The novel can certainly be used as a tool for the better understanding of a departed age. The period following World War I had been caught forever in Hemingway’s Sun Also Rises (1926; called Fiesta in England), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels and short stories about the so-called Jazz Age, the Antic Hay (1923) and Point Counter Point (1928) of Aldous Huxley, and D.H. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod (1922) and Kangaroo (1923). The spirit of the English 18th century, during which social, political, and religious ideas associated with rising middle classes conflicted with the old Anglican Tory rigidities, is better understood through reading Smollett and Fielding than by taking the cerebral elegance of Pope and his followers as the typical expression of the period.
Similarly, the unrest and bewilderment of the young in the period after World War II still speak in novels like J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim (1954). It is notable that with novels like these—and the beat-generation books of Jack Kerouac; the American-Jewish novels of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth; and the black novels of Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin—it is a segmented spirit that is expressed, the spirit of an age group, social group, or racial group, and not the spirit of an entire society in a particular phase of history. But probably a Zeitgeist has always been the emanation of a minority, the majority being generally silent. The 20th century seems, from this point of view, to be richer in vocal minorities than any other period in history. Creator of life-style and arbiter of taste
Novels have been known to influence, though perhaps not very greatly, modes of social behaviour and even, among the very impressionable, conceptions of personal identity. But more young men have seen themselves as Hamlet or Childe Harold than as Julien Sorel, the protagonist of Stendhal’s novel The Red and the Black (1830), or the sorrowing Werther. Richardson’s novel may popularize Pamela, or Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga (1906–22) Jon, as a baptismal name, but it rarely makes a deeper impression on the mode of life of literate families. On the other hand, the capacity of Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) to influence young men in the direction of sybaritic amorality, or of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) to engender a freer attitude to sex, has never been assessed adequately. With the lower middle class reading public, the effect of devouring The Forsyte Saga was to engender genteelisms—cucumber sandwiches for tea, supper renamed dinner—rather than to learn that book’s sombre lesson about the decline of the old class structure. Similarly, the ladies who read Scott in the early 19th century were led to barbarous ornaments and tastefully arranged folk songs.
Fiction has to be translated into one of the dramatic media—stage, film, or television—before it can begin to exert a large influence. Tom Jones as a film in 1963 modified table manners and coiffures and gave American visitors to Great Britain a new (and probably false) set of expectations. The stoic heroes of Hemingway, given to drink, fights, boats, and monosyllables, became influential only when they were transferred to the screen. They engendered other, lesser heroes—incorruptible private detectives, partisans brave under interrogation—who in their turn have influenced the impressionable young when seeking an identity. Ian Fleming’s James Bond led to a small revolution in martini ordering. But all these influences are a matter of minor poses, and such poses are most readily available in fiction easily adapted to the mass media—which means lesser fiction. Proust, though he recorded French patrician society with painful fidelity, had little influence on it, and it is hard to think of Henry James disturbing the universe even fractionally. Films and television programs dictate taste and behaviour more than the novel ever could. Style Romanticism
The Romantic movement in European literature is usually associated with those social and philosophical trends that prepared the way for the French Revolution, which began in 1789. The somewhat subjective, anti-rational, emotional currents of romanticism transformed intellectual life in the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods and remained potent for a great part of the 19th century. In the novel, the romantic approach to life was prepared in the “sentimental” works of Richardson and Sterne and attained its first major fulfillment in the novels of Rousseau. Sir Walter Scott, in his historical novels, turned the past into a great stage for the enactment of events motivated by idealism, chivalry, and strong emotional impulse, using an artificially archaic language full of remote and magical charm. The exceptional soul—poet, patriot, idealist, madman—took the place of dully reasonable fictional heroes, such as Tom Jones, and sumptuous and mysterious settings ousted the plain town and countryside of 18th-century novels.
The romantic novel must be seen primarily as a historical phenomenon, but the romantic style and spirit, once they had been brought into being, remained powerful and attractive enough to sustain a whole subspecies of fiction. The cheapest love story can be traced back to the example of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), or even Rousseau’s earlier Nouvelle Héloïse. Similarly, best-selling historical novels, even those devoid of literary merit, can find their progenitor in Scott, and science fiction in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), a romantic novel subtitled The Modern Prometheus, as well as in Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. The aim of romantic fiction is less to present a true picture of life than to arouse the emotions through a depiction of strong passions, or to fire the imagination with exotic, terrifying, or wonderful scenes and events. When it is condemned by critics, it is because it seems to falsify both life and language; the pseudopoetical enters the dialogue and récit alike, and humanity is seen in only one of its aspects—that of feeling untempered with reason.
If such early romantic works as those of Scott and of the Goethe of The Sorrows of Werther have long lost their original impact, the romantic spirit still registers power and truth in the works of the Brontës—particularly in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, in which the poetry is genuine and the strange instinctual world totally convincing. Twentieth-century romantic fiction records few masterpieces. Writers like Daphne du Maurier, the author of Jamaica Inn (1936), Rebecca (1938), and many others, are dismissed as mere purveyors of easy dreams. It is no more possible in the 20th century to revive the original romantic élan in literature than it is to compose music in the style of Beethoven. Despite the attempts of Lawrence Durrell to achieve a kind of decadent romantic spirit in his Alexandria Quartet, the strong erotic feeling, the exotic setting, the atmosphere of poetic hallucination, the pain, perversion, and elemental force seem to be contrivances, however well they fulfill the original romantic prescription. Realism