I
Certainly the modern English novel begins with that elaborate
masterpiece, _Tom Jones_, of Henry Fielding. And it seems to me that his
genius is contained, on the whole, in that one book; in which he creates
living people; the very soil is living. His hero is the typical sullen,
selfish, base-born, stupid, sensual, easily seduced and adventurous
youth, with whom his creator is mightily amused. The very Prefaces are
full of humorous wisdom; copied, I suppose, from Montaigne. The
typically wicked woman is painted almost as Hogarth might have painted
her. It is quite possible that she may have a few touches, here and
there, of Lady Wishfort, who, wrote Meredith, "is unmatched for the
vigour and pointedness of the tongue. It spins along with a final ring,
like the voice of Nature in a fury, and is, indeed, racy eloquence of
the elevated fishwife."
Fielding has a strong sense of the vigilant comic, which is the genius
of thoughtful laughter, but never serving as a public advocate. Contempt
can not be entertained by comic intelligence. Blifil is essentially the
grossly and basely animal creature, who is also a villain, and who has
his part in the plot; indeed one scandalous scene in which he is
discovered is laughable in the purely comic sense.
_Jonathan Wild_ presents a case of peculiar distinction, when that man
of eminent greatness remarks on the unfairness of a trial in which the
condemnation has been brought about by twelve men of the opposite party;
yet it is immensely comic to hear a guilty villain protesting that his
own "party" should have a voice in the Law. It opens an avenue into a
villain's ratiocination, as in Lady Booby's exclamation when Joseph
defends himself: "Your _virtue!_ I shall never survive it!" Fielding can
be equally satiric and comic: can raise laughter but never move pity.
And it is as he evokes great spirits that Meredith cries: "O for a
breath of Aristophanes, Rabelais, Voltaire, Cervantes, Fielding,
Molière! These are spirits that, if you know them well, will come when
you do call."
After Fielding comes Thackeray, and his _Vanity Fair_ is the second
masterpiece in modern fiction. It is the work of a man of the world,
keenly observant of all the follies and virtues and vices and crimes and
splendors, of crimes and of failures, of his neither moral nor immoral
Fair. He takes his title from John Bunyan; but in originality he is
almost equal with Fielding. "As the Manager of the Performance sits
before the curtain on the boards, and looks into the Fair, a feeling of
profound melancholy comes over him in his survey of the bustling place."
Such is the moral, if you like; at any rate the whole Show "is
accompanied by appropriate scenery and brilliantly illuminated with the
author's own candles." At the end the Finis: "Ah! _Vanitas Vanitatum!_
Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or,
having it, is satisfied?--Come children, let us shut up the box and the
puppets, for our play is played out."
There is no question that Becky Sharp is not derived from Balzac's
Lisbeth in _La Cousine Bette_, but at what a distance, when once you
think of the greatest of all novelists, who has the fortune to be
French, and of Thackeray, who has the fortune (at times the misfortune)
of being English. When we thing of Becky she startles us by her cynical
entrance: she inherits from her parents bad qualities. Her first epigram
sums her up. "Revenge may be wicked, but it's natural. I'm no angel."
She fascinates Lord Pitt, Rawdon Crawley and Lord Steyne in a way
Lisbeth never does. Lisbeth's fascination is that of the evil-doer; she
is envious, spiteful, malicious, a lying hypocrite; always deliberately
bent on having her own way, always for evil purposes: so that she, in
her sinister effrontery, causes the ruin of many of the lives she
thrives on, feigns to help, deludes; only, she never deludes as Valérie
Marnette does. We have only to say: "Valérie!" and the woman is before
us. As for Valérie: "_Elle était belle comme sont belles les femmes
assez belles, pour être belles en dormant_;" a sentence certainly
lyrical. Lisbeth's character has "_Une dose du mordant parisien._"
Unmarried, she is monstrous, her snares are inevitable, her
dissimulation impenetrable. But she is never given a scene so
consummately achieved in its sordid and voluptuous tragedy as the scene
in _Vanity Fair_ when Rawdon enters his house at midnight, and finds
Becky dressed in a brilliant toilet, her arms and her fingers sparkling
with bracelets and rings, and the brilliants in her breast which Steyne
had given her. "He had her hand in his, and was bowing to kiss it, when
Becky started up with a faint scream as she caught sight of Rawdon's
white face." And, as the writer adds, with an entire sense of the tragic
and comic drama that is over: "All her lies and her schemes, all her
selfishness and her wiles, all her wit and all her genius had come to
this bankruptcy."
I have never had any actual admiration for the novels of George Eliot;
she had her passing fame, her popularity, her success; people compared
her prose--wrongly--with the poetry of Mrs. Browning; and, as for her
attempts at verse, the less said of them the better. In favor of my
opinion I quote this scathing sentence of Swinburne: "Having no taste
for the dissection of dolls, I shall leave Daniel Deronda in his natural
place above the ragshop door; and having no ear for the melodies of a
Jew's harp, I shall leave the Spanish Gypsy to perform on that
instrument to such audience as she may collect." Certainly Charlotte
Brontë excelled George Eliot in almost every quality; the latter
having, perhaps, more knowledge and culture, but not for a moment
comparable with Charlotte's purity of passion, depth and fervor of
feeling, inspiration, imagination and a most masterly style.
As for her _Romola_, I find it almost an elaborate failure in the
endeavor to create the atmosphere of the period of Savonarola--that
amazing age when the greatest spirits of the world were alive and
producing works of unsurpassable genius--and in her too anatomical
demonstration of the varying vices and virtues of Tito: for she has none
of that strange subtlety that a writer of novels must possess to
delineate how this human soul may pass in the course of decomposition
into some irremediable ruin. She is too much of the moralist to be able
to present this character as a necessary and natural figure, such as far
greater writers have had no difficulty in doing. She presents
him--rather after the fashion of George Sand, as a fearful and warning
example. Think, for a moment,--the comparison is all but impossible,--of
this attempt at characterization with Browning's Guido Franceschini; for
in his two monologues every nerve of the mind is touched by the patient
scalpel, every joint and vein of the subtle and intricate spirit laid
bare and divided. Compare this also with Cenci: the comparison has been
made by Swinburne, with an equal praise of two masterpieces, _The Cenci_
of Shelley and _The Ring and the Book_ of Browning. Both Cenci and
Franceschini are cunningly drawn and colored so as to be absolute models
of the highest form of realism: as cunningly colored and drawn as the
immortal creation of Madame Bovary.
Take, for instance, the character of Rochester in _Jane Eyre._ It is
incomparable of its kind; an absolutely conceived living being, who has
enough nerves and enough passion to more or less extinguish the various
male characters in George Eliot's novels. That Maggie Tulliver, in _The
Mill on the Floss_, the finest of her novels, can be moved to any sense
but that of bitter disgust and sickening disdain by a thing--I will not
write, a man--of Stephen Guest's character, is a lamentable and an ugly
case of shameful failure; for as Swinburne says, "The last word of
realism has surely been spoken, the last abyss of cynicism has surely
been sounded and laid bare." And I am glad to note here that he
dismisses her with this reference to three great French writers; using,
of course, his invariable ironical paradoxes. "For a higher view and a
more cheery aspect of the sex, we must turn back to those gentler
teachers, those more flattering painters of our own--Laclos, Stendhal
and Merrimée; we must take up _La Double Méprise_--or _Le Rouge et le
Noir_--or _Les Liaisons Dangereuses._"
The genius of George Meredith is unquestionable; he was as great a
creator, in fact a greater creator, than any other English novelist; yet
his fascination is not, I think, quite explicable. Not since the
Elizabethans have we had so flame-like a life possessing the wanton body
of a style. Our literature has not a more vividly entertaining book than
_The Shaving of Shagpat_--I have the rare first edition of 1856 in my
possession--nor has the soul of a style been lost more spectacularly.
And with this fantastic, learned, poetic, passionate, intelligent style,
a style which might have lent itself so well to the making of
Elizabethan drama, Meredith has set himself the task of writing novels
of contemporary life; nor can it be wondered that every novel of his
breaks every rule which could possibly be laid down for the writing of a
novel. Why has his prose so irresistible a fascination for so many of
us, as it certainly has? I find Meredith breaking every canon of what
are to me the laws of the novel; and yet I read him in preference to any
other novelist.
Meredith first conceives that the novelist's prime study is human nature
and his first duty to be true to it. Moreover, being an artist, he is
not content with simple observations; there must be creation, the
imaginative fusion of the mass of observed fact. The philosophy of his
seeking is only another name for intuition, analysis, imaginative
thought. He has comprehension of a character from height to depth
through that "eye of steady flame," which he attributes to Shakespeare,
and which may be defined in every great artist. He sees it, he beholds a
complete nature, at once and in entirety. His task is to make others see
what he sees. But this can not be done at a stroke. It must be done
little by little, touch upon touch, light upon shade, shade upon light.
The completeness, as seen by the seer or creator--the term is the
same--must be microscopically investigated, divided into its component
parts, produced piece by piece, and connected visibly. It is this that
is meant when we talk of analysis; and the antithesis between analysis
and creation is hardly so sheer as it seems. Partly through a selection
of appropriate action, partly through the revealing casual speech, the
imagined character takes palpable form: finally it does, or it should,
live and breathe before the reader with some likeness of the hue and
breadth of actual life. But there is a step farther, and it is this step
that Meredith is strenuous to take. You have the flesh, animate it with
spirit, with soul. If this is an unworthy aim, condemn Shakespeare. This
is Meredith's, and it is this and no other consummation that he prays
for in demanding philosophy in fiction.
The main peculiarity of Meredith's style is this: he thinks, to begin
with, before writing--a singular thing, one must observe, for the
present day. Then, having certain definite thoughts to express, and
thoughts frequently of a difficult remoteness, he is careful to employ
words of a rich and fruitful significance, made richer and more fruitful
by a studied and uncommon arrangement. His sentences are architectural;
and it is natural in reading him to cry out at the strangeness. Strange,
certainly; often obscure, often tantalizing; more often magnificent and
somber and strong and passionate, his wit is perhaps too fantastical,
too remote, too allusive; partly because it is subtly ironical; perhaps
most of all because it is shrewdly stinging to our prejudices. Still,
everywhere, the poet, struggling against the bondage of prose, flings
himself on every opportunity of evading his bondage. It is thus by the
very quality that is his distraction--perhaps because he always writes
English as if it were a learned language--that Meredith holds us, by the
intensity of his vision of a world which is not our world, by the energy
of genius which has done so much to achieve the impossible.