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

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