The Columbia History of the British Novel

that the novelist should be a 'scientific observer.'

These assumptions reveal the continuing influence, in England in the 1890s, of French naturalism; that is, of the view that writers should not flinch from unpoetic subject matter and that they should treat whatever they write about with «scientific» exactitude and objectivity. -608-

The assumptions, however, are Cosima Chudleigh's, not Symonds's. Cosima is eventually persuaded, by the man she loves, a critic of force and integrity, to abandon them and to develop instead the 'personal flavour' that has always characterized English fiction.

French naturalism, resolutely unpoetic, exhaustively researched, was something English writers of any ambition measured themselves against. They could not ignore it. But unlike their American counterparts (Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser) they did not, in the end, assimilate it. The story of that resistance, that avoidance, is, to some extent, the story of English fiction in the final decades of the nineteenth century.

In 1896, George Gissing reported that there was 'no public for translated novels-except those of Zola.' In England, Zola was naturalism. He had articulated the creed of objectivity in Le roman expérimental (1880). 'We must operate with characters, passions, human and social data as the chemist and physicist work on inert bodies, as the physiologist works on living bodies.' No subject matter was beyond him. He had «done» peasant life in La terre, the stock exchange in L'Argent, Bohemia in L'Oeuvre, heavy industry in Germinal, and so on. But it wasn't, finally, the methodology or the choice of subject matter that made Zola such a force. English writers have always found method, when proclaimed as such, fairly resistible. It was, rather, the view of existence written into, and encoded by, his narratives.

For the naturalist fiction that began to appear in France in the 1870s added a new pattern to the small stock of curves describing the shape lives take (or adapted an old one from Classical and Racinian tragedy): the plot of decline, of physical and moral exhaustion. Most nineteenthcentury novels divided existence into a long rise stretching to the age of sixty, measured in social and moral terms, and a short (physical) decline. Naturalist fiction envisaged instead a rapid physical rise to the moment of reproduction in the twenties, then a long redundancy, a morbidity accelerated by the emergence of some innate physical and moral 'flaw.' Its narratives are shaped not by a process of moral and social adjustment but by the reiteration of genetic inheritance.

Zola's Rougon-Macquart novels (1871–1893) described the effects of heredity and environment on the members of a single family, tracing the passage of a genetic «flaw» down the legitimate line of the Rougons and the illegitimate line of the Macquarts. Henry James pointed out -609- that the development of each section of the long chronicle was 'Physiologically determined by previous combinations.' In each generation, the inherited flaw topples an individual life into a downward spiral of disease, alcoholism, poverty, or madness. This downward spiral is the way in which naturalist novels, in Europe and America, spoke about individual and social development.

Physiological narratives fed an anxiety about social decline whose formal expression was the theory of «degeneration» that began to emerge, in the natural and medical sciences, during the second half of the nineteenth century. The age of 'evolution,' 'progress,' and «reform» developed an urgent interest in regression, atavism, and decline. Indeed, it was Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection that, in Britain at any rate, provided a context. At first, the theory had seemed to suggest that evolution was inevitably progressive, slowly but surely transforming the simple into the complex, the primitive into the civilized. Increasingly, however, Darwin and his followers came to realize that evolution was not synonymous with progress. Environment operated in various ways to different effects, and the most adaptive inherited characteristics were not necessarily the «highest» or most «civilized» ones. Gradually, attention shifted to examples of regression. In Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism (1880), Darwin's disciple Edwin Ray Lankester pointed out that parasites, which necessarily postdate their host organisms, are nonetheless 'simpler and lower in structure' than those organisms.

The implications for social theory seemed distressingly clear. Lankester himself talked of the decline of the 'white races' into parasitism. Paradigms of regression created by the natural and medical sciences began to play an important part in the analysis of social change. Degeneration was seen as a self-reproducing pathological process: not the effect, but the cause of crime, poverty, disease (and experimental literature). Max Nordau's Degeneration, a lurid and influential treatise published in translation in 1895, proclaimed the end of civilization in biblical cadence. But his conviction that the European races were degenerating derived from medical science rather than from the Bible. Physicians, he said, had recognized in the behavior of the European elites a «confluence» of «degeneracy» and 'hysteria.' All the new tendencies in the arts could safely be regarded as «manifestations» of this confluence.

In 1910, Henry Adams pointed out that Europeans had become obsessed with 'supposed social decrepitude,' particularly in the cities. -610- 'A great newspaper opens the discussion of a social reform by the axiom that 'there are unmistakeable signs of deterioration in the race. The County Council of London publishes a yearly volume of elaborate statistics, only to prove, according to the LondonTimes, that 'the great city of today, of which Berlin is the most significant type, 'exhibits a constantly diminishing vitality. ' Evidence of diminishing vitality included not only the poor standard of health among army recruits, but also the falling birth rate, the decline of the rural population and the prevalence of alcoholism and nervous exhaustion. More or less any social «problem» could be attributed to it.

Naturalism's decline plot was the perfect match to the social narrative articulated by degeneration theory; too perfect a match, in fact, since it was itself regarded, by Nordau and others, as a symptom of degeneracy. British writers, then, were not simply competing with a new literary technique, a method and a choice of subject matter. Rather, they had to decide whether to exploit or moderate or deny an anxiety about social decline that was already a habit of mind among their readers.

Henry James, in Paris in 1884, told W. D. Howells that he respected Zola, despite his pessimism and his 'handling of unclean things.' It was the handling of unclean things that at first dictated the British response to Zola. Henry Vizetelly began to issue translations in the same year; he was tried for publishing obscene books in 1889, convicted, and sent to prison for three months. By that time, however, the other feature noted by James-the pessimism inscribed in naturalism's decline plots-had made its mark on the English novel.

Like Zola, George Gissing researched his subjects assiduously. His diary shows him going over 'a die-sinker's place' in Clerkenwell, in preparation for The Nether World (1889), and getting some 'useful ideas.' Gissing was proud that Charles Booth had used his novels as a source of information about working-class life, and he returned the compliment by studying Life and Labour of the People in London (1892–1903) in the British Museum; he was both flattered and irritated to discover that the Reverend Arthur Osborne Jay's Social Problem (1893) had incorporated, without acknowledgment, a long passage from The Nether World. Like Zola, he tended to «do» a subject per novel: the literary marketplace in New Grub Street (1891), suburban life in In the Year of Jubilee (1894), and so on.

The subject he returned to most frequently during the 1880s, in Workers in the Dawn (1880), The Unclassed (1884), Demos (1886), — 611- Thyrza (1887), and The Nether World, was urban deprivation. Gissing said that he wanted to capture 'the very spirit of London working-class life,' and he came closer to doing so than any other Victorian novelist except Margaret Harkness. Gissing's slums exist for us in their carefully differentiated sounds and smells, in the desires and anxieties that only an implacably earnest investigator would have troubled to disentangle from the received view of universal brutality and ignorance. He could always, and always meant to, tell the difference.

And yet the story told by these novels does not, in the end, differ all that much from the stories told by Zola and by degeneration theory. In Workers in the Dawn Arthur Golding, a would-be friend of the people, marries and attempts to reform a young prostitute, Carrie Mitchell. But his grammar lessons have no effect on a woman who is genetically programmed for a life of whoring and brandy drinking. When she leaves him for another man, he sadly pictures to himself the downward spiral of her future career: 'how her passions, now set free from every restraint, would scourge her on from degradation to degradation, till she met her end in some abyss of unspeakable horror.' Gissing's slums contain a residue of degenerates who so far exceed the norms of social classification that they can only be regarded as members of a different species. Clem Peckover, in The Nether World, is compared to a 'savage,' and to a 'rank, evilly-fostered growth.' 'Civilisation could bring no charge against this young woman; it and she had no common criterion.'

Gissing's methodical approach, and his degeneration plots, align him with Zola. But he never eradicated the personal flavor that was thought to distinguish English from French fiction. Carrie Mitchell was based on Nell Harrison, a young prostitute he himself had married and tried unsuccessfully to reform. Osmond Waymark, the hero