Sir Roger de Coverley—a novel.
If I were asked which was the first English novel of character-study, as I am asking myself now, I should reply, as I reply now, those essays in the Spectator that are concerned with Sir Roger de Coverley. Set that little series of pictures in a book by themselves, as has been done with appropriate and delightful illustrations by Mr. Hugh Thomson, and in reading them you will find it hard to remember that you are not enjoying a more than usually leisurely kind of narrative. The knight is shown to us in different scenes; we watch him at the assizes, leaning over to the judge to congratulate him on the good weather his lordship enjoys; we see him smile in greeting of Will Wimble; we watch him fidget in his seat with impatience of the misdeeds of the villain in the play; we hear of his death with a tear in our eye that is a testimony to the completeness and humanity of the portraiture. If only his love-story were thinly spread throughout the book and not begun and ended in a chapter, Sir Roger de Coverley would be a novel indeed. As it is, in that delicate picture of a country gentleman and country life—for Sir Roger does not stand against a black curtain for his portraiture, but before his tenants and his friends—we have the promise of The Vicar of Wakefield and of Cranford, and of all that chaste and tender kind of story-telling that is almost peculiar to our literature.
Johnson and Goldsmith.
Johnson and Goldsmith followed the tradition. Even the ponderous Doctor could step lightly at times, and never so lightly as when he obeyed the instinct that turns discussion into fiction and essays into sketches. He too can write his letters, and that from Mrs. Deborah Ginger, the unfortunate wife of a city wit, is a story in itself. And as for Goldsmith, he can hardly hold his pen for half a paragraph before it breaks away from the hard road of ideas and goes merrily along the bridle-path of mere humanity. His letters from Lien Chi Altangi, that serious Chinese busied in exposing the follies of the Occident, turn continually to story-telling. A wise remark will usher in an Eastern tale, and, not even in the papers of Steele or Addison are the subjects of characters, like the little beau, who would have been a 'mere indigent gallant,' magicked so deliciously to life. Finally, he did with 'The Man in Black' what Addison and Steele could so well have done with Sir Roger. Fielding and Smollett had written before him, and he saw that he could follow their art without resigning any of the graces of the essayist.
The later essayists.
The eighteenth century saw the absorption of the periodical essayists into avowed story-telling. Miss Burney left them nothing to do but to write sketches for chapters that might have appeared in her books. The essayists who came later could only make beautiful examples of a form that was already a little old-fashioned, though, following other suggestions, they experimented in a new direction and found another art to teach to story-tellers. Leigh Hunt's pair of early nineteenth-century portraits, 'The Old Gentleman,' and 'The Old Lady,' betray the family likeness of the character as it was known to Overbury. Lamb's portrait of Mrs. Battle is nearer modern story-telling. He does not let us into more than one of Sarah Battle's secrets, but in telling us of her attitude towards the game of whist he shows us how she looked upon the game of life. We would know her if we met her, even if she were not seated at the card-table, the candles unsnuffed, the fire merry on the hearth, and in the faces of her and her partner and foes the frosty joy of 'the rigour of the game.' Hazlitt, though he stuck close to his Montaigne, and cared less to illustrate himself by other people than by his own opinions, gives us characters too—that noble one of his father!—and his account of Jack Cavanagh the fives player, and his description of his going down to see the fight, are splendid passages of biography and narrative. But the gift of the later essayists to story-telling was the new art of reverie, and of the description of an event so soaked in the describer's personality as to be at once an essay and a story. |The art of reverie.| Few forms are richer in opportunity either for essayist or story-teller, than that which made possible Lamb's 'Dream Children,' and in which the child De Quincey, who had been in Hell, could show us the calamity of three generations of beautiful children, and ask at last whether death or life were the more terrible, the more to be feared. It is sufficient to mention the names of Walter Pater and Mr. Cunninghame Graham to show that some of the finest work of modern times has been done in this kind of story-telling, and is being so done to-day. And this art, this most delicate art of suggested narrative, is it not also—to return, perhaps a little fancifully, to the tragic old knight's definition—is it not also 'a picture in various colours, all of them heightned by one shadowing'? Is it not also 'a quicke and soft touch of many strings, all shutting up in one musicall close'?