MASTERS OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL:

A STUDY OF PRINCIPLES AND PERSONALITIES

BY RICHARD BURTON

PREFACE

The principle of inclusion in this book is the traditional one which assumes that criticism is only safe when it deals with authors who are dead. In proportion as we approach the living or, worse, speak of those still on earth, the proper perspective is lost and the dangers of contemporary judgment incurred. The light-minded might add, that the dead cannot strike back; to pass judgment upon them is not only more critical but safer.

Sometimes, however, the distinction between the living and the dead is an invidious one. Three authors hereinafter studied are examples: Meredith, Hardy and Stevenson. Hardy alone is now in the land of the living, Meredith having but just passed away. Yet to omit the former, while including the other two, is obviously arbitrary, since his work in fiction is as truly done as if he, like them, rested from his literary labors and the gravestone chronicled his day of death. For reasons best known to himself, Mr. Hardy seems to have chosen verse for the final expression of his personality. It is more than a decade since he published a novel. So far as age goes, he is the senior of Stevenson: "Desperate Remedies" appeared when the latter was a stripling at the University of Edinburgh. Hardy is therefore included in the survey. I am fully aware that to strive to measure the accomplishment of those practically contemporary, whether it be Meredith and Hardy or James and Howells, is but more or less intelligent guess-work. Nevertheless, it is pleasant employ, the more interesting, perhaps, to the critic and his readers because an element of uncertainty creeps into what is said. If the critic runs the risk of Je suis, J'y reste, he gets his reward in the thrill of prophecy; and should he turn out a false prophet, he is consoled by the reflection that it will place him in a large and enjoyable company.

Throughout the discussion it has been the intention to keep steadily before the reader the two main ways of looking at life in fiction, which have led to the so-called realistic and romantic movements. No fear of repetition in the study of the respective novelists has kept me from illustrating from many points of view and taking advantage of the opportunity offered by each author, the distinction thus set up. For back of all stale jugglery of terms, lies a very real and permanent difference. The words denote different types of mind as well as of art: and express also a changed interpretation of the world of men, resulting from the social and intellectual revolution since 1750.

No apology would appear to be necessary for Chapter Seven, which devotes sufficient space to the French influence to show how it affected the realistic tendency of all modern novel-making. The Scandinavian lands, Germany, Italy, England and Spain, all have felt the leadership of France in this regard and hence any attempt to sketch the history of the Novel on English soil, would ignore causes, that did not acknowledge the Gallic debt.

It may also be remarked that the method employed in the following pages necessarily excludes many figures of no slight importance in the evolution of English fiction. There are books a-plenty dealing with these secondary personalities, often significant as links in the chain and worthy of study were the purpose to present the complete history of the Novel. By centering upon indubitable masters, the principles illustrated both by the lesser and larger writers will, it is hoped, be brought home with equal if not greater force.

CONTENTS

I. FICTION AND THE NOVEL II. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY BEGINNINGS: RICHARDSON III. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY BEGINNINGS: FIELDING IV. DEVELOPMENTS: SMOLLETT, STERNE AND OTHERS V. REALISM: JANE AUSTEN VI. MODERN ROMANTICISM: SCOTT VII. FRENCH INFLUENCE VIII. DICKENS IX. THACKERAY X. GEORGE ELIOT XI. TROLLOPE AND OTHERS XII. HARDY AND MEREDITH XIII. STEVENSON XIV. THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION

CHAPTER I

FICTION AND THE NOVEL

All the world loves a story as it does a lover. It is small wonder then that stories have been told since man walked erect and long before transmitted records. Fiction, a conveniently broad term to cover all manner of story-telling, is a hoary thing and within historical limits we can but get a glimpse of its activity. Because it is so diverse a thing, it may be regarded in various ways: as a literary form, a social manifestation, a comment upon life. Main emphasis in this book is placed upon its recent development on English soil under the more restrictive name of Novel; and it is the intention, in tracing the work of representative novel writers, to show how the Novel has become in some sort a special modern mode of expression and of opinion, truly reflective of the Zeitgeist.

The social and human element in a literary phenomenon is what gives general interest and includes it as part of the culturgeschichte of a people. This interest is as far removed from that of the literary specialist taken up with questions of morphology and method, as it is from the unthinking rapture of the boarding-school Miss who finds a current book "perfectly lovely," and skips intrepidly to the last page to see how it is coming out. Thoughtful people are coming to feel that fiction is only frivolous when the reader brings a frivolous mind or makes a frivolous choice. While it will always be legitimate to turn to fiction for innocent amusement, since the peculiar property of all art is to give pleasure, the day has been reached when it is recognized as part of our culture to read good fiction, to realize the value and importance of the Novel in modern education; and conversely, to reprimand the older, narrow notion that the habit means self-indulgence and a waste of time. Nor can we close our eyes to the tyrannous domination of fiction to-day, for good or bad. It has worn seven-league boots of progress the past generation. So early as 1862, Sainte-Beuve declared in conversation: "Everything is being gradually merged into the novel. There is such a vast scope and the form lends itself to everything." Prophetic words, more than fulfilled since they were spoken.

Of the three main ways of story-telling, by the epic poem, the drama and prose fiction, the epic seems to be the oldest; poetry, indeed, being the natural form of expression among primitive peoples.

The comparative study of literature shows that so far as written records go, we may not surely ascribe precedence in time either to fiction or the drama. The testimony varies in different nations. But if the name fiction be allowed for a Biblical narrative like the Book of Ruth, which in the sense of imaginative and literary handling of historical material it certainly is, the great antiquity of the form may be conceded. Long before the written or printed word, we may safely say, stories were recited in Oriental deserts, yarns were spun as ships heaved over the seas, and sagas spoken beside hearth fires far in the frozen north. Prose narratives, epic in theme or of more local import, were handed down from father to son, transmitted from family to family, through the exercise of a faculty of memory that now, in a day when labor-saving devices have almost atrophied its use, seems well nigh miraculous. Prose story-telling, which allows of ample description, elbow room for digression, indefinite extension and variation from the original kernel of plot, lends itself admirably to the imaginative needs of humanity early or late.

With the English race, fiction began to take con-structural shape and definiteness of purpose in Elizabethan days. Up to the sixteenth century the tales were either told in verse, in the epic form of Beowulf or in the shrunken epic of a thirteenth century ballad like "King Horn"; in the verse narratives of Chaucer or the poetic musings of Spenser. Or else they were a portion of that prose romance of chivalry which was vastly cultivated in the middle ages, especially in France and Spain, and of which we have a doughty exemplar in the Morte D'Arthur, which dates nearly a century before Shakspere's day. Loose construction and no attempt to deal with the close eye of observation, characterize these earlier romances, which were in the main conglomerates of story using the double appeal of love and war.

But at a time when the drama was paramount in popularity, when the young Shakspere was writing his early comedies, fiction, which was in the fulness of time to conquer the play form as a popular vehicle of story-telling, began to rear its head. The loosely constructed, rambling prose romances of Lyly of euphuistic fame, the prose pastorals of Lodge from which model Shakspere made his forest drama, "As You Like It," the picaresque, harum-scarum story of adventure, "Jack Wilton," the prototype of later books like "Gil Blas" and "Robinson Crusoe,"—these were the early attempts to give prose narration a closer knitting, a more organic form.

But all such tentative striving was only preparation; fiction in the sense of more or less formless prose narration, was written for about two centuries without the production of what may be called the

Novel in the modern meaning of the word. The broader name fiction may properly be applied, since, as we shall see, all novels are fiction, but all fiction is by no means Novels. The whole development of the Novel, indeed, is embraced within little more than a century and a half; from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present time. The term Novel is more definite, more specific than the fiction out of which it evolved; therefore, we must ask ourselves wherein lies the essential difference. Light is thrown by the early use of the word in critical reference in English. In reading the following from Steele's "Tender Husband," we are made to realize that the stark meaning of the term implies something new: social interest, a sense of social solidarity: "Our amours can't furnish out a Romance; they'll make a very pretty Novel."

This clearly marks a distinction: it gives a hint as to the departure made by Richardson in 1742, when he published "Pamela." It is not strictly the earliest discrimination between the Novel and the older romance; for the dramatist Congreve at the close of the seventeenth century shows his knowledge of the distinction. And, indeed, there are hints of it in Elizabethan criticism of such early attempts as those of Lyly, Nast, Lodge and others. Moreover, the student of criticism as it deals with the Novel must also expect to meet with a later confusion of nomenclature; the word being loosely applied to any type of prose fiction in contrast with the short story or tale. But here, at an early date, the severance is plainly indicated between the study of contemporary society and the elder romance of heroism, supernaturalism, and improbability. It is a difference not so much of theme as of view-point, method and intention.

For underlying this attempt to come closer to humanity through the medium of a form of fiction, is to be detected an added interest in personality for its own sake. During the eighteenth century, commonly described as the Teacup Times, an age of powder and patches, of etiquette, epigram and surface polish, there developed a keener sense of the value of the individual, of the sanctity of the ego, a faint prelude to the note that was to become so resonant in the nineteenth century, sounding through all the activities of man. Various manifestations in the civilization of Queen Anne and the first Georges illustrate the new tendency.

One such is the coffee house, prototype of the bewildering club life of our own day. The eighteenth century coffee house, where the men of fashion and affairs foregathered to exchange social news over their glasses, was an organization naturally fostering altruism; at least, it tended to cultivate a feeling for social relations.

Again, the birth of the newspaper with the Spectator Papers in the early years of the century, is another such sign of the times: the newspaper being one of the great social bonds of humanity, for good or bad, linking man to man, race to race in the common, well-nigh instantaneous nexus of sympathy. The influence of the press at the time of a San Francisco or Messina horror is apparent to all; but its effect in furnishing the psychology of a business panic is perhaps no less potent though not so obvious. When Addison and Steele began their genial conversations thrice a week with their fellow citizens, they little dreamed of the power they set a-going in the world; for here was the genesis of modern journalism. And whatever its abuses and degradations, the fourth estate is certainly one of the very few widely operative educational forces to-day, and has played an important part in spreading the idea of the brotherhood of man.

That the essay and its branch form, the character sketch, both found in the Spectator Papers, were contributory to the Novel's development, is sure. The essay set a new model for easy, colloquial speech: just the manner for fiction which was to report the accent of contemporary society in its average of utterance. And the sketch, seen in its delightful efflorescence in the Sir Roger De Coverly papers series by Addison, is fiction in a sense: differing therefrom in its slighter framework, and the aim of the writer, which first of all is the delicate delineation of personality, not plot and the study of the social complex. There is the absence of plot which is the natural outcome of such lack of story interest. A wide survey of the English essay from its inception with Bacon in the early seventeenth century will impress the inquirer with its fluid nature and natural outflow into full-fledged fiction. The essay has a way, as Taine says, of turning "spontaneously to fiction and portraiture." And as it is difficult, in the light of evolution, to put the finger on the line separating man from the lower order of animal life, so is it difficult sometimes to say just where the essay stops and the Novel begins. There is perhaps no hard-and-fast line.

Consider Dr. Holmes' "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," for example; is it essay or fiction? There is a definite though slender story interest and idea, yet since the framework of story is really for the purpose of hanging thereon the genial essayist's dissertations on life, we may decide that the book is primarily essay, the most charmingly personal, egoistic of literary forms. The essay "slightly dramatized," Mr. Howells happily characterizes it. This form then must be reckoned with in the eighteenth century and borne in mind as contributory all along in the subsequent development, as we try to get a clear idea of the qualities which demark and limit the Novel.

Again, the theater was an institution doing its share to knit social feeling; as indeed it had been in Elizabethan days: offering a place where many might be moved by the one thought, the one emotion, personal variations being merged in what is now called mob psychology, a function for centuries also exercised by the Church. Nor should the function of the playhouse as a visiting-place be overlooked.

So too the Novel came to express most inclusively among the literary forms this more vivid realization of meum and tuum; the worth of me and my intricate and inevitable relations to you, both of us caught in the coils of that organism dubbed society, and willingly, with no Rousseau-like desire to escape and set up for individualists. The Novel in its treatment of personality began to teach that the stone thrown into the water makes circles to the uttermost bounds of the lake; that the little rift within the lute makes the whole music mute; that we are all members of the one body. This germinal principle was at root a profoundly true and noble one; it serves to distinguish modern fiction philosophically from all that is earlier, and it led the late Sidney Lanier, in the well-known book on this subject, to base the entire development upon the working out of the idea of personality. The Novel seems to have been the special literary instrument in the eighteenth century for the propagation of altruism; here lies its deepest significance. It was a baptism which promised great things for the lusty young form.

We are now ready for a fair working definition of the modern Novel. It means a study of contemporary society with an implied sympathetic interest, and, it may be added, with special reference to love as a motor force, simply because love it is which binds together human beings in their social relations.

This aim sets off the Novel in contrast with past fiction which exhibits a free admixture of myth and marvel, of creatures human, demi-human and supernatural, with all time or no time for the enactment of its events. The modern story puts its note of emphasis upon character that is contemporary and average; and thus makes a democratic appeal against that older appeal which, dealing with exceptional personages—kings, leaders, allegorical abstractions—is naturally aristocratic.

There was something, it would appear, in the English genius which favored a form of literature—or modification of an existing form—allowing for a more truthful representation of society, a criticism (in the Arnoldian sense) of the passing show. The elder romance finds its romantic effect, as a rule, in the unusual, the strange and abnormal aspects of life, not so much seen of the eye as imagined of the mind or fancy. Hence, romance is historically contrasted with reality, with many unfortunate results when we come to its modern applications. The issue has been a Babel-like mixture of terms.

Or when the bizarre or supernatural was not the basis of appeal, it was found in the sickly and absurd treatment of the amatory passion, quite as far removed from the every-day experience of normal human nature. It was this kind of literature, with the French La Calprenede as its high priest, which my Lord Chesterfield had in mind when he wrote to his son under date of 1752, Old Style: "It is most astonishing that there ever could have been a people idle enough to write such endless heaps of the same stuff. It was, however, the occupation of thousands in the last century; and is still the private though disavowed amusement of young girls and sentimental ladies." The chief trait of these earlier fictions, besides their mawkishness, is their almost incredible long-windedness; they have the long breath, as the French say; and it may be confessed that the great, pioneer eighteenth century novels, foremost those of Richardson, possess a leisureliness of movement which is an inheritance of the romantic past when men, both fiction writers and readers, seem to have Time; they look back to Lyly, and forward (since history repeats itself here), to Henry James. The condensed, breathless fiction of a Kipling is the more logical evolution.

Certainly, the English were innovators in this field, exercising a direct and potent influence upon foreign fiction, especially that of France and Germany; it is not too much to say, that the novels of Richardson and Fielding, pioneers, founders of the English Novel, offered Europe a type. If one reads the French fictionists before Richardson—Madame de La Fayette, Le Sage, Prevost and Rousseau—one speedily discovers that they did not write novels in the modern sense; the last named took a cue from Richardson, to be sure, in his handling of sentiment, but remained an essayist, nevertheless. And the greater Goethe also felt and acknowledged the Englishman's example. Testimonies from the story-makers of other lands are frequent to the effect upon them of these English pioneers of fiction. It will be seen from this brief statement of the kind of fiction essayed by the founders of the Novel, that their tendency was towards what has come to be called "realism" in modern fiction literature. One uses this sadly overworked term with a certain sinking of the heart, yet it seems unavoidable. The very fact that the words "realism" and "romance" have become so hackneyed in critical parlance, makes it sure that they indicate a genuine distinction. As the Novel has developed, ramified and taken on a hundred guises of manifestation, and as criticism has striven to keep pace with such a growth, it is not strange that a confusion of nomenclature should have arisen. But underneath whatever misunderstandings, the original distinction is clear enough and useful to make: the modern Novel in its beginning did introduce a more truthful representation of human life than had obtained in the romantic fiction deriving from the medieval stories. The term "realism" as first applied was suitably descriptive; it is only with the subsequent evolution that so simple a word has taken on subtler shades and esoteric implications.

It may be roundly asserted that from the first the English Novel has stood for truth; that it has grown on the whole more truthful with each generation, as our conception of truth in literature has been widened and become a nobler one. The obligation of literature to report life has been felt with increasing sensitiveness. In the particulars of appearance, speech, setting and action the characters of English fiction to-day produce a semblance of life which adds tenfold to its power. To compare the dialogue of modern masters like Hardy, Stevenson, Kipling and Howells with the best of the earlier writers serves to bring the assertion home; the difference is immense; it is the difference between the idiom of life and the false-literary tone of imitations of life which, with all their merits, are still self-conscious and inapt And as the earlier idiom was imperfect, so was the psychology; the study of motives in relation to action has grown steadily broader, more penetrating; the rich complexity of human beings has been recognized more and more, where of old the simple assumption that all mankind falls into the two great contrasted groups of the good and the bad, was quite sufficient. And, as a natural outcome of such an easy-going philosophy, the study of life was rudimentary and partial; you could always tell how the villain would jump and were comfortable in the assurance that the curtain should ring down upon "and so they were married and lived happily ever afterwards."

In contrast, to-day human nature is depicted in the Novel as a curious compound of contradictory impulses and passions, and instead of the clear-cut separation of the sheep and the goats, we look forth upon a vast, indiscriminate horde of humanity whose color, broadly surveyed, seems a very neutral gray,—neither deep black nor shining white. The white-robed saint is banished along with the devil incarnate; those who respect their art would relegate such crudities to Bowery melodrama. And while we may allow an excess of zeal in this matter, even a confusion of values, there can be no question that an added dignity has come to the Novel in these latter days, because it has striven with so much seriousness of purpose to depict life in a more interpretative way. It has seized for a motto the Veritas nos liberavit of the ancient philosopher. The elementary psychology of the past has been transferred to the stage drama, justifying Mr. Shaw's description of it as "the last sanctuary of unreality." And even in the theater, the truth demanded in fiction for more than a century, is fast finding a place, and play-making, sensitive to the new desire, is changing in this respect before our eyes.

However, with the good has come evil too. In the modern seeking for so-called truth, the nuda veritas has in some hands become shameless as well,—a fact amply illustrated in the following treatment of principles and personalities.

The Novel in the hands of these eighteenth century writers also struck a note of the democratic,—a note that has sounded ever louder until the present day, when fiction is by far the most democratic of the literary forms (unless we now must include the drama in such a designation). The democratic ideal has become at once an instinct, a principle and a fashion. Richardson in his "Pamela" did a revolutionary thing in making a kitchen wench his heroine; English fiction had previously assumed that for its polite audience only the fortunes of Algernon and Angelina could be followed decorously and give fit pleasure. His innovation, symptomatic of the time, by no means pleased an aristocratic on-looker like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who wrote to a friend: "The confounding of all ranks and making a jest of order has long been growing in England; and I perceive by the books you sent me, has made a very considerable progress. The heroes and heroines of the age are cobblers and kitchen wenches. Perhaps you will say, I should not take my ideas of the manners of the times from such trifling authors; but it is more truly to be found among them, than from any historian; as they write merely to get money, they always fall into the notions that are most acceptable to the present taste. It has long been the endeavor of our English writers to represent people of quality as the vilest and silliest part of the nation, being (generally) very low-born themselves"—a quotation deliciously commingled of prejudice and worldly wisdom.

But Richardson, who began his career by writing amatory epistles for serving maids, realized (and showed his genius thereby), that if the hard fortunes and eventful triumph of the humble Pamela could but be sympathetically portrayed, the interest on the part of his aristocratic audience was certain to follow,—as the sequel proved.

He knew that because Pamela was a human being she might therefore be made interesting; he adopted, albeit unconsciously, the Terentian motto that nothing human should be alien from the interests of his readers. And as the Novel developed, this interest not only increased in intensity, but ever spread until it depicted with truth and sympathy all sorts and conditions of men. The typical novelist to-day prefers to leave the beaten highway and go into the by-ways for his characters; his interest is with the humble of the earth, the outcast and alien, the under dog in the social struggle. It has become well-nigh a fashion, a fad, to deal with these picturesque and once unexploited elements of the human passion-play.

This interest does not stop even at man; influenced by modern conceptions of life, it overleaps the line of old supposed to be impassable, and now includes the lower order of living things: animals have come into their own and a Kipling or a London gives us the psychology of brutekind as it has never been drawn before—from the view-point of the animal himself. Our little brothers of the air, the forest and the field are depicted in such wise that the world returns to a feeling which swelled the heart of St. Francis centuries ago, as he looked upon the birds he loved and thus addressed them:

"And he entered the field and began to preach to the birds which were on the ground; and suddenly those which were in the trees came to him and as many as there were they all stood quietly until Saint Francis had done preaching; and even then they did not depart until such time as he had given them his blessing; and St. Francis, moving among them, touched them with his cape, but not one moved."

It is because this modern form of fiction upon which we fix the name Novel to indicate its new features has seized the idea of personality, has stood for truth and grown ever more democratic, that it has attained to the immense power which marks it at the present time. It is justified by historical facts; it has become that literary form most closely revealing the contours of life, most expressive of its average experience, most sympathetic to its heart-throb. The thought should prevent us from regarding it as merely the syllabub of the literary feast, a kind of after-dinner condiment. It is not necessary to assume the total depravity of current taste, in order to account for the tyranny of this latest-born child of fiction. In the study of individual writers and developing schools and tendencies, it will be well to keep in mind these underlying principles of growth: personality, truth and democracy; a conception sure to provide the story-maker with a new function, a new ideal. The distinguished French critic Brunetiere has said: "The novelist in reality is nothing more than a witness whose evidence should rival that of the historian in precision and trustworthiness. We look to him to teach us literally to see. We read his novels merely with a view to finding out in them those aspects of existence which escape us, owing to the very hurry and stir of life, an attitude we express by saying that for a novel to be recognized as such, it must offer an historical or documentary value, a value precise and determined, particular and local, and as well, a general and lasting psychologic value or significance."

It may be added, that while in the middle eighteenth century the novel-writing was tentative and hardly more than an avocation, at the end of the nineteenth, it had become a fine art and a profession. It did not occur to Richardson, serious-minded man that he was, that he was formulating a new art canon for fiction. Indeed, the English author takes himself less and less seriously as we go back in time. It was bad form to be literary when Voltaire visited Congreve and found a fine gentleman where he sought a writer of genius: complaining therefore that fine gentlemen came cheap in Paris; what he wished to see was the creator of the great comedies. In the same fashion, we find Horace Walpole, who dabbled in letters all his days and made it really his chief interest, systematically underrating the professional writers of his day, to laud a brilliant amateur who like himself desired the plaudits of the game without obeying its exact rules. He looked askance at the fiction-makers Richardson and Fielding, because they did not move in the polite circles frequented by himself.

The same key is struck by lively Fanny Burney in reporting a meeting with a languishing lady of fashion who had perpetrated a piece of fiction with the alarming title of "The Mausoleum of Julia": "My sister intends, said Lady Say and Sele, to print her Mausoleum, just for her own friends and acquaintances."

"Yes? said Lady Hawke, I have never printed yet."

And a little later, the same spirit is exhibited by Jane Austen when Madame de Sevigne sought her: Miss Austen suppressed the story-maker, wishing to be taken first of all for what she was: a country gentlewoman of unexceptionable connections. Even Walter Scott and Byron plainly exhibit this dislike to be reckoned as paid writers, men whose support came by the pen. In short, literary professionalism reflected on gentility. We have changed all that with a vengeance and can hardly understand the earlier sentiment; but this change of attitude has carried with it inevitably the artistic advancement of modern fiction. For if anything is certain it is that only professional skill can be relied upon to perfect an art form. The amateur may possess gift, even genius; but we must look to the professional for technique.

One other influence, hardly less effective in molding the Novel than those already touched upon, is found in the increasing importance of woman as a central) factor in society; indeed, holding the key to the social situation. The drama of our time, in so frequently making woman the protagonist of the piece, testifies, as does fiction, to this significant fact: woman, in the social and economic readjustment that has come to her, or better, which she is still undergoing, has become so much more dominant in her social relations, that any form of literature truthfully mirroring the society of the modern world must regard her as of potent efficiency. And this is so quite apart from the consideration that women make up to-day the novelist's largest audience, and that, moreover, the woman writer of fiction is in numbers and popularity a rival of men.

It would scarcely be too much to see a unifying principle in the evolution of the modern Novel, in the fact that the first example in the literature was Pamela, the study of a woman, while in representative latter-day studies like "Tess of the D'Urbervilles," "The House of Mirth," "Trilby" and "The Testing of Diana Mallory" we again have studies of women; the purpose alike in time past or present being to fix the attention upon a human being whose fate is sensitively, subtly operative for good or ill upon a society at large. It is no accident then, that woman is so often the central figure of fiction: it means more than that, love being the solar passion of the race, she naturally is involved. Rather does it mean fiction's recognition of her as the creature of the social biologist, exercising her ancient function amidst all the changes and shifting ideas of successive generations. Whatever her superficial changes under the urge of the time-spirit, Woman, to a thoughtful eye, sits like the Sphinx above the drifting sands, silent, secret, powerful and obscure, bent only on her great purposive errand whose end is the bringing forth of that Overman who shall rule the world. With her immense biologic mission, seemingly at war with her individual career, and destructive apparently of that emancipation which is the present dream of her champions, what a type, what a motive this for fiction, and in what a manifold and stimulating way is the Novel awakening to its high privilege to deal with such material. In this view, having these wider implications in mind, the role of woman in fiction, so far from waning, is but just begun.

This survey of historical facts and marshaling of a few important principles has prepared us, it may be hoped, for a clearer comprehension of the developmental details that follow. It is a complex growth, but one vastly interesting and, after all, explained by a few, great substructural principles: the belief in personality, democratic feeling, a love for truth in art, and a realization of the power of modern Woman. The Novel is thus an expression and epitome of the society which gave it birth.

CHAPTER II

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY BEGINNINGS: RICHARDSON

There is some significance in the fact that Samuel Richardson, founder of the modern novel, was so squarely a middle-class citizen of London town. Since the form, he founded was, as we have seen, democratic in its original motive and subsequent development, it was fitting that the first shaper of the form should have sympathies not too exclusively aristocratic: should have been willing to draw upon the backstairs history of the servants' hall for his first heroine.

To be sure, Mr. Richardson had the not uncommon failing of the humble-born: he desired above all, and attempted too much, to depict the manners of the great; he had naive aristocratical leanings which account for his uncertain tread when he would move with ease among the boudoirs of Mayfair. Nevertheless, in the honest heart of him, as his earliest novel forever proves, he felt for the woes of those social underlings who, as we have long since learned, have their microcosm faithfully reflecting the greater world they serve, and he did his best work in that intimate portrayal of the feminine heart, which is not of a class but typically human; he knew Clarissa Harlowe quite as well as he did Pamela; both were of interest because they were women. That acute contemporary, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, severely reprimands Richardson for his vulgar lapses in painting polite society and the high life he so imperfectly knew; yet in the very breath that she condemns "Clarissa Harlowe" as "most miserable stuff," confesses that "she was such an old fool as to weep over" it "like any milkmaid of sixteen over the ballad of the Lady's Fall"—the handsomest kind of a compliment under the circumstances. And with the same charming inconsistency, she declares on the appearance of "Sir Charles Grandison" that she heartily despises Richardson, yet eagerly reads him—"nay, sobs over his works in the most scandalous manner."

Richardson was the son of a carpenter and himself a respected printer, who by cannily marrying the daughter of the man to whom he was apprenticed, and by diligence in his vocation, rose to prosperity, so that by 1754 he became Master of The Stationers' Company and King's Printer, doing besides an excellent printing business.

As a boy he had relieved the dumb anguish of serving maids by the penning of their love letters; he seemed to have a knack at this vicarious manner of love-making and when in the full maturity of fifty years, certain London publishers requested him to write for them a narrative which might stand as a model letter writer from which country readers should know the right tone, his early practice stood him in good stead. Using the epistolary form into which he was to throw all his fiction, he produced "Pamela," the first novel of analysis, in contrast with the tale of adventure, of the English tongue. It is worth remarking that Richardson wrote this story at an age when many novelists have well-nigh completed their work; even as Defoe published his masterpiece, "Robinson Crusoe," at fifty-eight. But such forms as drama and fiction are the very ones where ripe maturity, a long and varied experience with the world and a trained hand in the technique of the craft, go for their full value. A study of the chronology of novel-making will show that more acknowledged masterpieces were written after forty than before. Beside the eighteenth century examples one places George Eliot, who wrote no fiction until she had nearly reached the alleged dead-line of mental activity: Browning with his greatest poem, "The Ring and the Book," published in his forty-eighth year; Du Maurier turning to fiction at sixty, and De Morgan still later. Fame came to Richardson then late in life, and never man enjoyed it more. Ladies with literary leanings (and the kind is independent of periods) used to drop into his place beyond Temple Bar—for he was a bookseller as well as printer, and printed and sold his own wares—to finger his volumes and have a chat about poor Pamela or the naughty Lovelace or impeccable Grandison. For how, in sooth, could they keep away or avoid talking shop when they were bursting with the books just read?

And much, too, did Richardson enjoy the prosperity his stories, as well as other ventures, brought him, so that he might move out Hammersmith way where William Mortis and Cobden Sanderson have lived in our day, and have a fine house wherein to receive those same lady callers, who came in increasing flocks to his impromptu court where sat the prim, cherub-faced, elderly little printer. It is all very quaint, like a Watteau painting or a bit of Dresden china, as we look back upon it through the time-mists of a century and a half.

In spite of its slow movement, the monotony of the letter form and the terribly utilitarian nature of its morals, "Pamela" has the essentials of interesting fiction; its heroine is placed in a plausible situation, she is herself life-like and her struggles are narrated with a sympathetic insight into the human heart—or better, the female heart. The gist of a plot so simple can be stated in few words: Mr. B., the son of a lady who has benefited Pamela Andrews, a serving maid, tries to conquer her virtue while she resists all his attempts—including an abduction, Richardson's favorite device—and as a reward of her chastity, he condescends to marry her, to her very great gratitude and delight. The English Novel started out with a flourish of trumpets as to its moral purpose; latter-day criticism may take sides for or against the novel-with-a-purpose, but that Richardson justified his fiction writing upon moral grounds and upon those alone is shown in the descriptive title-page of the tale, too prolix to be often recalled and a good sample in its long-windedness of the past compared with the terse brevity of the present in this matter: "Published in order to cultivate the principles of virtue and religion in the mind of youth of both sexes"; the author of "Sanford and Merton" has here his literary progenitor. The sub-title, "or Virtue Rewarded," also indicates the homiletic nature of the book. And since the one valid criticism against all didactic aims in story-telling is that it is dull, Richardson, it will be appreciated, ran a mighty risk. But this he was able to escape because of the genuine human interest of his tales and the skill he displayed with psychologic analysis rather than the march of events. The close-knit, organic development of the best of our modern fiction is lacking; leisurely and lax seems the movement. Modern editions of "Pamela" and "Clarissa Harlowe" are in the way of vigorous cutting for purposes of condensation. Scott seems swift and brief when set beside Richardson Yet the slow convolutions and involutions serve to acquaint us intimately with the characters; dwelling with them longer, we come to know them better.

It is a fault in the construction of the story that instead of making Pamela's successful marriage the natural climax and close of the work, the author effects it long before the novel is finished and then tries to hold the interest by telling of the honeymoon trip in Italy, her cool reception by her husband's family, involving various subterfuges and difficulties, and the gradual moral reform she was able to bring about in her spouse. It must be conceded to him that some capital scenes are the result of this post-hymeneal treatment; that, to illustrate, where the haughty sister of Pamela's husband calls on the woman she believes to be her husband's mistress. Yet there is an effect of anti-climax; the main excitement—getting Pamela honestly wedded—is over. But we must not forget the moral purpose: Mr. B.'s spiritual regeneration has to be portrayed before our very eyes, he must be changed from a rake into a model husband; and with Richardson, that means plenty of elbow-room. There is, too, something prophetic in this giving of ample space to post-marital life; it paves the way for much latter-day probing of the marriage misery.

The picture of Mr. B. and Pamela's attitude towards him is full of irony for the modern reader; here is a man who does all in his power to ruin her and, finding her adamant, at last decides to do the next best thing—secure her by marriage. And instead of valuing him accordingly, Pamela, with a kind of spaniel-like fawning, accepts his august hand. It must be confessed that with Pamela (that is, with Richardson), virtue is a market commodity for sale to the highest bidder, and this scene of barter and sale is an all-unconscious revelation of the low standard of sex ethics which obtained at the time. The suggestion by Sidney Lanier that the sub-title should be: "or Vice Rewarded," "since the rascal Mr. B. it is who gets the prize rather than Pamela," has its pertinency from our later and more enlightened view. But such was the eighteenth century. The exposure of an earlier time is one of the benefits of literature, always a sort of ethical barometer of an age—all the more trustworthy in reporting spiritual ideals because it has no intention of doing so.

That Richardson succeeds in making Mr. B. tolerable, not to say likable, is a proof of his power; that the reader really grows fond of his heroine—especially perhaps in her daughterly devotion to her humble family—speaks volumes for his grasp of human nature and helps us to understand the effect of the story upon contemporaneous readers. That effect was indeed remarkable. Lady Mary, to quote her again, testifies that the book "met with very extraordinary (and I think undeserved) success. It has been translated into French and Italian; it was all the fashion at Paris and Versailles and is still the joy of the chambermaids of all nations." Again she writes, "it has been translated into more languages than any modern performances I ever heard of." A French dramatic version of it under the same title appeared three years after the publication of the novel and a little later Voltaire in his "Nanine" used the same motif. Lady Mary's reference to chambermaids is significant; it points to the new sympathy on the part of the novelist and the consequent new audience which the modern Novel was to command; literally, all classes and conditions of mankind were to become its patrons; and as one result, the author, gaining his hundreds of thousands of readers, was to free himself forever of the aristocratic Patron, at whose door once on a time, he very humbly and hungrily knelt for favor. To-day, the Patron is hydra-headed; demos rules in literature as in life.

The sentimentality of this pioneer novel which now seems old-fashioned and even absurd, expressed Queen Anne's day. "Sensibility," as it was called, was a favorite idea in letters, much affected, and later a kind of cult. A generation after Pamela, in Mackenzie's "Man of Feeling," weeping is unrestrained in English fiction; the hero of that lachrymose tale incurred all the dangers of influenza because of his inveterate tendency toward damp emotional effects; he was perpetually dissolving in "showers of tears." In fact, our novelists down to the memory of living man gave way to their feelings with far more abandon than is true of the present repressive period. One who reads Dickens' "Nicholas Nickleby" with this in mind, will perhaps be surprised to find how often the hero frankly indulges his grief; he cries with a freedom that suggests a trait inherited from his mother of moist memory. No doubt, there was abuse of this "sensibility" in earlier fiction: but Richardson was comparatively innocuous in his practice, and Coleridge, having the whole sentimental tendency in view, seems rather too severe when he declared that "all the evil achieved by Hobbes and the whole school of materialists will appear inconsiderable if it be compared with the mischief effected and occasioned by the sentimental philosophy of Sterne and his numerous imitators." The same tendency had its vogue on both the English and French stage—the Comedie larmoyante of the latter being vastly affected in London and receiving in the next generation the good-natured satiric shafts of Goldsmith. It may be possible that at the present time, when the stoicism of the Red Indian in inhibiting expression seems to be an Anglo-Saxon ideal, we have reacted too far from the gush and the fervor of our forefathers. In any case, to Richardson belongs whatever of merit there may be in first sounding the new sentimental note.

Pope declared that "Pamela," was as good as twenty sermons—an innocently malignant remark, to be sure, which cuts both ways! And plump, placid Mr. Richardson established warm epistolary relations with many excellent if too emotional ladies, who opened a correspondence with him concerning the conductment of this and the following novels and strove to deflect the course thereof to soothe their lacerated feelings. What novelist to-day would not appreciate an audience that would take him au grand serieux in this fashion! What higher compliment than for your correspondent—and a lady at that—to state that in the way of ministering to her personal comfort, Pamela must marry and Clarissa must not die! Richardson carried on a voluminous letter-writing in life even as in literature, and the curled darlings of latter-day letters may well look to their laurels in recalling him, A certain Mme. Belfair, for example, desires to look upon the author of those wonderful tales, yet modestly shrinks from being seen herself. She therefore implores that he will walk at an hour named in St. James Park—and this is the novelist's reply:

I go through the Park once or twice a week to my little retirement; but I will for a week together be in it, every day three or four hours, till you tell me you have seen a person who answers to this description, namely, short—rather plump—fair wig, lightish cloth coat, all black besides; one hand generally in his bosom, the other a cane in it, which he leans upon under the skirts of his coat; … looking directly fore-right as passers-by would imagine, but observing all that stirs on either hand of him; hardly ever turning back; of a light brown complexion, smoothish faced and ruddy cheeked, looking about sixty-five; a regular, even pace, a gray eye, sometimes lively—very lively if he have hope of seeing a lady whom he loves and honors!

Such innocent philandering is delicious; there is a flavor to it that presages the "Personals" in a New York newspaper. "Was ever lady in such humor wooed?" or shall we say it is the novelist, not the lady, who is besieged!

"Pamela" ran through five editions within a year of its appearance, which was a conspicuous success in the days of an audience so limited when compared with the vast reading public of later times. The smug little bookseller must have been greatly pleased by the good fortune attending his first venture into a new field, especially since he essayed it so late in life and almost by accident. His motive had been in a sense practical; for his publishers had requested him to write a book "on the useful concerns of life"—and that he had done so, he might have learned any Sunday in church, for divines did not hesitate to say a kind word from the pulpit about so unexceptionable a work.

One of the things Richardson had triumphantly demonstrated by his first story was that a very slight texture of plot can suffice for a long, not to say too long, piece of fiction, if only a free hand be given the story-teller in the way of depicting the intuitions and emotions of human beings; dealing with their mind states rather than, or quite as much as, their actions. This was the modern note, and very speedily was the lesson learned; the time was apt for it. From 1742, the date of "Pamela," to 1765 is but a quarter century; yet within those narrow time-limits the English Novel, through the labors of Richardson and Fielding, Smollett, Sterne and Goldsmith, can be said to have had its birth and growth to a lusty manhood and to have defined once and for all the mold of this new and potent form of prose art. By 1773 a critic speaks of the "novel-writing age"; and a dozen years later, in 1785, novels are so common that we hear of the press "groaning beneath their weight,"—which sounds like the twentieth century. And it was all started by the little printer; to him the praise. He received it in full measure; here and there, of course, a dissident voice was heard, one, that of Fielding, to be very vocal later; but mostly they were drowned in the chorus of adulation. Richardson had done a new thing and reaped an immediate reward; and—as seldom happens, with quick recognition—it was to be a permanent reward as well, for he changed the history of English literature.

One would have expected him to produce another novel post-haste, following up his maiden victory before it could be forgotten, after the modern manner. But those were leisured days and it was half a dozen years before "Clarissa Harlowe" was given to the public. Richardson had begun by taking a heroine out of low life; he now drew one from genteel middle class life; as he was in "Sir Charles Grandison," the third and last of his fictions, to depict a hero in the upper class life of England. In Clarissa again, plot was secondary, analysis, sentiment, the exhibition of the female heart under stress of sorrow, this was everything. Clarissa's hand is sought by an unattractive suitor; she rebels—a social crime in the eighteenth century; whereat, her whole family turn against her—father, mother, sister, brothers, uncles and aunts—and, wooed by Lovelace, a dashing rake who is in love with her according to his lights, but by no means intends honorable matrimony, she flies with him in a chariot and four, to find herself in a most anomalous position, and so dies broken-hearted; to be followed in her fate by Lovelace, who is represented as a man whose loose principles are in conflict with a nature which is far from being utterly bad. The narrative is mainly developed through letters exchanged between Clarissa and her friend, Miss Howe. There can hardly be a more striking testimony to the leisure enjoyed by the eighteenth-century than that society was not bored by a story the length of which seems almost interminable to the reader to-day. The slow movement is sufficient to preclude its present prosperity. It is safe to say that Richardson is but little read now; read much less than his great contemporary, Fielding. And apparently it is his bulk rather than his want of human interest or his antiquated manner that explains the fact. The instinct to-day is against fiction that is slow and tortuous in its onward course; at least so it seemed until Mr. De Morgan returned in his delightful volumes to the method of the past. Those are pertinent words of the distinguished Spanish novelist, Valdes: "An author who wishes to be read not only in his life, but after his death (and the author who does not wish this should lay aside his pen), cannot shut his eyes, when unblinded by vanity, to the fact that not only is it necessary to be interesting to save himself from oblivion, but the story must not be a very long one. The world contains so many great and beautiful works that it requires a long life to read them all. To ask the public, always anxious for novelty, to read a production of inordinate length, when so many others are demanding attention, seems to me useless and ridiculous, … The most noteworthy instance of what I say is seen in the celebrated English novelist, Richardson, who, in spite of his admirable genius and exquisite sensibility and perspicuity, added to the fact of his being the father of the modern Novel, is scarcely read nowadays, at least in Latin countries. Given the indisputable beauties of his works, this can only be due to their extreme length. And the proof of this, that in France and Spain, to encourage the taste for them, the most interesting parts have been extracted and published in editions and compendiums."

This is suggestive, coming from one who speaks by the book. Who, in truth, reads epics now—save in the enforced study of school and college? Will not Browning's larger works—like "The Ring and the Book"—suffer disastrously with the passing of time because of a lack of continence, of a failure to realize that since life is short, art should not be too long? It may be, too, that Richardson, newly handling the sentiment which during the following generation was to become such a marked trait of imaginative letters, revelled in it to an extent unpalatable to our taste; "rubbing our noses," as Leslie Stephen puts it, "in all her (Clarissa's) agony,"—the tendency to overdo a new thing, not to be resisted in his case. But with all concessions to length and sentimentality, criticism from that day to this has been at one in agreeing that here is not only Richardson's best book but a truly great Novel. Certainly one who patiently submits to a ruminant reading of the story, will find that when at last the long-deferred climax is reached and the awed and penitent Lovelace describes the death-bed moments of the girl he has ruined, the scene has a great moving power. Allowing for differences of taste and time, the vogue of the Novel in Richardson's day can easily be understood, and through all the stiffness, the stilted effect of manner and speech, and the stifling conventions of the entourage, a sweet and charming young woman in very piteous distress emerges to live in affectionate memory. After all, no poor ideal of womanhood is pictured in Clarissa. She is one of the heroines who are unforgettable, dear. Mr. Howells, with his stern insistence on truth in characterization, declares that she is "as freshly modern as any girl of yesterday or to-morrow. 'Clarissa Harlowe,' in spite of her eighteenth century costume and keeping, remains a masterpiece in the portraiture of that ever-womanly which is of all times and places."

Lovelace, too, whose name has become a synonym for the fine gentleman betrayer, is drawn in a way to make him sympathetic and creditable; he is far from being a stock figure of villainy. And the minor figures are often enjoyable; the friendship of Clarissa with Miss Howe, a young woman of excellent good sense and seemingly quite devoid of the ultra-sentiment of her time, preludes that between Diana and her "Tony" in Meredith's great novel. As a general picture of the society of the period, the book is full of illuminations and sidelights; of course, the whole action is set on a stage that bespeaks Richardson's narrow, middle class morality, his worship of rank, his belief that worldly goods are the reward of well-doing.

As for the contemporaneous public, it wept and praised and went with fevered blood because of this fiction. We have heard how women of sentiment in London town welcomed the book and the opportunity it offered for unrestrained tears. But it was the same abroad; as Ike Marvel has it, Rousseau and Diderot over in France, philosophers as they professed to be, "blubbered their admiring thanks for 'Clarissa Harlowe."' Similarly, at a later day we find caustic critics like Jeffrey and Macaulay writing to Dickens to tell how they had cried over the death of Little Nell—a scene the critical to-day are likely to stigmatize as one of the few examples of pathos overdone to be found in the works of that master. It is scarcely too much to say that the outcome of no novel in the English tongue was watched with such bated breath as was that of "Clarissa Harlowe" while the eight successive books were being issued.

Richardson chose to bask for another half dozen years in the fame of his second novel, before turning in 1754 to his final attempt, "Sir Charles Grandison," wherein it was his purpose to depict the perfect pattern of a gentleman, "armed at all points" of social and moral behavior. We must bear in mind that when "Clarissa" was published he was sixty years of age and to be pardoned if he did not emulate so many novel-makers of these brisker mercantile times and turn off a story or so a year.

By common confession, this is the poorest of his three fictions. In the first place, we are asked to move more steadily in the aristocratic atmosphere where the novelist did not breathe to best advantage. Again, Richardson was an adept in drawing women rather than men and hence was self-doomed in electing a masculine protagonist. He is also off his proper ground in laying part of the action in Italy.

His beau ideal, Grandison, turns out the most impossible prig in English literature. He is as insufferable as that later prig, Meredith's Sir Willoughby in "The Egotist," with the difference that the author does not know it, and that you do not believe in him for a moment; whereas Meredith's creation is appallingly true, a sort of simulacrum of us all. The best of the story is in its portrayal of womankind; in particular, Sir Charles' two loves, the English Harriet Byron and the Italian Clementina, the last of whom is enamored of him, but separated by religious differences. Both are alive and though suffering in the reader's estimation because of their devotion to such a stick as Grandison, nevertheless touch our interest to the quick. The scene in which Grandison returns to Italy to see Clementina, whose reason, it is feared, is threatened because of her grief over his loss, is genuinely effective and affecting.

The mellifluous sentimentality, too, of the novelist seems to come to a climax in this book; justifying Taine's satiric remark that "these phrases should be accompanied by a mandolin." The moral tag is infallibly supplied, as in all Richardson's tales—though perhaps here with an effect of crescendo. We are still long years from that conception of art which holds that a beautiful thing may be allowed to speak for itself and need not be moraled down our throats like a physician's prescription. Yet Fielding had already, as we shall see, struck a wholesome note of satiric fun. The plot is slight and centers in an abduction which, by the time it is used in the third novel, begins to pall as a device and to suggest paucity of invention. The novel has the prime merit of brevity; it is much shorter than "Clarissa Harlowe," but long enough, in all conscience, Harriet being blessed with the gift of gab, like all Richardson's heroines. "She follows the maxim of Clarissa," says Lady Mary with telling humor, "of declaring all she thinks to all the people she sees without reflecting that in this mortal state of imperfection, fig-leaves are as necessary for our minds as our bodies." It is significant that this brilliant contemporary is very hard on Richardson's characterization of women in this volume (which she says "sinks horribly"), whereas never a word has she to say in condemnation of the hero, who to the present critical eye seems the biggest blot on the performance. How can we join the chorus of praise led by Harriet, now her ladyship and his loving spouse, when it chants: "But could he be otherwise than the best of husbands who was the most dutiful of sons, who is the most affectionate of brothers, the most faithful of friends, who is good upon principle in every relation in life?" Lady Mary is also extremely severe on the novelist's attempt to paint Italy; when he talks of it, says she, "it is plain he is no better acquainted with it than he is with the Kingdom of Mancomingo." It is probable tat Richardson could not say more for his Italian knowledge than did old Roger Ascham of Archery fame, when he declared: "I was once in Italy, but I thank God my stay there was only nine days." "Sir Charles Grandison" has also the substantial advantage of ending well: that is, if to marry Sir Charles can be so regarded, and certainly Harriet deemed it desirable.

It is pleasant to think of Richardson, now well into the sixties, amiable, plump and prosperous, surrounded for the remainder of his days—he was to die seven years later at the ripe age of seventy-five—by a bevy of admiring women, who, whether literary or merely human, gave this particular author that warm and convincing proof of popularity which, to most, is worth a good deal of chilly posthumous fame which a man is not there to enjoy. Looking at his work retrospectively, one sees that it must always have authority, even if it fall deadly dull upon our ears to-day; for nothing can take away from him the distinction of originating that kind of fiction which, now well along towards its second century of existence, is still popular and powerful. Richardson had no model; he shaped a form for himself. Fielding, a greater genius, threw his fiction into a mold cast by earlier writers; moreover, he received his direct impulse away from the drama and towards the novel from Richardson himself.

The author of "Pamela" demonstrated once and for all the interest that lies in a sympathetic and truthful representation of character in contrast with that interest in incident for its own sake which means the subordination of character, so that the persons become mere subsidiary counters in the game. And he exhibited such a knowledge of the subtler phases of the nooks and crannies of woman's heart, as to be hailed as past-master down to the present day by a whole school of analysts and psychologues; for may it not be said that it is the popular distinction of the nineteenth century fiction to place woman in the pivotal position in that social complex which it is the business of the Novel to represent? Do not our fiction and drama to-day—the drama a belated ally of the Novel in this and other regards—find in the delineation of the eternal feminine under new conditions of our time, its chief, its most significant motif? If so, a special gratitude is due the placid little Mr. Richardson with his Pamelas, Clarissas and Harriets. He found fiction unwritten so far as the chronicles of contemporary society were concerned, and left it in such shape that it was recognized as the natural quarry of all who would paint manners; a field to be worked by Jane Austen, Dickens and Thackeray, Trollope and George Eliot, and a modern army of latter and lesser students of life. His faults were in part merely a reflection of his time; its low-pitched morality, its etiquette which often seems so absurd. Partly it was his own, too; for he utterly lacked humor (save where unconscious) and never grasped the great truth, that in literary art the half is often more than the whole; The Terentian ne quid nimis had evidently not been taken to heart by Samuel Richardson, Esquire, of Hammersmith, author of "Clarissa Harlowe" in eight volumes, and Printer to the Queen. Again and again one of Clarissa's bursts of emotion under the tantalizing treatment of her seducer loses its effect because another burst succeeds before we (and she) have recovered from the first one. He strives to give us the broken rhythm of life (therein showing his affinity with the latter day realists) instead of that higher and harder thing—the more perfect rhythm of art; not so much the truth (which cannot be literally given) as that seeming-true which is the aim and object of the artistic representation. Hence the necessity of what Brunetiere calls in an admirable phrase, the true function of the novel—"to be an abridged representation of life." Construction in the modern sense Richardson had not studied, naturally enough, and was innocent of the fineness of method and the sure-handed touches of later technique. And there is a kind of drawing-room atmosphere in his books, a lack of ozone which makes Fielding with all his open-air coarseness a relief. But judged in the setting of his time, this writer did a wonderful thing not only as the Father of the Modern Novel but one of the few authors in the whole range of fiction who holds his conspicuous place amid shifting literary modes and fashions, because he built upon the surest of all foundations—the social instinct, and the human heart.

If the use of the realistic method alone denoted the Novel, Defoe, not Richardson, might be called its begetter. "Robinson Crusoe," more than twenty years before "Pamela," would occupy the primate position, to say nothing of Swift's "Gulliver's Travels," antedating Richardson's first story by some fifteen years. Certainly the observational method, the love of detail, the grave narrative of imagined fact (if the bull be permitted) are in this earlier book in full force. But "Robinson Crusoe" is not a rival because it does not study man-in-society; never was a story that depended less upon this kind of interest. The position of Crusoe on his desert isle is so eminently unsocial that he welcomes the black man Friday and quivers at the human quality in the famed footprints in the sand. As for Swift's chef d'oeuvre, it is a fairy-tale with a grimly realistic manner and a savage satiric intention. To speak of either of these fictions as novels is an example of the prevalent careless nomenclature. Between them and "Pamela" there yawns a chasm. Moreover, "Crusoe" is a frankly picaresque tale belonging to the elder line of romantic fiction, where incident and action and all the thrilling haps of Adventure-land furnish the basis of appeal rather than character analysis or a study of social relations. The personality of Crusoe is not advanced a whit by his wonderful experiences; he is done entirely from the outside.

Richardson, therefore, marks the beginning of the modern form. But that the objection to Defoe as the true and only begetter of the Novel lies in his failure, in his greatest story, to center the interest in man as part of the social order and as human soul, is shown by the fact that his less known, but remarkable, story "Moll Flanders," picaresque as it is and depicting the life of a female criminal, has yet considerable character study and gets no small part of its appeal for a present-day reader from the minute description of the fall and final reform of the degenerate woman. It is comparatively crude in characterization, but psychological value is not entirely lacking. However, with Richardson it is almost all. It was of the nature of his genius to make psychology paramount: just there is found his modernity. Defoe and Swift may be said to have added some slight interest in analysis pointing towards the psychologic method, which was to find full expression in Samuel Richardson.

CHAPTER III

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY BEGINNINGS: FIELDING

It is interesting to ask if Henry Fielding, barrister, journalist, tinker of plays and man-about-town, would ever have turned novelist, had it not been for Richardson, his predecessor. So slight, so seemingly accidental, are the incidents which make or mar careers and change the course of literary history. Certain it is that the immediate cause of Fielding's first story was the effect upon him of the fortunes of the virtuous Pamela. A satirist and humorist where Richardson was a somewhat solemn sentimentalist, Fielding was quick to see the weakness, and—more important,—the opportunity for caricature, in such a tale, whose folk harangued about morality and whose avowed motive was a kind of hard-surfaced, carefully calculated honor, for sale to the highest bidder. It was easy to recognize that Pamela was not only good but goody-goody. So Fielding, being thirty-five years of age and of uncertain income—he had before he was thirty squandered his mother's estate,—turned himself, two years after "Pamela" had appeared, to a new field and concocted the story known to the world of letters as: "The Adventures of Joseph Andrews and His Friend Abraham Adams."

This Joseph purports to be the brother of Pamela (though the denouement reveals him as more gently born) and is as virtuous in his character of serving-man as the sister herself; indeed, he outvirtues her. Fielding waggishly exhibits him in the full exercise of a highly-starched decorum rebuffing the amatory attempts of sundry ladies whose assault upon the citadel of his honor is analogous to that of Mr. B.,—who naturally becomes Squire Booby in Fielding's hands—upon the long suffering Pamela. Thus, Lady Booby, in whose employ Joseph is footman, after an invitation to him to kiss her which has been gently but firmly refused, bursts out with: "Can a boy, a stripling, have the confidence to talk of his virtue?"

"Madam," says Joseph, "that boy is the brother of Pamela and would be ashamed that the chastity of his family, which is preserved in her, should be stained in him."

The chance for fun is palpable here. But something unexpected happened: what was begun as burlesque, almost horse-play, began to pass from the key of shallow, lively satire, broadening and deepening into a finer tone of truth. In a few chapters, by the time the writer had got such an inimitable personage as Parson Adams before the reader, it was seen that the book was to be more than a jeu d'esprit: rather, the work of a master of characterization. In short, Joseph Andrews started out ostensibly to poke good-natured ridicule at sentimental Mr. Richardson: it ended by furnishing contemporary London and all subsequent readers with a notable example of the novel of mingled character and incident, entertaining alike for its lively episodes and its broadly genial delineation of types of the time. And so he soon had the town laughing with him at his broad comedy.

In every respect Fielding made a sharp contrast with Richardson. He was gentle-born, distinguished and fashionable in his connections: the son of younger sons, impecunious, generous, of strong often unregulated passions,—what the world calls a good fellow, a man's man—albeit his affairs with the fair sex were numerous. He knew high society when he choose to depict it: his education compared with Richardson's was liberal and he based his style of fiction upon models which the past supplied, whereas Richardson had no models, blazed his own trail. Fielding's literary ancestry looks back to "Gil Blas" and "Don Quixote," and in English to "Robinson Crusoe." In other words, his type, however much he departs from it, is the picturesque story of adventure. He announced, in fact, on his title-page that he wrote "in imitation of the manner of Cervantes."

Again, his was a genius for comedy, where Richardson, as we have seen, was a psychologist. The cleansing effect of wholesome laughter and an outdoor gust of hale west wind is offered by him, and with it go the rude, coarse things to be found in Nature who is nevertheless in her influence so salutary, so necessary, in truth, to our intellectual and moral health. Here then was a sort of fiction at many removes from the slow, analytic studies of Richardson: buoyant, objective, giving far more play to action and incident, uniting in most agreeable proportions the twin interests of character and event. The very title of this first book is significant. We are invited to be present at a delineation of two men,—but these men are displayed in a series of adventures. Unquestionably, the psychology is simpler, cruder, more elementary than that of Richardson. Dr. Johnson, who much preferred the author of "Pamela" to the author of "Tom Jones" and said so in the hammer-and-tongs style for which he is famous, declared to Bozzy that "there is all the difference in the world between characters of nature and characters of manners: and there is the difference between the characters of Fielding and those of Richardson. Characters of manners are very entertaining; but they are to be understood by a more superficial observer than characters of nature, where a man must dive into the recesses of the human heart."

And although we may share Boswell's feeling that Johnson estimated the compositions of Richardson too highly and that he had an unreasonable prejudice against Fielding—since he was a man of magnificent biases—yet we may grant that the critic-god made a sound distinction here, that Fielding's method is inevitably more external and shallow than that of an analyst proper like Richardson; no doubt to the great joy of many weary folk who go to novels for the rest and refreshment they give, rather than for their thought-evoking value.

The contrast between these novelists is maintained, too, in the matter of style: Fielding walks with the easy undress of a gentleman: Richardson sits somewhat stiff and pragmatical, carefully arrayed in full-bottomed wig, and knee breeches, delivering a lecture from his garden chair. Fielding is a master of that colloquial manner afterwards handled with such success by Thackeray: a manner "good alike for grave or gay," and making this early fiction-maker enjoyable. Quite apart from our relish of his vivid portrayals of life, we like his wayside chatting. For another difference: there is no moral motto or announcement: the lesson takes care of itself. What unity there is of construction, is found in the fact that certain characters, more or less related, are seen to walk centrally through the narrative: there is little or no plot development in the modern sense and the method (the method of the type) is frankly episodic.

In view of what the Novel was to become in the nineteenth century, Richardson's way was more modern, and did more to set a seal upon fiction than Fielding's: the Novel to-day is first of all psychologic and serious. And the assertion is safe that all the later development derives from these two kinds written by the two greatest of the eighteenth century pioneers, Richardson and Fielding: on the one hand, character study as a motive, on the other the portrayal of personality surrounded by the external factors of life. The wise combination of the two, gives us that tangle of motive, act and circumstance which makes up human existence.

With regard to the morals of the story, a word may here be said, having all Fielding's fiction in mind. Of the suggestive prurience of much modern novelism, whether French or French-derived, he, Fielding, is quite free: he deals with the sensual relations with a frank acknowledgment of their physical basis. The truth is, the eighteenth century, whether in England or elsewhere, was on a lower plane in this respect than our own time. Fielding, therefore, while he does no affront to essential decency, does offend our taste, our refinement, in dealing with this aspect of life. We have in a true sense become more civilized since 1750: the ape and tiger of Tennyson's poem have receded somewhat in human nature during the last century and a half. The plea that since Fielding was a realist depicting society as it was in his day, his license is legitimate, whereas Richardson was giving a sort of sentimentalized stained-glass picture of it not as it was but, in his opinion, should be,—is a specious one; it is well that in literature, faithful reflector of the ideals of the race, the beast should be allowed to die (as Mr. Howells, himself a staunch realist, has said), simply because it is slowly dying in life itself. Fielding's novels in unexpurgated form are not for household reading to-day: the fact may not be a reflection upon him, but it is surely one to congratulate ourselves upon, since it testifies to social evolution. However, for those whose experience of life is sufficiently broad and tolerant, these novels hold no harm: there is a tonic quality to them.—Even bowdlerization is not to be despised with such an author, when it makes him suitable for the hands of those who otherwise might receive injury from the contact. The critic-sneer at such an idea forgets that good art comes out of sound morality as well as out of sound esthetics. It is pleasant to hear a critic of such standing as Brunetiere in his "L'Art et Morale" speak with spiritual clarity upon this subject, so often turned aside with the shrug of impatient scorn.

The episodic character of the story was to be the manner of Fielding in all his fiction. There are detached bits of narrative, stories within stories—witness that dealing with the high comedy figures of Leonora and Bellamine—and the novelist does not bother his head if only he can get his main characters in motion,—on the road, in a tavern or kitchen brawl, astride a horse for a cross-country dash after the hounds. Charles Dickens, whose models were of the eighteenth century, made similar use of the episode in his early work, as readers of "Pickwick" may see for themselves.

The first novel was received with acclaim and stirred up a pretty literary quarrel, for Richardson and his admiring clique would have been more than human had they not taken umbrage at so obvious a satire. Recriminations were hot and many.

Mr. Andrew Lang should give us in a dialogue between dead authors, a meeting in Hades between the two; it would be worth any climatic risk to be present and hear what was said; Lady Mary, who may once more be put on the witness-stand, tells how, being in residence in Italy, and a box of light literature from England having arrived at ten o'clock of the night, she could not but open it and "falling upon Fielding's works, was fool enough to sit up all night reading. I think "Joseph Andrews" better than his Foundling"—the reference being, of course, to "Tom Jones"; a judgment not jumping with that of posterity, which has declared the other to be his masterpiece; yet not an opinion to be despised, coming from one of the keenest intellects of the time. Lady Mary, whose cousin Fielding was, had a clear eye alike for his literary merits and personal foibles and faults, but heartily liked him and acted as his literary mentor in his earlier days; his maiden play was dedicated to her and her interest in him was more than passing.

The Bohemian barrister and literary hack who had made a love-match half a dozen years before and now had a wife and several children to care for, must have been vastly encouraged by the favorable reception of his first essay into fiction; at last, he had found the kind of literature congenial to his talents and likely to secure suitable renown: his metier as an artist of letters was discovered, as we might now choose to express it; he would hardly have taken himself so seriously. It was natural that he should publish the next year a three volume collection of his miscellany, which contained his second novel, "Mr. Jonathan Wild The Great," distinctly the least liked of his four stories, because of its bitter irony, its almost savage tone, the gloom which surrounds the theme, a powerful, full-length portrayal of a famous thief-taker of the period, from his birth to his bad end on a Newgate gallows. Mr. Wild is a sort of foreglimpse of the Sherlock Holmes-Raffles of our own day.

Fielding's wife died this year and it may be that sorrow for her fatal illness was the subjective cause of the tone of this gruesomely attractive piece of fiction; but there is some reason for believing it to be an earlier work than "Joseph Andrews"; it belongs to a more primitive type of story-making, because of its sensational features: its dependence for interest upon the seamy side of aspects of life exhibited like magic lantern slides with little connection, but spectacular effects. The satire of the book is directed at that immoral confusion between greatness and goodness, the rascally Jonathan being pictured in grave mock-heroics as in every way worthy—and the sardonic force at times almost suggests the pen of Dean Swift.

But such work was but a prelude to what was to follow. When the world thinks of Henry Fielding it thinks of "Tom Jones," it is almost as if he had written naught else. "The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling" appeared six years after "Jonathan Wild," the intermediate time (aside from the novel itself) being consumed in editing journals and officiating as a Justice of the Peace: the last a role it is a little difficult, in the theater phrase, to see him in. He was two and forty when the book was published: but as he had been at work upon it for a long while (he speaks of the thousands of hours he had been toiling over it), it may be ascribed to that period of a man's growth when he is passing intellectually from youth to early maturity; everything considered, perhaps the best productive period. His health had already begun to break: and he was by no means free of the harassments of debt. Although successful in his former attempt at fiction, novel writing was but an aside with him, after all; he had not during the previous six years given regular time and attention to literary composition, as a modern story-maker would have done under the stimulus of like encouragement. The eighteenth century audience, it must be borne in mind, was not large enough nor sufficiently eager for an attractive new form of literature, to justify a man of many trades like Fielding in devoting his days steadily to the writing of fiction. There is to the last an effect of the gifted amateur about him; Taine tells the anecdote of his refusal to trouble himself to change a scene in one of his plays, which Garrick begged him to do: "Let them find it out," he said, referring to the audience. And when the scene was hissed, he said to the disconsolate player: "I did not: give them credit for it: they have found it out, have they?" In other words, he was knowing to his own poor art, content if only it escaped the public eye. This is some removes from the agonizing over a phrase of a Flaubert.

Like the preceding story, "Tom Jones" has its center of plot in a life history of the foundling who grows into a young manhood that is full of high spirits and escapades: likable always, even if, judged by the straight-laced standards of Richardson, one may not approve. Jones loves Sophia Western, daughter of a typical three-bottle, hunting squire: of course he prefers the little cad Blifil, with his money and position, where poor Tom has neither: equally of course Sophia (whom the reader heartily likes, in spite of her name) prefers the handsome Jones with his blooming complexion and many amatory adventures. And, since we are in the simple-minded days of fiction when it was the business of the sensible novelist to make us happy at the close, the low-born lover, assisted by Squire Allworthy, who is a deus ex machina a trifle too good for human nature's daily food, gets his girl (in imitation of Joseph Andrews) and is shown to be close kin to Allworthy—tra-la-la, tra-la-lee, it is all charmingly simple and easy! The beginners of the English novel had only a few little tricks in their box in the way of incident and are for the most part innocent of plot in the Wilkie Collins sense of the word. The opinion of Coleridge that the "Oedipus Tyrannus," "The Alchemist" and "Tom Jones" are "the three most perfect plots ever planned" is a curious comment upon his conception of fiction, since few stories have been more plotless than Fielding's best book. The fact is, biographical fiction like this is to be judged by itself, it has its own laws of technique.

The glory of "Tom Jones" is in its episodes, its crowded canvas, the unfailing verve and variety of its action: in the fine open-air atmosphere of the scenes, the sense of the stir of life they convey: most of all, in an indescribable manliness or humanness which bespeaks the true comic force—something of that same comic view that one detects in Shakspere and Moliere and Cervantes. It means an open-eyed acceptance of life, a realization of its seriousness yet with the will to take it with a smile: a large tolerancy which forbids the view conventional or parochial or aristocratic—in brief, the view limited. There is this in the book, along with much psychology so superficial as to seem childish, and much interpretation that makes us feel that the higher possibilities of men and women are not as yet even dreamed of. In this novel, Fielding makes fuller use than he had before of the essay link: the chapters introductory to the successive books,—and in them, a born essayist, as your master of style is pretty sure to be, he discourses in the wisest and wittiest way on topics literary, philosophical or social, having naught to do with the story in hand, it may be, but highly welcome for its own sake. This manner of pausing by the way for general talk about the world in terms of Me has been used since by Thackeray, with delightful results: but has now become old-fashioned, because we conceive it to be the novelist's business to stick close to his story and not obtrude his personality at all. Thackeray displeases a critic like Mr. James by his postscript harangues about himself as Showman, putting his puppets into the box and shutting up his booth: fiction is too serious a matter to be treated so lightly by its makers—to say nothing of the audience: it is more, much more than mere fooling and show-business. But to go back to the eighteenth century is to realize that the novel is being newly shaped, that neither novelist nor novel-reader is yet awake to the higher conception of the genre. So we wax lenient and are glad enough to get these resting-places of chat and charm from Fielding: it may not be war, but it is nevertheless magnificent.

Fielding in this fiction is remarkable for his keen observation of every-day life and character, the average existence in town and country of mankind high and low: he is a truthful reporter, the verisimilitude of the picture is part of its attraction. It is not too much to say that, pictorially, he is the first great English realist of the Novel. For broad comedy presentation he is unsurpassed: as well as for satiric gravity of comment and illustration. It may be questioned, however, whether when he strives to depict the deeper phases of human relations he is so much at home or anything like so happy. There is no more critical test of a novelist than his handling of the love passion. Fielding essays in "Tom Jones" to show the love between two very likable flesh-and-blood young folk: the many mishaps of the twain being but an embroidery upon the accepted fact that the course of true love never did run smooth. There is a certain scene which gives us an interview between Jones and Sophia, following on a stormy one between father and daughter, during which the Squire has struck his child to the ground and left her there with blood and tears streaming down her face. Her disobedience in not accepting the addresses of the unspeakable Blifil is the cause of the somewhat drastic parental treatment. Jones has assured the Squire that he can make Sophia see the error of her ways and has thus secured a moment with her. He finds her just risen from the ground, in the sorry plight already described. Then follows this dialogue:

'O, my Sophia, what means this dreadful sight?'

She looked softly at him for a moment before she spoke, and
then said:

'Mr. Jones, for Heaven's sake, how came you here? Leave me,
I beseech you, this moment.'

'Do not,' says he, 'impose so harsh a command upon me. My heart bleeds faster than those lips. O Sophia, how easily could I drain my veins to preserve one drop of that dear blood.'

'I have too many obligations to you already,' answered she,
'for sure you meant them such.'

Here she looked at him tenderly almost a minute, and then
bursting into an agony, cried:

'Oh, Mr. Jones, why did you save my life? My death would
have been happier for us both.'

'Happy for us both!' cried he. 'Could racks or wheels kill me so painfully as Sophia's—I cannot bear the dreadful sound. Do I live but for her?'

Both his voice and look were full of irrepressible tenderness when he spoke these words; and at the same time he laid gently hold on her hand, which she did not withdraw from him; to say the truth, she hardly knew what she did or suffered. A few moments now passed in silence between these lovers, while his eyes were eagerly fixed on Sophia, and hers declining toward the ground; at last she recovered strength enough to desire him again to leave her, for that her certain ruin would be the consequence of their being found together; adding:

'Oh, Mr. Jones, you know not, you know not what hath passed this cruel afternoon.'

'I know all, my Sophia,' answered he; 'your cruel father hath told me all, and he himself hath sent me hither to you.'

'My father sent you to me!' replied she: 'sure you dream!'

'Would to Heaven,' cried he, 'it was but a dream. Oh! Sophia, your father hath sent me to you, to be an advocate for my odious rival, to solicit you in his favor. I took any means to get access to you. O, speak to me, Sophia! Comfort my bleeding heart. Sure no one ever loved, ever doted, like me. Do not unkindly withhold this dear, this soft, this gentle hand—one moment perhaps tears you forever from me. Nothing less than this cruel occasion could, I believe, have ever conquered the respect and love with which you have inspired me.'

She stood a moment silent, and covered with confusion; then, lifting up her eyes gently towards him, she cried:

'What would Mr. Jones have me say?'

We would seem to have here a writer not quite in his native element. He intends to interest us in a serious situation. Sophia is on the whole natural and winning, although one may stop to imagine what kind of an agony is that which allows of so mathematical a division of time as is implied in the statement that she looked at her lover—tenderly, too, forsooth!—"almost a minute." The mood of mathematics and the mood of emotion, each excellent in itself, do not go together in life as they do in eighteenth century fiction. But in the general impression she makes, Sophia, let us concede, is sweet and realizable. But Jones, whom we have long before this scene come to know and be fond of—Jones is here a prig, a bore, a dummy. Sir Charles Grandison in all his woodenness is not arrayed like one of these. Consider the situation further: Sophia is in grief; she has blood and tears on her face—what would any lover,—nay, any respectable young man do in the premises? Surely, stanch her wounds, dry her eyes, comfort her with a homely necessary handkerchief. But not so Jones: he is not a real man but a melodramatic lay-figure, playing to the gallery as he spouts speeches about the purely metaphoric bleeding of his heart, oblivious of the disfigurement of his sweetheart's visage from real blood. He insults her by addressing her in the third person, mouths sentiments about his "odious rival" (a phrase with a superb Bowery smack to it!) and in general so disports himself as to make an effect upon the reader of complete unreality. This was no real scene to Fielding himself: why then should it be true: it has neither the accent nor the motion of life. The novelist is being "literary," is not warm to his work at all. When we turn from this attempt to the best love scenes in modern hands, the difference is world-wide. And this unreality—which violates the splendid credibility of the hero in dozens of other scenes in the book,—is all the worse coming from a writer who expressly announces his intention to destroy the prevalent conventional hero of fiction and set up something better in his place. Whereas Tom in the quoted scene is nothing if not conventional and drawn in the stock tradition of mawkish heroics. The plain truth is that with Fielding love is an appetite rather than a sentiment and he is only completely at ease when painting its rollicking, coarse and passional aspects.

In its unanalytic method and loose construction this Novel, compared with Richardson, is a throw-back to a more primitive pattern, as we saw was the case with Fielding's first fiction. But in another important characteristic of the modern Novel it surpasses anything that had earlier appeared: I refer to the way it puts before the reader a great variety of human beings, so that a sense of teeming existence is given, a genuine imitation of the spatial complexity of life, if not of its depths. It is this effect, afterwards conveyed in fuller measure by Balzac, by Dickens, by Victor Hugo and by Tolstoy, that gives us the feeling that we are in the presence of a master of men, whatever his limitations of period or personality.

How delightful are the subsidiary characters in the book! One such is Partridge, the unsophisticated schoolmaster who, when he attends the theater with Tom and hears Garrick play "Hamlet," thinks but poorly of the player because he only does what anybody would do under the circumstances! All-worthy and Blifil one may object to, each in his kind, for being conventionally good and bad, but in numerous male characters in less important roles there is compensation: the gypsy episode, for example, is full of raciness and relish. And what a gallery of women we get in the story: Mrs. Honour the maid, and Miss Western (who in some sort suggests Mrs. Nickleby), Mrs. Miller, Lady Bellaston, Mrs. Waters and other light-of-loves and dames of folly, whose dubious doings are carried off with such high good humor that we are inclined to overlook their misdeeds. There is a Chaucerian freshness about it all: at times comes the wish that such talent were used in a better cause. A suitable sub-title for the story, would be: Or Life in The Tavern, so large a share do Inns have in its unfolding. Fielding would have yielded hearty assent to Dr. Johnson's dictum that a good inn stood for man's highest felicity here below: he relished the wayside comforts of cup and bed and company which they afford.

"Tom Jones" quickly crossed the seas, was admired in foreign lands. I possess a manuscript letter of Heine's dated from Mainz in 1830, requesting a friend to send him this novel: the German poet represents, in the request, the literary class which has always lauded Fielding's finest effort, while the wayfaring man who picks it up, also finds it to his liking. Thus it secures and is safe in a double audience. Yet we must return to the thought that such a work is strictly less significant in the evolution of the modern Novel, because of its form, its reversion to type, than the model established by a man like Richardson, who is so much more restricted in gift.

Fielding's fourth and final story, "Amelia," was given to the world two years later, and but three years before his premature death at Lisbon at the age of forty-nine—worn out by irregular living and the vicissitudes of a career which had been checkered indeed. He did strenuous work as a Justice these last years and carried on an efficacious campaign against criminals: but the lights were dimming, the play was nearly over. The pure gust of life which runs rampant and riotous in the pages of "Tom Jones" is tempered in "Amelia" by a quieter, sadder tone and a more philosophic vision. It is in this way a less characteristic work, for it was of Fielding's nature to be instantly responsive to good cheer and the creature comforts of life. When she got the news of his death, Lady Mary wrote of him: "His happy constitution (even when he had, with great pains, half demolished it) made him forget everything when he was before a venison pastry or over a flask of champagne; and I am persuaded he has known more happy moments than any prince upon earth. His natural spirits gave him rapture with his cook-maid and cheerfulness in a garret." Here is a kit-kat showing the man indeed: all his fiction may be read in the light of it. The main interest in "Amelia" is found in its autobiographical flavor, for the story, in describing the fortunes—or rather misfortunes—of Captain Booth and his wife, drew, it is pretty certain, upon Fielding's own traits and to some extent upon the incidents of his earlier life. The scenes where the Captain sets up for a country gentleman with his horses and hounds and speedily runs through his patrimony, is a transcript of his own experience: and Amelia herself is a sort of memorial to his well-beloved first wife (he had married for a second his honest, good-hearted kitchen-maid), who out of affection must have endured so much in daily contact with such a character as that of her charming husband. In the novel, Mrs. Booth always forgives, even as the Captain ever goes wrong. There would be something sad in such a clear-eyed comprehension of one's own weakness, if we felt compelled to accept the theory that he was here drawing his own likeness; which must not be pushed too far, for the Captain is one thing Fielding never was—to wit, stupid. There is in the book much realism of scene and incident; but its lack of animal spirits has always militated against the popularity of "Amelia"; in fact, it is accurate to say that Fielding's contemporary public, and the reading world ever since, has confined its interest in his work to "Joseph Andrews" and "Tom Jones."

The pathos of his ending, dying in Portugal whither he had gone on a vain quest for health, and his companionable qualities whether as man or author, can but make him a more winsome figure to us than proper little Mr. Richardson; and possibly this feeling has affected the comparative estimates of the two writers. One responds readily to the sentiment of Austin Dobson's fine poem on Fielding:

"Beneath the green Estrella trees,
No artist merely, but a man
Wrought on our noblest island-plan,
Sleeps with the alien Portuguese."

And in the same way we are sympathetic with Thackeray in the lecture on the English humorists: "Such a brave and gentle heart, such an intrepid and courageous spirit, I love to recognize in the manly, the English Harry Fielding." Imagine any later critic calling Richardson "Sam!" It is inconceivable.

* * * * *

Such then were the two men who founded the English Novel, and such their work. Unlike in many respects, both as personalities and literary makers, they were, after all, alike in this: they showed the feasibility of making the life of contemporary society interesting in prose fiction. That was their great common triumph and it remains the keynote of all the subsequent development in fiction. They accomplished this, each in his own way: Richardson by sensibility often degenerating into sentimentality, and by analysis—the subjective method; Fielding by satire and humor (often coarse, sometimes bitter) and the wide envisagement of action and scene—the method objective. Richardson exhibits a somewhat straitened propriety and a narrow didactic tradesman's morality, with which we are now out of sympathy. Fielding, on the contrary, with the abuse of his good gift for tolerant painting of seamy human nature, gives way often to an indulgence of the lower instincts of mankind which, though faithfully reflecting his age, are none the less unpleasant to modern taste. Both are men of genius, Fielding's being the larger and more universal: nothing but genius could have done such original things as were achieved by the two. Nevertheless, set beside the great masters of fiction who were to come, and who will be reviewed in these pages, they are seen to have been excelled in art and at least equaled in gift and power. So much we may properly claim for the marvelous growth and ultimate degree of perfection attained by the best novel-makers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It remains now to show what part was played in the eighteenth century development by certain other novelists, who, while not of the supreme importance of these two leaders, yet each and all contributed to the shaping of the new fiction and did their share in leaving it at the century's end a perfected instrument, to be handled by a finished artist like Jane Austen. We must take some cognizance, in special, of writers like Smollett and Sterne and Goldsmith—potent names, evoking some of the pleasantest memories open to one who browses in the rich meadow lands of English literature.

CHAPTER IV

DEVELOPMENTS; SMOLLETT, STERNE AND OTHERS

The popularity of Richardson and Fielding showed itself in a hearty public welcome: and also in that sincerest form of flattery, imitation. Many authors began to write the new fiction. Where once a definite demand is recognized in literature, the supply, more or less machine-made, is sure to follow.

In the short quarter of a century between "Pamela" and "The Vicar of Wakefield," the Novel got its growth, passed out of leading strings into what may fairly be called independence and maturity: and by the time Goldsmith's charming little classic was written, the shelves were comfortably filled with novels recent or current, giving contemporary literature quite the air so familiar to-day. Only a little later, we find the Gentleman's Magazine, a trustworthy reporter of such matters, speaking of "this novel-writing age." The words were written in 1773, a generation after Richardson had begun the form. Still more striking testimony, so far back as 1755, when Richardson's maiden story was but a dozen years old, a writer in "The Connoisseur" is facetiously proposing to establish a factory for the fashioning of novels, with one, a master workman, to furnish plots and subordinates to fill in the details—an anticipation of the famous literary menage of Dumas pere.

Although there was, under these conditions, inevitable imitation of the new model, there was a deeper reason for the rapid development. The time was ripe for this kind of fiction: it was in the air, as we have already tried to suggest. Hence, other fiction-makers began to experiment with the form, this being especially true of Smollett. Out of many novelists, feeble or truly called, a few of the most important must be mentioned.

I

The Scotch-born Tobias Smollett published his first fiction, "Roderick Random," eight years after "Pamela" had appeared, and the year before "Tom Jones"; it was exactly contemporaneous with "Clarissa Harlowe," A strict contemporary, then, with Richardson and Fielding, he was also the ablest novelist aside from them, a man whose work was most influential in the later development. It is not unusual to dismiss him in a sentence as a coarser Fielding. The characterization hits nearer the bull's eye than is the rule with such sayings, and more vulgar than the greater writer he certainly is, brutal where Fielding is vigorous: and he exhibits and exaggerates the latter's tendencies to the picaresque, the burlesque and the episodic. His fiction is of the elder school in its loose fiber, its external method of dealing with incident and character. There is little or nothing in Smollett of the firm-knit texture and subjective analysis of the moderns. Thus the resemblances are superficial, the differences deeper-going and palpable. Smollett is often violent, Fielding never: there is an impression of cosmopolitanism in the former—a wider survey of life, if only on the surface, is given in his books. By birth, Smollett was of the gentry; but by the time he was twenty he had seen service as Surgeon's Mate in the British navy, and his after career as Tory Editor, at times in prison, literary man and traveler who visited many lands and finally, like Fielding, died abroad in Italy, was checkered enough to give him material and to spare for the changeful bustle, so rife with action and excitement, of his four principal stories. Like the American Cooper, he drew upon his own experiences for his picture of the navy; and like a later American, Dr. Holmes, was a physician who could speak by the card of that side of life.

Far more closely than Fielding he followed the "Gil Blas" model, depending for interest primarily upon adventures by the way, moving accidents by flood and field. He declares, in fact, his intention to use Le Sage as a literary father and he translated "Gil Blas." In striking contrast, too, with Fielding is the interpretation of life one gets from his books; with the author of "Tom Jones" we feel, what we do in greater degree with Shakespeare and Balzac, that the personality of the fiction-maker is healthily merged in his characters, in the picture of life. But in the case of Dr. Smollett, there is a strongly individual satiric bias: less of that largeness which sees the world from an unimplicated coign of vantage, whence the open-eyed, wise-minded spectator finds it a comedy breeding laughter under thoughtful brows. We seem to be getting not so much scenes of life as an author's setting of the scene for his own private reasons. Such is at least the occasional effect of Smollett. Also is there more of bitterness, of savagery in him: and where Fielding was broad and racily frank in his handling of delicate themes, this fellow is indecent with a kind of hardness and brazenness which are amazing. The difference between plain-speaking and unclean speaking could hardly be better illustrated. It should be added, in justice, that even Smollett is rarely impure with the alluring saliency of certain modern fiction.

In the first story, "The Adventures of Roderick Random" (the cumbrous full titles of earlier fiction are for apparent reasons frequently curtailed in the present treatment), published when the author was twenty-seven, he avails himself of a residence of some years in Jamaica to depict life in that quarter of the world at a time when the local color had the charm of novelty. The story is often credited with being autobiographic, as a novelist's first book is likely to be; since, by popular belief, there is one story in all of us, namely, our own. Its description of the hero's hard knocks does, indeed, suggest the fate of a man so stormily quarrelsome throughout his days: for this red-headed Scot, this "hack of genius," as Henley picturesquely calls him, was naturally a fighting man and, whether as man or author, attacks or repels sharply: there is nothing uncertain in the effect he makes. His loud vigor is as pronounced as that of a later Scot like Carlyle; yet he stated long afterward that the likeness between himself and Roderick was slight and superficial. The fact that the tale is written in the first person also helps the autobiographic theory: that method of story-making always lends a certain credence to the narrative. The scenes shift from western Scotland to the streets of London, thence to the West Indies: and the interest (the remark applies to all Smollett's work) lies in just three things—adventure, diversity of character, and the realistic picture of contemporary life—especially that of the navy on a day when, if Smollett is within hailing distance of the facts, it was terribly corrupt. Too much credit can hardly be given him for first using, so effectively too, the professional sea-life of his country: a motive so richly productive since through Marryat down to Dana, Herman Melville, Clark Russell and many other favorite writers, both British and American. In Smollett's hands, it is a strange muddle of religion, farce and smut, but set forth with a vivid particularity and a gusto f high spirits which carry the reader along, willy-nilly. Such a book might be described by the advertisement of an old inn: "Here is entertainment for man and beast." As to characterization, if a genius for it means the creation of figures which linger in the familiar memory of mankind, Smollett must perforce be granted the faculty; here in his first book are Tom Bowling and Strap—to name two—the one (like Richardson's Lovelace) naming a type: the other standing for the country innocent, the meek fidus Achates, both as good as anything of the same class in Fielding. The Welsh mate, Mr. Morgan, for another of the sailor sort, is also excellent. The judgment may be eccentric, but for myself the character parts in Smollett's dramas seem for variety and vividness often superior to those of Fielding. The humor at its best is very telling. The portraits, or caricatures, of living folk added to the story's immediate vogue, but injure it as a permanent contribution to fiction.

A fair idea of the nature of the attractions offered (and at the same time a clear indication of the sort of fiction manufactured by the doughty doctor) may be gleaned from the following precis—Smollett's own—of Chapter XXXVIII: "I get up and crawl into a barn where I am in danger of perishing through the fear of the country people. Their inhumanity. I am succored by a reputed witch. Her story. Her advice. She recommends me as a valet to a single lady whose character she explains." This promises pretty fair reading: of course, we wish to read on and to learn more of that single lady and the hero's relation to her. Such a motive, which might be called, "The Mistakes of a Night," with details too crude and physical to allow of discussion, is often overworked by Smollett (as, in truth, it is by Fielding, to modern taste): the eighteenth century had not yet given up the call of the Beast in its fiction—an element of bawdry was still welcome in the print offered reputable folk.

The style of Smollett in his first fiction, and in general, has marked dramatic flavor: his is a gift of forthright phrase, a plain, vernacular smack characterizes his diction. To go back to him now is to be surprised perhaps at the racy vigor of so faulty a writer and novelist. A page or so of Smollett, after a course in present-day popular fiction, reads very much like a piece of literature. In this respect, he seems full of flavor, distinctly of the major breed: there is an effect of passing from attenuated parlor tricks into the open, when you take him up. Here, you can but feel, is a masculine man of letters, even if it is his fate to play second fiddle to Fielding.

Smollett's initial story was a pronounced success with the public—and he aired an arrogant joy and pooh-poohed insignificant rivals like Fielding. His hand was against every man's when it came to the question of literary prowess; and like many authors before and since, one of his first acts upon the kind reception of "Roderick Random," was to get published his worthless blank-verse tragedy, "The Regicide," which, refused by Garrick, had till then languished in manuscript and was an ugly duckling beloved of its maker. Then came Novel number two, "The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle," three years after the first: an unequal book, best at its beginning and end, full of violence, not on the whole such good art-work as the earlier fiction, yet very fine in spots and containing such additional sea-dogs as Commodore Trunnion and Lieutenant Hatchway, whose presence makes one forgive much. The original preface contained a scurrilous reference to Fielding, against whom he printed a diatribe in a pamphlet dated the next year. The hero of the story, a handsome ne'er-do-well who has money and position to start the world with, encounters plenty of adventure in England and out of it, by land and sea. There is an episodic book, "Memoirs, supposed to be written by a lady of quality," and really giving the checkered career of Lady Vane, a fast gentlewoman of the time, done for pay at her request, which is illustrative of the loose state of fictional art in its unrelated, lugged-in character: and as well of eighteenth century morals in its drastic details. We have seen that Fielding was frankly episodic in handling a story; Smollett goes him one better: as may most notoriously be seen also in the unmentionable Miss Williams' story in "Roderick Random"—in fact, throughout his novels. Pickle, to put it mildly, is not an admirable young man. An author's conception of his hero is always in some sort a give-away: it expresses his ideals; that Smollett's are sufficiently low-pitched, may be seen here. Plainly, to, he likes Peregrine, and not so much excuses his failings as overlooks them entirely.

After a two years' interval came "The Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom," which was not liked by his contemporaries and is now seen to be definitely the poorest of the quartette. It is enough to say of it that Fathom is an unmitigable scoundrel and the story, mixed romance and melodrama, offers the reader dust and ashes instead of good red blood. It lacks the comic verve of Smollett's typical fiction and manipulates virtue and vice in the cut-and-dried style of the penny-dreadful. Even its attempts at the sensational leave the modern reader, bred on such heavenly fare as is proffered by Stevenson and others, indifferent-cold.

It is a pleasure to turn from it to what is generally conceded to be the best novel he wrote, as it is his last: "The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker," which appeared nearly twenty years later, when the author was fifty years old. "The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Graves," written in prison a decade earlier, and a poor satire in the vein of Cervantes, can be ignored, it falls so much below Smollett's main fiction. He had gone for his health's sake to Italy and wrote "Humphrey Clinker" at Leghorn, completing it only within a few weeks of his death. For years he had been degenerating as a writer, his physical condition was of the worst: it looked as if his life was quite over. Yet, by a sort of leaping-up of the creative flame out of the dying embers of the hearth, he wrought his masterpiece.

It was thrown into letter form, Richardson's framework, and has all of Smollett's earlier power of characterization and brusque wit, together with a more genial, mellower tone, that of an older man not soured but ripened by the years. Some of its main scenes are enacted in his native Scotland and possibly this meant strength for another Scot, as it did for Sir Walter and Stevenson. The kinder interpretation of humanity in itself makes the novel better reading to later taste; so much can not honestly be said for its plain speaking, for as Henley says in language which sounds as if it were borrowed from the writer he is describing, "the stinks and nastinesses are done with peculiar gusto." The idea of the story, as usual a pivot around which to revolve a series of adventures, is to narrate how a certain bachelor, country gentleman, Matthew Bramble, a malade imaginaire, yet good-hearted and capable of big laughter—"the most risible misanthrope ever met with," as he is limned by one of the persons of the story—travels in England, Wales and Scotland in pursuit of health, taking with him his family, of whom the main members include his sister, Tabitha (and her maid, Jenkins), and his nephew, not overlooking the dog, Chowder. Clinker, who names the book, is a subsidiary character, merely a servant in Bramble's establishment. The crotchety Bramble and his acidulous sister, who is a forerunner of Mrs. Malaprop in the unreliability of her spelling, and Lieutenant Lishmahago, who has been complimented as the first successful Scotchman in fiction—all these are sketched with a verity and in a vein of genuine comic invention which have made them remembered. Violence, rage, filth—Smollett's besetting sins—are forgotten or forgiven in a book which has so much of the flavor and movement of life, The author's medical lore is made good use of in the humorous descriptions of poor Bramble's ailments. Incidentally, the story defends the Scotch against the English in such a pronounced way that Walpole calls it a "part novel"; and there is, moreover, a pleasant love story interwoven with the comedy and burlesque. One feels in leaving this fiction that with all allowance for his defects, there is more danger of undervaluing the author's powers and place in the modern Novel than the reverse.

Fielding and Smollett together set the pace for the Novel of blended incident and character: both were, as sturdy realists, reactionary from the sentimental analysis of Richardson and express an instinct contrary to the self-conscious pathos of a Sterne or the idyllic romanticism of a Goldsmith. Both were directly of influence upon the Novel's growth in the nineteenth century: Fielding especially upon Thackeray, Smollett upon Dickens. If Smollett had served the cause in no other way than in his strong effect upon the author of "The Pickwick Papers," he would deserve well of all critics: how the little Copperfield delighted in that scant collection of books on his father's bookshelf, where were "Roderick Random," "Peregrine Pickle" and "Humphrey Clinker," along with "Tom Jones," "The Vicar of Wakefield," "Gil Blas" and "Robinson Crusoe"—"a glorious host," says he, "to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy and my hope of something beyond that time and place." And of Smollett's characters, who seem to have charmed him more than Fielding's, he declares: "I have seen Tom Pipes go clambering up the church-steeple: I have watched Strap with the knapsack on his back stopping to rest himself upon the wicket gate: and I know that Commodore Trunnion held that Club with Mr. Pickle in the parlor of our little village ale house." Children are shrewd critics, in their way, and what an embryo Charles Dickens likes in fiction is not to be slighted. But as we have seen, Smollett can base his claims to our sufferance not by indirection through Dickens, but upon his worth; many besides the later and greater novelist have a liking for this racy writer of adventure, and creator of English types, who was recognized by Walter Scott as of kin to the great in fiction.

II

In the fast-developing fiction of the late eighteenth century, the possible ramifications of the Novel from the parent tree of Richardson enriched it with the work of Sterne, Swift and Goldsmith. They added imaginative narratives of one sort or another, which increased the content of the form by famous things and exercised some influence in shaping it. The remark has in mind "Tristram Shandy," "Gulliver's Travels" and "The Vicar of Wakefield." And yet, no one of the three was a Novel in the sense in which the evolution of the word has been traced, nor yet are the authors strictly novelists.

Laurence Sterne, at once man of the world and clergyman, with Rabelais as a model, and himself a master of prose, possessing command of humor and pathos, skilled in character sketch and essay-philosophy, is not a novelist at all. His aim Is not to depict the traits or events of contemporary society, but to put forth the views of the Reverend Laurence Sterne, Yorkshire parson, with many a quaint turn and whimsical situation under a thin disguise of story-form. Of his two books, "Tristram Shandy" and "The Sentimental Journey," unquestionable classics, both, in their field, there is no thought of plot or growth or objective realization: the former is a delightful tour de force in which a born essayist deals with the imaginary fortunes of a person he makes as interesting before his birth as after it, and in passing, sketches some characters dear to posterity: first and foremost, Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim. It is all pure play of wit, fancy and wisdom, beneath the comic mask—a very frolic of the mind. In the second book the framework is that of the travel-sketch and the treatment more objective: a fact which, along with its dubious propriety, may account for its greater popularity. But much of the charm comes, as before, from the writer's touch, his gift of style and ability to unloose in the essay manner a unique individuality.

In his life Sterne, like Swift, exhibited most un-clerical traits of worldliness and in his work there is the refined, suggestive indelicacy, not to say indecency, which we are in the habit nowadays of charging against the French, and which is so much worse than the bluff, outspoken coarseness of a Fielding or a Smollett. At times the line between Sterne and Charles Lamb is not so easy to draw in that, from first to last, the elder is an essayist and humorist, while the younger has so much of the eighteenth century in his feeling and manner. In these modern times, when so many essayists appear in the guise of fiction-makers, we can see that Sterne is really the leader of the tribe: and it is not hard to show how neither he nor they are novelists divinely called. They (and he) may be great, but it is another greatness. The point is strikingly illustrated by the statement that Sterne was eight years publishing the various parts of "Tristram Shandy," and a man of forty-six when he began to do so. Bona fide novels are not thus written. Constructively, the work is a mad farrago; but the end quite justifies the means. Thus, while his place in letters is assured, and the touch of the cad in him (Goldsmith called him "the blackguard parson") should never blind us to his prime merits, his significance for our particular study—the study of the modern Novel in its development—is comparatively slight. Like all essayists of rank he left memorable passages: the world never tires of "God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb," and pays it the high compliment of ascribing it to holy writ: nor will the scene where the recording angel blots out Uncle Toby's generous oath with a tear, fade from the mind; nor that of the same kindly gentleman letting go the big fly which has, to his discomfiture, been buzzing about his nose at dinner: "'Go,' says he, lifting up the latch and opening his hand as he spoke to let it escape. 'Go, poor devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee? The world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me'"—a touch so modern as to make Sterne seem a century later than Fielding. These are among the precious places of literature. This eighteenth century divine has in advance of his day the subtler sensibility which was to grow so strong in later fiction: and if he be sentimental too, he gives us a sentimentality unlike the solemn article of Richardson, because of its French grace and its relief of delicious humor.

III

Swift chronologically precedes Sterne, for in 1726, shortly after "Robinson Crusoe" and a good fifteen years before "Pamela," he gave the world that unique lucubration, "Gulliver's Travels," allegory, satire and fairy story all in one. It is certainly anything but a novel. One of the giants of English letters, doing many things and exhibiting a sardonic personality that seems to peer through all his work, Swift's contribution to the coming Novel was above all the use of a certain grave, realistic manner of treating the impossible: a service, however, shared with Defoe. He gives us in a matter-of-fact chronicle style the marvelous happenings of Gulliver in Lilliputian land or in that of the Brobdingnagians. He and Defoe are to be regarded as pioneers who suggested to the literary world, just before the Novel's advent, that the attraction of a new form and a new method, the exploitation of the truth that, "The proper study of mankind is man," could not (and should not) kill the love of romance, for the good and sufficient reason that romance meant imagination, illusion, charm, poetry. And in due season, after the long innings enjoyed by realism with its triumphs of analysis and superfaithful transcriptions of the average life of man, we shall behold the change of mood which welcomes back the older appeal of fiction.

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.

CHAPTER V

REALISM: JANE AUSTEN

It has been said that Miss Austen came nearer to showing life as it is,—the life she knew and chose to depict,—than any other novelist of English race. In other words, she is a princess among the truth-tellers. Whether or not this claim can be substantiated, it is sure that, writing practically half a century after Richardson and Fielding, she far surpassed those pioneers in the exquisite and easy verisimilitude of her art. Nay, we can go further and say that nobody has reproduced life with a more faithful accuracy, that yet was not photography because it gave the pleasure proper to art, than this same Jane Austen, spinster, well-born and well-bred: in her own phrase, an "elegant female" of the English past. Scott's famous remark can not be too often quoted: "That young lady had a talent for describing the movements and feelings of characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with."

If you look on the map at the small Southern county of Hampshire, you will see that the town of Steventon lies hard by Selborne, another name which the naturalist White has made pleasant to the ear. Throughout her forty-two years of life—she was born the year of American revolution and died shortly after Scott had begun his Waverley series—she was a country-woman in the best sense: a clergyman's daughter identified with her neighborhood, dignified and private in her manner of existence, her one sensational outing being a four years' residence in the fashionable watering-place of Bath, where Beau Nash once reigned supreme and in our day, Beaucaire has been made to rebuke Lady Mary Carlisle for her cold patrician pride. Quiet she lived and died, nor was she reckoned great in letters by her contemporaries. She wrote on her lap with others in the room, refused to take herself seriously and in no respect was like the authoress who is kodaked at the writing-desk and chronicled in her movements by land and sea. She was not the least bit "literary." Fanny Burney, who had talent to Jane Austen's genius, was in a blaze of social recognition, a petted darling of the town, where the other walked in rural ways and unnoted of the world, wrote novels that were to make literary history. Such are the revenges of the whirligig, Time.

Austen's indestructible reputation is founded on half a dozen pieces of fiction: the best, and best known, "Sense and Sensibility" and "Pride and Prejudice," although "Mansfield Park," "Emma," "Northanger Abbey" and "Persuasion" (in order of publication but not of actual composition) are all of importance to the understanding and enjoyment of her, and her evenness of performance, on the whole, is remarkable. The earlier three of these books were written by Miss Austen when a young woman In the twenties, but published much later, and were anonymous—an indication of her tendency to take her authorship as an aside. Two of them appeared posthumously. Curiously, "Northanger Abbey," that capital hit at the Radcliffe romanticism, and first written of her stories, was disposed of to a publisher when the writer was but three and twenty, yet was not printed until she had passed away nearly twenty years later,—a sufficient proof of her unpopularity from the mercantile point of view.

Here is one of the paradoxes of literature: this gentlewoman dabbling in a seemingly amateur fashion in letters, turns out to be the ablest novelist of her sex and race, one of the very few great craftsmen, one may say, since art is no respector of sex. Jane Austen is the best example in the whole range of English literature of the wisdom of knowing your limitations and cultivating your own special plot of ground. She offers a permanent rebuke to those who (because of youth or a failure to grasp the meaning of life) fancy that the only thing worth while lies on the other side of the Pyrenees; when all the while at one's own back-door blooms the miracle. She had a clear-eyed comprehension of her own restrictions; and possessed that power of self-criticism which some truly great authors lack. She has herself given us the aptest comment ever made on her books: speaking of the "little bit of ivory two inches wide on which she worked with a brush so fine as to produce little effect after much labor";—a judgment hardly fair as to the interest she arouses, but nevertheless absolutely descriptive of the plus and minus of her gift.

Miss Austen knew the genteel life of the upper middle class Hampshire folk, "the Squirearchy and the upper professional class," as Professor Saintsbury expresses it, down to the ground—knew it as a sympathetic onlooker slightly detached (she never married), yet not coldly aloof but a part of it as devoted sister and maiden aunt, and friend-in-general to the community. She could do two things which John Ruskin so often lauded as both rare and difficult: see straight and then report accurately; a literary Pre-Raphaelite, be it noted, before the term was coined. It not only came natural to her to tell the truth about average humanity as she saw it; she could not be deflected from her calling. Winning no general recognition during her life-time, she was not subjected to the temptations of the popular novelist; but she had her chance to go wrong, for it is recorded how that the Librarian to King George the Third, an absurd creature yclept Clark, informed the authoress that his Highness admired her works, and suggested that in view of the fact that Prince Leonard was to marry the Princess Charlotte, Miss Austen should indite "An historical romance illustrative of the august house of Coburg." To which, Miss Jane, with a humor and good-sense quite in character (and, it may be feared, not appreciated by the recipient): "I could not sit down to write a serious romance under any other motive than amusement to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up, and never relax into laughter at myself and other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way."

There is scarce a clearer proof of genius than this ability to strike out a path and keep to it: in striking contrast with the weak wobbling so often shown in the desire to follow literary fashion or be complaisant before the suggestion of the merchants of letters.

All her novels are prophetic of what was long to rule, in their slight framework of fable; the handling of the scenes by the way, the characterization, the natural dialogue, the vraisemblance of setting, the witty irony of observation, these are the elements of interest. Jane Austen's plots are mere tempests in tea-pots; yet she does not go to the extreme of the plotless fiction of the present. She has a story to tell, as Trollope would say, and knows how to tell it in such a way as to subtract from it every ounce of value. There is a clear kernel of idea in each and every one of her tales. Thus, in "Sense and Sensibility," we meet two sisters who stand for the characteristics contrasted in the title, and in the fortunes of Mariane, whose flighty romanticism is cured so that she makes a sensible marriage after learning the villainy of her earlier lover and finding that foolish sentimentalism may well give way to the informing experiences of life,—the thesis, satirically conveyed though with more subtlety than in the earlier "Northanger Abbey," proclaims the folly of young-girl sentimentality and hysteria. In "Pride and Prejudice," ranked by many as her masterpiece, Darcy, with his foolish hauteur, his self-consciousness of superior birth, is temporarily blind to the worth of Elizabeth, who, on her part, does not see the good in him through her sensitiveness to his patronizing attitude; as the course of development brings them together in a happy union, the lesson of toleration, of mutual comprehension, sinks into the mind. The reader realizes the pettiness of the worldly wisdom which blocks the way of joy. As we have said, "Northanger Abbey" speaks a wise word against the abuse of emotionalism; it tells of the experiences of a flighty Miss, bred on the "Mysteries of Udolpho" style of literature, during a visit to a country house where she imagined all the medieval romanticism incident to that school of fiction,—aided and abetted by such innocuous helps as a storm without and a lonesome chamber within doors. Of the later stories, "Mansfield Park" asks us to remember what it is to be poor and reared among rich relations; "Emma" displays a reverse misery: the rich young woman whose character is exposed to the adulations and shams incident upon her position; while in "Persuasion," there is yet another idea expressed by and through another type of girl; she who has fallen into the habit of allowing herself to be over-ridden and used by friends and family.—There is something all but Shaksperian in that story's illustration of "the uncertainty of all human events and calculations," as she herself expresses it: Anne Eliot's radical victory is a moral triumph yet a warning withal. And in each book, the lesson has been conveyed with the unobtrusive indirection of fine art; the story is ever first, we are getting fiction not lectures. These novels adorn truth; they show what literature can effect by the method of much-in-little.

There is nothing sensational in incident or complication: as with Richardson, an elopement is the highest stretch of external excitement Miss Austen vouchsafes. Yet all is drawn so beautifully to scale, as in such a scene as that of the quarrel and estrangement of Elizabeth and Darcy in "Pride and Prejudice," that the effect is greater than in the case of many a misused opportunity where the events are earth-shaking in import. The situation means so much to the participants, that the reader becomes sympathetically involved. After all, importance in fiction is exactly like importance in life; important to whom? the philosopher asks. The relativity of things human is a wholesome theory for the artist to bear in mind. Even as the most terrific cataclysm on this third planet from the sun in a minor system, makes not a ripple upon Mars, so the most infinitesimal occurrence in eighteenth century Hampshire may seem of account,—if only a master draws the picture.

Not alone by making her characters thoroughly alive and interesting does Miss Austen effect this result: but by her way of telling the tale as well; by a preponderance of dialogue along with clear portraiture she actually gets an effect that is dramatic. Scenes from her books are staged even to the present day. She found this manner of dialogue with comparative parsimony of description and narration, to be her true method as she grew as a fiction-maker: the early unpublished story "Susan," and the first draught of "Sense and Sensibility," had the epistolary form of Richardson, the more undramatic nature of which is self-evident. As for characterization itself, she is with the few: she has added famous specimens—men and women both—to the natural history of fiction. To think of but one book, "Pride and Prejudice," what an inimitable study of a foolish woman is Mrs. Bennett! Who has drawn the insufferable patroness more vividly than in a Lady Catherine de Bourgh! And is not the sycophant clergyman hit off to the life in Mr. Collins! Looking to the stories as a group, are not her heroines, with Anne Eliot perhaps at their head, wonderful for quiet attraction and truth, for distinctness, charm and variety? Her personages are all observed; she had the admirable good sense not to go beyond her last. She had every opportunity to see the county squire, the baronet puffed up with a sense of his own importance, the rattle and rake of her day, the tuft hunter, the gentleman scholar, and the retired admiral (her two brothers had that rank)—and she wisely decided to exhibit these and other types familiar to her locality and class, instead of drawing on her imagination or trying to extend by guess-work her social purview. Her women in general, whether satiric and unpleasant like Mrs. Norris in "Mansfield Park" or full of winning qualities like Catherine Moreland and Anne Eliot, are drawn with a sureness of hand, an insight, a complete comprehension that cannot be over-praised. Jane Austen's heroines are not only superior to her heroes (some of whom do not get off scot-free from the charge of priggishness) but they excel the female characterization of all English novelists save only two or three,—one of them being Hardy. Her characters were so real to herself, that she made statements about them to her family as if they were actual,—a habit which reminds of Balzac.

The particular angle from which she looked on life was the satirical: therefore, her danger is exaggeration, caricature. Yet she yielded surprisingly little, and her reputation for faithful transcripts from reality, can not now be assailed. Her detached, whimsical attitude of scrutinizing the little cross-section of life she has in hand, is of the very essence of her charm: hers is that wit which is the humor of the mind: something for inward smiling, though the features may not change. Her comedy has in this way the unerring thrust and the amused tolerance of a Moliere whom her admirer Macaulay should have named rather than Shakspere when wishing to compliment her by a comparison; with her manner of representation and her view of life in mind, one reverts to Meredith's acute description of the spirit that inheres in true comedy. "That slim, feasting smile, shaped like the longbow, was once a big round satyr's laugh, that flung up the brows like a fortress lifted by gunpowder. The laugh will come again, but it will be of the order of the smile, finely tempered, showing sunlight of the mind, mental richness rather than noisy enormity. Its common aspect is one of unsolicitous observation, as if surveying a full field and having leisure to dart on its chosen morsels, without any flattering eagerness. Men's future upon earth does not attract it; their honesty and shapeliness in the present does; and whenever they were out of proportion, overthrown, affected, pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic, fantastically delicate; whenever it sees them self-deceived or hoodwinked, given to run riot in idolatries, drifting into vanities, congregating in absurdities, planning shortsightedly, plotting dementedly; whenever they are at variance with their professions, and violate the unwritten but perceptible laws binding them in consideration one to another; whenever they offend sound reason, fair justice; are false in humility or mined with conceit, individually or in the bulk—the Spirit overhead will look humanly malign and cast an oblique light on them, followed by volleys of silvery laughter. That is the Comic Spirit."

If the "silvery laughter" betimes sounds a bit sharp and thinly feminine, what would you have? Even genius must be subject to the defect of its quality. Still, it must be confessed that this attitude of the artist observer is broken in upon a little in the later novels, beginning with "Mansfield Park," by a growing tendency to moral on the time, a tendency that points ominously to didacticism. There is something of the difference in Jane Austen between early and late, that we shall afterwards meet in that other great woman novelist, George Eliot. One might push the point too far, but it is fair to make it.

We may also inquire—trying to see the thing freshly, with independence, and to get away from the mere handing-on of a traditional opinion—if Jane Austen's character-drawing, so far-famed for its truth, does not at times o'erstep the modesty of Nature. Goldwin Smith, in his biography of her, is quite right in pointing out that she unquestionably overdraws her types: Mr. Collins is at moments almost a reminder of Uriah Heap for oily submissiveness: Sir Walter Eliot's conceit goes so far he seems a theory more than a man, a "humor" in the Ben Jonson sense. So, too, the valetudinarianism of Mr. Wood-house, like that of Smollett's Bramble, is something strained; so is Lady de Bourgh's pride and General Tilney's tyranny. Critics are fond of violent contrasts and to set over against one another authors so unlike, for example, as Miss Austen and Dickens is a favorite occupation. Also is it convenient to put a tag on every author: a mask reading realist, romanticist, psychologue, sensation-monger, or some such designation, and then hold him to the name. Thus, in the case of Austen it is a temptation to call her the greatest truth-teller among novelists, and so leave her. But, as a matter of fact, great as realist and artist as she was, she does not hesitate at that heightening of effect which insures clearer seeing, longer remembering and a keener pleasure. Perhaps she is in the broad view all the better artist because of this: a thought sadly forgotten by the extreme veritists of our day. It is the business of art to improve upon Nature.

Again the reader of Jane Austen must expect to find her with the limitation of her time and place: it is, frankly, a dreadfully contracted view of the world she represents, just for the reason that it is the view of her Hampshire gentry in the day of the third George. The ideals seem low, narrow; they lack air and light. Woman's only role is marriage; female propriety chokes originality; money talks, family places individuals, and the estimate of sex-relations is intricately involved with these eidola. There is little sense of the higher and broader issues: the spiritual restrictions are as definite as the social and geographical: the insularity is magnificent. It all makes you think of Tennyson's lines:

"They take the rustic cackle of their burg
For the great wave that echoes round the world!"

Hence, one of the bye-products of Miss Austen's books is their revelation of hide-bound class-distinction, the not seldom ugly parochialism—the utilitarian aims of a circle of highly respectable English country folk during the closing years of the eighteenth century. The opening sentence of her masterpiece reads: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." Needless to say that "universally" here is applicable to a tiny area of earth observed by a most charming spinster, at a certain period of society now fast fading into a dim past. But the sentence might serve fairly well as a motto for all her work: every plot she conceived is firm-based upon this as a major premise, and the particular feminine deduction from those words may be found in the following taken from another work, "Mansfield Park": "Being now in her twenty-first year, Maria Bertram was beginning to think marriage a duty; and as a marriage with Mr. Rushford would give her the enjoyment of a larger income than her father's, as well as insure her the house in town, which was now a prime object, it became by the same rule of moral obligation, her evident duty to marry Mr. Rushford if she could." The egocentric worldliness of this is superb. The author, it may be granted, has a certain playful satire in her manner here and elsewhere, when setting forth such views: yet it seems to be fair to her to say that, taking her fiction as a whole, she contentedly accepts this order of things and builds upon it. She and her world exhibit not only worldliness but that "other-worldliness" which is equally self-centered and materialistic. Jane Austen is a highly enjoyable mondaine. To compare her gamut with that of George Eliot or George Meredith is to appreciate how much has happened since in social and individual evolution. The wide social sympathy that throbs in modern fiction is hardly born.

In spite, too, of the thorough good breeding of this woman writer, the primness even of her outlook upon the world, there is plain speaking in her books, even touches of coarseness that are but the echo of the rankness which abounds in the Fielding-Smollett school. Happily, it is a faint one.

Granting the slightness of her plots and their family likeness, warm praise is due for the skill with which they are conducted; they are neatly articulated, the climactic effect is, as a rule, beautifully graduated and sure in its final force: the multitude of littles which go to make up the story are, upon examination, seen to be not irrelevant but members of the one body, working together towards a common end. It is a puzzling question how this firm art was secured: since technique does not mean so much a gift from heaven as the taking of forethought, the self-conscious skill of a practitioner. Miss Austen, setting down her thoughts of an evening in a copybook in her lap, interrupted by conversations and at the beck and call of household duties, does not seem as one who was acquiring the mastery of a difficult art-form. But the wind bloweth where it listeth—and the evidences of skill are there; we can but chronicle the fact, and welcome the result.

She was old-fashioned in her adherence to the "pleasant ending"; realist though she was, she could not go to the lengths either of theme or interpretation in the portrayal of life which later novelists have so sturdily ventured. It is easy to understand that with her avowed dislike of tragedy, living in a time when it was regarded as the business of fiction to be amusing—when, in short, it was not fashionable to be disagreeable, as it has since become—Jane Austen should have preferred to round out her stories with a "curtain" that sends the audience home content. She treats this desire in herself with a gentle cynicism which, read to-day, detracts somewhat perhaps from the verity of her pictures. She steps out from the picture at the close of her book to say a word in proper person. Thus, in "Mansfield Park," in bringing Fanny Price into the arms of her early lover, Edmund, she says: "I purposely abstain from dates on this occasion, that every one may be at liberty to fix their own, aware that the cure of unconquerable passions and the transfer of unchanging attachments must vary much as to time in different people. I only entreat everybody to believe that exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so, and not a week earlier, Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford and became as anxious to marry Fanny as Fanny herself could desire."

But it cannot be urged against her that it was her habit to effect these agreeable conclusions to her social histories by tampering with probability or violently wresting events from their proper sequence. Life is neither comedy nor tragedy—it is tragi-comedy, or, if you prefer the graver emphasis, comi-tragedy. Miss Austen, truth-lover, has as good a right to leave her lovers at the juncture when we see them happily mated, as at those more grievous junctures so much affected by later fiction. Both representations may be true or false in effect, according as the fictionist throws emphasis and manages light-and-shade. A final page whereon all is couleur de rose has, no doubt, an artificial look to us now: a writer of Miss Austen's school or her kind of genius for reporting fact, could not have finished her fictions in just the same way. There is no blame properly, since the phenomenon has to do with the growth of human thought, the change of ideals reflected in literature.

For one more point: Miss Austen only knew, or anyhow, only cared to write, one sort of Novel—the love story. With her, a young man and woman (or two couples having similar relations) are interested in each other and after various complications arising from their personal characteristics, from family interference or other criss-cross of events, misplacement of affection being a trump card, are united in the end. The formula is of primitive simplicity. The wonder is that so much of involvement and genuine human interest can be got out of such scant use of the possible permutations of plot. It is all in the way it is done.

Love stories are still written in profusion, and we imagine that so compelling a motive for fiction will still be vital (in some one of its innumerable phases) in the twenty-fifth century. Yet it is true that novelists now point with pride to the work of the last generation of their art, in that it has so often made sex love subsidiary to other appeals, or even eliminated it altogether from their books. Some even boast of the fact that not a woman is to be found in the pages of their latest creation. Nearly one hundred years ago, Defoe showed the possibility (if you happen to have genius) of making a powerful story without the introduction of the eternal feminine: Crusoe could not declare with Cyrano de Bergerac:

"Je vous dois d'avoir eu tout au moins, une amie;
Grace a vous, une robe a passe dans ma vie."

It is but natural that, immensely powerful as it is, such a motive should have been over-worked: the gamut of variations has been run from love licit to love illicit, and love degenerate and abnormal to no-love-at-all. But any publisher will assure you that still "love conquers all"; and in the early nineteenth century any novelist who did not write tales of amatory interest was a fool: the time was not ripe to consider an extension of the theme nor a shifted point of view. For the earlier story-tellers, in the language of Browning's lyric,

"Love is best."

Jane Austen's diction—or better, her style, which is more than diction—in writing her series of social studies, affords a fine example of the adaptation of means to end. Given the work to be accomplished, the tools are perfect instruments for the purpose. The student of English style in its evolution must marvel at the idiom of Austen, so strangely modern is it, so little has time been able to make it passe. From her first book, her manner seems to be easy, adequate, unforced, with nothing about it self-conscious or gauche. In the development of some great writers the change from unsureness and vulgarity to the mastery of mature years can be traced: Dickens is one such. But nothing of the sort can be found in Austen. She has in "Northanger Abbey" and "Pride and Prejudice"—early works—a power in idiomatic English which enables her reader to see her thought through its limpid medium of language, giving, it may be, as little attention to the form of expression as a man uninstructed in the niceties of a woman's dress gives to those details which none the less in their totality produce on him a most formidable effect. Miss Austen's is not the style of startling tricks: nor has she the flashing felicities of a Stevenson which lead one to return to a passage for re-gustation. Her manner rarely if ever takes the attention from her matter. But her words and their marshaling (always bearing in her mind her unambitious purpose) make as fit a garment for her thought as was ever devised upon English looms. If this is style, then Jane Austen possesses it, as have very few of the race. There is just a touch of the archaic in it, enough to give a quaintness that has charm without being precious in the French sense; hers are breeding and dignity without distance or stiffness. Now and again the life-likeness is accentuated by a sort of undress which goes to the verge of the slip-shod—as if a gentlewoman should not be too particular, lest she seem professional; the sort of liberty with the starched proprieties of English which Thackeray later took with such delightful results. Of her style as a whole, then, we may say that it is good literature for the very reason that it is not literary; neither mannered nor mincing nor affectedly plain. The style is the woman—and the woman wrote as a lady should who is portraying genteel society; very much as she would talk—with the difference the artist will always make between life and its expression in letters.

Miss Austen's place was won slowly but surely, unlike those authors whose works spring into instantaneous popularity, to be forgotten with equal promptness, or others who like Mrs. Stowe write a book which, for historical reasons, gains immediate vogue and yet retains a certain reputation. The author of "Pride and Prejudice" gains in position with the passing of the years. She is one of the select company of English writers who after a century are really read, really of more than historical significance. New and attractive editions of her books are frequent: she not only holds critical regard (and to criticism her importance is permanent) but is read by an appreciable number of the lovers of sound literature; read far more generally, we feel sure, than Disraeli or Bulwer or Charles Kingsley, who are so much nearer our own day and who filled so large a place in their respective times. Compared with them, Jane Austen appears a serene classic. When all is said, the test, the supreme test, is to be read: that means that an author is vitally alive, not dead on the shelves of a library where he has been placed out of deference to the literary Mrs. Grundy. Lessing felt this when he wrote his brilliant quatrain:

Wer wird nicht einen Klopstock loben,
Doch wird ihn jeder lesen? Nein!
Wir wollen weniger erhoben
Und fleissiger gelesen sein,

So was the century which was to be conspicuous for its development of fiction that should portray the social relations of contemporary life with fine and ever-increasing truth, most happily inaugurated by a woman who founded its traditions and was a wonderful example of its method. She is the literary godmother of Trollope and Howells, and of all other novelists since who prefer to the most spectacular uses of the imagination the unsensational chronicling of life.

CHAPTER VI

MODERN ROMANTICISM: SCOTT

The year after the appearance of "Pride and Prejudice" there began to be published in England a series of anonymous historical stories to which the name of Waverley Novels came to be affixed, the title of the first volume. It was not until the writer had produced for more than a decade a splendid list of fictions familiar to all lovers of literature, that his name—by that time guessed by many and admitted to some—was publicly announced as that of Walter Scott—a man who, before he had printed a single romance, had won more than national importance by a succession of narrative poems beginning with "The Lay of the Last Minstrel."

Few careers, personal and professional, in letters, are more stimulating and attractive than that of Scott. His life was winsome, his work of that large and noble order that implies a worthy personality behind it. Scott, the man, as he is portrayed in Lockhart's Life and the ever-delightful Letters, is as suitable an object of admiration as Scott the author of "Guy Mannering" and "Old Mortality." And when we reflect that by the might of his genius he set his seal on the historical romance, that the modern romance derives from Scott, and that, moreover, in spite of the remarkable achievements in this order of fiction during almost a century, he remains not only its founder but its chief ornament, his contribution to modern fiction begins to be appreciated.

The characteristics of the Novel proper as a specific kind of fiction have been already indicated and illustrated in this study: we have seen that it is a picture of real life in a setting of to-day: the romance, which is Scott's business, is distinguished from this in its use of past time and historic personages, its heightening of effect by the introducing of the exceptional in scene and character, its general higher color in the conductment of the narrative: and above all, its emphasis upon the larger, nobler, more inspiring aspects of humanity. This, be it understood, is the romance of modern times, not the elder romance which was irresponsible in its picture of life, falsely idealistic. When Sir Walter began his fiction, the trend of the English Novel inheriting the method and purpose of Richardson, was away from the romantic in this sense. The analysis given has, it may be hoped, made this plain. It was by the sheer force of his creative gift, therefore, that Scott set the fashion for the romance in fiction: aided though he doubtless was by the general romanticism introduced by the greater English poets and expressive of the movement in literature towards freedom, which followed the French Revolution. That Scott at this time gave the fiction an impulse not in the central flow of development is shown in the fact of its rapid decadence after he passed away. While the romance is thus a different thing from the Novel, modern fiction is close woven of the two strands of realism and romance, and a comprehensive study must have both in mind. Even authors like Dickens, Thackeray and Eliot, who are to be regarded as stalwart realists, could not avoid a single sally each into romance, with "A Tale of Two Cities," "Henry Osmond" and "Romola"; and on the other hand, romanticists like Hawthorne and Stevenson have used the methods and manner of the realist, giving their loftiest flights the most solid groundwork of psychologic reality. It must always be borne in mind that there is a romantic way of dealing with fact: that a novel of contemporary society which implies its more exceptional possibilities and gives due regard to the symbol behind every so-called fact, can be, in a good sense, romantic. Surely, that is a more acceptable use of the realistic formula which, by the exercise of an imaginative grasp of history, makes alive and veritable for us some hitherto unrealized person or by-gone epoch. Scott is thus a romanticist because he gave the romantic implications of reality: and is a novelist in that broader, better definition of the word which admits it to be the novelist's business to portray social humanity, past or present, by means of a unified, progressive prose narrative. Scott, although he takes advantage of the romancer's privilege of a free use of the historic past, the presentation of its heroic episodes and spectacular events, is a novelist, after all, because he deals with the recognizably human, not with the grotesque, supernatural, impossible. He imparts a vivid sense of the social interrelations, for the most part in a medieval environment, but in any case in an environment which one recognizes as controlled by human laws; not the brain-freak of a pseudo-idealist. Scott's Novels, judged broadly, make an impression of unity, movement and climax. To put it tersely: he painted manners, interpreted character in an historic setting and furnished story for story's sake. Nor was his genius helpless without the historic prop. Certain of his major successes are hardly historical narratives at all; the scene of "Guy Mannering," for example, and of "The Antiquary," is laid in a time but little before that which was known personally to the romancer in his young manhood.

It will be seen in this theory of realism and romance that so far from antagonists are the story of truth and the story of poetry, they merely stand for diverging preferences in handling material. Nobody has stated this distinction better than America's greatest romancer, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Having "The House of the Seven Gables" in mind, he says:

When a writer calls his work a romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume, had he professed to be writing a novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not only to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience. The former, while as a work of art it must rigidly subject itself to laws and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart, has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances to a great extent of the author's own choosing or creation. If he think fit, also, he may so manage his atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture. He will be wise, no doubt, to make a very moderate use of the privileges here stated, and, especially, to mingle the marvelous rather as a slight, delicate and evanescent flavor than as any portion of the actual substance of the dish offered to the public. The point of view in which this tale comes under the romantic definition lies in the attempt to connect a by-gone time with the very present that is flitting away from us. It is a legend, prolonging itself from an epoch now gray in the distance, down into our own broad daylight, and bringing along with it some of its legendary mist, which the reader may either disregard or allow it to float almost imperceptibly about the characters and events for the sake of a picturesque effect. The narrative, it may be, is woven of so humble a texture, as to require this advantage and at the same time to render it the more difficult of attainment.

These words may be taken as the modern announcement of Romance, as distinguished from that of elder times.

The many romantic Novels written by Scott can be separated into two groups, marked by a cleavage of time: the year being 1819, the date of the publication of "Ivanhoe." In the earlier group, containing the fiction which appeared during the five years from 1814 to 1819, we find world-welcomed masterpieces which are an expression of the unforced first fruits of his genius: the three series of "Tales of My Landlord," "Guy Mannering," "Rob Roy," "The Heart of Midlothian" and "Old Mortality," to mention the most conspicuous. To the second division belong stories equally well known, many of them impressive: "The Monastery," "Kenilworth," "Quentin Durward," and "Red Gauntlet" among them, but as a whole marking a falling off of power as increasing years and killing cares made what was at first hardly more than a sportive effort, a burden under which a man, at last broken, staggered toward the desired goal. There is no manlier, more gallant spectacle offered in the annals of literature than this of Walter Scott, silent partner in a publishing house and ruined by its failure after he has set up country gentleman and gratified his expensive taste for baronial life, as he buckles to, and for weary years strives to pay off by the product of his pen the obligations incurred; his executors were able to clear his estate of debt. It was an immense drudgery (with all allowance for its moments of creative joy) accomplished with high spirits and a kind of French gayety. Nor, though the best quality of the work was injured towards the end of the long task, and Scott died too soon at sixty-one, was the born raconteur in him choked by this grim necessity of grind. There have been in modern fiction a few masters, and but a few, who were natural improvisatori: conspicuous among them are Dumas the elder and Walter Scott. Such writers pour forth from a very spring of effortless power invention after invention, born of the impulse of a rich imagination, a mind stored with bountiful material for such shaping, and a nature soaked with the humanities. They are great lovers of life, great personalities, gifted, resourceful, unstinted in their giving, ever with something of the boy in them, the careless prodigals of literature. Often it seems as if they toiled not to acquire the craft of the writer, nor do they lose time over the labor of the file. To the end, they seem in a way like glorious amateurs. They are at the antipodes of those careful craftsmen with whom all is forethought, plan and revision. Scott, fired by a period, a character or scene, commonly sat down without seeing his way through and wrote currente calamo, letting creation take care of its own. The description of him by a contemporary is familiar where he was observed at a window, reeling off the manuscript sheets of his first romance.

Since we sat down I have been watching that confounded hand—it fascinates my eye. It never stops—page after page is finished and thrown on the heap of manuscript, and still it goes on unwearied—and so it will be until candles are brought in, and God knows how long after that. It is the same every night.

The great merits of such a nature and the method that is its outcome should not blind us to its dangers, some of which Scott did not escape. Schoolboys to-day are able to point out defects in his style, glibly talking of loosely-built sentences, redundancies, diffuseness, or what not. He seems long-winded to the rising generation, and it may be said in their defense that there are Novels of Scott which if cut down one-third would be improved. Critics, too, speak of his anachronisms, his huddled endings, the stiffness of his young gentleman heroes, his apparent indifference to the laws of good construction; as well as of his Tory limitations, the ponderosity of his manner and the unmodernness of his outlook on the world along with the simple superficiality of his psychology. All this may cheerfully be granted, and yet the Scott lover will stoutly maintain that the spirit and the truth are here, that the Waverley books possess the great elements of fiction-making: not without reason did they charm Europe as well as the English-speaking lands for twenty years. The Scott romances will always be mentioned, with the work of Burns, Carlyle and Stevenson, when Scotland's contribution to English letters is under discussion; his position is fortified as he recedes into the past, which so soon engulfs lesser men. And it is because he was one of the world's natural storytellers: his career is an impressive object-lesson for those who would elevate technique above all else.

He produced romances which dealt with English history centuries before his own day, or with periods near his time: Scotch romances of like kind which had to do with the historic past of his native land: romances of humbler life and less stately entourage, the scenes of which were laid nearer, sometimes almost within his own day. He was, in instances, notably successful in all these kinds, but perhaps most of all in the stories falling in the two categories last-named: which, like "Old Mortality," have the full flavor of Scotch soil.

The nature of the Novels he was to produce became evident with the first of them all, "Waverley." Here is a border tale which narrates the adventures of a scion of that house among the loyal Highlanders temporarily a rebel to the reigning English sovereign and a recruit in the interests of the young pretender: his fortunes, in love and war, and his eventual reinstatement in the King's service and happiness with the woman of his choice. While it might be too sweeping to say that there was in this first romance (which has never ranked with his best) the whole secret of the Scott historical story, it is true that the book is typical, that here as in the long line of brilliantly envisaged chronicle histories that followed, some of them far superior to this initial attempt, are to be found the characteristic method and charm of Sir Walter. Here, as elsewhere, the reader is offered picturesque color, ever varied scenes, striking situations, salient characters and a certain nobility both of theme and manner that comes from the accustomed representation of life in which large issues of family and state are involved—the whole merged in a mood of fealty and love. You constantly feel in Scott that life "means intensely and means good." A certain amount of lovable partisanship and prejudice goes with the view, not un-welcomely; there is also some carelessness as to the minute details of fact. But the effect of truth, both in character and setting, is overwhelming. Scott has vivified English and Scotch history more than all the history books: he saw it himself—so we see it. One of the reasons his work rings true—whereas Mrs. Radcliffe's adventure tales seem fictitious as well as feeble—is because it is the natural outcome of his life: all his interest, his liking, his belief went into the Novels. When he sat down at the mature age of forty-three to make fiction, there was behind him the large part of a lifetime of unconscious preparation for what he had to do: for years he had been steeped in the folk-lore and legend of his native country; its local history had been his hobby; he had not only read its humbler literature but wandered widely among its people, absorbed its language and its life, felt "the very pulse of the machine." Hence he differed toto caelo from an archeologist turned romancer like the German Ebers: being rather a genial traveler who, after telling tales of his experiences by word of mouth at the tavern hearth, sets them down upon paper for better preservation. He had been no less student than pedestrian in the field; lame as he was, he had footed his way to many a tall memorial of a hoary past, and when still hardly more than a boy, burrowed among the manuscripts of the Advocates' Library in Edinburgh, making himself an able antiquary at a time when most youth are idling or philandering. Moreover, he was himself the son of a border chief and knew minstrelsy almost at his nurse's knee: and the lilt of a ballad was always like wine to his heart. It makes you think of Sir Philip Sidney's splendid testimony to such an influence: "I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet."

All this could not but tell; the incidents in a book like "Waverley" are unforced: the advance of the story closely imitates Life in its ever-shifting succession of events: the reader soon learns to trust the author's faculty of invention. Plot, story-interest, is it not the backbone of romantic fiction? And Scott, though perchance he may not conduct it so swiftly as pleases the modern taste, may be relied on to furnish it.

In the earlier period up to "Ivanhoe," that famous sortie into English history, belong such masterpieces as "Guy Mannering," "Old Mortality," "Heart of Midlothian," "The Bride of Lammermoor," and "Rob Roy"; a list which, had he produced nothing else would have sufficed to place him high among the makers of romance. It is not the intention to analyze these great books one by one—a task more fit for a volume than a chapter; but to bring out those qualities of his work which are responsible for his place in fiction and influence in the Novel of the nineteenth century.

No story of this group—nor of his career as a writer—has won more plaudits than "The Heart of Midlothian." Indeed, were the reader forced to the unpleasant necessity of choosing out of the thirty stories which Scott left the world the one most deserving of the prize, possibly the choice would fall on that superb portrayal of Scotch life—although other fine Novels of the quintet named would have their loyal friends. To study the peerlessly pathetic tale of Effie and Jeanie Deans is to see Scott at his representative best and note the headmarks of his genius: it is safe to say that he who finds nothing in it can never care for its author.

The first thing to notice in this novel of the ancient Edinburgh Tolbooth, this romance of faithful sisterhood, is its essential Scotch fiber. The fact affects the whole work. It becomes thereby simpler, homelier, more vernacular: it is a story that is a native emanation. The groundwork of plot too is simple, vital: and moreover, founded on a true incident. Effie, the younger of two sisters, is betrayed; concerning her betrayer there is mystery: she is supposed to commit child-murder to hide her shame: a crime then punishable by death. The story deals with her trial, condemnation and final pardon and happy marriage with her lover through the noble mediation of Jeanie, her elder sister.

In the presentation of an earlier period in Scotland, the opening of the eighteenth century, when all punitive measures were primitive and the lawless social elements seethed with restless discontent, Scott had a fine chance: and at the very opening, in describing the violent putting to death of Captain Porteous, he skilfully prepares the way for the general picture to be given. Then, as the story progresses, to the supreme sacrificial effort of Jeanie in behalf of her erring sister's life, gradually, stroke upon stroke, the period with its religious schisms, its political passions and strong family ties, is so illuminated that while the interest is centered upon the Deans and their homely yet tragic history, Scotch life in an earlier century is envisaged broadly, truthfully, in a way never to grow pale in memory. Cameraman or King's man, God-fearing peasant, lawless ruffian or Tory gentleman, the characters are so marshaled that without sides being taken by the writer, one feels the complexity of the period: and its uncivil wildness is dramatically conveyed as a central fact in the Tolbooth with its grim concomitants of gallows and gaping crowd of sightseers and malcontents.

Scott's feeling for dramatic situation is illustrated in several scenes that stand out in high relief after a hundred details have been forgotten: one such is the trial scene in which Effie implores her sister to save her by a lie, and Jeanie in agony refuses; the whole management of it is impressively pictorial. Another is that where Jeanie, on the road to London, is detained by the little band of gypsy-thieves and passes the night with Madge Wildfire in the barn: it is a scene Scott much relishes and makes his reader enjoy. And yet another, and greater, is that meeting with Queen Caroline and Lady Suffolk when the humble Scotch girl is conducted by the Duke of Argyll to the country house and in the garden beseeches pardon for her sister Effie. It is intensely picturesque, real with many homely touches which add to the truth without cheapening the effect of royalty. The gradual working out of the excellent plot of this romance to a conclusion pleasing to the reader is a favorable specimen of this romancer's method in story-telling. There is disproportion in the movement: it is slow in the first part, drawing together in texture and gaining in speed during its closing portion. Scott does not hesitate here, as so often, to interrupt the story in order to interpolate historical information, instead of interweaving it atmospherically with the tale itself. When Jeanie is to have her interview with the Duke of Argyll, certain preliminary pages must be devoted to a sketch of his career. A master of plot and construction to-day would have made the same story, so telling in motive, so vibrant with human interest, more effective, so far as its conductment is concerned. Scott in his fiction felt it as part of his duty to furnish chronicle-history, very much as Shakspere seems to have done in his so-called chronicle-history plays; whereas at present the skilled artist feels no such responsibility. It may be questioned if the book's famous scenes—the attempted breaking into the Tolbooth, or the visit of Jeanie to the Queen—would not have gained greatly from a dramatic point of view had they been more condensed; they are badly languaged, looking to this result, not swift enough for the best effects of drama, whereas conception and framework are highly dramatic. In a word, if more carefully written, fuller justice would have been done the superb theme.

The characters that crowd the novel (as, in truth, they teem throughout the great romances) testify to his range and grasp: the Dean family, naturally, in the center. The pious, sturdy Cameronian father and the two clearly contrasted sisters: Butler, the clergyman lover; the saddle-maker, Saddletree, for an amusing, long-winded bore; the quaint Laird Dumbledikes; the soldiers of fortune, George Wilson and his mate; that other soldier, Porteous; the gang of evildoers with Madge in the van—a wonderful creation, she, only surpassed by the better known Meg—the high personages clustered about the Queen: loquacious Mrs. Glass, the Dean's kinswoman—one has to go back to Chaucer or Shakspere for a companion picture so firmly painted in and composed on such a generous scale.

Contention arises in a discussion of a mortal so good as Jeanie: it would hardly be in the artistic temper of our time to draw a peasant girl so well-nigh superhuman in her traits; Balzac's "Eugenie Grandet" (the book appeared only fifteen years later), is much nearer our time in its conception of the possibilities of human nature: Eugenie does not strain credence, while Jeanie's pious tone at times seems out of character, if not out of humanity. The striking contrast with Effie is in a way to her advantage: the weaker damsel appears more natural, more like flesh and blood. But the final scene when, after fleeing with her high-born lover, she returns to her simple sister as a wife in a higher grade of society and the sister agrees that their ways henceforth must be apart—that scene for truth and power is one of the master-strokes. The reader finds that Jeanie Deans somehow grows steadily in his belief and affection: quietly but surely, a sense of her comeliness, her truthful love, her quaint touch of Scotch canniness, her daughterly duteousness and her stanch principle intensifies until it is a pang to bid her farewell, and the mind harks back to her with a fond recollection. Take her for all in all, Jeanie Deans ranks high in Scott's female portraiture: with Meg Merillies in her own station, and with Lucy Ashton and Di Vernon among those of higher social place. In her class she is perhaps unparalleled in all his fiction. The whole treatment of Effie's irregular love is a fine example of Scott's kindly tolerance (tempered to a certain extent by the social convention of his time) in dealing with the sins of human beings. He is plainly glad to leave Effie an honestly married woman with the right to look forward to happy, useful years. The story breeds generous thoughts on the theme of young womanhood: it handled the problem neither from the superior altitude of the conventional moralist nor the cold aloofness of the latter-day realist—Flaubert's attitude in "Madame Bovary."

"A big, imperfect, noble Novel," the thoughtful reader concludes as he closes it, and thinking back to an earlier impression, finds that time has not loosened its hold.

And to repeat the previous statement: what is true of this is true of all Scott's romances. The theme varies, the setting with its wealth of local color may change, the period or party differ with the demands of fact. Scotch and English history are widely invoked: now it is the time of the Georges, now of the Stuarts, now Elizabethan, again back to the Crusades. Scott, in fact, ranges from Rufus the Red to the year 1800, and many are the complications he considers within that ample sweep. It would be untrue to say that his plots imitate each other or lack in invention: we have seen that invention is one of his virtues. Nevertheless, the motives are few when disencumbered of their stately historical trappings: hunger, ambition, love, hate, patriotism, religion, the primary passions and bosom interests of mankind are those he depicts, because they are universal. It is his gift for giving them a particular dress in romance after romance which makes the result so often satisfactory, even splendid. Yet, despite the range of time and grasp of Life's essentials, there is in Scott's interpretation of humanity a certain lack which one feels in comparing him with the finest modern masters: with a Meredith, a Turgeneff or a Balzac. It is a difference not only of viewpoint but of synthetic comprehension and philosophic penetration. It means that he mirrored a day less complex, less subtle and thoughtful. This may be dwelt upon and illustrated a little in some further considerations on his main qualities.

Scott, like the earlier novelists in general, was content to depict character from without rather than from within: to display it through act and scene instead of by the probing analysis so characteristically modern. This meant inevitable limitations in dealing with an historical character or time. A high-church Tory himself, a frank Jacobite in his leanings—Taine declared he had a feudal mind—he naturally so composed a picture as to reflect this predilection, making effects of picturesqueness accordingly. The idea given of Mary Queen of Scots from "The Abbot" is one example of what is meant; that of Prince Charley in "Waverley" is another. In a sense, however, the stories are all the better for this obvious bias. Where a masculine imagination moved by warm affection seizes on an historic figure the result is sure to be vivid, at least; and let it be repeated that Scott has in this way re-created history for the many. He shows a sound artistic instinct in his handling of historic personages relative to those imaginary: rarely letting them occupy the center of interest, but giving that place to the creatures of his fancy, thereby avoiding the hampering restriction of a too close following of fact. The manipulation of Richard Coeur de Lion in "Ivanhoe" is instructive with this in mind.

While the lights and shadows of human life are duly blended in his romances, Scott had a preference for the delineation of the gentle, the grand (or grandiose), the noble and the beautiful: loving the medieval, desiring to reproduce the age of chivalry, he was naturally aristocratic in taste, as in intellect, though democratic by the dictates of a thoroughly good heart. He liked a pleasant ending—or, at least, believed in mitigating tragedy by a checker of sunlight at the close. He had little use for the degenerate types of mankind: certainly none for degeneracy for its own sake, or because of a kind of scientific interest in its workings. Nor did he conceive of the mission of fiction as being primarily instructional: nor set too high a value on a novel as a lesson in life—although at times (read the moral tag to "The Heart of Midlothian") he speaks in quite the preacher's tone of the improvement to be got from the teaching of the tale. Critics to-day are, I think, inclined to place undue emphasis upon what they regard as Scott's failure to take the moral obligations of fiction seriously: they confuse his preaching and his practice. Whatever he declared in his letters or Journal, the novels themselves, read in the light of current methods, certainly leave an old-fashioned taste on the palate, because of their moralizings and avowments of didactic purpose. The advantages and disadvantages of this general attitude can be easily understood: the loss in philosophic grasp is made up in healthiness of tone and pleasantness of appeal. One recognizes such an author as, above all, human and hearty. The reserves and delicacies of Anglo-Saxon fiction are here, of course, in full force: and a doctored view of the Middle Ages is the result, as it is in Tennyson's "Idylls of the King." A sufficient answer is that it is not Scott's business to set us right as to medievalism, but rather to use it for the imaginative purposes of pleasure. The frank intrusion of the author himself into the body of the page o in the way of footnotes is also disturbing, judged by our later standards: but was carried on with much charm by Thackeray in the mid-century, to reappear at its end in the pages of Du Maurier.

In the more technical qualifications of the story-maker's art, Scott compensated in the more masculine virtues for what he lacked in the feminine. Possessing less of finesse, subtlety and painstaking than some who were to come, he excelled in sweep, movement and variety, as well as in a kind of largeness of effect: "the big bow-wow business," to use his own humorously descriptive phrase when he was comparing himself with Jane Austen, to his own disadvantage. And it is these very qualities that endear him to the general and keep his memories green; making "Ivanhoe" and "Kenilworth" still useful for school texts—unhappy fate! Still, this means that he always had a story to tell and told it with the flow and fervor and the instinctive coherence of the story-teller born, not made.

When the fortunes of his fictive folk were settled, this novelist, always more interested in characters than in the plot which must conduct them, often loses interest and his books end more or less lamely, or with obvious conventionality. Anything to close it up, you feel. But of action and incident, scenes that live and situations with stage value, one of Scott's typical fictions has enough to furnish the stock in trade for life of many later-day romanticists who feebly follow in his wake. He has a special skill in connecting the comparatively small private involvement, which is the kernel of a story, with important public matters, so that they seem part of the larger movements or historic occurrences of the world. Dignity and body are gained for the tale thereby.

In the all-important matter of characterization, Scott yields the palm to very few modern masters. Merely to think of the range, variety and actuality of his creations is to feel the blood move quicker. From figures of historic and regal importance—Richard, Elizabeth, Mary—to the pure coinage of imagination—Dandy Dinmont, Dugald Dalgetty, Dominie Sampson, Rebecca, Lucy, Di Vernon and Jeanie—how the names begin to throng and what a motley yet welcome company is assembled in the assizes where this romancer sits to mete out fate to those within the wide bailiwick of his imagination! This central gift he possessed with the princes of story-making. It is also probable that of the imaginative writers of English speech, nobody but Shakspere and Dickens—and Dickens alone among fellow fiction-makers—has enriched the workaday world with so many people, men and women, whose speech, doings and fates are familiar and matter for common reference. And this is the gift of gifts. It is sometimes said that Scott's heroes and heroines (especially, perhaps, the former) are lay figures, not convincing, vital creations. There is a touch of truth in it. His striking and successful figures are not walking gentlemen and leading ladies. When, for example, you recall "Guy Mannering," you do not think of the young gentleman of that name, but of Meg Merillies as she stands in the night in high relief on a bank, weather-beaten of face and wild of dress, hurling her anathema: "Ride your ways, Ellangowan!" In characters rather of humble pathos like Jeanie Deans or of eccentric humor like Dominie Sampson, Scott is at his best. He confessed to mis-liking his heroes and only warming up to full creative activity over his more unconventional types: border chiefs, buccaneers, freebooters and smugglers. "My rogue always, in spite of me, turns out my hero," is his whimsical complaint.

But this does not apply in full force to his women. Di Vernon—who does not recall that scene where from horseback in the moonlight she bends to her lover, parting from him with the words: "Farewell, Frank, forever! There is a gulf between us—a gulf of absolute perdition. Where we go, you must not follow; what we do, you must not share in—farewell, be happy!" That is the very accent of Romance, in its true and proper setting: not to be staled by time nor custom.

Nor will it do to claim that he succeeds with his Deans and fails with women of regal type: his Marys and Elizabeth Tudors. In such portrayals it seems to me he is pre-eminently fine: one cannot understand the critics who see in such creations mere stock figures supplied by history not breathed upon with the breath of life. Scott had a definite talent for the stage-setting of royalty: that is one of the reasons for the popularity of "Kenilworth." It is, however, a true discrimination which finds more of life and variety in Scott's principal women than in his men of like position. But his Rob Roys, Hatteraicks and Dalgettys justify all praise and help to explain that title of Wizard of the North which he won and wore.

In nothing is Scott stronger than in his environments, his devices for atmosphere. This he largely secures by means of description and with his wealth of material, does not hesitate to take his time in building up his effects. Perhaps the most common criticism of him heard to-day refers to his slow movement. Superabundance of matter is accompanied by prolixity of style, with a result of breeding impatience in the reader, particularly the young. Boys and girls at present do not offer Scott the unreserved affection once his own, because he now seems an author upon whom to exercise the gentle art of skipping. Enough has been said as to Scott's lack of modern economy of means. It is not necessary to declare that this juvenile reluctance to his leisurely manner stands for total depravity. The young reader of the present time (to say nothing of the reader more mature) is trained to swifter methods, and demands them. At the same time, it needs to be asserted that much of the impressiveness of Scott would be lost were his method and manner other than they are: nor will it do harm to remind ourselves that we all are in danger of losing our power of sustained and consecutive attention in relation to literature, because of the scrap-book tendency of so much modern reading. On the center-table, cheap magazines; on the stage, vaudeville—these are habits that sap the ability for slow, ruminative pleasure in the arts. Luckily, they are not the only modern manifestation, else were we in a parlous state, indeed! The trouble with Scott, then, may be resolved in part into a trouble with the modern folk who read him.

When one undertakes the thankless task of analyzing coldly and critically the style of Scott, the faults are plain enough. He constantly uses two adjectives or three in parallel construction where one would do the work better. The construction of his sentences loses largely the pleasing variation of a richly articulated system by careless punctuation and a tendency to make parallel clauses where subordinate relations should be expressed. The unnecessary copula stars his pages. Although his manner in narration rises with his subject and he may be justly called a picturesque and forceful writer, he is seldom a distinguished one. One does not turn to him for the inevitable word or phrase, or for those that startle by reason of felicity and fitness. These strictures apply to his descriptive and narrative parts, not to the dialogue: for there, albeit sins of diffuseness and verbosity are to be noted—and these are modified by the genial humanity they embody—he is one of the great masters. His use of the Scotch dialect adds indefinitely to his attraction and native smack: racy humor, sly wit, canny logic, heartful sympathy—all are conveyed by the folk medium. All subsequent users of the people-speech pay toll to Walter Scott. Small courtesy should be extended to those who complain that these idioms make hard reading. Never does Scott give us dialect for its own sake, but always for the sake of a closer revelation of the human heart—dialect's one justification.

At its worst, Scott's style may fairly be called ponderous, loose, monotonous: at its finest, the adequate instrument of a natural story-teller who is most at home when, emerging from his longueur, he writes of grand things in the grand manner.

Thus, Sir Walter Scott defined the Romance for modern fiction, gave it the authority of his genius and extended the gamut of the Novel by showing that the method of the realist, the awakening of interest in the actualities of familiar character and life, could be more broadly applied. He opposed the realist in no true sense: but indicated how, without a lapse of art or return to outworn machinery, justice might yet be done to the more stirring, large, heroic aspects of the world of men: a world which exists and clamors to be expressed: a world which readers of healthy taste are perennially interested in, nay, sooner or later, demand to be shown. His fiction, whether we award it the somewhat grudging recognition of Carlyle or with Ruskin regard its maker as the one great novelist of English race, must be deemed a precious legacy, one of literature's most honorable ornaments—especially desirable in a day so apparently plain and utilitarian as our own, eschewing ornament and perchance for that reason needing it all the more.

CHAPTER VII

FRENCH INFLUENCE

In the first third of the nineteenth century English fiction stood at the parting of the ways. Should it follow Scott and the romance, or Jane Austen and the Novel of everyday life? Should it adopt that form of story-making which puts stress on action and plot and is objective in its method, roaming all lands and times for its material; or, dealing with the familiar average of contemporary society, should it emphasize character analysis and choose the subjective realm of psychology for its peculiar domain? The pen dropped from the stricken hand of Scott in 1832; in that year a young parliamentary reporter in London was already writing certain lively, closely observed sketches of the town, and four years later they were to be collected and published under the title of "Sketches by Boz," while the next year that incomparable extravaganza, "The Pickwick Papers," was to go to an eager public. English fiction had decided: the Novel was to conquer the romance for nearly a century. It was a victory which to the present day has been a dominant influence in story-making; establishing a tendency which, until Stevenson a few years since, with the gaiety of the inveterate boy, cried up Romance once more, bade fair to sweep all before it.

Before tracing this vigorous development of the Novel of Reality with Dickens, Thackeray and Eliot (to name three great leaders), it is important to get an idea of the growth on French soil which was so deeply influential upon English as well as upon other modern fiction. Nothing is more certain in literary evolution than the fact that the French Novel in the nineteenth century has molded and defined modern fiction, thus repaying an earlier debt owed the English pioneers, Richardson and Fielding. English fiction of our own generation may be described as a native variation on a French model: in fact, the fictionists of Europe and the English-speaking lands, with whatever divergencies personal or national, have derived in large measure from the Gaul the technique, the point of view and the choice of theme which characterizes the French Novel from Stendhal to Balzac, from Zola to Guy de Maupassant.

I

The name of Henri Beyle, known to literature under the sobriquet of Stendhal, has a meaning in the development of the modern type of fiction out of proportion to the intrinsic value of his stories.

He was, of course, far surpassed by mightier followers like Balzac, Flaubert and Zola; yet his significance lies in the very fact that they were followers. His is all the merit pertaining to the feat of introducing the Novel of psychic analysis: of that persistent and increasingly unpleasant bearing-down upon the darker facts of personality. Hence his "Rouge et Noir," dated 1830 and typical of his aim and method, is in a sense an epoch-making book.

Balzac was at the same time producing the earlier studies to culminate in that Human Comedy which was to stand as the chief accomplishment of his nation in the literature of fiction. But Stendhal, sixteen years older, began to print first and to him falls the glory of innovation. Balzac gives full praise to his predecessor in his essay on Beyle, and his letters contain frequent references to the debt he owed that curious bundle of fatuities, inconsistencies and brilliancies, the author of "The Chartreuse de Parme." Later, Zola calls him "the father of us all," meaning of the naturalistic school of which Zola himself was High Priest. Beyle's business was the analysis of soul states: an occupation familiar enough in these times of Hardy, Meredith and Henry James. He held several posts of importance under Napoleon, worshiped that leader, loved Italy as his birthplace, loved England too, and tried to show in his novels the result of the inactive Restoration upon a generation trained by Napoleon to action, violence, ambition and passion.

Read to-day, "Le Rouge et Noir," which it is sufficient to consider for our purposes, seems somewhat slow in movement, struggling in construction, meticulous in manner. At times, its interminability recalls "Clarissa Harlowe," but it possesses the traits' which were to mark the coming school of novel-writing in France and hence in the modern world: to wit, freedom in dealing with love in its irregular relation, the tendency towards tragedy, and that subtlety of handling which makes the main interest to depend upon motive and thought rather than upon the external action itself. "Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,"—that might be the motto. The young quasi-hero is Julian, an ambitious worldling of no family, and his use of the Church as a means of promotion, his amours with several women and his death because of his love for one of them, are traced with a kind of tortuous revelation of the inner workings of the human heart which in its way declares genius in the writer: and which certainly makes a work disillusioning of human nature. Its more external aspect of a study of the politic Church and State, of the rivalry between the reds and the blacks of the state religion, is entirely secondary to this greater purpose and result: here, for the first time at full length, a writer shows the possibility of that realistic portrayal sternly carried through, no matter how destructive of romantic preconceptions of men and women. It is the method of Richardson flowering in a time of greater freedom and more cynical questioning of the gods.

II

But giving Stendhal his full mint and cummin of praise, he yet was but the forerunner of a mightier man. Undoubtedly, he prepared the soil and was a necessary link in the chain of development wherewith fiction was to forge itself an unbreakable sequence of strength. Balzac was to put out his lesser light, as indeed the refulgence of his genius was to overshine all French fiction, before and since. It would be an exaggeration to say that the major English novelists of the middle nineteenth century were consciously disciples of Balzac—for something greater even than he moved them; the spirit of the Time. But it is quite within bounds to say that of all modern fiction he is the leader and shaper. Without him, his greatest native follower, Zola, is inconceivable. He gathers up into himself and expresses at its fullest all that was latent in the striking modern growth whose banner-cry was Truth, and whose method was that of the social scientist. Here was a man who, early in his career, for the first time in the history of the Novel, deliberately planned to constitute himself the social historian of his epoch and race: and who, in upwards of a hundred remarkable pieces of fiction in Novel form executed that plan in such fulness that his completed work stands not only as a monument of industry, but as perhaps the most inspiring example of literary synthesis in the history of letters. In bigness of conception and of construction—let alone the way in which the work was performed—the Human Comedy is awe-begetting; it drives one to Shakspere for like largeness of scale. Such a performance, ordered and directed to a foreseen end, is unique in literature.

As Balzac thus gave birth, with a fiery fecundity of invention, to book after book of the long list of Novels that make up his story of life, there took shape in his mind a definite intention: to become the Secretary of an Age of which he declared society to be the historian. He wished to exhibit man in his species as he was to be seen in the France of the novelist's era, just as a naturalist aims to study beast-kind, segregating them into classes for zoological investigation. Later, Balzac's great successor (as we shall see) applied this analogy with more rigid insistence upon the scientific method which should obtain in all literary study. The survey proposed covered a period of about half a century and included the Republic, the Empire and the Restoration: it ranged through all classes and conditions of men with no appearance of prejudice, preference or parti-pris (this is one of the marvels of Balzac), thus gaining the immense advantage of an apparently complete and catholic comprehension of the human show. Of all modern novelists, Balzac is the one whose work seems like life instead of an opinion of life; he has the objectivity of Shakspere. Even a Tolstoy set beside him seems limited.

This idea of a plan was not crystallized into the famous title given to his collective works—La Comedie Humaine—until 1842, when but eight years of life remained to him. But four years earlier it had been mentioned in a letter, and when Balzac was only a little over thirty, at a time when his better-known books were just beginning to appear, he had signified his sense of an inclusive scheme by giving such a running title to a group of his stories as the familiar "Scenes from Private Life"—to which, in due course, were added other designations for the various parts of the great plan. The encyclopedic survey was never fully completed, but enough was done to justify all the laudation that belongs to a Herculean task and the exploitation of an almost incredible amount of human data. As for finishing the work, the failure hardly detracts from its value or affects its place in literature. Neither Spenser's "Faery Queen" nor Wordsworth's "The Excursion" was completed, and, per contra, it were as well for Browning if "The Ring and the Book" had not been. In all such cases of so-called incompletion, one recognizes Hercules from the feet. Had this mighty story-teller and student of humanity carried out his full intention there would have been nearly 150 pieces of fiction; of the plan-on-paper he actually completed ninety-seven, two-thirds of the whole, and enough to illustrate the conception. And it must be remembered that Balzac died at fifty. One result of the incompletion, as Brunetiere has pointed out, is to give disproportionate treatment to certain phases of life, to the military, for instance, for which Balzac has twenty-four stories on his list, whereas only two, "The Chouans" and "A Passion in the Desert," were executed. But surely, sufficient was done, looking to the comedy as a whole, to force us to describe the execution as well as the conception as gigantic. Had the work been more mechanically pushed to its end for the exact plan's sake, the perfection of scheme might have been attained at the expense of vitality and inspiration. Ninety-seven pieces of fiction, the majority of them elaborate novels, the whole involving several thousand characters, would be impressive in any case, but when they come from an author who marvelously reproduces his time and country, creating his scenes in a way to afford us a sense of the complexity of life—its depth and height, its beauty, terror and mystery—we can but hail him as Master.

And in spite of the range and variety in Balzac's unique product, it has an effect of unity based upon a sense of social solidarity. He conceives it his duty to present the unity of society in his day, whatever its apparent class and other divergencies. He would show that men and women are members of the one body social, interacting upon each other in manifold relations and so producing the dramas of earth; each story plays its part in this general aim, illustrating the social laws and reactions, even as the human beings themselves play their parts in the world. In this way Balzac's Human Comedy is an organism, however much it may fall short of symmetry and completion.

In the outline of the plan we find him separating his studies into three groups or classes: The Studies of Manners, the Philosophical Studies, and the Analytic Studies. In the first division were placed the related groups of scenes of Private life, Provincial life, Parisian life, Political life, Military life and Country life. It was his desire, as he says in a letter to Madame Hanska, to have the group of studies of Manners "represent all social effects"; in the philosophic studies the causes of those effects: the one exhibits individualities typified, the other, types individualized: and in the Analytic Studies he searches for the principles. "Manners are the performance; the causes are the wings and the machinery. The principles—they are the author…. Thus man, society and humanity will be described, judged, analyzed without repetition and in a work which will be, as it were, 'The Thousand and One Nights' of the west."

The scheme thus categorically laid down sounds rather dry and formal, nor is it too easy to understand. But all trouble vanishes when once the Human Comedy itself, in any example of it, is taken up; you launch upon the great swollen tide of life and are carried irresistibly along.

It is plain that with an author of Balzac's productive powers, any attempt to convey an idea of his quality must perforce confine itself to a few representative specimens. A few of them, rightly chosen, give a fair notion of his general interpretation. What then are some illustrative creations?

In the case of most novelists, although of first rank, it is not as a rule difficult to define their class and name their tendency: their temperaments and beliefs are so-and-so, and they readily fall under the designation of realist or romanticist, pessimist, or optimist, student of character or maker of plots. This is, in a sense, impossible with Balzac. The more he be read, the harder to detect his bias: he seems, one is almost tempted to say, more like a natural force than a human mind. Persons read two or three—perhaps half a dozen of his books—and then prate glibly of his dark view, his predilection for the base in mankind; when fifty fictions have been assimilated, it will be realized that but a phase of Balzac had been seen.

When the passion of creation, the birth-throes of a novel were on him, he became so immersed in the aspect of life he was depicting that he saw, felt, knew naught else: externally this obsession was expressed by his way of life and work while the story was growing under his hand: his recluse habits, his monkish abstention from worldly indulgences, the abnormal night hours of activity, the loss of flesh, so that the robust man who went into the guarded chamber came out at the end of six weeks the shadow of himself.

As a consequence of the consecration to the particular task (as if it embraced the one view of existence), the reader perhaps experiences a shock of surprise in passing from "The Country Doctor" to "Pere Goriot." But the former is just as truly part of his interpretation as the latter. A dozen fictions can be drawn from the body of his production which portray humanity in its more beautiful, idealistic manifestations. Books like "The Country Doctor" and "Eugenic Grandet" are not alone in the list. And how beautiful both are! "The Country Doctor" has all the idyllic charm of setting which a poetic interpretation of life in a rural community can give. Not alone Nature, but human nature is hymned. The kindly old physician, whose model is the great Physician himself, is like Chaucer's good parson, an unforgettable vision of the higher potentialities of the race. Such a novel deserves to be called quite as truly romance and prose poem, save that Balzac's vraisemblance, his gift for photographic detail and the contemporaneousness of the setting, make it modern. And thus with "Eugenie Grandet" the same method applied in "The Country Doctor" to the study of a noble profession in a rural atmosphere, is here used for the portrait of a good woman whose entourage is again that of simple, natural conditions. There is more of light and shade in the revelation of character because Eugenie's father, the miser—a masterly sketch—furnishes a dark background for her radiant personality. But the same effect is produced, that of throwing into bold relief the sweet, noble, high and pure in our common humanity. And in this case it is a girl of humble station far removed from the shams and shameful passions of the town. The conventional contrast would be to present in another novel some woman of the city as foul as this daughter of Grandet is fair. Not so Balzac. He is too broad an observer of humanity, and as artist too much the master for such cheap effects of chiaroscuro. In "The Duchess De Langeais" e sets his central character amidst the frivolities of fashion and behold, yet another beautiful type of the sex! As Richardson drew his Pamela and Clarissa, so Balzac his Eugenie and the Duchess: and let us not refrain from carrying out the comparison, and add, how feeble seems the Englishman in creation when one thinks of the half a hundred other female figures, good and bad, high and low, distinctly etched upon the memory by the mordant pen of the Frenchman!

Then if we turn to that great tragedy of family, "Pere Goriot," the change is complete. Now are we plunged into an atmosphere of greed, jealousy, uncleanliness and hate, all steeped in the bourgeois street air of Paris. In this tale of thankless daughters and their piteous old father, all the hideousness possible to the ties of kin is uncovered to our frightened yet fascinated eye. The plot holds us in a vise; to recall Madame Vautrin's boarding house is to shudder at the sights and smells! Compare it with Dickens' Mrs. Todgers, and once and for all you have the difference between the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic genius.

Suppose, now, the purpose be to reveal not a group or community, but one human soul, a woman's this time: read "A Woman of Thirty" and see how the novelist,—for the first time—and one is inclined to add, for all time,—has pierced through the integuments and reached the very quick of psychologic exposure. It is often said that he has created the type of young-old, or old-young woman: meaning that before him, novelists overlooked the fact that a woman of this age, maturer in experience and still ripe in physical charms, is really of intense social attraction, richly worth study. But this is because Balzac knows that all souls are interesting, if only we go beneath the surface. The only work of modern fiction which seems to me so nakedly to lay open the recesses of the human spirit as does "A Woman of Thirty" is Meredith's "The Egoist"; and, of course, master against master, Balzac is easily the superior, since the English author's wonderful book is so mannered and grotesque. Utter sympathy is shown in these studies of femininity, whether the subject be a harlot, a saint or a patrician of the Grande Monde.

If the quest be for the handling of mankind en masse, with big effects of dark and light: broad brush-work on a canvas suited to heroical, even epic, themes,—a sort of fiction the later Zola was to excel in—Balzac will not fail us. His work here is as noteworthy as it is in the fine detailed manner of his most realistical modern studies—or in the searching analysis of the human spirit. "The Chouans" may stand for this class: it has all the fire, the color, the elan that emanate from the army and the call of country. We have flashed before us one of those reactionary movements, after the French Revolution, which take on a magic romanticism because they culminate in the name of Napoleon. While one reads, one thinks war, breathes war—it is the only life for the moment. Just ahead a step, one feels, is the "imminent deadly breach"; the social or business or Bohemian doings of later Paris are as if they did not exist. And this particular novel will achieve such a result with the reader, even although it is not by any means one of Balzac's supreme achievements, being in truth, a little aside from his metier, since it is historical and suggests in spots the manner of Scott. But this power of envisaging war (which will be farther realized if such slighter works as "A Dark Affair" and "An Episode Under the Terror" be also perused), is only a single manifestation of a general gift. Suppose there is desired a picture very common in our present civilization—most common it may be in America,—that of the country boy going up to the city to become—what? Perhaps a captain of commerce, or a leader of fashion: perhaps a great writer or artist; or a politician who shall rule the capitol. It is a venture packed full of realistic experience but equally full of romance, drama, poetry—of an epic suggestiveness. In two such volumes as "A Great Provincial Man in Paris" and "Lost Illusions," all this, with its dire chances of evil as well as its roseate promise of success, has been wonderfully expressed. So cogently modern a motive had never been so used before.

Sometimes in a brace of books Balzac shows us the front and back-side of some certain section of life: as in "Cousin Pons" and "Cousine Bette."—The corner of Paris where artists, courtesans and poor students most do congregate, where Art capitalized is a sacred word, and the odd estrays of humanity, picturesque, humorous, and tragic, display all the chances of mankind,—this he paints so that we do not so much look on as move amidst the throng. In the first-named novel, assuredly a very great book, the figure of the quaint old connoisseur is one of fiction's superlative successes: to know him is to love him in all his weakness. In the second book, Bette is a female vampire and the story around her as terrible as the other is heart-warming and sweet. And you know that both are true, true as they would not have been apart: "helpless each without the other."

Again, how much of the gambling activities of modern business are emblazoned in another of the acknowledged masterpieces, "Caesar Birotteau." We can see in it the prototype of much that comes later in French fiction: Daudet's "Risler Aine et Froment Jeune" and Zola's "L'Argent," to name but two. Such a story sums up the practical, material side of a reign or an epoch.

Nor should it be forgotten that this close student of human nature, whose work appears so often severely mundane, and most strong when its roots go down into the earth, sometimes seeming to prefer the rankness and slime of human growths,—can on occasion soar into the empyrean, into the mystic region of dreams and ideals and all manner of subtle imaginings. Witness such fiction as "The Magic Skin," "Seraphita," and "The Quest of the Absolute." It is hard to believe that the author of such creations is he of "Pere Goriot" or "Cousine Bette." But it is Balzac's wisdom to see that such pictures are quite as truly part of the Human Comedy: because they represent man giving play to his soul—exercising his highest faculties. Nor does the realistic novelist in such efforts have the air of one who has left his true business in order to disport himself for once in an alien element. On the contrary, he seems absolutely at home: for the time, this is his only affair, his natural interest.

And so with illustrations practically inexhaustible, which the long list prodigally offers. But the scope and variety have been already suggested; the best rule with Balzac is, each one to his taste, always remembering that in a writer so catholic, there is a peculiar advantage in an extended study. Nor can from twenty to twenty-five of his best books be read without a growing conviction that here is a man of genius who has done a unique thing.

It is usual to refer to Balzac as the first great realist of the French, indeed, of modern fiction. Strictly, he is not the first in France, as we have seen, since Beyle preceded him; nor in modern fiction, for Jane Austen, so admirably an artist of verity, came a generation before. But, as always when a compelling literary force appears, Balzac without any question dominates in the first half of the nineteenth century: more than this, he sets the mold of the type which marks the second half. In fact, the modern Novel means Balzac's recipe. English fiction, along with that of Europe, shares this influence. We shall see in dealing with Dickens how definitely the English writer adopted the Balzac method as suited to the era and sympathetic to Dickens' own nature.

As to the accuracy with which he gave a representation of contemporary life—thus deserving the name realist—considerable may be said in the way of qualification. Much of it applies with similar force to Zola, later to be hailed as a king among modern realists in the naturalistic extreme to which he pushed the movement. Balzac, through his remarkable instinct for detail and particularity, did introduce into nineteenth century fiction an effect of greater truth in the depiction of life. Nobody perhaps had—nobody has since—presented mis-en-scene as did he. He builds up an impression by hundreds of strokes, each seemingly insignificant, but adding to a totality that becomes impressive. Moreover, again and again in his psychologic analysis there are home-thrusts which bring the blood to the face of any honest person. His detail is thus quite as much subjective as external. It were a great mistake to regard Balzac as merely a writer who photographed things outside in the world; he is intensely interested in the things within—and if objectivity meant realism exclusively, he would be no realist at all.

But farther than this; with all his care for minute touches and his broad and painstaking observation, it is not so much life, after all, as a vision of life which he gives. This contradicts what was said early in the present chapter: but the two statements stand for the change likely to come to any student of Balzac: his objective personality at last resolves itself into a vividly personal interpretation. His breadth blinds one for a while, that is all. Hence Balzac may be called an incurable romantic, an impressionist, as much as realist. Like all first-class art, his gives us the seeming-true for our better instruction. He said in the Preface to "Pere Goriot" that the novelist should not only depict the world as it is, but "a possibly better world." He has done so. The most untrue thing in a novel may be the fact lifted over unchanged from life? Truth is not only stranger than fiction, but great fiction is truer than truth. Balzac understood this, remembered it in his heart. He is too big as man and artist to be confined within the narrow realistic formula. While, as we have seen, he does not take sides on moral issues, nor allow himself to be a special pleader for this or that view, his work strikes a moral balance in that it shows universal humanity—not humanity tranced in metaphysics, or pathologic in analysis, or enmeshed in sensualism. In this sense, Balzac is a great realist. There is no danger of any novelist—any painter of life—doing harm, if he but gives us the whole. It is the story-teller who rolls some prurient morsel under his tongue who has the taint in him: he who, to sell his books, panders to the degraded instincts of his audience. Had Balzac been asked point-blank what he deemed the moral duty of the novelist, he would probably have disclaimed any other responsibility than that of doing good work, of representing things as they are. But this matters not, if only a writer's nature be large and vigorous enough to report of humanity in a trustworthy way. Balzac was much too well endowed in mind and soul and had touched life far too widely, not to look forth upon it with full comprehension of its spiritual meaning.

In spite, too, of his alleged realism, he believed that the duty of the social historian was more than to give a statement of present conditions—the social documents of the moment,—variable as they might be for purposes of deduction. He insisted that the coming,—perhaps seemingly impossible things, should be prophesied;—those future ameliorations, whether individual or collective, which keep hope alive in the human breast. Let me again quote those words, extraordinary as coming from the man who is called arch-realist of his day: "The novelist should depict the world not alone as it is, but a possibly better world." In the very novel where he said it ("Pere Goriot") he may seem to have violated the principle: but taking his fiction in its whole extent, he has acted upon it, the pronunciamento exemplifies his practice.

Balzac's work has a Shaksperian universality, because it is so distinctly French,—a familiar paradox in literature. He was French in his feeling for the social unit, in his keen receptivity to ideas, in his belief in Church and State as the social organisms through which man could best work out his salvation. We find him teaching that humanity, in terms of Gallic temperament, and in time limits between the Revolution and the Second Republic, is on the whole best served by living under a constitutional monarchy and in vital touch with Mother Church,—that form of religion which is a racial inheritance from the Past. In a sense, then, he was a man with the limitations of his place and time, as, in truth, was Shakspere. But the study of literature instructs us that it is exactly those who most vitally grasp and voice their own land and period, who are apt to give a comprehensive view of humanity at large; to present man sub specie aeternitatis. This is so because, thoroughly to present any particular part of mankind, is to portray all mankind. It is all tarred by the same stick, after all. It is only in the superficials that unlikenesses lie.

Balzac was intensely modern. Had he lived today, he might have been foremost in championing the separation of Church and State and looked on serenely at the sequestration of the religious houses. But writing his main fiction from 1830 to 1850, his attitude was an enlightened one, that of a thoughtful patriot.

His influence upon nineteenth century English fiction was both direct and indirect. It was direct in its effect upon several of the major novelists, as will be noted in studying them; the indirect influence is perhaps still more important, because it was so all-pervasive, like an emanation that expressed the Time. It became impossible, after Balzac had lived and wrought, for any artist who took his art seriously to write fiction as if the great Frenchman had not come first. He set his seal upon that form of literature, as Ibsen, a generation later, was to set his seal upon the drama, revolutionizing its technique. To the student therefore he is a factor of potent power in explaining the modern fictional development. Nor should he be a negligible quantity to the cultivated reader seeking to come genially into acquaintance with the best that European letters has accomplished. While upon the lover of the Novel as a form of literature—which means the mass of all readers to-day—Balzac cannot fail to exercise a personal fascination.—Life widens before us at his touch, and that glamour which is the imperishable gift of great art, returns again as one turns the pages of the little library of yellow books which contain the Human Comedy.

Balzac died in 1850, when in the prime of his powers. Seven years later was published the "Madame Bovary" of Flaubert, one of the most remarkable novels of the nineteenth century and the most unrelenting depiction of the devolution of a woman's soul in all fiction: certainly it deserved that description up to the hour of its appearance, if not now, when so much has been done in the realm of female pathology. Flaubert is the most noteworthy intermediate figure between Balzac and Zola. He seems personally of our own day, for, living to be an old man, he was friend and fellow-worker with the brothers Goncourt (whom we associate with Zola) and extended a fatherly hand to the young Maupassant at the beginning of the latter's career,—so brilliant, brief, tragic. The influence of this one novel (overlooking that of "Salambo," in its way also of influence in the modern growth) has been especially great upon a kind of fiction most characteristic of the present generation: in which, in fact, it has assumed a "bad preeminence." I mean the Novel of sexual relations in their irregular aspects. The stormy artist of the Goncourt dinners has much to answer for, if we regard him only as the creator of such a creature as Madame Bovary. Many later books were to surpass this in license, in coarseness, or in the effect of evoking a libidinous taste; but none in its unrelenting gloom, the cold detachment of the artist-scientist obsessed with the idea of truthfully reflecting certain sinister facets of the many-faced gem called life! It is hardly too much to say, in the light of the facts, that "Madame Bovary" was epochal. It paved the way for Zola. It justified a new aim for the modern fiction of so-called unflinching realism. The saddest thing about the book is its lack of pity, of love. Emma Bovary is a weak woman, not a bad woman; she goes downhill through the force of circumstances coupled with a want of backbone. And she is not responsible for her flabby moral muscles. Behind the story is an absolutely fatalistic philosophy; given a certain environment, any woman (especially if assisted a bit by her ancestors) will go to hell,—such seems the lesson. Now there is nothing just like this in Balzac, We hear in it a new note, the latter-day note of quiescence, and despair. And if we compare Flaubert's indifference to his heroine's fate with the tenderness of Dumas fils, or of Daudet, or the English Reade and Dickens—we shall realize that we have here a mixture of a personal and a coming general interpretation: Flaubert having by nature a kind of aloof determinism, yet feeling, like the first puffs of a cold chilling wind, the oncoming of an age of Doubt.

III.

These three French writers then, Stendhal, Balzac and Flaubert, molded the Novel before 1860 into such a shape as to make it plastic to the hand of Zola a decade later. Zola's influence upon our present generation of English fiction has been great, as it has upon all novel-making since 1870. Before explaining this further, it will be best to return to the study of the mid-century English novelists who were too early to be affected by him to any perceptible degree.

CHAPTER VIII

DICKENS

By the year 1850, in England, the so-called Novel of realism had conquered. Scott in an earlier generation had by his wonderful gift made the romance fashionable. But, as we said, it was the romance with a difference: the romance with its feet firmly planted on mother-earth, not ballooning in cloudland; the romance depicting men and women of the past but yet men and women, not creatures existing only in the fancy of the romance-maker. In short, Scott, romancer though he was, helped modern realism along, because he handled his material more truthfully than it had been handled before. And his great contemporary, Jane Austen, with her strict adherence to the present and to her own locale, threw all her influence in the same direction, justifying Mr. Howell's assertion that she leads all English novelists in that same truthful handling.

Moreover, that occult but imperative thing, the spirit of the Time, was on the side of Realism: and all bend to its dictation. Then, in the mid-century, Dickens and Thackeray, with George Eliot a little later on their heels, and Trollope too, came to give a deeper set to the current which was to flow in similar channels for the remainder of the period. In brief, this is the story, whatever modifications of the main current are to be noted: the work of Bulwer and Disraeli, of Reade, Kingsley and Collins.

A decade before Thackeray got a general hearing Dickens had fame and mighty influence. It was in the eighteen thirties that the self-made son of an impecunious navy clerk, who did not live in vain since he sat for a portrait of Micawber and the father of the Marshalsea, turned from journalism to that higher reporting which means the fiction of manners and humors. All the gods had prepared him for his destiny. Sympathy he had for the poor, the oppressed, the physically and morally unfit, for he had suffered in his own person, or in his imagination, for them all. His gift of observation had been sharpened in the grim school of necessity: he had learned to write by writing under the pressure of newspaper needs. And he had in his blood, while still hardly more than a lad, a feeling for idiomatic English which, so far as it was not a boon straight from heaven, had been fostered when the very young Charles had battened, as we saw, upon the eighteenth century worthies.

It is now generally acknowledged that Dickens is not a temporary phenomenon in Victorian letters, but a very solid major fact in the native literature, too large a creative force to be circumscribed by a generation. Looked back upon across the gap of time, he looms up all the more impressively because the years have removed the clutter about the base of the statue. The temporary loss of critical regard (a loss affecting his hold on the general reading public little, if any) has given way to an almost violent critical reaction in his favor. We are widening the esthetic canvas to admit of the test of life, and are coming to realize that, obsessed for a time by the attraction of that lower truth which makes so much of external realities, realism lost sight of the larger demands of art which include selection, adaptation, and that enlargement of effect marking the distinction between art and so-called reality. No critic is now timid about saying a good word for the author of "Pickwick" and "Copperfield." A few years ago it was otherwise. Present-day critics such as Henley, Lang, and Chesterton have assured the luke-warm that there is room in English literature for both Thackeray and Dickens.

That Dickens began to write fiction as a very young journalist was in some ways in his favor; in other ways, to the detriment of his work. It meant an early start on a career of over thirty years. It meant writing under pressure with the spontaneity and reality which usually result. It also meant the bold grappling with the technique of a great art, learning to make novels by making them. Again, one truly inspired to fiction is lucky to have a novitiate in youth. So far the advantages.

On the other hand, the faults due to inexperience, lack of education, uncertainty of aim, haste and carelessness and other foes of perfection, will probably be in evidence when a writer who has scarcely attained to man's estate essays fiction. Dickens' early work has thus the merits and demerits of his personal history. A popular and able parliamentary reporter, with sympathetic knowledge of London and the smaller towns where his duties took him, possessed of a marvelous memory which photographed for him the boyish impressions of places like Chatham and Rochester, he began with sketches of that life interspersed with more fanciful tales which drew upon his imagination and at times passed the melodramatic border-line. When these collected pieces were published under the familiar title "Sketches by Boz," it is not too much to say that the Dickens of the "Pickwick Papers" (which was to appear next year) was revealed. Certainly, the main qualities of a great master of the Comic were in these pages; so, in truth, was the master of both tears and smiles. But not at full-length: the writer had not yet found his occasion;—the man needs the occasion, even as it awaits the man. And so, hard upon the Boz book, followed, as it were by an accident, the world-famous "Adventures of Mr. Pickwick." By accident, I say, because the promising young author was asked to furnish the letter-press for a series of comic sporting pictures by the noted artist, Seymour; whereupon—doubtless to the astonishment of all concerned, the pictures became quite secondary to the reading matter and the Wellers soon set all England talking and laughing over their inimitable sayings. Here in a loosely connected series of sketches the main unity of which was the personality of Mr. Pickwick and his club, its method that of the episodic adventure story of "Gil Blas" lineage, its purpose frankly to amuse at all costs, a new creative power in English literature gave the world over three hundred characters in some sixty odd scenes: intensely English, intensely human, and still, after the lapse of three quarters of a century, keenly enjoyable.

In a sense, all Dickens' qualities are to be found in "The Pickwick Papers," as they have come to be called for brevity's sake. But the assertion is misleading, if it be taken to mean that in the fifteen books of fiction which Dickens was to produce, he added nothing, failed to grow in his art or to widen and deepen in his hold upon life. So far is this from the truth, that one who only knows Charles Dickens in this first great book of fun, knows a phase of him, not the whole man: more, hardly knows the novelist at all. He was to become, and to remain, not only a great humorist, but a great novelist as well: and "Pickwick" is not, by definition, a Novel at all. Hence, the next book the following year, "Oliver Twist," was important as answering the question: Was the brilliant new writer to turn out very novelist, able to invent, handle and lead to due end a tangled representation of social life?

Before replying, one rather important matter may be adverted to, concerning the Dickens introduced to the world by "Pickwick": his astonishing power in the evocation of human beings, whom we affectionately remember, whose words are treasured, whose fates are followed with a sort of sense of personal responsibility. If the creation of differentiated types of humanity who persist in living in the imagination be the cardinal gift of the fiction writer, then this one is easily the leading novelist of the race. Putting aside for the moment the question of his caricaturing tendency, one fact confronts us, hardly to be explained away: we can close our eyes and see Micawber, Mrs. Gamp, Pegotty, Dick Swiveller, the Artful Dodger, Joe Gargery, Tootles, Captain Cutter, and a hundred more, and their sayings, quaint and dear, are like household companions. And this is true in equal measure of no other story-maker who has used English speech—it may be doubted if it is true to like degree of Shakspere himself.

In the quick-following stories, "Oliver Twist" and "Nicholas Nickleby," the author passed from episode and comic characterization to what were in some sort Novels: the fiction of organism, growth and climax.

His wealth of character creation was continued and even broadened. But there was more here: an attempt to play the game of Novel-making. It may be granted that when Dickens wrote these early books (as a young man in the twenties), he had not yet mastered many of the difficulties of the art of fiction. There is loose construction in both: the melodrama of "Oliver Twist" blends but imperfectly with the serious and sentimental part of the narrative, which is less attractive. So, too, in "Nickleby," there is an effect at times of thin ice where the plot is secondary to the episodic scenes and characters by the way. Yet in both Novels there is a story and a good one: we get the spectacle of genius learning its lesson,—experimenting in a form. And as those other early books, differing totally from each other too, "Old Curiosity Shop," and "Barnaby Rudge," were produced, and in turn were succeeded by a series of great novels representing the writer's young prime,—I mean "Martin Chuzzlewit," "Dombey and Son" and "David Copperfield,"—it was plain that the hand of Dickens was becoming subdued to the element it worked in. Not only was there a good fable, as before, but it was managed with increasing mastery, while the general adumbration of life gained in solidity, truth and rich human quality. In brief, by the time "Copperfield," the story most often referred to as his best work, was reached, Dickens was an artist. He wrought in that fiction in such a fashion as to make the most of the particular class of Novel it represented: to wit, the first-person autobiographic picture of life. Given its purpose, it could hardly have been better done. It surely bears favorable comparison, for architecture, with Thackeray's "Vanity Fair," a work in the same genre, though lacking the autobiographic method. This is quite aside from its remarkable range of character-portrayal, its humor, pathos and vraisemblance, its feeling for situation, its sonorous eloquence in massed effects.

By the time he had reached mid-career, then, Charles Dickens had made himself a skilled, resourceful story-teller, while his unique qualities of visualization and interpretation had strengthened. This point is worth emphasis, since there are those who contend that "The Pickwick Papers" is his most characteristic performance. Such a judgment is absurd, It overlooks the grave beauty of the picture of Chesney Wold in Bleak House; the splendid harmony of the Yarmouth storm in "Copperfield"; the fine melodrama of the chapter in "Chuzzlewit" where the guilty Jonas takes his haggard life; the magnificent portraiture of the Father of the Marshalsea in "Little Dorrit": the spiritual exaltation in vivid stage terms of Carton's death; the exquisite April-day blend of tenderness and fun in limning the young life of a Marchioness, a little Dombey and a tiny Tim. To call Dickens a comic writer and stop there, is to try to pour a river into a pint pot; for a sort of ebullient boy-like spirit of fun, the high jinks of literature, we go to "Pickwick"; for the light and shade of life to "Copperfield"; for the structural excellencies of fiction to later masterpieces like "The Tale of Two Cities" and "Great Expectations."

Just here a serious objection often brought against Dickens may be considered: his alleged tendency to caricature. Does Dickens make his characters other than what life itself shows, and if so, is he wrong in so doing?

His severest critics assume the second if the first be but granted. Life—meaning the exact reproduction of reality—is their fetish. Now, it must be granted that Dickens does make his creatures talk as their prototypes do not in life. Nobody would for a moment assert that Mrs. Gamp, Pecksniff and Micawber could be literally duplicated from the actual world. But is not Dickens within his rights as artist in so changing the features of life as to increase our pleasure? That is the nub of the whole matter. The artist of fiction should not aim at exact photography, for it is impossible; no fiction-maker since time began has placed on the printed pages half the irrelevance and foolishness or one-fifth the filth which are in life itself. Reasons of art and ethics forbid. The aim, therefore, should rather be at an effect of life through selection and re-shaping. And I believe Dickens is true to this requirement. We hear less now than formerly of his crazy exaggerations: we are beginning to realize that perhaps he saw types that were there, which we would overlook if they were under our very eyes: we feel the wisdom of Chesterton's remarks that Dickens' characters will live forever because they never lived at all! We suffered from the myopia of realism. Zola desired above all things to tell the truth by representing humanity as porcine, since he saw it that way: he failed in his own purpose, because decency checked him: his art is not photographic (according to his proud boast) but has an almost Japanese convention of restraint in its suppression of facts. Had Sarah Gamp been allowed by Dickens to speak as she would speak in life, she would have been unspeakably repugnant, never cherished as a permanently laughable, even lovable figure of fiction. Dickens was a master of omissions as well as of those enlargments which made him carry over the foot lights. Mrs. Gamp is a monumental study of the coarse woman rogue: her creator makes us hate the sin and tolerate the sinner. Nor is that other masterly portrait of the woman rascal—Thackeray's Becky Sharp—an example of strict photography; she is great in seeming true, but she is not life.

So much, then, for the charge of caricature: it is all a matter of degree. It all depends upon the definition of art, and upon the effect made upon the world by the characters themselves. If they live in loving memory, they must, in the large sense, be true. Thus we come back to the previous statement: Dickens' people live—are known by their words and in their ways all over the civilized world. No collection of mere grotesques could ever bring this to pass. Prick any typical creation of Dickens and it runs blood, not sawdust. And just in proportion as we travel, observe broadly and form the habit of a more penetrating and sympathetic study of mankind, shall we believe in these emanations of genius. Occasionally, under the urge and surplusage of his comic force, he went too far and made a Quilp: but the vast majority even of his drolls are as credible as they are dear.

That he showed inequality as he wrought at the many books which filled the years between "Pickwick" and the unfinished "Mystery of Edwin Drood," may also be granted. Also may it be confessed that within the bounds of one book there are the extremes of good and bad. It is peculiar to Dickens that often in the very novel we perchance feel called upon to condemn most, occurs a scene or character as memorably great as anything he left the world. Thus, we may regard "Old Curiosity Shop," once so beloved, as a failure when viewed as a whole; and yet find Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness at their immortal game as unforgettable as Mrs. Battle engaged in the same pleasant employment. Nor because other parts of "Little Dorrit" seem thin and artificial, would we forego the description of the debtor's prison. And our belief that the presentation of the labor-capital problem in "Hard Times" is hasty and shallow, does not prevent a recognition of the opening sketch of the circus troop as displaying its author at his happiest of humorous observation. There are thus always redeeming things in the stories of this most unequal man of genius. Seven books there are, novels in form, which are indubitable masterpieces: "Martin Chuzzlewit," "Dombey and Son," "David Copperfield," "Bleak House," "A Tale of Two Cities," "Great Expectations" and "Our Mutual Friend." These, were all the others withdrawn, would give ample evidence of creative power: they have the largeness, variety and inventive verve which only are to be found in the major novelists. Has indeed the same number of equal weight and quality been given forth by any other English writer?

Another proof that the power of Dickens was not dependent exclusively upon the comic, is his production of "A Tale of Two Cities." It is sometimes referred to as uncharacteristic because it lacks almost entirely his usual gallery of comics: but it is triumphantly a success in a different field. The author says he wished for the nonce to make a straight adventure tale with characters secondary. He did it in a manner which has always made the romance a favorite, and compels us to include this dramatic study of the French Revolution among the choicest of his creations. Its period and scene have never—save by Carlyle—been so brilliantly illuminated. Dickens was brooding on this story at a time when, wretchedly unhappy, he was approaching the crisis of a separation from his wife: the fact may help to explain its failure to draw on that seemingly inexhaustible fountain of bubbling fun so familiar in his work. But even subtract humor and Dickens exhibits the master-hand in a fiction markedly of another than his wonted kind. This Novel—or romance, as it should properly be called—reminds us of a quality in Dickens which has been spoken of in the way of derogation: his theatrical tendency. When one declares an author to be dramatic, a compliment is intended. But when he is called theatric, censure is implied. Dickens, always possessed of a strong sense of the dramatic and using it to immense advantage, now and again goes further and becomes theatric: that is, he suggests the manipulating of effects with artifice and the intention of providing sensational and scenic results at the expense of proportion and truth. A word on this is advisable.

Those familiar with the man and his works are aware how close he always stood to the playhouse and its product. He loved it from early youth, all but went on the stage professionally, knew its people as have few of the writing craft, was a fine amateur actor himself, wrote for the stage, helped to dramatize his novels and gave delightful studies of theatrical life in his books. Shall we ever forget Mr. Crummles and his family? He had an instinctive feeling for what was scenic and effective in the stage sense. When he appeared as a reader of his own works, he was an impersonator; and noticeably careful to have the stage accessories exactly right. And when all this, natural and acquired, was applied to fiction, it could not but be of influence. As a result, Dickens sometimes forced the note, favored the lurid, exaggerated his comic effects. To put it in another way, this theater manner of his now and then injured the literature he made. But that is only one side of the matter: it also helped him greatly and where he went too far, he was simply abusing a precious gift. To speak of Dickens' violent theatricality as if it expressed his whole being, is like describing the wart on Cromwell's face as if it were his set of features. Remove from Dickens his dramatic power, and the memorable master would be no more: he would vanish into dim air. We may be thankful—in view of what it produced—that he possessed even in excess this sense of the scenic value of character and situation: it is not a disqualification but a virtue, and not Dickens alone but Dumas, Hugo and Scott were great largely because of it.

In the praise naturally enough bestowed upon a great autobiographical Novel like "David Copperfield," the fine art of a late work like "Great Expectations" has been overlooked or at least minimized. If we are to consider skilful construction along with the other desirable qualities of the novelist, this noble work has hardly had justice done it: moreover, everything considered,—story value, construction, characters, atmosphere, adequacy of style, climactic interest, and impressive lesson, I should name "Great Expectations," published when the author was fifty, as his most perfect book, if not the greatest of Charles Dickens' novels. The opinion is unconventional: but as Dickens is studied more as artist progressively skilful in his craft, I cannot but believe this particular story will receive increasing recognition. In the matter of sheer manipulation of material, it is much superior to the book that followed it two years later, the last complete novel: "Our Mutual Friend." It is rather curious that this story, which was in his day and has steadily remained a favorite with readers, has with equal persistency been severely handled by the critics. What has insured its popularity? Probably its vigor and variety of characterization, its melodramatic tinge, the teeming world of dramatic contrasts it opens, its bait to our sense of mystery. It has a power very typical of the author and one of the reasons for Dickens' hold upon his audience. It is a power also exhibited markedly in such other fictions as "Dombey and Son," "Martin Chuzzlewit" and "Bleak House." I refer to the impression conveyed by such stories that life is a vast, tumultuous, vari-colored play of counter-motives and counter-characters, full of chance, surprise, change and bitter sweet: a thing of mystery, terror, pity and joy. It has its masks of respectability, its frauds of place, its beauty blossoming in the mud, its high and low of luck, its infinite possibilities betwixt heaven and hell. The effect of this upon the sensitive reader is to enlarge his sympathetic feeling for humanity: life becomes a big, awful, dear phantasmagoria in such hands. It seems not like a flat surface, but a thing of length, breadth, height and depth, which it has been a privilege to enter. Dickens' fine gift—aside from that of character creation—is found in this ability to convey an impression of puissant life. He himself had this feeling and he got it into his books: he had, in a happier sense, the joy of life of Ibsen, the life force of Nietzsche. From only a few of the world's great writers does one receive this sense of life, the many-sided spectacle; Cervantes, Hugo, Tolstoy, Sienkiewicz, it is men like they that do this for us.

Another side of Dickens' literary activity is shown in his Christmas stories, which it may be truly said are as well beloved as anything he gave the world in the Novel form. This is assuredly so of the "Christmas Carol," "The Chimes" and "The Cricket on the Hearth." This last is on a par with the other two in view of its double life in a book and on the boards of the theater. The fragrance of Home, of the homely kindness and tenderness of the human heart, is in them, especially in the Carol, which is the best tale of its kind in the tongue and likely to remain so. It permanently altered the feeling of the race for Christmas. Irving preceded him in the use of the Christmas motive, but Dickens made it forever his own. By a master's magic evocation, the great festival shines brighter, beckons more lovingly than it did of old. Thackeray felt this when he declared that such a story was "a public benefit." Such literature lies aside from our main pursuit, that of the Novel, but is mentioned because it is the best example possible, the most direct, simple expression of that essential kindness, that practical Christianity which is at the bottom of Dickens' influence. It is bonhomie and something more. It is not Dickens the reformer, as we get him when he satirizes Dotheboys hall, or the Circumlocution Office or the Chancery Court: but Dickens as Mr. Greatheart, one with all that is good, tender, sweet and true. Tiny Tim's thousand-times quoted saying is the quintessence, the motto for it all and the writer speaks in and through the lad when he says: "God bless us, every one." When an author gets that honest unction into his work, and also has the gift of observation and can report what he sees, he is likely to contribute to the literature of his land. With a sneer of the cultivated intellect, we may call it elementary: but to the heart, such a view of life is royally right.

This thought of Dickens' moral obligation in his work and his instinctive attitude towards his audience, leads to one more point: a main reason for this Victorian novelist's strong hold on the affections of mankind is to be found in the warm personal relation he establishes with the reader. The relationship implies obligation on the part of the author, a vital bond between the two, a recognition of a steady, not a chance, association. There goes with it, too, an assumption that the author believes in and cares much for his characters, and asks the reader for the same faith. This personal relation of author to reader and of both to the imagined characters, has gone out of fashion in fiction-making: in this respect, Dickens (and most of his contemporaries) seem now old-fashioned. The present realist creed would keep the novelist away and out of sight both of his fictive creations and his audience; it being his business to pull the strings to make his puppets dance—up to heaven or down to hell, whatever does it matter to the scientist-novelist? Tolstoy's novel "Resurrection" is as a subject much more disagreeable than Flaubert's "Madame Bovary"; but it is beautiful where the other is horrible, because it palpitates with a Christ-like sympathy for an erring woman, while the French author cares not a button whether his character is lost or not. The healthy-minded public (which can be trusted in heart, if not in head) will instinctively choose that treatment of life in a piece of fiction which shows the author kindly cooperative with fate and brotherly in his position towards his host of readers. That is the reason Dickens holds his own and is extremely likely to gain in the future, while spectacular reputations based on all the virtues save love, continue to die the death. What M. Anatole France once said of Zola, applies to the whole school of the aloof and unloving: "There is in man an infinite need of loving which renders him divine. M. Zola does not know it…. The holiness of tears is at the bottom of all religions. Misfortune would suffice to render man august to man. M. Zola does not know it."

Charles Dickens does know these truths and they get into his work and that work, therefore, gets not so much into the minds as into the souls of his fellow-man. When we recite the sayings which identify his classic creations: when we express ourselves in a Pickwickian sense, wait for something to turn up with Mr. Micawber, drop into poetry with Silas Wegg, move on with little Joe, feel 'umble after the manner of Uriah Heap, are willin' with Barkis, make a note of, in company with Captain Cuttle, or conclude with Mr. Weller, Senior, that it is the part of wisdom to beware of "widders," we may observe that what binds us to this motley crowd of creatures is not their grotesquerie but their common humanity, their likeness to ourselves, the mighty flood-tide of tolerant human sympathy on which they are floated into the safe haven of our hearts. With delightful understanding, Charles Dudley Warner writes: "After all, there is something about a boy I like." Dickens, using the phrasing for a wider application, might have said: "After all, there is something about men and women I like!" It was thus no accident that he elected to write of the lower middle classes; choosing to depict the misery of the poor, their unfair treatment in institutions; to depict also the unease of criminals, the crushed state of all underlings—whether the child in education or that grown-up evil child, the malefactor in prison. He was a spokesman of the people, a democratic pleader for justice and sympathy. He drew the proletariat preferably, not because he was a proletariat but because he was a brother-man and the fact had been overlooked. He drew thousands of these suppressed humans, and they were of varied types and fortunes: but he loved them as though they were one, and made the world love them too: and love their maker. The deep significance of Dickens, perhaps his deepest, is in the social note that swells loud and insistent through his fiction. He was a pioneer in the democratic sympathy which was to become so marked feature in the Novel in the late nineteenth century: and which, as we have already seen, is from the first a distinctive trait of the modern fiction, one of the explanations of its existence.

CHAPTER IX

THACKERAY

The habit of those who appraise the relative worth of Dickens and Thackeray to fall into hostile camps, swearing by one, and at the other, has its amusing side but is to be deprecated as irrational. Why should it be necessary to miss appreciation of the creator of "Vanity Fair" because one happens to like "David Copperfield"? Surely, our literary tastes or standards should be broad enough to admit into pleasurable companionship both those great early Victorian novelists.