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The English Novel

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Title: The English Novel

Author: George Saintsbury


        
Release date: December 26, 2004 [eBook #14469]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ENGLISH NOVEL ***

THE ENGLISH NOVEL

BY

GEORGE SAINTSBURY

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE
UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

LONDON: J.M. DENT & SONS LTD.
BEDFORD STREET, STRAND  1913
NEW YORK: E.P. BUTTON & CO.




PREFACE


It is somewhat curious that there is, so far as I know, no complete
handling in English of the subject of this volume, popular and important
though that subject has been. Dunlop's _History of Fiction_, an
excellent book, dealt with a much wider matter, and perforce ceased its
dealing just at the beginning of the most abundant and brilliant
development of the English division. Sir Walter Raleigh's _English
Novel_, a book of the highest value for acute criticism and grace of
style, stops short at Miss Austen, and only glances, by a sort of
anticipation, at Scott. The late Mr. Sidney Lanier's _English Novel and
the Principle of its Development_ is really nothing but a laudatory
study of "George Eliot," with glances at other writers, including
violent denunciations of the great eighteenth-century men. There are
numerous monographs on parts of the subject: but nothing else that I
know even attempting the whole. I should, of course, have liked to deal
with so large a matter in a larger space: but one may and should
"cultivate the garden" even if it is not a garden of many acres in
extent. I need only add that I have endeavoured, not so much to give
"reviews" of individual books and authors, as to indicate what Mr.
Lanier took for the second part of his title, but did not, I think,
handle very satisfactorily in his text.

I may perhaps add, without impropriety, that the composition of this
book has not been hurried, and that I have taken all the pains I could,
by revision and addition as it proceeded, to make it a complete survey
of the Novel, as it has come from the hands of all the more important
novelists, not now alive, up to the end of the nineteenth century.

GEORGE SAINTSBURY.

_Christmas_, 1912.




    CONTENTS

    CHAP.

       I. THE FOUNDATION IN ROMANCE
      II. FROM LYLY TO SWIFT
     III. THE FOUR WHEELS OF THE NOVEL WAIN
      IV. THE MINOR AND LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL
       V. SCOTT AND MISS AUSTEN
      VI. THE SUCCESSORS--TO THACKERAY
     VII. THE MID-VICTORIAN NOVEL
    VIII. THE FICTION OF YESTERDAY--CONCLUSION

          INDEX




THE ENGLISH NOVEL




CHAPTER I

THE FOUNDATION IN ROMANCE


One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of
literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any
rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great
classical languages, of what we call by that name. It might be an
accident, though a rather improbable one, that we have no Greek prose
fiction till a time long subsequent to the Christian era, and nothing in
Latin at all except the fragments of Petronius and the romance of
Apuleius. But it can be no accident, and it is a very momentous fact,
that, from the foundation of Greek criticism, "Imitation," that is to
say "Fiction" (for it is neither more nor less), was regarded as not
merely the inseparable but the constituent property of poetry, even
though those who held this were doubtful whether poetry must necessarily
be in verse. It is another fact of the greatest importance that the
ancients who, in other forms than deliberate prose fiction, try to "tell
a story," do not seem to know very well how to do it.

The _Odyssey_ is, indeed, one of the greatest of all stories, it is the
original romance of the West; but the _Iliad_, though a magnificent
poem, is not much of a story. Herodotus can tell one, if anybody can,
and Plato (or Socrates) evidently could have done so if it had lain in
his way: while the _Anabasis_, though hardly the _Cyropædia_, shows
glimmerings in Xenophon. But otherwise we must come down to Lucian and
the East before we find the faculty. So, too, in Latin before the two
late writers named above, Ovid is about the only person who is a real
story-teller. Virgil makes very little of his _story_ in verse: and it
is shocking to think how Livy throws away his chances in prose. No:
putting the Petronian fragments aside, Lucian and Apuleius are the only
two novelists in the classical languages before about 400 A.D.: and
putting aside their odd coincidence of subject, it has to be remembered
that Lucian was a Syrian Greek and Apuleius an African Latin. The
conquered world was to conquer not only its conqueror, but its
conqueror's teacher, in this youngest accomplishment of literary art.

It was probably in all cases, if not certainly, mixed blood that
produced the curious development generally called Greek Romance. It is
no part of our business to survey, in any detail, the not very numerous
but distinctly interesting compositions which range in point of
authorship from Longus and Heliodorus, probably at the meeting of the
fourth and fifth centuries, to Eustathius in the twelfth. At one time
indeed, when we may return to them a little, we shall find them
exercising direct and powerful influence on modern European fiction, and
so both directly and indirectly on English: but that is a time a good
way removed from the actual beginning of our journey. Still, _Apollonius
of Tyre_, which is probably the oldest piece of English prose fiction
that we have, is beyond all doubt derived ultimately from a Greek
original of this very class: and the class itself is an immense advance,
in the novel direction, upon anything that we have before. It is on the
one hand essentially a "romance of adventure," and on the other
essentially a "love-story"--in senses to which we find little in
classical literature to correspond in the one case and still less in the
other. Instead of being, like _Lucius_ and the _Golden Ass_, a tissue of
stories essentially unconnected and little more than framed by the main
tale, it is, though it may have a few episodes, an example of at least
romantic unity throughout, with definite hero and definite heroine, the
prominence and importance of the latter being specially noteworthy. It
is in fact the first division of literature in which the heroine assumes
the position of a protagonist. If it falls short in character, so do
even later romances to a great extent: if dialogue is not very
accomplished, that also was hardly to be thoroughly developed till the
novel proper came into being. In the other two great divisions, incident
and description, it is abundantly furnished. And, above all, the two
great Romantic motives, Adventure and Love, are quite maturely present
in it.

To pass to the deluge, and beyond it, and to come to close quarters with
our proper division, the origin of Romance itself is a very debatable
subject, or rather it is a subject which the wiser mind will hardly care
to debate much. The opinion of the present writer--the result, at least,
of many years' reading and thought--is that it is a result of the
marriage of the older East and the newer (non-classical) West through
the agency of the spread of Christianity and the growth and diffusion of
the "Saint's Life." The beginnings of Hagiology itself are very
uncertain: but what is certain is that they are very early: and that as
the amalgamation or leavening of the Roman world with barbarian material
proceeded, the spread of Christianity proceeded likewise. The _Vision of
St. Paul_--one of the earliest examples and the starter it would seem,
if not of the whole class of sacred Romances, at any rate of the large
subsection devoted to Things after Death--has been put as early as
"before 400 A.D." It would probably be difficult to date such legends as
those of St. Margaret and St. Catherine _too_ early, having regard to
their intrinsic indications: and the vast cycle of Our Lady, though
probably later, must have begun long before the modern languages were
ready for it, while that of the Cross should be earlier still. And let
it be remembered that these Saints' Lives, which are still infinitely
good reading, are not in the least confined to homiletic necessities.
The jejuneness and woodenness from which the modern religious story too
often suffers are in no way chargeable upon all, or even many, of them.
They have the widest range of incident--natural as well as supernatural:
their touches of nature are indeed extended far beyond mere incident.
Purely comic episodes are by no means wanting: and these, like the
parallel passages in the dramatising of these very legends, were sure to
lead to isolation of them, and to a secular continuation.

But, once more, we must contract the sweep, and quicken the pace to deal
not with possible origins, but with actual results--not with Ancient or
Transition literature, but with the literature of English in the
department first of fiction generally and then, with a third and last
narrowing, to the main subject of English fiction in prose.

The very small surviving amount, and the almost completely second-hand
character, of Anglo-Saxon literature have combined to frustrate what
might have been expected from another characteristic of it--the unusual
equality of its verse and prose departments. We have only one--not
quite entire but substantive--prose tale in Anglo-Saxon, the version of
the famous story of _Apollonius of Tyre_, which was to be afterwards
declined by Chaucer, but attempted by his friend and contemporary Gower,
and to be enshrined in the most certain of the Shakespearean
"doubtfuls," _Pericles_. It most honestly gives itself out as a
translation (no doubt from the Latin though there was an early Greek
original) and it deals briefly with the subject. But as an example of
narrative style it is very far indeed from being contemptible: and in
passages such as Apollonius' escape from shipwreck, and his wooing of
the daughter of Arcestrates, there is something which is different from
style, and with which style is not always found in company--that faculty
of telling a story which has been already referred to. Nor does this
fail in the narrative portions of the prose Saints' Lives and Homilies,
especially Aelfric's, which we possess; in fact it is in these last
distinctly remarkable--as where Aelfric tells the tale of the monk who
spied on St. Cuthbert's seaside devotions. The same faculty is
observable in Latin work, not least in Bede's still more famous telling
of the Caedmon story, and of the vision of the other world.

But these faculties have better chance of exhibiting themselves in the
verse division of our Anglo-Saxon wreckage. _Beowulf_ itself consists of
one first-rate story and one second-rate but not despicable tale,
hitched together more or less anyhow. The second, with good points, is,
for us, negligible: the first is a "yarn" of the primest character. One
may look back to the _Odyssey_ itself without finding anything so good,
except the adventures of the Golden Ass which had all the story-work of
two mightiest literatures behind them. As literature on the other hand,
_Beowulf_ may be overpraised: it has been so frequently. But let
anybody with the slightest faculty of "conveyance" tell the first part
of the story to a tolerably receptive audience, and he will not doubt
(unless he is fool enough to set the effect down to his own gifts and
graces) about its excellence as such. There is character--not much, but
enough to make it more than a _mere_ story of adventure--and adventure
enough for anything; there is by no means ineffectual speech--even
dialogue--of a kind: and there is some effective and picturesque
description. The same faculties reappear in such mere fragments as that
of _Waldhere_ and the "Finnsburgh" fight: but they are shown much more
fully in the Saints' Lives--best of all in the _Andreas_, no doubt, but
remarkably also (especially considering the slender amount of
"happenings") in the _Guthlac_ and the _Juliana_. In fact the very
fragments of Anglo-Saxon poetry, by a sort of approximation which they
show to dramatic narrative and which with a few exceptions is far less
present in the classics, foretell much more clearly and certainly than
in the case of some other foretellings which have been detected in them,
the future achievements of English literature in the department of
fiction. _The Ruin_ (the finest thing perhaps in all Anglo-Saxon) is a
sort of background study for something that might have been much better
than _The Last Days of Pompeii_: and _The Complaint of Deor_, in its
allusion to the adventures of the smith Weland and others, makes one
sorry that some one more like the historian of a later and decadent
though agreeable Wayland the Smith, had not told us the tale that is now
left untold. A crowd of fantastic imaginings or additions, to supply the
main substance, and a certain common-sense grasp of actual conditions
and circumstances to set them upon, and contrast them with--these are
the great requirements of Fiction in life and character. You must mix
prose and poetry to get a good romance or even novel. The consciences of
the ancients revolted from this mixture of kinds; but there was no such
revolt in the earlier moderns, and least of all in our own mediæval
forefathers.

So few people are really acquainted with the whole range of Romance
(even in English), or with any large part of it, that one may without
undue presumption set down in part, if not in whole, to ignorance, a
doctrine and position which we must now attack. This is that romance and
novel are widely separated from each other; and that the historian of
the novel is really straying out of his ground if he meddles with
Romance. These are they who would make our proper subject begin with
Marivaux and Richardson, or at earliest with Madame de La Fayette, who
exclude Bunyan altogether, and sometimes go so far as to question the
right of entry to Defoe. But the counter-arguments are numerous: and any
one of them would almost suffice by itself. In the first place the idea
of the novel arising so late is unnatural and unhistorical: these
Melchisedecs without father or mother are not known in literature. In
the second a pedantic insistence on the exclusive definition of the
novel involves one practical inconvenience which no one, even among
those who believe in it, has yet dared to face. You must carry your wall
of partition along the road as well as across it: and write separate
histories of Novel and Romance for the last two centuries. The present
writer can only say that, though he has dared some tough adventures in
literary history, he would altogether decline this. Without the help of
the ants that succoured Psyche against Venus that heap would indeed be
ill to sort.

But there is a third argument, less practical in appearance but bolder
and deeper, which is really decisive of the matter, though few seem to
have seen it or at least taken it up. The separation of romance and
novel--of the story of incident and the story of character and
motive--is a mistake logically and psychologically. It is a very old
mistake, and it has deceived some of the elect: but a mistake it is. It
made even Dr. Johnson think Fielding shallower than Richardson; and it
has made people very different from Dr. Johnson think that Count Tolstoi
is a greater analyst and master of a more developed humanity than
Fielding. As a matter of fact, when you have excogitated two or more
human beings out of your own head and have set them to work in the
narrative (not the dramatic) way, you have made the novel _in posse_, if
not _in esse_, from its apparently simplest development, such as
_Daphnis and Chloe_, to its apparently most complex, such as the
_Kreutzer Sonata_ or the triumphs of Mr. Meredith. You have started the
"Imitation"--the "fiction"--and _tout est là_. The ancients could do
this in the dramatic way admirably, though on few patterns; in the
poetical way as admirably, but again not on many. The Middle Ages lost
the dramatic way almost entirely, but they actually improved the
poetical on its narrative side, and the result was Romance. In every
romance there is the germ of a novel and more; there is at least the
suggestion and possibility of romance in every novel that deserves the
name. In the Tristram story and the Lancelot cycle there are most of the
things that the romancer of incident and the novelist of character and
motive can want or can use, till the end of the world; and Malory (that
"mere compiler" as some pleasantly call him) has put the possibilities
of the latter and greater creation so that no one who has eyes can miss
them. Nor _in the beginning_ does it much or at all matter whether the
vehicle was prose or verse. In fact they mostly wrote in verse because
prose was not ready.

In the minor romances and tales (taking English versions only) from
_Havelok_ to _Beryn_ there is a whole universe of situation, scenario,
opportunity for "business." That they have the dress and the
scene-backing of one particular period can matter to no one who has eyes
for anything beyond dress and scene-backing. And when we are told that
they are apt to run too much into grooves and families, it is sufficient
to answer that it really does not lie in the mouth of an age which
produces grime-novels, problem-novels, and so forth, as if they had been
struck off on a hectograph, possessing the not very exalted gift of
varying names and places--to reproach any other age on this score. But
we have only limited room here for generalities and still less for
controversy; let us turn to our proper work and survey the actual
turn-out in fiction--mostly as a result of mere fashion, verse, but
partly prose--which the Middle Ages has left us as a contribution to
this department of English literature.

It has been said that few people know the treasures of English romance,
yet there is little excuse for ignorance of them. It is some century
since Ellis's extremely amusing, if sometimes rather prosaic, book put
much of the matter before those who will not read originals; to be
followed in the same path by Dunlop later, and much later still by the
invaluable and delightful _Catalogue of_ [British Museum] _Romances_ by
Mr. Ward. It is nearly as long since the collections of Ritson and
Weber, soon supplemented by others, and enlarged for the last forty
years by the publications of the Early English Text Society, put these
originals themselves within the reach of everybody who is not so lazy
or so timid as to be disgusted or daunted by a very few actually
obsolete words and a rather large proportion of obsolete spellings,
which will yield to even the minimum of intelligent attention. Only a
very small number (not perhaps including a single one of importance)
remain unprinted, though no doubt a few are out of print or difficult to
obtain. The quality and variety of the stories told in them are both
very considerable, even without making allowance for what has been
called the stock character of mediæval composition. That almost all are
directly imitated from the French is probable enough, that most are is
certain: but this matters, for our purpose, nothing at all. That the
imitation was not haphazard or indiscriminate is obvious. Thus, though
we have some, we have not very many representatives of the class which
was the most numerous of all in France--the _chansons de geste_ or
stories of French legendary history, national or family. Except as far
as the Saracens are concerned, they would naturally have less interest
for English hearers. The _Matière de Rome_, again--the legends of
antiquity--though represented, is not very abundant outside of the
universally popular Tale of Troy; and the almost equally popular
Alexander legend does not occupy a very large part of them. What is
perhaps more remarkable is that until Malory exercised his genius upon
"the French book," the more poetical parts of the "matter of Britain"
itself do not seem to have been very much written about in English. The
preliminary stuff about Merlin and Vortigern exists in several
handlings; the foreign campaigns of Arthur seem always (perhaps from
national vanity) to have been popular. The "off"-branches of Tristram
and Percivale, and not a few of the still more episodic romances of
adventures concerning Gawain, Iwain, and other knights, receive
attention. The execrable Lonelich or Lovelich, who preceded Malory a
little, had of course predecessors in handling the other parts of the
Graal story. But the crown and flower of the whole--the inspiration
which connected the Round Table and the Graal and the love of Lancelot
and Guinevere--though, so far as the present writer's reading and
opinion are of any weight, the recent attempts to deprive the
Englishman, Walter Map, of the honour of conceiving it are of no
force--seems to have waited till the fifteenth century--that is to say
the last part of three hundred years--before Englishmen took it up. Most
popular of all perhaps, on the principle that in novels the flock "likes
the savour of fresh grass," seem to have been the pure _romans
d'aventures_--quite unconnected or nearly so with each other or with any
of the larger cycles. Those adventures of particular heroes have
sometimes a sort of Arthurian link, but they really have no more to do
with the main Arthurian story than if Arthur were not.

For the present purpose, however, filiation, origin, and such-like
things are of much less importance than the actual stories that get
themselves told to satisfy that demand which in due time is to produce
the supply of the novel. Of these the two oldest, as regards the actual
forms in which we have them, are capital examples of the more and less
original handling of "common-form" stories or motives. They were not
then, be it remembered, quite such common-form as now--the rightful heir
kept out of his rights, the usurper of them, the princess gracious or
scornful or both by turns, the quest, the adventure, the revolutions and
discoveries and fights, the wedding bells and the poetical justice on
the villain. Let it be remembered, too, if anybody is scornful of these
as _vieux jeu_, that they have never been really improved upon except by
the very obvious and unoriginal method common in clever-silly days, of
simply reversing some of them, of "turning platitudes topsy-turvy," as
not the least gifted, or most old-fashioned, of novelists, Tourguenief,
has it. Perhaps the oldest of all, _Havelok the Dane_--a story the age
of which from evidence both internal and external, is so great that
people have not quite gratuitously imagined a still older Danish or even
Anglo-Saxon original for the French romance from which our existing one
is undoubtedly taken--is one of the most spirited of all. Both hero and
heroine--Havelok, who should be King of Denmark and Goldborough, who
should be Queen of England--are ousted by their treacherous
guardian-viceroys as infants; and Havelok is doomed to drowning by his
tutor, the greater or at least bolder villain of the two. But the
fisherman Grim, who is chosen as his murderer, discovers that the child
has, at night, a _nimbus_ of flame round his head; renounces his crime
and escapes by sea with the child and his own family to Grimsby.
Havelok, growing up undistinguished from his foster-brethren, takes
service as a scullion with the English usurper. This usurper is seeking
how to rid himself of the princess without violence, but in some way
that will make her succession to the crown impossible, and Havelok
having shown prowess in sports is selected as the maiden's husband. She,
too, discovers his royalty at night by the same token; and the pair
regain their respective inheritances and take vengeance on their
respective traitors, in a lively and adventurous fashion. There are all
the elements of a good story in this: and they are by no means wasted or
spoilt in the actual handling. It is not a mere sequence of incident;
from the mixture of generosity and canniness in the fisherman who
ascertains that he is to have traitor's wages before he finally decides
to rescue Havelok, to the not unnatural repugnance of Goldborough at
her forced wedding with a scullion, the points where character comes in
are not neglected, though of course the author does not avail himself of
them either in Shakespearean or in Richardsonian fashion. They are
_there_, ready for development by any person who may take it into his
head to develop them.

So too is it in the less powerful and rather more cut and dried _King
Horn_. Here the opening is not so very different; the hero's father is
murdered by pirate invaders, and he himself set adrift in a boat. But in
this the princess (daughter of course of the king who shelters him)
herself falls in love with Horn, and there is even a scene of
considerable comic capabilities in which she confides this affection by
mistake to one of his companions (fortunately a faithful one) instead of
to himself. But Horn has a faithless friend also; and rivals, and
adventures, and journeys; and returns just in the nick of time, and
recognitions by rings, and everything that can properly be desired
occur. In these--even more perhaps than in Havelok's more masculine and
less sentimental fortunes--there are openings not entirely neglected by
the romancer (though, as has been said, he does not seem to have been
one of the strongest of his kind) for digression, expatiation,
embroidery. Transpose these two stories (as the slow kind years will
teach novelists inevitably to do) into slightly different keys,
introduce variations and episodes and _codas_, and you have the
possibilities of a whole library of fiction, as big and as varied as any
that has ever established itself for subscribers, and bigger than any
that has ever offered itself as one collection to buyers.

The love-stories of these two tales are what it is the fashion--exceedingly
complimentary to the age referred to if not to the age of the fashion
itself--to call "mid-Victorian" in their complete "propriety."
Indeed, it is a Puritan lie, though it seems to possess the vivaciousness
of its class, that the romances are distinguished by "bold bawdry."
They are on the contrary rather singularly pure, and contrast, in
that respect, remarkably with the more popular folk-tale. But fiction,
no more than drama, could do without the [Greek: amarthia]--the
human and not unpardonable frailty. This appears in, and complicates,
the famous story of _Tristram_, which, though its present English form
is probably younger than _Havelok_ and _Horn_, is likely to have existed
earlier: indeed must have done so if Thomas of Erceldoune wrote on the
subject. Few can require to be told that beautiful and tragical history
of "inauspicious stars" which hardly any man, of the many who have
handled it in prose and verse, has been able to spoil. Our Middle
English form is not consummate, and is in some places crude in manner
and in sentiment. But it is notable that the exaggerated and inartistic
repulsiveness of Mark, resorted to by later writers as a rather
rudimentary means of exciting compassion for the lovers, is not to be
found here; in fact, one of the most poetical touches in the piece is
one of sympathy for the luckless husband, when he sees the face of his
faithless queen slumbering by her lover's side with the sun on it. "And
Mark rewed therefore." The story, especially in its completion with the
"Iseult of Brittany" part and the death of Tristram, gives scope for
every possible faculty and craftsmanship of the most analytic as of the
most picturesque novelist of modern times. There is nothing in the least
like it in ancient literature; and to get a single writer who would do
it justice in modern times we should have to take the best notes of
Charles Kingsley, and Mr. Blackmore, and Mr. Meredith, leaving out all
their faults, and combine. It is not surprising that, in the very
infancy of the art, nobody in German or French, any more than in English
(though the German here is, as it happens, the best), should have done
it full justice; but it is a wonder that a story of such capacities
should have been sketched, and even worked out in considerable detail,
so early.

Of the far greater story of which _Tristram_ is a mere episode and
hardly even that--a chantry or out-lying chapel of the great
cathedral--the Arthurian Legend, the earlier English versions, or rather
the earlier versions in English, are, as has been said, not only
fragmentary but disappointing. There is nothing in the least strange in
this, even though (as the present writer, who can speak with indifferent
knowledge, still firmly holds) the conception of the story itself in its
greatest and unifying stage is probably if not certainly English. The
original sources of the story of Arthur are no doubt Celtic; they give
themselves out as being so, and there is absolutely no critical reason
for disbelieving them. But in these earlier forms--the authority of the
most learned Celticists who have any literary gift and any appreciation
of evidence is decisive on this point--not only are the most
characteristic unifying features--the Graal story and the love of
Lancelot and Guinevere--completely wanting, but _the_ great stroke of
genius--the connection of these two and the subordination of all minor
legends as to the dim national hero, Arthur, with those about him--is
more conspicuously wanting still. Whether it was the Englishman Walter
Map, the Norman Robert de Borron, or the Frenchman Chrestien de Troyes,
to whom this flash of illumination came, has never been proved--will
pretty certainly now never be proved. M. Gaston Paris failed to do it;
and it is exceedingly unlikely that, where he failed, any one else will
succeed, unless the thrice and thirty times sifted libraries of Europe
yield some quite unexpected windfall. In the works commonly attributed
to Chrestien, all of which are well known to the present writer, there
is no sign of his having been able to conceive this, though he is a
delightful romancer. Robert is a mere shadow; and his attributed works,
_as_ his works, are shadows too, though they are interesting enough in
themselves. Walter not only has the greatest amount of traditional
attribution, but is the undoubted author of _De Nugis Curialium_. And
the author of _De Nugis Curialium_, different as it is from the
Arthurian story, _could_ have finally divined the latter.

But at the time when he wrote, Englishmen, with the rarest exceptions,
wrote only in French or Latin; and when they began to write in English,
a man of genius, to interpret and improve on him, was not found for a
long time. And the most interesting parts of the Arthurian story are
rarely handled at all in such early vernacular versions of it as we
have, whether in verse or prose. Naturally enough, perhaps, it was the
fabulous historic connection with British history, and the story of the
great British enchanter Merlin, that attracted most attention. The
_Arthour and Merlin_ which is in the Auchinleck MS.; the prose _Merlin_,
published by the Early English Text Society; the alliterative Thornton
_Morte d'Arthur_, and others, are wont to busy themselves about the
antecedents of the real story--about the uninteresting wars of the King
himself with Saxons, and Romans, and giants, and rival kings, rather
than with the great chivalric triple cord of Round Table, Graal, and
Guinevere's fault. The pure Graal poems, _Joseph of Arimathea_, the work
of the abominable Lonelich or Lovelich, etc., deal mainly with another
branch of previous questions--things bearable as introductions,
fillings-up, and so forth, but rather jejune in themselves. The Scots
_Lancelot_ is later than Malory himself, and of very little interest.
Layamon's account, the oldest that we have, adds little (though what
little it does add is not unimportant) to Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace;
and tells what it has to tell with nearly as little skill in narrative
as in poetry. Only the metrical _Morte_--from which, it would appear,
Malory actually transprosed some of his most effective passages in the
manner in which genius transproses or transverses--has, for that reason,
for its dealings with the catastrophe, and for the further opportunity
of comparison with Tennyson, interest of the higher kind. But before we
come to Malory himself it is desirable to turn to the branches--the
chapels, as we have called them, to the cathedral--which he also, in
some cases at least, utilised in the _magnum opus_ of English prose
romance.

These outliers were rather more fortunate, probably for no more
recondite reason than that the French originals (from which they were in
almost every instance certainly taken) were finished in themselves. Of
the special Gawain cycle or sub-cycle we have two romances in pure
metrical form, and more than two in alliterative, which are above the
average in interest. _Ywain and Gawain_, one of the former, is derived
directly or indirectly from the _Chevalier au Lyon_ of Chrestien de
Troyes; and both present some remarkable affinities with the unknown
original of the "Sir Beaumains" episode of Malory, and, through it, with
Tennyson's _Gareth and Lynette_. The other, _Lybius Disconus (Le Beau
Déconnu)_ is also concerned with that courteous nephew of Arthur who, in
later versions of the main story, is somewhat sacrificed to Lancelot.
For a "_real_ romance," as it calls itself (though it is fair to say
that in the original the word means "royal"), of the simpler kind but
extremely well told, there are not many better metrical specimens than
_Ywain and Gawain_, but it has less character-interest, actual or
possible, than those which have been commented on. The hero, King
Urien's son, accepts an adventure in which another knight of the Table,
Sir Colgrevance, has fared ill, after it has been told in a conversation
at court which is joined in first by the Queen and afterwards by the
King. Sir Kay here shows his usual cross-grainedness; and Guinevere
"with milde mood" requests to know "What the devil is thee within?" The
adventure is of a class well known in romance. You ride to a certain
fountain, pour water from it on a stone, and then, after divers marvels,
have to do battle with a redoubtable knight. Colgrevance has fared
badly; Kay is as usual quite sure that he would fare better; but Ywain
actually undertakes the task. He has a tough battle with the knight who
answers the challenge, but wounds him mortally; and when the knight
flies to his neighbouring castle, is so hard on his heels that the
portcullis actually drops on his horse's haunches just behind the
saddle, and cuts the beast in two. Ywain is thus left between the
portcullis and the (by this time shut) door--a position all the more
awkward that the knight himself expires immediately after he has reached
shelter. The situation is saved, however, by the guardian damsel of
romance, Lunet (the Linet or Lynette of the Beaumains-Gareth story), who
emerges from a postern between gate and portcullis and conveys the
intruder safe to her own chamber. Here a magic bed makes him invisible:
though the whole castle, including the very room, is ransacked by the
dead knight's people and would-be revengers, at the bidding of his
widow.

This widow, however, is rather an Ephesian matron. The sagacious Lunet,
whose confidante she is, suggests to her that, unless she enlists some
doughty knight as her champion, the king will confiscate her fief; and
that there is no champion like a husband. A very little more finesse
effects the marriage, even though the lady is made aware of the identity
of her new lover and her own husband's slayer. (It is of course
necessary to remember that the death of a combatant in fairly challenged
and fought single contest was not reckoned as any fault to his
antagonist.) Ywain actually shows his prowess against the King: and has
an opportunity of showing Kay once more that it is one thing to blame
other people for failing, and another to succeed yourself. And after
this the newly married pair live together happily for a time. But it was
reckoned a fault in a knight to take too prolonged a honeymoon: and
Ywain, after what the French call _adieux déchirants_, obtains leave for
the usual "twelvemonth and a day," at the expiration of which, on St.
John's Eve, he is without fail to return, the engagement being sealed by
the gift from his lady of a special ring. He forgets his promise of
course: and at the stated time a damsel appears, sternly demands the
ring, and announces her lady's decision to have nothing further to do
with him. There is in such cases only one thing for any true knight,
from Sir Lancelot to Sir Amadis, to do: and that is to go mad, divest
himself of his garments, and take to the greenwood. This Ywain duly
does, supporting himself at first on the raw flesh of game which he
kills with a bow and arrows wrested from a chance-comer; and then on
less savage but still simple food supplied by a benevolent hermit. As he
lies asleep under a tree, a lady rides by with attendants, and one of
these (another of the wise damsels of romance) recognises him as Sir
Ywain. The lady has at the time sore need of a champion against a
hostile earl, and she also fortunately possesses a box of ointment
infallible against madness, which Morgane la Faye has given her. With
this the damsel is sent back to anoint Ywain. He comes to his senses, is
armed and clothed, undertakes the lady's defence, and discomfits the
earl: but is as miserable as ever. Resisting the lady's offer of herself
and all her possessions, he rides off once more "with heavy heart and
dreary cheer."

Soon he hears a hideous noise and, riding in its direction, finds that a
dragon has attacked a lion. He succours the holier beast, kills the
dragon, and though he has unavoidably wounded the lion in the _mêlée_ is
thenceforth attended by him not merely as a food-provider, but as the
doughtiest of squires and comrades in fight. To aggravate his sorrow he
comes to the fountain and thorn-tree of the original adventure, and
hears some one complaining in the chapel hard by. They exchange
questions. "A man," he said, "some time I was" (which must be one of the
earliest occurrences in English of a striking phrase), and the prisoner
turns out to be Lunet. She has been accused of treason by the usual
steward (it is _very_ hard for a steward of romance to be good) and two
brothers--of treason to her lady, and is to be burnt, unless she can
find a knight who will fight the three. Ywain agrees to defend her: but
before he can carry out his promise he has, on the same morning, to meet
a terrible giant who is molesting his hosts at a castle where he is
guested. Both adventures, however, are achieved on the same day, with
very notable aid from the lion: and Ywain undertakes a fresh one, being
recruited by the necessary damsel-messenger, against two half-fiend
brother knights. They stipulate that the lion is to be forcibly
prevented from interfering, and he is locked up in a room; but, hearing
the noise of battle, he scratches up the earth under the door, frees
himself, and once more succours his master at the nick of time. Even
this does not expiate Ywain's fault: and yet another task falls to
him--the championship of the rights of the younger of a pair of sisters,
the elder of whom has secured no less a representative than Gawain
himself. The pair, unknowing and unknown, fight all day long before
Arthur's court with no advantage on either side: and when the light
fails an interchange of courtesies leads to recognition and the
settlement of the dispute. Now the tale is nearly full. Ywain rides yet
again to the magic fountain and performs the rite; there is no one to
meet him; the castle rocks and the inmates quake. But the crafty Lunet
persuades her mistress to swear that if the Knight of the Lion, who has
fallen at variance with his lady, will come to the rescue, she will do
all she can to reconcile the pair. Which not ill-prepared "curtain" duly
falls: leaving us comfortably assured that Ywain and his Lady and Lunet
and the Lion (one wishes that these two could have made a match of it,
and he must surely have been a bewitched knight) lived happily

    "Until that death had driven them down."

This, it has been said, is a specimen of the pure romance; with little
except incident in it, and a touch or two of manners. It does not, as
the others noticed above do, lend itself much to character-drawing. But
it is spiritedly told; though rougher, it is much more vigorous than the
French original; and the mere expletives and stock phrases, which are
the curse of these romances, do not obtrude themselves too much. In this
respect, and some others, it is the superior of the one coupled above
with it, _Lybius Disconus_, which is closer, except in names, to the
Beaumains story. Still, this also is not a bad specimen of the same
class. The hero of it is a son, not a brother, of Gawain, comes nameless
or nicknamed, but as "Beaufils," not "Beaumains," to Arthur's court, and
is knighted at once, not made to go through the "kitchen-knave" stage.
Accordingly, the damsel Elene (not Lunet), to whom he is assigned as
champion in the adventure of the Lady of Sinadowne, objects only to his
novelty of knighthood and is converted by his first victory. The course
of the adventures is, however, different from that which some people
know from Malory, and many from Tennyson. One of them is farcical: the
Fair Unknown rescues a damsel at her utmost need from two giants, a red
and a black, one of whom is roasting a wild boar and uses the animal as
a weapon, with the spit in it, for the combat. Moreover, he falls a
victim to the wiles of a sorceress-chatelaine whom he has also
succoured: and it is only after the year and day that Elene goads him on
to his proper quest. But this also is no bad story.

The limits of this volume admit of not much farther "argument" (though
the writer would very gladly give it) of these minor romances of
adventure, Arthurian and other. Ellis's easily accessible book supplies
abstracts of the main Arthurian story before Malory; of the two most
famous, though by no means best, of all the non-Arthurian romances, _Guy
of Warwick_ and _Bevis of Hampton_ (the former of which was handled and
rehandled from age to age, moralised, curtailed, lengthened, and hashed
up in every form); of the brilliant and vigorous _Richard
Coeur-de-Lion_; of the less racy Charlemagne romances in English; of the
_Seven Wise Masters_, brought from the East and naturalised all over
Europe; of the delightful love story of _Florice and Blancheflour_; of
that powerful and pathetic legend of the _Proud King_ (Robert of
Sicily), which Longfellow and Mr. William Morris both modernised, each
in his way; of those other legends, _Sir Isumbras_ and _Amis and
Amillion_, which are so beautiful to those who can appreciate the
mediæval mind, and to the beauty of which others seem insensible; of
_Sir Triamond_ and _Sir Eglamour_ (examples of the romance at its
weakest); of the exceedingly spirited and interesting _Ipomydon_, and of
some others, including the best of Scotch romances, _Sir Eger, Sir
Grame, and Sir Graysteel_. But Ellis could not know others, and he left
alone yet others that he might have known--the exquisite _Sir Launfal_
of Thomas Chester at the beginning of the fifteenth century, where an
unworthy presentment of Guinevere is compensated by the gracious image
of Launfal's fairy love; the lively adventures of _William of Palerne_,
who had a werewolf for his friend and an emperor's daughter for his
love, eloping with her in white bear-skins, the unusual meat of which
was being cooked in her father's kitchen; _Sir Orfeo_--Orpheus and
Eurydice, with a happy ending; _Emarè_, one of the tales of innocent but
persecuted heroines of which Chaucer's Constance is the best known;
_Florence of Rome_; the rather famous _Squire of Low Degree; Sir
Amadas_, not a very good handling of a fine motive, charity to a corpse;
many others.

Nor does he seem to have known one of the finest of all--the
alliterative romance of _Gawain and the Green Knight_ which, since Dr.
Morris published it some forty years ago for the Early English Text
Society, has made its way through text-books into more general knowledge
than most of its fellows enjoy. In this the hero is tempted repeatedly,
elaborately, and with great knowledge of nature and no small command of
art on the teller's part, by the wife of his host and destined
antagonist. He resists in the main, but succumbs in the point of
accepting a magic preservative as a gift: and is discovered and lectured
accordingly. It is curious that this, which is far above the usual mere
adventure-story and is novel of a high kind as well as romance, has no
known French original; and is strongly English in many characteristics
besides its verse-form.

On the whole, however, one need have no difficulty in admitting that the
majority of these romances _do_ somewhat content themselves with
incident, incident only, and incident not merely of a naïf but of a
stock kind, for their staple. There are striking situations, even striking
phrases, here and there; there is plenty of variety in scene, and more than
is sometimes thought in detail; but the motive-and-character-interest is
rarely utilised as it might be, and very generally is not even suggested.
There is seldom any real plot or "fable"--only a chain of events: and
though no one but a very dull person will object to the supernatural
element, or to the exaggerated feats of professedly natural prowess and
endurance, it cannot be said that on the whole they are artistically
managed. You feel, not merely that the picture would have been better if
the painter had taken more pains, but that the reason why he did not
is that he did not know how.

Sir Thomas Malory, himself most unknown perhaps of all great writers,
did know how; and a cynical person might echo the _I nunc_ of the Roman
satirist, and dwell on the futility of doing great things, in reference
to the fact that it used to be fashionable, and is still not uncommon,
to call Malory a "mere compiler." Indeed from the direction which modern
study so often takes, of putting inquiry into origins above everything,
and neglecting the consideration of the work as work, this practice is
not likely soon to cease. But no mistake about the mysterious
Englishman (the place-names with which the designation is connected are
all pure English) is possible to any one who has read his book, and who
knows what prose fiction is. _The Noble Histories of King Arthur, La
Morte d'Arthur, The Story of the most Noble and Worthy King Arthur, The
Most Ancient and Famous History of the Renowned Prince Arthur, The
Birth, Life, and Acts of King Arthur_--call it by whichever name anybody
likes of those which various printers and reprinters have given it--is
one of the great books of the world. If they can give us any single
"French book"--the reference to which is a commonplace of the
subject--from which it was taken, let them; they have not yet. If they
point out (as they can) French and English books from which parts of it
were taken, similar things may be done with Dante and Chaucer, with
Shakespeare and Milton, and very probably could have been done with
Homer. It is what the artist does with his materials, not where he gets
them, that is the question. And Malory has done, with _his_ materials, a
very great thing indeed. He is working no doubt to a certain extent
blindly; working much better than he knows, and sometimes as he would
not work if he knew better; though whether he would work as well if he
knew better is quite a different point. Sometimes he may not take the
best available version of a story; but we must ask ourselves whether he
knew it. Sometimes he may put in what we do not want: but we must ask
ourselves whether there was not a reason for doing so, to him if not to
us. What is certain is that he, and he only in any language, makes of
this vast assemblage of stories one story, and one book. He does it
(much more than half unconsciously no doubt) by following the lines of,
as I suppose, Walter Map, and fusing the different motives, holding to
this method even in parts of the legend with which, so far as one knows,
Map cannot have meddled. Before him this legend consisted of half a
dozen great divisions--a word which may be used of malice prepense.
These were the story of Merlin, that of Arthur's own origin, and that of
the previous history of the Graal for introduction; the story of
Arthur's winning the throne, of the Round Table, and of the marriage
with Guinevere, also endless branchings of special knights' adventures,
and of the wars with the Saxons and the Romans, and the episode of the
False Guinevere--with whom for a time Arthur lives as with his
queen--for middle; and the story of the Graal-quest, the love of
Lancelot for the Queen, and the rebellion of Mordred with its fatal
consequences, for close. Exactly how much of this Malory personally had
before him we cannot of course say: but of any working up of the whole
that would have spared him trouble, and robbed him of credit, we do not
know. In fact the favourite term "compiler" gives up the only dangerous
point. Now in what way did Malory _compile_? In the way in which the
ordinary compiler proceeds he most emphatically does not. He cuts down
the preliminaries mercilessly: but they can be perfectly well spared. He
misses almost all the wars with the Saxons, which are the most tedious
parts of the originals. He adopts, most happily, the early, not the
late, placing of those with the Romans. He drops the false Guinevere
altogether, which is imperative, that the true one may have no right to
plead the incident--though he does not represent Arthur as "blameless."
He gives the _roman d'aventures_ side of the Round Table stories, from
the great Tristram and Palomides romances through the Beaumains episode
downwards, because they are interesting in themselves and lead up to
the Graal quest. He gives that Quest as plentifully because it leads up
to the "dolorous death and departing out of this world of them all." How
he gives the Lancelot and Guinevere tragedy we shall see presently. And
the catastrophe of the actual "departing" he gives perfectly; with the
magnificent final scenes which he has converted, sometimes in almost
Shakespearean fashion, by the slightest verbal touches from mediocre
verse to splendid prose. A very remarkable compiler! It is a pity that
they did not take him and cut him up in little stars for a light to all
his brethren in compiling thereafter.

For he has what no compiler as such can have--because the moment he has
it he ceases to be a compiler, and becomes an artist--the sense of
_grasp_, the power to put his finger, and to keep it, on the central
pulse and nerve of the story. That he did this deliberately is so
unlikely as to be practically impossible: that he did it is certain. The
Arthurian Legend is the greatest of mediæval creations as a subject--a
"fable"--just as the _Divina Commedia_ is the greatest of mediæval
"imitations" and works of art. And as such it is inevitable that it
should carry with it the sense of the greatest medieval _differences_,
Chivalry and Romance. The strong point of these differences is the way
in which they combine the three great motives, as Dante isolates them,
of Valour, Love, and Religion. The ancients never realised this
combination at all; the moderns have merely struggled after it, or
blasphemed it in fox-and-grapes fashion: the mediævals _had_ it--in
theory at any rate. The Round Table stories, merely as such, illustrate
Valour; the Graal stories, Religion; the passion of Lancelot and
Guinevere with the minor instances, Love. All these have their [Greek:
amarthia]--their tragic and tragedy-causing fault and flaw. The knight
wastes his valour in idle bickerings; he forgets law in his love; and
though there is no actual degradation of religion, he fails to live up
to the ideal that he does not actually forswear. To throw the
presentation--the _mimesis_--of all this into perfectly worthy form
would probably have been too much for any single genius of that curious
time (when genius was so widely spread and so little concentrated)
except Dante himself, whose hand found other work to do. To colour and
shape the various fragments of the mosaic was the work of scores. To put
them together, if not in absolutely perfect yet in more than sufficient
shape, was, so far as we know, the luck of Malory only: though some one
(Map or another) had done a mighty day's work long before in creating
the figure and the adventures of Lancelot and imagining the later quest
of the Graal with the figure of Galahad--that "improved Percivale," as
the seedsmen say.

But besides this power of shaping (or even of merely combining)
scattered elements into a story, Malory has another--_the_ other of the
first importance to the novelist proper--in his attraction to character,
if not exactly in his making up of it. It has been said above that the
defect of the pure romances--especially those of continental origin--is
the absence of this. What the Greeks called [Greek: dihanoia]--"sentiment,"
"thought," "cast of thought," as it has been variously rendered--is even
more absent from them than plot or character itself: and of its almost
necessary connection with this latter they often seem to have no idea.
Very rare is such a touch as that of Sir Amadas being unable at the feast
to get rid of the memory of the unburied corpse, kept by enemies from the
kindly earth that would hide it, and the rites that would help it to peace:
still rarer that in _Guy of Warwick_ when the hero, at the height of
his fame and in the full enjoyment of his desires, looks from the tower and
is struck by the selfishness and earthliness of his career. The first
notion is not "improved" in the original at all, and the second very badly;
but in most of the others such things do not even exist. Now the greater
Legend is full of situations which encourage such thoughts, and even of
expressed thoughts that only need craftsmanship to turn them into the
cornerstones of character-building, and the jewels, five or fifty words
long, of literature. The fate and metaphysical aid that determine the
relations of Tristram and Iseult; the unconscious incest of Arthur and
Margause with its Greek-tragic consequence; the unrewarded fidelity of
Palomides, and (an early instance of the soon to be triumphant allegory)
his fruitless chase of the Beast Glatissant; all these are matters in
point. But of course the main nursery of such things is the
Lancelot-and-Guinevere story itself. Nobody has yet made Guinevere a
person--nobody but Shakespeare could have done so perhaps, though
Shakespeare's Guinevere would probably have been the greatest woman in
all art. But Malory has not been the least successful with her: and of
Lancelot he has made, if only in study, one of the great characters of
that fictitious world which is so much truer than the real. And let no
one say that we are reading Tennyson or any one else into Malory. There
are yet persons, at least at the time this was written not quite
Methusalahs, who read the _Morte d'Arthur_ before the _Idylls_ appeared
and who have never allowed even the _Idylls_ to overlay their original
idea of the most perfect and most gentle of knights.

It is probable indeed that Malory invented little or nothing in the
various situations, by which the character of Lancelot, and the history
of his fatal love, are evolved. We know in most cases that this is so.
It is possible, too, that at first (probably because the possibilities
had not dawned on him, as it has been admitted they never did very
consciously) he has not made the most of the introduction of lover and
lady. But when the interest becomes concentrated, as in the various
passages of Guinevere's wrath with her lover and their consequences, or
in the final series of catastrophes, he is fully equal to the occasion.
We _know_--this time to his credit--how he has improved, in the act of
borrowing them, the earlier verse-pictures of the final parting of the
lovers, and there are many other episodes and juxtapositions of which as
much may be said. That except as to Lancelot's remorse (which after all
is the great point) there is not much actual talk about motive and
sentiment is nothing; or nothing but the condition of the time. The
important point is that, as the electricians say, "the house is wired"
for the actual installation of character-novelling. There is here the
complete scenario, and a good deal more, for a novel as long as
_Clarissa_ and much more interesting, capable of being worked out in the
manner, not merely of Richardson himself, but of Mr. Meredith or Mr.
Hardy. It _is_ a great romance, if not the greatest of romances: it has
a great novel, if not the greatest of novels, written in sympathetic ink
between the lines, and with more than a little of the writing sometimes
emerging to view.

Little in the restricted space here available can be, though much might
be in a larger, said about the remaining attempts in English fiction
before the middle of the sixteenth century. The later romances, down to
those of Lord Berners, show the character of the older with a certain
addition of the "conjuror's supernatural" of the _Amadis_ school. But
the short verse-tales, especially those of the Robin Hood cycle, and
some of the purely comic kind, introduce an important variation of
interest: and even some of the longer, such as that _Tale of Beryn_,
which used to be included in Chaucer's works, vary the chivalrous model
in a useful way. Still more important is the influence of the short
_prose_ tale:--first Latin, as in the _Gesta Romanorum_ (which of course
had older and positively mediæval forerunners), then Italian and French.
The prose saved the writer from verbiage and stock phrase; the shortness
from the tendency to "watering out" which is the curse of the long verse
or prose romance. Moreover, to get point and appeal, it was especially
necessary to _throw up_ the subject--incident, emotion, or whatever it
was--to bring it out; not merely to meander and palaver about it. But
language and literature were both too much in a state of transition to
admit of anything capital being done at this time. It was the great good
fortune of England, corresponding to that experienced with Chaucer in
poetry three quarters of a century earlier, that Malory came to give the
sum and substance of what mediæval fiction could do in prose. For more,
the times and the men had to come.




CHAPTER II

FROM LYLY TO SWIFT


During the dying-off of romance proper, or its transference from verse
to prose in the late fifteenth and earlier sixteenth century, there is
not very much to note about prose fiction in England. But, as the
conditions of modern literature fashioned themselves, a very great
influence in this as in other departments was no doubt exercised with us
by Italian, as well as some by Spanish in a way which may be postponed
for a little. The Italian prose tale had begun to exercise that
influence as early as Chaucer's time: but circumstances and atmosphere
were as yet unfavourable for its growth. It is a hackneyed truism that
Italian society was very much more modern than any other in Europe at
this time--in fact it would not be a mere paradox to say that it was,
and continued to be till the later sixteenth, much more modern than it
has ever been since--or till very recently. By "modern" is here meant
the kind of society which is fairly cultivated, fairly comfortable,
fairly complicated with classes not very sharply separated from each
other, not dominated by any very high ideals, tolerably corrupt, and
sufficiently business-like. The Italian _novella_, of course, admits
wild passions and extravagant crimes: but the general tone of it is
_bourgeois_--at any rate domestic. With its great number of situations
and motives, presented in miniature, careful work is necessary to bring
out the effect: and, above all, there is abundant room for study of
manners, for proverbial and popular wisdom and witticism, for
"furniture"--to use that word in a wide sense. Above all, the Italian
mind, like the Greek, had an ethical twist--twist in more senses than
one, some would say, but that does not matter. Manners, morals,
motives--these three could not but displace, to some extent, mere
incident: though there was generally incident of a poignant or piquant
kind as well. In other words the _novella_ was actually (though still in
miniature) a novel in nature as well as in name. And these _novelle_
became, as is generally known, common in English translations after the
middle of the sixteenth century. Painter's huge _Palace of Pleasure_
(1566) is only the largest and best known of many translations, single
and collected, of the Italian _novellieri_ and the French tale-tellers,
contemporary, or of times more or less earlier.

For some time, as almost everybody knows, these collections of
translated matter served a purpose--great indeed, but somewhat outside
their proper department--by furnishing the Elizabethan dramatists with a
large part--perhaps the larger part--of their subjects. But they very
soon began to exercise it directly by suggesting the fictitious part of
the prose pamphlet--a department which, though infinitely less well
known than the plays, and still not very easy to know, holds almost the
second position as representing the popular literature of the
Elizabethan time. And they also had--in one case certainly, in the other
probably--no little influence upon the two great Elizabethan works which
in a manner founded the modern novel and the modern romance in
English--the _Euphues_ of Lyly and the _Arcadia_ of Sir Philip Sidney.

The pamphlet stories (which are themselves often play-connected, as in
the case of Lodge's _Rosalynde_ and Greene's _Pandosto_) do not require
much notice, with one exception--Nash's _Jack Wilton or the Unfortunate
Traveller_, to which some have assigned a position equal, or perhaps
superior in our particular subject, to that of the _Arcadia_ or that of
_Euphues_. This seems to the present writer a mistake: but as to appear
important is (in a not wholly unreal sense) to be so, the piece shall be
separately considered. The rest are mostly marred by a superabundance of
rather rudimentary art, and a very poor allowance of matter. There is
hardly any character, and except in a few pieces, such as Lodge's
_Margarite of America_, there is little attempt to utilise new scenes
and conditions. But the whole class has special interest for us in one
peculiarity which makes it perhaps unreadable to any but students, and
that is its saturation with the Elizabethan conceit and word-play which
is sometimes called Euphuism. Nor is this wonderful, considering that
more than one of these "pamphlets" is directly connected with the matter
and the personages of _Euphues_ itself. To this famous book, therefore,
we had better turn.

Some people, it is believed, have denied that _Euphues_ is a novel at
all; and some of these some have been almost indignant at its being
called one. It is certainly, with _Rasselas_, the most remarkable
example, in English, of a novel which is to a great extent deprived of
the _agrémens_ to which we have for some two centuries been accustomed
in the kind, and, to a still greater, loaded with others which do not
appeal to us. To put aside altogether its extraordinary and in a way
epoch-making style, which gives it its main actual place in the history
of English literature, it is further loaded with didactic digressions
which, though certain later novelists have been somewhat peccant in the
kind, have never been quite equalled--no, not in _Rasselas_ itself or
the _Fool of Quality_. But if anybody, who has the necessary knowledge
to understand, and therefore the necessary patience to tolerate, these
knotty knarry envelopes, insertions, and excrescences, will for the
moment pay no attention to them, but merely strip them off, he will find
the carcass of a very tolerable novel left behind. The first plot of
Philautus--Euphues--Lucilla, and the successive jilting of the two
friends for each other and for Curio, is no mean novel-substance. Not
Balzac himself, certainly no one of his successors, need disdain it: and
more than one of them has taken up something like it. The journey from
Naples to London, and the episode of Fidus and Iffida, could have been
worked up, in the good old three-volume days, to a most effective second
volume. And the picture of the court, with the further loves of
Philautus, Camilla, and the "violet" Frances, would supply a third of
themselves even if Euphues were left out, though some livelier
presentation of his character (which Lyly himself was obviously too much
personally interested to make at all clear) would improve the whole
immensely. But it was still too early: the thing was not yet to be done.
Only, I do not know any book in which the possibilities, and even the
outlines, of this thing were indicated and vaguely sketched earlier in
any European language, unless it be the _Lucretia and Euryalus_ of Æneas
Silvius, which is much more confined in its scope.

The fact is that the very confusedness, the many undeveloped sides, of
_Euphues_, make it much more of an ancestor of the modern novel than if
it were more of a piece. The _quicquid agunt homines_ is as much the
province of the novel as of the satire; and there is more than something
of this as it affected Elizabethan times in _Euphues_. Men's interest in
morals, politics, and education; their development of the modern idea of
society; their taste for letters; their conceits and fancies--all these
appear in it.

The _Arcadia_ stands in a different compartment. _Euphues_ is very much
_sui generis_: failure as it may be from some points of view, it
deserves the highest respect for this, and like most other things _sui
generis_ it was destined to propagate the genus, if only after many
days. The _Arcadia_ was in intention certainly, and to great extent in
actual fact, merely a carrying out of the attempt, common all over
Europe (as a result of the critical searchings of heart of the
Italians), to practise a new kind--the Heroic Romance of the sub-variety
called pastoral. The "heroic" idea generally was (as ought to be, but
perhaps is not, well known) to blend, after a fashion, classical and
romantic characteristics--to substitute something like the classic unity
of fable or plot for the mere "meandering" of romantic story, and to pay
at least as much attention to character as the classics had paid,
instead of neglecting it altogether, as had recently though not always
been the case in Romance. But the scheme retained on the other hand the
variety of incident and appeal of this latter: and especially assigned
to Love the high place which Romance had given it. As for the
Pastoral--that is almost a story to itself, and a story which has been
only once (by Mr. W.W. Greg) satisfactorily, and then not quite
completely, told. It is enough to say here, and as affecting our own
subject, that it supplied a new opportunity of gratifying the passion of
the Renaissance for imitating antiquity, at the same time permitting to
no small extent the introduction of things that were really romantic,
and above all providing a convention. The Heroic romance generally and
the Pastoral in particular went directly back to the Greek romances of
Heliodorus and Longus: but they admitted many new and foreign elements.

At the same time, bastard as the heroic romance was, it could not but
exercise an important influence on the future of fiction, inasmuch as it
combined, or attempted to combine, with classical unity and mediæval
variety the more modern interest of manners and (sometimes) personality.
Sidney's attempt (which, it must be remembered, is not certainly known
to be wholly his as it stands, and _is_ certainly known not to have been
revised by him for publication) exercised a very great influence in
English. For its popularity was enormous, and it doubtless served as
shoehorn to draw on that of the English translations of French and
Spanish romance which supplied, during the greater part of the
seventeenth century, the want of original composition of the kind. The
unconscionable amount of talk and of writing "about it and about it"
which _Euphues_ and the minor Euphuist romances display is at least as
prominent in the _Arcadia_: and this talk rarely takes a form congenial
to the modern novel reader's demands. Moreover, though there really is a
plot, and a sufficient amount of incident, this reader undoubtedly, and
to no small extent justly, demands that both incident and plot shall be
more disengaged from their framework--that they should be brought into
higher relief, should stand out more than is the case. Yet further, the
pure character-interest is small--is almost nonexistent: and the
rococo-mosaic of manners and sentiment which was to prove the curse of
the heroic romance generally prevents much interest being felt in that
direction.[1] It would also be impossible to devise a style less suited
to prose narrative, except of a very peculiar kind and on a small scale,
than that either of _Euphues_ or of the _Arcadia_, which, though an
uncritical tradition credits it with driving out Lyly's, is practically
only a whelp of the same litter. Embarrassed, heavy, rhetorical, it has
its place in the general evolution of English prose, and a proper and
valuable place too. But it is bad even for pure romance purposes: and
nearly hopeless for the panoramic and kaleidoscopic variety which should
characterise the novel. To the actual successors of the _Arcadia_ in
English we shall come presently.

    [1] As a work of general literature, the attraction of the
    _Arcadia_ is of course much enhanced by, if it does not chiefly
    depend upon, its abundant, varied, and sometimes charming
    verse-insets. But, as a novel, it cannot count these.

_The Unfortunate Traveller_ is of much less importance than the other
two. It has obtained such reputation as it possesses, partly because of
its invention or improvement of the fable of "Surrey and Geraldine";
more, and more justly, because it does work up a certain amount of
historical material--the wars of Henry VIII. in French Flanders--into
something premonitory (with a little kindness on the part of the
premonished) of the great and long missed historical novel; still more
for something else. Nash, with his quick wit, seems to have been really
the first to perceive the capabilities of that foreign travel and
observation of manners which was becoming common, stripped of the
special atmosphere of pilgrimage which had formerly enveloped it. Even
here, he had had the "notion of the notion" supplied to him by Lyly in
_Euphues_: and a tolerably skilful advocate would not have so very much
difficulty in claiming the book as one of the tribe of Euphuist
pamphlets. But Jack Wilton the "traveller" is a little more of a person
than the pedagogic Euphues and the shadowy Philautus. At any rate he has
a very strong anticipation of Defoe, whose "Cavalier" was not improbably
suggested by him. But Nash has neither the patience of Defoe, nor that
singular originality, which accompanies in the author of _Moll Flanders_
a certain inability to make the most of it. _The Unfortunate Traveller_
is a sort of compilation or congeries of current _fabliaux, novelle_,
and _facetiæ_, with the introduction of famous actual persons of the
time, from the crowned heads of the period, through Luther and Aretine
downwards, to give bait and attraction. Sometimes it reminds one of a
working up of the _Colloquies_ of Erasmus: three centuries earlier than
_The Cloister and the Hearth_, with much less genius than Charles
Reade's, and still more without his illegitimate advantage of actual
novels behind him for nearly half the time. But it gives us "disjectæ
membra _novellæ_" rather than a novel itself: and the oftener one reads
it the more clear one is that the time for writing novels had not yet
come. The materials are there; the desire to utilise--and even a faint
vague idea of _how_ to utilise--them is there; but the art is almost
completely absent. Even regarded as an early attempt in the "picaresque"
manner, it is abortive and only half organised.

The subject of the English "Heroic" Romance, in the wide sense, is one
which has been very little dealt with. Dunlop neglected it rather
surprisingly, and until Professor Raleigh's chapter on the subject there
was little of a satisfactory kind to be found about it anywhere. It
must, however, be admitted that the abstainers from it have been to some
extent justified in their abstention. The subject is a curious one: and
it has an important place in the history of the Novel, because it shows
at once how strong was the _nisus_ towards prose fiction and how
surprisingly difficult writers seem, nevertheless, to have found it to
hit upon anything really good, much more anything really original in
kind. For it is hardly too much to say that this century of attempt--we
cannot call it a century of invention--from Ford to Congreve, does not
add a single piece of any considerable merit to the roll of English
books. As for a masterpiece, there is nothing in respect of which the
use of such a word would not be purely ridiculous. And yet the attempts
are interesting to the historian, and should not be uninteresting to the
historical student of literature. One or two of them have a sort of
shadowy name and place in literary history already.

In tracing their progress and character, we must allow for two native
models: and for three foreign sources, one ancient, two modern, of
influence. _The Arcadia_ and _Euphues_, the former continuously, the
latter by revival after an interval, exercised very great effect in the
first half of the seventeenth century, during at least the earlier part
of which the vogue of _Amadis_ and its successors, as Englished by
Anthony Munday and others, likewise continued. The Greek romances also
had much to do with the matter: for the Elizabethan translators had
introduced them to the vulgar, and the seventeenth century paid a good
deal of attention to Greek. Then, when that century itself was on its
way, the pastoral romance of D'Urfé first, and the Calprenède-Scudéry
productions in the second place, came to give a fresh impulse, and
something of a new turn. The actual translations of French and Spanish
romance, shorter and longer, good, bad, and indifferent, are of immense
bulk and doubtless excited imitation: but we cannot possibly deal with
them here. A bare list would fill a chapter. But some work of more or
less (generally less) originality, in at least adaptation, calls for a
little individual notice: and some general characterisation may be
added.

It may be desirable to prelude the story by a reminder to the reader
that the _general_ characteristics of these various sources were
"harlequin" in their diversity of apparent colour. The _Amadis_ romances
and, indeed, all the later examples of that great kind, such as _Arthur
of Little Britain_, which Berners translated, were distinguished on the
one side by a curious convention of unsmooth running of the course of
love, on the other sometimes by a much greater licence of morality than
their predecessors, and always by a prodigality of the "conjuror's
supernatural"--witches and giants and magic black and white. The Spanish
"picaresque" story was pretty real but even less decent: and its French
imitations (though not usually reaching the licence of the short tale,
which clung to _fabliau_ ways in this respect) imitated it here also.
The French heroic romance, on the other hand, observed the most
scrupulous propriety in language and situation: but aggravated the
Amadisian troubling of the course of true love, and complicated
everything, very frequently if not invariably, by an insinuated "key"
interest of identification of the ancient personages selected as heroes
and heroines with modern personages of quality and distinction.

Emanuel Ford (whom the British Museum catalogue insists on spelling
Ford_e_ and of whom very little seems to be known) published _Parismus,
Prince of Bohemia_, as early as 1598. In less than a hundred years
(1696) it had reached its fourteenth edition, and it continued to be
popular in abridged and chap-booked form[2] far into the eighteenth
century. (It is sometimes called _Parismus and Parismenus_: the second
part being, as very commonly in romances of the class after the _Amadis_
pattern, occupied largely with the adventures of the son of the hero of
the first.) On the whole, _Parismus_, though it has few pretensions to
elegance of style, and though some delicate tastes have been shocked at
certain licences of incident, description, and phrase in it, is quite
the best of our bunch in this kind. It is, in general conception, pure
_Amadis_ of the later and slightly degraded type. Laurana, the heroine
(of whom a peculiarly hideous portrait adorns the black-letter editions
side by side with Parismus himself, who is rather a "jolly gentleman")
is won with much less difficulty and in much less time than Oriana--but
separations and difficulties duly follow in "desolate isles" and the
like. And though Parismus himself is less of an Amadis than Amadis, the
"contrast of friends," founded by that hero and Galaor, is kept up by
his association with a certain Pollipus--"a man of his hands" if ever
there was one, for with them he literally wrings the neck of the
enchantress Bellona, who has enticed him to embrace her. There is plenty
of the book, as there always should be in its kind (between 400 and 500
very closely printed quarto pages), and its bulk is composed of
proportionately plentiful fighting and love-making and of a very much
smaller proportion of what schoolboys irreverently call "jaw" than is
usual in the class. If it were not for the black letter (which is trying
to the eyes) I should not myself object to have no other reading than
_Parismus_ for some holiday evenings, or even after pretty tough days of
literary and professional work. _The Famous History of Montelion, the
Knight of the Oracle_ (1633?) proclaims its Amadisian type even more
clearly: but I have only read it in an abridged edition of the close of
the century. I should imagine that _in extenso_ it was a good deal
duller than _Parismus_. And of course the comparative praise which has
been given to that book must be subject to the reminder that it is what
it is--a romance of disorderly and what some people call childish
adventure, and of the above-ticketed "conjuror's supernatural." If
anybody cannot read _Amadis_ itself, he certainly will not read
_Parismus_: and perhaps not everybody who can manage the original--perhaps
not even everybody who can manage _Palmerin_--could put up with Ford's
copy. I can take this Ford as I find him: but I am not sure that I would
go much lower.

    [2] It is pleasant to remember that one of the chief publishers
    of these things in the late seventeenth century was _W.
    Thackeray_.

_Ornatus and Artesia_ (1607?), on the other hand--his second or third
book--strikes me as owing more to Heliodorus than to Montalvo, or
Lobeira, or whoever was the author of the great romance of the last
chivalric type. There are more intricacies in it; the heroine plays a
rather more important part; there is even something of a nearer approach
to modern novel-ways in this production, which reappeared at "Grub
Street near the Upper Pump" in the year 1650. Ornatus sees his mistress
asleep and in a kind of deshabille, employs a noble go-between, Adellena
(a queer spelling of "Adelina" which may be intentional), is rejected
with apparent indignation, of course; writes elaborate letters in vain,
but overhears Artesia soliloquising confession of her love for him and
disguises himself as a girl, Silvia. Then the villain of the piece,
Floretus, to obtain the love of this supposed Silvia, murders a person
of distinction and plots to poison Artesia herself. Ornatus-Silvia is
banished: and all sorts of adventures and disguises follow, entirely in
the Greek style. The book is not very long, extending only to signature
R in a very small quarto. Except that it is much less lively and
considerably less "free," it reminds one rather in type of Kynaston's
verse _Leoline and Sydanis_. In fact the verse and prose romances of the
time are very closely connected: and Chamberlayne's _Pharonnida_--far
the finest production of the English "heroic" school in prose, verse, or
drama--was, when the fancy for abridging set in, condensed into a tiny
prose _Eromena_. But _Ornatus and Artesia_, if more modern, more
decent, and less extravagant than _Parismus_, is nothing like so
interesting to read. It is indeed quite possible that there is, if not
in it, in its popularity, a set-back to the _Arcadia_ itself, which had
been directly followed in Lady Mary Wroth's _Urania_ (1621), and to
which (by the time of the edition noted) Charles I.'s admiration--so
indecently and ignobly referred to by Milton--had given a fresh
attraction for all good anti-Puritans. That an anti-Puritan should be a
romance-lover was almost a necessity.

When the French "heroics" began to appear it was only natural that they
should be translated, and scarcely less so that they should be imitated
in England. For they were not far off the _Arcadia_ pattern: and they
were a distinct and considerable effort to supply the appetite for
fiction which has been dwelt upon. But except for this, and for
fashion's sake, they did not contain much that would appeal to an
English taste: and it is a little significant that one great reader of
them who is known to us--Mrs. Pepys--was a Frenchwoman. Indeed, save for
the very considerable "pastime" of a kind that they gave to a time, much
of which required passing, it is difficult to understand their
attraction for English readers. Their interminable talk never (till
perhaps very recently) was a thing to suit our nation: and the "key"
interest strikes us at any rate as of the most languid kind. But they
_were_ imitated as well as translated: and the three most famous of the
imitations are the work of men of mark in their different ways. These
are the _Parthenissa_ (1654) of Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill and Earl of
Orrery; the _Aretina_ (1661) of Sir George Mackenzie; and the _Pandion
and Amphigeneia_ (1665) of "starch Johnny" Crowne.

Boyle was a strong Francophile in literature, and his not inconsiderable
influence on the development of the heroic _play_ showed it only less
decidedly than his imitation of the Scudéry romance. I cannot say that I
have read _Parthenissa_ through: and I can say that I do not intend to
do so. It is enough to have read Sainte Madeleine of the Ink-Desert
herself, without reading bad imitations of her. But I have read enough
to know that _Parthenissa_ would never give me anything like the
modified satisfaction that is given by _Parismus_: and after all, if a
man will not take the trouble to finish writing his book (which Orrery
never did) why should his readers take the trouble even to finish
reading what he has written? The scene is Parthia, with alternation to
Syria, and diversions and episodes elsewhere: and though there is a
certain amount of fighting, the staple is quite decorous but exceedingly
dull love-making, conducted partly in the endless dialogue (or rather
automatic monologue) already referred to, and partly in letters more
"handsome" even than Mr. Frank Churchill's, and probably a good deal
more sincere in their conventional way, but pretty certainly less
amusing. The original attraction indeed of this class of novel
consisted, and, in so far as it still exists, may be said to consist, in
noble sentiment, elegantly expressed. It deserved, and in a manner
deserves, the commendatory part of Aramis's rebuke to Porthos for
expressing impatience with the compliments between Athos and D'Artagnan
at their first and hostile rencounter.[3] Otherwise there is not much to
be said for it. It does not indeed deserve Johnson's often quoted remark
as to Richardson (on whom when we come to him we shall have something
more to say in connection with these heroic romances), if any one were
to read _Parthenissa_ for the story he would not, unless he were a very
impulsive person, "hang himself." He would simply, after a number of
pages varying with the individual, cease to read it.

    [3] "Quant à moi, je trouve les choses que ces messieurs se
    disent fort bien dites et tout à fait dignes de deux
    gentilhommes."

The work of the great Lord Advocate who was traduced by Covenanting
malice is in a certain sense more interesting: and that not merely
because it is much shorter. _Aretina_ or _The Serious Romance_, opens
with an "apology for Romances" generally, which goes far to justify
Dryden's high opinion of Mackenzie as a critic. But it cannot be said to
be much--it is a little--more interesting as a story than _Parthenissa_,
and it is written in a most singular lingo--not displaying the racy
quaintness of Mackenzie's elder contemporary and fellow-loyalist
Urquhart, but a sort of Scotified and modernised Euphuism rather
terrible to peruse. A library is "a bibliotheck richly tapestried with
books." Somebody possesses, or is compared to "a cacochymick stomach,
which transubstantiates the best of meats in its own malignant humour."
And when the hero meets a pair of cannibal ruffians he confronts one and
"pulling out a pistol, sends from its barrel two balls clothed in
Death's livery, and by them opens a sallyport to his soul to fly out of
that nasty prison." A certain zest may be given by these oddities, but
it hardly lasts out more than 400 pages: and though the lives of Aretina
and Philaretes are more simply and straightforwardly told than might be
thought likely--though there are ingenious disguises of contemporary
politics, and though Mackenzie was both a wise man and a wit--it is more
certain than ever, when we close his book, that this is not the way of
the world, nor the man to walk in that way.

_Pandion and Amphigeneia_ is the inferior in importance of both these
books. Crowne had perhaps rather more talent than it is usual to credit
him with, but he does not show it here. I think Sir Walter Raleigh is
quite right in regarding the book as more or less traced over the
_Arcadia_: and it may be said to have all the defects of Sidney's
scheme--which, it is fair once more to observe, we do not possess in any
form definitely settled by its author--with none of the merits of his
ornament, his execution, and his atmosphere of poetic fancy.

The fact is that this heroic romance was foredoomed to inefficiency. It
was not a genuine _kind_ at all: but a sort of patchwork of imitations
of imitations--a mule which, unlike the natural animal, was itself bred,
and bred in and in, of mules for generations back. It was true to no
time, to no country, to no system of manners, life, or thought. Its
oldest ancestor in one sense, though not in another--the Greek
romance--was itself the growth of the latest and most artificial period
of the literature to which it belonged. The pure mediæval romance of
chivalry was another, but of this it had practically nothing left. The
_Amadis_ class, the late Renaissance pastorals, the immediately
preceding or accompanying French romances of the Scudéry type, were, in
increasing degree, hybrid, artificial, and dead-alive. Impotence and
sterility in every sense could but be its portion. Of the two great
qualities of the novel--Variety and Life--it had never succeeded in
attaining any considerable share, and it had now the merest show of
variety and no life at all. There is hardly anything to be said in its
favour, except that its vogue, as has been observed, testified to the
craving for prose fiction, and kept at least a simulacrum of that
fiction before the public. How far there may be any real, though
metaphysical, connection between the great dramatic output of this
seventeenth century in England and its small production in novel is a
question not to be discussed here. But undoubtedly the fact of the
contrast is a "document in the case," and one of the most important in
its own direction; completing the testimony of the mediæval period in
the other (that as romance dwindled, drama grew) and leading up to that
of the eighteenth century when drama dwindled and the novel grew. The
practice of Afra Behn in both, and the fact that Congreve, the greatest
English dramatist of the close of the century, began with a novel and
deserted the style for drama, are also interesting, and combine
themselves very apparently with the considerations just glanced at. But
Congreve and Afra must be postponed for a moment.

The two last discussed books, with _Eromena_ and some others, are
posterior to the Restoration in date, but somewhat earlier in type. The
reign of Charles II., besides the "heroic" romances and Bunyan, and one
most curious little production to be noticed presently, is properly
represented in fiction by two writers, to whom, by those who like to
make discoveries, considerable importance has sometimes been assigned in
the history of the English Novel. These are Richard Head and Afra Behn,
otherwise "the divine Astræa." It is, however, something of an injustice
to class them together: for Afra was a woman of very great ability, with
a suspicion of genius, while Head was at the very best a bookmaker of
not quite the lowest order, though pretty near it. Of _The English
Rogue_ (1665-1680), which earns him his place here, only the first part,
and a certain section of the fourth, are even attributed to him by
Francis Kirkman, the Curll of his generation, who published the thing at
intervals and admittedly wrote parts of it himself. It is quite openly a
picaresque novel: and imitated not merely from the Spanish originals but
from Sorel's _Francion_, which had appeared in France some forty years
before. Yet, if we compare this latter curious book with Head's we shall
see how very far behind, even with forty years' advantage in time, was
the country which, in the next century, was practically to create the
modern novel. _Francion_ is not a work of genius: and it does not
pretend to much more than the usual picaresque farrago of adventure,
unmoral and sometimes rather cruel, but comic of a kind, strung together
with little art in fable, and less in character. But the author is to
some extent "cumbered about serving." He names his characters, tries to
give them some vague personality, furnishes them with some roughly and
sketchily painted scenery, and gives us not merely told tales, but
occasionally something distantly resembling conversation. Head takes no
trouble of this kind: and Kirkman does not seem to think that any such
thing is required of him. Very few of the characters of _The English
Rogue_ have so much as a name to their backs: they are "a prentice," "a
master," "a mistress," "a servant," "a daughter," "a tapster," etc. They
are invested with hardly the slightest individuality: the very hero is a
scoundrel as characterless as he is nameless:[4] he is the mere thread
which keeps the beads of the story together after a fashion. These beads
themselves, moreover, are only the old anecdotes of "coney-catching,"
over-reaching, and worse, which had separately filled a thousand
_fabliaux, novelle_, "jests," and so forth: and which are now flung
together in gross, chiefly by the excessively clumsy and unimaginative
expedient of making the personages tell long strings of them as their
own experience. When anything more is wanted, accounts of the manners of
foreign countries, taken from "voyage-and-travel" books; of the tricks
of particular trades (as here of piratical book-selling); of anything
and everything that the writer's dull fancy can think of, are foisted
in. The thing is in four volumes, and it seems that a fifth was intended
as a close: but there is no particular reason why it should not have
extended to forty or fifty, nay to four or five hundred. It could have
had no real end, just as it has no real beginning or middle.

    [4] He _has_ a name, Meriton Latroon, but it is practically
    never used in the actual story.

One other point deserves notice. The tone of the Spanish and French
picaresque novel had never been high: but it is curiously degraded in
this English example. Furetière honestly called his book _Roman
Bourgeois_. Head might have called his, if he had written in French,
_Roman Canaille_. Not merely the sentiments but the very outward
trappings and accidents of gentility are banished from the book. Yet we
do not get any real reality in compensation. Head is no Defoe: he can
give us the company that Colonel Jack kept in his youth and Moll
Flanders in her middle age: but he makes not the slightest attempt to
give us Moll or Jack, or even Moll's or Jack's habit, environment,
novel-furniture of any kind whatsoever. The receipt to make _The English
Rogue_ is simply this: "Take from two to three dozen Elizabethan
pamphlets of different kinds, but principally of the 'coney-catching'
variety, and string them together by making a batch of shadowy
personages tell them to each other when they are not acting in them."
Except in a dim sort of idea that a novel should have some bulk and
substance, it is difficult to see any advance whatever in this
muck-heap--which the present writer, having had to read it a second time
for the present purpose, most heartily hopes to be able to leave
henceforth undisturbed on his shelves.

Not in this fashion must the illustrious Afra be spoken of. It is true
that--since it ceased to be the fashion merely to dismiss her with a
"fie-fie!" which her prose work, at any rate, by no means merits--there
has sometimes been a tendency rather to overdo praise of her, not merely
in reference to her lyrics, some of which can never be praised too
highly, but in reference to these novels. _Oroonoko_ or _The Royal
Slave_, with its celebration of the virtues of a noble negro and his
love for his Imoinda, and his brutal ill-treatment and death by torture
at the hands of white murderers, undoubtedly took the fancy of the
public. But to see at once Rousseau and Byron in it, Chateaubriand and
Wilberforce and I know not what else, is rather in the "lunatic, lover,
and poet" order of vision. Even Head and Kirkman, as we have observed,
had perceived the advantage of foreign scenery and travel to vary their
matter; Afra had herself been in Guiana; and, as she was of a very
inflammable disposition, it is quite possible that some Indian Othello
had caught her fresh imagination. On the other hand, there was the
heroic romance, with all its sighs and flames, still the rage: and a
much less nimble intellect than Afra's, with a much less cosmopolitan
experience, might easily see the use of transposing it into a new key.
Still, there is no doubt that _The Royal Slave_ and even its companions
are far above the dull, dirty, and never more than half alive stuff of
_The English Rogue. Oroonoko_ is a story, not a pamphlet or a mere
"coney-catching" jest. To say that it wants either contraction or
expansion; less "talk about it" and more actual conversation; a stronger
projection of character and other things; is merely to say that it is an
experiment in the infancy of the novel, not a following out of secrets
already divulged. It certainly is the first prose story in English which
can be ranked with things that already existed in foreign literatures.
Nor is it the only one of the batch in which advance is seen. "The King
of Bantam," for instance, is the account of an "extravagant," though not
quite a fool, who is "coney-catched" in the old manner. But it opens in
a fashion very different indeed from the old manner. "This money is
certainly a most devilish thing! I'm sure the want of it had been like
to ruin my dear Philibella!" and the succeeding adventures are pretty
freshly told. The trick of headlong overture was a favourite with Afra.
"The Adventure of the Black Lady" begins, "About the beginning of last
June, as near as I can remember, Bellamira came to town from Hampshire."
It is a trick of course: and here probably borrowed from the French: but
the line which separates trick from artistic device is an exceedingly
narrow and winding one. At any rate, this plunging into the middle of
things wakes up the reader's attention, and does not permit him to doze.
"The Lucky Mistake," on the other hand, opens with a little landscape,
"The river Loire has on its delightful banks, etc." "The Fair Jilt," a
Bandello-like story, begins with an exaltation of Love: and so on. Now
these things, though they may seem matters of course to the mere modern
reader, were not matters of course then. Afra very likely imitated; her
works have never been critically edited; and have not served as field
for much origin-hunting. But whether she followed others or not, she led
her own division. All these things and others are signs of an awakened
conscience--of a sense of the fact that fiction, to be literature, must
be something more than the relation of a bare fact, tragic, comic, or
neutral--that the novelist is a cook, and must prepare and serve his
materials with a sauce as much his own as possible, of plot,
arrangement, character-drawing, scenery, conversation, reflection, and
what not. That conversation itself--the subtlest instrument of all and
the most effective for constructing character--is so little developed,
can only, I think, be accounted for by supposing Afra and others to be
under the not unnatural mistake that conversation especially belonged to
the drama, which was still the most popular form of literature, and in
which she herself was a copious practitioner. But this mistake was not
long to prevail: and it had no effect on that great contemporary of hers
who would, it is to be feared, have used the harshest language
respecting her, and to whom we now come.

It is impossible to share, and not very easy even to understand, the
scruples of those who would not admit John Bunyan to a place in the
hierarchy and the pedigree of the English novel, or would at best grant
him an outside position in relation to it. Their exquisite reasons, so
far as one can discern them, appear to be (or to concern) the facts that
_The Pilgrim's Progress_ and _The Holy War_ are religious, and that they
are allegories.[5] It may be humbly suggested that by applying the
double rule to verse we can exclude _Paradise Lost_ and the _Faerie
Queene_ from the succession of English Poetry, whereby no doubt we
shall be finely holden in understanding the same: while it is by no
means certain that, if the exclusion of allegory be pushed home, we must
not cancel _Don Quixote_ from the list of the world's novels. Even in
prose, to speak plainly, the hesitation--unless it comes from the
foolish dislike to things religious, as such, which has been the bigotry
of the last generation or two--comes from the almost equally foolish
determination to draw up arbitrary laws of literary kind. Discarding
prejudice and punctilio, every one must surely see that, in diminishing
measure, even _The Holy War_ is a novel, and that _The Pilgrim's
Progress_ has every one of the four requisites--plot, character,
description, and dialogue--while one of these requisites--character with
its accessory manners--is further developed in the _History of Mr.
Badman_ after a fashion for which we shall look vainly in any division
of European literature (except drama) before it. This latter fact has
indeed obtained a fair amount of recognition since Mr. Froude drew the
attention of the general reader to it in his book on Bunyan, in the
"English Men of Letters" series, five-and-twenty years ago: but it must
have struck careful readers of the great tinker's minor works long
before. Indeed there are very good internal reasons for thinking that no
less a person than Thackeray must have known _Mr. Badman_. This
wonderful little sketch, however--the related history of a man who is an
utter rascal both in family and commercial relations, but preserves his
reputation intact and does not even experience any deathbed
repentance--is rather an unconscious study for a character in a novel--a
sketch of a _bourgeois_ Barnes Newcome--than anything more. It has the
old drawback of being narrated, not acted or spoken at first hand: and
so, though it is in a sense Fielding at nearly his best, more than half
a century before Fielding attempted _Joseph Andrews_, no more need be
said of it. So, too, the religious element and the allegory _are_ too
prominent in _The Holy War_--the novelist's desk is made too much of a
pulpit in large parts of it. Other parts, concerning the inhabitants of
Mansoul and their private affairs, are domestic novel-writing of nearly
the pure kind: and if _The Pilgrim's Progress_ did not exist, it would
be worth while to pick them out and discuss them. But, as it most
fortunately does exist, this is not needful.

    [5] The heroic kind had lent itself very easily and obviously to
    allegory. Not very long before Bunyan English literature had
    been enriched with a specimen of this double variety which for
    Sir W. Raleigh "marks the lowest depth to which English romance
    writing sank." I do not know that I could go quite so far as
    this in regard to the book--_Bentivolio and Urania_ by Nathaniel
    Ingelo. The first edition of this appeared in 1660: the second
    (there seem to have been at least four) lies before me at this
    moment dated 1669, or nine years before the _Progress_ itself.
    You require a deep-sea-lead of uncommonly cunning construction
    to sound, register, and compare the profundities of the bathos
    in novels. The book has about 400 folio pages very closely
    packed with type, besides an alphabetical index full of Hebrew
    and Greek derivations of its names--"Gnothisauton," "Achamoth,"
    "Ametameletus," "Dogmapernes," and so forth. Its principles are
    inexorably virtuous; there is occasional action interspersed
    among its innumerable discourses, and I think it not improbable
    that if it were only possible to read it, it might do one some
    good. But it would not be the good of the novel.

The only fault with the novel-character of the greater book which might
possibly be found by a critic who did not let the allegory bite him, and
was not frightened by the religion, is that there is next to no love
element in it, though there are wedding bells. Mercy is indeed quite
nice enough for a heroine: but Bunyan might have bestowed her better
than on a young gentleman so very young that he had not long before made
himself (no doubt allegorically) ill with unripe and unwholesome fruit.
But if he had done so, the suspicions of his brethren--_they_ were acute
enough as it was not to mistake the character of the book, whatever
modern critics may do--would have been even more unallayable. And, as it
is, the "alluring countenance" does shed not a little grace upon the
story, or at least upon the Second Part: while the intenser character of
the First hardly requires this. Any other lack is, to the present
writer, imperceptible. The romance interest of quest, adventure,
achievement, is present to the fullest degree: and what is sometimes
called the pure novel interest of character and conversation is present
in a degree not lower. It must be accepted as a great blessing, even by
those who regard Puritanism as an almost unmitigated curse, that its
principles forbade Bunyan to think of choosing the profane and
abominable stage-play as the form of his creation. We had had our fill
of good plays, and were beginning to drink of that which was worse:
while we had no good novels and wanted them. Of course the large amount
of actual "Tig and Tirry" dialogue (as Dr. Johnson would say) is
probably one of the things which have made precisians shy of accepting
the _Progress_ for what it really is. But we must remember that this
encroachment on the dramatic province was exactly what was wanted to
remove the reproach of fiction. The inability to put actual conversation
of a lively kind in the mouths of personages has been indicated as one
of the great defects of the novel up to this time. Except Cervantes, it
is difficult to think of any novelist who had shown himself able to
supply the want. Bunyan can do it as few have done it even since his
time. The famous dialogue of Christian and By-ends is only the best--if
it is the best--of scores nearly or quite as good. The curious
intellectual flaccidity of the present day seems to be "put off" by the
"ticket" names; but no one who has the true literary sense cares for
these one way or another, or is more disturbed by them than if they were
Wilkins and Jones. Just as Coleridge observed that to enjoy some kinds
of poetry you must suspend disbelief, so, with mere literary fashions,
you must suspend disagreement. We should not call By-ends By-ends now:
and whether we should do better or worse nobody, as Plato says, knows
but the Deity. But the best of us would be hard put to it to make
By-ends reveal his By-endishness more perfectly than he does by his
conversation, and without any ticket-name at all.

Not less remarkable, and only a little less new, is the vividness and
sufficiency of the scene painting and setting. It has been said that
the great novelists not only provide us with a world of friends more
real and enjoyable than the actual folk we know, but also with a world
for those friends to live in, more real and far more enjoyable than the
world in which we ourselves sojourn. And this is well seen of Christian.
The Slough of Despond and the terrible overhanging hill; the gateway and
the Interpreter's House and the House Beautiful; the ups and downs of
the road, and the arbours and the giants' dens: Beulah and the
Delectable Mountains:--one knows them as one knows the country that one
has walked over, and perhaps even better. There is no description for
description's sake: yet nothing is wanting of the descriptive kind.

Yet all these things are--as they should be--only subsidiary to the main
interest of the Pilgrimage itself. Once more, one may fear that it is no
good sign of the wits of the age that readers should be unable to
discard familiarity with the argument of the story. It is the way in
which that argument is worked out and illustrated that is the thing. I
have never myself, since I became thoroughly acquainted with Lydgate's
Englishing of Deguilevile's _Pilgrimage of the Soul of Man_, had any
doubt that--in some way or other, direct or indirect, at tenth or
twentieth hand perhaps--Bunyan was acquainted with it: but this is of no
importance. He might undoubtedly have got all his materials straight out
of the Bible. But his working of them up is all his own, and is
wonderful. Here, to begin with, is the marvel not merely of a
continuation which is not a falling off, but of a repetition of the same
general scheme with different but closely connected personages, which is
entirely free from monotony. One is so accustomed to the facts that
perhaps it hardly strikes one at first how extraordinarily audacious the
attempt is: nay, the very success of it may blind all but critics to
the difficulty. It is no wonder that people tried further continuations
and further complications: still less wonder that they utterly failed.
Probably even Bunyan himself could not have "done it a third time." But
he did it these twice with such vividness of figure and action; such
completeness of fable; such sufficiency of behaviour and of speech as
have scarcely ever been equalled. As ideal as Spenser, as real as Defoe:
such is Bunyan. And he shows this realism and this idealism in a prose
narrative, bringing the thoughts and actions and characters and speech
of fictitious human beings before his readers--for their inspection
perhaps; for their delight certainly. If this is not the being and the
doing of a novelist this deponent very humbly declareth that he knoweth
not what the being and the doing of a novelist are.

We must now turn to two small but noteworthy attempts at the kind, which
have been referred to above.

In 1668 there appeared a very curious little book (entitled at great
length after the manner of the times, but more shortly called _The Isle
of Pines_), which is important in the literary ancestry of Defoe and
Swift and not unimportant in itself. Its author was Henry Neville, of
the Nevilles of Billingbeare, son of one Sir Henry and grandson of
another, the grandfather having been of some mark in diplomacy and
courtiership in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean times. The grandson
had had a life of some stir earlier. Born in 1620, and educated at
Merton and University Colleges, he had left Oxford without a degree, had
taken the Parliamentary side, but as a rigid Republican and
anti-Cromwellite; had been a member of the Rota, and after the
Restoration had been arrested in 1663 for supposed treasonable
practices, but escaped serious punishment. He lived quietly for more
than thirty years longer and died in 1694. Besides _The Isle of Pines_
he wrote satirical tracts (the _Parliament of Ladies_ being the best
known), translated Machiavelli, and was evidently a man of parts,
though, like his friend Harrington, something of a "crank." He seems
also to have been, as some others of the extremer Puritans certainly
were, pretty loose in his construction of moral laws.

_The Isle_ is a very short book of thirty-one quarto pages: but there is
a good deal in it, and it must have been very carefully written. A
certain Cornelius van Sloetten writes, "supported by letters from
Amsterdam," how a Dutch ship, driven far out of reckoning in the
Southern Ocean, comes to a "fourth island, near Terra Australis
Incognita," which is inhabited by white people, speaking English, but
mostly naked. The headman is a certain William Pine, whose grandfather,
George, has left a written account of the origin of the community. This
relates how George was wrecked on the island, the ship perishing "with
man and mouse," except himself, his master's daughter, two white
maidservants, and a negro girl. The island proves pleasant and
habitable: and George, to prevent unfairness and ill-feeling, unites
himself to all his female companions, the quintet living in perfect
harmony. Thirty-seven children result: and these at first necessarily
intermarry; but after this first generation, a rule is made that
brothers and sisters may not unite--the descendants of the four original
wives forming clans who may marry into the others but not into their
own. A wider legal code of fair stringency is arranged, with the
sanction of capital and other punishments: and things go so well that
the patriarch musters a tribe of 565 persons by the time he is sixty,
and of 1789 twenty years later, when he departs this life, piously
praying God "to multiply them and send them the true report of the
gospel." The multiplication has duly taken place, and there is something
like a civil war while the Dutch are there; but they interfere with
fire-arms to restore order, and leave all well. The writer's cunning is
shown by the fact that he does not stop abruptly: but finishes off with
some subsequent and quite _verisimilar_ experiences of the Dutch ship.
The book does not appear to have had a very great popularity in England,
though it was reprinted and abridged at least once, pretty shortly. But
it was very popular abroad, was translated into three or four languages,
and was apparently taken as a genuine account.

Neville's art is in fact not inconsiderable. Earlier voyages and travels
of course supplied him with his technical and geographical details: and
the codification of the Isle of Pines suggests the Bacon-Harrington
tradition. But he has got the vividness and realism which have usually
been lacking before: and though some of his details are pretty "free" it
is by no means only through such things that these qualities are
secured. To Cyrano de Bergerac he bears no likeness at all. In fact,
though Neville _was_ a satirist, satire does not seem to have been in
any way his object here. Whatever that object may have been, he has
certainly struck, by accident or not, on the secret of producing an
interesting account by ingeniously multiplied and adjusted detail.
Moreover, as there is no conversation, the book stands--accidentally
this time almost without doubt--at the opposite pole from the
talk-deluged romances of the Scudéry type. Whether Defoe actually knew
it or not matters exceedingly little: that something of his method, and
in a manner the subject of his first and most famous novel, are here
before him, seems quite indisputable. Perhaps not the least piquant
thing to do with _The Isle of Pines_ is to contrast it with _Oceana_. Of
course the contrast is unfair: nearly all contrasts are. But there is
actually, as has been pointed out, a slight contact between the work of
the two friends: and their complete difference in every other respect
makes this more curiously apparent. And another odd thing is that
Neville--"Rota"-republican as he was--should have adopted patriarchal
(one can hardly say _legitimate_) government here.

Congreve's _Incognita_ (1692), the last seventeenth-century novel that
requires special notice, belongs much more to the class of Afra's tales
than to that of the heroic romances. It is a short story of seventy-five
small pages only and of the Italian-Spanish imbroglio type. The friends
Aurelian and Hippolito take each other's names for certain purposes, and
their beloveds, "Incognita," Juliana and Leonora, are perplexed
accordingly: while family feuds, letter assignations at a convent where
the name of the convent unluckily happens to be torn off, and other
stock ingredients of the kind are freely used. Most writers have either
said nothing about the book or have given it scanty praise; with the
exception, Sir Walter Raleigh, I confess that I cannot here agree. Being
Congreve's it could not be quite without flashes of wit, but they do not
appear to me to be either very numerous or very brilliant; the plot,
such as it is, is a plot of drama rather than of fiction; and there is
no character that I can see. It is in fact only one of a vast multitude
of similar stories, not merely in the two languages just referred to,
but in French, which were but to show that the time of the novel was not
yet come, even when the time of this century was all but over.

It was quite over, and the first two decades of the next were all but
over too, before the way was, to any important extent, further explored:
but important assistance in the exploration was given at the beginning
of the second of these decades. The history of the question of the
relations of the Addison-Steele periodical, and especially of the
"Coverley Papers," to the novel is both instructive and amusing to those
who have come to appreciate the humours of literary things. It would
probably have shocked the more orthodox admirers of the _Spectator_,
during the eighteenth century, to have any such connection or relation
so much as hinted. But when people began to consider literature and
literary history in a better arranged perspective, the fact that there
_is_ such a connection or relation must have been soon perceived. It has
become comparatively a commonplace: and now the third stage--that in
which people become uneasy and suspicious of the commonplace and obvious
and try to turn it topsy-turvy--has begun.

It is of course undeniable that the "Coverley Papers," as they stand,
are not a novel, even on the loosest conception and construction of the
term. There is no plot; some of what should be the most important
characters are merely heard of, not seen; and the various scenes have no
sort of connection, except that the same persons figure in them. But
these undeniable facts do not interfere with two other facts, equally
undeniable and much more important. The first is that the papers could
be turned into a novel with hardly any important alteration, and with
only _quantum suff._ of addition and completion. "The widow" is there in
the background ready to be produced and made a heroine; many of the
incidents are told novel-fashion already, and more could be translated
into that fashion by the veriest tyro at novel writing who has written
at any time during the last one hundred and fifty years. The personages
of the club have merely to step down and out; the scenes to be
connected, amplified, and multiplied; the conversation to undergo the
same process.

But the second point is of greater importance still. Not only could the
"Coverley Papers," be made into a novel without the slightest
difficulty, and by a process much of which would be simple enlargement
of material; but they already possess, in a fashion which requires no
alteration at all, many of the features of the novel, far more
successfully hit off than had ever been done before in the novel itself.
This is true of the dialogue to no small extent, and of the description
even more: but it is truest of all of the characters. Except Bunyan,
nobody in prose fiction had ever made personages so thoroughly spirited
as Sir Roger and even the two Wills, Honeycomb and Wimble; while here
there was "no allaying Thames" in the shape of allegory, little
moralising and that of a kind quite human, a plentiful setting of
ordinary and familiar scene, and a more plentiful and exact adjustment
of ordinary and familiar manners. It is true that Addison, partly owing
to the undercurrent of his satirical humour (Steele succeeds rather
better here), has not attained the astonishing verisimilitude of the
writer to whom we shall come next and last but one in this chapter. His
characters are perfectly natural, but we know, all the while, that they
are works of art. But in most of the points just mentioned he has
exactly the tricks of the novelist's art that Defoe has not. The smaller
tales in the _Tatler_ and its followers undoubtedly did something to
remove the reproach from prose fiction, and more to sharpen the appetite
for it. But they were nothing new: the short tale being of unknown
antiquity. The "Coverley Papers" _were_ new and did much more. This new
kind of treatment may not have suggested beforehand (it is not certain
that it did not) the extensive novel of character and manners--the play
lengthened, bodied more strongly, and turned into narrative form. But
the process was _there_; the instances of it were highly reputed and
widely known. It must in almost any case have gone hard but a further
step still would be taken. It was actually taken by the person who had
suggested the periodical essay itself.

Much has been written about Defoe, but, curiously enough, the least part
of what has been written about him has concerned the very part of him
that is read--his novels. Nay, occasional eccentrics, and not only
these, have shown a sort of disposition to belittle him as a novelist:
indeed the stock description of Richardson as the Father of the English
Novel almost pointedly rules Defoe out. Yet further, the most adequate
and intelligent appreciation of his novel work itself has too often been
mainly confined to what is no doubt a subject of exceeding interest--the
special means by which he secures the attention, and procures the
delight, of his readers. We shall have to deal with this too. But the
point to which it is wished to draw special attention now is different,
and we may reach it best by the ordinary "statement of case."

Almost everybody who knows any literary history, knows that the book by
which, after thirty or forty years of restless publication in all sorts
of prose and rhyme, Defoe niched himself immovably in English
literature, was a new departure by almost an old man. He was all but, if
not quite, sixty when _Robinson Crusoe_ appeared: and a very few
following years saw the appearance of his pretty voluminous "minor"
novels. The subject of the first every one knows without limitation: it
is not so certain, though vigorous efforts have been made to popularise
the others, that even their subjects are clearly known to many people.
_Captain Singleton_ (1720), _Moll Flanders_, and _Colonel Jack_ (both
1722) are picaresque romances with tolerably sordid heroes and heroines,
but with the style entirely rejuvenated by Defoe's secret. _Roxana_
(1724), a very puzzling book which is perhaps not entirely his writing,
is of the same general class: the _Voyage round the World_ (1725), the
least interesting, but not _un_interesting, is exactly what its title
imports,--in other words, the "stuffing" of the _Robinson_ pie without
the game. The _Memoirs of a Cavalier_ (1720) approach the historical
novel (or at least the similar "stuffing" of that) and have raised
curious and probably insoluble questions as to whether they are
inventions at all--questions intimately connected with that general one
referred to above. One or two minor things are sometimes added to the
list: but they require no special notice. The seven books just mentioned
are Defoe's contribution to the English novel. Let us consider the
quality of this contribution first--and then the means used to attain
it.

Their novel-quality (which, as has been hinted, has not been claimed so
loudly or so steadily as it should have been for Defoe) is the quality
of Story-Interest--and this, one dares say, he not only infused for the
first time in full dose, but practically introduced into the English
novel, putting the best of the old mediæval romances aside and also
putting aside _The Pilgrim's Progress_, which is not likely to have been
without influence on himself. It may be said, "Oh! but the _Amadis_
romances, and the Elizabethan novels, and the 'heroics' must have
interested or they would not have been read." This looks plausible, but
is a mistake. Few people who have not studied the history of criticism
know the respectable reluctance to be _pleased_ with literature which
distinguished mankind till very recent times; and which in fact kept the
novel back or was itself maintained by the absence of the novel. In life
people pleased themselves irregularly enough: in literature they could
not get out of the idea that they ought to be instructed, that it was
enough to be instructed, and that it was discreditable to ask for more.
Even the poet was allowed to delight grudgingly and at his peril; was
suspected because he did delight, and had to pay a sort of heavy
licence-duty for it, in the shape of concomitant instruction to others
and good behaviour in himself. In fact he was a publican who was bound
to serve stodgy food as well as exhilarating drink.

It is impossible to doubt that people were similarly affected to the
fiction of the Renaissance and the seventeenth century, at least in its
longer examples--for the smaller _novelle_ could amuse in their own way
sometimes, though they could hardly absorb. It is equally impossible to
imagine any one being "enthralled" by _Euphues_. Admiration, of a kind,
must have been the only passion excited by it. In the _Arcadia_ there is
a certain charm, but it belongs to the inset verse--to the almost
Spenserian _visionariness_ of parts--to the gracious lulling atmosphere
of the whole. If it had been published in three volumes, one cannot
imagine the most enthusiastic novel-reader knocking up a friend late at
night for volume two or volume three. I have said that I can read
_Parismus_ for pastime: but the pastime that it provides is certainly
not over-stimulating, and the mild stimulant becomes unsweetened and
unlemoned barley-water in books of the _Parthenissa_ class. If with them
conversing one forgets all time, it must be by the influence of the
kind go-between Sleep. We know, of course, that their contemporaries did
not go to sleep over them: but it was because they felt that they were
being done good to--that they were in the height of polite society--that
their manners were being softened and not allowed to be gross. The time,
in its blunt way, was fond of contrasting the attractions of a mistress
on one side and "a friend and a bottle" on the other. That a novel could
enter into competition with either or both, as an interesting and even
exciting means of passing the time, would have entered very few heads at
all and have been contemptuously dismissed from most of those that it
did enter.

Addison and Steele in the "Coverley Papers" had shown the way to
construct this new spell: Defoe actually constructed it. It may be that
some may question whether the word "exciting" applies exactly to his
stories. But this is logomachy: and in fact a well-willing reader _can_
get very fairly excited while the Cavalier is escaping after Marston
Moor; while it is doubtful whether the savages have really come and what
will be the event; while it is again doubtful whether Moll is caught or
not; or what has become of those gains of the boy Jack, which can hardly
be called ill-gotten because there is such a perfect unconsciousness of
ill on the part of the getter. At any rate, if such a reader cannot feel
excitement here, he would utterly stagnate in any previous novel.

In presence of this superior--this emphatically and doubly
"novel"--interest, all other things become comparatively unimportant.
The relations of _Robinson Crusoe_ to Selkirk's experiences and to one
or two other books (especially the already mentioned _Isle of Pines_)
may not unfitly employ the literary historian who chooses to occupy
himself with them. The allegory which Defoe alleges in it, and which
some biographers have endeavoured to work out, cannot, I suppose, be
absolutely pooh-poohed, but presents no attractions whatever to the
present writer. Whether the _Cavalier_ is pure fiction, or partly
embroidered fact, _is_ a somewhat interesting question, if only because
it seems to be impossible to find out the answer: and the same may be
said of the not impossible (indeed almost more than probable) Portuguese
maps and documents at the back of _Captain Singleton_. To disembroil the
chronological muddle of _Roxana_, and follow out the tangles of the
hide-and-seek of that most unpleasant "lady of pleasure" and her
daughter, may suit some. But, apart from all these things, there abides
the fact that you can _read_ the books--read them again and again--enjoy
them most keenly at first and hardly less keenly afterwards, however
often you repeat the reading.

As has been partly said, the means by which this effect is achieved, and
also the means by which it is not, are almost equally remarkable. The
Four Elements of the novel are sometimes, and not incorrectly, said to
be Plot, Character, Description, and Dialogue--Style, which some would
make a fifth, being rather a characteristic in another order of
division. It is curious that Defoe is rebellious or evasive under any
analysis of this kind. His plots are of the "strong" order--the events
succeed each other and are fairly connected, but do not compose a
history so much as a chronicle. In character, despite his intense
verisimilitude, he is not very individual. Robinson himself, Moll, Jack,
William the Quaker in _Singleton_, even Roxana the cold-blooded and
covetous courtesan, cannot be said not to be real--they and almost every
one of the minorities are an immense advance on the colourless and
bloodless ticketed puppets of the Middle Fiction. But they still want
_something_--the snap of the fingers of the artist. Moll is perhaps the
most real of all of them and yet one has no flash-sights of her
being--never sees her standing out against soft blue sky or
thunder-cloud as one sees the great characters of fiction; never hears
her steps winding and recognises her gesture as one does theirs.

So again his description is sufficient: and the enumerative
particularity of it is even great part of the _secret de Polichinelle_
to which we are coming. But it is far from elaborate in any other way
and has hardly the least decoration or poetical quality. Well as we know
Crusoe's Island the actual scenery of it is not half so much impressed
as that even, for instance, of Masterman Ready's--it is either of the
human figures--Crusoe's own grotesque bedizenment, the savages, Friday,
the Spaniards, Will Atkins--or of the works of man--the stockade, the
boat, and the rest--that we think. A little play is made with Jack's
glass-house squalor and Roxana's magnificence _de mauvais lieu_, but not
much: the gold-dust and deserts of _Singleton_ are a necessary part of
the "business," but nothing more. _Moll Flanders_--in some respects the
greatest of all his books--has the bareness of an Elizabethan stage in
scenery and properties--it is much if Greenfield spares us a table or a
bed to furnish it.

Of Dialogue Defoe is specially fond--even making his personages
soliloquise in this after a fashion--and it plays a very important part
in "the secret:" yet it can hardly be classed very high _as_ dialogue.
And this is at least partly due to the strange _drab_ shapelessness of
his style, which never takes on any brilliant colour, or quaint
individual form.

Yet it is very questionable whether any other style would have suited
the method so well, or would even have suited it at all. For this
method--to leave off hinting at it and playing round it--is one of
almost endless accumulation of individually trivial incident, detail,
and sometimes observation, the combined effect of which is to produce an
insensible but undoubting acceptance, on the reader's part, of the facts
presented to him. The process has been more than once analysed in that
curious and convenient miniature example of it, the "Mrs. Veal"
_supercherie_: but you may open the novels proper almost anywhere and
discover it in full operation. Like most great processes of art, this is
an adoption and perfecting of habits usual with the most inartistic
people--a turning to good account of the interminably circumstantial
superfluities of the common gossip and newsmonger. Very often Defoe
actually does not go beyond this--just as in _The Shortest Way with the
Dissenters_ he had simply reproduced the actual thoughts and wishes of
those who disliked dissent. But sometimes he got the better of this
also, as in the elaborate building up of Robinson's surroundings and not
a little in the other books. And there the effect is not only
verisimilar but wonderful in its verisimilitude. At any rate, in him,
and for English prose and secular fiction, we have first that mysterious
charm of the _real that is not real_--of the "human creation"--which
constitutes the appeal of the novel. In some of the books there is
hardly any appeal of any other sort. Moll Flanders, though not unkindly,
and "improper" rather from the force of circumstances than from any
specially vicious inclination, is certainly not a person for whom one
has much liking. Colonel Jack, after his youthful experiences in
pocket-picking, is rather a nonentity, something of a coward, a fellow
of no particular wits, parts, or definite qualities of any kind. Singleton
is a rascal who "plays Charlemagne," as the French gambling term has it,
and endows his repentance with the profits of his sin. As for Roxana there
are few more repulsive heroines in fiction--while the Cavalier and the
chief figure in the _Voyage Round the World_ are simply threads on
which their respective adventures are strung. Even Robinson himself enlists
no particular sympathy except of the "put-yourself-in-his-place" kind. Yet
these sorry or negative personages, of whom, in the actual creation of God,
we should be content to know nothing except from paragraphs in the
newspaper (and generally in the police-reports thereof), content us
perfectly well with their company through hundreds and thousands of
solid pages, and leave us perfectly ready to enjoy it again after
a reasonable interval.

This, as has been said, is the mystery of fiction--a mystery partly set
a-working in the mediæval romance, then mostly lost, and now
recovered--in his own way and according to his own capacity--by Defoe.
It was to escape others for a little longer and then to be yet again
rediscovered by the great quartette of the mid-eighteenth century--to
slip in and out of hands during the later part of that century, and then
to be all but finally established, in patterns for everlasting
pursuance, by Miss Austen and by Scott. But Defoe is really (unless we
put Bunyan before him) the first of the magicians--not the greatest by
any means, but great and almost alone in the peculiar talent of making
uninteresting things interesting--not by burlesquing them or satirising
them; not by suffusing or inflaming them with passion; not by giving
them the amber of style; but by serving them "simple of themselves" as
though they actually existed.

The position of Defoe in novel history is so great that there is a
temptation to end this chapter with him. But to do so would cause an
inconvenience greater than any resulting advantages. For the greatest of
Defoe's contemporaries in English letters also comes into our division,
and comes best here. One cannot conveniently rank Swift with the great
quartette of the next chapter, because he is a novelist "by interim" and
incompletely: to rank him among the minor and later novelists of the
eighteenth century would be as to the first part of the classification
absurd and as to the last false. And he comes, not merely in time,
pretty close to Defoe, incommensurable as is the genius of the two. It
has even been thought (plausibly enough, though the matter is of no
great importance) that the form of _Gulliver_ may have been to some
extent determined by _Robinson Crusoe_ and Defoe's other novels of
travel. And there is a subtler reason for taking the pair together and
both close to Addison and Steele.

Swift had shown the general set towards prose fiction, and his own bent
in the same direction, long before Defoe's novel-period and as early as
the _Tale of a Tub_ and the _Battle of the Books_ (_published_ 1704 but
certainly earlier in part). The easy flow of the narrative, and the
vivid dialogue of the Spider and the Bee in the latter, rank high among
those premonitions of novel with which, in this place, we should be
specially busied. In the former Peter, Martin, and Jack want but a
little more of the alchemist's furnace to accomplish their projection
into real characters, and not merely allegorical figure-heads. But, of
course, in both books, the satiric purpose dominates too much to allow
them to be really ranked among novels, even if they had taken the
trouble to clothe themselves with more of the novel-garb.

With _Gulliver_ it is different. It is a commonplace on its subject
(but like many other commonplaces a thing ill to forget or ignore) that
natural and unsophisticated children always _do_, and that almost
anybody who has a certain power of turning blind eyes when and where he
chooses _can_, read it simply as a story of adventure and enjoy it
hugely. It would be a most preternatural child or a most singularly
constituted adult who could read _Utopia_ or _Oceana_, or even Cyrano's
_Voyages_, "for the story" and enjoy them hugely. This means that Swift
had either learnt from Defoe or--and considering those earlier
productions of his own much more probably--had independently developed
the knack of _absorbing_ the reader--the knack of telling a story. But
of course there is in one sense much more, and in another much less,
than a story in _Gulliver_: and the finest things in it are independent
of story, though (and this once more comes in for our present purpose)
they are quite capable of adaptation to story-purposes, and have been so
adapted ever since by the greatest masters of the art. These are strokes
of satire, turns of phrase, little illuminations of character, and
seasonings of description. But the great point of _Gulliver_ is that,
like Defoe's work, though in not quite the same way, it is
_interesting_--that it takes hold of its reader and gives him its
"peculiar pleasure." When a work of art does this, it is pretty near
perfection.

There is, however, another book of Swift's which, though perhaps seldom
mentioned or even thought of in connection with the novel, is of real
importance in that connection, and comes specially in with our present
main consideration--the way in which the several parts of the completed
novel were being, as it were, separately got ready and set apart for the
use of the accomplished novelist. This is the very curious and
agreeable piece called _Polite Conversation_ (1738), on which, though it
was not printed till late in his life and close on _Pamela_ itself,
there is good reason for thinking that he had been for many years
engaged. The importance of dialogue in the novel has been often
mentioned and will scarcely be contested: while frequent occasion has
been taken to point out that it had hitherto been very ill-achieved.
Swift's "conversation" though designedly _underlined_, as it were, to
show up current follies and extravagances of phrase and of fashion
generally, is yet pretty certainly in the main the real average
conversation of the society of his time, which he knew well and
thoroughly. Further, there is a distinct, though it may be almost
impalpable, difference between it and the conversation of the stage,
though it is naturally connected therewith. Non-poetical stage dialogue
in capable hands is either deliberate talking for display of "wit" like
that of Congreve, or is conditioned and directed by the necessities of
action and character. Of course, novel conversation may diverge in the
first direction, and cannot properly neglect the second altogether. But,
as there is room for very much more of it, it may and should allow
itself a considerably wider range and imitate, on proper occasions, the
desultory gossip and small talk of people who live on the "boards" of a
room-floor and not of a stage.

This is just what Swift's does, and just what there is very little of in
Defoe; almost necessarily less in Addison and his group because of their
essay form; and hardly anything elsewhere and earlier. Just as the
Coverley Papers could, by one process and no difficult one, have been
thrown into a novel; so by another, a not much more difficult and a much
less complicated one, could the _Polite Conversation_ be thrown into
part of a novel--while in each case the incomplete and unintentional
draft itself supplies patterns for the complete work in new kind such as
had never been given before. Indeed the _Conversation_ may almost be
said to _be_ part of a novel--and no small part--as it stands, and of
such a novel as had never been written before.

But there was something still further all but absolutely necessary to
the novel, though not necessary to it alone, which Defoe, Addison, and
Swift, each in his several way, worked mightily to supply: and that was
a flexible business-like "workaday" prose style. Not merely so long as
men aimed at the eccentric and contorted styles of _Euphues_ and the
_Arcadia_, but so long as the old splendid and gorgeous, but cumbrous
and complicated pre-Restoration style lasted, romances were possible,
but novels were not. You might indeed pick out of Shakespeare--especially
from such parts as those of Beatrice, Rosalind, and some of the fools--a
capital novel-style: but then you can pick almost anything out of
Shakespeare. Elsewhere the constant presence either of semi-poetic
phraseology or of some kind of "lingo" was almost fatal. You want what
Sprat calls a more "natural way of speaking" (though not necessarily a
"naked" one) for novel purposes--a certain absence of ceremony and parade
of phrase: though the presence of slang and some other things, the rebuking
of which was partly Swift's object in the _Conversation_, is _not_
fatal, and so he, in a manner, blessed and prescribed what he meant to ban.

Thus, by the early years of the reign of George II., or a little later,
we find, on the one side, an evident, and variously though
inarticulately proclaimed, desire for novels; on the other, the
accumulation, in haphazard and desultory way, of almost all the methods,
the processes, the "plant," necessary to turn novels out; but hardly
anything except the considered work of Bunyan, Defoe, and Swift which
really deserves the name of novel. A similar process had been going on
in France; and, in the different work of Le Sage and Marivaux, had
actually produced work in the kind more advanced than anything in
English. But the tables were soon to be turned: and during the rest of
the century the English Novel was at last to assert itself as a
distinct, an increasingly popular, and a widely cultivated kind. That
this was due to the work of the four great novelists who fill its
central third and will fill our next chapter cannot perhaps be said:
that their work was the first great desertion of it may be said safely.




CHAPTER III

THE FOUR WHEELS OF THE NOVEL WAIN


It does not enter into the plan, because it would be entirely
inconsistent with the scale, of the present book to give details of the
lives of the novelists, except when they have something special to do
with the subject, or when (as in the case of a few minorities who happen
to be of some importance) even well-informed readers are likely to be
quite ignorant about them. Accounts, in all degrees of scale and
competence, of the lives of Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne
abound. It is sufficient--but in the special circumstances at this point
perhaps necessary--here to sum the facts very briefly in so far as they
bear on the main issue. Richardson (1689-1761), not merely the first to
write, but the eldest by much more than his priority in writing, was the
son of a Derbyshire tradesman, was educated for some time at
Charterhouse, but apprenticed early to a printer--which trade he pursued
with diligence and profit for the rest of his life in London and its
immediate neighbourhood. After his literary success, he gathered round
him a circle of ladies and gentlemen interested in literature: but he
never had any first-hand acquaintance with general society of the
"gentle" kind, much less with that of the upper classes. Fielding
(1707-1754), on the contrary, was a member (though only as the son of a
younger son of a younger son) of a family of great antiquity and
distinction, which held an earldom in England and another in Ireland,
and was connected as well as it was derived, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,
for instance, being the novelist's cousin. He was educated at Eton and
Leyden: but his branch of the family being decidedly impecunious, was
thrown very much on his own resources. These were mainly drawn from
literature, first as a playwright then as a novelist, journalism and
miscellanies coming in. But he was called to the Bar: and though he
probably did not make much money there, he obtained the poorly paid and
hard-worked but rather important position of "Bow Street Magistrate,"
which meant that he was head, directly of the London police such as it
was, and indirectly of that of the whole kingdom. His temper was in some
ways as aristocratic as his birth: but though Horace Walpole's accounts
of his fancy for low company are obviously exaggerated, there is no
doubt that he was a good deal of what has since been called a
"Bohemian." His experience of variety in scene was much wider than
Richardson's, although after he came home from Leyden (where he went to
study law) it was chiefly confined to London and the south of England
(especially Bath, Dorsetshire, where he lived for a time, and the
Western Circuit), till his last voyage, in hopeless quest of health, to
Lisbon, where he died. His knowledge of literature, and even what may be
called his scholarship, were considerable, and did credit to the public
school education of those days.

Smollett (1721-1771) differed from his two predecessors in being a
Scotsman: but in family was very much nearer to Fielding than to
Richardson, being the grandson of a judge who was a Commissioner of the
Union, and a gentleman of birth and property--which last would, had he
lived long enough, have come to Smollett himself. But he suffered in his
youth from some indistinctly known family jars, was apprenticed to a
Glasgow surgeon, and escaping thence to London with a tragedy in his
pocket, was in undoubted difficulties till (and after) he obtained the
post of surgeon's mate on board a man-of-war, and took part in the
Carthagena expedition. After coming home he made at least some attempts
to practise: but was once more drawn off to literature, though
fortunately not to tragedy. For the rest of his life he was a
hard-worked but by no means ill-paid journalist, novelist, and
miscellanist, making as much as £2000 by his _History of England_, not
ill-written, though now never read. Like Fielding (though, unlike him,
more than once) he went abroad in search of health and died in the quest
at Leghorn. Smollett was not ignorant, but he seems to have known modern
languages better than ancient: though there is doubt about his direct
share in the translations to which he gave his name. Moreover he had
some though no great skill in verse.

Lastly Sterne (1713-1768), though hardly, as it is the custom to call
him, "an Irishman," yet vindicated the claims of the third constituent
of the United Kingdom by being born in Ireland, from which country his
mother came. But the Sternes were pure English, of a gentle family which
had migrated from East Anglia through Nottingham to Yorkshire, and was
much connected with Cambridge. Thither Laurence, the novelist, after a
very roving childhood (his father was a soldier), and a rather irregular
education, duly went: and, receiving preferment in the Church from his
Yorkshire relations, lived for more than twenty years in that county
without a history, till he took the literary world--hardly by storm, but
by a sort of fantastic capful of wind--with _Tristram Shandy_ in 1760.
Seven or eight years of fame, some profit, not hard work (for his books
shrink into no great solid bulk), and constant travelling, ended by a
sudden death at his Bond Street lodgings, after a long course of
ill-health very carelessly attended to.

One or two more traits are relevant. All the four were married, and
married pretty early; two of them married twice. Richardson's first wife
was, in orthodox fashion, his master's daughter: of his second little is
known. Fielding's first (he had made a vain attempt earlier to abduct an
heiress who was a relation) was, by universal consent, the model both of
Sophia and Amelia, almost as charming as either, and as amiable; his
second was her maid. Of Mrs. Smollett, who was a Miss Lascelles and a
West Indian heiress in a small way, we know very little--the habit of
identifying her with the "Narcissa" of _Roderick Random_ is natural,
inconclusive, but not ridiculous. Sterne's matrimonial relations are the
most famous of all: and though posterity has, with its usual charity,
constructed a legend for the pair which is probably much worse than the
reality, that reality is more than a little awkward. Mrs. Sterne was a
Miss Lumley, of a good Yorkshire family, some, though small, fortune,
and more friends who exerted themselves for her husband. By inexcusable
levity, ignorance, misjudgment, or heartless cupidity their daughter
Lydia published, after the death of both, letters some of which contain
courtship of the most lackadaisical sentimentality and others later
expressions (which occasionally reach the scandalous) of weariness and
disgust on Sterne's part. Other evidence of an indisputable character
shows that he was, at least and best, an extravagant and mawkish
philanderer with any girl or woman who would join in a flirtation: and
while there is no evidence against Mrs. Sterne's character in the
ordinary sense, and hardly any of value against her temper, she seems
(which is perhaps not wonderful) to have latterly preferred to live
apart from her husband, and to have put him to considerable, if not
unreasonable, expenses by her fancy for wandering about France with the
daughter.

Finally, in general character, Richardson seems to have been a
respectable person of rather feminine temperament and, though
good-natured to his friends, endowed with a feminine spitefulness.
Fielding, though by no means answering to the standard of minor and even
major morals demanded

              "by the wise ones,
    By the grave and the precise ones."

though reckless and disorderly in his ways and habits, appears to have
been in the main a thorough gentleman, faithful to truth and honour,
fearless, compassionate, intolerant of meanness and brutality and of
treachery most of all--a man of many faults perhaps, but of no really
bad or disgusting ones. Concerning Smollett's personality we know least
of all the four. It was certainly disfigured by an almost savage
pugnacity of temper; by a strange indifference to what ought to be at
the lowest the conduct of a gentleman, and by a most repulsive
inclination--perhaps natural, but developed by training--to the merely
foul and nasty. But he seems to have been brave, charitable though not
in the most gracious way, honest, and on the whole a much better fellow
than he might generally seem. Sterne is the most difficult of the four
to characterise fairly, because of the unlucky revelations to which we
possess no parallel in the case of the other three, and which, if we had
them, might probably alter our estimates of a good many now well reputed
people. It is perhaps enough to say that his letters contain many good
traits as well as some bad ones; that his unlucky portrait, with its
combination of leer and sneer, is probably responsible for much; and
that the parts which, as we shall see further, he chose to play, of
extravagant humorist and extravagant sentimentalist, not only almost
necessitate attitudes which may easily become offensive in the playing,
but are very likely, in practice, to communicate something apparently
not natural and unattractive to the player.

But enough of the workers, though not too much in the case of such
remarkable contemporary exponents of a new kind of Human Comedy: let us
go to the work.

In the long "History of the Unexpected," thick-strewn as it is with
curiosities, there are few things odder than the appearance and the
sequels of _Pamela: or Virtue Rewarded_, which, in circumstances to be
noted presently, is said to have been begun on November 12, 1739, was
finished (as far as the first part goes) exactly two months later, and
(there being, in the case of the author's business, no obstacle of the
kind that has frequently beset the appearance of greater works) was
published later in the year 1740. That author was over fifty years old:
though he had had much to do with ushering literature into the world, he
had never attempted to produce it; he belonged to a class which was apt
to regard _belles lettres_ with profound suspicion; and his experiences,
both in literature itself and in life, had been necessarily of the most
limited kind. But there were certain counterbalancing facts to be taken
into consideration which, though they can hardly be said to be _causes_
of the marvel--the cause was the Hour, which hit, as it listed, on the
Man--were a little more than accidental occasions of it. Richardson, as
we see from his work, must have been a rather careful student of such
novels as there were. The name of his first heroine, with the
essentially English throwing back of the accent added, is the same as
that of one of Sidney's heroines in the _Arcadia_, which had been not
long before modernised for eighteenth-century reading by a certain Mrs.
Stanley. The not very usual form "Laurana," which is the name of a
character in his latest novel, is that of the heroine of _Parismus_.
Further, he had had curious early experiences (which we know from his
own meticulous revelations) of writing love-letters, when he was a mere
boy, for girl-friends of his to adapt in writing to their lovers. "His
eye," he says, "had been always on the ladies," though no doubt always
also in the most honourable way. And, quite recently, the
crystallisation had been precipitated by a commission from two of his
bookseller (i.e. publisher) patrons--the founder of the House of
Rivington and the unlucky Osborne who was knocked down by Johnson and
picked up (not quite as one would wish to be) by Pope. They asked him to
prepare a series of "Familiar Letters on the useful concerns of common
life." Five-and-twenty years before, he had heard in outline something
like the story of _Pamela_. In shaping this into letters he thought it
might be a "new species of writing that might possibly turn young people
into a course of reading different from the pomp and parade of
romance-writing, and dismissing the improbable and marvellous with which
novels generally abound, might tend to promote the cause of religion and
virtue." His wife and "a young lady living with them," to whom he had
read some of it, used to come into his little closet every night with,
"Have you any more of _Pamela_, Mr. R.?" Two other female friends joined
in the interest and eulogy. He finished it (that is, the first two
volumes which contain the whole of the original idea) and published it,
though at first with the business-like precaution of appearing to "edit"
only, and the more business-like liberty of liberal praise of what he
edited. It became at once popular: and received the often repeated, but
to the author very annoying, compliment of piratical continuation. So he
set to work and continued it himself: as usually (though by no means
invariably) with rather diminished success. On such points as the
suggestion that he may have owed a debt to Marivaux (in _Marianne_) and
others, little need be said here. I have never had much doubt myself
that the indebtedness existed: though it would be rash, and is
unnecessary, to attempt to determine to what extent and in what
particular form.

It is by no means so difficult as it may at first sight appear to put
oneself very much in the situation of a contemporary reader of _Pamela_,
even if one has read it three or four times, provided that a fairly long
period has elapsed since the last reading, and that the novels of the
preceding age are fairly--and freshly--familiar. The thing has been in
fact done--with unexpected but not in the least deliberate or suspicious
success--by the present writer, who has read the book after an interval
of some fifteen years and just after reading (in some cases again, in
some for the first time) most of the works noticed in the preceding
chapter. The difference of "the new species of writing" (one is reminded
of the description of Spenser as "the new poet") is almost startling:
and of a kind which Richardson pretty certainly did not fully apprehend
when he used the phrase. In order to appreciate it, one must not only
leave out the two last volumes (which, as has been said, the first
readers had not before them at all, and had better never have had) but
also the second, or great part of it, which they would only have reached
after they had been half whetted, half satiated, and wholly bribed, by
the first. The defects of this later part and indeed of the first itself
will be duly noticed presently. Let it be to us, for the moment, the
story of Pamela up to and including "Mr. B.'s" repentance and amendment
of mind: and the "difference" of this story, which fills some hundred
and twenty or thirty closely printed, double columned, royal octavo
pages in the "Ballantyne Novels," is (despite the awkwardness of such a
form for the enjoyment of a novel) almost astounding.

To begin with, the novel-attractions are presented with a completeness
which, as has been pointed out in the last chapter, is almost entirely
lacking before. There is, of course, not very much plot, in the martinet
sense of that word: there never was in Richardson, despite his immense
apparatus and elaboration. The story is not knotted and unknotted; the
wheel does not come full circle on itself; it merely runs along
pleasantly till it is time for it to stop, and it stops rather abruptly.
The siege of Pamela's virtue ends merely because the besieger is tired
of assaults which fail, and of offering dishonourable terms of
capitulation which are rejected: because he prefers peace and alliance.
But such as it is, it is told with a spirit which must have been
surprising enough to its readers, and which makes it, I confess, seem to
me now much the best _story_ in Richardson. The various alarums and
excursions of the siege itself go off smartly and briskly: there may be
more sequence than connection--there is _some_ connection, as in the
case of that most unlucky and ill-treated person the Rev. Mr.
Williams--but the sequence is rapid and unbroken, and the constituents
of it as it were jostle each other--not in any unfavourable sense, but
in a sort of rapid dance, "cross hands and down the middle," which is
inspiriting and contagious. He lost this faculty later: or rather he
allowed it to be diluted and slackened into the interminable episodes of
the not dissimilar though worse-starred plot against Clarissa, and the
_massacrant_ trivialities of the Italian part of _Grandison_. But he had
it here: and it is not a fair argument to say (as even in these days I
have known it said) that Pamela's honour is a commodity of too little
importance to justify such a pother about it.

This may bring us to the characters. They also are not of the absolutely
first class--excepting, as to be discussed later, the great attempt of
Lovelace, Richardson's never are. But they are an immense advance on the
personages that did duty as persons in preceding novels, even in Defoe.
"Mr. B." himself is indeed not very capital. One does not quite see why
a man who went on as long as he did and used the means which he
permitted himself to use, did not go on longer or use them more
thoroughly. But Richardson has at least vindicated his much-praised
"knowledge of the human heart" by recognising two truths: first, that
there are many natures (perhaps most) who are constantly tempted to
"over-bid"--to give more and more for something that they want and
cannot get; and, secondly, that there are others (again, perhaps, the
majority, if not always the same individuals) who, when they are
peremptorily told _not_ to do a thing, at once determine to do it. It
was to Lady Davers mainly that Pamela owed her escape from the fate of
Clarissa, though she would hardly have taken, or had the chance of
taking, that fate in the same way. As for the minor characters, at least
the lower examples are more than sufficient: and Mrs. Jewkes wants very
little of being a masterpiece. But of course Pamela herself is the
cynosure, such as there is. She has had rather hard measure with critics
for the last century and a little more. The questions to ask now are,
"Is she a probable human being?" and then, "Where are we to find a
probable human being, worked out to the same degree, before?" I say
unhesitatingly that the answer to the first is "Yes," and the answer to
the second "Nowhere." The last triumph of originality and individuality
she does not indeed reach. Richardson had, even more than other men of
his century in England, a strong Gallic touch: and he always tends to
the type rather than the individual. Beatrix Esmond is a coquette of the
highest--almost of the heroic-poetic--class, but she is first of all
Beatrix Esmond. Blanche Amory is a middle-class minx, hardly heroic at
all, but she is first of all Blanche Amory. Becky Sharp is an
adventuress who would go pretty close to, and perhaps not stop at,
positive crime, but she is first of all Becky Sharp. Pamela Andrews is
not first of all--perhaps she is hardly at all--Pamela Andrews. There
might be fifty or five hundred Pamelas, while there could be only one of
each of the others. She is the pretty, good-natured, well-principled,
and rather well-educated menial, whose prudence comes to the aid of her
principles, whose pride does not interfere with either, and who has a
certain--it is hardly unfair to call it--slyness which is of the sex
rather than of the individual. But, as such, she is quite admirably
worked out--a heroine of Racine in more detail and different
circumstances, a triumph of art, and at the same time with so much
nature that it is impossible to dismiss her as merely artificial. The
nearest thing to her in English prose fiction before (Marianne, of
course, is closer in French) is Moll Flanders: and good as Moll is, she
is flat and lifeless in comparison with Pamela. You may call "my
master's" mistress (actually in the honourable sense, but never in the
dishonourable) again a minx, though a better minx than Blanche, if you
like. But there is no animal more alive than a minx: and you will
certainly not find a specimen of the species in any English novel
before.

As for description and dialogue, there is not very much of the former
in _Pamela_, though it might not be unfair to include under the head
those details, after the manner of Defoe (such as Pamela's list of
purchases when she thinks she is going home), which supply their own
measure of verisimilitude to the story. But there are some things of the
kind which Defoe never would have thought of--such as the touches of
the "tufts of grass" and the "pretty sort of wildflower that grows
yonder near the elm, the fifth from us on the left," which occur in the
gipsy scene. The dialogue plays a much more important part: and may be
brought into parallel with that in the _Polite Conversation_, referred
to above and published just before _Pamela_. It is "reported" of course,
instead of being directly delivered, in accordance with the
letter-scheme of which more presently, but that makes very little
difference; to the first readers it probably made no difference at all.
Here again that process of "vivification," which has been so often dwelt
on, makes an astonishing progress--the blood and colour of the novel,
which distinguish it from the more statuesque narrative, are supplied,
if indirectly yet sufficiently and, in comparison with previous
examples, amply. Here you get, almost or quite for the first time in the
English novel, those spurts and sparks of animation which only the
living voice can supply. Richardson is a humorist but indirectly; yet
only the greatest humorists have strokes much better than that admirable
touch in which, when the "reconciliations and forgivenesses of injuries"
are being arranged, and Mr. B. (quite in the manner of the time)
suggests marrying Mrs. Jewkes to the treacherous footman John and giving
them an inn to keep--Pamela, the mild and semi-angelic but exceedingly
feminine Pamela, timidly inquires whether, "This would not look like
very heavy punishment to poor John?" She forgives Mrs. Jewkes of course,
but only "as a Christian"--as a greater than Richardson put it
afterwards and commented on it in the mouth of a personage whom
Richardson could never have drawn, though Fielding most certainly could.

The original admirers of _Pamela_, then, were certainly justified: and
even the rather fatuous eulogies which the author prefixed to it from
his own and (let us hope) other pens (and which probably provoked
Fielding himself more than even the substance of the piece) could be
transposed into a reasonable key. But we ought nowadays to consider this
first complete English novel from a rather higher point of view, and ask
ourselves, not merely what its comparative merits were in regard to its
predecessors, and as presented to its first readers, but what its
positive character is and what, as far as it goes, are the positive
merits or defects which it shows in its author.

The first thing to strike one in this connection is, almost of course,
the letter-form. More agreement has been reached about this, perhaps,
than about some other points in the inquiry. The initial difficulty of
fiction which does not borrow the glamour of verse or of the stage is
the question, "What does all this mean?" "What is the authority?" "How
does the author know it all?" And a hundred critics have pointed out
that there are practically only three ways of meeting this. The boldest
and the best by far is to follow the poet and the dramatist themselves;
to treat it like one of the magic lions of romance, ignore it, and pass
on, secure of safety, to tell your story "from the blue," as if it were
an actual history or revelation, or something passing before the eyes of
the reader. But at that time few novelists had the courage to do this,
daunted as they were by the absence of the sword and shield of verse,
of the vantage-room of the stage. Then there is the alternative of
recounting it by the mouth of one of the actors in, or spectators of,
the events--a plan obvious, early, presenting some advantages, still
very commonly followed, but always full of little traps and pits of
improbability, and peculiarly trying in respect to the character (if he
is made to have any) of the narrator himself. Thirdly, there is the
again easy resource of the "document" in its various forms. Of these,
letters and diaries possess some prerogative advantages; and were likely
to suggest themselves very particularly at this time when the actual
letter and diary (long rather strangely rare in English) had for some
generations appeared, and were beginning to be common. In the first
place the information thus obtained looks natural and plausible: and
there is a subsidiary advantage--on which Richardson does not draw very
much in _Pamela_, but which he employs to the full later--that by
varying your correspondents you can get different views of the same
event, and first-hand manifestations of extremely different characters.

Its disadvantages, on the other hand, are equally obvious: but there are
two or three of them of especial importance. In the first place, it is
essentially an artificial rather than an artful plan--its want of
verisimilitude, as soon as you begin to think of it, is as great as that
of either of the others if not greater. In the second, without immense
pains, it must be "gappy and scrappy," while the more these pains are
taken the more artificial it will become. In the third, the book is
extremely likely, in the taking of these pains and even without them, to
become intolerably lengthy and verbose. In the first part at least of
the first part of _Pamela_, Richardson avoided these dangers fairly if
not fully; in the second part he succumbed to them; in his two later
novels, though more elaborate and important plots to some extent bore up
the expansion, he succumbed to them almost more. Pains have been taken
above to show how the first readers of _Pamela_ might rejoice in it,
because of its contrast with the character of the seventeenth-century
novel which was most read--the Scudéry or "heroic" romance. It is not, I
think, too severe to say that nothing but the parallel with that
romance, and the tolerance induced by familiarity with it, could make
any one put up with the second part of _Pamela_ itself, or with the
inhumanly prolonged divagation of _Clarissa_ and _Grandison_. Nor, as
has been hinted, is the solace of the letters--in the opportunity of
setting forth different tempers and styles--here much taken.

There is no doubt that one main attraction of this letter-plan (whether
consciously experienced or not does not matter) was its ready adaptation
to Richardson's own special and peculiar gift of minute analysis of
mood, temper, and motive. The diary avowedly, and the letter in reality,
even though it may be addressed to somebody else, is a continuous
soliloquy: and the novelist can use it with a frequency and to a length
which would be intolerable and impossible on the stage. Now soliloquy is
the great engine for self--revelation and analysis. It is of course to a
great extent in consequence of this analysis that Richardson owes his
pride of place in the general judgment. It is quite possible to lay too
much stress on it, as distinguishing the novel from the romance: and the
present writer is of opinion that too much stress has actually been
laid. The real difference between romance _per se_ and novel _per se_
(so far as they are capable of distinct existence) is that the romance
depends more on incident and the novel more on character. Now this
minute analysis and exhibition, though it is one way of drawing or
constructing character, is not the only, nor even a necessary, one. It
can be done without: but it has impressed the vulgar, and even some who
are not the vulgar, from Dr. Johnson to persons whom it is unnecessary
to mention. They cannot believe that there is "no deception"--that the
time is correctly told--unless the works of the watch are bared to them:
and this Richardson most undoubtedly does. Even in his 'prentice work,
every flutter of Pamela's little heart is registered, and registered
probably enough: nor could the registry have been effected, perhaps, in
any other way that should be in the least probable so well as by the
letter and journal method. Of course this analysis was not quite new; it
had existed in a sort of way in the heroic novel: and it had been
eminently present in the famous _Princesse de Clèves_ of Madame de la
Fayette as well as in her French successors. But these stories had
generally been as short as the heroics had been long: and no one had
risen (or descended) to anything like the minuteness and fullness of
Richardson. As was before pointed out in regard to the letter-system
generally, this method of treatment is exposed to special dangers,
particularly those of verbosity and "overdoing"--not to mention the
greater one of missing the mark. Richardson can hardly be charged with
error, though he may be with excess, in regard to Pamela herself in the
earlier part of the book--perhaps even not in regard to Mr. B.'s
intricacies of courtship, matrimonial compliment, and arbitrary temper
later. But he certainly succumbs to them in the long and monstrous scene
in which Lady Davers bullies, storms at, and positively assaults her
unfortunate sister-in-law before she is forced to allow that she _is_
her sister-in-law. Part of course of his error here comes from the
mistake with which Lady Mary afterwards most justly reproached
him--that he talked about fine ladies and gentlemen without knowing
anything about them. It was quite natural for Lady Davers to be
disgusted, to be incredulous, to be tyrannical, to be in a certain sense
violent. But it is improbable that she would in any case have spoken and
behaved like a drunken fishfag quarrelling with another in the street:
and the extreme prolongation of the scene brings its impropriety more
forcibly into view. Here, as elsewhere (a point of great importance to
which I may invite attention), Richardson follows out, with
extraordinary minuteness and confidence, a wrong course: and his very
expertness in the process betrays him and brings him to grief. If he had
run the false scent for a few yards only it would not matter: in a chase
prolonged to something like "Hartleap Well" extension there is less
excuse for his not finding it out. Nevertheless it would of course be
absurd not to rank this "knowledge of the human heart" among the claims
which not only gave him but have kept his reputation. I do not know that
he shows it much less in the later part of the first two volumes
(Pamela's recurrent tortures of jealous curiosity about Sally Godfrey
are admirable) or even in the dreary sequel. But analysis for analysis'
sake can have few real, though it may have some pretended, devotees.

The foregoing remarks have been designed, less as a criticism of
_Pamela_ (which would be unnecessary here), or even of Richardson (which
would be more in place, but shall be given in brief presently), than as
an account and justification of the book's position in the real subject
of this volume--the History of the English Novel. And this account will
dispense us from dealing, at corresponding length, with the individually
more important but historically subordinate books which followed. Of
these _Clarissa_, as few people can be ignorant, is a sort of enlarged,
diversified, and transposed _Pamela_, in which the attempts of a
libertine of more resolution and higher gifts than Mr. B. upon a young
lady of much more than proportionately higher station and qualities than
Pamela's, are--as such success goes--successful at last: but only to
result in the death of the victim and the punishment of the criminal.
The book is far longer than even the extended _Pamela_; has a much wider
range; admits of episodes and minor plots, and is altogether much more
ambitious; but still--though the part of the seducer Lovelace is much
more important than that of Mr. B.--it is chiefly occupied with the
heroine. In _Sir Charles Grandison_, on the contrary, though no less
than three heroines exist after a fashion and are carefully treated, the
author's principal object is to depict--in direct contrast to Mr. B. and
Lovelace--a "Good Man"--the actual first title of the book, which he
wisely altered. This faultless and insufferable monster is frantically
beloved by, and hesitates long between, two beauties, the Italian
Clementina della Porretta and the English Harriet Byron. The latter of
these carries him off (rather because of religious difficulties than of
any great predilection on his own part) and the piece ends with a
repetition, extension, and intensification of the bounties showered upon
Pamela by her husband, and her almost abject gratitude for them. Only of
course "the good man" could never be guilty of Mr. B.'s meditated
relapse from the path of rectitude, nor (one may perhaps add) does Miss
Byron seem to possess the insinuating astuteness by which Pamela once
more

    "Reconciles the new perverted man,"

to adapt the last line of _A Lover's Complaint_ to the situation.

_Grandison_, like _Clarissa_, has a much wider range of personage and
incident than _Pamela_, and is again double the length of it. No
detailed criticism of these enormous books (both of which are conducted
in the letter-form, though, in the latter case especially, with long
retrospects and narratives which rather strain the style) is possible
here. But a few remarks on the characters of Lovelace and Clarissa,
which have usually been regarded as Richardson's greatest triumphs, may
fitly precede some on his whole character as a novelist.

Admiration and sympathy, tempered with a few reserves, have been the
general notes of comment on Clarissa: and--as she goes through the long
martyrdom of persecution by her family for not marrying the man she does
not love; of worse persecution from the man whom she does love, but who
will not marry her, at least until he has conquered her virtue; and of
perhaps worst when she feels it her duty to resist his repentant and (as
such things go) honourable proffers after he has treacherously deprived
her of technical honour--compassion at least is impossible to refuse.
But "compassion," though it literally translates "sympathy" from Greek
into Latin, is not its synonym in English. It is a disagreeable thing to
have to say: but Clarissa's purity strikes one as having at once too
much questionable prudery in it and too little honest prudence: while
her later resolution has as much false pride as real principle. Even
some of her admirers admit a want of straightforwardness in her; she has
no passion, which rather derogates from the merit of her conduct in any
case; and though she is abominably ill-treated by almost everybody,
one's pity for her never comes very near to love.

Towards Lovelace, on the other hand, the orthodox attitude, with even
greater uniformity, has been shocked, or sometimes even unshocked,
admiration. Hazlitt went into frequently quoted raptures over the
"regality" of his character: and though to approve of him as a man would
only be the pretence of a cheap paradoxer, general opinion seems to have
gone various lengths in the same direction. There have, however, been a
few dissenters: and I venture to join myself to them in the very
dissidence of their dissent. Lovelace, it is true, is a most
astonishingly "succeeded" blend of a snob's fine gentleman and of the
fine gentleman of a silly and rather unhealthy-minded schoolgirl. He
is--it is difficult to resist the temptation of dropping and inserting
the h's--handsome, haughty, arbitrary, as well as rich, generous after a
fashion, well descended, well dressed, well mannered--except when he is
insolent. He is also--which certainly stands to his credit in the bank
which is not that of the snob or the schoolgirl--no fool in a general
way. But he is not in the least a gentleman except in externals: and
there is nothing really "great" about him at all. Even his scoundrelism
is mostly, if not wholly, _pose_--which abominable thing indeed
distinguishes him throughout, in every speech and every act, from the
time when he sighs as he kisses Miss Arabella Harlowe's hand to the time
when he says, "Let this expiate!" as that hallowed sword of Colonel
Morden's passes through his rotten heart. Now if Richardson had _meant_
this, it might be granted at once that Lovelace is one of the greatest
characters of fiction: and I do not deny that _taken as this_, meant or
not meant, he is great. But Richardson obviously did _not_ mean it; and
Hazlitt did not mean it; and none of the admirers mean it. _They_ all
thought and think that Lovelace is something like what Milton's Satan
was, and what my Lord Byron would have liked to be. This is very unfair
to the Prince of Darkness: and it is even not quite just to "the noble
poet."

At the same time, the acute reader will have noticed, the acknowledgment
that the fact that Richardson--even not knowing it and intending to do
something else--did hit off perfectly and consummately the ideal of such
a "prevailing party" (to quote Lord Foppington) as snobs and
schoolgirls, is a serious and splendid tribute to his merits: as is also
the fact that his two chief characters are characters still interesting
and worth arguing about. Those merits, indeed, are absolutely
incontestable. His immediate and immense popularity, abroad as well as
at home, would not necessarily prove much, though it must not be
neglected, and historically, at least, is of the first importance. But
he does not need it.

For, as should have been sufficiently shown, he did very great
things--first by gathering up the scattered means and methods which had
been half ignorantly hit on by others, and co-ordinating them into the
production of the finished and complete novel; secondly (though less) by
that infusion of elaborate "minor psychology" as it may be called, which
is his great characteristic; and, thirdly, by means of it and of other
things, in raising the pitch of interest in his readers to an infinitely
higher degree than had ever been known before. The dithyrambs of Diderot
are, though not ridiculously, amusingly excessive: but they are only an
exaggeration of the truth. On the comic side he was weak: and he made a
most unfortunate mistake by throwing this part of the business on young
ladies of position and (as he thought) of charm--Miss Darnford, Miss
Howe, Charlotte Grandison--who are by no means particularly comic and
who are sometimes very particularly vulgar. But of tragedy positive, in
the _bourgeois_ kind, he had no small command, and in the middle
business--in affairs neither definitely comic nor definitely tragic--he
was wonderfully prolific and facile. His immense and heart-breaking
lengthiness is not _mere_ verbosity: it comes partly from the artist's
natural delight in a true and newly found method, partly from a still
more respectably artistic desire not to do the work negligently. As for
the unhealthiness of atmosphere which has been generally and not
unjustly charged upon him, it is, in part, no doubt the result of
imperfect temperament and breeding: but it is also as closely connected
with his very method as are the merits thereof. You cannot "consider so
curiously" without considering too curiously. The drawbacks of his work
are obvious, and they were likely to be, and were, exaggerated. But they
might be avoided and the merits kept: nor is it too much to say that the
triumphs of the English novel in the last century have been not a little
due to the avoidance of the one and the keeping of the other.

It would be, in the circumstances, peculiarly uncivil and disobliging
to lay very much stress on the fact that, after all, the greatest
of Richardson's works is his successor, caricaturist, and
superior--Fielding. When the memoirs of Miss Pamela Andrews appeared,
the future biographer of her doubly supposititious brother was a not
very young man of thirty-three, who had written a good many not very
good plays, had contributed to periodicals, and had done a little work
at the Bar, besides living, at least till his marriage and it may be
feared later, an exceedingly "rackety" life. It is not improbable,
though it is not certain, that he had already turned his attention to
prose fiction of a kind. For, though the _Miscellanies_ which followed
_Joseph Andrews_ were three years later than _Pamela_ in appearance,
the _Journey from this World to the Next_ which they contain has the
immaturity of earliness; and we can hardly conceive it as written after
the adventures and character of Mr. Abraham Adams. It is unequal, rather
tedious in parts, and in conception merely a _pastiche_ of Lucian and
Fontenelle: but it contains some remarkable things in the way of shrewd
satirical observation of human nature. And the very fact that it is a
following of something else is interesting, in connection with the
infinitely more important work that preceded it in publication, _The
Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams_ (1742).

Nobody has ever had much difficulty in accounting for the way in which
Fielding availed himself of the appearance and popularity of _Pamela_.
And though Richardson would have been superhuman instead of very human
indeed (with an ordinary British middle-class humanity, and an
extraordinary vein of genius) if he had done otherwise, few have joined
him in thinking _Joseph_ a "lewd and ungenerous engraftment." We have
not ourselves been very severe on the faults of _Pamela_, the reason of
lenity being, among other things, that it in a manner produced Fielding,
and all the fair herd of his successors down to the present day. But
those faults are glaring: and they were of a kind specially likely to
attract the notice and the censure of a genial, wholesome, and, above
all, masculine taste and intellect like Fielding's. Even at that time,
libertine as it was in some ways, and sentimental as it was in others,
people had not failed to notice that Pamela's virtue is not quite what
was then called "neat" wine--the pure and unadulterated juice of the
grape. The _longueurs_ and the fiddle-faddle, the shameless and fulsome
preface-advertisements and the rest lay open enough to censure. So
Fielding saw the handles, and gripped them at once by starting a _male_
Pamela--a situation not only offering "most excellent differences," but
in itself possessing, to graceless humanity at all times it may be
feared, and at that time perhaps specially, something essentially
ludicrous in minor points. At first he kept the parody very close:
though the necessary transposition of the parts afforded opportunity
(amply taken) for display of character and knowledge of nature superior
to Richardson's own. Later the general opinion is that he, especially
inspirited by his _trouvaille_ of Adams, almost forgot the parody, and
only furbished up the _Pamela_-connection at the end to make a formal
correspondence with the beginning, and to get a convenient and
conventional "curtain." I am not so sure of this. Even Adams is to a
certain extent suggested by Williams, though they turn out such very
different persons. Mrs. Slipslop, a character, as Gray saw, not so very
far inferior to Adams, is not only a parallel to Mrs. Jewkes, but also,
and much more, a contrast to the respectable Mrs. Jervis and Mrs.
Warden. All sorts of fantastic and not-fantastic doublets may be traced
throughout: and I am not certain that Parson Trulliber's majestic
doctrine that no man, even in his own house, shall drink when he "caaled
vurst" is not a demoniacally ingenious travesty of Pamela's
characteristic casuistry, when she says that she will do anything to
propitiate Lady Davers, but she will not "fill wine" to her in her own
husband's house.

But this matters little: and we have no room for it. Suffice it as
agreed and out of controversy that _Joseph Andrews_ started as a parody
of _Pamela_ and that, whether in addition or in substitution, it turned
to something very different. It is not quite so uncontroversial, but
will be asserted here as capable of all but demonstration, that the
"something different" is also something much greater. There is still not
very much plot--the parody did not necessitate and indeed rather
discouraged that, and what there is is arrived at chiefly by the old and
seldom very satisfactory system of _anagnorisis_--the long-lost-child
business. But, under the three other heads, Joseph distances his sister
hopelessly and can afford her much more than weight for sex. It has been
said that there are doubtfully in Richardson anywhere, and certainly not
in _Pamela_, those startling creations of personality which are almost
more real to us than the persons we know in the flesh. It is not that
Pamela and her meyney are _un_real; for they are not: but that they are
not personal. The Reverend Abraham Adams is a good deal more real than
half the parsons who preached last Sunday, and a good deal more
personal: and the quality is not confined to him, though he has most of
it. So, too, with the description. The time was not yet for any minute
or elaborate picture-setting. But here again also that extra dose of
life and action--almost of bustle--which Fielding knows how to instil is
present. In _Pamela_ the settings are frequent, but they are "still
life" and rather shadowy: we do not _see_ the Bedfordshire and
Lincolnshire mansions, the summer houses where (as she observes with
demure relish when the danger is over) Mr. B. was "very naughty;" even
the pond where, if she had been another sort of girl, the _drame_ might
have become real tragedy. Fielding does not take very much more trouble
and yet somehow we _do_ see it all, with a little help from our own
imaginations perhaps, but on his suggestion and start. Especially the
outdoor life and scenes--the inn-yards and the high roads and the downs
by night or day; the pig-sty where poor Adams is the victim of live
pigs and the public-house kitchen where he succumbs to a by-product of
dead ones--these are all real for us.

But most of all is the regular progress of vivification visible in the
dialogue. This, as we have seen, had been the very weakest point of the
weakness of almost all (we might say of all) English novels up to the
close of the first quarter of the eighteenth century. Richardson had
done a great deal for it: but it was impossible that, on his method, it
should not, for the most part, be languid, or at any rate long-winded.
Here again Fielding spirits the thing up--oxygenates and ozonises the
atmosphere: while, in even fuller measure than his predecessor and
victim, he recognises the efficacy of dialogue as the revealer of
character. He has, assisted no doubt by Shakespeare and his own dramatic
practice, discovered that you do not want volumes of it to do the
business--that single moments and single sentences will do that business
at times, if they are used in the proper way.

In short, Fielding here used his reluctant and indignant forerunner as a
spring-board, whence to attain heights which that forerunner could never
have reached: he "stood upon his shoulders" in the most cavalier but
also the most successful fashion. In the novel as Richardson knew it and
was thinking of it, when he began _Pamela_, you were, as a rule, in an
artificial world altogether--a world artificial with an artificiality
only faintly and occasionally touched with any reality at all. In
_Pamela_ itself there is perhaps nothing, and certainly not much, that
is _wholly_ unreal: but the reality is treated and rendered in an
artificial way. In _Joseph Andrews_, though its professed genesis and
procedure are artificial too, you break away at once from serious
artifice. These are all real people who do real things in a real way
now, as they did nearly two hundred years ago: however much dress, and
speech, and manners may have changed. And we are told of their doings in
a real way, too. Exactly how the teller knew it we do not know: but we
do not think of this at all. And on the other hand there is no perpetual
reminder of art, like the letter-ending and beginning, to disturb or
alloy the once and gladly accepted "suspension of disbelief."

A slight digression may not be improper here. Even in their own days,
when the _gros mot_ was much less shocking than it is now, there was a
general notion--which has more or less persisted, in spite of all
changes of fashion in this respect, and exists even now when licence of
subject as distinguished from phrase has to a great extent
returned--that Fielding is more "coarse," more "improper," and so forth
than Richardson. As a matter of fact, neither admits positively indecent
language--that had gone out, except in the outskirts and fringes of
English literature, generations earlier. But I am much mistaken if there
are not in Richardson more than a few scenes and situations the
"impropriety" of which positively exceeds anything in Fielding.
Naturally one does not give indications: but readers may be pretty
confident about the fact. The comparative "bloodlessness," however--the
absence of life and colour in the earlier and older writer--acts as a
sort of veil to them.

Yet (to return to larger and purer air), however much one may admire
_Joseph Andrews_, the kind of _parasitic_ representation which it allows
itself, and the absence of any attempt to give an original story tells
against it. And it may, in any case, be regarded as showing that the
novelist, even yet, was hugging the shore or allowing himself to be
taken in tow--that he did not dare to launch out into the deep and
trust to his own sails and the wind of nature to propel him--to his own
wits and soul to guide. Even Fielding's next venture--the wonderful and
almost unique venture of _Jonathan Wild_--leaves some objection of this
sort possible, though, for myself, I should never dream of admitting it.
Jonathan was (so much the worse for human nature) a real person: and the
outlines of his story--if not the actual details--are given partly by
his actual life, partly by Gay's _Beggar's Opera_ and its sequel.
Moreover, the whole marvellous little book has a purpose--the purpose of
satire on false ideas of greatness, historical and political. The
invention and the art of the writer are not even yet allowed frank and
free course.

But though criticism will allow this, it will, if it be competent and
courageous, allow no deduction to be made from the other greatness of
this little masterpiece. It has never been popular; it is never likely
to be popular; and one may almost say that it is sincerely to be hoped
that it never will be popular. For if it were, either all the world
would be scoundrels, which would be a pity: or all the world would be
philosophers and persons of taste, in which case it would be impossible,
as the famous story has it, to "look down on one's fellow-creatures from
a proper elevation." It really is a novel and a remarkable one--superior
even to _Vanity Fair_, according to Thackeray's own definition, as a
delineation of "a set of people living without God in the world." But it
is even more (and here its only parallel is _A Tale of a Tub_, which is
more desultory and much more of a _fatrasie_ or salmagundy of odds and
ends) a masterpiece and quintessential example of irony. Irony had come
in with the plain prose style, without which it is almost impossible:
and not merely Swift but others had done great things with it. It is,
however, only here that it reaches the quintessence just spoken of with
a coherent and substantive purpose to serve as vehicle for it. It is
possibly too strong for most people's taste: and one may admit that, for
anything like frequent enjoyment, it wants a certain admixture of the
fantastic in its various senses--after the method of Voltaire in one
way, of Beckford in another, of Peacock in a third, of Disraeli in a
fourth--to make it acceptable to more than a very few. But it shows,
even from our present limited point of view, of what immense and exalted
application the novel-method was capable: and it shows also the
astonishing powers of its author. "Genial," in the usual sense, it
certainly cannot be called; in the proper sense as equalling "what is
the production of genius" there are few books which deserve the term
better. But it is an exercise in a by-way of the novel road-system,
though an early proof of the fact that such by-ways are endlessly open.

But the time was coming, though it did not (and could hardly) come very
quickly, when Fielding was to discard all kinds of adventitious aids and
suggestions--all crutches, spring-boards, go-carts, tugs, patterns,
tracings--and go his own way--and the Way of the Novel--with no guidance
but something of the example of Cervantes directly and Shakespeare
indirectly among the moderns, and of the poetic fiction-writers of old.
It is perfectly clear that he had thought widely (and perhaps had read
not a little) on the subject of literary criticism, in a sense not
common in his day, and that the thinking had led him to a conception of
the "prose epic" which, though it might have been partly (not wholly by
any means) pieced out of the Italian and Spanish critics of the late
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, had never been worked out as
a complete theory, much less applied in practice and to prose. The
Prose Epic aims at--and in Fielding's case has been generally admitted
to have hit--something like the classical unity of main action. But it
borrows from the romance-idea the liberty of a large accretion and
divagation of minor and accessory plot:--not the mere "episode" of the
ancients, but the true minor plot of Shakespeare. It assumes,
necessarily and once for all, the licence of tragi-comedy, in that sense
of the term in which _Much Ado About Nothing_ and _A Winter's Tale_ are
tragi-comedies, and in which _Othello_ itself might have been made one.
And it follows further in the wake of the Shakespearean drama by
insisting far more largely than ancient literature of any kind, and far
more than any modern up to its date except drama had done, on the
importance of Character. Description and dialogue are rather subordinate
to these things than on a level with them--but they are still further
worked out than before. And there is a new element--perhaps suggested by
the _parabasis_ of ancient comedy, but, it may be, more directly by the
peculiar method of Swift in _A Tale of a Tub_. At various places in his
narrative, but especially at the beginnings of books and chapters,
Fielding as it were "calls a halt" and addresses his readers on matters
more or less relevant to the story, but rather in the manner of a
commentator and scholiast upon it than as actual parts of it. Of this
more later: for the immediate purpose is to survey and not to criticise.

The result of all this was _Tom Jones_--by practically universal consent
one of the capital books of English literature. It is unnecessary to
recapitulate the famous praises of Gibbon, of Coleridge, of Byron, and
of others: and it is only necessary to deal briefly with the complaints
which, if they have never found such monumental expression as the
praises, have been sometimes widely entertained. These objections--as
regards interest--fasten partly on the address-digressions, partly on
the great inset-episode of "The Man of the Hill:" as regards morality on
a certain alleged looseness of principle in that respect throughout, and
especially on the licence of conduct accorded to the hero himself and
the almost entire absence of punishment for it. As for the first, "The
Man of the Hill" was partly a concession to the fancy of the time for
such things, partly a following of such actual examples as Fielding
admitted--for it need hardly be said that the inset-episode, of no or
very slight connection with the story, is common both in the ancients
and in Cervantes, while it is to be found as long after Fielding as in
the early novel-work of Dickens. The digression-openings are at least as
satisfactory to some as they are unsatisfactory to others; it is even
doubtful whether they annoy anybody half so much as they have delighted
some excellent judges. The other point is well worn: but the wearing has
not taken off its awkwardness and unsavouriness. Difference of habit and
manners at the time will account for much: but the wiser apologists will
simply say that Fielding's attitude to certain deviations from the
strict moral law was undoubtedly very indulgent, provided that such
deviations were unaccompanied by the graver and more detestable vices of
cruelty, treachery, and fraud--that to vice which was accompanied by
these blacker crimes he was utterly merciless; and that if he is thus
rather exposed to the charge of "compounding by damning"--in the famous
phrase--the things that he damned admit of no excuse and those that he
compounded for have been leniently dealt with by all but the sternest
moralists.

Such things are, however (in the admirable French sense),
_misères_--wretched petty cavils and shallows of criticism. The only
sensible thing to do is to launch out with Fielding into that deep and
open sea of human character and fate which he dared so gloriously.
During the curious phase of literary opinion which the last twenty years
or so have seen, it has apparently been discovered by some people that
his scheme of human thought and feeling is too simple--"toylike" I think
they call it--in comparison with that, say, of Count Tolstoi or of Mr.
Meredith, that modern practice has reached a finer technique than his or
even than that of his greatest follower, Thackeray. Far be it from the
present writer to say, or to insinuate, anything disrespectful of the
great moderns who have lately left us. Yet it may be said without the
slightest disrespect to them that the unfavourable comparison is mainly
a revival of Johnson's mistake as to Fielding 

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