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

weak point with others. Some admirers have defended her even here: but proud as I am to be an Austen Friar, a knight (or at least squire) of the order of St. Jane, I cannot go to this length. She very nearly succeeded, and sometimes she did quite: but not always. The easy dialogue and phrase that we find as early as Horace Walpole, even as Chesterfield and Lady Mary, in letters; which, in her own early days, appears in Fanny Burney's diaries but not in the novels, does not seem always within Miss Austen's grasp. But her advance in this respect is enormous: she is, for instance, far beyond Scott himself in St. Ronan's Well : and when she is thoroughly interested in a character, and engaged in unfolding it and gently satirising it at the same time, she rarely goes even a hair's-breadth wrong. In almost every other respect she does not go wrong to the extent of the minutest section of a hair. The story is the least part with her: but her stories are always miraculously
adequate : neither desultory and pillar-to-post, nor elaborated with the minuteness which seems to please some people, but which is quite indifferent to the majority, and is certainly a positive nuisance to a few who are not quite of negligible judgment. But the reason of this adequacy in story contains in itself her greatest triumph. Not being a poet, she cannot reach the Shakespearian consummateness of poetic phrase: though she sometimes comes not so far short of this in the prose variety. But in the other great province of character, though hers is but a Rutland to his Yorkshire--or rather to his England or his world--she is almost equally supreme. And by her manipulation of it she showed, once for all, how the most ordinary set of circumstances, and even the most ordinary characters in a certain sense, can be made to supply the material of prose fiction to an absolutely illimitable extent. Her philosopher's stone (to take up the old parable again) does not lose its powers even when all the metal in the house is exhausted--if indeed the metal, or anything else, in the House of Humanity were exhaustible. The chairs and tables, the beds and the basins--everything--can be made into novel-gold: and, when it has been made, it remains as useful for future conversion, by the same or any other magician of the same class, as ever. One of the most curious things about Miss Austen is the entire absence of self-repetition in her. Even her young men--certainly not her greatest successes--are by no means doubles of each other: and nature herself could not turn out half a dozen girls more subtly and yet more sufficiently differentiated than Catherine and Elizabeth, Marianne and Fanny, Elinor and Emma, and finally the three sisters of Persuasion , the other (quite other) Elizabeth, Mary, and Anne. The "ruts of the brain" in novelists are a by-word. There are none here.

In these two great writers of English novel there is, really for the first time, the complementary antithesis after which people have often gone (I fear it must be said) wool-gathering elsewhere. The amateurs of cosmopolitan literature, I believe, like to find it in Stendhal and Michelet. They praise the former for his delicate and pitiless psychological analysis. It had been anticipated a dozen years, nay, nearly twenty years, before he saw the Beresina: and was being given out in print at about the very moment of that uncomfortable experience, and before he himself published anything, by a young English lady--a lady if ever there was one and English if any person ever was--in a country parsonage in Hampshire or in hired houses, quite humdrum and commonplace to the commonplace and humdrum imagination, at Bath and Southampton. They praise Michelet for his enthusiastic and multiform apprehension of the plastic reality of the past, his re-creation of it, his putting of it, live and active, before the present. The thing had been done, twenty years earlier again, by a Scotch advocate who had deliberately turned from poetic form, though he retained poetic imagination, and who did not disdain not to make a fool of himself, as Michelet, with all his genius, did again and again. Of all the essentials of the two manners of fictitious creation--Michelet's was not fictitious, but he almost made it so, and Stendhal's was not historical, but he almost made it so likewise--Scott and Miss Austen had set the types, given the methods, arranged the processes as definitely as Fust, or Coster, or Gutenberg, or Fust's friend Mephistopheles--who perhaps, on the whole, has the best title to the invention--did in another matter three hundred years before.

That Scott's variety should be taken up first, and should for a time have the great popularity, the greater number of disciples, the greater acceptance as a mode of pleasing--was, as has been pointed out, natural enough; it is not a little significant that (to avert our eyes from England) the next practitioner of the psychological style in European literature, Balzac, went through a long and mostly unsuccessful probation in the other kind, and never wholly deserted it, or at least always kept looking back to it. But the general shortcomings (as they have been admitted to be) in the whole of the second quarter of the century (or a little less) with us, were but natural results of the inevitable expatiation, unsystematic and irresolute, over the newly discovered provinces. And they gave admirable work of various kinds--work especially admirable if we remember that there was no general literary uprising with us as there was, in France and elsewhere, about 1830. If it were in any way possible--similar supposings have been admitted in literature very often--it would be extremely interesting to take a person ex hypothesi fairly acquainted with the rest of literature--English, foreign, European, and classical--but who knew nothing and had heard nothing of Bulwer, Disraeli, Peacock, Marryat, even Ainsworth and James and others between Scott and the accomplished work of Thackeray (Dickens's is, as has been said, mainly a sport of genius), and to turn him loose on this work. I do him the justice to suppose that he would find not a few faults: I shall also do him the justice to think it likely that he (being, as said, ex hypothesi furnished with the miscellaneous knowledge necessary to enjoy them) would enjoy them very keenly and thoroughly. If you added the minorities of the time, such as that very clever Miss Robinson (I think her name was Emma) who wrote Whitefriars and other historical romances in the forties; such as Charles Macfarlane, who died, like Colonel Newcome, a poor brother of the Charterhouse after writing capital things like The Dutch in the Medway and The Camp of Refuge --if, I say, you gave him these things and he was a good man, but lazy, like Gray, I think he would vote for a continuance of his life of novels and sofas without sighing for anything further. But undoubtedly it might be contended that something further was needed: and it came. This was verisimilitude--the holding of the true mirror to actual society.

This verisimilitude, it should be observed, is not only difficult to attain: it seems not to be easy even to recognise. I have seen it said that the reason which makes it "hopeless for many people even to try to get through Pickwick " (their state itself must be "hopeless" enough, and it is to be hoped there are not "many" of them) is that it "describes states of society unimaginable to many people of to-day." Again, these many people must be somewhat unimaginative. But that is not the point of the matter. The point is that Dickens depicts no "state of society" that ever existed, except in the Dickensium Sidus . What he gives is full of intensely real touches which help to create its charm. But it is difficult to say that there is even a single person in it who is real as a whole, in the sense of having possibly existed in this world: and the larger whole of the book generally is pure fantasy--as much so as one of the author's own favourite goblin-dream stories.

With Thackeray the case is exactly the opposite. It is a testimony no doubt to Dickens's real power--though perhaps not to his readers' perspicacity--that he made them believe that he intended a "state of society" when, whether he intended it or not, he certainly has not given it. But Thackeray intended it and gave it. His is a "state of society" always--whether in late seventeenth century, early or late eighteenth, early or middle nineteenth--which existed or might have existed; his persons are persons who lived or might have lived. And it is the discovery of this art of creation by him and its parallel diffusion among his contemporaries that I am endeavouring to make clear here. Fielding, Scott to some extent, Miss Austen had had it. Dickens, till
Great Expectations at least, never achieved and I believe never attempted it. Bulwer, having failed in it for twenty years, struck it at last about this time, and so did, even before him, Mrs. Marsh, and perhaps others, falteringly and incompletely. But as a general gift--a characteristic--it never distinguished novelists till after the middle of the century.

It is, I think, impossible to find a better meeting and overlapping place of the old and the new novel, than that very remarkable book
Emilia Wyndham , which has been already more than once referred to. It was written in 1845 and appeared next year--the year of Vanity Fair . But the author was twenty years older than Thackeray, though she survived him by nearly a dozen; she had not begun early; and she was fifty-five when she wrote Emilia . The not unnatural consequence is that there is a great deal of inconsistency in the general texture of the book: and that any clever cub, in the 'prentice stage of reviewing, could make columns of fun out of it. The general theme is age-old, being not different from the themes of most other novels in that respect. A half-idiotic spendthrift (he ends as very nearly an actual idiot) not merely wastes his own property but practically embezzles that of his wife and daughter; the wife dies and the daughter is left alone with an extravagant establishment, a father practically non compos , not a penny in her pocket after she has paid his doctor, and a selfish baronet-uncle who will do less than nothing to help her. She has loved half unconsciously, and been half consciously loved by, a soldier cousin or quasi-cousin: but he is in the Peninsular War. Absolutely no help presents itself but that of a Mr. Danby, a conveyancer, who, in some way not very consonant with the usual etiquette of his profession, has been mixed up with her father's affairs--a man middle-aged, apparently dry as his own parchments, and quite unversed in society. He helps her clumsily but lavishly: and her uncle forces her to accept his hand as the only means of saving her father from jail first and an asylum afterwards. The inevitable disunion, brought about largely by Danby's mother (an awful old middle-class harridan), follows; and the desk-and-head incident mentioned above is brought about by her seeing the (false) announcement of her old lover's death in the paper. But she herself is consistently, perhaps excessively, but it is fair to say not ridiculously, angelic; Danby is a gentleman and a good fellow at heart; and of course, after highly tragical possibilities, these good gifts triumph. The greatest danger is threatened, and the actual happy ending brought about, by an auxiliary plot, in which the actors are the