Chapter III: The Four Wheels of the Novel Wain (2)

But the time was coming, though it did not (and could hardly) come very quickly, when Fielding was to discard all kinds of adventitious aids and suggestions--all crutches, spring-boards, go-carts, tugs, patterns, tracings--and go his own way--and the Way of the Novel--with no guidance but something of the example of Cervantes directly and Shakespeare indirectly among the moderns, and of the poetic fiction-writers of old. It is perfectly clear that he had thought widely (and perhaps had read not a little) on the subject of literary criticism, in a sense not common in his day, and that the thinking had led him to a conception of the "prose epic" which, though it might have been partly (not wholly by any means) pieced out of the Italian and Spanish critics of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, had never been worked out as a complete theory, much less applied in practice and to prose. The Prose Epic aims at--and in Fielding's case has been generally admitted to have hit--something like the classical unity of main action. But it borrows from the romance-idea the liberty of a large accretion and divagation of minor and accessory plot:--not the mere "episode" of the ancients, but the true minor plot of Shakespeare. It assumes, necessarily and once for all, the licence of tragi-comedy, in that sense of the term in which _Much Ado About Nothing_ and _A Winter's Tale_ are tragi-comedies, and in which _Othello_ itself might have been made one. And it follows further in the wake of the Shakespearean drama by insisting far more largely than ancient literature of any kind, and far more than any modern up to its date except drama had done, on the importance of Character. Description and dialogue are rather subordinate to these things than on a level with them--but they are still further worked out than before. And there is a new element--perhaps suggested by the _parabasis_ of ancient comedy, but, it may be, more directly by the peculiar method of Swift in _A Tale of a Tub_. At various places in his narrative, but especially at the beginnings of books and chapters, Fielding as it were "calls a halt" and addresses his readers on matters more or less relevant to the story, but rather in the manner of a commentator and scholiast upon it than as actual parts of it. Of this more later: for the immediate purpose is to survey and not to criticise.

The result of all this was _Tom Jones_--by practically universal consent one of the capital books of English literature. It is unnecessary to recapitulate the famous praises of Gibbon, of Coleridge, of Byron, and of others: and it is only necessary to deal briefly with the complaints which, if they have never found such monumental expression as the praises, have been sometimes widely entertained. These objections--as regards interest--fasten partly on the address-digressions, partly on the great inset-episode of "The Man of the Hill:" as regards morality on a certain alleged looseness of principle in that respect throughout, and especially on the licence of conduct accorded to the hero himself and the almost entire absence of punishment for it. As for the first, "The Man of the Hill" was partly a concession to the fancy of the time for such things, partly a following of such actual examples as Fielding admitted--for it need hardly be said that the inset-episode, of no or very slight connection with the story, is common both in the ancients and in Cervantes, while it is to be found as long after Fielding as in the early novel-work of Dickens. The digression-openings are at least as satisfactory to some as they are unsatisfactory to others; it is even doubtful whether they annoy anybody half so much as they have delighted some excellent judges. The other point is well worn: but the wearing has not taken off its awkwardness and unsavouriness. Difference of habit and manners at the time will account for much: but the wiser apologists will simply say that Fielding's attitude to certain deviations from the strict moral law was undoubtedly very indulgent, provided that such deviations were unaccompanied by the graver and more detestable vices of cruelty, treachery, and fraud--that to vice which was accompanied by these blacker crimes he was utterly merciless; and that if he is thus rather exposed to the charge of "compounding by damning"--in the famous phrase--the things that he damned admit of no excuse and those that he compounded for have been leniently dealt with by all but the sternest moralists.

Such things are, however (in the admirable French sense), _misères_--wretched petty cavils and shallows of criticism. The only sensible thing to do is to launch out with Fielding into that deep and open sea of human character and fate which he dared so gloriously. During the curious phase of literary opinion which the last twenty years or so have seen, it has apparently been discovered by some people that his scheme of human thought and feeling is too simple--"toylike" I think they call it--in comparison with that, say, of Count Tolstoi or of Mr. Meredith, that modern practice has reached a finer technique than his or even than that of his greatest follower, Thackeray. Far be it from the present writer to say, or to insinuate, anything disrespectful of the great moderns who have lately left us. Yet it may be said without the slightest disrespect to them that the unfavourable comparison is mainly a revival of Johnson's mistake as to Fielding and Richardson. It is, however, something more--for it comes also from a failure to estimate aright the _parabasis_-openings which have been more than once referred to. These passages do not perhaps exhibit the by-work and the process in the conspicuous skeleton-clock fashion which their critics admire and desire, but they contain an amount of acute and profound exploration of human nature which it would be difficult to match and impossible to surpass elsewhere: while the results of Fielding's working, of his "toylike" scheme, are remarkable toys indeed--toys which, if we regard them as such, must surely strike us as rather uncanny. One is sometimes constrained to think that it is perhaps not much more difficult to make than to recognise a thoroughly live character. It certainly must be very difficult to do the latter if there is any considerable number of persons who are unable to do it in the case of almost every one of the personages of _Tom Jones_. With one possible exception they are all alive--even more so than those of _Joseph Andrews_ and with a less peculiar and limited liveliness than those of _Jonathan Wild_. But it certainly is curious that as the one good man of _Jonathan_, Heartfree, is the least alive of its personages, so the one bad man of _Tom_, Blifil, occupies the same position.

The result of this variety and abundance of life is an even more than corresponding opportunity for enjoyment. This enjoyment may arise in different persons from different sources. The much praised and seldom cavilled at unity and completeness of the story may appeal to some. There are others who are inclined towards elaborate plots as Sam Weller was to the "'rig'nal" of his subpoena. It was a "gratifyin' sort o' thing, and eased his mind" to be aware of its existence, and that was all. These latter find _their_ sources of enjoyment elsewhere, but everywhere else. The abundance and the vividness of character-presentation; the liveliness and the abundance of the staging of that character; the variety of scene and incident--all most properly connected with the plot, but capable of existing and of being felt without it; the human dialogue; the admirable phrase in that dialogue and out of it, in the digressions, in the narrative, above, and through, and about, and below it all--these things and others (for it is practically impossible to exhaust the catalogue) fill up the cup to the brim, and keep it full, for the born lover of the special novel-pleasure.

In one point only was Fielding a little unfortunate perhaps: and even here the "perhaps" has to be underlined. He came just before the end of a series of almost imperceptible changes in ordinary English speech which brought about something like a stationary state. His maligner and only slightly younger contemporary, Horace Walpole, in some of his letters, writes in a fashion which, putting mere slang aside, has hardly any difference from that of to-day. Fielding still uses "hath" for "has" and a few other things which seem archaic, not to students of literature but to the general. In the same way dress, manners, etc., though much more picturesque, were by that fact distinguished from those of almost the whole nineteenth century and the twentieth as far as it has gone: while incidents were, even in ordinary life, still usual which have long ceased to be so. In this way the immense advance--greater than was made by any one else till Miss Austen--that he made in the pure novel of this ordinary life may be missed. But the intrinsic magnificence, interest, nature, abundance of _Tom Jones_ can only be missed by those who were predestined to miss them. It is tempting--but the temptation must be resisted--to enliven these pages with an abstract of its astonishing "biograph-panorama." But nothing save itself can do it justice. "Take and read" is the only wise advice.

No such general agreement has been reached in respect of Fielding's last novel, _Amelia_. The author's great adversary, Johnson--an adversary whose hostility was due partly to generous and grateful personal relations with Richardson, partly to political disagreement (for Fielding was certainly "a vile Whig"), but most of all perhaps to a sort of horrified recoil from the novelist's easy handling of temptations which were no easy matter to his critic--was nearly if not quite propitiated by it: and the enthusiasm for it of such a "cynic" as Thackeray is well known. Of the very few persons whom it would not be ridiculous to name with these, Scott--whose competence in criticising his own art is one of the most wonderful though the least generally recognised things about him--inclines, in the interesting Introduction-Dialogue to _The Fortunes of Nigel_, to put it on a level with _Tom Jones_ itself as a perfectly constructed novel. But modern criticism has, rightly or wrongly, been more dubious. Amelia is almost too perfect: her very forgiveness (it has been suggested) would be more interesting if she had not almost completely shut her eyes to there being anything to forgive. Her husband seems to us to prolong the irresponsibility of youth, which was pardonable in Tom, to a period of life and to circumstances of enforced responsibility which make us rather decline to honour the drafts he draws; and he is also a little bit of a fool, which Tom, to do him justice, is not, though he is something of a scatterbrain. Dr. Harrison, whose alternate wrath and reconciliation supply the most important springs of the plot, is, though a natural, a rather unreasonable person. The "total impression" has even been pronounced by some people to be a little dull. What there is of truth in these criticisms and others (which it would be long even to summarise) may perhaps be put briefly under two heads. It is never so easy to arouse interest in virtue as it is in vice: or in weak and watered vice as in vice rectified (or _un_rectified) to full strength. And the old requirement of "the quest" is one which will hardly be dispensed with. Here (for we know perfectly well that Amelia's virtue is in no danger) there is no quest, except that of the fortune which ought to be hers, which at last comes to her husband, and which we are told (and hope rather doubtfully) that husband had at last been taught--by the Fool's Tutor, Experience--not utterly to throw away. But this fortune drops in half casually at the last by a series of stage accidents, not ill-machined by any means, but not very particularly interesting.

Such, however, are the criticisms which Fielding himself has taught people to make, by the very excellence of his success in the earlier novels: and there is a certain comparative and relative validity in them. But consider _Amelia_ in itself, and they begin to look, if not positively unfounded, rather unimportant. Once more, the astonishing truth and variety of scene and character make themselves felt--even more felt--even felt in new directions. The opening prison scenes exceed anything earlier even in Fielding himself, much more in any one else, as examples of the presentation of the unfamiliar. Miss Matthews--whom Fielding has probably abstained from working out as much as he might lest she should, from the literary point of view, obscure Amelia--is a marvellous outline; Colonels James and Bath are perfectly finished studies of ordinary and extraordinary "character" in the stage sense. No novel even of the author's is fuller of _vignettes_--little pictures of action and behaviour, of manners and society, which are not in the least irrelevant to the general story, but on the contrary extra-illustrate and carry it out.

While, therefore, we must in no way recede from the position above adopted in regard to Richardson, we may quite consistently accord an even higher place to Fielding. He relieved the novel of the tyranny and constraint of the Letter; he took it out of the rut of confinement to a single or a very limited class of subjects--for the themes of _Pamela_ and _Clarissa_ to a very large extent, of _Pamela_ and _Grandison_ to a considerable one, and of all three to an extent not small, are practically the same. He gave it altogether a larger, wider, higher, deeper range. He infused in it (or restored to it) the refreshing and preserving element of humour. He peopled it with a great crowd of lively and interesting characters--endowed, almost without regard to their technical "position _in_ life," with unlimited possession _of_ life. He shook up its pillows, and bustled its business arrangements. He first gave it--for in matter of prose style Richardson has few resources, and those rather respectable than transporting, and decidedly monotonous--the attractions of pure literature in form, and in pretty various form. He also gave it the attraction of pure comedy, only legitimately salted with farce, in such personages as Adams and Partridge; of lower and more farcical, but still admirable comedy in Slipslop and Trulliber and Squire Western; of comedy almost romantic and certainly charming in Sophia; of domestic drama in Amelia; of satiric portraiture in a hundred figures from the cousins (respectable and disreputable), Miss Western and Lady Bellaston, downwards. He stocked it with infinite miscellanies of personage, and scene, and picture, and phrase. As has happened in one or two other cases, he carried, at least in the opinion of the present writer, the particular art as far as it will go. He did not indeed leave nothing for his successors to do--on the contrary he left them in a sense everything--for he showed how everything could be done. But if he has sometimes been equalled, he has never been surpassed: and it is not easy to see even how he can be surpassed. For as his greatest follower has it somewhere, though not of him, "You cannot beat the best, you know."

One point only remains, the handling of which may complete a treatment which is designedly kept down in detail. It has been hinted at already, perhaps more than once, but has not been brought out. This is the enormous range of suggestion in Fielding--the innumerable doors which stand open in his ample room, and lead from it to other chambers and corridors of the endless palace of Novel-Romance. This had most emphatically not been the case with his predecessor: for Richardson, except in point of mere length, showed little power of expatiation, kept himself very much to the same ground and round, and was not likely to teach anybody else to make excursions. Indeed Fielding's breaking away in _Joseph Andrews_ is an allegory in itself. But, at least with pupils and followers of any wits, there was not even any need of such breaking away from himself, though no doubt there are in existence many dull and slavish attempts to follow his work, especially _Tom Jones_. "Find it out for yourself"--the great English motto which in the day of England's glory was the motto of her men of learning as well as of her men of business, of her artists as well as of her craftsmen--might have been Fielding's: but he supplemented it with infinite finger-pointings towards the various things that might be found out. Almost every kind of novel exists--potentially--in his Four (the custom of leaving out _Jonathan Wild_ should be wholly abrogated), though of course they do not themselves illustrate or carry out at length many of the kinds that they thus suggest.

And in fact it could not be otherwise: because, as has been pointed out, while Fielding had no inconsiderable command of the Book of Literature, he turned over by day and night the larger, the more difficult, but still the greater Book of Life. Not merely _quicquid agunt homines_, but _quicquid sentiunt, quicquid cogitant_, whatever they love and hate, whatever they desire or decline--all these things are the subjects of his own books: and the range of subject which they suggest to others is thus of necessity inexhaustible.

If there have been some who denied or failed to recognise his greatness, it must be because he has played on these unwary ones the same trick that Garrick, in an immortal scene, played on his own Partridge. There is so little parade about Fielding (for even the opening addresses are not parade to these good people: they may disconcert or even disgust, but they do not dazzle them), that his characters and his scenes look commonplace. They feel sure that "if they had seen a ghost they would have looked in the very same manner and done just as he does." They are sure that, in the scene with Gertrude, "Lord, help them! any man--that is any good man--that had such a mother would have done exactly the same."

Well! in a way no doubt they are right; and one may imitate the wisdom of Mr. Jones on the original occasion in not saying much more to them. To others, of course, this is the very miracle of art--a miracle, as far as the art of prose fiction is concerned, achieved in its fullness for practically the first time. This is the true _mimesis_--the re-creation or fresh creation of fictitious reality. There were in Fielding's time, and probably ever since have been, those who thought him "low;" there were, even in his own time, and have been in varying, but on the whole rather increased, degree since, those who thought him immoral: there appear to be some who think (or would like it to be thought that they think) him commonplace and obvious. Now, as it happens, all these charges have been brought against Nature too. To embellish, and correct, and heighten, and extra-decorate her was not Fielding's way: but to follow, and to interpret, and to take up her own processes with results uncommonly like her own. That is his immense glory to all those who can realise and understand it: and as for the others we must let them alone, joined to their own idols.

In passing to the third of this great quartette, we make a little descent, but not much of one, while the new peak to which we come is well defined and separated, with characters and outlines all its own. It may be doubted whether any competent critic not, like Scott, bribed by compatriotism, ever put Smollett above Fielding, or even on a level with him. Thackeray, in one of the most inspired moments of his rather irregularly-inspired criticism, remarks, "I fancy he did not invent much," and this of itself would refer him to a lower class. The writer of fiction is not to refuse suggestion from his experience; on the contrary, he will do so at his peril, and will hardly by any possibility escape shipwreck unless his line is the purely fantastic. But if he relies solely, or too much, on such experience, though he may be quite successful, his success will be subject to discount, bound to pay royalty to experience itself. It is pretty certain that most of Smollett's most successful things, from _Roderick Random_ to _Humphry Clinker_, and in those two capital books, perhaps, most of all, kept very close to actual experience, and sometimes merely reported it.

This, however, is only a comparative drawback; it is in a sense a positive merit; and it is connected, in a very intimate way, with the general character of Smollett's novel-method. This is, to a great extent, a reaction or relapse towards the picaresque style. Smollett may have translated both Cervantes and Le Sage; he certainly translated the latter: and it was Le Sage who in any case had the greatest influence over him. Now the picaresque method is not exactly untrue to ordinary life: on the contrary, as we have seen, it was a powerful schoolmaster to bring the novel thereto. But it subjects the scenes of ordinary life to a peculiar process of sifting: and when it has got what it wants, it proceeds to heighten them and "touch them up" in its own peculiar manner of decoration. This is Smollett's method throughout, even in that singular _pastiche_ of _Don Quixote_ itself, _Sir Launcelot Greaves_, which certainly was not his happiest conception, but which has had rather hard measure.

As used by him it has singular merits, and communicates to at least three of his five books (_The Adventures of an Atom_ is deliberately excluded as not really a novel at all) a certain "liveliness" which, though it is not the life_like_ness of Fielding, is a great attraction. He showed it first in _Roderick Random_ (1748), which appeared a little before _Tom Jones_, and was actually taken by some as the work of the same author. It would be not much more just to take Roderick as Smollett's deliberate presentment of himself than to apply the same construction to Marryat's not very dissimilar, but more unlucky, _coup d'essai_ of _Frank Mildmay_. But it is certain that there was something, though exactly how much has never been determined, of the author's family history in the earliest part, a great deal of his experiences on board ship in the middle, and probably not a little, though less, of his fortunes in Bath and London towards the end. As a single source of interest and popularity, no doubt, the principal place must be given to the naval part of the book. Important as the English navy had been, for nearly two centuries if not for much longer, it had never played any great part in literature, though it had furnished some caricatured and rather conventional sketches. There is something more in a play, _The Fair Quaker of Deal_, by Charles Shadwell, nephew or son of Dryden's victim, but this was only of third or fourth rate literary value, and an isolated example to boot. The causes of the neglect have been set forth by many writers from Macaulay downwards, and need not be discussed here; the fact is certain. Smollett's employment of "the service" as a subject may have been, consciously and intentionally, only one of those utilisings of personal experience of which we have spoken. But really it was an instance of the great fact that the novelist, on the instigation mainly of Fielding himself, was beginning to take all actual life to be his province.

Smollett brought to his work peculiar powers, the chief of which was a very remarkable one, and almost as much "improved on" Fielding as Fielding's exercise of it was improved on Richardson--that of providing his characters and scenes with accessories. Roderick is not only a much more disagreeable person than Tom, but he is much _less_ of a person: and Strap, though (_vice versâ_) rather a better fellow than Partridge, is a much fainter and more washed-out character. But in mere interest of story and accessories the journey of Roderick and Strap to London is quite the equal, and perhaps the superior, of that of Tom and his hanger-on after we once leave Upton, where the interest is of a kind that Smollett could not reach. It is probable that Fielding might, if he had chosen, have made the prison in _Amelia_ as horribly and disgustingly realistic (to use a horrible and disgusting word) as the ship in _Roderick_, but he at any rate did not choose. Moreover Smollett, himself a member of one of the less predominant partners of the British and Irish partnership, perhaps for that reason hit on utilising the difference of these partners (after a fashion which had never been seen since Shakespeare) in the Welshman Morgan. As far as mere plot goes, he enters into no competition whatever with either Fielding or Richardson: the picaresque model did not require that he should. When Roderick has made use of his friends, knocked down his enemies, and generally elbowed and shoved his way through the crowd of adventures long enough, Narcissa and her fortune are not so much the reward of his exertions as a stock and convenient method of putting an end to the account of them. The customer has been served with a sufficient amount of the commodity he demands: and the scissors are applied, the canister shut up, the tap turned off. It almost results--it certainly coincides--that some of the minor characters, and some of the minor scenes, are much more vivid than the hero (the heroine is almost an absolute nonentity) and the whole story. The curate and the exciseman in the ninth chapter are, by common consent, among Smollett's greatest triumphs; but the curate might be excommunicated and the exciseman excised without anybody who read the book perceiving the slightest gap or missing link, as far as the story is concerned.

Smollett's second venture, _Peregrine Pickle_ (1751), was more ambitious, perhaps rose higher in parts, but undoubtedly contained even more doubtful and inferior matter. No one can justly blame him, though any one may most justly refrain from praising, from the general point of view, as regards the "insets" of Miss Williams's story in _Roderick_ and of that of Lady Vane here. From that point of view they range with the "Man of the Hill" in _Tom Jones_, and in the first case at least, though most certainly not in the second, have more justification of connection with the central story. He may so far underlie the charge of error of judgment, but nothing worse. Unluckily the "Lady Vane" insertion was, to a practical certainty, a commercial not an artistic transaction: and both here and elsewhere Smollett carried his already large licence to the extent of something like positive pornography. He is in fact one of the few writers of real eminence who have been forced to Bowdlerise themselves. Further, there would be more excuse for the most offensive part of _Peregrine_ if it were not half plagiarism of the main situations of _Pamela_ and _Clarissa_: if Smollett had not deprived his hero of all the excuses which, even in the view of some of the most respectable characters of _Pamela_, attached to the conduct of Mr. B.; and if he had not vulgarised Lovelace out of any possible attribution of "regality," except of being what the time would have called King of the Black Guard. As for Tom Jones, he does not come into comparison with "Perry" at all, and he would doubtless have been most willing and able--competent physically as well as morally--to administer the proper punishment to that young ruffian by drubbing him within an inch of his life.

These, no doubt, are grave drawbacks: but the racy fun of the book almost atones for them: and the exaltation of the naval element of _Roderick_ which one finds here in Trunnion and Hatchway and Pipes carries the balance quite to the other side. This is the case even without, but much more with, the taking into account of Smollett's usual irregular and almost irrelevant _bonuses_, such as the dinner after the fashion of the ancients and the rest. No: _Peregrine Pickle_ can never be thrown to the wolves, even to the most respectable and moral of these animals in the most imposing as well as ravening of attitudes. English Literature cannot do without it.

Without _Ferdinand Count Fathom_ (1753) many people have thought that English Literature could do perfectly well: and without going quite so far, one may acknowledge that perhaps a shift could be made. The idea of re-transferring the method (in the first place at any rate) to foreign parts was not a bad one, and it may be observed that by far the best portion of _Fathom_ is thus occupied. Not a few of these opening passages are excellent: and Fathom's mother, if not a person, is an excellent type: it is probable that the writer knew the kind well. But his unhappy tendency to enter for the same stakes as his great forerunners makes it almost impossible not to compare _Ferdinand Fathom_ with _Jonathan Wild_: and the effect is very damaging to the Count. Much of the book is dull: and Fathom's conversation is (to adopt a cant word) extremely unconvincing. The fact seems to be that Smollett had run his picaresque vein dry, as far as it connected itself with mere rascality of various kinds, and he did well to close it. He had published three novels in five years: he waited seven before his next, and then eleven more before his last.

A qualified apology has been hinted above for _Sir Launcelot Greaves_. It is undoubtedly evidence of the greatness of _Don Quixote_ that there should have been so many direct imitations of it by persons of genius and talent: but this particular instance is unfortunate to the verge of the preposterous, if not over it. The eighteenth century was indeed almost the capital time of English eccentricity: and it was also a time of licence which sometimes looked very like lawlessness. But its eccentricities were not at this special period romantic: and its lawlessness was rather abuse of law than wholesale neglect of it. A rascally attorney or a stony-hearted creditor might inflict great hardship under the laws affecting money: and a brutal or tyrannical squire might do the same under those affecting the tenure or the enjoyment of house or land. "Persons of quality" might go very far. But even a person of quality, if he took to riding about the country in complete steel, assaulting the lieges, and setting up a sort of cadi-justice of his own in opposition to the king's, would probably have been brought pretty rapidly, if not to the recovery of his senses, to the loss of his liberty. Nor, with rare exceptions, are the subordinate or incidental humours of the first class. But I have always thought that the opening passage more than entitles the book to an honourable place in the history of English fiction. I do not know where to look, before it, for such an "interior"--such a complete Dutch picture of room and furniture and accessories generally. Even so learned a critic as the late M. Brunetière thought that things of the kind were not older than Balzac. I have known English readers, not ignorant, who thought they were scarcely older than Dickens. Dickens, however, undoubtedly took them from Smollett, of whom we know that he was an early and enthusiastic admirer: and Scott, who has them much earlier than Dickens, not improbably was in some degree indebted for them to his countryman. At any rate in that countryman they are: and you will not find a much better example of them anywhere than this of the inn-kitchen. But apart from it, and from a few other things of the same or similar kinds, there is little to be said for the book. The divine Aurelia especially is almost more shadowy than the divine Narcissa and the divine Emilia: and can claim no sort of sistership in personality with Amelia or Sophia, even with Clarissa or Pamela. In fact, up to this time Smollett's women--save in the case of Fathom's hell-cat of a mother, and one or two more who are "minors"--have done absolutely nothing for his books. It was to be quite otherwise in the last and best, though even here the heroine _en titre_ is hardly, even though we have her own letters to body her out, more substantial than her elder sisters. But Lydia, though the _ingénue_, is not the real heroine of this book: her aunt and her aunt's maid divide that position between them.

A sufficiently ungracious critic may, if he chooses, see in Smollett's falling back on the letter-plan for _Humphry Clinker_ (1771) an additional proof of that deficiency in strictly inventive faculty which has been noticed. The more generous "judge by results" will hardly care to consider so curiously in the case of such a masterpiece. For a masterpiece it really is. The comparative absence of "character" in the higher and literary sense as contrasted with "character-_parts_" in the technical meaning of the theatre has been admitted in the other books. Here, with the aid of the letters, it is amply supplied, or perhaps (to speak with extreme critical closeness) the character-parts are turned into characters by this means. There is no stint, because of the provision of this higher interest, of the miscellaneous fun and "business" which Smollett had always supplied so lavishly out of his experience, his observation, and, if not his invention, his combining faculty. And there is the setting of interior and exterior "furniture" which has been also referred to. Abundant as is the information which the eighteenth century has given us as to its justly beloved place of pilgrimage, Bath, there is nothing livelier than the Bath scenes here, from Chesterfield to Miss Austen, and few things, if any, so vivid and detailed. So it is with Clifton earlier, with London later, with Scotland last of all, and with the journeys connecting them. Yet these things are mere _hors d'oeuvre_, pickles, sauces, condiments, beside the solid character-food of the Brambles and Melfords, of Winifred Jenkins and of the redoubtable Lismahago. That there is no exaggeration or caricature cannot, of course, be said. It was not Smollett's notion of art to present the elaborate academies of Richardson, or the almost uncanny duplications of Nature which Fielding could achieve. He must embolden, in fact grotesque, the line; heighten, in fact splash and plaster, the colour. But he has not left Nature behind here: he has only put her in a higher light.

One means of doing so has been condemned in him, as in others, as in its great earlier master, Swift, and its greatest later one, Thackeray, by some purists. They call it cheap and inartistic: but this is mere pedantry and prudery. Mis-spelling is not a thing to be employed every day or for every purpose: if you do that, you get into the ineffably dreary monotony which distinguishes the common comic journalist. But thrown in occasionally, and in the proper place, it gives an excellent zest: and it has seldom been employed--never, except in the two instances quoted--better than in the cases of Tabitha Bramble and her maid. For it is employed in the only legitimate way, that of zest, not substance. Tabitha and Winifred would still be triumphs of characterisation of a certain kind if they wrote as correctly as Uncle Matthew or Nephew Jery. Further, Lismahago is a bolder and a much less caricatured utilising of the "national" resource than Morgan. If Smollett had not been a perfectly undaunted, as well as a not very amiable, person he would hardly have dared to "_lacess_ the thistle" in this fashion. But there are few sensible Scotsmen nowadays who would not agree with that most sensible, as well as greatest, of their compatriots, Sir Walter Scott, in acknowledging the justice (comic emphasis granted) of the twitch, and the truth of the grip, at that formidable plant. The way in which Smollett mixes up actual living persons, by their own names, with his fictitious characters may strike us as odd: but there is, for the most part, nothing offensive in it, and in fact, except a little of his apparently inevitable indulgence in nasty detail, there is nothing at all offensive in the book. The contrast of its general tone with that especially of his first two; the softening and mellowing of the general presentation--is very remarkable in a man of undoubtedly not very gentle disposition who had long suffered from extremely bad health, and whose chief original works recently--the _Journey_ and the _Adventures_--had been, the first a tissue of grumbles, the second an outburst of savagery. But though the grumbles recur in Matthew Bramble's mouth, they become merely humorous there: and there is practically no savagery at all. Leghorn, it has been observed more than once, was in a fashion a Land of Beulah: a "season of calm weather" had set in for a rather stormy life just before the end.

Whatever may be his defects (and from the mere point of view of Momus probably a larger number may be found in him than either in Richardson or in Fielding), Smollett well deserves an almost equal place with them in the history of the novel. Richardson, though he had found the universal as far as certain aspects of it in humanity are concerned, had confined it within a very narrow space, or particular envelope, in tone and temper: the fact that he has been called "stifling," though the epithet may not be entirely just, is almost sufficient evidence of this. Fielding had taken the novel into a far larger air and, as has been said already, there was hardly anything to which his method might not lead, and in which it would not be effective. But he had been exclusively English in externals: and the result is that, to this day, he has had less influence abroad than perhaps any English writer of equal genius and than some of far less.[6] Smollett, by his remarkable utilisation of the characteristics of the other members of Magna-Britannia; by his excursions into foreign European and even transatlantic scenery, had widened the external if not the internal prospect; and had done perhaps even more by that chance-medley, as it perhaps was, of attention to the still more internal detail which was to be of such importance in the novel to come. Taking the three together (not without due allowance for the contemporary, if mainly imitative, developments which will be described in the next chapter), they had put prose fiction in a position which it had not attained, even in Spain earlier, even in France at more or less the same time: and had entirely antiquated, on the one hand, the mere _fabliau_ or _novella_--the story of a single limited situation--on the other, the discursive romance with little plot and next to no character. One great further development, impossible at this time, of the larger novel, the historical, waited for Scott: but even this was soon, though very awkwardly, tried. It could not yet be born because the historic sense which was its necessary begetter hardly existed, and because the provision of historic matter for this sense to work on was rather scanty. But it is scarcely extravagant to say that it is more difficult to conceive even Scott doing what he did without Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett before him, than it is to believe that, with these predecessors, somebody like Scott was bound to come.

[6] This is said not to have been quite the case at the _very_
first: but it has been so since.

Great, however, as the three are, there is no need of any "injustice to Ireland"--little as Ireland really has to claim in Sterne's merit or demerit. He is not a fifth wheel to the coach by any means: he is the fourth and almost the necessary one. In Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett the general character and possibilities of the novel had been shown, with the exception just noted: and indeed hardly with that exception, because they showed the way clearly to it. But its almost illimitable particular capabilities remained unshown, or shown only in Fielding's half extraneous divagations, and in earlier things like the work of Swift. Sterne took it up in the spirit of one who wished to exhibit these capabilities; and did exhibit them signally in more than one or two ways. He showed how the novel could present, in refreshed form, the _fatrasie_, the pillar-to-post miscellany, of which Rabelais had perhaps given the greatest example possible, but of which there were numerous minor examples in French. He showed how it could be made, not merely to present humorous situations, but to exhibit a special kind of humour itself--to make the writer as it were the hero without his ever appearing as character in _Tristram_, or to humorise autobiography as in the _Sentimental Journey_. And last of all (whether it was his greatest achievement or not is matter of opinion), he showed the novel of purpose in a form specially appealing to his contemporaries--the purpose being to exhibit, glorify, luxuriate in the exhibition of, sentiment or "sensibility." In none of these things was he wholly original; though the perpetual upbraiding of "plagiarism" is a little unintelligent. Rabelais, not to mention others, had preceded him, and far excelled him, in the _fatrasie_; Swift in the humour-novel; two generations of Frenchmen and Frenchwomen in the "sensibility" kind. But he brought all together and adjusted the English novel, actually to them, potentially to much else.

To find fault with his two famous books is almost contemptibly easy. The plagiarism which, if not found out at once, was found out very soon, is the least of these: in fact hardly a fault at all. The indecency, which _was_ found out at once, and which drew a creditable and not in the least Tartuffian protest from Warburton, is a far more serious matter--not so much because of the licence in subject as because of the unwholesome and sniggering tone. The sentimentality is very often simply maudlin, almost always tiresome _to us_, and in very, very few cases justified by brilliant success even in its own very doubtful kind. Most questionable of all, perhaps, is the merely mechanical mountebankery--the blanks, and the dashes, and the rows of stops, the black pages and the marbled pages which he employs to force a guffaw from his readers. The abstinence from any central story in _Tristram_ is one of those dubious pieces of artifice which may possibly show the artist's independence of the usual attractions of story-telling, but may also suggest to the churlish the question whether his invention would have supplied him with any story to tell; and the continual asides and halts and parenthetic divagations in the _Journey_ are not quite free from the same suggestion. In fact if you "can see a church by daylight" you certainly want no piercing vision, and no artificial assistance of light or lens, to discover the faults of this very unedifying churchman.

But he remains, for all that, a genius; and one of the great figures in our history. There is to his credit in general, as has been already pointed out, the great asset of having indicated, and in two notable instances patterned, the out-of-the-way novel--the novel eccentric, particular, individual. There is to that credit still more the brilliancy of the two specimens themselves in spite of their faults; their effectiveness in the literature of delight; the great powers of a kind more or less peculiar to the artist which they show, and the power, perhaps still greater, which they display in the actually general and ordinary lines of the novel, though adapted to this extraordinary use.

For though it pleased Sterne to anticipate the knife-grinder's innocent confession, "Story? God bless you! I have none to tell, sir!" in a sardonic paraphrase of half a score of volumes, he actually possessed the narrative faculty in an extraordinary degree. He does not merely show this in his famous inset short stories, accomplished as these are: he achieves a much greater marvel in the way in which he makes his _fatrasies_ as it were novels. After one or two, brief but certainly not tedious, volumes of the _Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy_, you know that you are being cheated, and are going to be: at the end you know still more certainly that you have been. You have had nothing of the "Life" but a great deal round rather than about the birth, and a few equivocal, merely glanced at, and utterly unco-ordinated incidents later. If you have had any "opinions" they have been chiefly those of Mr. Tristram Shandy's father and other members of his family, or those of its friends and circle, or of those shadowy personages outside the pretended story, such as Eugenius and Yorick, besides a few discourses which drop the slightest pretension of being Shandean or Tristramic and are plainly and simply the author's. In the _Journey_ there is more unity; but it is, quite frankly, the unity of the temperament of that author himself. The incidents--sentimental, whimsical, fie-fie--have no other connection or tendency than the fact that they occur to the "gentleman in the black silk smalls" and furnish him with figures as it were for his performance. Yet you are _held_ in a way in which nothing but the romance or the novel ever does hold you. The thing is a [Greek: mythos hamythos]--story without story-end, without story-beginning, without story-connection or middle: but a story for all that. A dangerous precedent, perhaps; but a great accomplishment: and, even as a precedent, the leader of a very remarkable company. In not a few noteworthy later books--in a very much greater number of parts of later books--as we take our hats off to the success we are saluting not a new but an old friend, and that friend Sterne.

On the second great count--character--Sterne's record is still more distinguished: and here there is no legerdemain about the matter. There is a consensus of all sound opinion to the effect that my Uncle Toby is an absolute triumph--even among those who think that, as in the case of Colonel Newcome later, it would have been possible to achieve that triumph without letting his simplicity run so near to something less attractive. It is not the sentiment that is here to blame, because Sterne has luckily not forgotten (as he has in the case of his dead donkeys and his live Marias) that humour is the only thing that will keep such sentiment from turning mawkish, if not even rancid; and that the antiseptic effect will not be achieved by keeping your humour and your sentiment in separate boxes. Trim is even better: he is indeed next to Sancho--and perhaps Sam Weller--the greatest of all "followers" in the novel: he supplies the only class-figure in which Sterne perhaps beats Fielding himself. About Walter Shandy there is more room for difference: and it is possible to contend that, great as he is, he is not complete--that he is something of a "humour" in the old one-sided and over-emphasised Jonsonian sense. Nothing that he does or says misbecomes him: but a good deal that he does not do and say might be added with advantage, in order to give us the portrait of a whole as well as a live man. As for the other male characters, Sterne's plan excused him--as it did not quite in Mr. Shandy's case--from making them more than sketches and shadows. But what uncommonly lively sketches and shadows they are!

Sterne's unlucky failing prevented him in most cases from touching the women off with a clean brush: but the quality of _liveness_ pertains to them in almost a higher measure: and perhaps testifies even more strongly to his almost uncanny faculty of communicating it by touches which are not always unclean and are sometimes slight to an astonishing degree. Even that shadow of a shade "My dear, dear Jenny" has a suggestion of verity about her which has shocked and fluttered some: the maids of the Shandean household, the grisettes and peasant girls and ladies of the _Journey_, have flesh which is not made of paper, and blood that is certainly not ink. And the peculiarity extends to his two chief named heroines, Mrs. Shandy and the Widow. Never were any two female personages more unceremoniously treated in the way of scanty and incidental appearance. Never were any personages of scanty and incidental appearance made more alive and more female.

His details and accessories of all kinds, descriptive, literary, and other, would give subject for a separate chapter; but we must turn (for this chapter is already too long) to his phrase--in dialogue, narrative, whatever you please to call it. For the fact is that these two things, and all others in which phrase and expression can be used, melt into each other with Sterne in a manner as "flibberti-gibbety" as most other things about him. This phrase or expression is of course artificial to the highest degree: and it is to it that the reproach of depending on mechanical aids chiefly applies. And yet laboriously figured, tricked, machined as it is--easy as once more it may be to prove that it is artifice and not art--the fact remains that, not merely (perhaps not by any means chiefly) in the stock extract-pieces which everybody knows, but almost everywhere, it is triumphant: and that English literature would be seriously impoverished without it. Certainly never was there a style which more fully justified the definition given by Buffon, in Sterne's own time, of style as "the _very_ man." Falsetto, "faking," vamping, shoddy--all manner of evil terms may be heaped upon it without the possibility of completely clearing it from them. To some eyes it underlies them most when it is most ambitious, as in the Le Fevre story and the diatribe against critics. It leaves the court with all manner of stains on its character. Only, once more, if it did not exist we should be ignorant of more than one of the most remarkable possibilities of the English language.

Thus, in almost exactly the course of a technical generation--from the appearance of _Pamela_ in 1740 to that of _Humphry Clinker_ in 1771--the wain of the novel was solidly built, furnished with four main wheels to move it, and set a-going to travel through the centuries. In a sense, inasmuch as _Humphry Clinker_ itself, though Smollett's best work, can hardly be said to show any absolutely new faculties, character, or method, the process was even accomplished in two-thirds of the time, between _Pamela_ and _Tristram Shandy_. We shall see in the next chapter how eagerly the examples were taken up: and how, long before Smollett died, the novel of this and that kind had become one of the most prolific branches of literature. But, for the moment, the important thing is to repeat that it had been thoroughly and finally started on its high road, in general by Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett; in particular and wayward but promising side-paths by Sterne.