The English Novel by George Saintsbury (essential reading TXT) 📖

pages very closely
packed with type, besides an alphabetical index full of Hebrew
and Greek derivations of its names--"Gnothisauton," "Achamoth,"
"Ametameletus," "Dogmapernes," and so forth. Its principles are
inexorably virtuous; there is occasional action interspersed
among its innumerable discourses, and I think it not improbable
that if it were only possible to read it, it might do one some
good. But it would not be the good of the novel.

The only fault with the novel-character of the greater book which might possibly be found by a critic who did not let the allegory bite him, and was not frightened by the religion, is that there is next to no love element in it, though there are wedding bells. Mercy is indeed quite nice enough for a heroine: but Bunyan might have bestowed her better than on a young gentleman so very young that he had not long before made himself (no doubt allegorically) ill with unripe and unwholesome fruit. But if he had done so, the suspicions of his brethren-- they were acute enough as it was not to mistake the character of the book, whatever modern critics may do--would have been even more unallayable. And, as it is, the "alluring countenance" does shed not a little grace upon the story, or at least upon the Second Part: while the intenser character of the First hardly requires this. Any other lack is, to the present writer, imperceptible. The romance interest of quest, adventure, achievement, is present to the fullest degree: and what is sometimes called the pure novel interest of character and conversation is present in a degree not lower. It must be accepted as a great blessing, even by those who regard Puritanism as an almost unmitigated curse, that its principles forbade Bunyan to think of choosing the profane and abominable stage-play as the form of his creation. We had had our fill of good plays, and were beginning to drink of that which was worse: while we had no good novels and wanted them. Of course the large amount of actual "Tig and Tirry" dialogue (as Dr. Johnson would say) is probably one of the things which have made precisians shy of accepting the Progress for what it really is. But we must remember that this encroachment on the dramatic province was exactly what was wanted to remove the reproach of fiction. The inability to put actual conversation of a lively kind in the mouths of personages has been indicated as one of the great defects of the novel up to this time. Except Cervantes, it is difficult to think of any novelist who had shown himself able to supply the want. Bunyan can do it as few have done it even since his time. The famous dialogue of Christian and By-ends is only the best--if it is the best--of scores nearly or quite as good. The curious intellectual flaccidity of the present day seems to be "put off" by the "ticket" names; but no one who has the true literary sense cares for these one way or another, or is more disturbed by them than if they were Wilkins and Jones. Just as Coleridge observed that to enjoy some kinds of poetry you must suspend disbelief, so, with mere literary fashions, you must suspend disagreement. We should not call By-ends By-ends now: and whether we should do better or worse nobody, as Plato says, knows but the Deity. But the best of us would be hard put to it to make By-ends reveal his By-endishness more perfectly than he does by his conversation, and without any ticket-name at all.

Not less remarkable, and only a little less new, is the vividness and sufficiency of the scene painting and setting. It has been said that the great novelists not only provide us with a world of friends more real and enjoyable than the actual folk we know, but also with a world for those friends to live in, more real and far more enjoyable than the world in which we ourselves sojourn. And this is well seen of Christian. The Slough of Despond and the terrible overhanging hill; the gateway and the Interpreter's House and the House Beautiful; the ups and downs of the road, and the arbours and the giants' dens: Beulah and the Delectable Mountains:--one knows them as one knows the country that one has walked over, and perhaps even better. There is no description for description's sake: yet nothing is wanting of the descriptive kind.

Yet all these things are--as they should be--only subsidiary to the main interest of the Pilgrimage itself. Once more, one may fear that it is no good sign of the wits of the age that readers should be unable to discard familiarity with the argument of the story. It is the way in which that argument is worked out and illustrated that is the thing. I have never myself, since I became thoroughly acquainted with Lydgate's Englishing of Deguilevile's Pilgrimage of the Soul of Man , had any doubt that--in some way or other, direct or indirect, at tenth or twentieth hand perhaps--Bunyan was acquainted with it: but this is of no importance. He might undoubtedly have got all his materials straight out of the Bible. But his working of them up is all his own, and is wonderful. Here, to begin with, is the marvel not merely of a continuation which is not a falling off, but of a repetition of the same general scheme with different but closely connected personages, which is entirely free from monotony. One is so accustomed to the facts that perhaps it hardly strikes one at first how extraordinarily audacious the attempt is: nay, the very success of it may blind all but critics to the difficulty. It is no wonder that people tried further continuations and further complications: still less wonder that they utterly failed. Probably even Bunyan himself could not have "done it a third time." But he did it these twice with such vividness of figure and action; such completeness of fable; such sufficiency of behaviour and of speech as have scarcely ever been equalled. As ideal as Spenser, as real as Defoe: such is Bunyan. And he shows this realism and this idealism in a prose narrative, bringing the thoughts and actions and characters and speech of fictitious human beings before his readers--for their inspection perhaps; for their delight certainly. If this is not the being and the doing of a novelist this deponent very humbly declareth that he knoweth not what the being and the doing of a novelist are.

We must now turn to two small but noteworthy attempts at the kind, which have been referred to above.

In 1668 there appeared a very curious little book (entitled at great length after the manner of the times, but more shortly called The Isle of Pines ), which is important in the literary ancestry of Defoe and Swift and not unimportant in itself. Its author was Henry Neville, of the Nevilles of Billingbeare, son of one Sir Henry and grandson of another, the grandfather having been of some mark in diplomacy and courtiership in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean times. The grandson had had a life of some stir earlier. Born in 1620, and educated at Merton and University Colleges, he had left Oxford without a degree, had taken the Parliamentary side, but as a rigid Republican and anti-Cromwellite; had been a member of the Rota, and after the Restoration had been arrested in 1663 for supposed treasonable practices, but escaped serious punishment. He lived quietly for more than thirty years longer and died in 1694. Besides The Isle of Pines he wrote satirical tracts (the Parliament of Ladies being the best known), translated Machiavelli, and was evidently a man of parts, though, like his friend Harrington, something of a "crank." He seems also to have been, as some others of the extremer Puritans certainly were, pretty loose in his construction of moral laws.

The Isle is a very short book of thirty-one quarto pages: but there is a good deal in it, and it must have been very carefully written. A certain Cornelius van Sloetten writes, "supported by letters from Amsterdam," how a Dutch ship, driven far out of reckoning in the Southern Ocean, comes to a "fourth island, near Terra Australis Incognita," which is inhabited by white people, speaking English, but mostly naked. The headman is a certain William Pine, whose grandfather, George, has left a written account of the origin of the community. This relates how George was wrecked on the island, the ship perishing "with man and mouse," except himself, his master's daughter, two white maidservants, and a negro girl. The island proves pleasant and habitable: and George, to prevent unfairness and ill-feeling, unites himself to all his female companions, the quintet living in perfect harmony. Thirty-seven children result: and these at first necessarily intermarry; but after this first generation, a rule is made that brothers and sisters may not unite--the descendants of the four original wives forming clans who may marry into the others but not into their own. A wider legal code of fair stringency is arranged, with the sanction of capital and other punishments: and things go so well that the patriarch musters a tribe of 565 persons by the time he is sixty, and of 1789 twenty years later, when he departs this life, piously praying God "to multiply them and send them the true report of the gospel." The multiplication has duly taken place, and there is something like a civil war while the Dutch are there; but they interfere with fire-arms to restore order, and leave all well. The writer's cunning is shown by the fact that he does not stop abruptly: but finishes off with some subsequent and quite verisimilar experiences of the Dutch ship. The book does not appear to have had a very great popularity in England, though it was reprinted and abridged at least once, pretty shortly. But it was very popular abroad, was translated into three or four languages, and was apparently taken as a genuine account.

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