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THE NATURE OF PROSE FICTION
of 'realism', in particular the notion that by 'realism' is meant
an exclusive concern with 'low' subjects and the seamier side of
human life. From this position it is a short distance to the
fallacy that 'the real' and 'the ideal' are incompatible in art.^
The repercussions of this social interest were first felt in
France in the art of Balzac and Stendhal (Balzac's enthusiastic
salute to the otherwise neglected Stendhal is very largely a
gesture of sympathetic recognition 2). In England, they were
felt in the vigorous social novels of the 1840's and the early
1850's—in, for instance, Dickens's Dombey and Son (1846-8),
Bleak House (1852-3) and Hard Times (1854), Mrs. Gaskell's
Mary Barton ( 1 848) and North and South ( 1 854-5) 5 ^^^ Charles
Kingsley's Teast (1848) and Alton Locke (1850). In Russia, the
novel may be said to have come into being as a direct result of
this social concern. Gogol is a pioneer and Dostoevsky's remark,
'We have all come from under Gogol's Greatcoat', acknowledges
the originality in Russia of the portrayals of humble life
in The Greatcoat and Dead Souls (both of 1 842)
It was in France that writers were to allow this new range of
subject-matter to lead them to some damaging theories about
the function of the novel. Balzac's grandiose scheme to leave
behind a complete record of every aspect of his own life and
times is itself an extraordinary project, and so is the conception
on which it is based: that human beings who make up society
can be 'scientifically' classified. There is, however, a tremendous
imaginative vitality which lifts individual novels in Balzac's
Comedie Humaine above the limitations of his programme. Zola's
scientific programme is a more serious matter since it is more
ruthlessly followed. Zola really believed that Balzac had successfully
proved the novelist's obligation to carry out 'experiments'
which would illustrate the laws of heredity and environment—he
cites La Cousine Bette (1846) as an example^—and he
tried to put his own theories into practice in the huge Rougon-
Macquart series (1871-93). This brings us to the windy and pro-
^ See Stevenson's discussion of this problem below, pp. 72-3.
2 See H. de Balzac, 'Etude sur M. Beyle', CEuvres Completes (1873), Vol.
XXIII, pp. 687-738. Reprinted, with Stendhal's reply, as preface to C. K.
Scott-Moncrieff 's translation of Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma, Phoenix
Library, 1931.
^ See below, pp. 68-9.
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