The English Novel - George Saintsbury (read novel full .TXT) 📗

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.