It is good to have the magic door shut behind us. On the other side of
that door are the world and its troubles, hopes and fears, headaches
and heartaches, ambitions and disappointments; but within, as you lie
back on the green settee, and face the long lines of your silent
soothing comrades, there is only peace of spirit and rest of mind in
the company of the great dead. Learn to love, learn to admire them;
learn to know what their comradeship means; for until you have done so
the greatest solace and anodyne God has given to man have not yet shed
their blessing upon you. Here behind this magic door is the rest house,
where you may forget the past, enjoy the present, and prepare for the
future.
You who have sat with me before upon the green settee are familiar with
the upper shelf, with the tattered Macaulay, the dapper Gibbon, the
drab Boswell, the olive-green Scott, the pied Borrow, and all the
goodly company who rub shoulders yonder. By the way, how one wishes
that one’s dear friends would only be friends also with each other. Why
should Borrow snarl so churlishly at Scott? One would have thought that
noble spirit and romantic fancy would have charmed the huge vagrant,
and yet there is no word too bitter for the younger man to use towards
the elder. The fact is that Borrow had one dangerous virus in him—a
poison which distorts the whole vision—for he was a bigoted sectarian
in religion, seeing no virtue outside his own interpretation of the
great riddle. Downright heathendom, the blood-stained Berserk or the
chaunting Druid, appealed to his mind through his imagination, but the
man of his own creed and time who differed from him in minutiae of
ritual, or in the interpretation of mystic passages, was at once evil
to the bone, and he had no charity of any sort for such a person. Scott
therefore, with his reverent regard for old usages, became at once
hateful in his eyes. In any case he was a disappointed man, the big
Borrow, and I cannot remember that he ever had much to say that was
good of any brother author. Only in the bards of Wales and in the
Scalds of the Sagas did he seem to find his kindred spirits, though it
has been suggested that his complex nature took this means of informing
the world that he could read both Cymric and Norse. But we must not be
unkind behind the magic door—and yet to be charitable to the
uncharitable is surely the crown of virtue.
So much for the top line, concerning which I have already gossipped for
six sittings, but there is no surcease for you, reader, for as you see
there is a second line, and yet a third, all equally dear to my heart,
and all appealing in the same degree to my emotions and to my memory.
Be as patient as you may, while I talk of these old friends, and tell
you why I love them, and all that they have meant to me in the past. If
you picked any book from that line you would be picking a little fibre
also from my mind, very small, no doubt, and yet an intimate and
essential part of what is now myself. Hereditary impulses, personal
experiences, books—those are the three forces which go to the making of
man. These are the books.
This second line consists, as you see, of novelists of the eighteenth
century, or those of them whom I regard as essential. After all,
putting aside single books, such as Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy,”
Goldsmith’s “Vicar of Wakefield,” and Miss Burney’s “Evelina,” there
are only three authors who count, and they in turn wrote only three
books each, of first-rate importance, so that by the mastery of nine
books one might claim to have a fairly broad view of this most
important and distinctive branch of English literature. The three men
are, of course, Fielding, Richardson, and Smollett. The books are:
Richardson’s “Clarissa Harlowe,” “Pamela,” and “Sir Charles Grandison”;
Fielding’s “Tom Jones”, “Joseph Andrews,” and “Amelia”; Smollett’s
“Peregrine Pickle,” “Humphrey Clinker,” and “Roderick Random.” There we
have the real work of the three great contemporaries who illuminated
the middle of the eighteenth century—only nine volumes in all. Let us
walk round these nine volumes, therefore, and see whether we cannot
discriminate and throw a little light, after this interval of a hundred
and fifty years, upon their comparative aims, and how far they have
justified them by the permanent value of their work. A fat little
bookseller in the City, a rakehell wit of noble blood, and a rugged
Scotch surgeon from the navy—those are the three strange immortals who
now challenge a comparison—the three men who dominate the fiction of
their century, and to whom we owe it that the life and the types of
that century are familiar to us, their fifth generation.
It is not a subject to be dogmatic upon, for I can imagine that these
three writers would appeal quite differently to every temperament, and
that whichever one might desire to champion one could find arguments to
sustain one’s choice. Yet I cannot think that any large section of the
critical public could maintain that Smollett was on the same level as
the other two. Ethically he is gross, though his grossness is
accompanied by a full-blooded humour which is more mirth-compelling
than the more polished wit of his rivals. I can remember in callow
boyhood—_puris omnia pura_—reading “Peregrine Pickle,” and laughing
until I cried over the Banquet in the Fashion of the Ancients. I read
it again in my manhood with the same effect, though with a greater
appreciation of its inherent bestiality. That merit, a gross primitive
merit, he has in a high degree, but in no other respect can he
challenge comparison with either Fielding or Richardson. His view of
life is far more limited, his characters less varied, his incidents
less distinctive, and his thoughts less deep. Assuredly I, for one,
should award him the third place in the trio.
But how about Richardson and Fielding? There is indeed a competition of
giants. Let us take the points of each in turn, and then compare them
with each other.
There is one characteristic, the rarest and subtlest of all, which each
of them had in a supreme degree. Each could draw the most delightful
women—the most perfect women, I think, in the whole range of our
literature. If the eighteenth-century women were like that, then the
eighteenth-century men got a great deal more than they ever deserved.
They had such a charming little dignity of their own, such good sense,
and yet such dear, pretty, dainty ways, so human and so charming, that
even now they become our ideals. One cannot come to know them without a
double emotion, one of respectful devotion towards themselves, and the
other of abhorrence for the herd of swine who surrounded them. Pamela,
Harriet Byron, Clarissa, Amelia, and Sophia Western were all equally
delightful, and it was not the negative charm of the innocent and
colourless woman, the amiable doll of the nineteenth century, but it
was a beauty of nature depending upon an alert mind, clear and strong
principles, true womanly feelings, and complete feminine charm. In this
respect our rival authors may claim a tie, for I could not give a
preference to one set of these perfect creatures over another. The
plump little printer and the worn-out man-about-town had each a supreme
woman in his mind.
But their men! Alas, what a drop is there! To say that we are all
capable of doing what Tom Jones did—as I have seen stated—is the worst
form of inverted cant, the cant which makes us out worse than we are.
It is a libel on mankind to say that a man who truly loves a woman is
usually false to her, and, above all, a libel that he should be false
in the vile fashion which aroused good Tom Newcome’s indignation. Tom
Jones was no more fit to touch the hem of Sophia’s dress than Captain
Booth was to be the mate of Amelia. Never once has Fielding drawn a
gentleman, save perhaps Squire Alworthy. A lusty, brawling,
good-hearted, material creature was the best that he could fashion.
Where, in his heroes, is there one touch of distinction, of
spirituality, of nobility? Here I think that the plebeian printer has
done very much better than the aristocrat. Sir Charles Grandison is a
very noble type—spoiled a little by over-coddling on the part of his
creator, perhaps, but a very high-souled and exquisite gentleman all
the same. Had _he_ married Sophia or Amelia I should not have forbidden
the banns. Even the persevering Mr. B—— and the too amorous Lovelace
were, in spite of their aberrations, men of gentle nature, and had
possibilities of greatness and tenderness within them. Yes, I cannot
doubt that Richardson drew the higher type of man—and that in Grandison
he has done what has seldom or never been bettered.
Richardson was also the subtler and deeper writer, in my opinion. He
concerns himself with fine consistent character-drawing, and with a
very searching analysis of the human heart, which is done so easily,
and in such simple English, that the depth and truth of it only come
upon reflection. He condescends to none of those scuffles and
buffetings and pantomime rallies which enliven, but cheapen, many of
Fielding’s pages. The latter has, it may be granted, a broader view of
life. He had personal acquaintance of circles far above, and also far
below, any which the douce citizen, who was his rival, had ever been
able or willing to explore. His pictures of low London life, the prison
scenes in “Amelia,” the thieves’ kitchens in “Jonathan Wild,” the
sponging houses and the slums, are as vivid and as complete as those of
his friend Hogarth—the most British of artists, even as Fielding was
the most British of writers. But the greatest and most permanent facts
of life are to be found in the smallest circles. Two men and a woman
may furnish either the tragedian or the comedian with the most
satisfying theme. And so, although his range was limited, Richardson
knew very clearly and very thoroughly just that knowledge which was
essential for his purpose. Pamela, the perfect woman of humble life,
Clarissa, the perfect lady, Grandison the ideal gentleman—these were
the three figures on which he lavished his most loving art. And now,
after one hundred and fifty years, I do not know where we may find more
satisfying types.
He was prolix, it may be admitted, but who could bear to have him cut?
He loved to sit down and tell you just all about it. His use of letters
for his narratives made this gossipy style more easy. First _he_ writes
and he tells all that passed. You have his letter. _She_ at the same
time writes to her friend, and also states her views. This also you
see. The friends in each case reply, and you have the advantage of
their comments and advice. You really do know all about it before you
finish. It may be a little wearisome at first, if you have been
accustomed to a more hustling style with fireworks in every chapter.
But gradually it creates an atmosphere in which you live, and you come
to know these people, with their characters and their troubles, as you
know no others of the dream-folk of fiction. Three times as long as an
ordinary book, no doubt, but why grudge the time? What is the hurry?
Surely it is better to read one masterpiece than three books which will
leave no permanent impression on the mind.
It was all attuned to the sedate life of that, the last of the quiet
centuries. In the lonely country-house, with few letters and fewer
papers, do you suppose that the readers ever complained of the length
of a book, or could have too much of the happy Pamela or of the unhappy
Clarissa? It is only under extraordinary circumstances that one can now
get into that receptive frame of mind which was normal then. Such an
occasion is recorded by Macaulay, when he tells how in some Indian hill
station, where books were rare, he let loose a copy of “Clarissa.” The
effect was what might have been expected. Richardson in a suitable
environment went through the community like a mild fever. They lived
him, and dreamed him, until the whole episode passed into literary
history, never to be forgotten by those who experienced it. It is
tuned, for every ear. That beautiful style is so correct and yet so
simple that there is no page which a scholar may not applaud nor a
servant-maid understand.
Of course, there are obvious disadvantages to the tale which is told in
letters. Scott reverted to it in “Guy Mannering,” and there are other
conspicuous successes, but vividness is always gained at the expense of
a strain upon the reader’s good-nature and credulity. One feels that
these constant details, these long conversations, could not possibly
have been recorded in such a fashion. The indignant and dishevelled
heroine could not sit down and record her escape with such cool
minuteness of description. Richardson does it as well as it could be
done, but it remains intrinsically faulty. Fielding, using the third
person, broke all the fetters which bound his rival, and gave a freedom
and personal authority to the novel which it had never before enjoyed.
There at least he is the master.
And yet, on the whole, my balance inclines towards Richardson, though I
dare say I am one in a hundred in thinking so. First of all, beyond
anything I may have already urged, he had the supreme credit of having
been the first. Surely the originator should have a higher place than
the imitator, even if in imitating he should also improve and amplify.
It is Richardson and not Fielding who is the father of the English
novel, the man who first saw that without romantic gallantry, and
without bizarre imaginings, enthralling stories may be made from
everyday life, told in everyday language. This was his great new
departure. So entirely was Fielding his imitator, or rather perhaps his
parodist, that with supreme audacity (some would say brazen impudence)
he used poor Richardson’s own characters, taken from “Pamela,” in his
own first novel, “Joseph Andrews,” and used them too for the unkind
purpose of ridiculing them. As a matter of literary ethics, it is as if
Thackeray wrote a novel bringing in Pickwick and Sam Weller in order to
show what faulty characters these were. It is no wonder that even the
gentle little printer grew wroth, and alluded to his rival as a
somewhat unscrupulous man.
And then there is the vexed question of morals. Surely in talking of
this also there is a good deal of inverted cant among a certain class
of critics. The inference appears to be that there is some subtle
connection between immorality and art, as if the handling of the lewd,
or the depicting of it, were in some sort the hallmark of the true
artist. It is not difficult to handle or depict. On the contrary, it is
so easy, and so essentially dramatic in many of its forms, that the
temptation to employ it is ever present. It is the easiest and cheapest
of all methods of creating a spurious effect. The difficulty does not
lie in doing it. The difficulty lies in avoiding it. But one tries to
avoid it because on the face of it there is no reason why a writer
should cease to be a gentleman, or that he should write for a woman’s
eyes that which he would be justly knocked down for having said in a
woman’s ears. But “you must draw the world as it is.” Why must you?
Surely it is just in selection and restraint that the artist is shown.
It is true that in a coarser age great writers heeded no restrictions,
but life itself had fewer restrictions then. We are of our own age, and
must live up to it.
But must these sides of life be absolutely excluded? By no means. Our
decency need not weaken into prudery. It all lies in the spirit in
which it is done. No one who wished to lecture on these various spirits
could preach on a better text than these three great rivals,
Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett. It is possible to draw vice with
some freedom for the purpose of condemning it. Such a writer is a
moralist, and there is no better example than Richardson. Again, it is
possible to draw vice with neither sympathy nor disapprobation, but
simply as a fact which is there. Such a writer is a realist, and such
was Fielding. Once more, it is possible to draw vice in order to
extract amusement from it. Such a man is a coarse humorist, and such
was Smollett. Lastly, it is possible to draw vice in order to show
sympathy with it. Such a man is a wicked man, and there were many among
the writers of the Restoration. But of all reasons that exist for
treating this side of life, Richardson’s were the best, and nowhere do
we find it more deftly done.
Apart from his writings, there must have been something very noble
about Fielding as a man. He was a better hero than any that he drew.
Alone he accepted the task of cleansing London, at that time the most
dangerous and lawless of European capitals. Hogarth’s pictures give
some notion of it in the pre-Fielding days, the low roughs, the
high-born bullies, the drunkenness, the villainies, the thieves’
kitchens with their riverside trapdoors, down which the body is thrust.
This was the Augean stable which had to be cleaned, and poor Hercules
was weak and frail and physically more fitted for a sick-room than for
such a task. It cost him his life, for he died at 47, worn out with his
own exertions. It might well have cost him his life in more dramatic
fashion, for he had become a marked man to the criminal classes, and he
headed his own search-parties when, on the information of some bribed
rascal, a new den of villainy was exposed. But he carried his point. In
little more than a year the thing was done, and London turned from the
most rowdy to what it has ever since remained, the most law-abiding of
European capitals. Has any man ever left a finer monument behind him?
If you want the real human Fielding you will find him not in the
novels, where his real kindliness is too often veiled by a mock
cynicism, but in his “Diary of his Voyage to Lisbon.” He knew that his
health was irretrievably ruined and that his years were numbered. Those
are the days when one sees a man as he is, when he has no longer a
motive for affectation or pretence in the immediate presence of the
most tremendous of all realities. Yet, sitting in the shadow of death,
Fielding displayed a quiet, gentle courage and constancy of mind, which
show how splendid a nature had been shrouded by his earlier frailties.
Just one word upon another eighteenth-century novel before I finish
this somewhat didactic chat. You will admit that I have never prosed so
much before, but the period and the subject seem to encourage it. I
skip Sterne, for I have no great sympathy with his finicky methods. And
I skip Miss Burney’s novels, as being feminine reflections of the great
masters who had just preceded her. But Goldsmith’s “Vicar of Wakefield”
surely deserves one paragraph to itself. There is a book which is
tinged throughout, as was all Goldsmith’s work, with a beautiful
nature. No one who had not a fine heart could have written it, just as
no one without a fine heart could have written “The Deserted Village.”
How strange it is to think of old Johnson patronizing or snubbing the
shrinking Irishman, when both in poetry, in fiction, and in the drama
the latter has proved himself far the greater man. But here is an
object-lesson of how the facts of life may be treated without offence.
Nothing is shirked. It is all faced and duly recorded. Yet if I wished
to set before the sensitive mind of a young girl a book which would
prepare her for life without in any way contaminating her delicacy of
feeling, there is no book which I should choose so readily as “The
Vicar of Wakefield.”
So much for the eighteenth-century novelists. They have a shelf of
their own in the case, and a corner of their own in my brain. For years
you may never think of them, and then suddenly some stray word or train
of thought leads straight to them, and you look at them and love them,
and rejoice that you know them. But let us pass to something which may
interest you more.
If statistics could be taken in the various free libraries of the
kingdom to prove the comparative popularity of different novelists with
the public, I think that it is quite certain that Mr. George Meredith
would come out very low indeed. If, on the other hand, a number of
authors were convened to determine which of their fellow-craftsmen they
considered the greatest and the most stimulating to their own minds, I
am equally confident that Mr. Meredith would have a vast preponderance
of votes. Indeed, his only conceivable rival would be Mr. Hardy. It
becomes an interesting study, therefore, why there should be such a
divergence of opinion as to his merits, and what the qualities are
which have repelled so many readers, and yet have attracted those whose
opinion must be allowed to have a special weight.
The most obvious reason is his complete unconventionality. The public
read to be amused. The novelist reads to have new light thrown upon his
art. To read Meredith is _not_ a mere amusement; it is an intellectual
exercise, a kind of mental dumb-bell with which you develop your
thinking powers. Your mind is in a state of tension the whole time that
you are reading him.
If you will follow my nose as the sportsman follows that of his
pointer, you will observe that these remarks are excited by the
presence of my beloved “Richard Feverel,” which lurks in yonder corner.
What a great book it is, how wise and how witty! Others of the master’s
novels may be more characteristic or more profound, but for my own part
it is the one which I would always present to the new-comer who had not
yet come under the influence. I think that I should put it third after
“Vanity Fair” and “The Cloister and the Hearth” if I had to name the
three novels which I admire most in the Victorian era. The book was
published, I believe, in 1859, and it is almost incredible, and says
little for the discrimination of critics or public, that it was nearly
twenty years before a second edition was needed.
But there are never effects without causes, however inadequate the
cause may be. What was it that stood in the way of the book’s success?
Undoubtedly it was the style. And yet it is subdued and tempered here
with little of the luxuriance and exuberance which it attained in the
later works. But it was an innovation, and it stalled off both the
public and the critics. They regarded it, no doubt, as an affectation,
as Carlyle’s had been considered twenty years before, forgetting that
in the case of an original genius style is an organic thing, part of
the man as much as the colour of his eyes. It is not, to quote Carlyle,
a shirt to be taken on and off at pleasure, but a skin, eternally
fixed. And this strange, powerful style, how is it to be described?
Best, perhaps, in his own strong words, when he spoke of Carlyle with
perhaps the _arrière pensée_ that the words would apply as strongly to
himself.
“His favourite author,” says he, “was one writing on heroes in a style
resembling either early architecture or utter dilapidation, so loose
and rough it seemed. A wind-in-the-orchard style that tumbled down here
and there an appreciable fruit with uncouth bluster, sentences without
commencements running to abrupt endings and smoke, like waves against a
sea-wall, learned dictionary words giving a hand to street slang, and
accents falling on them haphazard, like slant rays from driving clouds;
all the pages in a breeze, the whole book producing a kind of
electrical agitation in the mind and joints.”
What a wonderful description and example of style! And how vivid is the
impression left by such expressions as “all the pages in a breeze.” As
a comment on Carlyle, and as a sample of Meredith, the passage is
equally perfect.
Well, “Richard Feverel” has come into its own at last. I confess to
having a strong belief in the critical discernment of the public. I do
not think good work is often overlooked. Literature, like water, finds
its true level. Opinion is slow to form, but it sets true at last. I am
sure that if the critics were to unite to praise a bad book or to damn
a good one they could (and continually do) have a five-year influence,
but it would in no wise affect the final result. Sheridan said that if
all the fleas in his bed had been unanimous, they could have pushed him
out of it. I do not think that any unanimity of critics has ever pushed
a good book out of literature.
Among the minor excellences of “Richard Feverel”—excuse the prolixity
of an enthusiast—are the scattered aphorisms which are worthy of a
place among our British proverbs. What could be more exquisite than
this, “Who rises from prayer a better man his prayer is answered”; or
this, “Expediency is man’s wisdom. Doing right is God’s”; or, “All
great thoughts come from the heart”? Good are the words “The coward
amongst us is he who sneers at the failings of humanity,” and a healthy
optimism rings in the phrase “There is for the mind but one grasp of
happiness; from that uppermost pinnacle of wisdom whence we see that
this world is well designed.” In more playful mood is “Woman is the
last thing which will be civilized by man.” Let us hurry away abruptly,
for he who starts quotation from “Richard Feverel” is lost.
He has, as you see, a goodly line of his brothers beside him. There are
the Italian ones, “Sandra Belloni,” and “Vittoria”; there is “Rhoda
Fleming,” which carried Stevenson off his critical feet; “Beauchamp’s
Career,” too, dealing with obsolete politics. No great writer should
spend himself upon a temporary theme. It is like the beauty who is
painted in some passing fashion of gown. She tends to become obsolete
along with her frame. Here also is the dainty “Diana,” the egoist with
immortal Willoughby Pattern, eternal type of masculine selfishness, and
“Harry Richmond,” the first chapters of which are, in my opinion, among
the finest pieces of narrative prose in the language. That great mind
would have worked in any form which his age had favoured. He is a
novelist by accident. As an Elizabethan he would have been a great
dramatist; under Queen Anne a great essayist. But whatever medium he
worked in, he must equally have thrown the image of a great brain and a
great soul.