VII.
It is good to have the magic door shut behind us. On the other
side of that door are the world and its troubles, hopes and fears,
headaches and heartaches, ambitions and disappointments; but within,
as you lie back on the green settee, and face the long lines of your
silent soothing comrades, there is only peace of spirit and rest
of mind in the company of the great dead. Learn to love, learn to
admire them; learn to know what their comradeship means; for until
you have done so the greatest solace and anodyne God has given to
man have not yet shed their blessing upon you. Here behind this
magic door is the rest house, where you may forget the past, enjoy
the present, and prepare for the future.
You who have sat with me before upon the green settee are familiar
with the upper shelf, with the tattered Macaulay, the dapper Gibbon,
the drab Boswell, the olive-green Scott, the pied Borrow, and all
the goodly company who rub shoulders yonder. By the way, how one
wishes that one's dear friends would only be friends also with each
other. Why should Borrow snarl so churlishly at Scott? One would
have thought that noble spirit and romantic fancy would have charmed
the huge vagrant, and yet there is no word too bitter for the
younger man to use towards the elder. The fact is that Borrow had
one dangerous virus in him--a poison which distorts the whole
vision--for he was a bigoted sectarian in religion, seeing no virtue
outside his own interpretation of the great riddle. Downright
heathendom, the blood-stained Berserk or the chaunting Druid,
appealed to his mind through his imagination, but the man of his
own creed and time who differed from him in minutiae of ritual, or
in the interpretation of mystic passages, was at once evil to the
bone, and he had no charity of any sort for such a person. Scott
therefore, with his reverent regard for old usages, became at once
hateful in his eyes. In any case he was a disappointed man, the big
Borrow, and I cannot remember that he ever had much to say that was
good of any brother author. Only in the bards of Wales and in the
Scalds of the Sagas did he seem to find his kindred spirits, though
it has been suggested that his complex nature took this means of
informing the world that he could read both Cymric and Norse. But we
must not be unkind behind the magic door--and yet to be charitable
to the uncharitable is surely the crown of virtue.
So much for the top line, concerning which I have already gossipped
for six sittings, but there is no surcease for you, reader, for as
you see there is a second line, and yet a third, all equally dear to
my heart, and all appealing in the same degree to my emotions and
to my memory. Be as patient as you may, while I talk of these old
friends, and tell you why I love them, and all that they have meant
to me in the past. If you picked any book from that line you would
be picking a little fibre also from my mind, very small, no doubt,
and yet an intimate and essential part of what is now myself.
Hereditary impulses, personal experiences, books--those are the
three forces which go to the making of man. These are the books.
This second line consists, as you see, of novelists of the
eighteenth century, or those of them whom I regard as essential.
After all, putting aside single books, such as Sterne's "Tristram
Shandy," Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield," and Miss Burney's
"Evelina," there are only three authors who count, and they in turn
wrote only three books each, of first-rate importance, so that by
the mastery of nine books one might claim to have a fairly broad
view of this most important and distinctive branch of English
literature. The three men are, of course, Fielding, Richardson, and
Smollett. The books are: Richardson's "Clarissa Harlowe," "Pamela,"
and "Sir Charles Grandison"; Fielding's "Tom Jones", "Joseph
Andrews," and "Amelia"; Smollett's "Peregrine Pickle," "Humphrey
Clinker," and "Roderick Random." There we have the real work of
the three great contemporaries who illuminated the middle of
the eighteenth century--only nine volumes in all. Let us walk
round these nine volumes, therefore, and see whether we cannot
discriminate and throw a little light, after this interval of a
hundred and fifty years, upon their comparative aims, and how far
they have justified them by the permanent value of their work. A fat
little bookseller in the City, a rakehell wit of noble blood, and
a rugged Scotch surgeon from the navy--those are the three strange
immortals who now challenge a comparison--the three men who dominate
the fiction of their century, and to whom we owe it that the life
and the types of that century are familiar to us, their fifth
generation.
It is not a subject to be dogmatic upon, for I can imagine that
these three writers would appeal quite differently to every
temperament, and that whichever one might desire to champion one
could find arguments to sustain one's choice. Yet I cannot think
that any large section of the critical public could maintain that
Smollett was on the same level as the other two. Ethically he is
gross, though his grossness is accompanied by a full-blooded humour
which is more mirth-compelling than the more polished wit of his
rivals. I can remember in callow boyhood--puris omnia pura--reading
"Peregrine Pickle," and laughing until I cried over the Banquet in
the Fashion of the Ancients. I read it again in my manhood with the
same effect, though with a greater appreciation of its inherent
bestiality. That merit, a gross primitive merit, he has in a high
degree, but in no other respect can he challenge comparison with
either Fielding or Richardson. His view of life is far more limited,
his characters less varied, his incidents less distinctive, and his
thoughts less deep. Assuredly I, for one, should award him the third
place in the trio.
But how about Richardson and Fielding? There is indeed a competition
of giants. Let us take the points of each in turn, and then compare
them with each other.
There is one characteristic, the rarest and subtlest of all, which
each of them had in a supreme degree. Each could draw the most
delightful women--the most perfect women, I think, in the whole
range of our literature. If the eighteenth-century women were like
that, then the eighteenth-century men got a great deal more than
they ever deserved. They had such a charming little dignity of their
own, such good sense, and yet such dear, pretty, dainty ways, so
human and so charming, that even now they become our ideals. One
cannot come to know them without a double emotion, one of respectful
devotion towards themselves, and the other of abhorrence for the
herd of swine who surrounded them. Pamela, Harriet Byron, Clarissa,
Amelia, and Sophia Western were all equally delightful, and it was
not the negative charm of the innocent and colourless woman, the
amiable doll of the nineteenth century, but it was a beauty of
nature depending upon an alert mind, clear and strong principles,
true womanly feelings, and complete feminine charm. In this respect
our rival authors may claim a tie, for I could not give a preference
to one set of these perfect creatures over another. The plump little
printer and the worn-out man-about-town had each a supreme woman in
his mind.
But their men! Alas, what a drop is there! To say that we are all
capable of doing what Tom Jones did--as I have seen stated--is the
worst form of inverted cant, the cant which makes us out worse than
we are. It is a libel on mankind to say that a man who truly loves
a woman is usually false to her, and, above all, a libel that he
should be false in the vile fashion which aroused good Tom Newcome's
indignation. Tom Jones was no more fit to touch the hem of Sophia's
dress than Captain Booth was to be the mate of Amelia. Never once
has Fielding drawn a gentleman, save perhaps Squire Alworthy. A
lusty, brawling, good-hearted, material creature was the best that
he could fashion. Where, in his heroes, is there one touch of
distinction, of spirituality, of nobility? Here I think that the
plebeian printer has done very much better than the aristocrat.
Sir Charles Grandison is a very noble type--spoiled a little by
over-coddling on the part of his creator, perhaps, but a very
high-souled and exquisite gentleman all the same. Had _he_ married
Sophia or Amelia I should not have forbidden the banns. Even the
persevering Mr. B--- and the too amorous Lovelace were, in spite of
their aberrations, men of gentle nature, and had possibilities of
greatness and tenderness within them. Yes, I cannot doubt that
Richardson drew the higher type of man--and that in Grandison he
has done what has seldom or never been bettered.
Richardson was also the subtler and deeper writer, in my opinion. He
concerns himself with fine consistent character-drawing, and with a
very searching analysis of the human heart, which is done so easily,
and in such simple English, that the depth and truth of it only
come upon reflection. He condescends to none of those scuffles and
buffetings and pantomime rallies which enliven, but cheapen, many
of Fielding's pages. The latter has, it may be granted, a broader
view of life. He had personal acquaintance of circles far above, and
also far below, any which the douce citizen, who was his rival, had
ever been able or willing to explore. His pictures of low London
life, the prison scenes in "Amelia," the thieves' kitchens in
"Jonathan Wild," the sponging houses and the slums, are as vivid
and as complete as those of his friend Hogarth--the most British
of artists, even as Fielding was the most British of writers. But
the greatest and most permanent facts of life are to be found in
the smallest circles. Two men and a woman may furnish either the
tragedian or the comedian with the most satisfying theme. And so,
although his range was limited, Richardson knew very clearly and
very thoroughly just that knowledge which was essential for his
purpose. Pamela, the perfect woman of humble life, Clarissa, the
perfect lady, Grandison the ideal gentleman--these were the three
figures on which he lavished his most loving art. And now, after
one hundred and fifty years, I do not know where we may find more
satisfying types.
He was prolix, it may be admitted, but who could bear to have him
cut? He loved to sit down and tell you just all about it. His use of
letters for his narratives made this gossipy style more easy. First
_he_ writes and he tells all that passed. You have his letter. _She_
at the same time writes to her friend, and also states her views.
This also you see. The friends in each case reply, and you have the
advantage of their comments and advice. You really do know all about
it before you finish. It may be a little wearisome at first, if you
have been accustomed to a more hustling style with fireworks in
every chapter. But gradually it creates an atmosphere in which you
live, and you come to know these people, with their characters and
their troubles, as you know no others of the dream-folk of fiction.
Three times as long as an ordinary book, no doubt, but why grudge
the time? What is the hurry? Surely it is better to read one
masterpiece than three books which will leave no permanent
impression on the mind.
It was all attuned to the sedate life of that, the last of the quiet
centuries. In the lonely country-house, with few letters and fewer
papers, do you suppose that the readers ever complained of the
length of a book, or could have too much of the happy Pamela or of
the unhappy Clarissa? It is only under extraordinary circumstances
that one can now get into that receptive frame of mind which was
normal then. Such an occasion is recorded by Macaulay, when he tells
how in some Indian hill station, where books were rare, he let loose
a copy of "Clarissa." The effect was what might have been expected.
Richardson in a suitable environment went through the community
like a mild fever. They lived him, and dreamed him, until the whole
episode passed into literary history, never to be forgotten by those
who experienced it. It is tuned, for every ear. That beautiful style
is so correct and yet so simple that there is no page which a
scholar may not applaud nor a servant-maid understand.
Of course, there are obvious disadvantages to the tale which is told
in letters. Scott reverted to it in "Guy Mannering," and there are
other conspicuous successes, but vividness is always gained at the
expense of a strain upon the reader's good-nature and credulity. One
feels that these constant details, these long conversations, could
not possibly have been recorded in such a fashion. The indignant and
dishevelled heroine could not sit down and record her escape with
such cool minuteness of description. Richardson does it as well as
it could be done, but it remains intrinsically faulty. Fielding,
using the third person, broke all the fetters which bound his rival,
and gave a freedom and personal authority to the novel which it had
never before enjoyed. There at least he is the master.
And yet, on the whole, my balance inclines towards Richardson,
though I dare say I am one in a hundred in thinking so. First of
all, beyond anything I may have already urged, he had the supreme
credit of having been the first. Surely the originator should have
a higher place than the imitator, even if in imitating he should
also improve and amplify. It is Richardson and not Fielding who is
the father of the English novel, the man who first saw that without
romantic gallantry, and without bizarre imaginings, enthralling
stories may be made from everyday life, told in everyday language.
This was his great new departure. So entirely was Fielding his
imitator, or rather perhaps his parodist, that with supreme audacity
(some would say brazen impudence) he used poor Richardson's own
characters, taken from "Pamela," in his own first novel, "Joseph
Andrews," and used them too for the unkind purpose of ridiculing
them. As a matter of literary ethics, it is as if Thackeray wrote
a novel bringing in Pickwick and Sam Weller in order to show what
faulty characters these were. It is no wonder that even the gentle
little printer grew wroth, and alluded to his rival as a somewhat
unscrupulous man.
And then there is the vexed question of morals. Surely in talking
of this also there is a good deal of inverted cant among a certain
class of critics. The inference appears to be that there is some
subtle connection between immorality and art, as if the handling of
the lewd, or the depicting of it, were in some sort the hallmark of
the true artist. It is not difficult to handle or depict. On the
contrary, it is so easy, and so essentially dramatic in many of its
forms, that the temptation to employ it is ever present. It is the
easiest and cheapest of all methods of creating a spurious effect.
The difficulty does not lie in doing it. The difficulty lies in
avoiding it. But one tries to avoid it because on the face of it
there is no reason why a writer should cease to be a gentleman,
or that he should write for a woman's eyes that which he would be
justly knocked down for having said in a woman's ears. But "you
must draw the world as it is." Why must you? Surely it is just in
selection and restraint that the artist is shown. It is true that in
a coarser age great writers heeded no restrictions, but life itself
had fewer restrictions then. We are of our own age, and must live
up to it.
But must these sides of life be absolutely excluded? By no means.
Our decency need not weaken into prudery. It all lies in the spirit
in which it is done. No one who wished to lecture on these various
spirits could preach on a better text than these three great rivals,
Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett. It is possible to draw vice with
some freedom for the purpose of condemning it. Such a writer is a
moralist, and there is no better example than Richardson. Again, it
is possible to draw vice with neither sympathy nor disapprobation,
but simply as a fact which is there. Such a writer is a realist, and
such was Fielding. Once more, it is possible to draw vice in order
to extract amusement from it. Such a man is a coarse humorist, and
such was Smollett. Lastly, it is possible to draw vice in order to
show sympathy with it. Such a man is a wicked man, and there were
many among the writers of the Restoration. But of all reasons that
exist for treating this side of life, Richardson's were the best,
and nowhere do we find it more deftly done.
Apart from his writings, there must have been something very noble
about Fielding as a man. He was a better hero than any that he drew.
Alone he accepted the task of cleansing London, at that time the
most dangerous and lawless of European capitals. Hogarth's pictures
give some notion of it in the pre-Fielding days, the low roughs,
the high-born bullies, the drunkenness, the villainies, the thieves'
kitchens with their riverside trapdoors, down which the body is
thrust. This was the Augean stable which had to be cleaned, and
poor Hercules was weak and frail and physically more fitted for a
sick-room than for such a task. It cost him his life, for he died at
47, worn out with his own exertions. It might well have cost him his
life in more dramatic fashion, for he had become a marked man to
the criminal classes, and he headed his own search-parties when, on
the information of some bribed rascal, a new den of villainy was
exposed. But he carried his point. In little more than a year the
thing was done, and London turned from the most rowdy to what it has
ever since remained, the most law-abiding of European capitals. Has
any man ever left a finer monument behind him?
If you want the real human Fielding you will find him not in the
novels, where his real kindliness is too often veiled by a mock
cynicism, but in his "Diary of his Voyage to Lisbon." He knew
that his health was irretrievably ruined and that his years were
numbered. Those are the days when one sees a man as he is, when he
has no longer a motive for affectation or pretence in the immediate
presence of the most tremendous of all realities. Yet, sitting in
the shadow of death, Fielding displayed a quiet, gentle courage and
constancy of mind, which show how splendid a nature had been
shrouded by his earlier frailties.
Just one word upon another eighteenth-century novel before I finish
this somewhat didactic chat. You will admit that I have never prosed
so much before, but the period and the subject seem to encourage
it. I skip Sterne, for I have no great sympathy with his finicky
methods. And I skip Miss Burney's novels, as being feminine
reflections of the great masters who had just preceded her. But
Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield" surely deserves one paragraph to
itself. There is a book which is tinged throughout, as was all
Goldsmith's work, with a beautiful nature. No one who had not a fine
heart could have written it, just as no one without a fine heart
could have written "The Deserted Village." How strange it is to
think of old Johnson patronizing or snubbing the shrinking Irishman,
when both in poetry, in fiction, and in the drama the latter has
proved himself far the greater man. But here is an object-lesson of
how the facts of life may be treated without offence. Nothing is
shirked. It is all faced and duly recorded. Yet if I wished to set
before the sensitive mind of a young girl a book which would prepare
her for life without in any way contaminating her delicacy of
feeling, there is no book which I should choose so readily as "The
Vicar of Wakefield."
So much for the eighteenth-century novelists. They have a shelf of
their own in the case, and a corner of their own in my brain. For
years you may never think of them, and then suddenly some stray word
or train of thought leads straight to them, and you look at them
and love them, and rejoice that you know them. But let us pass to
something which may interest you more.
If statistics could be taken in the various free libraries of the
kingdom to prove the comparative popularity of different novelists
with the public, I think that it is quite certain that Mr. George
Meredith would come out very low indeed. If, on the other hand,
a number of authors were convened to determine which of their
fellow-craftsmen they considered the greatest and the most
stimulating to their own minds, I am equally confident that Mr.
Meredith would have a vast preponderance of votes. Indeed, his only
conceivable rival would be Mr. Hardy. It becomes an interesting
study, therefore, why there should be such a divergence of opinion
as to his merits, and what the qualities are which have repelled
so many readers, and yet have attracted those whose opinion must
be allowed to have a special weight.
The most obvious reason is his complete unconventionality. The
public read to be amused. The novelist reads to have new light
thrown upon his art. To read Meredith is not a mere amusement; it is
an intellectual exercise, a kind of mental dumb-bell with which you
develop your thinking powers. Your mind is in a state of tension the
whole time that you are reading him.
If you will follow my nose as the sportsman follows that of his
pointer, you will observe that these remarks are excited by the
presence of my beloved "Richard Feverel," which lurks in yonder
corner. What a great book it is, how wise and how witty! Others of
the master's novels may be more characteristic or more profound, but
for my own part it is the one which I would always present to the
new-comer who had not yet come under the influence. I think that I
should put it third after "Vanity Fair" and "The Cloister and the
Hearth" if I had to name the three novels which I admire most in the
Victorian era. The book was published, I believe, in 1859, and it is
almost incredible, and says little for the discrimination of critics
or public, that it was nearly twenty years before a second edition
was needed.
But there are never effects without causes, however inadequate
the cause may be. What was it that stood in the way of the book's
success? Undoubtedly it was the style. And yet it is subdued and
tempered here with little of the luxuriance and exuberance which
it attained in the later works. But it was an innovation, and it
stalled off both the public and the critics. They regarded it, no
doubt, as an affectation, as Carlyle's had been considered twenty
years before, forgetting that in the case of an original genius
style is an organic thing, part of the man as much as the colour of
his eyes. It is not, to quote Carlyle, a shirt to be taken on and
off at pleasure, but a skin, eternally fixed. And this strange,
powerful style, how is it to be described? Best, perhaps, in his
own strong words, when he spoke of Carlyle with perhaps the arriere
pensee that the words would apply as strongly to himself.
"His favourite author," says he, "was one writing on heroes in a
style resembling either early architecture or utter dilapidation, so
loose and rough it seemed. A wind-in-the-orchard style that tumbled
down here and there an appreciable fruit with uncouth bluster,
sentences without commencements running to abrupt endings and smoke,
like waves against a sea-wall, learned dictionary words giving a
hand to street slang, and accents falling on them haphazard, like
slant rays from driving clouds; all the pages in a breeze, the whole
book producing a kind of electrical agitation in the mind and joints."
What a wonderful description and example of style! And how vivid
is the impression left by such expressions as "all the pages in a
breeze." As a comment on Carlyle, and as a sample of Meredith, the
passage is equally perfect.
Well, "Richard Feverel" has come into its own at last. I confess to
having a strong belief in the critical discernment of the public. I
do not think good work is often overlooked. Literature, like water,
finds its true level. Opinion is slow to form, but it sets true at
last. I am sure that if the critics were to unite to praise a bad
book or to damn a good one they could (and continually do) have
a five-year influence, but it would in no wise affect the final
result. Sheridan said that if all the fleas in his bed had been
unanimous, they could have pushed him out of it. I do not think
that any unanimity of critics has ever pushed a good book out of
literature.
Among the minor excellences of "Richard Feverel"--excuse the
prolixity of an enthusiast--are the scattered aphorisms which are
worthy of a place among our British proverbs. What could be more
exquisite than this, "Who rises from prayer a better man his prayer
is answered"; or this, "Expediency is man's wisdom. Doing right is
God's"; or, "All great thoughts come from the heart"? Good are the
words "The coward amongst us is he who sneers at the failings of
humanity," and a healthy optimism rings in the phrase "There is for
the mind but one grasp of happiness; from that uppermost pinnacle
of wisdom whence we see that this world is well designed." In more
playful mood is "Woman is the last thing which will be civilized by
man." Let us hurry away abruptly, for he who starts quotation from
"Richard Feverel" is lost.
He has, as you see, a goodly line of his brothers beside him. There
are the Italian ones, "Sandra Belloni," and "Vittoria"; there is
"Rhoda Fleming," which carried Stevenson off his critical feet;
"Beauchamp's Career," too, dealing with obsolete politics. No great
writer should spend himself upon a temporary theme. It is like the
beauty who is painted in some passing fashion of gown. She tends
to become obsolete along with her frame. Here also is the dainty
"Diana," the egoist with immortal Willoughby Pattern, eternal type
of masculine selfishness, and "Harry Richmond," the first chapters
of which are, in my opinion, among the finest pieces of narrative
prose in the language. That great mind would have worked in any form
which his age had favoured. He is a novelist by accident. As an
Elizabethan he would have been a great dramatist; under Queen Anne
a great essayist. But whatever medium he worked in, he must equally
have thrown the image of a great brain and a great soul.
