all the artistic or even the social value that it might have had, since
it became a vehicle for preventing the comfortable classes thinking of
unpleasant subjects whilst presenting their agreeable somnolences with
the warming possibilities of considering their neighbours’ defects. It
became, that is to say, the week-day, post-prandial sermon preached
by a family divine above all anxious to avoid giving offence to those
who provided his daily bread. And gentlemanly reformer, the British
novelist consciously or unconsciously remains to this day--in the great
bulk.
That Dickens, on the other hand, had, any more than Bunyan, any
_arrière-pensée_ at all should never for a moment be thought. His
was an agonized soul shuddering at the tortures that, as a poor
child, he had seen inflicted on the sufferings of non-comfortable
humanity in the horrible days--for the under-dog!--of the last
years of the reigns of the Georges and of the early years of the
reign of Queen Victoria. All the horrors of insanitation, filth,
child-labour, imprisonment for debt, the gallows for petty theft, the
hulks and the rest he had himself witnessed or endured and at these
horrors he lashed with the mad enthusiasm of a wolf that snaps at
the insupportable whip of the trainer. His novels were probably--at
least in the beginning--relatively nothing to him; if he could have
found any other way he would have poured out his feelings as readily
in that. But, happening on the novel and having a matchless command
of English, he took the simple course of presenting you with villains
all black, heroes all white and ringletted heroines all pink. He had
to see--though that is to reverse the colours--the world in terms of
Legrees, Uncle Toms, or Amelia Osbornes.
That, in effect, was the beginning of the end, the novel becoming
_the_ vehicle for the reform of abuses. And it is astonishing how
short has been the career of the novel as an art compared with that of
pottery-moulding, baking, weaving, or any other human avocation. You
may say that it began with Richardson and ended--for the time being
and as far as Anglo-Saxondom is concerned--with _Oliver Twist_, which,
significantly enough, appeared in the first year of Victoria’s spacious
reign.
Richardson, that is to say, did have an artistic convention of sorts,
did try in some way to render life, did deal almost exclusively in
neither very moral nor very immoral personages, but there almost
all attempts at rendering life or the normal almost came to an end.
_The Vicar of Wakefield_, “noted for purity and optimism,” says my
official guide to dates, was an obviously Richardsonian _pastiche_;
Henry Mackenzie’s _Man of Feeling_ may be said to have exaggerated
Richardson’s tearful sentimentality; and Smollett (“marked by
coarseness and brutality”) whose first book was published eight
years after the publication of _Pamela_ and in the same year as
_Clarissa_, undoubtedly had a shot at rendering the same world that
Richardson rendered. It is not as absurd as it may seem to say that
_Pamela_ suggested _Roderick Random_; it certainly suggested _Madame
Bovary_--and _Babbitt_!
It would, however, undoubtedly be absurd to suggest to the public
that Smollett was a greater artist or a greater novelist than either
Fielding or Dickens: and yet, if the novel is to be regarded as a
rendering of life, there is not much way out of it. He remains,
however, and will probably always remain, an isolated figure. He was
bitter, and as he rendered what he had seen and since what he had
seen had been coarse and brutal, those will be the epithets that
Anglo-Saxondom will for ever bestow on him. He wrote about the sea in
a period glorious for England’s sea-history--but in spite of that he
could hardly be regarded--as is Marryat--as a writer for boys. The
life of which he treated was too remote from to-day for the reader
interested in the renderings of the life of to-day to read of it with
any enthusiasm; he was little less virulent than Swift and, if he is
even less read, he receives even less lip-service. So no doubt he is
contented.
Marryat--as a writer read by boys, men being already too dulled in
the sense at twenty to appreciate him--has probably, through the
boys, exercised the greatest influence on the English character that
any writer ever did exercise. His magnificent gifts of drawing--not
exaggerating--character and of getting an atmosphere have so worked
that few of us have not been to sea in frigates before the age of
eighteen and come in some way in contact with non-comfortable men
and women. I have seldom been so impressed as when, the other day, I
re-read _Peter Simple_ for my pleasure. It was to come into contact
with a man who could write and see and feel. For me, nothing in _War
and Peace_ is as valuable as the boat cutting-out expeditions of
Marryat and for me he remains the greatest of English novelists. His
name is not even mentioned in the manual of literary dates with which I
have just been refreshing my memory.
I do not, however, dwell at any length on either Smollett or Marryat
because, great as for me they seem, they still remain individual
figures leaving very little trace on the traditions of English
literature--and that indeed was the case with Fenimore Cooper who was
one of the most beautiful pure stylists that the English language has
yet excited into writing. There is in _The Two Admirals_ a passage
descriptive of mists rising from the sails and cordage of battleships
as seen from the turf of cliff-tops at dawn, that remains for me one
of the incomparable passages in the language. And, whilst I am about
the matter of pure style, I may as well explain here why lately I
mentioned that I was then writing in Lisbon harbour. That apparently
egotistic excrescence was due to the fact that I liked to remember
that--no, not Fielding--but Beckford once lay in Lisbon harbour and
wrote most beautiful prose there. Beckford is known only as the
author of _Vathek_, which is, to be sure, most remarkable as a _tour
de force_--and which is usually bound up with _Rasselas_ in popular
reprints; but he is also the author of _Letters from Portugal_ which
might almost be regarded as a novel, such an admirable autobiographical
portrait do they give of their writer in his adventurous progress from
the city of Camoens and Vasco da Gama to the monastery of Batalha.
Prose, I suppose, is to some extent the business of a writer on the
English Novel, so I suppose I may be pardoned my digression about
Beckford and make the note that if I wanted to put together a small,
exquisitely pleasing fascicule of admirable because simple English
prose I should take a passage from the suppressed Preface to the Bible,
a passage from Henry V’s address to his soldiers before Agincourt,
one from Clarendon, one from _Gulliver_, one from Johnson’s _Life of
Drake_, the passage from Cooper that I have mentioned above, and one
from the _Letters from Portugal_, one from Maine’s _Ancient Law_--and
then one from any book of W. H. Hudson. The English language is not
very distinguished for its prose, but that would make a very admirable
little volume! One might almost add the opening description of the
village from White’s _Selborne_.
It is of course impossible to exhaust the topic of the English novel
from Fielding to Henry James in a few paragraphs of a small book.
But the topic of main currents of that literature is more easily got
rid of simply because there are practically no main currents at all.
There are some good writers, but of a Tradition practically no trace.
The writers who spring most immediately to the imagination as being
somewhere near in their works to the main stream of the international
novel--for the Novel is after all an international affair--the most
unforgettable writers of that type are two or three women. That I
suppose is because, whilst the men ran about actively intent on proving
that they were gentlemen or in improving the ungentle world, the women
had to prove that they were not unladylike and so remained at home and
looked at life, without any very immediate aim at publicity or even at
publication.
At any rate, if you take Miss Burney’s _Evelina_, Miss Edgeworth’s
_Castle Rackrent_, Miss Austen’s _Sense and Sensibility_, Mrs.
Gaskell’s _Mary Barton_, George Eliot’s _Scenes from Clerical Life_,
and Miss Brontë’s _Villette_, you do get something of a kinship, if not
much of a tradition, and if you add to them the _Barchester Towers_
series of Trollope and the works of Mark Rutherford and George Gissing
you do get, too, some attempts at rendering English life that are above
the attention of adults with the mentality of French boys of sixteen.
At rendering, that is to say, rather than at the mere relating of a
more or less arbitrary tale so turned as to ensure a complacent view of
life and carried on by characters that as a rule are--six feet high and
gliding two inches above the ground!
That is, of course, an arbitrary generalization as to all the English
nuvvles that string out from, say, Scott to, say, the late Marion
Crawford. But if sweeping it is not _completely_ unfair. Obviously even
Scott’s _Antiquary_ is worth consideration if one had the time, or _The
Cloister and the Hearth_, or let us say _Lorna Doone_. That last work I
read over twelve times when I was a boy and from the beginning: “If any
man would hear a plain tale told plainly, I John Ridd of the parish
of Oare” to the end; I dare say I could recite half the book to-day.
But then Blackmore was a market-gardener! Let me lay on his altar these
alms for oblivion, for I suppose that few people to-day read of the
Doones of Badgeworthy or of how John Ridd took his Lorna home in the
great snows.
In short, if you omit Dickens and Thackeray as immense amateurs who
wrote from time to time very admirable passages, and if you do not like
the works--from _Evelina_ to _New Grub Street_--that I have mentioned
in my last paragraph but two, the amount of work that you can read
in English produced between 1799 and 1899 or so will seem extremely
small--supposing you to be of any at all adult tastes or of any
seriousness of approach to literary matters.
If, on the other hand, you are indifferent to whether you are convinced
by what you read and care little with what you occupy your spare time
and desire to fill up your hours with an occupation calling for as
little mental concentration as, say, a game of golf, I dare say you
could agreeably narcotize yourself still with _Rob Roy_ or _The Tower
of London_ or _The Woman in White_ or, say, _Rudder Grange_.
CHAPTER FOUR
TO JOSEPH CONRAD
Thus in Mid-Victorian years there established itself for all the world
to see--The English Nuvvle.
And inasmuch as this phenomenon was really, in the last event,
combined--and no doubt unconscious--socio-political propaganda, it
was accepted by the whole world--and by the whole world even more
than by England. For if, as it were, you shut your eyes and consider
what images are brought up before you by the words The English Novel
you will see a Manor House, inhabited by the Best People: Sir Thomas,
amiable but not bright; Lady Charlotte, benevolent, charitable, in an
ample crinoline, an Earl’s daughter; the Misses Jean and Charlotte as
pure as dew within lily-chalices; Mr. Tom--not absolutely satisfactory;
Mr. Edward, always satisfactory; pigeons, shorthorns, a rose-garden,
a still-room, a housekeeper, a rectory. And you will see a whole
countryside, a whole continent, a whole world so conducted that those
amiable but not bright personages shall lead amiable, idle, and almost
blameless existences in an atmosphere of curtsyings and cap-touchings.
It was a world-ideal: you found households modelling themselves upon it
in the Government of Kiev, in the State of Massachusetts, in Pomerania,
in the department of the Var. So that God’s Englishman of the novels of
William Black--God’s drooping-bearded Englishman with his crinolined
or be-bustled consort, carrying fly-fishing rods and croquet mallets,
became the type which the whole world sighingly aped. For these
nuvvles--to which nobody surely could object--were read in Sarajevo as
in Potsdam, in Washington as on the Berkshire downs. They were works
written for the would-be gentry by the near-gentry which latter, if
their books proved sufficiently acceptable, might almost aspire to such
establishments as they described and, in the second generation, to
authentic gentrydom. The writer himself, like Shakespeare, would as a
rule have to content himself with a grant of arms from the College of
Heralds. But one could always, if one were a novelist, dazzle one’s
mind with the idea that Edward Bulwer Lytton, author of _The Last Days
of Pompeii_, became successively Sir Edward Bulwer, and Lord, Lytton,
and Benjamin Disraeli, also a novelist, Earl of Beaconsfield and
favourite of his Sovereign.
The nuvvles, naturally, differed in subject and even sometimes in
treatment. _The Woman in White_ was, I think, written in letters for
all the world like _Clarissa_; _Esmond_--which described the founding
of a county-family in Virginia, U.S.A.,--was autobiographical; or you
might have several characters each speaking in solid autobiographical
wads; or several diarists. There was, in fact, no literary convention
in particular--there was only the point of view. _Romola_ and _Far From
the Madding Crowd_ had to be recognized as of the same ethical family
as _Pelham_ or _Lorna Doone_ or they would not do at all.
Occasionally disturbing breaths swept across the trout-ponds. The
newest novel of Thackeray might cause a great deal of trepidating
discussion under the breath, or the latest passionate outpouring of
Dickens might cause Mamma to ask dear Papa whether Lucy and Emily
ought really to be allowed to read it. Steerforth and Little Em’ly
came _very_ near the Knuckle: but the lap-dog died amongst such
lamentations and the first heroine so delicately, and such refined
retribution overtook alike Steerforth and the young woman that, if
_Copperfield_ itself was put on the index of the young ladies’ boudoir,
_Bleak House_ which “introduced Society” could not be kept from the
fair denizens of that be-chintzed sanctuary. I believe, however, that
_Great Expectations_, the last of Dickens’ works to show his passionate
compassion for the under-dog, had a pretty rough passage.
I came into the world myself at about the hey-day of this national
phenomenon, but, by the time I had any real literary consciousness,
its supremacy was beginning to be already challenged. My own mother
enjoined on me the reading of _Silas Marner_, _The Mill on the Floss_,
_Wuthering Heights_, _Sidonia the Sorceress_, _Lorna Doone_, _The
Woman in White_, _The Moonstone_, _Diana of the Crossways_, and _Far
From the Madding Crowd_. But then my mother was “advanced” and never
wore a crinoline. My father thought Dickens was vulgar and though he
did not forbid me to read he certainly deprecated my expressing any
enthusiasm for--_Bleak House_. He thought too--I don’t know why--that
Robert Louis Stevenson was meretricious, except for the _Inland
Voyage_. My grandfather, who was considerably more “advanced” than
either my father or my mother, first recommended me to read--when
I was about seventeen--_Madame Bovary_, _Tartarin de Tarascon_ and
_Tartarin sur les Alpes_. He was pleased when at school they gave us
the _Lettres de mon Moulin_ of Daudet and a little later made me read
_Roderick Random_, _Humphry Clinker_, _Snarleyyow_, _Midshipman Easy_,
Waterton’s _Wanderings in South America_, which was all the same as
a novel. My uncle William Rossetti gave me _The Castle of Otranto_,
_Caleb Williams_, _Frankenstein_ and another novel of Meinhold’s--_The
Amber Witch_. I inherited from my uncle Oliver Madox Brown a large
number of translations from the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
Spanish. Trollope I had to find out for myself, oddly enough. I suppose
my own family were too advanced to care to advocate the reading of
projections of the lives of the cathedral clergy. That, at any rate,
was the reading of a boy of from twelve to eighteen of fairly advanced
family in the ’eighties of last century. It will be observed that,
with the possible exception of Wilkie Collins’ two books, these were
all works that would not normally be read in Middle Class families,
either because of social outspokennesses, individuality of outlook,
or difficulties of style. But even for my family it was then possible
to go too far. I remember my mother being seriously perturbed because
at the age of thirteen or so I was kissed at a tea-party by Mrs. Lynn
Lynton whose gleaming spectacles certainly frightened me and whose
novels advocated the Revolt of the Daughters of that day--and, if it
had lain within the ideas of right and wrong of my family to forbid
anyone to read anything, I should certainly have been forbidden to read
the works of Rhoda Broughton, who advocated the giving of latchkeys to
women.
Nemesis was by then on the way.
The newer ideas began with the cheapening of the products of the
press--and I dare say that cheapening was a good deal hastened by
the pirating of American works. I remember still with delight the
shilling edition--it was bound in scarlet paper--in which I first
purchased at the age of fourteen in a place called Malvern Wells,
Artemus Ward’s _Among the Mormons_, Sam Slick’s _The Clockmaker_, Mark
Twain’s _Mississippi Pilot_, Carleton’s _Farm Ballads_, and ever so
many other American books which I suppose must have been pirated or
they could scarcely have been sold for a shilling. And, though I was
ready at the injunctions of my family to read Lope da Vega or Smollett,
nothing would have induced me to spend sixpence on taking out from a
circulating library the three-volume novels of William Black, Besant
and Rice and the other purveyors of the nuvvle when by saving up my
pocket-money I could buy for a shilling--or ninepence net--the _Biglow
Ballads_ or _Hans Breitmann_.
So that of the novel of commerce of those days I really know very
little--and I do not think that there is very much about it that anyone
need know. That it existed in great numbers in three volumes apiece
was obvious. In every little town in England there was in those days a
circulating library and in every circulating library in every town were
shelves on shelves of obfusc bindings--but even the literary textbooks
of to-day give you no more names for the Victorian period than Dickens,
Thackeray, George Eliot, the Brontës, Charles Kingsley, Robert Louis
Stevenson (who died in 1894), George Meredith and Thomas Hardy. So that
even the official list is a pretty meagre one and if I rack my brains
really hard I cannot add many names to it. I have already given you
Black, Blackmore, Besant and Rice who collaborated--and of writers of
considerable merit, Mark Rutherford and Samuel Butler, but neither of
these really belong to the period--and Jane Austen really precedes
it, though we may well say that she originated the novel of the
country-house that was followed--at such great intervals--by the swarm
of commercial writers.
That all the commercial writers who solidly turned out solid
three-deckers produced absolute rubbish need not be assumed. Miss
Braddon, authoress of _Lady Audley’s Secret_, did honest, sound
journeyman’s work, year in, year out, during a very long life--and
obviously such a writer as Mrs. Gaskell will not ever be entirely
forgotten, if only on account of _Cranford_. I wish, myself, that
more weight attached to her _Mary Barton_, a grim--and indeed an
extraordinarily painful--account of Mid-Victorian labour troubles.
And of course there is Trollope.
Trollope and Miss Austen--like Shakespeare and Richardson--stand
so absolutely alone that nothing very profitable can be said about
them by a writer analysing British fiction in search of traces of
main-currents of tradition. They were both so aloof, so engrossed, so
contemplative--and so masterly--that beyond saying that some people
prefer _The Warden_ to _Framley Parsonage_ and _Sense and Sensibility_
to _Pride and Prejudice_, and that others think the reverse, there is
very little to be said. These at least are authentic writers: they
neither flare out into passages that are all super-genius--as in
Dickens’ passage about the dry leaves at Mr. Pecksniff’s back-door,
nor do they descend to the intolerable banalities of the endings of
_Copperfield_ or _Vanity Fair_. But, as in the case of Turgenev, the
aspiring writer can learn very little of either. These novelists
write well, know how to construct a novel so as to keep the interest
going with every word until the last page--but after that all you
can say is that they were just temperaments, and quiet ones at that.
Inimitable--that is what they are. You could imitate Oscar Wilde--but
never Trollope giving you the still, slow stream of English country and
small-town life. Nor could anyone else ever give you such pure agony of
interest and engrossment as you can get out of the financial troubles
over a few pounds of the poor clergyman in _Framley Parsonage_. I
shiver every time that I think of that book.
But once those tributes are paid it is astonishing to look back on
the course of the novel in England from the earliest times to say,
1895, Bunyan, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and then the few
Victorians of whom we have been treating. It is an astonishingly small
crop, even if you let me add Marryat and add for yourselves the other
solitary figure of Mark Twain, one of the greatest prose-writers the
English language has produced.
In the meantime, across the Channel, the main stream of the Novel
pursued its slow course.
It had begun with Richardson. His vogue with the French would be
incomprehensible if we were not able to consider that the French
Revolution was, in the end, a sentimental movement, basing itself on
civic, parental, filial, and rhetorical virtues. If the French beheaded
Marie Antoinette it was in order that Monsieur Durand, stay-maker of
the Passage Choiseul, might be sufficiently well-fed to utter tearful
homilies to his children; for homilies uttered by starving peasants
with their bones pushing through their skins and rags--such homilies
would little impress their children with the solid advantages of
virtuous careers. And the moment you consider pre-revolutionary France
from that angle the appeal of the author of _Pamela_ becomes instantly
blindingly clear.
At any rate, Diderot wrote _Rameau’s Nephew_ as a direct imitation of
that work of Richardson and a whole school of the contemporaries of
Diderot imitated _Rameau’s Nephew_. The influence, again, of Richardson
is plainly visible in Chateaubriand--for without Richardson how could
he have written long passages like: “How sad it is to think that eyes
that are too old to see have not yet outlived the ability to shed
tears,” and the like. And if the Richardsonian influence upon Stendhal
does not so immediately spring to the eye, we know from Stendhal’s
letters that it was extremely profound.
It was to Diderot--and still more to Stendhal--that the Novel owes its
next great step forward. That consisted in the discovery that words
put into the mouth of a character need not be considered as having
the personal backing of the author. At that point it became suddenly
evident that the Novel as such was capable of being regarded as a means
of profoundly serious and many-sided discussion and therefore a medium
of profoundly serious investigation into the human case. It came into
its own.