IV
It was the enlargement of this sense of romance which Oliver Goldsmith gave his time in that masterpiece in small, "The Vicar of Wakefield": his special contribution to the plastic variations connected with the growing pains of the Novel. Whether regarded as poet, essayist, dramatist or story-maker, Dr. Goldsmith is one of the best-loved figures of English letters, as Swift is one of the most terrible. And these lovable qualities are nowhere more conspicuous than in the idyllic sketch of the country clergyman and his family. Romance it deserves to be called, because of the delicate idealization in the setting and in the portrayal of the Vicar himself—a man who not only preached God's love, "but first he followed it himself." And yet the book—which, by the bye, was published in 1766 just as the last parts of "Tristram Shandy" were appearing in print—offers a good example of the way in which the more romantic depiction of life, in the hands of a master, inevitably blends with realistic details, even with a winning truthfulness of effect. Some of the romantic charm of "The Vicar of Wakefield," we must remember, inheres in its sympathetic reproduction of vanished manners, etiquette and social grace; a sweet old-time grace, a fragrance out of the past, emanates from the memory of it if read half a lifetime ago. An elder age is rehabilitated for us by its pages, even as it is by the canvases of Romney and Sir Joshua. And with this more obvious romanticism goes the deeper romanticism that comes from the interpretation of humanity, which assumes it to be kindly and gentle and noble in the main. Life, made up of good and evil as it is, is, nevertheless, seen through this affectionate time-haze, worth the living. Whatever their individual traits, an air of country peace and innocence hovers over the Primrose household: the father and mother, the girls, Olivia and Sophia, and the two sons, George and Moses, they all seem equally generous, credulous and good. We feel that the author is living up to a announcement in the opening chapter which of itself is a sort of promise of the idealized treatment of poor human nature. But into this pretty and perfect scene of domestic felicity come trouble and disgrace: the serpent creeps into the unsullied nest, the villain, Thorn-hill, ruins Olivia, their house burns, and the softhearted, honorable father is haled to prison. There is no blinking the darker side of mortal experience. And the prison scenes, with their noble teaching with regard to penal punishment, showing Goldsmith far in advance of his age, add still further to the shadows. Yet the idealization is there, like an atmosphere, and through it all, shining and serene, is Dr. Primrose to draw the eye to the eternal good. We smile mayhap at his simplicity but note at the same time that his psychology is sound: the influence of his sermonizing upon the jailbirds is true to experience often since tested. Nor are satiric side-strokes in the realistic vein wanting—as in the drawing of such a high lady of quality as Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs—the very name sending our thoughts forward to Thackeray. In the final analysis it will be found that what makes the work a romance is its power to quicken the sense of the attraction, the beauty of simple goodness through the portrait of a noble man whose environment is such as best to bring out his qualities. Dr. Primrose is humanity, if not actual, potential: he can be, if he never was. A helpful comparison might be instituted between Goldsmith's country clergyman and Balzac's country doctor in the novel of that name; another notable attempt at the idealization of a typical man of one of the professions. It would bring out the difference between the late eighteenth and the middle nineteenth centuries, as well as that between a great novelist, Balzac, and a great English writer, Goldsmith, who yet is not a novelist at all. It should detract no whit from one's delight in such a work as "The Vicar of Wakefield" to acknowledge that its aim is not to depict society as it then existed, but to give a pleasurable abstract of human nature for the purpose of reconciling us through art with life, when lived so sanely, simply and sweetly as by Primrose of gentle memory. Seldom has the divine quality of the forgiveness of sins been portrayed with more salutary effect than in the scene where the erring and errant Olivia is taken back to the heart of her father—just as the hard-headed landlady would drive her forth with the words:
"'Out I say! Pack out this moment! tramp, thou impudent strumpet, or I'll give thee a mark that won't be better for this three months. What! you trumpery, to come and take up an honest house without cross or coin to bless yourself with! Come along, I say.'
"I flew to her rescue while the woman was dragging her along by her hair, and I caught the dear forlorn wretch in my arms. 'Welcome, anyway welcome, my dearest lost one, my treasure, to your poor old father's bosom. Though the vicious forsake thee, there is yet one in the world who will never forsake thee; though thou hadst ten thousand crimes to answer for, he will forget them all!'"
Set beside this father the fathers of Clarissa and Sophia Western, and you have the difference between the romance and realism that express opposite moods; the mood that shows the average and the mood that shows the best. For portraiture, then, rather than plot, for felicity of manner and sweetness of interpretation we praise such a work;—qualities no less precious though not so distinctively appertaining to the Novel.
It may be added, for a minor point, that the Novel type as already developed had assumed a conventional length which would preclude "The Vicar of Wakefield" from its category, making it a sketch or novelette. The fiction-makers rapidly came to realize that for their particular purpose—to portray a complicated piece of contemporary life—more leisurely movement and hence greater space are necessary to the best result. To-day any fiction under fifty thousand words would hardly be called a novel in the proper sense,—except in publishers' advertisements. Goldsmith's story does not exceed such limits.
Therefore, although we may like it all the more because it is a romantic sketch rather than a novel proper, we must grant that its share in the eighteenth century shaping of the form is but ancillary. The fact that the book upon its appearance awakened no such interest as waited upon the fiction of Richardson or Fielding a few years before, may be taken to mean that the taste was still towards the more photographic portrayals of average contemporary humanity. Several editions, to be sure, were issued the year of its publication, but without much financial success, and contemporary criticism found little remarkable in this permanent contribution to English literature. Later, it was beloved both of the elect and the general. Goethe's testimony to the strong and wholesome effect of the book upon him in his formative period, is remembered. Dear old Dr. Johnson too believed in the story, for, summoned to Goldsmith's lodging by his friend's piteous appeal for help, he sends a guinea in advance and on arrival there, finds his colleague in high choler because, forsooth, his landlady has arrested him for his rent: whereupon Goldsmith (who had already expended part of the guinea in a bottle of Madeira) displays a manuscript,—"a novel ready for the press," as we read in Boswell; and Johnson—"I looked into it and saw its merit," says he—goes out and sells it for sixty pounds, whereupon Goldsmith paid off his obligation, and with his mercurial Irish nature had a happy evening, no doubt, with his chosen cronies! It is a sordid, humorous-tragic Grub Street beginning for one of the little immortals of letters—so many of which, alack! have a similar birth.
Certain other authors less distinguished than these, produced fiction of various kinds which also had some influence in the development, and further illustrate the tendency of the Novel to become a pliable medium for literary expression; a sort of net wherein divers fish might be caught. Dr. Johnson, essayist, critic, coffee-house dictator, published the same year that Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" began to appear, his "Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia"; a stately elegiac on the vanity of human pleasures, in which the Prince leaves his idyllic home and goes into the world to test its shams, only to return to his kingdom with the sad knowledge that it is the better part of wisdom in this vale of tears to prepare for heaven. Of course this is fiction only in seeming and by courtesy, almost as far removed from the Novel as the same author's mammoth dictionary or Lives of the Poets. It has Richardson's method of moralizing, while lacking that writer's power of studying humanity in its social relations. The sturdy genius of Dr. Johnson lay in quite other directions.
Richardson's sentimentality, too, was carried on by MacKenzie in his "Man of Feeling" already mentioned as the favorite tear-begetter of its time, the novel which made the most prolonged attack upon the lachrymosal gland. But it is only fair to this author to add that there was a welcome note of philanthropy in his story—in spite of its mawkishness; his appeal for the under dog in great cities is a forecast of the humanitarianism to become rampant in later fiction.
Again, the seriousness which has always, in one guise or the other, underlain English fiction, soon crystalized in the contemporary eighteenth century novelists into an attempt to preach this or that by propaganda in story-form. William Godwin, whose relations as father-in-law to Shelley gives him a not altogether agreeable place in our memory, was a leader in this tendency with several fictions, the best known and most readable being "Caleb Williams": radical ideas, social, political and religious, were mooted by half a dozen earnest-souled authors whose works are now regarded as links in the chain of development—missing links for most readers of fiction, since their literary quality is small. In later days, this kind of production was to be called purpose fiction and condemned or applauded according to individual taste and the esthetic and vital value of the book. When the moralizing overpowered all else, we get a book like that friend of childhood, "Sanford and Merton," which Thomas Day perpetrated in the year of grace 1783. Few properly reared boys of a generation ago escaped this literary indiscretion: its Sunday School solemnity, its distribution of life's prizes according to the strictest moral tests, had a sort of bogey fascination; it was much in vogue long after Day's time, indeed down to within our own memories. Perhaps it is still read and relished in innocent corners of the earth.. In any case it is one of the outcomes of the movement just touched upon.
At present, being more ennuye in our tastes for fiction than were our forefathers, and the pretence of piety being less a convention, we incline to insist more firmly that the pill at least be sugar-coated,—if indeed we submit to physic at all.
There was also a tendency during the second half of the eighteenth century—very likely only half serious and hardly more than a literary fad—toward the romance of mystery and horror. Horace Walpole, the last man on earth from whom one would expect the romantic and sentimental, produced in his "Castle of Otranto" such a book; and Mrs. Radcliffe's "The Mystery of Udolpho" (standing for numerous others) manipulated the stage machinery of this pseudo-romantic revival and reaction; moonlit castles, medieval accessories, weird sounds and lights at the dread midnight hour,—an attack upon the reader's nerves rather than his sensibilities, much the sort of paraphernalia employed with a more spiritual purpose and effect in our own day by the dramatist, Maeterlinck. Beckford's "Vathek" and Lewis' "The Monk" are variations upon this theme, which for a while was very popular and is decidedly to be seen in the work of the first novelist upon American soil, Charles Brockden Brown, whose somber "Wieland," read with the Radcliffe school in mind, will reveal its probable parentage. We have seen how the movement was happily satirized by its natural enemy, Jane Austen. Few more enjoyable things can be quoted than this conversation from "Northanger Abbey" between two typical young ladies of the time:—
'But, my dearest Catherine, what have you been doing with
yourself all this morning? Have you gone on with Udolpho?'
'Yes, I have been reading it ever since I woke; and I am
got to the black veil.'
'Are you, indeed? How delightful! Oh! I would not tell you what is behind the black veil for the world! Are you not wild to know?'
'Oh! yes, quite; what can it be? But do not tell me; I would not be told upon any account. I know it must be a skeleton; I am sure it is Laurentina's skeleton. Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it, I assure you; if it had not been to meet you, I would not have come away from it for all the world.'
'Dear creature! how much I am obliged to you; and when you have finished Udolpho, we will read the Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you.'
'Have you, indeed! How glad I am! What are they all?'
'I will read you their names directly; here they are in my
pocket-book. "Castle of Wolfenbach," "Clermont,"
"Mysterious Warnings," "Necromancer of the Black Forest,"
"Midnight Bell," "Orphan of the Rhine," and "Horrid Mysteries."
Those will last us some time.'
'Yes; pretty well; but are they all horrid? Are you sure
they are all horrid?'
'Yes, quite sure; for a particular friend of mine, a Miss
Andrews, a sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the
world, has read every one of them.'
After all, human nature is constant, independent of time; and fashions social, mental, literary, return like fashions in feminine headgear! Two club women were coming from a city play house after hearing a particularly lugubrious drama of Ibsen's, and one was overheard exclaiming to the other: "O isn't Ibsen just lovely! He does so take the hope out of life!"
Yet the tendency of eighteenth century fiction, with its handling of the bizarre and sensational, its use of occult effects of the Past and Present, was but an eddy in a current which was setting strong and steadily toward the realistic portrayal of contemporary society.
One other tendency, expressive of a lighter mood, an attempt to represent society a la mode, is also to be noted during this half century so crowded with interesting manifestations of a new spirit; and they who wrote it were mostly women. It is a remarkable fact that for the fifty years between Sterne and Scott, the leading novelists were of that sex, four of whom at least, Burney, Radcliffe, Edgeworth and Austen, were of importance. Of this group the lively Fanny Burney is the prophet; she is the first woman novelist of rank. Her "Evelina," with its somewhat starched gentility and simpering sensibility, was once a book to conjure with; it fluttered the literary dovecotes in a way not so easy to comprehend to-day. Yet Dr. Johnson loved his "little Burney" and greatly admired her work, and there are entertaining and without question accurate pictures of the fashionable London at the time of the American Revolution drawn by an observer of the inner circle, in her "Evelina" and "Cecilia"; one treasures them for their fresh spirit and lively humor, nor looks in them for the more serious elements of good fiction. She contributes, modestly, to that fiction to which we go for human documents. No one who has been admitted to the privileges of Miss Burney's Diary can fail to feel that a woman who commands such idiom is easily an adept in the realistic dialogue of the novel. Here, even more than in her own novels or those of Richardson and Fielding, we hear the exact syllable and intonation of contemporary speech. "Mr. Cholmondeley is a clergyman," she writes, "nothing shining either in person or manners but rather somewhat grim in the first and glum in the last." And again: "Our confab was interrupted by the entrance of Mr. King," or yet again: "The joke is, the people speak as if they were afraid of me, instead of my being afraid of them…. Next morning, Mrs. Thrale asked me if I did not want to see Mrs. Montagu? I truly said I should be the most insensible of animals not to like to see our sex's glory." It is hard to realize that this was penned in the neighborhood of one hundred and fifty years ago, so modern is its sound.
A great writer, with a wider scope and a more incisive satire, is Maria Edgeworth, whose books take us over into the nineteenth century. The lighter, more frivolous aspects of English high society are admirably portrayed in her "Belinda" and eight or ten other tales: and she makes a still stronger claim to permanent remembrance in such studies of Irish types, whether in England or on the native soil, as "The Absentee" and "Castle Rackrent." I venture the statement that even the jaded novel reader of to-day will find on a perusal of either of these capital stories that Miss Edgeworth makes literature, and that a pleasure not a penance is in store. She first in English fiction exploited the better-class Irishman at home and her scenes have historic value. Some years later, Susan Ferrier, who enjoyed the friendship of Scott, wrote under the stimulus of Maria Edgeworth's example a series of clever studies of Scotch life, dashed with decided humor and done with true observation.
These women, with their quick eye and facile ability to report what they saw, and also their ease of manner which of itself seems like a social gift, were but the prelude to the work so varied, gifted and vastly influential, which the sex was to do in the modern Novel; so that, at present, in an open field and no favors given, they are honorable rivals of men, securing their full share of public favor. And the English Novel, written by so many tentatively during these fifty years when the form was a-shaping, culminates at the turn of the century in two contrasted authors compared with whom all that went before seems but preparatory; one a man, the other a woman, who together express and illustrate most conveniently for this study the main movements of modern fiction,—romance and realism,—the instinct for truth and the instinct for beauty; not necessarily an antagonism, as we shall have ample occasion to see, since truth, rightly defined, is only "beauty seen from another side." It hardly needs to add that these two novelists are Jane Austen and Walter Scott.