The Royal Road of Fiction

The Royal Road of Fiction by Agnes Repplier

"The Royal Road of Fiction" by Agnes Repplier is an extended historical and critical essay tracing the origins, development, and cultural significance of prose fiction from ancient times through the nineteenth century, with particular attention to the English novel and its relationship to readers, writers, moralists, and society at large. Repplier opens by establishing the primacy of storytelling as a universal human need, arguing that fiction has always provided solace and pleasure across every stage of individual and collective life. She quotes the French critic Jusserand to anchor the claim that the tale is the first key to the heart of a child and the last utterance to penetrate old age, and she extends this observation to entire civilizations, tracing the impulse to narrate back to the earliest known cultures. She then moves into an account of early English fiction, noting that as a schoolgirl she was taught various conflicting candidates for the title of first English novel, from Pamela to Robinson Crusoe to Lodge's Rosalynde, before realizing that no firm origin point exists. She demonstrates that prose romance flourished long before the printing press, citing medieval nobles who bequeathed manuscript romances in their wills as treasured possessions. The romances of Troy, Alexander, and Tristram were among the most valued cultural objects of their time. A significant portion of the essay examines the imaginative freedom available to early fiction writers, who set their stories in remote and exotic lands such as Scythia, Abyssinia, and Arcadia, where readers expected the improbable and demanded it. Repplier dwells with affectionate irony on the pastoral paradise of Arcadia as it appeared in the works of Robert Greene and Sir Philip Sidney, a world of dancing nymphs, jousting knights, and philosophically inclined shepherds, a golden landscape that offered deliberate escape from the hardships of actual life. She traces the persistent hostility of moralists and religious reformers to fiction throughout its history, from the medieval accusation that minstrels and gleemen were children of Satan, through Roger Ascham's condemnation of chivalric romances for their depictions of slaughter and lewdness, to Milton's harsh criticism of King Charles for seeking spiritual comfort in Sidney's Arcadia. Repplier treats these attacks with a mixture of historical sympathy and gentle mockery, noting that no degree of denunciation succeeded in suppressing the popular appetite for stories. Women receive extended treatment throughout the essay as the primary patrons, consumers, and eventually producers of fiction. Repplier credits female readers with sustaining the long French romances that swept England in the seventeenth century, and she describes the symbiotic relationship between women and the novelists who courted their favor, from John Lyly's calculating flattery in Euphues to Samuel Richardson's unprecedented insight into feminine psychology in Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison. She gives a vivid account of the passionate correspondence Richardson received from female admirers who wept over Clarissa's fate, begged him to save her, and yet found their entreaties entirely without effect on a writer who remained immovably committed to his tragic design. Repplier discusses the careers of early female novelists, treating Eliza Heywood and Aphra Behn as producers of morally dubious but widely consumed fiction, while noting with some irony that Behn wrote what can be considered the first English didactic novel in Oroonoko, an anti-slavery work that anticipated the methods of Harriet Beecher Stowe. She recounts how Frances Burney dazzled London society with Evelina, winning extravagant praise from Johnson, Sheridan, and Reynolds, and she surveys the remarkable celebrity enjoyed by Maria Edgeworth across England and France, contrasting it with the neglect suffered by Jane Austen, whose novels sold for far less than the work of far lesser contemporaries and whose genius was recognized by only a handful of readers during her lifetime. The essay also considers the gothic tradition inaugurated by Horace Walpole and amplified by Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, and Charles Maturin, treating it with amused condescension while acknowledging the fever of excitement it generated among readers who tore apart volumes of The Mysteries of Udolpho so that multiple family members could read simultaneously. The essay concludes with the age of Walter Scott, which Repplier describes as the golden age of English fiction, a period in which the novel achieved complete cultural ascendancy and the novelist became the most celebrated of literary figures. She ends on a note of mild reproach toward contemporary novelists who have grown too proud to entertain, preferring preaching and social criticism to storytelling, while expressing confidence that fiction will always retain its essential power to lead readers away from the relentless realities of life into the enduring regions of romance.

By Agnes Repplier · First published 1901 · Genre: Literary Criticism, Essay, Non-fiction · 7,024 words

First lines

"A tale," says that charming scholar and critic, M. Jusserand, "is the first key to the heart of a child, the last utterance to penetrate the fastnesses of age. " And what is true of the individual is true also of the race. The earliest voice listened to by the nations in their infancy was the voice of the story-teller. Whether he spoke in rude prose or in ruder rhyme, his was the eloquence which won a hearing everywhere. All through the young world's vigorous, ill-spent manhood it found time mid wars, and pestilence, and far migrations to cherish and cultivate the first wild art of fiction. We, in our chastened, wise, and melancholy middle age, find still our natural solace in this kind and joyous friend. And when mankind grows old, so old we shall have mastered all the knowledge we are seeking now, and shall have found ourselves as far from happiness as ever, I doubt not we shall be comforted in the twilight of existence with the same cheerful and deceptive tales we hearkened to in childhood. Facts surround us from the cradle to the grave. Truth stares us coldly in the face, and checks our unmeaning gayety of heart. What wonder that we turn for pleasure and distraction to those charming dreams with which the story-teller, now grown to be a novelist, is ever ready to lure us away from everything that it is comfortable to forget.

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literary criticism · essays · fiction theory · literary analysis · novel criticism · short story criticism · reading culture · classical literature · English literature · American literature · French literature · European literature

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