Chapter THREE: Towards Flaubert

It may at first sight seem curious that a section of a small work devoted to the English--and of course the American--Novel should be captioned with the name of a French novelist. But in the first place the art and still more the frame of mind of the Sage of Croisset are so deep-embedded in the art and frame of mind of the English and still more of the American novelist and all thought of the great, Nordic work of “that poor dear Gustave,” as Mr. Henry James used to call him, is so cast out of all French literary practices or aspirations to-day that if Flaubert is not an English novelist his Titanic and Norman ghost has no place at all. To state one of those half-truths that are infinitely illuminating, you may say that without _Madame Bovary_, _Babbitt_ could never have existed and without _Bouvard et Pécuchet_ there could have been no _Way of All Flesh_. For all I know Mr. Sinclair Lewis may never have read a word of Flaubert and I will bet my hat that, for the purposes of this discussion, the shade of Samuel Butler would declare that he knew no French at all. But the point is that, without those two works in French, those two national monuments in English could hardly at this time exist or weigh with the public since the public would not be prepared for them.

Let us go a step further and declare that without Cranmer we should have had another three centuries to wait for Flaubert, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Joseph Conrad, Mr. John Galsworthy, and my friend “Red” Lewis. For without the English Prayer Book and its follower in date and style the English Bible, with or without Cranmer’s suppressed preface, and without the followers in date and style of Defoe, Bunyan, and Samuel Richardson, how should we have to-day any English prose, novel-form or any English frame of mind? Or any Anglo-American Concord literature; or any British Empire or any Anglo-Saxon anything?

You may say that that is stretching things a little. And yet I do not know that it is. Let us make concessions. If you will concede to me my little point about the descent of the English Novel from Cranmer’s prayer book and the English Bible--which cannot matter to you at all, I will willingly concede to you that it was the phraseology if not the doctrine of the Book of Common Prayer and the frame of mind of the Old Testament As By Law Appointed that gave to England the Empire of India and to the world the United States of North America, those two shining products of English stiff-neckedness and non-theological Bible-reading. For how without the Books of Kings could either Clive or, say, Andrew Jackson have found heart or courage to continue in their courses? Of course a thought or so might be given to North’s _Plutarch_ that was published in 1579.

Be that as it may, what I am here getting at is the fact that preceding and underlying the ornate florescences of Lyly and the prodigious formlessnesses of Spenser and preceding and underlying the incredible verbal felicity and neat plottings of Shakespeare himself went the stream of dogged, menacing prose and the realist’s native imagery of those two religious compilations. And that subterranean stream immensely fecundated--to make no larger claim--at once the Anglo-Saxon national character and the literature that is to be found in the English language.

I am aware that here we are on ticklish ground and that reformers and the advanced generally deny with a great deal of heat that literature has any influence at all on peoples. I remember once being furiously lectured by the most moral and one of the most advanced of English novelists--being furiously and minatorily taken to task because mildly and to make conversation I alleged that _Don Quixote_ had something to do with the passing of the sham chivalric spirit in Europe. The lecture was indeed so furious that, being a non-combative person and caring nothing about the matter, I have from that day to this rather given up considering the subject at all. You see, my friend the novelist was so notoriously virtuous and benevolent that hitherto I should have hated to hurt his feelings by advancing that anyone could be influenced by any book at all. For what he alleged, like an apostle announcing some kind of creed, was that populaces influence literature--that Cervantes was produced because a widespread spirit of mockery for chivalry, real or sham, was so abroad in the world that _Don Quixote_ was written merely in answer to a demand, as articles on the Calcutta Sweepstake are written about the time when Derby Day approaches.

As to that I am no authority and the reader must settle for himself whether that hen or that egg came first--I mean whether the spirit of the English populace demanded first the English Prayer Book and the English Bible and demanded afterwards in due course the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ and _Robinson Crusoe_, or whether the English Bible so influenced the English people that they demanded in due course the works of Bunyan and Defoe. Or as a third proposition: Did the English Bible so influence Bunyan and both so influence Defoe that in the end the product was _Pamela_, the short tales of Diderot, the novels of Stendhal, Flaubert, and his successors and so on until the novel of to-day was arrived at?

As I have said, I do not immensely care about the matter. Bunyan may never have read the Bible, Defoe may never have read Bunyan, or Richardson Defoe. But it makes such a convenient pattern to assume that writers are descended the one from the other that I mean to assume it and the reader must modify the theory how he will.

Regarded from that point of view, in pre- as in post-Elizabethan days and underlying Elizabethan days themselves, you did have that stern but decorated prose and that determination to rely on illustrations, parables, and images drawn solely from material to be found about normal people the world over and throughout time; simultaneously, on the surface of things you had a courtlier and more elaborated prose which had the Sublime as its ideal and nothing less vulgar than passages modelled on Juvenal or the plays of Plautus for its light relief. The Bible says: “Take us the little foxes, the foxes that eat our grapes” as an illustration of love, and “He shall feed his sheep” as the highest expression of the divine functionings of the Saviour. The _Faerie Queene_ cannot deal with any fox or any hound of lower extraction than Cerberus and the only redeemer who could have saved the world for the writers of Romances was, in his panoply, King Arthur with Lancelot, Gawain, and the rest of his apostles all pricking over the plains of Camelot.

So let us say that it was to the homespun illustrations, the simple imagery and the stern diction of the Bible that we owe Bunyan--for obviously Bunyan read the Scriptures, year in and year out, during a lifetime of Bedford Gaol, of persecution and turmoil, whereas the only remains of the courtlier modes are found to come from North’s _Plutarch_ which influenced profoundly Shakespeare and possibly Sir Thomas Browne. But Shakespeare obviously could not have any successors and Browne found none till R. L. S. came to be his sedulous ape. So that the influence of North’s translation remained, if profound, at least rather ethical than literary--until it was finally ousted by the versions of the Langhornes and Church’s of days much more modern.

Our space not being boundless we must now skip to Richardson. For Richardson I have the profoundest respect that amounts as nearly as possible to an affection--if that is to say it is possible to have an affection for a man whose death preceded one’s birth by one hundred and twelve years. I do not apologize for the fact that _Pamela_ is my personal favourite, whereas the graver critics and mankind in general prefer _Clarissa_. By that the reader need not be guided, but he should certainly pay a good deal of attention to the works of Richardson--and indeed to Richardson himself.

That tranquil person came into the world in 1689--twenty-seven or eight years after the birth of Defoe and one year after the death of Bunyan. But whereas both of his predecessors seem to strike notes almost entirely of the seventeenth century, Richardson seems to be absolutely of the eighteenth and, with him, sentimentality was born in the world of the novel. That perhaps was necessary to an age that banished if not conventional, then at least doctrinal, moralizings to its collections of sermons in volume form. For them of course there was a prodigious demand.

Of course, too, it would be wrong to assert that moralizing found no place in the novels of Richardson since the high moral purpose breathes from every pore of his pages. But it was not with moralizing that he made his primary appeal as had been the case with Bunyan, nor was it likely that had he so done he would have found many readers. No, it is his sentimentalizing that is his E string.

Against that I have nothing to say. Anglo-Saxons are sentimentalists before everything and in all their arts, and it is probable that without sentimentality as an ingredient no Anglo-Saxon artist could work: certainly he could have no appeal. To produce national masterpieces in paint Turner must bathe his canvases deep in that gentle fluid; the English lyric is a marvel of sentimentality and so is English domestic architecture with its mellow--or mellowed!--red brick, its dove-cotes, its south walls for netted fruits. So the first of modern novelists must be one of the greatest of sentimentalists. And on those lines his appeal is universal and everlasting.

Only to-day an American left the ship on which I am writing in the port of Lisbon and, I happening to mention because he was in my mind the name of Richardson, this American--professor at that and practitioner of a sister art--this American gentleman assured me solemnly that he read _Clarissa Harlowe_ at least twice every year and cried often during each reading. Now there must be some reason for this phenomenon, which appears very singular. It is not, however, rare, for the hottest literary discussions I have ever had in England--where, of course, the discussion of literature is not in good form--have been with laymen like professors or lawyers as to the relative merits of _Pamela_ and _Clarissa_.

For me, I read Richardson for a hearty and wholesome dose of sentimentality and if one does that one may as well have that quality laid on as thickly as it will go. And it seems to me that the history of a serving-maid who resists her master’s efforts at seduction and ultimately forces him to marry her is a more sentimental affair than that of a young lady of quality who permits herself to be seduced by a relatively commonplace Lothario. For myself I have always felt inclined to cheer over the success of the one young female rather than to weep for the tribulations of the other. Pamela certainly seems to be the more sporting character of the two.

Still, one should perhaps not read Richardson for his sporting quality, and that sort of thing is really no affair of mine. The main point is that Samuel Richardson is still read and read with enthusiasm. I have even met persons who were engrossed by the conversations in the Cedar Parlour of _Sir Charles Grandison_.

That Richardson’s tender muse was at times too much for the robuster and more cynical taste of his age is proved by the fact that Fielding’s first famous novel was begun as a parody on the first famous novel of Richardson. By that date the novel of commerce was well on the way to the market and young ladies lying on sofas reading the latest fiction or furiously sending their maids to the circulating libraries for the next five volumes of their latest favourite--such young ladies were familiar features of the social landscape. Literature had, in fact, become a sound, if not an immensely lucrative, proposition.

And it is pleasant to think that, happy as he was in everything that he touched, Richardson was not only novelist but printer and publisher and quite a warm business man in either capacity. He was, too, a favourite correspondent and companion of innumerable young ladies who consulted him as to their amatory predicaments and because of that he is not only the first novelist in the modern sense of the word but also the first literary feminist. You might call him an eighteenth-century Henry James and not go so far wrong.

At any rate, he stands alone as a modern novelist and had in England neither appreciable imitators nor rivals until the arrival on the scene of the author of the _Barchester Towers_ series.

Except for Smollett--whom it is hopeless to expect Anglo-Saxon readers to appreciate or to consume, the main stream of development of the novel passed once more to the Continent of Europe. Smollett begat Captain Marryat, who was one of the greatest of English novelists and is therefore regarded as a writer for boys, Smollett himself being most prized by the purveyors of books called “curious” in second-hand catalogues.

Before, however, considering Diderot, Stendhal, Chateaubriand, and Flaubert, all avowed followers of the author of _Clarissa_, it might be as well to think a little about Fielding--as at once a dreadful example of how not to do things and as the begetter of Thackeray and the product that it is convenient to call the nuvvle as opposed to the novel. For at about the date of the births of Napoleon, Wellington, Ney, and many others who began the modern world, and just a little after the death of Richardson, and just a little before the birth of the North American Republic, and still a little more before the Cæsarian operation that produced the French Republic, distinct cleavages began to make themselves observed in the fields of writing, these eventually hardening themselves into the three main streams of the Literature of Escape from the everyday world; into the commercial product that Mamma selected for your reading, that it is convenient to call the nuvvle and that formed the immense bulk of the reading matter, and finally into the modern novel which does not avoid the problems of the day and is written with some literary skill. This last Richardson begat.

And it is convenient to say that Defoe, in spite of his moralizations, was the first writer of the Literature of Escape, just as Smollett and Marryat may be described as carrying it on and the young H. G. Wells and the young Rudyard Kipling as bringing it--at any rate temporarily--to a triumphant close.

Were it not that they were avowed moralizers of a middle-to-lower-middle-class type, the Fielding-to-Thackeray lineage of writers might also be regarded as purveyors of the Literature of Escape, but their continually brought-in passages of moralizations are such a nuisance that they cannot be ignored. Though they were both amateurs in the sense that neither knew how to write or cared anything about it, Thackeray at times projected his scenes so wonderfully that now and then he trembles dreadfully excitingly on the point of passing from the stage of purveyor of the nuvvle to that of the real novelist. And it is to be said for Fielding that although _Tom Jones_ contains an immense amount of rather nauseous special-pleading, the author does pack most of it away into solid wads of hypocrisy at the headings of Parts or Chapters. These can in consequence be skipped and the picaresque story with its mildly salacious details can without difficulty be followed. One might indeed almost say that Fielding was a natural story-teller, whereas Thackeray was none at all. Fielding at least, like a story-teller in a school dormitory, does manage to lose himself in details of people running into and out of each others’ bedrooms in hotel corridors at night--something like that. But Thackeray never could: the dread spectre of the Athenæum Club was for ever in his background.

And I imagine that the greatest literary crime ever committed was Thackeray’s sudden, apologetic incursion of himself into his matchless account of the manœuvres of Becky Sharp on Waterloo day in Brussels. The greatest crime that anyone perhaps ever committed! For the motive of most crimes is so obscure, so pathological or so fatalized by hereditary weakness, that there is almost nothing that cannot be pardoned once one has dived beneath the calm surface of things. But Thackeray as child-murderer can never be forgiven: the deeper you delve into the hidden springs of his offence the more unforgivable does he appear.

I had better perhaps explain the cause of all this emotion for the benefit of the lay reader who has not yet got at what I am writing about.

The struggle--the aspiration--of the novelist down the ages has been to evolve a water-tight convention for the framework of the novel. He aspires--and for centuries has aspired--so to construct his stories and so to manage their surfaces that the carried-away and rapt reader shall really think himself to be in Brussels on the first of Waterloo days or in Grand Central Station waiting for the Knickerbocker Express to come in from Boston though actually he may be sitting in a cane lounge on a beach of Bermuda in December. This is not easy.

Of the three major novelists that we have hitherto examined each in his own way had a try, consciously or unconsciously, at performing this conjuring trick. Bunyan tried to do it--and succeeded remarkably well--by the simplest of story-teller’s devices. He just told on in simple language, using such simple images that the reader, astonished and charmed to find the circumstances of his own life typified in words and glorified by print, is seized by the homely narrative and carried clean out of himself into the world of that singular and glorious tinker.

Defoe, on the other hand, in the conscious or unconscious effort to achieve a convention for the novel, adopted the biographical or autobiographical form, relying on the verisimilitude of the details that he invented to confirm the reader in the belief that his characters had really existed and so to awaken the sympathy that makes books readable. And had he possessed a little more power of projection or a little more subtlety in presenting his figures and had his writing been a little less pedestrian his works might have gained and held the power to arouse a great deal more enthusiasm than they actually do.

Richardson, going a good deal further, has left it on record that he was actually bothered by the problem of the novelistic convention and that he racked his brain a long time before arriving at the one he finally adopted. He asked himself, that is to say, how the reader was to be convinced that the author--and by analogy still more his characters--how could they know all the details that go to making up a book? If, to reduce the matter to its most elementary form, Sir Charles Grandison is walking in the Yew Walk, how can he know what characters are present and what conversations are being carried on in the Cedar Parlour, and since, to satisfy the reader, the author is to be supposed to be cognizant of all that passes in his novel, how is _he_ to know simultaneously what is happening in both places?

That at least is what bothered Richardson and what has bothered all other novelists since his day, though until quite lately no English novelist made any serious attempt to attack the problem. The method that Richardson with characteristically homespun common sense eventually worked out was simply to cast the whole novel into correspondence, the characters exchanging letters as to events and as to their psychologies with other characters or with anyone to whom a letter could be handily addressed. In that way any character who was needed to know anything could be given the information and the author had only to let it be supposed that he had an unusual knack of getting hold of the correspondence of other people to convince the reader for all eighteenth-century purposes. For in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as every one knows, every one from Madame de Sevigné upwards and downwards addressed to every one else letters of prodigious length and in the most excruciating detail--and Richardson himself, as we have seen, had a prodigious knowledge of the prodigious letters that eighteenth-century young ladies could address to even unknown correspondents once their hearts and feelings were touched. So that although to-day the letter is one of the worst of methods that exist for telling a story if the dictates of probability are to be considered, Richardson may be considered to have done very well indeed with his peculiar form.

To its disadvantages in other hands we shall come in due time, but meanwhile enormous applause is due to the author of _Pamela_ for having given the matter any thought at all. And in any case his is a figure so sympathetic and so craftsmanlike that we do well to love him. He is sound, quiet, without fuss, going about his work as a carpenter goes about making a chair and in the end turning out an article of supreme symmetry and consistence. I know of no other figure in English literature--if it be not that of Trollope--who so suggests the two supreme artists of the world--Holbein and Bach.

It would be hyperbole to suggest that Richardson is as great in his art as either of the other two. He had neither their power over their materials nor their sense of the beauty of natural things. Our gratitude to him nevertheless should be great, for he worked with the simplest materials and manœuvred only the most normal of characters in the most commonplace of events and yet contrived to engross the minds of a large section of mankind. How to do that is the problem that, Richardson having been dead a century and a half, still engrosses the novelist.

And what more than anything is impressive about his figure is that one knows almost nothing about it: he is as little overdrawn as are his characters, whereas the besetting sin of almost all other English novelists from Fielding to George Meredith is that they seem to cut their characters out with hatchets and to colour them with the brushes of house-painters and, never, even at that, being able to let them alone, they are perpetually pushing their own faces and winking at you over the shoulders of Young Blifil, Uncle Toby, the Widow Wadman, Dick Swiveller, the Marchioness, Becky Sharp, Evan Harrington, and the rest. That is usually applauded by orthodox Anglo-Saxon criticism and to talk of the gallery of portraits left by this or that novelist is considered to be high praise indeed. But, as a matter of fact, the overdrawing of characters is merely a symptom of the laziness and contempt for their vehicle that is the too usual hall-mark of the English writer of nuvvles. And that it should be tremendously applauded is a symptom of the disdain that the English critic really feels for the novel. If English painting consisted of nothing but the caricatures of Rowlandson, Gillray, or Cruikshank, the art-critic would discover very soon that that grew monotonous, but since it is merely a matter of prose-fiction it is easily accepted as good enough; that which is too stupid to be said in any other way being consigned to the novel.

Of course if you choose to consider Swift and, say, Beckford as novelists you do arrive at something that you must, as you might say, chew upon--at something that has some mental dignity; and Smollett presents you with problems of humanity that are at least worth consideration. And naturally great vital spirits like Dickens, floundering away in oceans of words and eccentricities, will from time to time hit upon collocations of words and confrontations of characters that are unsurpassed in the literature of any time or nation. But from the death of Swift to the publication of _The Way of All Flesh_ there is very little to be found in the English novel that is not slightly unworthy of the whole attention of a grown-up man--say of a grown-up Frenchman.

I have adumbrated somewhere--in some previous pessimism!--the perturbation that must beset any Anglo-Saxon who desired to point out to almost any grown-up foreigner of average intelligence the glories of the English novel before, say, the day of the _Yellow Book_. Let us then examine with a little more attention the chief lights of that Institution between, say, 1745, the year of the death of Swift, and, say, 1890, when the _Yellow Book_ was well on the way.

Swift himself is obviously one of those solitary figures like, in their different ways, Shakespeare or Smollett or the author of _The Way of All Flesh_. In a sense he resembles Bunyan, that is to say he wrote allegories which, as a literary _genre_, are usually tiresome and unconvincing; but in his case, as in that of Bunyan, his fierce powers of observation and rendering carry him, as it were, in spite of himself, into the realms of realism. It is to be doubted if Swift ever aimed--as did, say, Mr. H. G. Wells in, say, _The First Men in the Moon_,--at giving the reader the sense of vicarious experience. Nevertheless he got there all the same and the corrosive nature of his misanthropy almost aids the sense of reality with which he overwhelms us. The “purpose” of _Gulliver’s Travels_ was no doubt philosophic, as the purpose of the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ was moral; but Lilliput is as real to us as the Slough of Despond and the Yahoos are the figures of the most horrible experience of every man who has come across them.

So that if to your intelligent--and of course slightly cynical--foreigner you presented _Gulliver_ and left it at that he might remain edified or horror-struck according as his individual frame of mind were pessimist of the other thing. But supposing you were to present him with the Steele-cum-Addison collaboration of the _Tatler_ or the _Spectator_ or with _Tom Jones_ itself, which was written about a quarter of a century later than _Gulliver_ and thirty years or so after the last number of the _Spectator_ appeared in 1714: and supposing you added--yes, certainly, suppose you add _Tristram Shandy_ and the _Sentimental Journey_, the first appearing or being written between 1760 and 1767 and the second being published in 1768! Keep up your sleeve Tobias Smollett whose _Humphry Clinker_ was published three years after the _Sentimental Journey_ and in the year of Smollett’s death at the age of fifty. And let us conclude this immediate inquiry of ours as ending with the awful name of the Wizard of the North who was born in the year of Smollett’s death and lived to be sixty.

As we have seen, Defoe in his _Advice from the Scandalous Club_, that was a “feature” of his periodical _Review of the Affairs of France_, very little anticipated--but by five years, indeed--what may be regarded as the fiction of the Addison-Steele collaboration. One is so apt to regard Defoe as of the seventeenth and Addison as of the eighteenth centuries that this appears rather astonishing, but actually the _Review_ ran from 1704 to 1713 and the _Tatler_ plus _Spectator_ from 1709 to 1714. Defoe’s publication was so essentially commercial and the other two so essentially social that the matter is rather one of chronology than comparison.

The fact that the novel had not yet begun as a commercial “proposition” to come into its own reduced Addison and Steele no doubt from the rank of novelists to those of draftsmen of “characters.” The novels of Defoe were “faked” memoirs and the other fiction of the period mostly consisted of equally “faked” memoirs of persons of quality, court-mistresses, and the like. And the “characters” and sham correspondence about social questions of the day that characterized the _Spectator_ may well be considered as developments of those popular, fictitious productions. Sir Roger de Coverley, Will Wimble, and the rest are as it were the characters of a novel, standing about and waiting for employment as the leaden soldiers of a child await their owner’s orders to fall in.

The idea of sustained fiction might indeed, if you liked and if you analysed the matter very closely, be said not by any means yet to have reached the public consciousness, and though for us _Clarissa_ may seem to be the first of novels, its peculiar form--of correspondence--may well, in the public mind of its day, have given it the aspect of the last of the spurious memoirs. And, considering the nature of the future influence of Richardson over the French realists from Diderot to Flaubert, it may be more accurate to regard that aspect as the truer one. For, in effect, the French realist movement from Diderot’s _Le Neveu de Rameau_ to _Le Rouge et le Noir_ and again to _Madame Bovary_ may in the last event be regarded as much more a movement for the production of fictitious memoirs than the narration of sustained tales, the difference between Richardson, Flaubert, and Joseph Conrad or Turgenev being simply one of form. Richardson, that is to say, tried to assure you that Clarissa was a real person by the mechanical device of publishing her letters, whilst Flaubert and his school try to hypnotize you into believing in their characters by methods of projection rather than of narration.

And the trouble with the English nuvvelist from Fielding to Meredith is that not one of them cares whether you quite believe in their characters or not. If you had told Flaubert or Conrad in the midst of their passionate composings that you were not convinced of the reality of Homais or Tuan Jim, as like as not they would have called you out and shot you, and in similar circumstances Richardson would have showed himself extremely disagreeable. But Fielding, Thackeray, or Meredith would have cared relatively little about that, though any one of them would have knocked you down if they could, supposing you had suggested that he was not a “gentleman.” So would any English novelist to-day.

That of course is admirable in its effect on Anglo-Saxon literary-social life where anyone taking pen in hand becomes _ipso fatso_ an esquire for all users of type-writing machines. But it is bitter bad for the English novel.

It is bitter bad for the English novel because--as is the case with all human enterprises--the art of the novel is so difficult a thing that unless a man’s whole energies are given to it he had much better otherwise occupy himself. For if Shakespeare’s ambitions for coat-armour had antedated instead of coming after _The Tempest_, where should we be to-day? We have to thank our stars that he was probably first a lousy, adulterous, poaching scoundrel--like Villon!

The lot of the novelist is, in fact, hard--but not harder than that of any other man. If you put it to bakers, tram-conductors, politicians, or musicians that they must be first bakers and the rest and then gentlemen, they will sigh, but admit it. It is almost only the English novelist who will aspire at being first gentleman and then craftsman--or even not craftsman at all since it is not really gentlemanly to think of being anything but a gentleman.

This is an incisive way of putting a truth that might perhaps be more wrapped up in social or material generalizations, but it is none the less a hard truth, and if you consider the case of Fielding, connected with the best families, placeman and diplomatist in a small way, and compare him with Smollett who was socially nothing at all with no chance of a change, you will see that truth all the more clearly.

God forbid that I should say anything really condemnatory of any book by any brother-novelist, alive or dead. One is here to commend all that one can commend and to leave the rest alone. But there are few books that I more cordially dislike than _Tom Jones_. That is no critical pronouncement but merely a statement of a personal prejudice: one may dislike grape-fruit and yet acknowledge its admirable qualities, or one may, as I do, dislike the quality of goose-flesh that reading Mr. George Moore will confer on one’s skin and yet acknowledge Mr. Moore as easily the greatest of living technicians.

But as regards _Tom Jones_ my personal dislike goes along with a certain cold-blooded, critical condemnation. I dislike Tom Jones, the character, because he is a lewd, stupid, and treacherous phenomenon; I dislike Fielding, his chronicler, because he is a bad sort of hypocrite. Had Fielding been in the least genuine in his moral aspirations it is Blifil that he would have painted attractively and Jones who would have come to the electric chair, as would have been the case had Jones lived to-day.

Of course that is merely saying that Fielding liked a type that I dislike--but what appals me in view of the serious, cynical foreigner that I have postulated our taking about with us is the extremely thin nature of all the character-drawing, of all the events and of all the catastrophes. Is it to be seriously believed that Tom Jones’s benefactor would have turned upon him on the flimsy nature of the evidence adduced against him, or, equally, is it to be believed that Tom Jones’s young woman would have again taken up with him after all the eye-openers she had had, she being represented as a girl of spirit? It simply isn’t in any world of any seriousness at all. The fact, in short, is that Tom Jones is a papier-mâché figure, the catastrophes the merest invention without any pretence at being convincing and even the mere morality of the most leering and disastrous kind.

For myself, I am no moralist: I consider that if you do what you want you must take what you get for it and that if you deny yourself things you will be better off than if you don’t. But fellows like Fielding, and to some extent Thackeray, who pretend that if you are a gay drunkard, lecher, squanderer of your goods and fumbler in placket-holes you will eventually find a benevolent uncle, concealed father or benefactor who will shower on you bags of tens of thousands of guineas, estates and the hands of adorable mistresses--those fellows are dangers to the body politic and horribly bad constructors of plots.

It is all very well to say that such happy endings were the convention of the day, that you find them in the _School for Scandal_, _The Vicar of Wakefield_ and in every eighteenth-century romance that you pick up out of the twopenny book-box, and it is all very well to say that the public demands a happy ending. But the really great writer is not bound by the conventions of his day, nor, if he desires to give his reader a happy ending, need he select a wastrel like Jones as the recipient of his too easily bestowed favours.

If, in short, we are to regard Fielding as a serious writer writing for grown-up people, we must regard him also as a rather intolerable scoundrel with perhaps _Jonathan Wild_ to his credit. But _Jonathan Wild_ is of another category and, neither winking nor leering, might be regarded as the finger on the wall, pointing out what happens to the Tom Joneses of the world if their case is regarded with any seriousness.

But the fact is that for a century and a half after the death of Fielding nothing in the Anglo-Saxon world was further from anyone, either novelist or layman, than the idea that the novel could be taken seriously. It was a thing a little above a fairy-tale for children, a little above a puppet-play; and, if not actually as damned socially and clerically as the actor who could not be either received at court or buried in consecrated ground, the novelist was practically without what the French call an _état civil_ because his was not a serious profession. In England that state of things still pertains. In the demobilization forms after the late War the novelist was actually placed in the eighteenth category--along with gipsies, vagrants, and other non-productive persons; and my last public act in Great Britain being to allow my name to be placed on a list of voters, when I gave my avocation to the political agent as being that of a novelist, he exclaimed: “Oh, don’t say that, sir. Say ‘Gentleman’!” He was anxious that his list should appear as serious as possible.

That being the state of things and the novelist being human--for you cannot be a novelist and lack the ordinary aspirations of the human being!--for that century and a half the Anglo-Saxon public had the novels that it deserved. I do not mean to say that generous spirits lacked amongst the ranks of fiction-writers. That great genius, Dickens, thrashed oppressions and shams with the resplendent fury of an Isaiah; and that singular megalomaniac, Charles Reade, did, with _It Is Never Too Late to Mend_, really succeed in modifying the system of solitary confinement in English gaols. And you have had _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_. But those works of propaganda had either no literary value at all or when, as in the case of Dickens, they did have the literary value that genius can infuse into work however faulty, their work itself suffered by the very intensity of their reforming passions.

That tendency alone has deprived the novel in Anglo-Saxondom of almost all the artistic or even the social value that it might have had, since it became a vehicle for preventing the comfortable classes thinking of unpleasant subjects whilst presenting their agreeable somnolences with the warming possibilities of considering their neighbours’ defects. It became, that is to say, the week-day, post-prandial sermon preached by a family divine above all anxious to avoid giving offence to those who provided his daily bread. And gentlemanly reformer, the British novelist consciously or unconsciously remains to this day--in the great bulk.

That Dickens, on the other hand, had, any more than Bunyan, any _arrière-pensée_ at all should never for a moment be thought. His was an agonized soul shuddering at the tortures that, as a poor child, he had seen inflicted on the sufferings of non-comfortable humanity in the horrible days--for the under-dog!--of the last years of the reigns of the Georges and of the early years of the reign of Queen Victoria. All the horrors of insanitation, filth, child-labour, imprisonment for debt, the gallows for petty theft, the hulks and the rest he had himself witnessed or endured and at these horrors he lashed with the mad enthusiasm of a wolf that snaps at the insupportable whip of the trainer. His novels were probably--at least in the beginning--relatively nothing to him; if he could have found any other way he would have poured out his feelings as readily in that. But, happening on the novel and having a matchless command of English, he took the simple course of presenting you with villains all black, heroes all white and ringletted heroines all pink. He had to see--though that is to reverse the colours--the world in terms of Legrees, Uncle Toms, or Amelia Osbornes.

That, in effect, was the beginning of the end, the novel becoming _the_ vehicle for the reform of abuses. And it is astonishing how short has been the career of the novel as an art compared with that of pottery-moulding, baking, weaving, or any other human avocation. You may say that it began with Richardson and ended--for the time being and as far as Anglo-Saxondom is concerned--with _Oliver Twist_, which, significantly enough, appeared in the first year of Victoria’s spacious reign.

Richardson, that is to say, did have an artistic convention of sorts, did try in some way to render life, did deal almost exclusively in neither very moral nor very immoral personages, but there almost all attempts at rendering life or the normal almost came to an end. _The Vicar of Wakefield_, “noted for purity and optimism,” says my official guide to dates, was an obviously Richardsonian _pastiche_; Henry Mackenzie’s _Man of Feeling_ may be said to have exaggerated Richardson’s tearful sentimentality; and Smollett (“marked by coarseness and brutality”) whose first book was published eight years after the publication of _Pamela_ and in the same year as _Clarissa_, undoubtedly had a shot at rendering the same world that Richardson rendered. It is not as absurd as it may seem to say that _Pamela_ suggested _Roderick Random_; it certainly suggested _Madame Bovary_--and _Babbitt_!

It would, however, undoubtedly be absurd to suggest to the public that Smollett was a greater artist or a greater novelist than either Fielding or Dickens: and yet, if the novel is to be regarded as a rendering of life, there is not much way out of it. He remains, however, and will probably always remain, an isolated figure. He was bitter, and as he rendered what he had seen and since what he had seen had been coarse and brutal, those will be the epithets that Anglo-Saxondom will for ever bestow on him. He wrote about the sea in a period glorious for England’s sea-history--but in spite of that he could hardly be regarded--as is Marryat--as a writer for boys. The life of which he treated was too remote from to-day for the reader interested in the renderings of the life of to-day to read of it with any enthusiasm; he was little less virulent than Swift and, if he is even less read, he receives even less lip-service. So no doubt he is contented.

Marryat--as a writer read by boys, men being already too dulled in the sense at twenty to appreciate him--has probably, through the boys, exercised the greatest influence on the English character that any writer ever did exercise. His magnificent gifts of drawing--not exaggerating--character and of getting an atmosphere have so worked that few of us have not been to sea in frigates before the age of eighteen and come in some way in contact with non-comfortable men and women. I have seldom been so impressed as when, the other day, I re-read _Peter Simple_ for my pleasure. It was to come into contact with a man who could write and see and feel. For me, nothing in _War and Peace_ is as valuable as the boat cutting-out expeditions of Marryat and for me he remains the greatest of English novelists. His name is not even mentioned in the manual of literary dates with which I have just been refreshing my memory.

I do not, however, dwell at any length on either Smollett or Marryat because, great as for me they seem, they still remain individual figures leaving very little trace on the traditions of English literature--and that indeed was the case with Fenimore Cooper who was one of the most beautiful pure stylists that the English language has yet excited into writing. There is in _The Two Admirals_ a passage descriptive of mists rising from the sails and cordage of battleships as seen from the turf of cliff-tops at dawn, that remains for me one of the incomparable passages in the language. And, whilst I am about the matter of pure style, I may as well explain here why lately I mentioned that I was then writing in Lisbon harbour. That apparently egotistic excrescence was due to the fact that I liked to remember that--no, not Fielding--but Beckford once lay in Lisbon harbour and wrote most beautiful prose there. Beckford is known only as the author of _Vathek_, which is, to be sure, most remarkable as a _tour de force_--and which is usually bound up with _Rasselas_ in popular reprints; but he is also the author of _Letters from Portugal_ which might almost be regarded as a novel, such an admirable autobiographical portrait do they give of their writer in his adventurous progress from the city of Camoens and Vasco da Gama to the monastery of Batalha.

Prose, I suppose, is to some extent the business of a writer on the English Novel, so I suppose I may be pardoned my digression about Beckford and make the note that if I wanted to put together a small, exquisitely pleasing fascicule of admirable because simple English prose I should take a passage from the suppressed Preface to the Bible, a passage from Henry V’s address to his soldiers before Agincourt, one from Clarendon, one from _Gulliver_, one from Johnson’s _Life of Drake_, the passage from Cooper that I have mentioned above, and one from the _Letters from Portugal_, one from Maine’s _Ancient Law_--and then one from any book of W. H. Hudson. The English language is not very distinguished for its prose, but that would make a very admirable little volume! One might almost add the opening description of the village from White’s _Selborne_.

It is of course impossible to exhaust the topic of the English novel from Fielding to Henry James in a few paragraphs of a small book. But the topic of main currents of that literature is more easily got rid of simply because there are practically no main currents at all. There are some good writers, but of a Tradition practically no trace. The writers who spring most immediately to the imagination as being somewhere near in their works to the main stream of the international novel--for the Novel is after all an international affair--the most unforgettable writers of that type are two or three women. That I suppose is because, whilst the men ran about actively intent on proving that they were gentlemen or in improving the ungentle world, the women had to prove that they were not unladylike and so remained at home and looked at life, without any very immediate aim at publicity or even at publication.

At any rate, if you take Miss Burney’s _Evelina_, Miss Edgeworth’s _Castle Rackrent_, Miss Austen’s _Sense and Sensibility_, Mrs. Gaskell’s _Mary Barton_, George Eliot’s _Scenes from Clerical Life_, and Miss Brontë’s _Villette_, you do get something of a kinship, if not much of a tradition, and if you add to them the _Barchester Towers_ series of Trollope and the works of Mark Rutherford and George Gissing you do get, too, some attempts at rendering English life that are above the attention of adults with the mentality of French boys of sixteen. At rendering, that is to say, rather than at the mere relating of a more or less arbitrary tale so turned as to ensure a complacent view of life and carried on by characters that as a rule are--six feet high and gliding two inches above the ground!

That is, of course, an arbitrary generalization as to all the English nuvvles that string out from, say, Scott to, say, the late Marion Crawford. But if sweeping it is not _completely_ unfair. Obviously even Scott’s _Antiquary_ is worth consideration if one had the time, or _The Cloister and the Hearth_, or let us say _Lorna Doone_. That last work I read over twelve times when I was a boy and from the beginning: “If any man would hear a plain tale told plainly, I John Ridd of the parish of Oare” to the end; I dare say I could recite half the book to-day. But then Blackmore was a market-gardener! Let me lay on his altar these alms for oblivion, for I suppose that few people to-day read of the Doones of Badgeworthy or of how John Ridd took his Lorna home in the great snows.

In short, if you omit Dickens and Thackeray as immense amateurs who wrote from time to time very admirable passages, and if you do not like the works--from _Evelina_ to _New Grub Street_--that I have mentioned in my last paragraph but two, the amount of work that you can read in English produced between 1799 and 1899 or so will seem extremely small--supposing you to be of any at all adult tastes or of any seriousness of approach to literary matters.

If, on the other hand, you are indifferent to whether you are convinced by what you read and care little with what you occupy your spare time and desire to fill up your hours with an occupation calling for as little mental concentration as, say, a game of golf, I dare say you could agreeably narcotize yourself still with _Rob Roy_ or _The Tower of London_ or _The Woman in White_ or, say, _Rudder Grange_.