The makers of English fiction

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CHAPTER PACE

I. The Father of English Fiction ... 7

II. Richardson, and the Novel of Sentiment . 19

II Richardson, And The Novel Of Sentiment

Samuel Richardson, bom 1689 in Derbyshire. Published " Pamela " in 1740; " Clarissa Harlowe," 1748; " Sir Charles Grandison," 1753. Died 1761.

DEFOE'S method found its greatest imitator in Swift. " Gulliver's Travels," published in 1726, is a book which perhaps would never have been written but for the success of " Robinson Crusoe." Swift was quick to realise the potencies of the new literary vehicle which Defoe had invented. But he brought to the practice of the new art a mind of incomparably greater range. Defoe was capable of describing ordinary human actions with admirable and vivid realism ; Swift created an absolutely unreal world, yet with such perfect accuracy of detail that it appears real. Robinson Crusoe is an ordinary human creature ; Gulliver is a human creature too, but he is made to move in a totally imaginary world. The voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag are, humanly speaking, impossible. The imaginations of a child may accept pygmies, dwarfs, and giants as credible, but the more sophisticated imagination of the man rejects them. Defoe makes the ghost of Mrs. Veal credible, but he was incapable of inventing Lilliput and Brobdingnag. To do this required a prodigious and sustained power of invention. Each part of the narrative must be fitted and proportioned with an infinite nicety. The least fault in invention destroys the entire structure. The story is inherently absurd; it is only by the most delicate proportion of its parts that it can impose its illusion upon the mind. Swift is the only writer who has perfectly succeeded in this most difficult of arts.

in saying this we should not forget Bunyan, or so modern a writer as Mr. Lewis Carroll. Each creates an impossible world, sustaining his illusion by constant ingenuity of invention. But even Bunyan is not uniformly successful. The picture Bunyan draws of the Slough of Despond is a case in point. Morally considered it is intelligible enough, and Bunyan was right in reckoning on the moral intuitions of his readers for its interpretation. But considered as a piece of fiction it does not for a moment impose upon the imagination. The Slough is said to be in a field, quite visible, and therefore easily avoided ; yet Christian falls into it. Christian does not appear to be aware of its existence until he begins running ; and yet it was close to his own home, and he must have seen it every day. Swift never makes such errors as these. His imagination is constantly controlled by the strongest logical faculty. Having once granted his premise, that a Lilliput or a Brobdingnag may exist, his logic moves without a flaw. Gulliver behaves exactly as a human creature would behave under the conditions depicted, and the pygmies and giants among whom he moves behave exactly as such creatures would behave if they were equipped with human reason. There is a sort of mathematical accuracy in Swift's method. Every part of his picture is consistent, harmonious, proportionate, and the most impossible incidents are narrated with such perfect gravity that the reason and imagination are equally satisfied and delighted. Defoe's principle of lying so like the truth as to be believed is here carried to its ultimate expression ; for in " Gulliver's Travels " we have a record which we know to be false, and never for a moment imagine to be true, yet we find nothing absurd in it, nothing that is not logically convincing.

In the proper sense, or at least in the accepted sense of the term, it is doubtful, however, if Swift should be ranked among the writers of fiction. He is rather an instance of a man of supreme genius who took up a literary medium* which happened to suit him, and bent it to his own ends, without the least regard for its true uses. He wanted an effect ; he cared as little how he got it as Turner did when he stuck a red wafer on his picture to represent the setting sun. He did nothing to advance the art of fiction ; he only showed us what could be made of it by a m-an who strangely combined pitiless logic and intense imaginative power with an embittered mind and a foul heart. One cannot acquit Swift of an indecency which goes deeper than the use of coarse material ; it is an indecency of the heart. He loathed the human race so thoroughly that he took a rancorous pleasure in its degradation. Mankind was to him a race of Yahoos, foul, unclean, brutal, and incapable of redemption. " A Republic of the Beasts " displays far higher virtues, a nobler temperance, a finer magnanimity, a loftier intelligence. In the tenth chapter of his " Voyage to the Houyhnhnms " Gulliver breaks out into passionate vituperation against mankind and all its ways, thanking heaven that at last he has found among the beasts what human society could not give him — a world where there was " neither physician to destroy my body, nor lawyer to ruin my fortune ; no informer to watch my words and actions, or forge accusations against me for hire ; no gibers, censurers, backbiters — no encouragers of vice by seducement or examples ; no dungeons, axes, gibbets, whipping-posts, or pillories — no scoundrels raised from the dust for the sake of their vices ; or nobility thrown into it on account of their virtues," and so on, through an interminable catalogue of all the basest things in human nature. What filled the heart of Swift with this ferocious rage against his kind is an unanswered question. There is something too awful in it for either blame or pity — something that goes beyond reason and the rebuke of reason ; it excites only the kind of terror which we experience when we listen to the ravings of the mad. Yet through it all the genius of the man shines so resplendent that we cannot refuse a sort of resentful admiration. Such vast powers of mind scarcely any other English writer has possessed ; and never was power so abused.

The work of Swift was rather an aberration than a development in the art of fiction. The seed sown by Defoe had fallen into a strange soil, and had sprung up in a monstrous flower, but it was clear that the line of right development must lie in other directions. The new development was to come from Samuel Richardson, who published his " Pamela " in 1740.

Nothing could have seemed more unlikely than that such a man as Richardson should give new impulse and direction to English fiction. He was intellectually and morally a small man, with very strict and narrow views of life. He was in spirit a sort of eighteenth-century Martin Tupper, precise, commonplace, full of little moral maxims, devoted to the proprieties, fond of adulation, the idol of female coteries, knowing nothing of life in its larger aspects, sedulous in skirting the edge of its most virile realities, and perfectly convinced that his quiet corner of the world stood for the entire universe. Richardson reminds us of a comfortable cat who purrs on ladies' laps, treads delicately, and makes no more adventurous pilgrimage than to the kitchen area. Defoe and Swift at least have masculine and massive good sense ; Richardson is an old maid. He has all the tedious garrulity of an old maid who finds the interest of life in trifles. He is prolix beyond all example. His books are to be measured, not by pages, but by volumes. " Pamela " or " Sir Charles Grandison " would be excellent books to take with one to a desert island ; there we might find time to read them ; and it is certain they would last a long time, for even a marooned bishop could not read much of them at once. The modern reader simply despairs over them. He sees no reason why they should ever have been begun, and none whatever why they should end. A stupefying atmosphere of dulness seems to emanate from them. There is something soporific in the very aspect of the close-packed page. Nevertheless, few books have exercised so wide an influence, and have more completely won the praise of those whose praise is best worth having. Macaulay has told us in a wellremembered passage, how entirely he succumbed to the charms of " Clarissa Harlowe," and how the residents of an Indian station were so infected with the same enthusiasm that they fought for the book and read it with tears. It is still more astonishing to find French critics and novelists equally enthusiastic over Richardson. Balzac and George Sand give him hearty admiration ; Diderot ranks him with the great Greek classics ; and — strangest thing of all — so thoroughly modern a writer as Alfred de Musset speaks of " Clarissa Harlowe " as the first romance in the world.

By what strange power or virtue did a man so essentially homely achieve this prodigious fame? The secret is, after all, quite simple : he was the originator of the Novel of Sentiment. The charge which Dickens brings against Defoe of an entire lack of tenderness and sentiment in his death of Friday is a charge which lies against all Defoe's work. Defoe never thinks of touching the fountain of tears, and probably could not have done so had he wished. The lack of sentiment is even more marked in Swift, for he takes a cruel pleasure in exposing human frailty, and has no tears even for the most pitiable of human miseries. Richardson strikes a new note. He introduces sympathy and pathos into English fiction. He investigates the human heart, not to sneer at its emotions, but to dignify them. His sympathy with women is remarkable. He understands them perfectly, he reverences them, and he applies to them an analysis which is as delicate as it is acute. No wonder he found himself the idol of female coteries : he was the anointed Prophet of the Feminine. Women read his books with a kind of breathless interest which the sentimental tales of Dickens excited in our own day, and wrote him passionate letters, imploring him not to kill his heroine, or to save the soul of his hero, much as the early readers of Dickens implored him not to kill Little Nell. One of his favourite correspondents, Lady Bradshaigh, has vividly described her emotions over " Clarissa Harlowe." She wept copiously over the book, laid it down unable to command her feelings, could not sleep at night for thinking of it, and needed all her fortitude and the active sympathy of her husband to enable her to persist in her agonising task.

There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of this confession. We have become inured to the sentimental novelist, and are on our guard against him. Our feelings have been outraged so often, that if we yield ourselves to his spell it is with deliberation, and with a due regard to the consequences of our weakness. But Richardson dealt with unsophisticated readers, rich in virgin emotions. He produced a kind of writing which had not been seen before, and it surprised the world by its novelty, as well as charmed it by its sympathy. Richardson thus began a movement whose effect was to be lasting. Henceforth fiction was to engage itself mainly with the interpretation of sentiment, and the influence of Richardson is as obvious in Goethe and Rousseau as it is on our own long array of sentimental novelists. If any man has the time and patience to explore Richardson, he will not go unrewarded. In spite of all his prolix moralisms and wearisome preachings he was an artist. The method of novel-writing he adopted was detestable : it was that most unsatisfactory of all methods, a story told in letters. Yet it must be confessed that, when the initial irritation of the method is surmounted, one is surprised to find how real is the grip which the story takes upon the imagination. The very repetition which the method involves gives a wonderful definiteness to the characterisation. The actors in the drama appear again and again : not in a single part, but in a variety of parts ; so that in the end we know them, not by a solitary phase of emotion, but through and through.

Sir Charles Grandison himself is an earlier edition of the " Egoist." He is made to reveal himself from every point of view, until his superb priggishness in all affects us with something like a sense of humour. Not that Richardson is ever guilty of deliberate humour: he takes himself much too seriously. He is a good, solemn, homely man, whose main object is to write a useful tract on the wisdom of being good and the extreme folly of all kinds of ill behaviour. It is this moral quality in Richardson which Dr. Johnson praised when he said that Richardson made the emotions move at the command of virtue. He does so far too much at times, for never was virtue more tiresome than in Sir Charles Grandison. Yet in spite of all — in spite of a cumbrous method, of a mind overwhelmed with copybook maxims, of an acquaintance with life that never went beyond a narrow range of society — this respectable homely bookseller was an artist, as any one of discrimination will readily discover by a careful study of the latter half of " Clarissa Harlowe."

In the development of English fiction Richardson is the greatest name, because he settled the trend of the novel for many generations. Among those who were the first to imitate him were Sterne and Goldsmith, but each in his own way. Sterne had an undoubted power of sentiment, unfortunately mixed with a fatal pruriency of taste. His humour and his pathos are equally remarkable and vital, yet both seem artifirial, owing to his lack of any real depth of feeling. Goldsmith, on the contrary, is exquisitely sincere, and his one novel, "The Vicar of Wakefield" (1766), is the finest example of the sentimental novel in English literature. One rarely weeps with Sterne, because there is ground for legitimate suspicion that Sterne waits for our tears only to laugh at us ; and he plays pranks with our emotions rather than purifies them. Goldsmith succeeds by his sincerity and his simplicity, for in him sentiment is genuine. Sterne will always be read by the student of literature with mixed feelings of admiration for his wit and dexterity and contempt for the man ; Goldsmith will be read by the humble and the wise, the cultured and the illiterate alike, with a genuine delight, and with a growing sense of personal affection for the writer.

The novel of sentiment did not take possession of the public mind without opposition. The eighteenth century was a particularly masculine age, and Richardson was a feminine writer. There will always be a large class of readers whose taste resents the sickly sweetness of the sentimental novel ; and such readers will demand a more robust treatment of life. Just as in our own day we find that after a long debauch of sentiment the public demand a rougher and plainer meal, the novel of adventure ousting for a time the novel of emotional analysis, so, even while Richardson's sway was unquestioned, a counter-movement had begun. The revolt was led by Henry Fielding, whose story of "Joseph Andrews" (1742) was meant to be a burlesque on Richardson's " Pamela." Richardson felt the insult keenly, and described Fielding's book as " a lewd and ungenerous engraftment " on his own story. Nevertheless, it marked the rise of a new school of fiction. Fielding was a man wholly different from Richardson at every point. He had moved in a large world ; he knew life at first-hand ; he knew how rough and bitter a thing life could be, and he boldly used in fiction the material he had won in many hard experiences. He was, in the full sense of the term, a great artist. He told his stories directly, not through a cumbrous mass of letters, and he took pains to perfect his plots. He was also a master of style. No better model of pure, strong, nervous English can be found than in Fielding's pages. Nor is he destitute of sentiment ; there are pages in " Amelia " which affect us much more deeply than anything in Richardson, simply because the sentiment is masculine and restrained.

With Fielding must be ranked Smollett; but it is method which unites them, not equality of genius. Smollett is more of the humourist, but only in the sense that his humour is broader, more farcical, and therefore more easily apprehended. Fielding's humour is subtle, and always has behind it the energy of a powerful thinker, who has a real philosophy of life to unfold. The old comparison which ranks Fielding with Thackeray, and Smollett with Dickens, is not altogether wrong. It is significant that Dickens himself preferred Smollett's "Roderick Random" (1748) to any work of Fielding; no doubt its spirit of caricature was more agreeable to his own genius than the more reticent art of Fielding. But, after all, such comparisons are misleading, because the true student of any art must be prepared to admit that the spirit of art may manifest itself through widely divergent forms, and until he does this he contracts prejudices rather than acquires culture. Both Fielding and Smollett speak in a language not suited to the present day. " Tom Jones " has again and again incurred the condemnation of the fastidious. Yet we may remember that our forefathers, and the best-bred women of an earlier time, read " Tom Jones " without the least sense of impropriety. Clearly Fielding is not refined — he paints human nature in its less pleasing aspects ; but neither was his age refined, and art follows rather than sets the standard of manners. In any case an age which permits Tolstoi and goes mad over Gorky can have little to say against Fielding and Smollett. They, at least, mark a great advance upon Defoe and Swift, and it is still a matter of question whether Coleridge was not right when he held Fielding to be a sound moralist.

For the man who really desires to learn something of the origin of English fiction, it will be enough to know that Smollett and Fielding are first-rate forces in the history of its development. With them the first period of English fiction closes. The pioneer work was now done ; the foundations were well and truly laid. The pleasanter task now remains of seeing how upon these foundations there rose stage by stage the splendid edifice — how this new land of art was gradually civilised, developed, and fashioned into a stable kingdom, becoming at last a glorious heritage, of which any nation and any literature might be proud.

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Henry Fielding, born 1707, died 1754. Tobias George Smollett, born 1721, died 1771. Laurence Sterne, bom 1713, died 1768. Oliver Goldsmith, born 1728, died 1774. Jane Austen, born 1775, died 1817.

A GREAT period in the history of English fiction closes with Fielding and Smollett. They had created the novel of masculine realism, as Richardson had created the novel of sentiment, and each of these forms of fiction was to prove enduring. The latter half of the eighteenth century produced no novelist who could contest their primacy. It did, however, produce an immense crop of fiction, much of it wholly feeble ; some of it execrable, both in style and matter; and a part of it really noteworthy because it marked the birth of the romantic spirit.

The new tendency towards romance began with four books which appeared between the years 1761 and 1770, viz., Macpherson's " Ossian " (1761-63), Horace Walpole's " Castle of Otranto " (1764), Bishop Percy's " Reliques of Ancient English Poetry" (1765) and Chatterton's "Poems" (1770). The influence of Macpherson, Percy, and Chatterton upon English poetry was decisive and far-reaching. The influence of Walpole upon the development of fiction was scarcely less remarkable.

Walpole, cynic, coxcomb, and dilettante as he was, nevertheless had a real literary gift, in spite of the fact that he avoided literary men, and thought that poets were like birds, who sang best when they were half starved. His conduct to Chatterton is well known, and admits of no excuse. Instead of recognising " The Marvellous Boy " as a fellow-craftsman, working toward the same end, he denounced him as a forger, telling him that " all the house of forgery are relations," and that he who forges poems is in danger of forging promissory notes. It is eminently characteristic of Walpole that he detests men of letters because " they are always in earnest, and think their profession serious, and reverence learning." Throughout his long life, spent in comfort secured by a State pension of £2,000 per annum, which he had done nothing whatever to merit, it is not known that he stretched out a kindly hand to any one of the great writers who were making the century famous. Dr. Johnson, working at literature at fifteen pence a day, and writing his fine fiction " Rasselas " in order to pay for the funeral of his mother; Goldsmith, producing his immortal " Vicar of Wakefield " under cruel conditions of precarious fortune ; Chatterton, writing a poem of several hundred lines for ten and sixpence, and receiving the same remuneration for sixteen songs, had nothing to expect from Walpole, who owned no kinship with them, and in his heart despised them. Yet Walpole, under all the cold polish of the cynic and the affectations of the fop, had a genuine sense of literature, and may claim to have invented the romantic novel.

Curiously enough, he who rebuked Chatterton for representing that his poems were the work of the monk

Rowley, recovered from the muniment chest of St. Mary's, Redcliff, Bristol, adopted the same method in publishing his fiction, and gave ground for the bitter imprecation of the disappointed boy :

Walpole, I thought not I should ever see So mean a heart as thine hath proved to be; Thou, who in luxury nurst, beholdst with scorn The boy, who friendless, fatherless, forlorn Asks thy high favour. Thou mayst call me cheat. Say, didst thou never practise such deceit Who wrote " Otranto " ?

The full title of Walpole's book is " The Castle of Otranto, a Gothic Story; translated by William Marshall, Gent., from the original Italian of Onuphrio, Muralto, Canon of the Church of St. Nicholas, Otranto." It abounds in absurdities, such as helmets that fall without visible agency, portraits which emit sighs, and blood that falls from the nose of a statue ; yet it is remarkable for a powerful, if crude, imagination. The element of the supernatural is never managed with the plausibility of Defoe; Walpole's object is merely to create terror by devices which may be called mechanical. Yet there can be no doubt that terror is created, and beneath all the absurdities of the book there is a genuine spirit of mediaeval romance which was to find many imitators and interpreters.

For the remarkable thing about Walpole's story is not in the attempt he makes to represent the supernatural, but in his effort to reproduce the spirit of medisevalism. If there was one thing about which Walpole was in earnest, it was his genuine admiration for medisevalism. His villa at Strawberry Hill was a pasteboard imitation of a Gothic castle, which he himself described as a bauble " set in enamelled meadows in filigree hedges." He was an eager collector of armour, china, old pictures, carvings, and so forth, in a day when the taste for connoisseurship was scarcely born. His book is a reflection of these tastes, which excited only contempt among his contemporaries. To them he appeared a trifler ; yet he was not trivial. It was his singular destiny to create a new taste in the public corresponding to his own, to turn the attention of men of letters from the commonplace life of the eighteenth century to the varied and wonderful life of the fifteenth century, and the romances of Scott, the poetry of Coleridge, and the Oxford Movement of Newman may all be traced to the influence of Walpole.

The greatest of Walpole's imitators were Mrs. Radcliffe, Maturin, and Beckford. Mrs. Radcliffe, in her famous "Mysteries of Udolpho " (1794), has carried the art of creating terror to a point never reached by Walpole. There is the same kind of mechanism, mysterious vaults, pictures, panels, and trapdoors ; but there is a new element — the creation of mysterious persons, stained with unknown crimes and vices, who inspire fear by something supernatural or profoundly melancholy in their aspect. " There was something in his physiognomy extremely singular, and that cannot easily be defined. It bore the traces of many passions, which seemed to have fixed the features they no longer animated." We can readily discern the genesis of Byron's " Lara " in such a description, and of many another mysterious personage in melodramatic fiction. There is also in all Mrs. Radcliffe's romances a sins:ular sensitiveness to the larger aspects of nature, which, perhaps, was due to the reading of " Ossian." Few writers have utilised the gloom of impenetrable forests, the suggestions of wild sunsets or melancholy dawns, the terror or magnificence of tempests, with more effect.

Maturin pursues the same method, but he relies less on violent mechanism to produce the sense of terror ; he suggests terror rather than describes it. It is he who has created the truly great figure of Melmoth, which fascinated the imagination of so great a writer as Balzac — Melmoth, the man who has purchased immortality at a price so terrible that its secret is incommunicable.

Beckford's name lives in fiction by his one romance of " Vathek " (1786). It opens with a passage which will strike the modern reader as absurd : Vathek's

figure was pleasing and majestic; but when he was angry one of his eyes became so terrible that no person could bear to behold it, and the wretch upon whom it was fixed instantly fell backward, and sometimes expired. For fear, however, of depopulating his dominions, and making his palace desolate, he but rarely gave way to his anger.

Nevertheless, the book rises at times to grandeur, though it scarcely deserves the praise that has been awarded it. as " the finest Oriental tale written by an Englishman." Some of its descriptions are intrinsically impressive — as, for instance, the description of Vathek's tower (Beckford's own passion for building towers amounted to a mania) :

His pride arrived at its height when, having ascended for the first time the eleven thousand stairs of his tower, he cast his eyes below and beheld men not larger than pismires, mountains than shells, and cities than beehives. The idea which such an elevation inspired of his own grandeur completely bewildered him; he was almost ready to adore himself, till, lifting his eyes upward, he saw the stars as high above him as they appeared when he stood on the surface of the earth.

The close of the book, with its famous description of the Hall of Eblis, reaches something nearly akin to sublimity:

They reached, at length, a hall of great extent, and covered with a lofty dome, around which appeared fifty portals of bronze, secured with as many fastenings of iron ; a funereal gloom prevailed over the whole scene ; here, upon two beds of incorruptible cedar, lay recumbent the fleshless forms of the pre-Adamite kings, who had been monarchs of the whole earth . . . each holding his right hand motionless on his heart; at their feet were inscribed the events of their several reigns, their power, their pride, and their crimes.

The sense of terror inspired by such a scene as this is very different from that inspired by the gross machinery of Walpole's " Castle of Otranto " ; it is legitimate, as his was illegitimate ; it is intellectually impressive, as his was intellectually absurd.

The success of this new form of fiction was immense. It seemed as though the vital and strenuous work of the earlier novelists was entirely forgotten. The public taste grew by what it fed on, and numberless romances appeared, in which no attempt was made to paint any single aspect of human life with fidelity or truth. The more horrible and blood-curdling the tale, and the more abnormal and monstrous the actors in it, the more certain was the author of success. Yet it must be remembered that, however crudely and coarsely this new romantic spirit expressed itself, it possessed the secret of a genuine literary impulse. " Monk " Lewis — so called from the immense success of his story "The Monk" (1795) — deals in crude horror with a hand much less scrupulous than Mrs. Radcliffe's ; but he also contrives to resuscitate the spirit of feudalism, and it was this element in his work which arrested the attention of Scott. In later literature Hawthorne, Poe, and Stevenson have been practitioners in the same school as Maturin. Mrs. Shelley's " Frankenstein " and Shelley's own boyish romance of " Zastrozzi " belong to the same movement. Yet upon the whole it must be said that the novel of terror has enjoyed but a precarious success in English literature. Now and then a writer of great genius has been able to handle his theme with supreme art, as in the " Dr. Jeykll and Mr. Hyde " and the " Thrawn Janet " of Stevenson ; but as a rule the writer of the novel of terror fails through extravagance of conception or puerility of invention. The best fruit of the movement is not found in prose literature at all, but in poetry, and particularly in " Christabel " and " The Ancient Mariner " of Coleridge.