DEVELOPMENTS; SMOLLETT, STERNE AND OTHERS
The popularity of Richardson and Fielding showed itself in a
hearty public welcome: and also in that sincerest form of
flattery, imitation. Many authors began to write the new
fiction. Where once a definite demand is recognized in
literature, the supply, more or less machine-made, is sure to
follow.
In the short quarter of a century between "Pamela" and "The
Vicar of Wakefield," the Novel got its growth, passed out of
leading strings into what may fairly be called independence and
maturity: and by the time Goldsmith's charming little classic
was written, the shelves were comfortably filled with novels
recent or current, giving contemporary literature quite the air
so familiar to-day. Only a little later, we find the Gentleman's
Magazine, a trustworthy reporter of such matters, speaking of
"this novel-writing age." The words were written in 1773, a
generation after Richardson had begun the form. Still more
striking testimony, so far back as 1755, when Richardson's
maiden story was but a dozen years old, a writer in "The
Connoisseur" is facetiously proposing to establish a factory for
the fashioning of novels, with one, a master workman, to furnish
plots and subordinates to fill in the details--an anticipation
of the famous literary menage of Dumas pere.
Although there was, under these conditions, inevitable imitation
of the new model, there was a deeper reason for the rapid
development. The time was ripe for this kind of fiction: it was
in the air, as we have already tried to suggest. Hence, other
fiction-makers began to experiment with the form, this being
especially true of Smollett. Out of many novelists, feeble or
truly called, a few of the most important must be mentioned.
I
The Scotch-born Tobias Smollett published his first fiction,
"Roderick Random," eight years after "Pamela" had appeared, and
the year before "Tom Jones"; it was exactly contemporaneous with
"Clarissa Harlowe," A strict contemporary, then, with Richardson
and Fielding, he was also the ablest novelist aside from them, a
man whose work was most influential in the later development. It
is not unusual to dismiss him in a sentence as a coarser
Fielding. The characterization hits nearer the bull's eye than
is the rule with such sayings, and more vulgar than the greater
writer he certainly is, brutal where Fielding is vigorous: and
he exhibits and exaggerates the latter's tendencies to the
picaresque, the burlesque and the episodic. His fiction is of
the elder school in its loose fiber, its external method of
dealing with incident and character. There is little or nothing
in Smollett of the firm-knit texture and subjective analysis of
the moderns. Thus the resemblances are superficial, the
differences deeper-going and palpable. Smollett is often
violent, Fielding never: there is an impression of
cosmopolitanism in the former--a wider survey of life, if only
on the surface, is given in his books. By birth, Smollett was of
the gentry; but by the time he was twenty he had seen service as
Surgeon's Mate in the British navy, and his after career as Tory
Editor, at times in prison, literary man and traveler who
visited many lands and finally, like Fielding, died abroad in
Italy, was checkered enough to give him material and to spare
for the changeful bustle, so rife with action and excitement, of
his four principal stories. Like the American Cooper, he drew
upon his own experiences for his picture of the navy; and like a
later American, Dr. Holmes, was a physician who could speak by
the card of that side of life.
Far more closely than Fielding he followed the "Gil Blas" model,
depending for interest primarily upon adventures by the way,
moving accidents by flood and field. He declares, in fact, his
intention to use Le Sage as a literary father and he translated
"Gil Blas." In striking contrast, too, with Fielding is the
interpretation of life one gets from his books; with the author
of "Tom Jones" we feel, what we do in greater degree with
Shakespeare and Balzac, that the personality of the fiction-maker
is healthily merged in his characters, in the picture of
life. But in the case of Dr. Smollett, there is a strongly
individual satiric bias: less of that largeness which sees the
world from an unimplicated coign of vantage, whence the open-eyed,
wise-minded spectator finds it a comedy breeding laughter
under thoughtful brows. We seem to be getting not so much scenes
of life as an author's setting of the scene for his own private
reasons. Such is at least the occasional effect of Smollett.
Also is there more of bitterness, of savagery in him: and where
Fielding was broad and racily frank in his handling of delicate
themes, this fellow is indecent with a kind of hardness and
brazenness which are amazing. The difference between plain-speaking
and unclean speaking could hardly be better
illustrated. It should be added, in justice, that even Smollett
is rarely impure with the alluring saliency of certain modern
fiction.
In the first story, "The Adventures of Roderick Random" (the
cumbrous full titles of earlier fiction are for apparent reasons
frequently curtailed in the present treatment), published when
the author was twenty-seven, he avails himself of a residence of
some years in Jamaica to depict life in that quarter of the
world at a time when the local color had the charm of novelty.
The story is often credited with being autobiographic, as a
novelist's first book is likely to be; since, by popular belief,
there is one story in all of us, namely, our own. Its
description of the hero's hard knocks does, indeed, suggest the
fate of a man so stormily quarrelsome throughout his days: for
this red-headed Scot, this "hack of genius," as Henley
picturesquely calls him, was naturally a fighting man and,
whether as man or author, attacks or repels sharply: there is
nothing uncertain in the effect he makes. His loud vigor is as
pronounced as that of a later Scot like Carlyle; yet he stated
long afterward that the likeness between himself and Roderick
was slight and superficial. The fact that the tale is written in
the first person also helps the autobiographic theory: that
method of story-making always lends a certain credence to the
narrative. The scenes shift from western Scotland to the streets
of London, thence to the West Indies: and the interest (the
remark applies to all Smollett's work) lies in just three
things--adventure, diversity of character, and the realistic
picture of contemporary life--especially that of the navy on a
day when, if Smollett is within hailing distance of the facts,
it was terribly corrupt. Too much credit can hardly be given him
for first using, so effectively too, the professional sea-life
of his country: a motive so richly productive since through
Marryat down to Dana, Herman Melville, Clark Russell and many
other favorite writers, both British and American. In Smollett's
hands, it is a strange muddle of religion, farce and smut, but
set forth with a vivid particularity and a gusto f high spirits
which carry the reader along, willy-nilly. Such a book might be
described by the advertisement of an old inn: "Here is
entertainment for man and beast." As to characterization, if a
genius for it means the creation of figures which linger in the
familiar memory of mankind, Smollett must perforce be granted
the faculty; here in his first book are Tom Bowling and Strap--to
name two--the one (like Richardson's Lovelace) naming a type:
the other standing for the country innocent, the meek fidus
Achates, both as good as anything of the same class in Fielding.
The Welsh mate, Mr. Morgan, for another of the sailor sort, is
also excellent. The judgment may be eccentric, but for myself
the character parts in Smollett's dramas seem for variety and
vividness often superior to those of Fielding. The humor at its
best is very telling. The portraits, or caricatures, of living
folk added to the story's immediate vogue, but injure it as a
permanent contribution to fiction.
A fair idea of the nature of the attractions offered (and at the
same time a clear indication of the sort of fiction manufactured
by the doughty doctor) may be gleaned from the following
precis--Smollett's own--of Chapter XXXVIII: "I get up and crawl
into a barn where I am in danger of perishing through the fear of
the country people. Their inhumanity. I am succored by a reputed
witch. Her story. Her advice. She recommends me as a valet to a
single lady whose character she explains." This promises pretty
fair reading: of course, we wish to read on and to learn more of
that single lady and the hero's relation to her. Such a motive,
which might be called, "The Mistakes of a Night," with details
too crude and physical to allow of discussion, is often
overworked by Smollett (as, in truth, it is by Fielding, to
modern taste): the eighteenth century had not yet given up the
call of the Beast in its fiction--an element of bawdry was still
welcome in the print offered reputable folk.
The style of Smollett in his first fiction, and in general, has
marked dramatic flavor: his is a gift of forthright phrase, a
plain, vernacular smack characterizes his diction. To go back to
him now is to be surprised perhaps at the racy vigor of so
faulty a writer and novelist. A page or so of Smollett, after a
course in present-day popular fiction, reads very much like a
piece of literature. In this respect, he seems full of flavor,
distinctly of the major breed: there is an effect of passing
from attenuated parlor tricks into the open, when you take him
up. Here, you can but feel, is a masculine man of letters, even
if it is his fate to play second fiddle to Fielding.
Smollett's initial story was a pronounced success with the
public--and he aired an arrogant joy and pooh-poohed
insignificant rivals like Fielding. His hand was against every
man's when it came to the question of literary prowess; and like
many authors before and since, one of his first acts upon the
kind reception of "Roderick Random," was to get published his
worthless blank-verse tragedy, "The Regicide," which, refused by
Garrick, had till then languished in manuscript and was an ugly
duckling beloved of its maker. Then came Novel number two, "The
Adventures of Peregrine Pickle," three years after the first: an
unequal book, best at its beginning and end, full of violence,
not on the whole such good art-work as the earlier fiction, yet
very fine in spots and containing such additional sea-dogs as
Commodore Trunnion and Lieutenant Hatchway, whose presence makes
one forgive much. The original preface contained a scurrilous
reference to Fielding, against whom he printed a diatribe in a
pamphlet dated the next year. The hero of the story, a handsome
ne'er-do-well who has money and position to start the world
with, encounters plenty of adventure in England and out of it,
by land and sea. There is an episodic book, "Memoirs, supposed
to be written by a lady of quality," and really giving the
checkered career of Lady Vane, a fast gentlewoman of the time,
done for pay at her request, which is illustrative of the loose
state of fictional art in its unrelated, lugged-in character:
and as well of eighteenth century morals in its drastic details.
We have seen that Fielding was frankly episodic in handling a
story; Smollett goes him one better: as may most notoriously be
seen also in the unmentionable Miss Williams' story in "Roderick
Random"--in fact, throughout his novels. Pickle, to put it
mildly, is not an admirable young man. An author's conception of
his hero is always in some sort a give-away: it expresses his
ideals; that Smollett's are sufficiently low-pitched, may be
seen here. Plainly, to, he likes Peregrine, and not so much
excuses his failings as overlooks them entirely.
After a two years' interval came "The Adventures of Ferdinand,
Count Fathom," which was not liked by his contemporaries and is
now seen to be definitely the poorest of the quartette. It is
enough to say of it that Fathom is an unmitigable scoundrel and
the story, mixed romance and melodrama, offers the reader dust
and ashes instead of good red blood. It lacks the comic verve of
Smollett's typical fiction and manipulates virtue and vice in
the cut-and-dried style of the penny-dreadful. Even its attempts
at the sensational leave the modern reader, bred on such
heavenly fare as is proffered by Stevenson and others,
indifferent-cold.
It is a pleasure to turn from it to what is generally conceded
to be the best novel he wrote, as it is his last: "The
Expedition of Humphrey Clinker," which appeared nearly twenty
years later, when the author was fifty years old. "The
Adventures of Sir Launcelot Graves," written in prison a decade
earlier, and a poor satire in the vein of Cervantes, can be
ignored, it falls so much below Smollett's main fiction. He had
gone for his health's sake to Italy and wrote "Humphrey Clinker"
at Leghorn, completing it only within a few weeks of his death.
For years he had been degenerating as a writer, his physical
condition was of the worst: it looked as if his life was quite
over. Yet, by a sort of leaping-up of the creative flame out of
the dying embers of the hearth, he wrought his masterpiece.
It was thrown into letter form, Richardson's framework, and has
all of Smollett's earlier power of characterization and brusque
wit, together with a more genial, mellower tone, that of an
older man not soured but ripened by the years. Some of its main
scenes are enacted in his native Scotland and possibly this
meant strength for another Scot, as it did for Sir Walter and
Stevenson. The kinder interpretation of humanity in itself makes
the novel better reading to later taste; so much can not
honestly be said for its plain speaking, for as Henley says in
language which sounds as if it were borrowed from the writer he
is describing, "the stinks and nastinesses are done with
peculiar gusto." The idea of the story, as usual a pivot around
which to revolve a series of adventures, is to narrate how a
certain bachelor, country gentleman, Matthew Bramble, a malade
imaginaire, yet good-hearted and capable of big laughter--"the
most risible misanthrope ever met with," as he is limned by one
of the persons of the story--travels in England, Wales and
Scotland in pursuit of health, taking with him his family, of
whom the main members include his sister, Tabitha (and her maid,
Jenkins), and his nephew, not overlooking the dog, Chowder.
Clinker, who names the book, is a subsidiary character, merely a
servant in Bramble's establishment. The crotchety Bramble and
his acidulous sister, who is a forerunner of Mrs. Malaprop in
the unreliability of her spelling, and Lieutenant Lishmahago,
who has been complimented as the first successful Scotchman in
fiction--all these are sketched with a verity and in a vein of
genuine comic invention which have made them remembered.
Violence, rage, filth--Smollett's besetting sins--are forgotten
or forgiven in a book which has so much of the flavor and
movement of life, The author's medical lore is made good use of
in the humorous descriptions of poor Bramble's ailments.
Incidentally, the story defends the Scotch against the English
in such a pronounced way that Walpole calls it a "part novel";
and there is, moreover, a pleasant love story interwoven with
the comedy and burlesque. One feels in leaving this fiction that
with all allowance for his defects, there is more danger of
undervaluing the author's powers and place in the modern Novel
than the reverse.
Fielding and Smollett together set the pace for the Novel of
blended incident and character: both were, as sturdy realists,
reactionary from the sentimental analysis of Richardson and
express an instinct contrary to the self-conscious pathos of a
Sterne or the idyllic romanticism of a Goldsmith. Both were
directly of influence upon the Novel's growth in the nineteenth
century: Fielding especially upon Thackeray, Smollett upon
Dickens. If Smollett had served the cause in no other way than
in his strong effect upon the author of "The Pickwick Papers,"
he would deserve well of all critics: how the little Copperfield
delighted in that scant collection of books on his father's
bookshelf, where were "Roderick Random," "Peregrine Pickle" and
"Humphrey Clinker," along with "Tom Jones," "The Vicar of
Wakefield," "Gil Blas" and "Robinson Crusoe"--"a glorious host,"
says he, "to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy and my
hope of something beyond that time and place." And of Smollett's
characters, who seem to have charmed him more than Fielding's,
he declares: "I have seen Tom Pipes go clambering up the
church-steeple: I have watched Strap with the knapsack on his back
stopping to rest himself upon the wicket gate: and I know that
Commodore Trunnion held that Club with Mr. Pickle in the parlor
of our little village ale house." Children are shrewd critics,
in their way, and what an embryo Charles Dickens likes in
fiction is not to be slighted. But as we have seen, Smollett can
base his claims to our sufferance not by indirection through
Dickens, but upon his worth; many besides the later and greater
novelist have a liking for this racy writer of adventure, and
creator of English types, who was recognized by Walter Scott as
of kin to the great in fiction.
II
In the fast-developing fiction of the late eighteenth century,
the possible ramifications of the Novel from the parent tree of
Richardson enriched it with the work of Sterne, Swift and
Goldsmith. They added imaginative narratives of one sort or
another, which increased the content of the form by famous
things and exercised some influence in shaping it. The remark
has in mind "Tristram Shandy," "Gulliver's Travels" and "The
Vicar of Wakefield." And yet, no one of the three was a Novel in
the sense in which the evolution of the word has been traced,
nor yet are the authors strictly novelists.
Laurence Sterne, at once man of the world and clergyman, with
Rabelais as a model, and himself a master of prose, possessing
command of humor and pathos, skilled in character sketch and
essay-philosophy, is not a novelist at all. His aim Is not to
depict the traits or events of contemporary society, but to put
forth the views of the Reverend Laurence Sterne, Yorkshire
parson, with many a quaint turn and whimsical situation under a
thin disguise of story-form. Of his two books, "Tristram Shandy"
and "The Sentimental Journey," unquestionable classics, both, in
their field, there is no thought of plot or growth or objective
realization: the former is a delightful tour de force in which a
born essayist deals with the imaginary fortunes of a person he
makes as interesting before his birth as after it, and in
passing, sketches some characters dear to posterity: first and
foremost, Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim. It is all pure play of
wit, fancy and wisdom, beneath the comic mask--a very frolic of
the mind. In the second book the framework is that of the
travel-sketch and the treatment more objective: a fact which,
along with its dubious propriety, may account for its greater
popularity. But much of the charm comes, as before, from the
writer's touch, his gift of style and ability to unloose in the
essay manner a unique individuality.
In his life Sterne, like Swift, exhibited most un-clerical
traits of worldliness and in his work there is the refined,
suggestive indelicacy, not to say indecency, which we are in the
habit nowadays of charging against the French, and which is so
much worse than the bluff, outspoken coarseness of a Fielding or
a Smollett. At times the line between Sterne and Charles Lamb is
not so easy to draw in that, from first to last, the elder is an
essayist and humorist, while the younger has so much of the
eighteenth century in his feeling and manner. In these modern
times, when so many essayists appear in the guise of fiction-makers,
we can see that Sterne is really the leader of the
tribe: and it is not hard to show how neither he nor they are
novelists divinely called. They (and he) may be great, but it is
another greatness. The point is strikingly illustrated by the
statement that Sterne was eight years publishing the various
parts of "Tristram Shandy," and a man of forty-six when he began
to do so. Bona fide novels are not thus written. Constructively,
the work is a mad farrago; but the end quite justifies the
means. Thus, while his place in letters is assured, and the
touch of the cad in him (Goldsmith called him "the blackguard
parson") should never blind us to his prime merits, his
significance for our particular study--the study of the modern
Novel in its development--is comparatively slight. Like all
essayists of rank he left memorable passages: the world never
tires of "God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb," and pays it
the high compliment of ascribing it to holy writ: nor will the
scene where the recording angel blots out Uncle Toby's generous
oath with a tear, fade from the mind; nor that of the same
kindly gentleman letting go the big fly which has, to his
discomfiture, been buzzing about his nose at dinner: "'Go,' says
he, lifting up the latch and opening his hand as he spoke to let
it escape. 'Go, poor devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt
thee? The world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and
me'"--a touch so modern as to make Sterne seem a century later
than Fielding. These are among the precious places of
literature. This eighteenth century divine has in advance of his
day the subtler sensibility which was to grow so strong in later
fiction: and if he be sentimental too, he gives us a
sentimentality unlike the solemn article of Richardson, because
of its French grace and its relief of delicious humor.
III
Swift chronologically precedes Sterne, for in 1726, shortly
after "Robinson Crusoe" and a good fifteen years before
"Pamela," he gave the world that unique lucubration, "Gulliver's
Travels," allegory, satire and fairy story all in one. It is
certainly anything but a novel. One of the giants of English
letters, doing many things and exhibiting a sardonic personality
that seems to peer through all his work, Swift's contribution to
the coming Novel was above all the use of a certain grave,
realistic manner of treating the impossible: a service, however,
shared with Defoe. He gives us in a matter-of-fact chronicle
style the marvelous happenings of Gulliver in Lilliputian land
or in that of the Brobdingnagians. He and Defoe are to be
regarded as pioneers who suggested to the literary world, just
before the Novel's advent, that the attraction of a new form and
a new method, the exploitation of the truth that, "The proper
study of mankind is man," could not (and should not) kill the
love of romance, for the good and sufficient reason that romance
meant imagination, illusion, charm, poetry. And in due season,
after the long innings enjoyed by realism with its triumphs of
analysis and superfaithful transcriptions of the average life of
man, we shall behold the change of mood which welcomes back the
older appeal of fiction.
IV
It was the enlargement of this sense of romance which Oliver
Goldsmith gave his time in that masterpiece in small, "The Vicar
of Wakefield": his special contribution to the plastic
variations connected with the growing pains of the Novel.
Whether regarded as poet, essayist, dramatist or story-maker,
Dr. Goldsmith is one of the best-loved figures of English
letters, as Swift is one of the most terrible. And these lovable
qualities are nowhere more conspicuous than in the idyllic
sketch of the country clergyman and his family. Romance it
deserves to be called, because of the delicate idealization in
the setting and in the portrayal of the Vicar himself--a man who
not only preached God's love, "but first he followed it
himself." And yet the book--which, by the bye, was published in
1766 just as the last parts of "Tristram Shandy" were appearing
in print--offers a good example of the way in which the more
romantic depiction of life, in the hands of a master, inevitably
blends with realistic details, even with a winning truthfulness
of effect. Some of the romantic charm of "The Vicar of
Wakefield," we must remember, inheres in its sympathetic
reproduction of vanished manners, etiquette and social grace; a
sweet old-time grace, a fragrance out of the past, emanates from
the memory of it if read half a lifetime ago. An elder age is
rehabilitated for us by its pages, even as it is by the canvases
of Romney and Sir Joshua. And with this more obvious romanticism
goes the deeper romanticism that comes from the interpretation
of humanity, which assumes it to be kindly and gentle and noble
in the main. Life, made up of good and evil as it is, is,
nevertheless, seen through this affectionate time-haze, worth
the living. Whatever their individual traits, an air of country
peace and innocence hovers over the Primrose household: the
father and mother, the girls, Olivia and Sophia, and the two
sons, George and Moses, they all seem equally generous,
credulous and good. We feel that the author is living up to a
announcement in the opening chapter which of itself is a sort of
promise of the idealized treatment of poor human nature. But
into this pretty and perfect scene of domestic felicity come
trouble and disgrace: the serpent creeps into the unsullied
nest, the villain, Thorn-hill, ruins Olivia, their house burns,
and the softhearted, honorable father is haled to prison. There
is no blinking the darker side of mortal experience. And the
prison scenes, with their noble teaching with regard to penal
punishment, showing Goldsmith far in advance of his age, add
still further to the shadows. Yet the idealization is there,
like an atmosphere, and through it all, shining and serene, is
Dr. Primrose to draw the eye to the eternal good. We smile
mayhap at his simplicity but note at the same time that his
psychology is sound: the influence of his sermonizing upon the
jailbirds is true to experience often since tested. Nor are
satiric side-strokes in the realistic vein wanting--as in the
drawing of such a high lady of quality as Miss Carolina
Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs--the very name sending our thoughts
forward to Thackeray. In the final analysis it will be found
that what makes the work a romance is its power to quicken the
sense of the attraction, the beauty of simple goodness through
the portrait of a noble man whose environment is such as best to
bring out his qualities. Dr. Primrose is humanity, if not
actual, potential: he can be, if he never was. A helpful
comparison might be instituted between Goldsmith's country
clergyman and Balzac's country doctor in the novel of that name;
another notable attempt at the idealization of a typical man of
one of the professions. It would bring out the difference
between the late eighteenth and the middle nineteenth centuries,
as well as that between a great novelist, Balzac, and a great
English writer, Goldsmith, who yet is not a novelist at all. It
should detract no whit from one's delight in such a work as "The
Vicar of Wakefield" to acknowledge that its aim is not to depict
society as it then existed, but to give a pleasurable abstract
of human nature for the purpose of reconciling us through art
with life, when lived so sanely, simply and sweetly as by
Primrose of gentle memory. Seldom has the divine quality of the
forgiveness of sins been portrayed with more salutary effect
than in the scene where the erring and errant Olivia is taken
back to the heart of her father--just as the hard-headed
landlady would drive her forth with the words:
"'Out I say! Pack out this moment! tramp, thou impudent
strumpet, or I'll give thee a mark that won't be better for
this three months. What! you trumpery, to come and take up
an honest house without cross or coin to bless yourself
with! Come along, I say.'
"I flew to her rescue while the woman was dragging her along
by her hair, and I caught the dear forlorn wretch in my
arms. 'Welcome, anyway welcome, my dearest lost one, my
treasure, to your poor old father's bosom. Though the
vicious forsake thee, there is yet one in the world who
will never forsake thee; though thou hadst ten thousand
crimes to answer for, he will forget them all!'"
Set beside this father the fathers of Clarissa and Sophia
Western, and you have the difference between the romance and
realism that express opposite moods; the mood that shows the
average and the mood that shows the best. For portraiture, then,
rather than plot, for felicity of manner and sweetness of
interpretation we praise such a work;--qualities no less
precious though not so distinctively appertaining to the Novel.
It may be added, for a minor point, that the Novel type as
already developed had assumed a conventional length which would
preclude "The Vicar of Wakefield" from its category, making it a
sketch or novelette. The fiction-makers rapidly came to realize
that for their particular purpose--to portray a complicated
piece of contemporary life--more leisurely movement and hence
greater space are necessary to the best result. To-day any
fiction under fifty thousand words would hardly be called a
novel in the proper sense,--except in publishers'
advertisements. Goldsmith's story does not exceed such limits.
Therefore, although we may like it all the more because it is a
romantic sketch rather than a novel proper, we must grant that
its share in the eighteenth century shaping of the form is but
ancillary. The fact that the book upon its appearance awakened
no such interest as waited upon the fiction of Richardson or
Fielding a few years before, may be taken to mean that the taste
was still towards the more photographic portrayals of average
contemporary humanity. Several editions, to be sure, were issued
the year of its publication, but without much financial success,
and contemporary criticism found little remarkable in this
permanent contribution to English literature. Later, it was
beloved both of the elect and the general. Goethe's testimony to
the strong and wholesome effect of the book upon him in his
formative period, is remembered. Dear old Dr. Johnson too
believed in the story, for, summoned to Goldsmith's lodging by
his friend's piteous appeal for help, he sends a guinea in
advance and on arrival there, finds his colleague in high choler
because, forsooth, his landlady has arrested him for his rent:
whereupon Goldsmith (who had already expended part of the guinea
in a bottle of Madeira) displays a manuscript,--"a novel ready
for the press," as we read in Boswell; and Johnson--"I looked
into it and saw its merit," says he--goes out and sells it for
sixty pounds, whereupon Goldsmith paid off his obligation, and
with his mercurial Irish nature had a happy evening, no doubt,
with his chosen cronies! It is a sordid, humorous-tragic Grub
Street beginning for one of the little immortals of letters--so
many of which, alack! have a similar birth.
Certain other authors less distinguished than these, produced
fiction of various kinds which also had some influence in the
development, and further illustrate the tendency of the Novel to
become a pliable medium for literary expression; a sort of net
wherein divers fish might be caught. Dr. Johnson, essayist,
critic, coffee-house dictator, published the same year that
Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" began to appear, his "Rasselas,
Prince of Abyssinia"; a stately elegiac on the vanity of human
pleasures, in which the Prince leaves his idyllic home and goes
into the world to test its shams, only to return to his kingdom
with the sad knowledge that it is the better part of wisdom in
this vale of tears to prepare for heaven. Of course this is
fiction only in seeming and by courtesy, almost as far removed
from the Novel as the same author's mammoth dictionary or Lives
of the Poets. It has Richardson's method of moralizing, while
lacking that writer's power of studying humanity in its social
relations. The sturdy genius of Dr. Johnson lay in quite other
directions.
Richardson's sentimentality, too, was carried on by MacKenzie in
his "Man of Feeling" already mentioned as the favorite
tear-begetter of its time, the novel which made the most prolonged
attack upon the lachrymosal gland. But it is only fair to this
author to add that there was a welcome note of philanthropy in
his story--in spite of its mawkishness; his appeal for the under
dog in great cities is a forecast of the humanitarianism to
become rampant in later fiction.
Again, the seriousness which has always, in one guise or the
other, underlain English fiction, soon crystalized in the
contemporary eighteenth century novelists into an attempt to
preach this or that by propaganda in story-form. William Godwin,
whose relations as father-in-law to Shelley gives him a not
altogether agreeable place in our memory, was a leader in this
tendency with several fictions, the best known and most readable
being "Caleb Williams": radical ideas, social, political and
religious, were mooted by half a dozen earnest-souled authors
whose works are now regarded as links in the chain of
development--missing links for most readers of fiction, since
their literary quality is small. In later days, this kind of
production was to be called purpose fiction and condemned or
applauded according to individual taste and the esthetic and
vital value of the book. When the moralizing overpowered all
else, we get a book like that friend of childhood, "Sanford and
Merton," which Thomas Day perpetrated in the year of grace 1783.
Few properly reared boys of a generation ago escaped this
literary indiscretion: its Sunday School solemnity, its
distribution of life's prizes according to the strictest moral
tests, had a sort of bogey fascination; it was much in vogue
long after Day's time, indeed down to within our own memories.
Perhaps it is still read and relished in innocent corners of the
earth.. In any case it is one of the outcomes of the movement
just touched upon.
At present, being more ennuye in our tastes for fiction than
were our forefathers, and the pretence of piety being less a
convention, we incline to insist more firmly that the pill at
least be sugar-coated,--if indeed we submit to physic at all.
There was also a tendency during the second half of the
eighteenth century--very likely only half serious and hardly
more than a literary fad--toward the romance of mystery and
horror. Horace Walpole, the last man on earth from whom one
would expect the romantic and sentimental, produced in his
"Castle of Otranto" such a book; and Mrs. Radcliffe's "The
Mystery of Udolpho" (standing for numerous others) manipulated
the stage machinery of this pseudo-romantic revival and
reaction; moonlit castles, medieval accessories, weird sounds
and lights at the dread midnight hour,--an attack upon the
reader's nerves rather than his sensibilities, much the sort of
paraphernalia employed with a more spiritual purpose and effect
in our own day by the dramatist, Maeterlinck. Beckford's
"Vathek" and Lewis' "The Monk" are variations upon this theme,
which for a while was very popular and is decidedly to be seen
in the work of the first novelist upon American soil, Charles
Brockden Brown, whose somber "Wieland," read with the Radcliffe
school in mind, will reveal its probable parentage. We have seen
how the movement was happily satirized by its natural enemy,
Jane Austen. Few more enjoyable things can be quoted than this
conversation from "Northanger Abbey" between two typical young
ladies of the time:--
'But, my dearest Catherine, what have you been doing with
yourself all this morning? Have you gone on with Udolpho?'
'Yes, I have been reading it ever since I woke; and I am
got to the black veil.'
'Are you, indeed? How delightful! Oh! I would not tell you
what is behind the black veil for the world! Are you not
wild to know?'
'Oh! yes, quite; what can it be? But do not tell me; I
would not be told upon any account. I know it must be a
skeleton; I am sure it is Laurentina's skeleton. Oh! I am
delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole
life in reading it, I assure you; if it had not been to
meet you, I would not have come away from it for all the
world.'
'Dear creature! how much I am obliged to you; and when you
have finished Udolpho, we will read the Italian together;
and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the
same kind for you.'
'Have you, indeed! How glad I am! What are they all?'
'I will read you their names directly; here they are in my
pocket-book. "Castle of Wolfenbach," "Clermont,"
"Mysterious Warnings," "Necromancer of the Black Forest,"
"Midnight Bell," "Orphan of the Rhine," and "Horrid Mysteries."
Those will last us some time.'
'Yes; pretty well; but are they all horrid? Are you sure
they are all horrid?'
'Yes, quite sure; for a particular friend of mine, a Miss
Andrews, a sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the
world, has read every one of them.'
After all, human nature is constant, independent of time; and
fashions social, mental, literary, return like fashions in
feminine headgear! Two club women were coming from a city play
house after hearing a particularly lugubrious drama of Ibsen's,
and one was overheard exclaiming to the other: "O isn't Ibsen
just lovely! He does so take the hope out of life!"
Yet the tendency of eighteenth century fiction, with its
handling of the bizarre and sensational, its use of occult
effects of the Past and Present, was but an eddy in a current
which was setting strong and steadily toward the realistic
portrayal of contemporary society.
One other tendency, expressive of a lighter mood, an attempt to
represent society a la mode, is also to be noted during this
half century so crowded with interesting manifestations of a new
spirit; and they who wrote it were mostly women. It is a
remarkable fact that for the fifty years between Sterne and
Scott, the leading novelists were of that sex, four of whom at
least, Burney, Radcliffe, Edgeworth and Austen, were of
importance. Of this group the lively Fanny Burney is the
prophet; she is the first woman novelist of rank. Her "Evelina,"
with its somewhat starched gentility and simpering sensibility,
was once a book to conjure with; it fluttered the literary
dovecotes in a way not so easy to comprehend to-day. Yet Dr.
Johnson loved his "little Burney" and greatly admired her work,
and there are entertaining and without question accurate
pictures of the fashionable London at the time of the American
Revolution drawn by an observer of the inner circle, in her
"Evelina" and "Cecilia"; one treasures them for their fresh
spirit and lively humor, nor looks in them for the more serious
elements of good fiction. She contributes, modestly, to that
fiction to which we go for human documents. No one who has been
admitted to the privileges of Miss Burney's Diary can fail to
feel that a woman who commands such idiom is easily an adept in
the realistic dialogue of the novel. Here, even more than in her
own novels or those of Richardson and Fielding, we hear the
exact syllable and intonation of contemporary speech. "Mr.
Cholmondeley is a clergyman," she writes, "nothing shining
either in person or manners but rather somewhat grim in the
first and glum in the last." And again: "Our confab was
interrupted by the entrance of Mr. King," or yet again: "The
joke is, the people speak as if they were afraid of me, instead
of my being afraid of them.... Next morning, Mrs. Thrale asked
me if I did not want to see Mrs. Montagu? I truly said I should
be the most insensible of animals not to like to see our sex's
glory." It is hard to realize that this was penned in the
neighborhood of one hundred and fifty years ago, so modern is
its sound.
A great writer, with a wider scope and a more incisive satire,
is Maria Edgeworth, whose books take us over into the nineteenth
century. The lighter, more frivolous aspects of English high
society are admirably portrayed in her "Belinda" and eight or
ten other tales: and she makes a still stronger claim to
permanent remembrance in such studies of Irish types, whether in
England or on the native soil, as "The Absentee" and "Castle
Rackrent." I venture the statement that even the jaded novel
reader of to-day will find on a perusal of either of these
capital stories that Miss Edgeworth makes literature, and that a
pleasure not a penance is in store. She first in English fiction
exploited the better-class Irishman at home and her scenes have
historic value. Some years later, Susan Ferrier, who enjoyed the
friendship of Scott, wrote under the stimulus of Maria
Edgeworth's example a series of clever studies of Scotch life,
dashed with decided humor and done with true observation.
These women, with their quick eye and facile ability to report
what they saw, and also their ease of manner which of itself
seems like a social gift, were but the prelude to the work so
varied, gifted and vastly influential, which the sex was to do
in the modern Novel; so that, at present, in an open field and
no favors given, they are honorable rivals of men, securing
their full share of public favor. And the English Novel, written
by so many tentatively during these fifty years when the form
was a-shaping, culminates at the turn of the century in two
contrasted authors compared with whom all that went before seems
but preparatory; one a man, the other a woman, who together
express and illustrate most conveniently for this study the main
movements of modern fiction,--romance and realism,--the instinct
for truth and the instinct for beauty; not necessarily an
antagonism, as we shall have ample occasion to see, since truth,
rightly defined, is only "beauty seen from another side." It
hardly needs to add that these two novelists are Jane Austen and
Walter Scott.