CHAPTER III

THE FOUR WHEELS OF THE NOVEL WAIN

It does not enter into the plan, because it would be entirely

inconsistent with the scale, of the present book to give details of the

lives of the novelists, except when they have something special to do

with the subject, or when (as in the case of a few minorities who happen

to be of some importance) even well-informed readers are likely to be

quite ignorant about them. Accounts, in all degrees of scale and

competence, of the lives of Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne

abound. It is sufficient--but in the special circumstances at this point

perhaps necessary--here to sum the facts very briefly in so far as they

bear on the main issue. Richardson (1689-1761), not merely the first to

write, but the eldest by much more than his priority in writing, was the

son of a Derbyshire tradesman, was educated for some time at

Charterhouse, but apprenticed early to a printer--which trade he pursued

with diligence and profit for the rest of his life in London and its

immediate neighbourhood. After his literary success, he gathered round

him a circle of ladies and gentlemen interested in literature: but he

never had any first-hand acquaintance with general society of the

"gentle" kind, much less with that of the upper classes. Fielding

(1707-1754), on the contrary, was a member (though only as the son of a

younger son of a younger son) of a family of great antiquity and

distinction, which held an earldom in England and another in Ireland,

and was connected as well as it was derived, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,

for instance, being the novelist's cousin. He was educated at Eton and

Leyden: but his branch of the family being decidedly impecunious, was

thrown very much on his own resources. These were mainly drawn from

literature, first as a playwright then as a novelist, journalism and

miscellanies coming in. But he was called to the Bar: and though he

probably did not make much money there, he obtained the poorly paid and

hard-worked but rather important position of "Bow Street Magistrate,"

which meant that he was head, directly of the London police such as it

was, and indirectly of that of the whole kingdom. His temper was in some

ways as aristocratic as his birth: but though Horace Walpole's accounts

of his fancy for low company are obviously exaggerated, there is no

doubt that he was a good deal of what has since been called a

"Bohemian." His experience of variety in scene was much wider than

Richardson's, although after he came home from Leyden (where he went to

study law) it was chiefly confined to London and the south of England

(especially Bath, Dorsetshire, where he lived for a time, and the

Western Circuit), till his last voyage, in hopeless quest of health, to

Lisbon, where he died. His knowledge of literature, and even what may be

called his scholarship, were considerable, and did credit to the public

school education of those days.

Smollett (1721-1771) differed from his two predecessors in being a

Scotsman: but in family was very much nearer to Fielding than to

Richardson, being the grandson of a judge who was a Commissioner of the

Union, and a gentleman of birth and property--which last would, had he

lived long enough, have come to Smollett himself. But he suffered in his

youth from some indistinctly known family jars, was apprenticed to a

Glasgow surgeon, and escaping thence to London with a tragedy in his

pocket, was in undoubted difficulties till (and after) he obtained the

post of surgeon's mate on board a man-of-war, and took part in the

Carthagena expedition. After coming home he made at least some attempts

to practise: but was once more drawn off to literature, though

fortunately not to tragedy. For the rest of his life he was a

hard-worked but by no means ill-paid journalist, novelist, and

miscellanist, making as much as £2000 by his _History of England_, not

ill-written, though now never read. Like Fielding (though, unlike him,

more than once) he went abroad in search of health and died in the quest

at Leghorn. Smollett was not ignorant, but he seems to have known modern

languages better than ancient: though there is doubt about his direct

share in the translations to which he gave his name. Moreover he had

some though no great skill in verse.

Lastly Sterne (1713-1768), though hardly, as it is the custom to call

him, "an Irishman," yet vindicated the claims of the third constituent

of the United Kingdom by being born in Ireland, from which country his

mother came. But the Sternes were pure English, of a gentle family which

had migrated from East Anglia through Nottingham to Yorkshire, and was

much connected with Cambridge. Thither Laurence, the novelist, after a

very roving childhood (his father was a soldier), and a rather irregular

education, duly went: and, receiving preferment in the Church from his

Yorkshire relations, lived for more than twenty years in that county

without a history, till he took the literary world--hardly by storm, but

by a sort of fantastic capful of wind--with _Tristram Shandy_ in 1760.

Seven or eight years of fame, some profit, not hard work (for his books

shrink into no great solid bulk), and constant travelling, ended by a

sudden death at his Bond Street lodgings, after a long course of

ill-health very carelessly attended to.

One or two more traits are relevant. All the four were married, and

married pretty early; two of them married twice. Richardson's first wife

was, in orthodox fashion, his master's daughter: of his second little is

known. Fielding's first (he had made a vain attempt earlier to abduct an

heiress who was a relation) was, by universal consent, the model both of

Sophia and Amelia, almost as charming as either, and as amiable; his

second was her maid. Of Mrs. Smollett, who was a Miss Lascelles and a

West Indian heiress in a small way, we know very little--the habit of

identifying her with the "Narcissa" of _Roderick Random_ is natural,

inconclusive, but not ridiculous. Sterne's matrimonial relations are the

most famous of all: and though posterity has, with its usual charity,

constructed a legend for the pair which is probably much worse than the

reality, that reality is more than a little awkward. Mrs. Sterne was a

Miss Lumley, of a good Yorkshire family, some, though small, fortune,

and more friends who exerted themselves for her husband. By inexcusable

levity, ignorance, misjudgment, or heartless cupidity their daughter

Lydia published, after the death of both, letters some of which contain

courtship of the most lackadaisical sentimentality and others later

expressions (which occasionally reach the scandalous) of weariness and

disgust on Sterne's part. Other evidence of an indisputable character

shows that he was, at least and best, an extravagant and mawkish

philanderer with any girl or woman who would join in a flirtation: and

while there is no evidence against Mrs. Sterne's character in the

ordinary sense, and hardly any of value against her temper, she seems

(which is perhaps not wonderful) to have latterly preferred to live

apart from her husband, and to have put him to considerable, if not

unreasonable, expenses by her fancy for wandering about France with the

daughter.

Finally, in general character, Richardson seems to have been a

respectable person of rather feminine temperament and, though

good-natured to his friends, endowed with a feminine spitefulness.

Fielding, though by no means answering to the standard of minor and even

major morals demanded

"by the wise ones,

By the grave and the precise ones."

though reckless and disorderly in his ways and habits, appears to have

been in the main a thorough gentleman, faithful to truth and honour,

fearless, compassionate, intolerant of meanness and brutality and of

treachery most of all--a man of many faults perhaps, but of no really

bad or disgusting ones. Concerning Smollett's personality we know least

of all the four. It was certainly disfigured by an almost savage

pugnacity of temper; by a strange indifference to what ought to be at

the lowest the conduct of a gentleman, and by a most repulsive

inclination--perhaps natural, but developed by training--to the merely

foul and nasty. But he seems to have been brave, charitable though not

in the most gracious way, honest, and on the whole a much better fellow

than he might generally seem. Sterne is the most difficult of the four

to characterise fairly, because of the unlucky revelations to which we

possess no parallel in the case of the other three, and which, if we had

them, might probably alter our estimates of a good many now well reputed

people. It is perhaps enough to say that his letters contain many good

traits as well as some bad ones; that his unlucky portrait, with its

combination of leer and sneer, is probably responsible for much; and

that the parts which, as we shall see further, he chose to play, of

extravagant humorist and extravagant sentimentalist, not only almost

necessitate attitudes which may easily become offensive in the playing,

but are very likely, in practice, to communicate something apparently

not natural and unattractive to the player.

But enough of the workers, though not too much in the case of such

remarkable contemporary exponents of a new kind of Human Comedy: let us

go to the work.

In the long "History of the Unexpected," thick-strewn as it is with

curiosities, there are few things odder than the appearance and the

sequels of _Pamela: or Virtue Rewarded_, which, in circumstances to be

noted presently, is said to have been begun on November 12, 1739, was

finished (as far as the first part goes) exactly two months later, and

(there being, in the case of the author's business, no obstacle of the

kind that has frequently beset the appearance of greater works) was

published later in the year 1740. That author was over fifty years old:

though he had had much to do with ushering literature into the world, he

had never attempted to produce it; he belonged to a class which was apt

to regard _belles lettres_ with profound suspicion; and his experiences,

both in literature itself and in life, had been necessarily of the most

limited kind. But there were certain counterbalancing facts to be taken

into consideration which, though they can hardly be said to be _causes_

of the marvel--the cause was the Hour, which hit, as it listed, on the

Man--were a little more than accidental occasions of it. Richardson, as

we see from his work, must have been a rather careful student of such

novels as there were. The name of his first heroine, with the

essentially English throwing back of the accent added, is the same as

that of one of Sidney's heroines in the _Arcadia_, which had been not

long before modernised for eighteenth-century reading by a certain Mrs.

Stanley. The not very usual form "Laurana," which is the name of a

character in his latest novel, is that of the heroine of _Parismus_.

Further, he had had curious early experiences (which we know from his

own meticulous revelations) of writing love-letters, when he was a mere

boy, for girl-friends of his to adapt in writing to their lovers. "His

eye," he says, "had been always on the ladies," though no doubt always

also in the most honourable way. And, quite recently, the

crystallisation had been precipitated by a commission from two of his

bookseller (i.e. publisher) patrons--the founder of the House of

Rivington and the unlucky Osborne who was knocked down by Johnson and

picked up (not quite as one would wish to be) by Pope. They asked him to

prepare a series of "Familiar Letters on the useful concerns of common

life." Five-and-twenty years before, he had heard in outline something

like the story of _Pamela_. In shaping this into letters he thought it

might be a "new species of writing that might possibly turn young people

into a course of reading different from the pomp and parade of

romance-writing, and dismissing the improbable and marvellous with which

novels generally abound, might tend to promote the cause of religion and

virtue." His wife and "a young lady living with them," to whom he had

read some of it, used to come into his little closet every night with,

"Have you any more of _Pamela_, Mr. R.?" Two other female friends joined

in the interest and eulogy. He finished it (that is, the first two

volumes which contain the whole of the original idea) and published it,

though at first with the business-like precaution of appearing to "edit"

only, and the more business-like liberty of liberal praise of what he

edited. It became at once popular: and received the often repeated, but

to the author very annoying, compliment of piratical continuation. So he

set to work and continued it himself: as usually (though by no means

invariably) with rather diminished success. On such points as the

suggestion that he may have owed a debt to Marivaux (in _Marianne_) and

others, little need be said here. I have never had much doubt myself

that the indebtedness existed: though it would be rash, and is

unnecessary, to attempt to determine to what extent and in what

particular form.

It is by no means so difficult as it may at first sight appear to put

oneself very much in the situation of a contemporary reader of _Pamela_,

even if one has read it three or four times, provided that a fairly long

period has elapsed since the last reading, and that the novels of the

preceding age are fairly--and freshly--familiar. The thing has been in

fact done--with unexpected but not in the least deliberate or suspicious

success--by the present writer, who has read the book after an interval

of some fifteen years and just after reading (in some cases again, in

some for the first time) most of the works noticed in the preceding

chapter. The difference of "the new species of writing" (one is reminded

of the description of Spenser as "the new poet") is almost startling:

and of a kind which Richardson pretty certainly did not fully apprehend

when he used the phrase. In order to appreciate it, one must not only

leave out the two last volumes (which, as has been said, the first

readers had not before them at all, and had better never have had) but

also the second, or great part of it, which they would only have reached

after they had been half whetted, half satiated, and wholly bribed, by

the first. The defects of this later part and indeed of the first itself

will be duly noticed presently. Let it be to us, for the moment, the

story of Pamela up to and including "Mr. B.'s" repentance and amendment

of mind: and the "difference" of this story, which fills some hundred

and twenty or thirty closely printed, double columned, royal octavo

pages in the "Ballantyne Novels," is (despite the awkwardness of such a

form for the enjoyment of a novel) almost astounding.

To begin with, the novel-attractions are presented with a completeness

which, as has been pointed out in the last chapter, is almost entirely

lacking before. There is, of course, not very much plot, in the martinet

sense of that word: there never was in Richardson, despite his immense

apparatus and elaboration. The story is not knotted and unknotted; the

wheel does not come full circle on itself; it merely runs along

pleasantly till it is time for it to stop, and it stops rather abruptly.

The siege of Pamela's virtue ends merely because the besieger is tired

of assaults which fail, and of offering dishonourable terms of

capitulation which are rejected: because he prefers peace and alliance.

But such as it is, it is told with a spirit which must have been

surprising enough to its readers, and which makes it, I confess, seem to

me now much the best _story_ in Richardson. The various alarums and

excursions of the siege itself go off smartly and briskly: there may be

more sequence than connection--there is _some_ connection, as in the

case of that most unlucky and ill-treated person the Rev. Mr.

Williams--but the sequence is rapid and unbroken, and the constituents

of it as it were jostle each other--not in any unfavourable sense, but

in a sort of rapid dance, "cross hands and down the middle," which is

inspiriting and contagious. He lost this faculty later: or rather he

allowed it to be diluted and slackened into the interminable episodes of

the not dissimilar though worse-starred plot against Clarissa, and the

_massacrant_ trivialities of the Italian part of _Grandison_. But he had

it here: and it is not a fair argument to say (as even in these days I

have known it said) that Pamela's honour is a commodity of too little

importance to justify such a pother about it.

This may bring us to the characters. They also are not of the absolutely

first class--excepting, as to be discussed later, the great attempt of

Lovelace, Richardson's never are. But they are an immense advance on the

personages that did duty as persons in preceding novels, even in Defoe.

"Mr. B." himself is indeed not very capital. One does not quite see why

a man who went on as long as he did and used the means which he

permitted himself to use, did not go on longer or use them more

thoroughly. But Richardson has at least vindicated his much-praised

"knowledge of the human heart" by recognising two truths: first, that

there are many natures (perhaps most) who are constantly tempted to

"over-bid"--to give more and more for something that they want and

cannot get; and, secondly, that there are others (again, perhaps, the

majority, if not always the same individuals) who, when they are

peremptorily told _not_ to do a thing, at once determine to do it. It

was to Lady Davers mainly that Pamela owed her escape from the fate of

Clarissa, though she would hardly have taken, or had the chance of

taking, that fate in the same way. As for the minor characters, at least

the lower examples are more than sufficient: and Mrs. Jewkes wants very

little of being a masterpiece. But of course Pamela herself is the

cynosure, such as there is. She has had rather hard measure with critics

for the last century and a little more. The questions to ask now are,

"Is she a probable human being?" and then, "Where are we to find a

probable human being, worked out to the same degree, before?" I say

unhesitatingly that the answer to the first is "Yes," and the answer to

the second "Nowhere." The last triumph of originality and individuality

she does not indeed reach. Richardson had, even more than other men of

his century in England, a strong Gallic touch: and he always tends to

the type rather than the individual. Beatrix Esmond is a coquette of the

highest--almost of the heroic-poetic--class, but she is first of all

Beatrix Esmond. Blanche Amory is a middle-class minx, hardly heroic at

all, but she is first of all Blanche Amory. Becky Sharp is an

adventuress who would go pretty close to, and perhaps not stop at,

positive crime, but she is first of all Becky Sharp. Pamela Andrews is

not first of all--perhaps she is hardly at all--Pamela Andrews. There

might be fifty or five hundred Pamelas, while there could be only one of

each of the others. She is the pretty, good-natured, well-principled,

and rather well-educated menial, whose prudence comes to the aid of her

principles, whose pride does not interfere with either, and who has a

certain--it is hardly unfair to call it--slyness which is of the sex

rather than of the individual. But, as such, she is quite admirably

worked out--a heroine of Racine in more detail and different

circumstances, a triumph of art, and at the same time with so much

nature that it is impossible to dismiss her as merely artificial. The

nearest thing to her in English prose fiction before (Marianne, of

course, is closer in French) is Moll Flanders: and good as Moll is, she

is flat and lifeless in comparison with Pamela. You may call "my

master's" mistress (actually in the honourable sense, but never in the

dishonourable) again a minx, though a better minx than Blanche, if you

like. But there is no animal more alive than a minx: and you will

certainly not find a specimen of the species in any English novel

before.

As for description and dialogue, there is not very much of the former

in _Pamela_, though it might not be unfair to include under the head

those details, after the manner of Defoe (such as Pamela's list of

purchases when she thinks she is going home), which supply their own

measure of verisimilitude to the story. But there are some things of the

kind which Defoe never would have thought of--such as the touches of

the "tufts of grass" and the "pretty sort of wildflower that grows

yonder near the elm, the fifth from us on the left," which occur in the

gipsy scene. The dialogue plays a much more important part: and may be

brought into parallel with that in the _Polite Conversation_, referred

to above and published just before _Pamela_. It is "reported" of course,

instead of being directly delivered, in accordance with the

letter-scheme of which more presently, but that makes very little

difference; to the first readers it probably made no difference at all.

Here again that process of "vivification," which has been so often dwelt

on, makes an astonishing progress--the blood and colour of the novel,

which distinguish it from the more statuesque narrative, are supplied,

if indirectly yet sufficiently and, in comparison with previous

examples, amply. Here you get, almost or quite for the first time in the

English novel, those spurts and sparks of animation which only the

living voice can supply. Richardson is a humorist but indirectly; yet

only the greatest humorists have strokes much better than that admirable

touch in which, when the "reconciliations and forgivenesses of injuries"

are being arranged, and Mr. B. (quite in the manner of the time)

suggests marrying Mrs. Jewkes to the treacherous footman John and giving

them an inn to keep--Pamela, the mild and semi-angelic but exceedingly

feminine Pamela, timidly inquires whether, "This would not look like

very heavy punishment to poor John?" She forgives Mrs. Jewkes of course,

but only "as a Christian"--as a greater than Richardson put it

afterwards and commented on it in the mouth of a personage whom

Richardson could never have drawn, though Fielding most certainly could.

The original admirers of _Pamela_, then, were certainly justified: and

even the rather fatuous eulogies which the author prefixed to it from

his own and (let us hope) other pens (and which probably provoked

Fielding himself more than even the substance of the piece) could be

transposed into a reasonable key. But we ought nowadays to consider this

first complete English novel from a rather higher point of view, and ask

ourselves, not merely what its comparative merits were in regard to its

predecessors, and as presented to its first readers, but what its

positive character is and what, as far as it goes, are the positive

merits or defects which it shows in its author.

The first thing to strike one in this connection is, almost of course,

the letter-form. More agreement has been reached about this, perhaps,

than about some other points in the inquiry. The initial difficulty of

fiction which does not borrow the glamour of verse or of the stage is

the question, "What does all this mean?" "What is the authority?" "How

does the author know it all?" And a hundred critics have pointed out

that there are practically only three ways of meeting this. The boldest

and the best by far is to follow the poet and the dramatist themselves;

to treat it like one of the magic lions of romance, ignore it, and pass

on, secure of safety, to tell your story "from the blue," as if it were

an actual history or revelation, or something passing before the eyes of

the reader. But at that time few novelists had the courage to do this,

daunted as they were by the absence of the sword and shield of verse,

of the vantage-room of the stage. Then there is the alternative of

recounting it by the mouth of one of the actors in, or spectators of,

the events--a plan obvious, early, presenting some advantages, still

very commonly followed, but always full of little traps and pits of

improbability, and peculiarly trying in respect to the character (if he

is made to have any) of the narrator himself. Thirdly, there is the

again easy resource of the "document" in its various forms. Of these,

letters and diaries possess some prerogative advantages; and were likely

to suggest themselves very particularly at this time when the actual

letter and diary (long rather strangely rare in English) had for some

generations appeared, and were beginning to be common. In the first

place the information thus obtained looks natural and plausible: and

there is a subsidiary advantage--on which Richardson does not draw very

much in _Pamela_, but which he employs to the full later--that by

varying your correspondents you can get different views of the same

event, and first-hand manifestations of extremely different characters.

Its disadvantages, on the other hand, are equally obvious: but there are

two or three of them of especial importance. In the first place, it is

essentially an artificial rather than an artful plan--its want of

verisimilitude, as soon as you begin to think of it, is as great as that

of either of the others if not greater. In the second, without immense

pains, it must be "gappy and scrappy," while the more these pains are

taken the more artificial it will become. In the third, the book is

extremely likely, in the taking of these pains and even without them, to

become intolerably lengthy and verbose. In the first part at least of

the first part of _Pamela_, Richardson avoided these dangers fairly if

not fully; in the second part he succumbed to them; in his two later

novels, though more elaborate and important plots to some extent bore up

the expansion, he succumbed to them almost more. Pains have been taken

above to show how the first readers of _Pamela_ might rejoice in it,

because of its contrast with the character of the seventeenth-century

novel which was most read--the Scudéry or "heroic" romance. It is not, I

think, too severe to say that nothing but the parallel with that

romance, and the tolerance induced by familiarity with it, could make

any one put up with the second part of _Pamela_ itself, or with the

inhumanly prolonged divagation of _Clarissa_ and _Grandison_. Nor, as

has been hinted, is the solace of the letters--in the opportunity of

setting forth different tempers and styles--here much taken.

There is no doubt that one main attraction of this letter-plan (whether

consciously experienced or not does not matter) was its ready adaptation

to Richardson's own special and peculiar gift of minute analysis of

mood, temper, and motive. The diary avowedly, and the letter in reality,

even though it may be addressed to somebody else, is a continuous

soliloquy: and the novelist can use it with a frequency and to a length

which would be intolerable and impossible on the stage. Now soliloquy is

the great engine for self--revelation and analysis. It is of course to a

great extent in consequence of this analysis that Richardson owes his

pride of place in the general judgment. It is quite possible to lay too

much stress on it, as distinguishing the novel from the romance: and the

present writer is of opinion that too much stress has actually been

laid. The real difference between romance _per se_ and novel _per se_

(so far as they are capable of distinct existence) is that the romance

depends more on incident and the novel more on character. Now this

minute analysis and exhibition, though it is one way of drawing or

constructing character, is not the only, nor even a necessary, one. It

can be done without: but it has impressed the vulgar, and even some who

are not the vulgar, from Dr. Johnson to persons whom it is unnecessary

to mention. They cannot believe that there is "no deception"--that the

time is correctly told--unless the works of the watch are bared to them:

and this Richardson most undoubtedly does. Even in his 'prentice work,

every flutter of Pamela's little heart is registered, and registered

probably enough: nor could the registry have been effected, perhaps, in

any other way that should be in the least probable so well as by the

letter and journal method. Of course this analysis was not quite new; it

had existed in a sort of way in the heroic novel: and it had been

eminently present in the famous _Princesse de Clèves_ of Madame de la

Fayette as well as in her French successors. But these stories had

generally been as short as the heroics had been long: and no one had

risen (or descended) to anything like the minuteness and fullness of

Richardson. As was before pointed out in regard to the letter-system

generally, this method of treatment is exposed to special dangers,

particularly those of verbosity and "overdoing"--not to mention the

greater one of missing the mark. Richardson can hardly be charged with

error, though he may be with excess, in regard to Pamela herself in the

earlier part of the book--perhaps even not in regard to Mr. B.'s

intricacies of courtship, matrimonial compliment, and arbitrary temper

later. But he certainly succumbs to them in the long and monstrous scene

in which Lady Davers bullies, storms at, and positively assaults her

unfortunate sister-in-law before she is forced to allow that she _is_

her sister-in-law. Part of course of his error here comes from the

mistake with which Lady Mary afterwards most justly reproached

him--that he talked about fine ladies and gentlemen without knowing

anything about them. It was quite natural for Lady Davers to be

disgusted, to be incredulous, to be tyrannical, to be in a certain sense

violent. But it is improbable that she would in any case have spoken and

behaved like a drunken fishfag quarrelling with another in the street:

and the extreme prolongation of the scene brings its impropriety more

forcibly into view. Here, as elsewhere (a point of great importance to

which I may invite attention), Richardson follows out, with

extraordinary minuteness and confidence, a wrong course: and his very

expertness in the process betrays him and brings him to grief. If he had

run the false scent for a few yards only it would not matter: in a chase

prolonged to something like "Hartleap Well" extension there is less

excuse for his not finding it out. Nevertheless it would of course be

absurd not to rank this "knowledge of the human heart" among the claims

which not only gave him but have kept his reputation. I do not know that

he shows it much less in the later part of the first two volumes

(Pamela's recurrent tortures of jealous curiosity about Sally Godfrey

are admirable) or even in the dreary sequel. But analysis for analysis'

sake can have few real, though it may have some pretended, devotees.

The foregoing remarks have been designed, less as a criticism of

_Pamela_ (which would be unnecessary here), or even of Richardson (which

would be more in place, but shall be given in brief presently), than as

an account and justification of the book's position in the real subject

of this volume--the History of the English Novel. And this account will

dispense us from dealing, at corresponding length, with the individually

more important but historically subordinate books which followed. Of

these _Clarissa_, as few people can be ignorant, is a sort of enlarged,

diversified, and transposed _Pamela_, in which the attempts of a

libertine of more resolution and higher gifts than Mr. B. upon a young

lady of much more than proportionately higher station and qualities than

Pamela's, are--as such success goes--successful at last: but only to

result in the death of the victim and the punishment of the criminal.

The book is far longer than even the extended _Pamela_; has a much wider

range; admits of episodes and minor plots, and is altogether much more

ambitious; but still--though the part of the seducer Lovelace is much

more important than that of Mr. B.--it is chiefly occupied with the

heroine. In _Sir Charles Grandison_, on the contrary, though no less

than three heroines exist after a fashion and are carefully treated, the

author's principal object is to depict--in direct contrast to Mr. B. and

Lovelace--a "Good Man"--the actual first title of the book, which he

wisely altered. This faultless and insufferable monster is frantically

beloved by, and hesitates long between, two beauties, the Italian

Clementina della Porretta and the English Harriet Byron. The latter of

these carries him off (rather because of religious difficulties than of

any great predilection on his own part) and the piece ends with a

repetition, extension, and intensification of the bounties showered upon

Pamela by her husband, and her almost abject gratitude for them. Only of

course "the good man" could never be guilty of Mr. B.'s meditated

relapse from the path of rectitude, nor (one may perhaps add) does Miss

Byron seem to possess the insinuating astuteness by which Pamela once

more

"Reconciles the new perverted man,"

to adapt the last line of _A Lover's Complaint_ to the situation.

_Grandison_, like _Clarissa_, has a much wider range of personage and

incident than _Pamela_, and is again double the length of it. No

detailed criticism of these enormous books (both of which are conducted

in the letter-form, though, in the latter case especially, with long

retrospects and narratives which rather strain the style) is possible

here. But a few remarks on the characters of Lovelace and Clarissa,

which have usually been regarded as Richardson's greatest triumphs, may

fitly precede some on his whole character as a novelist.

Admiration and sympathy, tempered with a few reserves, have been the

general notes of comment on Clarissa: and--as she goes through the long

martyrdom of persecution by her family for not marrying the man she does

not love; of worse persecution from the man whom she does love, but who

will not marry her, at least until he has conquered her virtue; and of

perhaps worst when she feels it her duty to resist his repentant and (as

such things go) honourable proffers after he has treacherously deprived

her of technical honour--compassion at least is impossible to refuse.

But "compassion," though it literally translates "sympathy" from Greek

into Latin, is not its synonym in English. It is a disagreeable thing to

have to say: but Clarissa's purity strikes one as having at once too

much questionable prudery in it and too little honest prudence: while

her later resolution has as much false pride as real principle. Even

some of her admirers admit a want of straightforwardness in her; she has

no passion, which rather derogates from the merit of her conduct in any

case; and though she is abominably ill-treated by almost everybody,

one's pity for her never comes very near to love.

Towards Lovelace, on the other hand, the orthodox attitude, with even

greater uniformity, has been shocked, or sometimes even unshocked,

admiration. Hazlitt went into frequently quoted raptures over the

"regality" of his character: and though to approve of him as a man would

only be the pretence of a cheap paradoxer, general opinion seems to have

gone various lengths in the same direction. There have, however, been a

few dissenters: and I venture to join myself to them in the very

dissidence of their dissent. Lovelace, it is true, is a most

astonishingly "succeeded" blend of a snob's fine gentleman and of the

fine gentleman of a silly and rather unhealthy-minded schoolgirl. He

is--it is difficult to resist the temptation of dropping and inserting

the h's--handsome, haughty, arbitrary, as well as rich, generous after a

fashion, well descended, well dressed, well mannered--except when he is

insolent. He is also--which certainly stands to his credit in the bank

which is not that of the snob or the schoolgirl--no fool in a general

way. But he is not in the least a gentleman except in externals: and

there is nothing really "great" about him at all. Even his scoundrelism

is mostly, if not wholly, _pose_--which abominable thing indeed

distinguishes him throughout, in every speech and every act, from the

time when he sighs as he kisses Miss Arabella Harlowe's hand to the time

when he says, "Let this expiate!" as that hallowed sword of Colonel

Morden's passes through his rotten heart. Now if Richardson had _meant_

this, it might be granted at once that Lovelace is one of the greatest

characters of fiction: and I do not deny that _taken as this_, meant or

not meant, he is great. But Richardson obviously did _not_ mean it; and

Hazlitt did not mean it; and none of the admirers mean it. _They_ all

thought and think that Lovelace is something like what Milton's Satan

was, and what my Lord Byron would have liked to be. This is very unfair

to the Prince of Darkness: and it is even not quite just to "the noble

poet."

At the same time, the acute reader will have noticed, the acknowledgment

that the fact that Richardson--even not knowing it and intending to do

something else--did hit off perfectly and consummately the ideal of such

a "prevailing party" (to quote Lord Foppington) as snobs and

schoolgirls, is a serious and splendid tribute to his merits: as is also

the fact that his two chief characters are characters still interesting

and worth arguing about. Those merits, indeed, are absolutely

incontestable. His immediate and immense popularity, abroad as well as

at home, would not necessarily prove much, though it must not be

neglected, and historically, at least, is of the first importance. But

he does not need it.

For, as should have been sufficiently shown, he did very great

things--first by gathering up the scattered means and methods which had

been half ignorantly hit on by others, and co-ordinating them into the

production of the finished and complete novel; secondly (though less) by

that infusion of elaborate "minor psychology" as it may be called, which

is his great characteristic; and, thirdly, by means of it and of other

things, in raising the pitch of interest in his readers to an infinitely

higher degree than had ever been known before. The dithyrambs of Diderot

are, though not ridiculously, amusingly excessive: but they are only an

exaggeration of the truth. On the comic side he was weak: and he made a

most unfortunate mistake by throwing this part of the business on young

ladies of position and (as he thought) of charm--Miss Darnford, Miss

Howe, Charlotte Grandison--who are by no means particularly comic and

who are sometimes very particularly vulgar. But of tragedy positive, in

the _bourgeois_ kind, he had no small command, and in the middle

business--in affairs neither definitely comic nor definitely tragic--he

was wonderfully prolific and facile. His immense and heart-breaking

lengthiness is not _mere_ verbosity: it comes partly from the artist's

natural delight in a true and newly found method, partly from a still

more respectably artistic desire not to do the work negligently. As for

the unhealthiness of atmosphere which has been generally and not

unjustly charged upon him, it is, in part, no doubt the result of

imperfect temperament and breeding: but it is also as closely connected

with his very method as are the merits thereof. You cannot "consider so

curiously" without considering too curiously. The drawbacks of his work

are obvious, and they were likely to be, and were, exaggerated. But they

might be avoided and the merits kept: nor is it too much to say that the

triumphs of the English novel in the last century have been not a little

due to the avoidance of the one and the keeping of the other.

It would be, in the circumstances, peculiarly uncivil and disobliging

to lay very much stress on the fact that, after all, the greatest

of Richardson's works is his successor, caricaturist, and

superior--Fielding. When the memoirs of Miss Pamela Andrews appeared,

the future biographer of her doubly supposititious brother was a not

very young man of thirty-three, who had written a good many not very

good plays, had contributed to periodicals, and had done a little work

at the Bar, besides living, at least till his marriage and it may be

feared later, an exceedingly "rackety" life. It is not improbable,

though it is not certain, that he had already turned his attention to

prose fiction of a kind. For, though the _Miscellanies_ which followed

_Joseph Andrews_ were three years later than _Pamela_ in appearance,

the _Journey from this World to the Next_ which they contain has the

immaturity of earliness; and we can hardly conceive it as written after

the adventures and character of Mr. Abraham Adams. It is unequal, rather

tedious in parts, and in conception merely a _pastiche_ of Lucian and

Fontenelle: but it contains some remarkable things in the way of shrewd

satirical observation of human nature. And the very fact that it is a

following of something else is interesting, in connection with the

infinitely more important work that preceded it in publication, _The

Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams_ (1742).

Nobody has ever had much difficulty in accounting for the way in which

Fielding availed himself of the appearance and popularity of _Pamela_.

And though Richardson would have been superhuman instead of very human

indeed (with an ordinary British middle-class humanity, and an

extraordinary vein of genius) if he had done otherwise, few have joined

him in thinking _Joseph_ a "lewd and ungenerous engraftment." We have

not ourselves been very severe on the faults of _Pamela_, the reason of

lenity being, among other things, that it in a manner produced Fielding,

and all the fair herd of his successors down to the present day. But

those faults are glaring: and they were of a kind specially likely to

attract the notice and the censure of a genial, wholesome, and, above

all, masculine taste and intellect like Fielding's. Even at that time,

libertine as it was in some ways, and sentimental as it was in others,

people had not failed to notice that Pamela's virtue is not quite what

was then called "neat" wine--the pure and unadulterated juice of the

grape. The _longueurs_ and the fiddle-faddle, the shameless and fulsome

preface-advertisements and the rest lay open enough to censure. So

Fielding saw the handles, and gripped them at once by starting a _male_

Pamela--a situation not only offering "most excellent differences," but

in itself possessing, to graceless humanity at all times it may be

feared, and at that time perhaps specially, something essentially

ludicrous in minor points. At first he kept the parody very close:

though the necessary transposition of the parts afforded opportunity

(amply taken) for display of character and knowledge of nature superior

to Richardson's own. Later the general opinion is that he, especially

inspirited by his _trouvaille_ of Adams, almost forgot the parody, and

only furbished up the _Pamela_-connection at the end to make a formal

correspondence with the beginning, and to get a convenient and

conventional "curtain." I am not so sure of this. Even Adams is to a

certain extent suggested by Williams, though they turn out such very

different persons. Mrs. Slipslop, a character, as Gray saw, not so very

far inferior to Adams, is not only a parallel to Mrs. Jewkes, but also,

and much more, a contrast to the respectable Mrs. Jervis and Mrs.

Warden. All sorts of fantastic and not-fantastic doublets may be traced

throughout: and I am not certain that Parson Trulliber's majestic

doctrine that no man, even in his own house, shall drink when he "caaled

vurst" is not a demoniacally ingenious travesty of Pamela's

characteristic casuistry, when she says that she will do anything to

propitiate Lady Davers, but she will not "fill wine" to her in her own

husband's house.

But this matters little: and we have no room for it. Suffice it as

agreed and out of controversy that _Joseph Andrews_ started as a parody

of _Pamela_ and that, whether in addition or in substitution, it turned

to something very different. It is not quite so uncontroversial, but

will be asserted here as capable of all but demonstration, that the

"something different" is also something much greater. There is still not

very much plot--the parody did not necessitate and indeed rather

discouraged that, and what there is is arrived at chiefly by the old and

seldom very satisfactory system of _anagnorisis_--the long-lost-child

business. But, under the three other heads, Joseph distances his sister

hopelessly and can afford her much more than weight for sex. It has been

said that there are doubtfully in Richardson anywhere, and certainly not

in _Pamela_, those startling creations of personality which are almost

more real to us than the persons we know in the flesh. It is not that

Pamela and her meyney are _un_real; for they are not: but that they are

not personal. The Reverend Abraham Adams is a good deal more real than

half the parsons who preached last Sunday, and a good deal more

personal: and the quality is not confined to him, though he has most of

it. So, too, with the description. The time was not yet for any minute

or elaborate picture-setting. But here again also that extra dose of

life and action--almost of bustle--which Fielding knows how to instil is

present. In _Pamela_ the settings are frequent, but they are "still

life" and rather shadowy: we do not _see_ the Bedfordshire and

Lincolnshire mansions, the summer houses where (as she observes with

demure relish when the danger is over) Mr. B. was "very naughty;" even

the pond where, if she had been another sort of girl, the _drame_ might

have become real tragedy. Fielding does not take very much more trouble

and yet somehow we _do_ see it all, with a little help from our own

imaginations perhaps, but on his suggestion and start. Especially the

outdoor life and scenes--the inn-yards and the high roads and the downs

by night or day; the pig-sty where poor Adams is the victim of live

pigs and the public-house kitchen where he succumbs to a by-product of

dead ones--these are all real for us.

But most of all is the regular progress of vivification visible in the

dialogue. This, as we have seen, had been the very weakest point of the

weakness of almost all (we might say of all) English novels up to the

close of the first quarter of the eighteenth century. Richardson had

done a great deal for it: but it was impossible that, on his method, it

should not, for the most part, be languid, or at any rate long-winded.

Here again Fielding spirits the thing up--oxygenates and ozonises the

atmosphere: while, in even fuller measure than his predecessor and

victim, he recognises the efficacy of dialogue as the revealer of

character. He has, assisted no doubt by Shakespeare and his own dramatic

practice, discovered that you do not want volumes of it to do the

business--that single moments and single sentences will do that business

at times, if they are used in the proper way.

In short, Fielding here used his reluctant and indignant forerunner as a

spring-board, whence to attain heights which that forerunner could never

have reached: he "stood upon his shoulders" in the most cavalier but

also the most successful fashion. In the novel as Richardson knew it and

was thinking of it, when he began _Pamela_, you were, as a rule, in an

artificial world altogether--a world artificial with an artificiality

only faintly and occasionally touched with any reality at all. In

_Pamela_ itself there is perhaps nothing, and certainly not much, that

is _wholly_ unreal: but the reality is treated and rendered in an

artificial way. In _Joseph Andrews_, though its professed genesis and

procedure are artificial too, you break away at once from serious

artifice. These are all real people who do real things in a real way

now, as they did nearly two hundred years ago: however much dress, and

speech, and manners may have changed. And we are told of their doings in

a real way, too. Exactly how the teller knew it we do not know: but we

do not think of this at all. And on the other hand there is no perpetual

reminder of art, like the letter-ending and beginning, to disturb or

alloy the once and gladly accepted "suspension of disbelief."

A slight digression may not be improper here. Even in their own days,

when the _gros mot_ was much less shocking than it is now, there was a

general notion--which has more or less persisted, in spite of all

changes of fashion in this respect, and exists even now when licence of

subject as distinguished from phrase has to a great extent

returned--that Fielding is more "coarse," more "improper," and so forth

than Richardson. As a matter of fact, neither admits positively indecent

language--that had gone out, except in the outskirts and fringes of

English literature, generations earlier. But I am much mistaken if there

are not in Richardson more than a few scenes and situations the

"impropriety" of which positively exceeds anything in Fielding.

Naturally one does not give indications: but readers may be pretty

confident about the fact. The comparative "bloodlessness," however--the

absence of life and colour in the earlier and older writer--acts as a

sort of veil to them.

Yet (to return to larger and purer air), however much one may admire

_Joseph Andrews_, the kind of _parasitic_ representation which it allows

itself, and the absence of any attempt to give an original story tells

against it. And it may, in any case, be regarded as showing that the

novelist, even yet, was hugging the shore or allowing himself to be

taken in tow--that he did not dare to launch out into the deep and

trust to his own sails and the wind of nature to propel him--to his own

wits and soul to guide. Even Fielding's next venture--the wonderful and

almost unique venture of _Jonathan Wild_--leaves some objection of this

sort possible, though, for myself, I should never dream of admitting it.

Jonathan was (so much the worse for human nature) a real person: and the

outlines of his story--if not the actual details--are given partly by

his actual life, partly by Gay's _Beggar's Opera_ and its sequel.

Moreover, the whole marvellous little book has a purpose--the purpose of

satire on false ideas of greatness, historical and political. The

invention and the art of the writer are not even yet allowed frank and

free course.

But though criticism will allow this, it will, if it be competent and

courageous, allow no deduction to be made from the other greatness of

this little masterpiece. It has never been popular; it is never likely

to be popular; and one may almost say that it is sincerely to be hoped

that it never will be popular. For if it were, either all the world

would be scoundrels, which would be a pity: or all the world would be

philosophers and persons of taste, in which case it would be impossible,

as the famous story has it, to "look down on one's fellow-creatures from

a proper elevation." It really is a novel and a remarkable one--superior

even to _Vanity Fair_, according to Thackeray's own definition, as a

delineation of "a set of people living without God in the world." But it

is even more (and here its only parallel is _A Tale of a Tub_, which is

more desultory and much more of a _fatrasie_ or salmagundy of odds and

ends) a masterpiece and quintessential example of irony. Irony had come

in with the plain prose style, without which it is almost impossible:

and not merely Swift but others had done great things with it. It is,

however, only here that it reaches the quintessence just spoken of with

a coherent and substantive purpose to serve as vehicle for it. It is

possibly too strong for most people's taste: and one may admit that, for

anything like frequent enjoyment, it wants a certain admixture of the

fantastic in its various senses--after the method of Voltaire in one

way, of Beckford in another, of Peacock in a third, of Disraeli in a

fourth--to make it acceptable to more than a very few. But it shows,

even from our present limited point of view, of what immense and exalted

application the novel-method was capable: and it shows also the

astonishing powers of its author. "Genial," in the usual sense, it

certainly cannot be called; in the proper sense as equalling "what is

the production of genius" there are few books which deserve the term

better. But it is an exercise in a by-way of the novel road-system,

though an early proof of the fact that such by-ways are endlessly open.

But the time was coming, though it did not (and could hardly) come very

quickly, when Fielding was to discard all kinds of adventitious aids and

suggestions--all crutches, spring-boards, go-carts, tugs, patterns,

tracings--and go his own way--and the Way of the Novel--with no guidance

but something of the example of Cervantes directly and Shakespeare

indirectly among the moderns, and of the poetic fiction-writers of old.

It is perfectly clear that he had thought widely (and perhaps had read

not a little) on the subject of literary criticism, in a sense not

common in his day, and that the thinking had led him to a conception of

the "prose epic" which, though it might have been partly (not wholly by

any means) pieced out of the Italian and Spanish critics of the late

sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, had never been worked out as

a complete theory, much less applied in practice and to prose. The

Prose Epic aims at--and in Fielding's case has been generally admitted

to have hit--something like the classical unity of main action. But it

borrows from the romance-idea the liberty of a large accretion and

divagation of minor and accessory plot:--not the mere "episode" of the

ancients, but the true minor plot of Shakespeare. It assumes,

necessarily and once for all, the licence of tragi-comedy, in that sense

of the term in which _Much Ado About Nothing_ and _A Winter's Tale_ are

tragi-comedies, and in which _Othello_ itself might have been made one.

And it follows further in the wake of the Shakespearean drama by

insisting far more largely than ancient literature of any kind, and far

more than any modern up to its date except drama had done, on the

importance of Character. Description and dialogue are rather subordinate

to these things than on a level with them--but they are still further

worked out than before. And there is a new element--perhaps suggested by

the _parabasis_ of ancient comedy, but, it may be, more directly by the

peculiar method of Swift in _A Tale of a Tub_. At various places in his

narrative, but especially at the beginnings of books and chapters,

Fielding as it were "calls a halt" and addresses his readers on matters

more or less relevant to the story, but rather in the manner of a

commentator and scholiast upon it than as actual parts of it. Of this

more later: for the immediate purpose is to survey and not to criticise.

The result of all this was _Tom Jones_--by practically universal consent

one of the capital books of English literature. It is unnecessary to

recapitulate the famous praises of Gibbon, of Coleridge, of Byron, and

of others: and it is only necessary to deal briefly with the complaints

which, if they have never found such monumental expression as the

praises, have been sometimes widely entertained. These objections--as

regards interest--fasten partly on the address-digressions, partly on

the great inset-episode of "The Man of the Hill:" as regards morality on

a certain alleged looseness of principle in that respect throughout, and

especially on the licence of conduct accorded to the hero himself and

the almost entire absence of punishment for it. As for the first, "The

Man of the Hill" was partly a concession to the fancy of the time for

such things, partly a following of such actual examples as Fielding

admitted--for it need hardly be said that the inset-episode, of no or

very slight connection with the story, is common both in the ancients

and in Cervantes, while it is to be found as long after Fielding as in

the early novel-work of Dickens. The digression-openings are at least as

satisfactory to some as they are unsatisfactory to others; it is even

doubtful whether they annoy anybody half so much as they have delighted

some excellent judges. The other point is well worn: but the wearing has

not taken off its awkwardness and unsavouriness. Difference of habit and

manners at the time will account for much: but the wiser apologists will

simply say that Fielding's attitude to certain deviations from the

strict moral law was undoubtedly very indulgent, provided that such

deviations were unaccompanied by the graver and more detestable vices of

cruelty, treachery, and fraud--that to vice which was accompanied by

these blacker crimes he was utterly merciless; and that if he is thus

rather exposed to the charge of "compounding by damning"--in the famous

phrase--the things that he damned admit of no excuse and those that he

compounded for have been leniently dealt with by all but the sternest

moralists.

Such things are, however (in the admirable French sense),

_misères_--wretched petty cavils and shallows of criticism. The only

sensible thing to do is to launch out with Fielding into that deep and

open sea of human character and fate which he dared so gloriously.

During the curious phase of literary opinion which the last twenty years

or so have seen, it has apparently been discovered by some people that

his scheme of human thought and feeling is too simple--"toylike" I think

they call it--in comparison with that, say, of Count Tolstoi or of Mr.

Meredith, that modern practice has reached a finer technique than his or

even than that of his greatest follower, Thackeray. Far be it from the

present writer to say, or to insinuate, anything disrespectful of the

great moderns who have lately left us. Yet it may be said without the

slightest disrespect to them that the unfavourable comparison is mainly

a revival of Johnson's mistake as to Fielding and Richardson. It is,

however, something more--for it comes also from a failure to estimate

aright the _parabasis_-openings which have been more than once referred

to. These passages do not perhaps exhibit the by-work and the process in

the conspicuous skeleton-clock fashion which their critics admire and

desire, but they contain an amount of acute and profound exploration of

human nature which it would be difficult to match and impossible to

surpass elsewhere: while the results of Fielding's working, of his

"toylike" scheme, are remarkable toys indeed--toys which, if we regard

them as such, must surely strike us as rather uncanny. One is sometimes

constrained to think that it is perhaps not much more difficult to make

than to recognise a thoroughly live character. It certainly must be very

difficult to do the latter if there is any considerable number of

persons who are unable to do it in the case of almost every one of the

personages of _Tom Jones_. With one possible exception they are all

alive--even more so than those of _Joseph Andrews_ and with a less

peculiar and limited liveliness than those of _Jonathan Wild_. But it

certainly is curious that as the one good man of _Jonathan_, Heartfree,

is the least alive of its personages, so the one bad man of _Tom_,

Blifil, occupies the same position.

The result of this variety and abundance of life is an even more than

corresponding opportunity for enjoyment. This enjoyment may arise in

different persons from different sources. The much praised and seldom

cavilled at unity and completeness of the story may appeal to some.

There are others who are inclined towards elaborate plots as Sam Weller

was to the "'rig'nal" of his subpoena. It was a "gratifyin' sort o'

thing, and eased his mind" to be aware of its existence, and that was

all. These latter find _their_ sources of enjoyment elsewhere, but

everywhere else. The abundance and the vividness of character-presentation;

the liveliness and the abundance of the staging of that character; the

variety of scene and incident--all most properly connected with the plot,

but capable of existing and of being felt without it; the human dialogue;

the admirable phrase in that dialogue and out of it, in the digressions, in

the narrative, above, and through, and about, and below it all--these

things and others (for it is practically impossible to exhaust the

catalogue) fill up the cup to the brim, and keep it full, for the

born lover of the special novel-pleasure.

In one point only was Fielding a little unfortunate perhaps: and even

here the "perhaps" has to be underlined. He came just before the end of

a series of almost imperceptible changes in ordinary English speech

which brought about something like a stationary state. His maligner and

only slightly younger contemporary, Horace Walpole, in some of his

letters, writes in a fashion which, putting mere slang aside, has hardly

any difference from that of to-day. Fielding still uses "hath" for "has"

and a few other things which seem archaic, not to students of literature

but to the general. In the same way dress, manners, etc., though much

more picturesque, were by that fact distinguished from those of almost

the whole nineteenth century and the twentieth as far as it has gone:

while incidents were, even in ordinary life, still usual which have long

ceased to be so. In this way the immense advance--greater than was made

by any one else till Miss Austen--that he made in the pure novel of this

ordinary life may be missed. But the intrinsic magnificence, interest,

nature, abundance of _Tom Jones_ can only be missed by those who were

predestined to miss them. It is tempting--but the temptation must be

resisted--to enliven these pages with an abstract of its astonishing

"biograph-panorama." But nothing save itself can do it justice. "Take

and read" is the only wise advice.

No such general agreement has been reached in respect of Fielding's last

novel, _Amelia_. The author's great adversary, Johnson--an adversary

whose hostility was due partly to generous and grateful personal

relations with Richardson, partly to political disagreement (for

Fielding was certainly "a vile Whig"), but most of all perhaps to a sort

of horrified recoil from the novelist's easy handling of temptations

which were no easy matter to his critic--was nearly if not quite

propitiated by it: and the enthusiasm for it of such a "cynic" as

Thackeray is well known. Of the very few persons whom it would not be

ridiculous to name with these, Scott--whose competence in criticising

his own art is one of the most wonderful though the least generally

recognised things about him--inclines, in the interesting

Introduction-Dialogue to _The Fortunes of Nigel_, to put it on a level

with _Tom Jones_ itself as a perfectly constructed novel. But modern

criticism has, rightly or wrongly, been more dubious. Amelia is almost

too perfect: her very forgiveness (it has been suggested) would be more

interesting if she had not almost completely shut her eyes to there

being anything to forgive. Her husband seems to us to prolong the

irresponsibility of youth, which was pardonable in Tom, to a period of

life and to circumstances of enforced responsibility which make us

rather decline to honour the drafts he draws; and he is also a little

bit of a fool, which Tom, to do him justice, is not, though he is

something of a scatterbrain. Dr. Harrison, whose alternate wrath and

reconciliation supply the most important springs of the plot, is, though

a natural, a rather unreasonable person. The "total impression" has even

been pronounced by some people to be a little dull. What there is of

truth in these criticisms and others (which it would be long even to

summarise) may perhaps be put briefly under two heads. It is never so

easy to arouse interest in virtue as it is in vice: or in weak and

watered vice as in vice rectified (or _un_rectified) to full strength.

And the old requirement of "the quest" is one which will hardly be

dispensed with. Here (for we know perfectly well that Amelia's virtue is

in no danger) there is no quest, except that of the fortune which ought

to be hers, which at last comes to her husband, and which we are told

(and hope rather doubtfully) that husband had at last been taught--by

the Fool's Tutor, Experience--not utterly to throw away. But this

fortune drops in half casually at the last by a series of stage

accidents, not ill-machined by any means, but not very particularly

interesting.

Such, however, are the criticisms which Fielding himself has taught

people to make, by the very excellence of his success in the earlier

novels: and there is a certain comparative and relative validity in

them. But consider _Amelia_ in itself, and they begin to look, if not

positively unfounded, rather unimportant. Once more, the astonishing

truth and variety of scene and character make themselves felt--even more

felt--even felt in new directions. The opening prison scenes exceed

anything earlier even in Fielding himself, much more in any one else, as

examples of the presentation of the unfamiliar. Miss Matthews--whom

Fielding has probably abstained from working out as much as he might

lest she should, from the literary point of view, obscure Amelia--is a

marvellous outline; Colonels James and Bath are perfectly finished

studies of ordinary and extraordinary "character" in the stage sense. No

novel even of the author's is fuller of _vignettes_--little pictures of

action and behaviour, of manners and society, which are not in the least

irrelevant to the general story, but on the contrary extra-illustrate

and carry it out.

While, therefore, we must in no way recede from the position above

adopted in regard to Richardson, we may quite consistently accord an

even higher place to Fielding. He relieved the novel of the tyranny and

constraint of the Letter; he took it out of the rut of confinement to a

single or a very limited class of subjects--for the themes of _Pamela_

and _Clarissa_ to a very large extent, of _Pamela_ and _Grandison_ to a

considerable one, and of all three to an extent not small, are

practically the same. He gave it altogether a larger, wider, higher,

deeper range. He infused in it (or restored to it) the refreshing and

preserving element of humour. He peopled it with a great crowd of lively

and interesting characters--endowed, almost without regard to their

technical "position _in_ life," with unlimited possession _of_ life. He

shook up its pillows, and bustled its business arrangements. He first

gave it--for in matter of prose style Richardson has few resources, and

those rather respectable than transporting, and decidedly

monotonous--the attractions of pure literature in form, and in pretty

various form. He also gave it the attraction of pure comedy, only

legitimately salted with farce, in such personages as Adams and

Partridge; of lower and more farcical, but still admirable comedy in

Slipslop and Trulliber and Squire Western; of comedy almost romantic and

certainly charming in Sophia; of domestic drama in Amelia; of satiric

portraiture in a hundred figures from the cousins (respectable and

disreputable), Miss Western and Lady Bellaston, downwards. He stocked it

with infinite miscellanies of personage, and scene, and picture, and

phrase. As has happened in one or two other cases, he carried, at least

in the opinion of the present writer, the particular art as far as it

will go. He did not indeed leave nothing for his successors to do--on

the contrary he left them in a sense everything--for he showed how

everything could be done. But if he has sometimes been equalled, he has

never been surpassed: and it is not easy to see even how he can be

surpassed. For as his greatest follower has it somewhere, though not of

him, "You cannot beat the best, you know."

One point only remains, the handling of which may complete a treatment

which is designedly kept down in detail. It has been hinted at already,

perhaps more than once, but has not been brought out. This is the

enormous range of suggestion in Fielding--the innumerable doors which

stand open in his ample room, and lead from it to other chambers and

corridors of the endless palace of Novel-Romance. This had most

emphatically not been the case with his predecessor: for Richardson,

except in point of mere length, showed little power of expatiation, kept

himself very much to the same ground and round, and was not likely to

teach anybody else to make excursions. Indeed Fielding's breaking away

in _Joseph Andrews_ is an allegory in itself. But, at least with pupils

and followers of any wits, there was not even any need of such breaking

away from himself, though no doubt there are in existence many dull and

slavish attempts to follow his work, especially _Tom Jones_. "Find it

out for yourself"--the great English motto which in the day of England's

glory was the motto of her men of learning as well as of her men of

business, of her artists as well as of her craftsmen--might have been

Fielding's: but he supplemented it with infinite finger-pointings

towards the various things that might be found out. Almost every kind of

novel exists--potentially--in his Four (the custom of leaving out

_Jonathan Wild_ should be wholly abrogated), though of course they do

not themselves illustrate or carry out at length many of the kinds that

they thus suggest.

And in fact it could not be otherwise: because, as has been pointed out,

while Fielding had no inconsiderable command of the Book of Literature,

he turned over by day and night the larger, the more difficult, but

still the greater Book of Life. Not merely _quicquid agunt homines_, but

_quicquid sentiunt, quicquid cogitant_, whatever they love and hate,

whatever they desire or decline--all these things are the subjects of

his own books: and the range of subject which they suggest to others is

thus of necessity inexhaustible.

If there have been some who denied or failed to recognise his greatness,

it must be because he has played on these unwary ones the same trick

that Garrick, in an immortal scene, played on his own Partridge. There

is so little parade about Fielding (for even the opening addresses are

not parade to these good people: they may disconcert or even disgust,

but they do not dazzle them), that his characters and his scenes look

commonplace. They feel sure that "if they had seen a ghost they would

have looked in the very same manner and done just as he does." They are

sure that, in the scene with Gertrude, "Lord, help them! any man--that

is any good man--that had such a mother would have done exactly the

same."

Well! in a way no doubt they are right; and one may imitate the wisdom

of Mr. Jones on the original occasion in not saying much more to them.

To others, of course, this is the very miracle of art--a miracle, as far

as the art of prose fiction is concerned, achieved in its fullness for

practically the first time. This is the true _mimesis_--the re-creation

or fresh creation of fictitious reality. There were in Fielding's time,

and probably ever since have been, those who thought him "low;" there

were, even in his own time, and have been in varying, but on the whole

rather increased, degree since, those who thought him immoral: there

appear to be some who think (or would like it to be thought that they

think) him commonplace and obvious. Now, as it happens, all these

charges have been brought against Nature too. To embellish, and correct,

and heighten, and extra-decorate her was not Fielding's way: but to

follow, and to interpret, and to take up her own processes with results

uncommonly like her own. That is his immense glory to all those who can

realise and understand it: and as for the others we must let them alone,

joined to their own idols.

In passing to the third of this great quartette, we make a little

descent, but not much of one, while the new peak to which we come is

well defined and separated, with characters and outlines all its own. It

may be doubted whether any competent critic not, like Scott, bribed by

compatriotism, ever put Smollett above Fielding, or even on a level with

him. Thackeray, in one of the most inspired moments of his rather

irregularly-inspired criticism, remarks, "I fancy he did not invent

much," and this of itself would refer him to a lower class. The writer

of fiction is not to refuse suggestion from his experience; on the

contrary, he will do so at his peril, and will hardly by any possibility

escape shipwreck unless his line is the purely fantastic. But if he

relies solely, or too much, on such experience, though he may be quite

successful, his success will be subject to discount, bound to pay

royalty to experience itself. It is pretty certain that most of

Smollett's most successful things, from _Roderick Random_ to _Humphry

Clinker_, and in those two capital books, perhaps, most of all, kept

very close to actual experience, and sometimes merely reported it.

This, however, is only a comparative drawback; it is in a sense a

positive merit; and it is connected, in a very intimate way, with the

general character of Smollett's novel-method. This is, to a great

extent, a reaction or relapse towards the picaresque style. Smollett may

have translated both Cervantes and Le Sage; he certainly translated the

latter: and it was Le Sage who in any case had the greatest influence

over him. Now the picaresque method is not exactly untrue to ordinary

life: on the contrary, as we have seen, it was a powerful schoolmaster

to bring the novel thereto. But it subjects the scenes of ordinary life

to a peculiar process of sifting: and when it has got what it wants, it

proceeds to heighten them and "touch them up" in its own peculiar

manner of decoration. This is Smollett's method throughout, even in that

singular _pastiche_ of _Don Quixote_ itself, _Sir Launcelot Greaves_,

which certainly was not his happiest conception, but which has had

rather hard measure.

As used by him it has singular merits, and communicates to at least

three of his five books (_The Adventures of an Atom_ is deliberately

excluded as not really a novel at all) a certain "liveliness" which,

though it is not the life_like_ness of Fielding, is a great attraction.

He showed it first in _Roderick Random_ (1748), which appeared a little

before _Tom Jones_, and was actually taken by some as the work of the

same author. It would be not much more just to take Roderick as

Smollett's deliberate presentment of himself than to apply the same

construction to Marryat's not very dissimilar, but more unlucky, _coup

d'essai_ of _Frank Mildmay_. But it is certain that there was something,

though exactly how much has never been determined, of the author's

family history in the earliest part, a great deal of his experiences on

board ship in the middle, and probably not a little, though less, of his

fortunes in Bath and London towards the end. As a single source of

interest and popularity, no doubt, the principal place must be given to

the naval part of the book. Important as the English navy had been, for

nearly two centuries if not for much longer, it had never played any

great part in literature, though it had furnished some caricatured and

rather conventional sketches. There is something more in a play, _The

Fair Quaker of Deal_, by Charles Shadwell, nephew or son of Dryden's

victim, but this was only of third or fourth rate literary value, and an

isolated example to boot. The causes of the neglect have been set forth

by many writers from Macaulay downwards, and need not be discussed here;

the fact is certain. Smollett's employment of "the service" as a

subject may have been, consciously and intentionally, only one of those

utilisings of personal experience of which we have spoken. But really it

was an instance of the great fact that the novelist, on the instigation

mainly of Fielding himself, was beginning to take all actual life to be

his province.

Smollett brought to his work peculiar powers, the chief of which was a

very remarkable one, and almost as much "improved on" Fielding as

Fielding's exercise of it was improved on Richardson--that of providing

his characters and scenes with accessories. Roderick is not only a much

more disagreeable person than Tom, but he is much _less_ of a person:

and Strap, though (_vice versâ_) rather a better fellow than Partridge,

is a much fainter and more washed-out character. But in mere interest of

story and accessories the journey of Roderick and Strap to London is

quite the equal, and perhaps the superior, of that of Tom and his

hanger-on after we once leave Upton, where the interest is of a kind

that Smollett could not reach. It is probable that Fielding might, if he

had chosen, have made the prison in _Amelia_ as horribly and

disgustingly realistic (to use a horrible and disgusting word) as the

ship in _Roderick_, but he at any rate did not choose. Moreover

Smollett, himself a member of one of the less predominant partners of

the British and Irish partnership, perhaps for that reason hit on

utilising the difference of these partners (after a fashion which had

never been seen since Shakespeare) in the Welshman Morgan. As far as

mere plot goes, he enters into no competition whatever with either

Fielding or Richardson: the picaresque model did not require that he

should. When Roderick has made use of his friends, knocked down his

enemies, and generally elbowed and shoved his way through the crowd of

adventures long enough, Narcissa and her fortune are not so much the

reward of his exertions as a stock and convenient method of putting an

end to the account of them. The customer has been served with a

sufficient amount of the commodity he demands: and the scissors are

applied, the canister shut up, the tap turned off. It almost results--it

certainly coincides--that some of the minor characters, and some of the

minor scenes, are much more vivid than the hero (the heroine is almost

an absolute nonentity) and the whole story. The curate and the exciseman

in the ninth chapter are, by common consent, among Smollett's greatest

triumphs; but the curate might be excommunicated and the exciseman

excised without anybody who read the book perceiving the slightest gap

or missing link, as far as the story is concerned.

Smollett's second venture, _Peregrine Pickle_ (1751), was more

ambitious, perhaps rose higher in parts, but undoubtedly contained even

more doubtful and inferior matter. No one can justly blame him, though

any one may most justly refrain from praising, from the general point of

view, as regards the "insets" of Miss Williams's story in _Roderick_ and

of that of Lady Vane here. From that point of view they range with the

"Man of the Hill" in _Tom Jones_, and in the first case at least, though

most certainly not in the second, have more justification of connection

with the central story. He may so far underlie the charge of error of

judgment, but nothing worse. Unluckily the "Lady Vane" insertion was, to

a practical certainty, a commercial not an artistic transaction: and

both here and elsewhere Smollett carried his already large licence to

the extent of something like positive pornography. He is in fact one of

the few writers of real eminence who have been forced to Bowdlerise

themselves. Further, there would be more excuse for the most offensive

part of _Peregrine_ if it were not half plagiarism of the main

situations of _Pamela_ and _Clarissa_: if Smollett had not deprived his

hero of all the excuses which, even in the view of some of the most

respectable characters of _Pamela_, attached to the conduct of Mr. B.;

and if he had not vulgarised Lovelace out of any possible attribution of

"regality," except of being what the time would have called King of the

Black Guard. As for Tom Jones, he does not come into comparison with

"Perry" at all, and he would doubtless have been most willing and

able--competent physically as well as morally--to administer the proper

punishment to that young ruffian by drubbing him within an inch of his

life.

These, no doubt, are grave drawbacks: but the racy fun of the book

almost atones for them: and the exaltation of the naval element of

_Roderick_ which one finds here in Trunnion and Hatchway and Pipes

carries the balance quite to the other side. This is the case even

without, but much more with, the taking into account of Smollett's usual

irregular and almost irrelevant _bonuses_, such as the dinner after the

fashion of the ancients and the rest. No: _Peregrine Pickle_ can never

be thrown to the wolves, even to the most respectable and moral of these

animals in the most imposing as well as ravening of attitudes. English

Literature cannot do without it.

Without _Ferdinand Count Fathom_ (1753) many people have thought that

English Literature could do perfectly well: and without going quite so

far, one may acknowledge that perhaps a shift could be made. The idea of

re-transferring the method (in the first place at any rate) to foreign

parts was not a bad one, and it may be observed that by far the best

portion of _Fathom_ is thus occupied. Not a few of these opening

passages are excellent: and Fathom's mother, if not a person, is an

excellent type: it is probable that the writer knew the kind well. But

his unhappy tendency to enter for the same stakes as his great

forerunners makes it almost impossible not to compare _Ferdinand Fathom_

with _Jonathan Wild_: and the effect is very damaging to the Count. Much

of the book is dull: and Fathom's conversation is (to adopt a cant word)

extremely unconvincing. The fact seems to be that Smollett had run his

picaresque vein dry, as far as it connected itself with mere rascality

of various kinds, and he did well to close it. He had published three

novels in five years: he waited seven before his next, and then eleven

more before his last.

A qualified apology has been hinted above for _Sir Launcelot Greaves_.

It is undoubtedly evidence of the greatness of _Don Quixote_ that there

should have been so many direct imitations of it by persons of genius

and talent: but this particular instance is unfortunate to the verge of

the preposterous, if not over it. The eighteenth century was indeed

almost the capital time of English eccentricity: and it was also a time

of licence which sometimes looked very like lawlessness. But its

eccentricities were not at this special period romantic: and its

lawlessness was rather abuse of law than wholesale neglect of it. A

rascally attorney or a stony-hearted creditor might inflict great

hardship under the laws affecting money: and a brutal or tyrannical

squire might do the same under those affecting the tenure or the

enjoyment of house or land. "Persons of quality" might go very far. But

even a person of quality, if he took to riding about the country in

complete steel, assaulting the lieges, and setting up a sort of

cadi-justice of his own in opposition to the king's, would probably

have been brought pretty rapidly, if not to the recovery of his senses,

to the loss of his liberty. Nor, with rare exceptions, are the

subordinate or incidental humours of the first class. But I have always

thought that the opening passage more than entitles the book to an

honourable place in the history of English fiction. I do not know where

to look, before it, for such an "interior"--such a complete Dutch

picture of room and furniture and accessories generally. Even so learned

a critic as the late M. Brunetière thought that things of the kind were

not older than Balzac. I have known English readers, not ignorant, who

thought they were scarcely older than Dickens. Dickens, however,

undoubtedly took them from Smollett, of whom we know that he was an

early and enthusiastic admirer: and Scott, who has them much earlier

than Dickens, not improbably was in some degree indebted for them to his

countryman. At any rate in that countryman they are: and you will not

find a much better example of them anywhere than this of the

inn-kitchen. But apart from it, and from a few other things of the same

or similar kinds, there is little to be said for the book. The divine

Aurelia especially is almost more shadowy than the divine Narcissa and

the divine Emilia: and can claim no sort of sistership in personality

with Amelia or Sophia, even with Clarissa or Pamela. In fact, up to this

time Smollett's women--save in the case of Fathom's hell-cat of a

mother, and one or two more who are "minors"--have done absolutely

nothing for his books. It was to be quite otherwise in the last and

best, though even here the heroine _en titre_ is hardly, even though we

have her own letters to body her out, more substantial than her elder

sisters. But Lydia, though the _ingénue_, is not the real heroine of

this book: her aunt and her aunt's maid divide that position between

them.

A sufficiently ungracious critic may, if he chooses, see in Smollett's

falling back on the letter-plan for _Humphry Clinker_ (1771) an

additional proof of that deficiency in strictly inventive faculty which

has been noticed. The more generous "judge by results" will hardly care

to consider so curiously in the case of such a masterpiece. For a

masterpiece it really is. The comparative absence of "character" in the

higher and literary sense as contrasted with "character-_parts_" in the

technical meaning of the theatre has been admitted in the other books.

Here, with the aid of the letters, it is amply supplied, or perhaps (to

speak with extreme critical closeness) the character-parts are turned

into characters by this means. There is no stint, because of the

provision of this higher interest, of the miscellaneous fun and

"business" which Smollett had always supplied so lavishly out of his

experience, his observation, and, if not his invention, his combining

faculty. And there is the setting of interior and exterior "furniture"

which has been also referred to. Abundant as is the information which

the eighteenth century has given us as to its justly beloved place of

pilgrimage, Bath, there is nothing livelier than the Bath scenes here,

from Chesterfield to Miss Austen, and few things, if any, so vivid and

detailed. So it is with Clifton earlier, with London later, with

Scotland last of all, and with the journeys connecting them. Yet these

things are mere _hors d'oeuvre_, pickles, sauces, condiments, beside the

solid character-food of the Brambles and Melfords, of Winifred Jenkins

and of the redoubtable Lismahago. That there is no exaggeration or

caricature cannot, of course, be said. It was not Smollett's notion of

art to present the elaborate academies of Richardson, or the almost

uncanny duplications of Nature which Fielding could achieve. He must

embolden, in fact grotesque, the line; heighten, in fact splash and

plaster, the colour. But he has not left Nature behind here: he has only

put her in a higher light.

One means of doing so has been condemned in him, as in others, as in its

great earlier master, Swift, and its greatest later one, Thackeray, by

some purists. They call it cheap and inartistic: but this is mere

pedantry and prudery. Mis-spelling is not a thing to be employed every

day or for every purpose: if you do that, you get into the ineffably

dreary monotony which distinguishes the common comic journalist. But

thrown in occasionally, and in the proper place, it gives an excellent

zest: and it has seldom been employed--never, except in the two

instances quoted--better than in the cases of Tabitha Bramble and her

maid. For it is employed in the only legitimate way, that of zest, not

substance. Tabitha and Winifred would still be triumphs of

characterisation of a certain kind if they wrote as correctly as Uncle

Matthew or Nephew Jery. Further, Lismahago is a bolder and a much less

caricatured utilising of the "national" resource than Morgan. If

Smollett had not been a perfectly undaunted, as well as a not very

amiable, person he would hardly have dared to "_lacess_ the thistle" in

this fashion. But there are few sensible Scotsmen nowadays who would not

agree with that most sensible, as well as greatest, of their

compatriots, Sir Walter Scott, in acknowledging the justice (comic

emphasis granted) of the twitch, and the truth of the grip, at that

formidable plant. The way in which Smollett mixes up actual living

persons, by their own names, with his fictitious characters may strike

us as odd: but there is, for the most part, nothing offensive in it,

and in fact, except a little of his apparently inevitable indulgence in

nasty detail, there is nothing at all offensive in the book. The

contrast of its general tone with that especially of his first two; the

softening and mellowing of the general presentation--is very remarkable

in a man of undoubtedly not very gentle disposition who had long

suffered from extremely bad health, and whose chief original works

recently--the _Journey_ and the _Adventures_--had been, the first a

tissue of grumbles, the second an outburst of savagery. But though the

grumbles recur in Matthew Bramble's mouth, they become merely humorous

there: and there is practically no savagery at all. Leghorn, it has been

observed more than once, was in a fashion a Land of Beulah: a "season of

calm weather" had set in for a rather stormy life just before the end.

Whatever may be his defects (and from the mere point of view of Momus

probably a larger number may be found in him than either in Richardson

or in Fielding), Smollett well deserves an almost equal place with them

in the history of the novel. Richardson, though he had found the

universal as far as certain aspects of it in humanity are concerned, had

confined it within a very narrow space, or particular envelope, in tone

and temper: the fact that he has been called "stifling," though the

epithet may not be entirely just, is almost sufficient evidence of this.

Fielding had taken the novel into a far larger air and, as has been said

already, there was hardly anything to which his method might not lead,

and in which it would not be effective. But he had been exclusively

English in externals: and the result is that, to this day, he has had

less influence abroad than perhaps any English writer of equal genius

and than some of far less.[6] Smollett, by his remarkable utilisation

of the characteristics of the other members of Magna-Britannia; by his

excursions into foreign European and even transatlantic scenery, had

widened the external if not the internal prospect; and had done perhaps

even more by that chance-medley, as it perhaps was, of attention to the

still more internal detail which was to be of such importance in the

novel to come. Taking the three together (not without due allowance for

the contemporary, if mainly imitative, developments which will be

described in the next chapter), they had put prose fiction in a position

which it had not attained, even in Spain earlier, even in France at more

or less the same time: and had entirely antiquated, on the one hand, the

mere _fabliau_ or _novella_--the story of a single limited situation--on

the other, the discursive romance with little plot and next to no

character. One great further development, impossible at this time, of

the larger novel, the historical, waited for Scott: but even this was

soon, though very awkwardly, tried. It could not yet be born because the

historic sense which was its necessary begetter hardly existed, and

because the provision of historic matter for this sense to work on was

rather scanty. But it is scarcely extravagant to say that it is more

difficult to conceive even Scott doing what he did without Richardson,

Fielding, and Smollett before him, than it is to believe that, with

these predecessors, somebody like Scott was bound to come.

[6] This is said not to have been quite the case at the _very_

first: but it has been so since.

Great, however, as the three are, there is no need of any "injustice to

Ireland"--little as Ireland really has to claim in Sterne's merit or

demerit. He is not a fifth wheel to the coach by any means: he is the

fourth and almost the necessary one. In Richardson, Fielding, and

Smollett the general character and possibilities of the novel had been

shown, with the exception just noted: and indeed hardly with that

exception, because they showed the way clearly to it. But its almost

illimitable particular capabilities remained unshown, or shown only in

Fielding's half extraneous divagations, and in earlier things like the

work of Swift. Sterne took it up in the spirit of one who wished to

exhibit these capabilities; and did exhibit them signally in more than

one or two ways. He showed how the novel could present, in refreshed

form, the _fatrasie_, the pillar-to-post miscellany, of which Rabelais

had perhaps given the greatest example possible, but of which there were

numerous minor examples in French. He showed how it could be made, not

merely to present humorous situations, but to exhibit a special kind of

humour itself--to make the writer as it were the hero without his ever

appearing as character in _Tristram_, or to humorise autobiography as in

the _Sentimental Journey_. And last of all (whether it was his greatest

achievement or not is matter of opinion), he showed the novel of purpose

in a form specially appealing to his contemporaries--the purpose being

to exhibit, glorify, luxuriate in the exhibition of, sentiment or

"sensibility." In none of these things was he wholly original; though

the perpetual upbraiding of "plagiarism" is a little unintelligent.

Rabelais, not to mention others, had preceded him, and far excelled him,

in the _fatrasie_; Swift in the humour-novel; two generations of

Frenchmen and Frenchwomen in the "sensibility" kind. But he brought all

together and adjusted the English novel, actually to them, potentially

to much else.

To find fault with his two famous books is almost contemptibly easy. The

plagiarism which, if not found out at once, was found out very soon, is

the least of these: in fact hardly a fault at all. The indecency, which

_was_ found out at once, and which drew a creditable and not in the

least Tartuffian protest from Warburton, is a far more serious

matter--not so much because of the licence in subject as because of the

unwholesome and sniggering tone. The sentimentality is very often simply

maudlin, almost always tiresome _to us_, and in very, very few

cases justified by brilliant success even in its own very doubtful

kind. Most questionable of all, perhaps, is the merely mechanical

mountebankery--the blanks, and the dashes, and the rows of stops, the

black pages and the marbled pages which he employs to force a guffaw

from his readers. The abstinence from any central story in _Tristram_ is

one of those dubious pieces of artifice which may possibly show the

artist's independence of the usual attractions of story-telling, but may

also suggest to the churlish the question whether his invention would

have supplied him with any story to tell; and the continual asides and

halts and parenthetic divagations in the _Journey_ are not quite free

from the same suggestion. In fact if you "can see a church by daylight"

you certainly want no piercing vision, and no artificial assistance of

light or lens, to discover the faults of this very unedifying churchman.

But he remains, for all that, a genius; and one of the great figures in

our history. There is to his credit in general, as has been already

pointed out, the great asset of having indicated, and in two notable

instances patterned, the out-of-the-way novel--the novel eccentric,

particular, individual. There is to that credit still more the

brilliancy of the two specimens themselves in spite of their faults;

their effectiveness in the literature of delight; the great powers of a

kind more or less peculiar to the artist which they show, and the power,

perhaps still greater, which they display in the actually general and

ordinary lines of the novel, though adapted to this extraordinary use.

For though it pleased Sterne to anticipate the knife-grinder's innocent

confession, "Story? God bless you! I have none to tell, sir!" in a

sardonic paraphrase of half a score of volumes, he actually possessed

the narrative faculty in an extraordinary degree. He does not merely

show this in his famous inset short stories, accomplished as these are:

he achieves a much greater marvel in the way in which he makes his

_fatrasies_ as it were novels. After one or two, brief but certainly not

tedious, volumes of the _Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy_, you know

that you are being cheated, and are going to be: at the end you know

still more certainly that you have been. You have had nothing of the

"Life" but a great deal round rather than about the birth, and a few

equivocal, merely glanced at, and utterly unco-ordinated incidents

later. If you have had any "opinions" they have been chiefly those of

Mr. Tristram Shandy's father and other members of his family, or those

of its friends and circle, or of those shadowy personages outside the

pretended story, such as Eugenius and Yorick, besides a few discourses

which drop the slightest pretension of being Shandean or Tristramic and

are plainly and simply the author's. In the _Journey_ there is more

unity; but it is, quite frankly, the unity of the temperament of that

author himself. The incidents--sentimental, whimsical, fie-fie--have no

other connection or tendency than the fact that they occur to the

"gentleman in the black silk smalls" and furnish him with figures as it

were for his performance. Yet you are _held_ in a way in which nothing

but the romance or the novel ever does hold you. The thing is a [Greek:

mythos hamythos]--story without story-end, without story-beginning,

without story-connection or middle: but a story for all that. A

dangerous precedent, perhaps; but a great accomplishment: and, even as

a precedent, the leader of a very remarkable company. In not a few

noteworthy later books--in a very much greater number of parts of later

books--as we take our hats off to the success we are saluting not a new

but an old friend, and that friend Sterne.

On the second great count--character--Sterne's record is still more

distinguished: and here there is no legerdemain about the matter. There

is a consensus of all sound opinion to the effect that my Uncle Toby is

an absolute triumph--even among those who think that, as in the case of

Colonel Newcome later, it would have been possible to achieve that

triumph without letting his simplicity run so near to something less

attractive. It is not the sentiment that is here to blame, because

Sterne has luckily not forgotten (as he has in the case of his dead

donkeys and his live Marias) that humour is the only thing that will

keep such sentiment from turning mawkish, if not even rancid; and that

the antiseptic effect will not be achieved by keeping your humour and

your sentiment in separate boxes. Trim is even better: he is indeed next

to Sancho--and perhaps Sam Weller--the greatest of all "followers" in

the novel: he supplies the only class-figure in which Sterne perhaps

beats Fielding himself. About Walter Shandy there is more room for

difference: and it is possible to contend that, great as he is, he is

not complete--that he is something of a "humour" in the old one-sided

and over-emphasised Jonsonian sense. Nothing that he does or says

misbecomes him: but a good deal that he does not do and say might be

added with advantage, in order to give us the portrait of a whole as

well as a live man. As for the other male characters, Sterne's plan

excused him--as it did not quite in Mr. Shandy's case--from making them

more than sketches and shadows. But what uncommonly lively sketches and

shadows they are!

Sterne's unlucky failing prevented him in most cases from touching the

women off with a clean brush: but the quality of _liveness_ pertains to

them in almost a higher measure: and perhaps testifies even more

strongly to his almost uncanny faculty of communicating it by touches

which are not always unclean and are sometimes slight to an astonishing

degree. Even that shadow of a shade "My dear, dear Jenny" has a

suggestion of verity about her which has shocked and fluttered some: the

maids of the Shandean household, the grisettes and peasant girls and

ladies of the _Journey_, have flesh which is not made of paper, and

blood that is certainly not ink. And the peculiarity extends to his two

chief named heroines, Mrs. Shandy and the Widow. Never were any two

female personages more unceremoniously treated in the way of scanty and

incidental appearance. Never were any personages of scanty and

incidental appearance made more alive and more female.

His details and accessories of all kinds, descriptive, literary, and

other, would give subject for a separate chapter; but we must turn (for

this chapter is already too long) to his phrase--in dialogue, narrative,

whatever you please to call it. For the fact is that these two things,

and all others in which phrase and expression can be used, melt into

each other with Sterne in a manner as "flibberti-gibbety" as most other

things about him. This phrase or expression is of course artificial to

the highest degree: and it is to it that the reproach of depending on

mechanical aids chiefly applies. And yet laboriously figured, tricked,

machined as it is--easy as once more it may be to prove that it is

artifice and not art--the fact remains that, not merely (perhaps not by

any means chiefly) in the stock extract-pieces which everybody knows,

but almost everywhere, it is triumphant: and that English literature

would be seriously impoverished without it. Certainly never was there a

style which more fully justified the definition given by Buffon, in

Sterne's own time, of style as "the _very_ man." Falsetto, "faking,"

vamping, shoddy--all manner of evil terms may be heaped upon it without

the possibility of completely clearing it from them. To some eyes it

underlies them most when it is most ambitious, as in the Le Fevre story

and the diatribe against critics. It leaves the court with all manner of

stains on its character. Only, once more, if it did not exist we should

be ignorant of more than one of the most remarkable possibilities of the

English language.

Thus, in almost exactly the course of a technical generation--from the

appearance of _Pamela_ in 1740 to that of _Humphry Clinker_ in 1771--the

wain of the novel was solidly built, furnished with four main wheels to

move it, and set a-going to travel through the centuries. In a sense,

inasmuch as _Humphry Clinker_ itself, though Smollett's best work, can

hardly be said to show any absolutely new faculties, character, or

method, the process was even accomplished in two-thirds of the time,

between _Pamela_ and _Tristram Shandy_. We shall see in the next chapter

how eagerly the examples were taken up: and how, long before Smollett

died, the novel of this and that kind had become one of the most

prolific branches of literature. But, for the moment, the important

thing is to repeat that it had been thoroughly and finally started on

its high road, in general by Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett; in

particular and wayward but promising side-paths by Sterne.