"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?'