Towards Lovelace, on the other hand, the orthodox attitude, with even greater uniformity, has been shocked, or sometimes even unshocked, admiration. Hazlitt went into frequently quoted raptures over the "regality" of his character: and though to approve of him as a man would only be the pretence of a cheap paradoxer, general opinion seems to have gone various lengths in the same direction. There have, however, been a few dissenters: and I venture to join myself to them in the very dissidence of their dissent. Lovelace, it is true, is a most astonishingly "succeeded" blend of a snob's fine gentleman and of the fine gentleman of a silly and rather unhealthy-minded schoolgirl. He is—it is difficult to resist the temptation of dropping and inserting the h's—handsome, haughty, arbitrary, as well as rich, generous after a fashion, well descended, well dressed, well mannered—except when he is insolent. He is also—which certainly stands to his credit in the bank which is not that of the snob or the schoolgirl—no fool in a general way. But he is not in the least a gentleman except in externals: and there is nothing really "great" about him at all. Even his scoundrelism is mostly, if not wholly, pose—which abominable thing indeed distinguishes him throughout, in every speech and every act, from the time when he sighs as he kisses Miss Arabella Harlowe's hand to the time when he says, "Let this expiate!" as that hallowed sword of Colonel Morden's passes through his rotten heart. Now if Richardson had meant this, it might be granted at once that Lovelace is one of the greatest characters of fiction: and I do not deny that taken as this, meant or not meant, he is great. But Richardson obviously did not mean it; and Hazlitt did not mean it; and none of the admirers mean it. They all thought and think that Lovelace is something like what Milton's Satan was, and what my Lord Byron would have liked to be. This is very unfair to the Prince of Darkness: and it is even not quite just to "the noble poet."
At the same time, the acute reader will have noticed, the acknowledgment that the fact that Richardson—even not knowing it and intending to do something else—did hit off perfectly and consummately the ideal of such a "prevailing party" (to quote Lord Foppington) as snobs and schoolgirls, is a serious and splendid tribute to his merits: as is also the fact that his two chief characters are characters still interesting and worth arguing about. Those merits, indeed, are absolutely incontestable. His immediate and immense popularity, abroad as well as at home, would not necessarily prove much, though it must not be neglected, and historically, at least, is of the first importance. But he does not need it.
For, as should have been sufficiently shown, he did very great things—first by gathering up the scattered means and methods which had been half ignorantly hit on by others, and co-ordinating them into the production of the finished and complete novel; secondly (though less) by that infusion of elaborate "minor psychology" as it may be called, which is his great characteristic; and, thirdly, by means of it and of other things, in raising the pitch of interest in his readers to an infinitely higher degree than had ever been known before. The dithyrambs of Diderot are, though not ridiculously, amusingly excessive: but they are only an exaggeration of the truth. On the comic side he was weak: and he made a most unfortunate mistake by throwing this part of the business on young ladies of position and (as he thought) of charm—Miss Darnford, Miss Howe, Charlotte Grandison—who are by no means particularly comic and who are sometimes very particularly vulgar. But of tragedy positive, in the bourgeois kind, he had no small command, and in the middle business—in affairs neither definitely comic nor definitely tragic—he was wonderfully prolific and facile. His immense and heart-breaking lengthiness is not mere verbosity: it comes partly from the artist's natural delight in a true and newly found method, partly from a still more respectably artistic desire not to do the work negligently. As for the unhealthiness of atmosphere which has been generally and not unjustly charged upon him, it is, in part, no doubt the result of imperfect temperament and breeding: but it is also as closely connected with his very method as are the merits thereof. You cannot "consider so curiously" without considering too curiously. The drawbacks of his work are obvious, and they were likely to be, and were, exaggerated. But they might be avoided and the merits kept: nor is it too much to say that the triumphs of the English novel in the last century have been not a little due to the avoidance of the one and the keeping of the other.
It would be, in the circumstances, peculiarly uncivil and disobliging to lay very much stress on the fact that, after all, the greatest of Richardson's works is his successor, caricaturist, and superior—Fielding. When the memoirs of Miss Pamela Andrews appeared, the future biographer of her doubly supposititious brother was a not very young man of thirty-three, who had written a good many not very good plays, had contributed to periodicals, and had done a little work at the Bar, besides living, at least till his marriage and it may be feared later, an exceedingly "rackety" life. It is not improbable, though it is not certain, that he had already turned his attention to prose fiction of a kind. For, though the Miscellanies which followed Joseph Andrews were three years later than Pamela in appearance, the Journey from this World to the Next which they contain has the immaturity of earliness; and we can hardly conceive it as written after the adventures and character of Mr. Abraham Adams. It is unequal, rather tedious in parts, and in conception merely a pastiche of Lucian and Fontenelle: but it contains some remarkable things in the way of shrewd satirical observation of human nature. And the very fact that it is a following of something else is interesting, in connection with the infinitely more important work that preceded it in publication, The Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams (1742).
Nobody has ever had much difficulty in accounting for the way in which Fielding availed himself of the appearance and popularity of Pamela. And though Richardson would have been superhuman instead of very human indeed (with an ordinary British middle-class humanity, and an extraordinary vein of genius) if he had done otherwise, few have joined him in thinking Joseph a "lewd and ungenerous engraftment." We have not ourselves been very severe on the faults of Pamela, the reason of lenity being, among other things, that it in a manner produced Fielding, and all the fair herd of his successors down to the present day. But those faults are glaring: and they were of a kind specially likely to attract the notice and the censure of a genial, wholesome, and, above all, masculine taste and intellect like Fielding's. Even at that time, libertine as it was in some ways, and sentimental as it was in others, people had not failed to notice that Pamela's virtue is not quite what was then called "neat" wine—the pure and unadulterated juice of the grape. The longueurs and the fiddle-faddle, the shameless and fulsome preface-advertisements and the rest lay open enough to censure. So Fielding saw the handles, and gripped them at once by starting a male Pamela—a situation not only offering "most excellent differences," but in itself possessing, to graceless humanity at all times it may be feared, and at that time perhaps specially, something essentially ludicrous in minor points. At first he kept the parody very close: though the necessary transposition of the parts afforded opportunity (amply taken) for display of character and knowledge of nature superior to Richardson's own. Later the general opinion is that he, especially inspirited by his trouvaille of Adams, almost forgot the parody, and only furbished up the Pamela-connection at the end to make a formal correspondence with the beginning, and to get a convenient and conventional "curtain." I am not so sure of this. Even Adams is to a certain extent suggested by Williams, though they turn out such very different persons. Mrs. Slipslop, a character, as Gray saw, not so very far inferior to Adams, is not only a parallel to Mrs. Jewkes, but also, and much more, a contrast to the respectable Mrs. Jervis and Mrs. Warden. All sorts of fantastic and not-fantastic doublets may be traced throughout: and I am not certain that Parson Trulliber's majestic doctrine that no man, even in his own house, shall drink when he "caaled vurst" is not a demoniacally ingenious travesty of Pamela's characteristic casuistry, when she says that she will do anything to propitiate Lady Davers, but she will not "fill wine" to her in her own husband's house.
But this matters little: and we have no room for it. Suffice it as agreed and out of controversy that Joseph Andrews started as a parody of Pamela and that, whether in addition or in substitution, it turned to something very different. It is not quite so uncontroversial, but will be asserted here as capable of all but demonstration, that the "something different" is also something much greater. There is still not very much plot—the parody did not necessitate and indeed rather discouraged that, and what there is is arrived at chiefly by the old and seldom very satisfactory system of anagnorisis—the long-lost-child business. But, under the three other heads, Joseph distances his sister hopelessly and can afford her much more than weight for sex. It has been said that there are doubtfully in Richardson anywhere, and certainly not in Pamela, those startling creations of personality which are almost more real to us than the persons we know in the flesh. It is not that Pamela and her meyney are unreal; for they are not: but that they are not personal. The Reverend Abraham Adams is a good deal more real than half the parsons who preached last Sunday, and a good deal more personal: and the quality is not confined to him, though he has most of it. So, too, with the description. The time was not yet for any minute or elaborate picture-setting. But here again also that extra dose of life and action—almost of bustle—which Fielding knows how to instil is present. In Pamela the settings are frequent, but they are "still life" and rather shadowy: we do not see the Bedfordshire and Lincolnshire mansions, the summer houses where (as she observes with demure relish when the danger is over) Mr. B. was "very naughty;" even the pond where, if she had been another sort of girl, the drame might have become real tragedy. Fielding does not take very much more trouble and yet somehow we do see it all, with a little help from our own imaginations perhaps, but on his suggestion and start. Especially the outdoor life and scenes—the inn-yards and the high roads and the downs by night or day; the pig-sty where poor Adams is the victim of live pigs and the public-house kitchen where he succumbs to a by-product of dead ones—these are all real for us.
But most of all is the regular progress of vivification visible in the dialogue. This, as we have seen, had been the very weakest point of the weakness of almost all (we might say of all) English novels up to the close of the first quarter of the eighteenth century. Richardson had done a great deal for it: but it was impossible that, on his method, it should not, for the most part, be languid, or at any rate long-winded. Here again Fielding spirits the thing up—oxygenates and ozonises the atmosphere: while, in even fuller measure than his predecessor and victim, he recognises the efficacy of dialogue as the revealer of character. He has, assisted no doubt by Shakespeare and his own dramatic practice, discovered that you do not want volumes of it to do the business—that single moments and single sentences will do that business at times, if they are used in the proper way.
In short, Fielding here used his reluctant and indignant forerunner as a spring-board, whence to attain heights which that forerunner could never have reached: he "stood upon his shoulders" in the most cavalier but also the most successful fashion. In the novel as Richardson knew it and was thinking of it, when he began Pamela, you were, as a rule, in an artificial world altogether—a world artificial with an artificiality only faintly and occasionally touched with any reality at all. In Pamela itself there is perhaps nothing, and certainly not much, that is wholly unreal: but the reality is treated and rendered in an artificial way. In Joseph Andrews, though its professed genesis and procedure are artificial too, you break away at once from serious artifice. These are all real people who do real things in a real way now, as they did nearly two hundred years ago: however much dress, and speech, and manners may have changed. And we are told of their doings in a real way, too. Exactly how the teller knew it we do not know: but we do not think of this at all. And on the other hand there is no perpetual reminder of art, like the letter-ending and beginning, to disturb or alloy the once and gladly accepted "suspension of disbelief."
A slight digression may not be improper here. Even in their own days, when the gros mot was much less shocking than it is now, there was a general notion—which has more or less persisted, in spite of all changes of fashion in this respect, and exists even now when licence of subject as distinguished from phrase has to a great extent returned—that Fielding is more "coarse," more "improper," and so forth than Richardson. As a matter of fact, neither admits positively indecent language—that had gone out, except in the outskirts and fringes of English literature, generations earlier. But I am much mistaken if there are not in Richardson more than a few scenes and situations the "impropriety" of which positively exceeds anything in Fielding. Naturally one does not give indications: but readers may be pretty confident about the fact. The comparative "bloodlessness," however—the absence of life and colour in the earlier and older writer—acts as a sort of veil to them.
Yet (to return to larger and purer air), however much one may admire Joseph Andrews, the kind of parasitic representation which it allows itself, and the absence of any attempt to give an original story tells against it. And it may, in any case, be regarded as showing that the novelist, even yet, was hugging the shore or allowing himself to be taken in tow—that he did not dare to launch out into the deep and trust to his own sails and the wind of nature to propel him—to his own wits and soul to guide. Even Fielding's next venture—the wonderful and almost unique venture of Jonathan Wild—leaves some objection of this sort possible, though, for myself, I should never dream of admitting it. Jonathan was (so much the worse for human nature) a real person: and the outlines of his story—if not the actual details—are given partly by his actual life, partly by Gay's Beggar's Opera and its sequel. Moreover, the whole marvellous little book has a purpose—the purpose of satire on false ideas of greatness, historical and political. The invention and the art of the writer are not even yet allowed frank and free course.