Social History of Art, Volume 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age by Arnold Hauser

Author:Arnold Hauser [Hauser, Arnold]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2005-10-05T04:00:00+00:00

injured’, but there are no revolutionaries among them. At best, they waver between genuine democratic impulses and the reflection that, in spite of everything, class differences are justified and have a beneficent influence. The differences between them are, at any rate, of subordinate importance in comparison with the common features of their philanthropic conservatism.133

The modern social novel arises in England, as in France, in the period around 1830, and enjoys its heyday in the turbulent years between 1840 and 1850, when the country stands on the brink of revolution. Here, too, it becomes the most important literary form of the generation which has come to question the aims and standards of bourgeois society and which wants to explain the sudden rise and threatening ruin of it. But in the English novel the problems discussed are more concrete, of more general significance, less intellectualistic and sophisticated than in the French; the authors’ standpoint is more humane, more altruistic, but, at the same time, more conciliatory and opportunistic. Disraeli, Kingsley, Mrs. Gaskell and Dickens are Carlyle’s first disciples and are among the writers who accept his ideas most readily.134 They are irrationalists, idealists, interventionists, they scoff at utilitarianism and national economy, condemn liberalism and industrialism, and place their novels at the service of the fight against the principle of ‘laissez-faire’ and the economic anarchy which they derive from this principle. Before 1830 the novel as a vehicle of this kind of social propaganda was absolutely unknown, although in England the modern novel had been ‘social’ from the very beginning, that is, from Defoe and Fielding onwards. It was much more directly and deeply connected with the essays of Addison and Steele than with the pastoral and love novel of Sidney and Lyly, and its first masters owed their insight into the contemporary situation and their moral feeling for the social problems of the day to the stimuli which they had received from journalism. It is true that this feeling becomes blunted at the end of the first great period of the English novel, but it was by no means lost. The novel of terror and mystery, which took the place of Fielding’s and Richardson’s works in the public favour, had no direct connection with the facts of society or with reality in general, and in Jane Austen’s novels social reality was the soil in which the characters were rooted, but in no sense a problem which the novelist made any attempt to solve or interpret. The novel does not become ‘social’ again until Walter Scott, though in quite a different sense from what it had been in Defoe, Fielding, Richardson or Smollett. In Scott the sociological background is stressed much more consciously than in his predecessors; he always shows his characters as the representatives of a social class, but the picture of society that he draws is much more programmatic and abstract than in the novel of the eighteenth century. He founds a new tradition and is only very loosely connected with the Defoe-Fielding-Smollett line of development.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.