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History of English Literature

Notes the Victorian period applies more truly to the modern period—‘Caught between two worlds, one
dying, the other seeking to be born’. It is the conflict between the two that the common basis of
poetry has disappeared. In England of today the society is no longer homogenous; it is divided in
different groups who speak different languages. Meanings that are taken for granted in one group
are not understood in another. The western man is swayed by conflicting intentions, and is therefore
erratic and inconsistent in his behaviour. It is difficult for him to choose between communism and
capitalism, between belief in God and scepticism, confidence in science and fear of the atomic
bomb, because every belief is riddled with doubts. In no department of life do we find postulates
which can be accepted at their face values. In the absence of any common values compression of
meaning is impossible. The poets of today find themselves isolated from society, and so they write
in a language which cannot be understood by all. Sometimes the isolation of the poet is so extreme
that his writing cannot be understood by anyone but himself. That is why poetry has lost its
popularity in the modern time. But the very reasons which make the writing of poetry difficult
have offered opportunity to fiction to flourish. In prose the ambiguity can be clarified. Those
things which are no longer assumed can be easily explained in a novel.
But it is not merely on account of the loss of common pattern of psychological response, and the
absence of common basis of values, that the novel has come into ascendancy. Science, which is
playing a predominant role today, and which insists on the analytical approach, has also helped
the novel to gain more popularity, because the method of the novel is also analytical as opposed
to the synthetical. The modern man also under the influence of science is not particularly interested
in metaphorical expression which is characteristic of poetry. He prefers the novel form because
here the things are properly explained and clarified. Moreover the development of psychology in
the twentieth century has made men so curious about the motivation of their conduct, that they
feel intellectually fascinated when a writer exposes the inner working of the mind of a character.
This is possible only in the novel form.
After discussing the various reasons which have made the novel the most popular literary form
today, let us consider the main characteristics of the modern novel. In the first place, we can say
that it is realistic as opposed to idealistic. The ‘realistic’ writer is one who thinks that truth to
observed facts—facts about the outer world, or facts about his own feelings is the great thing,
while the ‘idealistic’ writer wants rather to create a pleasant and edifying picture. The modern
novelist is ‘realistic’ in this sense and not in the sense of an elaborate documentation of fact,
dealing often with the rather more sordid side of contemporary life, as we find in the novels of
Zola. He is ‘realistic’ in the wider sense, and tries to include within the limits of the novel almost
everything the mixed, average human nature and not merely one-sided view of it. Tolstoy’s War
and Peace and George Eliot’s Middle March had proved that the texture of the novel can be made
as supple and various as life itself. The modern novelists have continued this experiment still
further, and are trying to make the novel more elegant and flexible. Under the influence of
Flaubert and Turgeniev, some modern novelists like Henry James have taken great interest in
refining the construction of the novel so that there will be nothing superfluous, no phrase, paragraph,
or sentence which will not contribute to the total effect. They have also tried to avoid all that
militates against plausibility, as Thackeray’s unwise technique of addressing in his own person,
and confessing that it is all a story. They have introduced into the novel subtle points of view,
reserved and refined characters, and intangible delicacies, of motive which had never been
attempted before by any English novelist.
In the second place, the modern novel is psychological. The psychological problem concerns the
nature of consciousness and its relation to time. Modern psychology has made it very difficult for
the novelist to think of consciousness, as moving in a straight chronological line from one point to
the next. He tends rather to see it as altogether fluid, existing simultaneously at several different
levels. To the modern novelists and readers who look at consciousness in this way, the presentation
of a story in a straight chronological line becomes unsatisfactory and unreal. People are what they
are because of what they have been. We are memories, and to describe as truthfully at any given
moment means to say everything about our past. This method to describe this consciousness in
operation is called the ‘stream of consciousness’ method. The novelist claims complete omniscience

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