The letter in which Lamb paid it him was written at the East India House, immediately after the labour of entering the accounts of a tea sale. Careless as it is, it contains a criticism of Defoe's books that goes to the root of his method. Here is its kernel. 'The author,' writes Lamb, 'never appears in these self-narratives (for so they ought to be called, or rather, autobiographies), but the narrator chains us down to an implicit belief in everything he says.' (It is interesting to notice that Defoe, a very early realist, obeyed the spirit of Flaubert's maxim, that a writer should be everywhere invisible in his work, and that his books should, so to speak, tell themselves.) 'There is all the minute detail of a log-book in it. Dates are painfully impressed upon the memory. Facts are repeated over and over in varying phases, till you cannot choose but believe them.' Then follows the sentence already quoted. Lamb goes on: 'So anxious the story-teller seems that the truth should be clearly comprehended, that when he has told us a matter of fact or a motive in a line or two farther down he repeats it, with his favourite figure of speech, 'I say,' so and so, though he had made it abundantly plain before. This is an imitation of the common people's way of speaking, or rather of the way in which they are addressed by a master or mistress, who wishes to impress something on their memories, and has a wonderful effect upon matter-of-fact readers.'

There is little to add to that, though Lamb 'had not looked into them latterly,' or he would have noticed in Defoe's books, with his quick eye for such things, Defoe's wary way with anything that seems to him at all incredible. In The Journal of the Plague Year, for example, none of the more dramatic anecdotes are vouched for by the writer. He heard them from some one else, did not see them with his own eyes, finds them hard to believe, and so rivets the belief of his readers. We shall observe in discussing Hawthorne the more advanced possibilities of this ingenious trick. The best books of Defoe's are rogue novels, and in none of them was he content with a merely literary reality. His heroes are as solid as ordinary men, or more so. The figure of Selkirk shrinks away like a faint shadow behind that of Crusoe, whose imaginary adventures his own had suggested, and there can be no doubt in anybody's mind as to which of the two is the more credible. And then there is that style of his, homelier even than Bunyan's, though less markedly so, since he is describing homelier things. There is no Euphuism here; Defoe was not the man to deal in gossamers. The essayist's delicacy of line had not yet been given to the story-tellers, and Defoe was not the man to deal with silver point. His style is as simple and effective as a bricklayer's hod. He carries facts in it, and builds with them alone. The resulting books are like solid Queen Anne houses. There is no affectation about them; they are not decorated with carving; but they are very good for 'matter-of-fact readers' to live in. Matter-of-fact readers made Defoe's audience, and the hundred years since Burton wrote had made a matter-of-fact English nation out of the credulous Elizabethans. The eighteenth century opens with this note. The tales the old woman told Psyche have been blown away like dead leaves into heaps for the children to play in, and grown-up people, serious now, have done with fairy tale and are ready for the English novel.

RICHARDSON AND THE FEMININE NOVEL

RICHARDSON AND THE FEMININE NOVEL

Euphues had addressed a dedication to the 'Ladies and Gentlewomen of England,' and had said openly that he would rather lie shut in a tiring closet than open in a study; but, writing for women as he did, he never tried to write as if he were himself a woman. On the contrary, Lyly's attitude was that of the gallant. The Elizabethan romancers who followed him were read by women but content to be men. Mrs. Behn, whose 'weltering sewerage' we have not had space to discuss, wrote for women, but certainly not less coarsely than if she had been writing for her own heroes. It was not until the eighteenth century that there was fairly launched a new story-telling, characteristically English in origin, without the fine careless heroism and improbability of romance, that it held was 'calculated for amusement only,' and different also from the mischievous realism of the picaresque. These ships, with their gallant scarlet and gold pennons, and their merry skull and cross-bones, had been long afloat before there came to join them a white barge with a lily at the prow and on her decks girls in white dresses, with their heads close together telling stories to each other. The author of a tale had hitherto been either a man, a god, or a rascal; he had never been content to be a girl. And the first of the new craftswomen was a fat and solid little printer and alderman of the City of London, called Samuel Richardson.

Richardson was an author of a kind quite new to English letters—neither a great gentleman like Sidney, nor a roisterer like Greene, nor a fanatic preacher like Bunyan, nor a journalist like Defoe; just a quiet, conscientious, little business man, who, after a duteous apprenticeship, had married his master's daughter like a proper Whittington, and, when she died, had married again, with admirable judgment in each case. It is not every one who can marry two wives and be unhappy with neither. As a boy, he had written love-letters for young women who were shy of their abilities. Girlish in his youth, he had preferred the tea-table to the tavern. Surrounded by women in his manhood, he was a grotesque little figure of a man, as inquisitive as an old maid, as serious over detail as a village gossip; walking in the Park, and looking at the feet of the women he met, and, as they passed him, quickly scanning their faces, and saying to himself, 'that kind of person,' or 'this kind of person,' and then going on to observe and summarise the next. He was accustomed, like a Japanese draughtsman, or a woman in a theatre, to complete and instantaneous observation. His was just the mind to show women what they could do; and this, with their constant applause and help, he did.

I believe that the femininity of the resulting books was due to his choice of the epistolary method as well as to his own temperament, and his enviable opportunities of studying the character of the audience at which he aimed. If he had not happened upon it, if he had tried to tell his stories in the manner fashionable at the time, they would but have been exaggerations and amplifications of tales that Steele would have put most comfortably into a single number of The Tatler or Spectator. If he had used the autobiographical form he would have been prohibited from much of his detail, and all the effect of lighting his subject from several points of view. But letters were so new in story-telling that they helped him to be new himself, just as a new and unusual fashion of coat helps a man to be militantly original, within as well as without. And then letters, always describing events that have scarcely happened, excuse the most unlimited detail, the most elaborately particularised gossip or confession. Letters were the perfect medium for the expression of the feminine mind.

I do not deny that there are disadvantages in the novel by post, that concerns many characters in elaborate play. Richardson has, for example, to keep his corresponding couples, naughty Lovelace and uneasy Belford, Clarissa and the giddy Miss Howe, dodging apart again and again for the purpose of exchanging letters. We are tortured by Pamela's efforts for the good of her story, her letters sandwiched between tiles and buried in earth, the incredible agility of her postman John, and the forethought and luck that enables her to provide herself with ink and paper in the most impossible circumstances. And when Mr. Belford writes of Clarissa, 'there never was a woman so young who wrote so much and with such celerity,' we look at the huge volumes and find it easy to believe him. When we hear that 'Her thoughts keeping pace with her pen she hardly ever stopped or hesitated, and very seldom blotted out or altered,' we reflect that she certainly had not the time. And when later we are told that 'Last night, for the first time since Monday last, she got to her pen and ink; but she pursues her writing with such eagerness and hurry as show her discomposure,' we cannot help smiling to think how very advantageous such discomposure must be to Mr. Richardson, who is to edit the correspondence. There is this difficulty of credibility, and also occasional even more obvious awkwardnesses, as when the characters, always very obliging to their creator, have to enclose copies of letters that would not otherwise have got into print.

On the other hand, we cannot count these as serious blemishes on a form of art so far removed from any attempt at illusion. There is in Richardson's novels no sort of visualised presentment of life. We see his principal characters through little panes of glass over their hearts, and in no other way. I cannot for the life of me imagine what Clarissa really looked like, but I know well enough what she thought. Spasmodic reminders of Pamela's abstract prettiness produce little but an impatient desire to see a portrait. I remember but one glimpse of her, and that is in the first volume, when she has dressed herself up in her new homespun clothes, dangles a straw hat by its two blue strings, and looks at herself in the looking-glass. There comes an expression a little later, 'a pretty neat damsel,' and again, 'a tight prim lass,' and I think that the ghost of a little girl shows in the looking-glass, but only for a moment, like the reflection of a bird flying over a pool of water. Richardson's characters are decreasingly real from their hearts outwards. They have no feet. But their hearts are so beautifully exhibited that we cannot ask for anything else. To quarrel over them with Richardson is like quarrelling with the delightful Euclid because no one has ever been able to draw a straight line that should really be length without breadth. Such a line does not exist outside his books, yet Euclid is all in the right when he talks of geometry. Pamela and Clarissa do not exist outside their propositions, yet Johnson, talking fairly honestly, was able to say that there was more knowledge of the human heart in a letter of Richardson's than in all Tom Jones.

It is knowledge of the human heart from the girl's point of view—the unromantic girl, for Richardson could never bring himself to believe in great passions. He would never have used as the text of a novel that sentence from the New Testament that has inspired so many later story-tellers: 'Her sins are forgiven her because she loved much.' Richardson's only passion is one not usually so called, and that is a passion for respectability. The desire for respectability, for her children's sake if not for her own, is part of every woman's armour in the battle of this world. In Richardson's two best novels it is something far more than this, an obsession that love cannot conquer nor goodness override. In Clarissa it is so Quixotic, so forlorn a hope as to be noble; but Pamela's respectability is a little disgusting. What, after all, is Pamela's story but the tale of a servant-girl who declaims continually about her honesty, writes foolish verse about it, lets her head fall on her master's shoulder, and refuses to be his except as his wife? She is quite right, of course, and most estimable. But her affronted virtue does not seem much more than a practical commercial asset, when she successfully marries the man who by every means in his power has sought to destroy it. Clarissa, on the other hand, has nothing to gain, nothing even to retain, except her self-respect. The respect of Howes, Belfords, and Harlowes could weigh but little with a being lifted from ordinary Philistine life into a conflict as unworldly as hers. She has the ivory dignity of some flowers, and the curious power of the book that traces her misfortunes is due to the spectacle of so flowerlike and fragile a being engaged in a struggle so terribly unequal. The struggle itself could hardly have been imagined by a wholly masculine writer. It is a kind of elaborate proposition, not a picture of life. It is like a chess problem in which we know that white mates in two moves, and are interested only in seeing how he does it. In Richardson, as in Euclid, we know always what is coming. Our artistic pleasure is in the logic and sequence of the intervening steps. If you expect a theorem to turn into a problem or vice versâ, the inevitability of Richardson annoys you; but if you read him in the right spirit that quality is your chief delight.

It is interesting to notice that Richardson, inventing girls' theorems, is unable to draw a hero in whom a man can believe. Lovelace, for example, is touched in in a way that makes women fall in love with him, but men feel for cobwebs in the air. Pamela's master is frankly incredible. And it is no bad illustration of Richardson's femininity that Charles Grandison, planned as the perfect man, has been found unbearable in the smoking-room, insipid at the tea-table, and has probably had no conquests but a few Georgian ladies'-maids. But the women, abstractions, algebraical formulæ, as they are, let us into secrets of the machinery of a woman's mind that no earlier novelist had been able to examine.

Richardson's precise, intimate, feminine knowledge of women and feminine method of writing had a wider influence than that we are tracing in this chapter. He showed story-tellers a new world to conquer and quite unexplored possibilities in the telling of a tale. It was for this that he was translated by the Abbé Prévost, the Jesuit, soldier, priest and novelist, who wrote in Manon Lescaut of a passion greater and more self-sacrificing than any that had come in the way of the little printer of Salisbury Court. And when St. Preux and Julie exchange those letters that brought a new freedom of sentiment into literature, Rousseau, who taught them how to write, had himself been taught by Richardson.

I do not intend any detailed portraiture of the later writers of the feminine novel, but only in a brief mention of two of them to suggest the course they took in the development of their art, until in the nineteenth century it combined with and became indistinguishable from the masculine novel that held it at first in a not lightly to be reconciled hostility. Let us look along the bookshelf for a volume called Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World. Thirty years had passed between the publication of Clarissa and that of Fanny Burney's best book, and in those years Fielding and Smollett had written, and Humphry Clinker had shown that it was possible to describe in letters other things than a series of attacks on the armour of respectability. Fanny Burney took more material with a lighter hand, stealing away the business of The Tatler, The Spectator, The Citizen of the World, and trying not only to 'draw characters from nature' but also to 'mark the manners of the time.' She had learnt from a diligent perusal of Richardson, avoided a too elaborate postal system, and made her butterfly task the easier by writing of herself, whereas he had to invent the Clarissas and Pamelas of his more bee-like labours.

Fanny Burney was the daughter of a popular music-master, whose house was always full of all sorts of people, so that she had the best of opportunities for observing that surface of life which she was able so incomparably to reproduce. She was able to see manners in contrast. Now 'manners' described by a man in a coffee-house—by Steele, for example, or Goldsmith, mean the habits and foibles of contemporary society. 'Manners' 'marked' at a young lady's rosewood desk mean vulgarity and its opposite, and the various shades between the two. In the essayist's eyes, manners were simply manners, to be described each one for its own sake. The feminine novelist found manners either good or bad, and was concerned with the tracing of a gossamer thread of distinction. The story of Evelina is not so much that of her love-affair with Lord Orville, but of the suffering or satisfaction of a sensitive person exposed alternately to atmospheres of bad manners or good. Evelina threads her way shyly along the border-line, and illustrates both sides by their effects upon her happiness. We are sorrier for her when she hears Miss Branghton cry out joyfully, 'Miss is going to marry a Lord,' than when she is in more serious trouble over her acknowledgment by her father. All the minor characters for whom the story makes a frame are set there as types less of character than of behaviour. There is Mrs. Selwyn with her habit of 'setting down' young men, and her characteristic praise of Lord Orville, 'there must have been some mistake about the birth of that young man; he was, undoubtedly, designed for the last age; for he is really polite.' There is Captain Mirvan, representing good birth and brutality of manners; Madame Duval, low birth seeking to veil itself in lofty affectation; the Branghtons, frank vulgarity; Mr. Smith, the tinsel gentility of the Holborn beau. Each character is in the book in order to inflict its peculiar type of manners on the heroine, so that we may watch the result. Evelina herself, delicious as she is, is given to us as a touchstone between good breeding and vulgarity.

Miss Burney marks very clearly the introduction of the feminine standards of delicacy that were to rule the English novel of the nineteenth century. Evelina's criticism of Love for Love, written less than a hundred years before she saw it, distinguishes honestly between her own point of view and that of the best of men. 'Though it (the play) was fraught with wit and entertainment, I hope I shall never see it represented again; for it is so extremely indelicate—to use the softest word I can—that Miss Mirvan and I were perpetually out of countenance, and could neither make any observations ourselves, nor venture to listen to those of others. This was the more provoking, as Lord Orville was in excellent spirits, and exceedingly entertaining.'

Twenty years after Evelina, the novel of femininity took a further step in technique and breadth of design. Miss Austen, who in the last decade of the eighteenth century was writing the novels that were not to be published till after the first decade of the nineteenth, learnt from both her precursors. She was a proper follower of Richardson, but dispensed altogether with the artifice of letters, although the whole of her work is so intimate and particular in expression that it would almost seem to be written in a letter to the reader.[7] Like Miss Burney she had read the masculine novels of an ordinary life, whose strings were not so finely stretched as those of life in the books of the sentimental little printer; she had read Fielding and Smollett and the Essayists, and Miss Burney herself, but she carried the satire she had learnt from them deeper than Miss Burney's criticism of well or ill-bred manners. She deals more directly with existence. Miss Burney with lovable skill made her puppets play her game. Miss Austen's puppets played a game of their own. She remarked before writing Emma, 'I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like,' exactly as if she were a little girl rather capriciously choosing a new plaything. But Emma, once chosen, illustrates no special theorem, and is compelled to tread no tight-rope over the abyss of vulgarity. Miss Austen's world has the vitality of independent life, and is yet close under observation, like society in a doll's house. Her people are alive and real, and yet so small that she found it easy to see round them and be amused. Indeed, she grew so accustomed to laughing at them that she came to include the reader in her play. I am not sure if it would not be wise for any one who found a page of hers a little dull or incomprehensible, to consider very carefully and seriously if she is not being mischievous enough and insolent enough to win her silvery laugh from his own self. To read her is like being in the room with an unscrupulously witty woman; it is delightful, but more than a trifle dangerous.

But Miss Austen's satire is not so important as the clear, keen sight that made it possible. The feminine novel finds its justification and characteristic in the quick light gossiping knowledge of Miss Burney, in Miss Austen's bric-à-brac of observation, in Richardson's topographical accuracy among the hidden alleys and byways of the heart. Its tenderness of detail is its most valuable contribution to story-telling, associated though it is with feminine standards of decency, and the sharp point of feminine raillery. The first of these concomitants is a gift of doubtful, and certainly not universal, virtue. The second is no more than a variation, a different-tinted, other-textured version of the satire of men. But the gift to which they were attached has made possible some of the finest work of later artists, in those stories whose absorbing interest is the unravelling of tangled skeins of intricate psychology. Theirs is a minuteness in the dissection of the heart quite different from, and indeed hostile to, the free-and-easy way of men like Fielding and Smollett, and wherever we meet with this fine and delicate surgery practice we can trace its ancestry with some assurance to the feminine novel of the eighteenth century.

FIELDING, SMOLLETT, AND THE MASCULINE NOVEL

FIELDING, SMOLLETT, AND THE MASCULINE NOVEL

I have always felt that the English Renaissance was considerably later than that of France or Italy, and happened in the eighteenth century. When we speak of the Italian or the French Renaissance we mean the times in the histories of Italy or France when the peculiar genius of each of these countries showed the most energetic and satisfying efflorescence. In Italy and in France this time was that of the revival of classical learning, when Boccaccio lectured on Dante at Florence and Ronsard gardened and rhymed. In England, although from the time of Chaucer to the time of Shakespeare we were picking continental flowers, and flowering ourselves individually and gorgeously, yet we had no general efflorescence in our national right, no sudden and complete self-portraiture in several arts at once. And this in the eighteenth century was what we had. All our national characteristics were unashamedly on view. Our solidity, our care for matter of fact, our love of oversea adventure, were exhibited in Defoe. Our sturdy spirituality had only recently found expression in Bunyan. Richardson discovered the young person who, rustling her petticoats, sits with so demure an air of permanence on Victorian literature, and represents indeed so real a part of our national character that we shall never be able to forget her blushes altogether. Our serious turn for morality showed itself at once in the aims all our authors professed, and in the pictures of Hogarth who, with courage unknown elsewhere, dared to paint ugliness as ugly. This is the century that represents us in the eyes of the world. If we would think of the Italian spirit we remember the Decameron; if of the French, we remember Ronsard's 'Mignonne, allons voir si la rose,' or Marot's 'Mignonne, je vous donne le bon jour.' But if a Frenchman tries to describe an Englishman his model is not a Chaucer but a Jean Bull, and the only adequate portraits of Jean Bull are to be found in the novels of Fielding and Smollett.

Out of this general efflorescence were to spring two branches of story-telling different and hostile from the start. The novel was given sex. Richardson had scarcely invented the feminine novel before Fielding and Smollett were at work producing books of a masculinity correspondingly pronounced. Fielding was the first to mark the difference, and Richardson to the end of his life hated him for writing Joseph Andrews. It often happens that one philosopher hates another whose system though less elaborate is obviously founded on a broader basis than his own. Fielding could afford to laugh at Richardson, but Richardson could never laugh at Fielding. He could only enjoy the lesser satisfaction of holding his rival accursed. Their upbringings had been as different as the resulting books. Eton, law studies at Leyden and the Middle Temple, were a different training for the art of story-telling than the Dick Whittington youth of the little business man. Richardson saw the game of life from the outside. Harry Fielding knew the rough and tumble. Richardson was all for virtue; so was Fielding, but, as he would have put it himself, for virtue that is virtue. Virtue at the expense of nature he could no more understand than Benvenuto Cellini, who, if the facts in the case of Pamela had been set before him, would have thought her a devilish artful young woman, and, if he had met her, congratulated her upon her capture. Fielding had a short, rough and ready creed, and that was that a good heart goes farther than a capful of piety towards keeping the world a habitable place.

Pamela made him laugh. He wanted to make money by writing, so he sat down to put the laugh on paper, with the ultimate notion of filling his pocket by publishing a squib. He set out to parody Pamela in the person of her brother Mr. Joseph Andrews. He had not gone very far in the performance before Parson Adams came into the story, and became so prodigiously delightful that it occurred to Fielding that he had here as admirable a couple for adventure as Cervantes himself could have wished, with the result that Mr. Andrews' correspondence does not compare at all favourably with his sister's, while his biography is infinitely more entertaining. When the book was done, its creator printed on the title-page: 'Written in imitation of the Manner of Cervantes, Author of Don Quixote,' made no very particular reference to his original purpose, and described his book as 'A Comic Epic in Prose.' The masculine novel was on its way. Like Don Quixote or Le Roman Comique it represented a smiling move towards reality, or the criticism of reality, in Fielding's hands through the high and difficult art of ridicule, in the hands of Smollett, whose first book was published six years later, through the easier art of caricature.

These two men between them made the masculine novel of the eighteenth century. Its scope and character are best mapped out by a study of their respective lives, which were sufficiently unlike to make their books almost as different from each other's as they were from Richardson's.

They both looked on man as man, a simple creature seldom wholly bad. They were not the fellows to tolerate humbug about platonic love, or the soul, or religion. Religion meant the Established Church, and a parson was a man, good or bad, a representative of the State perhaps, but not a representative of God. Love was no opal passion between Endymion and the moon. It meant desire between man and woman, as tender as you liked, but still desire. It was as simple a thing as valour, which meant ability to use the fists and stand fire. Fielding and Smollett knew a fairly brutal world. But their positions in it had been different. Fielding had always had his head above water. He is continually thinking of fair play, and feels, as we do, a thrill at the heart when he sees Tom Jones and an innkeeper shake hands after bleeding each other's noses. Smollett had had a harder time. He had known what it was to be denied the privileges of a gentleman. He had been in a subordinate position in the navy when that was an organisation of licensed brutality. He was as accustomed to seeing men's bodies cross-questioned, as Fielding to reading law-cases and examining men's minds. He writes always on a more animal level than Fielding. After every fight he lines up his characters for medical treatment:—

Fielding only inquires after their hearts. Put their portraits side by side, and the difference is clear. Fielding's is the face of the fortunate man who has had his bad times and come smiling through; Smollett's that of the man not bruised but permanently scarred by the experiences he has suffered. An old sailor once said to me that you can judge of the roughness of a man's employment by the coarseness of his language; those whose work is roughest, using the coarsest words. Fielding is seldom disgusting. His heroes are constantly putting their feet into it; but not into unnecessary filth. It is impossible to say the same of Smollett.

Their choice of models was characteristic; Joseph Andrews being written in imitation of the gentle banter of Cervantes, while Roderick Random copied the more acid satire of Le Sage. Indeed, Le Sage was not serious enough. 'The disgraces of Gil Blas,' says Smollett in his preface, 'are for the most part such as rather excite mirth than compassion; he himself laughs at them; and his transitions from distress to happiness, or at least ease, are so sudden, that neither the reader has time to pity him, nor himself to be acquainted with affliction. This conduct, in my opinion, not only deviates from probability, but prevents that generous indignation, which ought to animate the reader against the sordid and vicious disposition of the world.' That is a moving and very remarkable paragraph. Between those lines is the memory of more than enough 'acquaintance with affliction,' and there is something terrible in the assumption, made with such absolute conviction, that good luck 'deviates from probability.' Smollett had not known much happiness, and found so light-hearted an aim as Le Sage's impossible. His own was almost vengeful. 'I have attempted to represent modest merit struggling with every difficulty to which a friendless orphan is exposed, from his own want of experience, as well as from the selfishness, envy, malice, and base indifference of mankind.' Roderick Random is a rogue and a skunk, but we cannot blame Tobias Smollett if he did not know it. Random's more objectionable qualities are those that pull him through his difficulties. A nicer man would have gone under. The difficulties are at fault for making not Random but Smollett what he was.

The technique of the English novel was more elaborate than that of its models. Just as Joseph Andrews is more orderly than Don Quixote, so Roderick Random is a step between the pure rogue novel, the string of adventures only connected by the person of the adventurer, and the modern novel of definite plot. Don Quixote and Gil Blas could be cut off anywhere. Their creators had only to kill them. But the curtain could not be rung down on the adventures of Random or Andrew before quite a number of different threads had been properly gathered and explained. There were a few pretty wild coincidences to be discovered. Rory, Joseph, and Fanny all find their true parents; perhaps but rough and ready means to give rotundity to a story, but still pleasant mysteries, to be kept like sweetmeats and dessert as lures for flagging appetites. The novel had assumed some of the elaborate interest of the nouvelle, as practised by Cervantes and the Elizabethans, and the influence of the stage perhaps partly accounts for the construction of the English imitations, more consistent than that of their Spanish and Franco-Spanish models. The art of play-writing had reached its period of most scrupulous technique so recently that these two men who had failed in the theatre were not likely to forget its methods when experimenting with the more plastic art of narrative.

Of the two, Fielding is always the better artist. He is more interested in his art, more single-minded. He never forgets his duties as a novelist, and continually turns to the reader, just as if he were a sculptor executing a difficult piece of work in the presence of an audience whose admiration he expects. He was ready to laugh at himself for it too: 'We assure the reader we would rather have suffered half mankind to be hanged than have saved one contrary to the strictest laws of unity and probability.' He did not always keep up this admirable conscientiousness; but he did so more consistently than Smollett.

The delicacy of their craftsmanship is best compared not in their greatest books but in those two novels in which they essayed the same task, the portraiture of a rogue, and a rogue not after the merry sympathetic fashion of Lazarillo, but one whom the authors themselves accounted a villain and expected their readers to detest.

The ironic biographer of Jonathan Wild realised the difficulties of the undertaking. He saw that unless he adopted an attitude which would make it proper for him always to express approval of his hero, his readers would begin to cast this way and that, not knowing whether to sympathise or hate, as the genius of the author or the villainy of the hero were alternately prominent in their eyes. Accordingly, choosing the name of a real and famous gallows-bird who had been hung some twenty years before, Fielding took his tone from those little penny biographies that used to be hawked among the crowd who waited at Tyburn to see their hero swing. He ironically takes this tone; and sustains it without a false note for a couple of hundred pages. How admirably he uses it:—

'The hero, though he loved the chaste Laetitia with excessive tenderness, was not of that low snivelling breed of mortals who, as is generally expressed, tie themselves to a woman's apron-strings; in a word, who are afflicted with that mean, base, low vice or virtue, as it is called, of constancy.'

And again in the passage that sums up the book:—

'He laid down several maxims, as the certain means of attaining greatness, to which, in his own pursuit of it, he constantly adhered.

As—

1. Never to do more mischief than was necessary to the effecting of his purpose; for that mischief was too precious a thing to be thrown away.

2. To know no distinction of men from affection; but to sacrifice all with equal readiness to his interest.

3. Never to communicate more of an affair than was necessary to the person who was to execute it.

4. Not to trust him who hath deceived you, nor who knows he has been deceived by you.

5. To forgive no enemy; but to be cautious and often dilatory in revenge.

6. To shun poverty and distress, and to ally himself as close as possible to power and riches.

7. To maintain a constant gravity in his countenance and behaviour, and to affect wisdom on all occasions.

8. To foment eternal jealousies in his gang, one of another.

9. Never to reward any one equal to his merit; but always to insinuate that the reward was above it.

10. That all men were knaves or fools, and much the greater number a composition of both.

11. That a good name, like money, must be parted with or at least greatly risked, in order to bring the owner any advantage.

12. That virtues, like precious stones, were easily counterfeited; that the counterfeits in both cases adorned the wearer equally; and that very few had knowledge or discernment sufficient to distinguish the counterfeit jewels from the real.

13. That many men were undone by not going deep enough in roguery; as in gaming any man may be a loser who doth not play the whole game.

14. That men proclaim their own virtues, as shopkeepers expose their goods, in order to profit by them.

15. That the heart was the proper seat of hatred, and the countenance of affection and friendship.'

The whole scheme is worked out with a scrupulous attention to the main idea, and a consistency of mood that would not have been unworthy one of the self-conscious artists of a hundred years later. Poe himself could have built no more skilfully, and, lacking Fielding's knowledge of rascaldom, the straw for his bricks would not have been so good.

Smollett had the knowledge; but, a less perspicuous artist, did not realise the difficulties of using it. His villain is never frank in his villainy. Smollett intended from the beginning to disobey Fielding's principle, meant to save his rogue from the gallows, meant to do it all along, and was consequently handicapped in making him respectably wicked. Ferdinand, Count Fathom, does damnable deeds, but his author's purpose is completely nullified by his promise of eventual conversion. The book is not true to itself, but fails because Smollett was not sufficient of an artist to be able to send his hero to hell.

It is interesting to notice in one of the dullest scenes of this unsatisfactory book, that Smollett touched for the first time, in a fumbling, hesitant manner, the note of quasi-supernatural horror that was soon to be sounded with clarity and almost too facile skill. In the hero's device for the undoing of Celinda there is the first warning of the Radcliffes and Lewises and their kind, with their groans upon the battlements, their figures in white, and their unearthly music in the wind. Smollett did not wait long enough to find out what could be done with this new sensation. He jangled the note, and, in his inartistic way, passed on to paint and to reform the wickedness of the Count.

I am a little ungracious to Smollett in saying so loud that he was an artist inferior to Fielding. Inferior he was, but when I set their best books side by side, I remember that there is little to choose between the pleasures they have given me, and am compelled to admit that the less scrupulous Smollett had the wider range. I read Tom Jones in one sitting of twenty-four hours, and should like to write an essay on it, but can find no excuse for discussing here that epic of good-heartedness, since its characteristics are not different from those already noticed in Joseph Andrews. But Humphry Clinker would have held me for as long if it had had as many pages, and in the history of the art, has, as an example of the novel in letters, an interest wholly separate from that of Roderick Random, which is a specimen of the picaresque. When Smollett came to write that book he was fifty years old and just about to die. He seems to have forgotten his old feud with life, and to look at things with a kindlier eye as one just ready to depart. His late-won detachment helped him to a scheme as clear as one of Fielding's, although even in this he is sometimes submerged in human nature. His notion was to describe the same scenes and events simultaneously from several points of view, in letters from different persons, so as to keep a story moving gently forward, with half a dozen personalities revolving round it, able to realise themselves or be realised in their own letters or those of their friends. In none of his other books are the characters so rounded and complete. There is Matthew Bramble, the old knight, outwardly morose and secretly generous; his sister, an old maid determined not to remain one, for ever grumbling at her brother's generosities; Lyddy, their romantic niece, and Jerry, their young blood of a nephew; and, as persons of the counterplot, Mistress Winifred Jenkins and Mary Jones; not to speak of the ubiquitous Clinker. The letters tell the whole story, and yet, written long after Richardson's, they have an older manner. Richardson's letters, with all their passionate reiteration of detail, do not concern themselves with foibles. They do not make you smile at their writers, and if you had laughed, as Fielding did, he would have been prodigiously annoyed. Smollett's letters have the same aim as the letters of the Spectator or the Tatler. They are different only in less brilliant polish, and in their grouping round a story. The Humphry Clinker correspondence is as important as the letters of Clarissa in forming the most delicate and humorous epistolary style employed by Miss Evelina Anville.

The extreme difficulty I have experienced throughout this chapter in thinking of the technique of these novelists, instead of their material, is a tribute to their power. It is the same with Hogarth. It is impossible to get at the artist for thinking of the life upon his canvases. It is almost impossible to consider Fielding or Smollett as technicians (I have had to do it in their least human books), for thinking of the England that they represented. And now that I am looking about for a concluding paragraph on the work of these two men, when I should be summing up the general characteristics of their craftsmanship, I look at the pile of their books on the table before me, and feel a full and comfortable stomach, and cannot get out of my nose the smell of beer and beef and cheese associated as closely with their pages as lavender with the pages of Cranford. What an England it was in their day. Mr. Staytape carried Rory 'into an alehouse, where he called for some beer and bread and cheese, on which we breakfasted.' 'Our landlord and we sat down at a board, and dined upon a shin of beef most deliciously; our reckoning amounting to twopence halfpenny each, bread and small beer included.' The bright glances of Mistress Waters 'hit only a vast piece of beef which he was carrying into his plate, and harmless spent their force.' Her sighs were drowned 'by the coarse bubbling of some bottled ale.' Square meals are the best antidotes for sentiment, and in every scene of these novelists there is always some one who has fed too recently to allow any hairsplitting delicacy in the room with him. No confessional disentangling of emotions, but beer, beef, cheese, a good heart, a sound skin, and the lack of these things, are the motives of the masculine novel.

A NOTE ON STERNE

Sterne hardly comes within the scope of this book, since his was the art, not of telling stories, but of withholding them, not of keeping things on the move, but of keeping them on the point of moving. It is not without much difficulty and two or three chapters that a character of Sterne's crosses the room. The nine books of Tristram Shandy bring him through the midwife's hands, and a little further. I believe we hear breeches talked of for him. Another nine books would perhaps let him put one leg into them. Tristram Shandy is a continuous denial of the forms that Fielding and Smollett were doing their best to fix. But it is read by many who find them superficial, because Sterne writes of universal, whereas they write of a limited and particular humanity. They write of a Mr. Jones or a Mr. Random, while the hero of Sterne's book is man. He begins, as he puts it himself, ab ovo. He saw that the whole of humanity is a constellation revolving round the birth of a child, and contrived to introduce into his book every imaginable incident connected with that event. If Tristram Shandy does not grow up quick enough to take to himself a wife, My Uncle Toby is taken as a husband by the Widow Wadman. If he does not die, Yorick does. If My Uncle Toby's affairs do not go far enough to produce a baby, Tristram is born. In this book, where nothing seems to happen, everything does. It is the Life and Opinions, not of Tristram Shandy, but of Humanity, illustrated, not in a single character over a long period, but in half a dozen over a short one. For the story of the three generations of the giants, Rabelais needed land and sea, Paris and Touraine. For the adventures of his strolling players, Scarron needed a dozen little towns along the Loire, with inns and châteaux and what not. But for the adventures of Humanity, Sterne, who learnt from both of them, needed only a bowling-green, a study, a bedroom, and a parlour. There is really little else of background to the story. And it is all there; birth, love, death, and all the sad comedy of man misunderstood, and fortunate when, like Uncle Toby, he does not try to understand, the beginning in triviality, and the end in 'Alas, poor Yorick!'

PART II
ROMANTICISM

CHATEAUBRIAND AND ROMANTICISM

CHATEAUBRIAND AND ROMANTICISM