Hours in a Library, Volume 1
by Leslie Stephen · English · Gutenberg #20459 · 707,157 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Hours in a Library, Volume 1
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: Hours in a Library, Volume 1
Author: Leslie Stephen
Release date: January 27, 2007 [eBook #20459]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20459
Credits: Produced by Thierry Alberto, Henry Craig and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HOURS IN A LIBRARY, VOLUME 1 ***
Produced by Thierry Alberto, Henry Craig and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
* * * * *
+------------------------------------------------------------+
| Transcriber's Note: |
| |
| Obvious typographical errors have been corrected in |
| this text. For a complete list, please see the bottom of |
| this document. |
| |
+------------------------------------------------------------+
* * * * *
HOURS IN A LIBRARY
VOL. I.
HOURS IN A LIBRARY
BY
LESLIE STEPHEN
_NEW EDITION, WITH ADDITIONS_
IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOL. I.
LONDON SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE 1892
[_All rights reserved_]
CONTENTS
OF
THE FIRST VOLUME
PAGE
DE FOE'S NOVELS 1
RICHARDSON'S NOVELS 47
POPE AS A MORALIST 94
SIR WALTER SCOTT 137
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 169
BALZAC'S NOVELS 199
DE QUINCEY 237
SIR THOMAS BROWNE 269
JONATHAN EDWARDS 300
HORACE WALPOLE 345
_OPINIONS OF AUTHORS_
Libraries are as the shrines where all the relics of the
ancient saints, full of true virtue, and that without
delusion or imposture, are preserved and reposed.--BACON,
_Advancement of Learning_.
We visit at the shrine, drink in some measure of the
inspiration, and cannot easily breathe in other air less
pure, accustomed to immortal fruits.--HAZLITT'S _Plain
Speaker_.
What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though
all the souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their
labours to the Bodleian were reposing here as in some
dormitory or middle state. I seem to inhale learning,
walking amid their foliage; and the odour of their old
moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of the
sciential apples which grew around the happy
orchard.--CHARLES LAMB, _Oxford in the Long Vacation_.
My neighbours think me often alone, and yet at such times I
am in company with more than five hundred mutes, each of
whom communicates his ideas to me by dumb signs quite as
intelligibly as any person living can do by uttering of
words; and with a motion of my hand I can bring them as near
to me as I please; I handle them as I like; they never
complain of ill-usage; and when dismissed from my presence,
though ever so abruptly, take no offence.--STERNE,
_Letters_.
In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear
friends imprisoned by an enchanter in paper and leathern
boxes,--EMERSON, _Books, Society, and Solitude_.
Nothing is pleasanter than exploring in a library.--LANDOR,
_Pericles and Aspasia_.
I never come into a library (saith Heinsius) but I bolt the
door to me, excluding lust, ambition, avarice, and all such
vices whose nurse is idleness, the mother of ignorance and
melancholy herself; and in the very lap of eternity, among
so many divine souls, I take my seat with so lofty a spirit
and sweet content that I pity all our great ones and rich
men that know not their happiness.--BURTON, _Anatomy of
Melancholy_.
I do not know that I am happiest when alone; but this I am
sure of, that I am never long even in the society of her I
love without a yearning for the company of my lamp and my
utterly confused and tumbled-over library.--BYRON, _Moore's
Life_.
Montesquieu used to say that he had never known a pain or a
distress which he could not soothe by half an hour of a good
book.--JOHN MORLEY, _On Popular Culture_.
There is no truer word than that of Solomon: 'There is no
end of making books'; the sight of a great library verifies
it; there is no end--indeed, it were pity there should
be.--BISHOP HALL.
You that are genuine Athenians, devour with a golden
Epicurism the arts and sciences, the spirits and extractions
of authors.--CULVERWELL, _Light of Nature_.
He hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book;
he hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink;
his intellect is not replenished; he is only an animal, only
sensible in the duller parts.--SHAKESPEARE, _Love's Labour's
Lost_.
I have wondered at the patience of the antediluvians; their
libraries were insufficiently furnished; how then could
seven or eight hundred years of life be
supportable?--COWPER, _Life and Letters by Southey_.
Unconfused Babel of all tongues! which e'er
The mighty linguist Fame or Time the mighty traveller,
That could speak or this could hear!
Majestic monument and pyramid!
Where still the shapes of parted souls abide
Embalmed in verse; exalted souls which now
Enjoy those arts they wooed so well below,
Which now all wonders plainly see
That have been, are, or are to be
In the mysterious Library,
The beatific Bodley of the Deity!
COWLEY, _Ode on the Bodleian_.
This to a structure led well known to fame,
And called, 'The Monument of Vanished Minds,'
Where when they thought they saw in well-sought books
The assembled souls of all that men thought wise,
It bred such awful reverence in their looks,
As if they saw the buried writers rise.
Such heaps of written thought; gold of the dead,
Which Time does still disperse but not devour,
Made them presume all was from deluge freed
Which long-lived authors writ ere Noah's shower.
DAVENANT, _Gondibert_.
Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a
progeny of life in them, to be as active as that soul whose
progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the
purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that
bred them.--MILTON, _Areopagitica_.
Nor is there any paternal fondness which seems to savour
less of absolute instinct, and which may be so well
reconciled to worldly wisdom, as this of authors for their
books. These children may most truly be called the riches of
their father, and many of them have with true filial piety
fed their parent in his old age; so that not only the
affection but the interest of the author may be highly
injured by those slanderers whose poisonous breath brings
his book to an untimely end.--FIELDING, _Tom Jones_.
We whom the world is pleased to honour with the title of
modern authors should never have been able to compass our
great design of everlasting remembrance and never-dying fame
if our endeavours had not been so highly serviceable to the
general good of mankind.--SWIFT, _Tale of a Tub_.
A good library always makes me melancholy, where the best
author is as much squeezed and as obscure as a porter at a
coronation.--SWIFT.
In my youth I never entered a great library but my
predominant feeling was one of pain and disturbance of
mind--not much unlike that which drew tears from Xerxes on
viewing his immense army, and reflecting that in one hundred
years not one soul would remain alive. To me, with respect
to books, the same effect would be brought about by my own
death. Here, said I, are one hundred thousand books, the
worst of them capable of giving me some instruction and
pleasure; and before I can have had time to extract the
honey from one-twentieth of this hive in all likelihood I
shall be summoned away.--DE QUINCEY, _Letter to a young
man_.
A man may be judged by his library.--BENTHAM.
I ever look upon a library with the reverence of a
temple.--EVELYN, _to Wotton_.
'Father, I should like to learn to make gold.' 'And what
would'st thou do if thou could'st make it?' 'Why, I would
build a great house and fill it with books.'--SOUTHEY,
_Doctor_.
What would you have more? A wife? That is none of the
indispensable requisites of life. Books? That is one of
them, and I have more than I can use.--DAVID HUME, _Burton's
'Life_.'
Talk of the happiness of getting a great prize in the
lottery! What is that to opening a box of books? The joy
upon lifting up the cover must be something like that which
we shall feel when Peter the porter opens the door upstairs,
and says, 'Please to walk in, Sir.'--SOUTHEY, _Life_.
I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of
books than a king who did not love reading.--MACAULAY.
Our books ... do not our hearts hug them, and quiet
themselves in them even more than in God?--BAXTER'S _Saint's
Rest_.
It is our duty to live among books.--NEWMAN, _Tracts for the
Times, No. 2_.
What lovely things books are!--BUCKLE, _Life by Huth_.
(Query) Whether the collected wisdom of all ages and nations
be not found in books?--BERKELEY, _Querist_.
Read we must, be writers ever so indifferent.--SHAFTESBURY,
_Characteristics_.
It's mighty hard to write nowadays without getting something
or other worth listening to into your essay or your volume.
The foolishest book is a kind of leaky boat on a sea of
wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.--O. W.
HOLMES, _Poet at the Breakfast Table_.
I adopted the tolerating measure of the elder Pliny--'nullum
esse librum tam malum ut non in aliqua parte
prodesset.'--GIBBON, _Autobiography_.
A book's a book, although there's nothing in't.--BYRON,
_English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_.
While you converse with lords and dukes,
I have their betters here, my books;
Fixed in an elbow chair at ease
I choose companions as I please.
I'd rather have one single shelf
Than all my friends, except yourself.
For, after all that can be said,
Our best companions are the dead.
SHERIDAN _to Swift_.
We often hear of people who will descend to any servility,
submit to any insult for the sake of getting themselves or
their children into what is euphemistically called good
society. Did it ever occur to them that there is a select
society of all the centuries to which they and theirs can be
admitted for the asking?--LOWELL, _Speech at Chelsea_.
On all sides are we not driven to the conclusion that of all
things which men can do or make here below, by far the most
momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call
books? For, indeed, is it not verily the highest act of
man's faculty that produces a book? It is the thought of
man. The true thaumaturgic virtue by which man marks all
things whatever. All that he does and brings to pass is the
vesture of a book.--CARLYLE, _Hero Worship_.
Yet it is just
That here in memory of all books which lay
Their sure foundations in the heart of man,
...
That I should here assert their rights, assert
Their honours, and should, once for all, pronounce
Their benediction, speak of them as powers
For ever to be hallowed; only less
For what we are and what we may become
Than Nature's self, which is the breath of God,
Or His pure word by miracle revealed.
WORDSWORTH, _Prelude_.
Take me to some lofty room,
Lighted from the western sky,
Where no glare dispels the gloom,
Till the golden eve is nigh;
Where the works of searching thought,
Chosen books, may still impart
What the wise of old have taught,
What has tried the meek of heart;
Books in long dead tongues that stirred
Loving hearts in other climes;
Telling to my eyes, unheard,
Glorious deeds of olden times:
Books that purify the thought,
Spirits of the learned dead,
Teachers of the little taught,
Comforters when friends are fled.
BARNES, _Poems of Rural Life_.
A library is like a butcher's shop; it contains plenty of
meat, but it is all raw; no person living can find a meal in
it till some good cook comes along and says, 'Sir, I see by
your looks that you are hungry; I know your taste; be
patient for a moment and you shall be satisfied that you
have an excellent appetite!'--G. ELLIS, Lockhart's
'_Scott_.'
A library is itself a cheap university.--H. SIDGWICK,
_Political Economy_.
O such a life as he resolved to live
Once he had mastered all that books can give!
BROWNING.
I will bury myself in my books and the devil may pipe to his
own.--TENNYSON.
Words! words! words!--SHAKESPEARE.
HOURS IN A LIBRARY
_DE FOE'S NOVELS_
According to the high authority of Charles Lamb, it has sometimes
happened 'that from no inferior merit in the rest, but from some
superior good fortune in the choice of a subject, some single work' (of
a particular author) 'shall have been suffered to eclipse, and cast into
the shade, the deserts of its less fortunate brethren.' And after
quoting the case of Bunyan's 'Holy War' as compared with the 'Pilgrim's
Progress,' he adds that, 'in no instance has this excluding partiality
been exerted with more unfairness than against what may be termed the
secondary novels or romances of De Foe.' He proceeds to declare that
there are at least four other fictitious narratives by the same
writer--'Roxana,' 'Singleton,' 'Moll Flanders,' and 'Colonel
Jack'--which possess an interest not inferior to 'Robinson
Crusoe'--'except what results from a less felicitous choice of
situation.' Granting most unreservedly that the same hand is perceptible
in the minor novels as in 'Robinson Crusoe,' and that they bear at every
page the most unequivocal symptoms of De Foe's workmanship, I venture to
doubt the 'partiality' and the 'unfairness' of preferring to them their
more popular rival. The instinctive judgment of the world is not really
biassed by anything except the intrinsic power exerted by a book over
its sympathies; and as in the long run it has honoured 'Robinson
Crusoe,' in spite of the critics, and has comparatively neglected
'Roxana' and the companion stories, there is probably some good cause
for the distinction. The apparent injustice to books resembles what we
often see in the case of men. A. B. becomes Lord Chancellor, whilst C.
D. remains for years a briefless barrister; and yet for the life of us
we cannot tell but that C. D. is the abler man of the two. Perhaps he
was wanting in some one of the less conspicuous elements that are
essential to a successful career; he said, 'Open, wheat!' instead of
'Open, sesame!' and the barriers remained unaffected by his magic. The
secret may really be simple enough. The complete success of such a book
as 'Robinson' implies, it may be, the precise adaptation of the key to
every ward of the lock. The felicitous choice of situation to which Lamb
refers gave just the required fitness; and it is of little use to plead
that 'Roxana,' 'Colonel Jack,' and others might have done the same trick
if only they had received a little filing, or some slight change in
shape: a shoemaker might as well argue that if you had only one toe less
his shoes wouldn't pinch you.
To leave the unsatisfactory ground of metaphor, we may find out, on
examination, that De Foe had discovered in 'Robinson Crusoe' precisely
the field in which his talents could be most effectually applied; and
that a very slight alteration in the subject-matter might change the
merit of his work to a disproportionate extent. The more special the
idiosyncrasy upon which a man's literary success is founded, the
greater, of course, the probability that a small change will disconcert
him. A man who can only perform upon the drum will have to wait for
certain combinations of other instruments before his special talent can
be turned to account. Now, the talent in which De Foe surpasses all
other writers is just one of those peculiar gifts which must wait for a
favourable chance. When a gentleman, in a fairy story, has a power of
seeing a hundred miles, or covering seven leagues at a stride, we know
that an opportunity will speedily occur for putting his faculties to
use. But the gentleman with the seven-leagued boots is useless when the
occasion offers itself for telescopic vision, and the eyes are good for
nothing without the power of locomotion. To De Foe, if we may imitate
the language of the 'Arabian Nights,' was given a tongue to which no one
could listen without believing every word that he uttered--a
qualification, by the way, which would serve its owner far more
effectually in this commonplace world than swords of sharpness or cloaks
of darkness, or other fairy paraphernalia. In other words, he had the
most marvellous power ever known of giving verisimilitude to his
fictions; or, in other words again, he had the most amazing talent on
record for telling lies. We have all read how the 'History of the
Plague,' the 'Memoirs of a Cavalier,' and even, it is said, 'Robinson
Crusoe,' have succeeded in passing themselves off for veritable
narratives. The 'Memoirs of Captain Carleton' long passed for De Foe's,
but the Captain has now gained admission to the biographical dictionary
and is credited with his own memoirs. In either case, it is as
characteristic that a genuine narrative should be attributed to De Foe,
as that De Foe's narrative should be taken as genuine. An odd testimony
to De Foe's powers as a liar (a word for which there is, unfortunately,
no equivalent that does not imply some blame) has been mentioned. Mr.
M'Queen, quoted in Captain Burton's 'Nile Basin,' names 'Captain
Singleton' as a genuine account of travels in Central Africa, and
seriously mentions De Foe's imaginary pirate as 'a claimant for the
honour of the discovery of the sources of the White Nile.' Probably,
however, this only proves that Mr. M'Queen had never read the book.
Most of the literary artifices to which De Foe owed his power of
producing this illusion are sufficiently plain. Of all the fictions
which he succeeded in palming off for truths none is more instructive
than that admirable ghost, Mrs. Veal. Like the sonnets of some great
poets, it contains in a few lines all the essential peculiarities of his
art, and an admirable commentary has been appended to it by Sir Walter
Scott. The first device which strikes us is his ingenious plan for
manufacturing corroborative evidence. The ghost appears to Mrs.
Bargrave. The story of the apparition is told by a 'very sober and
understanding gentlewoman, who lives within a few doors of Mrs.
Bargrave;' and the character of this sober gentlewoman is supported by
the testimony of a justice of the peace at Maidstone, 'a very
intelligent person.' This elaborate chain of evidence is intended to
divert our attention from the obvious circumstance that the whole story
rests upon the authority of the anonymous person who tells us of the
sober gentlewoman, who supports Mrs. Bargrave, and is confirmed by the
intelligent justice. Simple as the artifice appears, it is one which is
constantly used in supernatural stories of the present day. One of those
improving legends tells how a ghost appeared to two officers in Canada,
and how, subsequently, one of the officers met the ghost's twin brother
in London, and straightway exclaimed, 'You are the person who appeared
to me in Canada!' Many people are diverted from the weak part of the
story by this ingenious confirmation, and, in their surprise at the
coherence of the narrative, forget that the narrative itself rests upon
entirely anonymous evidence. A chain is no stronger than its weakest
link; but if you show how admirably the last few are united together,
half the world will forget to test the security of the equally essential
links which are kept out of sight. De Foe generally repeats a similar
trick in the prefaces of his fictions. ''Tis certain,' he says, in the
'Memoirs of a Cavalier,' 'no man could have given a description of his
retreat from Marston Moor to Rochdale, and thence over the moors to the
North, in so apt and proper terms, unless he had really travelled over
the ground he describes,' which, indeed, is quite true, but by no means
proves that the journey was made by a fugitive from that particular
battle. He separates himself more ostentatiously from the supposititious
author by praising his admirable manner of relating the memoirs, and the
'wonderful variety of incidents with which they are beautified;' and,
with admirable impudence, assures us that they are written in so
soldierly a style, that it 'seems impossible any but the very person who
was present in every action here related was the relater of them.' In
the preface to 'Roxana,' he acts, with equal spirit, the character of an
impartial person, giving us the evidence on which he is himself
convinced of the truth of the story, as though he would, of all things,
refrain from pushing us unfairly for our belief. The writer, he says,
took the story from the lady's own mouth: he was, of course, obliged to
disguise names and places; but was himself 'particularly acquainted with
this lady's first husband, the brewer, and with his father, and also
with his bad circumstances, and knows that first part of the story.'
The rest we must, of course, take upon the lady's own evidence, but less
unwillingly, as the first is thus corroborated. We cannot venture to
suggest to so calm a witness that he has invented both the lady and the
writer of her history; and, in short, that when he says that A. says
that B. says something, it is, after all, merely the anonymous 'he' who
is speaking. In giving us his authority for 'Moll Flanders,' he ventures
upon the more refined art of throwing a little discredit upon the
narrator's veracity. She professes to have abandoned her evil ways, but,
as he tells us with a kind of aside, and as it were cautioning us
against over-incredulity, 'it seems' (a phrase itself suggesting the
impartial looker-on) that in her old age 'she was not so extraordinary a
penitent as she was at first; it seems only' (for, after all, you
mustn't make _too_ much of my insinuations) 'that indeed she always
spoke with abhorrence of her former life.' So we are left in a qualified
state of confidence, as if we had been talking about one of his patients
with the wary director of a reformatory.
This last touch, which is one of De Foe's favourite expedients, is most
fully exemplified in the story of Mrs. Veal. The author affects to take
us into his confidence, to make us privy to the pros and cons in regard
to the veracity of his own characters, till we are quite disarmed. The
sober gentlewoman vouches for Mrs. Bargrave; but Mrs. Bargrave is by no
means allowed to have it all her own way. One of the ghost's
communications related to the disposal of a certain sum of 10_l._ a
year, of which Mrs. Bargrave, according to her own account, could have
known nothing, except by this supernatural intervention. Mrs. Veal's
friends, however, tried to throw doubt upon the story of her appearance,
considering that it was disreputable for a decent woman to go abroad
after her death. One of them, therefore, declared that Mrs. Bargrave was
a liar, and that she had, in fact, known of the 10_l._ beforehand. On
the other hand, the person who thus attacked Mrs. Bargrave had himself
the 'reputation of a notorious liar.' Mr. Veal, the ghost's brother, was
too much of a gentleman to make such gross imputations. He confined
himself to the more moderate assertion that Mrs. Bargrave had been
crazed by a bad husband. He maintained that the story must be a mistake,
because, just before her death, his sister had declared that she had
nothing to dispose of. This statement, however, may be reconciled with
the ghost's remarks about the 10_l._, because she obviously mentioned
such a trifle merely by way of a token of the reality of her appearance.
Mr. Veal, indeed, makes rather a better point by stating that a certain
purse of gold mentioned by the ghost was found, not in the cabinet where
she told Mrs. Bargrave that she had placed it, but in a comb-box. Yet,
again, Mr. Veal's statement is here rather suspicious, for it is known
that Mrs. Veal was very particular about her cabinet, and would not have
let her gold out of it. We are left in some doubts by this conflict of
evidence, although the obvious desire of Mr. Veal to throw discredit on
the story of his sister's appearance rather inclines us to believe in
Mrs. Bargrave's story, who could have had no conceivable motive for
inventing such a fiction. The argument is finally clenched by a decisive
coincidence. The ghost wears a silk dress. In the course of a long
conversation she incidentally mentioned to Mrs. Bargrave that this was a
scoured silk, newly made up. When Mrs. Bargrave reported this remarkable
circumstance to a certain Mrs. Wilson, 'You have certainly seen her,'
exclaimed that lady, 'for none knew but Mrs. Veal and myself that the
gown had been scoured.' To this crushing piece of evidence it seems that
neither Mr. Veal nor the notorious liar could invent any sufficient
reply.
One can almost fancy De Foe chuckling as he concocted the refinements of
this most marvellous narrative. The whole artifice is, indeed, of a
simple kind. Lord Sunderland, according to Macaulay, once ingeniously
defended himself against a charge of treachery, by asking whether it was
possible that any man should be so base as to do that which he was, in
fact, in the constant habit of doing. De Foe asks us in substance, Is it
conceivable that any man should tell stories so elaborate, so complex,
with so many unnecessary details, with so many inclinations of evidence
this way and that, unless the stories were true? We instinctively
answer, that it is, in fact, inconceivable; and, even apart from any
such refinements as those noticed, the circumstantiality of the stories
is quite sufficient to catch an unworthy critic. It is, indeed,
perfectly easy to tell a story which shall be mistaken for a _bonâ fide_
narrative, if only we are indifferent to such considerations as making
it interesting or artistically satisfactory.
The praise which has been lavished upon De Foe for the verisimilitude of
his novels seems to be rather extravagant. The trick would be easy
enough, if it were worth performing. The story-teller cannot be
cross-examined; and if he is content to keep to the ordinary level of
commonplace facts, there is not the least difficulty in producing
conviction. We recognise the fictitious character of an ordinary novel,
because it makes a certain attempt at artistic unity, or because the
facts are such as could obviously not be known to, or would not be told
by, a real narrator, or possibly because they are inconsistent with
other established facts. If a man chooses to avoid such obvious
confessions of unreality, he can easily be as life-like as De Foe. I do
not suppose that foreign correspondence of a newspaper is often composed
in the Strand; but it is only because I believe that the honesty of
writers in the press is far too great to allow them to commit a crime
which must be speedily detected by independent evidence. Lying is, after
all, the easiest of all things, if the liar be not too ambitious. A
little clever circumstantiality will lull any incipient suspicion; and
it must be added that De Foe, in adopting the tone of a _bonâ fide_
narrator, not unfrequently overreaches himself. He forgets his dramatic
position in his anxiety to be minute. Colonel Jack, at the end of a long
career, tells us how one of his boyish companions stole certain articles
at a fair, and gives us the list, of which this is a part: '5thly, a
silver box, with 7_s._ in small silver; 6, a pocket-handkerchief; 7,
_another_; 8, a jointed baby, and a little looking-glass.' The
affectation of extreme precision, especially in the charming item
'another,' destroys the perspective of the story. We are listening to a
contemporary, not to an old man giving us his fading recollections of a
disreputable childhood.
The peculiar merit, then, of De Foe must be sought in something more
than the circumstantial nature of his lying, or even the ingenious
artifices by which he contrives to corroborate his own narrative. These,
indeed, show the pleasure which he took in simulating truth; and he may
very probably have attached undue importance to this talent in the
infancy of novel-writing, as in the infancy of painting it was held for
the greatest of triumphs when birds came and pecked at the grapes in a
picture. It is curious, indeed, that De Foe and Richardson, the
founders of our modern school of fiction, appear to have stumbled upon
their discovery by a kind of accident. As De Foe's novels are simply
history _minus_ the facts, so Richardson's are a series of letters
_minus_ the correspondents. The art of novel-writing, like the art of
cooking pigs in Lamb's most philosophical as well as humorous apologue,
first appeared in its most cumbrous shape. As Hoti had to burn his
cottage for every dish of pork, Richardson and De Foe had to produce
fiction at the expense of a close approach to falsehood. The division
between the art of lying and the art of fiction was not distinctly
visible to either; and both suffer to some extent from the attempt to
produce absolute illusion, where they should have been content with
portraiture. And yet the defect is balanced by the vigour naturally
connected with an unflinching realism. That this power rested, in De
Foe's case, upon something more than a bit of literary trickery, may be
inferred from his fate in another department of authorship. He twice got
into trouble for a device exactly analogous to that which he afterwards
practised in fiction. On both occasions he was punished for assuming a
character for purposes of mystification. In the latest instance, it is
seen, the pamphlet called 'What if the Pretender Comes?' was written in
such obvious irony, that the mistake of his intentions must have been
wilful. The other and better-known performance, 'The Shortest Way with
the Dissenters,' seems really to have imposed upon some of his readers.
It is difficult in these days of toleration to imagine that any one can
have taken the violent suggestions of the 'Shortest Way' as put forward
seriously. To those who might say that persecuting the Dissenters was
cruel, says De Foe, 'I answer, 'tis cruelty to kill a snake or a toad
in cold blood, but the poison of their nature makes it a charity to our
neighbours to destroy those creatures, not for any personal injury
received, but for prevention.... Serpents, toads, and vipers, &c., are
noxious to the body, and poison the sensitive life: these poison the
soul, corrupt our posterity, ensnare our children, destroy the vital of
our happiness, our future felicity, and contaminate the whole mass.' And
he concludes: 'Alas, the Church of England! What with Popery on the one
hand, and schismatics on the other, how has she been crucified between
two thieves! _Now let us crucify the thieves!_ Let her foundations be
established upon the destruction of her enemies: the doors of mercy
being always open to the returning part of the deluded people; let the
obstinate be ruled with a rod of iron!' It gives a pleasant impression
of the spirit of the times, to remember that this could be taken for a
genuine utterance of orthodoxy; that De Foe was imprisoned and
pilloried, and had to write a serious protestation that it was only a
joke, and that he meant to expose the nonjuring party by putting their
secret wishes into plain English. ''Tis hard,' he says, 'that this
should not be perceived by all the town; that not one man can see it,
either Churchman or Dissenter.' It certainly was very hard; but a
perusal of the whole pamphlet may make it a degree more intelligible.
Ironical writing of this kind is in substance a _reductio ad absurdum_.
It is a way of saying the logical result of your opinions is such or
such a monstrous error. So long as the appearance of logic is preserved,
the error cannot be stated too strongly. The attempt to soften the
absurdity so as to take in an antagonist is injurious artistically, if
it may be practically useful. An ironical intention which is quite
concealed might as well not exist. And thus the unscrupulous use of the
same weapon by Swift is now far more telling than De Foe's comparatively
guarded application of it. The artifice, however, is most skilfully
carried out for the end which De Foe had in view. The 'Shortest Way'
begins with a comparative gravity to throw us off our guard; the author
is not afraid of imitating a little of the dulness of his supposed
antagonists, and repeats with all imaginable seriousness the very taunts
which a High Church bigot would in fact have used. It was not a sound
defence of persecution to say that the Dissenters had been cruel when
they had the upper hand, and that penalties imposed upon them were
merely retaliation for injuries suffered under Cromwell and from
Scottish Presbyterians; but it was one of those topics upon which a
hot-headed persecutor would naturally dwell, though De Foe gives him
rather more forcible language than he would be likely to possess. It is
only towards the end that the ironical purpose crops out in what we
should have thought an unmistakable manner. Few writers would have
preserved their incognito so long. The caricature would have been too
palpable, and invited ridicule too ostentatiously. An impatient man soon
frets under the mask and betrays his real strangeness in the hostile
camp.
De Foe in fact had a peculiarity at first sight less favourable to
success in fiction than in controversy. Amongst the political writers of
that age he was, on the whole, distinguished for good temper and an
absence of violence. Although a party man, he was by no means a man to
swallow the whole party platform. He walked on his own legs, and was not
afraid to be called a deserter by more thoroughgoing partisans. The
principles which he most ardently supported were those of religious
toleration and hatred to every form of arbitrary power. Now, the
intellectual groundwork upon which such a character is formed has
certain conspicuous merits, along with certain undeniable weaknesses.
Amongst the first may be reckoned a strong grasp of facts--which was
developed to an almost disproportionate degree in De Foe--and a
resolution to see things as they are without the gloss which is
contracted from strong party sentiment. He was one of those men of
vigorous common-sense who like to have everything down plainly and
distinctly in good unmistakable black and white, and indulge a voracious
appetite for facts and figures. He was, therefore, able--within the
limits of his vision--to see things from both sides, and to take his
adversaries' opinions as calmly as his own, so long, at least, as they
dealt with the class of considerations with which he was accustomed to
deal; for, indeed, there are certain regions of discussion to which we
cannot be borne on the wings of statistics, or even of common-sense. And
this, the weak side of his intellect, is equally unmistakable. The
matter-of-fact man may be compared to one who suffers from
colour-blindness. Perhaps he may have a power of penetrating, and even
microscopic vision; but he sees everything in his favourite black and
white or gray, and loses all the delights of gorgeous, though it may be
deceptive, colouring. One man sees everything in the forcible light and
shade of Rembrandt: a few heroes stand out conspicuously in a focus of
brilliancy from a background of imperfectly defined shadows, clustering
round the centre in strange but picturesque confusion. To another, every
figure is full of interest, with singular contrasts and sharply-defined
features; the whole effect is somewhat spoilt by the want of perspective
and the perpetual sparkle and glitter; yet when we fix our attention
upon any special part, it attracts us by its undeniable vivacity and
vitality. To a third, again, the individual figures become dimmer, but
he sees a slow and majestic procession of shapes imperceptibly
developing into some harmonious whole. Men profess to reach their
philosophical conclusions by some process of logic; but the imagination
is the faculty which furnishes the raw material upon which the logic is
employed, and, unconsciously to its owners, determines, for the most
part, the shape into which their theories will be moulded. Now, De Foe
was above the ordinary standard, in so far as he did not, like most of
us, see things merely as a blurred and inextricable chaos; but he was
below the great imaginative writers in the comparative coldness and dry
precision of his mental vision. To him the world was a vast picture,
from which all confusion was banished; everything was definite, clear,
and precise as in a photograph; as in a photograph, too, everything
could be accurately measured, and the result stated in figures; by the
same parallel, there was a want of perspective, for the most distant
objects were as precisely given as the nearest; and yet further, there
was the same absence of the colouring which is caused in natural objects
by light and heat, and in mental pictures by the fire of imaginative
passion. The result is a product which is to Fielding or Scott what a
portrait by a first-rate photographer is to one by Vandyke or Reynolds,
though, perhaps, the peculiar qualifications which go to make a De Foe
are almost as rare as those which form the more elevated artist.
To illustrate this a little more in detail, one curious proof of the
want of the passionate element in De Foe's novels is the singular
calmness with which he describes his villains. He always looks at the
matter in a purely business-like point of view. It is very wrong to
steal, or break any of the commandments: partly because the chances are
that it won't pay, and partly also because the devil will doubtless get
hold of you in time. But a villain in De Foe is extremely like a
virtuous person, only that, so to speak, he has unluckily backed the
losing side. Thus, for example, Colonel Jack is a thief from his youth
up; Moll Flanders is a thief, and worse; Roxana is a highly immoral
lady, and is under some suspicion of a most detestable murder; and
Captain Singleton is a pirate of the genuine buccaneering school. Yet we
should really doubt, but for their own confessions, whether they have
villainy enough amongst them to furnish an average pickpocket. Roxana
occasionally talks about a hell within, and even has unpleasant dreams
concerning 'apparitions of devils and monsters, of falling into gulphs,
and from off high and steep precipices.' She has, moreover, excellent
reasons for her discomfort. Still, in spite of a very erroneous course
of practice, her moral tone is all that can be desired. She discourses
about the importance of keeping to the paths of virtue with the most
exemplary punctuality, though she does not find them convenient for her
own personal use. Colonel Jack is a young Arab of the streets--as it is
fashionable to call them now-a-days--sleeping in the ashes of a
glasshouse by night, and consorting with thieves by day. Still the
exemplary nature of his sentiments would go far to establish Lord
Palmerston's rather heterodox theory of the innate goodness of man. He
talks like a book from his earliest infancy. He once forgets himself so
far as to rob a couple of poor women on the highway instead of picking
rich men's pockets; but his conscience pricks him so much that he cannot
rest till he has restored the money. Captain Singleton is a still more
striking case: he is a pirate by trade, but with a strong resemblance to
the ordinary British merchant in his habits of thought. He ultimately
retires from a business in which the risks are too great for his taste,
marries, and settles down quietly on his savings. There is a certain
Quaker who joins his ship, really as a volunteer, but under a show of
compulsion, in order to avoid the possible inconveniences of a capture.
The Quaker always advises him in his difficulties in such a way as to
avoid responsibility. When they are in action with a Portuguese
man-of-war, for example, the Quaker sees a chance of boarding, and,
coming up to Singleton, says very calmly, 'Friend, what dost thou mean?
why dost thou not visit thy neighbour in the ship, the door being open
for thee?' This ingenious gentleman always preserves as much humanity as
is compatible with his peculiar position, and even prevents certain
negroes from being tortured into confession, on the unanswerable ground
that, as neither party understands a word of the other's language, the
confession will not be to much purpose. 'It is no compliment to my
moderation,' says Singleton, 'to say, I was convinced by these reasons;
and yet we had all much ado to keep our second lieutenant from murdering
some of them to make them tell.'
Now, this humane pirate takes up pretty much the position which De Foe's
villains generally occupy in good earnest. They do very objectionable
things; but they always speak like steady, respectable Englishmen, with
an eye to the main chance. It is true that there is nothing more
difficult than to make a villain tell his own story naturally; in a way,
that is, so as to show at once the badness of the motive and the excuse
by which the actor reconciles it to his own mind. De Foe is entirely
deficient in this capacity of appreciating a character different from
his own. His actors are merely so many repetitions of himself placed
under different circumstances and committing crimes in the way of
business, as De Foe might himself have carried out a commercial
transaction. From the outside they are perfect; they are evidently
copied from the life; and Captain Singleton is himself a repetition of
the celebrated Captain Kidd, who indeed is mentioned in the novel. But
of the state of mind which leads a man to be a pirate, and of the
effects which it produces upon his morals, De Foe has either no notion,
or is, at least, totally incapable of giving us a representation. All
which goes by the name of psychological analysis in modern fiction is
totally alien to his art. He could, as we have said, show such dramatic
power as may be implied in transporting himself to a different position,
and looking at matters even from his adversary's point of view; but of
the further power of appreciating his adversary's character he shows not
the slightest trace. He looks at his actors from the outside, and gives
us with wonderful minuteness all the details of their lives; but he
never seems to remember that within the mechanism whose working he
describes there is a soul very different from that of Daniel De Foe.
Rather, he seems to see in mankind nothing but so many million Daniel De
Foes; they are in all sorts of postures, and thrown into every variety
of difficulty, but the stuff of which they are composed is identical
with that which he buttons into his own coat; there is variety of form,
but no colouring, in his pictures of life.
We may ask again, therefore, what is the peculiar source of De Foe's
power? He has little, or no dramatic power, in the higher sense of the
word, which implies sympathy with many characters and varying tones of
mind. If he had written 'Henry IV.,' Falstaff, and Hotspur, and Prince
Hal would all have been as like each other as are generally the first
and second murderer. Nor is the mere fact that he tells a story with a
strange appearance of veracity sufficient; for a story may be truth-like
and yet deadly dull. Indeed, no candid critic can deny that this is the
case with some of De Foe's narratives; as, for example, the latter part
of 'Colonel Jack,' where the details of management of a plantation in
Virginia are sufficiently uninteresting in spite of the minute financial
details. One device, which he occasionally employs with great force,
suggests an occasional source of interest. It is generally reckoned as
one of his most skilful tricks that in telling a story he cunningly
leaves a few stray ends, which are never taken up. Such is the
well-known incident of Xury, in 'Robinson Crusoe.' This contrivance
undoubtedly gives an appearance of authenticity, by increasing the
resemblance to real narratives; it is like the trick of artificially
roughening a stone after it has been fixed into a building, to give it
the appearance of being fresh from the quarry. De Foe, however,
frequently extracts a more valuable piece of service from these loose
ends. The situation which has been most praised in De Foe's novels is
that which occurs at the end of 'Roxana.' Roxana, after a life of
wickedness, is at last married to a substantial merchant. She has saved,
from the wages of sin, the convenient sum of 2,056_l._ a year, secured
upon excellent mortgages. Her husband has 17,000_l._ in cash, after
deducting a 'black article of 8,000 pistoles,' due on account of a
certain lawsuit in Paris, and 1,320_l._ a year in rent. There is a
satisfaction about these definite sums which we seldom receive from the
vague assertions of modern novelists. Unluckily, a girl turns up at this
moment who shows great curiosity about Roxana's history. It soon becomes
evident that she is, in fact, Roxana's daughter by a former and long
since deserted husband; but she cannot be acknowledged without a
revelation of her mother's subsequently most disreputable conduct. Now,
Roxana has a devoted maid, who threatens to get rid, by fair means or
foul, of this importunate daughter. Once she fails in her design, but
confesses to her mistress that, if necessary, she will commit the
murder. Roxana professes to be terribly shocked, but yet has a desire to
be relieved at almost any price from her tormentor. The maid thereupon
disappears again; soon afterwards the daughter disappears too; and
Roxana is left in terrible doubt, tormented by the opposing anxieties
that her maid may have murdered her daughter, or that her daughter may
have escaped and revealed the mother's true character. Here is a telling
situation for a sensation novelist; and the minuteness with which the
story is worked out, whilst we are kept in suspense, supplies the place
of the ordinary rant; to say nothing of the increased effect due to
apparent veracity, in which certainly few sensation novelists can even
venture a distant competition. The end of the story differs still more
widely from modern art. Roxana has to go abroad with her husband, still
in a state of doubt. Her maid after a time joins her, but gives no
intimation as to the fate of the daughter; and the story concludes by a
simple statement that Roxana afterwards fell into well-deserved misery.
The mystery is certainly impressive; and Roxana is heartily afraid of
the devil and the gallows, to say nothing of the chance of losing her
fortune. Whether, as Lamb maintained, the conclusion in which the
mystery is cleared up is a mere forgery, or was added by De Foe to
satisfy the ill-judged curiosity of his readers, I do not profess to
decide. Certainly it rather spoils the story; but in this, as in some
other cases, one is often left in doubt as to the degree in which De Foe
was conscious of his own merits.
Another instance on a smaller scale of the effective employment of
judicious silence, is an incident in 'Captain Singleton.' The Quaker of
our acquaintance meets with a Japanese priest who speaks a few words of
English, and explains that he has learnt it from thirteen Englishmen,
the only remnant of thirty-two who had been wrecked on the coast of
Japan. To confirm his story, he produces a bit of paper on which is
written, in plain English words: 'We came from Greenland and from the
North Pole.' Here are claimants for the discovery of a North-west
Passage, of whom we would gladly hear more. Unluckily, when Captain
Singleton comes to the place where his Quaker had met the priest, the
ship in which he was sailing had departed; and this put an end to an
inquiry, and perhaps 'may have disappointed mankind of one of the most
noble discoveries that ever was made or will again be made, in the
world, for the good of mankind in general; but so much for that.'
In these two fragments, which illustrate a very common device of De
Foe's, we come across two elements of positive power over our
imaginations. Even De Foe's imagination recognised and delighted in a
certain margin of mystery to this harsh world of facts and figures. He
is generally too anxious to set everything before us in broad daylight;
there is too little of the thoughts and emotions which inhabit the
twilight of the mind; of those dim half-seen forms which exercise the
strongest influence upon the imagination, and are the most tempting
subjects for the poet's art. De Foe, in truth, was little enough of a
poet. Sometimes by mere force of terse idiomatic language he rises into
real poetry, as it was understood in the days when Pope and Dryden were
our lawgivers. It is often really vigorous. The well-known verses--
Wherever God erects a house of prayer,
The devil always builds a chapel there--
which begin the 'True-born Englishman,' or the really fine lines which
occur in the 'Hymn to the Pillory,' that 'hieroglyphic state machine,
contrived to punish fancy in,' and ending--
Tell them that placed him here,
They're scandals to the times,
Are at a loss to find his guilt,
_And can't commit his crimes_--
may stand for specimens of his best manner. More frequently he
degenerates into the merest doggerel, _e.g._--
No man was ever yet so void of sense,
As to debate the right of self-defence,
A principle so grafted in the mind,
With nature born, and does like nature bind;
Twisted with reason, and with nature too,
As neither one nor t'other can undo--
which is scarcely a happy specimen of the difficult art of reasoning in
verse. His verse is at best vigorous epigrammatic writing, such as would
now be converted into leading articles, twisted with more or less
violence into rhyme. And yet there is a poetical side to his mind, or at
least a susceptibility to poetical impressions of a certain order. And
as a novelist is on the border-line between poetry and prose, and novels
should be as it were prose saturated with poetry, we may expect to come
in this direction upon the secret of De Foe's power. Although De Foe for
the most part deals with good tangible subjects, which he can weigh and
measure and reduce to moidores and pistoles, the mysterious has a very
strong though peculiar attraction for him. It is indeed that vulgar kind
of mystery which implies nothing of reverential awe. He was urged by a
restless curiosity to get away from this commonplace world, and reduce
the unknown regions beyond to scale and measure. The centre of Africa,
the wilds of Siberia, and even more distinctly the world of spirits, had
wonderful charms for him. Nothing would have given him greater pleasure
than to determine the exact number of the fallen angels and the date of
their calamity. In the 'History of the Devil' he touches, with a
singular kind of humorous gravity, upon several of these questions, and
seems to apologise for his limited information. 'Several things,' he
says, 'have been suggested to set us a-calculating the number of this
frightful throng of devils who, with Satan the master-devil, was thus
cast out of heaven.' He declines the task, though he quotes with a
certain pleasure the result obtained by a grave calculator, who found
that in the first line of Satan's army there were a thousand times a
hundred thousand million devils, and more in the other two. He gives a
kind of arithmetical measure of the decline of the devil's power by
pointing out that 'he who was once equal to the angel who killed eighty
thousand men in one night, is not able now, without a new commission, to
take away the life of one Job.' He is filled with curiosity as to the
proceedings of the first parliament (p--------t as he delicately puts
it) of devils; he regrets that as he was not personally present in that
'black divan'--at least, not that he can remember, for who can account
for his pre-existent state?--he cannot say what happened; but he adds,
'If I had as much personal acquaintance with the devil as would admit
it, and could depend upon the truth of what answer he would give me, the
first question would be, what measures they (the devils) resolved on at
their first assembly?' and the second how they employed the time between
their fall and the creation of the man? Here we see the instinct of the
politician; and we may add that De Foe is thoroughly dissatisfied with
Milton's statements upon this point, though admiring his genius; and
goes so far as to write certain verses intended as a correction of, or
interpolation into, 'Paradise Lost.'
Mr. Ruskin, in comparing Milton's Satan with Dante's, somewhere remarks
that the vagueness of Milton, as compared with the accurate measurements
given by Dante, is so far a proof of less activity of the imaginative
faculty. It is easier to leave the devil's stature uncertain than to say
that he was eighteen feet high. Without disputing the proposition as Mr.
Ruskin puts it, we fancy that he would scarcely take De Foe's poetry as
an improvement in dignity upon Milton's. We may, perhaps, guess at its
merits from this fragment of a speech in prose, addressed to Adam by
Eve: 'What ails the sot?' says the new termagant. 'What are you afraid
of?... Take it, you fool, and eat.... Take it, I say, or I will go and
cut down the tree, and you shall never eat any of it at all; and you
shall still be a fool, and be governed by your wife for ever.' This, and
much more gross buffoonery of the same kind, is apparently intended to
recommend certain sound moral aphorisms to the vulgar; but the cool
arithmetical method by which De Foe investigates the history of the
devil, his anxiety to pick up gossip about him, and the view which he
takes of him as a very acute and unscrupulous politician--though
impartially vindicating him from some of Mr. Milton's aspersions--is
exquisitely characteristic.
If we may measure the imaginative power of great poets by the relative
merits of their conceptions of Satan, we might find a humbler gauge for
inferior capacities in the power of summoning awe-inspiring ghosts. The
difficulty of the feat is extreme. Your ghost, as Bottom would have
said, is a very fearful wild-fowl to bring upon the stage. He must be
handled delicately, or he is spoilt. Scott has a good ghost or two; but
Lord Lytton, almost the only writer who has recently dealt with the
supernatural, draws too freely upon our belief, and creates only
melodramatic spiritual beings, with a strong dash of the vulgarising
element of modern 'spiritualism.' They are scarcely more awful beings
than the terrible creations of the raw-head-and-bloody-bones school of
fiction.
Amongst this school we fear that De Foe must, on the whole, be reckoned.
We have already made acquaintance with Mrs. Veal, who, in her ghostly
condition, talks for an hour and three-quarters with a gossip over a cup
of tea; who, indeed, so far forgets her ghostly condition as to ask for
a cup of the said tea, and only evades the consequences of her blunder
by one of those rather awkward excuses which we all sometimes practise
in society; and who, in short, is the least ethereal spirit that was
ever met with outside a table. De Foe's extraordinary love for
supernatural stories of the gossiping variety found vent in 'A History
of Apparitions,' and his 'System of Magic.' The position which he takes
up is a kind of modified rationalism. He believes that there are genuine
apparitions which personate our dead friends, and give us excellent
pieces of advice on occasion; but he refuses to believe that the spirits
can appear themselves, on account 'of the many strange inconveniences
and ill consequences which would happen if the souls of men and women,
unembodied and departed, were at liberty to visit the earth.' De Foe is
evidently as familiar with the habits of spirits generally as of the
devil. In that case, for example, the feuds of families would never die,
for the injured person would be always coming back to right himself. He
proceeds upon this principle to account for many apparitions, as, for
example, one which appeared in the likeness of a certain J. O. of the
period, and strongly recommended his widow to reduce her expenses. He
won't believe that the Virgin appeared to St. Francis, because all
stories of that kind are mere impostures of the priests; but he thinks
it very likely that he was haunted by the devil, who may have sometimes
taken the Virgin's shape. In the 'History of Witchcraft' De Foe tells us
how, as he was once riding in the country, he met a man on the way to
inquire of a certain wizard. De Foe, according to his account, which may
or may not be intended as authentic, waited the whole of the next day at
a public-house in a country town, in order to hear the result of the
inquiry; and had long conversations, reported in his usual style, with
infinite 'says he's' and 'says I's,' in which he tried to prove that the
wizard was an impostor. This lets us into the secret of many of De Foe's
apparitions. They are the ghosts that frighten villagers as they cross
commons late at night, or that rattle chains and display lights in
haunted houses. Sometimes they have vexed knavish attorneys by
discovering long-hidden deeds. Sometimes they have enticed highwaymen
into dark corners of woods, and there the wretched criminal finds in
their bags (for ghosts of this breed have good substantial luggage)
nothing but a halter and a bit of silver (value exactly 13-1/2_d._) to
pay the hangman. When he turns to the owner, he has vanished.
Occasionally, they are the legends told by some passing traveller from
distant lands--probably genuine superstitions in their origin, but
amplified by tradition into marvellous exactitude of detail, and
garnished with long gossiping conversations. Such a ghost, which, on the
whole, is my favourite, is the mysterious Owke Mouraski. This being,
whether devil or good spirit no man knows, accompanied a traveller for
four years through the steppes of Russia, and across Norway, Turkey, and
various other countries. On the march he was always seen a mile to the
left of the party, keeping parallel with them, in glorious indifference
to roads. He crossed rivers without bridges, and the sea without ships.
Everywhere, in the wild countries, he was known by name and dreaded; for
if he entered a house, some one would die there within a year. Yet he
was good to the traveller, going so far, indeed, on one occasion, as to
lend him a horse, and frequently treating him to good advice. Towards
the end of the journey Owke Mouraski informed his companion that he was
'the inhabitant of an invisible region,' and afterwards became very
familiar with him. The traveller, indeed, would never believe that his
friend was a devil, a scepticism of which De Foe doubtfully approves.
The story, however, must be true, because, as De Foe says, he saw it in
manuscript many years ago; and certainly Owke is of a superior order to
most of the pot-house ghosts.
De Foe, doubtless, had an insatiable appetite for legends of this kind,
talked about them with infinite zest in innumerable gossips, and
probably smoked pipes and consumed ale in abundance during the process.
The ghosts are the substantial creations of the popular fancy, which no
longer nourished itself upon a genuine faith in a more lofty order of
spiritual beings. It is superstition become gross and vulgar before it
disappears for ever. Romance and poetry have pretty well departed from
these ghosts, as from the witches of the period, who are little better
than those who still linger in our country villages and fill corners of
newspapers, headed 'Superstition in the nineteenth century.' In his
novels De Foe's instinct for probability generally enables him to employ
the marvellous moderately, and, therefore, effectively; he is specially
given to dreams; they are generally verified just enough to leave us the
choice of credulity or scepticism, and are in excellent keeping with the
supposed narrator. Roxana tells us how one morning she suddenly sees her
lover's face as though it were a death's-head, and his clothes covered
with blood. In the evening the lover is murdered. One of Moll Flanders'
husbands hears her call him at a distance of many miles--a superstition,
by the way, in which Boswell, if not Johnson, fully believed. De Foe
shows his usual skill in sometimes making the visions or omens fail of a
too close fulfilment, as in the excellent dream where Robinson Crusoe
hears Friday's father tell him of the sailors' attempt to murder the
Spaniards: no part of the dream, as he says, is specifically true,
though it has a general truth; and hence we may, at our choice, suppose
it to have been supernatural, or to be merely a natural result of
Crusoe's anxiety. This region of the marvellous, however, only affects
De Foe's novels in a subordinate degree. The Owke Mouraski suggests
another field in which a lover of the mysterious could then find room
for his imagination. The world still presented a boundless wilderness
of untravelled land. Mapped and explored territory was still a bright
spot surrounded by chaotic darkness, instead of the two being in the
reverse proportions. Geographers might fill up huge tracts by writing
'here is much gold,' or putting 'elephants instead of towns.' De Foe's
gossiping acquaintance, when they were tired of ghosts, could tell of
strange adventures in wild seas, where merchantmen followed a narrow
track, exposed to the assaults of pirates; or of long journeys over
endless steppes, in the days when travelling was travelling indeed; when
distances were reckoned by months, and men might expect to meet
undiscovered tribes and monsters unimagined by natural historians.
Doubtless he had listened greedily to the stories of seafaring men and
merchants from the Gold Coast or the East. 'Captain Singleton,' to omit
'Robinson Crusoe' for the present, shows the form into which these
stories moulded themselves in his mind. Singleton, besides his other
exploits, anticipated Livingstone in crossing Africa from sea to sea. De
Foe's biographers rather unnecessarily admire the marvellous way in
which his imaginary descriptions have been confirmed by later
travellers. And it is true that Singleton found two great lakes, which
may, if we please, be identified with those of recent discoverers. His
other guesses are not surprising. As a specimen of the mode in which he
filled up the unknown space we may mention that he covers the desert
'with a kind of thick moss of a blackish dead colour,' which is not a
very impressive phenomenon. It is in the matter of wild beasts, however,
that he is strongest. Their camp is in one place surrounded by
'innumerable numbers of devilish creatures.' These creatures were as
'thick as a drove of bullocks coming to a fair,' so that they could not
fire without hitting some; in fact, a volley brought down three tigers
and two wolves, besides one creature 'of an ill-gendered kind, between a
tiger and a leopard.' Before long they met an 'ugly, venomous, deformed
kind of a snake or serpent,' which had 'a hellish, ugly, deformed look
and voice;' indeed, they would have recognised in it the being who most
haunted De Foe's imaginary world--the devil--except that they could not
think what business the devil could have where there were no people. The
fauna of this country, besides innumerable lions, tigers, leopards, and
elephants, comprised 'living creatures as big as calves, but not of that
kind,' and creatures between a buffalo and a deer, which resembled
neither; they had no horns, but legs like a cow, with a fine head and
neck, like a deer. The 'ill-gendered' beast is an admirable specimen of
De Foe's workmanship. It shows his moderation under most tempting
circumstances. No dog-headed men, no men with eyes in their breasts, or
feet that serve as umbrellas, will suit him. He must have something new,
and yet probable; and he hits upon a very serviceable animal in this
mixture between a tiger and a leopard. Surely no one could refuse to
honour such a moderate draft upon his imagination. In short, De Foe,
even in the wildest of regions, where his pencil might have full play,
sticks closely to the commonplace, and will not venture beyond the
regions of the easily conceivable.
The final element in which De Foe's curiosity might find a congenial
food consisted of the stories floating about contemporary affairs. He
had talked with men who had fought in the Great Rebellion, or even in
the old German wars. He had himself been out with Monmouth, and taken
part in the fight at Sedgemoor. Doubtless that small experience of
actual warfare gave additional vivacity to his descriptions of battles,
and was useful to him, as Gibbon declares that his service with the
militia was of some assistance in describing armies of a very different
kind. There is a period in history which has a peculiar interest for all
of us. It is that which lies upon the border-land between the past and
present; which has gathered some romance from the lapse of time, and yet
is not so far off but that we have seen some of the actors, and can
distinctly realise the scenes in which they took part. Such to the
present generation is the era of the Revolutionary wars. 'Old men still
creep among us' who lived through that period of peril and excitement,
and yet we are far enough removed from them to fancy that there were
giants in those days. When De Foe wrote his novels the battles of the
great Civil War and the calamities of the Plague were passing through
this phase; and to them we owe two of his most interesting books, the
'Memoirs of a Cavalier' and the 'History of the Plague.'
When such a man spins us a yarn the conditions of its being interesting
are tolerably simple. The first condition obviously is, that the plot
must be a good one, and good in the sense that a representation in
dumb-show must be sufficiently exciting, without the necessity of any
explanation of motives. The novel of sentiment or passion or character
would be altogether beyond his scope. He will accumulate any number of
facts and details; but they must be such as will speak for themselves
without the need of an interpreter. For this reason we do not imagine
that 'Roxana,' 'Moll Flanders,' 'Colonel Jack,' or 'Captain Singleton'
can fairly claim any higher interest than that which belongs to the
ordinary police report, given with infinite fulness and vivacity of
detail. In each of them there are one or two forcible situations. Roxana
pursued by her daughter, Moll Flanders in prison, and Colonel Jack as a
young boy of the streets, are powerful fragments, and well adapted for
his peculiar method. He goes on heaping up little significant facts,
till we are able to realise the situation powerfully, and we may then
supply the sentiment for ourselves. But he never seems to know his own
strength. He gives us at equal length, and with the utmost
plain-speaking, the details of a number of other positions, which are
neither interesting nor edifying. He is decent or coarse, just as he is
dull or amusing, without knowing the difference. The details about the
different connections formed by Roxana and Moll Flanders have no atom of
sentiment, and are about as wearisome as the journal of a specially
heartless lady of the same character would be at the present day. He has
been praised for never gilding objectionable objects, or making vice
attractive. To all appearance, he would have been totally unable to set
about it. He has only one mode of telling a story, and he follows the
thread of his narrative into the back-slums of London, or lodging-houses
of doubtful character, or respectable places of trade, with the same
equanimity, at a good steady jog-trot of narrative. The absence of any
passion or sentiment deprives such places of the one possible source of
interest; and we must confess that two-thirds of each of these novels
are deadly dull; the remainder, though exhibiting specimens of his
genuine power, is not far enough from the commonplace to be specially
attractive. In short, the merit of De Foe's narrative bears a direct
proportion to the intrinsic merit of a plain statement of the facts;
and, in the novels already mentioned, as there is nothing very
surprising, certainly nothing unique, about the story, his treatment
cannot raise it above a very moderate level.
Above these stories comes De Foe's best fragment of fictitious
history.[1] The 'Memoirs of a Cavalier' is a very amusing book, though
it is less fiction than history, interspersed with a few personal
anecdotes. In it there are some exquisite little bits of genuine Defoe.
The Cavalier tells us, with such admirable frankness, that he once left
the army a day or two before a battle, in order to visit some relatives
at Bath, and excuses himself so modestly for his apparent neglect of
military duty, that we cannot refuse to believe in him. A novelist, we
say, would have certainly taken us to the battle, or would, at least,
have given his hero a more heroic excuse. The character, too, of the old
soldier, who has served under Gustavus Adolphus, who is disgusted with
the raw English levies, still more disgusted with the interference of
parsons, and who has a respect for his opponents--especially Sir Thomas
Fairfax--which is compounded partly of English love of fair play, and
partly of the indifference of a professional officer--is better
supported than most of De Foe's personages. An excellent Dugald Dalgetty
touch is his constant anxiety to impress upon the Royalist commanders
the importance of a particular trick which he has learned abroad of
mixing foot soldiers with the cavalry. We must leave him, however, to
say a few words upon the 'History of the Plague,' which seems to come
next in merit to 'Robinson Crusoe.' Here De Foe has to deal with a story
of such intrinsically tragic interest that all his details become
affecting. It needs no commentary to interpret the meaning of the
terrible anecdotes, many of which are doubtless founded on fact. There
is the strange superstitious element brought out by the horror of the
sudden visitation. The supposed writer hesitates as to leaving the
doomed city. He is decided to stay at last by opening the Bible at
random and coming upon the text, 'He shall deliver thee from the snare
of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence.' He watches the comets:
the one which appeared before the Plague was 'of a dull, languid colour,
and its motion heavy, solemn, and slow;' the other, which preceded the
Great Fire, was 'bright and sparkling, and its motion swift and
furious.' Old women, he says, believed in them, especially 'the
hypochondriac part of the other sex,' who might, he thinks, be called
old women too. Still he half-believes himself, especially when the
second appears. He does not believe that the breath of the
plague-stricken upon a glass would leave shapes of 'dragons, snakes, and
devils, horrible to behold;' but he does believe that if they breathed
on a bird they would kill it, or 'at least make its eggs rotten.'
However, he admits that no experiments were tried. Then we have the
hideous, and sometimes horribly grotesque, incidents. There is the poor
naked creature, who runs up and down, exclaiming continually, 'Oh, the
great and the dreadful God!' but would say nothing else, and speak to no
one. There is the woman who suddenly opens a window and 'calls out,
"Death, death, death!" in a most inimitable tone, which struck me with
horror and chillness in the very blood.' There is the man who, with
death in his face, opens the door to a young apprentice sent to ask him
for money: 'Very well, child,' says the living ghost; 'go to Cripplegate
Church, and bid them ring the bell for me;' and with those words shuts
the door, goes upstairs, and dies. Then we have the horrors of the
dead-cart, and the unlucky piper who was carried off by mistake. De Foe,
with his usual ingenuity, corrects the inaccurate versions of the
story, and says that the piper was not blind, but only old and silly;
and that he does not believe that, as 'the story goes,' he set up his
pipes while in the cart. After this we cannot refuse to admit that he
was really carried off and all but buried. Another device for cheating
us into acceptance of his story is the ingenious way in which he
imitates the occasional lapses of memory of a genuine narrator, and
admits that he does not precisely recollect certain details; and still
better is the conscientious eagerness with which he distinguishes
between the occurrences of which he was an eye-witness and those which
he only knew by hearsay.
This book, more than any of the others, shows a skill in selecting
telling incidents. We are sometimes in doubt whether the particular
details which occur in other stories are not put in rather by good luck
than from a due perception of their value. He thus resembles a savage,
who is as much pleased with a glass bead as with a piece of gold; but in
the 'History of the Plague' every detail goes straight to the mark. At
one point he cannot help diverging into the story of three poor men who
escape into the fields, and giving us, with his usual relish, all their
rambling conversations by the way. For the most part, however, he is
less diffusive and more pointed than usual; the greatness of the
calamity seems to have given more intensity to his style; and it leaves
all the impression of a genuine narrative, told by one who has, as it
were, just escaped from the valley of the shadow of death, with the awe
still upon him, and every terrible sight and sound fresh in his memory.
The amazing truthfulness of the style is here in its proper place; we
wish to be brought as near as may be to the facts; we want good
realistic painting more than fine sentiment. The story reminds us of
certain ghastly photographs published during the American War, which had
been taken on the field of battle. They gave a more forcible impression
of the horrors of war than the most thrilling pictures drawn from the
fancy. In such cases we only wish the narrator to stand as much as
possible on one side, and just draw up a bit of the curtain which
conceals his gallery of horrors.
It is time, however, to say enough of 'Robinson Crusoe' to justify its
traditional superiority to De Foe's other writings. The charm, as some
critics say, is difficult to analyse; and I do not profess to
demonstrate mathematically that it must necessarily be, what it is, the
most fascinating boy's book ever written, and one which older critics
may study with delight. The most obvious advantage over the secondary
novels lies in the unique situation. Lamb, in the passage from which I
have quoted, gracefully evades this point. 'Are there no solitudes,' he
says, 'out of the cave and the desert? or cannot the heart, in the midst
of crowds, feel frightfully alone?' Singleton, he suggests, is alone
with pirates less merciful than the howling monsters, the devilish
serpents, and ill-gendered creatures of De Foe's deserts. Colonel Jack
is alone amidst the London thieves when he goes to bury his treasures in
the hollow tree. This is prettily said; but it suggests rather what
another writer might have made of De Foe's heroes, than what De Foe made
of them himself. Singleton, it is true, is alone amongst the pirates,
but he takes to them as naturally as a fish takes to the water, and,
indeed, finds them a good, honest, respectable, stupid sort of people.
They stick by him and he by them, and we are never made to feel the real
horrors of his position. Colonel Jack might, in other hands, have become
an Oliver Twist, less real perhaps than De Foe has made him, but
infinitely more pathetic. De Foe tells us of his unpleasant
sleeping-places; and his occasional fears of the gallows; but of the
supposed mental struggles, of the awful solitude of soul, we hear
nothing. How can we sympathise very deeply with a young gentleman whose
recollections run chiefly upon the exact numbers of shillings and pence
captured by himself and his pocket-picking 'pals'? Similarly Robinson
Crusoe dwells but little upon the horrors of his position, and when he
does is apt to get extremely prosy. We fancy that he could never have
been in want of a solid sermon on Sunday, however much he may have
missed the church-going bell. But in 'Robinson Crusoe,' as in the
'History of the Plague,' the story speaks for itself. To explain the
horrors of living among thieves, we must have some picture of internal
struggles, of a sense of honour opposed to temptation, and a pure mind
in danger of contamination. De Foe's extremely straightforward and
prosaic view of life prevents him from setting any such sentimental
trials before us; the lad avoids the gallows, and in time becomes the
honest master of a good plantation; and there's enough. But the horrors
of abandonment on a desert island can be appreciated by the simplest
sailor or schoolboy. The main thing is to bring out the situation
plainly and forcibly, to tell us of the difficulties of making pots and
pans, of catching goats and sowing corn, and of avoiding audacious
cannibals. This task De Foe performs with unequalled spirit and
vivacity. In his first discovery of a new art he shows the freshness so
often conspicuous in first novels. The scenery was just that which had
peculiar charms for his fancy; it was one of those half-true legends of
which he had heard strange stories from seafaring men, and possibly from
the acquaintances of his hero himself. He brings out the shrewd
vigorous character of the Englishman thrown upon his own resources with
evident enjoyment of his task. Indeed, De Foe tells us very emphatically
that in Robinson Crusoe he saw a kind of allegory of his own fate. He
had suffered from solitude of soul. Confinement in his prison is
represented in the book by confinement in an island; and even a
particular incident, here and there, such as the fright he receives one
night from something in his bed, 'was word for word a history of what
happened.' In other words, this novel too, like many of the best ever
written, has in it the autobiographical element which makes a man speak
from greater depths of feeling than in a purely imaginary story.
It would indeed be easy to show that the story, though in one sense
marvellously like truth, is singularly wanting as a psychological study.
Friday is no real savage, but a good English servant without plush. He
says 'muchee' and 'speakee,' but he becomes at once a civilised being,
and in his first conversation puzzles Crusoe terribly by that awkward
theological question, why God did not kill the devil--for
characteristically enough Crusoe's first lesson includes a little
instruction upon the enemy of mankind. He found, however, that it was
'not so easy to imprint right notions in Friday's mind about the devil,
as it was about the being of a God.' This is comparatively a trifle; but
Crusoe himself is all but impossible. Steele, indeed, gives an account
of Selkirk, from which he infers that 'this plain man's story is a
memorable example that he is happiest who confines his wants to natural
necessities;' but the facts do not warrant this pet doctrine of an
old-fashioned school. Selkirk's state of mind may be inferred from two
or three facts. He had almost forgotten to talk; he had learnt to catch
goats by hunting them on foot; and he had acquired the exceedingly
difficult art of making fire by rubbing two sticks. In other words, his
whole mind was absorbed in providing a few physical necessities, and he
was rapidly becoming a savage--for a man who can't speak and can make
fire is very near the Australian. We may infer, what is probable from
other cases, that a man living fifteen years by himself, like Crusoe,
would either go mad or sink into the semi-savage state. De Foe really
describes a man in prison, not in solitary confinement. We should not be
so pedantic as to call for accuracy in such matters; but the difference
between the fiction and what we believe would have been the reality is
significant. De Foe, even in 'Robinson Crusoe,' gives a very inadequate
picture of the mental torments to which his hero is exposed. He is
frightened by a parrot calling him by name, and by the strangely
picturesque incident of the footmark on the sand; but, on the whole, he
takes his imprisonment with preternatural stolidity. His stay on the
island produces the same state of mind as might be due to a dull Sunday
in Scotland. For this reason, the want of power in describing emotion as
compared with the amazing power of describing facts, 'Robinson Crusoe'
is a book for boys rather than men, and, as Lamb says, for the kitchen
rather than for higher circles. It falls short of any high intellectual
interest. When we leave the striking situation and get to the second
part, with the Spaniards and Will Atkins talking natural theology to his
wife, it sinks to the level of the secondary stories. But for people who
are not too proud to take a rather low order of amusement 'Robinson
Crusoe' will always be one of the most charming of books. We have the
romantic and adventurous incidents upon which the most unflinching
realism can be set to work without danger of vulgarity. Here is
precisely the story suited to De Foe's strength and weakness. He is
forced to be artistic in spite of himself. He cannot lose the thread of
the narrative and break it into disjointed fragments, for the limits of
the island confine him as well as his hero. He cannot tire us with
details, for all the details of such a story are interesting; it is made
up of petty incidents, as much as the life of a prisoner reduced to
taming flies, or making saws out of penknives. The island does as well
as the Bastille for making trifles valuable to the sufferer and to us.
The facts tell the story of themselves, without any demand for romantic
power to press them home to us; and the efforts to give an air of
authenticity to the story, which sometimes make us smile, and sometimes
rather bore us, in other novels are all to the purpose; for there is a
real point in putting such a story in the mouth of the sufferer, and in
giving us for the time an illusory belief in his reality. It is one of
the exceptional cases in which the poetical aspect of a position is
brought out best by the most prosaic accuracy of detail; and we imagine
that Robinson Crusoe's island, with all his small household torments,
will always be more impressive than the more gorgeously coloured island
of Enoch Arden. When we add that the whole book shows the freshness of a
writer employed on his first novel--though at the mature age of
fifty-eight; seeing in it an allegory of his own experience embodied in
the scenes which most interested his imagination, we see some reasons
why 'Robinson Crusoe' should hold a distinct rank by itself amongst his
works. As De Foe was a man of very powerful but very limited
imagination--able to see certain aspects of things with extraordinary
distinctness, but little able to rise above them--even his greatest book
shows his weakness, and scarcely satisfies a grown-up man with a taste
for high art. In revenge, it ought, according to Rousseau, to be for a
time the whole library of a boy, chiefly, it seems, to teach him that
the stock of an ironmonger is better than that of a jeweller. We may
agree in the conclusion without caring about the reason; and to have
pleased all the boys in Europe for near a hundred and fifty years is,
after all, a remarkable feat.
One remark must be added, which scarcely seems to have been sufficiently
noticed by Defoe's critics. He cannot be understood unless we remember
that he was primarily and essentially a journalist, and that even his
novels are part of his journalism. He was a pioneer in the art of
newspaper writing, and anticipated with singular acuteness many later
developments of his occupation. The nearest parallel to him is Cobbett,
who wrote still better English, though he could hardly have written a
'Robinson Crusoe.' Defoe, like Cobbett, was a sturdy middle-class
Englishman, and each was in his time the most effective advocate of the
political views of his class. De Foe represented the Whiggism, not of
the great 'junto' or aristocratic ring, but of the dissenters and
tradesmen whose prejudices the junto had to turn to account. He would
have stood by Chatham in the time of Wilkes and of the American War; he
would have demanded parliamentary reform in the time of Brougham and
Bentham, and he would have been a follower of the Manchester school in
the time of Bright and Cobden. We all know the type, and have made up
our minds as to its merits. When De Foe came to be a subject of
biography in this century, he was of course praised for his
enlightenment by men of congenial opinions. He was held up as a model
politician, not only for his creed but for his independence. The
revelations of his last biographer, Mr. Lee, showed unfortunately that
considerable deductions must be made from the independence. He was, as
we now know, in the pay of Government for many years, while boasting of
his perfect purity; he was transferred, like a mere dependent, from the
Whigs to the Tories and back again. In the reign of George I. he
consented to abandon his character in order to act as a spy upon unlucky
Jacobite colleagues. It is to the credit of Harley's acuteness that he
was the first English minister to make a systematic use of the press and
was the patron both of Swift and De Foe. But to use the press was then
to make a mere tool of the author. De Foe was a journalist, living, and
supporting a family, by his pen, in the days when a journalist had to
choose between the pillory and dependence. He soon had enough of the
pillory and preferred to do very dirty services for his employer. Other
journalists, I fear, since his day have consented to serve masters whom
in their hearts they disapproved. It may, I think, be fairly said on
behalf of De Foe that in the main he worked for causes of which he
really approved; that he never sacrificed the opinions to which he was
most deeply attached; that his morality was, at worst, above that of
many contemporary politicians; and that, in short, he had a conscience,
though he could not afford to obey it implicitly. He says himself, and I
think the statement has its pathetic side, that he made a kind of
compromise with that awkward instinct. He praised those acts only of the
Government which he really approved, though he could not afford to
denounce those from which he differed. Undoubtedly, as many respectable
moralists have told us, the man who endeavours to draw such lines will
get into difficulties and probably emerge with a character not a little
soiled in the process. But after all as things go, it is something to
find that a journalist has really a conscience, even though his
conscience be a little too open to solid arguments. He was still capable
of blushing. Let us be thankful that in these days our journalists are
too high-minded to be ever required to blush. Here, however, I have only
to speak of the effect of De Foe's position upon his fictions. He had
early begun to try other than political modes of journalism. His account
of the great storm of 1703 was one of his first attempts as a reporter;
and it is characteristic that, as he was in prison at the time, he had
already to report things seen only by the eye of faith. He tried at an
early period to give variety to his 'Review' by some of the 'social'
articles which afterwards became the staple of the 'Tatler' and
'Spectator.' When, after the death of Queen Anne, there was a political
lull he struck out new paths. It was then that he wrote lives of
highwaymen and dissenting divines, and that he patched up any narratives
which he could get hold of, and gave them the shape of authentic
historical documents. He discovered the great art of interviewing, and
one of his performances might still pass for a masterpiece. Jack
Sheppard, when already in the cart beneath the gallows, gave a paper to
a bystander, of which the life published by De Foe on the following day
professed to be a reproduction. Nothing that could be turned into copy
for the newspaper or the sixpenny pamphlet of the day came amiss to this
forerunner of journalistic enterprise. This is the true explanation of
'Robinson Crusoe' and its successors. 'Robinson Crusoe,' in fact, is
simply an application on a larger scale of the device which he was
practising every day. It is purely and simply a masterly bit of
journalism. It affects to be a true story, as, of course, every story
in a newspaper affects to be true; though De Foe had made the not very
remote discovery that it is often easier to invent the facts than to
investigate them. He is simply a reporter _minus_ the veracity. Like any
other reporter, he assumes that the interest of his story depends
obviously and entirely upon its verisimilitude. He relates the
adventures of the genuine Alexander Selkirk, only elaborated into more
detail, just as a modern reporter might give us an account of Mr.
Stanley's African expedition if Mr. Stanley had been unable to do so for
himself. He is always in the attitude of mind of the newspaper
correspondent, who has been interviewing the hero of an interesting
story and ventures at most a little safe embroidery. This explains a
remark made by Dickens, who complained that the account of Friday's
death showed an 'utter want of tenderness and sentiment,' and says
somewhere that 'Robinson Crusoe' is the only great novel which never
moves either to laughter or to tears. The creator of Oliver Twist and
Little Nell was naturally scandalised by De Foe's dry and matter-of-fact
narrative. But De Foe had never approached the conception of his art
which afterwards became familiar. He had nothing to do with sentiment or
psychology; those elements of interest came in with Richardson and
Fielding; he was simply telling a true story and leaving his readers to
feel what they pleased. It never even occurred to him, more than it
occurs to the ordinary reporter, to analyse character or describe
scenery or work up sentiment. He was simply a narrator of plain facts.
He left poetry and reflection to Mr. Pope or Mr. Addison, as your
straightforward annalist in a newspaper has no thoughts of rivalling
Lord Tennyson or Mr. Froude. His narratives were fictitious only in the
sense that the facts did not happen; but that trifling circumstance was
to make no difference to the mode of writing them. The poetical element
would have been as much out of place as it would have been in a
merchant's ledger. He could not, indeed, help introducing a little
moralising, for he was a typical English middle-class dissenter. Some of
his simple-minded commentators have even given him credit, upon the
strength of such passages, for lofty moral purpose. They fancy that his
lives of criminals, real or imaginary, were intended to be tracts
showing that vice leads to the gallows. No doubt, De Foe had the same
kind of solid homespun morality as Hogarth, for example, which was not
in its way a bad thing. But one need not be very cynical to believe that
his real object in writing such books was to produce something that
would sell, and that in the main he was neither more nor less moral than
the last newspaper writer who has told us the story of a sensational
murder.
De Foe, therefore, may be said to have stumbled almost unconsciously
into novel-writing. He was merely aiming at true stories, which happened
not to be true. But accidentally, or rather unconsciously, he could not
help presenting us with a type of curious interest; for he necessarily
described himself and the readers whose tastes he understood and shared
so thoroughly. His statement that 'Robinson Crusoe' was a kind of
allegory was truer than he knew. In 'Robinson Crusoe' is De Foe, and
more than De Foe, for he is the typical Englishman of his time. He is
the broad-shouldered, beef-eating John Bull, who has been shouldering
his way through the world ever since. Drop him in a desert island, and
he is just as sturdy and self-composed as if he were in Cheapside.
Instead of shrieking or writing poetry, becoming a wild hunter or a
religious hermit, he calmly sets about building a house and making
pottery and laying out a farm. He does not accommodate himself to his
surroundings; they have got to accommodate themselves to him. He meets a
savage and at once annexes him, and preaches him such a sermon as he had
heard from the exemplary Dr. Doddridge. Cannibals come to make a meal of
him, and he calmly stamps them out with the means provided by
civilisation. Long years of solitude produce no sort of effect upon him
morally or mentally. He comes home as he went out, a solid keen
tradesman, having, somehow or other, plenty of money in his pockets, and
ready to undertake similar risks in the hope of making a little more. He
has taken his own atmosphere with him to the remotest quarters. Wherever
he has set down his solid foot, he has taken permanent possession of the
country. The ancient religions of the primæval East or the quaint
beliefs of savage tribes make no particular impression upon him, except
a passing spasm of disgust at anybody having different superstitions
from his own; and, being in the main a good-natured animal in a stolid
way of his own, he is able to make use even of popish priests if they
will help to found a new market for his commerce. The portrait is not
the less effective because the artist was so far from intending it that
he could not even conceive of anybody being differently constituted from
himself. It shows us all the more vividly what was the manner of man
represented by the stalwart Englishman of the day; what were the men who
were building up vast systems of commerce and manufacture; shoving their
intrusive persons into every quarter of the globe; evolving a great
empire out of a few factories in the East; winning the American
continent for the dominant English race; sweeping up Australia by the
way as a convenient settlement for convicts; stamping firmly and
decisively on all toes that got in their way; blundering enormously and
preposterously, and yet always coming out steadily planted on their
feet; eating roast beef and plum-pudding; drinking rum in the tropics;
singing 'God Save the King' and intoning Watts's hymns under the nose of
ancient dynasties and prehistoric priesthoods; managing always to get
their own way, to force a reluctant world to take note of them as a
great if rather disagreeable fact, and making it probable that, in long
ages to come, the English of 'Robinson Crusoe' will be the native
language of inhabitants of every region under the sun.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Defoe may have had some materials for this story; but there seems to
be little doubt that it is substantially his own.
_RICHARDSON'S NOVELS_
The literary artifice, so often patronised by Lord Macaulay of
describing a character by a series of paradoxes, is of course, in one
sense, a mere artifice. It is easy enough to make a dark grey black and
a light grey white, and to bring the two into unnatural proximity. But
it rests also upon the principle which is more of a platitude than a
paradox, that our chief faults often lie close to our chief merits. The
greatest man is perhaps one who is so equably developed that he has the
strongest faculties in the most perfect equilibrium, and is apt to be
somewhat uninteresting to the rest of mankind. The man of lower eminence
has some one or more faculties developed out of all proportion to the
rest, with the natural result of occasionally overbalancing him.
Extraordinary memories with weak logical faculties, wonderful
imaginative sensibility with a complete absence of self-control, and
other defective conformations of mind, supply the raw materials for a
luminary of the second order, and imply a predisposition to certain
faults, which are natural complements to the conspicuous merits.
Such reflections naturally occur in speaking of one of our greatest
literary reputations, whose popularity is almost in an inverse ratio to
his celebrity. Every one knows the names of Sir Charles Grandison and
Clarissa Harlowe. They are amongst the established types which serve to
point a paragraph; but the volumes in which they are described remain
for the most part in undisturbed repose, sleeping peacefully amongst
Charles Lamb's _biblia a-biblia_, books which are no books, or, as he
explains, those books 'which no gentleman's library should be without.'
They never enjoy the honours of cheap reprints; the modern reader
shudders at a novel in eight volumes, and declines to dig for amusement
in so profound a mine; when some bold inquirer dips into their pages he
generally fancies that the sleep of years has been somehow absorbed into
the paper; a certain soporific aroma exhales from the endless files of
fictitious correspondence. This contrast, however, between popularity
and celebrity is not so rare as to deserve special notice. Richardson's
slumber may be deeper than that of most men of equal fame, but it is not
quite unprecedented. The string of paradoxes, which it would be easy to
apply to Richardson, would turn upon a different point. The odd thing
is, not that so many people should have forgotten him, but that he
should have been remembered by people at first sight so unlike him. Here
is a man, we might say, whose special characteristic it was to be a
milksop--who provoked Fielding to a coarse hearty burst of ridicule--who
was steeped in the incense of useless adulation from a throng of
middle-aged lady worshippers--who wrote his novels expressly to
recommend little unimpeachable moral maxims, as that evil courses lead
to unhappy deaths, that ladies ought to observe the laws of propriety,
and generally that it is an excellent thing to be thoroughly
respectable; who lived an obscure life in a petty coterie in fourth-rate
London society, and was in no respect at a point of view more exalted
than that of his companions. What greater contrast can be imagined in
its way than that between Richardson, with his second-rate
eighteenth-century priggishness and his twopenny-tract morality, and the
modern school of French novelists, who are certainly not prigs, and
whose morality is by no means that of tracts? We might have expected _à
priori_ that they would have summarily put him down, as a hopeless
Philistine. Yet Richardson was idolised by some of their best writers;
Balzac, for example, and George Sand, speak of him with reverence; and a
writer who is, perhaps, as odd a contrast to Richardson as could well be
imagined--Alfred de Musset--calls 'Clarissa' _le premier roman du
monde_. What is the secret which enables the steady old printer, with
his singular limitation to his own career of time and space, to impose
upon the Byronic Parisian of the next century? Amongst his
contemporaries Diderot expresses an almost fanatical admiration of
Richardson for his purity and power, and declares characteristically
that he will place Richardson's works on the same shelf with those of
Moses, Homer, Euripides, and other favourite writers; he even goes so
far as to excuse Clarissa's belief in Christianity on the ground of her
youthful innocence. To continue in the paradoxical vein, we might ask
how the quiet tradesman could create the character which has stood ever
since for a type of the fine gentleman of the period; or how from the
most prosaic of centuries should spring one of the most poetical of
feminine ideals? We can hardly fancy a genuine hero with a pigtail, or a
heroine in a hoop and high-heeled shoes, nor believe that persons who
wore those articles of costume could possess any very exalted virtues.
Perhaps our grandchildren may have the same difficulty about the race
which wears crinolines and chimney-pot hats.
It is a fact, however, that our grandfathers, in spite of their belief
in pigtails, and in Pope's poetry, and other matters that have gone out
of fashion, had some very excellent qualities, and even some genuine
sentiment, in their compositions. Indeed, now that their peculiarities
have been finally packed away in various lumber-rooms, and the revolt
against the old-fashioned school of thought and manners has become
triumphant instead of militant, we are beginning to see the picturesque
side of their character. They have gathered something of the halo that
comes with the lapse of years; and social habits that looked prosaic
enough to contemporaries, and to the generation which had to fight
against them, have gained a touch of romance. Richardson's characters
wear a costume and speak a language which are indeed queer and
old-fashioned, but are now far enough removed from the present to have a
certain piquancy; and it is becoming easier to recognise the real genius
which created them, as the active aversion to the forms in which it was
necessarily clothed tends to disappear. The wigs and the high-heeled
shoes are not without a certain pleasing quaintness; and when we have
surmounted this cause of disgust, we can see more plainly what was the
real power which men of the most opposite schools in art have
recognised. Readers whose appetite for ancient fiction is insufficient
to impel them to a perusal of 'Clarissa' may yet find some amusement in
turning over the curious collection of letters published with a life by
Mrs. Barbauld in 1804. Nowhere can we find a more vivid picture of the
social stratum to which Richardson belonged. We take a seat in the old
gentleman's shop, or drop in to take a dish of tea with him at North
End, in Hammersmith. We learn to know them almost as well as we know the
literary circle of the next generation from Boswell or the higher social
sphere from Horace Walpole--and it is a pleasant relief, after reading
the solemn histories which recall the struggles of Walpole and
Chesterfield and their like, to drop in upon this quiet little coterie
of homely commonplace people leading calm domestic lives and amusingly
unconscious of the political and intellectual storms which were raging
outside. Richardson himself was the typical industrious apprentice. He
was the son of a London tradesman who had witnessed with due horror the
Popish machinations of James II. Richardson, born just after the
Revolution, had been apprenticed to a printer, married his master's
daughter, set up a fairly successful business, was master of the
Stationers' Company in 1754, and was prosperous enough to have his
country box, first at North End and afterwards at Parson's Green. He
never learned any language but his own. He had taken to writing from his
infancy; he composed little stories of an edifying tendency and had
written love-letters for young women of his acquaintance. From his
experience in these departments he acquired the skill which was
afterwards displayed in 'Pamela' and his two later and superior novels.
We hear dimly of many domestic trials: of the loss of children, some of
whom had lived to be 'delightful prattlers,' of 'eleven affecting deaths
in two years.' Who were the eleven remains unknown. His sorrows have
long passed into oblivion, unless so far as the sentiment was transmuted
into his writings. We do not know whether it was from calamity or
constitutional infirmity that he became a very nervous and tremulous
little man. He never dared to ride, but exercised himself on a
'chamber-horse,' one of which apparently wooden animals he kept at each
of his houses. For years he could not raise a glass to his lips without
help. His dread of altercations prevented him from going often among
his workmen. He gave his orders in writing that he might not have to
bawl to a deaf foreman. He gave up 'wine and flesh and fish.' He drew a
capital portrait of himself, for the benefit of a lady still unknown to
him, who recognised him by its help at a distance of 'above three
hundred yards.' His description is minute enough: 'Short; rather plump
than emaciated, notwithstanding his complaints; about 5 foot 5 inches;
fair wig, lightish cloth coat, all black besides; one hand generally in
his bosom, the other, a cane in it, which he leans upon under the skirts
of his coat usually, that it may imperceptibly serve him as a support
when attacked by sudden tremors or startings and dizziness, which too
frequently attack him, but, thank God, not so often as formerly; looking
directly foreright, as passers by would imagine, but observing all that
stirs on either hand of him without moving his short neck; hardly ever
turning back; of a light-brown complexion; teeth not yet failing him;
smoothish-faced and ruddy cheeked; at some times looking to be about
sixty-five, at others much younger' (really sixty); 'a regular even pace
stealing away ground rather than seeming to rid it; a grey eye, too
often overclouded by mistinesses from the head; by chance lively--very
lively it will be if he have hopes of seeing a lady whom he loves and
honours; his eye always on the ladies; if they have very large hoops, he
looks down and supercilious and as if he would be thought wise, but
perhaps the sillier for that; as he approaches a lady his eye is never
fixed first upon her face, but upon her feet and thence he raises it up
pretty quickly for a dull eye; and one would think (if we thought him at
all worthy of observation) that from her air and the last beheld (her
face) he sets her down in his mind as _so_ and _so_, and then passes on
to the next object he meets; only then looking back, if he greatly
likes or dislikes, as if he would see if the lady appear to be all of a
piece in the one light or the other.' After this admirable likeness we
can appreciate better the two coloured engravings in the letters.
Richardson looks like a plump white mouse in a wig, at once vivacious
and timid. We see him in one picture toddling along the Pantiles at
Tunbridge-Wells, in the neighbourhood of the great Mr. Pitt and Speaker
Onslow and the bigamous Duchess of Kingston and Colley Cibber and the
cracked and shrivelled-up Whiston and a (perhaps not the famous) Mr.
Johnson in company with a bishop. In the other, he is sitting in his
parlour with its stiff old-fashioned furniture and a glimpse into the
garden, reading 'Sir Charles Grandison' to the admirable Miss Mulso,
afterwards Mrs. Chapone, and a small party, inclusive of the artist,
Miss Highmore, to whom we owe sincere gratitude for this peep into the
past. Richardson sits in his 'usual morning dress,' a kind of brown
dressing-gown with a skull-cap on his head, filling the chair with his
plump little body, and raising one foot (or has the artist found
difficulties in planting both upon the ground?) to point his moral with
an emphatic stamp.
Many eminent men of his time were polite to Richardson after he had won
fame at the mature age of fifty. He was not the man to presume on his
position. He was 'very shy of obtruding himself on persons of
condition.' He never rose like Pope, whose origin was not very
dissimilar, to speak to princes and ministers as an equal. He was always
the obsequious and respectful shopkeeper. The great Warburton wrote a
letter to his 'good sir'--a phrase equivalent to the two fingers of a
dignified greeting--suggesting, in Pope's name and his own, a plan for
continuing 'Pamela.' She was to be the ingenuous young person shocked at
the conventionalities of good society. Richardson sensibly declined a
plan for which he was unfitted; and in 1747 Warburton condescended to
write a preface to 'Clarissa Harlowe,' pointing out (very
superfluously!) the nature of the intended moral. Warburton afterwards
took offence at a passage in the same book which he took to glance at
Pope; and Richardson was on friendly terms with two authors, Edwards, of
the 'Canons of Criticism,' and Aaron Hill, who were among the
multitudinous enemies of Warburton and his patron Pope. Hill's letters
in the correspondence are worth reading as illustrations of the old
moral of literary vanity. He expresses with unusual _naïveté_ the
doctrine, so pleasant to the unsuccessful, that success means the
reverse of merit. Pope's fame was due to personal assiduities, and 'a
certain bladdery swell of management.' It is already passing away. He
does not speak from jealousy, for nobody ever courted fame 'with less
solicitude than I.' But for all that, there will come a time! He knows
it on a surer ground than vanity. Let us hope that this little salve to
self-esteem never lost its efficacy. Surely of all prayers the most
injudicious was that of Burns, that we might see ourselves as others see
us. What would become of us? Richardson, as we might expect, was highly
esteemed by Young of the 'Night Thoughts,' and by Johnson, to both of
whom he seems to have given substantial proofs of friendship. He wrote
the only number of the 'Rambler' which had a good sale, and helped
Johnson when under arrest for debt; Johnson repaid him by the phrase,
which long passed for the orthodox decision, that Richardson taught the
passions to move at the command of virtue. But the most delightful of
Richardson's friends was the irrepressible Colley Cibber. Mrs.
Pilkington, a disreputable adventuress, faintly remembered by her
relations to Swift, describes Cibber's reception of the unpublished
'Clarissa.' 'The dear gentleman did almost rave. When I told him that
she (Clarissa) must die, he said G---- d---- him if she should, and that
he should no longer believe Providence or eternal wisdom or goodness
governed the world if merit and innocence and beauty were to be so
destroyed. "Nay," added he, "my mind is so hurt with the thought of her
being violated, that were I to see her in heaven, sitting on the knees
of the blessed Virgin and crowned with glory, her sufferings would still
make me feel horror, horror distilled." These were his strongly
emphatical impressions.' Cibber's own letters are as lively as Mrs.
Pilkington's report of his talk. 'The delicious meal I made off Miss
Byron on Sunday last,' he says, 'has given me an appetite for another
slice of her, off from the spit, before she is served up to the public
table; if about five o'clock to-morrow afternoon be not inconvenient,
Mrs. Brown and I will come and nibble upon a bit more of her! And we
have grace after meat as well as before.' 'The devil take the insolent
goodness of your imagination!' exclaims the lively old buck, now past
eighty, and as well preserved as if he had never encountered Pope's
'scathing satire' (does satire ever 'scathe'?) or Fielding's rough
horseplay. One of Richardson's lady admirers saw Cibber flirting with
fine ladies at Tunbridge Wells in 1754 (he was born in 1671), and
miserable when he was neglected for a moment by the greatest _belle_ in
the society. He professed to be only seventy-seven!
Perhaps even Cibber was beaten in flattery by the 'minister of the
gospel' who thought that if some of Clarissa's letters had been found in
the Bible they would have been regarded as manifest proofs of divine
inspiration. But the more delightful incense came from the circle of
admiring young ladies who called him their dear papa; who passed long
days at his feet at Parson's Green; allowed him to escape to his
summer-house to add a letter to the growing volumes, and after an early
dinner persuaded him to read it aloud. Their eager discussions as to the
fate of the characters and the little points of morality which arose are
continued in his gossiping letters. When a child he had been the
confidant of tender-hearted maidens, and now he became a kind of
spiritual director. He was, as Miss Collier said, the 'only champion and
protector' of her sex. Women, and surely they must be good judges,
thought that he understood the feminine heart, as their descendants
afterwards attributed the same power to Balzac. The most attractive of
his feminine correspondents was Mrs. Klopstock, wife of the 'German
Milton,' who tells her only little love story with charming simplicity,
and thus lays her homage at the feet of Richardson. 'Honoured sir, will
you permit me to take this opportunity, in sending a letter to Dr.
Young, to address myself to you? It is very long that I wished to do it.
Having finished your "Clarissa" (oh, the heavenly book!), I would have
prayed you to write the history of a _manly_ Clarissa, but I had not
courage enough at that time. I should have it no more to-day, as this is
only my first English letter; but I have it! It may be because I am now
Klopstock's wife (I believe you know my husband by Mr. Hohorst), and
then I was only the single young girl. You have since written the manly
Clarissa without my prayer; oh, you have done it to the great joy and
thanks of all your happy readers! Now you can write no more, you must
write the history of an angel!'
Mrs. Klopstock died young; having had the happiness to find that
Richardson did not resent her intrusion, great author as he was. Another
correspondent, Lady Bradshaigh, wife of a Lancashire country gentleman,
took precautions which show what a halo then surrounded the author in
the eyes of his countrywomen. It was worth while to be an author then!
Lady Bradshaigh was a good housewife, it seems, but, having no children,
was able to devote some time to reading. She obtained a portrait of
Richardson, but altered the name to Dickenson, in order that no one
might suspect her of corresponding with an author. After reading the
first four volumes of 'Clarissa' (which were separately published), she
wrote under a feigned name to beg the author to alter the impending
catastrophe. She spoke as the mouthpiece of a 'multitude of admirers'
who desired to see Lovelace reformed and married to Clarissa. 'Sure you
will think it worth your while, sir, to save his soul!' she exclaims.
Richardson was too good an artist to spoil his tragedy; and was rewarded
by an account of her emotions on reading the last volumes. She laid the
book down in agonies, took it up again, shed a flood of tears, and threw
herself upon her couch to compose her mind. Her husband, who was
plodding after her, begged her to read no more. But she had promised
Richardson to finish the book. She nerved herself for the task; her
sleep was broken, she woke in tears during the night, and burst into
tears at her meals. Charmed by her delicious sufferings, she became
Richardson's friend for life, though it was long before she could muster
up courage to meet him face to face.
Yet Lady Bradshaigh seems to have been a sensible woman, and shows
vivacity and intelligence in some of her discussions with Richardson. If
he was not altogether spoilt by the flattery of so many excellent
women, we can only explain it by remembering that he did not become
famous till he was past fifty, and therefore past spoiling. One
peculiarity, indeed, is rather unpleasant in these letters. Richardson's
worshippers evidently felt that their deity was jealous, and made no
scruple of offering the base sacrifice of abuse of rival celebrities.
Richardson adopts their tone; he is always gibing at Fielding. '_I could
not help telling his sister_', he observes--a sister, too, whose merits
Fielding had praised with his usual generosity--'that I was equally
surprised at and concerned for his continuous lowness. Had your brother,
said I, been born in a stable or been a runner at a sponging-house we
should have thought him a genius,' but now! So another great writer came
just in time to be judged by Richardson. A bishop asked him, 'Who is
this Yorick,' who has, it seems, been countenanced by an 'ingenious
dutchess.' Richardson briefly replies that the bishop cannot have looked
into the books, 'execrable I cannot but call them.' Their only merit is
that they are 'too gross to be inflaming.' The history of the mutual
judgments upon each other of contemporary authors would be more amusing
than edifying.
Richardson should not have been so hard upon Sterne, for Sterne was in
some degree following Richardson's lead. 'What is the meaning,' asks
Lady Bradshaigh (about 1749) 'of the word _sentimental_, so much in
vogue among the polite both in town and country? Everything clever and
agreeable is comprehended in that word; but I am convinced a wrong
interpretation is given, because it is impossible everything clever and
agreeable can be so common as that word.' She has heard of a sentimental
man; a sentimental party, and a sentimental walk; and has been applauded
for calling a letter sentimental. I hope that the philological
dictionary may tell us what was the first appearance of a word which, in
this sense, marks an epoch in literature, and, indeed, in much else. I
find the word used in the old sense in 1752 in a pamphlet upon
'_Sentimental_ differences in point of faith,' that is, differences of
sentiment or opinion. When, a few years later, Sterne published his
'Sentimental Journey,' Wesley asks in his journal what is the meaning of
the new phrase, and observes (the illustration has lost its point) that
you might as well say _continental_. The appearance of the phrase
coincides with the appearance of the thing; for Richardson was the first
sentimentalist. We may trace the same movement elsewhere, though we need
not here speculate upon the cause. Pope's 'Essay on Man' is the
expression in verse of the dominant theology of the Deists and their
opponents, which was beginning to be condemned as dry and frigid. A
desire for something more 'sentimental' shows itself in Young's 'Night
Thoughts,' in Hervey's 'Meditations,' and appears in the religious
domain as Methodism. The literary historian has to trace the rise of the
same tendency in various places. In Germany, as we see from Mrs.
Klopstock's enthusiasm, the flame was only waiting for the spark.
Goethe, in his 'Wahrheit und Dichtung,' notices the influence of
Richardson's novels in Germany. They were among the predisposing causes
of Wertherism. In France, as I have said, Richardson found congenial
hearers, and Clarissa's soul doubtless transmigrated into the heroine of
the 'Nouvelle Héloïse.' Even in stubborn England, where Fielding's
masculine contempt for the whinings of 'Pamela' was more congenial, the
students of Richardson were prepared to receive 'Ossian' with
enthusiasm, and to be ecstatic over 'Tristram Shandy.' That Richardson
would have agreed with Johnson in regarding Rousseau as fit only for a
penal settlement, and that he actually considered Sterne to be
'execrable,' does not relieve him of the responsibility or deprive him
of the glory. He is not the only writer who has helped to evoke a spirit
which he would be the last to sanction. When he encouraged his admirably
proper young ladies to indulge in 'sentimentalism,' he could not tell
where so vague an impulse would ultimately land them. He was a sound
Tory, and an accepter of all established creeds. Sentimentalism with him
was merely a delight in cultivating the emotions, without any thought of
consequences; or, later, of cultivating them with the assumption that
they would continue to move, as he bade them, 'at the command of
virtue.' Once set in motion, they chose to take paths of their own; they
revolted against conventions, even those which he held most sacred; and
by degrees set up 'Nature' as an idol, and admired the ingenuous savage
instead of the respectable Clarissa, and denounced all corruption,
including, alas, the British constitution, and even the Thirty-nine
Articles, and put themselves at the disposal of all manner of
revolutionary audacities. But the little printer was safe in his grave,
and knew not of what strange developments he had been the ignorant
accomplice.
To return, however, it must be granted that Richardson's sympathy with
women gives a remarkable power to his works. Nothing is more rare than
to find a great novelist who can satisfactorily describe the opposite
sex. Women's heroes are women in disguise, or mere lay-figures, walking
gentlemen who parade tolerably through their parts, but have no real
vitality. On the other hand, the heroines of male writers are for the
most part unnaturally strained or quite colourless; male hands are too
heavy for the delicate work required. Milton could draw a majestic
Satan, but his Eve is no better than a good-managing housekeeper who
knows her place. It is, therefore, remarkable that Richardson's greatest
triumph should be in describing a woman, and that most of his feminine
characters are more life-like and more delicately discriminated than his
men. Unluckily, his conspicuous faults result from the same cause. His
moral prosings savour of the endless gossip over a dish of chocolate in
which his heroines delight; we can imagine the applause with which his
admiring feminine circle would receive his demonstration of the fact,
that adversity is harder to bear than prosperity, or the sentiment that
'a man of principle, whose love is founded in reason, and whose object
is mind rather than person, must make a worthy woman happy.' These are
admirable sentiments, but they savour of the serious tea-party. If 'Tom
Jones' has about it an occasional suspicion of beer and pipes at the
bar, 'Sir Charles Grandison' recalls an indefinite consumption of tea
and small-talk. In short, the feminine part of Richardson's character
has a little too much affinity to Mrs. Gamp--not that he would ever be
guilty of putting gin in his cup, but that he would have the same
capacity for spinning out indefinite twaddle of a superior kind. And, of
course, he fell into the faults which beset the members of mutual
admiration societies in general, but especially those which consist
chiefly of women. Men who meet for purposes of mutual flattery become
unnaturally solemn and priggish; they never free themselves from the
suspicion that the older members of the coterie may be laughing at them
behind their backs. But the flattery of women is so much more delicate,
and so much more sincere, that it is far more dangerous. It is a
poultice which in time softens the hardest outside. Richardson yielded
as entirely as any curate exposed to a shower of slippers. He evidently
wrote under the impression that he was not merely an imaginative writer
of the highest order, but also a great moralist. He was reforming the
world, putting down vice, sending duelling out of fashion, and
inculcating the lessons of the pulpit in a far more attractive form. A
modern novelist is half-ashamed of his art; he disclaims earnestly any
serious purpose; his highest aim is to amuse his readers, and his
greatest boast that he amuses them by honourable or at least by harmless
means. There are, indeed, novelists who write to inculcate High-Church
or Low-Church principles, or to prove that society at large is out of
joint; but a direct intention to prove that men ought not to steal or
get drunk, or commit any other atrocities, is generally considered to be
beside the novelist's function, and its introduction to be a fault of
art. Indeed, there is much to be said against it. In our youth we used
to read a poem about a cruel little boy who went out to fish and was
punished by somehow becoming suspended by his chin from a hook in the
larder. It never produced much effect upon us, because we felt that the
accident was, to say the least, rather exceptional; at most, we fished
on, and were careful about the larder. The same principle applies to the
poetic justice distributed by most novelists. When Richardson kills off
his villains by violent deaths, we know too well that many villains live
to a good old age, leave handsome fortunes, and are buried under the
handsomest of tombstones, with the most elegant of epitaphs. This very
rough device for inculcating morality is of course ineffectual, and
produces some artistic blemishes. The direct exhortations to his
readers to be good are still more annoying; no human being can long
endure a mixture of preaching and story-telling. For Heaven's sake, we
exclaim, tell us what happens to Clarissa, and don't stop to prove that
honesty is the best policy! In a wider sense, however, the seriousness
of Richardson's purpose is of high value. He is so keenly in earnest, so
profoundly interested about his characters, so determined to make us
enter into their motives, that we cannot help being carried away; if he
never spares an opportunity of giving us a lecture, at least his zeal in
setting forth an example never flags for an instant. The effort to give
us an ideally perfect character seems to stimulate his imagination, and
leads to a certain intensity of realisation which we are apt to miss in
the purposeless school of novelists. He is always, as it were, writing
at high-pressure and under a sense of responsibility.
The method which he adopts lends itself very conveniently to heighten
this effect. Richardson's feminine delight in letter-writing was, as we
have seen, the immediate cause of his plunge into authorship.
Richardson's novels, indeed, are not so much novels put for convenience
under the form of letters, as letters expanded till they become novels.
A genuine novelist who should put his work into the unnatural shape of a
correspondence would probably find it a very awkward expedient; but
Richardson gradually worked up to the novel from the conception of a
collection of letters; and his method, therefore, came spontaneously to
him. He started from the plan of writing letters to illustrate a certain
point of morality, and to make them more effective attributed them to a
fictitious character. The result was the gigantic tract called
'Pamela'--distinctly the worst of his works--of which it is enough to
say at present that it succeeds neither in being moral nor in amusing.
It shows, however, a truly amazing fertility in a specially feminine
art. We have all suffered from the propensity of some female minds (the
causes of which we will not attempt to analyse) for pouring forth
indefinite floods of correspondence. We know the heartless fashion in
which some ladies, even in these days of penny postage, will fill a
sheet of note-paper and proceed to cross their writing till the page
becomes a chequer-work of unintelligible hieroglyphics. But we may feel
gratitude in looking back to the days when time hung heavier, and
letter-writing was a more serious business. The letters of those times
may recall the fearful and wonderful labours of tapestry in which ladies
employed their needles by way of killing time. The monuments of both
kinds are a fearful indication of the _ennui_ from which the
perpetrators must have suffered. We pity those who endured the toil as
we pity the prisoners whose patient ingenuity has carved a passage
through a stone wall with a rusty nail. Richardson's heroines, and his
heroes too, for that matter, would have been portents at any time. We
will take an example at hazard. Miss Byron, on March 22, writes a letter
of fourteen pages (in the old collective edition). The same day she
follows it up by two of six and of twelve pages respectively. On the
23rd she leads off with a letter of eighteen pages, and another of ten.
On the 24th she gives us two, filling together thirty pages, at the end
of which she remarks that she is _forced_ to lay down her pen, and then
adds a postscript of six more; on the 25th she confines herself to two
pages; but after a Sunday's rest she makes another start of equal
vigour. In three days, therefore, she covers ninety-six pages. Two of
the pages are about equal to three in this volume. Consequently, in
three days' correspondence, referring to the events of the day, she
would fill something like a hundred and forty-four of these pages--a
task the magnitude of which may be appreciated by anyone who will try
the experiment. We should say that she must have written for nearly
eight hours a day, and are not surprised at her remark, that she has on
one occasion only managed two hours' sleep.
It would, of course, be the height of pedantry to dwell upon this, as
though a fictitious personage were to be in all respects bounded by the
narrow limits of human capacity. It is not the object of a really good
novelist, nor does it come within the legitimate means of high art in
any department, to produce an actual illusion. Showmen in some foreign
palaces call upon us to admire paintings which we cannot distinguish
from bas-reliefs; the deception is, of course, a mere trick, and the
paintings are simply childish. On the stage we do not require to believe
that the scenery is really what it imitates, and the attempt to
introduce scraps of real life is a clear proof of a low artistic aim.
Similarly a novelist is not only justified in writing so as to prove
that his work is fictitious, but he almost necessarily hampers himself,
to the prejudice of his work, if he imposes upon himself the condition
that his book shall be capable of being mistaken for a genuine
narrative. Every good novelist lets us into secrets about the private
thoughts of his characters which it would be impossible to obtain in
real life. We do not, therefore, blame Richardson because his characters
have a power of writing which no mortal could ever attain. His fault,
indeed, is exactly the contrary. He very erroneously fancies that he is
bound to convince us of the possibility of all his machinery, and often
produces the very shock to our belief which he seeks to avoid. He is
constantly trying to account by elaborate devices for the fertile
correspondence of his characters, when it is perfectly plain that they
are simply writing a novel. We should never have asked a question as to
the authenticity of the letters, if he did not force the question upon
us; and no art can induce us for a moment to accept the proffered
illusion. For example, Miss Byron gives us a long account of
conversations between persons whom she did not know, which took place
ten years before. It is much better that the impossibility should be
frankly accepted, on the clear ground that authors of novels, and
consequently their creatures, have the prerogative of omniscience. At
least, the slightest account of the way in which she came by the
knowledge would be enough to satisfy us for all purposes of fiction.
Richardson is not content with this, and elaborately demonstrates that
she might have known a number of minute details which it is perfectly
plain that a real Miss Byron could never have known, and thus dashes
into our faces an improbability which we should have been quite content
to pass unnoticed.
The method, however, of telling the story by the correspondence of the
actors produces more important effects. The hundred and forty-four pages
in question are all devoted to the proceedings of three days. They are
filled, for the most part, with interminable conversations. The story
advances by a very few steps; but we know all that every one of the
persons concerned has to say about the matter. We discover what was Sir
Charles Grandison's relation at a particular time to a certain Italian
lady, Clementina. We are told exactly what view he took of his own
position; what view Clementina took of it; what Miss Byron had to say to
Sir Charles on the subject, and what advice her relations bestowed upon
Miss Byron. Then we have all the sentiments of Sir Charles Grandison's
sisters, and of his brothers-in-law, and of his reverend old tutor; and
the sentiments of all the Lady Clementina's family, and the incidental
remarks of a number of subordinate actors. In short, we see the
characters all round in all their relations to each other, in every
possible variation and permutation; we are present at all the
discussions which take place before every step, and watch the gradual
variation of all the phases of the positions. We get the same sort of
elaborate familiarity with every aspect of affairs that we should
receive from reading a blue-book full of some prolix diplomatic
correspondence; indeed, Sir Charles Grandison closely resembles such a
blue-book, for the plot is carried on mainly by elaborate negotiations
between three different families, with proposals, and counter-proposals,
and amended proposals, and a final settlement of the very complicated
business by a deliberate signing of two different sets of articles. One
of them, we need hardly say, is a marriage settlement; the other is a
definite treaty between the lady who is not married and her family, the
discussion of which occupies many pages. The extent to which we are
drawn into the minutest details may be inferred from the fact that
nearly a volume is given to marrying Sir Charles Grandison to Miss
Byron, after all difficulties have been surmounted. We have at full
length all the discussions by which the day is fixed, and all the
remarks of the unfortunate lovers of both parties, and all the
criticisms of both families, and finally an elaborate account of the
ceremony, with the names of the persons who went in the separate
coaches, the dresses of the bride and bridesmaids, and the sums which
Sir Charles gave away to the village girls who strewed flowers on the
pathway. Surely the feminine element in Richardson's character was a
little in excess.
The result of all this is a sort of Dutch painting of extraordinary
minuteness. The art reminds us of the patient labour of a line-engraver,
who works for days at making out one little bit of minute stippling and
cross-hatching. The characters are displayed to us step by step and line
by line. We are gradually forced into familiarity with them by a process
resembling that by which we learn to know people in real life. We are
treated to few set analyses or summary descriptions, but by constantly
reading their letters and listening to their talk we gradually form an
opinion of the actors. We see them, too, all round; instead of, as is
usual in modern novels, regarding them steadily from one point of view;
we know what each person thinks of everyone else, and what everyone else
thinks of him; they are brought into a stereoscopic distinctness by
combining the different aspects of their character. Of course, a method
of this kind involves much labour on the part both of writer and reader.
It is evident that Richardson did not think of amusing a stray half-hour
in a railway-carriage or in a club smoking-room; he counted upon readers
who would apply themselves seriously to a task, in the hope of improving
their morals as much as of gaining some harmless amusement. This theory
is explicitly set forth in Warburton's preface to 'Clarissa.' But it
must also be said that, considering the cumbrous nature of the process,
the spirit with which it is applied is wonderful. Richardson's own
interest in his actors never flags. The distinct style of every
correspondent is faithfully preserved with singular vivacity. When we
have read a few letters we are never at a loss to tell, from the style
alone of any short passage, who is the imaginary author. Consequently,
readers who can bear to have their amusement diluted, who are content
with an imperceptibly slow development of plot, and can watch without
impatience the approach of a foreseen incident through a couple of
volumes, may find the prolixity less intolerable than might be expected.
If they will be content to skip when they are bored, even less patient
students may be entertained with a series of pictures of character and
manners skilfully contrasted and brilliantly coloured, though with a
limited allowance of incident. Within his own sphere, no writer exceeds
him in clearness and delicacy of conception.
In another way, the machinery of a fictitious correspondence is rather
troublesome. As the author never appears in his own person, he is often
obliged to trust his characters with trumpeting their own virtues. Sir
Charles Grandison has to tell us himself of his own virtuous deeds; how
he disarms ruffians who attack him in overwhelming numbers, and converts
evil-doers by impressive advice; and, still more awkwardly, he has to
repeat the amazing compliments which everybody is always paying him.
Richardson does his best to evade the necessity; he couples all his
virtuous heroes with friendly confidants, who relieve the virtuous
heroes of the tiresome task of self-adulation; he supplies the heroes
themselves with elaborate reasons for overcoming their modesty, and
makes them apologise profusely for the unwelcome task. Still, ingenious
as his expedients may be, and willing as we are to make allowance for
the necessities of his task, we cannot quite free ourselves from an
unpleasant suspicion as to the simplicity of his characters. 'Clarissa'
is comparatively free from this fault, though Clarissa takes a
questionable pleasure in uttering the finest sentiments and posing
herself as a model of virtue. But in 'Sir Charles Grandison' the
fulsome interchange of flattery becomes offensive even in fiction. The
virtuous characters give and receive an amount of eulogy enough to turn
the strongest stomachs. How amiable is A! says B; how virtuous is C, and
how marvellously witty is D! And then A, C, and D go through the same
performance, adding a proper compliment to B in place of the exclamation
appropriate to themselves. The only parallel in modern times is to be
found at some of the public dinners, where every man proposes his
neighbour's health with a tacit understanding that he is himself to
furnish the text for a similar oration. But then at dinners people have
the excuse of a state of modified sobriety.
This fault is, as we have said, aggravated by the epistolary method.
That method makes it necessary that each person should display his or
her own virtues, as in an exhibition of gymnastics the performers walk
round and show their muscles. But the fault lies a good deal deeper.
Every writer, consciously or unconsciously, puts himself into his
novels, and exhibits his own character even more distinctly than that of
his heroes. And Richardson, the head of a little circle of conscientious
admirers of each other's virtues, could not but reproduce on a different
scale the tone of his own society. The Grandisons, and the families of
Miss Byron and Clementina, merely repeat a practice with which he was
tolerably familiar at home; whilst his characters represent to some
extent the idealised Richardson himself;--and this leads us to the most
essential characteristic of his novels. The greatest woman in France,
according to Napoleon's brutal remark, was the woman who had the most
children. In a different sense, the saying may pass for truth. The
greatest writer is the one who has produced the largest family of
immortal children. Those of whom it can be said that they have really
added a new type to the fictitious world are indeed few in number.
Cervantes is in the front rank of all imaginative creators, because he
has given birth to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Richardson's literary
representatives are far indeed below these; but Richardson too may boast
that, in his narrower sphere of thought, he has invented two characters
that have still a strong vitality. They show all the weaknesses
inseparable from the age and country of their origin. They are far
inferior to the highest ideals of the great poets of the world; they are
cramped and deformed by the conventionalities of their century and the
narrow society in which they move and live. But for all that they stir
the emotions of a distant generation with power enough to show that
their author must have pierced below the surface into the deeper and
more perennial springs of human passion. These two characters are, of
course, Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison; and I may endeavour shortly
to analyse the sources of their enduring interest.
Sir Charles Grandison has passed into a proverb. When Carlyle calls
Lafayette a Grandison-Cromwell, he hits off one of those admirable
nicknames which paint a character for us at once. Sir Charles Grandison
is the model fine gentleman of the eighteenth century--the master of
correct deportment, the unimpeachable representative of the old school.
Richardson tells us with a certain _naïveté_ that he has been accused of
describing an impossible character; that Sir Charles is a man absolutely
without a fault, or at least with faults visible only on a most
microscopic observation. In fact, the only fault to which Sir Charles
himself pleads guilty, in seven volumes, is that he once rather loses
his temper. Two ruffians try to bully him in his own house, and even
draw their swords upon him. Sir Charles so far forgets himself as to
draw his own sword, disarm both of his opponents and turn them out of
doors. He cannot forgive himself, he says, that he has been 'provoked by
two such men to violate the sanctity of his own house.' His only excuse
is, 'that there were two of them; and that tho' I drew, yet I had the
command of myself so far as only to defend myself, when I might have
done with them what I pleased.' According to Richardson, this venial
offence is the worst blot on Sir Charles's character. We certainly do
not blame him for the attempt to draw an ideally perfect hero. It is a
perfectly legitimate aim in fiction, and the only question can be
whether he has succeeded: for Richardson's own commendation cannot be
taken as quite sufficient, neither can we quite accept the ingenious
artifice by which all the secondary characters perform as decoy-birds to
attract our admiration. They do their very best to induce us to join in
their hymns of praise. 'Grandison,' says a Roman Catholic bishop, 'were
he one of us, might expect canonisation.' 'How,' exclaims his uncle,
after a conversation with his paragon of a nephew, 'how shall I bear my
own littleness?' A party of reprobates about town have a long dispute
with him, endeavouring to force him into a duel. At the end of it one of
them exclaims admiringly, 'Curse me, if I believe there is such another
man in the world!' 'I never saw a hero till now,' says another. 'I had
rather have Sir C. Grandison for my friend than the greatest prince on
earth,' says a third. 'I had rather,' replies his friend, 'be Sir C.
Grandison for this one past hour than the Great Mogul all my life.' And
the general conclusion is, 'What poor toads are we!' 'This man shows
us,' as a lady declares, 'that goodness and greatness are synonymous
words;' and when his sister marries, she complains that her brother 'has
long made all other men indifferent to her. Such an infinite
difference!' In the evening, according to custom, she dances a minuet
with her bridegroom, but whispers a friend that she would have performed
better had she danced with her brother.
The structure, however, of the story itself is the best illustration of
Sir Charles's admirable qualities. The plot is very simple. He rescues
Miss Byron from an attempt at a forcible abduction. Miss Byron,
according to her friends, is the queen of her sex, and is amongst women
what Sir Charles is amongst men. Of course, they straightway fall in
love. Sir Charles, however, shows symptoms of a singular reserve, which
is at last explained by the fact that he is already half-engaged to a
noble Italian lady, Clementina. He has promised, in fact, to marry her
if certain objections on the score of his country and religion can be
surmounted. The interest lies chiefly in the varying inclinations of the
balance, at one moment favourable to Miss Byron, and at another to the
'saint and angel' Clementina. When Miss Byron thinks that Sir Charles
will be bound in honour to marry Clementina, she begins to pine; 'she
visibly falls away; and her fine complexion fades;' her friends 'watch
in silent love every turn of her mild and patient eye, every change of
her charming countenance; for they know too well to what to impute the
malady which has approached the best of hearts; they know that the cure
cannot be within the art of the physician.' When Clementina fears that
the scruples of her relatives will separate her from Sir Charles, she
takes the still more decided step of going mad; and some of her madness
would be very touching, if it were not a trifle too much after the
conventional pattern of the mad women in Sheridan's 'Critic.' Whilst
these two ladies are breaking their hearts about Sir Charles they do
justice to each other's merits. Harriet will never be happy unless she
knows that the admirable Clementina has reconciled herself to the loss
of her adored; when Clementina finds herself finally separated from her
lover, she sincerely implores Sir Charles to marry her more fortunate
rival. Never was there such a display of fine feeling and utter absence
of jealousy. Meanwhile a lovely ward of Sir Charles finds it necessary
to her peace of mind to be separated from her guardian; and another
beautiful, but rather less admirable, Italian actually follows him to
England to persuade him to accept her hand. Four ladies--all of them
patterns of physical, moral, and intellectual excellence--are breaking
their hearts; and though they are so excellent that they overcome their
natural jealousy, they can scarcely look upon any other man after having
known this model of all his sex. Indeed, every woman who approaches him
falls desperately in love with him, unless she is his sister or old
enough to be his grandmother. The plot of the novel depends upon an
attraction for the fair sex which is apparently irresistible; and the
men, if they are virtuous, rejoice to sit admiringly at his feet, and if
they are vicious retire abashed from his presence, to entreat his good
advice when they are upon their deathbeds.
All this is easy enough. A novelist can make his women fall in love with
his hero as easily as, with a stroke of the pen, he can endow him with
fifty thousand a year, or bestow upon him every virtue under heaven.
Neither has he any difficulty in making him the finest dancer in
England, or giving him such marvellous skill with the small-sword that
he can avoid the sin of duelling by instantaneously disarming his most
formidable opponents. The real question is, whether he can animate this
conglomerate of all conceivable virtues with a real human soul, set him
before us as a living and breathing reality, and make us feel that, if
we had known him, we too should have been ready to swell the full chorus
of admiration. It is rather more difficult to convey the impression
which a perusal of his correspondence and conversation leaves upon an
unprejudiced mind. Does Sir Charles, when we come to know him
intimately--for, with the ample materials provided, we really seem to
know him--fairly support the amazing burden thrown upon him? Do we feel
a certain disappointment when we meet the man whom all ladies love, and
in whom every gentleman confesses a superior nature.
Two anecdotes about Sir Charles may suggest the answer. Voltaire, we
know, ridiculed the proud English, who with the same scissors cut off
the heads of their kings and the tails of their horses. To this last
weakness Sir Charles was superior. His horses, says Miss Byron, 'are not
docked; their tails are only tied up when they are on the road.' She
would wish to find some fault with him, but as she forcibly says, 'if he
be of opinion that the tails of these noble animals are not only a
natural ornament, but of real use to defend them from the vexatious
insects that in summer are so apt to annoy them, how far from a
dispraise is this humane consideration!' The other anecdote is of a
different kind. When Sir Charles goes to church he does not, like some
other gentlemen, bow low to the ladies of his acquaintance, and then to
others of the gentry. No! 'Sir Charles had first other devoirs to pay.
He paid us his second compliments.' From these two exemplary actions we
must infer his whole character. It should have been inscribed on his
tombstone, 'He would not dock his horses' tails.' That is the most
trifling details of his conduct are regulated on the most serious
considerations. He is one of those solemn beings who can't shave
themselves without implicitly asserting a great moral principle. He
finds sermons in his horses' tails; he could give an excellent reason
for the quantity of lace on his coat, which was due, it seems, to a
sentiment of filial reverence; and he could not fix his hour for dinner
without an eye to the reformation of society. In short, he was a prig of
the first water; self-conscious to the last degree; and so crammed with
little moral aphorisms that they drop out of his mouth whenever he opens
his lips. And then his religion is in admirable keeping. It is
intimately connected with the excellence of his deportment; and is, in
fact, merely the application of the laws of good society to the loftiest
sphere of human duty. He pays his second compliments to his lady, and
his first to the object of his adoration. He very properly gives the
precedence to the being he professes to adore. As he carries his
solemnity into the pettiest trifles of life, so he considers religious
duties to be simply the most important part of social etiquette. He
would shrink from blasphemy even more than from keeping on his hat in
the presence of ladies; but the respect which he owes in one case is of
the same order with that due in the other: it is only a degree more
important.
We feel, indeed, a certain affection for Sir Charles Grandison. He is
pompous and ceremonious to an insufferable degree; but there is really
some truth in his sister's assertion, that his is the most delicate of
human minds; through the cumbrous formalities of his century there
shines a certain quickness and sensibility; he even condescends to be
lively after a stately fashion, and to indulge in a little 'raillying,'
only guarding himself rather too carefully against unbecoming levity.
Indeed, though a man of the world at the present day would be as much
astonished at his elaborate manners as at his laced coat and sword, he
would admit that Sir Charles was by no means wanting in tact; his talk
is weighted with more elaborate formulæ than we care to employ, but it
is good vigorous conversation in the main, and, if rather overlaid with
sermonising, can at times be really amusing. His religion is not of a
very exalted character; he rises to no sublime heights of emotion, and
would simply be puzzled by the fervours or the doubts of a more modern
generation. In short, it seems to be compounded of common-sense and a
regard for decorum--and those are not bad things in their way, though
not the highest. He is not a very ardent reformer; he doubts whether the
poor should be taught to read, and is very clear that everyone should be
made to know his station; but still he talks with sense and moderation,
and even gets so far as to suggest the necessity of reformatories. He is
not very romantic, and displays an amount of self-command in judicially
settling the claims of the various ladies who are anxious to marry him,
which is almost comic; he is perfectly ready to marry the Italian lady,
if she can surmount her religious scruples, though he is in love with
Miss Byron; and his mind is evidently in a pleasing state of
equilibrium, so that he will be happy with either dear charmer. Indeed,
for so chivalric a gentleman, his view of love and marriage is far less
enthusiastic than we should now require. One of his benevolent actions,
which throws all his admirers into fits of eulogy, is to provide one of
his uncles with a wife. The gentleman is a peer, but has hitherto been
of disreputable life. The lady, though of good family and education, is
above thirty, and her family have lost their estate. The match of
convenience which Sir Charles patches up between them has obvious
prudential recommendations; and of course it turns out admirably. But
one is rather puzzled to know what special merits Sir Charles can claim
for bringing it to pass.
Such a hero as this may be worthy and respectable, but is not a very
exalted ideal. Neither do his circumstances increase our interest. It
would be rather a curious subject of inquiry why it should be so
impossible to make a virtuous hero interesting in fiction. In real life,
the men who do heroic actions are certainly more attractive than the
villains. Domestic affection, patriotism, piety, and other good
qualities are pleasant to contemplate in the world; why should they be
so often an unspeakable bore in novels? Principally, no doubt, because
our conception of a perfect man is apt to bring the negative qualities
into too great prominence; we are asked to admire men because they have
not passions--not because they overcome them. But there are further
difficulties; for example, in a novel it is generally so easy to see
what is wrong and what is right--the right-hand path branches off so
decidedly from the left, that we give a man little credit for making the
proper choice. Still more is it difficult to let us sufficiently into a
man's interior to let us see the struggle and the self-sacrifice which
ought to stir our sympathies. We witness the victories, but it is hard
to make us feel the cost at which they are won. Now, Richardson has, as
we shall directly remark, overcome this difficulty to a great extent in
Clarissa; but in Sir Charles Grandison he has entirely shirked it; he
has made everything too plain and easy for his hero. 'I think I could be
a good woman,' says Becky Sharp, 'if I had five thousand a year,'--and
the history of Sir Charles Grandison might have suggested the remark. To
be young, handsome, healthy, active, with a fine estate and a grand old
house; to be able, by your eloquence, to send a sinner into a fit (as
Sir Charles did once); to be the object of a devoted passion from three
or four amiable, accomplished, and beautiful women--each of whom has a
fine fortune, and only begs you to throw your handkerchief towards her,
whilst she promises to bear no grudge if you throw it to her
neighbour--all these are favourable conditions for virtue--especially if
you mean the virtues of being hospitable, generous, a good landlord and
husband, and in every walk of life thoroughly gentlemanlike in your
behaviour. But the whole design is rather too much in accordance with
the device in enabling Sir Charles to avoid duels by having a marvellous
trick of disarming his adversaries. 'What on earth is the use of my
fighting with you,' says King Padella to Prince Giglio, 'if you have got
a fairy sword and a fairy horse?' And what merit is there in winning the
battle of life, when you have every single circumstance in your favour?
We are more attracted by Fielding's rather questionable hero, Captain
Booth, though he does get into a sponging-house, and is anything but a
strict moralist, than by this prosperous young Sir Charles, rich with
every gift the gods can give him, and of whom the most we can say is
that the possession of all those gifts, if it has made him rather
pompous and self-conscious, has not made him close-fisted or
hard-hearted. Sir Charles, then, represents a rather carnal ideal; he
suggest to us those well-fed, almost beefy and corpulent angels, whom
the contemporary school of painters sometimes portray. No doubt they are
angels, for they have wings and are seated in the clouds; but there is
nothing ethereal in their whole nature. We have no love for asceticism;
but a few hours on the column of St. Simon Stylites, or a temporary diet
of locusts and wild honey, might have purified Sir Charles's exuberant
self-satisfaction. For all this, he is not without a certain solid
merit, and the persons by whom he is surrounded--on whom we have not
space to dwell--have a large share of the vivacity which amuses us in
the real men and women of their time. Their talk may not be equal to
that in Boswell's 'Johnson;' but it is animated and amusing, and they
compose a gallery of portraits which would look well in a solid
red-brick mansion of the Georgian era.
We must, however, leave Sir Charles, to say a few words upon that which
is Richardson's real masterpiece, and which, in spite of a full share of
the defects apparent in 'Grandison,' will always command the admiration
of persons who have courage enough to get through eight volumes of
correspondence. The characters of the little world in which the reader
will pass his time are in some cases the same who reappear in
'Grandison.' The lively Lady G. in the last is merely a new version of
Miss Howe in the former. Clarissa herself is Miss Byron under altered
circumstances, and receives from her friends the same shower of
superlatives, whenever they have occasion to touch upon her merits.
Richardson's ideal lady is not at first sight more prepossessing than
his gentleman. After Clarissa's death, her friend Miss Howe writes a
glowing panegyric on her character. It will be enough to give the
distribution of her time. To rest it seems she allotted six hours only.
Her first three morning hours were devoted to study and to writing those
terribly voluminous letters which, as one would have thought, must have
consumed a still longer period. Two hours more were given to domestic
management; for, as Miss Howe explains, 'she was a perfect mistress of
the four principal rules of arithmetic.' Five hours were spent in music,
drawing, and needlework, this last especially, and in conversation with
the venerable parson of the parish. Two hours she devoted to breakfast
and dinner; and as it was hard to restrict herself to this allowance,
she occasionally gave one hour more to dinner-time conversation. One
hour more was spent in visiting the neighbouring poor, and the remaining
four hours to supper and conversation. These periods, it seems, were not
fixed for every day; for she kept a kind of running account, and
permitted herself to have an occasional holiday by drawing upon the
reserved fund of the four hours for supper.
Setting aside the fearfully systematic nature of this arrangement--the
stern determination to live by rule and system--it must be admitted that
Miss Harlowe was what in outworn phrase was called a very 'superior'
person. She would have made an excellent housekeeper, or even a
respectable governess. We feel a certain gratitude to her for devoting
four hours to supper; and, indeed, Richardson's characters are always
well cared for in the victualling department. They always take their
solid three meals, with a liberal intercalation of dishes of tea and
chocolate. Miss Harlowe, we must add, knew Latin, although her
quotations of classical authors are generally taken from translations.
Her successor, Miss Byron, was not allowed this accomplishment,
Richardson's doubts of its suitability to ladies having apparently
gathered strength in the interval. Notwithstanding this one audacious
excursion into the regions of manly knowledge, Miss Harlowe appears to
us as, in the main, a healthy, sensible country girl, with sound sense,
the highest respect for decorum, and an exaggerated regard for
constituted, especially paternal, authority. We cannot expect, from her,
any of the outbreaks against the laws of society customary with George
Sand's heroines. If she had changed places with Maggie Tulliver, she
would have accepted the society of the 'Mill on the Floss' with perfect
contentment, respected all the family of aunts and uncles, and never
repined against the tyranny of her brother Tom. She would have been
conscious of no vague imaginative yearnings, nor have beaten herself
against the narrow bars of stolid custom. She would have laid up a vast
store of linen, and walked thankfully in the path chalked out for her.
Certainly she would never have run away with Mr. Stephen Guest without
tyranny of a much more tangible kind than that which acts only through
the finer spiritual tissues. When Clarissa went off with Lovelace, it
was not because she had unsatisfied aspirations after a higher order of
life, but because she had been locked up in her room, as a solitary
prisoner, and her family had tried to force her into marriage with a man
whom she had excellent reasons for hating and despising. The worst point
about Clarissa is one which was keenly noticed by Johnson. There is
always something, he said, which she prefers to truth. She is a little
too anxious to keep up appearances, and we desire to see more of the
natural woman.
Yet the long tragedy in which Clarissa is the victim is not the less
affecting because the torments are of an intelligible kind, and require
no highly-strung sensibility to give them keenness. The heroine is first
bullied and then deserted by her family, cut off from the friends who
have a desire to help her, and handed over to the power of an
unscrupulous libertine. When she dies of a broken heart, the most
callous and prosaic of readers must feel that it is the only release
possible for her. And in the gradual development of his plot, the slow
accumulation of horrors upon the head of a virtuous victim, Richardson
shows the power which places him in the front rank of novelists, and
finds precisely the field in which his method is most effective and its
drawbacks least annoying. In the first place, in spite of his enormous
prolixity, the interest is throughout concentrated upon one figure. In
'Sir Charles Grandison' there are episodes meant to illustrate the
virtues of the 'next-to-divine man' which have nothing to do with the
main narrative. In 'Clarissa' every subordinate plot--and they
abound--bears immediately upon the central action of the story, and
produces a constant alternation of hope and foreboding. The last
volumes, indeed, are dragged out in a way which is injurious in several
respects. Clarissa, to use Charles II.'s expression about himself, takes
an unconscionable time about dying. But until the climax is reached, we
see the clouds steadily gathering, and yet with an increasing hope that
they may be suddenly cleared up. The only English novel which produces a
similar effect, and impresses us with the sense of an inexorable fate,
slowly but steadily approaching, is the 'Bride of Lammermoor'--in some
respects the best and most artistic of Scott's novels. Superior as is
Scott's art in certain directions, we scarcely feel the same interest in
his chief characters, though there is the same unity of construction. We
cannot feel for the Master of Ravenswood the sympathy which Clarissa
extorts. For in Clarissa's profound distress we lose sight of the
narrow round of respectabilities in which her earlier life is passed;
the petty pompousness, the intense propriety which annoy us in 'Sir
Charles Grandison' disappear or become pathetic. When people are dying
of broken hearts we forget their little absurdities of costume. A more
powerful note is sounded, and the little superficial absurdities are
forgotten. We laugh at the first feminine description of her dress--a
Brussels-lace cap, with sky-blue ribbon, pale crimson-coloured paduasoy,
with cuffs embroidered in a running pattern of violets and their leaves;
but we are more disposed to cry (if many novels have not exhausted all
our powers of weeping) when we come to the final scene. 'One faded cheek
rested upon the good woman's bosom, the kindly warmth of which had
overspread it with a faint but charming flush; the other paler and
hollow, as if already iced over by death. Her hands, white as the lily,
with her meandering veins more transparently blue than ever I had seen
even hers, hanging lifelessly, one before her, the other grasped by the
right hand of the kindly widow, whose tears bedewed the sweet face which
her motherly bosom supported, though unfelt by the fair sleeper; and
either insensibly to the good woman, or what she would not disturb her
to wipe off or to change her posture. Her aspect was sweetly calm and
serene; and though she started now and then, yet her sleep seemed easy;
her breath indeed short and quick, but tolerably free, and not like that
of a dying person.' Allowing for the queer grammar, this is surely a
touching and simple picture. The epistolary method, though it has its
dangers, lends itself well to heighten our interest. Where the object is
rather to appeal to our sympathies than to give elaborate analyses of
character, or complicated narratives of incident, it is as well to let
the persons speak for themselves. A hero cannot conveniently say, like
Sir Charles Grandison, 'See how virtuous and brave and modest I am;' nor
is it easy to make a story clear when it has to be broken up and
distributed amongst people speaking from different points of view; it is
hard to make the testimonies of the different witnesses fit into each
other neatly. But a cry of agony can come from no other quarter so
effectively as from the sufferer's own mouth. 'Clarissa Harlowe' is in
fact one long lamentation, passing gradually from a tone of indignant
complaint to one of despair, and rising at the end to Christian
resignation. So prolonged a performance in every key of human misery is
indeed painful from its monotony; and we may admit that a limited
selection from the correspondence, passing through more rapid
gradations, would be more effective. We might be spared some of the
elaborate speculations upon various phases of the affair which pass away
without any permanent effect. Richardson seems to be scarcely content
even with drawing his characters as large as life; he wishes to apply a
magnifying-glass. Yet, even in this incessant repetition there is a
certain element of power. We are forced to drain every drop in the cup,
and to appreciate every ingredient which adds bitterness to its flavour.
We are annoyed and wearied at times; but as we read we not only wonder
at the number of variations performed upon one tune, but feel that he
has succeeded in thoroughly forcing upon our minds, by incessant
hammering, the impression which he desires to produce. If the blows are
not all very powerful, each blow tells. There is something impressive in
the intensity of purpose which keeps one end in view through so
elaborate a process, and the skill which forms such a multitudinous
variety of parts into one artistic whole. The proportions of this
gigantic growth are preserved with a skill which would be singular even
in the normal scale; a respect in which most giants, whether human or
literary, are apt to break down.
To make the story complete, the plot should have been as effectively
conceived as Clarissa herself, and the other characters should be
equally worthy of their position. Here there are certain drawbacks. The
plot, it might easily be shown, is utterly incredible. Richardson has
the greatest difficulty in preventing his heroine from escaping, and at
times we must not look too closely for fear of detecting the flimsy
nature of her imaginary chains. There is, indeed, no reason for looking
closely; so long as the situations bring out the desired sentiment, we
may accept them for the nonce, without asking whether they could
possibly have occurred. It is of more importance to judge of the
consistency of the chief agent in the persecution. Lovelace is by far
the most ambitious character that Richardson has attempted. To heap
together a mass of virtues, and christen the result Clarissa Harlowe or
Charles Grandison, is comparatively easy; but it is a harder task to
compose a villain, who shall be by nature a devil, and yet capable of
imposing upon an angel. Some of Richardson's judicious critics declared
that he must have been himself a man of vicious life or he could never
have described a libertine so vividly. This is one of the smart sayings
which are obviously the proper thing to say, but which, notwithstanding,
are little better than silly. Lovelace is evidently a fancy
character--if we may use the expression. He bears not a single mark of
being painted from life, and is formed by the simple process of putting
together the most brilliant qualities which his creator could devise to
meet the occasion. We do not say that the result is psychologically
impossible; for it would be very rash to dogmatise on any such question.
No one can say what strange amalgams of virtue and vice may have
sufficient stability to hold together during a journey through this
world. But it is plain that Lovelace is not a result of observation, but
an almost fantastic mixture of qualities intended to fit him for the
difficult part he has to play. To exalt Clarissa, for example,
Lovelace's family are represented as all along earnestly desirous of a
marriage between them; and Lovelace has every conceivable motive,
including the desire to avoid hanging, for agreeing to the match. His
refusal is unintelligible, and Richardson has to supply him with a
reason so absurd and so diabolical that we cannot believe in it; it
reminds us of Hamlet's objecting to killing his uncle whilst at prayers,
on the ground that it would be sending him straight to heaven. But we
may, if we please, consider Hamlet's conceit as a mere pretext invented
to excuse his irresolution to himself; whereas Lovelace speculates so
long and so seriously upon the marriage, that we are bound to consider
his far-fetched arguments as sincere. And the supposition makes his
wickedness gratuitous, if we believe in his sanity. Lovelace suffers,
again, from the same necessity which injures Sir Charles Grandison; as
the virtuous hero has to be always expatiating on his own virtues, the
vicious hero has to boast of his own vices; it is true that this is, in
an artistic sense, the least repulsive habit of the two; for it gives
reason for hating not a hero but a villain; unluckily it is also a
reason for refusing to believe in his existence. The improbability of a
thoroughpaced scoundrel writing daily elaborate confessions of his
criminality to a friend, even when the friend condemns him, expatiating
upon atrocities that deserved hanging, and justifying his vices on
principle, is rather too glaring to be admissible. And by another odd
inconsistency, Lovelace is described as being all the time a steady
believer in eternal punishment and a rebuker of sceptics--Richardson
being apparently of opinion that infidelity would be too bad to be
introduced upon the stage, though a vice might be described in detail. A
man who has broken through all moral laws might be allowed a little
free-thinking. We might add that Lovelace, in spite of the cleverness
attributed to him, is really a most imbecile schemer. The first
principle of a villain should be to tell as few lies as will serve his
purpose; but Lovelace invents such elaborate and complicated plots,
presenting so many chances of detection and introducing so many persons
into his secrets, that it is evident that in real life he would have
broken down in a week.
Granting the high improbability of Lovelace as a real living human
being, it must be admitted that he has every merit but that of
existence. The letters which he writes are the most animated in the
voluminous correspondence. The respectable domestic old printer, who
boasted of the perfect purity of his own life, seems to have thrown
himself with special gusto into the character of a heartless reprobate.
He must have felt a certain piquancy in writing down the most atrocious
sentiments in his own respectable parlour. He would show that the quiet
humdrum old tradesman could be on paper as sprightly and audacious as
the most profligate man about town. As quiet people are apt to do, he
probably exaggerated the enormities which such men would openly avow; he
fancied that the world beyond his little circle was a wilderness of wild
beasts who could gnash their teeth and show their claws after a terribly
ostentatious fashion in their own dens; they doubtless gloated upon all
the innocent sheep whom they had devoured without any shadow of
reticence. And he had a fancy that, in their way, they were amusing
monsters too; Lovelace is a lady's villain, as Grandison is a lady's
hero; he is designed by a person inexperienced even in the observation
of vice. Indeed, he would exaggerate the charm a good deal more than the
atrocity. We must also admit that when the old printer was put upon his
mettle he could be very lively indeed. Lovelace, like everybody else, is
at times unmercifully prolix; he never leaves us to guess any detail for
ourselves; but he is spirited, eloquent, and a thoroughly fine gentleman
after the Chesterfield type. 'The devil take such fine gentlemen!'
exclaims somebody; and if he does not, I see little use (to quote the
proverbial old lady) in keeping a devil. But, as Johnson observed, a man
may be very wicked and 'very genteel.' Richardson lectures us very
seriously on the evil results which are sure to follow bad courses; but
he evidently holds in his heart that, till the Nemesis descends, the
libertines are far the most amusing part of the world. In Sir Charles
Grandison's company, we should be treated to an intolerable deal of
sermonising, with an occasional descent into the regions of humour--but
the humour is always admitted under protest. With Lovelace we might hear
some very questionable morality, but there would be a never-ceasing flow
of sparkling witticisms. The devil's advocate has the laugh distinctly
on his side, whatever may be said of the argument. Finally, we may say
that Lovelace, if too obviously constructed to work the plot, certainly
works it well. When we coolly dissect him and ask whether he could ever
have existed, we may be forced to reply in the negative. But whilst we
read we forget to criticise; he seems to possess more vitality than
most living men; he is so full of eloquent brag, and audacious
sophistry, and unblushing impudence, that he fascinates us as he is
supposed to have bewildered Clarissa. The dragon who is to devour the
maiden comes with all the flash and glitter and overpowering whirl of
wings that can be desired. He seems to be irresistible--we admire him
and hate him, and some time elapses before we begin to suspect that he
is merely a stage dragon, and not one of those who really walk this
earth.
Richardson's defects are, of course, obvious enough. He cares nothing,
for example, for what we call the beauties of nature. There is scarcely
throughout his books one description showing the power of appealing to
emotions through scenery claimed by every modern scribbler. In passing
the Alps, the only remark which one of his characters has to make,
beyond describing the horrible dangers of the Mont Cenis, is that 'every
object which here presents itself is excessively miserable.' His ideal
scenery is a 'large and convenient country-house, situated in a spacious
park,' with plenty of 'fine prospects,' which you are expected to view
from a 'neat but plain villa, built in the rustic taste.' And his views
of morality are as contracted as his taste in landscapes. The most
distinctive article of his creed is that children should have a
reverence for their parents which would be exaggerated in the slave of
an Eastern despot. We can pardon Clarissa for refusing to die happy
until her stupid and ill-tempered old father has revoked a curse which
he bestowed upon her. But we cannot quite excuse Sir Charles Grandison
for writing in this fashion to his disreputable old parent, who has
asked his consent to a certain family arrangement in which he had a
legal right to be consulted:--
'As for myself,' he says, 'I cannot have one objection; but what am I in
this case? My sister is wholly my father's; I also am his. The
consideration he gives me in this instance confounds me. It binds me to
him in double duty. It would look like taking advantage of it, were I so
much as to offer my humble opinion, unless he were pleased to command it
from me.'
Even one of Richardson's abject lady-correspondents was revolted by this
exaggerated servility. But narrow as his vision might be in some
directions, his genius is not the less real. He is a curious example of
the power which a real artistic insight may exhibit under the most
disadvantageous forms. To realise his characteristic power, we should
take one of the great French novelists whom we admire for the exquisite
proportions of his story, the unity of the interest and the skill--so
unlike our common English clumsiness--with which all details are duly
subordinated. He should have, too, the comparative weakness of French
novelists, a defective perception of character, a certain unwillingness
in art as in politics to allow individual peculiarities to interfere
with the main flow of events; for, admitting the great excellence of his
minor performers, Richardson's most elaborately designed characters are
so artificial that they derive their interest from the events in which
they play their parts, rather than give interest to them--little as he
may have intended it. Then we must cause our imaginary Frenchman to
transmigrate into the body of a small, plump, weakly printer of the
eighteenth century. We may leave him a fair share of his vivacity,
though considerably narrowing his views of life and morality; but we
must surround him with a court of silly women whose incessant flatteries
must generate in him an unnatural propensity to twaddle. It is curious,
indeed, that he describes himself as writing without a plan. He compares
himself to a poor woman lying down upon the hearth to blow up a wretched
little fire of green sticks. He had to live from hand to mouth. But the
absence of an elaborate scheme is not fatal to the unity of design. He
watches, rather than designs, the development of his plot. He has so
lively a faith in his characters that, instead of laying down their
course of action, he simply watches them to see how they will act. This
makes him deliberate a little too much; they move less by impulse than
from careful reflection upon all the circumstances. Yet it also implies
an evolution of the story from the necessity of the characters in a
given situation, and gives an air of necessary deduction to the whole
scheme of his stories. All the gossiping propensities of his nature will
grow to unhealthy luxuriance, and the fine edge of his wit will be
somewhat dulled in the process. He will thus become capable of being a
bore--a thing which is impossible to any unsophisticated Frenchman. In
this way we might obtain a literary product so anomalous in appearance
as 'Clarissa'--a story in which a most affecting situation is drawn with
extreme power, and yet so overlaid with twaddle, so unmercifully
protracted and spun out as to be almost unreadable to the present
generation. But to complete Richardson, we must inoculate him with the
propensities of another school: we must give him a liberal share of the
feminine sensitiveness and closeness of observation of which Miss Austen
is the great example. And perhaps, to fill in the last details, he
ought, in addition, to have a dash of the more unctuous and offensive
variety of the dissenting preacher--for we know not where else to look
for the astonishing and often ungrammatical fluency by which he is
possessed, and which makes his best passages remind us of the marvellous
malleability of some precious metals.
Anyone who will take the trouble to work himself fairly into the story
will end by admitting Richardson's power. Sir George Trevelyan records
and corroborates a well-known anecdote told by Thackeray from Macaulay's
lips. A whole station was infected by the historian's zeal for
'Clarissa.' It worked itself up into a 'passion of excitement,' and all
the great men and their wives fought for the book, and could hardly read
it for tears. The critic must observe that Macaulay had a singular taste
for reading even the trashiest novels; and, that probably an Indian
station at that period was in respect of such reading like a thirsty
land after a long drought. For that reason it reproduced pretty
accurately the state of society in which 'Clarissa' was first read, when
there were as yet no circulating libraries, and the winter evenings were
long in the country and the back parlours of tradesmen's shops.
Probably, a person eager to enjoy Richardson's novels now would do well
to take them as his only recreation for a long holiday in a remote place
and pray for steady rain. On those conditions, he may enter into the old
spirit. And the remark may suggest one moral, for one ought not to
conclude an article upon Richardson without a moral. It is that a
purpose may be a very dangerous thing for a novelist in so far as it
leads him to try means of persuasion not appropriate to his art; but
when, as with Richardson, it implies a keen interest in an imaginary
world, a desire to set forth in the most forcible way what are the great
springs of action of human beings by showing them under appropriate
situations, then it may be a source of such power of fascination as is
exercised by the greatest writers alone.
_POPE AS A MORALIST_
The vitality of Pope's writings, or at least of certain fragments of
them, is remarkable. Few reputations have been exposed to such perils at
the hands of open enemies or of imprudent friends. In his lifetime 'the
wasp of Twickenham' could sting through a sevenfold covering of pride or
stupidity. Lady Mary and Lord Hervey writhed and retaliated with little
more success than the poor denizens of Grub Street. But it is more
remarkable that Pope seems to be stinging well into the second century
after his death. His writings resemble those fireworks which, after they
have fallen to the ground and been apparently quenched, suddenly break
out again into sputtering explosions. The waters of a literary
revolution have passed over him without putting him out. Though much of
his poetry has ceased to interest us, so many of his brilliant couplets
still survive that probably no dead writer, with the solitary exception
of Shakespeare, is more frequently quoted at the present day. It is in
vain that he is abused, ridiculed, and often declared to be no poet at
all. The school of Wordsworth regarded him as the embodiment of the
corrupting influence in English poetry; and it is only of late that we
are beginning to aim at a more catholic spirit in literary criticism. It
is not our business simply to revile or to extol the ideals of our
ancestors, but to try to understand them. The passionate partisanship
of militant schools is pardonable in the apostles of a new creed, but
when the struggle is over we must aim at saner judgments. Byron was
impelled by motives other than the purely judicial when he declared Pope
to be the 'great moral poet of all times, of all climes, of all
feelings, and of all stages of existence;' and it is not less
characteristic that Byron was at the same time helping to dethrone the
idol before which he prostrated himself. A critic whose judgments,
however wayward, are always keen and original, has more recently spoken
of Pope in terms which recall Byron's enthusiasm. 'Pope,' says Mr.
Ruskin, in one of his Oxford lectures, 'is the most perfect
representative we have since Chaucer of the true English mind;' and he
adds that his hearers will find, as they study Pope, that he has
expressed for them, 'in the strictest language, and within the briefest
limits, every law of art, of criticism, of economy, of policy, and
finally of a benevolence, humble, rational, and resigned, contented with
its allotted share of life, and trusting the problem of its salvation to
Him in whose hand lies that of the universe.' These remarks are added by
way of illustrating the relation of art to morals, and enforcing the
great principle that a noble style can only proceed from a sincere
heart. 'You can only learn to speak as these men spake by learning what
these men were.' When we ask impartially what Pope was, we may possibly
be inclined to doubt the complete soundness of the eulogy upon his
teaching. Meanwhile, however, Byron and Mr. Ruskin agree in holding up
Pope as an instance, almost as the typical instance, of that kind of
poetry which is directly intended to enforce a lofty morality. Though we
can never take either Byron or Mr. Ruskin as the representative of sweet
reasonableness, their admiration is some proof that Pope possessed great
merits as a poetical interpreter of morals. Without venturing into the
wider ocean of poetical criticism, I will endeavour to consider what was
the specific element in Pope's poetry which explains, if it does not
justify, this enthusiastic praise.
I shall venture to assume, indeed, that Pope was a genuine poet.
Perhaps, as M. Taine thinks, it is a proof of our British grossness that
we still admire the 'Rape of the Lock,' yet I must agree with most
critics that it is admirable after its kind. Pope's sylphs, as Mr. Elwin
says, are legitimate descendants from Shakespeare's fairies. True, they
have entered into rather humiliating bondage. Shakespeare's Ariel has to
fetch the midnight dew from the still-vexed Bermoothes; he delights to
fly--
To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride
On the curl'd clouds--
whereas the 'humbler province' of Pope's Ariel is 'to tend the fair'--
To steal from rainbows, ere they drop in showers,
A brighter wash; to curl their waving hairs,
Assist their blushes, and inspire their airs.
Nay, oft in dreams invention we bestow
To change a flounce or add a furbelow.
Prospero, threatening Ariel for murmuring, says 'I will
rend an oak
And peg thee in his knotty entrails, until
Thou hast howled away twelve winters.'
The fate threatened to a disobedient sprite in the later poem is that he
shall
Be stuff'd in vials, or transfixed with pins,
Or plunged in lakes of bitter washes lie,
Or wedged whole ages in a bodkin's eye.
Pope's muse--one may use the old-fashioned word in such a
connection--had left the free forest for Will's Coffee-house, and
haunted ladies' boudoirs instead of the brakes of the enchanted island.
Her wings were clogged with 'gums and pomatums,' and her 'thin essence'
had shrunk 'like a rivel'd flower.' But a delicate fancy is a delicate
fancy still, even when employed about the paraphernalia of modern life;
a truth which Byron maintained, though not in an unimpeachable form, in
his controversy with Bowles. We sometimes talk as if our ancestors were
nothing but hoops and wigs; and forget that they had a fair allowance of
human passions. And consequently we are very apt to make a false
estimate of the precise nature of that change which fairly entitles us
to call Pope's age prosaic. In showering down our epithets of
artificial, sceptical, and utilitarian, we not seldom forget what kind
of figure we are ourselves likely to make in the eyes of our own
descendants.
Whatever be the position rightly to be assigned to Pope in the British
Walhalla, his own theory has been unmistakably expressed. He boasts
That not in fancy's maze he wandered long,
But stooped to truth and moralised his song.
His theory is compressed into one of the innumerable aphorisms which
have to some degree lost their original sharpness of definition, because
they have passed, as current coinage, through so many hands.
The proper study of mankind is man.
The saying is in form nearly identical with Goethe's remark that man is
properly the only object which interests man. The two poets, indeed,
understood the doctrine in a very different way. Pope's interpretation
strikes the present generation as narrow and mechanical. He would place
such limitations upon the sphere of human interest as to exclude,
perhaps, the greatest part of what we generally mean by poetry. How
much, for example, would have to be suppressed if we sympathised with
Pope's condemnation of the works in which
Pure description holds the place of sense.
Nearly all the works of such poets as Thomson and Cowper would
disappear, Wordsworth's pages would show fearful gaps, and Keats would
be in risk of summary suppression. We may doubt whether much would be
left of Spenser, from whom both Keats and Pope, like so many other of
our poets, drew inspiration in their youth. Fairyland would be deserted,
and the poet condemned to working upon ordinary commonplaces in broad
daylight. The principle which Pope proclaimed is susceptible of the
inverse application. Poetry, as it proves, may rightly concern itself
with inanimate nature, with pure description, or with the presentation
of lovely symbols not definitely identified with any cut-and-dried saws
of moral wisdom; because there is no part of the visible universe to
which we have not some relation, and the most ethereal dreams that ever
visited a youthful poet 'on summer eve by haunted stream' are in some
sense reflections of the passions and interests that surround our daily
life. Pope, however, as the man more fitted than any other fully to
interpret the mind of his own age, inevitably gives a different
construction to a very sound maxim. He rightly assumes that man is his
proper study; but then by man he means not the genus, but a narrow
species of the human being. 'Man' means Bolingbroke, and Walpole, and
Swift, and Curll, and Theobald; it does not mean man as the product of a
long series of generations and part of the great universe of
inextricably involved forces. He cannot understand the man of distant
ages; Homer is to him not the spontaneous voice of the heroic age, but a
clever artist whose gods and heroes are consciously-constructed parts of
an artificial 'machinery.' Nature has, for him, ceased to be inhabited
by sylphs and fairies, except to amuse the fancies of fine ladies and
gentlemen, and has not yet received a new interest from the fairy tales
of science. The old ideal of chivalry merely suggests the sneers of
Cervantes, or even the buffoonery of Butler's wit, and has not undergone
restoration at the hands of modern romanticists. Politics are not
associated in his mind with any great social upheaval, but with a series
of petty squabbles for places and pensions, in which bribery is the
great moving force. What he means by religion is generally not so much
the existence of a divine element in the world as a series of bare
metaphysical demonstrations too frigid to produce enthusiasm or to
stimulate the imagination. And, therefore, he inevitably interests
himself chiefly in what is certainly a perennial source of interest--the
passions and thoughts of the men and women immediately related to
himself; and it may be remarked, in passing, that if this narrows the
range of Pope's poetry, the error is not so vital as a modern delusion
of the opposite kind. Because poetry should not be brought into too
close a contact with the prose of daily life, we sometimes seem to think
that it must have no relation to daily life at all, and consequently
convert it into a mere luxurious dreaming, where the beautiful very
speedily degenerates into the pretty or the picturesque. Because poetry
need not be always a point-blank fire of moral platitudes, we
occasionally declare that there is no connection at all between poetry
and morality, and that all art is good which is for the moment
agreeable. Such theories must end in reducing all poetry and art to be
at best more or less elegant trifling for the amusement of the indolent;
and to those who uphold them Pope's example may be of some use. If he
went too far in the direction of identifying poetry with preaching, he
was not wrong in assuming that poetry should involve preaching, though
by an indirect method. Morality and art are not independent, though not
identical. Both, as Mr. Ruskin urges in the passage just quoted, are
only admirable when the expression of healthful and noble natures. But,
without discussing that thorny problem and certainly without committing
myself to an approval of Mr. Ruskin's solution, I am content to look at
it for the time from Pope's stand-point.
Taking Pope's view of his poetical office, there remain considerable
difficulties in estimating the value of the lesson which he taught with
so much energy. The difficulties result both from that element which was
common to his contemporaries and from that which was supplied by Pope's
own idiosyncrasies. The commonplaces in which Pope takes such infinite
delight have become very stale for us. Assuming their perfect sincerity,
we cannot understand how anybody should have thought of enforcing them
with such amazing emphasis. We constantly feel a shock like that which
surprises the reader of Young's 'Night Thoughts' when he finds it
asserted, in all the pomp of blank verse, that
Procrastination is the thief of time.
The maxim has rightly been consigned to copy-books. And a great deal of
Pope's moralising is of the same order. We do not want denunciations of
misers. Nobody at the present day keeps gold in an old stocking. When
we read the observation,
'Tis strange the miser should his cares employ
To gain the riches he can ne'er enjoy,
we can only reply that we have heard something like it before. In fact,
we cannot place ourselves in the position of men at the time when modern
society was first definitely emerging from the feudal state, and
everybody was sufficiently employed in gossiping about his neighbours.
We are perplexed by the extreme interest with which they dwell upon the
little series of obvious remarks which have been worked to death by
later writers. Pope, for example, is still wondering over the first
appearance of one of the most familiar of modern inventions. He
exclaims,
Blest paper credit! last and best supply!
That lends corruption lighter wings to fly!
He points out, with an odd superfluity of illustration, that bank-notes
enable a man to be bribed much more easily than of old. There is no
danger, he says, that a patriot will be exposed by a guinea dropping out
of his pocket at the end of an interview with the minister; and he shows
how awkward it would be if a statesman had to take his bribes in kind,
and his servants should proclaim,
Sir, Spain has sent a thousand jars of oil;
Huge bales of British cloth blockade the door;
A hundred oxen at your levees roar.
This, however, was natural enough when the South Sea scheme was for the
first time illustrating the powers and the dangers of extended credit.
To us, who are beginning to fit our experience of commercial panics into
a scientific theory, the wonder expressed by Pope sounds like the
exclamations of a savage over a Tower musket. And in the sphere of
morals it is pretty much the same. All those reflections about the
little obvious vanities and frivolities of social life which supplied
two generations of British essayists, from the 'Tatler' to the
'Lounger,' with an inexhaustible fund of mild satire, have lost their
freshness. Our own modes of life have become so complex by comparison,
that we pass over these mere elements to plunge at once into more
refined speculations. A modern essayist starts where Addison or Johnson
left off. He assumes that his readers know that procrastination is an
evil, and tries to gain a little piquancy by paradoxically pointing out
the objections to punctuality. Character, of course, becomes more
complex, and requires more delicate modes of analysis. Compare, for
example, the most delicate of Pope's delineations with one of Mr.
Browning's elaborate psychological studies. Remember how many pages of
acute observation are required to set forth Bishop Blougram's peculiar
phase of worldliness, and then turn to Pope's descriptions of Addison,
or Wharton, or Buckingham. Each of those descriptions is, indeed, a
masterpiece in its way; the language is inimitably clear and pointed;
but the leading thought is obvious, and leads to no intricate problems.
Addison--assuming Pope's Addison to be the real Addison--might be
cold-blooded and jealous; but he had not worked out that elaborate
machinery for imposing upon himself and others which is required in a
more critical age. He wore a mask, but a mask of simple construction;
not one of those complex contrivances of modern invention which are so
like the real skin that it requires the acuteness and patience of a
scientific observer to detect the difference and point out the nature of
the deception. The moral difference between an Addison and a Blougram
is as great as the difference between an old stage-coach and a
steam-engine, or between the bulls and bears which first received the
name in Law's time and their descendants on the New York Stock Exchange.
If, therefore, Pope gains something in clearness and brilliancy by the
comparative simplicity of his art, he loses by the extreme obviousness
of its results. We cannot give him credit for being really moved by such
platitudes. We have the same feeling as when a modern preacher employs
twenty minutes in proving that it is wrong to worship idols of wood and
stone. But, unfortunately, there is a reason more peculiar to Pope which
damps our sympathy still more decidedly. Recent investigations have
strengthened those suspicions of his honesty which were common even
amongst his contemporaries. Mr. Elwin was (very excusably) disgusted by
the revelations of his hero's baseness, till his indignation became a
painful burden to himself and his readers. Speaking bluntly, indeed, we
admit that lying is a vice, and that Pope was in a small way one of the
most consummate liars that ever lived. He speaks himself of
'equivocating pretty genteelly' in regard to one of his peccadilloes.
Pope's equivocation is to the equivocation of ordinary men what a
tropical fern is to the stunted representatives of the same species in
England. It grows until the fowls of the air can rest on its branches.
His mendacity in short amounts to a monomania. That a man with intensely
irritable nerves, and so fragile in constitution that his life might,
without exaggeration, be called a 'long disease,' should defend himself
by the natural weapons of the weak, equivocation and subterfuge, when
exposed to the brutal horseplay common in that day, is indeed not
surprising. But Pope's delight in artifice was something unparalleled.
He could hardly drink tea without 'a stratagem,' or, as Lady Bolingbroke
put it, was a politician abou
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/20459