Table of Contents for The English Novel by George Saintsbury

  CHAPTER III - THE FOUR WHEELS OF THE NOVEL WAIN

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

Smollett (1721-1771) differed from his two predecessors in being a Scotsman:  but in family was very much nearer to Fielding than to Richardson, being the grandson of a judge who was a Commissioner of the Union, and a gentleman of birth and property ­which last would, had he lived long enough, have come to Smollett himself.  But he suffered in his youth from some indistinctly known family jars, was apprenticed to a Glasgow surgeon, and escaping thence to London with a tragedy in his pocket, was in undoubted difficulties till (and after) he obtained the post of surgeon’s mate on board a man-of-war, and took part in the Carthagena expedition.  After coming home he made at least some attempts to practise:  but was once more drawn off to literature, though fortunately not to tragedy.  For the rest of his life he was a hard-worked but by no means ill-paid journalist, novelist, and miscellanist, making as much as L2000 by his History of England, not ill-written, though now never read.  Like Fielding (though, unlike him, more than once) he went abroad in search of health and died in the quest at Leghorn.  Smollett was not ignorant, but he seems to have known modern languages better than ancient:  though there is doubt about his direct share in the translations to which he gave his name.  Moreover he had some though no great skill in verse.

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

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

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

              “by the wise ones,     By the grave and the precise ones.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “Reconciles the new perverted man,”

to adapt the last line of A Lover’s Complaint to the situation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the time was coming, though it did not (and could hardly) come very quickly, when Fielding was to discard all kinds of adventitious aids and suggestions ­all crutches, spring-boards, go-carts, tugs, patterns, tracings ­and go his own way ­and the Way of the Novel ­with no guidance but something of the example of Cervantes directly and Shakespeare indirectly among the moderns, and of the poetic fiction-writers of old.  It is perfectly clear that he had thought widely (and perhaps had read not a little) on the subject of literary criticism, in a sense not common in his day, and that the thinking had led him to a conception of the “prose epic” which, though it might have been partly (not wholly by any means) pieced out of the Italian and Spanish critics of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, had never been worked out as a complete theory, much less applied in practice and to prose.  The Prose Epic aims at ­and in Fielding’s case has been generally admitted to have hit ­something like the classical unity of main action.  But it borrows from the romance-idea the liberty of a large accretion and divagation of minor and accessory plot: ­not the mere “episode” of the ancients, but the true minor plot of Shakespeare.  It assumes, necessarily and once for all, the licence of tragi-comedy, in that sense of the term in which Much Ado About Nothing and A Winter’s Tale are tragi-comedies, and in which Othello itself might have been made one.  And it follows further in the wake of the Shakespearean drama by insisting far more largely than ancient literature of any kind, and far more than any modern up to its date except drama had done, on the importance of Character.  Description and dialogue are rather subordinate to these things than on a level with them ­but they are still further worked out than before.  And there is a new element ­perhaps suggested by the parabasis of ancient comedy, but, it may be, more directly by the peculiar method of Swift in A Tale of a Tub.  At various places in his narrative, but especially at the beginnings of books and chapters, Fielding as it were “calls a halt” and addresses his readers on matters more or less relevant to the story, but rather in the manner of a commentator and scholiast upon it than as actual parts of it.  Of this more later:  for the immediate purpose is to survey and not to criticise.

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

Such things are, however (in the admirable French sense), misères ­wretched petty cavils and shallows of criticism.  The only sensible thing to do is to launch out with Fielding into that deep and open sea of human character and fate which he dared so gloriously.  During the curious phase of literary opinion which the last twenty years or so have seen, it has apparently been discovered by some people that his scheme of human thought and feeling is too simple ­“toylike” I think they call it ­in comparison with that, say, of Count Tolstoi or of Mr. Meredith, that modern practice has reached a finer technique than his or even than that of his greatest follower, Thackeray.  Far be it from the present writer to say, or to insinuate, anything disrespectful of the great moderns who have lately left us.  Yet it may be said without the slightest disrespect to them that the unfavourable comparison is mainly a revival of Johnson’s mistake as to Fielding and Richardson.  It is, however, something more ­for it comes also from a failure to estimate aright the parabasis-openings which have been more than once referred to.  These passages do not perhaps exhibit the by-work and the process in the conspicuous skeleton-clock fashion which their critics admire and desire, but they contain an amount of acute and profound exploration of human nature which it would be difficult to match and impossible to surpass elsewhere:  while the results of Fielding’s working, of his “toylike” scheme, are remarkable toys indeed ­toys which, if we regard them as such, must surely strike us as rather uncanny.  One is sometimes constrained to think that it is perhaps not much more difficult to make than to recognise a thoroughly live character.  It certainly must be very difficult to do the latter if there is any considerable number of persons who are unable to do it in the case of almost every one of the personages of Tom Jones.  With one possible exception they are all alive ­even more so than those of Joseph Andrews and with a less peculiar and limited liveliness than those of Jonathan Wild.  But it certainly is curious that as the one good man of Jonathan, Heartfree, is the least alive of its personages, so the one bad man of Tom, Blifil, occupies the same position.

The result of this variety and abundance of life is an even more than corresponding opportunity for enjoyment.  This enjoyment may arise in different persons from different sources.  The much praised and seldom cavilled at unity and completeness of the story may appeal to some.  There are others who are inclined towards elaborate plots as Sam Weller was to the “‘rig’nal” of his subpoena.  It was a “gratifyin’ sort o’ thing, and eased his mind” to be aware of its existence, and that was all.  These latter find their sources of enjoyment elsewhere, but everywhere else.  The abundance and the vividness of character-presentation; the liveliness and the abundance of the staging of that character; the variety of scene and incident ­all most properly connected with the plot, but capable of existing and of being felt without it; the human dialogue; the admirable phrase in that dialogue and out of it, in the digressions, in the narrative, above, and through, and about, and below it all ­these things and others (for it is practically impossible to exhaust the catalogue) fill up the cup to the brim, and keep it full, for the born lover of the special novel-pleasure.

In one point only was Fielding a little unfortunate perhaps:  and even here the “perhaps” has to be underlined.  He came just before the end of a series of almost imperceptible changes in ordinary English speech which brought about something like a stationary state.  His maligner and only slightly younger contemporary, Horace Walpole, in some of his letters, writes in a fashion which, putting mere slang aside, has hardly any difference from that of to-day.  Fielding still uses “hath” for “has” and a few other things which seem archaic, not to students of literature but to the general.  In the same way dress, manners, etc., though much more picturesque, were by that fact distinguished from those of almost the whole nineteenth century and the twentieth as far as it has gone:  while incidents were, even in ordinary life, still usual which have long ceased to be so.  In this way the immense advance ­greater than was made by any one else till Miss Austen ­that he made in the pure novel of this ordinary life may be missed.  But the intrinsic magnificence, interest, nature, abundance of Tom Jones can only be missed by those who were predestined to miss them.  It is tempting ­but the temptation must be resisted ­to enliven these pages with an abstract of its astonishing “biograph-panorama.”  But nothing save itself can do it justice.  “Take and read” is the only wise advice.

No such general agreement has been reached in respect of Fielding’s last novel, Amelia.  The author’s great adversary, Johnson ­an adversary whose hostility was due partly to generous and grateful personal relations with Richardson, partly to political disagreement (for Fielding was certainly “a vile Whig"), but most of all perhaps to a sort of horrified recoil from the novelist’s easy handling of temptations which were no easy matter to his critic ­was nearly if not quite propitiated by it:  and the enthusiasm for it of such a “cynic” as Thackeray is well known.  Of the very few persons whom it would not be ridiculous to name with these, Scott ­whose competence in criticising his own art is one of the most wonderful though the least generally recognised things about him ­inclines, in the interesting Introduction-Dialogue to The Fortunes of Nigel, to put it on a level with Tom Jones itself as a perfectly constructed novel.  But modern criticism has, rightly or wrongly, been more dubious.  Amelia is almost too perfect:  her very forgiveness (it has been suggested) would be more interesting if she had not almost completely shut her eyes to there being anything to forgive.  Her husband seems to us to prolong the irresponsibility of youth, which was pardonable in Tom, to a period of life and to circumstances of enforced responsibility which make us rather decline to honour the drafts he draws; and he is also a little bit of a fool, which Tom, to do him justice, is not, though he is something of a scatterbrain.  Dr. Harrison, whose alternate wrath and reconciliation supply the most important springs of the plot, is, though a natural, a rather unreasonable person.  The “total impression” has even been pronounced by some people to be a little dull.  What there is of truth in these criticisms and others (which it would be long even to summarise) may perhaps be put briefly under two heads.  It is never so easy to arouse interest in virtue as it is in vice:  or in weak and watered vice as in vice rectified (or unrectified) to full strength.  And the old requirement of “the quest” is one which will hardly be dispensed with.  Here (for we know perfectly well that Amelia’s virtue is in no danger) there is no quest, except that of the fortune which ought to be hers, which at last comes to her husband, and which we are told (and hope rather doubtfully) that husband had at last been taught ­by the Fool’s Tutor, Experience ­not utterly to throw away.  But this fortune drops in half casually at the last by a series of stage accidents, not ill-machined by any means, but not very particularly interesting.

Such, however, are the criticisms which Fielding himself has taught people to make, by the very excellence of his success in the earlier novels:  and there is a certain comparative and relative validity in them.  But consider Amelia in itself, and they begin to look, if not positively unfounded, rather unimportant.  Once more, the astonishing truth and variety of scene and character make themselves felt ­even more felt ­even felt in new directions.  The opening prison scenes exceed anything earlier even in Fielding himself, much more in any one else, as examples of the presentation of the unfamiliar.  Miss Matthews ­whom Fielding has probably abstained from working out as much as he might lest she should, from the literary point of view, obscure Amelia ­is a marvellous outline; Colonels James and Bath are perfectly finished studies of ordinary and extraordinary “character” in the stage sense.  No novel even of the author’s is fuller of vignettes ­little pictures of action and behaviour, of manners and society, which are not in the least irrelevant to the general story, but on the contrary extra-illustrate and carry it out.

While, therefore, we must in no way recede from the position above adopted in regard to Richardson, we may quite consistently accord an even higher place to Fielding.  He relieved the novel of the tyranny and constraint of the Letter; he took it out of the rut of confinement to a single or a very limited class of subjects ­for the themes of Pamela and Clarissa to a very large extent, of Pamela and Grandison to a considerable one, and of all three to an extent not small, are practically the same.  He gave it altogether a larger, wider, higher, deeper range.  He infused in it (or restored to it) the refreshing and preserving element of humour.  He peopled it with a great crowd of lively and interesting characters ­endowed, almost without regard to their technical “position in life,” with unlimited possession of life.  He shook up its pillows, and bustled its business arrangements.  He first gave it ­for in matter of prose style Richardson has few resources, and those rather respectable than transporting, and decidedly monotonous ­the attractions of pure literature in form, and in pretty various form.  He also gave it the attraction of pure comedy, only legitimately salted with farce, in such personages as Adams and Partridge; of lower and more farcical, but still admirable comedy in Slipslop and Trulliber and Squire Western; of comedy almost romantic and certainly charming in Sophia; of domestic drama in Amelia; of satiric portraiture in a hundred figures from the cousins (respectable and disreputable), Miss Western and Lady Bellaston, downwards.  He stocked it with infinite miscellanies of personage, and scene, and picture, and phrase.  As has happened in one or two other cases, he carried, at least in the opinion of the present writer, the particular art as far as it will go.  He did not indeed leave nothing for his successors to do ­on the contrary he left them in a sense everything ­for he showed how everything could be done.  But if he has sometimes been equalled, he has never been surpassed:  and it is not easy to see even how he can be surpassed.  For as his greatest follower has it somewhere, though not of him, “You cannot beat the best, you know.”

One point only remains, the handling of which may complete a treatment which is designedly kept down in detail.  It has been hinted at already, perhaps more than once, but has not been brought out.  This is the enormous range of suggestion in Fielding ­the innumerable doors which stand open in his ample room, and lead from it to other chambers and corridors of the endless palace of Novel-Romance.  This had most emphatically not been the case with his predecessor:  for Richardson, except in point of mere length, showed little power of expatiation, kept himself very much to the same ground and round, and was not likely to teach anybody else to make excursions.  Indeed Fielding’s breaking away in Joseph Andrews is an allegory in itself.  But, at least with pupils and followers of any wits, there was not even any need of such breaking away from himself, though no doubt there are in existence many dull and slavish attempts to follow his work, especially Tom Jones.  “Find it out for yourself” ­the great English motto which in the day of England’s glory was the motto of her men of learning as well as of her men of business, of her artists as well as of her craftsmen ­might have been Fielding’s:  but he supplemented it with infinite finger-pointings towards the various things that might be found out.  Almost every kind of novel exists ­potentially ­in his Four (the custom of leaving out Jonathan Wild should be wholly abrogated), though of course they do not themselves illustrate or carry out at length many of the kinds that they thus suggest.

And in fact it could not be otherwise:  because, as has been pointed out, while Fielding had no inconsiderable command of the Book of Literature, he turned over by day and night the larger, the more difficult, but still the greater Book of Life.  Not merely quicquid agunt homines, but quicquid sentiunt, quicquid cogitant, whatever they love and hate, whatever they desire or decline ­all these things are the subjects of his own books:  and the range of subject which they suggest to others is thus of necessity inexhaustible.

If there have been some who denied or failed to recognise his greatness, it must be because he has played on these unwary ones the same trick that Garrick, in an immortal scene, played on his own Partridge.  There is so little parade about Fielding (for even the opening addresses are not parade to these good people:  they may disconcert or even disgust, but they do not dazzle them), that his characters and his scenes look commonplace.  They feel sure that “if they had seen a ghost they would have looked in the very same manner and done just as he does.”  They are sure that, in the scene with Gertrude, “Lord, help them! any man ­that is any good man ­that had such a mother would have done exactly the same.”

Well! in a way no doubt they are right; and one may imitate the wisdom of Mr. Jones on the original occasion in not saying much more to them.  To others, of course, this is the very miracle of art ­a miracle, as far as the art of prose fiction is concerned, achieved in its fullness for practically the first time.  This is the true mimesis ­the re-creation or fresh creation of fictitious reality.  There were in Fielding’s time, and probably ever since have been, those who thought him “low;” there were, even in his own time, and have been in varying, but on the whole rather increased, degree since, those who thought him immoral:  there appear to be some who think (or would like it to be thought that they think) him commonplace and obvious.  Now, as it happens, all these charges have been brought against Nature too.  To embellish, and correct, and heighten, and extra-decorate her was not Fielding’s way:  but to follow, and to interpret, and to take up her own processes with results uncommonly like her own.  That is his immense glory to all those who can realise and understand it:  and as for the others we must let them alone, joined to their own idols.

In passing to the third of this great quartette, we make a little descent, but not much of one, while the new peak to which we come is well defined and separated, with characters and outlines all its own.  It may be doubted whether any competent critic not, like Scott, bribed by compatriotism, ever put Smollett above Fielding, or even on a level with him.  Thackeray, in one of the most inspired moments of his rather irregularly-inspired criticism, remarks, “I fancy he did not invent much,” and this of itself would refer him to a lower class.  The writer of fiction is not to refuse suggestion from his experience; on the contrary, he will do so at his peril, and will hardly by any possibility escape shipwreck unless his line is the purely fantastic.  But if he relies solely, or too much, on such experience, though he may be quite successful, his success will be subject to discount, bound to pay royalty to experience itself.  It is pretty certain that most of Smollett’s most successful things, from Roderick Random to Humphry Clinker, and in those two capital books, perhaps, most of all, kept very close to actual experience, and sometimes merely reported it.

This, however, is only a comparative drawback; it is in a sense a positive merit; and it is connected, in a very intimate way, with the general character of Smollett’s novel-method.  This is, to a great extent, a reaction or relapse towards the picaresque style.  Smollett may have translated both Cervantes and Le Sage; he certainly translated the latter:  and it was Le Sage who in any case had the greatest influence over him.  Now the picaresque method is not exactly untrue to ordinary life:  on the contrary, as we have seen, it was a powerful schoolmaster to bring the novel thereto.  But it subjects the scenes of ordinary life to a peculiar process of sifting:  and when it has got what it wants, it proceeds to heighten them and “touch them up” in its own peculiar manner of decoration.  This is Smollett’s method throughout, even in that singular pastiche of Don Quixote itself, Sir Launcelot Greaves, which certainly was not his happiest conception, but which has had rather hard measure.

As used by him it has singular merits, and communicates to at least three of his five books (The Adventures of an Atom is deliberately excluded as not really a novel at all) a certain “liveliness” which, though it is not the life_like_ness of Fielding, is a great attraction.  He showed it first in Roderick Random (1748), which appeared a little before Tom Jones, and was actually taken by some as the work of the same author.  It would be not much more just to take Roderick as Smollett’s deliberate presentment of himself than to apply the same construction to Marryat’s not very dissimilar, but more unlucky, coup d’essai of Frank Mildmay.  But it is certain that there was something, though exactly how much has never been determined, of the author’s family history in the earliest part, a great deal of his experiences on board ship in the middle, and probably not a little, though less, of his fortunes in Bath and London towards the end.  As a single source of interest and popularity, no doubt, the principal place must be given to the naval part of the book.  Important as the English navy had been, for nearly two centuries if not for much longer, it had never played any great part in literature, though it had furnished some caricatured and rather conventional sketches.  There is something more in a play, The Fair Quaker of Deal, by Charles Shadwell, nephew or son of Dryden’s victim, but this was only of third or fourth rate literary value, and an isolated example to boot.  The causes of the neglect have been set forth by many writers from Macaulay downwards, and need not be discussed here; the fact is certain.  Smollett’s employment of “the service” as a subject may have been, consciously and intentionally, only one of those utilisings of personal experience of which we have spoken.  But really it was an instance of the great fact that the novelist, on the instigation mainly of Fielding himself, was beginning to take all actual life to be his province.

Smollett brought to his work peculiar powers, the chief of which was a very remarkable one, and almost as much “improved on” Fielding as Fielding’s exercise of it was improved on Richardson ­that of providing his characters and scenes with accessories.  Roderick is not only a much more disagreeable person than Tom, but he is much less of a person:  and Strap, though (vice versa) rather a better fellow than Partridge, is a much fainter and more washed-out character.  But in mere interest of story and accessories the journey of Roderick and Strap to London is quite the equal, and perhaps the superior, of that of Tom and his hanger-on after we once leave Upton, where the interest is of a kind that Smollett could not reach.  It is probable that Fielding might, if he had chosen, have made the prison in Amelia as horribly and disgustingly realistic (to use a horrible and disgusting word) as the ship in Roderick, but he at any rate did not choose.  Moreover Smollett, himself a member of one of the less predominant partners of the British and Irish partnership, perhaps for that reason hit on utilising the difference of these partners (after a fashion which had never been seen since Shakespeare) in the Welshman Morgan.  As far as mere plot goes, he enters into no competition whatever with either Fielding or Richardson:  the picaresque model did not require that he should.  When Roderick has made use of his friends, knocked down his enemies, and generally elbowed and shoved his way through the crowd of adventures long enough, Narcissa and her fortune are not so much the reward of his exertions as a stock and convenient method of putting an end to the account of them.  The customer has been served with a sufficient amount of the commodity he demands:  and the scissors are applied, the canister shut up, the tap turned off.  It almost results ­it certainly coincides ­that some of the minor characters, and some of the minor scenes, are much more vivid than the hero (the heroine is almost an absolute nonentity) and the whole story.  The curate and the exciseman in the ninth chapter are, by common consent, among Smollett’s greatest triumphs; but the curate might be excommunicated and the exciseman excised without anybody who read the book perceiving the slightest gap or missing link, as far as the story is concerned.

Smollett’s second venture, Peregrine Pickle (1751), was more ambitious, perhaps rose higher in parts, but undoubtedly contained even more doubtful and inferior matter.  No one can justly blame him, though any one may most justly refrain from praising, from the general point of view, as regards the “insets” of Miss Williams’s story in Roderick and of that of Lady Vane here.  From that point of view they range with the “Man of the Hill” in Tom Jones, and in the first case at least, though most certainly not in the second, have more justification of connection with the central story.  He may so far underlie the charge of error of judgment, but nothing worse.  Unluckily the “Lady Vane” insertion was, to a practical certainty, a commercial not an artistic transaction:  and both here and elsewhere Smollett carried his already large licence to the extent of something like positive pornography.  He is in fact one of the few writers of real eminence who have been forced to Bowdlerise themselves.  Further, there would be more excuse for the most offensive part of Peregrine if it were not half plagiarism of the main situations of Pamela and Clarissa:  if Smollett had not deprived his hero of all the excuses which, even in the view of some of the most respectable characters of Pamela, attached to the conduct of Mr. B.; and if he had not vulgarised Lovelace out of any possible attribution of “regality,” except of being what the time would have called King of the Black Guard.  As for Tom Jones, he does not come into comparison with “Perry” at all, and he would doubtless have been most willing and able ­competent physically as well as morally ­to administer the proper punishment to that young ruffian by drubbing him within an inch of his life.

These, no doubt, are grave drawbacks:  but the racy fun of the book almost atones for them:  and the exaltation of the naval element of Roderick which one finds here in Trunnion and Hatchway and Pipes carries the balance quite to the other side.  This is the case even without, but much more with, the taking into account of Smollett’s usual irregular and almost irrelevant bonuses, such as the dinner after the fashion of the ancients and the rest.  No:  Peregrine Pickle can never be thrown to the wolves, even to the most respectable and moral of these animals in the most imposing as well as ravening of attitudes.  English Literature cannot do without it.

Without Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) many people have thought that English Literature could do perfectly well:  and without going quite so far, one may acknowledge that perhaps a shift could be made.  The idea of re-transferring the method (in the first place at any rate) to foreign parts was not a bad one, and it may be observed that by far the best portion of Fathom is thus occupied.  Not a few of these opening passages are excellent:  and Fathom’s mother, if not a person, is an excellent type:  it is probable that the writer knew the kind well.  But his unhappy tendency to enter for the same stakes as his great forerunners makes it almost impossible not to compare Ferdinand Fathom with Jonathan Wild:  and the effect is very damaging to the Count.  Much of the book is dull:  and Fathom’s conversation is (to adopt a cant word) extremely unconvincing.  The fact seems to be that Smollett had run his picaresque vein dry, as far as it connected itself with mere rascality of various kinds, and he did well to close it.  He had published three novels in five years:  he waited seven before his next, and then eleven more before his last.

A qualified apology has been hinted above for Sir Launcelot Greaves.  It is undoubtedly evidence of the greatness of Don Quixote that there should have been so many direct imitations of it by persons of genius and talent:  but this particular instance is unfortunate to the verge of the preposterous, if not over it.  The eighteenth century was indeed almost the capital time of English eccentricity:  and it was also a time of licence which sometimes looked very like lawlessness.  But its eccentricities were not at this special period romantic:  and its lawlessness was rather abuse of law than wholesale neglect of it.  A rascally attorney or a stony-hearted creditor might inflict great hardship under the laws affecting money:  and a brutal or tyrannical squire might do the same under those affecting the tenure or the enjoyment of house or land.  “Persons of quality” might go very far.  But even a person of quality, if he took to riding about the country in complete steel, assaulting the lièges, and setting up a sort of cadi-justice of his own in opposition to the king’s, would probably have been brought pretty rapidly, if not to the recovery of his senses, to the loss of his liberty.  Nor, with rare exceptions, are the subordinate or incidental humours of the first class.  But I have always thought that the opening passage more than entitles the book to an honourable place in the history of English fiction.  I do not know where to look, before it, for such an “interior” ­such a complete Dutch picture of room and furniture and accessories generally.  Even so learned a critic as the late M. Brunetiere thought that things of the kind were not older than Balzac.  I have known English readers, not ignorant, who thought they were scarcely older than Dickens.  Dickens, however, undoubtedly took them from Smollett, of whom we know that he was an early and enthusiastic admirer:  and Scott, who has them much earlier than Dickens, not improbably was in some degree indebted for them to his countryman.  At any rate in that countryman they are:  and you will not find a much better example of them anywhere than this of the inn-kitchen.  But apart from it, and from a few other things of the same or similar kinds, there is little to be said for the book.  The divine Aurelia especially is almost more shadowy than the divine Narcissa and the divine Emilia:  and can claim no sort of sistership in personality with Amelia or Sophia, even with Clarissa or Pamela.  In fact, up to this time Smollett’s women ­save in the case of Fathom’s hell-cat of a mother, and one or two more who are “minors” ­have done absolutely nothing for his books.  It was to be quite otherwise in the last and best, though even here the heroine en titre is hardly, even though we have her own letters to body her out, more substantial than her elder sisters.  But Lydia, though the ingenue, is not the real heroine of this book:  her aunt and her aunt’s maid divide that position between them.

A sufficiently ungracious critic may, if he chooses, see in Smollett’s falling back on the letter-plan for Humphry Clinker (1771) an additional proof of that deficiency in strictly inventive faculty which has been noticed.  The more generous “judge by results” will hardly care to consider so curiously in the case of such a masterpiece.  For a masterpiece it really is.  The comparative absence of “character” in the higher and literary sense as contrasted with “character-parts” in the technical meaning of the theatre has been admitted in the other books.  Here, with the aid of the letters, it is amply supplied, or perhaps (to speak with extreme critical closeness) the character-parts are turned into characters by this means.  There is no stint, because of the provision of this higher interest, of the miscellaneous fun and “business” which Smollett had always supplied so lavishly out of his experience, his observation, and, if not his invention, his combining faculty.  And there is the setting of interior and exterior “furniture” which has been also referred to.  Abundant as is the information which the eighteenth century has given us as to its justly beloved place of pilgrimage, Bath, there is nothing livelier than the Bath scenes here, from Chesterfield to Miss Austen, and few things, if any, so vivid and detailed.  So it is with Clifton earlier, with London later, with Scotland last of all, and with the journeys connecting them.  Yet these things are mere hors d’oeuvre, pickles, sauces, condiments, beside the solid character-food of the Brambles and Melfords, of Winifred Jenkins and of the redoubtable Lismahago.  That there is no exaggeration or caricature cannot, of course, be said.  It was not Smollett’s notion of art to present the elaborate academies of Richardson, or the almost uncanny duplications of Nature which Fielding could achieve.  He must embolden, in fact grotesque, the line; heighten, in fact splash and plaster, the colour.  But he has not left Nature behind here:  he has only put her in a higher light.

One means of doing so has been condemned in him, as in others, as in its great earlier master, Swift, and its greatest later one, Thackeray, by some purists.  They call it cheap and inartistic:  but this is mere pedantry and prudery.  Mis-spelling is not a thing to be employed every day or for every purpose:  if you do that, you get into the ineffably dreary monotony which distinguishes the common comic journalist.  But thrown in occasionally, and in the proper place, it gives an excellent zest:  and it has seldom been employed ­never, except in the two instances quoted ­better than in the cases of Tabitha Bramble and her maid.  For it is employed in the only legitimate way, that of zest, not substance.  Tabitha and Winifred would still be triumphs of characterisation of a certain kind if they wrote as correctly as Uncle Matthew or Nephew Jery.  Further, Lismahago is a bolder and a much less caricatured utilising of the “national” resource than Morgan.  If Smollett had not been a perfectly undaunted, as well as a not very amiable, person he would hardly have dared to “lacess the thistle” in this fashion.  But there are few sensible Scotsmen nowadays who would not agree with that most sensible, as well as greatest, of their compatriots, Sir Walter Scott, in acknowledging the justice (comic emphasis granted) of the twitch, and the truth of the grip, at that formidable plant.  The way in which Smollett mixes up actual living persons, by their own names, with his fictitious characters may strike us as odd:  but there is, for the most part, nothing offensive in it, and in fact, except a little of his apparently inevitable indulgence in nasty detail, there is nothing at all offensive in the book.  The contrast of its general tone with that especially of his first two; the softening and mellowing of the general presentation ­is very remarkable in a man of undoubtedly not very gentle disposition who had long suffered from extremely bad health, and whose chief original works recently ­the Journey and the Adventures ­had been, the first a tissue of grumbles, the second an outburst of savagery.  But though the grumbles recur in Matthew Bramble’s mouth, they become merely humorous there:  and there is practically no savagery at all.  Leghorn, it has been observed more than once, was in a fashion a Land of Beulah:  a “season of calm weather” had set in for a rather stormy life just before the end.

Whatever may be his defects (and from the mere point of view of Momus probably a larger number may be found in him than either in Richardson or in Fielding), Smollett well deserves an almost equal place with them in the history of the novel.  Richardson, though he had found the universal as far as certain aspects of it in humanity are concerned, had confined it within a very narrow space, or particular envelope, in tone and temper:  the fact that he has been called “stifling,” though the epithet may not be entirely just, is almost sufficient evidence of this.  Fielding had taken the novel into a far larger air and, as has been said already, there was hardly anything to which his method might not lead, and in which it would not be effective.  But he had been exclusively English in externals:  and the result is that, to this day, he has had less influence abroad than perhaps any English writer of equal genius and than some of far less. Smollett, by his remarkable utilisation of the characteristics of the other members of Magna-Britannia; by his excursions into foreign European and even transatlantic scenery, had widened the external if not the internal prospect; and had done perhaps even more by that chance-medley, as it perhaps was, of attention to the still more internal detail which was to be of such importance in the novel to come.  Taking the three together (not without due allowance for the contemporary, if mainly imitative, developments which will be described in the next chapter), they had put prose fiction in a position which it had not attained, even in Spain earlier, even in France at more or less the same time:  and had entirely antiquated, on the one hand, the mere fabliau or novella ­the story of a single limited situation ­on the other, the discursive romance with little plot and next to no character.  One great further development, impossible at this time, of the larger novel, the historical, waited for Scott:  but even this was soon, though very awkwardly, tried.  It could not yet be born because the historic sense which was its necessary begetter hardly existed, and because the provision of historic matter for this sense to work on was rather scanty.  But it is scarcely extravagant to say that it is more difficult to conceive even Scott doing what he did without Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett before him, than it is to believe that, with these predecessors, somebody like Scott was bound to come.

Great, however, as the three are, there is no need of any “injustice to Ireland” ­little as Ireland really has to claim in Sterne’s merit or demerit.  He is not a fifth wheel to the coach by any means:  he is the fourth and almost the necessary one.  In Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett the general character and possibilities of the novel had been shown, with the exception just noted:  and indeed hardly with that exception, because they showed the way clearly to it.  But its almost illimitable particular capabilities remained unshown, or shown only in Fielding’s half extraneous divagations, and in earlier things like the work of Swift.  Sterne took it up in the spirit of one who wished to exhibit these capabilities; and did exhibit them signally in more than one or two ways.  He showed how the novel could present, in refreshed form, the fatrasie, the pillar-to-post miscellany, of which Rabelais had perhaps given the greatest example possible, but of which there were numerous minor examples in French.  He showed how it could be made, not merely to present humorous situations, but to exhibit a special kind of humour itself ­to make the writer as it were the hero without his ever appearing as character in Tristram, or to humorise autobiography as in the Sentimental Journey.  And last of all (whether it was his greatest achievement or not is matter of opinion), he showed the novel of purpose in a form specially appealing to his contemporaries ­the purpose being to exhibit, glorify, luxuriate in the exhibition of, sentiment or “sensibility.”  In none of these things was he wholly original; though the perpetual upbraiding of “plagiarism” is a little unintelligent.  Rabelais, not to mention others, had preceded him, and far excelled him, in the fatrasie; Swift in the humour-novel; two generations of Frenchmen and Frenchwomen in the “sensibility” kind.  But he brought all together and adjusted the English novel, actually to them, potentially to much else.

To find fault with his two famous books is almost contemptibly easy.  The plagiarism which, if not found out at once, was found out very soon, is the least of these:  in fact hardly a fault at all.  The indecency, which was found out at once, and which drew a creditable and not in the least Tartuffian protest from Warburton, is a far more serious matter ­not so much because of the licence in subject as because of the unwholesome and sniggering tone.  The sentimentality is very often simply maudlin, almost always tiresome to us, and in very, very few cases justified by brilliant success even in its own very doubtful kind.  Most questionable of all, perhaps, is the merely mechanical mountebankery ­the blanks, and the dashes, and the rows of stops, the black pages and the marbled pages which he employs to force a guffaw from his readers.  The abstinence from any central story in Tristram is one of those dubious pieces of artifice which may possibly show the artist’s independence of the usual attractions of story-telling, but may also suggest to the churlish the question whether his invention would have supplied him with any story to tell; and the continual asides and halts and parenthetic divagations in the Journey are not quite free from the same suggestion.  In fact if you “can see a church by daylight” you certainly want no piercing vision, and no artificial assistance of light or lens, to discover the faults of this very unedifying churchman.

But he remains, for all that, a genius; and one of the great figures in our history.  There is to his credit in general, as has been already pointed out, the great asset of having indicated, and in two notable instances patterned, the out-of-the-way novel ­the novel eccentric, particular, individual.  There is to that credit still more the brilliancy of the two specimens themselves in spite of their faults; their effectiveness in the literature of delight; the great powers of a kind more or less peculiar to the artist which they show, and the power, perhaps still greater, which they display in the actually general and ordinary lines of the novel, though adapted to this extraordinary use.

For though it pleased Sterne to anticipate the knife-grinder’s innocent confession, “Story?  God bless you!  I have none to tell, sir!” in a sardonic paraphrase of half a score of volumes, he actually possessed the narrative faculty in an extraordinary degree.  He does not merely show this in his famous inset short stories, accomplished as these are:  he achieves a much greater marvel in the way in which he makes his fatrasies as it were novels.  After one or two, brief but certainly not tedious, volumes of the Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, you know that you are being cheated, and are going to be:  at the end you know still more certainly that you have been.  You have had nothing of the “Life” but a great deal round rather than about the birth, and a few equivocal, merely glanced at, and utterly unco-ordinated incidents later.  If you have had any “opinions” they have been chiefly those of Mr. Tristram Shandy’s father and other members of his family, or those of its friends and circle, or of those shadowy personages outside the pretended story, such as Eugenius and Yorick, besides a few discourses which drop the slightest pretension of being Shandean or Tristramic and are plainly and simply the author’s.  In the Journey there is more unity; but it is, quite frankly, the unity of the temperament of that author himself.  The incidents ­sentimental, whimsical, fie-fie ­have no other connection or tendency than the fact that they occur to the “gentleman in the black silk smalls” and furnish him with figures as it were for his performance.  Yet you are held in a way in which nothing but the romance or the novel ever does hold you.  The thing is a [Greek:  mythos hamythos] ­story without story-end, without story-beginning, without story-connection or middle:  but a story for all that.  A dangerous precedent, perhaps; but a great accomplishment:  and, even as a precedent, the leader of a very remarkable company.  In not a few noteworthy later books ­in a very much greater number of parts of later books ­as we take our hats off to the success we are saluting not a new but an old friend, and that friend Sterne.

On the second great count ­character ­Sterne’s record is still more distinguished:  and here there is no legerdemain about the matter.  There is a consensus of all sound opinion to the effect that my Uncle Toby is an absolute triumph ­even among those who think that, as in the case of Colonel Newcome later, it would have been possible to achieve that triumph without letting his simplicity run so near to something less attractive.  It is not the sentiment that is here to blame, because Sterne has luckily not forgotten (as he has in the case of his dead donkeys and his live Marias) that humour is the only thing that will keep such sentiment from turning mawkish, if not even rancid; and that the antiseptic effect will not be achieved by keeping your humour and your sentiment in separate boxes.  Trim is even better:  he is indeed next to Sancho ­and perhaps Sam Weller ­the greatest of all “followers” in the novel:  he supplies the only class-figure in which Sterne perhaps beats Fielding himself.  About Walter Shandy there is more room for difference:  and it is possible to contend that, great as he is, he is not complete ­that he is something of a “humour” in the old one-sided and over-emphasised Jonsonian sense.  Nothing that he does or says misbecomes him:  but a good deal that he does not do and say might be added with advantage, in order to give us the portrait of a whole as well as a live man.  As for the other male characters, Sterne’s plan excused him ­as it did not quite in Mr. Shandy’s case ­from making them more than sketches and shadows.  But what uncommonly lively sketches and shadows they are!

Sterne’s unlucky failing prevented him in most cases from touching the women off with a clean brush:  but the quality of liveness pertains to them in almost a higher measure:  and perhaps testifies even more strongly to his almost uncanny faculty of communicating it by touches which are not always unclean and are sometimes slight to an astonishing degree.  Even that shadow of a shade “My dear, dear Jenny” has a suggestion of verity about her which has shocked and fluttered some:  the maids of the Shandean household, the grisettes and peasant girls and ladies of the Journey, have flesh which is not made of paper, and blood that is certainly not ink.  And the peculiarity extends to his two chief named heroines, Mrs. Shandy and the Widow.  Never were any two female personages more unceremoniously treated in the way of scanty and incidental appearance.  Never were any personages of scanty and incidental appearance made more alive and more female.

His details and accessories of all kinds, descriptive, literary, and other, would give subject for a separate chapter; but we must turn (for this chapter is already too long) to his phrase ­in dialogue, narrative, whatever you please to call it.  For the fact is that these two things, and all others in which phrase and expression can be used, melt into each other with Sterne in a manner as “flibberti-gibbety” as most other things about him.  This phrase or expression is of course artificial to the highest degree:  and it is to it that the reproach of depending on mechanical aids chiefly applies.  And yet laboriously figured, tricked, machined as it is ­easy as once more it may be to prove that it is artifice and not art ­the fact remains that, not merely (perhaps not by any means chiefly) in the stock extract-pieces which everybody knows, but almost everywhere, it is triumphant:  and that English literature would be seriously impoverished without it.  Certainly never was there a style which more fully justified the definition given by Buffon, in Sterne’s own time, of style as “the very man.”  Falsetto, “faking,” vamping, shoddy ­all manner of evil terms may be heaped upon it without the possibility of completely clearing it from them.  To some eyes it underlies them most when it is most ambitious, as in the Le Fevre story and the diatribe against critics.  It leaves the court with all manner of stains on its character.  Only, once more, if it did not exist we should be ignorant of more than one of the most remarkable possibilities of the English language.

Thus, in almost exactly the course of a technical generation ­from the appearance of Pamela in 1740 to that of Humphry Clinker in 1771 ­the wain of the novel was solidly built, furnished with four main wheels to move it, and set a-going to travel through the centuries.  In a sense, inasmuch as Humphry Clinker itself, though Smollett’s best work, can hardly be said to show any absolutely new faculties, character, or method, the process was even accomplished in two-thirds of the time, between Pamela and Tristram Shandy.  We shall see in the next chapter how eagerly the examples were taken up:  and how, long before Smollett died, the novel of this and that kind had become one of the most prolific branches of literature.  But, for the moment, the important thing is to repeat that it had been thoroughly and finally started on its high road, in general by Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett; in particular and wayward but promising side-paths by Sterne.