Madame de Staél linked the fact that the Ancients had no novels with the fact that, largely as a result of the inferior social position of women, the classical world attached relatively little importance to the emotional relationships between men and women.! It is certainly true that classical Greece and Rome knew little of romantic love in our sense, and the erotic life in general was not given anything like the importance and approbation it has received in modern life and literature. Even in Euripides sexual passion is clearly considered as a violation of the human norm; while not exactly a vice, it is certainly not a virtue; and, for the man especially, to allow it much scope is an indication of weakness rather than strength. As for Latin literature, its similarly derogatory attitude is suggested by a passage in the commentary of Servius on the Aeneid: he explains that Dido’s love was not a serious enough subject for epic dignity, but that Virgil had redeemed himself by treating it in an almost comic style.
The idea that love between the sexes is to be regarded as the supreme value of life on earth is generally agreed to have had its origin in the rise of amour courtois in eleventh-century Provence, Courtly love is in essence the result of the transfer of an attitude of religious adoration from a divine to a secular object—from the Virgin Mary to the lady worshipped by the troubadour, Like modern individualism, therefore, the rise of romantic love has deep roots in the Christian tradition, and so it is very appropriate that it should be the basis of the ideal pattern of sexual behaviour in our society. The most universal religion of the West, according to Vilfredo Pareto,’ at least, is the sex religion; the novel supplies it with its doctrine and its rituals, just as the mediaeval romances had done for courtly love.
Courtly love, however, could not itself provide the kind of connective or structural theme which the novel required. It was primarily a leisure fantasy invented to gratify the noble lady whose actual social and economic future had already been decided by her marriage to a feudal lord; it belonged to an a-moral world, a social vacuum where only the individual existed and where the external world, with its drastic legal and religious sanctions against adultery,2 was completely forgotten. Consequently the forms of mediaeval literature which dealt with everyday life paid no attention to courtly love, and presented womankind as a species characterised by an insatiate fleshly cupidity; while, on the other hand, the verse and prose romances which dealt with courtly love presented their heroines as angelic beings, and this idealisation was usually extended to the psychology, the background and the language of the story. Not only so: from the point of view of plot, heroic chastity is subject to exactly the same literary defects as inveterate promiscuity; both are poor in the qualities of development and surprise. In the romances, therefore, while courtly love provided the conventional beginning and end, the main interest of the narrative lay in the adventures which the knight achieved for his lady, and not in the development of the love relationship itself.
Gradually, however, the code of romantic love began to accommodate itself to religious, social and psychological reality, notably to marriage and the family. This process seems to have occurred particularly early in England, and the new ideology which eventually came into being there does much to explain both the rise of the novel and the distinctive difference between the English and French traditions in fiction. Denis de Rougemont, in his study of the development of romantic love, writes of the French novel that ‘to judge by its literature, adultery would seem to be one of the most characteristic occupations of Western man’.!' Not so in England, where the break with the originally adulterous character of courtly love was so complete that George Moore was almost justified in claiming to have ‘invented adultery, which didn’t exist in the English novel till I began writing’
The values of courtly love could not be combined with those of marriage until marriage was primarily the result of a free choice by the individuals concerned. This freedom of choice has until recently been the cxception rather than the rule in the history of human socicty, especially as far as women have been concerned. The rise of the novel, then, would seem to be connected with the much greater freedom of women in modern society, a freedom which, especially as regards marriage, was achieved earlier and more completely in England than elsewhere,
In eighteenth-century France, for example, daughters were customarily secluded from young men until their parents had arranged a marriage for them. The extent of women’s freedom in England was very striking in comparison, as Montesquieu! and many other contemporaries pointed out. In Germany the position of women was considered to be even more disadvantageous,? while Lady Mary Wortley Montagu criticised Szr Charles Grandison on the grounds that Richardson should have known enough about the restrictions on feminine rights in Italy to realise that his hero could never have begun his amour with Clementina in her father’s house.3
The relatively great freedom of women in England had existed at least as far back as the Elizabethan period, but it was reinforced in the eighteenth century by some aspects of the rise of individualism. Economic individualism, we have seen, tended to weaken the ties between parents and children: and its spread was associated with the development of a new kind of family system which has since become the standard one in most modern societies,
This system can be described as the ‘elementary’ family, to we A. R. Radcliffe-Brown's term,' or as the ‘conjugal’ family, to use Emile Durkheim’s.* In nearly all countries, of course, the family unit includes the ‘elementary’ or ‘conjugal’ group consisting of husband, wife and their children, but it also includes a whole complex of other less closely related kinsfolk: the use of the terms here, therefore, has a real defining force because it indicates that this elementary or conjugal group alone is what constitutes the family in our society; it is an entity formed by the voluntary union of two individuals.
This kind of family, for which we will here use Durkheim’s term ‘conjugal’ as somewhat more descriptive and perhaps less imvidious than Radcliffe-Brown’s term ‘elementary’, is different from those of other societies and other periods in many respects, among which may be mentioned the following: on marriage the couple immediately sets up as a new family, wholly separate from their own parents and often far away from them; there is no established priority between the male and female lines of descent as regards property or authority, but instead both lineages are of equal relative unimportance; extended kinship ties in general, to grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, etc., have no compelling significance; and once set up, the conjugal family typically becomes an autonomous unit in economic as well as in social affairs.
These arrangements seem obvious enough to us today, but they are in fact historically new, and they all increase the importance of the marriage choice, This choice is especially fateful for the woman, because, as a result of masculine dominance in the economic field, and of the social, residential and occupational mobility brought about by capitalism, it determines, not only her most important personal relationship, but also her social, economic and even geographical future. It is natural, therefore, that modern sociologists should see romantic love as a necessary correlative of the conjugal family system; 3 a strengthening of the intrinsic bonds between man and wife being absolutely necessary to replace the greater security and continuity of the woman's lot afforded by more cohesive and Extended family systems and to provide the isolated conjugal unit and especially the wife with a strong supporting ideology.
Some of the most important causes of the very different modern emphasis have already been mentioned. Christianity in general, for example, was essentially an inward, individualist and self-conscious kind of religion, and its effects were strongest in Puritanism, with its stress on the inner light; while the indispensable Madame de Staél drew attention to the influence of the changed philosophical outlook of the seventeenth century on the novel’s subjective and analytic approach to character, the secularisation of thought which accompanied the new philosophy tended in the same direction: it produced an essentially mancentred world, and one in which the individual was responsible for his own scale of moral and social values.
Finally, the rise of individualism is of great importance. By weakening communal and traditional relationships, it fostered not only the kind of private and egocentric mental life we find in Defoe’s heroes, but also the later stress on the importance of personal relationships which is so characteristic both of modern society and of the novel—such relationships may be seen as offering the individual a more conscious and selective pattern of social life to replace the more diffuse, and as it were involuntary, social cohesions which individualism had undermined. Individualism also contributed to Richardson’s emphasis on private experience in at least two other respects: 1t provided an audience deeply enough interested in all the processes that occur in the individual consciousness to find Pamela absorbing; and its economic and social development eventually led to the development of the urban way of life, a fundamental formative influence on modern society which seems to be connected in many ways with the private and subjective tendency both of Richardson personally and of the novel form in general.
Eighteenth-century London had an importance in the national life of the time that was unequalled elsewhere. Throughout the period it was over ten times as large as any of modern urban man. The streets and places of resort in the various quarters of the town presented an infinite variety of ways of life, ways of life that anyone could observe, and yet for the most part utterly alien to any one individual’s personal experience.
This combination of physical proximity and vast social distance is a typical feature of urbanisation, and one of its results is to give a particular emphasis to external and material values in the city-dweller’s attitude to life: the most conspicuous values —those which are common to the visual experience of everyone —are economic; in eighteenth-century London, for example, it was the coaches, fine houses and expensive clothes which pervade the outlook of Moll Flanders. There was no real metropolitan equivalent to the expression of the community values available to all represented by the parish church in the country. In many of the new centres of population there was no church at all, and, consequently, according to Swift, ‘five parts in six of the people of London [were] absolutely hindered from hearing divine service’ ;? and in any case the atmosphere of what was fast becoming ‘a mart of infidelity’3 tended to discourage church-going—Bishop Secker said that ‘people of fashion’ often attended ‘Divine worship in the country . . . to avoid scandal’,
This decline of religious values in the town made way for the Supremacy of material values, a supremacy that was symbolised in the way that London was rebuilt after the Great Fire: under the new plan it was the Royal Exchange and not St. Paul’s which became the architectural focus of the City.?
An environment so large and various that only a little of it can be experienced by any one individual, and a system of values that is mainly economic—these have combined to provide the novel in general with two of its most characteristic themes: the individual seeking his fortune in the big city and perhaps only achieving tragic failure, so often described by the French and American Realists; and, frequently in association with this, the milieu studies of such writers as Balzac, Zola and Dreiser, where we are taken behind the scenes, and shown what actually happens in the places we know only by passing them in the street or reading about them in the newspapers. Both these subjects also feature prominently in eighteenthcentury literature, where the novel supplemented the work of journalists and pamphleteers3 and revealed all the secrets of the town: both Defoe and Richardson appeal to this interest, and it is even more marked in such works as Fielding’s Amelia and Smollett’s Humphrey Clinker. At the same time London figured in much of the drama and fiction of the time as the symbol of wealth, luxury, excitement and perhaps a rich husband: for Steele’s novel-reading girl Biddy Tipkins, and for Eliza Haywood’s Betsy Thoughtless it is the milieu where everything happens, where people really live: triumph in the big city has become the Holy Grail in the individual’s secular pilgrimage.
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