The Facts of Fiction

by Norman Collins

  A dying man, he could do no more than write his masterpiece, Humphry Clinker. Hazlitt declared this work to be “the most pleasant gossipy novel that was ever written,” and Thackeray described it as “the most laughable story that has ever been written, since the goodly art of novel writing began.” But Thackeray, it should be remembered, was prejudiced against Dickens.

  Certainly there is no novel in the language that would seem to have been written more completely free of the shadow of madness and death than Humphry Clinker. Yet Smollett when he wrote it was never free from the fear that he was losing his reason, and never in doubt that he was dying.

  It is after all only just a novel. It was a travel book in design, and a letter-book in form. This opened mail-bag of letters from different people about the same events is simply an opportunity for Smollett to reveal the only psychological discovery that he ever made: that different people have different minds. It was as remote from a book of travels as Mr. Belloc’s Path to Rome is remote from a Baedeker. Jaundice and spleen are still its principal constituents, and Smollett saw the defects of this world with the acute eye of a sanitary inspector. His work is truly excellent journalism. Consider, for instance, this admirable piece of sensational writing on the pollution of the nation’s food.

  The bread I eat in London is a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum and bone-ashes; insipid to the taste, and destructive to the constitution. The good people are not ignorant of this adulteration; but they prefer it to wholesome bread, because it is whiter than the meal of corn, thus they sacrifice their taste and their health, and the lives of their tender infants, to a most absurd gratification of a misjudging eye; and the miller, or the baker, is obliged to poison them and their families, in order to live by his profession.

  Humphry Clinker is full of such passages, which have as little to do with fiction as with travel. The book is pure Smollett, recognisable as he was to his mother who had not seen him for years, by the twinkle in his eye. When it appeared, the author was out of all favour in England. And Smollett, who had made more men amused or angry than any other author of his time died in the sad limbo that lies midway between neglect and unpopularity.

  His widow continued to live on near his foreign grave, supporting herself obscurely and with difficulty; a shadowy, retreating figure the whole of whose private fortune had been spent by her husband; a woman who in heaven must have found much to talk about with the first Mrs. Fielding.

  Laurence Sterne and His Fragment of Life

  It would be possible to write a far larger and more comprehensive history than this outline of outlines, yet do no more than touch on the strangely vegetating figure of the Yorkshire Parson, Laurence Sterne. He had a mind which was so peculiarly and richly and vexatiously his own that, though he was later in life imported to London because of it, no one of talent was fool enough to try to model his own style on Sterne’s.

  And so no school of Tristram Shandy—just as there was no school of Alice in Wonderland—ever grew up. Tristram Shandy was a work which, once done perfectly and by one man, needed never to be done again. And though we may deplore its morals with Hazlitt, its “stupid disgustingness ” with Coleridge, its “bawdry and pertness ” with Goldsmith, and even its very oddity with Dr. Johnson, there are qualities that, sooner or later, persuade us that of its solitary kind it is perfect. And the greatest of these is charity.

  For what did grow up as a result of Tristram Shandy was the novel of sentiment—a term that soon grew to mean so much that it came to mean nothing at all.

  Sterne’s family crest was a starling: a singularly applicable bird. Sterne’s great-grandfather was an Archbishop: a poorer choice of Fate’s. And Sterne in his major writings—his minor works, excellent sermons, served their purpose in York Minster in their own day—lived up to his arms rather than to his ancestor.

  Tristram Shandy stands out, a lonely and lavish monument to the idleness of the eighteenth century parson. It was composed, starling-wise, of bits that Sterne had caught from Rabelais and Cervantes and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding, and Bacon and Montaigne and any number of military treatises that supplied the gabions and bastions and sally-ports of Captain Shandy’s conversation.

  Indeed, had Sterne not been hailed for a genius he might have been hanged for a thief. His book is a madly unalphabetical and deliberately disarranged catalogue of the respectable learned works in the Library of York Minster, cemented with genius to an equally illogical and jumbled catalogue of the disreputable and amusing works in the library of Skelton Castle; the original of Crazy Castle, where the fin du dixhuitième siècle “Demoniacks,” originators of the popular Hell Fire Movement, once held their Young Men’s Assemblies.

  As for anyone’s hanging himself who read Richardson for the plot, so anyone should be straightway confined who attempted a second time to read Sterne for that purpose. His mind is so exorbitantly loaded with information and imagination that the slightest push administered by a new idea destroys the equilibrium of narrative. And it is so inquisitive a mind, so everlastingly subject to new attractions, that even stray words sweep him continually away in an instant into a new corner of his mental universe, to revolve for a space a rejoicing, glittering satellite to one of his own thoughts.

  If a reason, other than the simple and sublime fact of his being Laurence Sterne, can be found for this vagary, it is that during his early life he had amassed so great a store of something like learning, yet had so little opportunity in the Yorkshire parishes of Sutton-in-the-Forest and Stillington of trying it on anyone. It would be as wrong to imagine that Sterne ever allows himself to be accidentally diverted in his thoughts as it would be to imagine that a man who knows the tricks of Hampton Court maze is at fault for not marching straight ahead as inflexibly as a Roman. The only difference is that Sterne is like a man who walks in the shapes of a maze even though the walls of the maze are not there. And it is necessary only to remember the strange disorder in which Life, with its angles and malformations, is laid before us to see that Sterne’s method is at least as true to the passage of life as the unbending roadway, mapped out with the ruler of Time, that the ordinary narrative novelist follows.

  The popularity of Tristram Shandy has been fluctuating but, on the whole, declining since the first enthusiasm, when it appeared in 1760. Even in its own day, however, Walpole referred to its “very tedious performances ” and remarked that, “It makes one smile two or three times at the beginning, but in recompense makes one yawn for two hours.” True, the book is now more perfectly assured of immortality than any cautious critic or publisher would have cared to predict in its own time; even though Garrick—who was the Mr. Baldwin of his day for recommending semi-officially whatever reasonably good book he had last been reading—was tremulously excited by and about it.

  But Tristram Shandy has tended more and more to be read with an anticipation of delight, the quality of giving almost as much as we are getting, that we bestow on books that have become acknowledged literary curiosities.

  No one, I believe, who is not more than a little interested in writing has ever been more than a little interested in reading Tristram Shandy. Johnson declared that it would not last. And though it is usual to regard this as one of the Doctor’s critical howlers—like his inability to see more than raffishness in Fielding—perhaps Johnson was saying something nearer the truth than is generally realised.

  That is not to say that Johnson did not display a slight pettishness of temper in his attitude towards Sterne. He, as the devout churchman, outside Holy Orders, could hardly be expected to have been proud of the sentimental Epicurean within the Church.

  And when he made the remark, “Anyone who has a name, or who has the power of pleasing, will be very generally invited in London. The man, Sterne, I have been told has had engagements for three weeks,” we see the darkening frown of the everlasting Churchwarden over a poor one of the Cloth whose dignity is not so great as his cou
nsel’s. When Goldsmith quite stupidly bleated out, “And a very dull fellow,” and so provoked Johnson’s “Why, no, Sir,” we are not quite certain whether Johnson was paying a tribute to Sterne or merely disagreeing, as he invariably and conscientiously did, with Goldsmith.

  It is a strange thing that Tristram Shandy should ever have been a success; only a mixture of Yorkshire persistence and author’s pride got it printed at all. Dodsley, the cleverest publisher of his time, rejected it, despite the author’s charming letter which accompanied the MS., explaining that “the plan, as you will perceive, is a most extensive one—taking in not only the weak points, the sciences, in which the true point of ridicule lies—but everything else, which I find laugh-at-able in any way.”

  On the whole, we can only sympathise with Dodsley. He was on the point of retiring, and experiment is no part of the business of retirement. He had seen the rise of English prose fiction and he could hardly be expected to be enthusiastic about the rise of an English prose freak.

  For Sterne was not only revolutionary but reactionary. Literature, which had been steadily progressing, now looked like suffering a set-back. A table of laws as unyielding as the original Mosaic ones of stone had been drawn up, and Sterne, like Moses, had broken them.

  It has been wondered often enough, whether or not Tristram Shandy was a parody of the prevailing novel. And the answer would seem to be that it was about as much a parody of Tom Jones as Alice in Wonderland is a parody of The Cloister and the Hearth. It was a joke. But it was not a bitter joke. A parodist is usually a man whose wit has developed beyond his compassion—there must, it is true, be compassion there if the parody is to stick—and Sterne’s compassion was always at melting point. There were fragments of parody like the fragments that a caddis collects around it—Dr. Slop, for example, was Dr. Burton, the obstetrician, of York—but parody was not the prime excuse for the book. Turn to the Dedication:

  To the Right Honourable MR. PITT.

  SIR,

  Never poor Wight of a Dedicator has less hopes from his Dedication, than I have from this of mine; for it is written in a bye corner of the kingdom, and in a retired thatched house, where I live in a constant endeavour to fence against the infirmities of ill health, and other evils of life, by mirth; being firmly persuaded that every time a man smiles—but much more so, when he laughs, it adds something to this Fragment of Life.

  I humbly beg, sir, that you will honour this book, by taking it—(not under your Protection—it must protect itself, but)—into the country with you; where, if I am ever told that it has made you smile; or can conceive that it has beguiled you of one moment’s pain—I shall think myself as happy as a minister of state;—perhaps much happier than anyone (one only excepted) that I have read or heard of.

  I am, great sir,

  (and what is more to your Honour)

  I am, good sir,

  Your Well-wisher, and

  most humble Fellow-subject,

  THE AUTHOR.

  Those are not the words of a literary surgeon, whose words cure only by being cutting. There is none of the orgy of chastisement that we find in Fielding’s Prefaces; none of the thick stick laid across fat shoulders. Sterne, indeed, preferred the method of the sugar-stick to the thick stick, and introduced a sob where Fielding would have provoked a yelp.

  Sterne’s love-letters have their own sweet devoted charm and reveal a lot of the man. Unfortunately, they are not all written to the same woman; a defect more distracting to the reader, doubtless, than to the author.

  Admittedly the letters that Sterne wrote to his wife, Lydia, before marriage are at least as delightful as those he wrote to Eliza after his marriage. But there is an all too human falling off in the Lydia correspondence. Thus we find him assuring his fiancée that they would “be as merry and innocent as our first parents in Paradise,” and later warning her as his wife, “not to forget your luggage in changing postchaises.” It is a melancholy remark: it drains all the dew out of Paradise. But if Mrs. Sterne really was a luggage-losing kind of woman, she was hopeless; and we can excuse Sterne his devotion to Eliza.

  The love-letters, or at least the loving letters, of Sterne are important because in them Sterne for the first recorded time in the language uses the word “sentimental ”; a word that later came to be used very much as the word “psychological ” is used now. By meaning too much, it grew to mean very little. And the only clarity it acquired in the course of years was that it finally meant something appreciably different from its original intention.

  In 1749 Lady Bradshaigh wrote to Richardson: “Pray, Sir, give me leave to ask you (I forgot it before) what, in your opinion is the meaning of the word sentimental, so much in vogue among the polite, both in town and country.… I am frequently astonished to hear such a one is a sentimental man; we were a sentimental party; I have been taking a sentimental walk.” Had Sterne been asked, however, he might have replied, in less asphyxiating English of course, with a phrase that, as Mr. Priestley has suggested, might be raped from Hollywood, to describe the intention of a sentimental author, namely, “the making of dimples to catch the tears.”

  Part of this trouble in definition is caused by the fact that in its day “sentiment ” merely meant any indulgence of the emotions for their own sake, and to-day it obstinately means any over-indulgence for the reader’s sake. And the real contribution of sentiment to the novel is not that it taught writers what kind of novel to write, so much as that it gave them an excuse for writing at all. It was the first justification of art for art’s sake; agreeably disguised as art for heart’s sake.

  It is remarkable that Sterne, the founder of sentimental fiction, should not have been a true sentimentalist himself. He was above all things an artist; and artists cannot allow those emotions which affect their art to get out of hand. In the true eighteenth century manner he regarded indulgence of any kind as one of those extravagances which are good in moderation, and he chose to indulge in the tittering laugh and the wet handkerchief.

  Thackeray, who was really much more a slave to his emotions than Sterne, was naturally suspicious of him for it. His comment on Sterne was: “He goes to work systematically and of cold blood; paints his face, puts on his ruff and motley clothes, and lays down his carpet and tumbles on it.” Thackeray (who may have been thinking in the back of his mind of Dickens as he wrote it), remarked also that Sterne “used to blubber perpetually in his study, and finding his tears infectious, and that they brought him a great popularity, he exercised the lucrative gift of weeping.”

  But Thackeray came of a wet-eyed generation, who as children, had shared all the misfortunes of Amy Robsart, and who, when they put away childish things, were to weep as copiously at the bedside of Colonel Newcome. If Thackeray had lived when Sterne was alive, he would have seen what a civilising thing is a tear.

  That, however, is no reason why we need pay it more than its due of attention now, why we need regard poor Maria and the Lyons donkey in the Sentimental Journey, and ignore Widow Wadman and Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim in Tristram Shandy.

  Uncle Toby, indeed, deserves a statue in every literary institution in the country. For he was the first considerable character in English fiction to live without movement. The Epic of the Open Road was already changing into the smaller and finer Lyric of the Closed Room. Psychology had come in at the window and the coachmen and Tom Joneses has gone out of the door.

  The Rape of the Locke in Tristram Shandy, where Sterne, paraphrasing Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, shows Uncle Toby (who was “puzzled to death” by it all) being taught the philosophy that “whilst we receive successively ideas in our minds we know that we do exist,” is really an actor in the historic scene of a psychological, or sentimental, novelist battering the peg, on which he proposes to hang his fiction, into the thick skull of an unsentimental character.

  We have said that Sterne left no school, though his influence was discernible as far away as Meredith. But he left one ardent pupilshed
in the Scotsman, Henry Mackenzie, who published in 1771 a novel, The Man of Feeling, which only the greater glory of Scott has saved his fellow countrymen from the task of arduously admiring ever since.

  It is a book of that supercharged archness of sentiment that Sir James Barrie has so successfully revived. The author could burst into tears as easily as Alice. Morley made the joke that “no book so copiously watered with tears could be called ‘ dry,’ ” and gave an index of forty-seven instances of them. Though that, perhaps, is a harsher criticism of a man of letters temporarily gone mad and turned ledger-clerk, than of Mackenzie’s lachrymosity. Nevertheless some of the downpours and drizzles in Mackenzie’s Vale of Tears are remarkable enough to deserve perpetuity. For instance:

  Harley kissed off her tears as they flowed, and wept between every kiss, is as much a tribute to the hero’s caudal nimbleness of neck (incommoded as he was with his own paroxysms) as to his warm-heartedness.

  The truth is that Mackenzie was writing of tears and kisses as a poet might write of them; in the abstract. Just as any decadent eighteenth century poet, who earned his keep, saw wherever he walked a ruined Gothic tower with gibbous moon tingeing the obfuscation of a lettered urn and spires, dim discovered, discernible through a rift in the tower, so Mackenzie saw his tears and kisses everywhere.

  And it should be borne in mind that it is the method which is outmoded: not the grief, which is necessarily insincere. Mackenzie was striving to produce an effect, not to report one.