I.
The Great Novelists.
The novel, since the days of the mediaeval romances, and the Elizabethan prose stories from Sidney\'s "Arcadia" to the tales of Greene and Nash, was never quite unrepresented in England, for example, there were translations and imitations of the huge French "Heroic" romances; Bunyan\'s stories are religious and moral novels, and under the Restoration Mrs. Aphra Behn (1640-1689) wrote short novels of love which do not quite deserve the bad reputation conferred on them by an anecdote told by Sir Walter Scott. Eliza Haywood (1693-1756) was prolific in prose tales, and is the author of a little romance of Prince Charles\'s adventures in 1749-1750, disguised as "A Letter of H— G—," Henry Goring, the Prince\'s equerry. But in literary circles, the novel was held in as high disdain as it was later, before Scott produced "Waverley" (1814).
The novel of modern life, manners, and sentiment first came to its own as the universal joy of reading mankind in Richardson\'s "Pamela"; advertised as it was, in modern fashion from the pulpits of all denominations.
Samuel Richardson, the son of a Yorkshire joiner, was born in 1689, and after being educated at the Charterhouse was apprenticed to a London printer. As a boy he made small sums by writing love-letters for maid-servants and others who were unable to write for themselves; and when, as a middle-aged man, he turned to writing novels, he cast them in the form of letters.[Pg 459] "Pamela," which he began to publish in 1740, is the story of a girl who is a waiting-maid to a lady and is persecuted by her mistress\'s son; in the end he marries her and becomes a model husband. It may annoy us from the very strange and unnatural way in which all the characters behave. Pamela strikes us less as a being of equal innocence and virtue, mistress of her own passion for "the dear obliger," Mr. B. (only the initial is given), than as a young woman who knows her game and plays her cards most adroitly. Her snobbishness was, no doubt, in the manner of her class in her day, but we approve of Pamela no more than Fielding did, when he overwhelmed it with the sturdy laughter of his parody, "Joseph Andrews," brother of Pamela, and as virtuous as that paragon, yet no milksop. But "Pamela" was admired beyond "this side idolatry".
"Clarissa" (1748) is another novel of Virtue in danger and distress, but Clarissa is a lady of good family and fortune, and of a pure and heroic spirit. Decoyed from her home and friends by the wiles of the professional seducer, Lovelace, a rake so brilliant and witty and reckless as to win the hearts, if not of Clarissa, of all Richardson\'s lady readers, Clarissa is exposed to the last extreme of misery, steadily refuses to marry the scoundrel who has wronged her, and dies slowly among the sobs of the congregation.
"Sir Charles Grandison," whose name has become a proverb in the English language, appeared in 1753, and is one of the longest books that ever was printed. It is very badly constructed too, and contains lengthy episodes which have nothing to do with the story, and only puzzle and confuse the reader. Properly speaking it is not so much a novel as a series of incidents, all tending to the glorification of the hero, who is made up of long words, fine sentiments and whalebone. The women of the tale are less exasperating than the men, though they can hardly be considered attractive. The reason of this may be found in the fact that Richardson neither sought nor was sought by men, while he was in the habit of reading his manuscripts to a group of enthusiastic young ladies (among whom was the future Mrs. Chapone) in his garden at Fulham. Unluckily his audience, who might have been of service to him in pointing out that well-bred people[Pg 460] had other manners than those of the characters of Richardson, were too deeply engulfed in admiration to be capable of criticism; or possibly they may not have been aware, as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was, that Richardson did not know the society which he described. The letters themselves, besides showing a frankness and lack of reticence which it may confidently be said few real letters could ever parallel, are of a length which even on a desert island no one could write. The genuine letters in his correspondence, between him and the unknown but worshipping Lady Bradshaigh, and their romantic and elaborate arrangements to discover each other in Hyde Park, are far more amusing reading. Richardson has been accused, and justly, of a portentous lack of humour, but if his reader has any of his own, he will not read the novels in vain.
These censures are the candid criticism of the modern reader who finds that he cannot think himself back into the circle of Richardson, who finds its Virtue and its Sentiment hardly intelligible, though he is entirely at home with the society of all degrees that Fielding describes, or that lives in Boswell\'s "Life of Johnson," and in the "Letters" of Horace Walpole and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, expressing themselves like people of this world. But though Richardson lived in a kind of moral and sentimental hothouse, where one can scarcely breathe; though he had a more than feminine liking for accumulated minutenesses of details and a more than mediaeval prolixity; yet his full-length pictures of his personages, stippled like a miniature in a ring, delighted not only English but continental, especially French readers. It was an age when people took little exercise, were little in the open air, and passed endless hours in conversation on the ethics and philosophy of love and sentiment. The Memoirs of Madame d\'épinay are partly a romance in the manner of Richardson, and to read them is to understand the society which found in him its ideal novelist. "The man would hang himself who tried to read \'Clarissa\' for its story," said Dr. Johnson, a friend of the author, partly because the author was the friend of Virtue. We, if we please, may detest and disbelieve in Lovelace, who was, none the less, the conqueror of the hearts of the ladies of the time, that implored[Pg 461] Richardson to convert a hero so brilliant, witty and amiable. But for Richardson it had been enough to convert Mr. B., and he was artist enough to refuse to gratify tastes which, in the manner of Charles II., demanded that all tragedies should end happily. Scott, with the resurrection of Athelstane; Dickens, with the conversion of Estella, were more good-naturedly and erroneously amenable to the requests of friends.
There was a blush between Charles Lamb and the girl who sat down beside him to read "Pamela," and, in fact, Richardson\'s way of educating girls in virtue may seem apt to have effects which he did not contemplate. Other times, other manners.
Henry Fielding.
To say anything at once new and true about Henry Fielding passes the power of man. His defects and his qualities; the good in him and in his work, and the not so good, are so conspicuous that his contemporaries, and later generations down to our own, have passed on them the same remarks. There are the admirers of Fielding, who justly see in him one of the three very greatest of English novelists of contemporary life and manners as exhibited in the portions of society which he knew and illustrated. But he did not take all contemporary society for his province. Born at Sharpham Park, in Somerset, in 1707, he had far greater advantages of birth than other men of the pen. The House of Fielding is ancient and noble, though, unlike Gibbon in his monumental compliment to Fielding, Mr. Horace Round cannot accept its connexion with the House of Hapsburg.
The Fieldings had two Earldoms, of Desmond (in Ireland) and of Denbigh; Fielding\'s father was of a cadet branch of the family: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was a kind of cousin of the novelist. He was educated at Eton and in the law-loving University of Leyden; but when he "came upon the town," in 1728, he did not associate himself with the circle of Pope and Bolingbroke and the wits and the great ladies; he does not draw his characters from that splendid society, though Lady Bellaston, in "Tom Jones," is a member thereof.
Fielding had to live by his brains, by writing comedies, and by[Pg 462] journalism. He showed his genius for parody of the heroic tiresome tragedy that was "such an unconscionable time adying," in "Tom Thumb the Great"; and his dangerous turn for political satire in "The Historical Register" (1737). But the Licensing Act, making the Lord Chamberlain, or his subaltern, Licencer of Plays, excluded Fielding from that course; he was called to the Bar (1740), where he did not practise much. He was married in 1735 to the original, it is said, of the exquisite Sophia of "Tom Jones"; he wrote in the Press; in 1745 he took the Hanoverian side, in "The True Patriot," and "The Jacobite\'s Journal," in mockery so named; and during all this period he saw a great deal of the world, especially the world of the stage and of light literature.
But of all this he makes little display in his novels. He falls back on the humours of the country: on the country parson, Adams; the Tory Squire, Squire Western; a neighbour, in character of Sir Tunbelly Clumsey, and so good an Englishman that he rejoices when he hears that "twenty thousand honest Frenchmen are landed in Kent" to back the Rightful King, and the landed interest, against Hanoverians, financiers, and Whigs in general. His excellent Allworthy is no townsman; Mr. Thomas Jones, a Foundling, is country born and country bred; most of the adventures of Joseph Andrews take place in the country; in "Amelia" we are in town, and in taverns and prisons often, but by no means "in society".
"Jonathan Wild" is a tale of town villains and rogues; and Fielding\'s minor characters, from postilions to philosophers, like Philosopher Square, landlords, landladies, serving-men, lawyers, parsons, unfortunate ladies, people on the road, are of ordinary humanity, with a considerable sprinkling of hypocrites. He had heard the chimes at midnight and much later; he had hunted; he had lived the tavern life, the life of debts and expedients, but he "had kept the bird in his bosom," the sterling excellence of his heart; pity for the poor and oppressed; honour, good humour, tolerance, and manly indignation.
To Fielding, Richardson\'s "Pamela," the text of many a sermon, the snow-pure prudent Pamela, with Virtue rewarded by the hand of the enterprising Mr. B., was even as a red rag to a[Pg 463] bull. He did not weep over Pamela\'s tears, these "pearly fugitives". He no more believed in Mr. B.\'s return to virtue than in that of Vanbrugh\'s Loveless. Respectability was so far from being his favourite virtue, that, like many very inferior writers, he inclined to identify it, unjustly, with hypocrisy.
Consequently he began "Joseph Andrews" as a parody or burlesque of "Pamela". That paragon had a brother, appropriately named Joseph; and the virtue of Joseph is assailed like that of his sister, but in vain. Joseph is invincibly respectable, yet no hypocrite, but a very manly young fellow with an honest love in his own rank. The story soon ceased to be a parody; that grotesque, learned, excellent and extremely muscular Christian, Parson Adams, came into the tale with the egregious Mrs. Slipslop; and the thing became a "picaresque" novel, a tale of the road and of chance meetings: with the lesson that kind hearts are more than coronets, and a postilion, later guilty of robbing a hen roost, is a better Christian than a whole coach-load of Pharisees. Indeed St. Augustine, once at least, robbed an orchard, yet became a shining light, having been misled (as regards the apples and pears) by his sense of humour.
"Joseph Andrews," though its language is occasionally coarse, as regards its meaning is not obscure, and it is certainly one of the most amusing works in our language: though it is not written for small boys and little girls. We meet Pamela and Mr. B. (cruelly styled Mr. Booby), again at the close, and they behave ill in church, when Joseph is married.
Richardson was very much hurt, of course, and spoke very ill of Fielding; if he forgave Fielding, he "forgave him as a Christian," like Rowena in Ivanhoe, "\'which means,\' said Wamba, \'that she does not forgive him at all\'".
There is an endless discussion about Fielding\'s morality. Natural goodness of heart is everything with him. Of his Tom Jones the epitaph might be that devised by Joe Gargery in "Great Expectations" for his reprobate of a father,
Whatsume\'er the failings on his part,
Remember reader he were that good in his hart.
Thomas was "that good at his heart" and lectures young[Pg 464] Nightingale very nobly on the infamy of corrupting virtue. But where there is no virtue to corrupt in others, Thomas pays no attention to his own. Perhaps he could have resisted temptation, in Nightingale\'s circumstances, but he is wisely kept out of it by the author. He does what is thought the very basest thing that a man can do; Colonel Newcome never forgave him; if we are to pardon Tom it must be, as Dumas urges in the case of Porthos, because, "other times, other manners".
This affair is the dangerous step in "Tom Jones" (1749), that epic of the eighteenth century. Fielding thought of it as an epic in prose; he is fond of burlesquing Homer and of quoting Aristotle. The plot has been praised by Coleridge and justly, as on a level with that of the "?dipus Tyrannus" of Sophocles. The construction of plots has not been the strong point of most great novelists, but Fielding set this good example, no............