The English Novel - George Saintsbury (read novel full .TXT) 📗
- Author: George Saintsbury
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old lover (two old lovers indeed), his wife (a beautiful featherhead, who has been Emilia's school-fellow and dearest friend), and a wicked "Duke of C."
Even from this sketch the tolerably expert reader of novels may discover where the weak points are likely to lie; he will be a real expert if he anticipates the strong ones without knowing the book. As was formerly noticed, the dialogue is ill supplied with diction. The date of the story is 1809: and the author had for that period a fairly safe pattern in Miss Austen: but she does not use it at all, nor does she make the lingo frankly that of her own day. There are gross improbabilities--Mr. Danby, for instance (who is represented as wrapped up in his business, and exclusively occupied with the legal side of money matters and the money side of the law), actually discharges, or thinks he is discharging, hundreds and thousands of Mr. Wyndham's liabilities by handing his own open cheques, not to the creditors, not to any one representing them, but to a country attorney who has succeeded him in the charge of the debts and affairs, and whom he knows to be a sharp practitioner and suspects to be a scoundrel. The inhuman uncle and the licentious duke are mere cardboard characters: and the featherheaded Lisa talks and behaves like a mixture of the sprightly heroines of Richardson (for whom Lady Mary most righteously prescribed a sound whipping) and the gushing heroines of Lady Morgan. There is too much chaise-and-four and laudanum-bottle; too much moralising; too much of a good many other things. And yet, somehow or other, there are also things very rarely to be found in any novel--even taking in Bulwer and the serious part of Dickens--up to the date. The scene between Danby and his mother, in the poky house in Charlotte Street, when she discovers that he has been giving a hundred-pound cheque to a young lady is impressingly good: it is not absolutely unsuggestive of what Thackeray was just doing, and really not far from what Trollope was not for some years to do. There are other passages which make one think of George Eliot, who indeed might have been writing at the very time; there are even faint and faltering suggestions of Ibsenic "duty to ourselves." Mr. Danby (the characters regularly call each other "Mr.," "Mrs.," and "Miss," even when they are husbands and wives, daughters or nieces, and uncles or fathers) is a miss, and not quite a miss, of a very striking, original, possible, and even probable character. His mother, with something more of the Dickensian type-character, can stand by her unpleasant self, and came ten years before "the Campaigner." Susan, her pleasanter servant, is equally self-sufficing, and came five years before Peggotty, to whom she is not without resemblances.[28]
[28] Another novel of Mrs. Marsh-Caldwell's, Norman's Bridge ,
has strong suggestions of John Halifax , and is ten years
older.
But it is not so much the merits on the one hand, or the defects on the other, of the book that deserve attention here and justify the place given to it: it is the general "chip-the-shell" character. The shell is only being chipped: large patches of it still hamper the chicken, which is thus a half developed and half disfigured little animal. All sorts of didactics, of Byronic-Bulwerish sentiment, of conventionalities of various kinds, still hold their place; the language, as we have said, is traditional and hardly even that; and the characters are partly drawn from Noah's Arks of various dates, partly from the stock company of the toy theatre. On the other hand, besides the touches of modernity already mentioned, and assisting them, there is a great attention to "interiors." The writer has, for her time, a more than promising sense of the incongruity between Empire dress and furniture and the style of George II.: and the shabbiness or actual squalor of Charlotte Street and Chancery Lane show that she had either been a very early and forward scholar of Dickens, or had discovered the thing on her own account. Her age may excuse some of the weak points, but it makes the presence of the strong ones all the more remarkable: and it shows all the more forcibly how the general influences which were to produce the great central growth of Victorian novel were at work, and at work almost violently, in the business of pulling down the old as well as of building up the new.
Of that new novel it is not necessary to say much more. In the last fifty or sixty years of the nineteenth century it did, as it seems to me, very great things--so great that, putting poetry, which is supreme, aside, there is no division of the world's literature within a time at all comparable to its own which can much, if at all, excel it. It did these great things because partly of the inscrutable laws which determined that a certain number of men and women of unusual power should exist, and should devote themselves to it, partly of the less heroic-sounding fact that the general appetite of other men and womenkind could make it worth while for these persons of genius and talent not to do something else. But even so, the examination, rightly conducted, discovers more than a sufficient dose of nobility. For the novel appeal is not, after all, to a mere blind animal thirst for something that will pass and kill time, for something that will drug or flutter or amuse. Beyond and above these things there is something else. The very central cause and essence of it--most definitely and most keenly felt by nobler spirits and cultivated intelligences, but also dimly and unconsciously animating very ordinary people--is the human delight in humanity--the pleasure of seeing the men and women of long past ages living, acting, and speaking as they might have done, those of the present living, acting, speaking as they do--but in each case with the portrayal not as a mere copy of particulars, but influenced with that spirit of the universal which is the secret and the charm of art. It is because the novels of these years recognised and provided this pleasure in a greater degree than those of the former period (except the productions of a few masters) that they deserve the higher position which has been here assigned them. If the novels of any period, before or since or to come, have deserved, may or shall deserve, a lower place--it is, and will be, because of their comparative or positive neglect of the combination of these conditions. Perhaps it is not easy to see what new country there is for the novel to conquer. But, as with other kinds of literature, there is practically no limit to its powers of working its actual domains. In the finest of its already existing examples it hardly yields in accomplishment even to poetry; in that great secondary (if secondary) office of all Art--to redress the apparent injustice, and console for the apparent unkindness, of Nature--to serve as rest and refreshment between those exactions of life which, though neither unjust nor unkind, are burdensome, it has no equal among all the kinds of Art itself.
INDEX
Adam Bede Adams, W. Addison
Adeline Mowbray Aelfric
Agathos Ainsworth, H.
Alton Locke
Amadis
Amelia
Amis and Amillion Amory, Thomas
Anabasis, The Anglo-Saxon, Romance in
Anna
Anna St. Ives
Apollonius of Tyre Apuleius Arblay, Madame d', see Burney, F.
Arcadia, The
Aretina
Arthour and Merlin Arthurian Legend, the;
its romantic concentration
Ask Mamma
Ass, The Golden
Atlantis, The New Austen, Miss
Badman, Mr . Bage, R. Balzac Banim
Barchester Towers Barrett, E.S.
Barry Lyndon "Barsetshire Novels," the
Battle of the Books, The Beaconsfield, Lord, see Disraeli, B. Beckford Behn, Afra
Belinda Bennett, Mrs.
Bentivolio and Urania
Beowulf Bergerac, C. de Berington, S. Berkeley Berners, Lord
Bertrams, The
Beryn, The Tale of Besaut, Sir W.
Betsy Thoughtless
Bevis of Hampton Black, W. Blackmore, R.D. Blair Borrow, George Boyle, Roger, Lord Broghill and Earl of Orrery
Brambletye House Brontë, Charlotte
Emily and Anne Brooke, H. Brunetière, M. Brunton, Mrs. Bulwer, Sir E.B. Lytton (1st Lord Lytton)
Buncle, The life of John Bunyan Burney, F. Byrne, Mrs. Byron
Caleb Williams
Cambridge Freshman, The
Camilla
Canterbury Tales (the Misses Lee's)
Can You Forgive Her?
Captain Singleton
Castle of Otranto, The
Catherine
Catriona
Caxtons, The
Cecilia Chamier, Captain
Charles O'Malley "Charlotte Elizabeth" Chateaubriand, 152
Children of the Abbey, The
Chrestien de Troyes
Chronicles of Carlingford, The
Chrysal Circulating libraries, effort of
Clarissa Clive, Mrs. A.
Cloister and the Hearth, The Coleridge Collins, Wilkie
Colonel Jack
Complaint of Deor, The Congreve
Convent of Grey Penitents, The Coventry, F. "Coverley Papers," the Craik, Mrs.
Cranford
Cripps the Carrier Crisp, "Daddy" Croker, Crofton Croly
Crotchet Castle Crowe, Mrs. Crowne, John Croxall, Dr. Cumberland, R.
Cyropædia, The
Dante
David Simple Defoe Dickens Diderot
Discipline Disraeli, B.
Divina Commedia, The Dumas Dunlop
Edgeworth, Miss Ellis, G., Early English Romances
Emarè
Emilia Wyndham
Emma
English Rogue, The
Esmond
Euphues Eustathius Evans, Mary Ann ("George Eliot")
Evelina
Fair Quaker of Dea
Ferdinand Count Fathom Ferrier, Miss Fielding, H. Fielding, S.
Florence of Rome
Florice and Blancheflour
Fool of Quality, The Ford, Emmanuel
Fortunes of Nigel, The
Frank
Frank Fairlegh
Frank Mildmay
Galt
Gamekeeper at Home, The Gaskell, Mrs.
Gawain and the Green Knight Geoffrey of Monmouth "George Eliot," see Evans, M.A. Gilpin Glascock, Capt. Godwin, W. Goldsmith Gore, Mrs. Graves, Rev. R. Gray
Great Hoggarty Diamond, The Green, Sarah Grey, Mr. W.W.
Gryll Grange
Guadentio di Lucca
Gulliver's Travels
Guy Livingstone
Guy of Warwick
Hagiology, its effect on Romance Hamilton, Anthony Hardy, Mr.
Haunted and the Haunters, The
Havelok the Dam Haywood, Eliza Hazlitt Head, R.
Heir of Redclyffe, The
Heliodorus Henley, Mr. W.E.
Henrietta Temple
Henry
Hereward the Wake
Hermsprong Herodotus
Heroine, The Holcroft, T.
Holy War, The Hook, Theodore Hope
Horn, King
Humphry Clinker Hunt, Leigh
Hypatia
Idalia
Ida of Athena
Iliad The "Imitation" (the Greek=Fiction) Inchbald, Mrs.
Incognita Ingelo, N.
Ipomydon
Isle of Pines, The
Italian, The
It is Never too Late to Mend
Ixion
Jack Wilton
Jacob Faithful James, G.P.R.
Jane Eyre Jefferies, R.
Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy
John Runcle
John Inglesand Johnson, Dr. Johnstone, C.
Jonathan Wild "Jorrocks," Mr.
Joseph Andrews
Journey from This World to the Next, A
Kate Coventry Kingsley, C. Kingsley, H.
King's Own, The Kirkman, F.
"Lady Mary" (Wortley-Montagu)
Lady Susan
Lancelot (of the Laik) , the Scots
Last Chronicle of Barset, The Lawrence, G.A. Layamon Lee, the Misses "L.E.L." Lennox, Mrs.
Leoline and Sydanis Letter-form in novels Lever, C. Lewis, M.G.
Libertine, The Livy Lockhart
London Longus
Lorna Doone Lucian
Lybius Disconus Lydia Lyly Lytton, see Bulwer
Macaulay Macdonald, George Macfarlane, C. Mackenzie, Henry Mackenzie, Sir George Malory
Man as He Is
Manley, Mrs.
Man of Feeling, The
Mansfield Park Map, W.
Marianne (Marivaux)
Even from this sketch the tolerably expert reader of novels may discover where the weak points are likely to lie; he will be a real expert if he anticipates the strong ones without knowing the book. As was formerly noticed, the dialogue is ill supplied with diction. The date of the story is 1809: and the author had for that period a fairly safe pattern in Miss Austen: but she does not use it at all, nor does she make the lingo frankly that of her own day. There are gross improbabilities--Mr. Danby, for instance (who is represented as wrapped up in his business, and exclusively occupied with the legal side of money matters and the money side of the law), actually discharges, or thinks he is discharging, hundreds and thousands of Mr. Wyndham's liabilities by handing his own open cheques, not to the creditors, not to any one representing them, but to a country attorney who has succeeded him in the charge of the debts and affairs, and whom he knows to be a sharp practitioner and suspects to be a scoundrel. The inhuman uncle and the licentious duke are mere cardboard characters: and the featherheaded Lisa talks and behaves like a mixture of the sprightly heroines of Richardson (for whom Lady Mary most righteously prescribed a sound whipping) and the gushing heroines of Lady Morgan. There is too much chaise-and-four and laudanum-bottle; too much moralising; too much of a good many other things. And yet, somehow or other, there are also things very rarely to be found in any novel--even taking in Bulwer and the serious part of Dickens--up to the date. The scene between Danby and his mother, in the poky house in Charlotte Street, when she discovers that he has been giving a hundred-pound cheque to a young lady is impressingly good: it is not absolutely unsuggestive of what Thackeray was just doing, and really not far from what Trollope was not for some years to do. There are other passages which make one think of George Eliot, who indeed might have been writing at the very time; there are even faint and faltering suggestions of Ibsenic "duty to ourselves." Mr. Danby (the characters regularly call each other "Mr.," "Mrs.," and "Miss," even when they are husbands and wives, daughters or nieces, and uncles or fathers) is a miss, and not quite a miss, of a very striking, original, possible, and even probable character. His mother, with something more of the Dickensian type-character, can stand by her unpleasant self, and came ten years before "the Campaigner." Susan, her pleasanter servant, is equally self-sufficing, and came five years before Peggotty, to whom she is not without resemblances.[28]
[28] Another novel of Mrs. Marsh-Caldwell's, Norman's Bridge ,
has strong suggestions of John Halifax , and is ten years
older.
But it is not so much the merits on the one hand, or the defects on the other, of the book that deserve attention here and justify the place given to it: it is the general "chip-the-shell" character. The shell is only being chipped: large patches of it still hamper the chicken, which is thus a half developed and half disfigured little animal. All sorts of didactics, of Byronic-Bulwerish sentiment, of conventionalities of various kinds, still hold their place; the language, as we have said, is traditional and hardly even that; and the characters are partly drawn from Noah's Arks of various dates, partly from the stock company of the toy theatre. On the other hand, besides the touches of modernity already mentioned, and assisting them, there is a great attention to "interiors." The writer has, for her time, a more than promising sense of the incongruity between Empire dress and furniture and the style of George II.: and the shabbiness or actual squalor of Charlotte Street and Chancery Lane show that she had either been a very early and forward scholar of Dickens, or had discovered the thing on her own account. Her age may excuse some of the weak points, but it makes the presence of the strong ones all the more remarkable: and it shows all the more forcibly how the general influences which were to produce the great central growth of Victorian novel were at work, and at work almost violently, in the business of pulling down the old as well as of building up the new.
Of that new novel it is not necessary to say much more. In the last fifty or sixty years of the nineteenth century it did, as it seems to me, very great things--so great that, putting poetry, which is supreme, aside, there is no division of the world's literature within a time at all comparable to its own which can much, if at all, excel it. It did these great things because partly of the inscrutable laws which determined that a certain number of men and women of unusual power should exist, and should devote themselves to it, partly of the less heroic-sounding fact that the general appetite of other men and womenkind could make it worth while for these persons of genius and talent not to do something else. But even so, the examination, rightly conducted, discovers more than a sufficient dose of nobility. For the novel appeal is not, after all, to a mere blind animal thirst for something that will pass and kill time, for something that will drug or flutter or amuse. Beyond and above these things there is something else. The very central cause and essence of it--most definitely and most keenly felt by nobler spirits and cultivated intelligences, but also dimly and unconsciously animating very ordinary people--is the human delight in humanity--the pleasure of seeing the men and women of long past ages living, acting, and speaking as they might have done, those of the present living, acting, speaking as they do--but in each case with the portrayal not as a mere copy of particulars, but influenced with that spirit of the universal which is the secret and the charm of art. It is because the novels of these years recognised and provided this pleasure in a greater degree than those of the former period (except the productions of a few masters) that they deserve the higher position which has been here assigned them. If the novels of any period, before or since or to come, have deserved, may or shall deserve, a lower place--it is, and will be, because of their comparative or positive neglect of the combination of these conditions. Perhaps it is not easy to see what new country there is for the novel to conquer. But, as with other kinds of literature, there is practically no limit to its powers of working its actual domains. In the finest of its already existing examples it hardly yields in accomplishment even to poetry; in that great secondary (if secondary) office of all Art--to redress the apparent injustice, and console for the apparent unkindness, of Nature--to serve as rest and refreshment between those exactions of life which, though neither unjust nor unkind, are burdensome, it has no equal among all the kinds of Art itself.
INDEX
Adam Bede Adams, W. Addison
Adeline Mowbray Aelfric
Agathos Ainsworth, H.
Alton Locke
Amadis
Amelia
Amis and Amillion Amory, Thomas
Anabasis, The Anglo-Saxon, Romance in
Anna
Anna St. Ives
Apollonius of Tyre Apuleius Arblay, Madame d', see Burney, F.
Arcadia, The
Aretina
Arthour and Merlin Arthurian Legend, the;
its romantic concentration
Ask Mamma
Ass, The Golden
Atlantis, The New Austen, Miss
Badman, Mr . Bage, R. Balzac Banim
Barchester Towers Barrett, E.S.
Barry Lyndon "Barsetshire Novels," the
Battle of the Books, The Beaconsfield, Lord, see Disraeli, B. Beckford Behn, Afra
Belinda Bennett, Mrs.
Bentivolio and Urania
Beowulf Bergerac, C. de Berington, S. Berkeley Berners, Lord
Bertrams, The
Beryn, The Tale of Besaut, Sir W.
Betsy Thoughtless
Bevis of Hampton Black, W. Blackmore, R.D. Blair Borrow, George Boyle, Roger, Lord Broghill and Earl of Orrery
Brambletye House Brontë, Charlotte
Emily and Anne Brooke, H. Brunetière, M. Brunton, Mrs. Bulwer, Sir E.B. Lytton (1st Lord Lytton)
Buncle, The life of John Bunyan Burney, F. Byrne, Mrs. Byron
Caleb Williams
Cambridge Freshman, The
Camilla
Canterbury Tales (the Misses Lee's)
Can You Forgive Her?
Captain Singleton
Castle of Otranto, The
Catherine
Catriona
Caxtons, The
Cecilia Chamier, Captain
Charles O'Malley "Charlotte Elizabeth" Chateaubriand, 152
Children of the Abbey, The
Chrestien de Troyes
Chronicles of Carlingford, The
Chrysal Circulating libraries, effort of
Clarissa Clive, Mrs. A.
Cloister and the Hearth, The Coleridge Collins, Wilkie
Colonel Jack
Complaint of Deor, The Congreve
Convent of Grey Penitents, The Coventry, F. "Coverley Papers," the Craik, Mrs.
Cranford
Cripps the Carrier Crisp, "Daddy" Croker, Crofton Croly
Crotchet Castle Crowe, Mrs. Crowne, John Croxall, Dr. Cumberland, R.
Cyropædia, The
Dante
David Simple Defoe Dickens Diderot
Discipline Disraeli, B.
Divina Commedia, The Dumas Dunlop
Edgeworth, Miss Ellis, G., Early English Romances
Emarè
Emilia Wyndham
Emma
English Rogue, The
Esmond
Euphues Eustathius Evans, Mary Ann ("George Eliot")
Evelina
Fair Quaker of Dea
Ferdinand Count Fathom Ferrier, Miss Fielding, H. Fielding, S.
Florence of Rome
Florice and Blancheflour
Fool of Quality, The Ford, Emmanuel
Fortunes of Nigel, The
Frank
Frank Fairlegh
Frank Mildmay
Galt
Gamekeeper at Home, The Gaskell, Mrs.
Gawain and the Green Knight Geoffrey of Monmouth "George Eliot," see Evans, M.A. Gilpin Glascock, Capt. Godwin, W. Goldsmith Gore, Mrs. Graves, Rev. R. Gray
Great Hoggarty Diamond, The Green, Sarah Grey, Mr. W.W.
Gryll Grange
Guadentio di Lucca
Gulliver's Travels
Guy Livingstone
Guy of Warwick
Hagiology, its effect on Romance Hamilton, Anthony Hardy, Mr.
Haunted and the Haunters, The
Havelok the Dam Haywood, Eliza Hazlitt Head, R.
Heir of Redclyffe, The
Heliodorus Henley, Mr. W.E.
Henrietta Temple
Henry
Hereward the Wake
Hermsprong Herodotus
Heroine, The Holcroft, T.
Holy War, The Hook, Theodore Hope
Horn, King
Humphry Clinker Hunt, Leigh
Hypatia
Idalia
Ida of Athena
Iliad The "Imitation" (the Greek=Fiction) Inchbald, Mrs.
Incognita Ingelo, N.
Ipomydon
Isle of Pines, The
Italian, The
It is Never too Late to Mend
Ixion
Jack Wilton
Jacob Faithful James, G.P.R.
Jane Eyre Jefferies, R.
Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy
John Runcle
John Inglesand Johnson, Dr. Johnstone, C.
Jonathan Wild "Jorrocks," Mr.
Joseph Andrews
Journey from This World to the Next, A
Kate Coventry Kingsley, C. Kingsley, H.
King's Own, The Kirkman, F.
"Lady Mary" (Wortley-Montagu)
Lady Susan
Lancelot (of the Laik) , the Scots
Last Chronicle of Barset, The Lawrence, G.A. Layamon Lee, the Misses "L.E.L." Lennox, Mrs.
Leoline and Sydanis Letter-form in novels Lever, C. Lewis, M.G.
Libertine, The Livy Lockhart
London Longus
Lorna Doone Lucian
Lybius Disconus Lydia Lyly Lytton, see Bulwer
Macaulay Macdonald, George Macfarlane, C. Mackenzie, Henry Mackenzie, Sir George Malory
Man as He Is
Manley, Mrs.
Man of Feeling, The
Mansfield Park Map, W.
Marianne (Marivaux)
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