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

his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams (1742).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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