since English fiction found a new starting-point in Scott. Scott made us
sensible of many sources of interest to which Fielding was naturally
blind. He showed us especially that a human being belonged to a society
going through a long course of historical development, and renewed the
bonds with the past which had been rudely snapped in Fielding's period.
Fielding only deals, it may be roughly said, with men as members of a
little family circle, whereas Scott shows them as members of a nation
rich in old historical traditions, related to the past and the future,
and to the external nature in which it has been developed. A wider set
of forces is introduced into our conception of humanity, and the
romantic element, which Fielding ignored, comes again to life. Scott,
too, was a greater man than Fielding, of wider sympathy, loftier
character, and, not the least, with an incomparably keener ear for the
voices of the mountains, the sea, and the sky. The more Scott is
studied, the higher, I believe, the opinion that we shall form of some
of his powers. But in one respect Fielding is his superior. It is a kind
of misnomer which classifies all Scott's books as novels. They are
embodied legends and traditions, descriptions of men, and races, and
epochs of history; but many of them are novels, as it were, by accident,
and modern readers are often disappointed because the name suggests
misleading associations. They expect to sympathise with Scott's heroes,
whereas the heroes are generally dropped in from without, just to give
ostensible continuity to the narrative. The apparent accessories are
really the main substance. The Jacobites and not Waverley, the
Borderers, not Mr. Van Beest Brown, the Covenanters, not Morton or Lord
Evandale, are the real subject of Scott's best romances. Now Fielding is
really a novelist in the more natural sense. We are interested, that is,
by the main characters, though they are not always the most attractive
in themselves. We are really absorbed by the play of their passions and
the conflict of their motives, and not merely taking advantage of the
company to see the surrounding scenery or phases of social life. In this
sense Fielding's art is admirable, and surpassed that of all his English
predecessors as of most of his successors. If the light is concentrated
in a narrow focus, it is still healthy daylight. So long as we do not
wish to leave his circle of ideas, we see little fault in the vigour
with which he fulfils his intention. And therefore, whatever Fielding's
other faults, he is beyond comparison the most faithful and profound
mouthpiece of the passions and failings of a society which seems at once
strangely remote and yet strangely near to us. When seeking to solve
that curious problem which is discussed in one of Hazlitt's best
essays--what characters one would most like to have met?--and running
over the various claims of a meeting at the Mermaid with Shakespeare and
Jonson, a 'neat repast of Attic taste' with Milton, a gossip at Button's
with Addison and Steele, a club-dinner with Johnson and Burke, a supper
with Lamb, or (certainly the least attractive) an evening at Holland
House, I sometimes fancy that, after all, few things would be pleasanter
than a pipe and a bowl of punch with Fielding and Hogarth. It is true
that for such a purpose I provide myself in imagination with a new set
of sturdy nerves, and with a digestion such as that which was once equal
to the horrors of an undergraduates' 'wine party.' But, having made that
trifling assumption, I fancy that there would be few places where one
would hear more good motherwit, shrewder judgments of men and things, or
a sounder appreciation of those homely elements of which human life is
in fact chiefly composed. Common-sense in the highest degree--whether we
choose to identify it or contrast it with genius--is at least one of the
most enduring and valuable of qualities in literature as everywhere
else; and Fielding is one of its best representatives. But perhaps one
is unduly biassed by the charm of a complete escape in imagination from
the thousand and one affectations which have grown up since Fielding
died and we have all become so much wiser and more learned than all
previous generations.
FOOTNOTES:
[7] Richardson wrote the first part of 'Pamela' between November 10,
1739, and January 10, 1740. 'Joseph Andrews' appeared in 1742. The first
four volumes of 'Clarissa Harlowe' and 'Roderick Random' appeared in the
beginning of 1748; 'Tom Jones' in 1749.
[8] See some appreciative remarks upon this in Scott's preface to the
_Monastery_.
[9] It is rather curious that Richardson uses the same comparison to
Miss Fielding. He assures her that her brother only knew the outside of
a clock, whilst she knew all the finer springs and movements of its
inside. See _Richardson's Correspondence_, ii. 105.
[10] Fielding blundered rather strangely in the celebrated Betsy Canning
case, as Balzac did in the 'Affaire Peytel'; but the story is too long
for repetition in this place. The trials of Miss Canning and her
supposed kidnappers are amongst the most amusing in the great collection
of State Trials. See vol. xix. of the 8vo edition. Fielding's defence of
his own conduct in the matter is reprinted in his 'Miscellanies and
Poems,' being the supplementary volume of the last collected edition of
his works.
[11] They were really the property not of Fielding but of the once
famous '_beau_ Fielding.' See _Dictionary of National Biography_.
[12] See _Tom Jones_, book xiv. chap. i.
[13] See _Voyage to Lisbon_ (July 21) for some very good remarks upon
this word, which, as he says, no two men understand in the same sense.
[14] In his interesting Life of Godwin, Mr. Paul claims for his hero (I
dare say rightly) that he was the first English writer to give a
'lengthy and appreciative notice' of 'Don Quixote.' But when he infers
that Godwin was also the first English writer who recognised in
Cervantes a great humourist, satirist, moralist, and artist, he seems to
me to overlook Fielding and others. So Warton in his essay on 'Pope'
calls 'Don Quixote' the 'most original and unrivalled work of modern
times.' The book must have been popular in England from its publication,
as we know from the preface to Beaumont and Fletcher's 'Knight of the
Burning Castle'; and numerous translations and imitations show that
Cervantes was always enjoyed, if not criticised. Fielding's frequent
references to 'Don Quixote' (to say nothing of his play, 'Don Quixote in
England') imply an admiration fully as warm as that of Godwin. 'Don
Quixote,' says Fielding, is more worthy the name of history than
Mariana, and he always speaks of Cervantes in the tone of an
affectionate disciple. Fielding, I will add, seems to me to have admired
Shakespeare more heartily and intelligently than ninety-nine out of a
hundred modern supporters of Shakespeare societies; though these
gentlemen are never happier than when depreciating English
eighteenth-century critics to exalt vapid German philosophising.
Fielding's favourite play seems from his quotations to have been
'Othello.'
[15] Book x. chap. i.
[16] _Tom Jones_, book xv. chap. i.
[17] For Fielding's view of the French novels of his day see _Tom
Jones_, book xiii. chap. ix.
_COWPER AND ROUSSEAU_
Sainte-Beuve's Essay on Cowper--considered as the type of domestic
poets--has recently been translated for the benefit of English readers.
It is interesting to know on the highest authority what are the
qualities which may recommend a writer, so strongly tinged by local
prejudices, to the admiration of a different race and generation. The
gulf which separates the Olney of a century back from modern Paris is
wide enough to give additional value to the generous appreciation of the
critic. I have not the presumption to supplement or correct any part of
his judgment. It is enough to remark briefly that Cowper's immediate
popularity was, as is usually the case, due in part to qualities which
have little to do with his more enduring reputation. Sainte-Beuve dwells
with special fondness upon his pictures of domestic and rural life. He
notices, of course, the marvellous keenness of his pathetic poems; and
he touches, though with some hint that national affinity is necessary to
its full appreciation, upon the playful humour which immortalised John
Gilpin, and lights up the poet's most charming letters. Something,
perhaps, might still be said by a competent critic upon the singular
charm of Cowper's best style. A poet, for example, might perhaps tell
us, though a prosaic person cannot, what is the secret of the impression
made by such a poem as the 'Wreck of the Royal George.' Given an
ordinary newspaper paragraph about wreck or battle, turn it into the
simplest possible language, do not introduce a single metaphor or figure
of speech, indulge in none but the most obvious of all reflections--as,
for example, that when a man is once drowned he won't win any more
battles--and produce as the result a copy of verses which nobody can
ever read without instantly knowing them by heart. How Cowper managed to
perform such a feat, and why not one poet even in a hundred can perform
it, are questions which might lead to some curious critical speculation.
The qualities, however, which charm the purely literary critic do not
account for the whole of Cowper's influence. A great part of his
immediate, and some part of his more enduring success, have been clearly
owing to a different cause. On reading Johnson's 'Lives,' Cowper
remarked, rather uncharitably, that there was scarcely one good man
amongst the poets. Few poets, indeed, shared those religious views which
commended him more than any literary excellence to a large class of
readers. Religious poetry is generally popular out of all proportion to
its æsthetic merits. Young was but a second-rate Pope in point of
talent; but probably the 'Night Thoughts' have been studied by a dozen
people for one who has read the 'Essay on Man' or the 'Imitations of
Horace.' In our own day, nobody, I suppose, would hold that the
popularity of the 'Christian Year' has been strictly proportioned to its
poetical excellence; and Cowper's vein of religious meditation has
recommended him to thousands who, if biassed at all, were quite
unconsciously biassed by the admirable qualities which endeared him to
such a critic as Sainte-Beuve. His own view was frequently and
unequivocally expressed. He says over and over again--and his entire
sincerity lifts him above all suspicion of the affected
self-depreciation of other writers--that he looked upon his poetical
work as at best innocent trifling, except so far as his poems were
versified sermons. His intention was everywhere didactic--sometimes
annoyingly didactic--and his highest ambition was to be a useful
auxiliary to the prosaic exhortations of Doddridge, Watts, or his friend
Newton. His religion, said some people, drove him mad. Even a generous
critic like Mr. Stopford Brooke cannot refrain from hinting that his
madness was in some part due to the detested influence of Calvinism. In
fact, it may be admitted that Newton--who is half inclined to boast that
he has a name for driving people mad--scarcely showed his judgment in
setting a man who had already been in confinement to write hymns which
at times are the embodiment of despair. But it is obviously contrary to
the plainest facts to say that Cowper was driven mad by his creed. His
first attack preceded his religious enthusiasm; and a gentleman who
tries to hang himself because he has received a comfortable appointment
for life, is in a state of mind which may be explained without reference
to his theological views. It would be truer to say that when Cowper's
intellect was once unhinged, he found a congenial expression for the
tortures of his soul in the imagery provided by the sternest of
Christian sects. But neither can this circumstance be alleged as in
itself disparaging to the doctrines thus misapplied. A religious belief
which does not provide language for the darkest moods of the human mind,
for profound melancholy, torturing remorse and gloomy foreboding, is a
religion not calculated to lay a powerful grasp upon the imaginations of
mankind. Had Cowper been a Roman Catholic, the same anguish of mind
might have driven him to seek relief in the recesses of some austere
monastery. Had he, like Rousseau, been a theoretical optimist, he would,
like Rousseau, have tortured himself with the conflict between theory
and fact--between the world as it might be and the corrupt and tyrannous
world as it is--and have held that all men were in a conspiracy to rob
him of his peace. The chief article of Rousseau's rather hazy creed was
the duty of universal philanthropy, and Rousseau fancied himself to be
the object of all men's hatred. Similarly, Cowper, who held that the
first duty of man was the love of God, fancied that some mysterious
cause had made him the object of the irrevocable hatred of his Creator.
With such fancies, reason and creeds which embody reason have nothing to
do except to give shape to the instruments of self-torture. The cause of
the misery is the mind diseased. You can no more raze out its rooted
troubles by arguing against the reality of the phantoms which it
generates than cure any other delirium by the most irrefragable logic.
Sainte-Beuve makes some remarks upon this analogy between Rousseau and
Cowper. The comparison suggests some curious considerations as to the
contrast and likeness of the two cases represented. Some personal
differences are, of course, profound and obvious. Cowper was as
indisputably the most virtuous man, as Rousseau the greatest
intellectual power. Cowper's domestic life was as beautiful as
Rousseau's was repulsive. Rousseau, moreover, was more decidedly a
sentimentalist than Cowper, if by sentimentalism we mean that
disposition which makes a luxury of grief, and delights in poring over
its own morbid emotions. Cowper's tears are always wrung from him by
intense anguish of soul, and never, as is occasionally the case with
Rousseau, suggests that the weeper is proud of his excessive tenderness.
Nevertheless, it is probably true, as Mr. Lowell says, that Cowper is
the nearest congener of Rousseau in our language. The two men, of
course, occupy in one respect an analogous literary position. We
habitually assign to Cowper an important place--though of course a
subordinate place to Rousseau--in bringing about the reaction against
the eighteenth-century code of taste and morality. In each case it would
generally be said that the change indicated was a return to nature and
passion from the artificial coldness of the dominant school. That
reaction, whatever its precise nature, took characteristically different
forms in England and in France; and it is as illustrating one of the
most important distinctions that I propose to say a few words upon the
contrast thus exhibited.
Return to Nature! That was the war-cry which animated the Lake school in
their assault upon the then established authority. Pope, as they held,
had tied the hands of English poets by his jingling metres and frigid
conventionalities. The muse--to make use of the old-fashioned
phrase--had been rouged and bewigged, and put into high-heeled boots,
till she had lost the old majestic freedom of gait and energy of action.
Let us go back to our ancient school, to Milton and Shakespeare and
Spenser and Chaucer, and break the ignoble fetters imported from the
pseudo-classicists of France. These and similar phrases, repeated and
varied in a thousand forms, have become part of the stock-in-trade of
literary historians, and are put forward so fluently that we sometimes
forget to ask what it is precisely that they mean. Down to Milton, it is
assumed, we were natural; then we became artificial; and with the
Revolution we became natural again. That a theory so generally received
and so consciously adopted by the leaders of the new movement must have
in it a considerable amount of truth, is not to be disputed. But it is
sometimes not easy to interpret it into very plain language. The method
of explaining great intellectual and social movements by the phrase
'reaction' is a very tempting one, for the simple reason that it enables
us to effect a great saving of thought. The change is made to explain
itself. History becomes a record of oscillations; we are always swinging
backwards and forwards, pendulum fashion, from one extreme to another.
The courtiers of Charles II. were too dissolute because the Puritans
were too strict; Addison and Steele were respectable because Congreve
and Wycherley were licentious; Wesley was zealous because the Church had
become indifferent; the Revolution of 1789 was a reaction against the
manners of the last century, and the Revolution in running its course
set up a reaction against itself. Now it is easy enough to admit that
there is some truth in this theory. Every great man who moves his race
profoundly is of necessity protesting against the worst evils of the
time, and it is as true as a copy-book that zeal leads to extremes, and
one extreme to its opposite. A river flowing through a nearly level
plain turns its concavity alternately to the east and west, and we may
fairly explain each bend by the fact that the previous bend was in the
opposite direction. But that does not explain why the river flows
down-hill, nor show which direction tends downwards. We may account for
trifling oscillations, not for the main current. Nor does it seem at
first a self-evident proposition that vice, for example, necessarily
generates over-strictness. A man is not always a Pharisee because his
father has been a sinner. In fact, the people who talk so fluently about
reaction fall back whenever it suits them upon the inverse theory. If a
process happens to be continuous, the reason is as simple and
satisfactory as in the opposite case. A man is dissolute, they will tell
us, because his father was dissolute; just as they will tell us, in the
opposite case, that he was dissolute because his father was strict.
Obviously, the mere statement of a reaction is not by itself
satisfactory. We want to know why there should have been a reaction; why
the code of morals which satisfied one generation did not satisfy its
successors; why the coming man was repelled rather than attracted; what
it was that made Pope array himself in a wig instead of appreciating the
noble freedom of his predecessors; and why, again, at a given period men
became tired of the old wig business. When we have solved, or
approximated to a solution of, that problem, we shall generally find, I
suspect, that the action and reaction are generally more superficial
phenomena than we suppose, and that the great processes of evolution are
going on beneath the surface comparatively undisturbed by the changes
which first attract our notice. Every man naturally exaggerates the
share of his education due to himself. He fancies that he has made a
wonderful improvement upon his father's views, perhaps by reversing the
improvement made by the father on the grandfather's. He does not see,
what is plain enough to a more distant generation, that in reality each
generation is most closely bound to its nearest predecessors.
There is, too, a special source of ambiguity in the catchword used by
the revolutionary school. They spoke of a return to nature. What, to ask
once more a very troublesome question, is meant by nature? Does it mean
inanimate nature? If so, is a love of nature clearly good or 'natural?'
Was Wordsworth justifiable _primâ facie_ for telling us to study
mountains rather than Pope for announcing that
The proper study of mankind is man?
Is it not more natural to be interested in men than in mountains? Does
nature include man in his natural state? If so, what is the natural
state of man? Is the savage the man of nature, or the unsophisticated
peasant, or the man whose natural powers are developed to the highest
pitch? Is a native of the Andaman Islands the superior of Socrates? If
you admit that Socrates is superior to the savage, where do you draw the
line between the natural and the artificial? If a coral reef is natural
and beautiful because it is the work of insects, and a town artificial
and ugly because made by man, we must reject as unnatural all the best
products of the human race. If you distinguish between different works
of man, the distinction becomes irrelevant, for the products to which we
most object are just as natural, in any assignable sense of the word, as
those which we most admire. The word natural may indeed be used as
equivalent simply to beneficial or healthy; but then it loses all value
as an implicit test of what is and what is not beneficial. Probably,
indeed, some such sense was floating before the minds of most who have
used the term. We shall generally find a vague recognition of the fact
that there is a continuous series of integrating and disintegrating
processes; that some charges imply a normal development of the social or
individual organism leading to increased health and strength, whilst
others are significant of disease and ultimate obliteration or decay of
structure. Thus the artificial style of the Pope school, the appeals to
the muse, the pastoral affectation, and so forth, may be called
unnatural, because the philosophy of that style is the retention of
obsolete symbols after all vitality has departed, and when they
consequently become mere obstructions, embarrassing the free flow of
emotion which they once stimulated.