at first sight. They flee from the inn together, and Manon becomes his
mistress. The youth is ardent but inexperienced, while the girl, though
no older in years, is far maturer, more subtle and self-asserting.
It is not many weeks before she forsakes him for a more advantageous
connection. For a long time he is in despair at her faithlessness.
At last he enters upon a regular life, and becomes a student in a
theological seminary. On the day of his graduation she comes to him
again. In a moment all his good resolutions are flung to the winds and
he falls at once under her influence. They live for a time upon the
money she has acquired from a more opulent lover, but it is stolen,
and he betakes himself to the gambler’s expedients to restore their
shattered fortunes. She leads him into evil courses, and many are the
tricks they play upon her other admirers. Twice they are thrown into
prison, and on the last occasion, to gratify the revenge of a defrauded
and disappointed suitor, Manon is sent with a chain gang to the French
settlement at New Orleans. Her lover goes with her, and after they are
established in their distant abode they decide to invoke the aid of the
church upon their union and to become man and wife. But the governor
of the province has other views for Manon, and desires to marry her to
his nephew. A duel follows, and the Chevalier des Grieux is forced to
flee. Manon accompanies him to the wilderness, but, unable to endure
the fatigues and perils of such a life, she expires in the arms of her
lover.
This sounds like rather poor material for a novel, yet so charmingly
and simply is the story told, so deep and so natural is the Chevalier’s
passion, that he invests his wayward mistress in our eyes with the same
charms that he sees in her himself, until we pardon the infidelities of
the beautiful creature almost as readily as he.
TOM JONES
HENRY FIELDING
There are some who insist that Fielding’s “Tom Jones” has not been
surpassed by the work of any of the later novelists.
I confess that on the second reading of this story I failed to find
in either plot or portraiture that excellence which would entitle
the book to take a preëminent rank among works of fiction. In the
succession of adventures which compose the tale there is a recurrence
of incidents which resemble each other so closely that they cease to
be novel or attractive. Conversations are usually interrupted by the
unexpected appearance of some one not desired, or else by an “uproar”
followed by a fight, until the repetition becomes monotonous. There is
not a character in the book capable of arousing any strong feeling of
admiration or sympathy.
Sophia Western is intended to be amiable and attractive, though she
gives little evidence of any remarkable or alluring qualities in what
she says or does. Her sufferings are hardly great enough to cause
distress to the reader, and the manner in which she finally agrees to
wed her scapegrace of a lover, without waiting for the probationary
year which she had first required, does not betoken any great constancy
or strength of purpose.
Tom Jones himself is not beset by those overpowering temptations and
strong passions which might in a way excuse his scandalous behavior.
He is indeed warm-hearted, courageous, and fond of his benefactor,
Mr. Allworthy, and he is apparently somewhat attached even to the
young woman to whom he is continually unfaithful. If he has other
excellences, they do not appear, while his vices are conspicuous and
repulsive. A thoroughly interesting character can not be made out of
such material.
On the other hand, hypocrisy becomes living flesh and blood in the
person of the discreet, pious, treacherous, cold-blooded Blifil, who
“visited his friend Jones but seldom, and never alone,” and “cautiously
avoided any intimacy lest it might contaminate the sobriety of his own
character.”
The most picturesque person in the book is undoubtedly Squire Western,
with his senseless prejudices and his wild outbreaks of passion.
But if we leave the characters and incidents out of the question,
there is a good deal of delightful reading in the book. The author
is a consummate master of English. I began “Tom Jones” just after
finishing “David Copperfield,” and the transition from the style of
Dickens to that of Fielding was a refreshing surprise. The chapters
which are introductory to each of the so-called “books” of the novel
are intended, as the author tells us, to set off the rest by reason of
their dulness. Some of them are in fact a little tedious, but many are
pleasant excursions into fields of criticism and satire which mark the
author as an essayist of the first order. The mock-heroic manner in
which he describes the methods of his own work, the burlesque praises
which he bestows upon it, and his contempt for his critics, are very
amusing.
“This work,” he says, “may indeed be considered as a great creation of
our own, and for a little reptile of a critic to presume to find fault
with any of its parts without knowing the manner in which the whole
is connected, and before he comes to the final catastrophe, is a most
presumptuous absurdity.”
In another place he gives a comic justification of plagiarism from
classical authors:
“The ancients,” he says, “may be considered as a rich common where
every person who has the smallest tenement in Parnassus hath a free
right to fatten his muse.” “The writers of antiquity were so many
wealthy squires from whom the poor might claim an immemorial custom of
taking whatever they could come at, so long as they maintained strict
honesty among themselves.”
His use of epic diction in the description of the commonplace is
sometimes irresistibly comic,--for example, the following on the fight
of Mollie Seagrim in the churchyard:
“Recount, O Muse, the names of those who fell on this fatal day.
First, Jemmy Tweedle felt on his hinder head the direful bone.
Him the pleasant banks of sweetly winding Stour had nourished,
where he first learnt the vocal art, with which, wandering up and
down at wakes and fairs, he cheered the rural nymphs and swains,
when upon the green they interweaved the sprightly dance, while
he himself stood fiddling and jumping to his own music. How
little now avails his fiddle! He thumps the verdant floor with
his carcass.”
Contrary to the general opinion, I think that Fielding is entitled to
far more praise for the literary quality which pervades his novel than
for its “realism” and “fidelity to nature” which are the claims of most
of its admirers.
RASSELAS
DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON
Dr. Johnson is one of the few men whose reputation is due, not so much
to his writings (which are generally the source of all permanent renown
in a literary man) as to his conversation and his peculiarities as
recorded by his wonderful biographer--things which in most men are the
source of a very limited and evanescent fame.
It is not intended here to dispute the conclusions of Macaulay that he
was both a great and a good man, but merely to point out how little
good work he has put forth to justify his prodigious reputation. For
instance, he compiled a dictionary; and although it was never a very
good dictionary, and is now quite obsolete, yet the memory of the
tremendous stir it made has lasted down to the present time. He wrote
some annotations of Shakespeare’s plays, which show that he had a very
limited understanding of their meaning, yet his observations have been
more generally quoted than those of commentators far more accurate
and discerning. He entered the field of fiction and wrote “Rasselas,”
and there are very few novels (if “Rasselas” can be called a novel at
all) which upon their intrinsic merits less deserve an extravagant
reputation as one of the classics of our literature.
The plot is the slenderest possible. Rasselas, the fourth son of
the emperor of Abyssinia, is confined within the “Happy Valley,” from
which exit is impossible, and, wanting nothing, naturally suffers from
_ennui_. He spends twenty months in fruitless imaginings, and then
four months more in resolving to lose no more time in idle resolves,
when he is awakened to more vigorous exertion by hearing a maid who
had broken a porcelain cup remark, “What cannot be repaired is not to
be regretted.” Then for a few hours he “regretted his regret,” and
from that time bent his whole mind to the means of escape. He spent
ten months trying to find a way out (a job which would be laughed at
by an able-bodied member of the Alpine Club) then he betook himself to
an inventor of a flying machine, who of course came to grief. Finally
a poet, named Imlac, told Rasselas of his extensive travels, and they
received from the conies, who had “dug holes tending upwards in an
oblique line,” a hint as to the means of escape, of which Dr. Johnson
gives the following rather foggy description: “By piercing the mountain
in the same direction, we will begin where the summit hangs over the
middle part and labor upwards till we issue up behind the prominence.”
The two now proceed to tunnel the mountain, and Nekayah, the prince’s
sister, with her favorite maid, Pekuah, accompany them to the outside
world. They journey to Cairo, where they engage in the search for
happiness,--philosophy, the pastoral life, material prosperity,
solitude, the life led “according to nature,” the splendor of courts,
the modesty of humble life, marriage, and celibacy, all being
successively examined and found wanting. They visit the pyramids, and
here Pekuah is carried away by a band of Arabs, but she is afterwards
ransomed and relates her adventures (which are not interesting) at
considerable length. They admire the learning and happiness of a
certain astronomer, but Imlac finds out that he is crazy; they consult
an old man whose wisdom has deeply impressed them, but who can give
them little comfort; they discuss the merits of conventual life;
finally they visit the catacombs, where Imlac discourses on the nature
of the soul; and at “the conclusion in which nothing is concluded”
(for this is the title of the last chapter), Pekuah thinks she would
like to be the prioress of a convent, Nekayah wants to learn all the
sciences and found a college, Rasselas desires a little kingdom where
he can administer justice, while Imlac and the astronomer (who has now
recovered his right mind) “were contented to be driven along the stream
of life without directing their course to any particular port.” They
all know that none of their wishes can be gratified, so they resolve to
go home. This conclusion might have been inserted almost anywhere else
in the book with equal propriety.
The story is a mere thread upon which is hung a succession of
reflections and homilies, some of which are shallow, many commonplace
and trite, and only a few are at the same time striking, original, and
worthy of remembrance.
The author maintains the existence of ghosts because belief in them is
supported by the “concurrent and unvaried testimony of all ages and of
all nations,” and such an opinion “could become universal only by its
truth!”
There is very little humor to be found in the ponderous moralizing
of this book. There is, however, a touch of quaint satire upon the
theories of contemporary French philosophy, that deserves to be
remembered. Rasselas is listening to a philosopher who advises his
hearers to “throw away the incumbrance of precepts” and carry with
them “this simple and intelligible maxim that ‘deviation from nature
is deviation from happiness.’” He asks what it is to live according to
nature, and the philosopher answers:
“‘To live according to nature is to act always with due regard to
the fitness arising from the relations and qualities of causes
and effects; to concur with the great and unchangeable scheme of
universal felicity; to cooperate with the general disposition and
tendency of the present system of things.’
“The prince soon found that this was one of the sages whom he
should understand less as he heard him longer. He therefore bowed
and was silent; and the philosopher, supposing him satisfied, and
the rest vanquished, rose up and departed with the air of a man
that had coöperated with the present system.”
The style of “Rasselas” (like that of everything Dr. Johnson wrote)
is stilted and affected. In the Happy Valley “every blast shook spices
from the rocks and every month dropped fruits.” Its inhabitants
“wandered in the gardens of fragrance and slept in the fortresses
of security.” When Rasselas reaches Cairo he tells us of the gilded
youth of that metropolis, that “their mirth was without images, their
laughter without motive.... The frown of power dejected and the eye of
wisdom abashed them.”
Of a professor who there lectured on philosophy, Rasselas declares:
“He speaks, and attention watches his lips. He reasons, and conviction
closes his periods.” This might do in an oration, but it is pretty
poor for a novel. But worst of all, Dr. Johnson puts into the mouth of
the young and innocent Nekayah the following words upon the subject of
marriage:
“When I see and reckon the various forms of connubial infelicity,
the unexpected causes of lasting discord, the diversities of
temper, the oppositions of opinion, the rude collisions of
contrary desire where both are urged by violent impulses, the
obstinate contests of disagreeable virtues where both are
supported by consciousness of good intention, I am sometimes
disposed to think with the severer casuists of most nations,
that marriage is rather permitted than approved, and that none,
but by the instigation of a passion too much indulged, entangle
themselves with indissoluble compacts.”
Readers who think that this sort of conversation is natural and
beautiful ought to be fond of “Rasselas,” but those who do not will
inevitably feel that it was too bad that the author of the great
Dictionary had so intimate an acquaintance with so many words.
CANDIDE
FRANÇOIS VOLTAIRE
In the same year that “Rasselas” appeared (1759), Voltaire published
his “Candide.” While the coarseness and irreverent merriment of the
French philosopher are quite unlike the ponderous Sunday-school
didacticism of Dr. Johnson, still there are points of remarkable
resemblance in these two works, written as they were by the two
literary autocrats of that generation. The Happy Valley of Abyssinia
finds its counterpart in El Dorado, and the object of each book was to
illustrate the same truths--the uncertainties and vicissitudes of life
and the vanity of human wishes, although the moral drawn from these
truths is very different in the two cases.
Saintsbury considers “Candide”, from a literary point of view,
“unsurpassable,” while some of Voltaire’s critics and commentators seem
to regard it as scarcely worthy of notice. The truth lies somewhere
between these estimates. “Candide” can hardly be classed as a novel,
for it is in no sense a just portraiture of life or of human nature. It
is essentially a burlesque written in ridicule of philosophic optimism,
and of the orthodox contention that all which happens is the result of
a wise and beneficent design. It is a work thoroughly characteristic of
Voltaire, and sparkles everywhere with his wit and laughing mockery.
Candide, the hero, is brought up in the castle of the Baron of
Thunder-Ten-Tronckh, where Master Pangloss, the instructor who teaches
meta-physico-theologo-cosmolo-ingology, is the oracle of the family.
“It is demonstrable,” says this great philosopher, “that things cannot
be otherwise than they are; for as all things have been created for
some end, they must necessarily be created for the best end. Observe,
for instance, the nose is formed for spectacles; therefore we wear
spectacles. The legs are visibly designed for stockings; accordingly we
wear stockings,” etc. The book is a commentary on this text. Candide
is kicked out of the castle for falling in love with the baron’s
daughter. After sad wanderings, he is impressed by the Bulgarians,
flogged nearly to death, takes part in the war with the Abares, in
which some thirty thousand souls are massacred, escapes to Holland,
meets the sage Pangloss, who is dying of a loathsome disease and who
tells him that the castle has been destroyed and its inmates put to
death. But Pangloss recovers and they start for Portugal, encountering
a tempest, a shipwreck, the earthquake of Lisbon, (where 30,000 people
were destroyed,) and finally the Inquisition and an _auto-da-fé_,
where Candide receives a hundred lashes and Pangloss is hanged. Here
Candide finds that his inamorata Cunegund is alive, having escaped the
slaughter at Thunder-Ten-Tronckh, though she has encountered calamities
equal to his own, and though at that time the Grand Inquisitor and
one Issachar, a Jew, are holding her as their prisoner and slave.
Candide slays them one after the other, and escapes with his Cunegund
to Cadiz, whence they set sail for Buenos Aires. But here things are
as bad as in Europe. Cunegund is again torn from her lover, who, with
his servant, Cacambo, wanders through Paraguay; fights with her brother
the baron, who has turned Jesuit and become one of the rulers of that
country; escapes again, and discovers the hitherto inaccessible and
unknown country of El Dorado in the heart of the mountains, where the
clay is yellow gold, the pebbles are precious stones, where there are
no priests, nor monks, nor courts, nor prisons, and where the people
lead lives of innocence and ideal happiness. Upon his departure he
takes with him a flock of sheep laden with treasure, but as soon as he
reaches the haunts of men the wickedness of the world begins again. His
treasure is stolen and he returns to Europe, meeting with marvellous
adventures in France, in England, in Venice, and finally in Turkey,
where he again encounters his Cunegund, ransoms her from slavery, and
weds her, after she has become a hideous and ill-favored scold. The
sage Pangloss, although he has been hanged, dissected, enslaved and
flogged, turns up again, still maintaining that everything goes on as
well as possible, because as a philosopher it would be unbecoming in
him to retract!
At every turn of the kaleidoscope some new scene of fraud, lust,
rapine, slaughter, sacrilege, or inevitable calamity, comes into view,
generally linked with some ridiculous accessory such as only the mind
of Voltaire could conceive, and yet with each grotesque apparition
there comes also a sort of conviction that the author has not greatly
overdrawn the picture, but has merely grouped together in startling
juxtaposition the things which actually happen in the world.
At last Candide settles in a small farm in the Propontis, and from a
neighbor, an old man, quite ignorant of philosophy and public affairs,
he learns the real secret of happiness,--to cultivate his little patch
of land, and by labor to keep off the three great evils, idleness,
vice, and want. The moral is thus expressed in the concluding sentences:
“‘There is a concatenation of all events in the best of possible
worlds; for, in short, had you not been kicked out of a fine
castle for the love of Miss Cunegund, had you not been put into
the Inquisition, had you not traveled over America on foot, had
you not run the baron through the body, and had you not lost
all your sheep which you brought from the good country of El
Dorado, you would not have been here to eat preserved citrons and
pistachio nuts.’ ‘Excellently observed,’ answered Candide, ‘but
let us take care of our garden.’”
While the story as a whole is a wild phantasmagoria, calling to mind
the works of Rabelais by its grossness and inextricable confusion,
it contains also, like “Gargantua,” passages of exquisite irony and
masterly satire. For instance, the Venetian senator Pococurante, who
by despising and condemning the great works of art and literature
proved his superiority to all and passed for a prodigious genius, is
vividly drawn, and it makes us wonder whether Voltaire’s own great
reputation had not a source which was essentially the same as that of
his Pococurante.
TRISTRAM SHANDY
LAURENCE STERNE
I was for some time in doubt whether “Tristram Shandy” ought to be in
my list of masterpieces. In one sense it is hardly a work of fiction
at all, for a few rather trifling incidents are made the basis of such
endless digressions and ruminations that it is in fact not so much a
story as a medley of satire, philosophy, and humor. But the ear-marks
of Cervantes and Rabelais appear in it very plainly, and perhaps it is
as much entitled to a place here as the burlesques of the celebrated
Frenchman.
I began “Tristram Shandy” several times, and read the greater part of
it on disconnected occasions; yet the poor hero had such a hard time,
through so many hundreds of pages, in getting into the world at all,
that I always gave up without reading the book to the end. And, to
say the truth, nobody ought to read it consecutively. A part of the
humor consists in the endless prolixity with which trifling events are
narrated, and a joke thus lengthened out into the enormous dimensions
of several volumes becomes too huge to handle all at once. Another
part of the humor is displayed in the jumble with which the events and
observations upon them are thrown together. The preface, for instance
(and a very amusing preface it is), is pitched into the middle of the
book. Whole chapters are omitted and their places supplied by stars,
and the subsequent chapters (which tell the whole story) are given to
explaining why these omissions were made, namely, that the parts left
out were too fine for the rest of the story. The author appropriately
asks us, after several volumes of this confusion, how our heads feel!
The style, which is generally conversational and highly idiomatic,
is sometimes purposely involved, and gives us a picturesque, vague
impression, which is often vivid, though upon analysis it represents
nothing in particular. Evidently Carlyle, who was a great admirer of
Sterne, imitated his manner in places, though he lacked much of the
wit and lightness of fancy of the author of “Tristram Shandy.” There
are indeed passages in which the style of the two authors is almost
indistinguishable.
Naturally, in such a book a good part of the fun has to be dug out
with considerable labor; and this is not always the way in which humor
is most attractive. To the reader who is anxious for a _denouement_,
“Tristram Shandy” is a most exasperating work, for there is no
_denouement_ at all. You never get anywhere, and the book ends, like
the Sentimental Journey, right at the midst of perhaps the most
interesting part of it.
It improves a good deal, however, upon a second reading, when you
no longer care how anything is going to turn out, and when the
choice morsels are more easily extracted. It contains a great many
observations which go well in a commonplace book, containing as they do
a humorous epitome of matters of universal knowledge. Sterne has the
Shakespearean quality of filching from others and then transforming
his plunder into gold by a striking originality of his own. The
actual facts described are very few. Tristram’s birth, with all its
accessories, his broken nose, his christening, his father’s odd
philosophy and scheme of education, so elaborate that the boy’s actual
training had to be abandoned while the father was writing his great
Tristrapaedia,--these things, together with the history of Uncle Toby,
wounded in the groin at the siege of Namur, and of his faithful servant
Corporal Trim, and finally the episode of the Widow Wadman, who laid
siege to Uncle Toby’s heart, an episode broken off in the middle at the
end of the book, are pretty much all. But the descriptions of character
are admirable. The dear, simple-minded, modest Uncle Toby, with his
hobby, to wit: his fortifications and his military science,--Uncle
Toby, who continually interrupts the emanations of Shandean philosophy
by inapposite remarks, will always be a type in literature.
The coarseness of “Tristram Shandy” excludes the book from
indiscriminate reading at the present time, but its coarseness,
although in places very great, is, on the whole, of a rather innocent
character, and the work will keep its place as a classic among the
lovers of genuine humor.
It contains occasional passages of singular beauty. Witness the
following.
“Time wastes too fast; every letter I trace tells me with what
rapidity life follows my pen; the days and hours of it more
precious, my dear Jenny, than the rubies about thy neck, are
flying over our heads like light clouds of a windy day, never to
return more; everything presses on,--whilst thou art twisting
that lock, see! it grows gray; and every time I kiss thy hand to
bid adieu, and every absence which follows it, are preludes to
that eternal separation which we are shortly to make.”
THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD
OLIVER GOLDSMITH