The English Novel and the Principle of its DevelopmentLanier, Sidney
History
The English Novel and the Principle of its Development
Lanier, Sidney
English fiction -- History and criticism
I must add, too, that there was an explicit theory of what was called
Individuality among the Greeks; the phenomenon of the unaccountable
differences of men from birth early attracted those sharp eyes, and
the Stoics and others soon began to build in various directions from
this basis. But just as the Greeks had a theory of harmony--though
harmony was not developed until the last century--as Richter says
somewhere that a man may contemplate the idea of death for twenty
years, and only in some moment of the twenty-first suddenly have the
realization of death come upon him, and shake his soul; so their
theory of individuality must have been wholly amateur, not a working
element, and without practical result. Surely, we seem in condition to
say so with confidence if you run your minds back along this line of
development which now comes to an end. For what have we done? We have
interrogated Æschylus and Plato, whom we may surely call the two
largest and most typic spirits of the whole Greek cultus, upon the
main fact of personality; we have verified the abstract with the
concrete by questioning them upon the most vital and well-known
elements of personality: what do you believe about spiritual growth,
about spiritual compactness, about true love, marriage, children,
property? and we have received answers which show us that they have
not yet caught a conception of what personality means, and that when
they explicitly discuss individuality in their theories, it is a
discussion of blind men about colors.
VI.
We are now to enter upon the second of our four lines of study by
concentrating our attention upon three historic _details_ in the
growth of this personality whose _general_ advance has been so
carefully illustrated in our first line. These details are found in
the sudden rise of Physical Science, of Modern Music, and of the
Modern Novel, at periods of time so little separated from each other,
that we may consider these great fields of human activity as fairly
opened simultaneously to the entrance of man about the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries.
Addressing ourselves first, then, to the idea of Science, let us place
ourselves at a point of view from which we can measure with precision
the actual height and nature of the step which man took in ascending
from the plane of, say, Aristotle's "science" to that of Sir Isaac
Newton's "science." And the only possible method of placing ourselves
at this point of view is to pass far back and fix ourselves in the
attitude which antiquity maintained towards physical nature, and in
which succeeding ages comfortably dozed, scarcely disturbed even by
Roger Bacon's feeble protest in the thirteenth century, until it was
shocked out of all future possibility by Copernicus, Galileo and Sir
Isaac Newton.
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