to appreciate or to consume, the main stream of development of the
novel passed once more to the Continent of Europe. Smollett begat
Captain Marryat, who was one of the greatest of English novelists and
is therefore regarded as a writer for boys, Smollett himself being
most prized by the purveyors of books called “curious” in second-hand
catalogues.
Before, however, considering Diderot, Stendhal, Chateaubriand, and
Flaubert, all avowed followers of the author of _Clarissa_, it might
be as well to think a little about Fielding--as at once a dreadful
example of how not to do things and as the begetter of Thackeray and
the product that it is convenient to call the nuvvle as opposed to the
novel. For at about the date of the births of Napoleon, Wellington,
Ney, and many others who began the modern world, and just a little
after the death of Richardson, and just a little before the birth
of the North American Republic, and still a little more before the
Cæsarian operation that produced the French Republic, distinct
cleavages began to make themselves observed in the fields of writing,
these eventually hardening themselves into the three main streams of
the Literature of Escape from the everyday world; into the commercial
product that Mamma selected for your reading, that it is convenient to
call the nuvvle and that formed the immense bulk of the reading matter,
and finally into the modern novel which does not avoid the problems of
the day and is written with some literary skill. This last Richardson
begat.
And it is convenient to say that Defoe, in spite of his moralizations,
was the first writer of the Literature of Escape, just as Smollett
and Marryat may be described as carrying it on and the young H. G.
Wells and the young Rudyard Kipling as bringing it--at any rate
temporarily--to a triumphant close.
Were it not that they were avowed moralizers of a
middle-to-lower-middle-class type, the Fielding-to-Thackeray lineage
of writers might also be regarded as purveyors of the Literature of
Escape, but their continually brought-in passages of moralizations are
such a nuisance that they cannot be ignored. Though they were both
amateurs in the sense that neither knew how to write or cared anything
about it, Thackeray at times projected his scenes so wonderfully
that now and then he trembles dreadfully excitingly on the point of
passing from the stage of purveyor of the nuvvle to that of the real
novelist. And it is to be said for Fielding that although _Tom Jones_
contains an immense amount of rather nauseous special-pleading, the
author does pack most of it away into solid wads of hypocrisy at the
headings of Parts or Chapters. These can in consequence be skipped and
the picaresque story with its mildly salacious details can without
difficulty be followed. One might indeed almost say that Fielding was
a natural story-teller, whereas Thackeray was none at all. Fielding
at least, like a story-teller in a school dormitory, does manage
to lose himself in details of people running into and out of each
others’ bedrooms in hotel corridors at night--something like that. But
Thackeray never could: the dread spectre of the Athenæum Club was for
ever in his background.
And I imagine that the greatest literary crime ever committed was
Thackeray’s sudden, apologetic incursion of himself into his matchless
account of the manœuvres of Becky Sharp on Waterloo day in Brussels.
The greatest crime that anyone perhaps ever committed! For the
motive of most crimes is so obscure, so pathological or so fatalized
by hereditary weakness, that there is almost nothing that cannot be
pardoned once one has dived beneath the calm surface of things. But
Thackeray as child-murderer can never be forgiven: the deeper you delve
into the hidden springs of his offence the more unforgivable does he
appear.
I had better perhaps explain the cause of all this emotion for the
benefit of the lay reader who has not yet got at what I am writing
about.
The struggle--the aspiration--of the novelist down the ages has been
to evolve a water-tight convention for the framework of the novel. He
aspires--and for centuries has aspired--so to construct his stories and
so to manage their surfaces that the carried-away and rapt reader shall
really think himself to be in Brussels on the first of Waterloo days or
in Grand Central Station waiting for the Knickerbocker Express to come
in from Boston though actually he may be sitting in a cane lounge on a
beach of Bermuda in December. This is not easy.
Of the three major novelists that we have hitherto examined each in
his own way had a try, consciously or unconsciously, at performing
this conjuring trick. Bunyan tried to do it--and succeeded remarkably
well--by the simplest of story-teller’s devices. He just told on in
simple language, using such simple images that the reader, astonished
and charmed to find the circumstances of his own life typified in words
and glorified by print, is seized by the homely narrative and carried
clean out of himself into the world of that singular and glorious
tinker.
Defoe, on the other hand, in the conscious or unconscious effort
to achieve a convention for the novel, adopted the biographical or
autobiographical form, relying on the verisimilitude of the details
that he invented to confirm the reader in the belief that his
characters had really existed and so to awaken the sympathy that makes
books readable. And had he possessed a little more power of projection
or a little more subtlety in presenting his figures and had his writing
been a little less pedestrian his works might have gained and held the
power to arouse a great deal more enthusiasm than they actually do.
Richardson, going a good deal further, has left it on record that he
was actually bothered by the problem of the novelistic convention
and that he racked his brain a long time before arriving at the one
he finally adopted. He asked himself, that is to say, how the reader
was to be convinced that the author--and by analogy still more his
characters--how could they know all the details that go to making up a
book? If, to reduce the matter to its most elementary form, Sir Charles
Grandison is walking in the Yew Walk, how can he know what characters
are present and what conversations are being carried on in the Cedar
Parlour, and since, to satisfy the reader, the author is to be supposed
to be cognizant of all that passes in his novel, how is _he_ to know
simultaneously what is happening in both places?
That at least is what bothered Richardson and what has bothered
all other novelists since his day, though until quite lately no
English novelist made any serious attempt to attack the problem.
The method that Richardson with characteristically homespun common
sense eventually worked out was simply to cast the whole novel into
correspondence, the characters exchanging letters as to events and as
to their psychologies with other characters or with anyone to whom
a letter could be handily addressed. In that way any character who
was needed to know anything could be given the information and the
author had only to let it be supposed that he had an unusual knack of
getting hold of the correspondence of other people to convince the
reader for all eighteenth-century purposes. For in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, as every one knows, every one from Madame de
Sevigné upwards and downwards addressed to every one else letters of
prodigious length and in the most excruciating detail--and Richardson
himself, as we have seen, had a prodigious knowledge of the prodigious
letters that eighteenth-century young ladies could address to even
unknown correspondents once their hearts and feelings were touched. So
that although to-day the letter is one of the worst of methods that
exist for telling a story if the dictates of probability are to be
considered, Richardson may be considered to have done very well indeed
with his peculiar form.
To its disadvantages in other hands we shall come in due time, but
meanwhile enormous applause is due to the author of _Pamela_ for having
given the matter any thought at all. And in any case his is a figure
so sympathetic and so craftsmanlike that we do well to love him. He
is sound, quiet, without fuss, going about his work as a carpenter
goes about making a chair and in the end turning out an article of
supreme symmetry and consistence. I know of no other figure in English
literature--if it be not that of Trollope--who so suggests the two
supreme artists of the world--Holbein and Bach.
It would be hyperbole to suggest that Richardson is as great in his
art as either of the other two. He had neither their power over
their materials nor their sense of the beauty of natural things. Our
gratitude to him nevertheless should be great, for he worked with the
simplest materials and manœuvred only the most normal of characters in
the most commonplace of events and yet contrived to engross the minds
of a large section of mankind. How to do that is the problem that,
Richardson having been dead a century and a half, still engrosses the
novelist.
And what more than anything is impressive about his figure is that
one knows almost nothing about it: he is as little overdrawn as are
his characters, whereas the besetting sin of almost all other English
novelists from Fielding to George Meredith is that they seem to cut
their characters out with hatchets and to colour them with the brushes
of house-painters and, never, even at that, being able to let them
alone, they are perpetually pushing their own faces and winking at
you over the shoulders of Young Blifil, Uncle Toby, the Widow Wadman,
Dick Swiveller, the Marchioness, Becky Sharp, Evan Harrington, and
the rest. That is usually applauded by orthodox Anglo-Saxon criticism
and to talk of the gallery of portraits left by this or that novelist
is considered to be high praise indeed. But, as a matter of fact, the
overdrawing of characters is merely a symptom of the laziness and
contempt for their vehicle that is the too usual hall-mark of the
English writer of nuvvles. And that it should be tremendously applauded
is a symptom of the disdain that the English critic really feels for
the novel. If English painting consisted of nothing but the caricatures
of Rowlandson, Gillray, or Cruikshank, the art-critic would discover
very soon that that grew monotonous, but since it is merely a matter of
prose-fiction it is easily accepted as good enough; that which is too
stupid to be said in any other way being consigned to the novel.
Of course if you choose to consider Swift and, say, Beckford as
novelists you do arrive at something that you must, as you might
say, chew upon--at something that has some mental dignity; and
Smollett presents you with problems of humanity that are at least
worth consideration. And naturally great vital spirits like Dickens,
floundering away in oceans of words and eccentricities, will from time
to time hit upon collocations of words and confrontations of characters
that are unsurpassed in the literature of any time or nation. But from
the death of Swift to the publication of _The Way of All Flesh_ there
is very little to be found in the English novel that is not slightly
unworthy of the whole attention of a grown-up man--say of a grown-up
Frenchman.
I have adumbrated somewhere--in some previous pessimism!--the
perturbation that must beset any Anglo-Saxon who desired to point out
to almost any grown-up foreigner of average intelligence the glories
of the English novel before, say, the day of the _Yellow Book_. Let
us then examine with a little more attention the chief lights of that
Institution between, say, 1745, the year of the death of Swift, and,
say, 1890, when the _Yellow Book_ was well on the way.
Swift himself is obviously one of those solitary figures like, in
their different ways, Shakespeare or Smollett or the author of _The
Way of All Flesh_. In a sense he resembles Bunyan, that is to say he
wrote allegories which, as a literary _genre_, are usually tiresome
and unconvincing; but in his case, as in that of Bunyan, his fierce
powers of observation and rendering carry him, as it were, in spite
of himself, into the realms of realism. It is to be doubted if Swift
ever aimed--as did, say, Mr. H. G. Wells in, say, _The First Men in
the Moon_,--at giving the reader the sense of vicarious experience.
Nevertheless he got there all the same and the corrosive nature of his
misanthropy almost aids the sense of reality with which he overwhelms
us. The “purpose” of _Gulliver’s Travels_ was no doubt philosophic, as
the purpose of the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ was moral; but Lilliput is as
real to us as the Slough of Despond and the Yahoos are the figures of
the most horrible experience of every man who has come across them.
So that if to your intelligent--and of course slightly
cynical--foreigner you presented _Gulliver_ and left it at that he
might remain edified or horror-struck according as his individual frame
of mind were pessimist of the other thing. But supposing you were to
present him with the Steele-cum-Addison collaboration of the _Tatler_
or the _Spectator_ or with _Tom Jones_ itself, which was written
about a quarter of a century later than _Gulliver_ and thirty years
or so after the last number of the _Spectator_ appeared in 1714: and
supposing you added--yes, certainly, suppose you add _Tristram Shandy_
and the _Sentimental Journey_, the first appearing or being written
between 1760 and 1767 and the second being published in 1768! Keep up
your sleeve Tobias Smollett whose _Humphry Clinker_ was published three
years after the _Sentimental Journey_ and in the year of Smollett’s
death at the age of fifty. And let us conclude this immediate inquiry
of ours as ending with the awful name of the Wizard of the North who
was born in the year of Smollett’s death and lived to be sixty.
As we have seen, Defoe in his _Advice from the Scandalous Club_,
that was a “feature” of his periodical _Review of the Affairs of
France_, very little anticipated--but by five years, indeed--what
may be regarded as the fiction of the Addison-Steele collaboration.
One is so apt to regard Defoe as of the seventeenth and Addison as
of the eighteenth centuries that this appears rather astonishing,
but actually the _Review_ ran from 1704 to 1713 and the _Tatler_ plus
_Spectator_ from 1709 to 1714. Defoe’s publication was so essentially
commercial and the other two so essentially social that the matter is
rather one of chronology than comparison.
The fact that the novel had not yet begun as a commercial “proposition”
to come into its own reduced Addison and Steele no doubt from the
rank of novelists to those of draftsmen of “characters.” The novels
of Defoe were “faked” memoirs and the other fiction of the period
mostly consisted of equally “faked” memoirs of persons of quality,
court-mistresses, and the like. And the “characters” and sham
correspondence about social questions of the day that characterized the
_Spectator_ may well be considered as developments of those popular,
fictitious productions. Sir Roger de Coverley, Will Wimble, and the
rest are as it were the characters of a novel, standing about and
waiting for employment as the leaden soldiers of a child await their
owner’s orders to fall in.
The idea of sustained fiction might indeed, if you liked and if you
analysed the matter very closely, be said not by any means yet to have
reached the public consciousness, and though for us _Clarissa_ may seem
to be the first of novels, its peculiar form--of correspondence--may
well, in the public mind of its day, have given it the aspect of the
last of the spurious memoirs. And, considering the nature of the future
influence of Richardson over the French realists from Diderot to
Flaubert, it may be more accurate to regard that aspect as the truer
one. For, in effect, the French realist movement from Diderot’s _Le
Neveu de Rameau_ to _Le Rouge et le Noir_ and again to _Madame Bovary_
may in the last event be regarded as much more a movement for the
production of fictitious memoirs than the narration of sustained tales,
the difference between Richardson, Flaubert, and Joseph Conrad or
Turgenev being simply one of form. Richardson, that is to say, tried to
assure you that Clarissa was a real person by the mechanical device of
publishing her letters, whilst Flaubert and his school try to hypnotize
you into believing in their characters by methods of projection rather
than of narration.
And the trouble with the English nuvvelist from Fielding to Meredith
is that not one of them cares whether you quite believe in their
characters or not. If you had told Flaubert or Conrad in the midst of
their passionate composings that you were not convinced of the reality
of Homais or Tuan Jim, as like as not they would have called you out
and shot you, and in similar circumstances Richardson would have showed
himself extremely disagreeable. But Fielding, Thackeray, or Meredith
would have cared relatively little about that, though any one of them
would have knocked you down if they could, supposing you had suggested
that he was not a “gentleman.” So would any English novelist to-day.
That of course is admirable in its effect on Anglo-Saxon
literary-social life where anyone taking pen in hand becomes _ipso
fatso_ an esquire for all users of type-writing machines. But it is
bitter bad for the English novel.
It is bitter bad for the English novel because--as is the case with
all human enterprises--the art of the novel is so difficult a thing
that unless a man’s whole energies are given to it he had much
better otherwise occupy himself. For if Shakespeare’s ambitions for
coat-armour had antedated instead of coming after _The Tempest_, where
should we be to-day? We have to thank our stars that he was probably
first a lousy, adulterous, poaching scoundrel--like Villon!
The lot of the novelist is, in fact, hard--but not harder than
that of any other man. If you put it to bakers, tram-conductors,
politicians, or musicians that they must be first bakers and the rest
and then gentlemen, they will sigh, but admit it. It is almost only
the English novelist who will aspire at being first gentleman and
then craftsman--or even not craftsman at all since it is not really
gentlemanly to think of being anything but a gentleman.
This is an incisive way of putting a truth that might perhaps be more
wrapped up in social or material generalizations, but it is none the
less a hard truth, and if you consider the case of Fielding, connected
with the best families, placeman and diplomatist in a small way, and
compare him with Smollett who was socially nothing at all with no
chance of a change, you will see that truth all the more clearly.
God forbid that I should say anything really condemnatory of any book
by any brother-novelist, alive or dead. One is here to commend all that
one can commend and to leave the rest alone. But there are few books
that I more cordially dislike than _Tom Jones_. That is no critical
pronouncement but merely a statement of a personal prejudice: one may
dislike grape-fruit and yet acknowledge its admirable qualities, or
one may, as I do, dislike the quality of goose-flesh that reading Mr.
George Moore will confer on one’s skin and yet acknowledge Mr. Moore as
easily the greatest of living technicians.
But as regards _Tom Jones_ my personal dislike goes along with a
certain cold-blooded, critical condemnation. I dislike Tom Jones, the
character, because he is a lewd, stupid, and treacherous phenomenon;
I dislike Fielding, his chronicler, because he is a bad sort of
hypocrite. Had Fielding been in the least genuine in his moral
aspirations it is Blifil that he would have painted attractively and
Jones who would have come to the electric chair, as would have been the
case had Jones lived to-day.
Of course that is merely saying that Fielding liked a type that I
dislike--but what appals me in view of the serious, cynical foreigner
that I have postulated our taking about with us is the extremely thin
nature of all the character-drawing, of all the events and of all
the catastrophes. Is it to be seriously believed that Tom Jones’s
benefactor would have turned upon him on the flimsy nature of the
evidence adduced against him, or, equally, is it to be believed that
Tom Jones’s young woman would have again taken up with him after all
the eye-openers she had had, she being represented as a girl of spirit?
It simply isn’t in any world of any seriousness at all. The fact, in
short, is that Tom Jones is a papier-mâché figure, the catastrophes the
merest invention without any pretence at being convincing and even the
mere morality of the most leering and disastrous kind.
For myself, I am no moralist: I consider that if you do what you want
you must take what you get for it and that if you deny yourself things
you will be better off than if you don’t. But fellows like Fielding,
and to some extent Thackeray, who pretend that if you are a gay
drunkard, lecher, squanderer of your goods and fumbler in placket-holes
you will eventually find a benevolent uncle, concealed father or
benefactor who will shower on you bags of tens of thousands of guineas,
estates and the hands of adorable mistresses--those fellows are dangers
to the body politic and horribly bad constructors of plots.
It is all very well to say that such happy endings were the convention
of the day, that you find them in the _School for Scandal_, _The Vicar
of Wakefield_ and in every eighteenth-century romance that you pick up
out of the twopenny book-box, and it is all very well to say that the
public demands a happy ending. But the really great writer is not bound
by the conventions of his day, nor, if he desires to give his reader a
happy ending, need he select a wastrel like Jones as the recipient of
his too easily bestowed favours.
If, in short, we are to regard Fielding as a serious writer writing
for grown-up people, we must regard him also as a rather intolerable
scoundrel with perhaps _Jonathan Wild_ to his credit. But _Jonathan
Wild_ is of another category and, neither winking nor leering, might be
regarded as the finger on the wall, pointing out what happens to the
Tom Joneses of the world if their case is regarded with any seriousness.
But the fact is that for a century and a half after the death of
Fielding nothing in the Anglo-Saxon world was further from anyone,
either novelist or layman, than the idea that the novel could be taken
seriously. It was a thing a little above a fairy-tale for children, a
little above a puppet-play; and, if not actually as damned socially
and clerically as the actor who could not be either received at court
or buried in consecrated ground, the novelist was practically without
what the French call an _état civil_ because his was not a serious
profession. In England that state of things still pertains. In the
demobilization forms after the late War the novelist was actually
placed in the eighteenth category--along with gipsies, vagrants, and
other non-productive persons; and my last public act in Great Britain
being to allow my name to be placed on a list of voters, when I gave
my avocation to the political agent as being that of a novelist, he
exclaimed: “Oh, don’t say that, sir. Say ‘Gentleman’!” He was anxious
that his list should appear as serious as possible.
That being the state of things and the novelist being human--for you
cannot be a novelist and lack the ordinary aspirations of the human
being!--for that century and a half the Anglo-Saxon public had the
novels that it deserved. I do not mean to say that generous spirits
lacked amongst the ranks of fiction-writers. That great genius,
Dickens, thrashed oppressions and shams with the resplendent fury of an
Isaiah; and that singular megalomaniac, Charles Reade, did, with _It
Is Never Too Late to Mend_, really succeed in modifying the system of
solitary confinement in English gaols. And you have had _Uncle Tom’s
Cabin_. But those works of propaganda had either no literary value at
all or when, as in the case of Dickens, they did have the literary
value that genius can infuse into work however faulty, their work
itself suffered by the very intensity of their reforming passions.