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

and gives him its "peculiar pleasure." When a work of art does this, it is pretty near perfection.

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

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

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

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


CHAPTER III

THE FOUR WHEELS OF THE NOVEL WAIN


It does not enter into the plan, because it would be entirely inconsistent with the scale, of the present book to give details of the lives of the novelists, except when they have something special to do with the subject, or when (as in the case of a few minorities who happen to be of some importance) even well-informed readers are likely to be quite ignorant about them. Accounts, in all degrees of scale and competence, of the lives of Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne abound. It is sufficient--but in the special circumstances at this point perhaps necessary--here to sum the facts very briefly in so far as they bear on the main issue. Richardson (1689-1761), not merely the first to write, but the eldest by much more than his priority in writing, was the son of a Derbyshire tradesman, was educated for some time at Charterhouse, but apprenticed early to a printer--which trade he pursued with diligence and profit for the rest of his life in London and its immediate neighbourhood. After his literary success, he gathered round him a circle of ladies and gentlemen interested in literature: but he never had any first-hand acquaintance with general society of the "gentle" kind, much less with that of the upper classes. Fielding (1707-1754), on the contrary, was a member (though only as the son of a younger son of a younger son) of a family of great antiquity and distinction, which held an earldom in England and another in Ireland, and was connected as well as it was derived, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, for instance, being the novelist's cousin. He was educated at Eton and Leyden: but his branch of the family being decidedly impecunious, was thrown very much on his own resources. These were mainly drawn from literature, first as a playwright then as a novelist, journalism and miscellanies coming in. But he was called to the Bar: and though he probably did not make much money there, he obtained the poorly paid and hard-worked but rather important position of "Bow Street Magistrate," which meant that he was head, directly of the London police such as it was, and indirectly of that of the whole kingdom. His temper was in some ways as aristocratic as his birth: but though Horace Walpole's accounts of his fancy for low company are obviously exaggerated, there is no doubt that he was a good deal of what has since been called a "Bohemian." His experience of variety in scene was much wider than Richardson's, although after he came home from Leyden (where he went to study law) it was chiefly confined to London and the south of England (especially Bath, Dorsetshire, where he lived for a time, and the Western Circuit), till his last voyage, in hopeless quest of health, to Lisbon, where he died. His knowledge of literature, and even what may be called his scholarship, were considerable, and did credit to the public school education of those days.

Smollett (1721-1771) differed from his two predecessors in being a Scotsman: but in family was very much nearer to Fielding than to Richardson, being the grandson of a judge who was a Commissioner of the Union, and a gentleman of birth and property--which last would, had he lived long enough, have come to Smollett himself. But he suffered in his youth from some indistinctly known family jars, was apprenticed to a Glasgow surgeon, and escaping thence to London with a tragedy in his pocket, was in undoubted difficulties till (and after) he obtained the post of surgeon's mate on board a man-of-war, and took part in the Carthagena expedition. After coming home he made at least some attempts to practise: but was once more drawn off to literature, though fortunately not to tragedy. For the rest of his life he was a hard-worked but by no means ill-paid journalist, novelist, and miscellanist, making as much as £2000 by his History of England , not ill-written, though now never read. Like Fielding (though, unlike him, more than once) he went abroad in search of health and died in the quest at Leghorn. Smollett was not ignorant, but he seems to have known modern languages better than ancient: though there is doubt about his direct share in the translations to which he gave his name. Moreover he had some though no great skill in verse.

Lastly Sterne (1713-1768), though hardly, as it is the custom to call him, "an Irishman," yet vindicated the claims of the third constituent of the United Kingdom by being born in Ireland, from which country his mother came. But the Sternes were pure English, of a gentle family which had migrated from East Anglia through Nottingham to Yorkshire, and was much connected with Cambridge. Thither Laurence, the novelist, after a very roving childhood (his father was a soldier), and a rather irregular education, duly went: and, receiving preferment in the Church from his Yorkshire relations, lived for more than twenty years in that county without a history, till he took the literary world--hardly by storm, but by a sort of fantastic capful of wind--with Tristram Shandy in 1760. Seven or eight years of fame, some profit, not hard work (for his books shrink into no great solid bulk), and constant travelling, ended by a sudden death at his Bond Street lodgings, after a long course of ill-health very carelessly attended to.

One or two more traits are relevant. All the four were married, and married pretty early; two of them married twice. Richardson's first wife was, in orthodox fashion, his master's daughter: of his second little is known. Fielding's first (he had made a vain attempt earlier to abduct an heiress who was a relation) was, by universal consent, the model both of Sophia and Amelia, almost as charming as either, and as amiable; his second was her maid. Of Mrs. Smollett, who was a Miss Lascelles and a West Indian heiress in a small way, we know very little--the habit of identifying her with the "Narcissa" of Roderick Random is natural, inconclusive, but not ridiculous. Sterne's matrimonial relations are the most famous of all: and though posterity has, with its usual charity, constructed a legend for the pair which is probably much worse than the reality, that reality is more than a little awkward. Mrs. Sterne was a Miss Lumley, of a good Yorkshire family, some, though small, fortune, and more friends who exerted themselves for her husband. By inexcusable levity, ignorance, misjudgment, or heartless cupidity their daughter Lydia published, after the death of both, letters some of which contain courtship of the most lackadaisical sentimentality and others later expressions (which occasionally reach the scandalous) of weariness and disgust on