enlarge
. . . Moreover he is well aware of this tendency in himself and fights
it
unremittingly only to succumb again and again.
The harshness which Zola uses in portraying contemporary
society—a harshness which was to be largely responsible for a
belief that 'realism' was necessarily incompatible with 'idealism'
in art—can indeed be felt as an expression of sour romanticism.
When they tried to incorporate 'the marvellous' into their
fiction, what the primitive novelists sensed and the great artists
have always succeeded in showing us is that a certain kind of
fantasy is a necessary and a valuable ingredient in fiction. This
fantasy does not provide a means of escape into a world of fixed
ideals—the world conjured up by so many heroic and chivalrous
romances— but, in Shelley's words, it 'quickens and enlarges
the mind'. The novel furthers this quickening process by
attempting to realize the wonderful and strange in terms of the
near and familiar.
// The Novel as a Portrait of Life
IN ORDER to create the illusion of 'reality' while gratifying our
'love of the uncommon in human experience', the noveUst, as
we have seen, holds to the Aristotelian view that he must make
us believe in the 'probability' of his characters and events.
'Every good author will confine himself within the bounds of
probability', writes Fielding. ^ He is at one with Richardson in
holding that the novelist should avoid, if possible, extremes of
virtue and vice in his characters together with such happenings
as 'sudden conversions', which, Richardson says emphatically,
have 'neither art, nor nature, nor twen probability, in them'.^
'There is required . . . enough of the manners of real life to give
an air of probability to the work', says Clara Reeve when she
comments on Horace Walpole's attempt 'to unite the various
merits and graces of the ancient Romance and modern Novel'.
In 'the fields of fancy, sunt certi denique fines', maintains Richard
Cumberland, and 'it requires a nice discernment to find them
out, and a cautious temper not to step beyond them'.^ Accord-
^ See below, p- 53.
^ See below, p. 61. ^ See below, p. 61.
* See below, p. 45. ^ See below, p. 48.
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