This was the same art as that of Malory, though not that of the

chansons or the sagas. It is the art in which life is simplified into

a convention, and human figures worked into a tapestry. The pastoral

romances are duller than those of chivalry, partly, no doubt, because

their conventions are not home-made but taken as strictly as possible

from another civilisation, and partly because they are too long for

their motives--the pattern is repeated too often. But they do not

represent a dead or a dying art, but rather a stage in the infancy

of an art that has blossomed in our own day, in some of the work of

Théophile Gautier, for example; in Mr. Nevinson's _Plea of Pan_,

in some of the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley. Sidney's _Arcadia_ is

terribly unwieldy, but passage after passage in it breathes a fragrance

different from anything in the literature of realism.

Indeed it is well to mark thus early the distinction between these

two arts, the one that seeks to show us our own souls, the other

that shows us life, that one that, using symbols disentangled from

ordinary existence, can legitimately fill books with things beautiful

in themselves, and the other that reconciles us to ugliness by showing

us some vital interest, some hidden loveliness, some makeshift beauty

in things as they generally are. The spirit of the one set statues

of lovely forms in the bedchambers of the Grecian women, the spirit

of the other praises ugly babies to their mothers. Both spirits have

shown their right to be by the works of art whose inspiration they

have been. We must only be careful not to criticise the art of the one

by the canons that rule the art of the other. There are two worlds,

the actual and the ideal. If Tom Jones were to open a door by saying

'Open Sesame' to it, we should have a right to laugh, just as we

should be legitimately disappointed if Ali Baba were to turn a key and

enter the robber's treasury in the ordinary way. We cannot blame the

Arcadian shepherds because they are not like the shepherds we meet

about the hills, any more than we can blame that little kitchen slut

called Cinderella for riding to a king's ball in a gold chariot made

of a pumpkin. Truth to an ideal is all we may ask of dreams. And the

pastorals, in spite of their borrowed conventions, do hold an ideal,

suffocated though it sometimes is under an impossible technique, and

the weight of ornament which is so tempting to those who have but newly

learned the secrets of its manufacture.

[Poetic prose.]

Our later Arcadians have not so hampered themselves. They have made

short stories instead of labyrinthine narratives, and they have

been able, as Sidney tried to do, to disclaim any competition with

utilitarian homespun literature by the use of a poetic prose. In the

prose of Sidney's _Arcadia_, imitated from that of Lyly, but a little

less noisily eccentric, falling perhaps too often between poetry and

prose, we can see the promise of that new prose of ornament perfected

by the artists of the nineteenth century, a prose firm, unshaken by the

recurrent rhythms of verse, but richer in colour and melody than the

prose of use.

CERVANTES

CERVANTES

[Prologue.]

IT is curious how many odds and ends may be heaped together and woven

into a patchwork of thought, by a mind concentrating itself upon one

idea, and, as if in spite of itself, making excursions after each

chance butterfly and puff of wind, each half promise of real or phantom

value it perceives. The mind returns continually to where it stood,

bringing with it always something new, like a starling adding to its

nest, until at last the original idea is so covered over with half

visualised images, half clarified obscurities, dimly comprehended

notions, that it is itself no longer to be seen but by a reverse

process of picking away and throwing aside, one by one, the accretions

that have been brought to it by the adventuring mind. For the last hour

I have been sitting in my easy-chair, a cup of tea at my elbow, a pipe

in my mouth, a good fire at my feet, trying not to let myself stray too

far from the consideration of Cervantes and his place in the history

of story-telling. All that hour, without effort, almost against my

will, my mind has been playing about the subject, and bringing straw

and scraps of coloured cloth, until now the plain notion of Cervantes

is dotted over and burdened with a dozen other things--a comparison

between an active life and a bookish one, the relation between parody

and progress, the mingling of rogue novel and romance, Sir Walter

Scott, and the remembrance of a band of Spanish village musicians.

Perhaps if I disentangle this superstructure piece by piece Cervantes

himself will become as visible as he intends to allow me to present him.

* * * * *

[An active life and a bookish one.]

Cervantes was one of the men who write books in two languages; in

literature and in life. Indeed, his contribution to his country's

history is scarcely less vivid than his share in the history of

story-telling. Cervantes the soldier, losing the use of his hand in

the naval battle of Lepanto, in which he took so glorious a part

that the grandiloquent Spanish tradition attributed to him, a mere

private soldier, more than half the merit of the victory, is quite

as attractive as Cervantes the impecunious author, writing plays for

the theatre and poems for the nobility, collecting taxes for the

king, pleasing himself with his _Galatea_, and laying literature

under an international debt to him for his _Exemplary Novels_ and his

_Don Quixote_. Like Sir Philip Sidney, he won admiration from his

contemporaries as much for his personal worth as for his intellect.

The maimed hand meant to them and him as much as any printed books.

His own life was as romantic as his romance. Wherever he had found

himself, boarding a Turkish galley, plotting for freedom in the prisons

of Algiers, he had played the game as stirringly as d'Artagnan. Don

Quixote's patriotism was no more obstinate and glamorous than his, and

Sancho Panza's wisdom was gained in no school of harder knocks.

It is not without significance that his first book should be a specimen

of pastoral romance. The _Galatea_ bears no closer relation to workaday

life than Sir Philip Sidney's _Arcadia_. This old soldier began his

career as a man of letters by trying to settle upon an estate in

Arcady, the very country whose cardboard foliage he was afterwards to

ridicule, and the last book he wrote, in spite of the humaner work

that had preceded it, was a romance not dissimilar from his first.

Partly this must have been due to the fashion of the time; but it is

not extravagant to find in it an illustration of the wistful manner in

which men write about their opposites. Men like Stevenson, caged in

sick rooms, may love to be buccaneers on paper. The real adventurers

set the balance even by imagining themselves tending sheep on a smooth

grassy slope.

[_Don Quixote_ no parody.]

Cervantes' _Galatea_ is not a great work. Its shepherds weep more

than Sir Philip Sidney's, and sing considerably worse. But it had

its success, and Cervantes was never anything but proud of it, a

fact that should not be forgotten in remembering his _Don Quixote_.

_Don Quixote_ has often been described as a parody of the heroic and

pastoral romances, which indeed had become a little foolish. But

Cervantes was not the man to jeer at what he loved. Instead, he fills

the old skins that had held the wine of dreams with the new wine of

experience. He did not parody the old romances, but re-wrote them in

a different way. Parody laughs and writes a full stop; the art of

Cervantes, Fielding, and Rabelais ends always in a hyphen, a sign that

allows all manner of developments.

[Illustration: MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA]

[The picaresque form.]

Cervantes, like Shakespeare, used all the resources of his time, and

did not disdain to profit by other men's experiments. _Don Quixote_

owed a triple debt to the common-sensible humorous rogue novel invented

seventy years before, as well as to the more serious tales of knights

and pastoral life that made his existence possible. Thieves and

shepherds and paragons of chivalry assisted at his birth. The thieves

in particular were responsible for the design, or lack of design, in

the construction of the book. The rogue novels were made by stringing

a series of disconnected 'merry quips' along the autobiography or

biography of a disreputable hero. They were like Punch and Judy shows.

The character of Punch is as stable as his red nose or his hump back.

His deeds do not change him, and, so long as he is always well in the

front of his stage we ask for no other connecting thread in the

entertainment than his habit of punctuating his conversation with a

well-directed log of wood. Let him continue his villainous career, let

his squeaking inhuman voice continue to exult, and we are perfectly

contented. It was so with the rogues, and it is so with _Don Quixote_.

As the Bachelor says, 'many of those that love mirth better than

melancholy, cry out, give us more Quixoteries: let but Don Quixote lay

on, and Sancho talk, be it what it will, we are satisfied.'

[Rogue novel and romance.]

Three hundred years after the Bachelor, we too are satisfied with

Sancho's chatter, and his master's Quixoteries, because they are both

pretty closely connected with humanity. If Don Quixote is among the

clouds, Sancho Panza sits firm upon his donkey, and between the two of

them the book itself moves spaciously upon a mellowed earth. There is

a perpetual interplay between dignity and impudence, the ridiculous

and the sublime, and the partners, as if at tennis, lend vigour and

give opportunity to each other. Sancho is not a mere village bellyful

of common sense, whose business is to make the Knight of the Doleful

Countenance appear ridiculous. He, too, has his delusions; he, too,

prefers sometimes those two birds twittering distantly in the bush;

Romance, smilingly enough, has touched his puzzled forehead also. And

Don Quixote, with ideals no less noble than those of Amadis of Gaul or

Don Belianis of Greece, with notions of life no less exaggerated than

those in the interminable pastorals, is yet a man of blood and bone.

His ideals and notions are properly fleshed, and are in the book as a

soul in a body. _Don Quixote_ is a book of dreams set upon earth, and

earthly shrewdness reaching vainly after dreams. The rogue novels and

the romances were, either of them, the one without the other.

[The ideal not spoilt by the reality.]

We see Don Quixote's adventures with the realist's eye of disillusion,

and find that external perfection does not matter to our dreams. ''Tis

not the deed but the intent.' The gorgeous charger of the knight of

chivalry is become a poor old starveling hack that should have been

horsemeat these dozen years. Mambrino's helmet is but a barber's bason

after all. Lancelot's Guinevere is Dulcinea of the Mill. Her feet are

large and her shoulders one higher than the other. The castle is a

wayside inn, the routed army a flock of luckless sheep. The goatherds

do not talk after the fashion of the Court, like those in _Galatea_;

but, 'with some coarse compliment, after the country way, they desired

Don Quixote to sit down upon a trough with the bottom upwards.' Gone

are the rose-flecked cloudy pinnacles of dawn; we know them now for

drenching rain. And yet--the play's the thing, and is not judged by its

trappings, but by its beating heart. Not one scene in the Romances, not

one glimpse of the Happy Valley in the Pastorals, has ever moved us

like this book, which is so near life that when we close it we seem not

to have flown on an enchanted carpet from a thousand leagues away, but

to have stepped merely from one room to another of our own existence.

[The _Exemplary Novels_.]

The _Exemplary Novels_ were begun before _Don Quixote_, and published

afterwards. They are examples rather of a form in story-telling than

of any particular piety. Cervantes was, he tells us, 'the first to

essay novels in the Castilian tongue, for the many novels which go

about in print in Spanish are all translated from foreign languages,

while these are my own, neither imitated nor stolen.' He took the form

of the Italian short story, not the episode but the _nouvelle_, the

little novel that had inspired the Elizabethans. He took this form and

filled it with his own material, told in his own manner. In thinking of

that manner I am reminded of the band of Spanish village musicians who

seemed at first to have no obvious connection with my subject. There

were perhaps a dozen of them grouped on the stage of a London music

hall, and they played small windy tunes, occasionally blaring out with

trumpets, using a musical scale entirely different from our own. I

remembered a Japanese I had heard playing on a bamboo flute, and then

the semitones of a little henna-stained flageolet from Kairouan. For

theirs was Eastern music, and I wondered if these Spaniards still owed

their scale to the old rulers of Granada. They set me thinking whether

the peculiar movement of Cervantes' narrative had not also an Eastern

origin. The facts favour the supposition. Up to the battle of Lepanto

the Turks were so far a ruling nation as to be the supreme sea-power;

until even later the most likely of incidents for the use of the

story-teller was that which happened to Cervantes himself--capture by

a Moslem pirate and imprisonment in Algiers. Only a hundred years had

passed since the Moors had been driven from Granada. It would indeed be

surprising if in Cervantes' work we found no sign of Eastern influence.

'I tell it you,' quoth Sancho of his tale, 'as all stories are told

in my country, and I cannot for the blood of me tell it in any other

way, nor is it fit I should alter the custom.' Many characteristics of

Cervantes' narrative remind us that he was writing in a country only

recently freed from the Moors, and in a time when it took the united

forces of Venice, Spain, and the Papacy to beat the Turks at sea.

[Oriental story-telling.]

Cervantes is not ignorant, for example, of the literary trick

of letting his heroes quote from the poets, after the engaging,

erudite manner of the heroes of the _Arabian Nights_. Sancho Panza's

conversation is an anthology of those short wisdom-laden maxims that

had been the staple of Hebrew and Arabic literature. 'Set a hen

upon an egg'; 'While a man gets he never can lose'; 'Where there is

no hook, to be sure there can hang no bacon'; shrewd Ali and careful

Hakim exchange such sentences to-day in the market-places of the

East. But these are small things and beside the main point. I want to

suggest that Cervantes had caught, whether in his Algerine prison, or

in his Morocco-Spanish Spain, the yarning, leisurely, humanity-laden,

unflinching atmosphere of Oriental story-telling. The form of the

_nouvelle_, Eastern in origin, had been passed on from Naples to Paris

and to London, without noticeable improvement, but it seems to me that

now in Spain it met the East again, and was accordingly recreated. It

is just the element of Eastern narrative, accidental in the genius of

Cervantes, that makes his examples of that form so infinitely more

important than those of the English Elizabethans. Scott told Lockhart

that the reading of the _Exemplary Novels_ first turned his mind to

the writing of fiction, and in Scott there is precisely the mood of

uninterruptible story-telling that Cervantes shares with the Princess

Scherazada.

The novels are delightful specimens of ambling, elaborate narrative,

full of the easiest, most confident knowledge of humanity, illustrating

with serene clarity a point of view that is to-day as refreshing as it

is surprising. The happy endings, when the seducer falls in love at

sight on meeting the seduced of years before, and satisfies all her

scruples, and turns her sorrow to unblemished joy by marrying her, show

an ethic of respectability no less assured than Richardson's. They are

enriched by passages whose observation is as minute as Fielding's. They

are never tales about nothing. There is always meat on their bones.

They are among the few stories that can be read on a summer afternoon

under an apple-tree, for they will bear contact with nature, and are

never in a hurry. Even if Cervantes had not written _Don Quixote_, the

_Exemplary Novels_ would have assured him a place in the history of his

art. There is no cleverness in them, any more than in the greater book.

The whole body of Cervantes' work is an illustration of the impregnable

advantage that plain humanity possesses over intellect.

[The portrait of Cervantes.]

And now, after these various questions for the schoolmen, questions to

more than one of which the cautious man must answer with Sir Roger,

that 'much might be said on both sides,' let us return to the old

story-teller himself, who will survive by innumerable generations our

little praises and discussions as he has lived benevolent and secure

through the centuries that have already passed over his grave. The

only authentic portrait of Cervantes is in his own words. A hundred

artists have tried to supplement these words with paint, and their

pictures have at least a family likeness. The portrait made by Miss

Gavin after a careful comparison parison of many others represents

very fairly the traditional Cervantes type, and does not materially

belie the lineaments that he describes:--'He whom you here behold, with

aquiline visage, with chestnut hair, smooth and unruffled brow, with

sparkling eyes, and a nose arched though well proportioned, a silver

beard, although not twenty years ago it was golden, large moustache,

small mouth, teeth not important, for he has but six of them, and

those in ill condition and worse placed because they do not correspond

the one with the other, the body between two extremes, neither large

nor small, the complexion bright, rather white than brown, somewhat

heavy-shouldered, and not very nimble on his feet; this, I say, is

the portrait of the author of the _Galatea_ and of _Don Quixote de

la Mancha_.' That is the sort of statement of himself that an honest

humorous man might make to a friend. Part of the satisfaction given

by his books is due to the comfortable knowledge that there is a

man behind them, a man who knew the world and had not frozen in it.

Cervantes, for all his intimacy with life, never became worldly enough

to believe in hatred. He assumed that all his readers were his friends,

and made them so by the assumption.

* * * * *

[Epilogue.]

No: Cervantes is too simple a man to do anything but suffer in

discussion. There are men whom you know well, who seem to elude you

like the final mystery of metaphysics when you try to talk about them.

My history and not Cervantes is the clearer for the rags and tatters

of observation I have picked off him one by one. I had put them there

myself. It was necessary, for the purposes of my book, to notice the

Eastern character of his story-telling and his position between rogue

novel and romance, but, now that it is done, I am glad to go back to

him without pre-occupations. There is yet hot water in the kettle, and

tea in the pot, and four hours to spend with _Don Quixote_ before I go

to bed. Cervantes, at least, will bear me no malice, but tell me his

story as simply as before I had tried to bring it into argument.

THE ESSAYISTS' CONTRIBUTION TO STORY-TELLING

THE ESSAYISTS' CONTRIBUTION TO STORY-TELLING

[The Character.]

THE detailed, silver-point portrait studies of Fanny Burney, the

miniatures of Jane Austen, and the stronger etchings of Fielding

and Smollett, owed their existence to something outside the art of

story-telling, something other than the grave, humorous pictures of

Chaucer, or the hiding of real people under the homespun of lovesick

shepherds, or the gay autobiographies of swindling rogues. They owed it

to an art which in its beginnings seemed far enough away from any sort

of narrative. In those happy, thievish times when plagiary was a virtue

to be cried upon the housetops, this art, or rather this artistic form,

had been, like much else, stolen from antiquity.

When literature was for the first time become a fashionable toy, and

when, even at Court, a gallant or a soldier was far outmatched by a

wit, the little book of _Theophrastus his Characters_ suggested a

pastime that offered no less opportunity than poetry for the display

of nimbleness and sparkling fancy. Life had become very diverse and

elaborate, and how delightful to take one of its flowerings, one man,

one woman, of a particular species, and exhibit it in a small space,

in a select number of points and quips, each one barbed and sticking

in the chosen target. Sir Thomas Overbury, trying to define the art he

used so skilfully, said, in his clear way:--'To square out a character

by our English levell, it is a picture (reall or personall) quaintly

drawne, in various colours, all of them heightned by one shadowing.

It is a quicke and soft touch of many strings, all shutting up in one

musicall close: it is wit's descant on any plaine song.' The thing had

to be witty; it had to be short. A busy courtier could compose one

in a morning while his barber was arranging his coiffure, and show

it round in the afternoon for the delectation of his friends and the

increase of his vanity. He could take a subject like 'A Woman,' and

with quick sentences pin her to the paper like a butterfly on cork.

Then he could take another title, like 'A Very Woman,' and repeat his

triumph with another variety of the species. [Sir Thomas Overbury.]

Sir Thomas Overbury, that charming, insolent, honest man, the friend

of Somerset, venomously done to death by his Countess for having given

too good advice to her husband, is perhaps the most notable of the

early practitioners. He is not to be despised for his sage poem on the

choice of a wife, but he is at his best in the making of these little

portraits, like that of the 'Faire and happy Milk-mayd,' wherein, in

accordance with his definition, he could polish each detail without

jarring his musical close, and without nullifying the single shadowing

designed to heighten the whole. The form was fitted to the times like

their fashions in clothes. The Character belonged to that age, like the

novel to the nineteenth century. Sir Thomas, as his title-page tells

us, was assisted by 'other much learned gentlemen'; he was presently

followed by a man as different from himself as gentle John Earle,

Doctor of Divinity, and just such a student as an Inns of Court man

like Sir Thomas would naturally despise. So general was the inclination

of the age to portraiture.

[John Earle.]

With Earle we are nearer the drawing of individuals, and so to a

tenderer touch on idiosyncrasies. He relies less on quaint conceits

(though he has plenty of them and charming ones at command; witness the

child whose 'father hath writ him as his owne little story, wherein hee

reads those dayes of his life that hee cannot remember') and trusts

more often to fragments of real observation. His Characters are not so

consistently wit's descant on a plain song. He is often content to give

us a plain descant on a plain song--less concerned with his cleverness

than with his subjects. With Earle we are already some way from the

age of Elizabeth, and indeed Overbury, though he was able to quarrel

with Ben Jonson, and in spite of his Renaissance death, seems to have

a part in a less youthful century. In his wisdom, in his wise advice

unwisely given to his friend, there is something already of the flavour

of Addison; an essence ever so slight of the sound morality of the

periodical essayists whose work owed more than a little to his own.

[La Bruyère.]

The same impulse that suggested the pleasure and profit of collecting

Londoners as Theophrastus had collected his Athenians, suggested

also the noting of contemporary manners. Manners and Characters,

especially since Characters meant peculiarities, belonged to each

other. Overbury's 'Pyrate' is a picture of the times quite as much as

of that sterling fellow they produced, to whom if you gave 'sea roome

in never so small a vessell, like a witch in a sieve, you would think

he were going to make merry with the devill.' And the portrait of 'The

Faire and happy Milk-mayd' betrays in its painting more than a little

of the artist and of the age in which she sat for him. This is true of

the plain Character, unexpanded and unframed; it is still more true of

the Character in the form it very speedily took. The Character became

a paragraph in a discursive essay, and La Bruyère, who copied directly

from Theophrastus, does not make series of separate portraits, but

notices in his original less his picturing of types than his suggestion

of their circumstances, dividing his own work into large sections,

'de la ville,' 'de la Cour,' 'des Biens de Fortune,' 'de la Société

et de la Conversation,' where he seems to stroll slowly through a

garden-walk of philosophy, pointing his remarks with his stick, and

using such portraits as he cares to make to illustrate his general

observations. His Characters are almost anecdotes. He is like the more

advanced naturalist who, no longer content with his butterflies on

cork and his stuffed birds stiff on perches, attempts to place them in

the setting of their ordinary existence, where they may illustrate at

once that existence and their own natures by some characteristic pose.

How near is this to the desire of seeing them alive and in continuous

action, which, if he had had it, would perhaps have made him combine

his notes and sketches in a novel.

[The periodical essayists.]

The periodical essayists had La Bruyère, and Earle's _Microcosmography:

A Piece of the World discovered in Essays and Characters_, and Sir

Thomas Overbury with his much learned gentlemen, and Theophrastus, the

father of them all, well in their memory. They too were collectors

of Characters and observers of public morals and censurers of

private follies. La Bruyère's aims with something more were theirs.

Hazlitt's is so excellent a description of their work that I shall

quote it instead of writing a stupid one. '_Quicquid agunt homines

nostri farrago libelli_, is the general motto of this department of

literature.... It makes familiar with the world of men and women,

assigns their motives, exhibits their whims, characterises their

pursuits in all their singular and endless variety, ridicules their

absurdities, exposes their inconsistencies, "holds the mirror up to

nature, and shows the very age and body of the time its form and

pressure"; takes minutes of our dress, air, looks, words, thoughts,

and actions; shows us what we are, and what we are not; plays the

whole game of human life over before us, and by making us enlightened

spectators of its many coloured scenes, enables us (if possible)

to become tolerably reasonable agents in the one in which we have

to perform a part.' We might be listening to a description of the

eighteenth century novel of manners. Fanny Burney would have recognised

these pretensions for her secret own, though she might have blushed to

see them so emblazoned.

[Minuteness of observation.]

_The Tatler_, _The Spectator_, _The Guardian_, and the rest of them,

are like a long series of skirmishes in a determined campaign on the

part of the essayists to cross the borderland of narrative. Their

traditions, the Character, Montaigne, and Bacon, were very different

from those of the story-tellers. The canvases prescribed for them were

not huge things almost shutting out the sky, but a very small stock

size, two or three pages only, to lie two days on coffee-house tables,

and be used for wrapping butter on the third. The essayists were like

men compelled to examine an elephant with a pocket microscope. Each

subject, small as it was, hid all others for the moment, so that their

observation made mountain peaks and ranges out of pimples and creases.

These very limitations sharpened the weapons of their struggle, the

weapons that were at last to be taken over by the novelists. The small

canvas made carelessness impossible, and this compulsory attention to

detail gave a new dignity to the trivialities that the novelists had so

far overlooked.

[Mr. Bickerstaff.]

The very conception of these papers contained an accidental discovery

of a possibility in fiction. _The Tatler_ was not written by Steele,

or Swift, or Addison, or indeed by any one of its contributors, but

by a Mr. Isaac Bickerstaff, an oldish gentleman, a bachelor, a lover

of children and discreet good fellowship, of an austere but kindly

life, possessed by a pleasant, old-gentlemanly desire to better the

manners of the town. This is personal, yes, but ... and the _but_ has

the dignity of the sentence ... the personality is imaginary. It is a

Character so far alive as to be able to conduct a magazine. It was a

utilitarian conception. Steele was, or pretended to be, vastly annoyed

when the authorship was found out and his own jolly person discovered

under the sober clothes of Mr. Bickerstaff. 'The work,' he says, 'has

indeed for some time been disagreeable to me, and the purpose of it

wholly lost by my being so long understood as its author.... The

general purpose of the whole has been to recommend truth, innocence,

honour, and virtue as the chief ornaments of life; but I considered

that severity of manners was absolutely necessary to him who would

censure others, and for that reason, and that only, chose to talk

in a mask. I shall not carry my humility so far as to call myself a

vicious man, but at the same time must confess, my life is at best but

pardonable. And, with no greater character than this, a man would make

but an indifferent progress in attacking prevailing and fashionable

vices, which Mr. Bickerstaff has done with a freedom of spirit, that

would have lost both its beauty and efficacy, had it been pretended

to by Mr. Steele.' It is as if we were to hear Defoe apologising for

dressing up as Robinson Crusoe, assuring us that his book is but an

allegory, and telling us with due solemnity that he has lived with his

wife these many years, and hardly above once set foot on shipboard, and

then only between London Bridge and Greenwich. Steele was quite unaware

that _The Tatler_ was an embryo novel. And yet, what is it, but an

imaginary character, sometimes meeting other imaginary characters, and

experiencing subjects instead of undergoing adventures?

[Illustration: RICHARD STEELE AND JOSEPH ADDISON]

[The Character and the short story.]

Mr. Bickerstaff was in himself a contribution to character-study in

fiction; the daily talks that were put into his mouth by Steele and

his friends, supplied others no less valuable. The Character, the neat

driven team of short sentences, became in his hands something like

a story. It became an anecdote with no other point than to bring alive

the person described. And the portraits became less general. Types

turned into individuals. Ned Softly, for example, is not called 'a very

Poet,' and hit off with, 'He will ever into Company with a Copy of

Verses in his Pocket; and these will be read to all that suffer him.

Every Opinion he taketh for Praise, and Ridicule in his Ears soundeth

like Flattery.' He is given the name by which he is known in private

life. We see him walk into the room, hear his preliminaries, watch

his battery unmasked as he opens his pocket, listen to his verses,

hear them again, line by ridiculous line, observe him batten on the

opinions he extracts, and see him hide his darlings at the approach

of sterner-featured critics. The Character is become a little scene.

The moth has no pin through his middle, but flaps his way where we may

see him best. Here is the very art that Fanny Burney, that charming

show-woman, was to use for the exhibition of Madame Duval; here the

alchemy that was to turn puppets into people. It is the same that gave

Pygmalion his mistress. The essayists owed much to their own hearts, or

to the heart they set in 'our' Mr. Bickerstaff, for if you love a man

as well as you laugh at him, it is great odds that he will come alive.

[Mr. Bickerstaff's letter-box.]

Steele probably got a few letters from unknown correspondents, dull

and stupid as such things are. Perhaps in laughingly parodying them

at the coffee-house tables he caught the idea of inventing better

ones for Mr. Bickerstaff's assistance. Perhaps, when hard pressed for

time, thrown to the last minute for his work by some merry expedition

with the Kit Kats to talk and drink wine under the mulberry-tree

on Hampstead Heath, he found he could get quicker into a subject

through the letter of a servant girl than through Mr. Bickerstaff's

first-personal lucubrations. However that may be, much of the best

reading in both _Tatler_ and _Spectator_ is held in the letters

supposed to be written to the man who was supposed to write the whole.

These letters are not mere statements of fact, to serve instead of

Latin quotations as texts for essays. They are imitations, 'liker than

life itself,' of the letters of reality. Each one of them is written

by some individual person whose impress on its writing is so clear

that the letter makes a portrait of himself. Even the cock in Clare

Market has a personality quite his own when he sends Mr. Bickerstaff

a petition. And as for the Quaker; remember how he would have been

described in the old manner, and read this:--

'TO THE MAN CALLED THE SPECTATOR

'FRIEND,--Forasmuch as at the Birth of thy Labour, thou didst

promise upon thy Word, that letting alone the Vanities that do

abound, thou wouldest only endeavour to strengthen the crooked

Morals of this our _Babylon_, I gave Credit to thy fair Speeches,

and admitted one of thy Papers every Day, save _Sunday_, into my

House; for the Edification of my Daughter _Tabitha_, and to the End

that _Susanna_, the Wife of my Bosom, might profit thereby. But

alas! my Friend, I find that thou art a Liar, and that the Truth is

not in thee; else why didst thou in a Paper which thou didst lately

put forth, make Mention of those vain Coverings for the Heads of

our Females, which thou lovest to liken unto Tulips, and which are

lately sprung up among us? Nay, why didst thou make Mention of them

in such a Seeming, as if thou didst approve the Invention, insomuch

that my Daughter _Tabitha_ beginneth to wax wanton, and to lust

after these foolish Vanities? Surely thou dost see with the Eyes

of the Flesh. Verily, therefore, unless thou dost speedily amend

and leave off following thine own Imagination, I will leave off

thee.--_Thy Friend as hereafter thou dost demean Thyself_,

'HEZEKIAH BROADBRIM.'

Could anything of the kind be better? It needed only a series of such

letters, consistent to a few characters, and dealing with a succession

of events, to produce a 'Humphry Clinker.' The letters of Matthew

Bramble and his sister, and Lyddy, 'who had a languishing eye and read

romances,' are built no more cunningly than this of Hezekiah.

[Sir Roger de Coverley--a novel.]

If I were asked which was the first English novel of character-study,

as I am asking myself now, I should reply, as I reply now, those essays

in the _Spectator_ that are concerned with Sir Roger de Coverley.

Set that little series of pictures in a book by themselves, as has

been done with appropriate and delightful illustrations by Mr. Hugh

Thomson, and in reading them you will find it hard to remember that you

are not enjoying a more than usually leisurely kind of narrative. The

knight is shown to us in different scenes; we watch him at the assizes,

leaning over to the judge to congratulate him on the good weather

his lordship enjoys; we see him smile in greeting of Will Wimble; we

watch him fidget in his seat with impatience of the misdeeds of the

villain in the play; we hear of his death with a tear in our eye that

is a testimony to the completeness and humanity of the portraiture.

If only his love-story were thinly spread throughout the book and not

begun and ended in a chapter, _Sir Roger de Coverley_ would be a novel

indeed. As it is, in that delicate picture of a country gentleman and

country life--for Sir Roger does not stand against a black curtain for

his portraiture, but before his tenants and his friends--we have the

promise of _The Vicar of Wakefield_ and of _Cranford_, and of all that

chaste and tender kind of story-telling that is almost peculiar to our

literature.

[Johnson and Goldsmith.]

Johnson and Goldsmith followed the tradition. Even the ponderous Doctor

could step lightly at times, and never so lightly as when he obeyed the

instinct that turns discussion into fiction and essays into sketches.

He too can write his letters, and that from Mrs. Deborah Ginger,

the unfortunate wife of a city wit, is a story in itself. And as for

Goldsmith, he can hardly hold his pen for half a paragraph before it

breaks away from the hard road of ideas and goes merrily along the

bridle-path of mere humanity. His letters from Lien Chi Altangi, that

serious Chinese busied in exposing the follies of the Occident, turn

continually to story-telling. A wise remark will usher in an Eastern

tale, and, not even in the papers of Steele or Addison are the subjects

of characters, like the little beau, who would have been a 'mere

indigent gallant,' magicked so deliciously to life. Finally, he did

with 'The Man in Black' what Addison and Steele could so well have done

with Sir Roger. Fielding and Smollett had written before him, and he

saw that he could follow their art without resigning any of the graces

of the essayist.

[The later essayists.]

The eighteenth century saw the absorption of the periodical essayists

into avowed story-telling. Miss Burney left them nothing to do

but to write sketches for chapters that might have appeared in

her books. The essayists who came later could only make beautiful

examples of a form that was already a little old-fashioned, though,

following other suggestions, they experimented in a new direction and

found another art to teach to story-tellers. Leigh Hunt's pair of

early nineteenth-century portraits, 'The Old Gentleman,' and 'The

Old Lady,' betray the family likeness of the character as it was

known to Overbury. Lamb's portrait of Mrs. Battle is nearer modern

story-telling. He does not let us into more than one of Sarah Battle's

secrets, but in telling us of her attitude towards the game of whist

he shows us how she looked upon the game of life. We would know her

if we met her, even if she were not seated at the card-table, the

candles unsnuffed, the fire merry on the hearth, and in the faces of

her and her partner and foes the frosty joy of 'the rigour of the

game.' Hazlitt, though he stuck close to his Montaigne, and cared less

to illustrate himself by other people than by his own opinions, gives

us characters too--that noble one of his father!--and his account of

Jack Cavanagh the fives player, and his description of his going down

to see the fight, are splendid passages of biography and narrative.

But the gift of the later essayists to story-telling was the new

art of reverie, and of the description of an event so soaked in the

describer's personality as to be at once an essay and a story. [The art

of reverie.] Few forms are richer in opportunity either for essayist or

story-teller, than that which made possible Lamb's 'Dream Children,'

and in which the child De Quincey, who had been in Hell, could show

us the calamity of three generations of beautiful children, and ask

at last whether death or life were the more terrible, the more to be

feared. It is sufficient to mention the names of Walter Pater and

Mr. Cunninghame Graham to show that some of the finest work of modern

times has been done in this kind of story-telling, and is being so done

to-day. And this art, this most delicate art of suggested narrative, is

it not also--to return, perhaps a little fancifully, to the tragic old

knight's definition--is it not also 'a picture in various colours, all

of them heightned by one shadowing'? Is it not also 'a quicke and soft

touch of many strings, all shutting up in one musicall close'?

TRANSITION: BUNYAN AND DEFOE

TRANSITION: BUNYAN AND DEFOE

[The old world of fairy tale.]

THE hundred years between the Elizabethan romancers and the English

novelists was not a period of great story-telling like the fifty that

were to follow it, or the first half of the nineteenth century. It

is of interest here mainly because it witnessed a complete change of

audience, the gradual transition of all the arts from a light-hearted

and credulous old world to a careful and common-sense new one. The

change is made very clear by a comparison of the stories popular before

and after.

Robert Burton gives us a fairly accurate notion of the story-telling

of the first quarter of the century, in a paragraph of _The Anatomy

of Melancholy_. He is referring to spoken tales, but his description

applies quite as well to tales in print. 'The ordinary recreations

which we have in winter, and in the most solitarie times busie our

minds with, are cards, tables and dice ... merry tales of errant

knights, queens, lovers, lords, ladies, giants, dwarfs, theeves,

cheaters, witches, fayries, goblins, friers, etc., such as the old

woman told Psyche in Apuleius, Bocace novels, and the rest, _quarum

auditione pueri delectantur, senes narratione_, which some delight to

hear, some to tell, all are well pleased with.' In short, the material

of Shakespeare's plays, of Spenser's _Faërie Queene_, of the early

rogue books, and of the tales imitated from Italy and antiquity by

Greene and Lodge and Pettie.

[A more sober spirit.]

By 1640 things had already changed a little. James Mabbe, the quaint

flavour of whose Tudor style, endearing as the moss on an old house,

reminds us that he published his translation of six of the _Exemplary

Novels_ before Cervantes had been dead for a quarter of a century,

felt that he had to apologise for them to the more sober spirit of the

time. 'Your wisest and learnedst Men,' he writes, 'both in Church and

Common-weale, will sometimes leave off their more serious discourses,

and entertain themselves with matters of harmelesse Merriment and

Disports. Such are these stories I present unto your view. I will

not promise any great profit you shall reape by reading them, but I

promise they will be pleasing and delightful, the Sceane is so often

varied, the Passages are so pretty, the Accidents so strange, and in

the end wrought to so happy a Conclusion.' That marks very neatly the

mid-seventeenth-century attitude towards the art. It was not impossible

that the simple unascetic humanity of Cervantes would be taken amiss

by these people who were stirred by the forces that were producing a

Cromwell and a Bunyan, a Commonwealth and a _Pilgrim's Progress_.

Only, in contradiction to this, the translator could make a confident

appeal to a Pepysian delight in pretty passages, strange accidents,

and happy conclusions--a delight only different from that of the

Elizabethans in its anxiety to be able to write 'harmelesse' when it

had enjoyed them.

[Illustration: JOHN BUNYAN]

[Bunyan's world.]

Before the _Pilgrim's Progress_ was written there had come to be

two parties in the audience: one with an epicurean delight in loose

living, and one whose care was for a stern decency that postponed all

flamboyance to a future life. The men of the first party flung their

roses the more joyously for their antagonism to the sober black of

the others, and were all the merrier for the thought that most of the

community held them damned, although, when Bunyan wrote, theirs was

the outward victory. Consciences were violently stirred, and so were

either hardened absolutely, or else unmistakably alive. If you were

good you were very very good, and if you were bad you were horrid,

like the little girl in the rhyme. There had been revolutions and

counter-revolutions; and likes and dislikes were pretty strongly

marked, because men had had to fight for them.

Bunyan's business was the description of a pilgrim's progress through

a world thus vividly good and bad. His choice of allegory as a method

allowed him to illustrate at the same time the earnestness of his times

and their extraordinary clarity of sensation. It was a form ready to

his hand. The authorised version of the Bible, published in 1611, its

English retaining the savour of a style then out of date, formed at

once his writing and his method, as it constituted his education. 'My

Bible and Concordance are my only library in my writings.' And, himself

a minor prophet, he could quote from Hosea: 'I have used similitudes.'

[The justification of allegory.]

Bunyan's use of them was very different from Spenser's. Hazlitt said

of _The Faërie Queene_ that, if you left the allegory alone, it would

leave you; and his advice may be safely followed. It is not so with

Bunyan, and his allegory must be defended in another manner. It needs

defence, for although it is one of the oldest and pleasantest ways

of producing wisdom-laden stories, it is so easy to use badly that

people have become a little out of patience with it. We remember the

far-fetched explanations tagged on to the _Gesta Romanorum_, and refuse

any longer to be fobbed off with puzzles that are easy to make and hard

to solve. We demand that a book shall have cost its author at least as

much as it costs us. Allegory is like fantasy, either worthless, or not

to be bought with rubies and precious stones; with anything, in fact,

but blood. When Bunyan writes:

'It came from my own heart, so to my head,

And thence into my fingers trickled;

Then to my pen, from whence immediately

On paper I did dribble it daintily,'

he sets up the one plea that is an absolute justification of his

method; that it is 'dribbled daintily,' and came from the depths of

him. The old monks wrote their stories, and searched their heads for a

meaning. But Bunyan thought for himself, and could not think without

seeing. His heart's talk was in passionate imagery.

[Bunyan and the early painters.]

He was the son of a tinker, and a tinker himself, and saw his visions

as clearly as he saw his tin pans. His book is never opalescent with

the shifting colours of a vague mysticism. It is painted in tints as

sharp and bright and simple as Anglo-Saxon words. Bunyan had to throw

himself into no trance in order to watch the pilgrim's arrival at the

New Jerusalem. The Celestial City was as real to him as London, and

there seemed to him no need to describe it in a whisper. His eyes

were as childlike as those of the early painters, who clothed the

builders of the Tower of Babel in fifteenth-century Italian costume,

put a little bonnet on the head and a flying cloak about the shoulders

of Tobias, and set soft leather boots on the feet of the angel. The

whole of the _Pilgrim's Progress_ is contemporary with Mr. Pepys. 'Now

Christiana, if need was, could play upon the viol, and her daughter

Mercy upon the lute; so, since they were so merry disposed, she played

them a lesson, and Ready-to-halt would dance. So he took Despondency's

daughter, named Much-afraid, by the hand, and to dancing they went

in the road. True, he could not dance without one crutch in his

hand; but, I promise you, he footed it well. Also the girl was to be

commended, for she answered the music handsomely.' It might be Mr.

Pepys himself describing the frolic of some friends. And yet it was

the most natural, righteous thing in the world, since Great Heart had

killed Giant Despair, and Despondency and Much-afraid had just been

freed from the dungeons of Doubting Castle.

[The Fear of Life.]

It is characteristic of the English spirit that the greatest national

classic of piety should be written by a man whose relish for life was

in no way blunted by his thoughts of immortality. Bunyan had a fear of

life no less real than his fear of God, and loved both God and life the

better for fearing them. Men set capital letters to the Fear of God,

and there is a Fear of Life no less different from cowardice. Bunyan,

a brave man, imprisoned again and again for his beliefs, and more than

once in imminent danger of hanging, shows in a passage of his _Grace

Abounding_ this Fear of Life in a very glare of light. Bunyan had loved

bell-ringing, and, after he had come to consider it not the occupation

of a man whose profession was so perilous and serious as a Christian's,

he could not help going to the belfry to watch those whose scruples

still allowed them his favourite pastime.

'But quickly after, I began to think, "How if one of the bells

should fall?" Then I chose to stand under a main beam, that lay

athwart the steeple from side to side, thinking here I might stand

sure; but then I thought again, should the bell fall with a swing,

it might first hit the wall, and then rebounding upon me, might

kill me for all this beam. This made me stand in the steeple door;

and now thought I, I am safe enough, for if a bell should then

fall, I can slip out behind these thick walls, and so be preserved

notwithstanding. So after this I would yet go to see them ring,

but would not go any further than the steeple door; but then it

came into my head, 'How if the steeple itself should fall?' And

the thought (it may, for aught I know, when I stood and looked

on) did continually so shake my mind, that I durst not stand at

the steeple-door any longer, but was forced to flee, for fear the

steeple should fall upon my head.'

A man who felt as vividly as that, and was as stout as Bunyan, taking

existence as he would take a nettle, took it with a grip as firm as

that of love, and loved and feared his life as he loved and feared

his God. He knew that brightness and clarity of sensation desired by

Stendhal when he wrote, 'The perfection of civilisation would be to

combine all the delicate pleasures of the nineteenth century with the

more frequent presence of danger.' Life was very actual to him, and

so, in this account of a pious dream, we find the clearest prophecy of

that sense for reality that distinguishes the novels of the eighteenth

century. The _Pilgrim's Progress_ was the first great story of that

series of books that was to paint the English character in the eyes of

the world.

[Facts.]

A fact is something very like an Englishman. It is a thing complete in

itself, and satisfactory on that account. There is no vanity about a

fact, and, as a people, we hate showing off. I can think of no other

nation as hungry for fact as ours, none with a book that corresponds

to the _Newgate Calendar_ and has been so popular, none with a book of

spiritual adventure so actual as the _Pilgrims Progress_, none with a

book of bodily adventure comparable with _Robinson Crusoe_. Defoe and

Bunyan stand for the plain facts of religion and existence, in both of

which they found so English a delight.

[The instinct for verisimilitude.]

Bunyan's book is an account of a dream. It is not a frank fairy tale

demanding a certain licence of nature to make possible its supernatural

events. Like the _Romance of the Rose_, unlike the _Faërie Queene_, it

takes its licence in its first sentence--'As I slept, I dreamed'--and

is able thenceforth to be as miraculous as it pleases without much loss

of credibility, since miracle, if not consistency and continuity, is of

the very element of a dream. It was an instinct for reality that made

Bunyan give his story such a setting. Giants and dwarfs could no longer

be jostled with thieves and cheaters as when Burton wrote. And Defoe,

writing another forty years later, shows this same instinct for reality

very much more conscientiously developed.

[Illustration: DANIEL DEFOE]

With an imagination scarcely less opulent than Bunyan's, Defoe,

if he had described a dream, would have managed somehow to make it

as short-winded and inconsequent as a real one. He was in love with

verisimilitude, and delighted in facts for their own sakes. 'To read

Defoe,' wrote Charles Lamb, 'is like hearing evidence in a Court of

Justice.' No compliment could have pleased him better.

[Lamb and Defoe.]

The letter in which Lamb paid it him was written at the East India

House, immediately after the labour of entering the accounts of a tea

sale. Careless as it is, it contains a criticism of Defoe's books that

goes to the root of his method. Here is its kernel. 'The author,'

writes Lamb, 'never appears in these self-narratives (for so they ought

to be called, or rather, autobiographies), but the _narrator_ chains us

down to an implicit belief in everything he says.' (It is interesting

to notice that Defoe, a very early realist, obeyed the spirit of

Flaubert's maxim, that a writer should be everywhere invisible in his

work, and that his books should, so to speak, tell themselves.) 'There

is all the minute detail of a log-book in it. Dates are painfully

impressed upon the memory. Facts are repeated over and over in varying

phases, till you cannot choose but believe them.' Then follows the

sentence already quoted. Lamb goes on: 'So anxious the story-teller

seems that the truth should be clearly comprehended, that when he has

told us a matter of fact or a motive in a line or two farther down he

repeats it, with his favourite figure of speech, 'I say,' so and so,

though he had made it abundantly plain before. This is an imitation of

the common people's way of speaking, or rather of the way in which they

are addressed by a master or mistress, who wishes to impress something

on their memories, and has a wonderful effect upon matter-of-fact

readers.'

[The new world of matter-of-fact.]

There is little to add to that, though Lamb 'had not looked into

them latterly,' or he would have noticed in Defoe's books, with his

quick eye for such things, Defoe's wary way with anything that seems

to him at all incredible. In _The Journal of the Plague Year_, for

example, none of the more dramatic anecdotes are vouched for by the

writer. He heard them from some one else, did not see them with his

own eyes, finds them hard to believe, and so rivets the belief of his

readers. We shall observe in discussing Hawthorne the more advanced

possibilities of this ingenious trick. The best books of Defoe's

are rogue novels, and in none of them was he content with a merely

literary reality. His heroes are as solid as ordinary men, or more so.

The figure of Selkirk shrinks away like a faint shadow behind that of

Crusoe, whose imaginary adventures his own had suggested, and there

can be no doubt in anybody's mind as to which of the two is the more

credible. And then there is that style of his, homelier even than

Bunyan's, though less markedly so, since he is describing homelier

things. There is no Euphuism here; Defoe was not the man to deal in

gossamers. The essayist's delicacy of line had not yet been given to

the story-tellers, and Defoe was not the man to deal with silver point.

His style is as simple and effective as a bricklayer's hod. He carries

facts in it, and builds with them alone. The resulting books are like

solid Queen Anne houses. There is no affectation about them; they are

not decorated with carving; but they are very good for 'matter-of-fact

readers' to live in. Matter-of-fact readers made Defoe's audience, and

the hundred years since Burton wrote had made a matter-of-fact English

nation out of the credulous Elizabethans. The eighteenth century opens

with this note. The tales the old woman told Psyche have been blown

away like dead leaves into heaps for the children to play in, and

grown-up people, serious now, have done with fairy tale and are ready

for the English novel.

RICHARDSON AND THE FEMININE NOVEL

RICHARDSON AND THE FEMININE NOVEL

[For women by women.]

EUPHUES had addressed a dedication to the 'Ladies and Gentlewomen

of England,' and had said openly that he would rather lie shut in

a tiring closet than open in a study; but, writing for women as he

did, he never tried to write as if he were himself a woman. On the

contrary, Lyly's attitude was that of the gallant. The Elizabethan

romancers who followed him were read by women but content to be men.

Mrs. Behn, whose 'weltering sewerage' we have not had space to discuss,

wrote for women, but certainly not less coarsely than if she had been

writing for her own heroes. It was not until the eighteenth century

that there was fairly launched a new story-telling, characteristically

English in origin, without the fine careless heroism and improbability

of romance, that it held was 'calculated for amusement only,' and

different also from the mischievous realism of the picaresque. These

ships, with their gallant scarlet and gold pennons, and their merry

skull and cross-bones, had been long afloat before there came to join

them a white barge with a lily at the prow and on her decks girls in

white dresses, with their heads close together telling stories to each

other. The author of a tale had hitherto been either a man, a god, or

a rascal; he had never been content to be a girl. And the first of the

new craftswomen was a fat and solid little printer and alderman of the

City of London, called Samuel Richardson.

[Samuel Richardson.]

Richardson was an author of a kind quite new to English

letters--neither a great gentleman like Sidney, nor a roisterer like

Greene, nor a fanatic preacher like Bunyan, nor a journalist like

Defoe; just a quiet, conscientious, little business man, who, after a

duteous apprenticeship, had married his master's daughter like a proper

Whittington, and, when she died, had married again, with admirable

judgment in each case. It is not every one who can marry two wives and

be unhappy with neither. As a boy, he had written love-letters for

young women who were shy of their abilities. Girlish in his youth, he

had preferred the tea-table to the tavern. Surrounded by women in his

manhood, he was a grotesque little figure of a man, as inquisitive as

an old maid, as serious over detail as a village gossip; walking in the

Park, and looking at the feet of the women he met, and, as they passed

him, quickly scanning their faces, and saying to himself, 'that kind

of person,' or 'this kind of person,' and then going on to observe and

summarise the next. He was accustomed, like a Japanese draughtsman, or

a woman in a theatre, to complete and instantaneous observation.

His was just the mind to show women what they could do; and this, with

their constant applause and help, he did.

[Illustration: SAMUEL RICHARDSON]

He had a lifetime of feminine society behind him when he was asked

to write a series of letters on 'the useful concerns in common life'

for the guidance of servant-girls, and, setting himself to the task,

produced _Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded_, and then, stepping on from his

success, _Clarissa Harlowe_, and finally the monstrous _Grandison_.

The books were written in a close atmosphere of femininity. 'My

worthy-hearted wife and the young lady who is with us, when I had read

them some part of the story, which I had begun without their knowing

it, used to come into my little closet every night, with--"Have you any

more of Pamela, Mr. R.? We are come to hear a little more of Pamela."'

Every letter of Clarissa's was canvassed by the tea-parties that wept

and trembled for her fate, and worshipped her proud little creator.

And all his friends contributed their ideas of the perfect man to the

making of Sir Charles Grandison. No author had ever written so before.

[The novel by post.]

I believe that the femininity of the resulting books was due to his

choice of the epistolary method as well as to his own temperament, and

his enviable opportunities of studying the character of the audience

at which he aimed. If he had not happened upon it, if he had tried

to tell his stories in the manner fashionable at the time, they would

but have been exaggerations and amplifications of tales that Steele

would have put most comfortably into a single number of _The Tatler_

or _Spectator_. If he had used the autobiographical form he would have

been prohibited from much of his detail, and all the effect of lighting

his subject from several points of view. But letters were so new in

story-telling that they helped him to be new himself, just as a new

and unusual fashion of coat helps a man to be militantly original,

within as well as without. And then letters, always describing events

that have scarcely happened, excuse the most unlimited detail, the

most elaborately particularised gossip or confession. Letters were the

perfect medium for the expression of the feminine mind.

I do not deny that there are disadvantages in the novel by post,

that concerns many characters in elaborate play. Richardson has, for

example, to keep his corresponding couples, naughty Lovelace and

uneasy Belford, Clarissa and the giddy Miss Howe, dodging apart again

and again for the purpose of exchanging letters. We are tortured by

Pamela's efforts for the good of her story, her letters sandwiched

between tiles and buried in earth, the incredible agility of her

postman John, and the forethought and luck that enables her to provide

herself with ink and paper in the most impossible circumstances. And

when Mr. Belford writes of Clarissa, 'there never was a woman so young

who wrote so much and with such celerity,' we look at the huge volumes

and find it easy to believe him. When we hear that 'Her thoughts

keeping pace with her pen she hardly ever stopped or hesitated, and

very seldom blotted out or altered,' we reflect that she certainly

had not the time. And when later we are told that 'Last night, for

the first time since Monday last, she got to her pen and ink; but

she pursues her writing with such eagerness and hurry as show her

discomposure,' we cannot help smiling to think how very advantageous

such discomposure must be to Mr. Richardson, who is to edit the

correspondence. There is this difficulty of credibility, and also

occasional even more obvious awkwardnesses, as when the characters,

always very obliging to their creator, have to enclose copies of

letters that would not otherwise have got into print.

[Richardson does not attempt illusion.]

On the other hand, we cannot count these as serious blemishes on a

form of art so far removed from any attempt at illusion. There is in

Richardson's novels no sort of visualised presentment of life. We see

his principal characters through little panes of glass over their

hearts, and in no other way. I cannot for the life of me imagine what

Clarissa really looked like, but I know well enough what she thought.

Spasmodic reminders of Pamela's abstract prettiness produce little

but an impatient desire to see a portrait. I remember but one glimpse

of her, and that is in the first volume, when she has dressed herself

up in her new homespun clothes, dangles a straw hat by its two blue

strings, and looks at herself in the looking-glass. There comes an

expression a little later, 'a pretty neat damsel,' and again, 'a tight

prim lass,' and I think that the ghost of a little girl shows in the

looking-glass, but only for a moment, like the reflection of a bird

flying over a pool of water. Richardson's characters are decreasingly

real from their hearts outwards. They have no feet. But their hearts

are so beautifully exhibited that we cannot ask for anything else.

To quarrel over them with Richardson is like quarrelling with the

delightful Euclid because no one has ever been able to draw a straight

line that should really be length without breadth. Such a line does

not exist outside his books, yet Euclid is all in the right when he

talks of geometry. Pamela and Clarissa do not exist outside their

propositions, yet Johnson, talking fairly honestly, was able to say

that there was more knowledge of the human heart in a letter of

Richardson's than in all _Tom Jones_.

[The passion for respectability.]

It is knowledge of the human heart from the girl's point of view--the

unromantic girl, for Richardson could never bring himself to believe

in great passions. He would never have used as the text of a novel

that sentence from the New Testament that has inspired so many later

story-tellers: 'Her sins are forgiven her because she loved much.'

Richardson's only passion is one not usually so called, and that is

a passion for respectability. The desire for respectability, for her

children's sake if not for her own, is part of every woman's armour

in the battle of this world. In Richardson's two best novels it is

something far more than this, an obsession that love cannot conquer nor

goodness override. In Clarissa it is so Quixotic, so forlorn a hope

as to be noble; but Pamela's respectability is a little disgusting.

What, after all, is Pamela's story but the tale of a servant-girl

who declaims continually about her honesty, writes foolish verse

about it, lets her head fall on her master's shoulder, and refuses to

be his except as his wife? She is quite right, of course, and most

estimable. But her affronted virtue does not seem much more than a

practical commercial asset, when she successfully marries the man who

by every means in his power has sought to destroy it. Clarissa, on

the other hand, has nothing to gain, nothing even to retain, except

her self-respect. The respect of Howes, Belfords, and Harlowes could

weigh but little with a being lifted from ordinary Philistine life

into a conflict as unworldly as hers. She has the ivory dignity of

some flowers, and the curious power of the book that traces her

misfortunes is due to the spectacle of so flowerlike and fragile a

being engaged in a struggle so terribly unequal. The struggle itself

could hardly have been imagined by a wholly masculine writer. It is

a kind of elaborate proposition, not a picture of life. It is like a

chess problem in which we know that white mates in two moves, and are

interested only in seeing how he does it. In Richardson, as in Euclid,

we know always what is coming. Our artistic pleasure is in the logic

and sequence of the intervening steps. If you expect a theorem to turn

into a problem or _vice versâ_, the inevitability of Richardson annoys

you; but if you read him in the right spirit that quality is your chief

delight.

It is interesting to notice that Richardson, inventing girls' theorems,

is unable to draw a hero in whom a man can believe. Lovelace, for

example, is touched in in a way that makes women fall in love with

him, but men feel for cobwebs in the air. Pamela's master is frankly

incredible. And it is no bad illustration of Richardson's femininity

that Charles Grandison, planned as the perfect man, has been found

unbearable in the smoking-room, insipid at the tea-table, and has

probably had no conquests but a few Georgian ladies'-maids. But the

women, abstractions, algebraical formulæ, as they are, let us into

secrets of the machinery of a woman's mind that no earlier novelist had

been able to examine.

[Richardson's influence.]

Richardson's precise, intimate, feminine knowledge of women and

feminine method of writing had a wider influence than that we are

tracing in this chapter. He showed story-tellers a new world to conquer

and quite unexplored possibilities in the telling of a tale. It was

for this that he was translated by the Abbé Prévost, the Jesuit,

soldier, priest and novelist, who wrote in _Manon Lescaut_ of a passion

greater and more self-sacrificing than any that had come in the way of

the little printer of Salisbury Court. And when St. Preux and Julie

exchange those letters that brought a new freedom of sentiment into

literature, Rousseau, who taught them how to write, had himself been

taught by Richardson.

[Illustration: FANNY BURNEY]

[Fanny Burney.]

I do not intend any detailed portraiture of the later writers of the

feminine novel, but only in a brief mention of two of them to suggest

the course they took in the development of their art, until in the

nineteenth century it combined with and became indistinguishable from

the masculine novel that held it at first in a not lightly to be

reconciled hostility. Let us look along the bookshelf for a volume

called _Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the

World_. Thirty years had passed between the publication of _Clarissa_

and that of Fanny Burney's best book, and in those years Fielding and

Smollett had written, and _Humphry Clinker_ had shown that it was

possible to describe in letters other things than a series of attacks

on the armour of respectability. Fanny Burney took more material

with a lighter hand, stealing away the business of _The Tatler_, _The

Spectator_, _The Citizen of the World_, and trying not only to 'draw

characters from nature' but also to 'mark the manners of the time.'

She had learnt from a diligent perusal of Richardson, avoided a too

elaborate postal system, and made her butterfly task the easier by

writing of herself, whereas he had to invent the Clarissas and Pamelas

of his more bee-like labours.

[Young lady's 'manners.']

Fanny Burney was the daughter of a popular music-master, whose house

was always full of all sorts of people, so that she had the best of

opportunities for observing that surface of life which she was able so

incomparably to reproduce. She was able to see manners in contrast. Now

'manners' described by a man in a coffee-house--by Steele, for example,

or Goldsmith, mean the habits and foibles of contemporary society.

'Manners' 'marked' at a young lady's rosewood desk mean vulgarity and

its opposite, and the various shades between the two. In the essayist's

eyes, manners were simply manners, to be described each one for its

own sake. The feminine novelist found manners either good or bad, and

was concerned with the tracing of a gossamer thread of distinction.

The story of Evelina is not so much that of her love-affair with Lord

Orville, but of the suffering or satisfaction of a sensitive person

exposed alternately to atmospheres of bad manners or good. Evelina

threads her way shyly along the border-line, and illustrates both

sides by their effects upon her happiness. We are sorrier for her when

she hears Miss Branghton cry out joyfully, 'Miss is going to marry a

Lord,' than when she is in more serious trouble over her acknowledgment

by her father. All the minor characters for whom the story makes a

frame are set there as types less of character than of behaviour.

There is Mrs. Selwyn with her habit of 'setting down' young men, and

her characteristic praise of Lord Orville, 'there must have been

some mistake about the birth of that young man; he was, undoubtedly,

designed for the last age; for he is really polite.' There is Captain

Mirvan, representing good birth and brutality of manners; Madame Duval,

low birth seeking to veil itself in lofty affectation; the Branghtons,

frank vulgarity; Mr. Smith, the tinsel gentility of the Holborn beau.

Each character is in the book in order to inflict its peculiar type

of manners on the heroine, so that we may watch the result. Evelina

herself, delicious as she is, is given to us as a touchstone between

good breeding and vulgarity.

[Feminine standards of delicacy.]

Miss Burney marks very clearly the introduction of the feminine

standards of delicacy that were to rule the English novel of the

nineteenth century. Evelina's criticism of _Love for Love_, written

less than a hundred years before she saw it, distinguishes honestly

between her own point of view and that of the best of men. 'Though it

(the play) was fraught with wit and entertainment, I hope I shall never

see it represented again; for it is so extremely indelicate--to use

the softest word I can--that Miss Mirvan and I were perpetually out of

countenance, and could neither make any observations ourselves, nor

venture to listen to those of others. This was the more provoking, as

Lord Orville was in excellent spirits, and exceedingly entertaining.'

[Illustration: JANE AUSTEN]

[Jane Austen.]

Twenty years after _Evelina_, the novel of femininity took a further

step in technique and breadth of design. Miss Austen, who in the last

decade of the eighteenth century was writing the novels that were not

to be published till after the first decade of the nineteenth, learnt

from both her precursors. She was a proper follower of Richardson, but

dispensed altogether with the artifice of letters, although the whole

of her work is so intimate and particular in expression that it would

almost seem to be written in a letter to the reader.[7] Like Miss

Burney she had read the masculine novels of an ordinary life, whose

strings were not so finely stretched as those of life in the books of

the sentimental little printer; she had read Fielding and Smollett and

the Essayists, and Miss Burney herself, but she carried the satire

she had learnt from them deeper than Miss Burney's criticism of well

or ill-bred manners. She deals more directly with existence. Miss

Burney with lovable skill made her puppets play her game. Miss Austen's

puppets played a game of their own. She remarked before writing _Emma_,

'I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like,'

exactly as if she were a little girl rather capriciously choosing a

new plaything. But Emma, once chosen, illustrates no special theorem,

and is compelled to tread no tight-rope over the abyss of vulgarity.

Miss Austen's world has the vitality of independent life, and is yet

close under observation, like society in a doll's house. Her people are

alive and real, and yet so small that she found it easy to see round

them and be amused. Indeed, she grew so accustomed to laughing at them

that she came to include the reader in her play. I am not sure if it

would not be wise for any one who found a page of hers a little dull

or incomprehensible, to consider very carefully and seriously if she

is not being mischievous enough and insolent enough to win her silvery

laugh from his own self. To read her is like being in the room with an

unscrupulously witty woman; it is delightful, but more than a trifle

dangerous.

[The analysis of the heart.]

But Miss Austen's satire is not so important as the clear, keen sight

that made it possible. The feminine novel finds its justification

and characteristic in the quick light gossiping knowledge of Miss

Burney, in Miss Austen's bric-à-brac of observation, in Richardson's

topographical accuracy among the hidden alleys and byways of the

heart. Its tenderness of detail is its most valuable contribution to

story-telling, associated though it is with feminine standards of

decency, and the sharp point of feminine raillery. The first of these

concomitants is a gift of doubtful, and certainly not universal,

virtue. The second is no more than a variation, a different-tinted,

other-textured version of the satire of men. But the gift to which

they were attached has made possible some of the finest work of later

artists, in those stories whose absorbing interest is the unravelling

of tangled skeins of intricate psychology. Theirs is a minuteness in

the dissection of the heart quite different from, and indeed hostile

to, the free-and-easy way of men like Fielding and Smollett, and

wherever we meet with this fine and delicate surgery practice we can

trace its ancestry with some assurance to the feminine novel of the

eighteenth century.

FIELDING, SMOLLETT, AND THE MASCULINE NOVEL

FIELDING, SMOLLETT, AND THE MASCULINE NOVEL

[The English Renaissance.]

I HAVE always felt that the English Renaissance was considerably later

than that of France or Italy, and happened in the eighteenth century.

When we speak of the Italian or the French Renaissance we mean the

times in the histories of Italy or France when the peculiar genius

of each of these countries showed the most energetic and satisfying

efflorescence. In Italy and in France this time was that of the revival

of classical learning, when Boccaccio lectured on Dante at Florence

and Ronsard gardened and rhymed. In England, although from the time

of Chaucer to the time of Shakespeare we were picking continental

flowers, and flowering ourselves individually and gorgeously, yet we

had no general efflorescence in our national right, no sudden and

complete self-portraiture in several arts at once. And this in the

eighteenth century was what we had. All our national characteristics

were unashamedly on view. Our solidity, our care for matter of fact,

our love of oversea adventure, were exhibited in Defoe. Our sturdy

spirituality had only recently found expression in Bunyan. Richardson

discovered the young person who, rustling her petticoats, sits with

so demure an air of permanence on Victorian literature, and represents

indeed so real a part of our national character that we shall never be

able to forget her blushes altogether. Our serious turn for morality

showed itself at once in the aims all our authors professed, and in the

pictures of Hogarth who, with courage unknown elsewhere, dared to paint

ugliness as ugly. This is the century that represents us in the eyes

of the world. If we would think of the Italian spirit we remember the

_Decameron_; if of the French, we remember Ronsard's 'Mignonne, allons

voir si la rose,' or Marot's 'Mignonne, je vous donne le bon jour.'

But if a Frenchman tries to describe an Englishman his model is not a

Chaucer but a Jean Bull, and the only adequate portraits of Jean Bull

are to be found in the novels of Fielding and Smollett.

[Illustration: HENRY FIELDING]

[Two points of view.]

Out of this general efflorescence were to spring two branches of

story-telling different and hostile from the start. The novel was

given sex. Richardson had scarcely invented the feminine novel before

Fielding and Smollett were at work producing books of a masculinity

correspondingly pronounced. Fielding was the first to mark the

difference, and Richardson to the end of his life hated him for writing

_Joseph Andrews_. It often happens that one philosopher hates another

whose system though less elaborate is obviously founded on a broader

basis than his own. Fielding could afford to laugh at Richardson, but

Richardson could never laugh at Fielding. He could only enjoy the

lesser satisfaction of holding his rival accursed. Their upbringings

had been as different as the resulting books. Eton, law studies at

Leyden and the Middle Temple, were a different training for the art of

story-telling than the Dick Whittington youth of the little business

man. Richardson saw the game of life from the outside. Harry Fielding

knew the rough and tumble. Richardson was all for virtue; so was

Fielding, but, as he would have put it himself, for virtue that is

virtue. Virtue at the expense of nature he could no more understand

than Benvenuto Cellini, who, if the facts in the case of Pamela had

been set before him, would have thought her a devilish artful young

woman, and, if he had met her, congratulated her upon her capture.

Fielding had a short, rough and ready creed, and that was that a good

heart goes farther than a capful of piety towards keeping the world a

habitable place.

[_Pamela_ and _Joseph Andrews_.]

_Pamela_ made him laugh. He wanted to make money by writing, so he sat

down to put the laugh on paper, with the ultimate notion of filling

his pocket by publishing a squib. He set out to parody Pamela in the

person of her brother Mr. Joseph Andrews. He had not gone very far in

the performance before Parson Adams came into the story, and became

so prodigiously delightful that it occurred to Fielding that he had

here as admirable a couple for adventure as Cervantes himself could

have wished, with the result that Mr. Andrews' correspondence does

not compare at all favourably with his sister's, while his biography

is infinitely more entertaining. When the book was done, its creator

printed on the title-page: 'Written in imitation of the Manner of

Cervantes, Author of Don Quixote,' made no very particular reference

to his original purpose, and described his book as 'A Comic Epic in

Prose.' The masculine novel was on its way. Like _Don Quixote_ or

_Le Roman Comique_ it represented a smiling move towards reality, or

the criticism of reality, in Fielding's hands through the high and

difficult art of ridicule, in the hands of Smollett, whose first book

was published six years later, through the easier art of caricature.

These two men between them made the masculine novel of the eighteenth

century. Its scope and character are best mapped out by a study

of their respective lives, which were sufficiently unlike to make

their books almost as different from each other's as they were from

Richardson's.

[Fielding and Smollett.]

They both looked on man as man, a simple creature seldom wholly bad.

They were not the fellows to tolerate humbug about platonic love,

or the soul, or religion. Religion meant the Established Church,

and a parson was a man, good or bad, a representative of the State

perhaps, but not a representative of God. Love was no opal passion

between Endymion and the moon. It meant desire between man and woman,

as tender as you liked, but still desire. It was as simple a thing as

valour, which meant ability to use the fists and stand fire. Fielding

and Smollett knew a fairly brutal world. But their positions in it

had been different. Fielding had always had his head above water. He

is continually thinking of fair play, and feels, as we do, a thrill

at the heart when he sees Tom Jones and an innkeeper shake hands

after bleeding each other's noses. Smollett had had a harder time.

He had known what it was to be denied the privileges of a gentleman.

He had been in a subordinate position in the navy when that was an

organisation of licensed brutality. He was as accustomed to seeing

men's bodies cross-questioned, as Fielding to reading law-cases and

examining men's minds. He writes always on a more animal level than

Fielding. After every fight he lines up his characters for medical

treatment:--

'"'n' well," says he, "'n' how

Are yer arms, 'n' legs, 'n' liver, 'n' lungs, 'n' bones

a-feelin' now?"'

Fielding only inquires after their hearts. Put their portraits side

by side, and the difference is clear. Fielding's is the face of the

fortunate man who has had his bad times and come smiling through;

Smollett's that of the man not bruised but permanently scarred by the

experiences he has suffered. An old sailor once said to me that you

can judge of the roughness of a man's employment by the coarseness of

his language; those whose work is roughest, using the coarsest words.

Fielding is seldom disgusting. His heroes are constantly putting their

feet into it; but not into unnecessary filth. It is impossible to say

the same of Smollett.

[Smollett and Le Sage.]

Their choice of models was characteristic; _Joseph Andrews_ being

written in imitation of the gentle banter of Cervantes, while _Roderick

Random_ copied the more acid satire of Le Sage. Indeed, Le Sage

was not serious enough. 'The disgraces of Gil Blas,' says Smollett

in his preface, 'are for the most part such as rather excite mirth

than compassion; he himself laughs at them; and his transitions from

distress to happiness, or at least ease, are so sudden, that neither

the reader has time to pity him, nor himself to be acquainted with

affliction. This conduct, in my opinion, not only deviates from

probability, but prevents that generous indignation, which ought to

animate the reader against the sordid and vicious disposition of the

world.' That is a moving and very remarkable paragraph. Between those

lines is the memory of more than enough 'acquaintance with affliction,'

and there is something terrible in the assumption, made with such

absolute conviction, that good luck 'deviates from probability.'

Smollett had not known much happiness, and found so light-hearted an

aim as Le Sage's impossible. His own was almost vengeful. 'I have

attempted to represent modest merit struggling with every difficulty to

which a friendless orphan is exposed, from his own want of experience,

as well as from the selfishness, envy, malice, and base indifference of

mankind.' Roderick Random is a rogue and a skunk, but we cannot blame

Tobias Smollett if he did not know it. Random's more objectionable

qualities are those that pull him through his difficulties. A nicer man

would have gone under. The difficulties are at fault for making not

Random but Smollett what he was.

[The technique of the English novel.]

The technique of the English novel was more elaborate than that of its

models. Just as _Joseph Andrews_ is more orderly than _Don Quixote_, so

_Roderick Random_ is a step between the pure rogue novel, the string

of adventures only connected by the person of the adventurer, and the

modern novel of definite plot. _Don Quixote_ and _Gil Blas_ could be

cut off anywhere. Their creators had only to kill them. But the curtain

could not be rung down on the adventures of Random or Andrew before

quite a number of different threads had been properly gathered and

explained. There were a few pretty wild coincidences to be discovered.

Rory, Joseph, and Fanny all find their true parents; perhaps but rough

and ready means to give rotundity to a story, but still pleasant

mysteries, to be kept like sweetmeats and dessert as lures for flagging

appetites. The novel had assumed some of the elaborate interest of the

_nouvelle_, as practised by Cervantes and the Elizabethans, and the

influence of the stage perhaps partly accounts for the construction

of the English imitations, more consistent than that of their Spanish

and Franco-Spanish models. The art of play-writing had reached its

period of most scrupulous technique so recently that these two men who

had failed in the theatre were not likely to forget its methods when

experimenting with the more plastic art of narrative.

[Fielding the better artist.]

Of the two, Fielding is always the better artist. He is more interested

in his art, more single-minded. He never forgets his duties as a

novelist, and continually turns to the reader, just as if he were a

sculptor executing a difficult piece of work in the presence of an

audience whose admiration he expects. He was ready to laugh at himself

for it too: 'We assure the reader we would rather have suffered half

mankind to be hanged than have saved one contrary to the strictest laws

of unity and probability.' He did not always keep up this admirable

conscientiousness; but he did so more consistently than Smollett.

The delicacy of their craftsmanship is best compared not in their

greatest books but in those two novels in which they essayed the same

task, the portraiture of a rogue, and a rogue not after the merry

sympathetic fashion of Lazarillo, but one whom the authors themselves

accounted a villain and expected their readers to detest.

[_Jonathan Wild._]

The ironic biographer of Jonathan Wild realised the difficulties of

the undertaking. He saw that unless he adopted an attitude which would

make it proper for him always to express approval of his hero, his

readers would begin to cast this way and that, not knowing whether to

sympathise or hate, as the genius of the author or the villainy of the

hero were alternately prominent in their eyes. Accordingly, choosing

the name of a real and famous gallows-bird who had been hung some

twenty years before, Fielding took his tone from those little penny

biographies that used to be hawked among the crowd who waited at Tyburn

to see their hero swing. He ironically takes this tone; and sustains it

without a false note for a couple of hundred pages. How admirably he

uses it:--

'The hero, though he loved the chaste Laetitia with excessive

tenderness, was not of that low snivelling breed of mortals

who, as is generally expressed, _tie themselves to a woman's

apron-strings_; in a word, who are afflicted with that mean, base,

low vice or virtue, as it is called, of constancy.'

And again in the passage that sums up the book:--

'He laid down several maxims, as the certain means of attaining

greatness, to which, in his own pursuit of it, he constantly

adhered.

As--

1. Never to do more mischief than was necessary to the effecting

of his purpose; for that mischief was too precious a thing to be

thrown away.

2. To know no distinction of men from affection; but to sacrifice

all with equal readiness to his interest.

3. Never to communicate more of an affair than was necessary to the

person who was to execute it.

4. Not to trust him who hath deceived you, nor who knows he has

been deceived by you.

5. To forgive no enemy; but to be cautious and often dilatory in

revenge.

6. To shun poverty and distress, and to ally himself as close as

possible to power and riches.

7. To maintain a constant gravity in his countenance and behaviour,

and to affect wisdom on all occasions.

8. To foment eternal jealousies in his gang, one of another.

9. Never to reward any one equal to his merit; but always to

insinuate that the reward was above it.

10. That all men were knaves or fools, and much the greater number

a composition of both.

11. That a good name, like money, must be parted with or at least

greatly risked, in order to bring the owner any advantage.

12. That virtues, like precious stones, were easily counterfeited;

that the counterfeits in both cases adorned the wearer equally;

and that very few had knowledge or discernment sufficient to

distinguish the counterfeit jewels from the real.

13. That many men were undone by not going deep enough in roguery;

as in gaming any man may be a loser who doth not play the whole

game.

14. That men proclaim their own virtues, as shopkeepers expose

their goods, in order to profit by them.

15. That the heart was the proper seat of hatred, and the

countenance of affection and friendship.'

The whole scheme is worked out with a scrupulous attention to the main

idea, and a consistency of mood that would not have been unworthy one

of the self-conscious artists of a hundred years later. Poe himself

could have built no more skilfully, and, lacking Fielding's knowledge

of rascaldom, the straw for his bricks would not have been so good.

[_Ferdinand, Count Fathom._]

Smollett had the knowledge; but, a less perspicuous artist, did not

realise the difficulties of using it. His villain is never frank in his

villainy. Smollett intended from the beginning to disobey Fielding's

principle, meant to save his rogue from the gallows, meant to do it

all along, and was consequently handicapped in making him respectably

wicked. Ferdinand, Count Fathom, does damnable deeds, but his author's

purpose is completely nullified by his promise of eventual conversion.

The book is not true to itself, but fails because Smollett was not

sufficient of an artist to be able to send his hero to hell.

It is interesting to notice in one of the dullest scenes of this

unsatisfactory book, that Smollett touched for the first time, in a

fumbling, hesitant manner, the note of quasi-supernatural horror that

was soon to be sounded with clarity and almost too facile skill. In the

hero's device for the undoing of Celinda there is the first warning of

the Radcliffes and Lewises and their kind, with their groans upon the

battlements, their figures in white, and their unearthly music in the

wind. Smollett did not wait long enough to find out what could be done

with this new sensation. He jangled the note, and, in his inartistic

way, passed on to paint and to reform the wickedness of the Count.

[Illustration: TOBIAS SMOLLETT]

[Smollett the more versatile.]

I am a little ungracious to Smollett in saying so loud that he was an

artist inferior to Fielding. Inferior he was, but when I set their

best books side by side, I remember that there is little to choose

between the pleasures they have given me, and am compelled to admit

that the less scrupulous Smollett had the wider range. I read _Tom

Jones_ in one sitting of twenty-four hours, and should like to write

an essay on it, but can find no excuse for discussing here that epic

of good-heartedness, since its characteristics are not different from

those already noticed in _Joseph Andrews_. But _Humphry Clinker_ would

have held me for as long if it had had as many pages, and in the

history of the art, has, as an example of the novel in letters, an

interest wholly separate from that of _Roderick Random_, which is a

specimen of the picaresque. When Smollett came to write that book he

was fifty years old and just about to die. He seems to have forgotten

his old feud with life, and to look at things with a kindlier eye

as one just ready to depart. His late-won detachment helped him to

a scheme as clear as one of Fielding's, although even in this he is

sometimes submerged in human nature. His notion was to describe the

same scenes and events simultaneously from several points of view, in

letters from different persons, so as to keep a story moving gently

forward, with half a dozen personalities revolving round it, able to

realise themselves or be realised in their own letters or those of

their friends. In none of his other books are the characters so rounded

and complete. There is Matthew Bramble, the old knight, outwardly

morose and secretly generous; his sister, an old maid determined not to

remain one, for ever grumbling at her brother's generosities; Lyddy,

their romantic niece, and Jerry, their young blood of a nephew; and, as

persons of the counterplot, Mistress Winifred Jenkins and Mary Jones;

not to speak of the ubiquitous Clinker. The letters tell the whole

story, and yet, written long after Richardson's, they have an older

manner. Richardson's letters, with all their passionate reiteration

of detail, do not concern themselves with foibles. They do not make

you smile at their writers, and if you had laughed, as Fielding did,

he would have been prodigiously annoyed. Smollett's letters have the

same aim as the letters of the _Spectator_ or the _Tatler_. They

are different only in less brilliant polish, and in their grouping

round a story. The Humphry Clinker correspondence is as important as

the letters of Clarissa in forming the most delicate and humorous

epistolary style employed by Miss Evelina Anville.

[The motives of the masculine novel.]

The extreme difficulty I have experienced throughout this chapter

in thinking of the technique of these novelists, instead of their

material, is a tribute to their power. It is the same with Hogarth.

It is impossible to get at the artist for thinking of the life upon

his canvases. It is almost impossible to consider Fielding or Smollett

as technicians (I have had to do it in their least human books),

for thinking of the England that they represented. And now that I

am looking about for a concluding paragraph on the work of these

two men, when I should be summing up the general characteristics of

their craftsmanship, I look at the pile of their books on the table

before me, and feel a full and comfortable stomach, and cannot get

out of my nose the smell of beer and beef and cheese associated as

closely with their pages as lavender with the pages of _Cranford_.

What an England it was in their day. Mr. Staytape carried Rory 'into

an alehouse, where he called for some beer and bread and cheese, on

which we _breakfasted_.' 'Our landlord and we sat down at a board, and

dined upon a shin of beef most deliciously; our reckoning amounting to

twopence halfpenny each, bread and small beer included.' The bright

glances of Mistress Waters 'hit only a vast piece of beef which he was

carrying into his plate, and harmless spent their force.' Her sighs

were drowned 'by the coarse bubbling of some bottled ale.' Square

meals are the best antidotes for sentiment, and in every scene of

these novelists there is always some one who has fed too recently to

allow any hairsplitting delicacy in the room with him. No confessional

disentangling of emotions, but beer, beef, cheese, a good heart, a

sound skin, and the lack of these things, are the motives of the

masculine novel.

A NOTE ON STERNE

STERNE hardly comes within the scope of this book, since his was

the art, not of telling stories, but of withholding them, not of

keeping things on the move, but of keeping them on the point of

moving. It is not without much difficulty and two or three chapters

that a character of Sterne's crosses the room. The nine books

of _Tristram Shandy_ bring him through the midwife's hands, and

a little further. I believe we hear breeches talked of for him.

Another nine books would perhaps let him put one leg into them.

_Tristram Shandy_ is a continuous denial of the forms that Fielding

and Smollett were doing their best to fix. But it is read by many

who find them superficial, because Sterne writes of universal,

whereas they write of a limited and particular humanity. They

write of a Mr. Jones or a Mr. Random, while the hero of Sterne's

book is man. He begins, as he puts it himself, _ab ovo_. He saw

that the whole of humanity is a constellation revolving round the

birth of a child, and contrived to introduce into his book every

imaginable incident connected with that event. If Tristram Shandy

does not grow up quick enough to take to himself a wife, My Uncle

Toby is taken as a husband by the Widow Wadman. If he does not

die, Yorick does. If My Uncle Toby's affairs do not go far enough

to produce a baby, Tristram is born. In this book, where nothing

seems to happen, everything does. It is the Life and Opinions, not

of Tristram Shandy, but of Humanity, illustrated, not in a single

character over a long period, but in half a dozen over a short one.

For the story of the three generations of the giants, Rabelais

needed land and sea, Paris and Touraine. For the adventures of his

strolling players, Scarron needed a dozen little towns along the

Loire, with inns and châteaux and what not. But for the adventures

of Humanity, Sterne, who learnt from both of them, needed only a

bowling-green, a study, a bedroom, and a parlour. There is really

little else of background to the story. And it is all there; birth,

love, death, and all the sad comedy of man misunderstood, and

fortunate when, like Uncle Toby, he does not try to understand, the

beginning in triviality, and the end in 'Alas, poor Yorick!'