Chapter II: From Lyly to Swift (2)

Neville's art is in fact not inconsiderable. Earlier voyages and travels of course supplied him with his technical and geographical details: and the codification of the Isle of Pines suggests the Bacon-Harrington tradition. But he has got the vividness and realism which have usually been lacking before: and though some of his details are pretty "free" it is by no means only through such things that these qualities are secured. To Cyrano de Bergerac he bears no likeness at all. In fact, though Neville _was_ a satirist, satire does not seem to have been in any way his object here. Whatever that object may have been, he has certainly struck, by accident or not, on the secret of producing an interesting account by ingeniously multiplied and adjusted detail. Moreover, as there is no conversation, the book stands--accidentally this time almost without doubt--at the opposite pole from the talk-deluged romances of the Scudéry type. Whether Defoe actually knew it or not matters exceedingly little: that something of his method, and in a manner the subject of his first and most famous novel, are here before him, seems quite indisputable. Perhaps not the least piquant thing to do with _The Isle of Pines_ is to contrast it with _Oceana_. Of course the contrast is unfair: nearly all contrasts are. But there is actually, as has been pointed out, a slight contact between the work of the two friends: and their complete difference in every other respect makes this more curiously apparent. And another odd thing is that Neville--"Rota"-republican as he was--should have adopted patriarchal (one can hardly say _legitimate_) government here.

Congreve's _Incognita_ (1692), the last seventeenth-century novel that requires special notice, belongs much more to the class of Afra's tales than to that of the heroic romances. It is a short story of seventy-five small pages only and of the Italian-Spanish imbroglio type. The friends Aurelian and Hippolito take each other's names for certain purposes, and their beloveds, "Incognita," Juliana and Leonora, are perplexed accordingly: while family feuds, letter assignations at a convent where the name of the convent unluckily happens to be torn off, and other stock ingredients of the kind are freely used. Most writers have either said nothing about the book or have given it scanty praise; with the exception, Sir Walter Raleigh, I confess that I cannot here agree. Being Congreve's it could not be quite without flashes of wit, but they do not appear to me to be either very numerous or very brilliant; the plot, such as it is, is a plot of drama rather than of fiction; and there is no character that I can see. It is in fact only one of a vast multitude of similar stories, not merely in the two languages just referred to, but in French, which were but to show that the time of the novel was not yet come, even when the time of this century was all but over.

It was quite over, and the first two decades of the next were all but over too, before the way was, to any important extent, further explored: but important assistance in the exploration was given at the beginning of the second of these decades. The history of the question of the relations of the Addison-Steele periodical, and especially of the "Coverley Papers," to the novel is both instructive and amusing to those who have come to appreciate the humours of literary things. It would probably have shocked the more orthodox admirers of the _Spectator_, during the eighteenth century, to have any such connection or relation so much as hinted. But when people began to consider literature and literary history in a better arranged perspective, the fact that there _is_ such a connection or relation must have been soon perceived. It has become comparatively a commonplace: and now the third stage--that in which people become uneasy and suspicious of the commonplace and obvious and try to turn it topsy-turvy--has begun.

It is of course undeniable that the "Coverley Papers," as they stand, are not a novel, even on the loosest conception and construction of the term. There is no plot; some of what should be the most important characters are merely heard of, not seen; and the various scenes have no sort of connection, except that the same persons figure in them. But these undeniable facts do not interfere with two other facts, equally undeniable and much more important. The first is that the papers could be turned into a novel with hardly any important alteration, and with only _quantum suff._ of addition and completion. "The widow" is there in the background ready to be produced and made a heroine; many of the incidents are told novel-fashion already, and more could be translated into that fashion by the veriest tyro at novel writing who has written at any time during the last one hundred and fifty years. The personages of the club have merely to step down and out; the scenes to be connected, amplified, and multiplied; the conversation to undergo the same process.

But the second point is of greater importance still. Not only could the "Coverley Papers," be made into a novel without the slightest difficulty, and by a process much of which would be simple enlargement of material; but they already possess, in a fashion which requires no alteration at all, many of the features of the novel, far more successfully hit off than had ever been done before in the novel itself. This is true of the dialogue to no small extent, and of the description even more: but it is truest of all of the characters. Except Bunyan, nobody in prose fiction had ever made personages so thoroughly spirited as Sir Roger and even the two Wills, Honeycomb and Wimble; while here there was "no allaying Thames" in the shape of allegory, little moralising and that of a kind quite human, a plentiful setting of ordinary and familiar scene, and a more plentiful and exact adjustment of ordinary and familiar manners. It is true that Addison, partly owing to the undercurrent of his satirical humour (Steele succeeds rather better here), has not attained the astonishing verisimilitude of the writer to whom we shall come next and last but one in this chapter. His characters are perfectly natural, but we know, all the while, that they are works of art. But in most of the points just mentioned he has exactly the tricks of the novelist's art that Defoe has not. The smaller tales in the _Tatler_ and its followers undoubtedly did something to remove the reproach from prose fiction, and more to sharpen the appetite for it. But they were nothing new: the short tale being of unknown antiquity. The "Coverley Papers" _were_ new and did much more. This new kind of treatment may not have suggested beforehand (it is not certain that it did not) the extensive novel of character and manners--the play lengthened, bodied more strongly, and turned into narrative form. But the process was _there_; the instances of it were highly reputed and widely known. It must in almost any case have gone hard but a further step still would be taken. It was actually taken by the person who had suggested the periodical essay itself.

Much has been written about Defoe, but, curiously enough, the least part of what has been written about him has concerned the very part of him that is read--his novels. Nay, occasional eccentrics, and not only these, have shown a sort of disposition to belittle him as a novelist: indeed the stock description of Richardson as the Father of the English Novel almost pointedly rules Defoe out. Yet further, the most adequate and intelligent appreciation of his novel work itself has too often been mainly confined to what is no doubt a subject of exceeding interest--the special means by which he secures the attention, and procures the delight, of his readers. We shall have to deal with this too. But the point to which it is wished to draw special attention now is different, and we may reach it best by the ordinary "statement of case."

Almost everybody who knows any literary history, knows that the book by which, after thirty or forty years of restless publication in all sorts of prose and rhyme, Defoe niched himself immovably in English literature, was a new departure by almost an old man. He was all but, if not quite, sixty when _Robinson Crusoe_ appeared: and a very few following years saw the appearance of his pretty voluminous "minor" novels. The subject of the first every one knows without limitation: it is not so certain, though vigorous efforts have been made to popularise the others, that even their subjects are clearly known to many people. _Captain Singleton_ (1720), _Moll Flanders_, and _Colonel Jack_ (both 1722) are picaresque romances with tolerably sordid heroes and heroines, but with the style entirely rejuvenated by Defoe's secret. _Roxana_ (1724), a very puzzling book which is perhaps not entirely his writing, is of the same general class: the _Voyage round the World_ (1725), the least interesting, but not _un_interesting, is exactly what its title imports,--in other words, the "stuffing" of the _Robinson_ pie without the game. The _Memoirs of a Cavalier_ (1720) approach the historical novel (or at least the similar "stuffing" of that) and have raised curious and probably insoluble questions as to whether they are inventions at all--questions intimately connected with that general one referred to above. One or two minor things are sometimes added to the list: but they require no special notice. The seven books just mentioned are Defoe's contribution to the English novel. Let us consider the quality of this contribution first--and then the means used to attain it.

Their novel-quality (which, as has been hinted, has not been claimed so loudly or so steadily as it should have been for Defoe) is the quality of Story-Interest--and this, one dares say, he not only infused for the first time in full dose, but practically introduced into the English novel, putting the best of the old mediæval romances aside and also putting aside _The Pilgrim's Progress_, which is not likely to have been without influence on himself. It may be said, "Oh! but the _Amadis_ romances, and the Elizabethan novels, and the 'heroics' must have interested or they would not have been read." This looks plausible, but is a mistake. Few people who have not studied the history of criticism know the respectable reluctance to be _pleased_ with literature which distinguished mankind till very recent times; and which in fact kept the novel back or was itself maintained by the absence of the novel. In life people pleased themselves irregularly enough: in literature they could not get out of the idea that they ought to be instructed, that it was enough to be instructed, and that it was discreditable to ask for more. Even the poet was allowed to delight grudgingly and at his peril; was suspected because he did delight, and had to pay a sort of heavy licence-duty for it, in the shape of concomitant instruction to others and good behaviour in himself. In fact he was a publican who was bound to serve stodgy food as well as exhilarating drink.

It is impossible to doubt that people were similarly affected to the fiction of the Renaissance and the seventeenth century, at least in its longer examples--for the smaller _novelle_ could amuse in their own way sometimes, though they could hardly absorb. It is equally impossible to imagine any one being "enthralled" by _Euphues_. Admiration, of a kind, must have been the only passion excited by it. In the _Arcadia_ there is a certain charm, but it belongs to the inset verse--to the almost Spenserian _visionariness_ of parts--to the gracious lulling atmosphere of the whole. If it had been published in three volumes, one cannot imagine the most enthusiastic novel-reader knocking up a friend late at night for volume two or volume three. I have said that I can read _Parismus_ for pastime: but the pastime that it provides is certainly not over-stimulating, and the mild stimulant becomes unsweetened and unlemoned barley-water in books of the _Parthenissa_ class. If with them conversing one forgets all time, it must be by the influence of the kind go-between Sleep. We know, of course, that their contemporaries did not go to sleep over them: but it was because they felt that they were being done good to--that they were in the height of polite society--that their manners were being softened and not allowed to be gross. The time, in its blunt way, was fond of contrasting the attractions of a mistress on one side and "a friend and a bottle" on the other. That a novel could enter into competition with either or both, as an interesting and even exciting means of passing the time, would have entered very few heads at all and have been contemptuously dismissed from most of those that it did enter.

Addison and Steele in the "Coverley Papers" had shown the way to construct this new spell: Defoe actually constructed it. It may be that some may question whether the word "exciting" applies exactly to his stories. But this is logomachy: and in fact a well-willing reader _can_ get very fairly excited while the Cavalier is escaping after Marston Moor; while it is doubtful whether the savages have really come and what will be the event; while it is again doubtful whether Moll is caught or not; or what has become of those gains of the boy Jack, which can hardly be called ill-gotten because there is such a perfect unconsciousness of ill on the part of the getter. At any rate, if such a reader cannot feel excitement here, he would utterly stagnate in any previous novel.

In presence of this superior--this emphatically and doubly "novel"--interest, all other things become comparatively unimportant. The relations of _Robinson Crusoe_ to Selkirk's experiences and to one or two other books (especially the already mentioned _Isle of Pines_) may not unfitly employ the literary historian who chooses to occupy himself with them. The allegory which Defoe alleges in it, and which some biographers have endeavoured to work out, cannot, I suppose, be absolutely pooh-poohed, but presents no attractions whatever to the present writer. Whether the _Cavalier_ is pure fiction, or partly embroidered fact, _is_ a somewhat interesting question, if only because it seems to be impossible to find out the answer: and the same may be said of the not impossible (indeed almost more than probable) Portuguese maps and documents at the back of _Captain Singleton_. To disembroil the chronological muddle of _Roxana_, and follow out the tangles of the hide-and-seek of that most unpleasant "lady of pleasure" and her daughter, may suit some. But, apart from all these things, there abides the fact that you can _read_ the books--read them again and again--enjoy them most keenly at first and hardly less keenly afterwards, however often you repeat the reading.

As has been partly said, the means by which this effect is achieved, and also the means by which it is not, are almost equally remarkable. The Four Elements of the novel are sometimes, and not incorrectly, said to be Plot, Character, Description, and Dialogue--Style, which some would make a fifth, being rather a characteristic in another order of division. It is curious that Defoe is rebellious or evasive under any analysis of this kind. His plots are of the "strong" order--the events succeed each other and are fairly connected, but do not compose a history so much as a chronicle. In character, despite his intense verisimilitude, he is not very individual. Robinson himself, Moll, Jack, William the Quaker in _Singleton_, even Roxana the cold-blooded and covetous courtesan, cannot be said not to be real--they and almost every one of the minorities are an immense advance on the colourless and bloodless ticketed puppets of the Middle Fiction. But they still want _something_--the snap of the fingers of the artist. Moll is perhaps the most real of all of them and yet one has no flash-sights of her being--never sees her standing out against soft blue sky or thunder-cloud as one sees the great characters of fiction; never hears her steps winding and recognises her gesture as one does theirs.

So again his description is sufficient: and the enumerative particularity of it is even great part of the _secret de Polichinelle_ to which we are coming. But it is far from elaborate in any other way and has hardly the least decoration or poetical quality. Well as we know Crusoe's Island the actual scenery of it is not half so much impressed as that even, for instance, of Masterman Ready's--it is either of the human figures--Crusoe's own grotesque bedizenment, the savages, Friday, the Spaniards, Will Atkins--or of the works of man--the stockade, the boat, and the rest--that we think. A little play is made with Jack's glass-house squalor and Roxana's magnificence _de mauvais lieu_, but not much: the gold-dust and deserts of _Singleton_ are a necessary part of the "business," but nothing more. _Moll Flanders_--in some respects the greatest of all his books--has the bareness of an Elizabethan stage in scenery and properties--it is much if Greenfield spares us a table or a bed to furnish it.

Of Dialogue Defoe is specially fond--even making his personages soliloquise in this after a fashion--and it plays a very important part in "the secret:" yet it can hardly be classed very high _as_ dialogue. And this is at least partly due to the strange _drab_ shapelessness of his style, which never takes on any brilliant colour, or quaint individual form.

Yet it is very questionable whether any other style would have suited the method so well, or would even have suited it at all. For this method--to leave off hinting at it and playing round it--is one of almost endless accumulation of individually trivial incident, detail, and sometimes observation, the combined effect of which is to produce an insensible but undoubting acceptance, on the reader's part, of the facts presented to him. The process has been more than once analysed in that curious and convenient miniature example of it, the "Mrs. Veal" _supercherie_: but you may open the novels proper almost anywhere and discover it in full operation. Like most great processes of art, this is an adoption and perfecting of habits usual with the most inartistic people--a turning to good account of the interminably circumstantial superfluities of the common gossip and newsmonger. Very often Defoe actually does not go beyond this--just as in _The Shortest Way with the Dissenters_ he had simply reproduced the actual thoughts and wishes of those who disliked dissent. But sometimes he got the better of this also, as in the elaborate building up of Robinson's surroundings and not a little in the other books. And there the effect is not only verisimilar but wonderful in its verisimilitude. At any rate, in him, and for English prose and secular fiction, we have first that mysterious charm of the _real that is not real_--of the "human creation"--which constitutes the appeal of the novel. In some of the books there is hardly any appeal of any other sort. Moll Flanders, though not unkindly, and "improper" rather from the force of circumstances than from any specially vicious inclination, is certainly not a person for whom one has much liking. Colonel Jack, after his youthful experiences in pocket-picking, is rather a nonentity, something of a coward, a fellow of no particular wits, parts, or definite qualities of any kind. Singleton is a rascal who "plays Charlemagne," as the French gambling term has it, and endows his repentance with the profits of his sin. As for Roxana there are few more repulsive heroines in fiction--while the Cavalier and the chief figure in the _Voyage Round the World_ are simply threads on which their respective adventures are strung. Even Robinson himself enlists no particular sympathy except of the "put-yourself-in-his-place" kind. Yet these sorry or negative personages, of whom, in the actual creation of God, we should be content to know nothing except from paragraphs in the newspaper (and generally in the police-reports thereof), content us perfectly well with their company through hundreds and thousands of solid pages, and leave us perfectly ready to enjoy it again after a reasonable interval.

This, as has been said, is the mystery of fiction--a mystery partly set a-working in the mediæval romance, then mostly lost, and now recovered--in his own way and according to his own capacity--by Defoe. It was to escape others for a little longer and then to be yet again rediscovered by the great quartette of the mid-eighteenth century--to slip in and out of hands during the later part of that century, and then to be all but finally established, in patterns for everlasting pursuance, by Miss Austen and by Scott. But Defoe is really (unless we put Bunyan before him) the first of the magicians--not the greatest by any means, but great and almost alone in the peculiar talent of making uninteresting things interesting--not by burlesquing them or satirising them; not by suffusing or inflaming them with passion; not by giving them the amber of style; but by serving them "simple of themselves" as though they actually existed.

The position of Defoe in novel history is so great that there is a temptation to end this chapter with him. But to do so would cause an inconvenience greater than any resulting advantages. For the greatest of Defoe's contemporaries in English letters also comes into our division, and comes best here. One cannot conveniently rank Swift with the great quartette of the next chapter, because he is a novelist "by interim" and incompletely: to rank him among the minor and later novelists of the eighteenth century would be as to the first part of the classification absurd and as to the last false. And he comes, not merely in time, pretty close to Defoe, incommensurable as is the genius of the two. It has even been thought (plausibly enough, though the matter is of no great importance) that the form of _Gulliver_ may have been to some extent determined by _Robinson Crusoe_ and Defoe's other novels of travel. And there is a subtler reason for taking the pair together and both close to Addison and Steele.

Swift had shown the general set towards prose fiction, and his own bent in the same direction, long before Defoe's novel-period and as early as the _Tale of a Tub_ and the _Battle of the Books_ (_published_ 1704 but certainly earlier in part). The easy flow of the narrative, and the vivid dialogue of the Spider and the Bee in the latter, rank high among those premonitions of novel with which, in this place, we should be specially busied. In the former Peter, Martin, and Jack want but a little more of the alchemist's furnace to accomplish their projection into real characters, and not merely allegorical figure-heads. But, of course, in both books, the satiric purpose dominates too much to allow them to be really ranked among novels, even if they had taken the trouble to clothe themselves with more of the novel-garb.

With _Gulliver_ it is different. It is a commonplace on its subject (but like many other commonplaces a thing ill to forget or ignore) that natural and unsophisticated children always _do_, and that almost anybody who has a certain power of turning blind eyes when and where he chooses _can_, read it simply as a story of adventure and enjoy it hugely. It would be a most preternatural child or a most singularly constituted adult who could read _Utopia_ or _Oceana_, or even Cyrano's _Voyages_, "for the story" and enjoy them hugely. This means that Swift had either learnt from Defoe or--and considering those earlier productions of his own much more probably--had independently developed the knack of _absorbing_ the reader--the knack of telling a story. But of course there is in one sense much more, and in another much less, than a story in _Gulliver_: and the finest things in it are independent of story, though (and this once more comes in for our present purpose) they are quite capable of adaptation to story-purposes, and have been so adapted ever since by the greatest masters of the art. These are strokes of satire, turns of phrase, little illuminations of character, and seasonings of description. But the great point of _Gulliver_ is that, like Defoe's work, though in not quite the same way, it is _interesting_--that it takes hold of its reader and gives him its "peculiar pleasure." When a work of art does this, it is pretty near perfection.

There is, however, another book of Swift's which, though perhaps seldom mentioned or even thought of in connection with the novel, is of real importance in that connection, and comes specially in with our present main consideration--the way in which the several parts of the completed novel were being, as it were, separately got ready and set apart for the use of the accomplished novelist. This is the very curious and agreeable piece called _Polite Conversation_ (1738), on which, though it was not printed till late in his life and close on _Pamela_ itself, there is good reason for thinking that he had been for many years engaged. The importance of dialogue in the novel has been often mentioned and will scarcely be contested: while frequent occasion has been taken to point out that it had hitherto been very ill-achieved. Swift's "conversation" though designedly _underlined_, as it were, to show up current follies and extravagances of phrase and of fashion generally, is yet pretty certainly in the main the real average conversation of the society of his time, which he knew well and thoroughly. Further, there is a distinct, though it may be almost impalpable, difference between it and the conversation of the stage, though it is naturally connected therewith. Non-poetical stage dialogue in capable hands is either deliberate talking for display of "wit" like that of Congreve, or is conditioned and directed by the necessities of action and character. Of course, novel conversation may diverge in the first direction, and cannot properly neglect the second altogether. But, as there is room for very much more of it, it may and should allow itself a considerably wider range and imitate, on proper occasions, the desultory gossip and small talk of people who live on the "boards" of a room-floor and not of a stage.

This is just what Swift's does, and just what there is very little of in Defoe; almost necessarily less in Addison and his group because of their essay form; and hardly anything elsewhere and earlier. Just as the Coverley Papers could, by one process and no difficult one, have been thrown into a novel; so by another, a not much more difficult and a much less complicated one, could the _Polite Conversation_ be thrown into part of a novel--while in each case the incomplete and unintentional draft itself supplies patterns for the complete work in new kind such as had never been given before. Indeed the _Conversation_ may almost be said to _be_ part of a novel--and no small part--as it stands, and of such a novel as had never been written before.

But there was something still further all but absolutely necessary to the novel, though not necessary to it alone, which Defoe, Addison, and Swift, each in his several way, worked mightily to supply: and that was a flexible business-like "workaday" prose style. Not merely so long as men aimed at the eccentric and contorted styles of _Euphues_ and the _Arcadia_, but so long as the old splendid and gorgeous, but cumbrous and complicated pre-Restoration style lasted, romances were possible, but novels were not. You might indeed pick out of Shakespeare--especially from such parts as those of Beatrice, Rosalind, and some of the fools--a capital novel-style: but then you can pick almost anything out of Shakespeare. Elsewhere the constant presence either of semi-poetic phraseology or of some kind of "lingo" was almost fatal. You want what Sprat calls a more "natural way of speaking" (though not necessarily a "naked" one) for novel purposes--a certain absence of ceremony and parade of phrase: though the presence of slang and some other things, the rebuking of which was partly Swift's object in the _Conversation_, is _not_ fatal, and so he, in a manner, blessed and prescribed what he meant to ban.

Thus, by the early years of the reign of George II., or a little later, we find, on the one side, an evident, and variously though inarticulately proclaimed, desire for novels; on the other, the accumulation, in haphazard and desultory way, of almost all the methods, the processes, the "plant," necessary to turn novels out; but hardly anything except the considered work of Bunyan, Defoe, and Swift which really deserves the name of novel. A similar process had been going on in France; and, in the different work of Le Sage and Marivaux, had actually produced work in the kind more advanced than anything in English. But the tables were soon to be turned: and during the rest of the century the English Novel was at last to assert itself as a distinct, an increasingly popular, and a widely cultivated kind. That this was due to the work of the four great novelists who fill its central third and will fill our next chapter cannot perhaps be said: that their work was the first great desertion of it may be said safely.