Chapter VI: Part 6

He that has the book of the _Thousand Nights and a Night_ has Hachisch- made-words for life. Gallant, subtle, refined, intense, humourous, obscene, here is the Arab intelligence drunk with conception. It is a vast extravaganza of passion in action and picarooning farce and material splendour run mad. The amorous instinct and the instinct of enjoyment, not tempered but heightened greatly by the strict ordinances of dogma, have leave to riot uncontrolled. It is the old immortal story of Youth and Beauty and their coming together, but it is coloured with the hard and brilliant hues of an imagination as sensuous in type and as gorgeous in ambition as humanity has known. The lovers must suffer, for suffering intensifies the joy of fruition; so they are subjected to all such modes of travail and estrangement as a fancy careless of pain and indifferent to life can devise. But it is known that happy they are to be; and if by the annihilation of time and space then are space and time annihilated. Adventures are to the adventurous all the world over; but they are so with a difference in the East. It is only Sinbad that confesses himself devoured with the lust of travel. The grip of a humourous and fantastic fate is tight on all the other heroes of this epic-in-bits. They do not go questing for accidents: their hour comes, and the finger of God urges them forth, and thrusts them on in the way of destiny. The air is horrible with the gross and passionate figments of Islamite mythology. Afrits watch over or molest them; they are made captive of malignant Ghouls; the Jinns take bodily form and woo them to their embraces. The sea-horse ramps at them from the ocean floor; the great roc darkens earth about them with the shadow of his wings; wise and goodly apes come forth and minister unto them; enchanted camels bear them over evil deserts with the swiftness of the wind, or the magic horse outspreads his sail-broad vannes, and soars with them; or they are borne aloft by some servant of the Spell till the earth is as a bowl beneath them, and they hear the angels quiring at the foot of the Throne. So they fare to strange and dismal places: through cities of brass whose millions have perished by divine decree; cities guilty of the cult of the Fire and the Light wherein all life has been striken to stone; or on to the magnetic mountain by whose horrible attraction the bolts are drawn from the ship, and they alone survive the inevitable wreck. And the end comes. Comes the Castle of Burnished Copper, and its gates fly open before them: the forty damsels, each one fairer than the rest, troop out at their approach; they are bathed in odours, clothed in glittering apparel, fed with enchanted meats, plunged fathoms deep in the delights of the flesh. There is contrived for them a private paradise of luxury and splendour, a practical Infinite of gold and silver stuffs and jewels and all things gorgeous and rare and costly; and therein do they abide for evermore. You would say of their poets that they contract immensity to the limits of desire; they exhaust the inexhaustible in their enormous effort; they stoop the universe to the slavery of a talisman, and bind the visible and invisible worlds within the compass of a ring.

Its Comedy.

But there is another side to their imaginings. When the Magian has done beating his copper drum--(how its mysterious murmur still haunts the echoes of memory!)--when Queen Lab has finished her tremendous conjurations, wonder gives place to laughter, the apotheosis of the flesh to the spirit of comedy. The enchanter turns harlequin; and what the lovers ask is not the annihilation of time and space but only that the father be at his prayers, or the husband gone on a fool's errand, while they have leave to kiss each other's mouths, 'as a pigeon feedeth her young,' to touch the lute, strip language naked, and 'repeat the following verses' to a ring of laughing girls and amid all such comfits and delicates as a hungry audience may rejoice to hear enumerated. And the intrigue begins, and therewith the presentment of character, the portraiture of manners. Merry ladies make love to their gallants with flowers, or scorn them with the huckle-bones of shame; the Mother Coles of Araby pursue the unwary stranger for their mistress' pleasure; damsels resembling the full moon carouse with genial merchants or inquiring calenders. The beast of burden, even the porter, has his hour: he goes the round at the heels of a veiled but beautiful lady, and lays her in the materials of as liberal and sumptuous a carouse as is recorded in history. Happy lady, and O thrice-fortunate porter! enviable even to the term of time! It is a voluptuous farce, a masque and anti-masque of wantonness and stratagem, of wine-cups and jewels and fine raiment, of gaudy nights and amorous days, of careless husbands and adventurous wives, of innocent fathers and rebel daughters and lovers happy or befooled. And high over all, his heart contracted with the spleen of the East, the tedium of supremacy, towers the great Caliph Haroun, the buxom and bloody tyrant, a Muslim Lord of Misrule. With Giafar, the finest gentleman and goodliest gallant of Eastern story, and Mesrour, the well- beloved, the immortal Eunuch, he goes forth upon his round in the enchanted streets of Bagdad, like Francois Premier in the maze of old- time Paris. The night is musical with happy laughter and the sound of lutes and voices; it is seductive with the clink of goblets and the odour of perfumes: not a shadow but has its secret, or jovial or amorous or terrible: here falls a head, and there you may note the contrapuntal effect of the bastinado. But the blood is quickly hidden with flowers, the bruises are tired over with cloth-of-gold, and the jolly pageant sweeps on. Truly the comic essence is imperishable. What was fun to them in Baghdad is fun to us in London after a thousand years.

Sacer Vates.

The prose of Mr. Payne's translation is always readable and often elegant; Sir Richard Burton's notes and 'terminal essays' are a mine of curious and diverting information; but for me the real author of _The Arabian Nights_ is called not Burton nor Payne but Antoine Galland. He it was, in truth, who gave the world as much exactly as it needed of his preposterous original: who eliminated its tediousness, purged it of its barbarous and sickening immorality, wiped it clean of cruelty and unnaturalness, selected its essentials of comedy and romance, and set them clear and sharp against a light that western eyes can bear and in an atmosphere that western lungs can breathe. Of course the new translations are interesting--especially to ethnologists and the critic with a theory that translated verse is inevitably abominable. But they are not for the general nor the artist. They include too many pages revolting by reason of unutterable brutality of incident and point of view--as also for the vileness of those lewd and dreadful puritans whose excesses against humanity and whose devotion to Islam they record--to be acceptable as literature or tolerable as reading. Now, in Galland I get the best of them. He gave me whatever is worth remembering of Bedreddin and Camaralzaman and that enchanting Fairy Peri-Banou; he is the true poet alike of Abou Hassan and the Young King of the Black Islands, of Ali Baba and the Barber of the Brothers; to him I owe that memory--of Zobeide alone in the accursed city whose monstrous silence is broken by the voice of the one man spared by the wrath of God as he repeats his solitary prayer--which ranks with Crusoe's discovery of the footprint in the thrilling moments of my life; it was he who, by refraining from the use of pepper in his cream tarts, contrived to kitchen those confections with the very essence of romance; it was he that clove asunder the Sultan's kitchen-wall for me, and took me to the pan, and bade me ask a certain question of the fish that fried therein, and made them answer me in terms mysterious and tremendous yet. Nay, that animating and delectable feeling I cherish ever for such enchanted commodities as gold-dust and sandal-wood and sesame and cloth of gold and black slaves with scimitars--to whom do I owe it but this rare and delightful artist? 'O mes chers _Mille et une Nuits_!' says Fantasio, and he speaks in the name of all them that have lived the life that Galland alone made possible. The damsels of the new style may 'laugh till they fall backwards,' etc., through forty volumes instead of ten, and I shall still go back to my Galland. I shall go back to him because his masterpiece is--not a book of reference, nor a curiosity of literature, nor an achievement in pedantry, nor even a demonstration of the absolute failure of Islamism as an influence that makes for righteousness, but--an excellent piece of art.

RICHARDSON

His Fortune.

It is many years since Richardson fell into desuetude; it is many years since he became the novelist not of the world at large but of that inconsiderable section of the world which is interested in literature. His methods are those of a bygone epoch; his ideals, with one or two exceptions, are old-fashioned enough to seem fantastic; his sentiment belongs to ancient history; to a generation bred upon Ouida's romances and the plays of Mr. W. S. Gilbert his morality appears not merely questionable but coarse and improper and repulsive. While he lived he was adored: he moved and spoke and dwelt in an eternal mist of 'good, thick, strong, stupefying incense smoke'; he was the idol of female England, a master of virtue, a king of art, the wisest and best of mankind. Johnson revered him--Johnson and Colley Gibber; Diderot ranked him with Moses and Homer; to Balzac and Musset and George Sand he was the greatest novelist of all time; Rousseau imitated him; Macaulay wrote and talked of him with an enthusiasm that would have sat becomingly on Lady Bradshaigh herself. But all that is over. Not even the emasculation to which the late Mr. Dallas was pleased to subject his _Clarissa_ could make that _Clarissa_ at all popular; not all the allusions of all the leader-writers of a leader-writing age have been able to persuade the public to renew its interest in the works and ways of Grandison the august and the lovely and high-souled Harriet Byron. Richardson has to be not skimmed but studied; not sucked like an orange, nor swallowed like a lollipop, but attacked _secundum artem_ like a dinner of many courses and wines. Once inside the vast and solid labyrinth of his intrigue, you must hold fast to the clue which you have caught up on entering, or the adventure proves impossible, and you emerge from his precincts defeated and disgraced. And by us children of Mudie, to whom a novel must be either a solemn brandy-and-soda or as it were a garrulous and vapid afternoon tea, adventures of that moment are not often attempted.

Pamela.

Again, when all is said in Richardson's favour it has to be admitted against him that in _Pamela_ he produced an essay in vulgarity--of sentiment and morality alike--which has never been surpassed. In these days it is hardly less difficult to understand the popularity of this masterpiece of specious immodesty than to speak or think of it with patience. That it was once thought moral is as wonderful as that it was once found readable. What is more easily apprehended is the contempt of Henry Fielding--is the justice of that ridicule he was moved to visit it withal. To him, a scholar and a gentleman and a man of the world, _Pamela_ was a new-fangled blend of sentimental priggishness and prurient unreality. To him the pretensions to virtue and consideration of the vulgar little hussy whom Richardson selected for his heroine were certainly not less preposterous than the titles to life and actuality of the wooden libertine whom Richardson put forth as his hero. He was artist enough to know that the book was ignoble as literature and absolutely false as fact; he was moralist enough to see that its teachings were the reverse of elevating and improving; and he uttered his conclusions _more suo_ in one of the best and healthiest books in English literature. This, indeed, is the only merit of which the history of Miss Andrews can well be accused: that it set Fielding thinking and provoked him to the composition of the first of his three great novels. Pamela is only remembered nowadays as Joseph's sister: the egregious Mr. B--- has hardly any existence save as Lady Booby's brother. 'Tis an ill wind that blows good to nobody. There are few more tedious or more unpleasant experiences than _Pamela_; _or_, _Virtue Rewarded_. But you have but to remember that without it the race might never have heard of Fanny and Joseph, of the fair Slipslop and the ingenuous Didapper, of Parson Trulliber and immortal Abraham Adams, to be reconciled to its existence and the fact of its old-world fame. Nay, more, to remember its ingenious author with something of gratitude and esteem.

Grandison.

Nor is this the only charge that can be made and sustained against our poet. It is also to be noted in his disparagement that he is the author of _Sir Charles Grandison_, and that _Sir Charles Grandison_, epic of the polite virtues, is deadly dull. 'My dear,' says somebody in one of Mr. Thackeray's books, 'your eternal blue velvet quite tires me.' That is the worst of _Sir Charles Grandison_: his eternal blue velvet--his virtue, that is, his honour, his propriety, his good fortune, his absurd command over the affections of the other sex, his swordsmanship, his manliness, his patriotic sentiment, his noble piety--quite tires you. He is an ideal, but so very, very tame that it is hard to justify his existence. He is too perfect to be of the slightest moral use to anybody. He has everything he wants, so that he has no temptation to be wicked; he is incapable of immorality, so that he is easily quit of all inducements to be vicious; he has no passions, so that he is superior to every sort of spiritual contest; he is monstrous clever, so that he has made up his mind about everything knowable and unknowable; he is excessively virtuous so that he has made it up in the right direction. He is, as Mr. Leslie Stephen remarks, a tedious commentary on the truth of Mrs. Rawdon Crawley's acute reflection upon the moral effect of five thousand a year. He is only a pattern creature, because he has neither need nor opportunity, neither longing nor capacity, to be anything else. In real life such faultless monsters are impossible: one does not like to think what would happen if they were not. In fiction they are possible enough, and--what is more to the purpose--they are of necessity extravagantly dull. This is what is the matter with Sir Charles. He is dull, and he effuses dulness. By dint of being uninteresting himself he makes his surroundings uninteresting. In the record of his adventures and experiences there is enough of wit and character and invention to make the fortune of a score or more of such novels as the public of these degenerate days would hail with enthusiasm. But his function is to vitiate them all. He is a bore of the first magnitude, and of his eminence in that capacity his history is at once the monument and the proof.

Clarissa.

But if _Grandison_ be dull and _Pamela_ contemptible _Clarissa_ remains; and _Clarissa_ is what Musset called it, 'le premier roman du monde.' Of course _Clarissa_ has its faults. Miss Harlowe, for instance, is not always herself--is not always the complete creation she affects to be: there are touches of moral pedantry--anticipations of George Eliot--in her; the scenes in which she is brought to shame are scarcely real, living, moving, all the rest of it. But on the other hand is there anything better than Lovelace in the whole range of fiction? Take Lovelace in all or any of his moods--suppliant, intriguing, repentant, triumphant, above all triumphant--and find his parallel if you can. Where, you ask, did the little printer of Salisbury Court--who suggests to Mr. Stephen 'a plump white mouse in a wig'--where did Richardson discover so much gallantry and humanity, so much romance and so much fact, such an abundance of the heroic qualities and the baser veracities of mortal nature? Lovelace is, if you except Don Quixote, the completest hero in fiction. He has wit, humour, grace, brilliance, charm; he is a scoundrel and a ruffian, and he is a gentleman and a man; of his kind and in his degree he has the right Shakespearean quality. Almost as perfect in her way is the enchanting Miss Howe--an incarnation of womanliness and wit and fun, after Lovelace the most brilliant of Richardson's creations. Or take the Harlowe family: the severe and stupid father, the angry and selfish uncles, the cub James, the vixen Arabella, a very fiend of envy and hatred and malice--what a gallery of portraits is here! And Solmes and Tomlinson, Belford and Brand and Hickman; and the infinite complexity of the intrigue; the wit, the pathos, the invention; the knowledge of human nature; the faculty of dialogue--where save in _Clarissa_ shall we find all these? As for Miss Harlowe herself, all incomplete as she is she remains the Eve of fiction, the prototype of the modern heroine, the common mother of all the self-contained, self-suffering, self-satisfied young persons whose delicacies and repugnances, whose independence of mind and body, whose airs and ideas and imaginings, are the stuff of the modern novel. With her begins a new ideal of womanhood; from her proceeds a type unknown in fact and fiction until she came. When after outrage she declines to marry her destroyer, and prefers death to the condonation of her dishonour, she strikes a note and assumes a position till then not merely unrecognised but absolutely undiscovered. It has been said of her half in jest and half in earnest that she is 'the aboriginal Woman's Rights person'; and it is a fact that she and Helena and Desdemona and Ophelia are practically a thousand years apart. And this is perhaps her finest virtue as it is certainly her greatest charm: that, until she set the example, woman in literature as a self-suffering individuality, as an existence endowed with equal rights to independence--of choice, volition, action--with man, had not begun to be. That of itself would suffice to make _Clarissa_ memorable; and that is the least of its merits. Consider it from which point you will, the book remains a masterpiece, unique of its kind. It has been imitated but it has never been equalled. It is Richardson's only title to fame; but it is enough. Not the Great Pyramid itself is more solidly built nor more incapable of ruin.

TOLSTOI

The Man and the Artist.

There are two men in Tolstoi. He is a mystic and he is also a realist. He is addicted to the practice of a pietism that for all its sincerity is nothing if not vague and sentimental; and he is the most acute and dispassionate of observers, the most profound and earnest student of character and emotion. These antitheses are both represented in his novels. He has thought out the scheme of things for himself; his interpretation, while deeply tinctured with religion, is also largely and liberally human; he is one to the just and the unjust alike, and he is no more angry with the wicked than he is partial to the good. He asks but one thing of his men and women--that they shall be natural; yet he handles his humbugs and impostors with as cold a kindness and a magnanimity as equable as he displays in his treatment of their opposites. Indeed his interest in humanity is inexhaustible, and his understanding of it is well nigh formidable in its union of breadth with delicacy. Himself an aristocrat and an official, he is able to sympathise with the Russian peasant as completely and to express his sentiments as perfectly as he is able to present the characters and give utterance to the ambitions and the idiosyncrasies of the class to which he belongs and might be assumed to have studied best. It is to be noted, moreover, that he looks for his material at one or other pole of society. He is equally at home with officers and privates, with diplomats and carpenters, with princes and ploughmen; but with the intermediary strata he is out of touch, and he is careful to leave the task of presenting them to others. It is arguable that only in the highest and lowest expressions of society is unsophisticated nature to be found; and that Tolstoi, interested less in manners than in men and studious above all of the elemental qualities of character, has done right to avoid the middle- class and attach himself to the consideration and the representation of the highest and the lowest. Certain it is that here have been his successes. The Prince Andrew of _War and Peace_--cultured, intelligent, earnest, true lover and true gentleman--is as noble a hero as modern fiction has achieved; but he is no more interesting as a human being and no more successful as art than the Marianna of _les Cosaques_, who is a savage pure and simple, or the Efim of _les Deux Vieillards_, who would seem to the haughty Radical no better than a common idiot. It is to be noted of all three--the prince, the savage, and the peasant--that none in himself is sophisticate nor vile but that each is rich in the common, simple, elemental qualities of humanity. It is to these and the manifestations of these that Tolstoi turns for inspiration first of all. If he chose he could be as keen a satirist and as indefatigable a student of the meannesses and the minor miseries of existence, the toothaches and the pimples of experience, as Thackeray. But he does not choose. The epic note sounds in his work. The eternal issues of life, the fundamental interests of character and conduct and emotion, are his material. Love, valour, self-sacrifice, charity, the responsibilities of being, these and their like are the only vital facts to him; they constitute the really important part of the scheme of things as he sees and comprehends it. In their analysis the artist and the mystic meet and take hands; sometimes to each other's profit, more often, to each other's hurt. It is not without significance that no other novelist has looked so closely and penetrated so far into the secret of death: that none has divined so much of it, nor presented his results with so complete and intimate a mastery and so persuasive and inspiring a belief. Plainly Tolstoi has learned 'la vraie signification de la vie'; his faith in its capacities is immense, his acceptance of its consequences is unhesitating. He is the great optimist, and his work is wholesome and encouraging in direct ratio to the vastness of his talent and the perfection of his method.

Ivan Iliitch.

Who does not know that extraordinary _Death of Ivan Iliitch_? It is an achievement in realism: not the realism of externals and trivial details--though of this there is enough for art if not for the common Zolaphyte--but the higher and better sort, the realism which deals with mental and spiritual conditions, the realism of _Othello_ and _Hamlet_. There are many deaths in literature, but there is none, I think, in which the gradual processes of dissolution are analysed and presented with such knowledge, such force, such terrible directness, as here. The result is appalling, but the final impression is one of encouragement and consolation. Here, as everywhere, Tolstoi appeals to the primitive nature of man, and the issue is what he wishes it to be. Not for him is the barren pessimism of the latter-day French rhapsodist in fiction, and the last word of his study, inexorable till then, is a word of hope and faith.

War and Peace.

Incomparably his greatest book, however, is _War and Peace_. It is the true Russian epic; alike in the vastness of its scope and in the completeness of its execution. It tells the story of the great conflict between Koutouzoff and Russia and Napoleon and France, it begins some years before Austerlitz, and it ends when Borodino and Moscow are already ancient history. The canvas is immense: the crowd of figures and the world of incidents almost bewildering. It is not a complete success. In many places the mystic has got the better of the artist: he is responsible for theories of the art of war which, advanced with the greatest confidence, are disproved by the simple narrative of events; and he has made a study of Napoleon in which, for the first and only time in all his work, he appears as an intemperate advocate. But when all is said in blame so much remains to praise that one scarce knows where to begin. Tolstoi's theory of war is mystical and untenable, no doubt; but his pictures of warfare are incomparably good. None has felt and reproduced as he has done what may be called the intimacy of battle--the feeling of the individual soldier, the passion and excitement, the terror and the fury, that taken collectively make up the influence which represents the advance or the retreat of an army in combat. But also, in a far greater degree, none has dealt so wonderfully with the vaster incidents, the more tremendous issues. His Austerlitz is magnificent; his Borodino is (there is no other word for it) epic; his studies of the Retreat are almost worthy of what has gone before. For the first time what has been called 'the peering modern touch' is here applied to great events, with the result that here is a book unique in literature. Of the characters--Natasha, Peter, Mary, Dennissoff, the Rostoffs, Helen, Dologhoff, Bagration, Bolkonsky, and the others; above all, Koutouzoff and Prince Andrew--Prince Andrew the heroic gentleman, Koutouzoff the genius of Russia and the war--to meet them once is to take on a set of friends and enemies for life.

FIELDING

Illusions.

Fielding is one of the most striking figures in our literary history, and he is one of the most popular as well. But it is questionable if many people know very much about him after all, or if the Fielding of legend--the potwalloper of genius at whom we have smiled so often--has many things in common with the Fielding of fact, the indefatigable student, the vigorous magistrate, the great and serious artist. You hear but little of him from himself; for with that mixture of intellectual egoism and moral unselfishness which is a characteristic of his large and liberal nature he was as careless of Henry Fielding's sayings and doings and as indifferent to the fact of Henry Fielding's life and personality as he was garrulous in respect of the good qualities of Henry Fielding's friends and truculently talkative about the vices of Henry Fielding's enemies. And what is exactly known people have somehow or other contrived to misapprehend and misapply. They have preferred the evidence of Horace Walpole to that of their own senses. They have suffered the brilliant antitheses of Lady Mary to obscure and blur the man as they might have found him in his work. Booth and Jones have been taken for definite and complete reflections of the author of their being: the parts for the whole, that is--a light-minded captain of foot and a hot-headed and soft-hearted young man about town for adequate presentments of the artist of a new departure and the writer of three or four books of singular solidity and finish. Whichever way you turn, you are confronted with appearances each more distorted and more dubious than the other. Some have chosen to believe the foolish fancies of Murphy, and have pictured themselves a Fielding begrimed with snuff, heady with champagne, and smoking so ferociously that out of the wrappings of his tobacco he could keep himself in paper for the manuscripts of his plays. For others the rancour of Smollett calls up a Fielding who divides his time and energy between blowing a trumpet on a Smithfield show and playing Captain Bilkum to a flesh-and-blood Stormandra at the establishment of a living, breathing, working Mother Punchbowl. With Dr. Rimbault and Professor Henry Morley others yet evolve from their inner consciousness a Fielding with a booth in Smithfield, buffooning for the coppers of a Bartlemy Fair audience. The accomplished lawyer has had as little place in men's thoughts as the tender father, the admirable artist as little as the devoted husband and the steadfast friend. Fielding has been so often painted a hard drinker that few have thought of him as a hard reader; he has been suspected of conjugal infidelity, so it has seemed impossible that he should be other than a violent Bohemian. In certain chapters of _Jonathan Wild the Great_ there is enough of sustained intellectual effort to furnish forth a hundred modern novels; but you only think of Fielding reeling home from the Rose, and refuse to consider him except as sitting down with his head in a wet towel to scribble immodest and ruffianly trash for the players! A consequence of all these exercises in sentiment and imagination has been that, while many have been ready to deal with Fielding as the text for a sermon or the subject of an essay, as the point of a moral or the adornment of a tale, few have cared to think of him as worthy to dispute the palm with Cervantes and Sir Walter as the heroic man of letters.

Facts.

He is before all things else a writer to be studied. He wrote for the world at large and to the end that he might be read eternally. His matter, his manner, the terms of his philosophy, the quality of his ideals, the nature of his achievement, proclaim him universal. Like Scott, like Cervantes, like Shakespeare, he claims not merely our acquaintance but an intimate and abiding familiarity. He has no special public, and to be only on nodding terms with him is to be practically dead to his attraction and unworthy his society. He worked not for the boys and girls of an age but for the men and women of all time; and both as artist and as thinker he commands unending attention and lifelong friendship. He is a great inventor, an unrivalled craftsman, a perfect master of his material. His achievement is the result of a life-time of varied experience, of searching and sustained observation, of unwearying intellectual endeavour. The sound and lusty types he created have an intellectual flavour peculiar to themselves. His novels teem with ripe wisdom and generous conclusions and beneficent examples. As Mr. Stephen tells you, 'he has the undeniable merit of representing certain aspects of contemporary society with a force and accuracy not even rivalled by any other writer'; and it is a fact that not to have studied him 'is to be without a knowledge of the most important documents of contemporary history.' More: to contrast those fair, large parchments in which he has stated his results with those tattered and filthy papers which the latter- day literary rag-picker exists but to grope out from kennel and sewer is to know the difference between the artist in health and the artist possessed by an idiosyncrasy as by a devil.

The Worst of It.

But the present is an age of sentiment: its ideals and ambitions are mainly emotional; what it chiefly loves is romance or the affectation of romance, passion, self-conscious solemnity, and a certain straining after picturesque effects. In Fielding's time there was doubtless a good deal of sentimentalism, for his generation delighted not only in Western and Trunnion and Mrs. Slipslop but in Pamela and Clarissa and the pathetic Le Fevre. But for all that it was--at all events in so far as it was interesting to Fielding and in so far as Fielding has pictured it--a generation that knew nothing of romance but was keenly interested in common sense, and took a vast deal of honest pleasure in humour and wit and a rather truculent and full-blooded type of satire. It is plain that such possibilities of sympathy and understanding as exist between a past of this sort and such a present as our own must of necessity be few and small. Their importance, too, is greatly diminished when you reflect on the nature and tendency of certain essential elements in Fielding's art and mind. The most vigorous and the most individual of these is probably his irony; the next is that abundant vein of purely intellectual comedy by whose presence his work is exalted to a place not greatly inferior to that of the _Misantrope_ and the _Ecole des Femmes_. These rare and shining qualities are distinguishing features in the best and soundest part of Fielding. Of irony he is probably the greatest English master; of pure comedy--the intellectual manipulation and transmutation into art of what is spiritually ridiculous in manners and society--he is both in narrative and in dialogue the greatest between Shakespeare and Mr. George Meredith. And with both our sympathy is imperfect. We have learned to be sentimental and self-sufficient with Rousseau, to be romantic and chivalrous with Scott, to be emotional with Dickens, to take ourselves seriously with Balzac and George Eliot; there are touches of feeling in our laughter, even though the feeling be but spite; we have acquired a habit of politeness--a tradition of universal consideration and respect; and our theory of satire is rounded by the pleasing generalities of Mr. Du Maurier on the one hand and the malevolent respectability of Mr. W. S. Gilbert on the other. It is an age of easy writing and still easier reading: our authors produce for us much in the manner of the silkworm--only their term of life is longer; we accept their results in something of the spirit of them that are interested, and not commercially, in the processes of silkworms. And M. Guy de Maupassant can write but hath a devil, and we take him not because of his writing but because of his devil; and Blank and Dash and So-and-So and the rest could no more than so many sheep develop a single symptom of possession among them, and we take them because a devil and they are incompatibles. And art is short and time is long; and we care nothing for art and almost as much for time; and there is little if any to choose between Mudie's latest 'catch' and last year's 'sensation' at Burlington House. And to one of us it is 'poor Fielding'; and to another Fielding is merely gross, immoral, and dull; and to most the story of that last journey to Lisbon is unknown, and Thackeray's dream of Fielding--a novelist's presentment of a purely fictitious character--is the Fielding who designed and built and finished for eternity. Which is to be pitied? The artist of _Amelia_ and _Jonathan Wild_, the creator of the Westerns and Parson Adams and Colonel Bath? or we the whippersnappers of sentiment--the critics who can neither read nor understand?

THE END

Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty, at the Edinburgh University Press.