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

his temperament appears to have been as discontented as hers was sunny: but he had his successes in drama as well as in novel, and one of his attempts in the latter kind had a wide-ranging influence abroad as well as at home, has been recently printed both in whole and in part, and undoubtedly ranks among the novels which any tolerably well instructed person would enumerate if he were asked to give a pretty full list of celebrated (and deservedly celebrated) books of the kind in English. The others fall quite out of comparison. The Fatal Revenge or the Family of Montorio (1807) is a try for the "furthest" in the Radcliffe-Lewis direction, discarding indeed the crudity of The Monk , but altogether neglecting the restraint of Udolpho and its companions in the use of the supernatural. The Wild Irish Boy (1808), The Milesian Chief (1812),
Women (1818), and The Albigenses (1824) are negligible, the last, perhaps, rather less so than the others. But Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) is in quite a different case. It has faults in plenty--especially a narrative method of such involution that, as it has been said, "a considerable part of the book consists of a story told to a certain person, who is a character in a longer story, found in a manuscript which is delivered to a third person, who narrates the greater part of the novel to a fourth person, who is the namesake and descendant of the title-hero." Stripped of these tiresome lendings (which, as has been frequently pointed out, were a mania with the eighteenth century and naturally grew to such intricacy as this), the central story, though not exactly new, is impressive: and it is told and worked out in manner more impressive, because practically novel, save for, perhaps, a little suggestion from Vathek . Melmoth has bartered his soul with the devil for something like immortality and other privileges, including the unusual one of escaping doom if he can get some one to take the bargain off his hands. This leads up to numerous episodes or chapters in which Melmoth endeavours to obtain substitutes: and in one of these the love interest of the book--the, of course, fatal love of Melmoth himself for a Spanish-Indian girl Immalee or Isidora--is related with some real pathos and passion, though with a good deal of mere sentiment and twaddle. Maturin is stronger in his terror-scenes, and affected his own generation very powerfully: his influence being so great in France that Balzac attempted a variation and continuation, and that there are constant references to the book in the early French Romantics. In fact for this kind of "sensation" Maturin is, putting Vathek aside, quite the chief of the whole school. But it is doubtful whether he had many other gifts as a novelist, and this particular one is one that cannot be exercised very frequently, and is very difficult to exercise at all without errors and extravagances.

The child-literature of this school and period was very large, and, had we space, would be worth dealing with at length--as in the instances of the famous Sandford and Merton (1783-1789) by Thomas Day, Richard Edgeworth's friend, of Mrs. Trimmer's Story of the Robins , and others. It led up to the definitely religious school of children's books, first evangelical, then tractarian, with which we shall deal later: but was itself as a rule utilitarian--or sentimental--moral rather than directly religious. It is, however, like other things--indeed almost all things--in this chapter--a document of the fashion in which the novel was "filling all numbers" and being used for all purposes. It was, of course, in this case, nearest to the world-old "fable"--especially to the moral apologues of which the mediæval sermon-writers and others had been so fond. But its popularity, especially when taken in connection with the still surviving distrust of fiction, is valuable. It involves not merely the principle that "the devil shall not have all the best tunes," but the admission that this tune is good.

This point, and that other also frequently mentioned and closely connected with it, that the novel at this time overflows into almost every conceivable department of subject and object, are the main facts of a general historical kind, which should be in the reader's mind as the upshot of this chapter. But there is a third, almost as important as either, and that is the almost universal coming short of complete success--the lack of consummateness, the sense that if the Novel Israel is not exactly still in the wilderness, it has not yet crossed the Jordan. Even if we take in the last chapter, and its comparative giants, with the present and its heroes, ordinary folk, and pygmies, we shall scarcely find more than one great master, Fielding, and one little masterpiece, Vathek , deserving the adjective "consummate." No doubt the obvious explanation--that the hour was not because the man had not come except in this single case--is a good one: but it need not be left in the bare isolation of its fatalism. There are at least several subsidiary considerations which it is well to advance. The transition state of manners and language cannot be too often insisted upon: for this affected the process at both ends, giving the artist in fictitious life an uncertain model to copy and unstable materials to work in. The deficiency of classical patterns--at a time which still firmly believed, for the most part, that all good work in literature had been so done by the ancients that it could at best be emulated--should count for something: the scanty respect in which the kind was held for something more. As to one of the most important species, frequent allusions have been made, and in the next chapter full treatment will be given, to the causes which made the historical novel impossible until very late in the century, and decidedly unlikely to be good even then. Perhaps, without attempting further detail, we may conclude by saying that the productions of this time present, and present inevitably, the nonage and novitiate of a branch of art which hardly possessed any genuine representatives when the century was born and which numbered them, bad and good, by thousands and almost tens of thousands at its death. In the interval there had been continuous and progressive exercise; there had been some great triumphs; there had been not a little good and pleasant work; and of even the work that was less good and less pleasant one may say that it at least represented experiment, and might save others from failure.


CHAPTER V

SCOTT AND MISS AUSTEN


In 1816 Sir Thomas Bernard, baronet, barrister, and philanthropist, published, having it is said written it three years previously, an agreeable dialogue on Old Age , which was very popular, and reached its fifth edition in 1820. The interlocutors are Bishops Hough and Gibson and Mr. Lyttleton, the supposed time 1740--the year, by accident or design, of Pamela . In this the aged and revered "martyr of Magdalen" is mildly reproached by his brother prelate for liking novels. Hough puts off the reproach as mildly, and in a most academic manner, by saying that he only admits them speciali gratiâ . This was in fact the general attitude to the whole kind, not merely in 1740, but after all the work of nearly another life-time as long as Hough's--almost in 1816 itself. Yet when Sir Thomas published his little book, notice to quit, of a double kind, had been served on this fallacy. Miss Austen's life was nearly done, and some of her best work had not been published: but the greater part had. Scott was in his actual hey-day. Between them, they had dealt and were dealing--from curiously different sides and in as curiously different manners--the death-blow to the notion that the novel was an inferior if not actually discreditable kind, suitable for weak intellects only, and likely to weaken strong ones, frivolous when not positively immoral, giving a distaste for serious reading, implying in the writer an inability to do anything more serious, and generally presenting a glaring contrast to real "literature."

Interesting as each of these two great novelists is individually, the interest of the pair, from our present historical point of view, is almost greater; and the way in which they complete each other is hardly short of uncanny. Before their time, despite the great examples of prose fiction produced by Bunyan, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, and the remarkable determination towards the life of ordinary society given, or instanced, by Miss Burney; despite the immense novel-production of the last half of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth--it is hardly too much to say that "the novel," as such, had not found its proper way or ways at all. Bunyan's was an example of genius in a peculiar kind of the novel: as, in a very different one, was Sterne's. Defoe, possessing some of the rarest gifts of the novelist, was quite lacking in others. Richardson was not only
exemplar vitiis imitabile and imitatum , but it might be doubted whether, even when not faulty, he was not more admirable than delightful. Smollett, like Defoe, was not much more than part of a novelist: and Miss Burney lacked strength, equality, and range. There remained Fielding: and it certainly is not here that any restrictions or allowances will be insinuated as to Fielding's praise. But Fielding's novels are a circle in which no one else save Thackeray has ever been able to walk. And what we are looking for now is something rather different from this--a masterpiece, or masterpieces, which may not only yield delight and excite admiration in itself or themselves, but may bring forth fruit in others--fruit less masterly perhaps, but of the same or a similar kind. In other words, nobody's work yet--save in the special kinds--had been capable of yielding a novel- formula : nobody had hit upon the most capital and fruitful novel-ideas. And nearly everybody had, in the kind, done work curiously and almost incomprehensibly faulty. Of these faults, the worst, perhaps, were classable under the general head of inverisimilitude. Want of truth to nature in character and dialogue, extravagant and clumsy plotting, neglect of (indeed entire blindness to) historic colour, unreal and unobserved description--all these things might be raised to a height or sunk to a bathos in the work of the Minerva Press--but there was far too much of them in all the novel work of these sixty or seventy years.

Although the facts and dates are well enough known, it is perhaps not always remembered that Miss Austen, while representing what may, using a rather objectionable and ambiguous word, be called a more "modern" style of novel than Scott's, began long before him and had almost finished her work before his really began. If that wonderful Bath bookseller had not kept Northanger Abbey in a drawer, instead of publishing it, it would have had nearly twenty years start of Waverley . And it must be remembered that Northanger Abbey , though it is, perhaps, chiefly thought of as a parody-satire on the school of Mrs. Radcliffe, is, as these parody-satires have a habit of being, a great deal more. If Catherine had not made a fool of herself about the Orphan of the Black Forest and Horrid Mysteries (or rather if everything relating to this were "blacked out" as by a Russian censor) there would still remain the admirable framework of her presentation at Bath and her intercourse with the Tilneys; the more admirable character-sketches of herself--the triumph of the ordinary made not ordinary--and