It is impossible to use these immoderate terms of Fielding without absurdity: to compare the kept woman, Miss Mathews, in Amelia, as Dobson did, with a character of Balzac’s. He belonged to the wrong century for this kind of greatness. His heroic characters are derived from Dryden – unsuccessfully (the relation between Amelia and a character like Almeyda is obvious). But what puts us so supremely in his debt is this: that he had gathered up in his novels the two divided strands of Restoration fiction: he had combined on his own lower level the flippant prose fictions of the dramatists and the heroic drama of the poets.
On the lower, the unreligious level. His virtues are natural virtues, his despair a natural despair, endured with as much courage as Dryden’s but without the supernatural reason.
Brutus and Cato might discharge their Souls,
And give them Furlo’s for another World:
But we like Centries are oblig’d to stand
In Starless Nights, and wait th’ appointed hour.
So Dryden, and here more lovably perhaps, with purely natural virtue, Fielding faces death – death in the shape of a last hard piece of work for public order, undertaken in his final sickness with intention of winning from the government some pension for his wife and children: ‘And though I disclaim all pretence to that Spartan or Roman patriotism which loved the public so well that it was always ready to become a voluntary sacrifice to the public good I do solemnly declare I have that love for my family.’
He hated iniquity and he certainly died in exile: his books do represent a moral struggle, but they completely lack the sense of supernatural evil or supernatural good. Mr Eliot has suggested that ‘with the disappearance of the idea of Original Sin, with the disappearance of the idea of intense moral struggle the human beings presented to us both in poetry and in prose fiction . . . tend to become less and less real’, and it is the intensity of the struggle which is lacking in Fielding. Evil is always a purely sexual matter: the struggle seems invariably to take the form of whether or not the ‘noble lord’ or colonel James will succeed in raping or seducing Amelia, and the characters in this superficial struggle, carried out with quite as much ingenuity as Uncle Toby employed on his fortifications, do tend to become less and less real. How can one take seriously Mrs Heartfree’s five escapes from ravishment in twenty pages? One can only say in favour of this conception that it is at least expressed with more dignity than in the Sentimental Journey where Sterne himself has stolen the part of Pamela, of Amelia, and Mrs Heartfree, and asks us to be breathlessly concerned for his virtue (The foot of the bed was within a yard and a half of the place where we were standing – I had still hold of her hands – and how it happened I can give no account, but I neither ask’d her – nor drew her – nor did I think of the bed –’). But the moral life in Fielding is apt to resemble one of those pictorial games of Snakes and Ladders. If the player’s counter should happen to fall on a Masquerade or a ticket to Vauxhall Gardens, down it slides by way of the longest snake.
It would be ungrateful to end on this carping note. There had been picaresque novels before Fielding – from the days of Nashe to the days of Defoe – but the picaresque had not before in English been raised to an art, given the form, the arrangement, which separates art from mere realistic reporting however vivid. Fielding lifted life out of its setting and arranged it for the delight of all who love symmetry. He can afford to leave Sterne his graceful play with the emotions, his amusing little indecencies: the man who created Partridge had a distant kinship to the creator of Falstaff. ‘Nothing’, Jones remarks, ‘can be more likely to happen than death to men who go into battle. Perhaps we shall both fall in it – and what then?’ ‘What then?’ replied Partridge; ‘why then there is an end of us, is there not? When I am gone, all is over with me. What matters the cause to me, or who gets the victory, if I am killed? I shall never enjoy any advantage from it. What are all the ringing of bells, and bonfires, to one that is six foot under ground? there will be an end of poor Partridge.’
Fielding had tried to make the novel poetic, even though he himself had not the poetic mind, only a fair, a generous and a courageous mind, and the conventions which he established for the novel enabled it in a more passionate age to become a poetic art, to fill the gap in literature left when Dryden died and the seventeenth century was over. He was the best product of his age, the post-revolutionary age when politics for the first time ceased to represent any deep issues and religion excited only the shallowest feeling. His material was underpaid officers, highwaymen, debtors, noblemen who had nothing better to do than pursue sexual adventures, clergymen like Parson Adams whose virtues are as much pagan as Christian. ‘At the moment when one writes,’ to quote Mr Eliot again, ‘one is what one is, and the damage of a lifetime . . . cannot be repaired at the moment of composition.’ We should not complain; rather we should be amazed at what so unpoetic a mind accomplished in such an age.
1937
SERVANTS OF THE NOVEL
ROBERT BAGE, Edward Bancroft, Elizabeth Blower – like the names on country tombs they are deeply forgotten, but now a new scroll has been beautifully cut for them. They deserve their new memorial, for they held the fort. When Richardson, Smollett, Fielding, and Sterne were dead, these kept their public ready for Jane Austen and Scott. Without a novel-reading public. Scott would have remained an inferior poet, and even the self-sufficient and solitary genius of Jane Austen owed a debt to the innumerable female novelists of this dead period, who persuaded the critics that it was respectable for a woman to write.
‘There was, in the period that followed the masterpieces of the four great novelists, a real conviction that the novel was played out.’ Miss Tompkins*1 might be referring to the 1930s as easily as to the 1770s. We, too, have our four great dead, Hardy and Lawrence, James and Conrad, and Miss Tompkins’s sketch of the novel market bears many resembblances to the noisier modern trade. In the 1770s new editions were faked, being announced long before the first had been sold, a method of advertisement with a familiar ring. To give them a longer life books were post-dated (a custom adopted today by women’s magazines); reviewers complained of the flood of novels and were abused in their turn for high-handedness; there were schoolboy novelists; and women, always women, writing with ‘a dry intolerance of phrase’, ‘an irritated fastidiousness’.
‘Dead books’, Miss Tompkins remarks in her preface ‘can provide little information when exposed on the gibbet of scorn.’ It would have been too easy to guy the novel of sensibility with its voluptuous enjoyment of charity or the Gothic romance; it is far more valuable to discover the aim of the author. The popular writer of today will be fortunate if in a hundred and fifty years he is disinterred by a critic so sensitive to shades of intention, who responds so quickly to the faintest sign of originality, cutting away from the dead the quick wood, the ‘real things seen and heard, dresses and street-cries and smoking puddings and the talk of the servants’ hall’; who is alive in Charles Jenner to the first lyric quickening of prose when a character tells how, as a boy of nineteen, he was drowsing all night in a dark stage coach and at last opened the wooden shutter to see if it was light: ‘I had better have left it alone; it was light; and by that light I saw over against me a face, which several years’ experience of its deceit has hardly been able to reconcile me to consigning to oblivion.’
There are passages in Miss Tompkins’s chapter on ‘Theory and Technique’ which should modify the criticism of the novel. She is discussing the accepted view that the novel of her period suffered from laxity of structure.
It is abundantly clear that careful articulation of plot and due regard for proportion, even in a simple story, were not among the principles of composition current in the ‘seventies and ‘eighties. But principles of composition there must have been; and we shall appreciate them more easily if, remembering the Sentimental Journey and the Man of Feeling, we discard the term structure, with its architectural suggestions, and think of these books rather in terms of colo
ur. What their authors aimed at – at least the best of them – was delicacy and variety of emotional hue. The novel was to be a sort of artificial rainbow, woven of tears and glinting sunshine, but allowing, at times, of more violent contrasts.
This was the excuse for the episode unconnected with the main plot and for the apparently unnecessary character.
A technical device is practised by the novelist half-consciously a long while before the critic analyses it. Henry James did not invent the ‘point of view’, but his prefaces gave the method a general importance it lacked as long as it was practised unconsciously. No novelist now can fail to take the ‘point of view’ into account. For this reason Miss Tompkins’s study of eighteenth-century technique is of far wider importance than the novelists she discusses.
1932
ROMANCE IN PIMLICO
THIS entertaining volume*2 is a by-product of the author’s reading while she was engaged on her fascinating study, The Popular Novel in England, and the reviewer who criticizes it can only do so on material supplied him by Dr Tompkins, for I doubt if there is any other living authority on the Bristol Milkwoman, Dr Downman, the author of Infancy, a poem published with the wish ‘that even in hostile America mothers might be the better for his advice’, Mary Hays, Philosophess, James White, the author of burlesque medieval romances, the Griffiths who publicized their happy marriage with the reckless confidence of modern film-stars, and, best of all to my mind, the ingenuous and disreputable author of The Scotch Parents. For once the reviewer is also the general reader, and as a general reader let us leave behind all nonsense about literary influences and the like and consider a character – John Ramble, whom we should certainly have never encountered without Dr Tompkins’s aid, and his cunning, emotional and heartless pursuit of Nell Macpherson, a milliner’s apprentice.
The most fascinating feature of this autobiographical novel – written apparently with the idea of blackmailing Nell’s stubborn parents into returning his mistress whom they had rather roughly taken from him – is a pink ribbon. Nell gave him this to tie round his guitar, and in a fit of jealousy he removed it and substituted a white one, ‘which hung over Nell’, in Dr Tompkins’s words, ‘like a sign of wrath and estrangement, to be removed only by an abasement of devotion’. How we keep our eyes on that guitar! ‘When will the ribbon be changed? how far must she go?’ The answer is – a very long way; every man in that rational and rather lubricious age felt that he had a right to life, liberties, and the pursuit of happiness. An Act and Deed signed and dated by Nell guaranteed Ramble’s sole possession of her body: but the white ribbon remained on the guitar. One day, overcome by a violent fit of toothache when he was walking with Nell, Ramble sought an inn. ‘There was a bed in the room . . .. Situations at times are so critical that it is not in the power of us mortals to resist.’ Nevertheless the pink ribbon was not restored, and as the suspense grows the ribbons become identified in our mind with the black and the white sails for which Tristram waited; but this is life – grotesque and comic – not fiction. The ribbon remained white even after her attempted suicide in the Serpentine, after she had scalded her hand to prove the resolution of her love, and after she had borne unflinchingly his murderous assault with a tea knife. Only when she had deserted her parents and deceived her mother did the white ribbon give place to the pink. ‘I made her no answer, but got up directly, and then put the exiled ribbon on my guitar, and showing it to her, I said, look here. – You remember the token.’ But they didn’t marry: as Ramble put it to Mrs Macpherson, ‘Call to mind the delicacy of marrying a Girl too soon after the loss of her honour.’ There is an odd realistic charm about this transparent romance: it emerges from the vivid and surprising ‘properties’ – toothache and Hyde Park, the Serpentine and Pimlico and the pink ribbon and a kettle of boiling water, Nell’s uncle called McClack who was too much for not very brave Ramble, and a poor relation called Mrs Drulin; and like most of the romances in this book it is conveyed to us by Dr Tompkins with elegance and wit.
Indeed we have so much reason for gratitude that it seems surly to complain that the volume has longueurs; that there are occasions when Dr Tompkins seems to take a little too seriously the literary interest of the Bristol Milkwoman or Mary Hays. She puts as her epigraph a rather unwise remark of G. K. Chesterton, ‘It is too often forgotten that just as a bad man is nevertheless a man, so a bad poet is nevertheless a poet’, and sometimes her investigation of these obscure works becomes too whimsical-serious. The real interest in the bad poet is not literary but psychological – the twist in Dr Downman’s character which induced him to put into blank verse his advice to mothers on ‘rickets, regular meals and a fruit diet’, and we feel Dr Tompkins has struck a wrong note when she observes: ‘A nerve thrilled in him. He has directness of attack – a resonant simplicity in the opening line of a poem, that recalls Sidney.’ And occasionally she is guilty of such a phrase as ‘Downman zealously inverting the garden-mould with his new-found strength.’ It is as though she had been temporarily possessed by her curious by-way writers, with their strenuous euphuism – she will really have to be careful of Ramble.
1938
THE YOUNG DICKENS
A CRITIC must try to avoid being a prisoner of his time, and if we are to appreciate Oliver Twist at its full value we must forget that long shelf-load of books, all the stifling importance of a great author, the scandals and the controversies of the private life; it would be well too if we could forget the Phiz and the Cruikshank illustrations that have frozen the excited, excitable world of Dickens into a hall of waxworks, where Mr Mantalini’s whiskers have always the same trim, where Mr Pickwick perpetually turns up the tails of his coat, and in the Chamber of Horrors Fagin crouches over an undying fire. His illustrators, brilliant craftsmen though they were, did Dickens a disservice, for no character any more will walk for the first time into our memory as we ourselves imagine him and our imagination after all has just as much claim to truth as Cruikshank’s.
Nevertheless the effort to go back is well worth while. The journey is only a little more than a hundred years long, and at the other end of the road is a young author whose sole claim to renown in 1836 had been the publication of some journalistic sketches and a number of comic operettas: The Strange Gentleman, The Village Coquette, Is She His Wife? I doubt whether any literary Cortez at that date would have yet stood them upon his shelves. Then suddenly with The Pickwick Papers came popularity and fame. Fame falls like a dead hand on an author’s shoulder, and it is well for him when it falls only in later life. How many in Dickens’s place would have withstood what James called ‘the great corrupting contact of the public’, the popularity founded, as it almost always is, on the weakness and not the strength of an author?
The young Dickens, at the age of twenty-five, had hit on a mine that paid him a tremendous dividend. Fielding and Smollett, tidied and refined for the new industrial bourgeoisie, had both salted it; Goldsmith had contributed sentimentality and Monk Lewis horror. The book was enormous, shapeless, familiar (that important recipe for popularity). What Henry James wrote of a long-forgotten French critic applies well to the young Dickens: ‘He is homely, familiar and colloquial; he leans his elbows on his desk and does up his weekly budget into a parcel the reverse of compact. You can fancy him a grocer retailing tapioca and hominy full weight for the price; his style seems a sort of integument of brown paper.’
This is, of course, unfair to The Pickwick Papers. The driest critic could not have quite blinkered his eyes to those sudden wide illuminations of comic genius that flap across the waste of words like sheet lightning, but could he have foreseen the second novel, not a repetition of this great loose popular holdall, but a short melodrama, tight in construction, almost entirely lacking in broad comedy, and possessing only the sad twisted humour of the orphan’s asylum?
‘You’ll make your fortune, Mr Sowerberry,’ said the beadle, as he thrust his thumb and forefinger into the proffered snuff-box of the undertaker: which was an
ingenious little model of a patent coffin.
Such a development was as inconceivable as the gradual transformation of that thick boggy prose into the delicate and exact poetic cadences, the music of memory, that so influenced Proust.
We are too inclined to take Dickens as a whole and to treat his juvenilia with the same kindness or harshness as his later work. Oliver Twist is still juvenilia – magnificent juvenilia: it is the first step on the road that led from Pickwick to Great Expectations, and we condone the faults of taste in the early book the more readily if we recognize the distance Dickens had to travel. These two typical didactic passages can act as the first two milestones at the opening of the journey, the first from Pickwick, the second from Oliver Twist.
And numerous indeed are the hearts to which Christmas brings a brief season of happiness and enjoyment. How many families, whose members have been dispersed and scattered far and wide, in the restless struggles of life, are then reunited, and meet once again in that happy state of companionship and mutual goodwill, which is a source of such pure and unalloyed delight, and one so incompatible with the cares and sorrows of the world, that the religious belief of the most civilized nations, and the rude traditions of the roughest savages, alike number it among the first joys of a future condition of existence, provided for the blest and happy.
Collected Essays Page 8
