FIELDING, SMOLLETT, AND THE MASCULINE NOVEL
The English Renaissance.
I have always felt that the English Renaissance was considerably later than that of France or Italy, and happened in the eighteenth century. When we speak of the Italian or the French Renaissance we mean the times in the histories of Italy or France when the peculiar genius of each of these countries showed the most energetic and satisfying efflorescence. In Italy and in France this time was that of the revival of classical learning, when Boccaccio lectured on Dante at Florence and Ronsard gardened and rhymed. In England, although from the time of Chaucer to the time of Shakespeare we were picking continental flowers, and flowering ourselves individually and gorgeously, yet we had no general efflorescence in our national right, no sudden and complete self-portraiture in several arts at once. And this in the eighteenth century was what we had. All our national characteristics were unashamedly on view. Our solidity, our care for matter of fact, our love of oversea adventure, were exhibited in Defoe. Our sturdy spirituality had only recently found expression in Bunyan. Richardson discovered the young person who, rustling her petticoats, sits with so demure an air of permanence on Victorian literature, and represents indeed so real a part of our national character that we shall never be able to forget her blushes altogether. Our serious turn for morality showed itself at once in the aims all our authors professed, and in the pictures of Hogarth who, with courage unknown elsewhere, dared to paint ugliness as ugly. This is the century that represents us in the eyes of the world. If we would think of the Italian spirit we remember the Decameron; if of the French, we remember Ronsard's 'Mignonne, allons voir si la rose,' or Marot's 'Mignonne, je vous donne le bon jour.' But if a Frenchman tries to describe an Englishman his model is not a Chaucer but a Jean Bull, and the only adequate portraits of Jean Bull are to be found in the novels of Fielding and Smollett.
HENRY FIELDING
Two points of view.
Out of this general efflorescence were to spring two branches of story-telling different and hostile from the start. The novel was given sex. Richardson had scarcely invented the feminine novel before Fielding and Smollett were at work producing books of a masculinity correspondingly pronounced. Fielding was the first to mark the difference, and Richardson to the end of his life hated him for writing Joseph Andrews. It often happens that one philosopher hates another whose system though less elaborate is obviously founded on a broader basis than his own. Fielding could afford to laugh at Richardson, but Richardson could never laugh at Fielding. He could only enjoy the lesser satisfaction of holding his rival accursed. Their upbringings had been as different as the resulting books. Eton, law studies at Leyden and the Middle Temple, were a different training for the art of story-telling than the Dick Whittington youth of the little business man. Richardson saw the game of life from the outside. Harry Fielding knew the rough and tumble. Richardson was all for virtue; so was Fielding, but, as he would have put it himself, for virtue that is virtue. Virtue at the expense of nature he could no more understand than Benvenuto Cellini, who, if the facts in the case of Pamela had been set before him, would have thought her a devilish artful young woman, and, if he had met her, congratulated her upon her capture. Fielding had a short, rough and ready creed, and that was that a good heart goes farther than a capful of piety towards keeping the world a habitable place.
Pamela and Joseph Andrews.
Pamela made him laugh. He wanted to make money by writing, so he sat down to put the laugh on paper, with the ultimate notion of filling his pocket by publishing a squib. He set out to parody Pamela in the person of her brother Mr. Joseph Andrews. He had not gone very far in the performance before Parson Adams came into the story, and became so prodigiously delightful that it occurred to Fielding that he had here as admirable a couple for adventure as Cervantes himself could have wished, with the result that Mr. Andrews' correspondence does not compare at all favourably with his sister's, while his biography is infinitely more entertaining. When the book was done, its creator printed on the title-page: 'Written in imitation of the Manner of Cervantes, Author of Don Quixote,' made no very particular reference to his original purpose, and described his book as 'A Comic Epic in Prose.' The masculine novel was on its way. Like Don Quixote or Le Roman Comique it represented a smiling move towards reality, or the criticism of reality, in Fielding's hands through the high and difficult art of ridicule, in the hands of Smollett, whose first book was published six years later, through the easier art of caricature.
These two men between them made the masculine novel of the eighteenth century. Its scope and character are best mapped out by a study of their respective lives, which were sufficiently unlike to make their books almost as different from each other's as they were from Richardson's.
Fielding and Smollett.
They both looked on man as man, a simple creature seldom wholly bad. They were not the fellows to tolerate humbug about platonic love, or the soul, or religion. Religion meant the Established Church, and a parson was a man, good or bad, a representative of the State perhaps, but not a representative of God. Love was no opal passion between Endymion and the moon. It meant desire between man and woman, as tender as you liked, but still desire. It was as simple a thing as valour, which meant ability to use the fists and stand fire. Fielding and Smollett knew a fairly brutal world. But their positions in it had been different. Fielding had always had his head above water. He is continually thinking of fair play, and feels, as we do, a thrill at the heart when he sees Tom Jones and an innkeeper shake hands after bleeding each other's noses. Smollett had had a harder time. He had known what it was to be denied the privileges of a gentleman. He had been in a subordinate position in the navy when that was an organisation of licensed brutality. He was as accustomed to seeing men's bodies cross-questioned, as Fielding to reading law-cases and examining men's minds. He writes always on a more animal level than Fielding. After every fight he lines up his characters for medical treatment:—
'"'n' well," says he, "'n' how
Are yer arms, 'n' legs, 'n' liver, 'n' lungs, 'n' bones a-feelin' now?"'
Fielding only inquires after their hearts. Put their portraits side by side, and the difference is clear. Fielding's is the face of the fortunate man who has had his bad times and come smiling through; Smollett's that of the man not bruised but permanently scarred by the experiences he has suffered. An old sailor once said to me that you can judge of the roughness of a man's employment by the coarseness of his language; those whose work is roughest, using the coarsest words. Fielding is seldom disgusting. His heroes are constantly putting their feet into it; but not into unnecessary filth. It is impossible to say the same of Smollett.
Smollett and Le Sage.
Their choice of models was characteristic; Joseph Andrews being written in imitation of the gentle banter of Cervantes, while Roderick Random copied the more acid satire of Le Sage. Indeed, Le Sage was not serious enough. 'The disgraces of Gil Blas,' says Smollett in his preface, 'are for the most part such as rather excite mirth than compassion; he himself laughs at them; and his transitions from distress to happiness, or at least ease, are so sudden, that neither the reader has time to pity him, nor himself to be acquainted with affliction. This conduct, in my opinion, not only deviates from probability, but prevents that generous indignation, which ought to animate the reader against the sordid and vicious disposition of the world.' That is a moving and very remarkable paragraph. Between those lines is the memory of more than enough 'acquaintance with affliction,' and there is something terrible in the assumption, made with such absolute conviction, that good luck 'deviates from probability.' Smollett had not known much happiness, and found so light-hearted an aim as Le Sage's impossible. His own was almost vengeful. 'I have attempted to represent modest merit struggling with every difficulty to which a friendless orphan is exposed, from his own want of experience, as well as from the selfishness, envy, malice, and base indifference of mankind.' Roderick Random is a rogue and a skunk, but we cannot blame Tobias Smollett if he did not know it. Random's more objectionable qualities are those that pull him through his difficulties. A nicer man would have gone under. The difficulties are at fault for making not Random but Smollett what he was.
The technique of the English novel.
The technique of the English novel was more elaborate than that of its models. Just as Joseph Andrews is more orderly than Don Quixote, so Roderick Random is a step between the pure rogue novel, the string of adventures only connected by the person of the adventurer, and the modern novel of definite plot. Don Quixote and Gil Blas could be cut off anywhere. Their creators had only to kill them. But the curtain could not be rung down on the adventures of Random or Andrew before quite a number of different threads had been properly gathered and explained. There were a few pretty wild coincidences to be discovered. Rory, Joseph, and Fanny all find their true parents; perhaps but rough and ready means to give rotundity to a story, but still pleasant mysteries, to be kept like sweetmeats and dessert as lures for flagging appetites. The novel had assumed some of the elaborate interest of the nouvelle, as practised by Cervantes and the Elizabethans, and the influence of the stage perhaps partly accounts for the construction of the English imitations, more consistent than that of their Spanish and Franco-Spanish models. The art of play-writing had reached its period of most scrupulous technique so recently that these two men who had failed in the theatre were not likely to forget its methods when experimenting with the more plastic art of narrative.
Fielding the better artist.
Of the two, Fielding is always the better artist. He is more interested in his art, more single-minded. He never forgets his duties as a novelist, and continually turns to the reader, just as if he were a sculptor executing a difficult piece of work in the presence of an audience whose admiration he expects. He was ready to laugh at himself for it too: 'We assure the reader we would rather have suffered half mankind to be hanged than have saved one contrary to the strictest laws of unity and probability.' He did not always keep up this admirable conscientiousness; but he did so more consistently than Smollett.
The delicacy of their craftsmanship is best compared not in their greatest books but in those two novels in which they essayed the same task, the portraiture of a rogue, and a rogue not after the merry sympathetic fashion of Lazarillo, but one whom the authors themselves accounted a villain and expected their readers to detest.
Jonathan Wild.
The ironic biographer of Jonathan Wild realised the difficulties of the undertaking. He saw that unless he adopted an attitude which would make it proper for him always to express approval of his hero, his readers would begin to cast this way and that, not knowing whether to sympathise or hate, as the genius of the author or the villainy of the hero were alternately prominent in their eyes. Accordingly, choosing the name of a real and famous gallows-bird who had been hung some twenty years before, Fielding took his tone from those little penny biographies that used to be hawked among the crowd who waited at Tyburn to see their hero swing. He ironically takes this tone; and sustains it without a false note for a couple of hundred pages. How admirably he uses it:—
'The hero, though he loved the chaste Laetitia with excessive tenderness, was not of that low snivelling breed of mortals who, as is generally expressed, tie themselves to a woman's apron-strings; in a word, who are afflicted with that mean, base, low vice or virtue, as it is called, of constancy.'
And again in the passage that sums up the book:—
'He laid down several maxims, as the certain means of attaining greatness, to which, in his own pursuit of it, he constantly adhered.
As—
1. Never to do more mischief than was necessary to the effecting of his purpose; for that mischief was too precious a thing to be thrown away.
2. To know no distinction of men from affection; but to sacrifice all with equal readiness to his interest.
3. Never to communicate more of an affair than was necessary to the person who was to execute it.
4. Not to trust him who hath deceived you, nor who knows he has been deceived by you.
5. To forgive no enemy; but to be cautious and often dilatory in revenge.
6. To shun poverty and distress, and to ally himself as close as possible to power and riches.
7. To maintain a constant gravity in his countenance and behaviour, and to affect wisdom on all occasions.
8. To foment eternal jealousies in his gang, one of another.
9. Never to reward any one equal to his merit; but always to insinuate that the reward was above it.
10. That all men were knaves or fools, and much the greater number a composition of both.
11. That a good name, like money, must be parted with or at least greatly risked, in order to bring the owner any advantage.
12. That virtues, like precious stones, were easily counterfeited; that the counterfeits in both cases adorned the wearer equally; and that very few had knowledge or discernment sufficient to distinguish the counterfeit jewels from the real.
13. That many men were undone by not going deep enough in roguery; as in gaming any man may be a loser who doth not play the whole game.
14. That men proclaim their own virtues, as shopkeepers expose their goods, in order to profit by them.
15. That the heart was the proper seat of hatred, and the countenance of affection and friendship.'
The whole scheme is worked out with a scrupulous attention to the main idea, and a consistency of mood that would not have been unworthy one of the self-conscious artists of a hundred years later. Poe himself could have built no more skilfully, and, lacking Fielding's knowledge of rascaldom, the straw for his bricks would not have been so good.
Ferdinand, Count Fathom.
Smollett had the knowledge; but, a less perspicuous artist, did not realise the difficulties of using it. His villain is never frank in his villainy. Smollett intended from the beginning to disobey Fielding's principle, meant to save his rogue from the gallows, meant to do it all along, and was consequently handicapped in making him respectably wicked. Ferdinand, Count Fathom, does damnable deeds, but his author's purpose is completely nullified by his promise of eventual conversion. The book is not true to itself, but fails because Smollett was not sufficient of an artist to be able to send his hero to hell.
It is interesting to notice in one of the dullest scenes of this unsatisfactory book, that Smollett touched for the first time, in a fumbling, hesitant manner, the note of quasi-supernatural horror that was soon to be sounded with clarity and almost too facile skill. In the hero's device for the undoing of Celinda there is the first warning of the Radcliffes and Lewises and their kind, with their groans upon the battlements, their figures in white, and their unearthly music in the wind. Smollett did not wait long enough to find out what could be done with this new sensation. He jangled the note, and, in his inartistic way, passed on to paint and to reform the wickedness of the Count.
TOBIAS SMOLLETT
Smollett the more versatile.
I am a little ungracious to Smollett in saying so loud that he was an artist inferior to Fielding. Inferior he was, but when I set their best books side by side, I remember that there is little to choose between the pleasures they have given me, and am compelled to admit that the less scrupulous Smollett had the wider range. I read Tom Jones in one sitting of twenty-four hours, and should like to write an essay on it, but can find no excuse for discussing here that epic of good-heartedness, since its characteristics are not different from those already noticed in Joseph Andrews. But Humphry Clinker would have held me for as long if it had had as many pages, and in the history of the art, has, as an example of the novel in letters, an interest wholly separate from that of Roderick Random, which is a specimen of the picaresque. When Smollett came to write that book he was fifty years old and just about to die. He seems to have forgotten his old feud with life, and to look at things with a kindlier eye as one just ready to depart. His late-won detachment helped him to a scheme as clear as one of Fielding's, although even in this he is sometimes submerged in human nature. His notion was to describe the same scenes and events simultaneously from several points of view, in letters from different persons, so as to keep a story moving gently forward, with half a dozen personalities revolving round it, able to realise themselves or be realised in their own letters or those of their friends. In none of his other books are the characters so rounded and complete. There is Matthew Bramble, the old knight, outwardly morose and secretly generous; his sister, an old maid determined not to remain one, for ever grumbling at her brother's generosities; Lyddy, their romantic niece, and Jerry, their young blood of a nephew; and, as persons of the counterplot, Mistress Winifred Jenkins and Mary Jones; not to speak of the ubiquitous Clinker. The letters tell the whole story, and yet, written long after Richardson's, they have an older manner. Richardson's letters, with all their passionate reiteration of detail, do not concern themselves with foibles. They do not make you smile at their writers, and if you had laughed, as Fielding did, he would have been prodigiously annoyed. Smollett's letters have the same aim as the letters of the Spectator or the Tatler. They are different only in less brilliant polish, and in their grouping round a story. The Humphry Clinker correspondence is as important as the letters of Clarissa in forming the most delicate and humorous epistolary style employed by Miss Evelina Anville.
The motives of the masculine novel.
The extreme difficulty I have experienced throughout this chapter in thinking of the technique of these novelists, instead of their material, is a tribute to their power. It is the same with Hogarth. It is impossible to get at the artist for thinking of the life upon his canvases. It is almost impossible to consider Fielding or Smollett as technicians (I have had to do it in their least human books), for thinking of the England that they represented. And now that I am looking about for a concluding paragraph on the work of these two men, when I should be summing up the general characteristics of their craftsmanship, I look at the pile of their books on the table before me, and feel a full and comfortable stomach, and cannot get out of my nose the smell of beer and beef and cheese associated as closely with their pages as lavender with the pages of Cranford. What an England it was in their day. Mr. Staytape carried Rory 'into an alehouse, where he called for some beer and bread and cheese, on which we breakfasted.' 'Our landlord and we sat down at a board, and dined upon a shin of beef most deliciously; our reckoning amounting to twopence halfpenny each, bread and small beer included.' The bright glances of Mistress Waters 'hit only a vast piece of beef which he was carrying into his plate, and harmless spent their force.' Her sighs were drowned 'by the coarse bubbling of some bottled ale.' Square meals are the best antidotes for sentiment, and in every scene of these novelists there is always some one who has fed too recently to allow any hairsplitting delicacy in the room with him. No confessional disentangling of emotions, but beer, beef, cheese, a good heart, a sound skin, and the lack of these things, are the motives of the masculine novel.
A NOTE ON STERNE
Sterne hardly comes within the scope of this book, since his was the art, not of telling stories, but of withholding them, not of keeping things on the move, but of keeping them on the point of moving. It is not without much difficulty and two or three chapters that a character of Sterne's crosses the room. The nine books of Tristram Shandy bring him through the midwife's hands, and a little further. I believe we hear breeches talked of for him. Another nine books would perhaps let him put one leg into them. Tristram Shandy is a continuous denial of the forms that Fielding and Smollett were doing their best to fix. But it is read by many who find them superficial, because Sterne writes of universal, whereas they write of a limited and particular humanity. They write of a Mr. Jones or a Mr. Random, while the hero of Sterne's book is man. He begins, as he puts it himself, ab ovo. He saw that the whole of humanity is a constellation revolving round the birth of a child, and contrived to introduce into his book every imaginable incident connected with that event. If Tristram Shandy does not grow up quick enough to take to himself a wife, My Uncle Toby is taken as a husband by the Widow Wadman. If he does not die, Yorick does. If My Uncle Toby's affairs do not go far enough to produce a baby, Tristram is born. In this book, where nothing seems to happen, everything does. It is the Life and Opinions, not of Tristram Shandy, but of Humanity, illustrated, not in a single character over a long period, but in half a dozen over a short one. For the story of the three generations of the giants, Rabelais needed land and sea, Paris and Touraine. For the adventures of his strolling players, Scarron needed a dozen little towns along the Loire, with inns and châteaux and what not. But for the adventures of Humanity, Sterne, who learnt from both of them, needed only a bowling-green, a study, a bedroom, and a parlour. There is really little else of background to the story. And it is all there; birth, love, death, and all the sad comedy of man misunderstood, and fortunate when, like Uncle Toby, he does not try to understand, the beginning in triviality, and the end in 'Alas, poor Yorick!'
PART II
ROMANTICISM