The development of the English novel

Front matter

PR

mi

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CHAPTER I From Arthurian Romance to Richardson SECT

1. The Mediaeval Romancers and Story-tellers ... 1

2. The Spanish Influence 6

8. The Elizabethans 10

4. The Historical Allegory and the French Influence . 13

5. The Restoration 18

6. Literary Forms that contributed to the Novel . . 22

7. The Passing of the Old Romance .... 25

8. Daniel Defoe 27

CHAPTER II The Eighteenth-century Realists

1. Samuel Richardson 31

2. Henry Fielding 42

3. The Novel versus the Drama 57

4. Tobias Smollett 63

5. Laurence Sterne 69

6. The Minor Novelists : Sarah Fielding, Samuel John-

son, Oliver Goldsmith 76

vii

VIU CONTENTS

CHAPTER III From ' Humphry Clinker ' to ' Waverley '

6E0T. PAGB

1. The Imitators 82

2. The Novel of Purpose 84

3. The Light Transcript of Contemporary Manners . 93

4. The Gothic Romance 98

5. The Historical Romance 110

6. Jane Austen — the Critic of Romance and of Manners 114

CHAPTER IV Nineteenth-century Romance

1. Sir Walter Scott and the Historical Novel . . . 125

2. Scott's Legacy 136

3. The Romance of War 149

4. James Fenimore Cooper and the Romance of the

Forest and the Sea 150

5. The Renovation of Gothic Romance .... 168

CHAPTER V The Realistic Reaction

1. The Minor Humorists and the Author of ' Pickwick ' 168

2. Charles Dickens and the Humanitarian Novel . . 180

CHAPTER VI The Return to Realism

1. William Makepeace Thackeray 197

2. Bulwer-Lytton in the R61e of Realist, George Borrow,

Charles Reade 208

CONTENTS IX

SECT. PAGB

3. Anthony TroUope 215

4. Charlotte Bronte 224

CHAPTER Vn The Psychological Novel

1. Elizabeth Gaskell — the Ethical Formula of the Psy-

chologists 234

2. George Eliot 237

3. George Meredith 252

CHAPTER VIII The Contemporary Novel

1. Henry James and Impressionism .... 263

2. Philosophical Realism : Mrs. Humplny Ward and

Thomas Hardy 268

3. Robert Louis Stevenson and the Revival of Romance 280

4. Rudyard Kipling 290

Conclusion 293

Appendix

1. A List of Twenty-five Prose Fictions . . . .297

2. Bibliographical and Other Notes 300

Index 315

Introduction

This book aims to trace in outline tlie course of English fiction from Arthurian romance to Stevenson, and to indicate, especially in the earlier chapters, Continental sources and tributaries. I hope that the volume may be of service to the student as a preliminary to detailed investigation in special epochs ; and of interest to the general reader, who may wish to follow some of the more important steps whereby a fascinating literary form has become what it is through modifications in structure and content.

The apparent law that has governed these changes is the same as is operative in all literary development : the principle of action and reaction in the ordinary acceptation of the terms. This law has a psychological basis. We are by nature both realists and idealists, delighting in the long run about equally in the representation of life somewhat as it is and as it is dreamed to be. There is accordingly no time in which art does not to some extent minister to both instincts of human nature. But in one period the ideal is in ascendency; in another the real. Why this is so we have not far to seek. Idealism in course of time falls into unendurable exorbitancies ; realism likewise offends by its brutality and cynicism. And in either case there is a recoil, often accompanied, as

XU INTRODUCTION

will be noted, by unreasonable criticism, even by parody and burlesque. The reaction of the public is taken advantage of by a man of letters ; it is enforced by him and may be led by him. Fielding was such a man, and so was Thackeray. And if, as was true in these two cases, the leader is a man of genius, he can for a period do what he pleases with his public. Now what is the procedure of the man of letters who has assented to a reactionary creed ? He reverts to some earlier form or method, and modifies and develops it ; in the language of science, he varies the type. Not to go for illustration beyond the two novelists just cited. Fielding set the Spanish rogue story over against Eichardson ; and Thackeray professedly took Fielding as his model in his reaction against Dickens. Both were, according to their light, realists; but their works are different. No one would confound the authorship of ' Tom Jones ' with that of ^ Vanity Fair.' Why ? Besides the strictly personal element, there are differences in literary antecedents and divergences in public taste. For realism. Fielding had behind him, for the most part, only picaresque fiction and the comedy of manners. Thackeray had behind him not only Fielding, but a line of succeeding novelists — romancers and realists. For example, between Fielding and Thackeray is Scott; and with what result? There is no history in 'Tom Jones'; if 'Vanity Fair' does not have a background in actual historical incident, it has at least the show of history. There is thus never a full return to the past ; romance learns from realism ; and realism learns from romance. In this way literature is always moving on, and to something that can never be predicted. In the

LNTRODUCTION xiii

details of my work, in determining the antecedents of a writer and what he added that is new and original in form and content to the art of fiction, I have found that there are modes or processes of change and development best expressed in the terms that natural science has made familiar, — modification, variation, deviation, persistence, and transformation. These are perhaps only analogies. That the material of literary history can be treated with the exactness of science I have, after some experimenting, no disposition to maintain.

The terms 'romance' and 'novel,' which in themselves are a summary of the two conflicting aims in fiction, require at the outset brief historical and descriptive definition. The former is in English the older word, being in common use as early as the fourteenth century. Our writers then meant first of all by the romance a highly idealized verse-narrative of adventure or love translated from the French, that is, from a romance language; they also extended the term to similar stories derived from classic and other sources, or of their own invention. For a verse-narrative approaching closer to the manners of real life — its intrigues and jealousies, — the Provenqal poets had employed the word novas (always plural) ; for a like narrative in prose, always short, Boccaccio and his contemporaries were using the cognate word novella. Of stories of this realistic content, many were written in English in the fourteenth century, but they were called tales, — a word of elastic connotation, which Chaucer made to comprehend nearly all the different kinds of verse-stories current in his time.

XIV INTRODUCTION

During the two centuries following Boccaccio the Italians continued to compose books of novelle, and in very great numbers. In the age of Elizabeth they came into English in shoals, and with them the word ^ novel/ as applicable to either the translation or an imitation. It was a particularly felicitous make-believe designation, for it conveyed the notion that the incidents and the treatment were new. It however had a hard struggle to maintain itself, for the Elizabethans preferred to it the word ' history,' which they applied to all manner of fictions in verse and prose, as may be seen from such titles as ' The Tragical History of E/Omeus and Juliet' and ^The History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.' This, too, was a happy designation, for it implied a pretended faithfulness to fact. Richardson and Fielding, after some vacillation, settled upon the word ' history ' for their fictions, though they both refer to them as novels. From the invention of printing down to this time the word ^romance,' by which our mediaeval writers denoted adventures in verse or in prose, had not been common in the titles and the prefaces of English fictions, though many romances had been written. But when in the last half of the eighteenth century wild and supernatural stories came into fashion, the word was often placed upon title-pages. At this time Clara Beeve, in an exceedingly pleasant group of dialogues, drew the line of distinction between the romance and the novel. She says in ^The Progress of Romance' (1785) : —

The Novel is a picture of real life and manners, and of the times in which it is written. The Romance, in lofty

INTRODUCTION XV

and elevated language, describes what never happened nor is likely to happen. The Novel gives a familiar relation of such things as pass every day before our eyes, such as may happen to our friend or to ourselves ; and the perfection of it is to represent every scene in so easy and natural a manner and to make them appear so probable as to deceive us into a persuasion (at least while we are reading) that all is real, until we are affected by the joys or distresses of the persons in the story as if they were our own.

Scott was a disturbing element to the critic's classification, for he combined the novel and the romance as defined by Clara Reeve. What name shall the amalgamation bear? It was at this time that the word ^ novel' became the generic term for English prose fiction. But while this is mainly true, our nomenclature continues somewhat uncertain. In a not very precise way the novel and the romance are still brought into an antithesis similar to Clara Reeve's. That prose-fiction which deals realistically with actual life is called, in criticism and conversation, preeminently the novel. That prose-fiction which deals with life in a false or a fantastic manner, or represents it in the setting of strange, improbable, or impossible adventures, or idealizes the virtues and the vices of human nature, is called romance.

The expression 'the English novel,' in common speech, means the novel written in Great Britain. For reasons that will appear very obvious, I shall regard the novel written in the United States as a constituent part of English fiction.

All dates placed in parentheses after novels are of publication. Where a novel has appeared as a serial and afterward as a whole the date of the latter pubxvi INTRODUCTION

lication is given, unless an express statement is made to the contrary. Such a date as 1871-72 for 'Middlemarch' means that the novel was published in parts during those years. Title-pages in most instances are of necessity much abridged. Immediately after the main text I have placed a list of twenty-five novels which will show the general progress of English fiction. This in turn is followed by bibliographical and other notes for the use of more advanced students. In both instances I have indicated recent editions available to those who do not have easy access to large libraries.

It would be impracticable to enumerate here the sources drawn upon for this volume. J. C. Dunlop's ^ History of Prose Fiction ' and Professor Walter Raleigh's ^ English Novel ' should be expressly mentioned, for, in guiding my reading down to Scott, they were of great aid. Though I cannot hope to have detached myself from opinions and estimates now prevailing, I have striven to gain a new standpoint ; consulting to this end, from Scott onward, current reviews of novels as they were appearing. As so little has been attempted thus far in the history of the English novel, I have been able to present in outline considerable new material : the far-reaching influence of Spanish fiction from Fielding to Thackeray; the historical romance as an offshoot of the historical allegory; the relation of Richardson and Fielding to the drama; the beginnings of the Gothic romance in Smollett ; and the immediate source of George Eliot's ethical formula. Access to the library of the British Museum has also enabled me to put the origin of the novel of letters in a new light. What has most im-

INTRODUCTION Xvii

pressed me is the intimate connection between English and French fiction. This might be expected in the centuries immediately following the Norman Conquest. The relationship, however, is very close from Eichardson to Hardy. So far as I have been able I have given organic treatment to my subject. The book is not a series of independent essays, but one essay, divided here and there for convenience.

While the volume has been passing through the press, I have received much aid from two students in the graduate department of the University, — Mr. A. H. Bartlett and Mr. J. M. Berdan. To Professor Charles Sears Baldwin, who has read all the proofsheets, I am greatly indebted for unsparing criticism. I have also to thank Professor Henry A. Beers for the encouragement he has given me from the beginning of the work to its publication.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL

CHAPTER I From Arthurian Eomance to Richardson

1. The Mediaeval Romancers and Story-tellers

Norman England came into possession of an immense body of fictitious narrative. Learned societies have edited and published some of it, but there still remain unedited hundreds of manuscripts, for a knowledge of which we are compelled to have recourse to imperfect bibliographies. The heroes of these tales were taken from Teutonic, Celtic, French, Classic, and Eastern tradition. It was especially around Charlemagne, Arthur, Alexander the Great, and the siege of Troy, that epic and mythological incident gathered, assuming the form of histories and biographies, now called cycles of romance. On their appearance first in French and then in English, these adventures were usually in verse, composed by minstrels and trouveres for recitation and reading at court and in the castles of the nobility ; later they were turned into prose. First in popularity and first in interest to him who is seeking the antecedents of the modern novel are the legends of King Arthur and the Round

B I

Table ; the scope of which is represented, though not in its fulness, by Tennyson's ^Idylls of the King.' As early as 1139, there was circulating a curious herosaga, written in Latin by Geoffrey of Monmouth and professing to be a translation from the Welsh. This famous 'History of the British Kings,' reflecting vaguely the struggles of Eoman, Celt, and Saxon for supremacy in Britain, becomes in its later parts a splendid romance of Arthur's ancestry, marriage, coronation, conquests, and passage to Avallon to be healed of his wounds. This so-called ' Celtic matter ' proved most attractive to the French and Anglo-Norman poets, who reared upon it a vast superstructure. Thus, as might be illustrated by many similar examples,^ fiction freed itself from the restraint of fact, and the romance came into being. Long after this event had taken place, a certain Sir Thomas Malory made a graceful redaction of the stories about Arthur and his knights in a book entitled ' Morte Darthur ' (1485), which is for the general reader the first easily accessible prose romance in English.

The Arthurian romances do not consist merely of improbable adventures. It is true that they sought to interest, and did interest, by a free employment of the marvellous, fierce encounters of knights, fights with giants" and dragons, swords that would not out of their scabbards, and the enchantments of Merlin. But these romances were also analytical. In those brilliant assemblages of lords and ladies at the Norman and French courts of the twelfth century, conversation turned for subject to the nature of love, and the proper conduct of the lover toward his mis-

1 'Epic and Komance,' W. P. Ker, Lond. and N.Y., 1897.

tress ; and, as a result, the courtly philosophers, working on Ovid's ' Art of Love ' as a basis, formulated a code of passion which rivalled, in minute detail, the metaphysical distinctions of the Schoolmen. There were major precepts and minor precepts, showing the processes by which a knight might win the heart of the lady of the castle; the symptoms of love were noted and recorded, and nice questions of conduct — for example, the circumstances under which the lady might become ^ the fair dear friend ' of a knight not her husband — were put into syllogistic form. This casuistry is the basis of the stories of Tristram and Iseult, and of Lancelot and Guenevere.^ Other conceptions of passion also found their way into Arthurian romance : in Cameliard, Arthur had the first sight of Guenevere, and ever after he loved her ; the fair maid of Astolat swooned and died when abandoned by Lancelot of the Lake; and in course of time, the ethics of the court clashing with the ethics of the cloister, there was conceived Sir Galahad's quest of the Holy Grail. This formal analysis of love winds its way through Spanish, French, and English romance down to the eighteenth century ; and becomes in Richardson a starting-point for a less scholastic dissection of the heart. The main situations in the great stories of Arthurian romance in which one is asked to sympathize with guilty passion have appeared again and again in the modern novel. Lancelot and Guenevere, Tristram and Iseult, have proved to be permanent types.

Side by side with the Arthurian cycle, though the period of their popularity was somewhat later, were the verse-tales called by the French, who first composed them, romances of adventure. Some of them, as the English alliterative poem ^ Gawain and the Green Knight,' are Celtic in incident. Others are episodes of the Charlemagne cycle. Still others, indistinct echoes of Greek and far Eastern fable, are throughout professedly fictitious, and thus have an important significance. Eiction is expanding and taking a step toward the freedom of the modern novel. Its ethics are also undergoing change ; for the exaltation of illegitimate passion or of asceticism is not so frequent as in Arthurian romance. The prevailing theme is now the constancy of young lovers, separ rated by accident or design, and united after shipwreck, capture by pirates, and servitude. Beautiful renderings of this situation are ' Florice and Blancheflour,' and the story of Aucassin, who for his love of Nicolette would sacrifice his kingdom, his knighthood, and Paradise.^ As verse-tales the romances of adventure disappeared toward the close of the fourteenth century, when Chaucer in ^The Eime of Sir Thopas ' ridiculed them as undeservedly as delightfully. But their incidents in many cases survived the wreck of their form. There were Tudor prose versions of the two favorites, ' Guy of Warwick ' and ' Eobert the Devil ' ; and the Elizabethan love stories are romances of adventure with pastoral decorations.

The delicate poetry and analysis of courtly romance could hardly have been appreciated by the rude mediaeval barons and the common folk. They naturally had their own stories, in verse and prose, which

1 English translation : ' The Lovers of Provence,' N.Y., 1890.

were more in accord with their own lives, feelings, and ways of looking at things. These stories, of which the finished types are the French fabliau in octosyllabic rhyming couplets and the Italian novella in prose, have for subject striking and humorous incidents of ordinary life. They are not, in content, all indigenous. Many of them are the common property of mankind, and have been traced in their germinal form to India. But what originally came from the East was almost invariably so modified and enriched that it seemed to spring from mediaeval soil. AVidely diffused were developments of ^sopian fable, such as the story of ^Reynard the Fox,' in which animals are made to talk and reason, and comment in a gay satirical vein on human life and its affairs. The clergy catered to the popular taste for this kind of story, making, as Wyclif accused them, the basis of the sermon an Eastern tale, from which was drawn a new and fantastic moral. For the vulgar, the minstrels degraded what had once been a noble art, singing their songs of humorous incident at street corners and at the wassails of the barons. They held up to cynical ridicule the intrigues and frailties of the clergy ; and gave a coarse realistic touch to Arthurian fable, tearing the mask from the courteous knights and the glittering ladies at Caerleon on Usk, and exposing amid peals of laughter from their hearers the cowardice and unfaithfulness beneath. In these popular songs and stories, frequently composed with an eye upon the characteristic weaknesses of human nature, are the beginnings of the realistic novel.

During the reign of Richard the Second, John Gower collected and moralized, somewhat after the way of the clergy, many of the tales that had long been current. His great contemporary Chaucer — at will a romancer or a realist — clothed in artistic form the low intrigue, the fable, the adventure, and the romance of chivalry, prefacing them with a group of contemporary portraits. Delightful as are these tales of the Canterbury pilgrims, yet the poem in which Chaucer moved most directly toward the novel is 'Troilus and Cressida.' Its heroine is the subtlest piece of psychological analysis in mediaeval fiction; and the shrewd and practical Pandarus is a character whose presence of itself brings the story down from the heights of romance to the plains of real life. Moreover, though written when the dramatic imagination had hardly appeared elsewhere in romance, this tale of illicit passion possesses in a marked degree the structure of Elizabethan tragedy. Less than a century after the death of Chaucer, mediaeval and modern England met at the printing-press of William Caxton.

2. The Spanish Influence

The first half of the sixteenth century is a dreary waste in the history of English fiction. Its only oasis is Sir Thomas More's ' Utopia,' which, written and published in Latin, may be characterized as the ' Coming Eace ' or the ^ Looking Backward ' of our learned ancestors. It is true that amid the fierce contest of Komanism and Protestantism for supremacy in English politics, men found time to read stories and romances, but they did not write them. They were content with those that Caxton, Wynkyn de Worde, Pynson, and

Copland edited and printed for them from English mediaeval manuscripts, or translated for them from French and German. The direct line in the development of English fiction, though not broken, is at this point worn to a slender thread, which we may neglect. When midway in the reign of Elizabeth creative work began anew, the main impetus came rather from southern Europe, especially from Spain.

The romantic incidents early current in France and England were likewise well known in the Spanish peninsula, where they were moulded into fictions similar to those we have described. From a Portuguese romance of adventure there grew up through the accretions of a long period the famous * Amadis de Gaula,' which has been preserved in a Spanish prose redaction made by Ordonez de Montalvo toward the end of the fifteenth century. It is the norm of the romances of chivalry. For its machinery of wonders, hand-to-hand fights with giants, monsters, and devils, the romance dips into medisevalism. Its code of conduct for the knight is likewise essentially the same as in the Arthurian cycle. When Amadis stands before Oriana, he is abashed and silent like Lancelot in the presence of Guenevere ; and for her he traverses Europe in search of adventure to prove his worth. But the reader of ^Amadis de Gaula' is at once aware that he is getting away from medisevalism. Its author had some artistic sense of what a novel should be. Its plot for a time has a degree of definiteness, for it drifts toward the marriage of Amadis and Oriana. Magic, which had hitherto been an adornment to please the superstitious, is made to bear an ethical import; and manners are invested with a new and striking dignity. There are appearing also new ideals of character, such as in the course of time Eichardson is to fix permanently in the novel : for example, Galaor is the first of the Lovelaces; and Amadis, a figure without taint or speck, is a remote ancestor of Sir Charles Grandison. And lastly, fiction is beginning to have a more serious motive ; it would defend the purity of the home, and it would proclaim that right will finally triumph over wrong.

The Spanish romance of chivalry quickly degenerated into grotesque adventure. The reaction against it first took the form of the pastoral. For a long time the poets of southern Europe had been writing series of pastoral poems connected by explanatory prose links; and just as Vergil had in a measure done in his ^Eclogues,' they were accustomed to disguise themselves and their friends under fictitious names. A good example of this kind of work is the ' Arcadia ' (1504), written by the Italian Jacopo Sannazaro. But substance was first given to the pastoral in the ' Diana ' (1558?) of George of Montemayor, a Portuguese by birth and a Spaniard by adoption, who localized his scene, and wrote mostly in prose. Men and women, who in the romances of chivalry were turned into knights and ladies, now assume the dress and life of shepherds and shepherdesses, wandering along gently flowing streams, sleeping beneath sycamores, and lamenting in madrigals over unrequited loves. To the ^ Diana' of Montemayor, which was translated into French and English, even attracting the attention of Shakespeare, is bound most closely all the succeeding pastoral romances of northern Europe.

To Spain, too, the novel owes the development of another form of fiction. The incident in a popular mediaeval story was frequently a trick or a practical joke of a witty fellow. The romance of 'Eeynard the Fox ' is a collection of such tricks, which Master Reynard plays upon his brother animals. This kind of fiction was first turned to good account in prose in a little Spanish story entitled, ^ Lazarillo de Tormes ' (1554), which is the first of the picaresque novels, or the rogue stories. It differs from its mediaeval prototype in that the tricks are made secondary. A conspicuous aim of its unknown author was to put a young scamp behind the scenes of Spanish society, and let him report and comment upon what was taking place there. The story was translated into all the literary languages of Europe, and was followed by a host of imitations down to Fielding and Smollett. This rogue literature is one of the broadest avenues through which that license in speech which characterized the Eenaissance in its first stages entered the modern novel.

Somewhat akin to the Spanish picaresque novel is <Don Quixote' (1605, 1616). In both, the point of view is unromantic. The picaresque novel is an indirect attack upon the romance of chivalry, a shell or two from the distance; ^Don Quixote' is a bombardment with the intent to demolish utterly 'the entire mischievous pile of romantic absurdity.' Cervantes accomplished his purpose by placing the world of romance in the real world, and letting the characters and sentiments of each mutually play upon one another. The knight is treated as a madman and his squire is tossed in a blanket. Along with this banter Cervantes carried such a careful reproduction of the language of the aristocracy and the rabble, and such impressive work in the delineation of character, that his romance becomes an epoch in the history of realism. It also marks the appearance in fiction of a new quality of humor. Europe, ancient and mediaeval, had its great humorists long before Cervantes: they are Aristophanes, Lucian, and Chaucer. But Cervantes' humor goes deeper than theirs. Like theirs, it is rippling and sparkling on the surface as a summer sea; as in Chaucer's, there is beneath a warm stream of kindly feeling; but still deeper there is a current of the intensest tragedy. Under the irresistible sway of this humor, approaching and receding from pathos, came Fielding, Goldsmith, Sterne, and Thackeray, and, in a less degree, Smollett, Scott, Dickens, and Bulwer; with the result that they created for the continual delight of their audience characters reminding one of Don Quixote. Among them are Parson Adams, Uncle Toby, Jonathan Oldbuck, and Colonel Newcome.

3. The Elizabethans

Elizabethan England inherited much that was best in English mediaeval fiction : the Arthurian romances, the moralized stories of Gower, and the highly finished tales of Chaucer. From Italy came the pastoral romance in its most dreamy and attenuated form, the gorgeous poetic romances of Tasso and Ariosto, and many collections of novelle. Some of these novelle had as subject the interesting events of everyday life ; others were of fierce incident and color, and furnished Elizabethan tragedy with tremendous scenes. From

Germany came jest-books and tales of necromancy; from France, the Greek story of adventure with its shipwrecks and pirates; from Spain came 'Amadis/ the ^ Diana ' of Montemayor, and the picaresque novel. And what the noble printers of the Renaissance gave her, England worked over into fictions of her own.

The most characteristic of her adaptations, the one that most fully expressed her restless spirit of adventure and aesthetic restoration of the age of chivalry, was a romance midway between the knightly quest and the pastoral. Of this species, a conspicuous example is Sir Philip Sidney's ' Arcadia ' (1590). This romance has in places as background to its pretty wooing adventures the loveliness of the summer scenery about Wilton House, where it was planned, — violets and roses, meadows and wide-sweeping downs 'garnished with stately trees,' — and into it was infused the noble courtesy, the high sense of honor, and the delicate feeling of the first gentleman of the age. Though touching at points the real in its reflection of English scenes and the princely virtues of Sidney and his friends, the ^Arcadia' is mainly an ideal creation. The country it describes is the land of dream and enchantment, of brave exploit, unblemished chastity, constant love, and undying friendship. Villany and profane passion darken these imaginary realms, but they, too, like the virtues, are all ideal. In structure the ' Arcadia ' is epic, having attached to the main narrative numerous episodes, one of which — the story of Argalus and Parthenia, faithful unto death — is among the most lovely situations romance has ever conceived and elaborated.