CHAPTER III
THE FOUR WHEELS OF THE NOVEL WAIN
It does not enter into the plan, because it would be entirelyinconsistent with the scale, of the present book to give details of thelives of the novelists, except when they have something special to dowith the subject, or when (as in the case of a few minorities who happento be of some importance) even well-informed readers are likely to bequite ignorant about them. Accounts, in all degrees of scale andcompetence, of the lives of Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterneabound. It is sufficient--but in the special circumstances at this pointperhaps necessary--here to sum the facts very briefly in so far as theybear on the main issue. Richardson (1689-1761), not merely the first towrite, but the eldest by much more than his priority in writing, was theson of a Derbyshire tradesman, was educated for some time atCharterhouse, but apprenticed early to a printer--which trade he pursuedwith diligence and profit for the rest of his life in London and itsimmediate neighbourhood. After his literary success, he gathered roundhim a circle of ladies and gentlemen interested in literature: but henever had any first-hand acquaintance with general society of the"gentle" kind, much less with that of the upper classes. Fielding(1707-1754), on the contrary, was a member (though only as the son of ayounger son of a younger son) of a family of great antiquity anddistinction, which held an earldom in England and another in Ireland,and was connected as well as it was derived, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,for instance, being the novelist's cousin. He was educated at Eton andLeyden: but his branch of the family being decidedly impecunious, wasthrown very much on his own resources. These were mainly drawn fromliterature, first as a playwright then as a novelist, journalism andmiscellanies coming in. But he was called to the Bar: and though heprobably did not make much money there, he obtained the poorly paid andhard-worked but rather important position of "Bow Street Magistrate,"which meant that he was head, directly of the London police such as itwas, and indirectly of that of the whole kingdom. His temper was in someways as aristocratic as his birth: but though Horace Walpole's accountsof his fancy for low company are obviously exaggerated, there is nodoubt that he was a good deal of what has since been called a"Bohemian." His experience of variety in scene was much wider thanRichardson's, although after he came home from Leyden (where he went tostudy law) it was chiefly confined to London and the south of England(especially Bath, Dorsetshire, where he lived for a time, and theWestern Circuit), till his last voyage, in hopeless quest of health, toLisbon, where he died. His knowledge of literature, and even what may becalled his scholarship, were considerable, and did credit to the publicschool education of those days.
Smollett (1721-1771) differed from his two predecessors in being aScotsman: but in family was very much nearer to Fielding than toRichardson, being the grandson of a judge who was a Commissioner of theUnion, and a gentleman of birth and property--which last would, had helived long enough, have come to Smollett himself. But he suffered in hisyouth from some indistinctly known family jars, was apprenticed to aGlasgow surgeon, and escaping thence to London with a tragedy in hispocket, was in undoubted difficulties till (and after) he obtained thepost of surgeon's mate on board a man-of-war, and took part in theCarthagena expedition. After coming home he made at least some attemptsto practise: but was once more drawn off to literature, thoughfortunately not to tragedy. For the rest of his life he was ahard-worked but by no means ill-paid journalist, novelist, andmiscellanist, making as much as L2000 by his _History of England_, notill-written, though now never read. Like Fielding (though, unlike him,more than once) he went abroad in search of health and died in the questat Leghorn. Smollett was not ignorant, but he seems to have known modernlanguages better than ancient: though there is doubt about his directshare in the translations to which he gave his name. Moreover he hadsome though no great skill in verse.
Lastly Sterne (1713-1768), though hardly, as it is the custom to callhim, "an Irishman," yet vindicated the claims of the third constituentof the United Kingdom by being born in Ireland, from which country hismother came. But the Sternes were pure English, of a gentle family whichhad migrated from East Anglia through Nottingham to Yorkshire, and wasmuch connected with Cambridge. Thither Laurence, the novelist, after avery roving childhood (his father was a soldier), and a rather irregulareducation, duly went: and, receiving preferment in the Church from hisYorkshire relations, lived for more than twenty years in that countywithout a history, till he took the literary world--hardly by storm, butby a sort of fantastic capful of wind--with _Tristram Shandy_ in 1760.Seven or eight years of fame, some profit, not hard work (for his booksshrink into no great solid bulk), and constant travelling, ended by asudden death at his Bond Street lodgings, after a long course ofill-health very carelessly attended to.
One or two more traits are relevant. All the four were married, andmarried pretty early; two of them married twice. Richardson's first wifewas, in orthodox fashion, his master's daughter: of his second little isknown. Fielding's first (he had made a vain attempt earlier to abduct anheiress who was a relation) was, by universal consent, the model both ofSophia and Amelia, almost as charming as either, and as amiable; hissecond was her maid. Of Mrs. Smollett, who was a Miss Lascelles and aWest Indian heiress in a small way, we know very little--the habit ofidentifying her with the "Narcissa" of _Roderick Random_ is natural,inconclusive, but not ridiculous. Sterne's matrimonial relations are themost famous of all: and though posterity has, with its usual charity,constructed a legend for the pair which is probably much worse than thereality, that reality is more than a little awkward. Mrs. Sterne was aMiss Lumley, of a good Yorkshire family, some, though small, fortune,and more friends who exerted themselves for her husband. By inexcusablelevity, ignorance, misjudgment, or heartless cupidity their daughterLydia published, after the death of both, letters some of which containcourtship of the most lackadaisical sentimentality and others laterexpressions (which occasionally reach the scandalous) of weariness anddisgust on Sterne's part. Other evidence of an indisputable charactershows that he was, at least and best, an extravagant and mawkishphilanderer with any girl or woman who would join in a flirtation: andwhile there is no evidence against Mrs. Sterne's character in theordinary sense, and hardly any of value against her temper, she seems(which is perhaps not wonderful) to have latterly preferred to liveapart from her husband, and to have put him to considerable, if notunreasonable, expenses by her fancy for wandering about France with thedaughter.
Finally, in general character, Richardson seems to have been arespectable person of rather feminine temperament and, thoughgood-natured to his friends, endowed with a feminine spitefulness.Fielding, though by no means answering to the standard of minor and evenmajor morals demanded
"by the wise ones, By the grave and the precise ones."
though reckless and disorderly in his ways and habits, appears to havebeen in the main a thorough gentleman, faithful to truth and honour,fearless, compassionate, intolerant of meanness and brutality and oftreachery most of all--a man of many faults perhaps, but of no reallybad or disgusting ones. Concerning Smollett's personality we know leastof all the four. It was certainly disfigured by an almost savagepugnacity of temper; by a strange indifference to what ought to be atthe lowest the conduct of a gentleman, and by a most repulsiveinclination--perhaps natural, but developed by training--to the merelyfoul and nasty. But he seems to have been brave, charitable though notin the most gracious way, honest, and on the whole a much better fellowthan he might generally seem. Sterne is the most difficult of the fourto characterise fairly, because of the unlucky revelations to which wepossess no parallel in the case of the other three, and which, if we hadthem, might probably alter our estimates of a good many now well reputedpeople. It is perhaps enough to say that his letters contain many goodtraits as well as some bad ones; that his unlucky portrait, with itscombination of leer and sneer, is probably responsible for much; andthat the parts which, as we shall see further, he chose to play, ofextravagant humorist and extravagant sentimental
ist, not only almostnecessitate attitudes which may easily become offensive in the playing,but are very likely, in practice, to communicate something apparentlynot natural and unattractive to the player.
But enough of the workers, though not too much in the case of suchremarkable contemporary exponents of a new kind of Human Comedy: let usgo to the work.
In the long "History of the Unexpected," thick-strewn as it is withcuriosities, there are few things odder than the appearance and thesequels of _Pamela: or Virtue Rewarded_, which, in circumstances to benoted presently, is said to have been begun on November 12, 1739, wasfinished (as far as the first part goes) exactly two months later, and(there being, in the case of the author's business, no obstacle of thekind that has frequently beset the appearance of greater works) waspublished later in the year 1740. That author was over fifty years old:though he had had much to do with ushering literature into the world, hehad never attempted to produce it; he belonged to a class which was aptto regard _belles lettres_ with profound suspicion; and his experiences,both in literature itself and in life, had been necessarily of the mostlimited kind. But there were certain counterbalancing facts to be takeninto consideration which, though they can hardly be said to be _causes_of the marvel--the cause was the Hour, which hit, as it listed, on theMan--were a little more than accidental occasions of it. Richardson, aswe see from his work, must have been a rather careful student of suchnovels as there were. The name of his first heroine, with theessentially English throwing back of the accent added, is the same asthat of one of Sidney's heroines in the _Arcadia_, which had been notlong before modernised for eighteenth-century reading by a certain Mrs.Stanley. The not very usual form "Laurana," which is the name of acharacter in his latest novel, is that of the heroine of _Parismus_.Further, he had had curious early experiences (which we know from hisown meticulous revelations) of writing love-letters, when he was a mereboy, for girl-friends of his to adapt in writing to their lovers. "Hiseye," he says, "had been always on the ladies," though no doubt alwaysalso in the most honourable way. And, quite recently, thecrystallisation had been precipitated by a commission from two of hisbookseller (i.e. publisher) patrons--the founder of the House ofRivington and the unlucky Osborne who was knocked down by Johnson andpicked up (not quite as one would wish to be) by Pope. They asked him toprepare a series of "Familiar Letters on the useful concerns of commonlife." Five-and-twenty years before, he had heard in outline somethinglike the story of _Pamela_. In shaping this into letters he thought itmight be a "new species of writing that might possibly turn young peopleinto a course of reading different from the pomp and parade ofromance-writing, and dismissing the improbable and marvellous with whichnovels generally abound, might tend to promote the cause of religion andvirtue." His wife and "a young lady living with them," to whom he hadread some of it, used to come into his little closet every night with,"Have you any more of _Pamela_, Mr. R.?" Two other female friends joinedin the interest and eulogy. He finished it (that is, the first twovolumes which contain the whole of the original idea) and published it,though at first with the business-like precaution of appearing to "edit"only, and the more business-like liberty of liberal praise of what heedited. It became at once popular: and received the often repeated, butto the author very annoying, compliment of piratical continuation. So heset to work and continued it himself: as usually (though by no meansinvariably) with rather diminished success. On such points as thesuggestion that he may have owed a debt to Marivaux (in _Marianne_) andothers, little need be said here. I have never had much doubt myselfthat the indebtedness existed: though it would be rash, and isunnecessary, to attempt to determine to what extent and in whatparticular form.
It is by no means so difficult as it may at first sight appear to putoneself very much in the situation of a contemporary reader of _Pamela_,even if one has read it three or four times, provided that a fairly longperiod has elapsed since the last reading, and that the novels of thepreceding age are fairly--and freshly--familiar. The thing has been infact done--with unexpected but not in the least deliberate or suspicioussuccess--by the present writer, who has read the book after an intervalof some fifteen years and just after reading (in some cases again, insome for the first time) most of the works noticed in the precedingchapter. The difference of "the new species of writing" (one is remindedof the description of Spenser as "the new poet") is almost startling:and of a kind which Richardson pretty certainly did not fully apprehendwhen he used the phrase. In order to appreciate it, one must not onlyleave out the two last volumes (which, as has been said, the firstreaders had not before them at all, and had better never have had) butalso the second, or great part of it, which they would only have reachedafter they had been half whetted, half satiated, and wholly bribed, bythe first. The defects of this later part and indeed of the first itselfwill be duly noticed presently. Let it be to us, for the moment, thestory of Pamela up to and including "Mr. B.'s" repentance and amendmentof mind: and the "difference" of this story, which fills some hundredand twenty or thirty closely printed, double columned, royal octavopages in the "Ballantyne Novels," is (despite the awkwardness of such aform for the enjoyment of a novel) almost astounding.
To begin with, the novel-attractions are presented with a completenesswhich, as has been pointed out in the last chapter, is almost entirelylacking before. There is, of course, not very much plot, in the martinetsense of that word: there never was in Richardson, despite his immenseapparatus and elaboration. The story is not knotted and unknotted; thewheel does not come full circle on itself; it merely runs alongpleasantly till it is time for it to stop, and it stops rather abruptly.The siege of Pamela's virtue ends merely because the besieger is tiredof assaults which fail, and of offering dishonourable terms ofcapitulation which are rejected: because he prefers peace and alliance.But such as it is, it is told with a spirit which must have beensurprising enough to its readers, and which makes it, I confess, seem tome now much the best _story_ in Richardson. The various alarums andexcursions of the siege itself go off smartly and briskly: there may bemore sequence than connection--there is _some_ connection, as in thecase of that most unlucky and ill-treated person the Rev. Mr.Williams--but the sequence is rapid and unbroken, and the constituentsof it as it were jostle each other--not in any unfavourable sense, butin a sort of rapid dance, "cross hands and down the middle," which isinspiriting and contagious. He lost this faculty later: or rather heallowed it to be diluted and slackened into the interminable episodes ofthe not dissimilar though worse-starred plot against Clarissa, and the_massacrant_ trivialities of the Italian part of _Grandison_. But he hadit here: and it is not a fair argument to say (as even in these days Ihave known it said) that Pamela's honour is a commodity of too littleimportance to justify such a pother about it.
This may bring us to the characters. They also are not of the absolutelyfirst class--excepting, as to be discussed later, the great attempt ofLovelace, Richardson's never are. But they are an immense advance on thepersonages that did duty as persons in preceding novels, even in Defoe."Mr. B." himself is indeed not very capital. One does not quite see whya man who went on as long as he did and used the means which hepermitted himself to use, did not go on longer or use them morethoroughly. But Richardson has at least vindicated his much-praised"knowledge of the human heart" by recognising two truths: first, thatthere are many natures (perhaps most) who are constantly tempted to"over-bid"--to give more and more for something that they want andcannot get; and, secondly, that there are others (again, perhaps, themajority, if not always the same individuals) who, when they areperemptorily told _not_ to do a thing, at once determine to do it. Itwas to Lady Davers mainly that Pamela owed her escape from the fate ofClarissa, though she would hardly have taken, or had the chance oftaking, that fate in the same way. As for the minor characters, at leastthe lower examples are more than sufficient: and Mrs. Jewkes wants verylittle of being a masterpiece. But of course Pamela herself is thecynosure, such as there is. She has had rather hard measure with criticsfor the l
ast century and a little more. The questions to ask now are,"Is she a probable human being?" and then, "Where are we to find aprobable human being, worked out to the same degree, before?" I sayunhesitatingly that the answer to the first is "Yes," and the answer tothe second "Nowhere." The last triumph of originality and individualityshe does not indeed reach. Richardson had, even more than other men ofhis century in England, a strong Gallic touch: and he always tends tothe type rather than the individual. Beatrix Esmond is a coquette of thehighest--almost of the heroic-poetic--class, but she is first of allBeatrix Esmond. Blanche Amory is a middle-class minx, hardly heroic atall, but she is first of all Blanche Amory. Becky Sharp is anadventuress who would go pretty close to, and perhaps not stop at,positive crime, but she is first of all Becky Sharp. Pamela Andrews isnot first of all--perhaps she is hardly at all--Pamela Andrews. Theremight be fifty or five hundred Pamelas, while there could be only one ofeach of the others. She is the pretty, good-natured, well-principled,and rather well-educated menial, whose prudence comes to the aid of herprinciples, whose pride does not interfere with either, and who has acertain--it is hardly unfair to call it--slyness which is of the sexrather than of the individual. But, as such, she is quite admirablyworked out--a heroine of Racine in more detail and differentcircumstances, a triumph of art, and at the same time with so muchnature that it is impossible to dismiss her as merely artificial. Thenearest thing to her in English prose fiction before (Marianne, ofcourse, is closer in French) is Moll Flanders: and good as Moll is, sheis flat and lifeless in comparison with Pamela. You may call "mymaster's" mistress (actually in the honourable sense, but never in thedishonourable) again a minx, though a better minx than Blanche, if youlike. But there is no animal more alive than a minx: and you willcertainly not find a specimen of the species in any English novelbefore.
As for description and dialogue, there is not very much of the formerin _Pamela_, though it might not be unfair to include under the headthose details, after the manner of Defoe (such as Pamela's list ofpurchases when she thinks she is going home), which supply their ownmeasure of verisimilitude to the story. But there are some things of thekind which Defoe never would have thought of--such as the touches ofthe "tufts of grass" and the "pretty sort of wildflower that growsyonder near the elm, the fifth from us on the left," which occur in thegipsy scene. The dialogue plays a much more important part: and may bebrought into parallel with that in the _Polite Conversation_, referredto above and published just before _Pamela_. It is "reported" of course,instead of being directly delivered, in accordance with theletter-scheme of which more presently, but that makes very littledifference; to the first readers it probably made no difference at all.Here again that process of "vivification," which has been so often dwelton, makes an astonishing progress--the blood and colour of the novel,which distinguish it from the more statuesque narrative, are supplied,if indirectly yet sufficiently and, in comparison with previousexamples, amply. Here you get, almost or quite for the first time in theEnglish novel, those spurts and sparks of animation which only theliving voice can supply. Richardson is a humorist but indirectly; yetonly the greatest humorists have strokes much better than that admirabletouch in which, when the "reconciliations and forgivenesses of injuries"are being arranged, and Mr. B. (quite in the manner of the time)suggests marrying Mrs. Jewkes to the treacherous footman John and givingthem an inn to keep--Pamela, the mild and semi-angelic but exceedinglyfeminine Pamela, timidly inquires whether, "This would not look likevery heavy punishment to poor John?" She forgives Mrs. Jewkes of course,but only "as a Christian"--as a greater than Richardson put itafterwards and commented on it in the mouth of a personage whomRichardson could never have drawn, though Fielding most certainly could.
The original admirers of _Pamela_, then, were certainly justified: andeven the rather fatuous eulogies which the author prefixed to it fromhis own and (let us hope) other pens (and which probably provokedFielding himself more than even the substance of the piece) could betransposed into a reasonable key. But we ought nowadays to consider thisfirst complete English novel from a rather higher point of view, and askourselves, not merely what its comparative merits were in regard to itspredecessors, and as presented to its first readers, but what itspositive character is and what, as far as it goes, are the positivemerits or defects which it shows in its author.
The first thing to strike one in this connection is, almost of course,the letter-form. More agreement has been reached about this, perhaps,than about some other points in the inquiry. The initial difficulty offiction which does not borrow the glamour of verse or of the stage isthe question, "What does all this mean?" "What is the authority?" "Howdoes the author know it all?" And a hundred critics have pointed outthat there are practically only three ways of meeting this. The boldestand the best by far is to follow the poet and the dramatist themselves;to treat it like one of the magic lions of romance, ignore it, and passon, secure of safety, to tell your story "from the blue," as if it werean actual history or revelation, or something passing before the eyes ofthe reader. But at that time few novelists had the courage to do this,daunted as they were by the absence of the sword and shield of verse,of the vantage-room of the stage. Then there is the alternative ofrecounting it by the mouth of one of the actors in, or spectators of,the events--a plan obvious, early, presenting some advantages, stillvery commonly followed, but always full of little traps and pits ofimprobability, and peculiarly trying in respect to the character (if heis made to have any) of the narrator himself. Thirdly, there is theagain easy resource of the "document" in its various forms. Of these,letters and diaries possess some prerogative advantages; and were likelyto suggest themselves very particularly at this time when the actualletter and diary (long rather strangely rare in English) had for somegenerations appeared, and were beginning to be common. In the firstplace the information thus obtained looks natural and plausible: andthere is a subsidiary advantage--on which Richardson does not draw verymuch in _Pamela_, but which he employs to the full later--that byvarying your correspondents you can get different views of the sameevent, and first-hand manifestations of extremely different characters.
Its disadvantages, on the other hand, are equally obvious: but there aretwo or three of them of especial importance. In the first place, it isessentially an artificial rather than an artful plan--its want ofverisimilitude, as soon as you begin to think of it, is as great as thatof either of the others if not greater. In the second, without immensepains, it must be "gappy and scrappy," while the more these pains aretaken the more artificial it will become. In the third, the book isextremely likely, in the taking of these pains and even without them, tobecome intolerably lengthy and verbose. In the first part at least ofthe first part of _Pamela_, Richardson avoided these dangers fairly ifnot fully; in the second part he succumbed to them; in his two laternovels, though more elaborate and important plots to some extent bore upthe expansion, he succumbed to them almost more. Pains have been takenabove to show how the first readers of _Pamela_ might rejoice in it,because of its contrast with the character of the seventeenth-centurynovel which was most read--the Scudery or "heroic" romance. It is not, Ithink, too severe to say that nothing but the parallel with thatromance, and the tolerance induced by familiarity with it, could makeany one put up with the second part of _Pamela_ itself, or with theinhumanly prolonged divagation of _Clarissa_ and _Grandison_. Nor, ashas been hinted, is the solace of the letters--in the opportunity ofsetting forth different tempers and styles--here much taken.
There is no doubt that one main attraction of this letter-plan (whetherconsciously experienced or not does not matter) was its ready adaptationto Richardson's own special and peculiar gift of minute analysis ofmood, temper, and motive. The diary avowedly, and the letter in reality,even though it may be addressed to somebody else, is a continuoussoliloquy: and the novelist can use it with a frequency and to a lengthwhich would be intolerable and impossible on the stage. Now soliloquy isthe great engine for self--revelation and analysis. It is of cou
rse to agreat extent in consequence of this analysis that Richardson owes hispride of place in the general judgment. It is quite possible to lay toomuch stress on it, as distinguishing the novel from the romance: and thepresent writer is of opinion that too much stress has actually beenlaid. The real difference between romance _per se_ and novel _per se_(so far as they are capable of distinct existence) is that the romancedepends more on incident and the novel more on character. Now thisminute analysis and exhibition, though it is one way of drawing orconstructing character, is not the only, nor even a necessary, one. Itcan be done without: but it has impressed the vulgar, and even some whoare not the vulgar, from Dr. Johnson to persons whom it is unnecessaryto mention. They cannot believe that there is "no deception"--that thetime is correctly told--unless the works of the watch are bared to them:and this Richardson most undoubtedly does. Even in his 'prentice work,every flutter of Pamela's little heart is registered, and registeredprobably enough: nor could the registry have been effected, perhaps, inany other way that should be in the least probable so well as by theletter and journal method. Of course this analysis was not quite new; ithad existed in a sort of way in the heroic novel: and it had beeneminently present in the famous _Princesse de Cleves_ of Madame de laFayette as well as in her French successors. But these stories hadgenerally been as short as the heroics had been long: and no one hadrisen (or descended) to anything like the minuteness and fullness ofRichardson. As was before pointed out in regard to the letter-systemgenerally, this method of treatment is exposed to special dangers,particularly those of verbosity and "overdoing"--not to mention thegreater one of missing the mark. Richardson can hardly be charged witherror, though he may be with excess, in regard to Pamela herself in theearlier part of the book--perhaps even not in regard to Mr. B.'sintricacies of courtship, matrimonial compliment, and arbitrary temperlater. But he certainly succumbs to them in the long and monstrous scenein which Lady Davers bullies, storms at, and positively assaults herunfortunate sister-in-law before she is forced to allow that she _is_her sister-in-law. Part of course of his error here comes from themistake with which Lady Mary afterwards most justly reproachedhim--that he talked about fine ladies and gentlemen without knowinganything about them. It was quite natural for Lady Davers to bedisgusted, to be incredulous, to be tyrannical, to be in a certain senseviolent. But it is improbable that she would in any case have spoken andbehaved like a drunken fishfag quarrelling with another in the street:and the extreme prolongation of the scene brings its impropriety moreforcibly into view. Here, as elsewhere (a point of great importance towhich I may invite attention), Richardson follows out, withextraordinary minuteness and confidence, a wrong course: and his veryexpertness in the process betrays him and brings him to grief. If he hadrun the false scent for a few yards only it would not matter: in a chaseprolonged to something like "Hartleap Well" extension there is lessexcuse for his not finding it out. Nevertheless it would of course beabsurd not to rank this "knowledge of the human heart" among the claimswhich not only gave him but have kept his reputation. I do not know thathe shows it much less in the later part of the first two volumes(Pamela's recurrent tortures of jealous curiosity about Sally Godfreyare admirable) or even in the dreary sequel. But analysis for analysis'sake can have few real, though it may have some pretended, devotees.
The foregoing remarks have been designed, less as a criticism of_Pamela_ (which would be unnecessary here), or even of Richardson (whichwould be more in place, but shall be given in brief presently), than asan account and justification of the book's position in the real subjectof this volume--the History of the English Novel. And this account willdispense us from dealing, at corresponding length, with the individuallymore important but historically subordinate books which followed. Ofthese _Clarissa_, as few people can be ignorant, is a sort of enlarged,diversified, and transposed _Pamela_, in which the attempts of alibertine of more resolution and higher gifts than Mr. B. upon a younglady of much more than proportionately higher station and qualities thanPamela's, are--as such success goes--successful at last: but only toresult in the death of the victim and the punishment of the criminal.The book is far longer than even the extended _Pamela_; has a much widerrange; admits of episodes and minor plots, and is altogether much moreambitious; but still--though the part of the seducer Lovelace is muchmore important than that of Mr. B.--it is chiefly occupied with theheroine. In _Sir Charles Grandison_, on the contrary, though no lessthan three heroines exist after a fashion and are carefully treated, theauthor's principal object is to depict--in direct contrast to Mr. B. andLovelace--a "Good Man"--the actual first title of the book, which hewisely altered. This faultless and insufferable monster is franticallybeloved by, and hesitates long between, two beauties, the ItalianClementina della Porretta and the English Harriet Byron. The latter ofthese carries him off (rather because of religious difficulties than ofany great predilection on his own part) and the piece ends with arepetition, extension, and intensification of the bounties showered uponPamela by her husband, and her almost abject gratitude for them. Only ofcourse "the good man" could never be guilty of Mr. B.'s meditatedrelapse from the path of rectitude, nor (one may perhaps add) does MissByron seem to possess the insinuating astuteness by which Pamela oncemore
"Reconciles the new perverted man,"
to adapt the last line of _A Lover's Complaint_ to the situation.
_Grandison_, like _Clarissa_, has a much wider range of personage andincident than _Pamela_, and is again double the length of it. Nodetailed criticism of these enormous books (both of which are conductedin the letter-form, though, in the latter case especially, with longretrospects and narratives which rather strain the style) is possiblehere. But a few remarks on the characters of Lovelace and Clarissa,which have usually been regarded as Richardson's greatest triumphs, mayfitly precede some on his whole character as a novelist.
Admiration and sympathy, tempered with a few reserves, have been thegeneral notes of comment on Clarissa: and--as she goes through the longmartyrdom of persecution by her family for not marrying the man she doesnot love; of worse persecution from the man whom she does love, but whowill not marry her, at least until he has conquered her virtue; and ofperhaps worst when she feels it her duty to resist his repentant and (assuch things go) honourable proffers after he has treacherously deprivedher of technical honour--compassion at least is impossible to refuse.But "compassion," though it literally translates "sympathy" from Greekinto Latin, is not its synonym in English. It is a disagreeable thing tohave to say: but Clarissa's purity strikes one as having at once toomuch questionable prudery in it and too little honest prudence: whileher later resolution has as much false pride as real principle. Evensome of her admirers admit a want of straightforwardness in her; she hasno passion, which rather derogates from the merit of her conduct in anycase; and though she is abominably ill-treated by almost everybody,one's pity for her never comes very near to love.
Towards Lovelace, on the other hand, the orthodox attitude, with evengreater uniformity, has been shocked, or sometimes even unshocked,admiration. Hazlitt went into frequently quoted raptures over the"regality" of his character: and though to approve of him as a man wouldonly be the pretence of a cheap paradoxer, general opinion seems to havegone various lengths in the same direction. There have, however, been afew dissenters: and I venture to join myself to them in the verydissidence of their dissent. Lovelace, it is true, is a mostastonishingly "succeeded" blend of a snob's fine gentleman and of thefine gentleman of a silly and rather unhealthy-minded schoolgirl. Heis--it is difficult to resist the temptation of dropping and insertingthe h's--handsome, haughty, arbitrary, as well as rich, generous after afashion, well descended, well dressed, well mannered--except when he isinsolent. He is also--which certainly stands to his credit in the bankwhich is not that of the snob or the schoolgirl--no fool in a generalway. But he is not in the least a gentleman except in externals: andthere is nothing really "great" about him at all. Even his scoundrelismis mostly, if not wholly, _pose_--
which abominable thing indeeddistinguishes him throughout, in every speech and every act, from thetime when he sighs as he kisses Miss Arabella Harlowe's hand to the timewhen he says, "Let this expiate!" as that hallowed sword of ColonelMorden's passes through his rotten heart. Now if Richardson had _meant_this, it might be granted at once that Lovelace is one of the greatestcharacters of fiction: and I do not deny that _taken as this_, meant ornot meant, he is great. But Richardson obviously did _not_ mean it; andHazlitt did not mean it; and none of the admirers mean it. _They_ allthought and think that Lovelace is something like what Milton's Satanwas, and what my Lord Byron would have liked to be. This is very unfairto the Prince of Darkness: and it is even not quite just to "the noblepoet."
At the same time, the acute reader will have noticed, the acknowledgmentthat the fact that Richardson--even not knowing it and intending to dosomething else--did hit off perfectly and consummately the ideal of sucha "prevailing party" (to quote Lord Foppington) as snobs andschoolgirls, is a serious and splendid tribute to his merits: as is alsothe fact that his two chief characters are characters still interestingand worth arguing about. Those merits, indeed, are absolutelyincontestable. His immediate and immense popularity, abroad as well asat home, would not necessarily prove much, though it must not beneglected, and historically, at least, is of the first importance. Buthe does not need it.
For, as should have been sufficiently shown, he did very greatthings--first by gathering up the scattered means and methods which hadbeen half ignorantly hit on by others, and co-ordinating them into theproduction of the finished and complete novel; secondly (though less) bythat infusion of elaborate "minor psychology" as it may be called, whichis his great characteristic; and, thirdly, by means of it and of otherthings, in raising the pitch of interest in his readers to an infinitelyhigher degree than had ever been known before. The dithyrambs of Diderotare, though not ridiculously, amusingly excessive: but they are only anexaggeration of the truth. On the comic side he was weak: and he made amost unfortunate mistake by throwing this part of the business on youngladies of position and (as he thought) of charm--Miss Darnford, MissHowe, Charlotte Grandison--who are by no means particularly comic andwho are sometimes very particularly vulgar. But of tragedy positive, inthe _bourgeois_ kind, he had no small command, and in the middlebusiness--in affairs neither definitely comic nor definitely tragic--hewas wonderfully prolific and facile. His immense and heart-breakinglengthiness is not _mere_ verbosity: it comes partly from the artist'snatural delight in a true and newly found method, partly from a stillmore respectably artistic desire not to do the work negligently. As forthe unhealthiness of atmosphere which has been generally and notunjustly charged upon him, it is, in part, no doubt the result ofimperfect temperament and breeding: but it is also as closely connectedwith his very method as are the merits thereof. You cannot "consider socuriously" without considering too curiously. The drawbacks of his workare obvious, and they were likely to be, and were, exaggerated. But theymight be avoided and the merits kept: nor is it too much to say that thetriumphs of the English novel in the last century have been not a littledue to the avoidance of the one and the keeping of the other.
It would be, in the circumstances, peculiarly uncivil and disobligingto lay very much stress on the fact that, after all, the greatestof Richardson's works is his successor, caricaturist, andsuperior--Fielding. When the memoirs of Miss Pamela Andrews appeared,the future biographer of her doubly supposititious brother was a notvery young man of thirty-three, who had written a good many not verygood plays, had contributed to periodicals, and had done a little workat the Bar, besides living, at least till his marriage and it may befeared later, an exceedingly "rackety" life. It is not improbable,though it is not certain, that he had already turned his attention toprose fiction of a kind. For, though the _Miscellanies_ which followed_Joseph Andrews_ were three years later than _Pamela_ in appearance,the _Journey from this World to the Next_ which they contain has theimmaturity of earliness; and we can hardly conceive it as written afterthe adventures and character of Mr. Abraham Adams. It is unequal, rathertedious in parts, and in conception merely a _pastiche_ of Lucian andFontenelle: but it contains some remarkable things in the way of shrewdsatirical observation of human nature. And the very fact that it is afollowing of something else is interesting, in connection with theinfinitely more important work that preceded it in publication, _TheAdventures of Joseph Andrews and his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams_ (1742).
Nobody has ever had much difficulty in accounting for the way in whichFielding availed himself of the appearance and popularity of _Pamela_.And though Richardson would have been superhuman instead of very humanindeed (with an ordinary British middle-class humanity, and anextraordinary vein of genius) if he had done otherwise, few have joinedhim in thinking _Joseph_ a "lewd and ungenerous engraftment." We havenot ourselves been very severe on the faults of _Pamela_, the reason oflenity being, among other things, that it in a manner produced Fielding,and all the fair herd of his successors down to the present day. Butthose faults are glaring: and they were of a kind specially likely toattract the notice and the censure of a genial, wholesome, and, aboveall, masculine taste and intellect like Fielding's. Even at that time,libertine as it was in some ways, and sentimental as it was in others,people had not failed to notice that Pamela's virtue is not quite whatwas then called "neat" wine--the pure and unadulterated juice of thegrape. The _longueurs_ and the fiddle-faddle, the shameless and fulsomepreface-advertisements and the rest lay open enough to censure. SoFielding saw the handles, and gripped them at once by starting a _male_Pamela--a situation not only offering "most excellent differences," butin itself possessing, to graceless humanity at all times it may befeared, and at that time perhaps specially, something essentiallyludicrous in minor points. At first he kept the parody very close:though the necessary transposition of the parts afforded opportunity(amply taken) for display of character and knowledge of nature superiorto Richardson's own. Later the general opinion is that he, especiallyinspirited by his _trouvaille_ of Adams, almost forgot the parody, andonly furbished up the _Pamela_-connection at the end to make a formalcorrespondence with the beginning, and to get a convenient andconventional "curtain." I am not so sure of this. Even Adams is to acertain extent suggested by Williams, though they turn out such verydifferent persons. Mrs. Slipslop, a character, as Gray saw, not so veryfar inferior to Adams, is not only a parallel to Mrs. Jewkes, but also,and much more, a contrast to the respectable Mrs. Jervis and Mrs.Warden. All sorts of fantastic and not-fantastic doublets may be tracedthroughout: and I am not certain that Parson Trulliber's majesticdoctrine that no man, even in his own house, shall drink when he "caaledvurst" is not a demoniacally ingenious travesty of Pamela'scharacteristic casuistry, when she says that she will do anything topropitiate Lady Davers, but she will not "fill wine" to her in her ownhusband's house.
But this matters little: and we have no room for it. Suffice it asagreed and out of controversy that _Joseph Andrews_ started as a parodyof _Pamela_ and that, whether in addition or in substitution, it turnedto something very different. It is not quite so uncontroversial, butwill be asserted here as capable of all but demonstration, that the"something different" is also something much greater. There is still notvery much plot--the parody did not necessitate and indeed ratherdiscouraged that, and what there is is arrived at chiefly by the old andseldom very satisfactory system of _anagnorisis_--the long-lost-childbusiness. But, under the three other heads, Joseph distances his sisterhopelessly and can afford her much more than weight for sex. It has beensaid that there are doubtfully in Richardson anywhere, and certainly notin _Pamela_, those startling creations of personality which are almostmore real to us than the persons we know in the flesh. It is not thatPamela and her meyney are _un_real; for they are not: but that they arenot personal. The Reverend Abraham Adams is a good deal more real thanhalf the parsons who preached last Sunday, and a good deal morepersonal: and the quality is not confined to him, though he has most ofit. So, too,
with the description. The time was not yet for any minuteor elaborate picture-setting. But here again also that extra dose oflife and action--almost of bustle--which Fielding knows how to instil ispresent. In _Pamela_ the settings are frequent, but they are "stilllife" and rather shadowy: we do not _see_ the Bedfordshire andLincolnshire mansions, the summer houses where (as she observes withdemure relish when the danger is over) Mr. B. was "very naughty;" eventhe pond where, if she had been another sort of girl, the _drame_ mighthave become real tragedy. Fielding does not take very much more troubleand yet somehow we _do_ see it all, with a little help from our ownimaginations perhaps, but on his suggestion and start. Especially theoutdoor life and scenes--the inn-yards and the high roads and the downsby night or day; the pig-sty where poor Adams is the victim of livepigs and the public-house kitchen where he succumbs to a by-product ofdead ones--these are all real for us.
But most of all is the regular progress of vivification visible in thedialogue. This, as we have seen, had been the very weakest point of theweakness of almost all (we might say of all) English novels up to theclose of the first quarter of the eighteenth century. Richardson haddone a great deal for it: but it was impossible that, on his method, itshould not, for the most part, be languid, or at any rate long-winded.Here again Fielding spirits the thing up--oxygenates and ozonises theatmosphere: while, in even fuller measure than his predecessor andvictim, he recognises the efficacy of dialogue as the revealer ofcharacter. He has, assisted no doubt by Shakespeare and his own dramaticpractice, discovered that you do not want volumes of it to do thebusiness--that single moments and single sentences will do that businessat times, if they are used in the proper way.
In short, Fielding here used his reluctant and indignant forerunner as aspring-board, whence to attain heights which that forerunner could neverhave reached: he "stood upon his shoulders" in the most cavalier butalso the most successful fashion. In the novel as Richardson knew it andwas thinking of it, when he began _Pamela_, you were, as a rule, in anartificial world altogether--a world artificial with an artificialityonly faintly and occasionally touched with any reality at all. In_Pamela_ itself there is perhaps nothing, and certainly not much, thatis _wholly_ unreal: but the reality is treated and rendered in anartificial way. In _Joseph Andrews_, though its professed genesis andprocedure are artificial too, you break away at once from seriousartifice. These are all real people who do real things in a real waynow, as they did nearly two hundred years ago: however much dress, andspeech, and manners may have changed. And we are told of their doings ina real way, too. Exactly how the teller knew it we do not know: but wedo not think of this at all. And on the other hand there is no perpetualreminder of art, like the letter-ending and beginning, to disturb oralloy the once and gladly accepted "suspension of disbelief."
A slight digression may not be improper here. Even in their own days,when the _gros mot_ was much less shocking than it is now, there was ageneral notion--which has more or less persisted, in spite of allchanges of fashion in this respect, and exists even now when licence ofsubject as distinguished from phrase has to a great extentreturned--that Fielding is more "coarse," more "improper," and so forththan Richardson. As a matter of fact, neither admits positively indecentlanguage--that had gone out, except in the outskirts and fringes ofEnglish literature, generations earlier. But I am much mistaken if thereare not in Richardson more than a few scenes and situations the"impropriety" of which positively exceeds anything in Fielding.Naturally one does not give indications: but readers may be prettyconfident about the fact. The comparative "bloodlessness," however--theabsence of life and colour in the earlier and older writer--acts as asort of veil to them.
Yet (to return to larger and purer air), however much one may admire_Joseph Andrews_, the kind of _parasitic_ representation which it allowsitself, and the absence of any attempt to give an original story tellsagainst it. And it may, in any case, be regarded as showing that thenovelist, even yet, was hugging the shore or allowing himself to betaken in tow--that he did not dare to launch out into the deep andtrust to his own sails and the wind of nature to propel him--to his ownwits and soul to guide. Even Fielding's next venture--the wonderful andalmost unique venture of _Jonathan Wild_--leaves some objection of thissort possible, though, for myself, I should never dream of admitting it.Jonathan was (so much the worse for human nature) a real person: and theoutlines of his story--if not the actual details--are given partly byhis actual life, partly by Gay's _Beggar's Opera_ and its sequel.Moreover, the whole marvellous little book has a purpose--the purpose ofsatire on false ideas of greatness, historical and political. Theinvention and the art of the writer are not even yet allowed frank andfree course.
But though criticism will allow this, it will, if it be competent andcourageous, allow no deduction to be made from the other greatness ofthis little masterpiece. It has never been popular; it is never likelyto be popular; and one may almost say that it is sincerely to be hopedthat it never will be popular. For if it were, either all the worldwould be scoundrels, which would be a pity: or all the world would bephilosophers and persons of taste, in which case it would be impossible,as the famous story has it, to "look down on one's fellow-creatures froma proper elevation." It really is a novel and a remarkable one--superioreven to _Vanity Fair_, according to Thackeray's own definition, as adelineation of "a set of people living without God in the world." But itis even more (and here its only parallel is _A Tale of a Tub_, which ismore desultory and much more of a _fatrasie_ or salmagundy of odds andends) a masterpiece and quintessential example of irony. Irony had comein with the plain prose style, without which it is almost impossible:and not merely Swift but others had done great things with it. It is,however, only here that it reaches the quintessence just spoken of witha coherent and substantive purpose to serve as vehicle for it. It ispossibly too strong for most people's taste: and one may admit that, foranything like frequent enjoyment, it wants a certain admixture of thefantastic in its various senses--after the method of Voltaire in oneway, of Beckford in another, of Peacock in a third, of Disraeli in afourth--to make it acceptable to more than a very few. But it shows,even from our present limited point of view, of what immense and exaltedapplication the novel-method was capable: and it shows also theastonishing powers of its author. "Genial," in the usual sense, itcertainly cannot be called; in the proper sense as equalling "what isthe production of genius" there are few books which deserve the termbetter. But it is an exercise in a by-way of the novel road-system,though an early proof of the fact that such by-ways are endlessly open.
But the time was coming, though it did not (and could hardly) come veryquickly, when Fielding was to discard all kinds of adventitious aids andsuggestions--all crutches, spring-boards, go-carts, tugs, patterns,tracings--and go his own way--and the Way of the Novel--with no guidancebut something of the example of Cervantes directly and Shakespeareindirectly among the moderns, and of the poetic fiction-writers of old.It is perfectly clear that he had thought widely (and perhaps had readnot a little) on the subject of literary criticism, in a sense notcommon in his day, and that the thinking had led him to a conception ofthe "prose epic" which, though it might have been partly (not wholly byany means) pieced out of the Italian and Spanish critics of the latesixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, had never been worked out asa complete theory, much less applied in practice and to prose. TheProse Epic aims at--and in Fielding's case has been generally admittedto have hit--something like the classical unity of main action. But itborrows from the romance-idea the liberty of a large accretion anddivagation of minor and accessory plot:--not the mere "episode" of theancients, but the true minor plot of Shakespeare. It assumes,necessarily and once for all, the licence of tragi-comedy, in that senseof the term in which _Much Ado About Nothing_ and _A Winter's Tale_ aretragi-comedies, and in which _Othello_ itself might have been made one.And it follows further in the wake of the Shakespearean drama byinsisting far more largely than ancient literature of any kind, and farmore than any modern up
to its date except drama had done, on theimportance of Character. Description and dialogue are rather subordinateto these things than on a level with them--but they are still furtherworked out than before. And there is a new element--perhaps suggested bythe _parabasis_ of ancient comedy, but, it may be, more directly by thepeculiar method of Swift in _A Tale of a Tub_. At various places in hisnarrative, but especially at the beginnings of books and chapters,Fielding as it were "calls a halt" and addresses his readers on mattersmore or less relevant to the story, but rather in the manner of acommentator and scholiast upon it than as actual parts of it. Of thismore later: for the immediate purpose is to survey and not to criticise.
The result of all this was _Tom Jones_--by practically universal consentone of the capital books of English literature. It is unnecessary torecapitulate the famous praises of Gibbon, of Coleridge, of Byron, andof others: and it is only necessary to deal briefly with the complaintswhich, if they have never found such monumental expression as thepraises, have been sometimes widely entertained. These objections--asregards interest--fasten partly on the address-digressions, partly onthe great inset-episode of "The Man of the Hill:" as regards morality ona certain alleged looseness of principle in that respect throughout, andespecially on the licence of conduct accorded to the hero himself andthe almost entire absence of punishment for it. As for the first, "TheMan of the Hill" was partly a concession to the fancy of the time forsuch things, partly a following of such actual examples as Fieldingadmitted--for it need hardly be said that the inset-episode, of no orvery slight connection with the story, is common both in the ancientsand in Cervantes, while it is to be found as long after Fielding as inthe early novel-work of Dickens. The digression-openings are at least assatisfactory to some as they are unsatisfactory to others; it is evendoubtful whether they annoy anybody half so much as they have delightedsome excellent judges. The other point is well worn: but the wearing hasnot taken off its awkwardness and unsavouriness. Difference of habit andmanners at the time will account for much: but the wiser apologists willsimply say that Fielding's attitude to certain deviations from thestrict moral law was undoubtedly very indulgent, provided that suchdeviations were unaccompanied by the graver and more detestable vices ofcruelty, treachery, and fraud--that to vice which was accompanied bythese blacker crimes he was utterly merciless; and that if he is thusrather exposed to the charge of "compounding by damning"--in the famousphrase--the things that he damned admit of no excuse and those that hecompounded for have been leniently dealt with by all but the sternestmoralists.
Such things are, however (in the admirable French sense),_miseres_--wretched petty cavils and shallows of criticism. The onlysensible thing to do is to launch out with Fielding into that deep andopen sea of human character and fate which he dared so gloriously.During the curious phase of literary opinion which the last twenty yearsor so have seen, it has apparently been discovered by some people thathis scheme of human thought and feeling is too simple--"toylike" I thinkthey call it--in comparison with that, say, of Count Tolstoi or of Mr.Meredith, that modern practice has reached a finer technique than his oreven than that of his greatest follower, Thackeray. Far be it from thepresent writer to say, or to insinuate, anything disrespectful of thegreat moderns who have lately left us. Yet it may be said without theslightest disrespect to them that the unfavourable comparison is mainlya revival of Johnson's mistake as to Fielding and Richardson. It is,however, something more--for it comes also from a failure to estimatearight the _parabasis_-openings which have been more than once referredto. These passages do not perhaps exhibit the by-work and the process inthe conspicuous skeleton-clock fashion which their critics admire anddesire, but they contain an amount of acute and profound exploration ofhuman nature which it would be difficult to match and impossible tosurpass elsewhere: while the results of Fielding's working, of his"toylike" scheme, are remarkable toys indeed--toys which, if we regardthem as such, must surely strike us as rather uncanny. One is sometimesconstrained to think that it is perhaps not much more difficult to makethan to recognise a thoroughly live character. It certainly must be verydifficult to do the latter if there is any considerable number ofpersons who are unable to do it in the case of almost every one of thepersonages of _Tom Jones_. With one possible exception they are allalive--even more so than those of _Joseph Andrews_ and with a lesspeculiar and limited liveliness than those of _Jonathan Wild_. But itcertainly is curious that as the one good man of _Jonathan_, Heartfree,is the least alive of its personages, so the one bad man of _Tom_,Blifil, occupies the same position.
The result of this variety and abundance of life is an even more thancorresponding opportunity for enjoyment. This enjoyment may arise indifferent persons from different sources. The much praised and seldomcavilled at unity and completeness of the story may appeal to some.There are others who are inclined towards elaborate plots as Sam Wellerwas to the "'rig'nal" of his subpoena. It was a "gratifyin' sort o'thing, and eased his mind" to be aware of its existence, and that wasall. These latter find _their_ sources of enjoyment elsewhere, buteverywhere else. The abundance and the vividness of character-presentation;the liveliness and the abundance of the staging of that character; thevariety of scene and incident--all most properly connected with the plot,but capable of existing and of being felt without it; the human dialogue;the admirable phrase in that dialogue and out of it, in the digressions, inthe narrative, above, and through, and about, and below it all--thesethings and others (for it is practically impossible to exhaust thecatalogue) fill up the cup to the brim, and keep it full, for theborn lover of the special novel-pleasure.
In one point only was Fielding a little unfortunate perhaps: and evenhere the "perhaps" has to be underlined. He came just before the end ofa series of almost imperceptible changes in ordinary English speechwhich brought about something like a stationary state. His maligner andonly slightly younger contemporary, Horace Walpole, in some of hisletters, writes in a fashion which, putting mere slang aside, has hardlyany difference from that of to-day. Fielding still uses "hath" for "has"and a few other things which seem archaic, not to students of literaturebut to the general. In the same way dress, manners, etc., though muchmore picturesque, were by that fact distinguished from those of almostthe whole nineteenth century and the twentieth as far as it has gone:while incidents were, even in ordinary life, still usual which have longceased to be so. In this way the immense advance--greater than was madeby any one else till Miss Austen--that he made in the pure novel of thisordinary life may be missed. But the intrinsic magnificence, interest,nature, abundance of _Tom Jones_ can only be missed by those who werepredestined to miss them. It is tempting--but the temptation must beresisted--to enliven these pages with an abstract of its astonishing"biograph-panorama." But nothing save itself can do it justice. "Takeand read" is the only wise advice.
No such general agreement has been reached in respect of Fielding's lastnovel, _Amelia_. The author's great adversary, Johnson--an adversarywhose hostility was due partly to generous and grateful personalrelations with Richardson, partly to political disagreement (forFielding was certainly "a vile Whig"), but most of all perhaps to a sortof horrified recoil from the novelist's easy handling of temptationswhich were no easy matter to his critic--was nearly if not quitepropitiated by it: and the enthusiasm for it of such a "cynic" asThackeray is well known. Of the very few persons whom it would not beridiculous to name with these, Scott--whose competence in criticisinghis own art is one of the most wonderful though the least generallyrecognised things about him--inclines, in the interestingIntroduction-Dialogue to _The Fortunes of Nigel_, to put it on a levelwith _Tom Jones_ itself as a perfectly constructed novel. But moderncriticism has, rightly or wrongly, been more dubious. Amelia is almosttoo perfect: her very forgiveness (it has been suggested) would be moreinteresting if she had not almost completely shut her eyes to therebeing anything to forgive. Her husband seems to us to prolong theirresponsibility of youth, which was pardonable in Tom, to a period oflife and to circumstance
s of enforced responsibility which make usrather decline to honour the drafts he draws; and he is also a littlebit of a fool, which Tom, to do him justice, is not, though he issomething of a scatterbrain. Dr. Harrison, whose alternate wrath andreconciliation supply the most important springs of the plot, is, thougha natural, a rather unreasonable person. The "total impression" has evenbeen pronounced by some people to be a little dull. What there is oftruth in these criticisms and others (which it would be long even tosummarise) may perhaps be put briefly under two heads. It is never soeasy to arouse interest in virtue as it is in vice: or in weak andwatered vice as in vice rectified (or _un_rectified) to full strength.And the old requirement of "the quest" is one which will hardly bedispensed with. Here (for we know perfectly well that Amelia's virtue isin no danger) there is no quest, except that of the fortune which oughtto be hers, which at last comes to her husband, and which we are told(and hope rather doubtfully) that husband had at last been taught--bythe Fool's Tutor, Experience--not utterly to throw away. But thisfortune drops in half casually at the last by a series of stageaccidents, not ill-machined by any means, but not very particularlyinteresting.
Such, however, are the criticisms which Fielding himself has taughtpeople to make, by the very excellence of his success in the earliernovels: and there is a certain comparative and relative validity inthem. But consider _Amelia_ in itself, and they begin to look, if notpositively unfounded, rather unimportant. Once more, the astonishingtruth and variety of scene and character make themselves felt--even morefelt--even felt in new directions. The opening prison scenes exceedanything earlier even in Fielding himself, much more in any one else, asexamples of the presentation of the unfamiliar. Miss Matthews--whomFielding has probably abstained from working out as much as he mightlest she should, from the literary point of view, obscure Amelia--is amarvellous outline; Colonels James and Bath are perfectly finishedstudies of ordinary and extraordinary "character" in the stage sense. Nonovel even of the author's is fuller of _vignettes_--little pictures ofaction and behaviour, of manners and society, which are not in the leastirrelevant to the general story, but on the contrary extra-illustrateand carry it out.
While, therefore, we must in no way recede from the position aboveadopted in regard to Richardson, we may quite consistently accord aneven higher place to Fielding. He relieved the novel of the tyranny andconstraint of the Letter; he took it out of the rut of confinement to asingle or a very limited class of subjects--for the themes of _Pamela_and _Clarissa_ to a very large extent, of _Pamela_ and _Grandison_ to aconsiderable one, and of all three to an extent not small, arepractically the same. He gave it altogether a larger, wider, higher,deeper range. He infused in it (or restored to it) the refreshing andpreserving element of humour. He peopled it with a great crowd of livelyand interesting characters--endowed, almost without regard to theirtechnical "position _in_ life," with unlimited possession _of_ life. Heshook up its pillows, and bustled its business arrangements. He firstgave it--for in matter of prose style Richardson has few resources, andthose rather respectable than transporting, and decidedlymonotonous--the attractions of pure literature in form, and in prettyvarious form. He also gave it the attraction of pure comedy, onlylegitimately salted with farce, in such personages as Adams andPartridge; of lower and more farcical, but still admirable comedy inSlipslop and Trulliber and Squire Western; of comedy almost romantic andcertainly charming in Sophia; of domestic drama in Amelia; of satiricportraiture in a hundred figures from the cousins (respectable anddisreputable), Miss Western and Lady Bellaston, downwards. He stocked itwith infinite miscellanies of personage, and scene, and picture, andphrase. As has happened in one or two other cases, he carried, at leastin the opinion of the present writer, the particular art as far as itwill go. He did not indeed leave nothing for his successors to do--onthe contrary he left them in a sense everything--for he showed howeverything could be done. But if he has sometimes been equalled, he hasnever been surpassed: and it is not easy to see even how he can besurpassed. For as his greatest follower has it somewhere, though not ofhim, "You cannot beat the best, you know."
One point only remains, the handling of which may complete a treatmentwhich is designedly kept down in detail. It has been hinted at already,perhaps more than once, but has not been brought out. This is theenormous range of suggestion in Fielding--the innumerable doors whichstand open in his ample room, and lead from it to other chambers andcorridors of the endless palace of Novel-Romance. This had mostemphatically not been the case with his predecessor: for Richardson,except in point of mere length, showed little power of expatiation, kepthimself very much to the same ground and round, and was not likely toteach anybody else to make excursions. Indeed Fielding's breaking awayin _Joseph Andrews_ is an allegory in itself. But, at least with pupilsand followers of any wits, there was not even any need of such breakingaway from himself, though no doubt there are in existence many dull andslavish attempts to follow his work, especially _Tom Jones_. "Find itout for yourself"--the great English motto which in the day of England'sglory was the motto of her men of learning as well as of her men ofbusiness, of her artists as well as of her craftsmen--might have beenFielding's: but he supplemented it with infinite finger-pointingstowards the various things that might be found out. Almost every kind ofnovel exists--potentially--in his Four (the custom of leaving out_Jonathan Wild_ should be wholly abrogated), though of course they donot themselves illustrate or carry out at length many of the kinds thatthey thus suggest.
And in fact it could not be otherwise: because, as has been pointed out,while Fielding had no inconsiderable command of the Book of Literature,he turned over by day and night the larger, the more difficult, butstill the greater Book of Life. Not merely _quicquid agunt homines_, but_quicquid sentiunt, quicquid cogitant_, whatever they love and hate,whatever they desire or decline--all these things are the subjects ofhis own books: and the range of subject which they suggest to others isthus of necessity inexhaustible.
If there have been some who denied or failed to recognise his greatness,it must be because he has played on these unwary ones the same trickthat Garrick, in an immortal scene, played on his own Partridge. Thereis so little parade about Fielding (for even the opening addresses arenot parade to these good people: they may disconcert or even disgust,but they do not dazzle them), that his characters and his scenes lookcommonplace. They feel sure that "if they had seen a ghost they wouldhave looked in the very same manner and done just as he does." They aresure that, in the scene with Gertrude, "Lord, help them! any man--thatis any good man--that had such a mother would have done exactly thesame."
Well! in a way no doubt they are right; and one may imitate the wisdomof Mr. Jones on the original occasion in not saying much more to them.To others, of course, this is the very miracle of art--a miracle, as faras the art of prose fiction is concerned, achieved in its fullness forpractically the first time. This is the true _mimesis_--the re-creationor fresh creation of fictitious reality. There were in Fielding's time,and probably ever since have been, those who thought him "low;" therewere, even in his own time, and have been in varying, but on the wholerather increased, degree since, those who thought him immoral: thereappear to be some who think (or would like it to be thought that theythink) him commonplace and obvious. Now, as it happens, all thesecharges have been brought against Nature too. To embellish, and correct,and heighten, and extra-decorate her was not Fielding's way: but tofollow, and to interpret, and to take up her own processes with resultsuncommonly like her own. That is his immense glory to all those who canrealise and understand it: and as for the others we must let them alone,joined to their own idols.
In passing to the third of this great quartette, we make a littledescent, but not much of one, while the new peak to which we come iswell defined and separated, with characters and outlines all its own. Itmay be doubted whether any competent critic not, like Scott, bribed bycompatriotism, ever put Smollett above Fielding, or even on a level withhim. Thackeray, in one of the most inspired mo
ments of his ratherirregularly-inspired criticism, remarks, "I fancy he did not inventmuch," and this of itself would refer him to a lower class. The writerof fiction is not to refuse suggestion from his experience; on thecontrary, he will do so at his peril, and will hardly by any possibilityescape shipwreck unless his line is the purely fantastic. But if herelies solely, or too much, on such experience, though he may be quitesuccessful, his success will be subject to discount, bound to payroyalty to experience itself. It is pretty certain that most ofSmollett's most successful things, from _Roderick Random_ to _HumphryClinker_, and in those two capital books, perhaps, most of all, keptvery close to actual experience, and sometimes merely reported it.
This, however, is only a comparative drawback; it is in a sense apositive merit; and it is connected, in a very intimate way, with thegeneral character of Smollett's novel-method. This is, to a greatextent, a reaction or relapse towards the picaresque style. Smollett mayhave translated both Cervantes and Le Sage; he certainly translated thelatter: and it was Le Sage who in any case had the greatest influenceover him. Now the picaresque method is not exactly untrue to ordinarylife: on the contrary, as we have seen, it was a powerful schoolmasterto bring the novel thereto. But it subjects the scenes of ordinary lifeto a peculiar process of sifting: and when it has got what it wants, itproceeds to heighten them and "touch them up" in its own peculiarmanner of decoration. This is Smollett's method throughout, even in thatsingular _pastiche_ of _Don Quixote_ itself, _Sir Launcelot Greaves_,which certainly was not his happiest conception, but which has hadrather hard measure.
As used by him it has singular merits, and communicates to at leastthree of his five books (_The Adventures of an Atom_ is deliberatelyexcluded as not really a novel at all) a certain "liveliness" which,though it is not the life_like_ness of Fielding, is a great attraction.He showed it first in _Roderick Random_ (1748), which appeared a littlebefore _Tom Jones_, and was actually taken by some as the work of thesame author. It would be not much more just to take Roderick asSmollett's deliberate presentment of himself than to apply the sameconstruction to Marryat's not very dissimilar, but more unlucky, _coupd'essai_ of _Frank Mildmay_. But it is certain that there was something,though exactly how much has never been determined, of the author'sfamily history in the earliest part, a great deal of his experiences onboard ship in the middle, and probably not a little, though less, of hisfortunes in Bath and London towards the end. As a single source ofinterest and popularity, no doubt, the principal place must be given tothe naval part of the book. Important as the English navy had been, fornearly two centuries if not for much longer, it had never played anygreat part in literature, though it had furnished some caricatured andrather conventional sketches. There is something more in a play, _TheFair Quaker of Deal_, by Charles Shadwell, nephew or son of Dryden'svictim, but this was only of third or fourth rate literary value, and anisolated example to boot. The causes of the neglect have been set forthby many writers from Macaulay downwards, and need not be discussed here;the fact is certain. Smollett's employment of "the service" as asubject may have been, consciously and intentionally, only one of thoseutilisings of personal experience of which we have spoken. But really itwas an instance of the great fact that the novelist, on the instigationmainly of Fielding himself, was beginning to take all actual life to behis province.
Smollett brought to his work peculiar powers, the chief of which was avery remarkable one, and almost as much "improved on" Fielding asFielding's exercise of it was improved on Richardson--that of providinghis characters and scenes with accessories. Roderick is not only a muchmore disagreeable person than Tom, but he is much _less_ of a person:and Strap, though (_vice versa_) rather a better fellow than Partridge,is a much fainter and more washed-out character. But in mere interest ofstory and accessories the journey of Roderick and Strap to London isquite the equal, and perhaps the superior, of that of Tom and hishanger-on after we once leave Upton, where the interest is of a kindthat Smollett could not reach. It is probable that Fielding might, if hehad chosen, have made the prison in _Amelia_ as horribly anddisgustingly realistic (to use a horrible and disgusting word) as theship in _Roderick_, but he at any rate did not choose. MoreoverSmollett, himself a member of one of the less predominant partners ofthe British and Irish partnership, perhaps for that reason hit onutilising the difference of these partners (after a fashion which hadnever been seen since Shakespeare) in the Welshman Morgan. As far asmere plot goes, he enters into no competition whatever with eitherFielding or Richardson: the picaresque model did not require that heshould. When Roderick has made use of his friends, knocked down hisenemies, and generally elbowed and shoved his way through the crowd ofadventures long enough, Narcissa and her fortune are not so much thereward of his exertions as a stock and convenient method of putting anend to the account of them. The customer has been served with asufficient amount of the commodity he demands: and the scissors areapplied, the canister shut up, the tap turned off. It almost results--itcertainly coincides--that some of the minor characters, and some of theminor scenes, are much more vivid than the hero (the heroine is almostan absolute nonentity) and the whole story. The curate and the excisemanin the ninth chapter are, by common consent, among Smollett's greatesttriumphs; but the curate might be excommunicated and the excisemanexcised without anybody who read the book perceiving the slightest gapor missing link, as far as the story is concerned.
Smollett's second venture, _Peregrine Pickle_ (1751), was moreambitious, perhaps rose higher in parts, but undoubtedly contained evenmore doubtful and inferior matter. No one can justly blame him, thoughany one may most justly refrain from praising, from the general point ofview, as regards the "insets" of Miss Williams's story in _Roderick_ andof that of Lady Vane here. From that point of view they range with the"Man of the Hill" in _Tom Jones_, and in the first case at least, thoughmost certainly not in the second, have more justification of connectionwith the central story. He may so far underlie the charge of error ofjudgment, but nothing worse. Unluckily the "Lady Vane" insertion was, toa practical certainty, a commercial not an artistic transaction: andboth here and elsewhere Smollett carried his already large licence tothe extent of something like positive pornography. He is in fact one ofthe few writers of real eminence who have been forced to Bowdlerisethemselves. Further, there would be more excuse for the most offensivepart of _Peregrine_ if it were not half plagiarism of the mainsituations of _Pamela_ and _Clarissa_: if Smollett had not deprived hishero of all the excuses which, even in the view of some of the mostrespectable characters of _Pamela_, attached to the conduct of Mr. B.;and if he had not vulgarised Lovelace out of any possible attribution of"regality," except of being what the time would have called King of theBlack Guard. As for Tom Jones, he does not come into comparison with"Perry" at all, and he would doubtless have been most willing andable--competent physically as well as morally--to administer the properpunishment to that young ruffian by drubbing him within an inch of hislife.
These, no doubt, are grave drawbacks: but the racy fun of the bookalmost atones for them: and the exaltation of the naval element of_Roderick_ which one finds here in Trunnion and Hatchway and Pipescarries the balance quite to the other side. This is the case evenwithout, but much more with, the taking into account of Smollett's usualirregular and almost irrelevant _bonuses_, such as the dinner after thefashion of the ancients and the rest. No: _Peregrine Pickle_ can neverbe thrown to the wolves, even to the most respectable and moral of theseanimals in the most imposing as well as ravening of attitudes. EnglishLiterature cannot do without it.
Without _Ferdinand Count Fathom_ (1753) many people have thought thatEnglish Literature could do perfectly well: and without going quite sofar, one may acknowledge that perhaps a shift could be made. The idea ofre-transferring the method (in the first place at any rate) to foreignparts was not a bad one, and it may be observed that by far the bestportion of _Fathom_ is thus occupied. Not a few of these openingpassages are excellent: and Fathom's mother, if not a person, is anexcel
lent type: it is probable that the writer knew the kind well. Buthis unhappy tendency to enter for the same stakes as his greatforerunners makes it almost impossible not to compare _Ferdinand Fathom_with _Jonathan Wild_: and the effect is very damaging to the Count. Muchof the book is dull: and Fathom's conversation is (to adopt a cant word)extremely unconvincing. The fact seems to be that Smollett had run hispicaresque vein dry, as far as it connected itself with mere rascalityof various kinds, and he did well to close it. He had published threenovels in five years: he waited seven before his next, and then elevenmore before his last.
A qualified apology has been hinted above for _Sir Launcelot Greaves_.It is undoubtedly evidence of the greatness of _Don Quixote_ that thereshould have been so many direct imitations of it by persons of geniusand talent: but this particular instance is unfortunate to the verge ofthe preposterous, if not over it. The eighteenth century was indeedalmost the capital time of English eccentricity: and it was also a timeof licence which sometimes looked very like lawlessness. But itseccentricities were not at this special period romantic: and itslawlessness was rather abuse of law than wholesale neglect of it. Arascally attorney or a stony-hearted creditor might inflict greathardship under the laws affecting money: and a brutal or tyrannicalsquire might do the same under those affecting the tenure or theenjoyment of house or land. "Persons of quality" might go very far. Buteven a person of quality, if he took to riding about the country incomplete steel, assaulting the lieges, and setting up a sort ofcadi-justice of his own in opposition to the king's, would probablyhave been brought pretty rapidly, if not to the recovery of his senses,to the loss of his liberty. Nor, with rare exceptions, are thesubordinate or incidental humours of the first class. But I have alwaysthought that the opening passage more than entitles the book to anhonourable place in the history of English fiction. I do not know whereto look, before it, for such an "interior"--such a complete Dutchpicture of room and furniture and accessories generally. Even so learneda critic as the late M. Brunetiere thought that things of the kind werenot older than Balzac. I have known English readers, not ignorant, whothought they were scarcely older than Dickens. Dickens, however,undoubtedly took them from Smollett, of whom we know that he was anearly and enthusiastic admirer: and Scott, who has them much earlierthan Dickens, not improbably was in some degree indebted for them to hiscountryman. At any rate in that countryman they are: and you will notfind a much better example of them anywhere than this of theinn-kitchen. But apart from it, and from a few other things of the sameor similar kinds, there is little to be said for the book. The divineAurelia especially is almost more shadowy than the divine Narcissa andthe divine Emilia: and can claim no sort of sistership in personalitywith Amelia or Sophia, even with Clarissa or Pamela. In fact, up to thistime Smollett's women--save in the case of Fathom's hell-cat of amother, and one or two more who are "minors"--have done absolutelynothing for his books. It was to be quite otherwise in the last andbest, though even here the heroine _en titre_ is hardly, even though wehave her own letters to body her out, more substantial than her eldersisters. But Lydia, though the _ingenue_, is not the real heroine ofthis book: her aunt and her aunt's maid divide that position betweenthem.
A sufficiently ungracious critic may, if he chooses, see in Smollett'sfalling back on the letter-plan for _Humphry Clinker_ (1771) anadditional proof of that deficiency in strictly inventive faculty whichhas been noticed. The more generous "judge by results" will hardly careto consider so curiously in the case of such a masterpiece. For amasterpiece it really is. The comparative absence of "character" in thehigher and literary sense as contrasted with "character-_parts_" in thetechnical meaning of the theatre has been admitted in the other books.Here, with the aid of the letters, it is amply supplied, or perhaps (tospeak with extreme critical closeness) the character-parts are turnedinto characters by this means. There is no stint, because of theprovision of this higher interest, of the miscellaneous fun and"business" which Smollett had always supplied so lavishly out of hisexperience, his observation, and, if not his invention, his combiningfaculty. And there is the setting of interior and exterior "furniture"which has been also referred to. Abundant as is the information whichthe eighteenth century has given us as to its justly beloved place ofpilgrimage, Bath, there is nothing livelier than the Bath scenes here,from Chesterfield to Miss Austen, and few things, if any, so vivid anddetailed. So it is with Clifton earlier, with London later, withScotland last of all, and with the journeys connecting them. Yet thesethings are mere _hors d'oeuvre_, pickles, sauces, condiments, beside thesolid character-food of the Brambles and Melfords, of Winifred Jenkinsand of the redoubtable Lismahago. That there is no exaggeration orcaricature cannot, of course, be said. It was not Smollett's notion ofart to present the elaborate academies of Richardson, or the almostuncanny duplications of Nature which Fielding could achieve. He mustembolden, in fact grotesque, the line; heighten, in fact splash andplaster, the colour. But he has not left Nature behind here: he has onlyput her in a higher light.
One means of doing so has been condemned in him, as in others, as in itsgreat earlier master, Swift, and its greatest later one, Thackeray, bysome purists. They call it cheap and inartistic: but this is merepedantry and prudery. Mis-spelling is not a thing to be employed everyday or for every purpose: if you do that, you get into the ineffablydreary monotony which distinguishes the common comic journalist. Butthrown in occasionally, and in the proper place, it gives an excellentzest: and it has seldom been employed--never, except in the twoinstances quoted--better than in the cases of Tabitha Bramble and hermaid. For it is employed in the only legitimate way, that of zest, notsubstance. Tabitha and Winifred would still be triumphs ofcharacterisation of a certain kind if they wrote as correctly as UncleMatthew or Nephew Jery. Further, Lismahago is a bolder and a much lesscaricatured utilising of the "national" resource than Morgan. IfSmollett had not been a perfectly undaunted, as well as a not veryamiable, person he would hardly have dared to "_lacess_ the thistle" inthis fashion. But there are few sensible Scotsmen nowadays who would notagree with that most sensible, as well as greatest, of theircompatriots, Sir Walter Scott, in acknowledging the justice (comicemphasis granted) of the twitch, and the truth of the grip, at thatformidable plant. The way in which Smollett mixes up actual livingpersons, by their own names, with his fictitious characters may strikeus as odd: but there is, for the most part, nothing offensive in it,and in fact, except a little of his apparently inevitable indulgence innasty detail, there is nothing at all offensive in the book. Thecontrast of its general tone with that especially of his first two; thesoftening and mellowing of the general presentation--is very remarkablein a man of undoubtedly not very gentle disposition who had longsuffered from extremely bad health, and whose chief original worksrecently--the _Journey_ and the _Adventures_--had been, the first atissue of grumbles, the second an outburst of savagery. But though thegrumbles recur in Matthew Bramble's mouth, they become merely humorousthere: and there is practically no savagery at all. Leghorn, it has beenobserved more than once, was in a fashion a Land of Beulah: a "season ofcalm weather" had set in for a rather stormy life just before the end.
Whatever may be his defects (and from the mere point of view of Momusprobably a larger number may be found in him than either in Richardsonor in Fielding), Smollett well deserves an almost equal place with themin the history of the novel. Richardson, though he had found theuniversal as far as certain aspects of it in humanity are concerned, hadconfined it within a very narrow space, or particular envelope, in toneand temper: the fact that he has been called "stifling," though theepithet may not be entirely just, is almost sufficient evidence of this.Fielding had taken the novel into a far larger air and, as has been saidalready, there was hardly anything to which his method might not lead,and in which it would not be effective. But he had been exclusivelyEnglish in externals: and the result is that, to this day, he has hadless influence abroad than perhaps any English writer of equal geniusand than some of far less.[6] Smollett, by his rem
arkable utilisationof the characteristics of the other members of Magna-Britannia; by hisexcursions into foreign European and even transatlantic scenery, hadwidened the external if not the internal prospect; and had done perhapseven more by that chance-medley, as it perhaps was, of attention to thestill more internal detail which was to be of such importance in thenovel to come. Taking the three together (not without due allowance forthe contemporary, if mainly imitative, developments which will bedescribed in the next chapter), they had put prose fiction in a positionwhich it had not attained, even in Spain earlier, even in France at moreor less the same time: and had entirely antiquated, on the one hand, themere _fabliau_ or _novella_--the story of a single limited situation--onthe other, the discursive romance with little plot and next to nocharacter. One great further development, impossible at this time, ofthe larger novel, the historical, waited for Scott: but even this wassoon, though very awkwardly, tried. It could not yet be born because thehistoric sense which was its necessary begetter hardly existed, andbecause the provision of historic matter for this sense to work on wasrather scanty. But it is scarcely extravagant to say that it is moredifficult to conceive even Scott doing what he did without Richardson,Fielding, and Smollett before him, than it is to believe that, withthese predecessors, somebody like Scott was bound to come.
[6] This is said not to have been quite the case at the _very_ first: but it has been so since.
Great, however, as the three are, there is no need of any "injustice toIreland"--little as Ireland really has to claim in Sterne's merit ordemerit. He is not a fifth wheel to the coach by any means: he is thefourth and almost the necessary one. In Richardson, Fielding, andSmollett the general character and possibilities of the novel had beenshown, with the exception just noted: and indeed hardly with thatexception, because they showed the way clearly to it. But its almostillimitable particular capabilities remained unshown, or shown only inFielding's half extraneous divagations, and in earlier things like thework of Swift. Sterne took it up in the spirit of one who wished toexhibit these capabilities; and did exhibit them signally in more thanone or two ways. He showed how the novel could present, in refreshedform, the _fatrasie_, the pillar-to-post miscellany, of which Rabelaishad perhaps given the greatest example possible, but of which there werenumerous minor examples in French. He showed how it could be made, notmerely to present humorous situations, but to exhibit a special kind ofhumour itself--to make the writer as it were the hero without his everappearing as character in _Tristram_, or to humorise autobiography as inthe _Sentimental Journey_. And last of all (whether it was his greatestachievement or not is matter of opinion), he showed the novel of purposein a form specially appealing to his contemporaries--the purpose beingto exhibit, glorify, luxuriate in the exhibition of, sentiment or"sensibility." In none of these things was he wholly original; thoughthe perpetual upbraiding of "plagiarism" is a little unintelligent.Rabelais, not to mention others, had preceded him, and far excelled him,in the _fatrasie_; Swift in the humour-novel; two generations ofFrenchmen and Frenchwomen in the "sensibility" kind. But he brought alltogether and adjusted the English novel, actually to them, potentiallyto much else.
To find fault with his two famous books is almost contemptibly easy. Theplagiarism which, if not found out at once, was found out very soon, isthe least of these: in fact hardly a fault at all. The indecency, which_was_ found out at once, and which drew a creditable and not in theleast Tartuffian protest from Warburton, is a far more seriousmatter--not so much because of the licence in subject as because of theunwholesome and sniggering tone. The sentimentality is very often simplymaudlin, almost always tiresome _to us_, and in very, very fewcases justified by brilliant success even in its own very doubtfulkind. Most questionable of all, perhaps, is the merely mechanicalmountebankery--the blanks, and the dashes, and the rows of stops, theblack pages and the marbled pages which he employs to force a guffawfrom his readers. The abstinence from any central story in _Tristram_ isone of those dubious pieces of artifice which may possibly show theartist's independence of the usual attractions of story-telling, but mayalso suggest to the churlish the question whether his invention wouldhave supplied him with any story to tell; and the continual asides andhalts and parenthetic divagations in the _Journey_ are not quite freefrom the same suggestion. In fact if you "can see a church by daylight"you certainly want no piercing vision, and no artificial assistance oflight or lens, to discover the faults of this very unedifying churchman.
But he remains, for all that, a genius; and one of the great figures inour history. There is to his credit in general, as has been alreadypointed out, the great asset of having indicated, and in two notableinstances patterned, the out-of-the-way novel--the novel eccentric,particular, individual. There is to that credit still more thebrilliancy of the two specimens themselves in spite of their faults;their effectiveness in the literature of delight; the great powers of akind more or less peculiar to the artist which they show, and the power,perhaps still greater, which they display in the actually general andordinary lines of the novel, though adapted to this extraordinary use.
For though it pleased Sterne to anticipate the knife-grinder's innocentconfession, "Story? God bless you! I have none to tell, sir!" in asardonic paraphrase of half a score of volumes, he actually possessedthe narrative faculty in an extraordinary degree. He does not merelyshow this in his famous inset short stories, accomplished as these are:he achieves a much greater marvel in the way in which he makes his_fatrasies_ as it were novels. After one or two, brief but certainly nottedious, volumes of the _Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy_, you knowthat you are being cheated, and are going to be: at the end you knowstill more certainly that you have been. You have had nothing of the"Life" but a great deal round rather than about the birth, and a fewequivocal, merely glanced at, and utterly unco-ordinated incidentslater. If you have had any "opinions" they have been chiefly those ofMr. Tristram Shandy's father and other members of his family, or thoseof its friends and circle, or of those shadowy personages outside thepretended story, such as Eugenius and Yorick, besides a few discourseswhich drop the slightest pretension of being Shandean or Tristramic andare plainly and simply the author's. In the _Journey_ there is moreunity; but it is, quite frankly, the unity of the temperament of thatauthor himself. The incidents--sentimental, whimsical, fie-fie--have noother connection or tendency than the fact that they occur to the"gentleman in the black silk smalls" and furnish him with figures as itwere for his performance. Yet you are _held_ in a way in which nothingbut the romance or the novel ever does hold you. The thing is a [Greek:mythos hamythos]--story without story-end, without story-beginning,without story-connection or middle: but a story for all that. Adangerous precedent, perhaps; but a great accomplishment: and, even asa precedent, the leader of a very remarkable company. In not a fewnoteworthy later books--in a very much greater number of parts of laterbooks--as we take our hats off to the success we are saluting not a newbut an old friend, and that friend Sterne.
On the second great count--character--Sterne's record is still moredistinguished: and here there is no legerdemain about the matter. Thereis a consensus of all sound opinion to the effect that my Uncle Toby isan absolute triumph--even among those who think that, as in the case ofColonel Newcome later, it would have been possible to achieve thattriumph without letting his simplicity run so near to something lessattractive. It is not the sentiment that is here to blame, becauseSterne has luckily not forgotten (as he has in the case of his deaddonkeys and his live Marias) that humour is the only thing that willkeep such sentiment from turning mawkish, if not even rancid; and thatthe antiseptic effect will not be achieved by keeping your humour andyour sentiment in separate boxes. Trim is even better: he is indeed nextto Sancho--and perhaps Sam Weller--the greatest of all "followers" inthe novel: he supplies the only class-figure in which Sterne perhapsbeats Fielding himself. About Walter Shandy there is more room fordifference: and it is possible to contend that, great as he is, he isnot complete--that he i
s something of a "humour" in the old one-sidedand over-emphasised Jonsonian sense. Nothing that he does or saysmisbecomes him: but a good deal that he does not do and say might beadded with advantage, in order to give us the portrait of a whole aswell as a live man. As for the other male characters, Sterne's planexcused him--as it did not quite in Mr. Shandy's case--from making themmore than sketches and shadows. But what uncommonly lively sketches andshadows they are!
Sterne's unlucky failing prevented him in most cases from touching thewomen off with a clean brush: but the quality of _liveness_ pertains tothem in almost a higher measure: and perhaps testifies even morestrongly to his almost uncanny faculty of communicating it by toucheswhich are not always unclean and are sometimes slight to an astonishingdegree. Even that shadow of a shade "My dear, dear Jenny" has asuggestion of verity about her which has shocked and fluttered some: themaids of the Shandean household, the grisettes and peasant girls andladies of the _Journey_, have flesh which is not made of paper, andblood that is certainly not ink. And the peculiarity extends to his twochief named heroines, Mrs. Shandy and the Widow. Never were any twofemale personages more unceremoniously treated in the way of scanty andincidental appearance. Never were any personages of scanty andincidental appearance made more alive and more female.
His details and accessories of all kinds, descriptive, literary, andother, would give subject for a separate chapter; but we must turn (forthis chapter is already too long) to his phrase--in dialogue, narrative,whatever you please to call it. For the fact is that these two things,and all others in which phrase and expression can be used, melt intoeach other with Sterne in a manner as "flibberti-gibbety" as most otherthings about him. This phrase or expression is of course artificial tothe highest degree: and it is to it that the reproach of depending onmechanical aids chiefly applies. And yet laboriously figured, tricked,machined as it is--easy as once more it may be to prove that it isartifice and not art--the fact remains that, not merely (perhaps not byany means chiefly) in the stock extract-pieces which everybody knows,but almost everywhere, it is triumphant: and that English literaturewould be seriously impoverished without it. Certainly never was there astyle which more fully justified the definition given by Buffon, inSterne's own time, of style as "the _very_ man." Falsetto, "faking,"vamping, shoddy--all manner of evil terms may be heaped upon it withoutthe possibility of completely clearing it from them. To some eyes itunderlies them most when it is most ambitious, as in the Le Fevre storyand the diatribe against critics. It leaves the court with all manner ofstains on its character. Only, once more, if it did not exist we shouldbe ignorant of more than one of the most remarkable possibilities of theEnglish language.
Thus, in almost exactly the course of a technical generation--from theappearance of _Pamela_ in 1740 to that of _Humphry Clinker_ in 1771--thewain of the novel was solidly built, furnished with four main wheels tomove it, and set a-going to travel through the centuries. In a sense,inasmuch as _Humphry Clinker_ itself, though Smollett's best work, canhardly be said to show any absolutely new faculties, character, ormethod, the process was even accomplished in two-thirds of the time,between _Pamela_ and _Tristram Shandy_. We shall see in the next chapterhow eagerly the examples were taken up: and how, long before Smollettdied, the novel of this and that kind had become one of the mostprolific branches of literature. But, for the moment, the importantthing is to repeat that it had been thoroughly and finally started onits high road, in general by Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett; inparticular and wayward but promising side-paths by Sterne.
The English Novel Page 3
