Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 109.djvu/19

 the other, does not seem even to be suspected by the energetic, virtuous, and more or less amiable people whose activities in politics, and upon the backstairs of politics, bring about these developments. They assume that the sort of official they need, a combination of god-like virtue and intelligence with unfailing mechanical obedience, can be made out of just any young nephew. And I know of no means of persuading people that this is a rather unjustifiable assumption, and of creating an intelligent controlling criticism of officials, and of assisting conscientious officials to an effective self-examination, and generally of keeping the atmosphere of official life sweet and healthy, except the novel. Yet so far the novel has scarcely begun its attack upon this particular field of human life, and all the attractive varied play of motive it contains.

Of course, we have one supreme and devastating study of the illiterate minor official in Bumble. That one figure lit up, and still lights, the whole problem of Poor-Law administration for the English reading community. It was a translation of well-meant regulations and pseudo-scientific conceptions of social order into blundering, arrogant, ill-bred flesh and blood. It was worth a hundred royal commissions. You may make your regulations as you please, said Dickens in effect; this is one sample of the stuff that will carry them out. But Bumble stands almost alone. Instead of realizing that he is only one aspect of officialdom, we are all too apt to make him the type of all officials; and not an urban district council can get into a dispute about its electric light without being denounced as a Bumbledom by some whirling enemy or other.

The burthen upon Bumble’s shoulders is too heavy to be borne, and we want the contemporary novel to give us a score of other figures to put beside him: other aspects of and reflections upon this great problem of officialism made flesh. Bumble is a magnificent figure of the follies and cruelties of ignorance in office; I would have every candidate for the post of Workhouse Master pass a severe examination on Oliver Twist; but it is not only caricature and satire that I demand. We must have the fullest treatment, not only of the temptations, vanities, abuses and absurdities of office, but of all its dreams, its sense of constructive order, its consolations, its sense of service, and its nobler satisfactions. You may say that is demanding more insight and power in our novels and novelists than we can possibly hope to find in them. So much the worse for us. I stick to my thesis that the complicated social organization of to-day cannot get along without the amount of mutual understanding and mutual explanation which such a range of characterization in our novels implies.

The success of civilization amounts ultimately to a success of sympathy and understanding. If people cannot be brought to an interest in one another greater than they feel to-day, to curiosities and criticisms far keener, and coöperations far subtler, than we have now; if class cannot be brought to measure itself against and to interchange experience and sympathy with class, and temperament with temperament, then we shall never struggle very far beyond the confused discomforts and uneasiness of to-day, and the changes and complications of human life will remain as they are now, very like the crumplings and separations and complications of an immense avalanche that is sliding down a hill. And in this tremendous work of human reconciliation and elucidation, it seems to me it is the novel that must attempt most, and achieve most.