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."