What is curious, though, is that ideas are still today felt to be unsightly in the novel, whereas the nether areas—the cloaca—are fully admitted to view. I suppose that the ban on ideas that even now largely prevails, above all in English-speaking countries, is a heritage from modernism in its prim anti-Victorian phase. To Virginia Woolf, for instance, it was not question of what might be brought into the novel—sex, the natural functions—but of what should be kept out. In the reaction against the Victorian novel, it was natural that the discursive authors, from Dickens to Meredith and Hardy, should stand in the pillory as warning examples of what was most to be avoided. When the young Eliot complimented James on the fact that no rough bundles of concepts disfigure and coarsen his novels, he at once went on to cite Meredith (“the disciple of Carlyle”) as a bad case of the opposite.
Actually Meredith with his tendency to aphorism was in his own way an experimental writer, which made him exciting to the young. This may have been why he was singled out for rapid disposal. That he went counter to the “stuffy” realist tradition, jested with the time-honored conventions of the form, even gave hints of something like the interior monologue, did not excuse him. In fact he has not lasted, except, I think, for The Egoist; the mock-heroic vein, which he worked and overworked, failed to undermine the old structure and became a blind alley. Brio was not enough. In any case, his way with ideas, wavering between persiflage and orotund pronouncement, was too unsteady to maintain a serious weight. His contemporaries seem to have known what he was “about,” but a reader today finds it hard to determine the overall pattern of his thought.
This can never be said of Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy. Nor on the Continent of Hugo, Stendhal, Balzac, even Flaubert, of Manzoni, or any of the Russians except Chekhov, who was relatively taciturn. The talkative, outspoken novelist was evidently the norm and always had been. In America, those who have survived—chiefly Melville and Hawthorne—seldom expressed themselves on topics and issues of the day, and their utterances could be somewhat riddling on the great themes of good and evil. Nevertheless they cannot be charged with unsteadiness, lack of serious purpose. They were sermonizers like their contemporaries in the Old World; it was only that their sermon, like the Book of Revelations, required some decoding; the apocalyptic imagery, as with an allegory, called for interpretation.
In fact the nineteenth-century novel was so evidently an idea-carrier that the component of overt thought in it must have been taken for granted by the reader as an ingredient as predictable as a leavening agent in bread. He came to expect it in his graver fiction, perhaps to count on it, just as he counted on the geographical and social coordinates that gave him his bearings in the opening chapter: the expanse of Egdon Heath at sundown crossed by the solitary reddleman and his cart; the mountain heights of the Lecco district looking down on the lone homeward-bound figure of Don Abbondio. Or “A rather pretty little chaise on springs, such as bachelors, half-pay officers, staff captains, landowners with about a hundred serfs...drive about in, rolled in at the gates of the hotel of the provincial town of N.” Or “About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good fortune to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton.” We are so much in the habit of skipping pages of introductory description and general reflections that interrupt the story that we can scarcely believe that such “blemishes” once gave pleasure, that a novel would have been felt by our ancestors to be a far poorer thing without them. They can be dismissed by the modern reader as “mere” conventions of the genre, but in the old times a novel that lacked them would have been like an opera without an overture, which of course is a convention too.