His details and accessories of all kinds, descriptive, literary, and other, would give subject for a separate chapter; but we must turn (for this chapter is already too long) to his phrase—in dialogue, narrative, whatever you please to call it. For the fact is that these two things, and all others in which phrase and expression can be used, melt into each other with Sterne in a manner as "flibberti-gibbety" as most other things about him. This phrase or expression is of course artificial to the highest degree: and it is to it that the reproach of depending on mechanical aids chiefly applies. And yet laboriously figured, tricked, machined as it is—easy as once more it may be to prove that it is artifice and not art—the fact remains that, not merely (perhaps not by any means chiefly) in the stock extract-pieces which everybody knows, but almost everywhere, it is triumphant: and that English literature would be seriously impoverished without it. Certainly never was there a style which more fully justified the definition given by Buffon, in Sterne's own time, of style as "the very man." Falsetto, "faking," vamping, shoddy—all manner of evil terms may be heaped upon it without the possibility of completely clearing it from them. To some eyes it underlies them most when it is most ambitious, as in the Le Fevre story and the diatribe against critics. It leaves the court with all manner of stains on its character. Only, once more, if it did not exist we should be ignorant of more than one of the most remarkable possibilities of the English language.
Thus, in almost exactly the course of a technical generation—from the appearance of Pamela in 1740 to that of Humphry Clinker in 1771—the wain of the novel was solidly built, furnished with four main wheels to move it, and set a-going to travel through the centuries. In a sense, inasmuch as Humphry Clinker itself, though Smollett's best work, can hardly be said to show any absolutely new faculties, character, or method, the process was even accomplished in two-thirds of the time, between Pamela and Tristram Shandy. We shall see in the next chapter how eagerly the examples were taken up: and how, long before Smollett died, the novel of this and that kind had become one of the most prolific branches of literature. But, for the moment, the important thing is to repeat that it had been thoroughly and finally started on its high road, in general by Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett; in particular and wayward but promising side-paths by Sterne.
CHAPTER IV
THE MINOR AND LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL[7]
It is at last beginning to be recognised in principle, though it is still much too often forgotten in practice, that the minor work of a time is at least as important as the major in determining general literary characteristics and tendencies. Nor is this anywhere much more noticeable than in regard to the present period of our present subject. The direct influence of Richardson and Fielding was no doubt very great: but the development of the novel during the middle and later century was too large and too various to be all mere imitation. As a result, however, of their influence, there certainly came over the whole kind a very remarkable change. Even before them the nisus towards it, which has been noticed in the chapter before the last, is observable enough. Mrs. Manley's rather famous New Atlantis (1709) has at least the form of a key-novel of the political sort: but the whole interest is in the key and not in the novel, though the choice of the form is something. And the second, third, and fourth decades of the century saw other work testifying to the vague and almost unconscious hankering after prose fiction which was becoming endemic. A couple of examples of this may be treated, in passing, before we come to the work—not exactly of the first class in itself—of a writer who shows both the pre-Richardsonian and the post-Richardsonian phases of it most interestingly, and after a fashion to which there are few exact parallels.
A book, which counts here from the time of its appearance, and from a certain oddity and air of "key" about it, rather than from much merit as literature, or any as a story, is the Adventures of Gaudentio di Lucca by Simon Berington.[8] It appeared in 1737, between Defoe and Swift on the earlier, and Richardson on the later side, while the English world was to the novel as an infant crying for the light—and the bottle—at once. It begins and ends with adventures and discoveries of an ordinary romantic type. But the body consists of a revelation to certain Italian Inquisitors (who are not at all of the lurid type familiar to the Protestant imagination, but most equitable and well-disposed as well as potent, grave, and reverend signers) of an unknown country of "the Grand Pophar" in the centre of Africa. This country is civilised, but not yet Christianised: and the description of it of course gives room for the exercise of the familiar game of contrast—in this case not so much satiric as didactic—with countries nearer home which are at least supposed to be both civilised and Christian. It is a "respectable" book both in the French and the English sense: but it is certainly not very amusing, and cannot even be called very interesting in any way, save historically.
The other example which we shall take is of even less intrinsic attraction: in fact it is a very poor thing. There are, however, more ways than one in which corpora vilia are good for experiment and evidence: and we may find useful indications in the mere bookmaking of the time. Lowndes, the fortunate publisher of Evelina, some dozen years before that windfall came, had issued, or reissued, a collection called The Novelist and professedly containing The select novels of Dr. Croxall [the ingenious author of The Fair Circassian and the part destroyer of Hereford Cathedral] and other Polite Tales. The book is an unblushing if not an actually piratical compilation; sweeping together, with translations and adaptations published by Croxall himself at various times in the second quarter of the century and probably earlier, most of the short stories from the Spectator class of periodical which had appeared during the past two-thirds of a century. Most of the rest are obvious (and very badly done) translations from the French and even from Cervantes' Exemplary Novels; seasoned with personal and other anecdotes, so that the whole number of separate articles may exceed four-score. Of these a few are interesting attempts at the historical novel or novelette—short sketches of Mary Queen of Scots (very sympathetic and evidently French in origin from the phrase "a temple which was formerly a church"), Jane Shore (an exquisitely absurd piece of eighteenth-century middle-class modernising and moralising), Essex, Buckingham, and other likely figures. There are cuts by the "Van-somethings and Back-somethings" of the time: and the whole, though not worthy of anything better than the "fourpenny box," is an evident symptom of popular taste. The sweetmeats or hors d'oeuvre of the older caterings for that taste are here collected together to form a pièce de résistance. It is true that The Novelist is only a true title in the older sense—that the pieces are novelle not "novels" proper. But they are fiction, or fact treated like fiction: and though the popular taste itself was evidently ceasing to be satisfied with these morsels and demanding a substantial joint, yet the substance was, after all, the same.
We rise higher, if not very high, with the novels of Mrs. Eliza Haywood (1693-1756), one of the damned of the Dunciad, but, like some of her fellows in that Inferno, by no means deserving hopeless reprobation. Every one who has devoted any attention to the history of the novel, as well as some who have merely considered it as a part of that of English literature generally, has noticed the curious contrast between the earlier and the later novels of this writer. Betsy Thoughtless (1751) and Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (1753) could, without much difficulty, be transposed into novels of to-day. Idalia (1723) is of an entirely different mood and scheme. It is a pure Behnesque nouvelle, merely describing the plots and outrage which ruin the heroine (The Unfortunate Mistress is the second title), but attempting no character-drawing (the only hint at such a thing is that Idalia, instead of being a meek and suffering victim, is said to have a violent temper), and making not the slightest effort even to complete what story there is. For the thing breaks off with a sort of "perhaps to be concluded in some next," about which we have not made up our minds. Very rarely do we find such a curious combination or succession of styles so early: but the novel, for pretty obvious reasons, seems to offer temptations to it and facilities for it.
For Idalia's above-named juniors, while not bad books to read for mere amusement, have a very particular interest for the student of the history of the novel. Taken in connection with their author's earlier work, they illustrate, for the first time, a curious phenomenon which has repeated itself often, notably in the case of Bulwer, and of a living novelist who need not be named. This is that the novel, more almost than any other kind of literature, seems to lend itself to what may be called the timeserving or "opportunism" of craftsmanship—to call out the adaptiveness and versatility of the artist. Betsy and Jenny are so different from Idalia and her group that a critic of the idle Separatist persuasion would, were it not for troublesome certainties of fact, have no difficulty whatever in proving that they must be by different authors. We know that they were not: and we know also the reason of their dissimilarity—the fact that Pamela and her brother and their groups ont passé par là.[9] This fact is most interesting: and it shows, among other things, that Mrs. Eliza Haywood was a decidedly clever woman.